Anne's book on Virginia Woolf is now available! "This study argues that Virginia Woolf taught herself how to be a feminist artist and public intellectual through her revisionary reading. Fernald gives a clear view of Woolf's tremendous body of knowledge and her constant references to past literary periods."Congrats, Anne! What an amazing year this has been for you!
The Book of God is an imaginative overview, sensitive to narrative detail and to stylistic nuance, of both Testaments. Josipovici sees how the Bible constitutes a unique kind of literature--a book, as he says, meant to change your sense of reality--which is nevertheless linked with certain later writers. He proposes surprising comparisons with Proust, Kafka and other modernists. Some biblical passages, he observes, "bring us face to face with characters who can be neither interpreted nor deconstructed. They are emblems of the limits of comprehension."I have yet to read any Josipovici (through lack of availability in this part of the hemisphere), but have already added three of his books to my TBR list. Hm...must do something about this the next time I head north.
Condemning Appelfeld for his silence, which has been rendered into support for Israeli violence, seems as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. Perhaps it is useful to point out the partiality of his understanding of the "human condition", about which he has written so wonderfully well, and right to condemn his silence and the politics it suggests. But this only confirms that Appelfeld's novels are better than the man, a paradox one should remember as we read his best novels and ignore (what we imagine to be) his politics. Knowing that Appelfeld has perhaps failed to understand the full import of his own enigmatic writing makes me wish he was as good a reader as he is a writer. But good readers are as rare as good writers. And good men rarer still.
Don't you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying in my poems to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of daily life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own...for their mental, moral, and spiritual uplift.I've read opinions on this view of Joyce's that range anywhere from "blasphemous" to "arrogant," but to me, these ideas are self-evident. It may be my background, it may be my love, it may be my curse, but I will never be able to believe otherwise of the vitality of words.
Pitchfork spreads the joy:On November 14, the Ys descend. Yes, that's the release date and title of harpist/pianist/woodland creature Joanna Newsom's much-anticipated new album, due out on Drag City. It features arrangements scored and conducted by legendary Beach Boys collaborator Van Dyke Parks, and from what we've been hearing, the record contains some looong songs.Pure bliss.
Another extremely perverse thing is that when I'm in a bookstore, I can never find authors like Gabriel García Márquez or Federico García Lorca or Emilia Pardo Bazán where they are should be located according to proper alphabetization by last name. I've always got to resort to looking under Márquez, Lorca, and Bazán, even in the foreign language section of my university's official bookstore. I never know where I'll end up finding Lope de Vega or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, either... This doesn't change whether I look for the works of these authors in Spanish or in translation.Let the bookstores learn from the litbloggers, as we continue to develop the excellence of this necessary medium.
Apparently, there's yet another TV adaptation of Jane Eyre in the works, as if the world needed yet another adaptation of Jane Eyre. (Incidentally, isn't Francesca Annis a little over-qualified for a two-bit character like Lady Ingram?) Even more so than many Victorian novels told in the first person--or, for that matter, many Victorian novels with strong narrative voices--JE is not at all suited to cinematic realism. It's not just that the novel's literary effects depend on JE's very distinctive, complex POV, but also that its events themselves often seem bizarre or bathetic when rendered in "objective" form. The "Red Room," the symbolic lightning bolt (when it's included), Rochester's "telepathic" connection to Jane, and so forth frequently appear uncomfortably comical--especially when, as is usually the case, the filmmaker strips the narrative of its theological underpinnings and turns it into a straightforward twentieth- or twenty-first century romance. That being said, I think that in JE's case an overtly stylized or even surreal aesthetic might work in an adaptation's favor.Exactly. There isn't an adaptation out there that hasn't come off as clumsy or melodramatic in parts--and the final act is invariably botched (or passed over altogether), completely missing the point of how the force of Jane's convictions fuel her strength of will. (And I liked Toby Stephens and Tara Fitzgerald in The Tennant of Wildfell Hall...but Stephens as Rochester? Doubtful.)
