Spufford, Auden, Iceland, Food

I just discovered that Francis Spufford had written a "Letter to Wystan Auden" (pastiching L. to L. Byron). I guess I knew about the influence of Auden on Spufford -- Auden's fingerprints are all over the fairytale parts of The Child that Books Built, and Spufford even casually uses the phrase "the sexy airs of summer" somewhere -- but I am still delighted by the fact of the existence of this poem, it is the sort of object the universe might have concocted specifically for my sake. Unfortunately, the poem itself -- though it "adumbrates" various themes that resurface in the ice book and the books book -- is a little blah; rhyme royal doesn't go well with a villainous looseness of numbers. But here is the bit where he talks about the genesis of the ice book -- it rings very true; these are exactly the sorts of reasons why I've found the idea of novel-writing impossibly daunting:

I’m sure that if I tried to write a novel
    The cast party I held would be a flop.
I’d be the wallflower, or I’d simply grovel,
    And all the characters would never stop
    Gesticulating. An aged peer would try to hop;
A dour divine would Charleston; close to tears,
The strong and silent one would play on others’ fears.

A catastrophic prospect. Wiser, you will agree,
    To first try something rather smaller,
Requiring of these skills a less complete degree.
    That way my judgment may grow slowly taller,
    And I’ll learn how to entertain a caller –
Not one that I invented – someone real and dead
Whose passions need to be interpreted.

[...] I’d like to say that searching for my subject
    Was an exhausting task that lasted years;
I’d like to say that weary, pure and abject
    I brought myself close to the brink of tears,
    Burdened by severe stylistic cares.
It’s unfortunate for me that from my crib
I’ve not been capable of such a fib.

The truth’s just this: I knew exactly what
    I hoped to do to educate my heart.
I’ve been fascinated by each human jot
    Of POLAR EXPLORATION from the start,
    And wondered how on earth to tease apart
The knots their souls are tied in (reef or bowline)
Who think the good life’s found above the snowline.

The classic polar expedition’s personnel
    Were capable, Edwardian and intense;
Good sports; good diary-keepers; fit as hell;
    Trained by their education to think tents
    Were the natural sites for virtuous events.
Yet these solid types made journeys that involved
Odder qualities than toughness or resolve.

I see them walking, always in a line,
    Pursuing an abstraction through the snow;
Above (thanks to refraction) six suns shine
    And wrap them round in whiteness as they go,
    Skin blackened, feet wrecked, agonisedly slow.
But it isn’t meteorology, or nature’s wild trompe l’oeil,
That can explain their journal entries, indicating joy.

If I’m to understand at all, I need a way
    Of obtaining for my book a steady fix
On emotions that you don’t meet every day –
    The atavistic ones, the muscly ethics
    You tried to grasp yourself, ascending F6.
It’s especially hard to find out what they mean
Because the censorship of laughter intervenes:

(It might also be worthwhile to compare this with Donald Davie's "Remembering the Thirties.")

While I'm on this topic let me quote a bit from Letters from Iceland that I rediscovered today:

Dried fish is a staple food in Iceland. This should be shredded with the fingers and eaten with butter. It varies in toughness. The tougher kind tastes like toenails, and the softer kind like the skin off the soles of one's feet.

Grog-blossomed

Robert Graves -- whose work I hadn't thought about in years, and never, except for Goodbye to All That, took seriously -- has been forcing himself on my attention from all sides. (I wonder, is a Graves revival in the works?) Snippets follow:

1. A marvelous piece by Graves on L'Allegro (Verdict: "[with Shakespeare] the probing cold-chisel of criticism rings against the true rock of poetry. With L’Allegro, the plaster flakes away and the rubble tumbles out." Elsewhere, he speaks of "jolly old father Zeus himself, with a thunderbolt in his fist and a grog-blossom on his nose.") I have never liked these poems, which must have something to do why I enjoyed the Graves piece so much.

(It occurs to me that I haven't made full use of the newly-free TNR archive.)

2. Geoffrey Hill, in a lecture (nominally on war poetry) that Calista sent me, has much to say about Graves. The glib summary of the first 10-15 mins of the talk is that Seven Types, and its interest in verbal tensions and ambiguities, was ultimately the fruit of Graves's interest in psychology after WW1. (I'd known, of course, about Empson picking up the idea from the Graves/Riding analysis of "the expense of spirit(s)", but Hill pushes the chronology back a decade. I'm not sure this has more than bibliographical interest, though.) Later in the lecture, Hill quotes a short and really very good Graves poem that I hadn't prev. seen:

On Portents

If strange things happen where she is,
So that men say that graves open
And the dead walk, or that futurity
Becomes a womb and the unborn are shed,
Such portents are not to be wondered at,
Being tourbillions in Time made
By the strong pulling of her bladed mind
Through that ever-reluctant element.

It is almost free of Graves's signature tweeness, except possibly for "tourbillions" which I can't make up my mind on; Hill, to his credit(?), treats the word as a serious literary choice rather than a symptom. (Obviously he is really drawn to the poem by that "ever-reluctant element"; recalcitrance of any kind seems always to have had an irresistible romance for him -- his first book begins with the line, "Against the burly air I strode" -- but this is all a story for another time.)

(As a note to self, if one ever finds the elementary excitation responsible for turbulence, "tourbillion" is a good name as it sounds international and has the "-on" ending.)

