Catechisms and Cliché : Fatuous Minds Think Alike or Finishing School for Versifiers (part 1)

I’m ashamed to admit I’ve taken agin a number of writers simply because, unknown to me, like Amundsen at the South Pole, they’ve trumped me by reaching the goal of our mutually contemplated journey first.

The harmless object of my ire is the poetess, Elizabeth Bishop, whose poem, First Lessons in Geography, reduced to ashes the bright ambitions I had when decades ago, at great personal cost, I first started to collect Pinnock’s early 19th Century Catechisms. If you are not familiar with Bishop’s ‘found poem’, then I should explain it’s practically a verbatim rendering of a page from Monteith’s Geographical Series, 1884, which as a pirated publication must have been a direct steal from Pinnock’s earlier works.

My purpose in pursuing Pinnock? Well, it was no different from Bishop’s in her pursuit of Monteith ... a love of a clarity of diction and directness in explaining the phenomena of this planet and our existence to a child. The page from my own collection reflects closely the language of Bishop’s Lesson VI and Lesson X, which I commend since my own efforts are now redundant.

Of course, this reduplicative thought calls into question the vaunted originality of acclaimed writers. Take Jane Austen’s most famous axiom. ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’

My contention is that, like Pinnock’s prose, Austen’s structure follows the formulaic assertion favoured by late 18th Century expositors. The Universal English Dictionary of 1792 contains any number of constructions precisely like this: ‘... universally acknowledged to have been the author of the Gospel ...’; ‘... universally allowed to be the best Harbour in Great Britain ...’ etc. In my Pinnock's Catechism of Poetry, a volume in his standard series of primers, you may read a truth ‘universally allowed’ that Milton excels all others.  No Janeite scholar, as far as I know, has yet suggested that the aphoristic cadences of Miss Austen's prose owe much to schoolroom textbooks.

So like Miss Bishop, Miss Austen stirs doubts as to the nature of true originality, and prompts the inner questioning that should torment any self-respecting writer who shrinks from short-changing readers with banalities.

And before I leave the subject of Miss Bishop, I cannot escape commenting on perhaps her most famous work, her villanelle, One Art.

Do other readers share my doubts when considering the concluding lines of the final quatrain?

                              the art of losing’s not too hard to master
                              though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Even the charm of Cameron Diaz when stumblingly reciting the piece in the movie, In Her Shoes (2005), cannot redeem the parenthetical padding of that clumsy antepenultimate metrical foot, which to me always seems as though it’s been desperately shoe-horned into a fit unsuited to it. Metrically, it seems like – as we English say in the demotic – like a cop out.

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Postscript on Poetic Makeweights (December 6 2015)

For one solution to the One Art puzzle see my later post . . . .
Finishing School for Versifiers (part 2)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/no-poetic-makeweights-thank-you-pastry.html
Finishing School for Versifiers (part 3)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/finishing-school-for-versifiers-part-3.html

Two Tautologies : Right and Wrong?

My long-held interest in Henry Harland, chameleon-like editor of the The Yellow Book (feigned Russian-born descent) led me to the British Library website whose profile of Harland begins thus... 

‘An itinerant traveller, role-player, and protégé of some of the key literary taste-makers of his time ...’ 

As an inveterate snatcher-up of unconsidered tautologies, I am reminded of my recent error in directing the attention of an eminent grammarian to the opening chapter of The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler: 

‘It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills.’

Was not that first sentence tautological, I asked, with WET RAIN hardly exemplary hard-boiled prose.

Seemingly I had tried the patience of that patient man because promptly came a rap on the knuckles: 

‘Some people (especially those on the west coast of the U.S., where Chandler's novel is set) make a distinction between "wet rain" and "dry rain." (See Joel Achenbach's piece on "Dry Rain Again": http://voices.washingtonpost.com/achenblog/2005/09/dry_rain_again.html). More interesting than the apparent tautology, I think, is the paradox of a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills, which introduces a major theme of “The Big Sleep": the gap between appearances and reality.’

May I confess here I sat, bowed, in sackcloth and ashes for at least the length of my elevenses.

 

No Geraniums! Wrong Wreath for Dickens’s Grave

What an opportunity lost!  I note, with regret, that last month a wreath of insipid white roses and snowdrops was laid on Charles Dickens's grave, at Poets’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, to mark the bicentennial of his birth (February 7th 2012). This act seems somewhat out of sympathy with the spirit and essence of the man, when his coffin at his burial was famously scattered with his favourite flower, the scarlet geranium of sooty old London, an altogether cheerier effect.

Well. There it is. We’ll just have to wait another hundred years, I suppose.

Consobrinal Twinship, Esau and De Wikkelkinderen

Twinship is an ever-absorbing phenomenon for me for I can claim to be one of consobrinal (first-cousin) twins.*  I was brought up as the ‘twin’ of my first cousin (we were conceived in the same month**) who was adopted by my mother when her only sister died giving birth (septicemia due to absence of penicillin). We were born ten days apart. Sibling rivalry was compounded by another curious aspect of our upbringing and that was the ‘precocious puberty’ of my ‘sister’, which I now believe was due to her living in a household with the presence of an unrelated male (i.e. my father); from the earliest age she was exposed to non-familial male pheromones, an exposure which is now regarded as the trigger for premature pubertal development. 

Rivalrous cousinhood in twinship is an important sub-theme in my narratives.
      

As to true twins, the Esau versus Jacob story is possibly the most powerful nativity of archetypes ... BUT ... as distinguished paediatricians have observed (G Corney & W Aherne) the event recorded in Genesis —‘the first came out red’ — could actually be an example of disparity in haemoglobin values, where one twin is born pale and the other twin is born with heightened colour. It was realized towards the end of the nineteenth century that there could be a difference in the haemoglobin values in uniovular twins. As Corney and Aherne affirm, the Esau versus Jacob story ‘may well have been the first description of the birth of a plethoric twin,’ a syndrome in which one twin is born anaemic, the other polycythaemic.

De Wikkelkinderen (The Swaddled Children) of 1617 depicts infant male twins who most likely succumbed to Twin to Twin Transfusion Syndrome (TTS), otherwise known as ‘placental transfusion syndrome’, a condition that only affects identical twins that share one placenta (monochorionic). This is suggested by their marked difference in colouring — one twin’s face is red, while the other twin’s face is white.

The fine details in the painting suggest that the unknown artist portrayed his subject matter faithfully. The infants in question were the children of Amsterdam Mayor Jacob Dirkszoon de Graeff (1571–1638) and his wife Aeltje Boelens (1579-1620). The painting is dated 7 April 1617, possibly the day the twins died.  Did the twins’ mother die three years later from a broken heart?

 

* Latin : sobrina - female cousin and sobrinus - male cousin. Only recently (September 2013) have I stumbled across the lines by Robert Southey that fully distil the marvel of cousins born at the same hour resembling each other ...

What marvel then if thus their features wore 

Resemblant lineaments of kindred birth?

 

** PS (14.01.23)  The Daily Telegraph this month records the death of an extraordinary non-twin, having been born ‘shortly before her sister Claudia: their birth written up in The Lancet’ as ‘an example of “superfetation”, an extremely rare condition in which babies conceived a month apart are born as twins.” ’

See Twinlife at :

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/resemblant-lineaments-of-kindred-birth.html

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Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html  

and A Bad Case (2015)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html