Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

The climax of The Dewy Morn is more political than personal, the triangle of Martial, Felice and Godwin seemingly only having been constructed to make a point more important to Jefferies. The squire, Cornleigh Cornleigh, is presented as such a useless article, alongside his steward, Godwin's, venal devotion to duty, that one can't help suspecting Jefferies of overloading our sympathies unnecessarily but, more subtly, the tenant farmers are presented s their own worst enemy in their subordination and respect for a system that exploits them to the limit.

As in a Hardy novel, motivations run deep and over long periods and Godwin's nine year infatuation with Felice is as crucial to his animosity towards Martial Barnard as his martinet application of the terms of tenancy on the estate. Mary, Felice's maid, is an innocent victim not unlike Hardy's Marty South in The Woodlanders and such a plot building to its final dramas is worthy of the Dorset man even if Jefferies delineates good and bad in such absolute terms. In as far as the diatribe on the condition of the rural poor will allow, we are left with a happy ending.  

That  was a few quid well spent, books already being by far the best value entertainment one can have and further Richard Jefferies will be pursued in due course.

--

The temperature outside is perfect. I hardly wanted to come in but it's nearly time for Sounds of the 70's. The return to comfortable conditions, especially with quiet reigning, is as welcome s the end of toothache or the restoration of other normalities usually taken for granted. And, one book finished, a return to Dr. Johnson and his tremendous sense was most fitting.

I had heard it suggested that his Lives of the Poets were dubious. I thought, well, literary criticism was a different thing in the C18th. Fashions change. One day we might be less impressed again by Paul Muldoon's ludic outlandishness.

So, I read a bit of Johnson on Abraham Cowley.  The problem, stated in several different ways, is summarized in how,

by a voluntary deviation from nature in pursuit of something new and strange; and that writers fail to give delight, by their desire of exciting admiration. 

Johnson's preconception of what constitutes 'nature' might be getting in the way of appreciating the ingenuity but he has a point if he thinks that cleverness on its own isn't enough. I don't think he's far wrong and, of course, criticism is there to be taken or left as much as the primary texts are.

But I progressed to the Selected Essays, 500 pages of highlights from The Rambler, The Adventurer and The Idler, produced prolifically from 1750-60. It can be opened anywhere and it is brilliant, often melancholy in its implications but wise to the consolations of philosophy. Returning to any of those seven Best Books in the House has not so far disappointed and I'm thinking I got that shortlist right.

For the most part he is in pursuit of happiness or at least wondering what is the point. And that is the point. Much of it lies in being active or absorbed in life rather than dilatory but observing the folly of others helps a lot, like,

others...lie down to sleep and rise up to trifle, are employed every morning in finding expedients to rid themselves of the day, chase pleasure through all the places of public resort, fly from London to Bath and from Bath to London, without any other reason for changing place, but that they go in quest of company as idle and vagrant as themselves.  

It's not the highest state of satisfaction to despair that others lead more pointless lives than you do but their example can be learnt from. Avoiding their behaviour reduces your own chances of the encounter with what Sartre would identify two hundred years later as existential angst. There might be ironies involved, though, in how the likes of Johnson and Sartre were concerned about it whereas those so 'passionately' following the fortunes of England - and, especially, Scotland- in the World Cup attribute meaning to their vicarious belonging to such a cause and believe themselves to belong to something.

Paradox, Negative Capability, whatever it is - we are all on one side of it or the other. 

The Dewy Morn

My recent return to Coate Farm and the Richard Jefferies Museum found two copies of Amaryllis at the Fair in not very good condition and no copies of Bevis so I came away with The Dewy Morn. 

The title comes from a poem in The Passionate Pilgrim, 1598, attributed to Shakespeare at the time, open to some doubt now. It concerns the fortunes of Felice Goring, her infatuation with Martial Barnard and the wicked ways of the squire's steward, Robert Godwin who has no sympathy for the tenants on the estate.

