Un anno di lettere

by Algernon Charles Swinburne, Masolino d'Amico (Editor)

General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1901 Notes: This is an OCR reprint of the original rare book. There may be typos or missing text and there are no illustrations. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there.

196 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1905

About the author

In musical, often erotic verse, British poet and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote and attacked the conventions of Victorian morality.

This controversial Englishman in his own day invented the roundel form and some novels and contributed to the famous eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algerno...

Reviews

[Rick Harsch · Rating 5 out of 5]

On the same day Lesbia Brandon comes out, we have this magnificent immediate collector's item with Zach Tanner's intro, cover art, and passion matching Swinburne oddity for oddity, sublimity for sublimity. 10€ pocket book from corona\samizdat. The press is still on a roll!

[Zachary Tanner · Rating 5 out of 5]

So good my review requires a trip to the library. Back in a hot minute.

UPDATE: October 26,2021****************************************

“The world of Swinburne does not depend upon some other world which it simulates; it has the necessary completeness and self-sufficiency for justification and permanence.”
- T. S. Eliot1

Need one be a sex-positive, 21st-century "esoteric of the Garden" into impact play who has read their Joyce and de Sade to relish Swinburne's subtle, iconoclast novels? Maybe it takes one of us to savor the author's cryptic treatments of forbidden eros, but certainly we're not the only reader demographic capable of appreciating the vernacular prose-poetry of this Victorian ode to the Epistolary Novel, and so, let the people their Swinburne, for as the author once wrote of the "Arch-Professor of the Ithyphallic Science," I "would give anything to have, by way of study, six or seven other opinions as genuine and frank as mine shall be."2

What turned me on to Swinburne? No doubt coming across some striking legend such as the one I came across in Richard Church's introduction to my Everyman’s Library edition of Swinburne: Poems & Prose:

“Swinburne the tadpole-scholar was a quiet member of his aristocratic family, aloof and retiring. But enrage him with drink, or poetry, and he would become poisoned with all possible forms of mental and emotional perversity, calling upon the ghost of the Marquis de Sade to initiate his imagination into the more exquisite forms of sensual indulgence, or evoking the lamian beauty of some Renaissance strumpet so that he might boast to his Victorian public of fictitious dallyings with her.”3

On the threshold of Swinburne studies, one finds a basket of nasty letters about the author's eccentric personality, the mass of uninspired tweed-types loving to hate as it does the marvel of such functional substance abusers as William S. Burroughs or Rainer Werner Fassbinder—in Algernon the makings of a genderfluid movie starlet who lived out life's best years before the moving image was around to lend a longing luster to the monotonous ordeal of one's despair. What I'm getting at is the debased genius of Mozart that Hollywood imagines would have so disgusted Salieri. What we find is the Blakean primacy of sensual experience lucidly deranged in a manner reminiscent of Rimbaud in the forgotten novels of a poet contemporary of Dickens, Dumas, Balzac, et al. Any reader with an affinity for the biographies of literary eccentrics will find a doozy in Swinburne and may turn to any of a number by Lafourcade, Fuller, Thomas, and Henderson, sparing Gosse only for its historical importance, for, as Beetz writes in Algernon Charles Swinburne: A Bibliography of Secondary Works: "…Gosse relied heavily on unreliable sources and possibly apocryphal anecdotes for his bio."4
Originally published serially as A Year's Letters in The Tatler in 1877 under the pseudonym "Mrs. Horace Manners" (fifteen years after it was written), Love's Cross-Currents was finally published in book form in 1905 after the death of the author's parents. May they not roll in their graves to be dug up again for our purposes here.

But to read Love's Cross-Currents one hundred and sixty years after it was begun, more than a century still since it was finished, need we know—to enjoy this elegant fiction—that it was inspired by several very real Life Events concerning Swinburne and his cousin Mary Gordon, to whom he read sections of this novel before her marriage? Need we know of Adah Isaacs Menken to appreciate Miss Lenora Harley of Lesbia Brandon? What of the hat stomping episode? What of Swinburne adoring and corresponding with Baudelaire before the English speaking world knew he was cool? Need we recognize a Caroline lyric as such to cry over the verse? Well?

