Category: Literature

Annie’s story …

One could I suppose wonder whether there comes a point where all the small and greater stories of any one life have been told – memories revisited and retold, enough secrets divulged. Should such a point of saturation exist (a hypothetical I may well argue against), it seems that, in the case of Annie Ernaux, it has not yet been reached.

Das andere Mädchen (2022) and Der Junge Mann (2023) pub. Suhrkamp

Corresponding with an excellent magazine piece (subscription) by Rachel Cusk in The New York Times last weekend, I had coincidentally borrowed two slight – very slight – installments in that aforesaid life; both published in translation only quite recently in Germany.

In Das andere Mädchen (L’autre fille, NiL Éditions, 2011), Ernaux gives life to the no-memory-of a sister she didn’t have; for the death from diphtheria of she named Ginette predated her own birth. Written (mostly) in a mini Briefroman form addressed to this at first unknown sister – and always aware of the irrationality of this exercise – that no-memory becomes essential to her real memories: of discovering as a ten year old, and only through chance, of Ginette’s existence, and the realization that Ginette’s death is for Annie existential (her parents only intended to have one child); of her parents who never spoke of their loss; of their fear of losing another; of their expectations for Annie, the replacement. It is almost as if her whole childhood was lived in the haunting shadow of another.

L’autre fille (only sixty or so pages) has not been translated into English. (Perhaps due in this instance to the smaller French publishing house rather than Gallimard?) A translation note unto myself: Given that the book builds on that overheard conversation which ends with Annie’s mother stating that Ginette was “viel lieber als die da”, that is, “much more lovable/better/preferable as [Annie]”. I can only say: good luck with that one!

Did I say: slight, very slight? Now, Der Junge Mann, is really very slight – about thirty pages, each formatted, shall we say, ‘opposite of condensed’. In the French original, Le jeune homme, Éditions Gallimard, 2022, this life fragment (you see I am grappling with what terminology to apply to these Ernaux-esque episodes!) was written in the last year of the last millennium and revolves about Annie Ernaux’s relationship with a thirty year younger student called only A. – Ernaux was in her mid-fifties – that has presumably not long ended. (Here, at UK Vogue – surprisingly! – is an excerpt.)

The age difference matters – not only in the public space (no, the French are not immune to the dictates of societal norms) but also in their private interactions; to paraphrase: i would like you to have my baby, he says at one point … well, that is just not going to happen, her obvious reply. (Though, she who had two children in her twenties and had never contemplated anymore, did find herself idly wondering what, with all the new technology and stuff, that would be like!) And age is often a determinate of the power balance. In this relationship, had the age difference been the other way round, the young man (then no longer young – even for a bloke !) would have had more options in which to exercise power (and at the same time without eliciting the glares of disapproval afforded an older woma), but against the norm here it is clear that Annie is control. She instigated this thing and she will end it.

The question remains: was this for Ernaux simply an arrangement of convenience (for her )? One that fulfilled not only her physical needs – for sexual intimacy and the rituals and familiarity of a partnership – but, importantly, her intellectual needs as a writer whose sharpest tool was that of memory? In that respect A. offered a convenient conduit to her past. He was from a similar working class provincial milieu (she says that, but Ernaux’s experience, born in 1940 and growing up in the immediate decades after, surely were substantially different to a young man born, say, in 1970?); as she did, he, too, is studying in Rouen with the minimum of resources and an uncertain future. Observing him at a place she once was, had a way of stimulating feelings and emotions that she had thought long left behind. The most startling of these the abortion that she had as a student, and in the hospital to be seen from A.’s window. The book ends with the end of the relationship and Annie having written down the trauma of that experience, published the next year in France as L’événement and written about by me in this post.

These works continue Annie Ernaux’s excavation of her person and her past; with each shifting the perspective of the story we thought we knew that came before. I would be surprised if they were to be the last.

English translations of Ernaux’s work are available through Seven Stories in the U.S. and Fitzcarraldo in the U.K.

