Mary Anne Evans a.k.a. George Eliot

(22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880)

Also known as? I would suggest really, mostly only known as …

George Eliot (1819-1880), aged 30, François D’Albert Durade (1804-1886) 

George Eliot is remembered by me today, and a very many more I would imagine, on this the 200th anniversary of her birth.

Eliot was someone I read a lot when I was really quite young, and thinking from the here and now about The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch I remember that I seemed to have almost forgotten how much she, and especially these two books, had once meant to me. They were firmly entrenched there in the private literary (and sometimes not so profoundly “literary”!) canon of the younger me but, as it often is as one grows older, passions dim somewhat with the passing of time and (too) often diverted by the seductions of the “new”. This doesn’t have to be seen entirely negatively though; passions rekindled also have their appeal and may even be enhanced by experience. George Eliot then is due to reenter my life – and not before time!

Arbury, Birthplace of George Eliot by Frederick Whitehead, 1906

I’m actually quite surprised that, with the exception of the UK where there has indeed been a number of written pieces and some radio and television programs, there has not been more media attention granted to this absolute giant of 19th century English literature in these days, nor to the best of my knowledge is there a major celebratory biography in the offing.

Some articles I have read focus on the provincial settings (and sensibilities) of much of Eliot’s work, and the inspiration drawn from her own youth and familial relationships – for example this one by Kathryn Hughes at The Guardian. Another interesting perspective, and relatively new to me, is her non-literary – and quite idiosyncratic – work, exemplified by her translation of Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics. Again, here is a Guardian story in respect to this. And indeed a full text pdf of her translation (from the University of Nebraska) is to be found here, though I cannot of course guarantee its certitude. It should also be said, very few articles written about Eliot could fail to ignore her highly unusual personal circumstances. The following Wiki extract I think makes clear that George Eliot’s complicated private life was also inextricably bound to her work.

…The philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes (1817–78) met Evans in 1851, and by 1854 they had decided to live together. Lewes was already married to Agnes Jervis, although in an open marriage. In addition to the three children they had together, Agnes also had four children by Thornton Leigh Hunt.[18] In July 1854, Lewes and Evans travelled to Weimar and Berlin together for the purpose of research. Before going to Germany, Evans continued her theological work with a translation of Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, and while abroad she wrote essays and worked on her translation of Baruch Spinoza‘s Ethics, which she completed in 1856, but which was not published in her lifetime.[19] …

Wikipedia contributors. “George Eliot.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 3 Dec. 2019. Web. 4 Dec. 2019.


I say above “relatively new” in respect to my acquaintanceship with Eliot’s works of non-fiction and translation because it was only on reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead last year, and pondering the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach who in Robinson’s novel plays an important role in intellectually influencing (and driving towards atheism) the brilliant brother of the narrator, that I learnt that it was George Eliot who had translated his most well known (and controversial) work The Essence of Christianity from German.

Also, an interesting collection of articles and manuscripts at The British Library may provide a nudge towards becoming (re-) acquainted with Eliot. An excellent time to do so.

The reality of writing

novelist, poeT, playwright: Writers ALL

A very interesting event at the British Library, organised by BBC Radio in conjunction with the Royal Society of Literature, in which some very fine contemporary British voices – Ali Smith, Jay Bernard and James Graham – discuss the complexities that arise at the intersection of art with real life events.

It is interesting how they all see their literary forms as a reflective and often non-deliberative response that is essentially different from that of journalism or reportage in that it creates the space to explore nuance and ambiguity and place it beyond the specificity of time; creating context and texture that questions and enhances the everyday experience.

To take the analogy (of the intersection, which I think is mine) further; as at the road intersection, collisions have a way of occurring irrespective of rules and intentions.

I should say that this was, in the first instance, broadcast on Radio 3 in their Free Thinking programme, but it is also embedded in a really excellent podcast called Arts & Ideas available on the website or also at Apple.

(Ig)noble intentions

The yearly hullabaloo of the Nobel Prize for Literature! What is noble for one is ignoble for another.

The Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk I know only from reputation, that is, from another prize – the International Booker in 2018 – so I can’t say very much at all. Both that then book honoured, entitled Flights; seemingly a flight of fancy into the fragmentary nature of life and living, and her more recent Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, that the review just read suggests as a very original work, have been widely praised. She is in fact more and longer known (and published) in Germany than in the English speaking world, so I will try to get to her work some time soon. Scandal factor: just middling. Feminist, youngish, leftish, politically engaged, controversial in homeland. What’s new?!

