Proof that he is indeed the one who stamps on all ages -

What You Need - A severed foot on a plate

From 1485. This is presumably the period he met Dr Johann Faust (1480-1540-ish), as related in that piece of documentary journalism Dktr Faustus -

1

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Count Magnus, there you are. I should dearly like to see you.’

‘Like many solitary men,’ he writes, ‘I have a habit of talking to myself aloud; and, unlike some of the Greek and Latin particles, I do not expect an answer. Certainly, and perhaps fortunately in this case, there was neither voice nor any that regarded: only the woman who, I suppose, was cleaning up the church, dropped some metallic object on the floor, whose clang startled me.’

Despite their capacity to create mortal fear, the presentation of ghosts must be delicately handled. They are sensitive entities, with a particular aversion to being overdescribed, which leads many of them to avoid the light. We must tread carefully, so that we don’t frighten them.

MR James was a masterly handler of ghosts, an aspect of which is his skilful management of framing devices.

In The Mezzotint the narrative of horror takes place within the frame of the picture, and Dennistoun’s first sighting of the demon in Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook is in a lurid picture of it at the court of Solomon, in the scrapbook of the title (‘One remark is universally made by those to whom I have shown the picture: ‘It was drawn from the life.”).

The practice is not, of course, limited to actual pictures – that would be tediously unvarying and unimaginative – but extends itself across, among others, dolls houses, Punch and Judy shows (the wonderful, unregarded Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance), mazes and, naturally, dreams. Nested narratives of letters, diaries, travelogues and gossip also provide suitable settings for horrific apparition.

These are frequently the places where the initial stages of the ghost’s appearance occur, the way it first insinuates itself into the physical world. It is also the place where the ghost is most willing to show itself in its true form: ghosts in his stories are at their most vivid when they are furthest from the real world of the reader. They fragment the closer they approach us, to the point of imminence where they may be represented by just a claw, a mouth, a series of panicked or uncertain glimpses.

One of the effects of the framing device is to engage our belief: disbelief in what the picture frame contains does not affect our belief in the existence of the picture itself; we may not believe in fairies, but we believe in fairy stories; we should be surprised by the appearance of a vampire in our local pub, but we should not be surprised by the appearance of a vampire movie at our local cinema. At least this is what we naively believe - but the rules of the ghost story are the rules of the supernatural, and every ghost story writer knows what every ghost knows: frames aren’t containers, they are portals.

‘And then if you please, he switched on another slide, which showed a great mass of snakes, centipedes, and disgusting creatures with wings, and somehow or other he made it seems as if they were climbing out of the picture and getting in amongst the audience.

In fact the reader shares the characteristics of James’ academics, willed curiosity and innocent scepticism. We desire to read the story (willed curiosity), and we approach it as a story (innocent scepticism) but we should perhaps be more cautious, lest sharing these characteristics should lead us to share their fate – only one story, The Tractate Middoth, has anything like a happy ending.

In Count Magnus there are numerous frames, pictures within pictures, tales within tales.

The first voice is that of the antiquary narrator, who has come into possession of some papers by a Mr Wraxall, the second voice.

Mr Wraxall has gone on a tour of Sweden, and has stopped in the town of Råbäck, where is carrying out researches for a possible book. Here he encounters the history of Count Magnus, nearly three centuries dead, who went on a mysterious Black Pilgrimage to the city of Chorazin.

On making enquiries, the reluctant landlord of the inn that Wraxall is staying at agrees to tell him a tale that his grandfather told him, this is the third voice. We are now at three narrative removes from the room of the antiquary where we started, a picture within a picture within a picture. The tale he is told is of two men going to hunt at night in the recently dead Count’s forest, and, on their failure to return, the search for them the next morning -

“I heard one cry in the night, and I heard one laugh afterwards. If I cannot forget that , I shall not be able to sleep again.

‘So they went to the wood, and they found these men on the edge of the wood. Hans Thorbjorn was standing with his back against a tree, and all the time he was pushing with his hands – pushing something away from him which was not there. So he was not dead. And they lead him away, and took him to the house at Nykjoping, and he died before the winter; but he went on pushing with his hands. Also Anders Bjornsen was there; but he was dead. And I tell you this about Anders Bjornsen, that he was once a beautiful man, but now his face was not there, because the flesh of it was sucked away off the bones. You understand that?’

The next day Wraxall goes to the church and enters the mausoleum and finds the copper sarcophagus where the Count is buried, which has, round the edge, several engraved bands, ‘representing various scenes.’

One was a battle, with cannon belching out smoke, and walled towns, and troops of pikemen. Another showed an execution. In a third, among trees, was a man running at full speed, with flying hair and outstretched hands. After him followed a strange form; it would be hard to say whether the artist had intended it for a man, and was unable to give the requisite similitude, or whether it was intentionally made as monstrous as it looked. In view of the skill with which the rest of the drawing was done, Mr Wraxall felt inclined to adopt the latter idea. The figure was unduly short, and was for the most part muffled in a hooded garment which swept the ground. The only part of the form which projected from that shelter was not shaped like any hand or arm. Mr Wraxall compares it to the tentacle of a devil-fish, and continues: ‘On seeing this, I said to myself, “This, then, which is evidently an allegorical representation of some kind – a fiend pursuing a hunted soul – may be the origin of the Count Magnus and his mysterious companion. Let us see how the huntsman is pictured: doubtless it will be a demon blowing on his horn.” But, as it turned out, there was no such sensational figure, only the semblance of a cloaked man on a hillock, who stood leaning on a stick, and watching the hunt with an interest which the engraver had tried to express in his attitude.

Once again, the most vivid images of horrific implication are deeply interred within  the story, presented in a picture within a picture within a picture, like the triple padlocks that seal Count Magnus’s sarcophagus, although – Wraxall notes on his first visit – one has come asunder and lies on the floor…

2

Tonight, for the second time, I had entirely failed to notice where I was going (I had planned a private visit to the tomb-house to copy the epitaphs), when I suddenly, as it were, awoke to consciousness, and found myself (as before) turning in at the churchyard gate, and, I believe, singing or chanting some such words as, “Are you awake, Count Magnus? Are you asleep, Count Magnus?” and then something more which I have failed to recollect. It seemed to me that I must have been behaving in this nonsensical way for some time.’

[...]

‘I must have been wrong,’ he writes, ‘in saying that one of the padlocks of my Count’s sarcophagus was unfastened; I see tonight that two are loose.’

I said that ghosts do not like the light. This is because, although they have a fondness for apparition and animation, they do not like being seen. The eye is the sense organ of light, and is the vehicle of that reason that comes from observation, which we call science, and is the symbol of the movement that promotes that reason, the Enlightenment.