May 14 2023: Some days later, prompted by a discussion elsewhere, I have found myself making a connection between Annie’s story about her sister (in L’autre fille) and that other which told about her abortion as a young woman (inspired during the time frame covered in Le jeune homme and explicitly written about in L’événement). Both of these forms of absence, have, it seems to me, moved Ernaux to reflect upon what is left behind in the gaps of unrealized, or not wholly so, lives. I have often talked about Ernaux’s writing of her own life, but perhaps, here, the imperative was to write and memorialize two ‘lives’ that were, to various degrees fleeting, but, nevertheless, profoundly influenced the course of her life.

What’s in a name

RSC production – Garrick Theatre, London, 2023

With Shakespeare on my mind of late, I take special note of the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling novel Hamnet; recently premiered in Stratford and on its way to London in the autumn; and well reviewed, though both The Guardian and The New York Times, while mostly complimentary, suggest varying degrees of sentimentality. Oh, how I hate not being able to see these things!

Did anyone not like O’Farrell’s book? I dare say there were some. There are also some out there without a heart or, at least, to whom sentimentality is always an unreliable emotion: perhaps the theatrical production goes there, the book does not – unless one mistakes grief writ large for such.

I, then, was one of the most, or many, who enjoyed Hamnet – a lot really. I think it a fine work of the imagination; an example of one way through which a very good writer can grasp an idea that is, in itself, not absolutely original in terms of historical reading and scholarship but, by giving it an absolutely original emotional slant and a peculiar narrative twist, craft it into something quite ‘novel’.

Hamnet. Hamlet. What’s in a name? All or nothing at all? If one will, one can say “the name” is nigh on an anagram of “Hamnet” – or the other way around – save the duplicating of one pesky vowel – “the man”, who would have thunk it, is a perfect fit. But in good company with the Bard who, as with his contemporaneous creatives, all constantly inconsistent with their orthography; and Hamnet and Hamlet differ too by only one – this time a consonant; required only that it be only once lazily or hastily transcribed or mumbled quiet or loud. Still constant is the creeping duplicity. And duality – of people, of place – Hamnet or Judith, upon Avon or Thames.

Anne. Agnes. What’s in a name? And, when it is she who is the guiding light, the star of the ensemble here assembled? For so she is; it is filtered through the cloak of mystery in which the free-spirited Agnes is draped, that we encounter the spirit of the living Hamnet. Through Agnes’ eyes, Hamnet becomes more than just another boy-child lost to a past before history was made, barely more than an apparition; briefly there, then forever gone. Instead, his essence is captured and revealed; in death now channeled through a mother’s love and grief. But, it’s not just Hamnet that Agnes gifts us, but all the strangeness (and stagey-ness) of Elizabethan England, and the myriad of players cavorting in her fabled landscape – their talents, their habits, their secrets. Well be it that another wrote the words, and duly credited, but Agnes it is who provides the rhythm along with which the story beats and soars.

And the man? What of that other not named? He, the conjurer of words and stories destined for an immortality of sorts? A man with two lives, or as many lives as his quill and posterity has granted. Here, though, just a mortal husband and father. For this story, Agnes’ version is enough.

A longer interview with Maggie O’Farrell with The Observer is here on the The Guardian website.

Keeping up with the Joneses

… or, more precisely, the Duncan-Joneses.

With the regularity in which people, ideas, situations intersect in my readings and observations, I have often been taken aback. That, perhaps, the blessing – or the curse – of being widely informed! Regrettably; not deeply, rather tending to the shallow.

A case in point:

In David Edmonds’ book about the Vienna Circle that I have written on in the previous post, there is an examination of the difficulties many of its members had as they sought refuge from the Nazi terror that was taking over much of the Continent. Therein quoted were some fragments of correspondence between Karl Popper and Austin Duncan-Jones, Professor of Philosophy at Birmingham [pp 240-242 in the German edition read by me], in which the former was invited there as a guest lecturer.