3. Speaking of Graves's style, Richard Wilbur on Graves, in the relevant PR interview:

Still, it can be useful and safe to read someone like Robert Graves who, as John Holmes said, is a great starter. You read Graves and he reminds you how delightful poetry can be at its best, and what a fine game it is—and it makes you want to write a poem. Not, however, a poem by Robert Graves, but one of your own.

Symptomatic, perhaps, of his own not-unrelated tweeness, that he should say this? Elsewhere, Randall Jarrell remarks about some of the Auden poems in Nones, 'If you see such a poem, what can you say except, "Ah, Graves, poor dear Robert Graves! Inimitable, isn't he?" But how extraordinary that Auden [should have written it].' I must also confess that few things set my teeth on edge as effectively as hearing Graves read his poems.

4. And, before burying this topic, I should recall that marvelous bit in Goodbye to All That where he meets Thomas Hardy:

[Hardy] said that he regarded professional critics as parasites no less noxious than autograph hunters, and wished the world rid of them. He also wished that he had not listened to them when he was a young man; on their advice he had cut out dialect-words from his early poems, though they had no exact synonyms to fit the context. And still the critics were plaguing him. One of them recently complained of a poem of his where he had written `his shape smalled in the distance'. Now what in the world else could he have written? Hardy then laughed a little and said that once or twice recently he had looked up a word in the dictionary for fear of being again accused of coining, and had found it there right enough — only to read on and find that the sole authority quoted was himself in a half-forgotten novel! He talked of early literary influences, and said that he had none at all, for he did not come of literary stock. Then he corrected himself and said that a friend, a fellow-apprentice in the architect's office where he worked as a young man, used to lend him books. (His taste in literature was certainly most unexpected. Once when Lawrence had ventured to say something disparaging against Homer's Iliad, he protested: `Oh, but I admire the Iliad greatly. Why, it's in the Marmion class!' Lawrence could not at first believe that Hardy was not making a little joke.)

"Sand / Is grand / But oyster / Is moister"

From the larder, a newly unearthed poem by Housman, concerning oysters and cucumbers. (Previous local coverage of Housman here.) Naturally the juxtaposition of Housman and moisture brings up that Auden sonnet:

Deliberately he chose the dry-as-dust,
Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer;
Food was his public love, his private lust
Something to do with violence and the poor. 

Also new to me: A.D. Hope's response to the Auden sonnet. And I am reminded that I recently stumbled upon this astoundingly bad translation of Aeschylus ("with nurture-milk it sucked the clotted blood"!). (Connection is via Housman parody that Calista pointed me to upon being sent the Aesch.)

Some unrelated linkage: Leigh Hunt's wonderful apostrophe to a fish (and the fish's response); Alice James's self-description of her body as a "mildewed toadstool".

After some grief, the defense has been scheduled! Key outstanding task now -- other than various admin. horrors -- is to write the introduction. Given how heavily my research depends on "reducing to previously solved problems," this is a delicate task; one cannot, as in papers, simply point to the appropriate references, but a detailed introduction to all the relevant ideas would entail unimaginable bloat...

Tales and Tayles; ideas of ordure

I have been bad about closing tabs -- have also been meaning to do some posts that involve writing rather than linking, but this term has been overwhelming. NB I'll be in Boston next week for the APS meeting. Anyway here are some links:

1. 30 photos of a Chinese sex toy factory (via clusterflock)

2. Harold Bloom reminisces about Auden (birthday today, as was DFW's apparently):

The poet arrived in a frayed, buttonless overcoat, which my wife insisted on mending. His luggage was an attaché case containing a large bottle of gin, a small one of vermouth, a plastic drinking cup, and a sheaf of poems. After being supplied with ice, he requested that I remind him of the amount of his reading fee. A thousand dollars had been the agreed sum, a respectable honorarium more than forty years ago. He shook his head and said that as a prima donna he could not perform, despite the prior arrangement. Charmed by this, I phoned the college master--a good friend--who cursed heartily but doubled the sum when I assured him that the poet was as obdurate as Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest. Informed of this yielding, Auden smiled sweetly and was benign and brilliant at dinner, then at the reading, and as he went to bed after we got home.

(A few addenda: i. I should really have a separate tag for this sort of Auden post as opposed to the posts that quote him. ii. A good source for more stories of this kind, seen from a glancing angle, is the Lowell-Bishop correspondence. iii. Bloom is not fond of Auden's work, but has always seemed to me a pretty good judge of the relative merits of different Auden poems; in particular, he correctly rates Letter to Lord Byron and the limestone poem as among A's best. (Re which, see also Anthony Hecht.))

3. From the lardr, animal-specific terms for tails and excrement (unearthed by Calista):

THe tayle of Harte, Bucke, Rowe, or any other Deare, is to be called the Syngle. The Tayle of a Goate, is plain∣ly called his Tayle. The tayle of a Bore, is to be termed his wreath. The tayle of an Hare and Conney, is called their Skut. The tayle of a Foxe is called his Bush, or (as some vse to say) his hollywater sprinkle. The tayle of a Wolfe is to be called his Stearne. Of the rest I haue not read.
and

The termes proper for the ordure and naturall excrements of chaces.