Ghosts never appear in well-lit laboratories, are notoriously chary of experimental conditions, in the light of science they become ‘phenomena’, their trappings bed sheets, paste-board masks, projections of psychological megrims and disorder. They may look unconvincing or gimcrack, even becoming subjects not of fear but (disastrously for their ability to frighten) of mockery, laughter and scorn.

The eye is also the most sedulously duplicitous of the sense organs, its world so detailed and convincing, so seemingly incapable of modification, that we call its representations reality. This is the world we exist in, and its light is the light by which we read. In order to have a successful ghost story, the ineluctable modality of the visual must be eluded, the rules of reason modified.

Or you can do what Rudyard Kipling did in The End of the Passage – take the very instruments of observational rationalism, the camera and the eye, and make them the vessels of the terror that they are supposed to dissolve, producing an ocular ghost story.

‘T’isn’t in medical science.’

‘What?’

‘Things in a dead man’s eye.’

The End of the Passage – Rudyard Kipling

Only a writer of Kipling’s genius could do this. He has the short-story writer’s knack of economy – suggesting experience and knowledge beyond what is described on the page.

His expertise in this area was honed by his early newspaper writing. His early stories, collected in Plain Tales from the Hills, inferred entire tales from scraps of society gossip, snatched market overhearings, cryptic glimpses of everyday Anglo-Indian life, and fitted them to a column-and-a-half of newsprint.

In a sense, The End of the Passage isn’t a ghost story at all - the only apparition is of someone still living;

Hummil turned on his heel to face the echoing desolation of his bungalow, and the first thing he saw standing in the verandah was the figure of himself.

Kipling implies (without ever describing or explaining) what Hummil sees in his mind, or I should say what he sees in his eye. A terrifying supernatural force is suggested without ever being described, in fact it is sealed within the organ of description itself.

The background is a cholera epidemic – and in a wonderful opening  (he was superb at atmospherics) Kipling sets the scene -

Four men, each entitled to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ sat at a table playing whist. The thermometer marked – for them – one hundred and one degrees of heat. The room was darkened till it was only just possible to distinguish the pips of the cards and the very white faces of the players. A tattered, rotten punkah of whitewashed calico was puddling the hot air and whining dolefully at each stroke. Outside lay gloom of a November day in London. There was neither sky, sun, nor horizon, – nothing but a brown purple haze of heat. It was as though the earth were dying of apoplexy.

Despite being an expert at the framing device (think of The Man Who Would Be King, or The Disturber of the Traffic)  Kipling uses none here. Possibly because, as he suggests at the beginning of another excellent supernatural story The Mark of the Beast,

East of Suez, some hold, the direct control of Providence ceases; Man being there handed over to the power of the Gods and Devils of Asia, and the Church of England Providence only exercising an occasional and modified supervision in the case of Englishmen.

The laws that govern spirits of the West do not hold true for the East. He has also, as can be seen in the opening paragraph, already cut the four men off from the light and laws of the outer world.

After the whist party has broken up, one of the group, Hummil, confesses to another, a doctor,  Spurstow, that he is losing his mind. Spurstow medicates him with morphine, which seems to help, and goes to attend to an outbreak of cholera in another district. That is the point at which Hummil turns to see the apparition of himself.

When they come back the following week they find Hummil in his bed.

The body lay on its back, hands clinched by the side, as Spurstow had seen it lying seven nights previously. In the staring eyes was written terror beyond the expression of any pen.

Spurstow asks another of the men, Mottram, to look into Hummil’s eyes.

Mottram leaned over his shoulder and looked intently.

‘I see nothing except some gray blurs in the pupil. There can be nothing there, you know.’

Despite Mottram’s insistence, Spurstow decides to take a photograph of the eyes with a Kodak camera, but destroys the pictures without showing them to anyone else.

‘It was impossible, of course. You needn’t look, Mottram. I’ve torn up the films. There was nothing there. It was impossible.’

‘That,’ said Lowndes, very distinctly, watching the shaking hand striving to relight the pipe, ‘is a damned lie.’

The eye is no longer the vessel of reason, and has become like the sarcophagus that contains Count Magnus, a vessel of mortal fear, unopenable, and sealed by more than padlocks.

3

‘You may have been a bit of a rascal in your time, Magnus,’ he was saying, ‘but for all that I should like to see you, or, rather -’

‘Just at that instant,’ he says, ‘I felt a blow on my foot. Hastily enough I drew it back, and something fell on the pavement with a clash…’

Although Denton Welch was not a ghost story writer, there is often a tang of the macabre about his writing, sometime more than a tang. Take this paragraph from a description of a night time walk in his masterpiece A Voice Through A Cloud -

After a few minutes I was able to force myself on; but now the landscape seemed to be taking on an ugly significance. I imagined that the vacant plots between the raw gardens and houses had probably been left desolate in superstitious fear, because of vile crimes committed there. Perhaps in the moonlight, over and over again, night after night, a little child’s atrocious murder would be re-enacted; or there would be ghost figures loping over the ground, arms outstretched greedily, white hair on the palms of the brown-pink hands. Their fingers would be webbed. Yellow fangs, hollow and rotten, would jut from their dripping jaws, and eyes, on fire with hate and lust, would be swimming and swirling as my head was swirling.

He did write, however one short story, called Ghosts (collected in A Last Sheaf) which is an ingenious variation on the technique of gradual revelation through multiple narratives. It consists of three supernatural experiences, each very different from the other.

The first is a description of a ghost story he wrote at school, which has Welch’s characteristic level of fetishized detail -

I panelled my imaginary room in pine and finished it with a heavy cornice. From a cracked punch-bowl came the faint scent of mildewed rose-leaves, and a hissing fire of green branches spat and danced on the scratched marble heath [sic - hearth?]. The hangings of the fantastically high bed were of rose madder damask, faded in parts to tawny, dried-blood colour, and they were so rotten that they had to be held together on a new foundation by countless lines of cross-sewing.

The ghost that appears to him in the middle of the night is ‘a beautiful woman, tall and sweeping and not young – ageless, like the queens in fairy tales.’

The story is read out in class, and goes down well, until the teacher gets to a phrase that Welch has taken from the Bible – ‘the hair of my flesh stood up.’ His schoolmates are not charitable:

Instantly laughter broke out all over the room and voices called out: “Oh, I say, Welch, do they really stand up?” “Oh Welch!”

Unwisely rushing to my own defence as a writer by referring them to my august source, I protested: ‘But it’s in the Bible! You can read it there.”

This started a second storm of laughter, groans and mockeries. I thought: “Let them laugh. Everything is ridiculous if you like to make it so.”