The Shakespearean scholar, Professor Katherine Duncan-Jones, died in October. This I noted with sadness, not because I know her work – for which I am sorry because her ‘hatchet job’ on William S. – his character that is – sounds terrific and original – but because I know her to be the mother of Emily Wilson – and that means an awful lot.

The point is: I wondered about the name. And, lo and behold, the first mentioned Prof. Duncan-Jones is the father of the second said.

And all this means? Professors of Philosophy beget those of Literature beget those of Classics? Perhaps. Or that an academic career in the UK has, or once had, an awful lot to do with family and class? I don’t know. Mostly, just a very interesting generational chain of circumstance and one from which, in this familial instance, very many have benefited – and continue to.

The death of Prof. Duncan-Jones was reported upon by some of the more culturally attentive British media and noted by me in a Twitter thread (begun by Bee Wilson and retweeted by Emily), and The New York Times has now run an obituary.

And the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature goes to…

…at about 16:00 min

Annie Ernaux!

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2022 is awarded to the French author Annie Ernaux,

“for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”.

Press Release
6 October 2022

A very short formal announcement I must say – and not as punctual as one is use to (presumably their winner could not be contacted; follows, she wasn’t sitting by the phone! is that a diss? hope so!). Here is the biobibliography (that’s a mouthful!) on the Nobel website (and as pdf). How delighted I am I need not say; for, on Ernaux, I have said enough in the past.

The Bennett of Bennett & Brown

Following from my previous post, if you get another shot at The Spectator, A.N. Wilson also had something to say earlier in the year on Arnold Bennett and a new biography by Patrick Donovan called Arnold Bennett: Lost Icon (Unicorn) which couldn’t help but interest me.

pub. Unicorn (2022)

Now for me, Bennett is only the Bennett of Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown; that essay from a certain Mrs. Woolf that is the wryly imagined culmination of the legendary dispute between herself and the aforesaid, and is a proxy – so to speak – for that greater reckoning between proponents of realism and modernism in the early 2oth century novel.

More than a little snarky when it comes to Mrs. Woolf, in my opinion, is the Mr. Wilson. Nor quite accurate either. Bennett and Woolf were contemporaries only up to a point, more precisely their careers briefly overlapped; most of Bennett’s works (including the “Clayhanger” series) were published in the first two decades of the century, and Mr. Bennett’s criticism of Mrs. Woolf’s third novel Jacob’s Room came in 1922 and before her real rise to literary fame with Mrs. Dalloway. And Wilson’s claim that she (and others) had it in for Bennett because he was too “middle-brow” is rather specious. On the contrary, one could contend; it was Mrs. Woolf’s “Mrs Brown” who displayed various degrees of the too easily maligned “middle-brow” – Mrs. Woolf is rooting for the “middle-brow” with all their peculiarities and inconsistencies and against easy assumptions made of them. Her point is: if it were to be a “Mr. Bennett” who was to imagine and describe his “Mrs Brown”, he would have her been imbued in his own image, reflecting the world as he saw it.

I do understand Mr. Wilson’s loyalties towards Mr. Bennett – the links between the two men: Stoke-on-Trent, potteries, Wedgwood are clear. And Clayhanger and The Potter’s Hand stand only a century apart in the setting and a (different) century in the writing of; neither of which I have read, but am inclined to.

Playing Faust

I mentioned here that Goethe’s Faust will soon no longer be compulsory reading in most of the German secondary curriculums. But these nine minutes – courtesy of Michael Sommer and his Playmobile support cast – should very well be.

Lots of fun! And, more generally, Sommers Weltliterature to go offers an off-beat and creative introduction to some great works of literature – from ancient times to the contemporary. Mostly in German, but so cleverly constructed that even non-speakers should be able to get the gist and, if all else fails, the auto-translate works reasonably well. Potentially, also, an excellent resource for German language learners.