IT is a thing highly obserued and not here to be omitted, that the ordure of euery beaste of chace & Uenerie hath his proper terme. The reason is, by cause theyr ordure and excrements are one principall marke whereby we know the place of their feede, and their estate. So that a Huntesman in talke or makyng of his reportes shall be often constreyned to rehearse the same. Of an Harte therfore, and of all Deare the ordure is called Fewmets or Fewmishing: Of a Gote, and of an Hare the Crotising or Crot∣tels: Of a Bore the Lesses: Of a Foxe, and all other vermine, The Fyaunts: Of an Otter the Spraynts. And I haue neyther readde nor heard what it is termed of a Wolfe or a Beare: neyther is it greatly materiall.

See also: animal-specific verbs for slicing-up. 

Frightening inaction

An assortment of quotes with links attached:

1. Michel Houellebecq on blogging (I should like to declare him entirely mistaken, but he is not):

You can always microblog, Houellebecq had told him [...]; but to launch yourself into the writing of a blog post you have to wait for all of that to become compact and irrefutable. You have to wait for the appearance of an authentic core of necessity. You never decide to write a blog post, he had added; a blog post, according to him, was like a block of concrete that had decided to set, and the blogger’s freedom to act was limited to the fact of being there, and of waiting in frightening inaction, for the process to start by itself.

2. Auden on songs/"words-for-music" (linked site is not without interest -- HT Conor Leahy!):

The song ... is, of all kinds of poetry, the one in which the formal verbal elements play the greatest role.... In the world of the song, one might say, the important relationship between the inhabitants is not any community of concern or action so much as family kinship. The satisfaction I get from reading a poem by Campion, for example, is similar to the satisfaction I get from studying a well worked out genealogical tree. (A wet afternoon could be pleasantly spent developing this analogy. Starting with the notion that masculine rhymes represent brothers, feminine rhymes sisters, refrains identical twins, one could ask what verbal relationship would be equivalent to a second cousin once removed. From there one could go on to consider what discords correspond to marriage within the prohibited degrees, e.g., to marrying one's deceased wife's sister.)

3. Jay Rayner, on adventurous cooking (HT Sarah Duff):

Modern techniques are great. They’re brilliant. If you want to cook my steak by banging it round the Large Hadron Collider, be my guest. Dehydrate my pig cheeks. Spherify my nuts. But only do so if the result tastes nicer.

4. Graffiti from Pompeii:

Herculaneum (on the exterior wall of a house); 10619: Apollinaris, the doctor of the emperor Titus, defecated well here 

5. On relocating detective stories from Portsmouth to Le Havre:

There is no translation for "mush" (a Pompey term of affection), "scrote" (the opposite) or "scummer" (anyone from Southampton). Can the city be exported? "I was intrigued by the move to Le Havre," said Hurley. "But they have done a good job. What holds true for Portsmouth also holds true for Le Havre. There are similarities: neither city is fashionable, they are both at the end of the railway line, relatively uncursed by money. Sharp-elbowed places, robust." Could you move other English detectives – Morse to Rouen, say, or Rebus to Marseille? "Rebus, maybe yes. But I'm not sure about Morse. You can't get away from those dreaming spires."

6. Much to like in this review of Dickens's letters (via Light Reading). I particularly liked

the pile of clean spittoons in the corner of a country inn “looking like a collection of petrified three-cornered hats”

(In Ulysses, Joyce has "a hogo you could hang your hat on" and also "what a man looks like with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of him or sticking up at you like a hatrack.")

Torschlusspanik

From yet another list of untranslatable words (cf.):

Torschlusspanik
From German, this word literally means “gate-closing panic” and is used to describe the fear of diminishing opportunities as one ages. This word is most frequently applied to women who race the “biological clock” to wed and bear children.

This is high up on my list of frequently-felt emotions, a little behind schadenfreude and buyer's remorse, and perhaps slightly ahead of envy. Also provides an excuse to quote Auden:

Certain it became while we were still incomplete
There were certain prizes for which we would never compete:
A choice was killed by every childish illness,
The boiling tears among the hothouse plants,
The rigid promise fractured in the garden,
And the long aunts.

And every day there bolted from the field
Desires to which we could not yield;
Fewer and clearer grew the plans,
Schemes for a life and sketches for a hatred,
And early among my interesting scrawls
Appeared your portrait. 

(Another worthwhile untranslatable is "tartle" -- "a Scottish verb meaning to hesitate while introducing someone due to having forgotten his/her name.") 

"Not all good poetry is also 'important poetry'"

Mark Ford has a good article in the new LRB (gated) on A.S.J. Tessimond and Bernard Spencer, two largely forgotten English poets of the Auden generation; on the strength of the quotations, Tessimond seems reasonably worthwhile, Spencer less so. (Ford's remarks on Spencer seem muddled to me. Not only is all the quoted verse bristling with Audenesque phrases -- "a word or a lock which gunfire may not break, / Or a love whose range it may not take" -- but surely the idea that one couldn't write tentatively while under Auden's influence is refuted by the example of Louis MacNeice.) Anyway, here is Ford on Tessimond:

Tessimond can’t be said to have developed as a poet in any clearly discernible way, and it’s not easy when reading his posthumously published poems to decide which is early, which middle and which late. All seem buoyed up by his wit and curiosity and compassion; this is especially surprising given that in middle age he developed severe manic depression and underwent extensive electric shock therapy.

