Arnold Bennett was born in 1867 and grew up in what many would argue was a golden age in English Literature: Dickens, Thackerary, Gaskell, Trollope, Hardy, the Brontes, Eliot and Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant (née Margaret Wilson Oliphant: she married her cousin Francis Wilson Oliphant in 1852), 1828 – 1897. Her entry in the Dictionary of National Biography compared her novels to those of George Eliot, particularly the four novels in her series Chronicles of Carlingford. Margaret Oliphant’s Ngram looks like this:

Whereas George Eliot’s Ngram looks like this:

Search for George Eliot on the BBC shop and you are given the chance to buy one audiobook and four DVDs. Search for Margaret Oliphant and you are given thirty eight results which contain the word “elephant.” Clearly something odd is happening in the zeitgeist

Yet Margaret Oliphant was a profitable, popular and prolific author. After the success of Salem Chapel, the publisher Mr Blackwood paid her £1500 for The Perpetual Curate (worth  £104,000 in 2011 according to MeasuringWorth.com), much to the horror of his cashier. According to the online At the Circulating Library – a database of Victorian Fiction, she was, with 62 serialised titles, the most prolific of serial authors; and with 100 titles, she was the most prolific of authors, full stop. Of the authors mentioned above only Trollope makes it into any of these categories, coming in at number five  in Most Prolific Authors with 52 titles.

Of the previous generation of writers, Sir Walter Scott, is often presented as an author driven to write by circumstances, a necessity which, we all know, finally killed him. Scott’s biographer, John Gibson Lockhart, wrote of a party at the Edinburgh home of William Menzies, a Supreme judge at the Cape of Good Hope. A friend asked him to swap seats because he had had enough of watching the hand of a writer hidden in some corner of the room fill page after page without pause. Some stupid clerk, replied someone in the party.  The host quietly reprimanded them by saying “No, boys. I well know what hand it is—’tis Walter Scott’s.” Lockhart finished the anecdote by adding “…this was the hand that, in the evenings of three summer weeks, wrote the two last volumes of Waverley.” However, with his 64 titles as listed by the Dictionary of National Biography, Scott would have come a distant fourth to Margaret Oliphant in the category of Most Prolific Authors in At the Circulating Library.

Like Sir Walter Scott, Margaret Oliphant was obliged to write. Living in Rome because of her husband’s poor health, she was widowed in 1859, in debt to the tune of £1000 (£78,000 in 2012) and pregnant with her third child. Returning to Rome in 1864, she was faced with the further grief of losing her daughter, followed shortly by the return of her recently widowed brother from Canada with his three children, all of whom she took into her home, charging herself with their care and education. Given that they were to be educated at Eton, the money she earned from her multi-volume series was always quickly spent: as the author of her entry in the DNB put it “…her life might have been described as slavery to the pen, if writing had not been a real enjoyment to her.” Her two sons, despite their privileged education, never amounted to much; they died before she did without accomplishing anything of note. She died, after a journey to Sienna, at the age of 69. A few days before her death she had even managed to compose a few lines in honour of Queen Victoria’s jubilee.

Of her 100 titles, Bennett included one in Literary Taste, Salem Chapel. Of George Eliot’s eight, he included five. This is not the place to dispute the statement that although the works of both were comparable, the mind behind Margaret Oilphant’s novels was “…manifestly of less intellectual calibre.” But she was of sufficient importance and held in high regard during her lifetime to have caused Robert Louis Stevenson to charge in on his friend Harry Moors, excitedly waving a sheet of paper in the air, crying out  that he  ”…would never guess, if I gave you all morning, who it is who has at last admitted me to be in the front rank of my profession. It is Mrs Oliphant, my dear sir – Mrs Oliphant!” Like the Victorian penny dreadfuls, she seems to have, if not disappeared from the literary zeitgeist, to have slipped far to one side, hidden by the bustles of George Eliot and Mrs Gaskell’s dresses; and like the penny dreadfuls she seems to play only a small part in our conception of the varied forms taken by Victorian literary culture; and like the copy of Marvel’s Avengers No. 1 I bought on Sunday, she is there somewhere in that pliable, personal and subjective entity, known as literary taste.

Coming soon, Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate.

NB.

I did not of course of buy a physical copy of Avengers No. 1. As this rather splendid graph shows, even adjusting its 1963 cover price of 12¢ to its 2011 equivalent of 86¢, makes little difference when comparing with the $4,299.99 being asked for a first edition on sale on eBay. I bought it instead from the online comiXology for 1.59€.

Cover via Amazon

These include:

• The Writer’s Idea Book by Jack Heffron
  This book has the subtitle ‘How to Develop Great Ideas for Fiction, Non-fiction, Poetry and Screenplays’. Heffron has been a professional editor for more than 15 years, has published many short stories in literary journals and won awards for his writing. Apologies, (this is embarrassing) but I’ve just been informed that this book is no longer free (thanks, Shirley!) but I’ve left the details here just in case the price is removed again (fingers crossed)
• The Author’s Craft by Arnold Bennett.
  ‘Arnold Bennett writes in a very amusing and accessible style in this short manual of advice for authors which will be useful even to today’s writers,’ says a review.
• Write Good or Die edited by the thriller writer Scott Nicholson.
  This is subtitled ‘Survival Tips for the 21st Century’. One reviewer said, ‘It’s a gem of a book, not least because I came away from reading this with the thought that if the writers within this book can do it? Why can’t I?’.

I haven’t had chance to read any of these myself yet so can’t give a personal recommendation but I have just downloaded The Writer’s Idea Book in the hope of finding some inspiration. By the way, free books do tend to come and go on Amazon – so if you’re interested in any of these it’s probably worth getting them sooner rather than later.

Many thanks to Philip Mallinson whose post on Writing Magazine’s Talkback Forum alerted me to these books.

Bennett was an admirer of the French realistic novelists like Balzac and Flaubert and set out to write something similar in English. I can’t say how true to his models this book is as I’ve never any of them, but I agree with the reviewers of the time (1908) who apparently hailed The Old Wives’ Tale as a masterpiece.

It is about two sisters, born in a pottery town in Staffordshire in the mid-nineteenth century. The story follows them from their mid-teens to their deaths some fifty years later. Although there are a few scenes of high drama – a murder, a public execution and quite a number of less outrageous deaths – this is a look at ‘real life’ so the sisters live day to day, year to year in a ‘normal’ world, and much of the action is subtle and understated.

Bennett wanted to show that people become what they are through their experiences in life. The paths of the sisters diverge: the eldest stays at home, works in her father’s shop and marries his chief assistant; the youngest elopes to Paris, is abandoned by her husband and sets herself up as the owner of a pension. When they are reunited years later, they have each developed, not only according to their initial characters, but also because of their histories.

By following the sisters separately for at least half the book it can at times seem like two stories. But the structure is also part of its originality.

For me, one of the most positive things about the novel is that the main characters are capable career women. The eldest balances motherhood and work in a way a 21st century woman would recognise, and the youngest becomes wealthy through her own hard work.

Another feature I liked is that the women age realistically. Because they are different, the two of them move differently from lively teenager to responsible working woman to slightly grumpy old lady. But in some ways each of them is a universal ageing woman.

I also liked the effect on the women of the background of social and political changes they experienced. This kind of study is really only possible when the story covers a long period.

I did feel that the relationship between the sisters could have been developed a bit more, but I think the author was more focussed on the effect of time and personal history on individuals than on relationships.

Bennett chose a large canvas to work and fills it splendidly: each change is logical, each mood true, and the ends of the two lives we have followed are natural.

Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.—Arnold Bennett

To detect changes in the zeitgeist has been notoriously difficult. But not now. With the wonderfully elegant Ngram from Google you can track the highs and lows of everything from cheese to Zoroastrianism. Recently, I have been praising Arnold Bennett and Hugh Walpole (as much their personalities as their books) and wondering if I would have liked to have had a pint with Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey (no). As you can see from the Ngrams below I am clearly on the wrong side of history when it comes to our man Bennett and caught between a rock and a hard place with Walpole and Strachey.

Virginia Woolf’s death in 1941 did nothing to dent her rising popularity, whereas Bennett’s death in 1931 was followed by a fall in interest that has only begun to level out in the last ten years. The publication in 1956 of the letters  between Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey can clearly be seen in the graph. Reginald Pound’s biography of Bennett published in 1954 could only detain but not reverse his downward trend in interest in him and his works.

Hugh Walpole and Lytton Strachey are the twin dark stars of publishing, their destinies strangely intertwined. Michael Holroyd’s 1967 biography of Lytton Strachey momentarily reawakened (or reflected)  interest in his work, whereas Rupert Hart-Davis’s biography of Hugh Walpole, published in 1952, two years before Bennett’s, maintained interest in him for less than a decade before the downward course began again.

For those of you interested in what a graph of cheese and Zoroastrianism would look like, it looks like this.

Next the works of Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate from 1913 until his death in 1930.

In the 1944, October 17th edition of the The Western Daily Press and Bristol Mirror there was a review of Sir Hugh Walpole’s play The Cathedral. “Paul Lorraine,” it reported, “was magnificent as the self-centred embittered old archdeacon…who, suffering under the illusion that everyone is up against him, brings his egotistical castle in the clouds crashing around him.” The acting of Constance Chapman, who played his wife, was described as “sensitive” while Malcolm Farquhar “gave a convincing picture of a hot-headed, impetuous youth.” In The Daily Mail of November 17th 1947, the choice of The Old Ladies, adapted from a Hugh Walpole novel, by the Wyke Players was described as “courageous.” It went on to say “…those who played the three old ladies in the basement deserved great credit.” In January of the following year, the Western Daily Press and Bristol Mirror reported on a less than successful production of Hugh Walpole’s The Haxtons by the Knowle Park Congregational Church Dramatic Society. Although “…a sincere, steady production of a social drama…it’s very steadiness proved to be one of its chief faults.” Essayist, critic, novelist and playwright, Sir Hugh Walpole, as the above highlights, was also middle class, middle aged and Middle England. Following his death in June 1941, The Western Morning News published a short obituary under the heading Famous Novelist with Cornish Association Dead. So, we can add the charge of provincialism too.

But, I ask, is that such a bad thing? In the October of 1940, The Western Daily Press and Bristol Mirror reported on a talk given by Sir Hugh in the Bristol Central Library on The Romantic Novel in England. In the talk, which was described as both “comprehensive and amusing”, Sir Hugh outlined its history, from its beginnings in the 18th century, through the achievements of the Victorians, to the determination of H.G.Wells, Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy to tell the truth, “the first of the realists,” and its end following the First World War. Absent from the report was that during the lecture Heinkel 111 bombers of Kampfgeschwader 55, led by Oberleutnant Speck von Sternburg, were attempting to bomb the Bristol Aircraft Works at nearby Filton. Despite the air-raid sirens over 700 people stayed to listen as a 57 year old man talked about the English romantic novel while bombers of a crack Luftwaffe squadron tried to drop bombs on them. Were it not an oxymoron, one could say that any intelligent nazi reading about this would have quickly realised that the game was up and any chance of world domination was lost as soon as Sir Hugh, signing a copy of his The Bright Pavilions for the library, added “In the time of bombing October 18, ’40.”

Not, perhaps, a Churchillian moment but it was an example of the bravery that characterised many of the smaller moments of the war.  It was, I suggest, that quiet, unassuming bravery that Middle England does so well, a quality that we who are not from Middle England can only look on from afar and admire. It was also very human, another quality which I have already suggested was important in the life and work of Sir Hugh Walpole. The American writer Joseph Hergesheimer (1880 – 1954) in his book Hugh Walpole, An Appreciation wrote of his work “They, the novels, are at once provincial, as the great novels invariably are, and universal as any deep penetration of humanity, and considerable artistry, must be.” True, it was published by Walpole’s American publisher and true also that Douglas Goldring (1887 – 1960) in his book Reputations, Essays on Criticism likened the reading of a novel by Hugh Walpole as “…putting on one’s high hat and grandpapa’s Sunday trousers and making a call in Rutland Gate!” Having read Mr Perrin and Mr Traill and The Dark Forest I can vouch for the former criticism and pass lightly over the latter, justifying it by noting Goldring’s friendship with Wyndham Lewis and the whole Vorticist nonsense.

