Cider donut / LBTS

It’s a miserable little book, it truly is — but what else is there to do with ten days of holiday?

(Eat donuts, of course.)

In very simple terms, Jude the Obscure is about a poor, orphan boy, who is determined to earn a university degree and be ordained in the church of England. Along the way, he meets and falls in love with his cousin, Sue, also a scholar and intellectual. Although kindred spirits, the two can not marry — not because they are near relations, but because they are already married to others, albeit unhappily.

When, at last, they are both free, they determine not to marry, out of an intellectual fear that it will ruin their love for one another. In the end, this decision seems to lead to poverty, death and real ruin: their children die, Jude dies, and Sue sacrifices herself to her loveless first marriage.

Jude is Hardy’s last novel. When it published in 1895, it was said to be a “savage attack” on marriage. In fact, what Hardy seems to propose is that marriage should be dissolvable the moment it becomes painful to either party and is no longer a true marriage.

Yet while the book is obsessed with whether or not the two will marry, Hardy himself said that he wished readers would have focused more on the young peoples’ shattered ideals.

I’m not sure if that is failure on the part of the readers or the writer. If Hardy had every shown his characters in any other state than abject misery, perhaps his readers would have understood (and later mourned) the value, the beauty of their ideals better. Instead, it reads like a great moral tale: here’s what happens to people who break the rules.

I think this passage sums up the book pretty well:

It was not until now, when he found himself actually on the spot of his enthusiasm, the [sic] Jude perceived how far away from the object of that enthusiasm he really was. Only a wall divided him from those happy young contemporaries of his with whom he shared a common mental life; men who had nothing to do from morning till night but to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. Only a wall — but what a wall!

This piece is cut from the chapter in which Jude arrives at Christminster — Hardy’s literary stand-in for Oxford — but it could be applied to nearly every scene in Jude’s life:

1. As an orphan, he arrives at his aunt’s house and is told that it would have been better if he had died — no one wants him, no one can afford him

2. Only when he moves in with Sue does he realize that she loves him as a fellow traveler; she wants to talk with him, not sleep with him

3. Although Jude and Sue have a very productive intellectual life together, he soon realizes that, every where they go, people will judge them for not being married and that they won’t be able to get work

4. When he and Sue finally give in to physical love and consummate their common-law marriage — and have three children — people seem to smell their outsider-ness, guessing that they aren’t actually married so that even the inn-keepers refuse to let them stay together as a family

5. When Sue leaves him, he is scooped up by Arabella, his first wife, and spends the rest of his days drunk and semi-unconscious because he does not love her and can not relate to the workaday palaver her family and friends

I could make a similar list for Sue, but it would only be depressing.

So, society won’t let these intellectuals live out their ideals, there will always be walls — but what about Hardy? I can accept the meanness of the people around Sue and Jude; the latter were ahead of their time, and people always love to gossip and judge. Hardy might have given his characters some little redemption.

There is something external to us which says, “You shan’t” First it said, “You shan’t learn!” Then it said, “You shan’t labour!” Now it says, “You shan’t love!”

All Jude and Sue have is their love, really. Living outside of general society, they alone understand each other, intellectual curiosity and all. But Hardy refuses to let them be happy — or really, to illustrate that happiness.

For example, Sue summed up the two-year period in which their children were born, “I called myself happy … We said that we would make a virtue of joy.” Yet Hardy’s narrative skips over that entire period and continues to string together the many, many little pockets of despair.

Of course, it’s more complex than that: the psychology of the characters — and the book really — is all attraction and repulsion, and that’s what makes it interesting. But one does sort of long for the relative simplicity of an Austen romance.

It’s not a wonder readers of the time wished these kids would just set down their books and get married.

27 October, Tuesday.

We left our hostel at 2:45 a.m.—yes, in the morning—and blearily dragged ourselves to the airport and onto our flight, most of which I spent in a half-asleep stupor. I finished my Italian homework in the airport and then rushed to Brit Lit right from Fiumicino. We talked about Hardy, who plagued me with The Return of the Native but who won my heart back with his poetry, and then I had pizza and peaches with Katie for lunch. Mystics was good as always and Italian was our best class ever. I hardly looked at the clock once. We sat in a circle, the whole class, and pretended to be an advertising committee discussing campaigns to increase tourism in Lazio. Everyone talked and there was no unnecessary broken monologues. It was lovely.

After school was impromptu boot shopping by Termini with Genie and Marcelo. I had worn my heeled boots for the first time today, thinking that I’d not have to walk much since I’d just take the bus home, so of course I was limping after a half hour. Genie got a boot stuck on her at one store and we had to rush out of there, but we both managed to find perfect pairs in another store. I had exactly the right amount of cash and an Italian lady told me they were beautiful, plus I was in extreme pain at this point, so that did it. At night, we headed upstairs where Caitlin Kelly cooked dinner. Most of the girls were there and it was nice to come together again, since it had been so long since we were all together. We gossiped and shared stories about ND and our travels and gorged ourselves on chicken and potatoes and green beans. Then it was time to do homework and catch up from a weekend of travel.

N.B. Thomas Hardy often wrote prefaces—at times, wonderful documents—for his books of verse. But none, in my view, or in the view of most other devoted readers of his poetry, rivals the one reprinted here, which is by turns cagey; deftly unapologetic (though “Apology” it be called); satirical; and perfectly in temper with the poetry that this book, like all of Hardy’s later books of poetry, contains. Hardy surveys, along the way, and in relatively short order, the history of English poetry at least since the earliest Romantics; and he offers up, with a concision altogether admirable, a summary of certain philosophical developments, from Schopenhauer to Darwin and beyond to Einstein, that English poetry had yet—except in Hardy’s own case—taken fully into account.  The preface appeared first in Hardy’s 1922 volume Late Lyrics and Earlier with Many Other Verses. I reprint it whole, here, in the spirit in which I began this web-blog two months ago: as a commonplace book, a definition of which you will find at the top right margin of The Era of Casual Fridays.

Thomas Hardy, "evolutionary meliorist."

APOLOGY

About half the verses that follow were written quite lately.  The rest are older, having been held over in MS. when past volumes were published, on considering that these would contain a sufficient number of pages to offer readers at one time, more especially during the distractions of the war. The unusually far back poems to be found here are, however, but some that were overlooked in gathering previous collections. A freshness in them, now unattainable, seemed to make up for their inexperience and to justify their inclusion. A few are dated; the dates of others are not discoverable.

The launching of a volume of this kind in neo-Georgian days by one who began writing in mid-Victorian, and has published nothing to speak of for some years, may seem to call for a few words of excuse or explanation. Whether or no, readers may feel assured that a new book is submitted to them with great hesitation at so belated a date. Insistent practical reasons, however, among which were requests from some illustrious men of letters who are in sympathy with my productions, the accident that several of the poems have already seen the light, and that dozens of them have been lying about for years, compelled the course adopted, in spite of the natural disinclination of a writer whose works have been so frequently regarded askance by a pragmatic section here and there, to draw attention to them once more.

I do not know that it is necessary to say much on the contents of the book, even in deference to suggestions that will be mentioned presently.  I believe that those readers who care for my poems at all—readers to whom no passport is required—will care for this new installment of them, perhaps the last, as much as for any that have preceded them.

William Wordsworth, painter unkown (at least to me)

Moreover, in the eyes of a less friendly class the pieces, though a very mixed collection indeed, contain, so far as I am able to see, little or nothing in technique or teaching that can be considered a Star-Chamber matter, or so much as agitating to a ladies’ school; even though, to use Wordsworth’s observation in his “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, such readers may suppose “that by the act of writing in verse an author makes a formal engagement that he will gratify certain known habits of association: that he not only thus apprises the reader that certain classes of ideas and expressions will be found in his book, but that others will be carefully excluded.” It is true, nevertheless, that some grave, positive, stark, delineations are interspersed among those of the passive, lighter, and traditional sort presumably nearer to stereotyped tastes. For—while I am quite aware that a thinker is not expected, and, indeed, is scarcely allowed, now more than heretofore, to state all that crosses his mind concerning existence in this universe, in his attempts to explain or excuse the presence of evil and the incongruity of penalizing the irresponsible—it must be obvious to open intelligences that, without denying the beauty and faithful service of certain venerable cults, such disallowance of “obstinate questionings” and “blank misgivings” tends to a paralysed intellectual stalemate. Heine observed nearly a hundred years ago that the soul has her eternal rights; that she will not be darkened by statutes, nor lullabied by the music of bells. And what is to-day, in allusions to the present author’s pages, alleged to be “pessimism” is, in truth, only such “questionings” in the exploration of reality, and is the first step towards the soul’s betterment, and the body’s also.

If I may be forgiven for quoting my own old words, let me repeat what I printed in this relation more than twenty years ago, and wrote much earlier, in a poem entitled “In Tenebris”:

If way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst:

that is to say, by the exploration of reality, and its frank recognition stage by stage along the survey, with an eye to the best consummation possible: briefly, evolutionary meliorism. But it is called pessimism nevertheless; under which word, expressed with condemnatory emphasis, it is regarded by many as some pernicious new thing (though so old as to underlie the Christian idea, and even to permeate the Greek drama); and the subject is charitably left to decent silence, as if further comment were needless.