Peter Handke. Scandal factor: high! Oh my! Are they blöd oder what! Did they (that is, the new Committee put in place after the scandal(s) that led to the postponement last year) not see it coming! For the obvious reasons of language and familiarity, the furore has raged more on this side of the Atlantic, though that is often so with Nobel controversies given the (unfortunate) coincidence (?) that the announcement usually approximately corresponds with the Frankfurt Book Fair.

No, I haven’t read Peter Handke. And of that, I can at least convince myself, I am somewhat ashamed. He is after all an integral part of the contemporary German literary canon – for better or worse. And why haven’t I? Well I was here and about when the old Yugoslavia was falling apart and new nations were being built and tyrants were aplenty. Handke stood there very much alone amongst European intellectuals in positioning himself alongside the Serbia of Slobodan Milošević and cohorts. So it was in the charged climate of the Balkans 1990s that I first became aware of him, his story, his history, and as a consequence shied away from the writer Handke, and then when the dust settles it is very difficult to get back. These years on, and his political naiveté or moral shortcomings remain (or better said, become again) a matter of controversy, especially for those with a personal stake because of their heritage or sympathies. I get that. Of taking sides, of black and white.

But Handke’s literature, his aesthetic? It is the latter which the Committee holds so high in coming to their decision, as if aesthetic can be as disassociated from the politic as the artist may be from the man? Reasonable people here can come to a different conclusion. Bret Stephens offers in The New York Times his opinion, with which I am mostly in agreement, and is worth reading.

Would anyone want to contemplate all those (prize winners or not) who wrote like angels (some of the time) but were anything but (maybe a lot of the time)? Dickens, Twain, Hamsun, Sartre, Pound, Dahl, Mann, Hemingway, Mailer, Grass … all men I know! The Woolf! The Stein! Sontag. Complex lives all. Ambiguity aplenty. Some got a (the!) gong, some not. Just a very few of the very many with moral shortcomings or sympathies (or more) towards political extremes or accused of discriminating, racist or abusive behaviour.

What to do? It’s complicated.

It occurs to me now that I have in fact read something by Handke – well sort of. A few years ago now, a really nice German translation of that highly unusual marriage diary Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne wrote (in German “Das Paradies der kleinen Dinge”) came my way, and Peter Handke wrote a prologue of sorts that I (think I) remember thinking was just as unusual but I can’t remember exactly why, except that I liked it. What a literary iteration that is!

Will I read him now? I don’t know.

Daring to presume

A new essay by Zadie Smith in the current October 24 2019 issue of The New York Review of Books, and for the moment at least online, eloquently argues against a particularly stringent interpretation of cultural appropriation prevalent in the literary world in recent times and the strident sometimes virulent debates that inevitably ensue, and pleads instead for a fiction that dares to presume rather than contain, that is driven by the imagination rather than the manifest self and finds its voice in revealing what it doesn’t know.

How I have longed for an argument along these lines to be so articulated.

Annie Ernaux & an art of autobiography

I did want to mention the French writer Annie Ernaux. As in the case of Patrick Modiano, my recent readings of two of her books have been in German translation – and for the same reasons: mediocre French skills and as a matter of convenience.  Firstly, some months back, having recently come to my attention through some very interesting reviews, I took to a hand a new German translation of La Place (“Le Platz”) at my local library; having recently come to my attention through some very interesting reviews in mostly German media. First published in 1984 (there is a 1992 English translation: “A man’s place”),  I now know it to be representative of the very special narrative form with its highly  (or absolutely?) autobiographical elements that Ernaux has chosen. Perhaps “autofiction” is the correct terminology these days, though absent the “fiction” that also doesn’t seem quite right.

La Place is a memorial of sorts to Ernaux’s father – his struggles, disappointments and modest gains  – from hard, impoverished circumstances at the beginning of the 20th century, through farm and manual labour and two wars to the relative comfort afforded by a small family and “property”  – in provincial northern France; reflected upon by the adult daughter now in her twenties, wife and mother, who has returned to the stupefying closeness of her childhood home that she so eagerly fled in her father’s last days. She too has moved on in life, but further, away from the hard-earned “place” in society that her father fought for and won and defended and had pride in. This narrator, this Annie, had no pride in this “place” from where she came, but irritated by her estrangement from her parents and her roots, she speaks to us and to herself from her father’s “place”, attempting to understand the nuances and conventions that erect then maintain the barriers of class.  But, as much as the subject here may well be the father, his story is very much just a building block to her own autobiographical quest; in channeling the father, Annie Ernaux is on a journey, sometimes painful, of coming back to herself.