The first few chapters elaborate at great length on how Felice's great natural beauty is one with the beauty of nature. If it seems overdone then it is a tribute to Jefferies that he can write so much on the subject to make his point so abundantly clear. She is full of love without having an object for it but she finds one in Martial, which seems to me one more of the profound things that Jefferies is capable of that make him a writer so worth reading in spite of his perceived faults. Restless Human Hearts contained many wonderful passages without, perhaps, being a great novel. Felice is compared to a woman's face the narrator had seen at a window,

Upon that face waiting had had set its seal unmistakably. She was waiting- she had been waiting years. No end to waiting. 

She plots to gain the attention of Martial,

Has anyone thought for an instant upon the extreme difficulty of knowing a person?

... People's entire destiny depends upon those whom they know. One's friends lift one or depress one to their level. 

But, maybe even better than that,  

Is it best to have a strong imagination, or to be entirely without it? 

Surprisingly, from the author of fiction, 

An imaginative mind creates for itself a beautiful world; but upon entering into practical life, at every step, first one and then another portion of the structure is shattered till the entire fabric falls to pieces. Dust under foot and bitterness to the taste are all that remain; a void heart, a hopeless future, a weary present.  

It's a melancholy reflection from a very writerly writer of the type that broods long enough on such things for them to be self-fulfillingly melancholy. Except, given a few more pages, this argument in favour of the practical life turns out to be by way of introduction to Godwin who has no notion of anything but the practical and that is what makes him a monster.

The book is to become a tract on the socio-economic condition of the rural poor who are closer to the land they work on than those who own it and, effectively, them. Published in 1884, ahead of any progress made by Socialism, there were plenty of writers making similar points but now that Socialism has come and maybe gone, one wonders at the partial success it had.

The Dewy Morn survives its slow, overly poetic beginnings to confirm Jefferies as an admirable writer if a flawed one. Not subtle, maybe not brilliantly clever but one that it is easy to be in sympathy with. The empathy with nature is idealistic and it is easy to see him as a lonely misfit in a society based on commerce, business and profit. Such a writer is maybe all he could ever have been so good for him that he was and that he is so fondly, if not widely, remembered as such. 

Edward Thomas on Richard Jefferies

 Edward Thomas does Richard Jefferies something of a disfavour in his critical biography. It's a brilliant, clear sighted and appreciative account but it quotes so heavily from the Jefferies books that one feels as if one has been provided with the salient points, a generous selection of highlights and know Jefferies well enough from it without needing to go to the original texts unless one wants the fine detail. It's such a great tribute of close reading and deep appreciation that it threatens to eclipse the need for its subject.

I've had it here for years but it soon became apparent that I'd only ever read the first chapter, which is a survey of the countryside south of Swindon that I know not quite as well as they did from having ridden through parts of it on a bike in the 1990's.

Thomas and Jefferies are kindred spirits in many ways, being so attentive to nature. Thomas was really a city man, though, and appreciated the countryside as a visitor. Coate, when Jefferies was there, wasn't on the outskirts of Swindon, it was a separate place. Thus Jefferies is, or first was, the sort of rural man who, however thoughtful and dreamy he might have been, loved the natural world in the same way as Ted Hughes did and King Charles III once did, who both saw fit to kill it whether by gun, fishing rod or other device. To the credit of Jefferies, he at least progressed to a preference for watching a bit longer and preferring to delay or make less use of his weaponry. Whereas Hughes often seemed to be reducing animals to their visceral parts and Jefferies sometimes becomes all mystical about what nature has to offer, it is Thomas whose sensitivity to the elements might appear more mainstream to us now, who get our milk from Tesco and much of our countryside from train windows.  

The autobiographical The Story of My Heart, the hymn to female beauty The Dewy Morn and the novel without a plot, Amaryllis at the Fair, look like the places to go in due course, perhaps Amaryllis first, but, as has happened before, I intend to go further into a writer and then another turns up - and here comes Henry James- but Jefferies has been tremendous value so far and I'm by no means finished with him yet. 

Restless Human Hearts

That is one helluva book for only the second effort by a writer not successful in his day as a novelist and not much read now beyond the society doing such good work in and about his place on the outskirts of Swindon.

