Notes on Recent Reading 27 (Forster, Sackville-West, Capote)

Howard’s End (Forster)

     I had thought it seemed a lot of fussing around in the secondary elaboration of values expressed in the troubled relations of the upper-class intellectual Schlegels and the bourgeois Wilcoxes. Their initial bridling at each other was amusing, but it had then no sooner begun to seem to me unnecessarily strung out that I began to think that there was something in it, and I found myself wondering if I myself may have taken artistic and progressive values a bit for granted and that there might be something valuable in those of straight people (by which I mean not heterosexual but unhip). Hmm.
     The opening of Chapter XX is a magnificent piece of rhetoric, itself sufficient reason to read the book. I can do no better than to quote. The disturbances due to love are in fact “welcoming the new generation, and chafing against the ultimate Fate, who holds all the seas in the palm of her hand. But Love cannot understand this. He cannot comprehend another's infinity; he is conscious only of his own--flying sunbeam, falling rose, pebble that asks for one quiet plunge below the fretting interplay of space and time. He knows that he will survive at the end of things, and be gathered by Fate as a jewel from the slime, and be handed with admiration round the assembly of the gods.”


All Passion Spent (Sackville-West)

     Sackville-West’s novel is a very pleasant book full of wit and satisfaction. The satire is bracing; the eccentrics (Bucktrout, Gosheron, and FitzGeorge) not only amusing but individually characterized. Sackville-West mounts a few lovely rhetorical flights, though perhaps it is significant that one of the grandest, the notable butterfly passage, is meant to convey precisely the sort of instinctual flurry of mind the author presumably recommends. The theme is only too comforting, a bit overdetermined and then slightly problematized by the author’s and the main character’s insistence that they are by no means feminists. How nice to think that “once common sense rarely laid its fingers” her, all went well. And how unexpected and apt to introduce the implication of romantic feelings to the superannuated matriarch.
     I must be especially liable to swooning over style this season, because I will also quote this breath-taking passage which may seem rather long, but which I have cut off with half the single sentence still to come.
     "She remembered how, crossing the Persian Desert with Henry, their cart had been escorted by flocks of butterflies, white and yellow, which danced on either side and overhead and all around them, now flying ahead in a concerted movement, now returning to accompany them, amused as it were to restrain their swift frivolity to a flitting round this lumbering conveyance, but still unable to suit their pace to such sobriety, so, to relieve their impatience, soaring up into the air or dipping between the very axles, coming out on the other side before the horses had time to put down another hoof; making, all the while, little smuts of shadow on the sand, like little black anchors dropped, tethering them by invisible cables to earth, but dragged about with the same capricious swiftness, obliged to follow; and she remembered thinking, lulled by the monotonous progression that trailed after the sun from dawn to dusk, like a plough that should pursue the sun in one straight slow furrow round and round the world – she remembered thinking that this was something like her own life . . ."
     Whew! More succinctly, in Twelve Days she remarks of keeping a travel journal, “How else, indeed, to clasp the net over the butterfly of the moment?” And at that Virginia Woolf could do no better a job, either in the superabundantly exuberant style or the laconic.


The Grass Harp (Capote)

     Those who enjoy Capote’s “A Christmas Memory” (and they are many) will like The Grass Harp yet more. It is equally quirky and sweet and has, after all, more pages, more Southern oddballs, and a more casual structure -- Ida Honey intrudes and lingers for a surprisingly lengthy spell. The minor characters earn their way: Morris Ritz, Riley Henderson, the courageous Judge Cool who is cool indeed. The sentiment is unapologetic and mixed with sufficient humor and darkness to be digestible. The reader feels immense sympathy for Catherine, for example, while accepting the fact that she was difficult indeed for anyone on earth with the exception of Dolly. Strange to say, much of the unlikely machinery of the story is more or less factual. The oddly mismatched sisters and the grand treehouse are well-documented from the author’s childhood even if one suspects that his character Collin is a bit more a regular boy than Truman may have been. One need not speculate about what he and Sooky or he and Harper Lee may have spoken of while up among the green of tree-leaves. This book is doubtless better, though the plot is hardly credible. The thought of the bumbling vigilantes defeated by a cascade of rocks from the Honey family above seems entirely fabulous, but so do a good many actual events.

