Great Dictators: Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Barbara Cartland, Edgar Wallace and Co.

I have often thought that there must exist any number of recordings gathering dust made by those ‘great dictators’, the famous novelists over the past century or so who advanced their craft beyond dependence on stenographers by speaking directly to phonograph, dictaphone or plastic disc.

As I noted in my remarks on the Napoleonic Henry James, the ‘Master’, due to rheumatism of the wrist, relied on ‘typewriters’, as shorthand typists were called circa 1900. Similarly, Joseph Conrad.

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/fruits-sec-and-napoleon-of-over.html

How far this vivâ-voce approach to prose conditions a writer’s style is a question that exercises many academics, particularly in the case of James and his tortured parentheses, described by one contemporary critic as ‘phraseologic stress’. Discerning criticism of his times disparaged James’s overcultivation of the parenthetical exposition, suspecting its origin lay in the hesitancies of dictation, a prose manner  that compels the reader ‘to leap the five-barred gates of his parentheses in a game of verbal hide-and-seek’ to keep the writer’s meaning in sight.

In this regard, James’s shunning  of the straightforward was noted by contemporary novelist Mrs Humphry Ward:

‘Personally, I regret that, from What Maisie Knew onward, he adopted the method of dictation. A mind so teeming, and an art so flexible, were surely the better for the slight curb imposed by the physical toil of writing. I remember how and when we first discussed the pros and cons of dictation ... he was then enchanted by the endless vistas of work and achievement which the new method seemed to open out. And indeed it is plain that he produced more with it than he could have produced without it ... Still, the diffuseness and over-elaboration which were the natural snares of his astonishing gifts were encouraged rather than checked by the new method ...’

(Incidentally, Aldous Huxley was the nephew of Mrs. Humphry Ward, whom he described as his ‘ literary godmother’. ‘I used to have long talks with her about writing; she gave me no end of sound advice. She was a very sound writer herself, rolled off her plots like sections of macadamized road. She had a curious practice: every time she started work on a new novel, she read Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau.’ )

So the jury is still out, it seems, when a verdict is demanded on the merits of dictation.

The roll call of the great dictators is long (Dostoevsky, Hardy, James, Milton, Scott, Stendhal, may be mentioned, together with Barbara Cartland) and many of the names will prompt loyal readers to return to consult the texts in attempts to find the nigh invisible seam between authorial longhand and the mechanical transcription of the author’s voice or dependency on a literary amanuensis.

Under such critical scrutiny, it seems, literary works are reweighed to determine where a writer’s distinctive style remains unalloyed, and where it is debased by oratorical flourishes.

That reliance on dictation can give rise to mockery of an author is confirmed by the following anecdote:

Famously, a visitor to the home of Edgar Wallace observed him dictate a novel in the course of one weekend. It became a standing joke that if someone telephoned Edgar and was told he was writing a novel, they would promptly reply, ‘I'll wait!’

PS. I could not find a suitable photo of one of my great dictators so here is another Edgar ... Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1935 dictating one of his books.

See also:
Miss Emily Dickinson Communes with the Great Dictator Mr John Milton . . .
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/10/miss-emily-dickinson-communes-with.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   

Le gérondif d’un fruit sec.

That the writer looking for wriggle-room when attempting to compare the incomparable invariably finds a lexicon-defying escape hatch in the gerund was borne in on me on a further reading of George Saintsbury’s Scrap Books (I now have the set of three). 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/fruits-sec-and-napoleon-of-over.html 

As has been cogently observed by grammarians, as soon as we add a definite or indefinite article to what we regard as a gerund – whether singular or plural – we automatically transform its verbal sense into a verbal noun.

So clearly we hear the scream of a gerund when Hannibal Lecter says to Clarice Starling, ‘You still wake up sometimes, don't you? You wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the lambs.’ 

Or our ears are seduced by the art of a master prosodist in Poe’s gerunding of ‘And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming . . .’

Or see . . .

‘At the end of the first year arrived . . . what was called “The Speaking,” when certain boys recited verses written by themselves . . .’ (From A Memoir of Schooldays by Sir Charles Lyell Kt FRS. )

 

The Pernickity.

But do we hear the scream of a gerund-like adjectival noun when George Saintsbury, in comparing the incomparable, writes: ‘Chocolate-boxity is after all better than Cubism.’ (?)

There’s a hidden definite article here, I suggest, cf. ‘... the pernickity and the fashionable ...’ from the Preface to The Four Gospels in Braid Scots - William A Smith (1901)

Thatlessness, Redundancy, Probability and Glitchiness.

A lawyer, a specialist in Shipping and Transport, wrote to me recently, pointing out there are  precedents in Marine Law being cited and discussed in relation to the case of the Costa Concordia tragedy. The bulletin was littered with redundant that’s, which obscured the legalese and what turned out to be an extraordinarily subtle argument.

Here, I have taken the liberty of editing the main argument by reducing six that’s to three.

It was argued by the First Claimant in the ‘Saint Jacques II’ that, as a matter of logic, the more times the First Claimant had navigated contrary to the separation scheme, the less there was any or real prospect of inferring that he had actual knowledge when he set the course on the day in question that a collision would probably result.

So here we see, ‘as a matter of logic’, a probability argument deployed in Maritime Law.  In this case, the more an incorrect thing is done without error the greater the expectation that similar illegal manoeuvres will be free of accident.

In practically the same post came intelligence of the development of randomised software algorithms whereby inexactness, if introduced into an ‘adder’ electronic chip, can yield computationally faster, more effective operations that are cheaper, because they are more energy-efficient.

What does the fate of the Costa Concordia have to do with Probability Theory applied to an electronic chip?

As the electronics guru makes clear, inexactness using probabilistic computation provides an opportunity to take ‘a more relaxed approach to what is correct.’

The results of processors that are ‘glitchy’ and reproduce errors might not be of the same quality as those that are the products of exact computing, free of randomness, but ‘background imperfections’ will not be important if the deviation from accuracy is of a low order.

However, let it be said, these considerations as to the definition of correctitude surely have no place in any examination of navigational contrariness when reliance is placed on probabilistic outcomes.

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.

 

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.