It's a Victorian 'sensation' novel full of drama and a certain amount of unlikeliness but a rip-roaring read in which one can suspend disbelief not only in its outrageously contrived climax but elsewhere, too, and care less about such considerations. Not least because its digressions are, for me, its highlights and not, as is suggested elsewhere, ballast to fill out the word count required for three volumes. 

What shall we do with ourselves? This is the cry of our age. We have exhausted all passions and all pleasures. 

I'm sure it was ever thus, or seemed so. 

 

It wasn't easy to keep track of who was who and how their often problematic relationships built into whatever the main theme is but Jefferies is a vibrant writer without having done a university creative writing degree and was writing the equivalent of a television drama to keep the audience agog. Quite how this lines up with the writing he's better remembered for, about the countryside, is not obvious beyond the radiant purity of Heloise but I'll be pursuing Jefferies further. Next in Edward Thomas's book on him that has been on the shelves for years but not, as far as I can remember, ever read in full.

The climax comes when the luxuriantly atttactive Carlotta is trapped in a railway carriage with a cobra and jumps out to escape from it. We might assume her dead as some kind of just desserts for her vanity and selfishness but she isn't and quite why a lady in a railway carriage had found herself in such a situation is perfectly reasonably explained away. In the circumstances, I'm surprised such dramas don't happen more often.

It's a big canvas and a crowded dramatis personae and art for art's sake might not have been its first concern. One can't make either Carlotta or Heloise the central character and, as such, it's more like the map of society laid out in Hardy's The Woodlanders than anything concentrated on the destiny of one.

One or two are lost along the way. But, having had all the excitement, Carlotta retires to Torquay as a monument to her former glory. Heloise is made ideal, reading Tennyson to her son which represents some idea of C19th English consummation, I dare say. It is a happy ending. 

But, for me, it might only be a beginning. There is stacks of Richard Jefferies to be had and if this is not regarded as his best work then I'm interested to see what is. I'll see what Edward Thomas has to say first. 

Juggling

 The art of juggling was always beyond me. But I'm juggling books, quite enjoyably, for a few days. It throws up all kinds of unlikely links.

The Richard Jefferies book by Edward Thomas can be sensibly left until I've finished Restless Human Hearts. But the novel, for all its characters and maybe bittiness is taking some sort of thematic shapre for me and, since he is so enjoyable to read, the contemporary fault-finding of it seems disproportionate compared to its good points. It's a great performance even if technically flawed.

As below, the digressions are to be treasured rather than dismissed as 'padding'. And if at first there appear to be too many characters, maybe they all have places in the scheme of things. Two-thirds of the way through, it's possible to see the parallel stories of the various dissatisfactions as different attempts at resloving them. By the end, we might find which of them Jefferies thought the most workable.

It's unlikely to be the artificiality of vain, glamorous Carlotta. I'm thinking it might not be the religious devotions of Georgiana, or her ground-breaking short-term marriage contract. 

A captivating chapter in which a famous stained-glass window on the continent is found to be 'tame and flat' in comparison with one hidden in a corner of Gloucestershire - in Fairford, I reckon- that becomes a 'breathing reality, breathing fire and torture and misery indecribable' makes Ella the representative of art whose temperament prefers it to the actual, real world of love. But perhaps Jefferies's sympathies lie mostly with Heloise and her mystical attachment to nature.

 

It's not going to be quite so easy to empathize with Peter Bessell, the subject of Finding Dad by his son, Paul, however charismatic he was if one had met him. There is some sort of connection to Carlotta in how such people use and abuse others in pursuit of their own tawdry purposes. Bessell was an MP and part of a long tradition of deelpy untrustworthy types that has thrown up the likes of Profumo, Stonehouse, Maxwell, Johnson, Mandelson and, I dare say, my one-time hero, Jeremy Thorpe.

It looks like being a horror story about one bent on serving themselves in a Faustian pact with chance that they had no chance of ultimately gaining from but what does one expect from a book one saw advertised in the Daily Express. It was never likely to be morally uplifting.

