The grievous worries of Gissingites . . . ‘You have to promise me to suppress your redundant auxiliary verbs . . . ’ (To Have and Have Not, Part 2.)

I fear the following reflections rehash a Case of Unfinished Business inasmuch as a little while ago I challenged  those assumptions that accept there is a classical economy expressed by Lewis (Lutwidge) Carroll’s prose, a feature many would expect of an Oxford logician. I have no doubt that his near namesake, the Cambridge logician Ludwig Wittgenstein, would have had a view on it.  http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2012/04/to-have-and-have-not.html

I questioned the words of Alice, ‘Oh dear! I’d nearly forgotten that I’ve got to grow up again!’  I maintained that the sort of double-verbing Carroll employs with his irritating auxiliary+verb clusters lacks the crystal clarity one would have expected from an Euclidean geometrist and syllogistic rationalist. 

With these scruples – not to say overscrupulosity – in mind, I was prompted to ask Pierre Coustillas, the world’s foremost authority on George Gissing – a master of plain English prose perfected by the acutest discrimination – as to whether ‘a Frenchman of equal discernment had ever noted in Gissing the use of the redundant auxiliary verb of “got” (as in “I have got” instead of “I have”).’ I added: ‘In your estimation, having read and reread Gissing, do you regard Gissing as a purist in English usage?’

For a contemporary usage, I noted that Wilde, in his Ideal Husband of 1893, has the character, Mrs. Cheveley, say: ‘You have got to promise me to suppress your report.’

‘You have got to promise me . . ’

 

 

Linguistic oddities?

Professor Coustillas kindly replied: ‘As you seem to have guessed linguistic problems and Gissing’s use of English have been to me (and to my wife) a fascinating subject. Very rarely do we happen to notice oddities. An example which will not surprise you is his (in my opinion) faulty  use – off and on – of “like” for “as”. Clara Collet* once told him about this and (surprisingly!) he declared himself surprised. But this being said, he was, I think, an excellent stylist. He was a purist. His correspondence with Kitton about their respective editorial labours for the Rochester Edition of Dickens’s works (Methuen) is interesting in this respect.

 ‘He certainly never uses the form used by Mrs. Cheveley! Indeed he never uses “do” with “have”. I think that looking for “I do not have” in his works and correspondence would be a waste of time.

‘Although I do not wish either you or myself to spend too much time on such problems, I am tempted to ask you whether you have noticed that very few English people ever use the word “whom” these days. The mistake which consists in using “who” for “whom” is common even among English academics. As a foreigner, such things worry me grievously.’

* Noted statistician and confidante of George Gissing and Eleanor Marx.

 

Evanescent conjectures . . . alleged solecism.

In the event, since this correspondence was conducted in November 2009, we never returned to these rather evanescent conjectures and, nine years later, this venerated scholar sadly was taken from us (Pierre Coustillas, literary scholar, born 11 July 1930; died 11 August 2018).

Only lately have I reconsidered the alleged solecism of ‘like’ for ‘as’.

It did not take me long to find in Demos an example of how the ‘as = like’ misconception of Gissing’s ‘impure English’ might have arisen.

In Demos, the protagonist Richard Mutimer is lower-class.  On two occasions the alleged solecism can be read:

‘She never takes things like you do,’ Richard remarked.

‘You’re not going to say, like mother did, that it was the worst piece of news she’d ever heard?’

In my view, in each case the lower class colloquialisms are in character, so hardly the error Clara Collet supposedly identified.

So for loyal Gissingites the writings of our hero remain an unpolluted stream of both demotic and unadorned English in cadences regulated by a classicist, in exemplars of English prose at its neatest and nimblest because even when, without sentiment, it reaches down to explore below the Lower Depths it still issues from a source that flows faultlessly from the Heights of Parnassus.    

 

See also . . . Escape Chute: An Unexpected Loophole to Enfranchisement (re. Gissing’s feminism). http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2013/03/escape-chute-unexpected-loophole-to.html

See also . . . A Girl Alone: Scenario of a Screenplay in Homage to George Gissing. http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/04/a-girl-alone-scenario-of-screenplay-in.html

See also . . . Respectable Log-Rolling.                              https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2012/02/?m=0

•

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 (2014)

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

 

‘Did someone call for a recitation?’ Finishing School for Versifiers (Part 5)

All poets, whatever they
may seem to others, die young. 

Tennessee Williams

Suddenly Last Summer.

You might say of certain literary outpourings refined by a classical education that there’s a recognisable constant observable in the writer’s cleverly wrought symmetry where a drama features the explication of a verse to parallel the plot or, correspondingly, the gestation of a poem provides impetus to the action.  

The Browning Version by Terence Rattigan springs to mind. And let us not forget Elizabeth Bishop’s villanelle, One Art, when stumblingly reciting by Cameron Diaz in the movie, In Her Shoes (2005); or even those memorable WW2 epigraphs, Johnny-head-in-air by John Pudney (heard in the film, The Way To The Stars) and The Life That I Have by Leo Marks (issued as a code-mnemonic for SOE secret agent heroine Violette Szabo and recited in the movie, Carve Her Name with Pride). 