Now in the last days I have finished reading Mémoire de fille , in German of course as “Erinnerung eines Mädchens”, and also from my wonderful locallibrary. Published in original only in 2016, (and not yet in English) it fills in gaps, things touched upon but not fully explained in her 2008 and critically acclaimed work Les Années (Ger. “Die Jahre” Eng. “The Years” both  pub. 2017).  Not having read that work (yet!), I can only relate from other sources that it was there that Ernaux conjures (for the first time I think) this very particular voice that also characterizes Mémoire de fille. I must say I was a few pages in before I realised that the “I” (“ich” “Je”) was absent. She takes herself out of time and place; as a third person viewer to her own biography.  She objectifies herself so to speak. She hovers over this eighteen year old that she once was and is both detached and intimately involved, as irritated and sympathethic as any reader may be. She is both unforgiving and non-judgemental of this her former self.  The time span is not great; Ernaux approaches a memory of a just a few weeks in the Summer of 1958 that was consequential and a brief snap shot of the immediate couple of years that followed, dissects the shame that wasn’t there until it became memory, tests the boundaries of belonging, rejection and reconciliation. This literary feat of disassociation that Annie Ernaux achieves in her writing is a triumph over the demons that haunt us all. 

I didn’t mean to write so much here. I need to read some more, especially the much feted  Les Années, and get closer to the writer Annie Ernaux.   Coincidentally today I read a bit of a Q & A with Zadie Smith in The Guardian in which she mentions Ernaux as a favourite: “… and Annie Ernaux changed my mind about French writing. In that I got very excited about it again”– that doesn’t surprise me at all. And Wikipedia alerted me to this excellent piece in The Paris Review by Laura Elkin that seems to affirm some of the things I was thinking about, including my genre confusion, and gives me much more to think about.

Return to Bois Sauvage

Perhaps I have just read over it, but I don’t recall an explicit mention of (calendar) time in Sing, Unburied, Sing. The best I could come up with is about 2014, and that being based on Michael having been present at the Deepwater Horizon explosion which occurred in April, 2010, and it seems to have been not so long after, traumatised and unable to find work in the region, that he falls into drug addiction and related criminal activities presumably leading to a conviction and interment in Parchman. Kayla doesn’t seem to have been born when he leaves, so given that she is now three, this seems a reasonable enough guess.

A Dedeaux oak in Jesmyn Ward’s hometown of Delisle, Miss. The sight of such Leonie associates with Bois – and then she sees Esch and Skeet.

Which of course got me thinking about Jesmyn Ward’s Bois Sauvage and how it may have changed between Salvage the Bones, defined by Katrina in 2005, and the time in which Sing, Unburied, Sing is set. It seems to me, a lot can happen in what must be almost a decade, both to people and to place, and especially in a a very special fictional world that has evolved out of a very real one. Now of course even if I wasn’t wondering madly over this, Ward sort of invites one to do so with a neatly placed reference as they drive back into Bois at journey’s end, the road journey anyway. Leonie narrates:

Two people walk in the distance …a man, short and muscled…[leading] a black dog… next to him, a skinny little woman with …cloud of hair that moves like a kaleidoscope of butterflies…Skeetah and Eschelle…The siblings walk in sync…Esch says something and Skeetah laughs…

“Sing, Unburied, Sing” Bloomsbury paperback ed. p.197

To be deduced: Esch and Skeetah are in their mid-twenties now, and they are in Bois where we left them immediately after Katrina; with Esch awaiting a child, and Skeet still unreconciled to the loss of China. One wonders about the extended Batiste family, Daddy and the kids and their friends: who has gone and who has stayed? are they well enough? I hope so, for how I loved this chaotic troupe, and Leonie’s envious reaction “…jealousy twins with anger…”(ending with Kayla being severely slapped and a vague imagining of how different it may have been for her had Given lived) seems to suggest at least these two are doing okay. For Skeet, what times – good and bad – lay between that radiant white China and this black beast now on parade? Does the colour tell a story? Esch’s baby would now be almost ten (a Jason or a Rose?), and I dare to imagine, armed with Medea and the love of family, that she salvaged some good out of the devastation Katrina left in her wake, and that her fine, kind mind has been given the chance it deserved to bloom, that she is a good mother, and all the fathers Big Henry promised were there for her. Wearing still, and proudly, her wild crown atop her head makes me happy and gives me hope. (While Leonie’s maternal failures may more than irritate, that she sees a “kaleidoscope of butterflies” where others would see a “dishevelled mop” says much.)