 

Another one-time hero was Thom Gunn and, separating the artist from the art, he still rates in the top echelon of poets in his best work. And, again, to those who met him- which I once very briefly did- he was an utterly convincing charmer, if bringing with him some louche reference points. Graham Dixon, author of Oh Mother, What Did You Do?, knew him much better than that but any book that begins,

Linked with other Movement poets such as Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn....

must be dubious from the outset.

Dixon was given the postgraduate job at Berkeley of grading Gunn's undergraduate class's papers. I'd prefer not to have my work marked by someone who thought Hughes was a 'Movement' poet and so one reads him warily from thereon in. 

It must be significant that Dixon moved into psychotherapy and, as such, a case like Thom Gunn's must be irresisitible to him. It's not yet clear how much the over-diagnosis going on is Dixon's fault or largely understandable given his subject matter.  

It's quite possible that the account of Gunn provided by the book will prove to be worth having, with certain credibility but already it is making me look back on those days when the object under consideration in Eng Lit was the text and not the author. The revolution whereby the text was studied to the exclusion of any reference to its author was misguided but counter revolutions are often worse and by now poems can be reduced to symptoms in the diagnosis of the author who is put into the role of patient.

Some of Gunn's poems weren't very good but plenty were brilliant. It would be more rewarding to read those and understand why. Let's give Graham Dixon an even break and see if he can contribute.

Bunting, Jefferies, Edward Thomas

Books, like events, can be overtaken by others more pressing. Basil Bunting's letters were a diversion but not a priority for me. Having reached the end of the first part, I'll go back to them one day when more attractive propositions are harder to find. It's a good place to leave it, in December 1938, just as Bunting has told Ezra Pound where he stands vis a vis Ezra's unpalatable views,

You know as well as any man that a Jew has the same physique and a similar amount of grey matter as the rest of us. You know as well as any man that to hold one individual guilty of the sins of another is an abomination. You know as well as any man that the non-Jews have contributed their fair share, of the bankers and other millionaires of doubtful honesty...

Every anti-semitism, anti-niggerism, anti-moorish, that I recall in history was base...

and so, whatever one might decide about Bunting's poetry in due course, he has made his point and deserves much credit for that. I'm still not convinced I'm going to like him but that one letter makes the £1 I spent on the book £1 well spent and I'm glad of having read it.

--

There's an equally memorable, if entirely different passage in Restless Human Hearts by Richard Jefferies. There are several but one in particular for me. These shifts into meditation in some loose way are reminiscent of how Tolstoy makes his books the length they are, extrapolating lines of thought at intervals in his involved narrative.   

I've had to make a diagram to keep track of the relationships and dynamics between the characters in Restless Human Hearts. The title is rightly in the plural. Quite how all the infatuations relate to each other remains to be seen but I'm ready to guess that the vain, glamorous but hideous Carlotta is to be contrasted with the almost unearthly Heloise. 

The second part has already become melodramatic with a duel and a tragic riding accident and critics who find the book flawed- as only Jefferies's second attempt- might have a point but, such reservations aside, it still makes for great reading.

The pages that I was most taken by reflecting,

What a curious system it is to teach us, not only at school, but at home, and in the early part of our life, ideas and feelings which we must afterwards spend years in endeavouring to unlearn...

and the next long paragraph,

We know so much nowadays. Everything has been done. Every possible emotion has been felt in every imaginable manner. Every combination conceivable of human relationship has been worked out, and the quarry is empty....

And that was in 1875.

That by 2026 it seems to us that maybe it wasn't quite the case then suggests that if it seems so now, it might not be so yet, either. And thus might never be. As with Francis Fukuyama's pronouncement of the 'end of history', we are all tempted to think we've arrived at a crucial point only for the next generation to find themselves in among the next pile of theories, wonders, crises and absurdities. It must be a state of mind to think everything has been done rather than a piece of cultural analysis.

Kant, Hegel, Sartre, Derrida then Baudrillard all came and went but none of them turned out to be the last word. To arrive at Boulez two hundred years after Bach shows that it's not always linear progress. Surely pop music has run its course but only older people whose time has come and gone would say so. Mark Radcliffe on Sounds of the 70's said that the Bowie and T. Rex sounded so 'fresh' and could have been made now. But, no, they sounded tremendous because they were from the 1970's.

