Patrick’s Comments

Patrick’s comments from the Catching up on Classics (and lots more!) group.

Note: Patrick is not currently a member of this group.

Simon Raven’s roman-fleuve is quite long. The first sequence, Alms for Oblivion, is 10 volumes in length, and the follow-up set, The First-Born of Egypt, is seven. The immediate obvious difference between Raven’s novels and those of other roman-fleuvists such as C.P. Snow and Anthony Powell is the gusto with which Raven gets into bodily functions - sex (straight and gay), elimination, side effects of various illnesses, etc. Within pages of the opening of the second novel in story-chron order * , Sound the Retreat, we’re getting graphic descriptions of diarrhea as an inevitable adjustment to arrival in India; and later, a masculine competition narrated with pornographic gusto (I found it quite funny, but your mileage might vary 😏). I love Snow and Powell, but they are Victorian aunts by comparison.

Raven (born 1927) was precisely a generation younger than Snow and Powell (both born 1905), and his fiction practically defines the differences that 20 years wrought. Of course, his personality had plenty to do with the obvious pleasure he took in the new freedoms (“known for his louche lifestyle as much as for his literary output”). And it’s not just the provocative stuff that you notice, but the DIRECTNESS - where those earlier authors might hint at a character’s awfulness, Raven simply presents it full-throttle. The parents of Fielding Gray in the novel named for him (first in story-chron) are among the most ghastly in fiction, and one wonders why the book doesn’t turn into a murder story.

* As with a number of other novel sequences, including Snow’s, and Mazo de la Roche’s Jalna series, publication order and story-chron order are different; the authors backfilled when it suited them.

Years ago I was supposed to read the entirety of Boswell’s Life of Johnson for a course, but I was taking four graduate-level English classes and one education class that semester, plus teaching part-time, so I only managed excerpts. But I promised myself that I would get back to the text, and so I have, now halfway through the Oxford unabridged edition. A complete joy.

I will always be grateful that I got an excellent grounding in 17th and 18th Century British literature as an undergrad at Yale, so I have a head start on Boswell because the context and personalities are familiar.

Thomas Hardy shrewdly observes in A Pair of Blue Eyes that a great many friendships are makeshift, emerging because people happen to be around and not because those are the ones you would choose given your druthers. This reality is crucial in Olivia Manning’s The Great Fortune, the first in her Balkan Trilogy (and the six-volume Fortunes of War), in which we are confronted with the disparate members of the international community in Bucharest at the beginning of World War II.

Our focal center is the newly-married Pringles, Guy and Harriet, but we are more privy to Harriet’s perspective. For her this is clearly a case of “marry in haste, repent at leisure”, because she knew very little about Guy when she jumped in, and seems increasingly exasperated by what she discovers. He, a university instructor, is blandly tolerant of whatever goofballs they encounter; she is much more selective, and this inevitably creates a lot of tension.

Guy’s interpersonal approach is better-suited to expatriate life, of course, yet I find myself deeply sympathetic to Harriet (as Manning intends), because I have been there, oh Lord have I been there. There is no doubt that you meet a lot of screwy messed-up people in the international rounds, on the run from something or other (frequently themselves). My strategy has been to be polite but distant, not to invite more contact than necessary. But Guy, perhaps out of a desire to examine “specimens”, gathers such folk in.

I’ll leave off there at the moment, not to give too much away (and I’m not done with the novel yet either).

Virginia Woolf is the deep end of the pool! 🙂

I’m currently reading The Diary of John Quincy Adams: 1794-1845, a selected (but long) edition edited by Allan Nevins in 1951. JQA is an interesting case because he appeared to dislike politics and public life, frequently stating his preference for being a reader, writer, and scholar; yet when he had a chance to do that, after his Presidency and in his early 60s, he launched right back into a nine-term career as a US Representative that took him to his death at age 80. It is theorized that he suffered from depression, and he consistently seems to have sought out whatever conditions would make him most miserable. The family mantle always weighed heavily on him * , and although one might find his sense of public service admirable, he was privately quite cynical about political life and constantly frustrated by it. It is not just that he couldn’t achieve what he wanted through politics - that is common - but he took no pleasure in the process, as the more extroverted can. Meeting with supplicants, for example, was profoundly tedious for him.

So the effect of the diaries which he assiduously kept is sad, but also stimulating because he was a man of genuine cultivation and always “in the thick of things”.