He remembers this first story when a second story is told him, while a guest at a friend’s house in Sussex. He is sitting shelling peas on a summer’s evening with another guest, a woman, who tells him of her visit to a large old house in the Midlands, where a remarkable ghost appears to her in the night -

…she was woken, just as I had been in my story; although it was not a beautiful woman that she saw, but a huge filmy egg, made out of mucus membrane and lighted from within. It floated slowly through the darkness until it was above her in the bed. She saw with horror then that the egg-shaped glow encased the face and shoulders of a man. The shoulders were naked and just below them the body dissolved into stringy, phosphorescent mucus. Round his head was a squirming halo of the same. The flesh was of an extraordinary ruddiness, and exaggeratedly tight, as if the image had been blown up with a bicycle-pump.

The young man was grinning at her, showing his white, animal teeth. On his forehead were hot brown curls and the needle points of his eyes bored into her.

Fascinated, she watched until it disappeared on the other side of the bed, then she lay still, wondering what it could be, until, most surprisingly, she fell asleep again.

The next morning she tells her hosts about the apparition and is told that ‘the image appeared in various parts of the house, not only in that room.’

Sometimes it sailed down the passages. The face and the shoulders were all that could ever be seen. They had no explanation to give for the appearance of the image, except a rather unconvincing tradition about a young man, a villain, and an ancestor of theirs.

Although as a whole Welch’s story is somewhat inconsequential at this stage, the way he has moved from the description of a conscious fiction at the beginning to a more documentary tale, all related in his typical unfeigned autobiographical voice, represents a novel, perhaps even counter-intuitive approach to the literary problem of conjuring ghosts.

A comparison of the two stories by Welch leads to an experience of intense revelation that retrospectively gives the whole story its force:

For a moment after the end of the story we went on shelling peas in silence. The pods, as they were ripped open, made a sucking noise, like mouths gasping for air. My mind was busy comparing the true experience with my invented one. I could think of nothing but ghosts; I was filled with the idea of them.

And jumping up restlessly, I left my companion, and the empty pods on the lawn; and I wandered a long way until I came to a black pool almost surrounded by tangled thickets. I knelt down and dipped my hand in the still water. My fingers were magnified into fat, curling grubs. Baring my arm, I stretched down till I felt rotting branches and twigs soft as horse’s noses. I pulled, and a mossy, peeling antler rose dripping from the pond. Delving still deeper I came to a pile of excrement and leaves, layer on layer, and limp and black as chow dogs’ tongues.

It was evening now, with the sun setting. I looked up at the turquoise sky, then down at the stirred-up water where black motes like pepper starred the pinkness of my tingling arm. From across the pool a dull blind window suddenly flashed back the dying fire of the sun, and a rush of birds streamed out above me. I saw the woodman’s ruined shelter of branches, and his pile of bark peelings turned now into a mass of dead mottled snakes.

Everything at that moment held a secret. Everything was haunted. But human eyes were not the right eyes, and my ears would never hear.

The three varied narratives are three keys to three padlocks, the unlocking of which brings about a sense of the imminent revelation of places and beings not normally seen by living eyes, here, in the lighted world.

…It was the third, the last of the three padlocks which had fastened the sarcophagus. I stooped to pick it up, and – Heaven is my witness that I am writing only the bare truth – before I had raised myself there was a sound of metal hinges creaking, and I distinctly saw the lid shifting upwards. I may have behaved like a coward, but I could not for my life stay for one moment. I was outside that dreadful building in less time than I can write – almost as quickly as I could have said – the words; and what frightens me yet more, I could not turn the key in the lock. As I sit here in my room noting these facts, I ask myself (it was not twenty minutes ago) whether that noise of creaking metal continued, and I cannot tell whether it did or not. I only know that there was something more than I have written that alarmed me, but whether it was sound or sight I am not able to remember. What is this that I have done?’

October 31st, 2009

There is a wonderful project over at Freaky Trigger – ongoing discussions of MR James’ stories, well worth taking a look at.

Ghosts and Scholars collects a lot of material in one place to do with MR James.

]]> http://theidiotandthedog.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/james-kipling-welch-three-ghost-stories-for-all-hallows-even/feed/ 2 fitzroycyclonic http://theidiotandthedog.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/jg-frazer-on-the-x-factor/ http://theidiotandthedog.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/jg-frazer-on-the-x-factor/#comments Sat, 24 Oct 2009 15:00:38 +0000 fitzroycyclonic http://theidiotandthedog.wordpress.com/?p=193 ]]>

When this bejewelled exquisite lounged through the streets playing on his flute, puffing at a cigar, and smelling at a nosegay, the people whom he met threw themselves on the earth before him and prayed to him with sighs and tears. Women came forth with children in their arms and presented them to him, saluting him as a god.

Uh oh, wait a sec -

…as the young man ascended the stairs he broke at every step one of the flutes on which he had played in the days of his glory. On reaching the summit he was seized and held down by the priests on his back upon a block of stone, while one of them cut open his breast, thrust his hand into the wound, and wrenching out his heart held it up in sacrifice to the sun. The body of the dead god was not, like the bodies of human victims, sent rolling down the steps of the temple, but was carried down to the foot, where the head was cut off and spitted on a pike.

I’m definitely going to this. I’ve long been a fan of Gaudier-Brzeska, initially coming to him through Pound and Wyndham Lewis. Likewise Epstein.

But most of all I’m looking forward to seeing Eric Gill’s designs and sculptures. There’s an article on him here. Whenever I walk past Broadcasting House, with Gill’s sculpture of Prospero and Ariel (see the photo accompanying the article) I’m reminded of the story, related by Simon Loxley in his Type: The Secret History of Letters:

The governors of the BBC, viewing the work from behind the tarpaulin, were startled by what they considered the extravagant dimensions of Ariel’s penis, and Gill was ordered to make a reduction.

I hadn’t realised, until I read the book, that Gill had been a pupil of Edward Johnston, the man who designed the London Underground typeface. Perhaps I should have done, the famous Gill Sans typeface closely resembles Johnston’s iconic creation.

Hey, it’s not all sans serif round here though – we are nothing if not bookish after all. David Kindersley was an apprentice to Eric Gill (to continue the genealogy) and in 1959, infuriated by the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation’s decision to go for a mixed case sans serif face for the signs on Britain’s expanding road system, produced his own MoT typeface.

[won't let me link to the example of his road sign, sadly - you can see it on the link below]

The one on the right will be the familiar one, as it is the one that the Ministry of Transport eventually went with. There’s an article on the kerfuffle here, part of an excellent general history of road signs.

No, come back, seriously, I’m a wow at parties.