My sense is that 20th Century American Christianity–its most vocal elements, anyway–has been a largely anti-intellectual endeavor, largely suspicious of art in general, and pretty much dumbed down in comparison to earlier epochs, making what usually passes for "Christian poetry" to be pretty thin soup. Moreover, the apophatic, parabolic, essentially poetic character of traditional theological discourse itself has been eclipsed in the most visible Christian communities by a reductive literalism, and by a disposition that has substituted arrogance for mysteries, substituted allegory for metaphor, substituted zeal for love, substituted earnestness for joy. As if that weren't trouble enough, I also sense that poetry in general has undergone a similar diminishment, wherein the poem has come to be understood as a document of experience, rather than a scene of revelation, retrospective rather than prospective.(via The Page)
There is a view that some ideas are so obnoxious that they can't be put into a form that would be rather beautiful. Some believe there is a conflict between, for example, moral value and aesthetic value, such that viciousness can't be beautiful. I claim it can. One way of doing that is to demonstrate it. It is perfectly possible, it seems to me, for there to be a beautiful anti-Semitic speech. My present work requires me to do just that. So some of it is the challenge of creating something out of garbage, and there's a philosophical point there if you can make it. But also, the words are nothing by themselves until they're placed in relationships. For me, there are no bad words; there are just ill-written things. So the idea is to find contexts so integrated and interconnected that they have the beauty some mathematicians speak of. Everything fits. Everything's functioning fully. You have a complete system. It's sometimes a challenge to make that system out of things people find rather awful or objectionable. It's careless to associate what the characters say with what the author thinks. I frequently don't agree with what mine say. The challenge is, to me, to be able to say it as well as I can and represent and fit it into the larger scheme. It doesn't matter whether what I'm saying is nice or true.(via wood s lot)
I am determined, shamefacedly, to overcome my own reticence in writing reviews and comments. The opening paragraphs here—whatever their other faults—now seem to me gutless throat-clearing. How delighted I was, in March, to present my own muddling through of the incorrigible situation created by the publication of Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke Box. There I go, pottering about, careful to acknowledge, on the one hand, the potential usefulness of some of the writing in this volume, and yet careful to deplore the commodification of Bishop’s unpublished works and the contravention of so many years of her artistic practice.
I read Helen Vendler’s review of Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke Box in The New Republic of April 3 with self-recognition and a bit of horror. I am not Helen Vendler, nor was meant to be. Vendler writes from power:Students eagerly wanting to buy ‘the new book by Elizabeth Bishop’ should be told to go back and buy the old one, where the poet represents herself as she wished to be known....In the long run, these newly published materials will be relegated to what Robert Lowell called ‘the back stacks,’ and this imperfect volume will be forgotten, except by scholars. The real poems will outlast these, their maimed and stunted siblings.Unlike [Meghan] O’Rourke, or [Peter] Campion, or even [Charles] Simic, she need not make nice with an Alice Quinn or a Farrar Straus & Giroux. Vendler’s lack of reticence, her ability to step up and to stake her claim, clearly and vigorously, exposed for me the vapidity of my own earnestness. What exactly was my interest in presenting a persona who would promise not to follow through on the moral objections he was just about to raise? What else but the creation of some slack space in which to enjoy the prospect of a guilty pleasure. Not every reticence is powerful.
The problem is you can't get to where I am now without going through a decade or more of immersion in a highly politicized and anti-literary academic culture. You have to spend so many years conforming that, by the time freedom presents itself, you don't know why you became an English major in the first place. You might even have contempt for your seemingly naïve students, who represent the self that you had to repress in order to be a professional.It seems that "idealistic" people such as myself have to find alternate routes to express this insatiable love of literature and are compelled to delve deeper into modes of personal study (which isn't a bad thing). Yet somehow, I still harbor the small hope that more will come of this passion. I especially wonder how Mr. Benton's observations would apply to literature departments in other countries. How widespread is this political disease?
"I consider writing a kind of adventure," he says. "I don't want to repeat myself, doing things that I have already done. No, because that would impoverish something for me that is very fresh, very new always. And that's why my books are very different, one from the other ... Even the writing is different because it depends very much on what you want to tell ... You have to find the way it is with each story." [...](via The Literary Saloon)
When asked how he discovers how each story must be told, he invokes another writer he invariably cites (along with Sartre and Flaubert) as a seminal influence.
