"Alloverishness"

(Carroll's drawing of the Giant Puppy in Alice)

Marina Warner writes about Lewis Carroll's drawings in Tate Etc.:

Carroll’s juvenilia also include lots of drawings and graphic marginalia. The frontispiece of The Rectory Umbrella, for example, shows a bearded old man beaming as fairies fly under the shelter of his umbrella. They’re bearing cradle blessings labelled “Good Humour”, “Knowledge”, “Mirth” and “Cheerfulness”, among other boons. Above them, comical grimacing goblins are hurling rocks – these are “Woe”, “Spite”, “Gloom”, “Crossness”, “Ennui” and “Alloverishness” (presumably from the woeful cry, “It’s all over”.) Most tellingly of all, the umbrella that is shielding the good sprites has written between its spokes, “Jokes”, “Riddles”, “Poetry”, “Tales” and, in the centre, “Fun”. The young Charles Dodgson was interposing a determined brand of fun between himself and unhappiness.

Warner asserts that Dodgson didn't have a split personality, which is of course true; the mystery is why anyone would think otherwise. Another fact of interest primarily to myself is that "Dodgson" is cognate with "Rogers." (Andrew Gelman recently posted a list of blog obsessions; an analogous list here would include snouts and the word Hodge/Hogge and its equivalents, as well as other obvious things like Coleridge's drug intake and the physics of coffee stains.)

Thematically similar, and also of note, is this writer/illustrator collaboration by Krasznahorkai and the German artist Max Neumann.

"A major / Prophet taken short"

Wittgenstein and Housman:

(Housman, qua Cambridge institution, comes up a lot in stories about people like Wittgenstein, Russell, G.H. Hardy and John Littlewood. I remember there being a delightful anecdote in Littlewood's Miscellany involving Housman but I've forgotten what it was.) This story is in a letter from Guy Davenport to Marjorie Perloff; the letter is worth reading in full, it cleverly juxtaposes Wittgenstein with Gertrude Stein, who might have liked the implied comparison. Davenport also has amusing things to say about Wittgenstein elsewhere; see a prev. post.

While on the topic of celebrity letters, I should link to Eliot's letter to Woolf that was posted on the Paris Review's blog today. And, while I'm free-associating on this topic, to Eliot's magnificent letter to Middleton Murry on his second (third?) marriage.

PS re title see here.

Parfit, carpet knight

Dice sent along this engrossing NY'er profile of Derek Parfit [gated link] -- it is really a case where understanding the life helps one appreciate the work. It is immensely revealing, e.g., that Parfit did not like mathematics:

He hypothesized that there was some relationship between his inability to read music and his deficiencies at mathematics: he was not good at processing symbols.

By far the most irritating thing about Reasons and Persons is Parfit's aversion to algebraic symbols; many of the arguments would be infinitely clearer and shorter if he introduced x's and y's, or used heuristic numbers. (See Tyler Cowen on this re Parfit's new book.) I had put this down to convention, but idiosyncrasy is a more believable explanation. His obsessive circling around the same thoughts, his sheer repetitiveness, also turns out to be a character trait. ["Every time he'd say, 'Larry, isn't that boring, don't you want some of my curry?' I'd say, 'No, Derek, I don't like curry.'"] MacFarquhar cleverly splices in bits of dialogue between Parfit and his wife Janet Radcliffe Richards; I find that I agree with JRR's positions on most cases. (Though unlike her I would cheerily agree to align myself with "those gloomy Scandinavians" who believe life, even at its best, is only just worth living.)

Two other factoids that really illuminate R&P:

1. "Theodora and Derek were brilliant students, like their mother. ... Joanna, like her father, was bad at everything. Her teeth stuck out. She was also much too tall... [Derek's father] had a narrow life. He took refuge in two hobbies -- tennis, which he didn't play well, and stamp collecting... Parfit emerged from his childhood with the understanding that he and his mother and Theo were lucky and would live full lives, while Norman and Joanna were unlucky and would never be happy." This fleshes out the endless nattering on about full lives and crimped lives in part 4 of R&P.
2. [At All Souls] "he had become, he realized, what psychiatrists call institutionalized -- a person for whom living in an institution feels much more normal than living in a family." This, it seems to me, makes his views on selflessness etc. fairly easy to understand, and also his inability to engage persuasively with the Bernard Williams/JRR point of view.

His views on poetry ("he developed an obsession with the idea that not only should the lines of a poem rhyme but the words within each line should have internal assonances... when he read his favorite poets ... their poems seemed to him badly flawed, because they had too few internal assonances") and photography ("he disliked overhead lights, in which category he included the midday sun") are vaguely charming in the usual nutty way but perhaps not of much interest.

Finally, there is one of these decompositions-of-personality:

he pictures his thinking self as a government minister sitting behind a large desk, who writes a question on a piece of paper and puts it in his out-tray. The minister then sits idly at his desk, twiddling his thumbs, while in some back room civil servants labor furiously, come up with the answer, and place it in his in-tray.

Cf. the street that is John Davidson's heart, the household that is T.S. Eliot.

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.)