Philip Larkin b. 1922

…that year again

This time, the birth year of the British poet Philip Larkin. With little tolerance for “modernist” pretensions, or that which he may so have considered, it is interesting that Larkin should be born at a time when that particular movement was turning the literary establishment upside down, and in that year that such legendary modernist texts like T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and Joyce’s novel Ulysses were published and creating furor. Perhaps from mother’s womb, to the cradle and onward, Larkin was predestined to rebel against the new or, at least, make the old new again.

Philip Larkin (1969) by Fay Godwin. © The British Library Board

Philip Larkin was born in Coventry on 9 August, 1922, a hundred years ago today, and died on 2 December, 1985. In the years since his death, and particularly those most recent, Larkin has fell afoul of many who seek to (re)define the British literary canon – an endeavor not without merit. His sins appear to have been numerous (and contested) – misogynistic, sexually compulsive and irresponsible, racist, antisemitic, and some would say just plain not very nice – traits so defining and presumably inextricable from his work that examination boards have dropped him from the curriculum (not being cancelled, though, says The New Statesman).

Larkin’s poetry is only as difficult as one wants it to be, highly accessible and, I think, not at all dated – definitely stuff for young, curious minds. Certainly I could imagine a contemporary British school student, irrespective of background, being able to imagine more in Larkin, getting more from Larkin, than, say, a young German vis-à-vis Goethe. Yes, Goethe, he who is being relegated from the compulsory to the optional category of the German secondary curriculums in some states. Including, Bavaria, the state in which I live, with the demotion of Faust in 2024. I am quite sure Goethe’s well documented erotic predilections had nothing to do with that decision, rather a reasonable approach in broadening the range for a particular epoch in which Germany is not short of literary representation. Unfortunately, in England, Larkin seems primarily to have fallen victim to his white maleness as educationalists scramble to make amends for the colonial mindset and lack of diversity that had hitherto characterized the curriculum. That is understandable, but … Why Larkin?!

What do I know about Philip Larkin? Not much. I haven’t read Andrew Motion’s biography nor any other biographical material, including controversial correspondence with mother, girlfriends and others that have surfaced, nor anything much in the way of scholarly or gossipy articles. But it seems clear Larkin was a very complicated man, plagued by melancholy and inadequacy to the point of depression, and influenced (as are we all) by the society (human and situational) he kept. And, a wonderful poet. I only know some of his work, and those the familiar pieces known to many, but I think them splendid. Following are links to some of these, and other reference material.

Auntie, reluctant to show her age these days (change: all just a matter of cosmetics), lets herself go this week and the next and, with the (probably fleeting) acceptance of their listener’s demographic, presents “Larkin Revisited” on Radio 4: “Across ten programmes and ten Philip Larkin poems, Simon Armitage, the poet laureate, finds out what happens when he revisits and unpicks Larkin’s work in his centenary year.”

Aftermath

Diverging to dabble in some amateur wordsmithing (is that a word?); inspired by a word pondered by Woolf; inconsequential to all intents and purposes and simply said in passing, but worthy of thought.

In her diary entry of Wednesday 7 November 1928, Virginia Woolf wonders at her poor physical and mental state in the aftermath of the publication of Orlando. And true to form, that contemplation once written sets her searching mind, unhindered by its fragile state, momentarily meandering, and she wonders about the etymology of a rather ordinary word, the word “aftermath”, and turns to, as she says, “Trench”, for some reconciliation.

Well, none was forthcoming from the said Trench. But I was curious and wondered at her reference, and a footnote explained the tome to be: A Select Glossary of English Words used formerly in senses different from their present (1859) compiled by Richard Chenevix Trench. Rather dated, even during Woolf’s time to be sure, and one may presume that it was long in her possession; from her father’s library perhaps.

To my surprise a digitized version (of the American edition) is on the hathitrust website, and this curious work of reference is certainly well worth a browse – even if it doesn’t help on the matter concerning “aftermath”!

