A Panegyric on a Junoesque Colossus : Finishing School for Versifiers (Part 6)

                           Are you not weary of ardent ways,
                           Lure of the fallen seraphim?
                           Tell no more of enchanted days.

                           Your eyes have set man’s heart ablaze
                           And you have had your will of him.
                           Are you not weary of ardent ways?

                           Above the flame the smoke of praise
                           Goes up from ocean rim to rim.
                           Tell no more of enchanted days.

                           Our broken cries and mournful lays
                           Rise in one eucharistic hymn.
                           Are you not weary of ardent ways?

                           While sacrificial hands upraise
                           The chalice flowing to the brim,
                           Tell no more of enchanted days.

                           And still you hold our longing gaze
                           With languorous grace, divine of limb.
                           Are you not weary of ardent ways?
                           Tell no more of enchanted days.

‘With languorous look and lavish limb!’ (?)

Yes, you’re right, of course, the antepenultimate line that James Joyce wrote (aged 18 years?), in his Villanelle of the Temptress, was, indeed, ‘With languorous look and lavish limb!’; an infelicity that jars, especially with calorie-counting readers expecting his aesthetic to match a more archetypal Hellenic ideal of beauty.

In other words, the Muse that young Joyce intended to invoke was, we must believe, surely not a divinity in the image of a prehistoric earth-mother-goddess with bloated hips whose over-burdened flesh of loose corpulence resembles layers of molten candle wax. Or did he mean by ‘lavish limb’ to advert to a certain ‘largeness of gesture’, which for some is held to be a defining characteristic of Irishness?

Brazen tweaks.
Whatever the case, the liberties I have taken with the verse to mitigate my own obsessive-compulsive neuroses are not excessively brazen when you consider the immaturity of the celebrated versifier and, perhaps, Joyce’s conscious intention to mock his own nascent counter-cultural revaluation since his villanelle appears in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published more than a decade later (1915), following the passage where Stephen Dedalus (James Joyce’s literary alter ego) propounds his modernist aesthetic philosophy.

His mature revisionism we must assume would have shunned such classic prosodic forms as the villanelle, as indeed such swooning fin de siècle Swinburnian accentual tics as Alliteration and the Parallel Syntax to be found in the echoes of contiguous phrases (ardent ways/enchanted days), which I have attempted to replicate in longing gaze/languorous grace.

Repeat offender.

One further transgression recorded in this Discipline Report from my Bowdler Correctional Facility should be mentioned: the reduplication of the adjectival participle -ing (sacrificing hands upraise/The chalice flowing) within the span of one sentence. For the perpetration of this ill-advised inelegance the perp has received counselling under new measures for improvement (i.e. the change from sacrificing to sacrificial is deservedly an advance towards reformation). 

It is true that Joyce’s fellow countryman, Yeats (whom he venerated), regarded the younger poet’s lyrics as somewhat clichéd and a ‘little thin’ though undoubtedly worthy in their command of poetic form.

As I have commented elsewhere, Aldous Huxley remarks in an iconoclastic vein: ‘There are slightly reckless good poets, and there are good poets who, at times, are extremely reckless . . .’ He then cites the conclusion of Yeats’s Byzantium to illustrate the ‘recklessness’ of his proposition: ‘That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.’

It follows, then, that the callow verses of Yeats’s disciple should be similarly held to account as, even, a species of kitsch. ‘And still you hold our longing gaze/With languorous look and lavish limb!’

Is this, we wonder, the moment when the gong-tormented tin-eared versifier is called out for an audacious musical effect that does not quite ‘come off’, as our idiom bluntly has it. I welcome your views . . . Oh! Is that the bell?

Well, never mind. Class dismissed.