"There was the way in which [William] Faulkner transformed stories that otherwise would have been unacceptable, no?" he says, going on to describe a scene from "The Hamlet," a novel Faulkner published in 1940.
"If I tell you, 'well, I know a man who became in love with a cow.' So you smile. That's a stupid story! But when you read Faulkner, this story becomes something so tragic, so tragic. It's not the story. It's the way in which the story's presented, the way in which he creates a context that can transform this stupid thing into something very tragic in which the human condition is expressed.
"That is something that I learned reading Faulkner, that anything can become the most important, the most deep human experience, if you have the ability to reach this story or this situation, linking it with the human condition in general."
Carson listened in fascination to Wystan's pronouncement that detective stories were virtually the only type of novel that he cared to read. Most other kinds, particularly American novels, lacked interest in his opinion. He disliked Steinbeck's work, for example, since he did not believe that novels could successfully deal "with inarticulates or with failures." Moreover, he was struck by the utter loneliness of American literature. Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, James--American literature was "one extraordinary literature of lonely people." That was not necessarily a criticism. It was the destiny of all Western nations, as the machine age developed, to lose their traditions, their connections, their allegiances. America was just ahead of the rest of the world in highlighting man's aloneness, his real condition. [...] Carson, far from being offended by his lack of interest in novels, drank in his remarks about American literature and thought a great deal about them, both at the dinner table and later in her room. [...] Contrary to Auden's opinion, Carson felt that, in a sense, inarticulates and failures may be the only people worth writing novels about. But she also knew that their inability to formulate feelings made it difficult to portray them.
Most alarming to Auden, meals turned out to be equally casual. Carson enjoyed playing chef, but her menus were limited to such dishes as meat patties, canned green pea soup with wienies, and a concoction she called "Spuds Carson"--mashed potatoes mixed with onions, cheese, or whatever she found in the larder. Even these were often burnt to the consistency of charcoal, since Carson tended to wander off and forget that she was cooking.
Kandinsky undoubtedly led the European revival in synaesthesia but there are many other examples of sonic influence in modern art, from Munch's The Scream and Whistler's Nocturnes and Harmonies to Ezra Pound's cantos and T S Eliot's quartets. Yet Kandinsky's curious gift of colour-hearing, which he successfully translated onto canvas as "visual music", to use the term coined by the art critic Roger Fry in 1912, gave the world another way of appreciating art that would be inherited by many more poets, abstract artists and psychedelic rockers throughout the rest of the disharmonic 20th century. Here then are Kandinsky's guidelines so that you can. . .experience synaesthesia for yourself: "Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and… stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to 'walk about' into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?"This reminds of me of Stephen Mitchelmore's comments on Wallace Stevens, Vladimir Nabokov, and Jeffrey Ford. I had never read "Signs and Symbols" before last month (thank God for such blogs as This Space!). It altered my mood for the rest of the day. Nabokov knows exactly how to "catch the heart off guard and blow it open" (as Seamus Heaney writes). Ford's story, "The Empire of Ice Cream," was also very interesting--less poignant and elliptical, but a really nice piece of work.
In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I dont know what I am. I dont know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not. He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not what he is and he is what he is not. [...] And since sleep is is-not and rain and wind are was, it is not. Yet the wagon is, because when the wagon is was, Addie Bundren will not be. And Jewel is, so Addie Bundren must be.This bears a sharp contrast to Jewel, who has transferred his fierce love for his mother to his horse, maintaining being (and the existence of his love) at any cost. But as Darl plainly states, "I cannot love my mother because I have no mother." This idea also causes Vardaman to observe:
“Jewel’s mother is a horse,” Darl said.Vardaman then says, “But you are, Darl,” and Darl responds, “I know it [...] That’s why I am not is. Are is too many for one woman to foal.” Interestingly, he accepts his brother's idea of her being a horse, but cannot accept being her son or the validity of his own existence (the negation they share).
“Then mine can be a fish, cant it, Darl?” I said.
Jewel is my brother.
“Then mine will have to be a horse, too,” I said.
“Why?” Darl said. “If pa is your pa, why does your ma have to be a horse just because Jewel’s is?”