Sir Hugh Walpole, we salute you! In your honour we fire a mighty salvo of coordinates (7,3) and (8,3), moving my literary taste back towards the E.M.Forster axis, which is where we want to be.

Karpo is far nicer than you expect

From its deliberately obscure name (some kind of goddess, apparently) to its wildly graffiti-ed frontage opposite St Pancras, to its curious, mismatched interior (‘living wall’ of plants; open-ish kitchen; concrete seating; entire tree-trunk), Karpo is distinctly odd.

None of this promises a top culinary experience: but, yes, first impressions can be wrong. 

Look at clever Southern-fried quail. It’s the perfect way to take your dirty little junk food cravings out of the closet and on to the restaurant plate. Tender, flavour-packed bird, spiced crunchy coating, a slaw of creamily mayo-ed celeriac: works in every way.

Perfectly al dente lobster macaroni lacks cheese – not that it’s billed as having any, just a Pavlovian response to ‘macaroni’ – but is big on sweet lobster bisque flavours and chunks of crustacean.

Pink lamb with green beans may look a bit perfunctory, but the quality and flavours are all there. Only a huge, blowsy pink peppercorn meringue bombs out: flawless, gooey meringue, but blunderbuss spicing that lives with us for the rest of the day. (Pause for small, peppery belch.)

There’s a lot to like in this unlikely setting: excellent home-baking; moody downstairs bar; a terrific breakfast menu (kedgeree or omelette Arnold Bennett: yes, please); those concrete benches come with internal heating for toasty bums. Karpo is a rare beast in that it’s far nicer than you expect.

Dinner for two with wine, water and service costs about £80. 23 Euston Road, NW1.  www.karpo.co.uk Follow Marina @marinaoloughlin

“Any change, even a change for the better, is always
accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.”

– Arnold Bennett

I read Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians a couple of years ago. Up to then all that I knew of Lytton Strachey I had learned from the film Carrington. From somewhere I had come across his reply to the question as to what would he do if he saw a German soldier trying to rape his sister – he was conscientious objector in the First World War – “I would try and come between them.” He was therefore a personality and Eminent Victorians was one of those books I felt I should read. But as I read his description of Florence Nightingale’s obsession with windows (open or closed, she was, he wrote, immune to good advice as to why the opposite was better medical practice); his criticism of Cardinal Manning for being, well, Cardinal Manning; General Gordon’s decision to listen to God rather than Gladstone  and Thomas Arnold’s introduction of prefects to Rugby with all that entailed for the more sensitive pupils, I wondered why I felt uneasy. Having now read Hugh Walpole’s Mr Perrin and Mr Traill, I have the answer. Lytton Strachey was not Hugh Walpole.

Frank Swinnerton (novelist and critic: 1884 – 1982) devoted a chapter to Hugh Walpole in his literary autobiography Figures in the Foreground. Walpole was, he wrote, “…a very complex character, impulsive, loyal, affectionate, laughing, but at the same time aware of the advantages of publicity and tormented by conscience, bad dreams, ambition, schoolgirlish spitefulness, and an incurable habit of self-protective secrecy, or dissimulation.” Swinnerton’s comments on Strachey are more guarded but of Eminent Victorians he wrote “…he [Strachey] carefully chose incidents in the lives of four eminent Victorians and quotations from what they had said, with the object of staining an entire age.” Bloomsbury, Swinnerton declared, he admired but did not respect; its laughter he wrote “was always salted with derision” and Strachey was the chief exponent of the Bloomsbury spirit. They were all terrible gossips, both Bloomsbury and non-Bloomsbury. Of their gossip, it is Walpole’s I would have chosen to listen to. He gossiped because he was a gossip. Strachey gossiped because he was cruel.

“We must start with the man in order to do justice to the work.” That’s what the German classical philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf (1848 – 1931) wrote in his essay to celebrate the bimillenary  anniversary of the birth of the Roman poet Virgil. It would be easy to say that I’m just trying to look clever by using this quote. And, given that it is easy, it should, I agree, be said. But the words are written. A man with an impressive name, who lived a long time ago, said something that supports my argument. Is there more to be said? Well, a little. Hugh Walpole enjoyed being famous and rich from writing best-selling books. Lytton Strachey, in the words of Swinnerton, to amuse himself, sought to make “ardent supporters of the Christian virtues laughable,” doing it all “…with deliberate malice.” Hugh Walpole, famous now for the number of websites which remind us that he is no longer read, is of the two the much more attractive personality. It is his books I would look forward to reading, not being the kind of person who now enjoys the malice of another.

Next, Mr Perrin and Mr Traill. The first signs are very positive and I look forward to the accumulation of a great deal of literary taste.

Answers. 1. The glasses. Hugh Walpole, the vainer of the two, is wearing rimless ones. Lytton Strachey, always keen to draw attention to his physical weaknesses, wears rimmed ones. 2. The hair. Hugh Walpole, worried that he will not be regarded as an intellectual, brushes it back, exposing his high forehead. Lytton Strachey has no such insecurities and combs it to one side. 3. The tie pin. Hugh Walpole, keen to show his wealth and status, wears one. Lytton Strachey does not. 4. The pocket handkerchief. Hugh Walpole, for whom personal hygiene and being well-dressed were important, has one. Lytton Strachey scorns all such pomposity. 5. The book. Hugh Walpole does not have one. He wishes to attract a wide range of admirers by not appearing too intellectual. Lytton Strachey, on the other hand, by turning away from the viewer and reading his book, makes clear his disdain for all things non-literary.

According to Wikipedia it is regarded as one of Bennett’s best books and has been listed among the 100 Best English-language novels of the 20th Century.

It was published in 1908 so the lives covered will, in some ways, be very different from the experience of today’s women. In other ways, like earning a living or worry over children, they will be similar.

Picture from Wikipedia.

The February 9th edition of Harper’s Weekly, 1861, carried a lengthy report under the heading REVOLUTION IN NAVAL WARFARE. SHOT-PROOF IRON STEAMSHIPS. The news that the French were already building an armoured warship, La Gloire, had, it reported, led the British government to order the construction of HMS Warrior. Fast, capable of 14 knots, heavily armoured, 4 and 1/2 inch iron plates lined its oak sides, and heavily armed, 48 heavy 68 pounders, it would, the report stated, make clear that the British navy had “resolved to oppose to La Gloire a real sea-going ship of war; not a mere floating battery, nor a craft that would have to keep the land in sight, but a ship which should be fit to take the open sea, and, if need be, to bear the flag of old England once more to the enemy’s coasts.”

Four years later, The Lincolnshire Chronicle, on the 10th of March 1865, carried under the heading Literary Notices the following, “Mr Matthew Arnold carries to perfection the double faculty of delighting and exasperating his readers; but even those most opposed to his teaching and sensitive to his clever caprices, will rejoice that the Essays on Criticism, which appeared in several magazines, and by their ability challenged considerable attention, are now available in a permanent form.” Following his death in 1888, the Liberal statesman John Morley, then Chief Secretary for Ireland, spoke in the House of Commons noting that in “…the disappearance of that bright ornament of his time, I express for many on both sides of the House our sense of the loss of one who was a man of letters of the first eminence and distinction, who, besides that, was a public servant of the greatest usefulness, and who, finally, constantly showed a very keen and luminous insight into some of the most urgent social, intellectual, and political needs of his generation and his country.” The American literary critic Lionel Trilling in his 1939 book Matthew Arnold, writing of Arnold’s time as Oxford Professor of Poetry, described it as “revolutionary”, not the least revolutionary aspect being giving his lectures in English rather than Latin which his predecessors had done.

There is a risk in both of the examples above of simply being over-impressed by facts. But compared to the risks associated with leaving the top off a jar containing the Ebola virus or transporting high-level nuclear waste in cardboard boxes, the consequences are negligible. Perspective is everything. So, let us put Arnold on HMS Warrior. It is debatable whether he would have given the order to fire on La Gloire, given his declared admiration in the Essays on Criticism for French writers such as Maurice de Guérin, Joseph Joubert and the advantages gained by French culture from the Academie Française (central control as opposed to the dreaded and dreadful British provincialism). However, I would have given the order (he would not have wept, nor would he have reproached me – duty is duty after all – but he would have been conscious of the heavy symbolism as La Gloire was pounded into matchwood). But I would have given the order with a heavy heart as I would have wanted to have impressed the man who had given his three lectures On Translating Homer between November 1860 and January 1861 in the Taylor Institute Library, Oxford. Even more than pace the gun deck of the Warrior, I would have wanted to have sat in the front row and listened to him talk.

For that I would have willingly endured the contemptuous glances of the other men in the audience at my lack of side-whiskers (and very possibly from any women present also); I would have nodded unknowingly at the quotations in Greek, laughed in the wrong places, uttered “Hear, hear” in a way that showed I had not the slightest understanding of what  had been said and applauded before the end of the lecture just as I do when I think a piece of classical music has finished and it has not. It is very likely I would have even said to the embarrassment of those around me “Well worth £125″* - (the stipend paid annually to Arnold as Oxford Professor of Poetry and worth £9,160 in 2010 prices). Just as he spoke of the rapidity, the plainness, the directness and the nobility of Homer (all qualities lacking, he argued, in F.W.Newman’s 1856 translation of the Iliad), his own words carried those same qualities. “Few are those who can recall the graceful figure in its silken gown, the gracious address, the slightly supercilious smile” wrote G.W.E. Russell in 1904.

This is Literary Taste in all its glory. Reading the Essays in Criticism lets the middlebrow lift its head up and look the highbrow in the eye; it encourages a person to leave behind the provinces, make the journey to the metropolitan centre and yet still look on a literary career as just work. Someone, in other words, like Arnold Bennett.

For some strange reason, ‘Christmas’ offers many people an opportunity  for a peculiar kind of celebration which seems to entail spending vast amounts of money. Over ‘Christmas’ 2011 I decided I’d celebrate in a peculiar manner by re-reading the selected essays of Michel de Montaigne. I first read these about fifty years ago and I was playing a hunch that they had a big impact on the way I came to view the world.

I have lost the copy of the essays I read all those years ago otherwise I have no doubt I would easily have been able to turn up the things I deemed important then because I have long been in the habit of underlining things of significance to me in books neatly in pencil.

The introduction to the new Penguin Selected Essays by the translator, Dr MAScreech, included several references which made me think I was on the right track with my hunch.

It seems that when Montaigne withdrew from the world he inscribed quotations on the roof of his library in much the same way as Gurdjieff did at Fontainebleu. For instance he might have had this (which is amongst the host of quotations in his essays, some of which I quote here from time to time) up there in his library:

‘Endeavour to make circumstances subject to me, and not me subject to circumstances…’ (Horace)

I emulated Mr G by covering in a similar fashion the six-sided conical ceiling of the summer-house I built at the end of last century. These act as anchors for ideas and serve for reminders of key things in the 4th Way. They feature boxed throughout the text of my farrago book  ROOM THREE.

My Summerhouse

For Montaigne the possession of books was a delight… When I was about 16 I read Arnold Bennett (in Literary Taste I think it was) who said that the way to learning was first of all simply to surround yourself with books—so I’ve done just that for 50 years. Like Montaigne it pleases me greatly to be able to reach up to a wall of books and either find something I know is up there or discover something new on an autumn afternoon, as it might be. It delights me to lace my writing with quotations that seem to add something to what I write, confirm it, justify it somehow. Like Sartre’s Autodidact (in Nausea) I am always pleased when I discover that somebody more famous than I will ever be has expressed the same (or a similar) idea as I have tried (= ‘essayed’) to put into words. I always feel a need to honour and acknowledge earlier writers, not to put myself on their level but simply somehow to confirm a common basis in humanity. Montaigne says: ‘I only quote others the better to quote myself…’ I suppose I delight in quoting others because it gives me a better inkling of what I think I mean to say…  As here, just now!

Learning is always for a purpose; it is instrumental; like Montaigne I have no desire to be ‘learned for its own sake’. Learning is life; Montaigne said ‘…my soul is ever in its apprenticeship and being tested…’ No completion; no finality till death…

Screech says ‘Montaigne held that philosophy should be delightful. He saw no need for it to be severe and forbidding…’ Them’s my sentiments too. A philosophy that larks about! Unless you can play the clown you are not entitled to be serious, say I.

