steepholm

Hyperbole is the strangest thing. (Not just a strange thing - the strangest.) In most situations, the law of diminishing returns applies: the more exaggerated the claim, the less purchase it will have on reality. Hyperbole is like trying to sew on a button while holding the needle in the jaws of a JCB. It's clumsy at best; at worst, ridiculous.

Sometimes, though, hyperbole really works. I was thinking about this while listening to The Tannahill Weavers' "Capernaum". As a city, Edinburgh's really not that grim (if it had been about Aberdeen I could have understood it), but this song works precisely because its lyrics, which come from a 1920s poem by Lewis Spence, are so emphatically hyperbolic.

"Capernaum"

St Matthew, xi, 23

If aa the bluid shed at thy Tron
Embro', Embro'
If aa the bluid shed at thy Tron
Were sped intae a river
It would ca' the mills o' Bonnington
Embro', Embro'
It would ca' the mills o' Bonnington
For ever and for ever

If aa the tears that thou hast grat
Embro', Embro'
If aa the tears that thou hast grat
Were shed intae the sea
Whaur wad ye find an Ararat
Embro', Embro'
Whaur wad ye find an Ararat
Frae that fell flude tae flee?

If aa the psalms sung in thy kirks
Embro', Embro'
If aa the psalms sung in thy kirks
Were gaithered in a wind
Twad shaw the taps o' Roslin's birks
Embro', Embro'
Twad shaw the taps o' Roslin's birks
Till time was oot o' mind.

If aa the broken herts o' thee
Embro', Embro'
If aa the broken herts o' thee
Were heapit in a howe
There wid be neither land nor sea
Embro', Embro'
There wid be neither land nor sea
But yon reid brae and thou.

Love the poem, love the song. But why does hyperbole intensify here, when it so often dilutes?

There's a very nice interview with Alan Garner by the noted Tolkienian John Garth in Oxford Today (though Garth tactfully avoids the 'T' word). It includes a good deal of familiar stuff, but also one or two plums - such as Garner's pre-Peter-Cook double-act with Dudley Moore. Well worth reading for those whose tastes run that way, as mine do.

Sometimes I have to plump up books like pillows, until they're the right shape for my brain.

If, indeed, the trip to the land of the Wild Things was all in Max's head (as adult critics would have you believe), then his mother must have come up with his supper at some point and placed it on the table. But then, how did Max not notice this and break from his reverie? Was he in some kind of catatonic state? If so, how did his mother not notice that and call an ambulance? Surely she'd have been expecting some response from her naughty son, not just a blank stare? It makes no sense.

Or maybe - and this is my belief - the critics are wrong, and the bedroom really did turn into a forest. Maybe Max was indeed away for over a year. And maybe, like Mrs Darling leaving the window open, his penitent parent brought a hot supper to his room each evening, in the hope that it might lure him back.

Until, one day, it did.

I'll be interested to read Sylvia Plath's children's books, but I'm puzzled as to how they can be appearing in a series called "Faber's Children's Classics". I see no sense in which these obscure works can be called "classic" children's books, except that they're written by a "classic" author for adults. They may become classics in time, perhaps deservedly so, and the new publication may help them along that path - but let's not jump the gun.

Perhaps I'm being snobbish - but I suspect the snob is Faber. Anything a famous writer for adults deigns to write for children must be a classic, ipso facto. We should crown them by acclamation.

Faber have form in this area. It's always bothered me that the Collected Poems of T. S. Eliot disdains to include what are probably now his best-known poems - those from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Being written for children, they are beneath notice. I remember I wrote to Faber to complain about this some thirty years ago: I'm still awaiting their reply. (I will add, though, that the more recent Complete Poems and Plays does include them.)