“Why does it?” I said. “Why does it, Darl?”
Darl is my brother.
“Then what is your ma, Darl?” I said.
“I haven’t got ere one,” Darl said. “Because if I had one, it is was. And if it is was, it cant be is. Can it?”
We generally give to our ideas about the unknown the color of our notions about what we do know: If we call death a sleep it's because it has the appearance of sleep; if we call death a new life, it's because it seems different from life. We build our beliefs and hopes out of these small misunderstandings with reality and live off husks of bread we call cakes, the way poor children play at being happy.~ Fernando Pessoa, born on this day in 1888
But that's how all life is; at least that's how the particular way of life generally known as civilization is. Civilization consists in giving an innapropriate [sic] name to something and then dreaming what results from that. And in fact the false name and the true dream do create a new reality. The object really does become other, because we have made it so. We manufacture realities. We use the raw materials we always used but the form lent it by art effectively prevents it from remaining the same. A table made out of pinewood is a pinetree but it is also a table. We sit down at the table not at the pinetree. ...
He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that anymore than pride or fear.Taking this even further, she coins words of negation, denying the inherent being of language. She confesses that the one thing her husband could have given her was "not-Anse." By surrendering to the fact that this would not happen, she fulfills her "duty" to him:
I would be I; I would let him be the shape and echo of his word. That was more than he asked, because he could not have asked for that and been Anse, using himself so with a word.This negation of language extends into her rejection of conventional spirituality, according to Cleanth Brooks (in William Faulkner: First Encounters):
One might call her basic philosophy a kind of transcendental materialism, for she has simply inverted the Christian doctrine. Since the soul is nothing, the body itself must be everything, and so, transcendentally important, for only the tangible is truly real.With this perspective, she channels her remaining affection into her illegitimate son, Jewel. By placing sole importance on physical reality, Addie sees her salvation (or vindication) as a corporeal thing: "Addie tells Cora that 'he' will save her from the fire and the flood. The conventionally pious Cora thinks at first that Addie is referring to Christ," yet she soon "realizes that Addie is referring to her son Jewel, who in the course of the journey actually does save her decomposing body from both perils" (Brooks 83). Addie’s identity and selfhood impinge upon those of her entire family, particularly Darl and Jewel, directly affecting their individual fates. By effectually giving being to Jewel (through her love), and denying it to Darl (through unreasonable withdrawal), Addie dictates the being and non-being of each son...with words.
That Faulkner conveys a worldview incorporating "classical" qualities must certainly be true, but I don't see why this feature of his work makes it incompatible with modernism. Does this mean T.S. Eliot, a self-confessed classicist, was also no modernist? Has our definition of "modernist" evolved to the stage where it simply means "chaotic"? No work that moves through apparent disorder to achieve a different kind of order need apply to the "timeless" club? With modernists, nothing matters?I'll have more on this later (when I have a bit more time). Suffice it to say that it's good to see muddied ideas sorted out. In discussions concerning modernism and postmodernism, there is a tendency towards sloppy generalizations that blur essential issues of how a work functions in the first place, leaving us with nothing more than rote stereotypes that lead to facile judgments. This robs us of literary understanding rather than adding to it. Better to confess ignorance than to make unwarranted assumptions.
You have fallen; the world knows you as blessed. You are a saint of chance.(And it continues....)
The face of God is worn out. You do not pray. Or prayer is thought, the whole of thought, as it is present in you. Come with me. Follow me there, to where we will fall together. There where thought needs our weakness to come to itself. Where thought desires only to hold itself, to touch itself as I would touch you. But thought will not be kept. Thought keeps us. It would keep us, the exhausted ones, who have fallen from everything but thinking.
'I would like to learn how to fall.' - 'But you cannot learn.' - 'I would like to fall.' - 'But falling must be what you do not want.'
We are exhausted, the sacred ones. Thought crowns us. Thought is joined to itself in our exhaustion, and there it unjoins the world. For that is what thought demands, impossible gift: you will think as no one; nothing will think in your place.