Since my aim is to quote sufficiently from Montaigne’s essays to back up my hunch that I owe such a lot to him, I have gone to the on-line Gutenburg Project’s free version of Charles Cotton’s 1685/6 translation rather than run the risk of being extradited or incarcerated for infringing copyright by Penguin. However, I do owe my researches to reading the MAScreech translation over Xmas 2011.

At the age of 38, tired of the life he’d been leading, Montaigne

…retired to my own house, with a resolution, as much as possibly I could, to avoid all manner of concern in affairs, and to spend in privacy and repose the little remainder of time I have to live, I fancied I could not more oblige my mind than to suffer it at full leisure to entertain and divert itself, which I now hoped it might henceforth do, as being by time become more settled and mature; but I find—

Variam semper dant otia mentem—Leisure ever creates varied thought—Lucan

that… it is like a horse that has broke from his rider, who voluntarily runs into a much more violent career than any horseman would put him to, and creates me so many chimaeras and fantastic monsters, one upon another, without order or design, that, the better at leisure to contemplate their strangeness and absurdity, I have begun to commit them to writing, hoping in time to make it ashamed of itself…

Montaigne's Chateau

Notice that it was at the age of 38 that Montaigne decided he’d had enough of living life for the benefit of others. At that age he determined to ‘..live out the small remnant of life’ for himself. To do this he had to ‘call in [his] thoughts and intentions to [himself, in aid of his] own ease and repose…’

It is no light thing to make a sure retreat; it will be enough for us to do without mixing other enterprises.  Since God gives us leisure to order our removal, let us make ready, truss our baggage, take leave of company, and disentangle ourselves from those violent importunities that engage us elsewhere and separate us from ourselves. We must break the knot of our obligations, how strong soever, and hereafter love this or that, but espouse nothing but ourselves: that is to say, let the remainder be our own, but not so joined and so close as not to be forced away without flaying us or tearing out part of our whole.  The greatest thing in the world is for a man [sic] to know that he is his own.

Apart from the historical fact, this is such a useful metaphor for learning to be yourself, without attachments, on the road to the ideal state of Nothingness from which you can always choose to move carefully towards the idea of being ‘something-or-other’. Gurdjieff said approximately: ‘Until you can think of yourself as a Nothingness, going Nowhere, there’s no chance of change…’

I suppose that retirement from wage slavery in 1992 at 55 (17 years after Montaigne escaped the rat race) should have brought me a peace similar to what he had hoped for but, as in his case, the flow of ideas keeps growing apace, without, perhaps, much in the way of order or design.

‘This plodding occupation of books is as painful as any other, and as great an enemy unto health, which ought principally to be considered.  And a man should not suffer him self to be inveigled by the pleasure he takes in them…’ (Florio) Ah books! What would life be without them?

The many worlds I still inhabit sustain multiple interests which have a habit of linking up in accordance with Ouspensky’s dictum written on the ceiling of my summerhouse, ‘All things are connected—they appear to be separated…’ Conversely, every world is managed by a different set of ‘I’s; people of the haiku world would not necessarily recognise the ‘I’s in me of that world as compared with the ‘I’s in me of the Enneagram world or the ‘I’s in me that flourish in the musical world, for instance. As Dr MAScreech points out ‘…Montaigne discovered that he could never pin down a stable I which he could study: his I as the writer was ever-changing; his I as the subject was ever-changing too…’

In 2006 Writer-I made the idea of the variable (or Multiple) ‘I’ the subject of a 200 page book, The Campaign Against Abstractionism.

Montaigne comments that he cannot provide a stable portrait of himself since he changes depending on context; he is never the same for two consecutive moments; he is not depicting a Being, but a Becoming. I think that when I first read this I must have felt so comforted—as a young man not long out of adolescence, I ambled from this to that in an vain attempt to figure out what it was all about.

As a kind of follower of the 4th Way now, I know that the only way to do this successfully is to engage in what’s called External Considering, to look objectively at one’s experience of life and track the Multiple-I’s that appear in different circumstances. Since everything can be looked at from these multiple points of view, nobody can have the last word on anything. As Montaigne points out ‘Men [and women] are vain authorities who can resolve nothing…’

Charles Cotton’s editor, William Carew Hazlitt, in 1877, said of Montaigne that ‘…What he did, and what he had professed to do, was to dissect his mind, and show us, as best he could, how it was made, and what relation it bore to external objects.  He investigated his mental structure as a schoolboy pulls his watch to pieces, to examine the mechanism of the works; and the result, accompanied by illustrations abounding with originality and force…’

How Do I Imagine that my Reading of Montaigne’s Essays 50 years ago Affected Me?

I suppose the main thing might be that it perhaps set me up for an embrace of Gurdjieff’s instruction which I came across much later on to engage in constant self-examination without making judgements, without ever beating oneself up about anything.

Montaigne’s blend of Stoicism, Epicureanism and Scepticism got into my soul (or somewhere like that) as did Thoreau with his statement that it was pointless reading newspapers—once you’ve read one, you’ve read the lot because you know that they will consist of reports on murders, bomb-dropping, political chicanery, sporting pastimes and celebrity antics—the things that make up civilisation as we know it. Why would you wish to remind yourself daily about such things? All superficial ‘A Influences’.

…if you have lived a day, you have seen all: one day is equal and like to all other days.  There is no other light, no other shade; this very sun, this moon, these very stars, this very order and disposition of things, is the same your ancestors enjoyed, and that shall also entertain your posterity…  And, come the worst that can come, the distribution and variety of all the acts of my comedy are performed in a year.  If you have observed the revolution of my four seasons, they comprehend the infancy, the youth, the virility, and the old age of the world: the year has played his part, and knows no other art but to begin again; it will always be the same thing…

Once we have got the hang of the pattern of life, we realise that things go round and round: for instance, by the time I went to school in 1942 Gradgrindism had begun to give way to a more enlightened more creative approach; then my great experience at Kingston Grammar School was flexibly anarchic; nowadays, mechanism, computers and the ticking of boxes are all the rage; but there are suggestions that we are producing a race of kids who cannot think for themselves—modern Gradgrindism will no doubt give way to a more creative approach in due course, though we have first of all to get through the Gove Factor. (Gove is the current posh Monster of What-he-likes-to-think-of-as-Education in the UK so-called Government…)

A constant state of flux does make it difficult at first to pin things down; it is impossible to say once and for all, “So this is how it is…” Any serious thinker is constantly on the go, putting this together with that, making sense of things by comparing, synthesising, making a collage of ideas, shaking up the kaleidoscope whilst essaying to keep a strong grasp on her own angle.

This is a daunting proposition. It threatens to overwhelm us and so we tend to limit ourselves to what we can see around us, what’s at the end of our all too simple nose. But how exciting! The true thinker embraces everything like Socrates when asked ‘of what country he was, he did not make answer, of Athens, but of the world…’

This great world… is the mirror wherein we are to behold ourselves, to be able to know ourselves as we ought to do in the true bias. [Montaigne] would have this to be the book [which should be studied] with the most attention.  So many humours, so many sects, so many judgments, opinions, laws, and customs… So many mutations of states and kingdoms, and so many turns and revolutions of public fortune, will make us wise enough to make no great wonder of our own.  So many great names, so many famous victories and conquests drowned and swallowed in oblivion… The pride and arrogance of so many foreign pomps, the inflated majesty of so many courts and grandeurs… so many trillions of men, buried before us… Pythagoras was want to say, that our life resembles the great and populous assembly of the Olympic games, wherein some exercise the body, that they may carry away the glory of the prize: others bring merchandise to sell for profit: there are also some (and those none of the worst sort) who pursue no other advantage than only to look on, and consider how and why everything is done, and to be spectators of the lives of other men, thereby the better to judge of and regulate their own.

Montaigne seems to be agreeing that the spectators at the Olympic Games are the  most admirable types. These latter days though, the spectators will be roaring their heads off, shouting for the winners, wining & dining themselves in the corporate hospitality saloons, staying in hotels where they can afford £2000 per night in London 2012; hyped up to the eyebrows with various invented patriotisms, they will certainly not be sober & collected enough to learn much from the potential experience of being docile & ordinary down-to-earth observers.

It requires a certain quiet distancing to develop the ability to shuffle things into order. Until the synthetic nature of ‘reality’ can be grasped, until a certain amount of carefully observed repeated experience makes it clear that things are constantly shifting, it’s more less impossible to assert, “This is where I stand…” Until then

…my fancy and judgment do but grope in the dark, tripping and stumbling in the way; and when I have gone as far as I can, I am in no degree satisfied; I discover still a new and greater extent of land before me, with a troubled and imperfect sight and wrapped up in clouds, that I am not able to penetrate.

I wonder if Tennyson read Montaigne…

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use…

(Ulysses)

And so I have kept at it, groping around in the dark, trying to catch up with untravelled worlds, never satisfied with one way of looking at things, delighting in subtle changes of emphasis from one writer to another, from one idea to another. Pursuing Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas!

Teaching

I first read Montaigne’s essays around the time (early 1960’s) when I was toying with the idea of turning myself into a teacher. Montaigne offers some advice to an acquaintance about the general characteristics of a person suitable for her to choose to tutor her child. I think I probably welded a lot of this into my scheme of things:

…a tutor [should rather have] a well-made than a well-filled head; …seeking, indeed, both the one and the other… [but preferring to cultivate] manners and judgment to mere learning, and… should exercise his charge after a new method…

in order to get away from the usual method which is based on

…pedagogues [habitually thundering] in their pupil’s ears, as if they were pouring into a funnel, whilst the business of the pupil is only to repeat what [they] have said. Now I would have a tutor… permitting the pupil himself [sic] to taste things, and of himself to discern and choose them, sometimes opening the way to him, and sometimes leaving him to open it for himself; …[just as] Socrates [had his] scholars speak, before he spoke to them…

Montaigne quotes Cicero: ‘The authority of those who teach, is very often an impediment to those who desire to learn…’

Authority alienates.  Though I had never, of course, put it into two words of eight syllables, this I had felt during my time at school; I always put myself down in the face of authority while all the time, I lately realise, keeping my own secret counsel. As a result of my experience, for many years, teaching teachers how to teach, I used to assert that the task of teachers was to render themselves superfluous as soon as possible so that their students are given space to develop their own dynamic.

Before content becomes important, it’s the process of learning that has to be come to terms with—what has come to be called ‘learning how to learn’. Gregory Bateson called it ‘deutero-learning’…

…let the learner judge of the profit she has made [out of learning], not by the testimony of memory, but by that of life.  Let the learner put what she has learned into a hundred several forms, and accommodate it to so many several subjects, to see if she yet rightly comprehends it, and has made it her own… …no matter if she forget where she had her learning, provided she know how to apply it to her own use…  so the several fragments she borrows from others, she will transform and shuffle together to compile a work that shall be absolutely her own…

I have so often quoted ANWhitehead (in Aims of Education) who says exactly this. Learning remains inert unless you can contrive ways of making into your own possession and work out how it relates to other subjects and to life itself. Unless we can do this

…our minds work only upon trust… Bound and compelled to follow the appetite of another’s fancy, enslaved and captivated under the authority of another’s instruction; we have… no free, nor natural pace of our own; our own vigour and liberty are extinct and gone.

Learners should ‘…thoroughly sift everything they read, and lodge nothing in fancy on simple authority and trust… Who follows another, follows nothing, finds nothing, nay, is inquisitive after nothing…’  Verify everything for yourself, said Gurdjieff.

Getting on the Inside of Things    

It follows that ‘…to know by rote, is no knowledge, and signifies no more but only the ability to retain what one has intrusted to memory…  there is yet no foundation for any superstructure to be built upon it…’

How do we get on the inside of things, to make them our own possession so that we can, so to speak, build endless structures of ideas on them? I suppose that the answer is to talk about them, turning the words over and over in an experimental kind of way, learning to ‘approximate to truth’ (JGBennett) by taking feedback into account. A systemic process. It’s pretty clear that a diligent respectful dealing with things in themselves will ‘force the words to express them…’ (Cicero). Handling ideas and trying them out in various ways for ourselves will turn them into our own possession. ‘When things are once in the mind, the words offer themselves readily… When things have taken possession of the mind, the words trip out accordingly…’ (Cicero)

Horace says: ‘Once a thing is conceived in the mind, the words to express it soon present themselves… The words will not reluctantly follow the thing preconceived…’

To confirm this, imagine what must be going on for a person who complains that they can’t quite put something into words—it’s surely an indication that they just haven’t got on the inside of what they think they want to say. If they could attach words to what they want to say, they would find out what they were imagining they were thinking; the words would probably still be an inadequate representation of what they think they want to say. But once it’s out in the open, the wording can always be refined by an honest thinker willing to spend time ‘approximating to truth…’ rather than concluding to start with that they’ve got it.