In this overcrowded genre, the masterly poet Roy Fuller’s novel The Carnal Island (1970) should not be forgotten. I suspect Robert Graves is the model for Fuller’s fictional poet and the poetry pastiched in this (I assume) reworking of The Aspen Papers by Henry James (a doomed visit to the shrine of  venerated poet) leads me to this view. (A specimen poem, entitled In a Barn near Beugny, adds substance to this conjecture and the birth year of the poet, 1890, makes him, like Graves, a member of the Lost Generation who came of age during WWI).

The instances of this literary form are legion . . .

Poetry as a Propellant of Plot:
Deborah Kerr as Hannah and Cyril Delevanti as Nonno
in The Night of the Iguana.

Echoes of the absurd . . . The Night of the Iguana.

Take, for instance, The Night of the Iguana by Tennessee Williams. A highly suspenseful device in the drama is the unfinished poem by Nonno, the elderly poet grandfather of Hannah, an itinerant artist, who like the washed-up Episcopal priest, the Reverend Shannon, finds herself stranded as a guest in a seedy hotel on a remote Mexican beach, where this introduction is made:

                    Revd Shannon: ‘And Gramps?’
                    Hannah: ‘He’s the world’s oldest living and practising poet . . . Do you 
                    know, he’s started a new poem. For the first time in twenty years he’s 
                    started another poem.’
                    Revd Shannon: ‘He hasn’t finished it yet?’
                    Nonno: ‘Did someone call for a recitation?’
                    Hannah: ‘No, Nonno . . . Just rest for a few moments, Nonno.’
                    Nonno: ‘How calmly does the olive branch* observe the sky begin to 
                    blanch, without a cry, without a prayer, with no betrayal of despair.’ 
                    (The tremulous speech trails off.)

What immediately strikes the discerning listener, however, in appreciation of Nonno’s verses, is how risibly their iambic quadrimeter resembles Lewis Carroll’s How doth the little crocodile improve his shining tail, itself a parody of Isaac Watts’s didactic poems for children, How doth the little busy bee improve each shining hour. 

Did Tennessee Williams nod, we wonder, when putting Nonno’s words on the ancient poet’s lips, or was the triumph of Nonno’s completion of his poem moments before his death an ironic hollow victory (by the playwright) over the pathetic fallacy? 

How differently, though, these absurd echoes of the pedagogic homily could have been resolved with the merest tweaks.

                    So calmly sure, the olive branch.

                    So calmly sure, the olive branch
                    observes the sky begin to blanch
                    without a cry, without a prayer
                    with no betrayal of despair.

                    Some time while light obscures the tree
                    the zenith of its life will be
                    gone past forever and from thence
                    a second history will commence . . .

•

A Metrical Duel . . . Cyrano de Bergerac.

Of course, this lietmotif of the genesis of a poem emergent from dramatic action has a recognised precursor in Cyrano de Bergerac and his celebrated metrical duel :

                    Cyrano: ‘While we fence, presto! all extempore I will compose a 
                    ballade . . . Three eight-versed couplets. . . And an envoi of four lines . . . 
                    I'll make one while we fight; and touch you at the final line . . . 
                    (the refrain) . . .  À la fin de l’envoi, je touche!’

Elegiac verses evoking Nabokov’s lost homeland.

To my mind, however (within, of course, the delimited horizons of my own reading), only one poet – an incomparable master of two languages – has evoked with nigh sorcerous alchemy the process of a poem’s gestation as a parable of the eternal émigré’s homesickness of the dispossessed. 

Many critics consider Vladimir Nabokov’s novel The Gift (1935-1937) as the masterpiece most faithful to the ‘local consciousness’ of his genius as a young man in exile on the brink of world recognition. It is also regarded as the crowning achievement of the first phase of his literary career and the virtuoso swansong of those novels he wrote in Russian.

A reimagining of Nabokov’s own life in Berlin (1922-1937), The Gift tells of a young Russian poet, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, and of his growth as an exiled writer following his family’s flight from the Bolshevik Revolution. 

I will conclude, with veneration, by quoting those supersensory passages that chart with astonishing clear-sightedness the evolution of his elegiac verses evoking his lost homeland . . . and that movingly convey the paradoxically ineffable rapture of a writer in the moment of triumphant expression.

