Books – Page 12 – My Own RE:public

Bloomsday 2020

Another sort of “Odyssey” – James Joyce’s Ulysses. That one day wonder, or is it wander – through the streets of Dublin – on 16th June, 1904. Yes, I plead guilty to not having…! Virginia Woolf, however, did read it (in the end) and had opinions; not all good, for reasons which I am no longer sure of and would have to return to her diary to clarify (which I will!) [*Which I now have – see for instance this VW diary entry]. I do remember her sounding off about it to all who would listen, and provoking heady discourse where she could; meaning I suspect that it also interested her madly and she wanted to talk about it. Impossible! did she say of it? …or worse – obscene! vulgar! But I am fairly sure that Woolf suggests that they, that is she and Leonard, that is, their Hogarth Press, only turned it down because of the length and the complicated structure and typography required, supposing the manual setting would be time consuming to the detriment of their own work and other publications. A personal musing: am I the only person to wonder at the Leonard Bloom/Leonard Woolf/Bloomsbury/Jewish coincidental? I can’t think that Joyce ever knew the Woolves. Coincidence.

But it got published anyway, and has a life of its very own, a day of its own, and from one end of the world to the next, first and foremost, in Ireland, it is celebrated; this year a little differently – “Bloomsday to Zoomsday” quips The Guardian. In that spirit here is a selection from the James Joyce Centre in Dublin.

Waiting on …

“Jack” by Marilynne Robinson (29 September 2020)

Hallelujah! Something to look forward to still! (The truth is, look hard enough, and there is more than enough!) Some time ago I blogged on the confirmation of another Gilead novel from Marilynne Robinson, and schedule-wise not much has changed in the interim – what after all is a couple of weeks in these trying times! But it does now indeed have a cover – and, it seems, an author’s name typeset to the same dimension as the title. Presumably “Marilynne Robinson” sells! And so she should!

“Jack” by Marilynne Robinson, pub. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

In any old time I would be awaiting this book, but the circumstances and constraints, under which we are at the moment so struggling, particularly cries out for the grace and quiet and fortitude that emanate from Robinson’s prose.

Then and now

A startling, comparative photographic study at The New York Times! Inspired by the solitude and deserted streets of a city under lockdown, the photographer Mauricio Lima has returned to the scenes of Eugène Atget‘s Paris of a century ago. Startling is; how ever much things change, devoid of the human factor, it is that which endures, in essence unchanged, that comes to the fore. One is invited to consider the act of habitation as a continuum, as bringing with it responsibilities – for the place in and of itself, for its history and its future, and for all the generations who have and will occupy that space.

Atget’s work is perhaps familiar to many from nostalgic postcards or illustrations, and I probably also similarly first encountered his work; one is tempted to think it a feat unto itself how Paris has been able to spin images that suggest melancholy and desolation to enhance its image as the city of lights, lovers …! Rather contrary sensual perceptions, but perhaps there-in lay the abiding allure of these photographs; they capture the essence of an urban landscape, and that in turn captivates the human heart.

Adam Nossiter, in his NYT piece, refers to Walter Benjamin’s very famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. Here the relevant passage:

…the incomparable significance of Atget, who, around 1900, took photographs of deserted Paris streets. It has quite justly been said of him that he photographed them like scenes of crime. The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance. They demand a specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is not appropriate to them. They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way.
from part VI of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Walter Benjamin, 1936.

In my opinion a remarkably accurate analogy, for Atget has with almost forensic rigour extricated place from its human constraints, assiduously excavating the remnants, giving them every subjective advantage, and thereby humanising them.

A few years ago, an old worn paperback came to my attention at my local library’s bazaar -costing all but nothing, I was momentarily taken aback because I knew of it’s legend status amongst aficionados of the history and art of photography, but then kindly took it off their hands!

On any one of my next flânerie, be the streets deserted as they may, I’ll look again and differently, and see how rich they are in hidden humanity – and wonder at how the eye can deceive and all that exposed by a technical apparatus in the right hands.