I would question the statement in that piece that it was Kindersley’s evidence that was found to be suspect though. According to Loxley it was the Ministry that had cited the (apparently non-existant) German evidence, and the dubious Californian evidence (the dodgy dossier of the late ’50s – Suez had nothing on it).  Kindersley’s typeface was more legible on smaller signs, and to my eye anyway, much more attractive. Difficult to see from the picture above, but it had been carefully designed for maximum utility -

Few of the letters are consistent with each other in the places where you would expect them to be. The top crossbar on the F ends with an upper serif and a slightly flared lower edge, whereas the corresponding section of the E has a double serif; on the E it is flared. the crossbar of the T is slightly flared, but has no serifs. The angled strokes of the Y are fatter, then taper, whereas the strokes of the V are of consistent width. The top of angle of the N has a small serif; those of the M have none. The bottom of the vertical stroke of the R has one small serif on the left edge, nothing on the right, whereas on the P there is a small serif on the left edge and a large on the on the right.

Kindersley had designed the alphabet this way to create maximum distinctiveness between the characters; he wanted there to be no confusion between them when view from a distance.

It has a strongly British feel to it, weighty like old money, idiosyncratic and effective both in appearance and design, and would have reduced the size of the vast hoardings of directions that punctuate our roads. I wish they’d taken it up.

Kindersley married a very young wife late in his life, who survives him and carries on his work at the Cardozo-Kindersley workshop. They designed and executed the distinctive main gates at the British Library. Which, I think, brings us safely back to books, thankfully cocooned again from the world of fast cars and big willies.

I assume you were looking for a suitable cheese to have with a wine from the Guicciardini-Strozzi estate. If so, might I suggest a table pecorino? (NB: Not the hard, grating version, pecorino romano, which in its packaged supermarket form is disgusting.)

If, however, you were looking for mentions of cheese in the works of Lodovico Guicciardini, as I initially thought, then might I direct you to page 37 of the English translation (1593) of his Descrittione di [...] Paese Bassi?

England

Thence come Cloathes and carsayes [kerseys] of all sorts, and of them great aboundance, both fine and course [sic], Frises, fine wooll, excellent Saffron, but no great quantitie, Tinne, Lead, Sheep skins, Cony skins, and divers sorts of fine furres, lether, Beere, Cheese and other victuals, and Malmesie (malmsey) brought out of Candia into England.

page 61

The butter and cheese made in a year in Holland, amounteth to as much as the spice that is yearely brought into the Low countries out of Portugale, which is above a million of crownes.

Five villages in Holland, namely, Assendelft, Oostsane, Westsasne, Cromeine & Cromenierdiick, yeeld as much butter and cheese yearely, as amounteth to the valew of the Rhenish wine that is yearely brought to Dordrecht, which is a marvelous quantitie, for there is the Staple of the Rhenish wine.

page 65

In this towne there is kept yearlie in May, a marte of butter and Cheese, whereof there is so great quantitie brought unto this faire, that it is almost incredible, for it furnisheth not onlie thes Countreys, but also Spaine and Portugale.

Alcmair is a very rich towne, by reason that the countrey round about it, yeeldeth more plentie of butter and cheese, than any other place in Holland whatsoever.

page 66

Edam standeth neere the Zuiderzee. This towne is famous for the great number of shippes of all burdens that are builte in it, and the innumerable multitude of excellet good cheeses that are made in the countrey round it.

and page 71

To conclude, considering the great wealth that groweth to this Countrie [Holland] by cheese, butter, flesh, fish, foule, chickens, eggs, cattell, linen cloth, wollen cloth, turfe, and shipping, it may be called the Treasure house of all good thinges.

There, never let it be said that I do not go the extra mile to gain a potential reader, even to the extent of driving away everyone else.

Personally I found his account of amber farming along the north coast of far more interest:

Amber is a ioyce not of a tree, but of a stone which groweth like Corall in a Mountaine in the Northe Sea cleane covered with water and shunned by all Mariners at the least three Leagues for feare of wracke. The mountaine is reasonable large, and about 50. English yardes high, and when anie tempest ariseth in the North sea especiallie in September and December this Liquour by ye violence of the Sea is rent from the rocke & caste into divers Havens, & upon diverse Sea coastes both neere & far from this rich rocke where the people gather it, to the great commoditie of divers princes, namely the king of Sweden, the Duke of Pomerania, but especially the Duke of Prussia in whole Countrye the most of it is taken up. The people of the Countrie when the Sea rageth most, all naked leape into the Sea, upon the which first appeareth great store of weed, & after ye Amber, which being taken out of ye water hardeneth like to Corall, neither is this Amber founde else where, but in those Seas onlye.

I say this is all Guicciardini’s doing, but the presence of the translator Thomas Danett lies heavy on the text, concerned as he clearly was with conveying the information that LG had collected rather than any aspects of style, so that the reader is treated to interruptions like the following:

Heere the Author entereth into a discourse of Sea-men and Sea-women beeing fishes, yet proportioned in all parts like man and woman, whereof one being a female, was taken uppe at Haerlem, An.1403. and the other being a male, in Friesland, but within this 50.yeares, both the which lived many yeares, and fell to eate as wee doo, and were brought to civilitie, and taught to doo many workes and services: as for example the woman to spin, but they remained alwaies dumbe. Which strange accidents, though impertinent to our discourse of the Low countreys, yet I thought good briefly to touch, as well because Guicciardini himselfe discourseth thereof, as also because the like is written by divers other approved authors.

Must be true then.

Lodovico was the nephew of Francesco, statesman and historian (contemporary with Machiavelli), whose Maxims I pored through for mentions of cheese, confusing him with his nephew.

Now, the concept ‘machiavellian’ may represent “the first terror-stricken meeting of the England of the Elizabeth with the Italy of the late renaissance” (see Wyndham Lewis’ superb book of Shakespeare criticism The Lion and the Fox), but reading F. Guicciardini certainly does little to exorcise this stagey eyetalian bugaboo:

Never, from a desire to confer pleasure or to conciliate friends, refrain from doing what will gain you reputation.

Charming. I suppose Tony Blair might have done himself a service in reading Maxim 342, however:

I do not say that a ruler is never to imbue his hands in blood, but that he is not to do so without grave cause, and that in most instances he loses more than he gains by it. For not only does he offend those on whom he lays hands, but displeases many besides; and although he thus gets rid of some one enemy or obstacle, he does not thereby destroy the seed; so that others take their place, and often, as with the heads of Hydra, seven for one.

No cheese though.

Francesco Guicciardini

Who ate all the cheese?

How I hate this world. I would like to tear it apart with my own two hands if I could. I would like to dismantle the universe star by star, like a treeful of rotten fruit. Nor do I believe in progress.

Peter de Vries was an American humorist and writer of Dutch Calvinist extraction. Anthony Burgess called him ‘one of the great prose virtuosos of modern America’, Kingsley Amis said he was ‘the funniest serious writer to be found on either side of the Atlantic.’ Absurdly, he is now little known.

At times the pith and wit of his comic novels can to me feel slightly relentless. In The Blood of the Lamb however, this pith and wit is transformed into a biting wisdom. The book deals unsparingly with the limits of faith and the limits of doubt. And it does so without being at all pretentious because of the authority of its grief and the directness of its writing.