Early Snow by
Konstantin Yakovlevich Kryzhitsky (1858-1911) 

. . . Fyodor began pacing the side-walk to the corner and back. The street was echoic and completely empty. High above it milk-white lamps were suspended, each on its own transverse wire; beneath the closest one a ghostly circle swung with the breeze across the wet asphalt. And this swinging motion, which had no apparent relation to him, with a sonorous tambourine-like sound nevertheless nudged something off the brink of his soul where that something had been resting, and now, no longer with the former distant call but reverberating loudly and close by, rang out ‘Thank you, my land, for your remotest . . .’ and immediately, on a returning wave, ‘most cruel mist my thanks are due. . . .’ And again, flying off in search of an answer: ‘. . . by you unnoticed. . . .’ He was somnambulistically talking to himself as he paced a nonexistent sidewalk; his feet were guided by local consciousness, while the principal Fyodor Konstantinovich, and in fact the only Fyodor Konstantinovich that mattered, was already peering into the next shadowy strophe, which was swinging some yards away and which was destined to resolve itself in a yet-unknown but specifically promised harmony. ‘Thank you, my land . . .’ he began again, aloud, gathering momentum afresh, but suddenly the sidewalk turned back to stone under his feet, everything around him began speaking at once, and, instantly sobered, he hurried to the door of his house, for now there was a light behind it. 

. . . 

A moment later, in bed, just as his thoughts had begun to settle down for the night and his heart to sink in the snow of slumber (he always had palpitations when falling asleep), Fyodor ventured imprudently to repeat to himself the unfinished poem—simply to enjoy it once more before the separation by sleep; but he was weak, and it was strong, twitching with avid life, so that in a moment it had conquered him, covered his skin with goose pimples, filled his head with a heavenly buzz, and so he again turned on the light, lit a cigarette, and lying supine, the sheet pulled up to his chin and his feet protruding, like Antokolski's Socrates (one toe lost to Lugano’s damp), abandoned himself to all the demands of inspiration. This was a conversation with a thousand interlocutors, only one of whom was genuine, and this genuine one must be caught and kept within hearing distance. How difficult this is, and how wonderful. . . . And in these talks between tamtambles, tamtam my spirit hardly knows. . . .             After some three hours of concentration and ardour dangerous to life, he finally cleared up the whole thing, to the last word, and decided that tomorrow he would write it down. In parting with it he tried reciting softly the good, warm, farm-fresh lines: 

                                             Thank you, my land; for your remotest 
                                             Most cruel mist my thanks are due. 
                                             By you possessed, by you unnoticed, 
                                             Unto myself I speak of you. 
                                             And in these talks between somnambules 
                                             My inmost being hardly knows 
                                             If it’s my demency that rambles 
                                             Or your own melody that grows. 

                                             Благодарю тебя, отчизна,
                                             за злую даль благодарю!
                                             Тобою полн, тобой не признан,
                                             я сам с собою говорю.
                                             И в разговоре каждой ночи
                                             сама душа не разберет,
                                             мое ль безумие бормочет,
                                             твоя ли музыка растет . . .


According to a number of critics, this poem expresses Nabokov’s own yearning for wider cultural recognition while appreciating the inestimable ‘gift’ bestowed on him by his homeland; that is: his phenomenal memory of the lost domain that was imperial Russia as refashioned and restored by the unique perceptions granted him by his native Russian identity.

*Apparently, the written version of this poem in the original play used an ‘Orange Branch’ rather than the ‘Olive Branch’ included in the movie version; thus: ‘How Calmly Does the Orange Branch’.

•

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

To Have and Have Not.

I was SO pleased to have a text of mine published this year in the Winter issue of Ambit, particularly as I feared its subject was contentious: the sickly aesthetic of Lewis Carroll. Anyhow, the piece was published free of any censorious hand ( A Bad Case : The Unexplained Growing Pains of Elise von Alpenberg ), prompting a deal of private correspondence in which I questioned those assumptions that accept there is a classical economy expressed by Carroll’s prose, a feature many would expect of an Oxford logician. 

Mind you, my misgivings are more to do with the sensibilities of an offended preciosity that few would indulge, for my contention is that, though the prose of Alice has, yes, a marvelous colloquial simplicity, it's disappointing to find speech like, 'Oh dear! I'd nearly forgotten that I've got to grow up again!'  

I would have thought that a logician would have retained the perfect-tense auxiliary verb HAVE and dispensed with the past participle of the verb GET. The sort of double verbing Carroll employs with his irritating auxiliary+verb clusters lacks the crystal clarity one would have expected from an Euclidean geometrist and syllogistic rationalist.

 My tender ear would prefer:

 'Oh dear! I'd nearly forgotten that I have to grow up again!'

However, an august grammarian (one the augustest) responds to demolish my theory.

He says: ' "I have got an idea" has a tense perfect-tense auxiliary verb HAVE followed by the past participle of the verb GET, with a slightly idiomatic meaning: normally "I have VERBed" is the perfect tense of "I VERB", and refers to something in the past seen from a present reference point and with present relevance; but "have got X" simply means "possess X". '

How elegantly put!

He goes on: 'English is loaded with auxiliary + verb sequences with slightly idiomatic meanings (i.e., meanings not fully predictable from the usual meanings of the words used) ... Nothing wrong with them, nothing surprising about them, nothing "doubled".'

Mmm. Nothing doubled, eh?  Still not entirely sure about that.