I turned to Goodreads, in search of contemp-orary opinions, finding only a single text review from user Steven, who writes, "Anyone who gets through the book does so only by dint of drawing up a family tree to keep straight its three sets of cousins." I don't know if I necessarily agree. I charted out the birthdates in the Prologue on the flyleaf, but didn't bother with a family tree until my second reading, and I don't think Love's Cross-Currents is any more difficult to follow than the familial contortions of Austen, Faulkner, Nabokov, or Tolstoy. In fact, I believe that it reads so well and in such a surprising, revelatory way that I hesitate to spoil the story in the introduction with any kind of analytical summary, beyond reiterating what Swinburne wrote of the novel in an early Spring letter to Rosetti in 1866: “This book stands or falls by Lady Midhurst; if she gives satisfaction, it must be all right; if not, chaos is come again." Any reader who requires such a summary before reading a suspenseful plot can turn to the Falcon Press edition of Lesbia Brandon and Randolph Hughes's Commentary within, where is given from pages 285 to 288 "a rapid account of the family, in so far as it is necessary to an intelligence of the situation as a whole."

What need we know beyond the fact that betwixt this quasi-incestuous love quadrangle (it only counts if it's your first cousin), a broken-hearted dreamer will write to the unrequitable object of passion: I do not think you can mean to break with all our hopes and recollections and change the whole look of life for me. (p.132) What do you do when the person you love has resolved to have done with you? Well? "Of course the boy talks as if the old tender terms between them had been broken off for centuries, and their eyes were now meeting across a bottomless pit of change. I shall not say another word on the matter: all is as straight and right as it need be, though I know that only last month he was writing her the most insane letters." (p.263)

"Le dénoûment c'est qu'il n'y a pas de dénoûment." (p.267)

But I would sell the reader short should I not make some sort of tangible scholarly analysis of this book as Epistolary Novel. Randolph Hughes asserted that the book's only artistic deficiency was that the seaside mid-point did not grow out of the initial conditions of the story.

I, however, fault Swinburne's artistry for not making any such use of the seemingly infinite variation of metafictional conditions that might exist in a text of this sort. Though in its own unique way, it rewards readers familiar with Laclos, Richardson, and Crébillon Fils, it makes little use of such liberated effects in those other novels as letters recopied, resequenced, enclosed within other letters, continued, annexed to the former, dictated by Valmont, written by a waiting maid, now sent along with copies of letters to uncles and their responses, delivered same-day, written at daybreak or nightfall, within an Ivy Summer-house, interrupted by nervous mothers, for each letter in these classic epistolary novels, a new trick, in them vast rewards for any fan of postmodern metafictions, but in Love's Cross-Currents, never do we find this hypertextual delight that most other novels of this sort have to offer. It is not the sort of story where a character continues a letter, having sat up late to finish and seal in readiness a letter in response to the above, only to be interrupted at dawn by the arrival of thy second fellow which infinitely disturbed us all. But it could have been.
A simple visual analysis of four novels should suffice to exhibit something of Swinburne's perplexing non-comformity. That with such a simple schematic and so few letters, a story of the same depth as these others is successfully told is something I find quite striking, whereby somehow the poet's deficiencies as a novelist boost the work. It is also telling of the claustrophobic nature of this study of concurrent familial temperaments.