Brevity is here not just the soul of wit but the blade of tragedy; suffering is briefly dealt with and lasts as long as life. De Vries does not spare the reader with melodrama and he does not romanticise. It is all the more powerful because the bravery within the book’s covers is the bravery that we will all have to show to greater or lesser degrees in our own lives.

Its briefly lyrical moments are hard earned and are very painful and beautiful.  It’s one of the best books I have ever read and the only one I’ve read that’s made me cry, which is, if I may be dry about it, a testament to the care with which it is structured and the skill of the writing.

The clear-eyed sanity with which it is written is at times unbearable. If that comment seems slightly melodramatic itself, I would example the end of Bend, Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov, where the author relieves Adam Krug of his sanity in order to relieve him of his intolerable grief. Peter De Vries cannot, will not do this. Thus the unbearable is shown to be bearable, only by the fact that it is borne.

So The Blood of the Lamb is incredibly sad but it is also, remarkably, often funny. It will not, I suggest, make you depressed, or gloomy. This is because although I said the book deals with the limits of faith and doubt, this is not what it is about. Ultimately it is a hymn of praise, and a  memorial to its subject.

I was going through unposted posts the other day – detritus from my phase incommunicado. Most of them were gravely disappointing, but I did find this (I’ll get back to Stevenson-proper soon, onist injun) -

A hiatus in the Idiot and the Dog’s affairs has meant the ongoing peripatetic and trivial analysis of Stevenson has fallen by the wayside for the moment. However, offering something half-baked or jejune is better than offering nothing at all, just as if a job’s worth doing it’s worth doing as quickly as possible so we can all get down the pub. So:

In one of Stevenson’s letters (Vol 1 of the Mehew edition, Letter [can't now remember which letter - more evidence of my terrible notetaking - I'll find out, promise]) Stevenson finds himself in a railway carriage with an eccentric old man;

I addressed to him some remarks on the subject of the weather; but he appeared completely shut up by the novelty of my views on the subject, as he said no more till the end of our journey. By dwelling upon this subject, it seems that his mind, too weak to grapple with such subjects, became entirely deranged; for he suddenly began to talk aloud to himself and to snap his fingers, and to nod his head in an encouraging manner. At first I expected to be Mullered; but the journey ended too soon and I was rescued.

There is a footnote -

Franz Muller murdered Thomas Briggs in a London railways carriage in July 1864. He attempted to escape to America but was arrested on arrival in New York. The case excited great public interest.

This gave me to contemplate the word ‘mullered’ (pronounced as in the German - mʊllered, or müllered if you will).

In our contemporary English society, where we uphold the fine tradition of celebrating Liberty by going out and getting gut-bustingly drunk, getting mullered means to get very very pissed and is one of those words used to designate a debilitating self-imposed attack upon the senses and nervous system through excessive consumption of alcohol.

‘I was well mullered last night,’ for instance. (See also – brace yourselves ladies –  arseholed, twatted, fucked, smashed, mashed, lashed, the aforementioned pissed, blitzed, cunted, wrecked, slaughtered, and the memorable occasion when my brother, in answer to a question from my mother as to where he was going, said, ‘I’m going out to get damaged.’ And people wonder why our town centres are in a state.)

Anyway – whence, I wondered, this word. Could it have continued from Stevenson’s time? Or was it a coincidental modern version?

The Internet asserted vaguely that it was possibly adapted from Gerd Müller, the prolific German striker of the ’70s, known for his strikes of prodigious power into the back of the net – thus, ‘Cor, did you see ‘im hoof that ball? He well müllered it‘ (actual usage), or from the popular tabloid cliche of the Mad Mullah, used conveniently to label any Middle Eastern religious leader who happened to enter the public consciousness. In fact interestingly, since I thought it was a ’70s/80s thing, Wikipedia suggests that this term was first used about Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, who was around at the turn of the 19th century.

To get back to the point in hand; neither of those explanations seemed to carry any sort of weight of authority behind them. Not that you can necessarily expect such certainty in this sort of area, but still, I felt the quarry had not yet been run to ground. That latter derivation from the Mad Mullah seemed most unlikely.

The idea that it originated from the verb ‘to muller’, to beat or pound (as in a muller – the vessel in which mulled wine was made) was tempting but foundered on the rocks of pronunciation – sounds like ‘to mull over’ don’t you know. Müller might go to muller, (and indeed did, see below) but surely not the other way round.

A dictionary of modern slang was not much use, telling me only that Mullah was a Dublin slang term for any Irishman not from Dublin. A new one on me.

Time to pull out the OED -

müller – also muller [f. the name of Franz Müller, a murderer, who was convicted in 1864 on circumstantial evidence in which a hat was of considerable significance]. To alter (a hat) in the manner alleged to have been done by Franz Müller. Also as sb., a type of flat-topped felt hat similar to that associated with Müller.

1864 in Farmer & Henly Slang (1896) IV .384/1 In a small shop not from from Sloane-square, Chelsea, may be seen the following tasteful announcement: Hats muller’d here.

1909 Daily Chron. 22 Nov. 4/7 Müller’s hat … formed the connectcing link in a remarkable chain of circumstantial evidence. Henceforth ‘mullers’, as they were called, were tabooed.

Note that they don’t actually have the definition as used by Stevenson – that is to be attacked in such a way. Well, and what of it? On the whole I’m inclined to go with the Gerd Müller version, mainly because I find it slightly unlikely that the pronounciation would have been preserved over all these years, and also, well the source feels more likely for your lager swilling hoolie such as wot I is. That’s no guarantee though, I mean  ’quid’s been in continuous use for centuries innit.

Maybe these chaps will know. After all, they know about hats. And language. Should be a cinch. I don’t know about these things, do I.

Oh, Wikipedia has a nice couple of bits of trivia, if you choose to believe such things (place well above ‘man in pub’ but slightly below ’scholarly book’, I’d say) -

The murder of Briggs resulted in the establishment of compulsory communication between train passengers and members of the crew. If Briggs had been able to contact the train driver or guard, the murder could have been prevented.

The oddest feature of this first railway murder case in England was its effect on fashion. Muller’s redesign of the hat he took from Briggs became a popular style into the 20th Century, called “the Muller Cut-Down” hat. It was especially popularized by future Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Well, I’m no closer to actually knowing where this word comes from. But the things you learn, eh? The things you learn.

Right, I’m orf down the rub-a-dub-dub for a sniff of the barmaid’s apron. So to speak.

The details you find in journals and memoirs are often things that are lost to less digressive forms of recorded history.

Take this wartime meal described by Denton Welch in his journal entry for Monday, 7th June, 1943 -

Last Monday I went to supper with Noel Adeney. We had cold soup flavoured with claret, and fennel in long green shreds; then a sort of pilau of rice, onions fried, pimento excitingly scarlet like dogs’ tools, and grated cheese. The tiniest new potatoes and salad. Afterwards plums, and creamy mild tomato cocktail to drink.