Happily there are some who feel such Levitical passing-by to be, alas, by no means a permanent dismissal of the matter; that comment on where the world stands is very much the reverse of needless in these disordered years of our prematurely afflicted century: that amendment and not madness lies that way. And looking down the future these few hold fast to the same: that whether the human and kindred animal races survive till the exhaustion or destruction of the globe, or whether these races perish and are succeeded by others before that conclusion comes, pain to all upon it, tongued or dumb, shall be kept down to a minimum by loving-kindness, operating through scientific knowledge, and actuated by the modicum of free will conjecturally possessed by organic life when the mighty necessitating forces—unconscious or other—that have “the balancings of the clouds,” happen to be in equilibrium, which may or may not be often.

Frederic Harrison, English jurist, historian, and a "positivist" follower of Comte (in his philosophy)

To conclude this question I may add that the argument of the so-called optimists is neatly summarized in a stern pronouncement against me by my friend Mr. Frederic Harrison in a late essay of his, in the words: “This view of life is not mine.” The solemn declaration does not seem to me to be so annihilating to the said “view” (really a series of fugitive impressions which I have never tried to co-ordinate) as is complacently assumed. Surely it embodies a too human fallacy quite familiar in logic. Next, a knowing reviewer, apparently a Roman Catholic young man, speaks, with some rather gross instances of the suggestio falsi in his article, of “Mr. Hardy refusing consolation,” the “dark gravity of his ideas,” and so on. When a Positivist and a Catholic agree there must be something wonderful in it, which should make a poet sit up. But . . . O that ‘twere possible!

Matthew Arnold

I would not have alluded in this place or anywhere else to such casual personal criticisms—for casual and unreflecting they must be—but for the satisfaction of two or three friends in whose opinion a short answer was deemed desirable, on account of the continual repetition of these criticisms, or more precisely, quizzings. After all, the serious and truly literary inquiry in this connection is: Should a shaper of such stuff as dreams are made on disregard considerations of what is customary and expected, and apply himself to the real function of poetry, the application of ideas to life (in Matthew Arnold’s familiar phrase)? This bears more particularly on what has been called the “philosophy” of these poems—usually reproved as “queer.” Whoever the author may be that undertakes such application of ideas in this “philosophic” direction—where it is specially required—glacial judgments must inevitably fall upon him amid opinion whose arbiters largely decry individuality, to whom ideas are oddities to smile at, who are moved by a yearning the reverse of that of the Athenian inquirers on Mars Hill; and stiffen their features not only at sound of a new thing, but at a restatement of old things in new terms. Hence should anything of this sort in the following adumbrations seem “queer”—should any of them seem to good Panglossians to embody strange and disrespectful conceptions of this best of all possible worlds, I apologize; but cannot help it.

Such divergences, which, though piquant for the nonce, it would be affectation to say are not saddening and discouraging likewise, may, to be sure, arise sometimes from superficial aspect only, writer and reader seeing the same thing at different angles. But in palpable cases of divergence they arise, as already said, whenever a serious effort is made towards that which the authority I have cited – who would now be called old-fashioned, possibly even parochial – affirmed to be what no good critic could deny as the poet’s province, the application of ideas to life. One might shrewdly guess, by the by, that in such recommendation the famous writer may have overlooked the cold-shouldering results upon an enthusiastic disciple that would be pretty certain to follow his putting the high aim in practice, and have forgotten the disconcerting experience of Gil Blas with the Archbishop.

To add a few more words to what has already taken up too many, there is a contingency liable to miscellanies of verse that I have never seen mentioned, so far as I can remember; I mean the chance little shocks that may be caused over a book of various character like the present and its predecessors by the juxtaposition of unrelated, even discordant, effusions; poems perhaps years apart in the making, yet facing each other. An odd result of this has been that dramatic anecdotes of a satirical and humorous intention (such, e.g., as “Royal Sponsors”) following verse in graver voice, have been read as misfires because they raise the smile that they were intended to raise, the journalist, deaf to the sudden change of key, being unconscious that he is laughing with the author and not at him. I admit that I did not foresee such contingencies as I ought to have done, and that people might not perceive when the tone altered. But the difficulties of arranging the themes in a graduated kinship of moods would have been so great that irrelation was almost unavoidable with efforts so diverse. I must trust for right note-catching to those finely-touched spirits who can divine without half a whisper, whose intuitiveness is proof against all the accidents of inconsequence. In respect of the less alert, however, should any one’s train of thought be thrown out of gear by a consecutive piping of vocal reeds in jarring tonics, without a semiquaver’s rest between, and be led thereby to miss the writer’s aim and meaning in one out of two contiguous compositions, I shall deeply regret it.

Samuel Talor Coleridge, painting by Peter Vandyke (1729-1799)

Having at last, I think, finished with the personal points that I was recommended to notice, I will forsake the immediate object of this Preface; and, leaving Late Lyrics to whatever fate it deserves, digress for a few moments to more general considerations.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, painting by Amelia Curran (1775-1847)

The thoughts of any man of letters concerned to keep poetry alive cannot but run uncomfortably on the precarious prospects of English verse at the present day. Verily the hazards and casualties surrounding the birth and setting forth of almost every modern creation in numbers are ominously like those of one of Shelley’s paper-boats on a windy lake. And a forward conjecture scarcely permits the hope of a better time, unless men’s tendencies should change. So indeed of all art, literature, and “high thinking” nowadays. Whether owing to the barbarizing of taste in the younger minds by the dark madness of the late war, the unabashed cultivation of selfishness in all classes, the plethoric growth of knowledge simultaneously with the stunting of wisdom, “a degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation” (to quote Wordsworth again), or from any other cause, we seem threatened with a new Dark Age. I formerly thought, like so many roughly handled writers, that so far as literature was concerned a partial cause might be impotent or mischievous criticism; the satirizing of individuality, the lack of whole-seeing in contemporary estimates of poetry and kindred work, the knowingness affected by junior reviewers, the overgrowth of meticulousness in their peerings for an opinion, as if it were a cultivated habit in them to scrutinize the tool-marks and be blind to the building, to hearken for the key-creaks and be deaf to the diapason, to judge the landscape by a nocturnal exploration with a flash-lantern. In other words, to carry on the old game of sampling the poem or drama by quoting the worst line or worst passage only, in ignorance or not of Coleridge’s proof that a versification of any length neither can be nor ought to be all poetry; of reading meanings into a book that its author never dreamt of writing there. I might go on interminably. [N.B. Here, Hardy alludes to Coleridge's remarks in the Biographia Literaria: "In short, whatever specific import we attach to the word, Poetry, there will be found involved in it, as a necessary consequence, that a poem of any length neither can be, nor ought to be, all poetry."]

But I do not now think any such temporary obstructions to be the cause of the hazard, for these negligences and ignorances, though they may have stifled a few true poets in the run of generations, disperse like stricken leaves before the wind of next week, and are no more heard of again in the region of letters than their writers themselves. No: we may be convinced that something of the deeper sort mentioned must be the cause.

In any event poetry, pure literature in general, religion—I include religion because poetry and religion touch each other, or rather modulate into each other; are, indeed, often but different names for the same thing—these, I say, the visible signs of mental and emotional life, must like all other things keep moving, becoming; even though at present, when belief in witches of Endor is displacing the Darwinian theory and “the truth that shall make you free,” men’s minds appear, as above noted, to be moving backwards rather than on.

The Book of Common Prayer, as used in the Anglican Church

I speak, of course, somewhat sweepingly, and should except many isolated minds; also the minds of men in certain worthy but small bodies of various denominations, and perhaps in the homely quarter where advance might have been the very least expected a few years back—the English Church—if one reads it rightly as showing evidence of “removing those things that are shaken,” in accordance with the wise Epistolary recommendation to the Hebrews. For since the historic and once august hierarchy of Rome some generation ago lost its chance of being the religion of the future by doing otherwise, and throwing over the little band of neo-Catholics who were making a struggle for

Arthur Schopenhauer in 1818 (painting by Ludwig Sigismund Ruhl)

continuity by applying the principle of evolution to their own faith, joining hands with modern science, and outflanking the hesitating English instinct towards liturgical reform (a flank march which I at the time quite expected to witness, with the gathering of many millions of waiting agnostics into its fold); since then, one may ask, what other purely English establishment than the Church, of sufficient dignity and footing, and with such strength of old association, such architectural spell, is left in this country to keep the shreds of morality together? It may be a forlorn hope, a mere dream, that of an alliance between religion, which must be retained unless the world is to perish, and complete rationality, which must come, unless also the world is to perish, by means of the interfusing effect of poetry – “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; the impassioned expression of science,” as it was defined by an English poet who was quite orthodox in his ideas. But if it be true, as Comte argued, that advance is never in a straight line, but in a looped orbit, we may, in the aforesaid ominous moving backward, be doing it pour mieux sauter, drawing back for a spring. I repeat that I forlornly hope so, notwithstanding the supercilious regard of hope by Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, and other philosophers down to Einstein who have my respect.  But one dares not prophesy. Physical, chronological, and other contingencies keep me in these days from critical studies and literary circles

Where once we held debate, a band
Of youthful friends, on mind and art

(if one may quote Tennyson in this century of free verse). Hence I cannot know how things are going so well as I used to know them, and the aforesaid limitations must quite prevent my knowing hence-forward.