                                                   •

See also:

All that apart.
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2018/09/all-that-apart.html

Joseph Conrad’s Amazonian Warrioresses
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2014/03/joseph-conrads-amazonian-warrioresses.html

Henry James and Conrad’s Junoesque Women
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2014/03/secret-sharers-henry-james-and-joseph.html

See also Re-evaluated Elizabeth Bishop (a Villanelle):

Finishing School for Versifiers (part 1)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/catechisms-and-cliche-fatuous-minds.html

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)

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/12/finishing-school-for-versifiers-part-3.html

Finishing School for Versifiers (part 4)

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2017/02/finishing-school-for-versifiers-part-4.html

Finishing School for Versifiers (part 5)

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2017/03/did-someone-call-for-recitation.html

Finishing School for Versifiers (part 7)

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2023/09/tyro-poets-eton-v-marlborough-finishing.html 

Fruits secs and the Napoleon of Over-Stippled Prose

A recent fossicking in a rummage sale at a Cambridge country house brought to light a rare volume by that scourge of poetastry, eminent francophile, and most donnish of philographers, George Saintsbury: his recondite Scrap Book of 1922.

His manner is dry. Extra Dry. His phrasing is convoluted with very often qualifying clauses further qualified by supplementary clauses before the subject of the sentence has been introduced, a practice that makes one’s head hurt.*

But never mind these incidental torments, Saintsbury is prescient and eloquent in his appreciation of Swinburne as the exemplar of Matter and Form, perfectly expressed in the poet’s ‘rush and roar’ of ‘volleying anapaests’ and the ‘rocketing soar’ of that masterpiece, a Song in Time of Revolution.

As to Saintsbury’s own views on criticism as a vocation, he writes: ‘Criticism is the result of the reaction of the processes of one mind on the products of another.’  The critic is to be considered, chemically, purely as a ‘reactant’ and he, Saintsbury, complains that ‘in the whole preceding history of criticism’ the mischief of prejudgement has prevailed, with critics ‘looking for certain pieces anticipated, not finding them, and judging accordingly.’

Well. My chemical reaction to Mr. Saintsbury’s tortuous 19th Century prose has been more a muted whimper than an outburst, for, regardless of my first impulse to recoil from over-ornateness, I find myself respecting the subtlety of thought that can introduce secondary shades of qualifications into such a recollection as this: ‘...a more delightful place than it then was I have seldom known.’

From his Scrapbook I can quote a no more representative fragment of Saintsbury’s dense prose than this remark: ‘There is no more mischievous class of human beings than a dissatisfied intelligentsia – no more pitiable or worthless one than a congregation of fruits secs.’

Here, surely, Saintsbury pierces to the root the discontent of a writer like Henry James, his exact contemporary, who famously lamented that both critics and the reading public failed to understand the modernity of his highly wrought prose technique, a matter of regret that never ceased to pain him.

Yet can one wonder at this exasperation with Jamesian mannerisms – the clotted adverbs, the finicky ramblings, the quaint syntax, the quibbling asides, the over-stippled effects – when even one of James’s later critics (Clara MacIntyre in 1912) could identify ‘such a sentence as “with the sense, moreover, of what he saw her see he had the sense of what she saw him” [as] not only hopelessly obscure; it seems grammatically incomplete.’ (The Golden Bowl, Chapter VIII.)

I suppose that I, too, like Clara, can quite easily take against this archetype of the Omniscient Narrator who fixedly intercepts each fleeting glance and counts each breath and flutter of heart and eyelid, if only because we mortals lack the infinite idle hours required to read these orotund ledgers of emotions encyclopedically itemised by a sedentary recording angel.

If this seems glib, please recognise here my veneration for a writer who, on his death bed, even in delirium, could yet compose perfectly measured and cadenced sentences.

Here, for your appreciation, is Henry James’s last dictation, dictated in delirium in 1915, weeks before his death. It's known as the ‘Napoleon** fragment’ or ‘Bonaparte letter’. As to its content, Henry may have thought he was writing to his brother William and his sister-in-law Alice. William had died six years before, but Henry probably thought of him as alive, and – significantly for an Omniscient Narrator – he may have seen him in his confused mind in the guise of Napoleon’s brother.

Dear and Most Esteemed Brother and Sister,

I call your attention to the precious enclosed transcripts of plans and designs for the decoration of certain apartments of the palaces, here, of the Louvre and the Tuileries, which you will find addressed in detail to artists and workmen who are to take them in hand. I commit them to your earnest care till the questions relating to this important work are fully settled. When that is the case I shall require of you further zeal and further taste. For the present the course is definitely marked out, and I beg you to let me know from stage to stage definitely how the scheme promises, and what results it may be held to inspire. It is, you will see, of a great scope, a majesty unsurpassed by any work of the kind yet undertaken in France. Please understand I regard these plans as fully developed and as having had my last consideration and look forward to no patchings nor perversions, and with no question of modifications either economic or aesthetic. This will be the case with all further projects of your affectionate NAPOLEONE

A Nightmare Courtroom Scene by Sir Max Beerbohm

Mr. Henry James subpoena’d, as psychological expert,

in a cause célèbre (1908).

