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.

 

A Way of Seeing: Ronald Searle

Having only this evening viewed a truly remarkable (and sobering) documentary on BBC2 TV, The Fall of Singapore: The Great Betrayal, I was reminded of the recent death of that delightful and much admired satirical artist, Ronald Searle.

He was stationed in Singapore when it fell to the Japanese, and he was imprisoned first in Changi Jail and then taken as a slave labourer on the infamous Siam-Burma Death Railway. 

It is not bad taste, I’m convinced, to present this mordant poésie trouvée as a tribute to a great honorary Frenchman, since it is in his own words.

A Way of Seeing.

‘My friends and I,
we all signed up together,’
he recalled. ‘Basically
all the people we loved and knew,
and grew up with, simply
became fertiliser
for the nearest bamboo.’

Ronald Searle*

*Quoted verbatim from the Daily Telegraph obituary column, 3 January 2012.  Ronald Searle, acclaimed as one of the world's greatest satirical artists, died 30 December 2011, aged 91.

Mangled Frankenstein: the Perils of the e-Text.

In four years’ time (2016) I shall be ready to commemorate the bicentennial of the birth of Frankenstein, when I intend to explode the myth of his haunting monster’s origins by publishing my own account of its true inspiration, a source unsuspected by my fellow mythologists. 

See:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/maimed-hero-frankenstein-exhumed-tragic.html

 I was reminded of these pending studies when recently encountering any number of misspellings and linguistic errors in a document scanned and converted to digital text by Optical Character Recognition.

The undue reliance placed on OCR and web-based texts is a concern that calls to mind the mangling of Mary Shelley’s classic text six years’ ago in a broadcast production of the drama. 

In that particular dramatization I was appalled to hear an actress seemingly quote Mary’s own exegetical introduction to Frankenstein:

‘Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endured with vital warmth.’

Of course, the true text should read (not ‘endured’) ‘... endued with vital warmth.’

(ENDUED = invested with.)

That this error was perpetuated was due, I fear, to the all-too-common failure today to consult the PRINTED TEXT and to placing reliance on the Web or remotely scanned texts.

MORAL: To remind us of the wisdom of scholarly engagement with a palpable text, here is a reference to the frontispiece of the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, published by Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, London. 

‘They All Ought to be Hung’: a Minor Spat.

Talking of Roger Casement being ‘hanged on a comma’, I am reminded of my recent spat with an admired American translator from the French of a notable 20th Century authoress.

I had mildly disputed her translation of the French novelist (‘...both of them had been arrested and hung’) when I asked: ‘Did the authoress intend to convey the men were “hung” like game-birds to soften the flesh; or “hanged” until they were dead, in the customary usage of that participle?’

I had also asked (re. ‘... the heat in the church had made me nauseous ...’): ‘Did the authoress intend the narrator to convey that he, himself, caused nausea in others, i.e. a dose of Christianity had caused him to become offensive by his own odour?’

The eminent translator’s reply? ‘The distinctions you questioned are actually a matter of British or US English. Hanged (British) and hung (US) are synonymous. When a person is nauseous, he feels sick; when nauseated, something else makes him feel sick.’

Apparently, this American scholar studied at the Sam Goldwyn School of English.

As Dorothy Parker (a celebrated American, I believe) states in the Paris Review (Summer 1956):

‘Sam Goldwyn said, “How’m I gonna do decent pictures when all my good writers are in jail?” Then he added, the infallible Goldwyn, “Don't misunderstand me, they all ought to be hung.” Mr. Goldwyn didn’t know about “hanged.” ’

 

Oh well. It seems one person in America knows about “hanged”.

 

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.