Some further research on my part indicates that the word does in fact fit the criteria insinuated in the title, so the good Mr. Trench was indeed remiss.

aftermath (n.)

1520s, originally a second crop of grass grown on the same land after the first had been harvested, from after + -math, from Old English mæð “a mowing, cutting of grass,” from PIE root *me- (4) “to cut down grass or grain.”

Also known as aftercrop (1560s), aftergrass (1680s), lattermath, fog (n.2). Figurative sense is by 1650s. Compare French regain “aftermath,” from re- + Old French gain, gaain “grass which grows in mown meadows,” from Frankish or some other Germanic source similar to Old High German weida “grass, pasture.”

Online Etymology Dictionary

A modern definition, “figurative sense” as mentioned above or in the original might read:

aftermath | ˈɑːftəmaθ, ˈɑːftəmɑːθ | noun

 1 the consequences or after-effects of a significant unpleasant event: food prices soared in the aftermath of the drought. 

2 Farming new grass growing after mowing or harvest. ORIGIN late 15th century (in aftermath (sense 2)): from after (as an adjective) + dialect math ‘mowing’, of Germanic origin; related to German Mahd.

(My) Apple Dictionary

I note that the Online Etymology entry suggests the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem so named to further illustrate the meaning of the word, and it does so in a lyrical fashion. The poem (see below) appears to have been first published in 1873, and I make the observation that, in the sense that it combines the agricultural meaning with the figurative idea of change – natural and man-made – and what remains, that Longfellow may have been moved – even subconsciously – by the slaughter upon the battle fields of the Civil War – and its aftermath. (I don’t know this, of course, and probably am influenced by Siegfried Sassoon’s 1919 poem also called “Aftermath”; in which the aftermath in question is that of the First World War – no tepid “gloom” to be found in Sassoon’s poem, rather the stark, bitter reality of war.)

 Aftermath

 by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

When the summer fields are mown,
When the birds are fledged and flown,
      And the dry leaves strew the path;
With the falling of the snow,
With the cawing of the crow,
Once again the fields we mow
      And gather in the aftermath.

Not the sweet, new grass with flowers
Is this harvesting of ours;
      Not the upland clover bloom;
But the rowen mixed with weeds,
Tangled tufts from marsh and meads,
Where the poppy drops its seeds
      In the silence and the gloom. 

- Poetry Foundation

There is no need to connect Longfellow with Trench, but I can’t resist. Both were born in the same year and died only a few years apart. Trench (1807-86), for a time Dean of Westminster, is buried in the knave of the Abbey and Longfellow (1807-82) is one of the few Americans, and the first, to have a memorial dedicated in Poet’s Corner at that same venerated place. Whether the pair met during any of Longfellow’s sojourns to Europe I couldn’t say but, even had they, “aftermath” probably didn’t arise in polite conversation, for had it done so Trench would surely have recognized the special characteristic of interest to him and noted it for his scholarly volume; and many, many years later Virginia Woolf’s curiosity could well have been quickly satisfied. Was she ever the wiser? Did she inquire of Leonard or one of her many gentleman (or not so) farmer acquaintances in the home counties?

Though I can find no direct reference, Virginia Woolf’s father would surely have made the acquaintance of Trench – the man. With Longfellow, though, I can make a connection – albeit fleetingly. In Frederic William Maitland’s The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (for which Woolf was a source), a note made by the subject for October 7 1863 during an extended Summer in the United States records an encounter (presumably through James Russell Lowell – who would remain a life time friend) in which Stephen describes Longfellow as “a pleasant, white-bearded, benevolent-looking man of very quiet manners, who talked agreeably but not poetically (?) with a want of (the?) readiness (?) which appears to be characteristic of literary gents in these parts …” [p.118]. (Read on a little and one learns Stephen also met Seward and Lincoln – sort of – in Washington! The first did not particularly impress, and the second more than he expected.)

What a rabbit hole did I just fall down!