Somethings we do know. The prevalence of cannabis and cocaine has been superseded by the scourge of crystal meth, oxycontin and god alone knows what else. White privilege spares not – just ask Michael or Misty. Prosperity is there alongside the desperate, and race defines as ever; in ways subtle and not so, and boundaries drawn accordingly – you can be up the Kill (where white folk live) or in the Pit (where the Batistes lived); transgress at your own peril.

Bois Sauvage has survived; not capitulating to the most powerful forces that Nature could muster, nor to the deprivations formented through mortal weakness and depravity. Against all laws of Nature, the Delta draws sustenance from the vast river of human waste salvaged as it flows from its history into each moment.

Sing, sing of …

“Sing, Unburied, Sing” pub. Scribner, 2017.

In Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing we are returned to the fictional Bois (Sauvage) of Salvage the Bones then north on an odyssey to (a very real) Parchman and back again. And what an odyssey it is in every meaning of that word, for I am struck by the language of Homer in the very title – “Sing, O goddess, the anger …”( The Iliad, Samuel Butler, Ed.) and suggesting the ancient’s interest in ritual and the afterlife. This is an even more powerful work; uncompromising, brutal even. To be wondered at again is Ward’s gift of crafting such a narrative with the tools of lyric and filtered through the veil of myth.

For the most part, the narrative voice alternates between JoJo and his troubled, addicted mother Leonie, and it is through their eyes, eyes that see other, that father and grandfather, Pop, and the dying Mam are described, that their world is described. When we meet them it is JoJo’s thirteenth birthday, and the eve of their trip together with Leonie’s friend Misty, white, just as troubled, and the three year old baby of the family, called Michaela by Leonie and Kayla by JoJo (which says something about the order of affections and disaffections of mother and son) to bring home Michael, the lover of one and the absent father the other. Along the way we will be confronted with the irreconcilable truths that haunt them both.

And indeed they are haunted – Leonie by the silent ghost of the elder brother, Given, beloved by all, taken in youth, beautiful, not yet tainted by the harsh reality defined by race and place that killed him, and JoJo by the boy Richie, a tortured spirit, bound to him through his grandfather and the history shared at Parchman, long ago when neither was much more than a child and one survived and the other not. Richie does have a voice and a lot to say, and joins the narrating chorus for the journey home.

The relationships here are so intense, the interplay of race and familial dynamics all pervading and the situations described with a realism such that one’s senses are in a permanent state of alert – the stench conjured each time the little Kayla vomits is as visceral as the softness of her cheeks seeking human touch. And when these realistic elements are intertwined with the mythical of afterlife and voodoo ritual, a potent literary tableau is created.

A wanting, needing, to get home permeates the whole novel, and home comes in a guise other than situational – rather as an overriding desire to find a place of rest, either in this world or the next. Some are to find it, some not, and for some we just don’t know. And after all, isn’t that how it is?

Just like in the ancient Greek song culture, the song never really ends, for memory never ends, but is passed on through the generations. And so it is fitting that this wonderful novel should close with Kayla singing joyfully forth in unison with all the ghosts of the past, and with the promise of an enduring love that fate denied her mother, that her mother denied herself.

On Toni Morrison

A few days later and the tributes, and love, for Toni Morrison have no end! Amongst the many, Jesmyn Ward has contributed a longer piece at The New York Times. I have read in the last days so much in this vein from younger, a lot younger, writers – black, women but not only – who Ms. Morrison has touched and inspired, who have learnt her lessons on the power of language to pass on to new generations – beyond her literary greatness this too will surely be an enduring legacy.

And here is her 1993 Nobel Lecture – whereby that latter word can not adequately describe the beauty of her words and the narrative voice she chooses, and in audio to be heard as she delivered it twenty-six years ago.

That this should have been said a quarter of a century before an Internet gone haywire and a President equally so:

…The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek – it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language – all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas…

 Toni Morrison – Nobel Lecture. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Media AB 2019. Tue. 13 Aug 2019.
The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563)

In life Toni Morrison pleaded with words – the words of her novels, stories and essays – for a greater human language that is universal in its embrace of the individual, the “other” – not in its “sameness”. It was not the cacophony of unintelligible sound that doomed The Tower of Babel, rather an unwillingness to share in the myriad of other languages – cultures, points of view. She says: “…unmolested language surges toward knowledge not its destruction …We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

It was certainly the measure of this most remarkable life.