Montaigne made articulate what I came to feel about teaching & learning… What else did he do for me?

Solitude

He alerted me to the possible pleasures of solitude or rather, perhaps, he served to firm up a predisposition towards the idea of being comfortable inside your own skin that was already in my being.  ‘In solitude, be company for thyself…’   (Tibullus)

At the age of 38, then, Montaigne abandoned the world that most people imagine is the only world there is—making money, paying the mortgage, watching sport, attending popular events, chatting ‘on-line’, expressing vapid opinions and so on—and repaired to his fortress expecting the benefits of the solitary life. Ironically, the space he created for himself simply filled up with thinking.

Montaigne suggests that, the aim of life being ‘to live at more leisure and at one’s ease’, we do all really crave solitude, even those who ‘aspire to titles and offices and the tumult of the world…’ Such as they simply ‘…make their private advantage [of solitude] at the public expense…’ He would have us ‘…tell ambition that it is she herself who gives us a taste of solitude; for what does she so much avoid as society?  What does she so much seek as elbowroom?…’ But not for Montaigne is the belief that the way to solitude is to elbow others out of the way by a kind of cash-force.

He quotes Horace: ‘Reason and prudence, not a place with a commanding view of the great ocean, banish care…’ Some inner shift of being is necessary to dispose of ‘…ambition, avarice, irresolution, fear, and inordinate desires…’ otherwise we take all our cares with us: ‘…they often follow us even to cloisters and philosophical schools; nor deserts, nor caves, hair-shirts, nor fasts, can disengage us from them…’ Socrates was told about somebody who ‘…was nothing improved by his travels: “I can very well believe it,” said he, “for he took himself along with him… ‘Why do we seek climates warmed by another sun?  Who is the person that by fleeing from his own country, can also flee from himself?” (Horace)

If we take all Leading-an-ordinary-life-I’s away to a secret place in the country, Being-happy-with-solitude-I will not stand a chance.

If a man [sic] do not first discharge both himself and his mind of the burden with which he finds himself oppressed, motion will but make it press the harder and sit the heavier… You do a sick man more harm than good in removing him from place to place; you fix and establish the disease by motion, as stakes sink deeper and more firmly into the earth by being moved up and down in the place where they are designed to stand.  Therefore, it is not enough to get remote from the public; it is not enough to shift the soil only; you must flee from the popular conditions that have taken possession of your soul, you must sequester and come again to yourself: ‘You say, perhaps, you have broken your chains: but the dog who after long efforts has broken his chain, still in his flight drags a heavy portion of it after him…’ (Persius)

‘Our disease lies in the mind, which cannot escape from itself…’ (Horace)

Left to my own devices for even so short a period as a weekend, I know how time may be squandered unless I take charge of the minutes & hours, being careful not to let ordinary things intrude. A longer period is much easier to deal with because you can relax into it, and not mind the minutes, especially if the object is to go from place to place with a constant succession of new sights & sounds & smells. But it does all depend on you.

Since we will attempt to live alone, and to waive all manner of conversation… let us so order it that our content may depend wholly upon ourselves; let us dissolve all obligations that ally us to others; let us obtain this from ourselves, that we may live alone in good earnest, and live at our ease too.

What can one do without? What can one eschew that solitude be made more secure from distractions? Even without a desire for solitude, it’s worth noting how much we are attached to things; we identify our selves with external objects, people, things, opinions, excitements and so on, so much that we take it that the loss of anything we imagine close to us to be the loss of a part of ourselves.

The philosopher Antisthenes… said, that ‘men should furnish themselves with such things as would float, and might with the owner escape the storm’ (Diogenes Laertius) and certainly a wise man never loses anything if he have himself.  When the city of Nola was ruined by the barbarians, Paulinus, who was bishop of that place, having there lost all he had, himself a prisoner, prayed after this manner: ‘O Lord, defend me from being sensible of this loss; for Thou knowest they have yet touched nothing of that which is mine…’ (St Augustine) The riches that made him rich and the goods that made him good, were still kept entire.  This it is to make choice of treasures that can secure themselves from plunder and violence, and to hide them in such a place into which no one can enter and that is not to be betrayed by any but ourselves.

The riches & treasure of the mind… But what comes of separating ourselves from the people who are close to us? Family and friends? To separate my self from attachments to people, I have become very clear that human-beings lead their own lives; that while I have very strong bonds with other people, especially those closest to me, I cannot live their lives for them. But, sadly, what for me is simply disidentification can seem like coldness or being remote from humanity, when, in fact, for me, radical disidentification makes me feel paradoxically closer to others; in Meta-I it’s possible to see what’s going on for others without being involved oneself. Every now and again though it’s necessary to surprise people with an expression of proximity. But we must all have our ‘backshops’, secret rooms, summerhouses and sheds.

Wives, children, and goods must be had, and especially health, by him that can get it; but we are not so to set our hearts upon them that our happiness must have its dependence upon them; we must reserve a backshop, wholly our own and entirely free, wherein to settle our true liberty, our principal solitude and retreat. And in this we must for the most part entertain ourselves with ourselves, and so privately that no exotic knowledge or communication be admitted there; there to laugh and to talk, as if without wife, children, goods, train, or attendance, to the end that when it shall so fall out that we must lose any or all of these, it may be no new thing to be without them. We have a mind pliable in itself, that will be company; that has wherewithal to attack and to defend, to receive and to give: let us not then fear in this solitude to languish under an uncomfortable vacuity.

And that’s the problem: it is uncomfortable to my self to cause others to be uncomfortable with my own seeming lack of enthusiasm to be with them. It is really nice to have visitors but it’s maybe even nicer when they’ve gone so that the event may be clasped to the breast as the perfect and rounded meeting of people—it’s only when they’ve gone that it becomes this as it always does… It is always good to be with people in teaching situations but such a relief to be on your own again when you are able to review what went on like a multi-faceted jewel—this does not happen truly while the meeting of minds is taking place… Whatever we do with others ‘…in our ordinary actions there is not one of a thousand that concerns ourselves…’ Paradox: we can best keep things close to us by keeping them at arm’s length. ‘Can you conceive in your mind or realise what is dearer than you are to yourself?’ (Terence) ‘It is rarely seen that we have respect and reverence enough for ourselves.’ (Quintilian)

On the other hand, when I find myself in a friendship it often becomes something very significant. I have a few deep friendships; they are what matter to me. It seems to be something similar to Montaigne’s experience:-

I am very capable of contracting and maintaining rare and exquisite friendships; I greedily seize upon such acquaintance as fit my liking, I throw myself with such violence upon them that I hardly fail to stick, and to make an impression where I hit; as I have often made happy proof.  In ordinary friendships I am somewhat cold and shy, for my motion is not natural unless with full sail: besides which, my fortune having in my youth given me a relish for one sole and perfect friendship has, in truth, created in me a kind of distaste to others… And also I have a natural difficulty of communicating myself by halves, with the modifications and the servile and jealous prudence required in the conversation of numerous and imperfect friendships…

I also enjoy relating to people at any time, investigating their innermost beings, provided my actual contact does not have to be a lengthy one. The measure of the very best of friends is that you can pick up with them from just where you left off, maybe many years ago.

What I would praise would be a soul with many storeys, one of which knew how to strain and relax: a soul at ease wherever fortune led it; which could chat with a neighbour about  whatever he is building, his hunting or his legal action, and take pleasure in conversing with a carpenter or a gardener. I envy those who can come down to the level of the meanest on their staff and make conversation with their own servants…

Montaigne points out that ‘Plato requires three attributes in anyone who wishes to examine the soul of another: knowledge, benevolence, daring…’ To understand how others tick it is necessary to recognise these things in yourself.

Plato’s three attributes are not that far removed, if at all, from the KUB model, as I call it, in the Gurdjieff model:-

Knowledge can easily be amassed, as my old Greek master said on advising his students to drop geography in the third year at Grammar School when we had dropped Chemistry, Physics & Biology after the first year in order to take up the study of Ancient Greek. Benevolence, acquired through empathy and emotional Understanding, takes a bit longer to acquire, as does Being which accumulates as you seek to transform the products of thoughts & emotion into some kind of practice. Lots of Being but not much Knowledge = paucity of Understanding; lots of Knowledge but not much practical Being = paucity of Understanding; a balance of Being and Knowledge leads, other things being equal, to a growth of Understanding. The KUB model is a thoroughly natural process which can only be appreciated as you put it into operation, as Montaigne did:-

When I dance, I dance. When I sleep, I sleep; and when I am strolling alone through a beautiful orchard, although part of the time my thoughts are occupied by other things, for part of the time too I bring then back to the walk, to the orchard, to the delight in being alone there, and to me. Mother-like, Nature has provided that such actions as she has imposed on us as necessities should also be pleasurable, urging us towards them not only by reason but by desire. To corrupt her laws is wrong.

Our most great and glorious achievement is to live out life fittingly. Everything else—reigning, building, laying up treasure—consists of tiny props and small accessories…

Prepare Yourself for Retirement

Those preparing to retire might well do the process systemically in terms of Multiple-I’s just as Montaigne does and using his very own words (the systemic arrangement of them is mine though—double-click to enlarge) :-

Montaigne used the concept of Multiple-I’s, so many years before Gurdjieff? Not in so many words maybe, but reading what he wrote might well have been the moment when I conceived my passion for the concept. After I had read the words they would have been lodged somewhere in my being ready for the moment when I first read The Fourth Way…

…anyone who turns his [sic] prime attention on to himself will hardly ever find himself in the same state twice. I give my soul this face or that, depending upon which side I lay it down on. I speak about myself in diverse ways: that is because I look at myself in diverse ways. Every sort of contradiction can be found in me, depending upon some twist or attribute: timid, insolent: chaste, lecherous;  talkative, taciturn; tough, sickly; clever, dull; brooding, affable; lying, truthful; learned, ignorant;  generous, miserly and then prodigal—I can see something of all that in myself, depending on how I gyrate; and anyone who studies himself attentively finds in himself and in his very judgement this whirring about and this discordancy. There is nothing I can say about myself as a whole simply and completely, without intermingling and admixture. The most universal article of my own Logic is distinguo. [I make distinctions...]

We are all lumps, and of so varied a contexture, that every piece plays, every moment, its own game, and there is as much difference betwixt us and ourselves as betwixt us and others…

And what then do we get from retirement from the world? The aim is to act as a Whole person, Unified-I, Meta-I, Observer-I, Master-I (take your pick!) because, just as Seneca said, we should ‘Esteem it a great thing always to act as one and the same man…’ But before we can get to that stage it is sufficient to remember (to use him as an anchor, emblematic of the ideal) the man

… who was asked why he toiled so hard at an art which few could ever know about: “For me a few are enough; one is enough; having none is enough.” He spoke the truth. You and one companion are audience enough for each other; so are you for yourself. For you, let the crowd be one, and one be a crowd. It is a vile ambition in one’s retreat to want to extract glory from one’s idleness. We must do like the beasts and scuff out our tracks at the entrance to our lairs. You should no longer be concerned with what the world says of you but with what you say to yourself. Withdraw into yourself, but first prepare yourself to welcome yourself there. It would be madness to entrust yourself to yourself, if you did not know how to govern yourself. There are ways of failing in solitude as in society.

The man Montaigne refers to might well have been my friend Mick Miller of Wheathampstead in Hertfordshire.