Sounds delicious doesn’t it? Easy on the dogs’ tools tho.

A bit later, he goes into a pub with his friend Eric who has gin with half a pint of stock. Impressive, huh? Don’t see that very often. One to ask superior cocktail waiters for.

Wouldn’t like to see you all going hungry though, so here’s what today’s top chefs have to offer.

The pen grows rusty in the grip, the ink runs dry and the page remains blank with unexpressed thoughts. As a consequence the inexpressible becomes unattainable.

As a further consequence the starting again becomes doubly hard. Nothing flows, all is clogged up and once, after a period of scrabbling, a start is achieved, the pen slides meaninglessly across the page.

Nothing seems worth talking about, writing a mere exercise in style. Experiments that might justify such an exercise seem egregious, and to obscure the matter in hand. Attempts at elegance come across as both callow and conservative, at worst pompous – like a child pretending to be an adult. Plain speaking seems uninteresting, and dangerously revealing of a moribund and fruitless intellect.

Clearly, a subject is needed.

Jocelyn Brooke is worth writing about for many reasons, but has hardly been written about at all. The ground is still fresh and I can tell myself that what I am writing is not an exercise in redundant self-gratification. We can pretend. It is, after all, a start.

More, I wrote elsewhere in faintish praise of his poetry, in my usual style of civil leering, which I suppose might just be all right in respect of his poetry, but is not representative of the man and his works, particularly where there is so little material praising him as he deserves.

And Brooke’s writing poses the problems facetiously sketched at the beginning of this piece with a tenfold intensity. His work occupies a landscape that intimidates expression but he charts it with a facility that is magical.

A Private View, published in 1954, is an unambitious looking book. A selection of four unconnected character portraits – perhaps works the author thought particularly good, worth preserving, but of a length difficult to be collected in any other way.

The title might give the impression that the reader is getting a privileged insight into the author’s normally inaccessible mental and spiritual estate, which to a certain extent is the case. For me the title also conveys reticence, a sense of things, certain memoirs for instance, of interest only to a limited audience, one’s family maybe, perhaps only for oneself; Private in the sense of being secluded, rather than providing any special level of disclosure.

‘Gerald Brockhurst’ is the centrepiece; it follows the intermittent acquaintance of the Brooke narrator with Brockhurst over a number of years, from initial affection and friendship to the loss of these. In this respect it bears some resemblance to The Passing of a Hero (published a year before). In fact, the declining and imperfect nature of personal acquaintance is a theme of Brooke’s, even in the vignettes.

Brockhurst is representative of a Brooke type – impressively vulgar and athletic early on, the demands of age overcome them, a coarsening of the youthful manner. There is drink, and more than a hint of incompetently realised homosexuality, but mainly there is a sense, as Brooke puts it at the end of ‘Gerald Brockhurst’, of ‘Time’s revenges and all the ruined years.’

This tendency of Brooke to revisit character types can result in them feeling almost allegorical…

I hesitate for several reasons – the nature of Brooke’s characters is in one way simple and in another way very complicated. Simple because they are well-drawn characters who display characteristics that interest Brooke and who have a certain tragi-comic potential, complicated because, well, this is from the preface to The Goose Cathedral -

The present volume, like its two predecessors, is neither entirely fictitious nor entirely autobiographical; by way of apology for this hybrid breed, I can only say that, as a method of composition, I happen to find it useful. To force my material into novel form would involve a Procrustean distortion of theme which, for me at least, would make the book pointless, and not worth the bother of writing. On the other hand ‘ straight’ autobiography is ruled out for more obvious reasons – the law of libel being one.

This applies to most of what he wrote. Although Brooke had an interest in characters whose behaviour was to some extent unconventional or disreputable, ‘the law of libel’ is surely only partly responsible for this method of composition he chose. Self-deprecating and intensely shy (his description of Denton Welch as “Hypersensitive, diffident, ‘difficult’” feels autobiographical) he was temperamentally unsuited to the sort of personal revelation that autobiography entails – its sordid succession of incoherent events.

He continues -

I have tried to solve these problems by presenting a blend of fact and fiction; but here a new difficulty arises, for certain personages and episodes exist on the border-line between truth and phantasy, and are consequently liable to confusion.

The ‘confusion’ is presumably that to do with the possibility of mistaken identification, but as readers of Brooke’s remarkable Image of a Drawn Sword will know, the border-line between truth and phantasy is his natural home, and the confusion and uncertainty that his method creates is one of the ways in which his landscape is apprehended by the reader. The Brooke-narrator himself often finds it hard to place acquaintances he encounters in circumstances different to that in which he has known them before.

Every now and then the void beneath the pleasant surface can be seen -

‘I don’t know why you’ve been keeping him under a bushel for so long,’ he complained. ‘I think he’s very nice: I do so like that sort of athlete – so restful, don’t you think? And it’s odd and pleasing that his name should be Gerald.’

‘Why odd- or pleasing?’ I enquired with bewilderment.

‘Oh, haven’t you noticed? In novels, people like that are always called Gerald. There’s one in E.M. Forster, and another in Lawrence – you know, the man in Women in Love – and I once read a novel by Gilbert Frankau, when I was at school, called Gerald Cranston’s Lady; the hero was just the same type, terrifically hearty and military, with a moustache.’

‘You ought to write a little monograph on the subject,’ I suggested.

‘Yes, I did think of it – or we might start some very queer, esoteric sort of society, and make Gerald Brockhurst the president.’
Thereafter, for some considerable time, Eric and I ‘collected’ Geralds.

The enumeration of specific fictional parallels, the insistence on the relation of the presumably appropriated name and more or less factual character produces a strange, vertiginous sensation; a retrospective consideration of the synthetic nature of the hitherto solidly drawn Gerald, a dissolution of the conventional relations between fiction and autobiography and reality, so that the collected generations of ‘Gerald’ appear as Brooke wrote elsewhere not real people at all, but mere fleshless phantoms, images of ‘reality’ reflected in the distorting mirror of my own imagination.

This is, after all, the epistemological nature of the sort of fictional work where there is a strong element of autobiography and character portrait. But for Brooke it is not merely an epistemological consequence of the mode, but a string that he plays on, which gives his writing a sweet evanescence:

Some truths seem almost Falsehoods and some Falsehoods almost Truths; Wherein Falsehood and Truth seem almost aequilibriously stated, and but a few grains of distinction to bear down the balance … Besides, many things are known, as some are seen, that is by Parallaxis, or at some distance from their true and proper beings, the superficial regard of things having a different aspect from their true and central Natures.

