Blind man, have mercy on me!

When I was about five or six, nothing produced a greater feeling of dread than a Mervyn Peake illustration of Blind Pew from acopy of Treasure Island given me when I was young. Peake’s Treasure Island illustrations use no outlines, but are composed of the finest etchings of pen, so that nothing is distinct but emerges as it were from a sea mist. The bullying, terrifying Pew himself seems woven from the very darkness around him, his blindness part of the fabric of the world in which he exists and seems a thing more powerful than sight.

The picture shows him moments before he gets trampled to death by a horse. He has taken a wrong turn, and the caption has him piteously pleading and wheedling -

‘Johnny, Black Dog, Dirk,’ and other names, ‘you won’t leave old Pew, mates – not old Pew?’

I still find it utterly hypnotic – no illustration or work of art has a more immediate hold over me.

This then was my introduction to Robert Louis Stevenson. Later I found out that those early compelling and precipitous chapters of Treasure Island were written almost as quickly as they are read; even to this day if I pick up the book I will find myself halfway through almost without realising it.

Since then I have read Kidnapped, its sequel Catriona, some of his essays and The New Arabian Nights. He is strangely impenetrable for one whose style is so open. He is like a window in a lit room on a darkened exterior, perfectly clear, yet impossible to see through. Was it just that his works were so simple that they invited no more than the most perfunctory analysis? The more I read, the less I felt this to be the case; The New Arabian Nights specifically present such a structure of mirrors and nesting boxes, and such a non-morbid preoccupation with violent death and a non-pious preoccupation with morality, while all rattling along in Stevenson’s typically brisk way, as to feel unique among things I have read.

This curiosity about his unmysterious but enigmatic writing has prompted me to go through his collected works from beginning to end – the Swanston edition.  I’ll draw my impressions as I go, and then after I’ve read it all, I’ll go into a biography and maybe some critical stuff to see how they match up. With writers who have this rather external, many-faceted gem-like appearance, opinions tend to differ quite a lot; as with Shakespeare, I can imagine people finding their own appearance in the lineaments of his writing.

It’s as well to set out what I know of him – a vaguely coherent congeries of facts, and half certainties -

• Scottish, Edinburgh (the midden out back and the clean rational streets in front, being a sort of psychological ‘explanation’ of Jekyll and Hyde I came across once)
• Father, a lighthouse designer?
• Suffered health problems (tuberculosis?), causing him to eventually go to Samoa (and die there?)
• First half of Treasure Island written very quickly (map of island came to him first? did he lose it as well?)
• Wyndham Lewis’s not at all hostile description of him in Time and Western Man as ‘the sedulous ape’, and an observation about his cartoon like characters.
• known as a fine essayist.
• Got wife to help him with second selection of New Arabian Nights, known as the Dynamiter – an attractive image, like Elizabeth Jane Howard and Kingsley Amis writing bits of each other’s books.

That I think is pretty much that,

Oh, did he live in Sussex for a bit? Or have I made that up?

Next: What I Discovered Behind the Doors of Volume 1…

Wait, don’t tell me… Who are the linesmen?

I first read ST Bindoff’s Tudor England as a teenager. I’d picked it up in a second-hand bookshop, which was hardly surprising as it is in my experience outdone only by the orange-jacketed Penguin edition of The Way of All Flesh for second-hand bookshop ubiquity.

The book is chiefly memorable for containing the following statement in its Prologue -

A Crown which had become a football was ceasing to be a referee, and a game which begins by doing without a referee runs a risk of finishing without a ball.

A statement in which my heart never ceases to rejoice.

How do people ever read Slavoj Zizek when there is such a thing as the crime and detection thriller?

The Times recently published a list of Top 50 Greatest Crime Writers. Great! A list! A chance to indulge in the sort of thought-free analysis only normally allowed down the pub! I will pause, leaning on this five-bar gate, and chew over it as my dog chews over a satisfying looking but in fact rather annoyingly shaped bone.

Arthur Machen and The Fall

An essay originally written for Fall fans who wanted to know a little bit more about Welsh supernatural writer Arthur Machen. As a consequence its intended reader is someone who knows a lot about The Fall but next to nothing about Machen and the life is interlarded with lyrics from Fall songs. That said the life, like the works, is not at all without interest. The place to go for further information is the Friends of Arthur Machen website, from which I have taken several of the photos.