A possible way of dealing with the world successfully in retreat, as well as during one’s miserable sojourn in the ‘real world’, is to make yourself invisible. Twelve years ago while reading Maurice Nicoll’s Commentaries, I wrote this poem which is especially poignant to me right now since my cat Hanley is slowly dying of liver cancer.

my cat Hanley

turns himself into a cardboard cutout
as he approaches the shrubbery;
he essays to escape the notice
of the small bird teetering in liveliness
in the lavatera; stillness bestows invisibility
motionless in space

frozen thus you are not noticed
by the scavengers and the mountebanks
of the mind; there’s no doubt that you’ll experience
their questing  their failure to locate you—
you will hear them twittering in the undergrowth
falling in the pond     diving
from the summerhouse roof

when my cat Hanley leaps into action again
all the animals and birds instantly
see where he is     rumble his little game;
the customary demons representing worries
irritations unpleasant thoughts  conceits
anxieties from out of the thorny thickets
of the mind   seize upon you once again;
the animals and birds roar and scream
and all the scavengers and mountebanks
of the mind shout   GOT YOU!!!

you lose the sense of what is really you—
dismembered again—the anxious look
the hurried step    the urgent voice on the telephone
sleepless nights and frantic days

(from Looking Closely Hub Editions 2000)

Being invisible (or equally desirable, as Leonardo da Vinci advises, being like smoke, sfumato—hence my passion for bonfires) presents you with the opportunity to be infinitely flexible.

It seems to me to follow that

…those are the bravest souls that have in them the most variety and pliancy: ‘His parts were so pliable to all uses, that one would say he had been born only to that which he was doing.’ (Livy)… Had I liberty to set myself forth after my own mode, there is no so graceful a fashion to which I would be so fixed as not to be able to disengage myself from it; life is an unequal, irregular and multiform motion.  To be led by the nose by one’s self, and to be so fixed in one’s inclinations, that one cannot turn aside nor writhe one’s neck out of the collar is not to be a friend to one’s self, much less a master—it is to be a slave… Most men’s minds require foreign matter to exercise and enliven them; mine has rather need to sit still and repose itself… I had rather fashion my soul than furnish it… ‘to live is to think…’ (Cicero)

I like a Man Who Can Talk about His Library (after Sidney Greenstreet…)

When I first read Montaigne’s essays I suppose I might have had maybe forty books—an amount which could hardly warrant the name ‘library’. Now I have getting on for four thousand books which I am proud to call ‘library’.

I wonder now if my need to be able to occupy a room surrounded by books was set going, at least in part, by having read about Montaigne’s own passion. One of the great things about books is the way that the reading of them sows ideas that come up unexpectedly like snowdrops in spring.

Montaigne's Library Room

When at home, I a little more frequent my library, whence I overlook at once all the concerns of my family.  It is situated at the entrance into my house, and I thence see under me my garden, court, and base-court, and almost all parts of the building.  There I turn over now one book, and then another, on various subjects, without method or design.  One while I meditate, another while I record and dictate, as I walk to and fro, such whimsies as these I present to you here.  It is in the third storey of a tower, of which the ground-room is my chapel, the second storey a chamber with a withdrawing-room and closet, where I often lie, to be more retired; and above is a great wardrobe.  This formerly was the most useless part of the house.  I there pass away both most of the days of my life and most of the hours of those days.  In the night I am never there. There is by the side of it a cabinet handsome enough, with a fireplace very commodiously contrived, and plenty of light…

The Tower Itself

Montaigne shows us that his grasp of the world is thoroughly balanced in the 4th Way sense: he not only thinks about life and feels deeply about all aspects of it but he recognises the need to activate his whole body/brain system by physical activity.

Every place of retirement requires a walk: my thoughts sleep if I sit still: my fancy does not go by itself, as when my legs move it: and all those who study without a book are in the same condition.  The figure of my study is round, and there is no more open wall than what is taken up by my table and my chair, so that the remaining parts of the circle present me a view of all my books at once, ranged upon five rows of shelves round about me.  It has three noble and free prospects, and is sixteen paces in diameter.  I am not so continually there in winter; for my house is built upon an eminence and no part of it is so much exposed to the wind and weather as this, which pleases me the better, as being of more difficult access and a little remote, as well upon the account of exercise, as also being there more retired from the crowd.  ‘Tis there that I am in my kingdom, and there I endeavour to make myself an absolute monarch, and to sequester this one corner from all society, conjugal, filial, and civil; elsewhere I have but verbal authority only, and of a confused essence.  That man, in my opinion, is very miserable, who has not at home a place where to be by himself, where to entertain himself alone, or to conceal himself from others.  Ambition sufficiently plagues her proselytes, by keeping them always in show, like the statue of a public, square: ‘A great fortune is a great slavery…’ Seneca

I live from day to day, and, with reverence be it spoken, I only live for myself; there all my designs terminate.  I studied, when young, for ostentation; since, to make myself a little wiser; and now for my diversion, but never for any profit.

What is it About Books?

I think it’s their handleability that does it; the feel of them, the smell of them, their permanence down the years. The pages you can turn never knowing what’s coming next like turning a corner in an unknown city or coming to the top of a long laborious hill intrigued by the idea of the coming view. Then there’s the idea that contained in their pages there are endless delights; riches beyond imagination. One does not have to go abroad to find such treasure. Elia, Lynd, Lucas & Lubbock, Mannin & Mansfield, Priestley & Pearsall Smith—the whole of life is there. I am nearing the time when I shall consider that my library is complete; its collecting has taken me 60 years; it contains more than anybody could probably read in a lifetime—I am coming to the end of my lifetime. Aware of this, I have spent a great deal of time in the last ten years doing a sort of resumé, revisiting the books that I take to have formed the basis of my Intellectual Life, as, for instance, Montaigne’s essays. When I see people on trains opening these e-contraptions I know for sure that my time has been and gone and when I find myself back in my library I breathe a sigh of relief that I am home once more and do not have to concern myself with the ‘Modern World’ which tips all its eggs into the e-basket imagining it to be The Panacea but does by no means improve itself in spite of all its contrived excitements. Bread and Circuitry.

I have been described as a ‘chain reader’: while I am reading one book I’m am wondering which one to go to next, a contrast or something by the same author, or in the same vein.

Books have many charming qualities to such as know how to choose them; but every good has its ill; it is a pleasure that is not pure and clean, no more than others: it has its inconveniences, and great ones too.  The soul indeed is exercised therein; but the body, the care of which I must withal never neglect, remains in the meantime without action, and grows heavy and sombre.  I know no excess more prejudicial to me, nor more to be avoided in this my declining age.

Until various bodily failures, I had always balanced the reading habit with great physical activity, gardening, cycling, walking; but in recent years reading and writing have taken precedence. Maybe I do need to make space for the exercise of the body as well as the soul…

I seek, in the reading of books, only to please myself by an honest diversion; or, if I study, it is for no other science than what treats of the knowledge of myself, and instructs me how to die and how to live well.

A great delight in my life has been the segment called ‘Reading on a Summer Lawn’ first alluded to in my more than curious novel Structures. Nothing please me more on fine summer days than to dump myself in a deckchair on a lawn and find myself in a book, more often than not with a pen and notebook by my side in case some sequence of words should suddenly form itself into a Found Poem. Books fold into one another; the images join and rejoin in a parade that can never end. I am never done with anything; it’s just possible that I deliberately avoid the trap of self-satisfaction which

…is a sign of diminished faculties or weariness. No powerful mind stops within itself: it is always stretching out and exceeding its capacities. It makes sorties which go beyond what it can achieve: it is only half-alive if it is not advancing, pressing forward, getting driven into a corner and coming to blows; its inquiries are shapeless and without limits; its nourishment consists in amazement, the hunt and uncertainty…  It is an irregular activity, never-ending and without pattern or target. Its discoveries excite each other, follow after each other and between them produce more…

The Writing of Books

Montaigne tells us, on many occasions and in different ways, that, in writing his essaies, he is not into a display of knowledge, not attempting to be encyclopaedic, but merely piling up words in the expectation that he will eventually find himself under, or inside, the heap.

These are fancies [his essays] of my own, by which I do not pretend to discover things but to lay open myself; …if I am a man of some reading, I am a man of no retention; so that I can promise no certainty, more than to make known to what point the knowledge I now have has risen.  Therefore, let none lay stress upon the matter I write, but upon my method in writing it…  As things come into my head, I heap them one upon another; sometimes they advance in whole bodies, sometimes in single file.  I would that every one should see my natural and ordinary pace, irregular as it is; I suffer myself to jog on at my own rate… My design is to pass over easily, and not laboriously, the remainder of my life; there is nothing that I will cudgel my brains about; no, not even knowledge, of what value soever.

It used to tax me no end that on closing the last page of a book everything I had read would fly out of the window; the completed book would literally be a ‘closed book’. It must have been some comfort to me to read that Montaigne considered himself to have a poor memory. It took me many years to understand that there is no such thing as ‘memory’—it is a meaningless abstraction—but only an activity called ‘remembering’; what contributed significantly to my enlightenment was the reading of Memory by IMLHunter. Once I had got rid of the bucket metaphor of ‘memory’—which gives rise to the idea that when you tip more things into your bucket it will overflow—I constructed a different metaphor for myself: ideas and concepts can be hooked up on a sort of celestial clothes-line that reaches from here to the stratosphere and back—so things can be retrieved by reconstruction, going on a journey. Remembering is a reconstructive process; ideas can be pulled off the clothes-line at random and be fitted together to make sense in whatever way one chooses.  ‘As things come into my head, I heap them one upon another; sometimes they advance in whole bodies, sometimes in single file…’ Cudgeling the brain doesn’t work any more than trying to squash things into a bucket will.

Montaigne’s direction to pay attention to the way he writes is useful for anybody who might claim to experience ‘writer’s block’: he heaps things up and kind of hopes for the best; things gravitate to order especially when, as I do, you work always with the virtual question at the back of your mind: HOW CAN I CONNECT THIS WITH THAT?

It took me many years to create a flow in my writing but I think now that the seeds were sown by Montaigne. Before that I thought that you had to get it right first time; I had not got hold of the idea of an ‘essay’ (literally a ‘try’) as simply having a go at saying something; if it doesn’t work first time then it’s OK to have another go, and another and so on. What you’re doing is to interpret the way things are. Interpretations of interpretations… In recognising that he takes this route, Montaigne is slightly critical of others who build their writings by just interpreting those of others; there is too much interpretation, he seems to be saying, and not enough totally original writing about things in themselves. But he persists!

In any case, we interpret the world; then we interpret our interpretations, forever and forever. That’s all.

Our opinions are grafted upon one another; the first serves as a stock to the second, the second to the third, and so forth; thus step by step we climb the ladder; whence it comes to pass that he who is mounted highest has often more honour than merit, for he is got up but an inch upon the shoulders of the last, but one.

How often, and, peradventure, how foolishly, have I extended my book to make it speak of itself; foolishly, if for no other reason but this, that it should remind me of what I say of others who do the same: that the frequent amorous glances they cast upon their work witness that their hearts pant with self-love, and that even the disdainful severity wherewith they scourge them are but the dandlings and caressings of maternal love…  My own excuse is, that I ought in this to have more liberty than others, forasmuch as I write specifically of myself and of my writings, as I do of my other actions; that my theme turns upon itself; but I know not whether others will accept this excuse.

That’s fine by me!

…all this hodge-podge which I scribble here, is nothing but a register of the essays of my own life, which, for the internal soundness, is exemplary enough to take instruction against the grain…

Self-knowledge Provides Knowledge of Others

Montaigne justifies his excessive self-examination on the grounds that it gives him enhanced insight into the nature of others.

That long attention that I employ in considering myself, also fits me to judge tolerably enough of others; and there are few things whereof I speak better and with better excuse.  I happen very often more exactly to see and distinguish the qualities of my friends than they do themselves: I have astonished some with the pertinence of my description, and have given them warning of themselves.  By having from my infancy been accustomed to contemplate my own life in those of others, I have acquired a complexion studious in that particular; and when I am once intent upon it, I let few things about me, whether countenances, humours, or discourses, that serve to that purpose, escape me.  I study all, both what I am to avoid and what I am to follow.

The principle on which I have based all my teaching is that the more you find out about yourself you more you are likely to be able to empathise with what you might construct as the inner workings of others. First find out where you are currently fixated in Enneagram terms and then check out how you could make things better for yourself by talking about the fixations of others.

This is done bit by bit; change does not come bounding over the hill like the American Cavalry with dancing stars and fireworks. Change is the fruit of long tentative conversations.

