Old friends like book ends

There are those who think it's silly to read something more than once, but I've found one of the greatest pleasures life affords is reading a book you've loved again. There are many reasons to read something again: perhaps to see if it's as good as you remember, perhaps because you have to teach it, perhaps because you know you'll like it. A post at the Bldg Blog has another reason. Re-reading a book as a good way to measure your own growth, as "a literary way of marking your height in the same old doorsill, seeing how high you now stand."

A converse argument comes from Geoff Dyer, author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. He confesses here that he reads far less as he gets older. My immediate reaction was a sharp intake of breath, followed by mildly outraged clucking and tutting. But as I read on I took his point. Reading shaped his character, and inspired his construction of a life. Now that he's living that life richly and purposefully, books aren't quite as necessary as they were. “Reading, which gave me a life, is now just part of that life, at the moment rather a small part.”

I'd like to have it both ways, but I suspect I'll find myself at Dyer's age still reading, still imagining a life; measuring my height by the books I'm reading for the seventeenth time.

The moon upon her fluent route

I'm a week late with this inexcusably long post. The so-called supermoon was last weekend, and though I missed the opportunity last Friday,  I couldn't let it go by without assembling some poetry in its honour. There's plenty about so I picked a few lovely ones to place here. Don't feel you have to read them all!

Du Fu (8th century, Tang)
Above the tower -- a lone, twice-sized moon.
On the cold river passing night-filled homes,
It scatters restless gold across the waves.
On mats, it shines richer than silken gauze.

Empty peaks, silence: among sparse stars,
Not yet flawed, it drifts. Pine and cinnamon
Spreading in my old garden . . . All light,
All ten thousand miles at once in its light!

Sir Philip Sidney
With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies!
How silently, and with how wan a face!
What, may it be that even in heav'nly place
That busy archer his sharp arrows tries!
Sure, if that long-with love-acquainted eyes
Can judge of love, thou feel'st a lover's case,
I read it in thy looks; thy languish'd grace
To me, that feel the like, thy state descries.
Then, ev'n of fellowship, O Moon, tell me,
Is constant love deem'd there but want of wit?
Are beauties there as proud as here they be?
Do they above love to be lov'd, and yet
Those lovers scorn whom that love doth possess?
Do they call virtue there ungratefulness?

Alfred Tennyson
When on my bed the moonlight falls,
I know that in thy place of rest
By that broad water of the west,
There comes a glory on the walls:
Thy marble bright in dark appears,
As slowly steals a silver flame
Along the letters of thy name,
And o'er the number of thy years.
The mystic glory swims away;
From off my bed the moonlight dies;
And closing eaves of wearied eyes
I sleep till dusk is dipt in gray:
And then I know the mist is drawn
A lucid veil from coast to coast,
And in the dark church like a ghost
Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn.

Emily Bronte
'Tis moonlight, summer moonlight,
All soft and still and fair;
The solemn hour of midnight
Breathes sweet thoughts everywhere,

But most where trees are sending
Their breezy boughs on high,
Or stooping low are lending
A shelter from the sky.

And there in those wild bowers
A lovely form is laid;
Green grass and dew-steeped flowers
Wave gently round her head.

Emily Dickinson
The Moon upon her fluent Route
Defiant of a Road --
The Star's Etruscan Argument
Substantiate a God --

If Aims impel these Astral Ones
The ones allowed to know
Know that which makes them as forgot
As Dawn forgets them -- now --

Gerard Manley Hopkins
I awoke in the Midsummer not to call night, in the white and the walk of the morning:
The moon, dwindled and thinned to the fringe of a finger-nail held to the candle,
Or paring of paradisaical fruit, lovely in waning but lustreless,
Stepped from the stool, drew back from the barrow, of dark Maenefa the mountain;

A cusp still clasped him, a fluke yet fanged him, entangled him, not quite utterly.
This was the prized, the desirable sight, unsought, presented so easily,
Parted me leaf and leaf, divided me, eyelid and eyelid of slumber.

Rupert Brooke (extract)
All the earth grows fire,
White lips of desire
Brushing cool on the forehead, croon slumbrous things.
Earth fades; and the air is thrilled with ways,
Dewy paths full of comfort. And radiant bands,
The gracious presence of friendly hands,
Help the blind one, the glad one, who stumbles and strays,
Stretching wavering hands, up, up, through the praise
Of a myriad silver trumpets, through cries,
To all glory, to all gladness, to the infinite height,
To the gracious, the unmoving, the mother eyes,
And the laughter, and the lips, of light.

Robert Frost
I've tried the new moon tilted in the air
Above a hazy tree-and-farmhouse cluster
As you might try a jewel in your hair.
I've tried it fine with little breadth of luster,
Alone, or in one ornament combining
With one first-water start almost shining.

I put it shining anywhere I please.
By walking slowly on some evening later,
I've pulled it from a crate of crooked trees,
And brought it over glossy water, greater,
And dropped it in, and seen the image wallow,
The color run, all sorts of wonder follow.

Kenneth Slessor
Thief of the moon, thou robber of old delight,
Thy charms have stolen the star-gold, quenched the moon-
Cold, cold are the birds that, bubbling out of night,
Cried once to my ears their unremembered tune-
Dark are those orchards, their leaves no longer shine,
No orange's gold is globed like moonrise there-
O thief of the earth's old loveliness, once mine,
Why dost thou waste all beauty to make thee fair?

Break, break thy strings, thou lutanists of earth,
Thy musics touch me not – let midnight cover
With pitchy seas those leaves of orange and lime,
I'll not repent. The world's no longer worth
One smile from thee, dear pirate of place and time,
Thief of old loves that haunted once thy lover!