And here are two Tessimond poems quoted in the article, both of which I like:

Letter from Luton

Dear Hubert,
                  Bored, malevolent and mute on
A wet park seat, I look at life and Luton
And think of spittle, slaughterhouses, double
Pneumonia, schizophrenia, kidney trouble,
Piles, paranoia, gallstones in the bladder,
Manic depressive madness growing madder,
Cretins with hideous tropical diseases
And red-eyed necrophiles – while on the breezes
From Luton Gasworks comes a stench that closes
Like a damp frigid hand on my neuroses,
And Time (arthritic deaf-mute) stumbles on
And on and on and on.
                      Yours glumly,
                                       John

In that cold land

Ghosts do not kiss, or, if they kiss, they feel
   Ice touching ice, and turn away, and shiver;
But there as here, perhaps, we still can steal
   Quietly off, and talk and talk for ever.

Fronnies revisited; a slier gnu

Someone said the other day that "fronny" would be a helpfully disambiguating portmanteau of "front" and "fanny." I was reminded of Auden's lost play The Fronny, went looking for a page about it, and came upon this book re Auden and Isherwood in Berlin:

What seems to be an account of Isherwood's first full day in Berlin is headed "Saturday getting tight," and later come "Intervening period of Margaret and sex expectation," "Meeting Gerhart and John's expected suicide," "The Dutchman and the Tour." [...] Auden told his brother that he was "writing another play." [...] This play was The Fronny -- again named after Francis Turville-Petre, who may well have been a topic of conversation between Auden and Isherwood during that June visit.

"Gerhart" also comes up in Auden's lines about "absence of fear in Gerhart Meyer / From the sea, the truly strong man." (IIRC they were lovers at some point.) Fronny -- i.e., FTP -- was an interesting character by all accounts, and excellently named. Here is some more about an early draft of the Fronny, called The Enemies of a Bishop aka Where is Fronny?:

One of the characters is a pederast, another is based on a character in the film Der Student von Prag, and the Bishop himself is based on Homer Lane. Auden introduced one of his favorite lead mines, and Isherwood contributed characters who owed much to the fantasy world he and [Edward] Upward had created together.

The Isherwood-Upward fantasy world was Mortmere, which (according to Lions and Shadows) was once provisionally named Stoat Grange. (One supposes The Wind in the Willows was a large influence on Isherwood, though I don't think he mentions having read it.)

---

Unrelated: the string "Aer Lingus" has an inordinate number of anagrams: e.g., "e.g., urinals," "seal ruing," "earl suing," "glue rains," "sugar line," "realign us," "alien rugs," "silage urn," "sea ruling," "ursine gal," and "a slier gnu."

"If a man lacks the gift of song, then he may laugh as a substitute"

W.H. Auden, in The Enchafed Flood (writing, here, about Stubb):

A man may laugh for pleasure or joy. Pleasure or joy are not comic, and the appropriate response is song, i.e., the expression of gratitude and praise. If a man lacks the gift of song, then he may laugh as a substitute. The substitute is acceptable because there is no suffering involved, except the comic contradiction of being unable to sing in a situation demanding song and in which laughter is actually ridiculous.

For what is the comic? The comic is a contradiction that does not involve suffering, either directly in the subject or indirectly by sympathetic identification with those involved in the contradiction. [...] A man who makes a religion out of the comic is unable to face suffering. He is bound to deny it or to look the other way.

The first paragraph makes a nice pendant to "Notes on the Comic" (cf. "Among those I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.") and one is also reminded of Auden's aphorism about opera:

"No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible."

Vpdate Re laughter cf. Spenser's faun, who "saw that pleased much his eye, / And made his hart to tickle in his brest" (i.e., Diana bathing). Like much else in this genre, via Calista.

Unregistered occupations, Yeats-mocking, etc.

George Yeats, writing -- not automatically for once -- to W.B. in 1930:

"No newses here but for the thrill of our dustbin being stolen yesterday evening from the pavement between the hours of eightthirty and ten. McCoy was most puzzled this morning when he went out to fetch it in and found nothing to fetch, and filled with vehement righteous indignation when I told him that I had observed on returning home last night at 10.15 that it was not there. He insisted on my telephoning to the police at Lad Lane [...] 'There's a lot of police regulations that are never enforced' says the police at the other end of the telephone 'but there's a regulation that bins shouldnt be put out as early as that.' 'Do you think the police took it' says I. 'O no' says he 'They wouldnt take it. They'd notify.' Then, 'When they take them they generally empty them out on the pavement, did they empty out yours?' 'They did not' says I. 'They must have had a handcart with them' says he. 'Do you mean the Garda would have emptied it out' says I. 'No, the people who take the dustbins' says he; so it is evidently one of the unregistered occupations like the stealing of doormats, washbaskets and umbrellas."

