Weekends and other addenda

As the world really is going to hell in a handcart, it's as well to note that this decline may have been going on for longer than we imagine. Listening to Tim Butcher talking about his book Blood River on Start the Week a few years ago, I was struck by something he said about how connected the Congo used to be with the rest of the world, how very civilized it was at the turn of the century. Pre-WWI, there was a perfectly good postal service, for instance. You could quite dependably get a letter to and from Britain, right the way up the river. While in Europe, again before WWI, Orwell claims in one of his 'As I Please' columns it was quite possible to travel across Europe without having to produce a passport (Russia was the exception). By 1937, the sanctity of the weekend (now what's that?) was under serious threat:

It's a masochistic pleasure to read newspapers, not every day but once a week, on Sunday, at the height of the weekend, which is one of the most important factors in politics since the beginning of the apocalypse. Whatever good and useful thoughts and decisions begin to burgeon in democratic statesmen on Friday afternoons have begun to evaporate by Saturday afternoon. But tyrants don't have weekends. God created the world in six days, and on the seventh He rested. Peaceful statemen rest on the sixth and seventh. For forty-eight hours they celebrate the Lord's day. They exceed the demands of religion, and they overdo the example set by the Almighty. It's a striking thing that dictators don't play golf. Their Sabbath is not reserved for sport but surprises. Golf plays a considerable responsibility for the end of the civilized world. Napoleon played chess, Prince Eugene played dominoes. Politicians have fewer good ideas on the greens than they once did on the much reviled "green baize". On Christmas 1916, I was at the front. Our divisional staff, the colonel, the company commander, were all getting ready for a well-deserved "breather". They had forgotten that our opponents, the Russians, celebreated Christmas two weeks later than we did. They took advantage of our peaceful celebrations and launched a surprise attack on us, distracted as we were by Christmas lights and pious thoughts. Two weeks later we duly retaliated, but without success, because they were waiting for us. It's a pity the democratic statemen didn't serve at the front, especially the Eastern Front. Dictators always postpone Christmas by a couple of weeks. Democrats are always sticklers for punctual Christmases and punctual Sundays, thanks to which they have been able to celebrate many glorious victories: on the golf course.

- Joseph Roth; from the final section 'From an Author's Diary' of The White Cities: Reports from France 1925-39

There's an anecdote in the final chapter of Something of Myself which provides comparable insight. The Times had received by Sunday mail some verses titled 'The Old Volunteer' purporting to be by Kipling, but which to his mind were such an obvious forgery,

[...] the contribution should not have deceived a messenger-boy. Ninthly and lastly, they were wholly unintelligible.

Human nature being what it is, The Times was much more annoyed with me than anyone else, though goodness knows - this, remember, was in '17 - I did not worry them about it, beyond hinting that the usual weekend English slackness, when no-one is in charge, had made the mess.

[...] On the heels of my modest disclaimer which appeared, none too conspicuously, in The Times, I [had] a letter in a chaffing vein about 'The Old Volunteer' from a non-Aryan who had never much appreciated me; and the handwriting of it, coupled with the subtlety of choosing a weekend (as the Hun had chosen August Bank Holiday of '14) for the work, plus the Oriental detachedness and insensitiveness of playing that sort of game in the heart of a life-and-death struggle, made me suspect him more than a little. He is now in Abraham's bosom, so I shall never know.

To conclude, Kipling received a visit from a detective, sent by The Times, who more or less suggested that Kipling really was the author not only of the verses but of the letter, sent from himself to himself, for the purposes of publicity. Kipling was so intrigued by the notion that he "forgot to defend my 'injured honour'. The thing had passed out of reason into the Higher Hysterics."

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Incidentally, that casual anti-Semitism of Kipling's recalls a line of dialogue from Chariots of Fire:

Master of Trinity: There goes your Semite, Hugh. A different God; a different mountain-top.

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A quantum of solace from the Father of Humanism himself, Petrarch:

"[...]all those who have been, are, or shall be, seized by this passionate and diseased craving to write."