This epigraph to A Mine of Serpents, taken from Sir Thomas Browne’s Christian Morals, applies not just to the concoction of character, but more generally to his writing. Apodictic expressions of sentiment and experience are impossible. Everything is contingent. To state a thing with certainty is to lie. Brooke’s ouvre embodies this principle; he was in some ways a descendant of the fin-de-siecle aesthete, who rejected cumbersome Victorian and masculine proclamations of moral truth and took the beauty instead. In him this is realised through a mode that makes conventional patterns of fictional and autobiographical interpretative certainty elusive. Objects and events in his writing exist in relation to each other rather than triangulate from a fixed point in reality.

‘Alison Vyse’, the first piece in the collection, is delightful. A good deal of the humour is achieved, as is usually the case in Brooke’s childhood scenes, through a sort of Lilliputian effect, where childish concerns are given adult articulation – thus the delicious first line of the book:

At the age of six I was, like most normally constituted children, a polymorphous pervert.

Once again the effect is one of parallaxis, recollection being a synthesis of the recollector and the recollected, and not a simple descriptive process. Nor is it one way; Brooke’s acute sympathy for childhood and its perceptions allows the experiences of youth to enlighten maturer concerns. In ‘Alison Vyse’  there is a description of a scene which reads like a gloss on his adult work. Retreating to a secluded part of the garden his home at Sandgate that he called ‘the Bushes’ -

I would occupy myself with what I was wont to call, with deliberate indefiniteness, a ‘place’.

These ‘places’ (for there were a series of them) represented I can only suppose, an attempt to impose upon the inchoate waste land of the Bushes a local habitation and a name. …

..the Bushes, unlike the rest of the garden, seemed to possess no particular meaning or purpose, they existed, so to speak, in vacuou, a mere no-man’s-land between the flower-beds above and the shingle-floored terrace … below.

The building of these ‘places’ kept me happily occupied for some weeks; but in due course, as was to be expected, my secret was discovered by the grown-ups who, plainly mystified by these curious and apparently pointless constructions, proceeded (like visitors to an exhibition of abstract pictures) to advance a number of ingenious theories as to what, exactly, they were ‘meant to be’.

‘Why, there’s a road – and there’s a garage’ (pointing to one of the toy motors) ‘and surely that’s a house’. … Like some pioneer of Cubism, I would listen, with a supercilious disdain, to their fatuous comments: outwardly calm, but inwardly enraged by such attempts to translate my essays in Significant Form into the humdrum terms of mere academic realism.

and later

‘A place can’t just be a place,’ Alison asserted, with a cold reasonableness which horrified me. I realised that what she said was, in fact, perfectly logical and accurate; yet I knew, also, without being able to express it, that my ‘places’ were unique and self-sufficient – they were not garages or forts or anything else; they were just Places, meaningless to others, perhaps, but to myself immensely and perennially significant.

It need hardly be added that this description of the childhood psyche is also a description of the adult’s conception of the world. No matter how wryly indulgent of childhood the tone, here again is the ‘inchoate waste land’, the vacuum in which his work is suspended.

Brooke’s almost habitual ironic, understated humour does not just provide a good deal of the charm of his writing, but is yet another device for avoiding sincere expression (an English characteristic as well, of course). It is not always easy to tell with certainty what Brooke or his narrator’s attitude to a person or occurrence is. Humour is yet another example of understanding by parallaxis. No matter how down-to-earth the tone, the reader is but loosely anchored upon a psychic littoral, a place of uncertainty where bald statements of untempered fact are inadequate and misleading.

Once more, in ‘Alison Vyse’, one of those trivial-seeming voids appears momentarily, from behind the placid surface, when the child Jocelyn uses ‘a very bad word’ at Alison.

‘All right, then,’ I interjected, ‘if I’m a devil you’re a ____, so there.’
The moment I had uttered the awful, the unforgivable word, I regretted it.

On being questioned by his mother, Brooke admits the crime but not the word. An interrogation ensues.

Which word had I used? Did it begin with a D? Did it begin – surely it couldn’t have begun – with a B? Throughout that evening the dreadful inquisition proceeded; finally, by dint of excluding every letter of the alphabet in turn, the appalling syllables were extracted from me.

Which word indeed? At this distance, with the vastly increased acceptance of swearing on all levels of society and culture, it’s difficult to judge what it might have been. In the the other portraits ‘Bastard’ is written and ‘Fuck’ implied – so that the blank here seems an expression of childish innocence. None of the guesses I can make quite fit, to the extent that, given the nature of Brooke’s approach, I began to wonder whether that blank represents just that, a blank, an unsayable, like the 100th name of God. Again, a realisation of the uncertain relation of his writing to concrete events  is brought into focus.

‘Kurt Schlegel’ is different from the other three pieces in A Private View. A note at the beginning of the book tells the reader one reason for this, that it was first ‘conceived and delivered’ as a broadcast talk for the BBC. Schlegel is a gloomy Palestinian Jew who Brooke meets while in the army (and who appears briefly in A Mine of Serpents). He’s rather facetiously drawn, and the tendency to make him finish his sentences with ‘isn’t it’, no matter how accurate, has the effect of making him seem like a comedy Welshman. As the piece develops weightier themes than Brooke usually deals with emerge. Racial tradition and the burden of historical suffering are contemplated, the narrator’s relationship with the subject is less ambiguous than normal, and the humorous tone is by and large, though not entirely, absent. Without these deflective mechanisms, and with the greater expression of sincerity, the void, which is normally only implied or fleetingly inferred, becomes material:

Kurt said no more. We sat, smoking, for a few minutes more, the twilight deepening around us. The footballers had gone, and the whole landscape – the cliff-top, the town behind us, the little bay between the cliffs – was folded in a profound silence. I had an odd sense, sitting here in the dusk above the sea, of being, not only on the extreme verge of land, but on some remote margin of life itself. The ordinary preoccupations of our existence – food and sleep and work – seemed curiously thinned-out and immaterial. We had only to take a step or two, and we could walk over the cliff-side on to the jagged rocks two or three hundred feet below; and it seemed to me that it would require only some slight movement of the mind to precipitate me into some spiritual néant beyond the verges of my consciousness.

In scenes that are I think partly related to this image of being on the remote margin of life, both Basil Medlicott in A Mine of Serpents and Gerald Brockhurst swim off into the sea, and Brooke gets the sensation that they are going to carry on swimming with no return; in the case of Brockhurst -

I remembered his look of blank, unutterable misery as he spoke of his misfortunes; and the thought struck me, with a desolating horror, that he might, in a moment of sudden despair, cease to struggle with the strong, downward pull of the waves…

I wonder, in fact, whether it is too fanciful to associate the sea and outdoor bathing generally (a recurring theme) with the néant Brooke identifies above, with soldiering the cure; and to associate the inland country to which he went on his childhood holidays with youth and beauty, the things that Brooke, not without wry self-deprecation, valued most. He implies something of the sort in The Military Orchid;

At the time Sandgate lacked romance, being merely the place where we lived (…); during the autumn and winter, the village became for me a Land of Lost Content, the symbol of a happiness which would only be renewed again in the spring. (With most children, this state of affairs is reversed: it is the seaside which enshrines the memory of summer-happiness, not, as for me, the country.) Later, in adolescence, Sandgate too would become part of the legend of the past, the private myth; but in childhood, it was the village in the Elham Valley which, alone possessed the quality of romance.