Ted Hughes
The flame-red moon, the harvest moon,
Rolls along the hills, gently bouncing,
A vast balloon,
Till it takes off, and sinks upward
To lie on the bottom of the sky, like a gold doubloon.
The harvest moon has come,
Booming softly through heaven, like a bassoon.
And the earth replies all night, like a deep drum.

So people can't sleep,
So they go out where elms and oak trees keep
A kneeling vigil, in a religious hush.
The harvest moon has come!

And all the moonlit cows and all the sheep
Stare up at her petrified, while she swells
Filling heaven, as if red hot, and sailing
Closer and closer like the end of the world.

Till the gold fields of stiff wheat
Cry `We are ripe, reap us!' and the rivers
Sweat from the melting hills.

e. e. cummings
who knows if the moon's
a balloon,coming out of a keen city
in the sky--filled with pretty people?
(and if you and i should

get into it,if they
should take me and take you into their balloon,
why then
we'd go up higher with all the pretty people

than houses and steeples and clouds:
go sailing
away and away sailing into a keen
city which nobody's ever visited,where

always
it's
Spring)and everyone's
in love and flowers pick themselves

The good and the great

A couple of posts back I linked to an article at The Millions which compares the reception of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom with that of Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector, both out last year. The writer argues that while the books treat comparable themes and characters, Franzen's was hailed as a formidable and (probably) abiding contribution to American letters, whereas Goodman's received scant and condescending praise of the ‘not bad for a girl' sort. The writer sees this disparity as a function of institutionalised sexism in the literary industry. (It might be, but having just read The Cookbook Collector and the first hundred pages or so of Freedom, I think they really are in different leagues. Goodman's writing is exuberant, but has nothing like the complexity and craft of Franzen's.) A good deal depends on how gendered genre is. There's an assumption that women write about home and family in warm and affirming ways, and that grand alienations and cold ironies are the province of men.

Perhaps there are gender biases at play, but there's a deeper divide, and a more ancient one: that between comedy and tragedy. Possibly tragedy has always had a grandeur that comedy, domestic by nature, could never have, but it seems to be a peculiar bent of the twentieth century that the ‘great’ books, the powerful books, are inevitably the sad books, the difficult, devastating, awakened books that affirm only fragility, inconsistency, and pain. Books that celebrate life and perhaps even end, like traditional comedies, in happy marriages are seen as somehow less powerful, less brave, less grand.  Rom coms never win best picture. Something happened in the twentieth-century - perhaps a great Russian winter - that made comedy with its happy ending the province of fools. Virginia Woolf's comment on Jane Austen shows the shift: “Of all great writers, she is the one most difficult to catch in the act of greatness.” What, after all, is great about ordered and ordinary life in a small community? What is great about goodness?

Another great is most often caught in the act in his big tragedies: Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth. (Some lists include Othello, but others won't on the grounds that it's too domestic.)  Shakespeare's tragic vision has influenced a half millenium of thought, but what about his comic vision? What about a view of the world that sees the catastrophe of life as food for laughter, laughter as medicine for life's various ills? It's the fools in Shakespeare that know this, and that speak truth. It's the comedies that know life not as a trajectory, a tragic fall, but as a circle. Life follows death, spring follows winter. All life comes to an end, but this is no reason not to be happy.

Freedom begins with what appears a happy marriage. Adultery follows, and finally, estrangement. The Cookbook Collector ends with a wedding, and closes with an apt image of mortal happiness: “The hammock swayed under them, and George and Jess floated together, although nothing lasted. They held each other, although nothing stayed.”  Like the original pair: “Happy, but for so happy ill secured.”  But happy.

Even more on covers

While curiosity is natural, and reverence is healthy, there are times when an author’s familiarity with the literary universe obstructs and clutters her creativity. We like a narrator to be literate, cognisant, and even referential, but we don’t like a story that’s simply a tissue of references, or one that gets stuck in the cobwebs of the literary attic. It feels too second-hand, and too clever by half. Iris Murdoch says somewhere (I can’t find it now), the most obstructive thing for a new writer is literary tradition. This can mean that the greatness of the tradition stops a new writer before he’s begun, or it can mean that the great tradition so entangles and tongue-ties his story that he ends by adding nothing to the tradition he so admires. An overly referential story falls short because it’s written in a kind of shorthand, full of gestures to points already made, images already bodied forth, full of obeisance rather than bold strides. And it cuts to that old dichotomy between artist and critic: both know how a novel is written, but only one can write it.

More on covers

This article's discussion of Colm Toibin's book about Henry James, The Master, led me to further pondering of the copyright issue. There are subtleties here, and beyond the question of whether literary borrowing is good or bad is the question of why we do it. What's the compulsion to go back instead of on? In revisiting scenes of literary greatness, what do we expect to find? Or, more probably, to leave? It's a compulsion I feel too, though I've never acted on it. (And in James' case, reverence would humble my ambition.)

I think it starts with simple curiosity. What became of the younger sister? Who might have lived in the house next door? What happened to him in those three years at sea? That curiosity is strongest where the novel's world is strongest, where the author's creation is real and robust, and carries a resonance of its own. We want to explore the empty rooms that exist by implication, the darknesses left by the limits of an author's fiat lux.

 I think such curiosity and the creativity it inspires show a healthy respect for the power of good writing. “Imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown,” and “gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.” Theseus, the king in Midsummer Night's Dream, knows well the power of poets to call things convincingly into being, to name and locate them so thoroughly that they have an existence outside the work which first embodied them.

At a deeper level, I think it proves my theory that art is singular: all art is part of humanity's collected works. I'm not talking about T.S. Eliot's “tradition,” or about a canon of great works, but about the inescapable connection between all works of art, whether they acknowledge it or not.