JA: When I go to Breadloaf, I like to go to the poetry lectures. I am much more interested in what the poets have to say. They are the ones at the cutting edge where language meets the ineffable, the silence. Seamus Heaney gave a reading a few years back at Middlebury and he said poetry is about [she opens her mouth as if to say something]. He just stood there, his mouth hanging open, as if dumbfounded, like he couldn't find the words.
RB: [laughs]
JA: His point, I think, was that poetry tries to put into words what can't be put into words! That is what poets do. I think of them as the hot lava pushing out. They are the scouts, traveling out into the unknown where language has not gone before. They are doing interesting things with language, thinking about ways of using syntax. They talk about line breaks, about the breath as opposed to the visual cutting off of language. Storytellers, we're the settlers, we come in later, we need schools and a post office and homes and day care centers—but I am more interested in poets. I learn more from them. I don't know why.
¿Qué más quiere, qué más quiere? Átelo pronto a su muñeca, déjelo latir en libertad, imítelo anhelante. El miedo herrumbra las áncoras, cada cosa que pudo alcanzarse y fue olvidada va corroyendo las venas del reloj, gangrenando la fría sangre de sus pequeños rubíes. Y allá en el fonda está la muerte si no corremos y llegamos antes y comprendemos que ya no importa.~ Julio Cortázar, "Instrucciones para dar cuerda al reloj,"
It is only of course after the fact that we can name these grammatical means accelerating the perceptual thrust of the sentence; during our actual stretched assimilation of this long cascade of words flung over a page we are, to put it imaginatively, participating in making the sun come up, the birds awaken, and the churchbells ring. Such an epic sentence--as the town turns from night to morning--is a human, and therefore effortful, Fiat lux. It cannot have the concision and effortlessness of the divine illumination of chaos, because it is made from a human sensing and concentrating body striving to comprehend a moment in one internalized physical and mental gestalt. And that human body is replicating itself in its aesthetic body of words, rather than replicating the outside world in a direct mimesis. The poet has to substitute, for the metaphysical divine will and the intellectual divine Logos, a frail human eye and even frailer human will, which must concentrate fiercely to translate into internal kinesthetic sense-response "the most loud invisible" of the light and "the vapor of accreting inaudibles," the silent flocking of birds. The poet must translate these first into a consciousness of her own internal physical mimicry of the external stimuli, and then, in turn, she must translate that internal kinesthetic mimicry into the visible and audible signs of English, a language with its own internal constraints on expression. The order of linguistic signification, which succeeds the orders of perception and kinesthesia, is represented in the poem by the moment when "one name is called out." Every genuine poem, as Mallarmé insisted, aims at being "one name"--a single complex and indivisible unit of language proper to its moment and irreplaceable by any other. As the poet lifts the silent and the nonlinguistic and the nonpropositional from perceptual import to kinesthetic import into semiotic and rhythmic import, one form of suffering--seeing the day go by unregistered and unrecorded--is brought to an end.More than a mouthful... Vendler manages to peel back the film of words to give us a glimpse into the living organism of a good poem... For it is a living, vibrant, evolving thing, involving both the reader's imagination and understanding.
He was not above melodrama. He would cry at westerns and gangster films. He sobbed at the ending of Angels With Dirty Faces when James Cagney accepts to behave as a coward when they take him to the electric chair, so the boys who idolize him will not look up to him any longer. Standing on the edge of the pampas, the sight of which he said affected Argentines as the sight of the sea affected the English, a tear would roll down his cheek and he would mutter: "Carajo, la patria!" (’By God, my homeland!’). His breath would stop when he would come to the line where the Norwegian sailor says to his king as the mast of the royal ship cracks: "That was Norway breaking/ from thy hand, O king!" (in a poem by Longfellow, a line — Borges pointed out — then used by Kipling in "The Most Beautiful Story in the World"). He once recited the Lord’s Prayer in Old English, in a crumbling Saxon chapel near Dr. Johnson’s Lichfield, "to give God a little surprise." He wept at a certain paragraph by the forgotten Argentinian writer Manuel Peyrou because it mentioned Calle Nicaragua, a street close to where Borges was born. He enjoyed reciting four verses by Rubén Darío, "Boga y boga en el lago sonoro/ que en el sueño a los tristes espera/ donde aguarda una góndola de oro/ a la novia de Luis de Baviera," because in spite of the long vanished gondolas and royal brides, the rhythm brought tears to his eyes. He confessed many times that he was unabashedly sentimental.(via Maud)
Now I become myself. It's taken Pollock's Part I terror of the conclusiveness of final shape is answered in Part III of "Pollock and Canvas," which envisages a way out of formal shape. That formal shape (beauty, love, the figure), once it has been conferred on the canvas, permanently settles over a piece of life and determines it. The only way out of the conclusiveness of that formal shape is the admission into it of elements of chance; and Graham's figure for that possibility is God's rest after He made the world, a point at which the unintended, the serpent, can slip into Paradise[.]This is the snapping of the thread of narrative...the loss of any sense of foreshadowing in our unwritten lives. A step, once taken, is irrevocable. There is no undoing it. (As Lucinda sings, "Can't put the rain back in the sky...")