Notes on Recent Reading 25 [Baskervill, Gissing, Capote]

The Elizabethan Jig and Related Song Drama (Baskervill)

     Unfortunately, this book and many like it no longer are available from Dover which for many years served a unique role by keeping a lengthy list of worthy old books in print. What an amazing catalogue they once had, and all sewn and costing only a dollar or two! The chit-chat in their editorial offices must have been marvelous, among colleagues who could see the value in reissuing the autobiographies of both P. T. Barnum and Casanova, Sam Loyd’s puzzles, Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste, Ker’s Epic and Romance, reprints of Müller’s Sacred Books of the East, and Andrew Lang’s collections of folk stories for children.
     Charles Read Baskervill’s The Elizabethan Jig, published originally by the University of Chicago in 1929, is a monument of what might seem from today’s perspective a golden age of scholarship. A leisurely and comprehensive survey of a variety of associated songs, skits, dramas, and dances, the book forged quite new territory in its attention to neglected texts and its enthusiasm (perhaps extending now and then to over-enthusiasm) for tracing folk sources. The book sheds much light on popular comedy and includes a considerable collection of original texts, including German Singspiele. This is the sort of volume that would cost a hundred and fifty dollars today (even assuming an author’s subsidy) could it even find a publisher.


The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Gissing)

     The Signet paperbacks were part of that glorious age in which most of the world’s classics were easily available to virtually anyone. Signets were neither particularly attractive (like Doubleday Anchor editions were) nor were they well-made (like Dover books), but they were cheap and textually reliable. My copy of The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft is dated 1961. By contrast, a glance at Signet’s current offerings on B & N’s page today features horoscopes and sports trivia.
     Even Henry Ryecroft would have been shocked, I think, to find civilization in such rapid decline. The introduction in my edition by V. S. Pritchett describes the book as “elusive,” “evasive,” and “weary.” “The voice is of one who has given up.” Ryecroft (and Gissing by implication) present the “self-accusing, self-consuming face of failure, the scornful silence of the lonely man.” To Pritchett the book’s charm consists solely in its “exposition of the mind of a scholar, of one who lives by the dreams of literature.” Naturally we who read the book are likely to be susceptible to the same dreams.
     A reader such as I who lived for years on an income well below what the government called the poverty line might seem his ideal reader. Like Gissing’s Ryecroft, I sometimes felt as though I had learned sufficient Classical Greek to disqualify me for any employment. Like him I taught in various circumstances in which I found myself ineffective and unfit but where I persisted because I seemed even more unfit for other vocations. Like him I felt at home in a library.
     Yet I would not care to be thought Ryecroft’s double. His studied modesty cannot compensate for his ego’s defensiveness expressed in misanthropy and in the absence of a lover. His fierce disgust at modern commercial culture leads him to be politically radical, but he has ambivalence about the working class, and his grandiosely elitist temperament leads him to consider himself an arch-conservative.
     One might think from Gissing’s scholarly interest and declared bookishness that The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft would be full (like this site) of literary criticism. But it is not. Most of the pieces are psychological self-reflection and meditations on society. Many precise and sometimes pretty natural descriptions appear in keeping with the book’s arrangement following the course of the seasons.
     Such seasonal descriptions have been more appreciated in Japan where the book has found, perhaps, more readers than in the U.K.. Since Tokubotu Hirata declared it his favorite book in 1908, a number of Japanese translations appeared, some published in periodicals. It became then a common choice for reading passages in English textbooks. It does, surely, share something of the tone of the great Heian Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon though the one was written by a wealthy aristocrat and the other by a constantly struggling resident of Grub Street.


Music for Chameleons (Capote)

     I found a great deal to enjoy in Truman Capote’s late collection of pieces, many of which had appeared in magazines (The New Yorker, Interview, McCalls, New York, and Esquire). Though some feel Capote’s late work has little value, these pieces seem to me to offer wit, entertainment, and an occasional note of pathos. Further, he continues to explore the territory between fiction and nonfiction which he had made so much his own with In Cold Blood. Here he offers an account that pretends to be veracious (“Handcarved Coffins: A Nonfiction Account of an American Crime”), but which indulges in such improbable imaginative excesses that he cannot have expected anyone to take him at his word. (The story involves, for instance, an episode of murder by snakes injected with amphetamines.) It includes also the very amusing (and also unlikely) story of a day with his cleaning lady “A Day’s Work,” “Then It All Came Down” (a visit with Manson’s friend Bobby Beausoleil), , “A Beautiful Child” characterizing Marilyn Monroe, and “Derring-do” in which Pearl Bailey helps him evade the cops on his trail.
     There is much more as well, though the ending piece is weak indeed. There may be no great works here, or even bits one would return to, but Capote’s charm holds for me. Though the murder may be made of whole cloth and the celebrities misrepresented, my wife and I read it out loud to no loss of good effect. In “Hello, Stranger,” he paints a portrait of a man ruined by what he claims to be false accusations of pedophilia. Whether Capote thinks his friend has done anything reprehensible, whether he is in fact guilty or innocent, or whether he exists at all seem matters of little moment. Did magazines as recently as the seventies print better material than they do today?