I have to thank the editors and owners of The Times, Fortnightly, Mercury, and other periodicals in which a few of the poems have appeared for kindly assenting to their being reclaimed for collected publication.

T. H. February 1922.

When up aloft
I fly and fly,
I see in pools
The shining sky,
And a happy bird
Am I, am I!
When I descend
Toward the brink
I stand and look
And stop and drink
And bathe my wings,
And chink, and Prink.
When winter frost
Makes earth as steel,
I search and search
But find the meal,
And most unhappy
Then I feel.
But when it lasts,
And snows still fall,
I get to feel
No grief at all
For I turn to a cold, stiff
Feathery ball!

Thomas Hardy [1901]

Veja como “Dom Casmurro” se tornou um marco e entenda Machado de Assis; leia trecho de livro

da Folha Online

Escrito por um dos maiores especialistas brasileiros no assunto, o volume “Machado de Assis”, da coleção “Folha Explica”, da Publifolha, trata de toda a produção machadiana –romances, novelas, contos, crônicas, teatro e poesia. O primeiro capítulo pode ser lido abaixo.

Nota completa

Machado de Assis é considerado o melhor romancista brasileiro. E, à medida que a sua obra for traduzida para as principais línguas cultas, crescerá a probabilidade de seu nome incluir-se entre os maiores narradores do século 19. A sua estatura ombreia-se com a de alguns contemporâneos que alcançaram renome internacional: Zola, Maupassant, Verga, Eça de Queirós, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Tchekhov.

Two nights ago my wife and I watched the BBC version of The Mayor of Casterbridge, one of Thomas Hardy’s classic novels of passionately hard-headed people who ruin themselves. The central character is Michael Henchard, an impulsive, driven man who swears off drink after literally selling his wife to a sailor. He then makes a mint and becomes the respected (if not well liked) mayor. Yet he so mismanages his life that he loses everything. It’s not drink that does him in, but his persistent tendency to project his inner demons onto other people, to treat them badly and make them his enemies.

In Hardy’s novels the lovely English countryside is only backdrop for tortured souls and moral tragedy. Of all the great Victorian novelists he is the bleakest. His protagonists brush past grace in the figure of kind and forgiving people, but are too strong to be deterred by it. Their character is their undoing. There is no God to save them. They damn themselves to hell.

After watching the film my wife, who is a therapist, commented on the many centuries in which people like Michael Henchard lived and died without a glimmer of understanding of brain chemistry. “He probably was bipolar.”  For me, her comment instantly changed the picture from black and white to color, or vice versa. I had been so thoroughly immersed in Victorian moral tragedy, I had temporarily lost the 21^st century view of character, in which failings are explained in terms of outside influences (family, poverty, drugs) and chemical imbalances.

David Brooks had an interesting column last week about the commentariat’s tendency to therapize what Nidal Hasan did at Ft. Hood. (here) Brooks wrote that “Hasan was portrayed as a victim of society, a poor soul who was pushed over the edge by prejudice and unhappiness.” That absolved him of his responsibility, Brooks said, and denied the possibility of evil.

Which is it, moral tragedy or chemical imbalance? When I think of people I know, I have to say “both.” Their problems are undoubtedly a result of factors beyond their control. You can trace it from their genes or their upbringing or the tragedies that happened when they were children. Yet they become active participants in destruction. They have the power to change direction–that is near the root of what it means to be a conscious human being. And at the same time they don’t have the power. That is also near the root of their humanity.

“He knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust,” the Psalmist says in explaining God’s compassion. (Psalm 103:14) Dust that follows the rules of chemistry.

I think it’s clear that our (slight) understanding of brain chemistry helps us grasp more fully why people do irrational acts. We also understand better our own vulnerability, since we all suffer from brain chemistry.  And yet the knowledge of brain chemistry does not let anyone escape personal responsibility, not in the slightest. For however we interpret the causes of our dysfunctions, we are the ones who do destructive acts, and we are the ones who carry the load of suffering. We are dust—thinking, feeling, hurting, and sinful dust.

Compassion is the only proper response. Hardy was blind to a redeeming God. His best response, therefore, was pity. But compassion is more. It is, from the Latin, with-suffering. In compassion we come alongside, as redemptive participants in tragedy. Compassion hurts.

The good-news story of the cross is about compassion, God himself becoming dust—feeling, hurting, sin-filled and dying dust.

Actors, politicians and royalty pay respects to Sir John Mortimer

Celebration of Rumpole creator’s life at Southwark Cathedral one year after lawyer and playwright’s death

Memorial Service for Sir John Mortimer

Detail from the order of service at the memorial service for Sir John Mortimer at Southwark Cathedral.
For a man who did not believe in God, only a cathedral was big enough to accommodate Sir John Mortimer’s many friends and admirers for a memorial service today.

Actually, the event at Southwark Cathedral in London was billed as a celebration of the life of the lawyer, author, playwright, entertainer and wit, who died last January at the age of 85, and that turned out to be more appropriate than a service. The thing about the Church of England is that you don’t have to be religious to get your day in church.

It made for a good house as the performer in him would undoubtedly have acknowledged and, if God was not entirely absent from the proceedings, the biblical readings, prayers, psalms and hymns were outnumbered by readings from the canon of Mortimer himself, declaimed in the most actorly of ways by the likes of Edward Fox, Derek Jacobi and Patricia Hodge. Topping up the bill were Joss Ackland, with a concessionary reading from Ecclesiastes and Jeremy Irons reciting the Thomas Hardy poem Afterwards.

Mortimer was well-known for his defences of artistic free speech as a barrister in court, admired as the playwright of semi-autobiographical works such as A Voyage Round My Father, even more famous as the creator of Rumpole of the Bailey on television and then in novels and latterly celebrated as a raconteur in an indefatigable one-man show – albeit one in which he was invariably accompanied by glamorous women actors. He would have loved the show in the cathedral.

Among the audience – a more appropriate term than congregation – were Mortimer’s widow Penny and children, including daughters Emily and Rosie, both of whom are expecting babies around the anniversary of his death in the new year, the Duchess of Cornwall, and such figures as Tom Stoppard and Peter Hall, Melvyn Bragg, Anna Ford and Peter O’Toole. The former Tory leader Michael Howard came to pay his respects to the old socialist and fellow barrister and there was even a retired bishop, Lord Harries, formerly of the Oxford diocese, in the pews. Lord Kinnock, another old friend and holiday companion, gave the address and Lord Mandelson materialised beside the royal party.

As the service started, wintry sunlight flooded the cathedral, which soon echoed also with music evocative of Mortimer’s lifelong south Oxfordshire home, around the village of Turville Heath. As for the cathedral itself, even that was appropriate, Canon Andrew Nunn said, as it sits just south of the Thames, out of the grasp of the censorious authorities of the City of London and hence surrounded historically by theatres and pleasure grounds, the louche haunt of lawyers and writers out on a spree and the whores who serviced them, known as Winchester geese after the bishop whose writ once ran across the area.

“Please make sure your mobile telephones are turned off and please save any applause for the end of the service,” Nunn added as the performance began. As if to get his retaliation in first he added: “Jesus had more to say about lawyers than any other group in society. He could not stand them, though he may have had a bit more time for Sir John Mortimer.”

Kinnock told the audience that Mortimer had always been a devout unbeliever: “He was in his own words an atheist certainly, but an atheist for Jesus – he liked to say a character without contradictions is like an egg without salt.”

He praised him as a valorous champion for liberty, an opponent of bigotry and a “splendid fulminator”, a friend and admirer of women even though in his own words he had a face like a bag of spanners, and a doting father, including of the son, Ross, who he discovered in his 80s he had conceived 40 years earlier with the actor Wendy Craig.

“He was a day-star of his age,” said Kinnock. “He illuminated our lives, he lit up our times. Rejoice in him and be thankful. The defence rests but his soul goes strolling on.”

Afterwards, the cathedral rang with applause as the service ended, before the more favoured of them filed out to a marquee and to what Mortimer himself described as the unwavering attraction of cold champagne.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/nov/17/sir-john-mortimer-memorial-service
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Afterwards

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
‘He was a man who used to notice such things’?

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,
‘To him this must have been a familiar sight.’

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, ‘He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone.’

If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
‘He was one who had an eye for such mysteries’?

And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,
Till they rise again, as they were a new bell’s boom,
‘He hears it not now, but used to notice such things’?