 

Alongside the Jefferies novel, I'll go further into the Edward Thomas biography of him that I remember the first chapter of- the detailed, evocative description of Wiltshire- which is gorgeous. And from there, we will see how far Jefferies Studies can go. There's no shortage of material. 

However, two other books due this week will be making their demands. 

Oh Mother, What Did You Do? Pose and Repose in the Life, Letters and Poetry of Thom Gunn by Graham Dixon promises a reassessment that will be interesting to assess, mostly because it depends what sort of assessment it reassesses.

Paul Bessell's Finding Dad might not prove to be uplifting, it being Peter Bessell's son's findings about his life which is likely to be louche, salacious and probably scandalous although it depends where one's scandal threshold is set. The story of Jeremy Thorpe, my teenage political hero, seems a bit quaint, a bit Midsomer Murders, post-Boris, in the Age of Trump and so quite cosy. We will see. I wouldn't have ordered it if I expected it to be a vindication of Bessell including evidence for his beatification.  

Shakespeare in Oxford and other stories

 When one's life is one big holiday, time spent anywhere else but at home is only an excursion, not really any more of a holiday than one was having anyway. Not being in favour of travel for travel's sake, I don't go as far as I might but a few days up the road, or railtracks as it was, proved to be time well spent.

Swindon doesn't feature large on the literary map but Richard Jefferies and his museum there turned out to be a rewarding visit. Restless Human Hearts, the early three-part novel from 1875, is highly readable, clearly delineated and with pertinent passages worth quoting that, in due course, I surely will. I knew of Jefferies only from the fact that Edward Thomas wrote a book on him and that he had lived in that place by Coate Water. With the likes of Thomas Hardy for competition, success as a novelist was never going to be easy but he stuck at it with some conviction, it seems, before making more of a name as a nature writer while Thomas progressed from countryside prose to major poetry status. Having reached a suitable place at which to leave Basil Bunting aside, I'll gladly divert to the more likeable Jefferies for the foreseeable.

The bus pass gets one to Oxford and back. I don't know if it was exam time but a number of young people around town in gowns made me wonder if they still wear them while reproducing their versions of Suetonius.

I was reacquainted with the gorgeous Alfred Jewel in the Ashmolean, spent a few minutes with Walter Sickert's Brighton Pierrots so familiar from my front room and don't know why the internet can't find me the de Hooch that I'm sure I saw there in among all the ancient porcelain. But a major personal breakthrough came thanks to the kind lady in St. Michael's Church whose forebearance allowed me to expatiate on some Shakespeare biography.

The font over in the opposite corner. Shakespeare once stood next to it when it was in another church.

Yes, in St. George's.

He stood next to it at the christening of William Davenant, his godson.

Yes.

Who was born to Jane, or Jeanette, landlady of the inn where he stayed on his way from London to Stratford.

Yes.

Good. So can you tell me where that inn was, at no. 5 Cornmarket Street.

And, yes, she could. I'd been counting from the wrong end and finding a shoe shop. If you count from the other end, you find the Golden Cross, set back from the street in a courtyard and exactly the detail I was looking for.

Not only that but if you go on the right day in September, they will show you the room that Shakespeare stayed in.

I said I'm ready to accept that Shakespeare was the real father of Davenant, as later claimed by the boy. There might have been a bit of a trend for actual fathers being designated as god fathers in those days. She said, yes, in those parts it is widely believed to be so.

Without it being classed as a conspiracy theory, in any way subversive or unpatriotic. Just something that happened. And I found that most 'refreshing'.

I didn't want to outstay my welcome and appear any more of a bore than I had been already. Oxford surely has its share of them. So I'm glad I didn't think to ask whether there was any correlative local pride taken in the Earl of Oxford's claim to authorship, or that made on his behalf. Because that is a conspiracy theory, it is nonsense and it's a shame that such low-level rumour-mongering is allowed to pass as some kind of scholarship. Except it makes for a bit of a diversion, cul-de-sac though it turns out to be.

So, yes. Not a holiday but a useful day out and I felt much the better for it.