* Not just on him. His oldest son committed suicide at 28, and his second son drank himself to death by 31.

Oh man. You thought Ulysses was difficult, but I assure you it has NOTHING on Robert Browning’s knotty narrative poem Sordello (1840), about 13th Century Italian politics and troubadouring. I used Arthur J. Whyte’s 1913 annotated edition - very helpful it was and very grateful I was for the help. But still, a tough go, lightened by beautiful lines and passages, but the difficulties always remain in view: Like, what is going on, what IS he talking about? Nonetheless, for true hardcore littérateurs, I unhesitatingly recommend.

Browning interrupts his narrative at the mid-point for a 400-line digression discussing whether he will finish it, which is not merely a modern but indeed a post-modern gesture, and has to be considered one of the most striking such oddities in any 19th Century text.

^ I have done that metaphorically - given up reading a book, felt guilty, and gone back and finished it later.

Almost never. I love almost everything that I read.

This morning, finished D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (which really should be called Men in Love with Each Other). Well, that was quite something. Although I would acknowledge it as a major novel, one dominant impression that I had is that all four main characters are repulsive, and I possibly won’t mind spending any more time with them. That is very rare for me to say. (I didn’t feel that way at the end of The Rainbow, preceding.)

Lawrence does not offer a very comforting view of romantic relations. Constant tension, out of which comes an occasional hot tumble, about which Lawrence himself gets mystically (sometimes near-ludicrously) worked up. There are few novels in which the protagonists yammer so much about what their relationships MEAN; one wants to slap them sometimes. And as if to serve them right for being over-analytic…well I shouldn’t say, but without going into spoilers I can point out that one NEVER feels that a “happy ending” is in the offing.

The novel never stops being compelling, though. I wanted to throw it at the wall, yes, but then pick it right up again. 🙂

I hadn’t read much Lawrence before The Rainbow, a few short stories and poems way back when. Now I shall move on to Sons and Lovers.

I have accounts both here at Goodreads and at LibraryThing, and generally if it’s not here it’s there (or in one of LibraryThing’s linked libraries), but I do have a list of titles that I haven’t located at EITHER site.

Thanks! That is a resource I was unfamiliar with.

That sound very interesting! Scott Thompson’s Furrowed Middlebrow site has this to say about Lawrence:

LAWRENCE, MARGERY (8 Aug 1889 – 13 Nov 1969)
(married name Towle)
1920s – 1970s
Author of more than three dozen volumes of fiction, many featuring supernatural or uncanny themes. These include the collections Nights of the Round Table (1926), The Terraces of Night, Being Further Chronicles of the Club of the Round Table (1932), Strange Caravan (1941), and Number Seven Queer Street (1945). The Madonna of Seven Moons (1931) is a novel dealing with split personality, and The Bridge of Wonder (1939) with spiritualism. The Rent in the Veil (1951) is a timeslip tale, and The Tomorrow of Yesterday (1966) deals with Atlantis. Other fiction includes Red Heels (1924), Fine Feathers (1928), Madame Holle (1934), Emma of Alkistan (1953), Skivvy (1961), The Yellow Triangle (1965), and Autumn Rose (1971).

Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno / Sylvie and Bruno Concluded is not exactly a work you recommend so much as point out, because honestly, one in 500 people is going to care for this level of extreme eccentricity. Melville’s Mardi: and a Voyage Thither and Robert Browning’s Sordello are two other productions in this same WTF? class. However, it should go without saying by now that I am very fond of all these and similar demented creations. 😏

Sylvie and Bruno uneasily combines a daft fantasy with a realistic late Victorian novel, and ladles on the sentimentality in a way that many now find unappealing. But all that said, it is QUITE an experience. I even find Bruno’s oft-criticized baby talk very funny. ("I never talks to nobody when he isn't here! It isn't good manners. Oo should always wait till he comes, before oo talks to him!")

Robert Smith Surtees has been pigeon-holed as a fox-hunting novelist, and perhaps partly because of that, has never "boomed," as the critic Edward Wagenknecht once pointed out. But Wagenkecht also astutely notes that it is easy to enjoy Surtees even if one thoroughly disapproves of hunting, because he excels at comic characterizations.