“On rereading…

such and such, …” – how often I have started a sentence so; inconsistently placing a hyphen, as in ‘re-reading’, or sometimes not – how then delighted I am by reading this essay written by Larry McMurtry in The New York Review of Books in 2005. (The NYRB is showing a great kindness of late by heavily digging into their archives, but available for only a limited period I would suggest.)

Referring to Leonard Woolf’s autobiography, McMurtry says:

[…Woolf…] records that his widowed mother, Marie Woolf, got herself a copy of Dr. Johnson’s Rasselas, kept it by her bedside, and reread it “dozens of times.” …As one who has so far failed to make it through Rasselas even once, I consider Marie Woolf’s devotion to the book a matter worth pondering. […Should what WooIf said be true …]—Marie Woolf was probably the world’s biggest fan of Rasselas, […as I…] might claim to be the world’s biggest fan of Slowly Down the Ganges, a wonderful travel book by Eric Newby, which I have been rereading more or less continuously since 1965.
On Rereading, Larry McMurtry, NYRB JULY 14, 2005 ISSUE

And does then go on to ponder whether rereaders generally have the “one book fetish” he shares with Marie Woolf, or are more inclined to reread over a greater range. Anthony Powell and Shakespeare, but a thing for The Sun also Rises (humanising him, says McMurtry). Kenneth Clark and Ruskin, but Clark takes a shortcut and edits a collection (presumably including his favourites), always to keep near. And Edmund Wilson and Cyril Connolly ? Rereading was par the course inherent to their work, but one must think also an abiding pleasure. Did they have a “talisman”? McMurtry seems not to know. One could though go asearchin’ in the University of Tulsa repositories for clues. (By the way, okay Wilson is a renowned American literary figure, but I always wonder why the papers of others – like the aforesaid, and very British, Connolly – end up in universities in the middle of the US! Yes I know the answer I suppose – $$$!)

A monster and his maker

In the last days, I have savoured the theatrical treat (via YouTube livestream) of Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller alternating as Victor Frankenstein and his monster creation (a tour de force by both as both in my opinion!) in Danny Boyle’s 2011 National Theatre (UK) adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. (Here is Michael Billington’s original Guardian review.) Without this pest that is upon us, would such a privilege be granted? Perhaps not. You see, I do look for things positive [sic] to take from this crisis.

Firstly, as I have previously stated, I am interested in the process of adaptation from one medium to another, and in this instance it works very well indeed; perhaps, because the reduced plot form (for instance, the omission of the framed narrative) and character tableau does not mitigate the precepts of rationalist thought and the limitations of science being explored in the original work, nor the questions posed of the conflict between the enlightened individual and a humane social order. As with the novel, this stage version can be best appreciated as a composite – as a philosophical treatise masquerading as an entertainment in a gothic tradition.

Illustration by Theodor von Holst frontispiece 1831 edition

On reflection, I must also say that Shelley’s classic tale first published anonymously in 1818 as Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (the Prometheus additive being particularly telling), captivates still, and when considering a range of Lektüre for these daunting days, it is one, with its relativisation of our place in the greater natural order of things, that is well worth returning to. Not to mention, it being just a wonderfully well told story!

Reading in the “Time of C_____”


Not wanting to say it out loud,
and shout it I surely will not.
Neither in a state of denial,
nor pretending to be.
And denying not the fear -
that refuses to be felt.
As an aside instead,
here then said:


To be imagined now:
this grimace not feigned.
Forced disaffection;
barely - or not even - 
restrained.

Days - each one,
and to follow fast,
to Weeks turn, to more thereof-
to this date at the very least.

Distress so rarely exposed
is creeping now near,
nearer to Fate shared.
 
Not the cholera, no love here -
no, not in this time -
not with this pest.

(This plague upon all our houses.)

Hovering, menacing -
dictating our existence now
to that which may not come.

-Anne Dromache, April 25, 2020.