...Then things not yet trueNegation--the opposite, the chaotic, the random--inhabits truth as well. It is paradox, the undoing of tidy lines and fixed truths--the suspension of both belief and disbelief.
which slip in
are true,
aren't they?
speaks directly of what the double excess of the long line and the long pause mean to Graham--a way of representing the luxurious spread of experienced being, preanalytic and precontingent. This condition has Romantic affinities; but Graham does not want to be laid asleep in body to become a living soul. Rather, against Wordsworth, she almost wants to be laid asleep in mind to become a living body. Her maya contains no access to Wordsworthian transcendence; rather, she accepts its blessed stoppage in prolonged sensual illusion, that excess that is, in Stevens' terms, the cure of sorrow. The incarnation of this maya as it takes place "between the creator and the created" (83) is the Stevensian moment of credences of summer, of human existence without temporal entrance or exit, represented paradoxically by "of the graces the / 8 / most violent one, the one all gash, all description." This grace is the Muse of eternal process, who has replaced for Graham the meditated, investigateive, and shaped Muse of product.It is both/and, not either/or. It is all Possibility--not act but the potential of act. Process. The correct limbo of the time-between-times--our inescapable state of being neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring, but flesh and spirit, mortal and immortal--equal parts angel, demon, and dirt.
Not until inner feeling and outer perception begin to meld, and the poet's body becomes, kinesthetically, a form of the world's fluid body, can the world be re-created in language. The poet declares her creed: that the sun must come up in her before it can come up on her page; and it must come up on her page before it can come up for her reader[.]
Once, many years ago, there was a child of nine who loved Walter Milligan. Once Saturday morning she was walking in the neighborhood of her school. She walked and thought, "The plain fact is--as I have heard so many times--that in several years' time I will not love Walter Milligan. I will very probably marry someone else. I will be untrue; I will forget Walter Milligan."~ Annie Dillard, born on this day in 1945
Deeply, unforgettably, she thought that if what they said about Walter Milligan was true, then the rest went with it: that she would one day like her sister, and that she would be glad she had taken piano lessons. She was standing at the curb, waiting for the light to change. It was all she could do to remember not to get run over, so she would live to betray herself. For a series of connected notions presented themselves: if all these passions of mine be overturned, then what will become of me? Then what am I now?
She seemed real enough to herself, willful and conscious, but she had to consider the possibility--the likelihood, even--that she was a short-lived phenomenon, a fierce, vanishing thing like a hard shower, or a transitional form like a tadpole or winter bud--not the thing in itself but a running start on the thing--and that she was being borne helplessly and against all her wishes to suicide, to the certain loss of self and all she held dear. Herself and all that she held dear--this particular combination of love for Walter Milligan, hatred of sister and piano lessons, etc.--would vanish, destroyed against her wishes by her own hand.
When she changed, where will that other person have gone? Could anyone keep her alive, this person here on the street, and her passions? Will the unthinkable adult that she would become remember her? Will she think she is stupid? Will she laugh at her?
She was a willful one, and she made a vow. The light changed; she crossed the street and set off up the sloping sidewalk by the school. I must be loyal, for no one else is. If this is the system, then I will buck it. I will until I die ride my bike and walk along these very streets, where I belong. I will until I die love Walter Milligan and hate my sister and read and walk in the woods. And I will never, not I, sit and drink and smoke and do nothing but talk.