Thomas Hardy
________________________________________________________________________________________

Genre: Classic

Year of Publication: 1874

Independent and spirited Bathsheba Everdene has come to Weatherbury to take up her position as a farmer on the largest estate in the area. Her bold presence draws three very different suitors: the gentleman-farmer Boldwood, soldier-seducer Sergeant Troy and the devoted shepherd Gabriel Oak. Each, in contrasting ways, unsettles her decisions and complicates her life, and tragedy ensues, threatening the stability of the whole community. The first of his works set in Wessex, Hardy’s novel of swift passion and slow courtship is imbued with his evocative descriptions of rural life and landscapes, and with unflinching honesty about sexual relationships.

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Today, I dedicate my post to Thomas Hardy, whose later novels were so controversial that the Bishop of Wakefield, in reference to Jude the Obscure, “threw the wicked book into the fire” and subsequently banned all of Hardy’s books. Hardy’s audience was more devoted to him (and–let’s be honest–absolutely titillated by Hardy’s risquè writing) than they were to the great Bishop, so they began to cover their copies of Hardy’s novels with brown bags so they could read them in public or have them sitting around their homes without a prude’s detection. Hardy was a man ahead of his time, advocating for women’s rights, looser divorce laws, and the eradication of Church hypocrisy. His two last novels, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, received such censure for their condemnation of Victorian principle and law that he stopped writing novels altogether and began to focus on his first love, poetry.

Though Hardy’s novels are representative of Victorianism, many of the themes remain true today. Partially from Hardy, I have learned not to take anything sitting down, and he is another master who has helped me refine my own writing.

Though one of Hardy’s skeptical beliefs is that the dead are soon forgotten, he is buried in two places: his ashes are in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey and his heart lies in Stinsford Churchyard, his parish church. In addition, Dorset, from where Hardy hailed, is immensely proud of “their Tommy,” and hosts a Hardy Museum and has erected (heh heh) a statue in his honor in its town square.

Cheers to you, Thomas Hardy, remembered yet again long past when you thought you’d be forgotten.

Thomas Hardy: 1840-1928

“The sky was clear – remarkably clear – and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse.”

Con questo post inauguro una nuova categoria, quella dedicata alla storia della fotografia.
Inizio con uno dei fotografi più incisivi della prima metà del novecento.

Parlo di  Bill Brandt.

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Tracciare un percorso certo della vita di Bill Brandt è piuttosto difficile: le fonti, cui si può attingere a tale scopo, sono copiose ma talora contraddittorie, poiché Brandt, da uomo schivo, pare abbia preferito lasciare in ombra se non addirittura modificare certi dettagli biografici.
Nasce ad Amburgo il 3 maggio del 1904. I suoi genitori sono benestanti: il padre discende da una famiglia inglese, la madre da una russa. Trascorre l’infanzia a Schleswig-Holstein. Ancora ragazzo si sposta in Svizzera: all’età di sedici (o di venti) anni, infatti, si ammala di tubercolosi, ed è ricoverato in un sanatorio a Davos.

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Dimesso fra il ’26 e il ’27, si trasferisce a Vienna, forse inseguendo l’idea di una cura psicoanalitica, forse soltanto per raggiungere uno dei suoi tre fratelli, Rolf, che là ha intrapreso la propria carriera di grafico; sarà questi a presentarlo alla dottoressa Eugenie Schwarzwald, noto personaggio dell’intellighenzia viennese, che spinge il giovane Bill a dedicarsi alla fotografia trovandogli un impiego presso lo studio dell’amica ritrattista Greta Kolliner.
Frequentando casa Schwarzwald, Brandt ha modo d’incontrare l’élite culturale del tempo, fra cui Ezra Pound, con l’aiuto del quale diventerà assistente nello studio di Man Ray a Parigi. Presso il celebre fotografo e artista rimane solo tre mesi, durante i quali non arricchisce il suo bagaglio professionale di nuove nozioni, ma riceve piuttosto un fortissimo impulso creativo. Comincia a lavorare come freelance.

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In Gran Bretagna mette piede per la prima volta solo nel ’31; dapprima per un breve viaggio, poi per stabilirsi definitivamente a Londra. Prenderà lezioni di dizione a lungo per nascondere il proprio accento tedesco, senza mai riuscirci del tutto.
Mosso da un interesse genuino verso il sociale, egli lavora intensamente per dare alle stampe un libro fotografico dal titolo “The English at Home”, il quale, uscito per la prima volta nel ’35, urta la sensibilità britannica mostrando troppo esplicitamente le disparità di classe che la “Depressione” ha acuito. La mancanza di consenso è tale da farlo ritirare, ma la sua riedizione dopo un anno, in un mutato clima politico, fa del libro un trampolino di lancio per la carriera di Brandt.
Così nel 1938, Arts Métiers Graphiques pubblica subito sia in Gran Bretagna sia in Francia il suo “A night in London”, che si preannuncia un sicuro successo, anche perché considerato come la versione inglese del volume di Brassaï “Paris by Night”.
Frattanto Brandt ha già incontrato Tom Hopkinson e Stefan Lorant; entrambi impegnati politicamente, attraverso il loro lavoro editoriale con le riviste Lilliput, Picture Post e Weekly illustrated, costoro giudicano favorevolmente il lavoro del fotografo e gli affidano molti incarichi, che egli può svolgere in piena libertà artistica: nonostante le sue immagini contengano sempre qualcosa in più che la pura cronaca della realtà, diventa fotogiornalista. Le sue fotografie vengono pubblicate anche su Harper’s Bazaar.
Il suo impegno sociale è costante, e una nuova incisiva tappa nella sua denuncia del malessere di quel triste periodo, è rappresentata dalle fotografie che scatta agli abitanti del nord industriale dell’Inghilterra.

© Bill Brandt Archive Ltd

La fotografia ha, in questo momento storico, lo scopo di una lotta contro il capitalismo fondato sulle sperequazioni di classe, e contro i condizionamenti repressivi della borghesia, tipica del pensiero surrealista. La protesta non è però portata sempre avanti con modalità plateali e manifestamente provocatorie, è bensì spesso sottile e pervasiva, nell’apparente innocenza degli accostamenti delle immagini come accade in Bill Brandt (Amburgo1904/ Londra1983) e nei suoi nudi, espressione di un nuovo modo di vedere. Sembra persa ogni possibilità di esistere, annientata sotto miraggi di cumuli di carbone. Sono anni di crisi profonda e la guerra è sempre più imminente. Guerra devastante, guerra che prevede anche la distruzione di obiettivi civili. E Londra è bombardata. Apprezzato per la sua attività di reporter, impegnato allo scoppio della seconda Guerra Mondiale, per conto del Ministero dell’informazione britannico, egli documenta la condizione dei londinesi durante il blackout ed all’interno dei rifugi approntati per far fronte ai raid aerei tedeschi. Ma di queste devastazioni Brandt fotografa solo i silenzi e i chiari di luna, una popolazione nascosta e unita nella notte, che aspetta la pace. Ancora una volta si tratta di immagini evocative, non descrittive: Brandt non racconta la guerra, la evoca.

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Poi il conflitto finisce e Brandt, come molti altri artisti di quel periodo, si allontana da quella società che in fin dei conti la guerra ha creato. Si auspica un ritorno a condizioni originarie, alla natura, all’uomo, alla terra… a luoghi e a tempi in cui la civiltà foriera di conflitti bellici ancora non era stata creata. Ne derivano le immagini di sapore neoromantico delle campagne inglesi, i luoghi delle sorelle Brönte, di Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy. Il paesaggio diventa espressione di sentimenti interiori. Le condizioni atmosferiche, come in epoca romantica, si fanno espressioni dell’anima.

© Bill Brandt Archive Ltd

La fotografia è in lui risultato otticomeccanico della concezione spaziale prospettica occidentale. La prospettiva non solo è la componente fondamentale della fotografia, ma è irrimediabilmente data insieme alla fotografia. Non è un caso che Bill Brandt titoli la sua prima raccolta di nudi (1961) “Perspective of Nudes”, perché proprio la prospettiva è il soggetto sotteso a ogni fotogramma. Usando obiettivi grandangolari molto spinti Brandt ritrae donne inquietanti, dai volti assenti e dai corpi allungati,esasperati. Donne mute, distanti sono rinchiuse in stanze opprimenti estremamente eloquenti che raccontano gli incubi e le paure del fotografo. Ricordano la stanza di Alice nel paese delle meraviglie ma nello stesso tempo evocano in maniera sottile il terrore e l’orrore di Bacon. Sono palcoscenici dell’inconscio in cui Brandt mette in scena se stesso, dove paura ed erotismo si confondono e Balthus lascia il posto a Hitchcock.
La guerra aveva precluso molti orizzonti, distrutto molti ideali; aveva isolato non solo le istituzioni culturali, ma anche la nazione coi suoi abitanti. Ecco dunque le stanze chiuse, emblema di un isolamento generalizzato. Non è forse un caso che con l’allontanarsi dello spettro della guerra, negli anni Cinquanta, inizino a profilarsi nuovi orizzonti, questa volta aperti, infiniti e illuminati da raggi di sole e di speranza che nelle stanze non erano mai penetrati. Si hanno i celebri nudi in esterno in cui frammenti di corpi femminili si confondono nel paesaggio, diventando tutt’uno con esso. La macchina fotografica inquadra sezioni di corpo trasformandole, rendendole “altro”. Si creano nuovi paesaggi, paesaggi surreali, ibridi.
Il surrealismo brandtiano qui si fa dichiarato, esplicito. La fotografia di nudo coinvolgerà Brandt incessantemente per quindici anni, fotografando questi interni con una Kodak ad obiettivo grandangolare ed apertura piccola, l’artista reinventerà il nudo. È probabile che questa passione sia nata parallelamente al suo interesse per il cinematografo ed il fascino esercitato su di lui dal cinema surrealista. Sulla sua immaginazione agì profondamente una particolare esperienza cinematografica: quella di “Quarto potere” di Orson Welles. I sinistri ed avvolgenti interni, dove pareti, pavimenti, e soffitti si allontanavano via via dallo spettatore, spinsero Brand nella sua sperimentazione circa la fotografia d’interni.