Surtees' slangy language is very dense for us and takes some getting used to; some references will be missed by non-specialists. But he is a joyously high-spirited writer, which is immediately noticeable and sustained me through the early going while I was getting used to the style. By the 100-page mark, I was reveling in the entire performance.

The book I chose for my initiation was Surtees' first, Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities. The Hunting, Shooting, Racing, Driving, Sailing, Eccentric and Extravagant Exploits of That Renowned Sporting Citizen Mr. John Jorrocks, not a novel but a collection of fictional sketches that first started appearing in the New Sporting Magazine (which Surtees co-founded) in 1831, and that were gathered between hard covers in 1838. (The Pickwick Papers, very obviously influenced by Jorrocks' adventures, had made Charles Dickens' reputation in the meantime.)

John Jorrocks is a rumbustious Cockney grocer whose character develops over a number of Surtees' fictions, but at the beginning he is pretty much a flat-out idiot, though not lacking in a certain crude charm. At his social level, he is clubbable; his friends enjoy him, for his inanities as much as anything else. And every now and then amidst much foolish chatter he comes out with a bit of down-home wisdom: " - so come without any ceremony - us fox-hunters hate ceremony - where there's ceremony there's no friendship."

Only the first few of the 13 sketches in JJ & J are really hunting pieces; after that, Surtees starts to vary the game, so that we get Jorrocks at the seaside, Jorrocks on excursion in France, Jorrocks throwing a dinner party, and so on. Abundance of ingestion is a running theme; the man eats like one of his horses. He also dandies himself up as much as possible, doing his best to be a "man of mode" despite having (to put it mildly) no gentlemanly or intellectual qualifications.

But elan vital, now that he's got. And if Surtees can't help satirizing Jorrocks, he also admires him for the sheer life-force he represents; appetite for hunting, for food, for nice togs translates easily into appetite for life in general.

Like many a vigorous fellow, Jorrocks feels himself hobbled by his wife, which lends a good deal of marital comedy to the book's later passages: " - wish to God I'd never see'd her - took her for better and worser, it's werry true; but she's a d----d deal worser than I took her for."

In short, if you have any winking fondness for vulgarity at all, Jorrocks is your man, and you ought to make his acquaintance.

Of the 19th Century British novelists who figure in the standard histories, Charles Reade (1814-1884), a good friend of Dickens and Wilkie Collins, is one of the least-read today. He is best known for an uncharacteristic production, the historical novel The Cloister and the Hearth, but essentially he was a contemporary social fiction writer who was all over the hot-button issues of his day, and quite a bit of a muckraker. I greatly admired the first Reade that I read, It is Never Too Late to Mend, which achieves considerable power in its pictures of English prison life and the Australian goldfields. I just started Put Yourself in His Place, an industrial labor novel set in Sheffield (“Hillsborough”).

Arthur van Schendel’s John Company (1932), one of the many fine Dutch novels of the colonial East Indies, is “impersonal” in the sense that the Dutch East India Company of the 17th Century is the true protagonist, and not any individual, although the story of adventurer Jan de Brasser provides a through-line. Van Schendel’s approach is original - he gives a comparatively dry and objective-sounding account of “goings-on” in Dutch Indonesia without any conventional plot as such. John Company is not like other novels, and all the better for it.

Among the other novels of this history that I would recommend are Louis Couperus’ The Hidden Force by Louis Couperus, Multatuli’s Max Havelaar, or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company, and Maria Dermout’s The Ten Thousand Things.

^ I knew someone would get on me about that. 🙂 Empire is a fact of human history, on all continents. So maybe it is just possible that there were somewhat more enlightened empires. In any case, my understanding of this history is fairly conservative, fairly center-right. Niall Ferguson and I could have a nice drinks session.

Pharmacdon wrote: "Patrick wrote: "The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature by M.C. Howatson is another guide."

All assistance is welcome!

Reading this morning in Plutarch’s Lives, the Dryden / Clough translation in the old Modern Library Giant edition. Now that’s as classical as it gets. Long sentences with many clauses, you really have to pay attention. I like this quotation about empire: “And indeed there was nothing did more advance the greatness of Rome, than that she did always unite and incorporate those whom she conquered into herself.”

Along with books such as Plutarch, one might take a look at Moses Hadas’s helpful guide Ancilla to Classical Reading.

^ This is the first of hers that I have read, looking forward to more. They certainly are chunky.