The wise speak and deliver their fancies more specifically, and piece by piece; I, who see no further into things than as use informs me, present mine generally without rule and experimentally: I pronounce my opinion by disjointed articles, as a thing that cannot be spoken at once and in gross; relation and conformity are not to be found in such low and common souls as ours.  Wisdom is a solid and entire building, of which every piece keeps its place and bears its mark: ‘Wisdom only is wholly within itself’ Cicero

This fits the ‘Artful Vagueness’ of Milton Erikson and Gurdjieff’s ‘Nothing must be given in a ready-made form’. Keep yourself to yourself and make brief utterances which people have to fit together to make sense for themselves—their own sense is what counts, not yours. Montaigne is happy to leave it to others to figure out his meanings—‘to settle our inconstancy, and set it in order…’ He would find it quite useful, he says, to find out what sense others might make of his ramblings but one has to be in the right state of mind to receive comment & criticism. ‘A man had need have sound ears to hear himself frankly criticised; and as there are few who can endure to hear it without being nettled, those who hazard the undertaking it to us manifest a singular effect of friendship; for it is to love sincerely indeed, to venture to wound and offend us, for our own good…’ On the other hand…  ‘I think it harsh to judge a man whose ill qualities are more than his good ones…’ He would have the sensitivity to hold off in that case and maybe try to figure out some other way of helping.

How to Do Life According to Montaigne

By the time Montaigne was writing his later essays he admitted that… ‘my age is now past instruction, and has henceforward nothing to do but to keep itself up as well as it can…’ but he also thought he might have something to offer others in the way of advice. ‘I have lived long enough to be able to give an account of the custom that has carried me so far; for him who has a mind to try it, as his taster, I have made the experiment.  Here are some of the articles, as my memory shall supply me with them…’

•    I have no custom that has not varied according to circumstances; but I only record those that I have been best acquainted with, and that hitherto have had the greatest possession of me.

•    My form of life is the same in sickness as in health; the same bed, the same hours, the same meat, and even the same drink, serve me in both conditions alike; I add nothing to them but the moderation of more or less, according to my strength and appetite.

•    My health is to maintain my wonted state without disturbance.  I see that sickness puts me off it on one side, and if I will be ruled by the physicians, they will put me off on the other; so that by fortune and by art I am out of my way.

•    I believe nothing more certainly than this, that I cannot be hurt by the use of things to which I have been so long accustomed.  It is for custom to give a form to a person’s life, in whatever way it please…

•    …it is  not long ago that I found one of the learnedest men in France, among those of not inconsiderable fortune, studying in a corner of a hall that they had separated for him with tapestry, and about him a rabble of his servants full of licence.  He told me..  he made an advantage of this hubbub; that, beaten with this noise, he so much the more collected and retired himself into himself for contemplation, and that this tempest of voices drove back his thoughts within himself. Being a student at Padua, he had his study so long situated amid the rattle of coaches and the tumult of the square, that he not only formed himself to the contempt, but even to the use of noise, for the service of his studies.  Socrates answered Alcibiades, who was astonished how he could endure the perpetual scolding of his wife, “Why,” said he, “as those do who are accustomed to the ordinary noise of wheels drawing water.”

Though this state of affairs appears from the way he writes about it to be admirable to Montaigne, he admits that he can’t do what he appears to be about to recommend: ‘I am quite otherwise; I have a tender head and easily discomposed; when it is bent upon anything, the least buzzing of a fly murders it…’ But my old Greek master said to us one morning, “Gentlemen, as you grow older you will find it possible to work and concentrate under the most adverse conditions..” Taking everything he said as gospel, I decided then and there that was how it would be for me but I’m not too sure that he applied his dictum to himself during the adverse conditions we often created for him in the course of our Greek classes; maybe his own inability to follow his rule accounted for the frequent fury he directed at us after which he would say, “I’m sorry, gentlemen!” He always called us ‘gentlemen’!

•    Speaking is half his who speaks, and half his who hears; the latter ought to prepare himself to receive it, according to its bias; as with tennis-players, he who receives the ball, shifts and prepares, according as he sees him move who strikes the stroke, and according to the stroke itself.

•    Experience has, moreover, taught me this, that we ruin ourselves by impatience.  Evils have their life and limits, their diseases and their recovery.

•    Have you known how to regulate your conduct, you have done a great deal more than he who has composed books.  Have you known how to take repose, you have done more than he who has taken empires and cities.

•    …let the mind rouse and quicken the heaviness of the body, and the body stay and fix the levity of the soul…

•    …let custom make you hope better for the time to come

•    …use imagination as gently as you can… discharge it, if you can

•    Let us keep our possession to the last; for the most part, a man hardens himself by being obstinate

•    A man [sic] should addict himself to the best rules, but not enslave himself to them, except to such, if there be any such, where obligation and servitude are of profit.

The End of Things

One begins to fall apart a bit in various ways. I’m not sure that there’s anything to be done about it; nowadays the doctors consult their computer screens and offer you a pill or two; I avoid doctors and pills.

I consult little about the alterations I feel: for these doctors take advantage; when they have you at their mercy, they surfeit your ears with their prognostics; and formerly surprising me, weakened with sickness, injuriously handled me with their dogmas and magisterial fopperies—one while menacing me with great pains, and another with approaching death. Hereby I was indeed moved and shaken, but not subdued nor jostled from my place; and though my judgment was neither altered nor distracted, yet it was at least disturbed.

So long as I can get on my motorbike and drive off into the blue yonder I will be OK.

My good friend, your business is done; nobody can restore you; they can, at the most, but patch you up, and prop you a little, and by that means prolong your misery an hour or two: ‘Like one who, desiring to stay an impending ruin, places various props against it, till, in a short time, the house, the props, and all, giving way, fall together.’ Pseudo-Gallus

The book by which I have lived my life is The Story of My Heart by Richard Jefferies who ironically died at 39—just over half my age. To make up for poor health he expressed a craving for ‘soul-life’ and energy together with a complete indifference for what Gurdjieff would have called ‘A Influences’.

It is in myself that I desire increase, profit, and exaltation of body, mind, and soul.   The surroundings, the clothes, the dwelling,  the social status, the circumstances are to me utterly indifferent. Let the floor of the room be bare, let the furniture be a plank table, the bed a mere pallet.  Let the house be plain and simple, but in the midst of air and light. These are enough—a cave would be enough; in a warmer climate the open air would suffice. Let me be furnished in myself with health, safety, strength, the perfection of physical existence; let my mind be furnished with highest thoughts of soul-life. Let me be in myself myself fully. The pageantry of power, the still more foolish pageantry of wealth, the senseless precedence of place; I fail words to express my utter contempt for such pleasure or such ambitions.

Life is composed of opposites between which we constantly swing as on a Pendulum: night & day, light & dark, winter & summer, hot & cold, misery & happiness, sickness & health, mystery & clarity, stupidity & wisdom, harmony & discord, openness & withdrawal, mess & order. Always the swinging… We could say that… ‘nature has given us pain for the honour and service of pleasure and indolence.  When Socrates, after his fetters were knocked off, felt the pleasure of that itching which the weight of them had caused in his legs, he rejoiced to consider the strict alliance betwixt pain and pleasure; how they are linked together by a necessary connection, so that by turns they follow and mutually beget one another…’

We must learn to suffer what we cannot evade; our life, like the harmony of the world, is composed of contrary things—of diverse tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, sprightly and solemn: the musician who should only affect some of these, what would he be able to do?  he must know how to make use of them all, and to mix them; and so we should mingle the goods and evils which are consubstantial with our life; our being cannot subsist without this mixture, and the one part is no less necessary to it than the other.  To attempt to combat natural necessity, is to represent the folly of Ctesiphon, who undertook to kick with his mule.

Without contraries no progression, says Blake.

I have made a kinaesthetic exercise out of the Pendulum concept; it is an integral part of my Enneagram course. The discovery one makes is to be able to find out what happens at the bottom of the Pendulum swing which is where energy is conserved. Gurdjieff calls it Third Force.

I try to rock asleep and amuse my imagination, and to dress its wounds.  If I find them worse tomorrow, I will provide new stratagems… He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears…  I only judge of myself by actual sensation, not by reasoning: to what end, since I am resolved to bring nothing to it but expectation and patience?  Will you know how much I get by this? observe those who do otherwise, and who rely upon so many diverse persuasions and counsels; how often the imagination presses upon them without any bodily pain.  I have many times amused myself, being well and in safety, and quite free from these dangerous attacks in communicating them to the physicians as then beginning to discover themselves in me; I underwent the decree of their dreadful conclusions, being all the while quite at my ease…

And What of the Hunch Itself?

I think that I have proved my original hunch—the one I set out to prove: that I learned much from reading Montaigne’s essays… They did have the effect on me that I believed they had had.

Or maybe I have simply reconstructed Montaigne as I would have him in my imagination.

Such is life…

In 1858, after seven years of marriage, Matthew Arnold moved into what was then called a small house in Chester Square, London. It would now be called “worth a million pounds.” Still a relatively new housing development when Matthew Arnold moved in, it had up to the 1820s been an area of lagoons and the haunt of footpads and robbers. Lagoons, I always feel, are the British equivalent of Indian graveyards (on which American middle class families insist on building their homes – always with dire results). It would be pleasing to think of the heavily side-whiskered Arnold doing combat with a resurrected Grendel or indeed aliens emerging from his cellars. His ability to quote widely and wittily in Latin and Greek would doubtless come in useful. “Sic semper tyrannis” he would mutter as he empties his Beaumont Adams revolver into the quivering tentacles of the alien leader. Half way to Chelsea there was even a pub appropriately called The Monster, which was reached via a cabbage patch.

If not a fighter of monsters and aliens, why not a private detective? As an  inspector of schools for thirty five years, he was noted as knowing more about the timetables, stations and trains of England than most men. What better opportunity for the solving of crimes the length and breadth of the country (especially those involving trains)? He could once more empty his trusty Beaumont Adams revolver into the chest of Randolph Churchill as he attempts to bundle Queen Victoria onto the Dover train, the first step in his mad plan to make her Empress of his African Empire; or arrest John Ruskin as he smuggles Turner’s smutty pictures to Paris on the ferry train to Folkestone. In his book Portraits of the Seventies, George Russell speaks warmly of the dinners at Arnold’s house in Chester Square. Where better to share his adventures with his friends and companions George Buckle, Herbert Paul and George Augustus as they drink their port?

Not quite Flashman nor the current on-line comic adventures of Babbington and Lovelace, but it would be nice to think there would be a market for a nineteenth century crime-solving/monster-slaughtering Oxford Professor of Poetry with impressive side-whiskers. Some of the above is true. Much of it is not. There is certainly enough to horrify the ghost of one great and possibly neglected literary figure.

On the 30th March 1931, the Western Daily Press (published in Bristol) reported the death of Arnold Bennett, one of the “greatest figures” in English Literature. He was, in the writer’s opinion, the “technical master” of the novel, in the same lineage as Fielding and Dickens. It includes the telling comment, “As a writer of life he shunned the intellectual standpoint and thereby created better works of art.”

Virginia Woolf would probably have agreed with one part of that final comment, although it is unlikely  she was a regular reader of the Western Daily Press. Checking the index for the essays in Virginia Woolf (edited by Harold Bloom) there is in fact no mention of Bristol, which raises the tantalising possibility that Virginia Woolf did not know where it was, far less subscribe to its newspaper. This is not as fanciful as it seems. Frank Swinnerton, Bennett’s friend, writing in Figures in the Foreground, spoke more than once of the importance of getting out once in a while and meeting people. Virginia Woolf, he felt of all the Bloomsbury group, was particularly bad at that. Whatever the truth of this, it would be fair to say that in any Geography test our man Bennett would have outscored Woolf, particularly anything arising from the catchment areas of the rivers Avon, Trent, Severn and Wye.

How different the history of English literature would have been had they chosen to fight out their diagreements via common entrance examinations in Geography. But they didn’t. According to Margaret Drabble in her biography of Arnold Bennett it was Woolf who took exception to a negative comment in an overall positive review of her book Jacob’s Room. It was Woolf who described Bennett as having a “…a shopkeeper’s view of literature.” A good choice of words on her part. Had she written that he had a solicitor’s view of literature (he had trained for a while to be a solicitor) we probably wouldn’t have known what she meant. He was, in the end, provincial.

Matthew Arnold had a lot to say about provincialism. Prose that was extravagant, he felt, was more than likely to be provincial, and far from his attic ideal. Newspapers carried much of the blame for the prevalence of provincialism in British culture, the brutalité des journaux anglais as he reminds us of how the French looked upon our press. English newspapers are not checked by coming into contact with any centre of intellect or urbanity, “rather they are stimulated by coming into contact with a provincial spirit.” The Western Daily Press for example.