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Più tardi per i suoi esperimenti di nudo Brandt si servì delle spiagge dell’Inghilterra meridionale e della Francia del nord. Per raggiungere effetti simili, apprese anche ad usare una Hasselblad con relativo bagaglio di obiettivi. Per queste fotografie sarebbe preferibile evitare il termine “distorsione”, più adatti ai nudi realizzati da Andrè Kertesz con specchi deformanti.

© Bill Brandt Archive Ltd

Negli ultimi anni di vita, affetto da lungo tempo da diabete, la sua salute è fragile. A causa di un glaucoma, la vista continua a peggiorare rendendogli sempre più difficile quel controllo delle proprie stampe, cui tiene da sempre ad occuparsi personalmente. Bill Brandt muore a Londra nel Dicembre del 1983, dopo una breve malattia, lasciando Noya, ultima delle tre mogli, dalle quali non ha avuto figli. Le sue ceneri vengono sparse a Holland Park, dove amava recarsi a passeggiare ogni giorno.

© Bill Brandt Archive Ltd

Already the LBTS is getting a head start on the 2010 RMBLI (Read More British Literature Initiative.) This past Saturday, members made an afternoon trip to the second-hand bookshop to purchase well-worn books by Thomas Hardy.  Sitting on the floor amongst the stacks, members voted to start the new year reading Jude the Obscure, the last of Mr. Hardy’s novels.  While no deadline is yet established for the club discussion, one LBTS member volunteered to research and report on the life of Mr. Hardy.  Another LBTS member volunteered to research and report on the historical and cultural context in which the novel was written.  The LBTS executive committee is delighted with the enthusiastic response and participation of club members.

Original illustration by Helen Paterson

I have lost all confidence in contemporary love stories. Comparisons hardly seem fair, but when you go from reading Twilight or The Time Traveler’s Wife to Thomas Hardy’s great pastoral novel, Far From the Madding Crowd, you start to loose the faith.

Hardy is an exceptional craftsmen of plot and dramatic tension. With its attention to detail, surprising and complex protagonists and beautiful language, Far From the Madding Crowd is story telling at its best. Reading it in the country of Hardy’s partially fictionalised Wessex (based on the English county of Dorset), makes it even easier to imagine the simple scenes of pastoral beauty that Hardy describes so well. While there is some definite irony throughout the book, it is quite a romanticised portrayal of rural village life. But then, it is a romantic book – and probably why I loved it so much.

Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd was first published in twelve monthly instalments in the popular Cornhill Magazine in 1874.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy took to cycling relatively late in life but was still cycling regularly into his eighties. Receiving bad reviews and criticism for offending public decency with Jude the Obscure, cycling may well have been his escape.

‘I have almost forgotten there is such a pursuit as literature in the arduous study of — bicycling!’

In an interview for a book-related job, the questioning went something like this:

Interviewer 1: What are you currently reading?
TSR: *takes deep breath*
Interviewer 2: Restrain yourself!!

[Yeah, Interviewer 2 had me dialed. And I did get the job.]

The sidebar ‘books I’m reading’ has been pretty static lately, mainly because I keep starting books and then not finishing them, or rather some other book gets in the way. I currently have on the go:

- George Gissing, New Grub Street. Someday I must determine why I love Gissing so much, even though his work is so depressing, whereas Thomas Hardy’s work is also depressing but makes me want to stab myself with a sharpened pen. The problem is that this will probably require me to read more Hardy, and that is something I do not wish to do. I am rereading NGS in the hopes that it will make me feel better to be reminded that, in fact, there never was a prelapsarian publishing era of joy, and authors have always had it tough. Status: just begun.

- Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey. Required reading. I like it, but I really want to reread Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility. Status: just begun.

- Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played With Fire. I mistakenly thought this was the first in the series, though as the library won’t be able to get me that one for weeks, I might as well start with this. I am trying to approach this book with an open mind, but given that the original title of book number one is Men Who Hate Women, I have the feeling I may finish the book solely to avoid ‘but you haven’t READ IT’ arguments (though these will undoubtedly be replaced with arguments that include the words ‘you feminists’ and ‘no sense of humor’). Status: just begun.

- Tom Brown and Henry McLeish, Scotland: A Suitable Case for Treatment. Am toying with writing something set in an independent Scotland (those cries you hear are the Scottish Nationalists a-whoopin’ and a-hollerin’), and picked this up in a quest to figure out how Scots view Scottish national identity. Still not entirely sure, though most seem to agree that the deep-fried Mars bar is an aberration. Status: a third finished.

- Tobias Smollett, Humphrey Clinker. I have a woefully deficient background in 18th century literature so I figured this would help fill the gap. Also, I can read bits aloud to my Scottish friends, who splutter amusingly when they hear nice things about Alloa and Greenock. Status: three-quarters finished.

And don’t even ask about the BTR stacks/shelves. No, really, please don’t….

“His pore mother, not being a Scripture-read woman, made a mistake at his christening, thinking ‘twas Abel killed Cain, and called ‘em Cain, meaning Abel all the time. The parson put it right, but ‘twas too late, for the name could never be got rid of in the parish. ‘Tis very unfortunate for the boy…. We soften it down as much as we can, and call him Cainy.”

(Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, 1874)

“The Blinded Bird” (Thomas Hardy)

Thomas Hardy

So zestfully canst thou sing?
And all this indignity,
With God’s consent, on thee!
Blinded ere yet a-wing
By the red-hot needle thou,
I stand and wonder how
So zestfully thou canst sing!

Resenting not such wrong,
Thy grievous pain forgot,
Eternal dark thy lot,
Groping thy whole life long;
After that stab of fire;
Enjailed in pitiless wire;
Resenting not such wrong!

Who hath charity? This bird.
Who suffereth long and is kind,
Is not provoked, though blind
And alive ensepulchred?
Who hopeth, endureth all things?
Who thinketh no evil, but sings?
Who is divine? This bird.

This poem first appeared in Hardy’s Moments of Vision (1916), where it precedes “The wind blew words along the skies…” (a poem I discuss elsewhere in The Era of Casual Fridays). I find “The Blinded Bird” almost unbearable to read, less for the appalling facts it details—about which more in due course—than for the obvious pain that those facts occasion in the poet. Of course, the affiliation, the fellowship, of poet and song-bird is almost as old as English poetry. Our poets can’t seem to let the theme alone; it was particularly abused by the Romantics. Poets are said to be “singers,” etc.; and we have Shelley and his skylark, and Keats and his nightingale. But the affiliation between poet and bird, and between poem and bird-song, is quite different in “The Blinded Bird,” a point made all the clearer by the poem’s appearing opposite “The wind blew words…”:

The wind blew words along the skies,
And these it blew to me
Through the wide dusk: “Lift up your eyes,
Behold this troubled tree,
Complaining as it sways and plies;
It is a limb of thee.

“Yea, too, the creatures sheltering round—
Dumb figures, wild and tame,
Yea, too, thy fellows who abound—
Either of speech the same
Or far and strange—black, dwarfed, and browned,
They are stuff of thy own frame.”

I moved on in a surging awe
Of inarticulateness
At the pathetic Me I saw
In all his huge distress,
Making self-slaughter of the law
To kill, break, or suppress.

This poem assumes the (Darwinian) unity of all organic life—of all creatures great and small, wild and tame, caged or un-caged. The “black, dwarfed, and browned” “fellows” referred to in stanza two are the peoples of Africa and Asia. And we may be still more particular. In speaking of “dwarfed” men Hardy likely has in mind the peoples or “pygmies” (as the British called them) native to south-central Africa. The “black” men are sub-Saharan Africans generally, and the “browned” men Indians, and, perhaps, also Arabs. When this poem was written and published, all of these peoples were subject to British colonial rule, which often justified itself—sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly—with the claim, which “The wind blew words…” incidentally contradicts, that “white” men are in some sense set apart from, and also above, “colored” men.