Foremost in her vow was this, that she would remember the vow itself. She woke to her surroundings; it was cold. Even walking so fiercely uphill, she was cold, and illuminated by a powerful energy. To her left was the stone elementary school, deserted on Saturday. Across the street was a dark row of houses, stone and brick, with their pillared porches. The porch floors were painted red or gray or green. This was not her own neighborhood, but it was her turf. She pushed uphill to the next corner. She committed to memory the look of that block, that neighborhood: the familar cracked sidewalk, how pale it was, how sand collected in its cracks; the sycamores; the muffled sky.
On the same day that Yeats’s friends gathered around the makeshift grave in Roquebrune, Hitler stood before the German Reichstag and prophesied the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe. In September, the month George had settled on as the best time to transfer the remains, France declared war on Germany, forcing the poet’s family and friends to postpone the removal indefinitely.This Phillips piece is really a very reasoned review of R.F. Foster's biography, W.B. Yeats: A Life Volume II: The Arch-Poet 1915-1939. The reconciliation between life and art is beautifully analyzed:
But the end of the war brought a bizarre and unwelcome surprise. The body had disappeared. When Yeats’s last lover, Edith Shackleton Heald, returned to Roquebrune to visit the grave, she found that the grave was gone. A confused exchange of correspondence between the priest at Roquebrune, the undertaker’s office, and a small group of Yeats’s friends revealed that, apparently due to a clerical error and the priest’s ignorance of Yeats’s identity, the grave had been dug up and the poet’s remains taken to the ossuary, where anonymous bones were kept. It would be difficult to find the poet’s skeleton: in the ossuary skulls and limbs were stored separately.
A macabre comedy followed these strange revelations. Heald and a few of the poet’s English friends decided to cover up the disappearance and keep it secret from Yeats’s family in Ireland. They began implementing an elaborate and farcical scheme, swearing the priest to secrecy and designing a substitute gravestone (it portrayed a unicorn flying to the stars), while at the same time, George Yeats and the Irish authorities were conferring about the best way to bring the poet’s body to Sligo, to the landscape he had known as a boy, and the best way to stage an Irish funeral. In the end, the English contingent, which discovered the plan to return the remains to Ireland by way of an article in the Times, had no choice but to confess the case to George, who took it up with the French government. Authorities from Paris descended on Roquebrune, hastily identified and reassembled the poet’s bones, and arranged a ceremony in which the new coffin, draped in the Irish flag and escorted by a French guard of honor, was driven to Nice, where it joined an Irish naval vessel bound for Galway. Here it was met by the poet’s family and taken ashore before a large crowd. At Sligo, where it was escorted by a pipe band, it met another guard of honor, this one Irish, and lay in state for an hour before an enormous throng in front of the Town Hall. Then, finally, on September 17, 1948, Yeats was buried for the last time, in Drumcliff churchyard overlooking the dramatic peak of Ben Bulben. Down to the epitaph on his headstone, the situation of the grave was just as Yeats inscribed in his great death-anticipating poem “Under Ben Bulben”[.]
There are always the poems, where the ungainly aggregations of the life are distilled into moments of airy and bluff and sweet and impossible beauty, and as long as the poems exist, the last word will be theirs. To laugh at Yeats’s life is to find oneself softly checkmated. The poems are things of such constant astonishment that they dismay description; flocks of adjectives graze on them and never see the ground. Reading the fourth section of “Vacillations” makes one understand very well how the split sense of the burial story could have come into existence, how the poet could appear simultaneously as a helpless collection of bones and a powerful guiding spirit. Its ten plain lines show how accident can be transfigured by inspiration.My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessèd and could bless.
Faber and Faber have announced the projected publication of a seven-volume edition of The Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot, under the General Editorship of Ronald Schuchard and an advisory board comprising Warwick Gould, Archibald Henderson, Sir Frank Kermode, Edward Mendelson and Christopher Ricks.The involvement of Schuchard, Kermode, and Ricks alone would tell me this is a definitive project--the "dream team" of Eliot scholars coming together to finally have it all in one place... Wow. I'm incredibly excited about this.