It is tempting to look on all of the above as a wider metaphor for the persistent conflict between between highbrow and middlebrow culture, metropolitan and provincial attitudes in Britain. Given that contained within any understanding of the word “tempting” there has to be something of surrendering to it, then that is what I shall do. I shall surrender to it. All of the above is just that, a metaphor for the division between these two worlds. Should you wonder on which side your own tastes fall, ask yourself this: who would you rather have at your side on the fields of Agincourt, the gun deck of the Victory or the beaches at Dunkirk, a reader of the Western Daily Press or Virginia Woolf?

Anyway, the book I pulled off the shelf (it was close in alphabetical order to the author of the book I’d just finished reading) was his Mental Efficiency. This morning in the early spring sun (February 24, 2012) I came to an essay on Books. I became so identified with it that I decided that my next ROOM book—6 or 7, I forget which—will be a celebration of Proper Books, a compendium of what good bold writers filed in my library have said about books down the years with my reflections on my own life of books.

We may be living at a time when books are about to disappear.  What miserable lives people will lead without the smell of books, the feel of them, the turning of the page, the weight in the hand, the texture… When all life is reduced to e-sameness…

The sight of people on trains, even people like myself in their dotage who ought to know better, stuck in front of one of these e-book things (I will not call it reading) puts me into a mixture of rage and sadness; that books as I have known them all my life are threatened with extinction is like the total obliteration of Meaning and Significance.

The following extracts from Arnold Bennett’s Mental Efficiency make a beginning of a basis for my new book.

***

…when one is a bookman one is a bookman during about twenty-three and three-quarter hours in every day. Now, bookmen are capable of understanding things about books which cannot be put into words; they are not like mere subscribers to circulating libraries; for them a book is not just a book—it is a book. If these lines should happen to catch the eye of any persons not bookmen, such persons may imagine that I am writing nonsense; but I trust that the bookmen will comprehend me…

TOO TRUE!

…lately, I summoned energy and caused fifteen hundred volumes to be transported to me; and I arranged them on shelves; and I rearranged them on shelves; and I left them to arrange themselves on shelves. Well, you know, the way that I walk up and down in front of these volumes, whose faces I had half forgotten, is perfectly infantile.  It is like the way of a child at a menagerie.  There, in its cage, is that 1839 edition of  Shelley, edited by Mrs.  Shelley, that  I once nearly sold to the British Museum because the Keeper of Printed Books  thought he hadn’t got a copy—only he had. And there, in a cage by himself, because of  his  terrible hugeness, is  the 1652 Paris edition of Montaigne’s Essays. And so I might continue, and so I would continue, were it not essential that I come to my argument.

Do you suppose that the presence of these books, after our long separation, is making me read more than I did ? Do you suppose I am engaged in looking up my favourite passages ? Not a bit. The other evening I had a long tram journey, and, before starting, I tried to select a book to take with me. I couldn’t find one to suit just the tram-mood. As I had to catch the tram I was obliged to settle on something, and in the end I went off with nothing more original than Hamlet, which I am really too familiar with… Then I bought an evening paper, and read it all through, including advertisements. So I said to myself: ‘This is a nice result of all my trouble to resume company with some of my books!’ However, as I have long since ceased to be surprised at the eccentric manner in which human nature refuses to act as one would have expected it to act, I was able to keep calm and unashamed during this extraordinary experience. And I am still walking up and down in front of my books and enjoying them without reading them.

I wish to argue that a great deal of cant is talked (and written) about reading.   Papers such as the Athenaeum, which nevertheless I peruse with joy from end to end every week, can scarcely notice a new edition of a classic without expressing, in a grieved and pessimistic tone, the fear that more people buy these agreeable editions than read them. And if it is so? What then? Are we only to buy the books that we read? The question has merely to be thus bluntly put, and it answers itself. All impassioned bookmen, except a few who devote their whole lives to reading, have rows of books on their shelves which they have never read, and which they never will read. I know that I have hundreds such. My eye rests on the works of Berkeley in three volumes, with a preface by the Right Honourable Arthur James Balfour. I cannot conceive the circumstances under which I shall ever read Berkeley; but I do not regret having bought him in a good edition, and I would buy him again if I had him not; for when I look at him some of his virtue passes into me; I am the better for him. A certain aroma of philosophy informs my soul, and I am less crude than I should otherwise be.  This is not fancy, but fact.

Taking Berkeley simply as an instance, I will utilize him a little further. I ought to have read Berkeley, you say; just as I ought to have read Spenser, Ben Jonson, George Eliot, Victor Hugo. Not at all. There is no ought about it. If the mass of obtainable first-class literature were, as it was perhaps a century ago, not too large to be assimilated by a man of ordinary limited leisure in his leisure and during the first half of his life, then possibly there might be an ought about it. But the mass has grown unmanageable, even by those robust professional readers who can ‘grapple with whole libraries’. And I am not a professional reader. I am a writer, just as I might be a hotel-keeper, a solicitor, a doctor, a grocer, or an earthenware manufacturer.  I read in my scanty spare time, and I don’t read in all my spare time, either.  I have other distractions.  I read what I feel inclined to read, and I am conscious of no duty to finish a book that I don’t care to finish. I read in my leisure not from a sense of duty, not to improve myself, but solely because it gives me pleasure to read. Sometimes it takes me a month to get through one book.  I expect my case is quite an average case.  But am I going to fetter my buying to my reading?  Not exactly! I want to have lots of books on my shelves because I know they are good, because I know they would amuse me, because I like to look at them, and because one day I might have a caprice to read them. (Berkeley, even thy turn may come!)  In short, I want them because I want them. And shall I be deterred from possessing them by the fear of some sequestered and singular person, some person who has read vastly but who doesn’t know the difference between a JS Muria cigar and an RP Muria, strolling in and bullying me with the dreadful query: “Sir, do you read your books ?”

Therefore I say : In buying a book, be influenced by two considerations only. Are you reasonably sure that it is a good book ? Have you a desire to possess it ? Do not be influenced by the probability or the improbability of your reading it. After all, one does read a certain proportion of what one buys. And further, instinct counts. The man who spends half a crown on Stubbs’s Early Plantagenets instead of going into the Gaiety pit to see The Spring Chicken, will probably be the sort of man who can suck goodness out of Stubbs’s Early Plantagenets  years before he bestirs himself to read it.

Set in Burslem and Paris beginning near the mid 1800′s through the turn of the century, we meet the appropriately named Baines sisters; sophisticated Sophia and constant Constance and follow them through the end of their lives.

Constance Baines is the homebody, seemingly content with her life at her family’s drapery shop.  She accepts her position and seems to have no ambition beyond marriage and supporting the family’s business.  She marries Samuel Povey, the shop’s dedicated assistant, ensuring her permanence in Burslem.  Family tragedies with the Povey’s take their toll and impact the uneventful days.  A seemingly simple woman, I believe there was a little more to her that was never quite revealed.  Even upon overhearing things not meant for her ears, she behaved unaffected, but surely was not.

Quite unlike her sister, Sophia Baines decides at an early age that she by no means intends to stay tethered to the family business.  She runs away to elope with the young cur, Gerald Scales, who abandons her in Paris.  Anticipating troubles, she manages to take money from her husband who had no qualms about leaving her abandoned and penniless.  Her wits and self-preservation carry her through and she eventually becomes a successful pension owner, but not until she earns the battle scars of life.  Her evidential feelings of superiority to her sister cannot mask her regret for the one thing she does not have; a child of her own.

Chirac, a French acquaintance of Gerald Scales falls in love with Sophia, but the feelings are not mutual.   A journalist and a gentleman, he helps Sophia to succeed and become an independent and wealthy woman,  When he realizes his adoration is one-sided,  he departs in a balloon destined for failure.  Bennett’s time writing in Paris surely was the inspiration for this character.

Quotes:

Mrs. Baines had suffered much that day.  She knew that she was in an irritable, nervous state, and therefore she said to herself, in her quality of wise woman, “I must watch myself.   I mustn’t let myself go.”  And she thought how reasonable she was.  She did not guess that all her gestures betrayed her; nor did it occur to her that few things are more galling than the spectacle of a person, actuated by lofty motives, obviously trying to be kind and patient under what he considers to be extreme provocation.

He was adopting the injured magisterial tone of the man who is ridiculously trying to conceal from himself and others that he has recently behaved like an ass.

Mr. Bennett evidently had keen insight into the human psyche so I’d love to chat him up over his own upbringing.  That he escaped a mundane life to pursue his literary ambitions is a topic I’d applaud him for over a glass of wine although I’d steer clear of the criticism he apparently confronted.

My rating for The Old Wives’ Tale  is an 8 out of 10.

To see the entire list, visit Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels.

Please share your own reviews or  comments by using the link below.

Next up, Jack London’s The Call of the Wild…

star magnolia, one of the first to bloom, making it through the cold.

The chief beauty about time is that you cannot waste it in advance. The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoiled, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your life. You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose. ~Arnold Bennett, British writer

Dear God, today I awake to the gift that I truly am, that my life truly is. Let me be as excited about my new day of life, of my precious self, as I have been at the new foal and baby goats. I appreciate your help to make good choices in this loving attitude toward myself and others. Amen. So it is.

Blessing for a great week,
CurtissAnn

The Hull Literary Club (which really was a literary club and not a independent pop group such as The Bombay Bicycle Club) was founded in 1879 and met regularly until 1983. Talks were given and a journal was published. Apart from encouraging an interest in literature, it sought specifically to promote writers from Hull and the surrounding area. One of its members was Philip Larkin, whose poem The Mower^⁠1 was published in Humberside, the club’s journal, in 1979. It grew out of an era of British history when provincial meant more than just having an accent. When, perhaps, not living in London was not seen as a handicap when it came to the reading of books.

Accounts of its meetings were published regularly in the the Hull Daily Mail. In January of 1939 the members of the club listened to Frank Thompson give a talk on The Modern Short Story, its debt to Maupassant and Tchekov and its current masters Somerset Maughan, Elizabeth Bowen, Aldous Huxley, H.E.Bates and James Hanley. He concluded by saying that if it was an art in its infancy, it was a lusty infant, suited to the expression of the age. In February it was the matter of “Recent Books” that caught the interest of the speakers. Bertrtand Russell’s Power, Louis Golding’s The Jewish Problem and a criticised Herbert Palmer’s Post Victorian Poetry were all discussed. Our man Bennett’s Literary Taste was surveyed lightly and humorously, while a careful study was made of Hall Caine’s Life of Christ and Dr Cronin’s The Citadel was contrasted with Francis Brett Young’s Dr Bradley Remembers. And so it goes on through the rest of the year with a slight interruption caused by the outbreak of war in September of that year. In November Frank Thompson, now club president, spoke of the challenge to the conventional values of life and that in the works of the the three Powys brothers, John, Llewellyn and Theodore, the essential truths of life could be found. And as at the end of every meeting, thanks were proposed and supported.

We have, of course, been visiting Bennett’s constituency of readers, not withstanding the light and humorous survey of Literary Taste. Indeed it could be said that it is because of the tone of the talk that we know that we are with like-minded people. And as it could be said, then I will say it. There is no Rex Warner here, no Henry Green, no James Joyce and definitely no Dorothy Richardson. Nor should there be. We are in the provinces. We may order our books from London publishers, we may even read the reviews in the London press, but we feel no need to ape their modish likes and dislikes.

¹ The Mower

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found

A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,

Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.

Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world

Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.

The first day after a death, the new absence

Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind

While there is still time.

The blue rotary lawn mower that killed the hedgehog can be found in the archive of Philip Larkin’s work at the University of Hull, as can the archives of the Hull Literary Club.

In the December of 1916, after two years of war, the Central Powers declared they were ready to negotiate peace terms with the Allies. President Wilson, asked by the Central Powers to broker the talks, asked both sides what their peace terms were. The Allies quickly replied: a free and neutral Belgium, its rights guaranteed by self-representation. The Germans didn’t bother to reply as that was the last thing that they wanted. In the first months of the war the German leadership had stated its war aims in the secret Septemberprogramm, as “security for the German Reich in west and east for all imaginable time.” Belgium would be reduced to a vassal state, large chunks of the French coast would be annexed, an empire carved out of Central Africa and Russia pushed as far back as possible from the eastern frontier.  It makes you wonder why they bothered asking for peace negotiations in the first place.