From Don Share's blog. In other Yeatsiana, Ray Davis recently quoted Anne Gregory (subject of this poem) rather delightfully mocking Yeats. Possibly the ne plus ultra of this particular unregistered occupation is that bit about the peacock in one of Pound's cantos:

The Kakemono grows in flat land out of mist
        sun rises lop-sided over the mountain
              so that I recalled the noise in the chimney
as it were the wind in the chimney
              but was in reality Uncle William
downstairs composing
that had made a great Peeeeacock
        in the proide ov his oiye
        had made a great peeeeeeecock in the . . .
made a great peacock
              in the proide of his oyyee

proide ov his oy-ee
as indeed he had, and perdurable

a great peacock aere perennius

By the way, Michael Wood recently quoted Auden (in a longish review of the new vol. of the Prose, of which more later) complaining as he often did that "I sometimes feel that the question “Is this statement true or false?” has never occurred to [Yeats]." (In the Dyer's Hand Auden compares Yeats unfavorably with D.H. Lawrence re sincerity.) The first vol. of Roy Foster's biography of Yeats (and maybe later ones but I haven't read those) lends a lot of support to the notion that Yeats didn't really believe, in the usual sense, in the mythological stuff; he just found the masks useful, and had to keep up the solemnity to sustain the mood (hence the general sense that he was pompous and affected). He was a bore by choice, unlike (say) Auden and Wordsworth who were bores by nature.

(On Auden as a bore see Alan Bennett. Or for that matter read as much as you can of that horrid little book on Auden's Table Talk. It is the only book I know that is almost as bad as its Richard Howard introduction. (The link is to a prev. post about Richard Howard's introductions.))

I have never read, or wanted to read, a biography of Auden or a critical/expository work by Yeats (I am interested in anecdotes about both, however), but am endlessly fascinated by the thought of the one and the life of the other.

(A few miscellaneous notes. 1. I introduced someone to Peter Porter. 2. In a comment on yesterday's post Jenny Davidson suggested that "hierarchy" probably implies priesthood; this would make sense of the "order" -- as in monastic order -- of people who believe in intrinsic value. I don't think one can make complete sense of Hill's answers, treated as answers -- he seems to be conflating the questions, "what entities should a poet enter into an imaginative relationship with?" and "whom should a poet write for?" -- but I think he is just ignoring the second question. 3. I greatly enjoyed this book review by Keith Ridgway in the Irish Times.)

Berks and Wankers; Barbarism and Triviality; Primness

M. Amis, in the Guardian, about K. Amis's usage book:

The battle against illiteracies and barbarisms, and pedantries and genteelisms, is not a public battle. It takes place within the soul of every individual who minds about words.
Rather bluffly, perhaps, Kingsley draws up the battle lines as a conflict between Berks and Wankers:

Berks are careless, coarse, crass, gross and of what anybody would agree is a lower social class than one's own. They speak in a slipshod way with dropped Hs, intruded glottal stops, and many mistakes in grammar. Left to them the English language would die of impurity, like late Latin.

Wankers are prissy, fussy, priggish, prim and of what they would probably misrepresent as a higher social class than one's own. They speak in an over-precise way with much pedantic insistence on letters not generally sounded, especially Hs. Left to them the language would die of purity, like medieval Latin.

Cf. Auden paraphrasing Whitehead:

Civilisation is a precarious balance between barbaric vagueness and trivial order. Barbarism is unified but undifferentiated; triviality is differentiated but lacking in any central unity; the ideal of civilisation is the integration into a complete whole and with the minimum strain, of the maximum number of distinct activities.

To paraphrase further: if berks had their way the language would be vital -- see the richness of slang -- but too indistinct for clarity, and therefore applicable for very few purposes; it would floriate like Elizabethan writing and be useless for specialized purposes like communicating unfamiliar ideas efficiently. If wankers had their way it would be lucid and dead, good for scientific writing but lacking in suggestiveness and ambiguity.

I am curious about the gender politics of these terms. (NB berk is rhyming slang for cunt via Berkeley hunt. Wanker of course is orig. specifically male.) Primness is, like worldliness, one of those concepts for which the stereotypes won't stay put -- the stereotype re "prim/barren" is f. but so is that re "primal chaos." Amis goes with men as prim, but, e.g., (as per Russell) Kant did not:

Like everybody else at that time, [Kant] wrote a treatise on the sublime and the beautiful. Night is sublime, day is beautiful; the sea is sublime, the land is beautiful; man is sublime, woman is beautiful; and so on.

"A black Irish beer that disappears in the course of the creative process"

Brodsky describes the daily routines of Auden, with whom he briefly stayed in Austria (I assume in Kirchstetten though the article doesn't specify) after being kicked out of the USSR:

W. H. Auden drinks his first martini dry at 7:30 in the morning, after which he sorts his mail and reads the paper, marking the occasion with a mix of sherry and scotch. After this he has breakfast, which can consist of anything so long as it’s accompanied by the local dry pink and white, I don’t remember in which order. At this point he sets to work. Probably because he uses a ballpoint pen, he keeps on the desk next to him, instead of an inkwell, a bottle or can of Guinness, which is a black Irish beer that disappears in the course of the creative process. At around 1 o’clock he has lunch. Depending on the menu, this lunch is decorated by this or that rooster’s tail, or cocktail. After lunch, a nap, which is, I think, the only dry point of the day.

This is from a New Yorker profile of Brodsky (who apparently wasn't gay; for some reason I had always assumed he was). There are some vaguely pleasant renderings of Brodsky's poems; I must say that, although he has technically been fortunate in his translators (Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, ...), they have tended to overdo the house-training; I've never managed to get a handle on the idiosyncrasy (in the Fowlerian sense) of Brodsky's work. 