Sometimes, a poet known as a writer for adults may be shown to best advantage in their work for children. For example, perhaps the best thing Gertrude Stein ever wrote was The World is Round (1939). (It is also a far more enjoyable book to my mind than the outwardly-similar The Little Prince, which it predates by four years.) Here are the opening lines, to give you a feel:

Once upon a time the world was round and you could go on it around and around.
Everywhere there was somewhere and everywhere there were men women children dogs cows wild pigs little rabbits cats lizards and animals. That is the way it was. And everybody dogs cats sheep rabbits and lizards and children all wanted to tell everybody all about it and they wanted to tell all about themselves.
And then there was Rose.
Rose was her name and would she have been rose if her name had not been Rose. She used to think and then she used to think again.

Suddenly, instead of being irritating, Stein is revealed as a really good children's writer. Every picture is enhanced by the right frame - and for writers, the frame is genre.

Is The World is Round included in The Collected Works of Gertrude Stein, you ask? No, it is not - but perhaps only because, as far as I know, no such book exists.

Looking back through this journal I see that over the years I have spent a lot of time shoving The Great Gatsby up against other texts, to see if they were a good fit. I'm really not sure why. I mean, I like Fitzgerald's book, and I've taught it several times, but it's not one of my "big" books, or not consciously. So yesterday, when I found myself musing, "Is Kurtz the man Gatsby would have become had he been born in Mitteleuropa instead of the Midwest?" I slapped myself down severely and made myself repeat "Conrad took a steamer up the Congo" twenty times until the fit had passed.

It's not just Gatsby, though. Last summer, I read - and was blown away by - Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. One of the things I liked best was the attenuated despair of the main narrative's final pages, as the protagonist stumbles toward suicide while desperately trying to keep alive his grandiose self-image. There was a certain flavour about the account that resonated - though I wasn't sure with what. This morning it came to me what it had reminded me of: the wonderful description of Nero's death in Suetonius. (I remember where I read that, too - in a cafe near the bus station in Cambridge, during my lunch break when I was a technical writer 25 years ago. I have an excellent memory for things like that, even though I can't name more than two or three of my colleagues from that unhappy time.)

No doubt one's past reading forms a rich humus in which the experience of new books can flower all the more vigorously. Still, it's a chicken-and-egg thing, or a hermeneutically circular one. Would I have enjoyed that bit of Hogg as much, or at all, had it not been for meeting Nero first? I'm not usually attracted to tales of suicidal despair - in fact, I prefer happy endings and find them more rewarding technically, spiritually, and aesthetically. My own depression and sense of futility perhaps contributed to that part of Suetonius sticking with me. What made it an important literary experience had as much to do with my own state of mind as anything I could have said about the text, even though I was consciously appreciating things about that too, and (since I was reading it in Graves's translation) thinking about it as source text for the Claudius books. That was consciously, ratiocinatively absorbing, but it took another reading of another text a quarter of a century later to hook out what had mattered to me most, and even since then it's been the best part of a year. And perhaps it wouldn't have occurred to me now if I hadn't dreamed about Nero last night - which was entirely the fault of Beric the Briton. Well, that's the kind of brain I've had the privilege of growing from a cutting, I suppose - but by God, it's a wonder we can make ourselves understood when we talk about books at all.

"Swords like those we sent you are useful," Aska said. "They are
made by the Romans, and are vastly better than any we have. With
one of those you might chop down as many saplings in a day as
would build a hut, and could destroy any wild beasts that may lurk
in your swamps. (G. A. Henty, Beric the Briton [1893])

The speaker is an Iceni chief bartering with some fen-dwellers in the wake of the defeat of AD 60/1. The swords were captured from the Romans earlier in the campaign, and are presumably standard-issue legionary weapons, which I think of as designed more for stabbing from between the serried shields of a Roman line than waving about or chopping down saplings, but which I'm willing to believe could have done any of these things (though for chopping I'd rather have a hatchet).

My question is this. Is it likely that a British chief of this era (putting all partisanship to one side, for Henty's officer class is nothing if not realist) would consider a standard legionary sword to be "vastly better" than anything Made in Britain? Was Roman sword-making technology noticeably superior to that of the British, speaking in terms of quality rather than their ability to churn the things out on a large scale?