Title page, "On the Origin of Species" (1859)

We need not specify the poem’s attitude toward the idea of white supremacy to say that it belongs to (among other things) the long history of (white) meditations on the question of “race.” Now, when poems appear to make “arguments” or “statements” (not all poems do these things) we must do our best to understand them. The last stanza of this poem says something like this: “The ‘natural’ law of the world is that things (and this includes all things: all things wise and wonderful, all creatures great and small) shall kill, break, and suppress, and be killed, broken and suppressed in turn. I now recognize, here in this wind-swept place, that I am a part of this (somewhat Hobbesian) world. All men are part of it. Though we once thought Man was opposed to, or at least distinct from, the rest of ‘Nature,’ we can no longer make that assumption (not after what Darwin showed us, for example).”

In “The Blinded Bird,” we find expression of precisely the sort of “fellow-feeling” with a suffering bird one might expect a writer who held these (Darwinian) beliefs to consider irresistible—in fact, painfully irresistible: bird and poet are “framed” from the “same stuff.” It will surprise no reader of “The Blinded Bird” that Hardy was both a member of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), the oldest animal-rights organization in the world, and an ardent anti-vivisectionist. Readers of the poem unfamiliar with a terrifically arcane Flemish sport will not likely understand why the bird was blinded by “a hot needle,” rather than in some other way.

Detailed view of the equipment used in "vinkensport."

The sport is called “vinkensport,” defined in the following manner in Wikipedia: “Vinkensport (Dutch for ‘finch sport’) is a competitive animal sport in which male chaffinches are made to compete for the highest number of bird calls in an hour. Also called vinkenzetting (Dutch finch sitting), it is primarily active in the Dutch-speaking Flanders region of Belgium. Vinkensport traces its origins to competitions held by

A vinkensport competition in progress.

Flemish merchants in 1596, and is considered part of traditional Flemish culture. . . As of 2007, it is estimated that there are over 13,000 enthusiasts, called vinkeniers (‘finchers’), breeding 10,000 birds every year. Animal rights activists have opposed the sport for much of its history. Early proponents of the sport would blind birds with hot needles in order to reduce visual distractions.” The Wikipedia entry continues to make what would seem an incontestable point: “Thomas Hardy—the celebrated English author, antivivisectionist and member of the RSPCA—is said to have written his poem ‘The Blinded Bird’ as a protest against the practice.” So much then, for the theme of the poem: it expresses outrage not simply about cruelty to animals (in this case, a finch), but about cruelty done to them for the purpose of sport. It should go without saying that most vinkeniers do not, in fact, engage in bird-blinding. But some certainly did, and it is these men whom Hardy has in his sights in this devastating poem. But there is much more to be said about the poem than that.

Most contemporary readers in the U.S. and the U.K. will know little to nothing about vinkensport, but the English Bible they do know, or ought to. And in the last stanza of the poem Hardy revises a well-known text from 1st Corinthinans:

1 Cor. 13: 1-8: Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing. Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.

Bear in mind the Darwinian subtext of the poem that succeeds “The Blinded Bird,” and bear in mind what I have suggested about the differences that distinguish this poem about “zestful” birdsong from any number of conventional Romantic poems on the same theme, and one feels in it, as Hardy re-casts the words of St. Paul, a kind of Schopenhaurian atheism hardly unfamiliar to readers of his poetry. Hardy brings “divinity” down to earth. And one feels in it as well the dry reproach Hardy made, in a letter to a Scottish divine who’d queried him on the

Alexander Grosart

age-old Christian theme of reconciling, or attempting to, the idea of an omnipotent and benevolent God with the cruelty and suffering everywhere evident in our sublunary sphere: “Mr. Hardy regrets that he is unable to offer any hypothesis which would reconcile the existence of such evils as Dr. Grosart describes with the idea of omnipotent goodness. Perhaps Dr. Grosart might be helped to a provisional view of the universe by the recently published Life of Darwin, and the works of Herbert Spencer, and other agnostics.” Hardy is even clearer on the so-called theological “problem of evil” in a short poem titled “Christmas: 1924″ (where, in the closing couplet, he uses disjunctive rhyme to wickedly good effect):

“Peace upon earth!” was said. We sing it
And pay a million priests to bring it.
After two thousand years of mass
We’ve got as far as poison-gas.

But I’d like to return to “The Blinded Bird.” Much of its force, its bitter recrimination, derives, I think, from its unusual form. Hardy has chosen to frame the poem in three stanzas of equal length (7 lines). The lines themselves vary in length from 6 to 8 syllables, but all have, for the most part, three stresses. (It is in, as I see it, “accentual meter.”) The rhyme scheme is a tight one (ABBACCA), with the added fact that the first and last lines of each stanza register a slight variation of the same phrase, sentence, or, as in stanza three, two sentences. The form, whatever else it may be, is certainly emphatic: it is built to drive home a point. And yet relation of sentence to line varies wonderfully across the poem—a matter I discuss more generally, again, elsewhere in this web-log—as its governing mood of indignation undergoes changes in intensity, bitterness, and sheer wonder at the cruelty men are capable of. In the first stanza, Hardy lays out three sentences in the allotted 7 lines. In the second, he lays a single sentence that is itself a kind of expletive. And then in the third and final stanza, the stanza in which St. Paul’s paean to charity is so ingeniously re-cast, we find no fewer than 7 sentences in seven lines: a curt and recursive style that brings the poem into perfect focus. It is nigh impossible to read this without feeling in it an intimation not simply that God might “consent” to indignities such as these (as is suggested in stanza one), but that there is no God at all: “divinity” and “charity,” such as they are, are here, on earth, with us—indeed, in a finch—or they are nowhere.  “The Blinded Bird” puts everyone to shame.

One more thing. I’m risking a little something here, but quite possibly, in describing the bird as “alive ensepulchured” and as “divine”—right here, in a stanza calling us back to the Pauline writings;—quite possibly Hardy is dispatching that second person of our three-personed God: the Son, the Christ, who was “ensepulchured” if not “alive” then at the very least “undead.” For He arose, we are told, and upon that fancy, as many contend, St. Paul built the whole edifice of Christianity, whose “two thousand years of mass” have gotten us “as far as poison-gas.”  Probably I am larking in my suggestion about the further reaches of the phrase “alive ensepulchured,” but in any case the general point is clear: Better to set aside the queer aforementioned theological “problem of evil” and get on with the business of reforming our own sorry reprobation. And so Mr. Hardy “regrets that he is unable to offer any hypothesis which would reconcile the existence of such evils as Dr. Grosart describes with the idea of omnipotent goodness.”

Charles Darwin

Of course, we already have Darwin’s word on it, from the Autobiography: “That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Some have explained this in reference to Man, by imagining that it serves for his moral improvement. But the number of men in the world is as nothing compared with that of all other sentient beings, and these often suffer greatly without any moral improvement. A being so powerful and so full of knowledge as a God who could create the universe, is to our finite minds omnipotent and omniscient, and it revolts our understanding to suppose that his benevolence is not unbounded, for what advantage can there be in the suffering of millions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time? This very old argument from the existence of suffering against the existence of an intelligent first cause seems to me a strong one; whereas, as just remarked, the presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection.”

N.B. Unlikely, but possible, is an ironic echo in line 18 of “The Blinded Bird” of a passage from Elizabeth Barret Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856): “. . . now could I but unloose my soul! / We are sepulchred alive in this close world, / And want more room.” For a video, with sound, of a male chaffinch singing in the forest, click here. Here is a link to the Nationaal Volkssportmuseum Vinkensport. Hardy’s oft-quoted response to Grosart is reprinted on page 174 of The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy: 1840-1892, ed. Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate (Oxford, 1978). Hardy, in fact, makes an explicit and counter-Romantic reply to Shelley in a poem published in Poems of the Past and Present titled “Shelley’s Skylark.” Finally, for the most devastating of Hardy’s poems on cruelty to animals, cf. the first comment below, where I reprint his poem “The Mongrel.” Read it if you dare.

This is the weather the cuckoo likes,
And so do I;
When showers betumble the chestnut spikes,
And nestlings fly;
And the little brown nightingale bills his best,
And they sit outside at ‘The Traveller’s Rest,’
And maids come forth sprig-muslin drest,
And citizens dream of the south and west,
And so do I.

This is the weather the shepherd shuns,
And so do I;
When beeches drip in browns and duns,
And thresh and ply;
And hill-hid tides throb, throe on throe,
And meadow rivulets overflow,
And drops on gate bars hang in a row,
And rooks in families homeward go,
And so do I.

- Thomas Hardy

* This one is really best read aloud or recited.  Try it.  But go slow because it can be a tongue twister.  Its an excellent elocution exercise.

The Ladies Books & Tackle Society held their fall retreat last weekend. After much discussion – including the merits of a toasty cabin after a day of cool fall-weather fishing, the acceptable travel distance for a trout fishing weekender, the agenda, and the proper quantity of wine to bring on said weekender – the ladies voted to explore Iowa’s Driftless Region.

First, the agenda:
1. Catch fish
2. Drink tea
3. Plan 2009 Fall Gala
4. Discuss 2010 LBTS Initiatives

Mave, who traveled from Cong for the retreat especially, volunteered to take notes. She did, although her notes are sparse, editorialized, and obscured by cigarette ash and wine stains. We’ve reconstructed them as best as possible.