Cf. Lydia Davis on Auden's sleeping habits.

The Snark as Christ-figure

An endearing thing about Auden's book on Romanticism, The Enchafed Flood, is that it treats Carroll and Lear on par with the more "serious" Romantics; this leads to many odd felicities. E.g., here's Auden talking about ships as communities:

a ship can represent [...] the civitas terrena, created by self-love, inherited and repeated, into which all men since Adam are born, yet where they have never totally lost their knowledge of and longing for the Civitas Dei and the Law of Love. From this arise absurd contradictions [...]

Then he quotes Melville, from Pierre, on the contradictions:

Bacon's brains were mere watchmaker's brains; but Christ was a chronometer... And the reason why His teachings seemed folly to the Jews, was because he carried Heaven's time in Jerusalem, while the Jews carried Jerusalem time there... as the China watches are right as to China, so the Greenwich chronometers must be wrong as to China. Besides, of what use to the Chinaman would a Greenwich chronometer, keeping Greenwich time, be? Were he thereby to regulate his daily actions, he would be guilty of all manner of absurdities: -- going to bed at noon, say, when his neighbors would be sitting down to dinner.* [...] with inferior beings, the absolute effort to live in this world according to the strict letter of the chronometricals is, somehow, apt to involve those inferior beings eventually in strange, unique follies and sins, unimagined before.

This earns the following footnote:

*cf. the snark

Its habit of getting up late you'll agree
That it carries too far when I say
That it frequently breakfasts at five-o-clock tea
And dines on the following day.

The book, which I haven't finished yet, is extraordinarily helpful as a guide to Auden's Kierkegaard-and-Whitehead phase in the 1940s (esp. the long poems, esp. The Sea and the Mirror, in which Alonso's song is very lightly processed Whitehead -- I also vaguely wonder if Auden saw any parallels between Alfred North Whitehead and Moby Dick (also white and northern and of considerable stature)). I'd been meaning to post about Auden's recycling of Alonso's advice to Ferdinand in the Tempest adaptation (1945) in his intro to the Portable Greek Reader (1948) but the scale of reuse is actually more formidable, as the same set of images is expanded into an entire lecture in the Flood (1949).

I am pretty sure this has been done to death in the literature, but a benefit of being an amateur is that there's no opportunity cost to reinventing the wheel.

(PS see here for previous notes on sleeping habits.)

The bike inside your heart

A couple of days ago Calista sent along a fascinating poem, "Thirty Bob a Week," by the late-Victorian poet John Davidson. It's got considerable documentary interest (e.g., "like a mole I journey in the dark / a travelling along the Underground" and "with your science and your books and your theories about spooks") but, like most Victorian verse, comes apart near the end when it tries to get serious. This passage caught my eye (RPO has a v. with notes):

I step into my heart and there I meet
   A god-almighty devil singing small,
 Who would like to shout and whistle in the street,
   And squelch the passers flat against the wall;
 If the whole world was a cake he had the power to take,
   He would take it, ask for more, and eat them all.

 And I meet a sort of simpleton beside,
   The kind that life is always giving beans;
 With thirty bob a week to keep a bride
   He fell in love and married in his teens:
 At thirty bob he stuck; but he knows it isn't luck:
   He knows the seas are deeper than tureens.

 And the god-almighty devil and the fool
   That meet me in the High Street on the strike,
 When I walk about my heart a-gathering wool,
   Are my good and evil angels if you like.
 And both of them together in every kind of weather
   Ride me like a double-seated bike. 

It is obvious why this would have appealed to McDiarmid. I'm surprised that Auden didn't include this poem in his light verse anthology; it was sufficiently well-known that either A. or the Doddses would almost certainly have read it, it meets the criteria, and the quoted passage is reminiscent of Auden's famous analysis of T.S. Eliot's sensibility:

T.S. Eliot is not a single figure but a household. This household has, I think, at least three permanent residents. First, there is the archdeacon, who believes in and practices order, discipline, and good manners, social and intellectual, with a thoroughly Anglican distaste for evangelical excess.... And, no wonder, for the poor gentleman is condemned to be domiciled with a figure of a very different stamp, a violent and passionate old peasant grandmother, who has witnessed murder, rape, pogroms, famine, flood, fire, everything; who has looked into the abyss and, unless restrained, would scream the house down.... Last, as if this state of affairs were not difficult enough, there is a young boy who likes to play slightly malicious jokes. The too earnest guest, who has come to interview the Reverend, is startled and bewildered in being handed an explosive cigar.

One possible diagnosis of what went wrong with Victorian poetry -- and more generally with Victorian writing -- is that the diction got stratified to such a degree that you couldn't sensibly talk about seas in the same register as tureens; the only ways around this were to write in dialect or at least in brogue, or to use images that were in some sense explicitly comic. Davidson's poem, in the parts that work, does a bit of both but I think depends chiefly on deniability-through-comedy; his use of the outlandish but up-to-date image is very like what Eliot does in the first few paragraphs of "Prufrock."

An Auden poem that's stuck in my head...

... for reasons I don't understand. It isn't like I recently read it or anything. But blogging is occasionally an effective form of exorcism. (Btw the NYRB is doing a poem a day for national cruelty month, including this late Auden poem that was new to me, and this Les Murray poem I liked (the first one).)