Lewis Carroll's White Knight's song rather spoiled "Resolution and Independence" for me for a while; however, it also enhanced it. Without Carroll, it would probably never have occurred to me that in the last line of the poem Wordsworth is looking back to a time when he was looking forward to a time when he would be looking back to the time he was looking forward from. This of course stands in contrast to the mood earlier in the poem, in which he is looking back to a time when he was looking even further back to a time that exemplified what, at that time, he felt he had to look forward to.

That's poetry, that is.

I really ought to be going to bed - and I will, in a minute - but once you've had the idea of rewriting The Great Gatsby in the style of Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam it's hard to tear yourself away. This is as far as I've got. If I leave it here now, will I find the entire novel completed by the morning courtesy of night-tripping elves? One can only hope.

A blown seed of the house of Carraway,
A Hunter of the East, to hope a prey—
Caught on a wind of restless dreams
He floats, he falls—but how long will he stay?

The Sultan’s Turret echoes to the gong
That throws his doors wide to a gorgeous throng:
Each week a glittering caravanserai
Renews their numbers and renews their song.

The Hyacinth, with wanton petals dressed,
The Rose whose perfume makes a Saint twice blessed,
These flowers by evening lose their bloom and die:
Pluck me one Daisy, and forget the rest.

Yesterday in class we were comparing the poetry of William Wordsworth - "I Wandered Lonely" and "Resolution and Independence" - with the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. Before the seminar, I resolved to make a feminist point by never referring to William simply as "Wordsworth", as if only Dorothy required a forename; but I've got to say, it was incredibly difficult, and I stumbled more than once. I do hate the way these things get embedded in one's brain and habits.

Meanwhile, sparked by From our Own Correspondent, I've been admiring the stained-glass windows of Notre-Dame-Du-Rugby in south-west France. Much as I like the "La Vierge au Joueur Blessé", a virtually blasphemous take on the Pietà, my favourite has to be "La Vierge a la Touche" (The Virgin at the Lineout), which shows the baby Jesus about to lob the ball to the supplicant players like an ovoid benison. What will future archaeologists make of it?

Though Spenser was well read in classical literature, scholars have noted that his poetry does not rehash tradition, but rather is distinctly his. This individuality may have resulted, to some extent, from a lack of comprehension of the classics.

This is Wikipedia putting it crassly, but it's just the kind of attitude that put me off Chaucerian criticism when I was an undergraduate. The notes to my edition of Chaucer were nothing but a list of references to what he'd borrowed from Virgil, Machaut, Ovid, Macrobius, etc. - and if there was a line or an idea without a source, something that might even be deemed original, you could just feel the frustration steaming from the the page. The thought that poets might think of something for themselves was clearly disturbing, threatening even, for then what would become of the poor scholar? Ergo, if Spenser is not sufficiently slavish in his imitation, the readiest explanation is incompetence.

Romantic critics didn't seem to have the same obsession. On the contrary, they valued novelty and genius, even where, as in the case of The Lyrical Ballads, it was presented by the poets themselves as something of a return to an existing folk tradition. (And of course such declarations of a return to simpler roots constitute a tradition in themselves: cf. Thomas Sprat extolling the Royal Society in 1667 for its "constant Resolution, to reject the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style: to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness".)

It's hard to avoid the suspicion that both sets of critics were influenced by the canons of the times they studied. Chaucer and Spenser, along with their contemporaries, set great store by authority and precedent; the Romantic poets emphasized genius and creativity (I simplify just a bit!). Their critics were perhaps drawn to these eras by a compatibility in their own temperaments and tastes, which were reinforced by what they found there; or else their nature was "subdued / to what it works in, like the dyer's hand". Either way, they needed to get out more.

Thomas Nashe was more of my mind, referring to Spenser in the splendidly-titled Have With You to Saffron Walden (a pamphlet written against Spenser's best friend, as it happens, so he had no cause to flatter) as "the Summ' tot' of whatsoeuer can be said of sharpe inuention and scholarship". A fine summation itself, and one that pays due regard to both these complementary, essential qualities.