Take the ayre? Recreation? Greatly delighted? What the suck?

A while ago I was reading a translation of Lodovico Guicciardini’s account of his travels in the Low Countries, Descrittione di Lodovico Guicciardini patritio fiorentino di tutti i Paesi Bassi altrimenti detti Germania inferiore (1567)—published in English in 1597 as The Description of the Low Countreys. It’s an informal and appealing work, of pleasantly varied interest, but does contain this remarkable entry on the Isle of Schellinck (incidentally I have silently altered the use of the ’long s’. It’s pretty funny in, say, early editions of Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici – ‘Di∫dain to ∫uck Divinity from the Flowers of Nature’ for instance – but all too confusing without a suitably tailored font and ligatures.)

This is an Ilande in which are some villages abounding with excellent good pastures, greate plentie of Cattell and excellent good fish, especialle Dog-fish, the taking wherof is verie strange and ridiculous, for you shall understand that the Ilande men disguise themselves like Beasts, and in that attire go to the Seaside at such times as they knowe that these fishes will come forth of the sea to take the ayre for their recreation upon the shore, then these diguised men fall and dauncing and leaping with the which sport the fishes being greatly delighted are by the means drawne far from the Sea, while in the meane time nets are pitched betweene the Sea and them, which being done, the dauncers throwe off there digsuised apparell and discovere themselves, wherewith the fishes being astonished, flee towards the Sea and are taken in the nets.

I find it difficult to adequately explain this passage, although three alternatives seem available -

1) He didn’t actually go to Schellinck, and despite sort of implying that he has seen this curious custom, was having his leg pulled (or he totally misunderstood what the person was saying – possible in an area with so many dialects. It is a pretty total misunderstanding though)

2) Something of the sort actually took place and, as it is clearly described as a custom, also worked.

3) He was on drugs.

Anyone who can enlighten me will, on application, be bought a pint.

Champagne Charlie

Evelyn Waugh’s travel writing as selected in When the Going was Good is exceptionally enjoyable. Rather than generally review its considerable merits however I wanted to look briefly at a single incident when he was on a Mediterranean cruise. In Athens after a late night out, Waugh visits a friend -

I told him that I had had a late night, drinking after the ball with some charming Norwegians, and felt a little shaken. He then made me this drink, which I commend to anyone in need of a wholesome and easily accessibly pick-me-up. he took a large tablet of beet sugar (an equivalent quantity of ordinary lump sugar does equally well) and soaked it in Angostura Bitters and then rolled it in Cayenne pepper. This he put into a large glass which he filled up with champagne. The excellences of this drink defy description. The sugar and Angostura enrich the wine and take away that slight acidity which renders even the best champagne slightly repugnant in the early morning. Each bubble as it rises to the surface carries with it a red grain of pepper, so that as one drinks one’s appetite is at once stimulated and gratified, heat and cold, fire and liquid, contending on one’s palate and alternating in the mastery of one’s sensations. I sipped this almost unendurably desirable drink and played with the artificial birds and musical boxes until Alastair was ready to come out.

When I read this I was very struck;

The Great Vortex

In theory lectures put on for the public are a great idea, in practice normal people like you and I are given cause to wonder what sort of person voluntarily attends a lecture that they don’t have to go to, or even in some cases pays to go to such an event, especially if the pubs are open. That’s not to say we should spend all our time catching the dew from the barmaid’s apron, it’s just by way of saying that you get a certain type at these things. (A type that would probably benefit from a drop of what does you good from time to time, truth be told.)

Still, as I went to one a week or so ago, the last laugh is on me. I did take the precaution of going to the pub first, feeling it was unwise to embark on such an undertaking without a Beatific Cushion of Alcohol to protect against any potential boredom. I also plead the excuse that the lecture was on Blast, that remarkable and explosive Vorticist periodical of two issues, whose creator Wyndham Lewis I have long been a fan of, while accepting that he is a ‘funny old stick’ as Mark E Smith once, with a considerable amount of cheek, called him. 