Later in the same letter, Petrarch says, "The favour of humanity begins with the author's decease; the end of life is the beginning of glory." Or, as Gore Vidal observed pithily upon Truman Capote's death: "Good career move."

The Great Bloomsday Tortoise

Team Ulysses finally made it to the summit and have every reason to be proud of themselves. This was essentially a year-long online book group devoted to reading the world's second most unreadable English-language novel (actually the first, if you consider Finnegans Wake to be multi-lingual) at sixty pages a month, beginning on Bloomsday '09, ending a week last Wednesday, and hosted and led by the oft-linked-to dovegreyreader.

I left a partly encouraging, slightly patronising comment on the initial post, bestowing a handful of brief impressions of my own, as I'd begun Ulysses in December '08. I'd been working up to it for some time, having read The Odyssey in the Fagles translation at the beginning of the year, and then Dubliners and A Portrait. I was also dipping into Anthony Burgess's Here Comes Everybody, picked up second-hand a few years before, which is typically fluid, intelligent, enthusiastic.

By the time Team Ulysses began I had read around 200 pages. I toyed with the notion of taking part, but I had already been a member of a book group, and the joint-reading thing just doesn't ring my bell. (Anyway, I was well ahead of them.) Real life and other interests intervened, and when I got round to hefting Ulysses again, nearly a year had gone by. The hare had slept too long.

I have now completed 300 pages. It has gone back on the shelf. It won't be taken down again for a while. I have some sympathy with Roddy Doyle's invective against Ulysses, still more with his criticism of what he terms 'the Joyce industry', but most of all with something I heard him say in interview in 1996: at some point one has to accept that there are some books one is probably never going to read. He was talking about War and Peace (which he did in fact read, very quickly, when he was in his teens), but for me the most likely candidate is Ulysses. At some point I'll have a go at the final chapter, the famous Molly monologue, but I make no promises regarding the rest of it.

Now this is interesting, because that makes three key modernist novels I've been unable to finish: Ulysses, The Good Soldier, and That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana. Perhaps I'm too bound to narrative, skewered by time's arrow, but in my more frustrated moments it seems as though modernism is simply a licence for the writer not to bother telling a story - and Al Alvarez, who if I recall correctly thinks it was the last great movement in European literature and possibly its high point, can go suck a runny egg.

From Here Comes Everybody [1965]:

[Ulysses] is, in many ways, a precursor of the new wave in the novel, which is quite capable of asking us to treat a work of fiction as if it were a dictionary or an encyclopedia - something to be stepped into at any point we please, begun at the end and finished at the beginning, partly read or wholly read, a plot of space for free wandering rather than a temporal escalator. The 'Wandering Rocks' episode of Ulysses is a reminder that the whole book has a spatial scheme in which time has been divested of its bullying hurry-along authority, and this is reinforced by the knowledge that the final image is of a human body, presented piecemeal in its various organs. Time is the great enemy, and books like Ulysses and Finnegans Wake triumphantly trounce it. Time has to be put in its place.

On the other hand, one only has so much of it, particularly when one sees the chapters getting longer and longer, and Joyce's accretive writing method becoming more in need of a fierce edit. The two most attractive words in the quoted section above are 'partly read'. I accept that this is close to a contradiction of a recent post on the virtues of browsing, but whaddaya know? I am legion - I mean to say, I contain multitudes.

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I find one thing to say without equivocation in defence of Ulysses, and have said it before: one does get to know Bloom to a degree that one simply doesn't and can't with the characters in Dubliners. (Dubliners, I should say, is one of the very few books which I think demonstrates art in prose, as opposed to craft, and which I would urge other people to read without feeling I was being an unjustified nuisance.) Orwell says something of the same in his essay on Dickens:

You cannot hold an imaginary conversation with a Dickens character as you can with, say, Pierre Bezukhov. And this is not merely because of Tolstoy's greater seriousness, for there are also comic characters that you can imagine yourself talking to - Bloom, for instance [...]