Cross-examining counsel: ‘Come, sir, I ask you a plain question,

and I expect a plain answer!’  

* The puzzle of a number of George Saintsbury’s labyrinthine sentences resides in the unorthodox ‘order of appearance’ of nouns and pronouns, when a noun as a natural ‘antecedent’ is placed in apposition after the pronoun, sometimes challenging a reader’s comprehension with a pronoun’s referent placed towards the end of a sentence, and too distant from its noun-ish stand-in for us to readily grasp.

Edgar Allan Poe is conditioned by metrical constraints to succumb to the same stylistic tic.

I could not love except where Death

Was mingling his with Beauty’s breath.

                                                                                               Edgar Allan Poe 1831

and, Tennyson, of course:

. . . long since a body was found,         

His who had given me life—O father! 

**Consider this: The narrator of The Aspern Papers (a.k.a, Henry James), states, ‘I have been looking at furnished rooms all over the place, and it seems impossible to find any [in Venice] with a garden attached. Naturally in a place like Venice gardens are rare.’ (The narrator finds himself the possessor of such a rare garden.) Then, reader, consider that Napoleon, himself, with Venice as his dominion, caused the Giardinetti Reali (the Royal Gardens) to be created for his own pleasure, since he too recognised the scarcity of such an oasis in the ‘City of Water’.

 

●

 

PS: Those Who Believe they Know the Way the World Wags

Such exhibitions of narcissistic grandiosity as the foregoing Jamesiana – and by a ‘Master’, after all – certainly give us pause for thought; a thought that might prompt the question: Is the Omniscient Narrator just another term for Incipient Megalomaniac?

One is reminded of the words of Nietzsche, in one of his letters from Turin to Strindberg, where the signatory for Nietzsche – as madness overtook him – was The Crucified One.

That Nietzsche considered himself not only the Godhead but a god-given World Conqueror is evinced by his final brief note to Strindberg in the last days of 1888, his Year Zero.

I am powerful enough to break the history of humanity into two parts. I have commanded a royal holiday at Rome. I wish to order a fusillade.

Caesar Nietzsche

●

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://www.amazon.co.uk/Sister-Morphine-Narratives-Community-Psychiatric/dp/1844712990

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

A Droll Macaw with a Lyric Tongue.

Isn’t it astonishing how the lyric voice can often spring from a fount of less than heroic proportions.

I’m thinking of Swinburne here.

For Maupassant, his first impressions were of a poet short and thin ‘with a pointed face, a hydrocephalous forehead, pigeon-chested, agitated by a trembling which affected his glass with St Vitus’ dance, and talking incessantly like a madman.’

Swinburne was abnormally short with narrow sloping shoulders and tiny hands and feet. His eyes were green, and his disproportionately large head was topped by a great aureole of bright red hair. His appearance, plus his habit of fluttering his hands and hopping about as he excitedly talked, provoked a contemporary to compare him to ‘a crimson macaw’ who was ‘quite original, wildly eccentric, astonishingly gifted and convulsingly droll.’

From this droll macaw issued sublime lyrics:
 

Vicisti, Galilaee. 

Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;

We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.

Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day;

But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May.

I think we may assume that in describing laurel as ‘green for a season’ Swinburne did not speak ‘horticulturally’, as Wilde would say, but employs a metonym for the short-lived crown of bay leaves awarded to an energetic young poet whose ‘green fuse’ is destined to fizzle out.

However, considered strictly horticulturally, what can one make of this celebrated quatrain?
 

Pale as the duskiest lily’s leaf or head,

Smooth-skinned and dark, with bare throat made to bite,

Too wan for blushing and too warm for white,

But perfect-coloured without white or red.

I think the Linnaean system of classification would be defeated, in this case, by observations more fervid than evidential.