The Letter
W.H. Auden

From the very first coming down
Into a new valley with a frown
Because of the sun and a lost way,
You certainly remain: to-day
I, crouching behind a sheep-pen, heard
Travel across a sudden bird,
Cry out against the storm, and found
The year's arc a completed round
And love's worn circuit re-begun,
Endless with no dissenting turn.
Shall see, shall pass, as we have seen
The swallow on the tile, Spring's green
Preliminary shiver, passed
A solitary truck, the last
Of shunting in the Autumn. But now
To interrupt the homely brow,
Thought warmed to evening through and through
Your letter comes, speaking as you,
Speaking of much but not to come.

Nor speech is close nor fingers numb,
If love not seldom has received
An unjust answer, was deceived.
I, decent with the seasons, move
Different or with a different love,
Nor question overmuch the nod,
The stone smile of this country god
That never was more reticent,
Always afraid to say more than it meant.

"No -- seals do"

Calista's tumblr is really quite marvelous, consider, for instance, this new post, quoted in full:

W. H. Auden (from “Shorts”)

  Many creatures make nice noises,
  but none, it seems,
  are moved by music.

in the margin, E. Bishop:

   no — seals are

[ed.] The context here is Bishop singing to the seal in "At the Fishhouses":

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,

element bearable to no mortal,

to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly

I have seen here evening after evening.

He was curious about me. He was interested in music;

like me a believer in total immersion,

so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.

I also sang “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”

He stood up in the water and regarded me

steadily, moving his head a little.

Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge

almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug

as if it were against his better judgment.

Snippets, connections

1. From Dainty Ballerina, an account of the wedding of James I's daughter Elizabeth. A lot of "white Satten," much "Pearle and Golde," and more than a whiff of Spenserian influence:

Upon her head a crowne of refined golde, made imperiall by the Pearles and Dyamonds thereupon placed, which were so thicke beset that they stood like shining pinnacles.  Upon her amber coloured haire, hanging plaited down over her shoulders to her Waste, betweene every plaight Gold spangles, Pearles, Riche stones, and Diamonds, and many Diamonds of inestimable value embroidered upon her sleeves, which dazzled and amazed the eyes of the beholders.

2. A crash blossom, of sorts, in an old issue of the Daily Illini left in the men's room: "Anti-gay bullying victim remembered at vigil." The sense is obvious upon reflection -- this is about one of those teenage suicides last year -- but the natural way to read the headline is as if the victim were anti-gay: "All those PC bullies!"

3. I quoted Randall Jarrell on Auden yesterday: "Auden [...] lies back in himself as if he were an unmade bed." This strongly reminded me of something but I couldn't, at the time, quite place it; it's Catullus 31:

O quid solutis est beatius curis,
cum mens onus reponit, ac peregrino
labore fessi venimus larem ad nostrum,
desideratoque acquiescimus lecto?

("O what is happier than when, all cares resolved, the mind puts down its burden, and we come exhausted with the labor of travel to our home, and rest on the longed-for bed?") This passage has an amusingly high density of false friends. I've always loved the idea of acquiescing in one's bed -- it is precisely what one fails to do a lot of the time -- and Jarrell's line uses the same association in reverse.


4. In case you missed the addendum to the sloth/sleuth post, "sleuth" appears to come from the same Norse root as "slot." A sleuth is originally a slot, or groove, or trail, left by an animal, then becomes an elliptic term for a tracking dog or sleuth-hound, and finally the sleuth-hound becomes a detective by metaphoric extension. I am frustratingly unable to come up with the right technical term for this device, but there must be something more precise than "metaphor."

Cobbett, etc.

1. I was reading William Cobbett's Rural Rides on the flight back from Dallas; was hooked by this passage on p. 1:

All Middlesex is ugly , notwithstanding the millions upon millions which it is continually sucking up from the rest of the kingdom; and, though the Thames and its meadows now and then are seen from the road, the country is not less ugly from Richmond to Chertsey bridge, through Twickenham, Hampton, Sunbury and Shepperton, than it is elsewhere. The soil is a gravel at bottom with a black loam at top near the Thames; further back it is a sort of spewy gravel; and the buildings consist generally of tax-eaters’ showy, tea-garden-like boxes, and of shabby dwellings of labouring people who, in this part of the country, look to be about half Saint Giles’s: dirty, and have every appearance of drinking gin.

There is a great deal to like -- lists of place-names and soil, "local color"... -- but on the whole it makes for atrocious in-flight reading as there is no narrative to it. I read fitfully and got through about 70pp. Disappointed he didn't do East Anglia as I sort of wanted to read Cobbett in parallel with Sebald. I'm always baffled by the things I choose to pack... this is why one should own a Kindle I suppose.

2. Speaking of Cobbett, I had not heard of Tom Paine's afterlife (Wikipedia):

A plan to return to England with the remains of [...] Thomas Paine (died 1809) for a proper burial led to the ultimate loss of Paine's remains. The plan was to give Paine a heroic reburial on his native soil, but the bones were still among Cobbett's effects when he died over twenty years later. There is no confirmed story about what happened to them after that, although down the years various people have claimed to own parts of Paine's remains such as his skull and right hand.

This is, of course, coheres with everything else one does know about Cobbett.