Some solace: words written and lost along the way or never found, searched for or come upon by chance, may find their time again and the readers they were waiting for.

The Great Plague of London in 1665. The last major outbreak of the bubonic plague in England.

Everyone it seems has a recommended reading relevant to this time. For me, one come’s immediately to mind: Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera – I loved this book years ago, but will not read it again now. My hefty flirtation with Latin American magic realism was a long time ago, and has life associations that I’d rather not disturb but confine to memory … I’ve been to Aracataca, I’ve not lived a hundred years…A fatalist would find confirmation and the inevitability of it all in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Many have mentioned Daniel Defoe’s The Journal of the Plague Year, which is freely available in many corners of the Internet – NO copyright! Hardly surprising given it was written in 1722 about the 1665 Great Plague of London! And then there is Samual Pepys’ diary version of the same plague – here is a collection of relevant extracts. Pepys is fun to dive into I must admit – in a very bawdy sort of Renaissance way, though just how much fun I’m up to in this regard at the moment I’m not at all sure. A book that I know of and for other reasons has been on my reading list for quite some time (and that I haven’t heard mentioned of late) is Year of Wonders (2001) by Geraldine Brooks, again set during 1665-66.

Thirty years of heresy, persecution, hunger, pestilence ….

Oh, and war!…Just a few of the words that come to mind of a much darker time four hundred odd years ago (1618-1648) that puts this year of ours into perspective. One could add: torture, execution, butchery, disease…You surely get the picture.

The prankster Till Eulenspiegel, depicted with *owl* and *mirror* (title page of the Strasbourg edition of 1515)

Well I do…having finished reading Daniel Kehlmann’s latest work, Tyll, (mentioned here upon its recent publication in English, though I read in German so I can not speak on the translation) which powerfully describes the devastation visited upon a continent and its peoples – brutalised as they were through all the above said … I can’t think that it would have occurred to Kehlmann just how prescient his novel would be. Not in that the grotesqueness of a pre-modern era (and the literary form chosen) is so relatable, rather that the grotesqueness told as it is with a picaresque slant and the mocking gaze of Tyll Eulenspiegel reflected through a contemporary lens portends of the potential consequences of social disharmony.

Mothering Sunday – 22nd March 2020

While half listening to BBC Radio 4 today, and being informed of a virtual service to be led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, I am reminded that today is what is known in the UK as Mothering Sunday. I have taken the time to track down Justin Welby’s sermon – it is not long and the circumstances we face from this wretched pandemic do not have to be explicitly stated to impart a warmth and nearness that contrasts with the coldness and distance that threatens to envelope us. Not surprisingly, Welby advocates seeking consolation in the Church, as a conduit to imparting the same to others, but he also suggests that loving and giving to family and friends, and commitment to our place as a member of a community will in itself offer hope and consolation.

My copy of Mothering Sunday,Graham Swift, Scribner UK, 2016

And this day reminds me of the wonderful 2016 work from Graham Swift entitled Mothering Sunday, which I liked so very much – each of the 149 pages! Best described therefore as a novella, an oft maligned and not easy to define genre but the perfect form I think for this gem from Swift.

Not long ago I was contemplating the single day narrative, but I did forget this one, and essentially it is just that, and that day is Mothering Day, 30th March, 1924; diverging only to explain the situation and the perspective from which the narrator speaks. The mood of that day is so beautifully described that it is almost tangible. And startling is Swift’s first person narration – unafraid as he is to choose a woman’s voice; the language, the measure he brings is, to my mind, truly brilliant. To me his work is put together as a Matryoshka doll – a literary form within a literary form, and is illustrative of how a historical moment can define the trajectory of a life, can define literature, can define life, lives …

Subtitled “A romance”; that it is, but more, for it also is a snapshot of British society at that time, when, exacerbated by the trauma and losses of war, the stringent class structures were being stretched and opportunities being created, such that a young woman with brains and ambition had alternatives, places to go beyond servitude.