Just so, and this is down to the space that a novel affords, and to the terrific expansion in technique beyond the standard tropes of realism which Joyce made use of in Dubliners, the famous 'stream-of-consciousness' which has been very interesting to see at work.

The more Bloom is exposed, the more one sees of his various aspects (or inspects, as so much of what we read is internal mumblings, half-finished thoughts and reflections, flashes of desire and surges of memory), the more one appreciates him. Among other things, he is much more sympathetic than any of the Dubliners: kind, tolerant, humble, fallible - in fact, the complete opposite to his Homeric counterpart, who is cunning, proud, violent, resourceful, respected - a king, not an advertising canvasser - and of course fiercely protective of his wife's virtue, whereas Bloom is a cuckold perfectly aware and accepting of his position.

According to the introduction by Jeri Johnson in the OWC edition of Ulysses, Joyce saw that the ancient heroic attributes could not be applied to modern urban life, and sought to present an everyman heroic in his ordinariness, his life being lived internally rather than through action. It's an interesting notion, particularly in the light of a criticism by Gore Vidal:

Until the last century the mainline of imaginative literature had always been stories of the gods, heroes, kings of a people. From Aeschylus to Dante to Shakespeare to Tolstoi, what went on in the palaces or on Olympus provided the main line of narrative in verse, prose, drama. [What about The Beggar's Opera? Tom Jones? Simplicissimus? But perhaps these are stops on a branch line.] I think it a pity that, as a character in Saul Bellow's Herzog remarks, somewhere around 1840 the novel fell into the quotidian, to which Professor Herzog irritably asks, So where was it standing before it fell? The answer was in myth or history or whatever narrative is back of us.

[From the introduction to Creation.]

I'm not convinced by either argument, but I see the merits of both. It is of course Joyce's right to rework the ancient myths for modernity (and Modernism), but with considerable relief I'm going back to Richard III.

A rounded education

Throughout All Quiet on the Western Front Remarque has his narrator make various bitter comparisons between the academic subjects he and his classmates spent so much time and effort studying at school - little different from the ones I studied myself - and the knowledge and skills they've been forced to acquire as soldiers.

We remember mighty little of all that rubbish. Anyway, it has never been the slightest use to us. At school nobody ever taught us how to light a cigarette in a storm of rain, nor how a fire could be made with wet wood - nor that it is best to stick a bayonet in the belly because there it doesn't get jammed, as it does in the ribs.

Something of the same sentiment is expressed in lines by Ezra Pound from the poem-sequence Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (which I have not read - I came across them quoted in another book):

There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilisation.

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
At the quick eyes gone under earth's lid.

For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books

and again, rather more convincingly to my mind, in the passage I've quoted before by Czeslaw Milosz, which begins

The work of human thought should withstand the test of brutal, naked reality. If it cannot, it is worthless...

It should be pointed out that All Quiet... passes this test admirably, and provides an answer to the question it tacitly poses, 'What use is a liberal education?' Plenty, if the result is a novel like this.

But to return to education...perhaps we should side-step the dilemma by trying something like this, from Gore Vidal's Creation:

In my time, school life was strenuous. We were up before dawn. We were taught to use every kind of weapon. We were even taught farming and husbandry as well as mathematics and music. We learned to read and even to write, if necessary. We were taught how to build not only bridges and fortresses but palaces too. We were given only one meager meal a day.
By the time a Persian noble is twenty, there is very little he cannot do for himself if he has to.

Although the catering smacks of Orwell's memoir of school days, of the slab of suet used to break the boys' appetites, of Lamb's account of Christ's Hospital, of Dotheboys Hall. Assuming this reflects research and not invention on Vidal's part, the practice of educating children through partial starvation clearly has a long pedigree.

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Some cheering news: Frederik Pohl, he of The Space Merchants, Gateway and Man Plus, is not only still alive (which I was surprised, impressed and oddly comforted to learn in 2008 when The Last Theorem was published, Arthur C. Clarke's last novel, for which Pohl was co-author) but he blogs. Pretty good it is, too - and it has got him a nomination for Best Fan Writer in the 2010 Hugos. I intend to read all of it.