To return to the point about Brooke’s persistently ironic tone, when he  is not being humorous, there is a crepuscular gloom of the sort that suffuses his Image of a Drawn Sword so hauntingly, a materialisation of darkness. We leave Kurt

..slumped upon the fallen tombstone in the fading twilight: the figure of an outcast, rootless and without hope, bearing about with him always, like a hidden tumour, his heritage of persecution and disaster.

‘Miss Wimpole’ is the final portrait and is a return to the scenes of childhood that opened the book. It is light-hearted and amusing, on occasion in fact very funny – particularly in a recital of the Jabberwocky, and the description of a dinner table conflagration. Miss Wimpole is an actress of sorts (although what sort exactly is never made clear to the child Brooke). We go back, in a manner of speaking, to the stage, where we started with ‘Alison Vyse’ – an example of the delicate threads that hold his apparently loosely arranged works together. In an altogether lighter fashion the portrait once again follows the arc of so many of Brooke’s character portraits, initial affection, on this occasion on the part of his family, specifically his father, turning into uneasy tolerance, into a slightly embarrassed and quiet ‘dropping’ of the relationship.

If there is, to get back to where I tailed off, something esoterically allegorical about his characters, with the many variations on similar types (and the variations on similar sounding names that I can never quite believe could belong to anyone), then there is something almost totemistic about his objects – the orchids, the fireworks, the childhood places. I’m reminded of what Brooke said about Denton Welch -

…it was the little things – not only dolls’ houses and chinoiserie, but things seen on a country walk, a ruined church, a flower, a young man bathing – which served him best as defences against his growing weakness and his prescience of an early death.

The latter morbid elements are specific to Welch but if they are substituted for a more general sense of futilitarian angst, an awareness of the inchoate (to use Brooke’s word) void I have attempted to identify, then I hope some sense of the faint mystical quality that delicately scents his work is conveyed. These objects are to a certain extent sacred, and guard against the coarseness that Brooke so often describes developing in his masculine acquaintances; they preserve the childhood qualities of perception.

Beauty is not less deep
If it should die at last,
The greatest prize men keep
Is glory that is past
Denton Welch, Journals (ed. Jocelyn Brooke)

I have focused on elements that make Brooke look rather different than he is. I should add therefore that there is no strain of contradiction in his writing – he is not paradoxical, or conceptually modernistic. Everything is done with the lightest of touches, with the easy and straightforward grace that he admired physically in young men. The unpretentious biographical voice and the easy swing of recollection is yet so subtle that it can adapt itself without apparent effort to both the mundane and the philosophical.

These beautiful, elusive, funny but melancholy books are a delight. It is sad but in a way entirely appropriate to his quiet genius that they go so easily out of print. Anthony Powell wrote that Brooke liked corresponding – the sort of relationship ‘that did not make him feel hemmed in,’ and guesses an ‘unwillingness to cope with face-to-face cordialities of a kind that might at the same time be agreeable in letters’. Brooke’s writings are so personable, that I like to think they provide that intimacy that perhaps he never found with sufficient ease in life.

(Oh, and I meant to say earlier – If this intimacy-but-at-a-distance is a characteristic of Brooke, it is also a characteristic of the English and it’s worth noting, if we’re going to play that fruitless bagatelle called ‘The English Proust’ (and Brooke deserves that title much more than any other writer I can think of) the adjective is not merely a qualifier but a positive inidication of unique characteristics.)

It should be obvious from what I have said that a biography of Brooke would be of special interest – a chance to see just how he arranged his experiences into their published form. I am told that a biography has in fact just recently been written and I hope it finds some sort of publication.

A lovely addition to his obituary in The Times, written by ‘a friend’, sums him up what it is like to read him very well.

Jocelyn Brooke’s field may not have been wide nor his output large, but everything to which he set his hand showed a delicacy of feeling and perception – for language, for landscape, for his own beloved East Kent, and for the acute experiences of childhood – which have given extreme pleasure to his readers.

Behind the work was a gentle, sensitive man, of a nature saved from sweetness by a fine sense of irony, who will be sadly missed.

He died, aged 57, in the late autumn of 1966, at his home in Bishopsbourne, Kent.

There is an excellent website, cleanly and intelligently designed, with an all-too-rare cheerful and relaxed looking photo.

.

* the pen slides meaninglessly across the page - For the sake of a metaphor I pretend here I’m not writing this on a computer. Lo! the indignities the innocent pliancy of words can make us descend to, corrupting their innocence with our mendacious intentions! Those who feel the inherent duplicity of the writer is all too apparent here (it being on the internet and all) may substitute the following –

The laptop sits dusty in the corner, the fizzing screen is blank with deletions, and as a consequence the expressible seems inexpressible, the inexpressible becomes a imponderable, a spiritual bogieman to frighten scientific intellectuals: ah to undo! to redo! to have the zest of highlighting and the boldness of itallics! To be the font of all human knowledge!

But as a blah blah the starting again becomes doubly hard. The rhythmic drumbeat at the keyboard, indicative of momentum of thought, is absent, and once, after period of probing, a start is achieved, the flaying keystrokes crackle like so much indistinguishable static

* and I once read a novel by Gilbert Frankau – Gilbert Frankau – Popular romantic novelist (who in 1933 wrote an article called ‘As a Jew I am Not Against Hitler’ apparently. Later retracted, presumably when he discovered the feeling was not reciprocal.)

* Which word indeed? - ’Bitch’ seems likeliest, although Brooke seems to imply not, ‘B’ apparently already having been accounted for. (edit – on reflection I think ‘whore’ is in fact the likeliest candidate – the point stands though – the word is unknowable)

* Objects and events in his writing exist in relation to each other rather than triangulate from a fixed point in reality - Nabokov wrote somewhere or other that the word ‘reality’ (or was it ‘real’) is the only word in the English language that should appear in inverted commas. I’m not sure this is at all the case. In fact I think the opposite, and anyone who smugly pipes up, ‘Ah, but what do you mean by real?’ will get the treatment an Glaswegian chap I once knew used to dole out to people who had crossed him: they would get his pint over their head, which he would follow by drinking their pint in one gulp, all the while fixing them with a wildly angry eye, before storming off.

When I was about five or six, nothing produced a greater feeling of dread than a Mervyn Peake illustration of Blind Pew from a copy 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.

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…