1. Catch fish: goes without saying
2. Drink tea: also goes without saying, preferable only when wine not available, will work to get gin reinstated on the agenda, just a minor mix-up last year after the nordic boy bartenders neglected to include tonic
3. 2009 Fall Gala: no awards this year, ladies putting together a half-witted retrospective of the club, invitees sure to be impressed?
4. 2010 LBTS Initiatives: EFI & RMBLI (Excellence in Fishing Initiative and Read More British Literature Initiative) basically just fish more and not let work or shaky knot tying skills discourage, was talk of a LBTS Opener but idea lost when cheeses arrived, ladies to read Thomas Hardy and the Bronte sisters in 2010
Side notes: lengthy discussion of evils of overachievement, one member forced to point out the ambitious design of a beaded necklace, eyes clouded over but no tears shed, just relief at having been called out and saved from great expectations, also some thought to volunteerism but will leave for better ladies, again a threat, may redress next year

Following on from yesterday’s post about reading at leisure and just going off at a tangent I was mulling through my shelves and spotted one that has been getting no attention since I moved into my new house. Now I am a big fan of seeing other people’s shelves on their blogs, for example Claire of Paperback Reader has done a series of colour co-ordinated shelves which looked stunning. I tried this back in February and though it looked lovely I couldn’t ever find anything and so that became a bit of a nightmare, if an aesthetically pleasing on, I know it works wonderfully well for a lot of people though.

When I moved house back in July I inherited lots of new shelves in my room as well as the shelves “for books I have read” in the lounge. The question was how to organise them so I did a hardback shelf, a review paperback shelf, a non fiction shelf, a mixture shelf (books by Daphne, Man Booker winners and dare I say it books I haven’t finished), a short reads shelf and the shelf of today’s post The Blinking Big Books shelf.

Now some of the titles have been must reads for ages and I think one or two of them may end up in my packing for my long weekend up north that’s coming up. The ones I have heard lots about and am looking forward to reading are…

• Small Island – Andrea Levy (on of my Gran’s fav’s)
• A Widow for One Year – John Irving
• The Little Friend – Donna Tartt
• The Mysteries of Udolpho – Ann Radcliffe
• Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
• Alias Grace – Margaret Atwood
• The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver (another of Gran’s favourites)
• The American Boy – Andrew Taylor
• Beyond Black – Hilary Mantel
• Crime & Punishment – Dostoevsky

The ones I am not so sure about which have either been bought for me, sent to me or randomly purchased in shops ‘because they look nice’ (and could do with your thought on, though do give them on the ones above too) are…

• Of Human Bondage – W Somerset Maugham
• At Swim Two Boys – Jamie O’Neil
• The Impressionist – Hari Kunzru (one my Mum very much liked)
• Special Topics in Calamity Physics – Marissa Pessl
• The Forsythe Saga – John Galsworthy
• Rebecca’s Tale – Sally Beauman (a Rebecca sequel/prequel)
• The Historian – Elizabeth Kostova
• The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters – G. W. Dahlquist
• The Madness of a Seduced Woman – Susan Fromberg Schaeffer
• The Grave Diggers Daughter – Joyce Carol Oates

There are a few more (such as the book We Need To Talk About Kevin that I may try and re-read after failing miserably) but that’s quite enough for now. I would just like your thoughts on them especially as I always find really long books quite hard work. I don’t know why this is, one possible explanation is the fact I think about how many shorter books I could be reading. Or the fact they are a bit of nightmare to carry around with you when you are commuting, though I won’t be for quite a while so that’s another excuse down. It could of course just be I am reading the wrong ones?

What are your thoughts on great big books? Which have been your favourites? Do you avoid them at all costs? Do I have any gems above that I simply must read now? Anything big bookish to add?

Ernest Rhys & M. Larigot (ed.) – The Haunted And The Haunters (Donald O’Connor, 1921;  Aegypan, 2007)

Reissued by Aegypan Press of North Hollywood, 2007. Prefer to read it all online? Short, Scary Ghost Stories

Cover of 2007 reissue

Ernest Rhys – Introduction

I. GHOST STORIES FROM LITERARY SOURCES

Edgar Allan Poe – The Fall Of The House Of Usher
George MacDonald – The Old Nurses Story
Thomas Hardy – The Superstitious Man’s Story
Boccaccioa – A Story Of Ravenna
Douglass Hyde [Trans] – Teig O’Kane And The Corpse
E. Bulwer Lytton – The Haunted And The Haunters
R. S. Hawker – The Bothanan Ghost
Arnold Bennett – The Ghost Of Lord Clarenceux
Arthur Machen – Dr Duthoit’s Vision
John Wilson – The Seven Lights
Anonymous – The Spectral Coach Of Blackadon
William Hunt – Drake’s Drum
William Hunt – The Spectre Bridegroom
Greville MacDonald – The Pool In The Graveyard
William Carleton – The Liahan Shee
Sir George Douglas – The Haunted Cove
Sir Walter Scott – Wandering Willie’s Tale

II. GHOST STORIES FROM LOCAL RECORDS, FOLK LORE, AND LEGEND

Anonymous – Glamis Castle
Anonymous – Powys Castle
Augustus Hare – Croglin Grange
Joseph Glanvil – The Ghost of Major Sydenham
Anonymous – Miraculous Case of Jesch Claes
Anonymous – The Radiant Boy of Corby Castle
Anonymous – Clerk Saunders
Mrs Catherine Crowe – Dorothy Durant
C. K. Sharpe – Pearlin Jean
Anonymous – The Denton Hall Ghost
Anonymous – The Goodwood Ghost Story
Dale Owen – Captain Wheatcroft
Mrs Catherine Crowe – The Iron Cage
William Hunt – The Ghost of Rosewarne
Joseph Glanvil – The Iron Chest of Durley
Anonymous – The Strange Case of M. Bezeul
Anonymous – The Marquis de Rambouillet
Anonymous – The Altheim Revenant
Anonymous – Sertorius and His Hind
E. W. Godwin – Erichto

III. OMENS AND PHANTASMS

E.H. Blakeney [Trans] – Patroklos [from The Iliad]
“Arise Evans” – Vision of Cromwell
Rev. John Mastin – Lord Stafford’s Warning
Ferrier – Kotter’s Red Circle
Anonymous – The Vision of Charles XI of Sweden
Drummond – Ben Jonson’s Prevision
Anonymous – Queen Ulrica and the Countess Steenbock
Anonymous – Denis Misanger
Anonymous – The Pied Piper
Ferrier – Jeanne D’Arc
Anonymous – Anne Walker
Henderson – The Hand of Glory
Anonymous – The Bloody Footstep
Anonymous – The Ghostly Warriors of Worms
Anonymous – The Wandering Jew in England
Edmund Jones – Bendith Eu Mammau
John F. Campbell – The Red Book of Appin
Anonymous – The Good O’Donoghue
William Hunt – Sarah Polgrain
William Godwin – Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester

The Aegypan edition drops the co-credit although it’s clear from Rhys’ introduction that this compilation of folklore, fact, ‘fact’, legend and fiction is all the mysterious M. Larigot’s work!

In this Ghost Book, M. Larigot, himself a writer of supernatural tales, has collected a remarkable batch of documents, fictive or real, describing the one human experience that is hardest to make good. Perhaps the very difficulty of it has rendered it more tempting to the writers who have dealt with the subject. His collection, notably varied and artfully chosen as it is, yet by no means exhausts the literature, which fills a place apart with its own recognised classics, magic masters, and dealers in the occult. Their testimony serves to show that the forms by which men and women are haunted are far more diverse and subtle than we knew. So much so, that one begins to wonder at last if every person is not liable to be “possessed.”

Recentemente o blogueiro e escritor Sérgio Rodrigues fez um concurso de melhores inícios de romances, ganho com toda justiça por Tolstói e seu “Ana Karenina“. Mas se tivesse feito um concurso para melhor final de romance, meu voto seria dado para a primeira frase do parágrafo final de “Tess of the D’Urbervilles“: “Justice” was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess. (A “justiça” foi feita, e o Presidente dos Imortais, em uma frase Esquiliana, terminara seu jogo com Tess”.)

A referência à tragédia clássica faz justiça à obra-prima de Thomas Hardy. Os elementos estão lá: o orgulho que precede a queda, ainda que tal orgulho seja obra de um parvo, bêbado e idiota; o erro trágico cometido pela família ignorante e gananciosa; a viravolta, mudança de acontecimentos que transformam a felicidade em infelicidade, ainda que a felicidade houvera sido brevíssima e ilusória; a morte trágica e por fim o determinismo, mas não mais imputado por deuses ciumentos e manipulativos, mas um determinismo causado por condições materiais e sociais.

O pessimismo crônico de Hardy em relação ao homem está presente. O estilo elegante, hábil em produzir no romance tanto a fala em “dialeto” dos pobres e camponeses como a fala escolarizada dos burgueses também. E como em “Jude, the Obscure“, a certeza absoluta de que o esforço não recompensará os não aquinhoados pela fortuna.