And some tab-closing:

3. From Randall Jarrell's review of The Shield of Achilles: "Auden [...] lies back in himself as if he were an unmade bed." (Cf. Lydia Davis's prose poem on Auden's sleeping habits.) I think most people who still read Auden today would be a little puzzled at Jarrell's claim that the very earliest work was the best. One is fond of "The Watershed," "1929," etc., but they are neither the anthology pieces nor the poems that have actually had influence.

4. Jeremy Harding on Hitch's "strong, almost gamey opinions" [LRB]. Trilling remarked somewhere that Orwell should be thought of an essayist in the tradition of Cobbett and Hazlitt; Hitchens, of course, is in the tradition of Orwell, and this is a transitive relation. Harding manages to squeeze in a swipe at Martin Amis, as a sidekick "with a frozen alcopop in one hand and an unread novel by Victor Serge in the other" who isn't as clever/fastidious/etc. as Hitchens. True in relative terms, perhaps, but reading Hitch in parallel with Orwell -- or Cobbett -- reminds you of what a self-indulgent poseur he is by comparison, how shallow and improvisatory his crotchets have always seemed.

"Obesity / and a little fame"

Lowell described this poem, in a letter to Bishop, as "really marvelous"; I agree. Auden's late style required him to walk a tightrope between goofiness and preachiness that he tended to fall off, but every now and again, almost fortuitously, he did something like this:

Since
W.H. Auden 

On a mid-December day, 
frying sausages
for myself, I abruptly
felt under fingers
thirty years younger the rim
of a steering wheel,
on my cheek the parching wind
of an August noon,
as passenger beside me
You as then you were.

Slap across a veg-growing
alluvial plain
we raced in clouds of white dust,
and geese fled screaming
as we missed them by inches,
making a bee-line
for mountains gradually
enlarging eastward,
joyfully certain nightfall
would occasion joy.

It did. In a flagged kitchen
we were served boiled trout
and a rank cheese: for a while
we talked by the fire,
then, carrying candles, climbed
steep stairs. Love was made
then and there: so halcyoned,
soon we fell asleep
to the sound of a river
swabbling through a gorge.

Since then, other enchantments
have blazed and faded,
enemies changed their address,
and War made ugly
an uncountable number
of unknown neighbors,
precious as us to themselves:
but round your image
there is no fog, and the earth
can still astonish.

Of what, then, should I complain,
pottering about
a neat suburban kitchen?
Solitude? Rubbish!
It's social enough with real
faces and landscapes
for whose friendly countenance
I at least can learn
to live with obesity
and a little fame. 

Ischia

[today being the 104th anniversary of Auden's birth -- this is not an anthology piece but is, I think, one of the better examples of Auden's late style when it comes off. Proximate source here.]

Ischia
W.H. Auden

There is a time to admit how much the sword decides,
with flourishing horns to salute the conqueror,
_____impassive, cloaked and great on
__horseback under his faffling flag.

Changes of heart should also occasion song, like his
who, turning back from the crusaders’ harbour, broke
_____with our aggressive habit
__once and for all and was the first

to see all penniless creatures as our siblings. Then
at all times it is good to praise the shining earth,
_____dear to us whether we choose our
__duty or do something horrible.

Dearest to each his birthplace; but to recall a green
valley where mushrooms fatten in the summer nights
_____and silvered willows copy
__the circumflexions of the stream

is not my gladness today: I am presently moved
by sun-drenched Parthenopea, my thanks are for you,
_____Ischia, to whom a fair wind has
__brought me rejoicing with dear friends

from soiled productive cities. How well you correct
our injured eyes, how gently you train us to see
_____things and men in perspective
__underneath your uniform light.

Noble are the plans of the shirt-sleeved engineer,
but luck, you say, does more. What design could have washed
_____with such delicate yellows
__and pinks and greens your fishing ports

that lean against ample Epomeo, holding on
to the rigid folds of her skirts? The boiling springs
_____which betray her secret fever,
__make limber the gout-stiffened joint

and improve the venereal act; your ambient peace
in any case is a cure for, ceasing to think
_____of a way to get on, we
__learn to simply wander about

by twisting paths which at any moment reveal
some vista as an absolute goal; eastward, perhaps,
_____suddenly there, Vesuvius,
__looming across the bright bland bay

like a massive family pudding, or, around
a southern point, sheer-sided Capri who by herself
_____defends the cult of Pleasure,
__a jealous, sometimes a cruel, god.

Always with some cool space or shaded surface, too,
you offer a reason to sit down; tasting what bees
_____from the blossoming chestnut
__or short but shapely dark-haired men

from the aragonian grape distil, your amber wine,
your coffee-coloured honey, we believe that our
_____lives are as welcome to us as
__loud explosions are to your saints.

Not that you lie about pain or pretend that a time
of darkness and outcry will not come back; upon
_____your quays, reminding the happy
__stranger that all is never well,

sometimes a donkey breaks out into a choking wail
of utter protest of what is the case or his
_____master sighs for a Brooklyn
__where shirts are silk and pants are new,

far from tall Restituta’s all-too-watchful eye,
whose annual patronage, they say, is bought with blood.
_____That, blessed and formidable
__Lady, we hope is not true; but since

nothing is free, whatever you charge shall be paid,
that these days of exotic splendour may stand out
_____in each lifetime like marble
__mileposts in an alluvial land.