Behold the Enchantments of the Genre:

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Evelina (1778)
by Frances Burney
84 Letters from March to October

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Les liaisons dangereuses (1782)
by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
175 Letters from August to January

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Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady: Comprehending the Most Important Concerns of Private Life. And Particularly Shewing, the Distresses that May Attend the Misconduct Both of Parents and Children, In Relation to Marriage (1748)
by Samuel Richardson
537 Letters from January to December

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Love's Cross-Currents (1905)
by Algernon Charles Swinburne
30 Letters from January to February following

If it is perhaps insufficient in the very form in which it's written, what makes this a worthwhile read is that "the genuine stamp of a sincere and single mind was visible throughout; which was no small comfort.” (p.11) "To be face to face with such a dead and buried bit of life as that was so quaint that stranger things even would have fallen flat after it."(p. 260)
The striking whole amounts to something that models quite closely the experiences I've had of sending and receiving messages in this instantaneous, globalized world, well-wrought art offering as it does timeless relief beyond generational boundaries, creating an empathic connection between the living and the dead. What a marvel like a shell upon a beach is this!


NOTES:

1T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1920), “Swinburne as Poet."
2To Richard Monckton Milness - August 18, 1862, in Volume 1 of Lang's The Swinburne Letters, p. 53-59. He continues playfully: “At first, I quite expected to add another to the gifted author’s list of victims; I really thought I must have died or split open or choked with laughing. I never laughed so much in my life: I couldn’t have stopped to save the said life. I went from text to illustrations and back again, till I literally doubled up and fell down with laughter. I regret to add that all the friends to whom I have lent or shown the book were affected in just the same way.” But what I find especially interesting is the way that Swinburne is able to subvert even the Arch Pariah of Subversion: “But in Justine there seems to me throughout to be one radical mistake rotting and undermining the whole structure of the book. De Sade is like a Hindoo mythologist; he takes bulk and number for greatness…I boast not of myself; but I do say that a schoolboy, set to write on his own stock of experience, and having a real gust and appetite for the subject in him, may make and has made more of a sharp short school flogging of two or three dozen cuts than you of your enormous interminable afflictions; more of the simple common birch rod and daily whipping-block than you of your loaded iron whips and elaborately ingenious racks and horses.”
3p. xi.
4p. v.

[Steven Meyers · Rating 5 out of 5]

This may be the best unreadable novel in English (it was originally published as Love's Cross-Currents, not the author's title). Swinburne has a story he desperately wishes to tell, but equally desperately wishes not to be known. Saturated with feeling (however perversely expressed), partly autobiographical (if also derived from Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses), subtle (and yet operatic), his story presents an unforgettable character, Lady Helena Midhurst, who undertakes to parcel out fates. Lady Midhurst (who also dominates Swinburne’s one other novel, the fragmentary Lesbia Brandon) ecstatically whips daughter, niece, nephews, and grandchildren into and out of affairs and marriages, crowning her manipulations by securing—at any cost to others—her brother’s title for her own great-grandson.

The book’s structure seems transparent: a series of letters written by members of an extended family recounting their interactions over one year’s time. But the text is incomparably dense—very hard to read. Swinburne assumes his multiple voices with gusto (and wonderful humor), but writes obscurely and indirectly, making few concessions to the reader. Anyone who gets through the book does so only by dint of drawing up a family tree to keep straight its three sets of cousins.

The surface is so impenetrable that it is a surprise to find beneath it the armature of a standard Victorian plot of follow-the-title: Midhurst’s eldest brother, holder of the family title, dies; his son inherits, but himself dies; Midhurst’s nephew then inherits, but the son’s widow (Midhurst’s granddaughter) gives birth to a boy, thus stripping the nephew of the title and bringing it into Lady Midhurst’s direct line.

But of course the novel’s real action takes place below these events, in a killing zone of hearts. For the widow’s child is not, after all, her husband’s, but the nephew’s; Midhurst, after first bringing about and promoting the affair, cleaves the lovers apart. She also promotes and then ends her grandson Redgie’s first experience of love (Redgie, it would seem, stands in Swinburne). She manages to hurt every cousin, and in the end all the pain and devastation seems to have been suffered so that Midhurst can feel forever young and in control. Perhaps the reader’s difficulty in getting at Swinburne’s story is the index of its meaning to him. Manipulation, surrender, play, rivalry, scores to be settled—only by packing such elements of family dynamics into a mass that resists understanding could Swinburne even raise such issues.