Pois bem, vamos à história. Após saber que é descendente de uma antiga linhagem de nobres, Jack Durbeyfield convence sua filha mais velha, Tess, a procurar seus parentes ricos e apresentar-se ao novo ramo da família. Tess é estuprada, engravida de seu primo, passa a ser malvista pelos aldeões de onde mora, testemunha a morte de seu bebê, cujo enterro e ofício fúnebre é negado pelo presbítero de sua aldeia pelo fato dele ser fruto de uma fornicação. Acha pouco? Pois bem, Tess vai embora de sua aldeia e se radica em uma fazenda de leite, onde conhece e se apaixona por Angel Clare, um filho de um pastor que quer aprender o ofício para abrir sua própria fazenda. Ao casar com Angel, que se considerava um “livre-pensador”, Tess pensa ter encontrado a felicidade, mas é abandonada na noite de núpcias pelo marido quando este descobre que Tess não é mais virgem, muito embora ele próprio tivesse levado uma vida libertina antes de sua estada na fazenda. Tess volta para sua aldeia, onde vê todos os habitantes da aldeia perderem suas terras que garantiam o sustento daquela população, num processo conhecido como “enclosure“,  que nada mais é que a transformação de antigas áreas públicas e de uso comunitário em propriedade privada.  Acabou? Não. Ela sofre, sofre, sofre e sofre ainda mais. Depois de muito curtir seu sofrimento e ter um breve e ilusório período de amor com um arrependido (e imbecil) Angel, que voltara tarde demais não podendo mais redimí-la, Tess é executada por ter assassinado Alec, seu primo, estuprador e amante.

Porém mais que mero conteúdo psicológico e moral, “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” retrata com argúcia e lirismo o momento do capitalismo da Inglaterra no final do século XIX, o quanto esse mesmo capitalismo tomava cada vez mais espaços de formas de vida tradicionais e centenárias e o início da mecanização agrícola. Inclusive, numa cena onde Tess e Angel levavam o leite para ser embarcado no trem rumo a Londres, no diálogo entre os dois enamorados há quase uma explicação sobre o processo de apagamento das relações sociais na produção das mercadorias como consequência da reificação.

Outro aspecto notável no romance é que pela primeira vez na literatura o campo passa a ser descrito como o lugar do trabalho, da exploração, do sofrimento e da vida dura. Diferentemente do que sempre acontecera, onde a oposição campo x cidade sempre se deu na base de associar a cidade ao vício, ao pecado, ao trabalho, à violência (basta lembrar dos romances de Charles Dickens e seus órfãos sofredores) e o campo ao bucólico, ao pacífico e à natureza.

O autor, Thomas Hardy, foi severamente criticado na época tanto pelo pessimismo de sua obra quanto pela suposta licenciosidade de sua obra, que feria o código de moralidade de um vitorianismo tardio puritano e recalcado. Tais críticas chegaram ao nível do insuportável após o lançamento do romance subsequente, “Jude, the Obscure”, praticamente uma Tess de calças, onde o personagem principal luta com todas as forças que lhe são possíveis para perceber ao final de sua vida (curta, como a de Tess) que não há como lutar contra forças históricas e contra a ideologia que domina as forças de produção. Após a repercussão terrível de “Tess” e “Jude”, Hardy abandona o romance e passa a se dedicar exclusivamente à poesia.

O romance, um calhamaço de 592 páginas, foi adaptado para o cinema por Roman Polanski, o também estuprador de uma adolescente recentemente preso na Suíça, estrelado por uma deslumbrante Nastassja Kinski, então com 19 anos.

Se por um lado o filme fracassa ao retratar as relações sociais de então, concentrando-se principalmente nos desencontros das relações humanas (aliás, o filme ganhou um ridículo subtítulo em português por ocasião de seu relançamento em DVD: Tess – Uma lição de vida. Lição de vida do quê? A coitada da Tess só fez cagada e no final morreu por causa disso), por outro o filme reproduz o tratamento quase fetichista que o narrador do romance dedicava à protagonista. A beleza, a sensualidade ingênua mas abrasadora, os lábios carnudos e vermelhos narrados no romance estão lá presentes no filme. Presentes na beleza ao mesmo tempo arrebatadora e inibida de Tess, representada por Nastassja.

Thomas Hardy poderia até não aprovar a adaptação cinematográfica de sua obra (recentemente adaptada para a televisão em uma minissérie de quatro capítulos produzida pela BBC), mas certamente se orgulharia da Tess interpretada por Nastassja Kinski.

Sorry this is so overdue–I finished The Mayor of Casterbridge two weeks ago and am only now trying to turn my notes into a coherent review. It always seems that the more there is to say about a book, the more trouble I have doing so!

He experienced not only the bitterness of a man who finds, in looking back upon an ambitious course, that what he had sacrificed in sentiment was worth as much as he had gained in substance; but the superadded bitterness of seeing his very recantation nullified. He had been sorry for all this long ago; but his attempts to replace ambition by love had been as fully foiled as his ambition itself.

I read Tess of the D’Urbervilles last summer knowing absolutely nothing about Thomas Hardy or the book. I quickly fell in love with the complicated characters, a reaction only heightened by watching the adaptation (thoughts here and here, but plenty of spoilers as well). Having read all I could about Tess means that I went into The Mayor of Casterbridge with a deeper understanding of Hardy’s favorite themes and plot devices. So forgive me if I make occasional comparisons, as that is in part how I made sense of the novel.

The mayor of Casterbridge is Michael Henchard. Twenty years ago he was a lowly hay trusser who sold his wife and daughter at an auction while drunk (not a spoiler); now he has become a successful and respected grain merchant whom fortune has treated well. His luck and status seem to change however, when a few newcomers arrive. His wife Susan and daughter Elizabeth-Jane come to claim his support as a “kinsman,” and Scotsman Donald Farfrae joins his staff as business manager. These events start a chain of interactions that last throughout the novel, as Hardy deftly reveals the complexities of Henchard’s character.

He certainly is worthy of study. Michael Henchard is both strong and weak, in that he succumbs easily to the passions of a moment but can also behave resolutely when he has decided on a course. For example, after selling his wife he took an oath to avoid alcohol for twenty-one years, and followed it. He bestows his affections only with conviction, and if he feels slighted is tempted to cast them off. Too often he places business before emotional connections, or behaves cruelly to those he loves, so that at times it’s hard to like him. On the other hand, however, Henchard finds it had to like himself. He is remorseful for wrongs he causes, and in his heart knows what courses he should take. Above all I found him a sympathetic character whom I came to understand.

Hence, when she felt her heart going out to him, she would say to herself with a mock pleasantry that carried an ache with it, “No, no, Elizabeth-Jane–such dreams are not for you!” She tried to prevent herself from seeing him, and thinking of him; succeeding fairly well in the former attempt, in the latter not so completely.

The novel covers not just Henchard, but all those in his sphere, especially Elizabeth-Jane. She is a sweet and studious girl, saved from vanities by the hardship of her early life. You can’t help but wish her every happiness, even if she thinks she doesn’t deserve them. The energetic and innovative Farfrae has the biblical luck of Jacob and Joseph in that he can do no wrong when it comes to the grain market. And Lucetta, a rich young woman with a tragic past, seems almost a precursor to Tess in that she refuses to let prior incidents dictate her future. We also see recurring townspeople, who add color, commentary, and a touch of humor.

Hardy does touch on some of the same themes as in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, such as the role of destiny or fate. Here the events are a bit more melodramatic without being piled up, and I wonder why his later book had less of a balance. At times it does seem as if something greater is dictating the happiness or success of the characters; Michael especially bemoans this. He also, however, recognizes that just as often the events that befall him are a result of his own character and choices. The biggest effect of fate seems to be in the timing of things, beginning with the simultaneous arrival of Susan and Farfrae.

Casterbridge was the complement of the rural life around; not its urban opposite. Bees and butterflies in the cornfields at the top of the town, who desired to get to the meads at the bottom, took no circuitous course but flew straight down High Street without any apparent consciousness that they were transversing strange latitudes. And in autumn airy spheres of thistledown floated into the same street, lodged upon the shop fronts, blew into drains; and innumerable tawny and yellow leaves skimmed along the pavement, and stole through people’s doorways into their passages with a hesitating scratch on the floor like the skirts of timid visitors.

Sorry for such a long quote, but I just loved that imagery. It’s important to remember that even when first published in the late nineteenth century Hardy’s novels were historical, set forty years earlier and describing a vanishing way of life. Casterbridge is a small town completely coexistent with the farming community. As with Tess there are scenes of harvest and rural life, the details of the grain trade. Roman ruins on the outskirts of town complete the pretty picture. Hardy’s view of Nature seems to be what is most natural and simple. The right path may not always make sense, but it scorns artifice or false aims.

After my experience with Tess I went into this with baited breath, waiting for bad things to happen. While as a character study this leans much more towards tragedy than comedy, it has better balance and retains a sense of hope and promise. I can’t wait to read the afterword, and see what others have to say about the book.

The Mayor of Casterbridge is on both the Guardian and 1001 Books lists. It is also my fifth and final book for the Classics Challenge. I’m so glad I chose it, because I ended up loving it almost as much as Tess. The characters feel like they will stay with me for a long time.