Some art critic called Richard Cork gave the lecture, held in a disconcertingly space age lecture theatre at the British Library (the windows seemed to reverse their polarity at one point, which had me briefly listening for the sound of bolts thudding shut across the doors and the hiss of escaping gas as an accompaniment).

As with most lectures on matters in which you’ve some sort of interest, this one seemed to consist of things I already knew, and things I didn’t really care about. CW Nevinson, for instance, produces nothing but indifference in me. His Vorticism and abstract stuff seems imaginatively lenten; conventional mutton dressed with radical mustard, the art end of what would become 20th century design. I see however that he’s credited with holding the first cocktail party in Britain, so props for that Charlie boy.

Corky also evidently has a bit of a pash for Bomberg, so he went on about him a bit, not entirely relevantly I felt.

Anything interesting?

Crap blurbs – part one of a series

Or in this case, crap quote from review used as part of blurb. On the back of Thomas Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon, is the following excerpt from Philip Hensher’s Spectator review -

Very grand and mad and beautiful… I can’t remember having reviewed a more original novel … and if America produces a novel to come near this marvellous, proliferating thing this decade, I promise to eat it.

While we’re on the subject, I lost my copy of Mason and Dixon a while ago. (On a camping trip? Is that possible?) So in order to check the Hensher quote, I popped into my local friendly stationers, also known as Waterstones, and located a copy. What the fuck have they done to the cover?

Same with all his books. If I can’t find an original paperback copy, I’m going to have to do what I did with the Penguin Classics version of Lucky Jim and also the Arden second series edition of Othello and rip the front cover off.

The latter depicted the noble Moor as a sort of bewildered chocolate cake and would have been incredibly offensive were it not for the memorable ineptitude of all the second series covers, composed by some group of high grade mental defectives calling themselves the…

This is very exciting. I couldn’t remember what they were called, so I went trawling on the internet, and via this slightly loopy question and answer, discovered that they were the rather sinister sounding Brotherhood of Ruralists. They’ve got their own website!

[this initially linked to the website, but some brainless fanny made it link to a pr0n site somehow - I've now taken the link down]

Further researches have led me to believe that one Graham Arnold is responsible for the Othello front cover. I still can’t find an image of it anywhere though, so it isn’t possible to pin the blame firmly on him yet. In the meantime his biographical page provides a fascinating insight into the life of an artist -

Moved to Shropshire, 1986
Falls from ladder - breaks shoulder, 1987
Visits Umbria (Italy), 1992

In between was presumably when he went metnal wit da choklit kake init.

Next week, Second Leg – Jocelyn Brooke reviews MY juvenile poetic output…

Jocelyn Brooke’s poetry…

Stop right there, a stray person accidentally reading this might say, why start with his poetry? Why start at the obscure end of an already slightly obscure figure?

Circumstance, I’m afraid. I’ve got his two volumes of poetry, December Spring (1946) and The Elements of Death (1952) next to me, and they’ve got to go back to the library soon.

As I’ve already said elsewhere, I’m not really very good at poetry, having a bit of a tin ear and tending to like stuff that people have shown me how to like, rather than having that natural feel for The Singing Line that enables the best critics to pick a single jewel out of a load of dross.

Still, we can only use the tools we’ve got…

(Rather long again, I’m afraid; my only excuse being that there’s very little on his poetry anywhere as far as I can tell, and while I’m hardly qualified to produce anything definitive, this may at least provide some grist to put to the mill of any future thoughts or discussions.)

A couple of things to read before returning to fantasies of Tommy gunning down your colleagues

Being at work isn’t really compatible with posting trenchant entries on literature; no brilliant 10,000 word close analysis of Wyndham Lewis’s Childermass today, you’ll be disappointed to learn. 

Just a quick nod, then, at a couple of things that should help distract from the agonising quotidian boredom and inutile hatred engendered by spreadsheets, and emails marked urgent.

Look! Journal to Stella on the internet! OK, so it’s a bit of a mess at the moment, but I’m sure it will all be cleaned up soon and, with the Diary of Samuel Pepys, should form an essential part of anyone’s morning reading. I usually find that entering their daily grind is a welcome distraction from mine.

Surely it can’t be just me that warms to Swift’s servant Patrick rather more than the Dean at times? All that whingeing.

And fuck M&S’s Christmas campaign; I’m shopping here from now on -