Edmund Blunden was twenty one by the time the war ended. He had survived two years without a scratch, not physical ones anyway. Reviewing Undertones of War, his account of his time as Temporary Second Lieutenant in the 11^th Royal Sussex Regiment, in the Evening Standard Bennett wrote “…The intimate horror of war has never been, and never will be, more movingly and modestly rendered than he renders it.” Blunden was brave as the cutting below from the London Gazette from the 26^th January 1917 makes all too clear.

He was also a modest man, never mentioning his award of the Military Cross in the book. His poetry shines through his prose, as does his love of countryside, even the blasted wastelands in which he toiled, officered and strolled through. He witnessed the deadly and deathly consequences of the “red tab’s” tinkerings with maps and plans of attack. It was all a terrible waste. And, like the elephant in the living room that no one mentions, those German troops still occupy neutral Belgium, their masters anticipating that their stay there will be a long one.

You can see where I’m going with this, can’t you? Without that waste, call it sacrifice if you will, witnessed by Blunden, those German troops (who did commit atrocities against Belgian civilians) would not have left of their own choice. My search for literary taste here has come up against the uncomfortable truths that history sometimes deals in; also reading the work of a young man when you are in middle-age and seeing that youthful passionate belief in Right and Wrong has faded somewhat. I read his book sympathetically but with an emotional distance that surprises me. Coordinates have to be given, direction maintained and velocity pursued, therefore (10, 10) is given, leading off the graph to unknown territories.

In her biography of her father, The Life and Letters of Captain Frederick Marryat, Dorothy Marryat recounts an incident that occurred during his campaign to become an MP for Tower Hamlets in 1833. Asked by a voter if he was opposed to flogging in the navy he gave a long and indirect answer. Asked again if he would flog either himself or one of his sons should they ever come under his command, Marryat replied:

“Sir, you say the answer I gave you is not direct; I will answer you again. If ever you, or one of your sons, should come under my command and deserve punishment, if there be no other effectual mode of conferring it I shall flog you.”

We can congratulate ourselves on living in more civilized times yet still indulge our sense of regret that there is not a best-selling author alive today who could give such an answer.

This was the same year that saw the publication of his best selling novel  Midshipman Easy, recommended, of course, by Arnold Bennett. Dorothy writes that the publishers, Messrs. Saunders and Otley, paid him £1200 for the book (worth £88,800 in 2011 according to the MeasuringWorth website in case you were wondering). Jack Easy is rich too at the end of the novel, from prize money won in combat with Spanish and French ships and from the inheritance he receives after the death of his father. Marryat makes sure that life at sea has matured the hotheaded youth and his naive belief in the equality of all men. The drive of the novel, in which mutinies, attacks by evil Italian half-brothers and the years spent at sea are telescoped into a few pages, takes him from his indulged childhood to wealth, marriage and a house in the country. Like Captain Marryat he can now live the life of a gentleman and, like his creator, write long letters to the newspapers in which, complaining of the effects of cheap and sensationalist literature, he could claim “…it would be better at once to stop all national education, for every child that is taught to read is but prepared to receive the poison which is now so rapidly circulating.”

Once more, it is easy to mock (although gently, I hope). Marryat described himself as devoted to the  Liberal cause, denouncing the use of child labour in factories and describing the destitute artisans he saw in Spitalfields as victims of a new slavery. Jack Easy is a precursor of the modern hero in fiction, a man of action whose interior life, nonetheless, clashes with the exterior world, leading to new perspectives, growth and thoughtful reflection. For all these reasons, it is a welcome coordinate of (6,3) that is plotted on the chart.

Following John Selden’s Table Talk, I decided to stay with the seventeenth century and read Dorothy Osborne’s Love Letters. Covering the years 1652 to 1654, when Cromwell ruled as Lord Protector, they are a reminder, if nothing else, that even in moments of crisis, life continues. Marriages have to be arranged, gossip passed on, brothers assuaged and admonitions made to lovers who write short letters. These letters, written by Dorothy Osborne to William Temple in the last two years of their seven year courtship, show her to have been a woman of strong character, equally strong opinions, witty, literate, socially well-connected, who withstood the disapproval of her family so as to marry the man she loved. The very antithesis of John Selden’s life of legal documents and charters. However, having read it, I really have little idea how it helps me form a literary taste.

Had you asked a literate Roman in the last years of the Republic what defined literary taste, he would have likely told you it was the reading of Greek authors. His grandson, educated in the time of Augustus by the innovative teacher Q. Caecilius Epirota, who included Virgil’s Aeneid in his curriculum, would have told you it was by reading the Roman greats. Dorothy would have advised you to read the latest French novel while Dr Johnson would likely have thrown a copy of his Lives of the Poets at your head and told you to make a start there. Having browsed online Gladstone’s library it would appear that his idea of literary taste did not include Jane Austen.

Bennett’s literary taste, however, was broad, stretching from The Venerable Bead’s Ecclesiastical History via Edward Lear’s A Book of Nonsense to the modern editions added by Frank Swinnerton such as Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow. In 1938 to have read all these books would have set you back £87 18/- 6d, worth, according to MeasuringWorth.com, a hefty £4,380.00, using the retail price index as a reference point. Quite a sum to pay to form a literary taste. Perhaps we have lost the habit of reading widely. Bennett lists 327 authors and 562 works, all of which, I am sure, he had read. Perhaps too it is a question of time. I read on the journey into work and then in the last half hour of the day. Is it possible to form a literary taste, as defined by Bennett, keeping to this timetable? Does Dorothy Osborne fall into the category of enjoyable and interesting but not necessarily culture forming?

Questions to ponder in the future. Now it’s time to plot a hedging-your-bets coordinate of (4,5), slipping uncomfortably, once more, into Virginia Woolf territory.

It’s hard to imagine a world in which Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard don’t exist in stark opposition to one another.

A curious thought when you consider how close Steven Gerrard was to signing for Chelsea Football Club back in the summer of 2005, a ludicrous suggestion both then and now.  Even as the pair shared the England crest for national duty, talk turned to how the duo could not forge the type of partnership their individual club form implied they should.

It was suggested that for England to be truly effective, one must make way for the other. There could be no Frank Lampard for England, at least how we know him for Chelsea, whilst Steven Gerrard was on the field. And vice versa.

Such a bond hasn’t shown signs of relinquishing its hold on the duplet as they transition into the latter stages of their playing career, throwing up oppositional readings of both the club and manager they represent.

At a time when Frank Lampard has lost the automatic starting place he once possessed at Chelsea, under a young manager desperate to assert his authority and continental jus on the squad he inherited, Steven Gerrard has returned from a frustrating year of injury to rapturous welcome by a manager eager to let the club captain power the Liverpool engine room long into the future with a significant contract extension.

For Liverpool, Steven Gerrard is more than just a player. His recent contract extension exemplifies this with the stipulation that Steven is to become a club ambassador once he hangs up his boots after what would be a quarter of a century at the club he has supported since childhood.

Director of Football Damien Comolli summed up the club’s keenness to not only retain but fully utilise Gerrard’s presence at the club in the future,

“Whenever we want to sign a young player, no matter what their age is, if I ask Stevie to come to the academy to speak to a player, or have a word with someone at Melwood, he is always there to help and try and convince the boy to come to us, to tell the boy about his experiences of being at Liverpool, of coming through the academy and playing for the first team and for this fantastic fan base…”

“As an ambassador he’s going to be around and can give advice to young players, he can give advice to players he would have played with. It’s just great to know he’ll be around for a long time.”

Frank Lampard hasn’t received such affectionate praise from the club he’s long driven to success, despite André Villas-Boas’ assertion that the pair share a ‘fantastic’ relationship.

The England midfielder has appeared visibly disgruntled at his fall in favour around Kings Road, leaving the field with an expression of stunned defiance and doing his best to hide such anger as he loiters, feet up, on the bench.

After scoring the winner against Wolves, he barbed his post match comments with open resistance to his current status at the club, “I like to play football games” he poised, “and I like to play 90 minutes.” he added with such unashamed intent.

“I know what I can do. I’ve been here many years as part of a successful team and I like to play. I can’t hide that and I don’t think the manager would expect anything more from me. He’s the boss, he picks the team and when I play I feel I can do things like I did. And I’ll keep trying to do them. Then I’ll smile more.”

As Gerrard celebrated his return to first team action with not just a goal against Newcastle, but an almost Hollywood high five with Kenny Dalglish, Lampard rejected the opportunity to engage in an embarrassingly scripted arm to arm huddle with Villas Boas following their opener against Wolves on January 2^nd.

Perhaps the answer to why the two have received such differing treatment at the later stages of their career comes in how they began it.

Gerrard signed for Liverpool as a fan at the age of eight. He has, for the most part dedicated himself to both the club and it’s fans since his footballing education began. He is a servant. With the greatest of implications.

Lampard on the other hand emerged at West Ham, his father’s club. He was bought by Chelsea, not reared. He is an acquisition. With the greatest respect.

Lampard’s situation is analogous to that of Woody and Buzz in the much revered (not by me) Toy Story. An expendable plaything left out to rot as time erodes it’s worth. Whilst Andy yearns for his childhood toys (eerily so), the Chelsea fans nostalgically hold on to Lampard with an ingrained affection. As College rips Andy from his toys, and as a result his youth, it’s players like Ramires, Meireles and McEachran who wrestle Villas-Boas’ attentions away from the ageing Lampard.

As for Gerrard, he’s always been more of a family member than a toy. A persistent fixture, rather than a decoration.

As the pair enter the back straight of their exceptional careers, it seems likely that they’ll sever the fateful bond which has connected them for the last decade, an association that’s caused more frowns than smiles. And when that day comes we’ll remember them for what they really were: Two of England’s finest ever central midfielders.

The book is written in a very amusing way but it makes some extremely relevant points.  We all have aims and ambitions but many of us fail to do anything about them because of ‘lack of time’ but as Bennett points out we will never have any more time than we have now – 24 hours.  Often we say we will start a new regime on a particular day but why wait?  Each minute is new, fresh and unsullied – why not start now?

The book is clearly aimed at men as there is no mention of basic household tasks but obviously in 1910 men went to work and women stayed at home and looked after the household.  But the philosophy behind the book is relevant to anyone.  We tend, even now, to see the day as the working day and disregard the rest of the 24 hours.  To look at work as only part of the day  is to give us a different perspective on the way we use our time.

Bennett shows how it is perfectly possible to free up seven hours out of the one hundred and sixty eight which make up a week in order to accomplish something specific such as learning about the instruments of an orchestra so that you can appreciate a concert as something more than a pleasant sound.  You could also read a passge of philosophy in the evening and then think about it – really concentrate on it – the next morning during your train journey to work.  Train your mind to concentrate on one subject instead of flitting around whereever it wants.

If you only ever read one time management book then make it this one.

Using the MeasuringWorth website I can see that 6d in 1938 would have been worth £1.19 in 2010, using the Retail Price Index as a guide. The 17/- spent on buying all the books on the list would, by the same criteria be worth £40.50. The average nominal wage in 1938, decimal not pre-decimal, was £161.87. To buy a copy of Literary Taste, possibly from Boots which had agreed to stock Allen Lane’s Penguin and Pelican books, you would be spending just under 10% of your monthly wage, while all thirty three books would have represented 25% of your annual income.

It would be easy to draw the conclusion that forming a literary taste was a matter of economics. Easy and simplistic. There is the role also played by education, expectations and class, sometime in unexpected combinations. You could borrow books if you did not want to buy them. Public and subscription libraries were popular, but often because they stocked large numbers of best sellers by L.A.Strong or Daphne du Maurier. Going to the cinema was also popular throughout the decade: a ticket would cost the same as Penguin or Pelican book. Working class audience enjoyed Hollywood films such as those made by the Marx brothers and disliked the quota quickies, British films made by American studios; a legal obligation if they were to show their own. Nor would any of the above have been mutually exclusive. There’s no reason to think that someone who read Literary Taste could not also enjoy A Day at the Races. 

No graph I’m afraid. I’m still reading The Love Letters of Dorothy Osbourne and will have it finished for the New Year.