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. 

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.

•

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

●

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

Respectable Log-Rolling

At the beginning of January 2012, I wrote to the editor of Private Eye to comment on their traditional New Year log-rolling* feature, which contained in my opinion an unwarranted attack.

Dear Editor

I do take issue with your singling out of D.J. Taylor for pretentiousness in his review of Professor Coustillas's magisterial Life of George Gissing (Part 1) under your terms for inclusion within the 'obscurely highbrow' category of literary reviews for 2011 (PE no. 1304). Professor Coustillas is the chronicler most venerated by Gissingites and a plainer speaking critic of this 19th century master one could not find. Anyhow, the works of Gissing are anything but obscurely highbrow. It's because they are subtle dramas of social realism written in perfected plain English prose that they are so admired.
Etc.

My letter duly appeared in the January 25 2012 Issue 1306, and I felt I had staunchly defended Gissing's greatest champion against gross charges of high brow elitism, unwarranted in respect of both the biographer AND his subject.

I hasten to declare my interest.

I am a devoted disciple of Gissing, and admire his neutral prose style. And like Gissing, I don’t actively shun the passive voice or negative form of statements if they add variation to the texture of one’s prose.  I have no doubt that this attitude flouts today's convention, which holds that the active voice should dominate one’s writing style.

Funnily enough, shortly after shooting off my letter to PE, I found myself re-reading Morley Roberts on the idiosyncracies of his pal, Gissing.  Roberts writes: ‘On more than one occasion, as it was known that I was acquainted with Gissing, men asked me to write about him. I never did so without asking his permission. This happened once in 1895. He answered me: "What objection could I possibly have, unless it were that I should not like to hear you reviled for log-rolling? But it seems to me that you might well write an article which would incur no such charge; and indeed, by so doing, you would render me a very great service.” ’

So there it is. Log-rolling is quite respectable according to GG !

*Log-rolling = The exchanging of favours or praise, as among artists, critics, or academics.

A Surrealist’s Misfortune

Although the Daily Telegraph’s well-observed obituary (February 4, 2012) of Dorothea Tanning, the surrealist, pointed up her sense of ill-luck at having been consigned to exist as an artist only in the shadow of her husband, Max Ernst, her obituarist did not identity another misfortune, which was to be the appointed artist for the label of the 1965 Château Mouton Rothschild, variously described as possibly the worst vintage of the last two centuries, and giving off an odour of rotten garbage and stale mushrooms. It is considered by many connoisseurs to be undrinkable.