Archives for August 2006

Erin O’ Connor has further thoughts on Gilbert White:

There is a special relationship between the words here–minimal, sharp, observant but not effusive, descriptive but not lingering or self-conscious–and the experience they describe, which is not only essentially non-verbal, but elementally impersonal. The pleasure evoked by these descriptions is not a linguistic pleasure, or even a particularly thoughtful one, though it is a knowledgeable and aware one. You might call it a modest pleasure, or at least one that is not in the least ego-centric. There is no self in White’s entries, though there is an outlook; he reduces himself to a pair of eyes and impartially records what they see.

And Delicious Pundit throws in another Larkin birthday selection, “Essential Beauty.”

“He had previously had no idea of the difficulties and frustrations of a correspondent’s life. All one did, he had believed, was to collect the facts from people anxious and willing to give them accurately and then, after due reflection, to write the piece. Now he had to learn about the different kinds of lying, that of the official, that of the press relations officer, the lies of men with grievances or axes to grind or something to conceal, or who simply preferred lying to the truth.”

Honor Tracy, A Number of Things

Frank Wilson reminds us all that today is Philip Larkin’s birthday. He commemmorates it by linking to “Church Going.” I’ll link to the uncharacteristically happy “Coming” (here with a comment from the poet), where failure of understanding is a condition of the happiness on offer–but in Larkin we take whatever happiness we can get.

When the world is too much with me, I reach for Gilbert White. The eighteenth-century naturalist made 10,000 daily records of the flora and fauna, weather and harvests of his Hampshire village, Selborne. These are his notes from August 1771.

Aug. 5. Young partridgers, strong flyers. Soft showers. Swifts. Pease are hacking.

Aug. 6. Nuthatch chirps; is very loquacious at this time of the year. Large bat appears, vespertilio altivolans.

Aug. 7. Rye-harvest begins. Procured the above-mentioned specimen of the bat, a male.

Aug. 8. Rain in the night, with wind. Swifts. Sultry & moist: Cucumbers bear abundantly. Showers about. Procured a second large bat, a male.

Aug. 10. Flying ants, male & female.

Aug. 11. Heavy clouds round the horizon. Lambs play & frolick.

Aug. 16. Rain, driving rain, dry. Four swifts still.

Aug. 18. No dew, rain, rain, rain. Swans flounce & dive. Chilly & dark.

Aug. 19. Swifts abound. Swallows & martins bring out their second broods which are perchers. Thunder: wind.

Aug. 22. Bank-martins [sand-martins] bring out their second brood. Swifts. No swifts seen after this day.

Aug. 23. Young swallows & martins come out every day. Still weather. Wheat-harvest becomes pretty general.

Aug. 25. Wheat not ripe at Faringdon. Winter weather. Oats & barley ripe before wheat.

Aug. 26. Nuthatch chirps much. No swifts since 22nd.

Aug. 28. Dark, grey, & soft. People bind their wheat.

Aug. 29. Fog, sun, brisk wind. Sweet day. Wheat begins to be housed.

Aug. 30. Young Stoparolas abound. Swallows congregate in vast flocks. Wheat housed.

I really do bliss out reading these journals. The above, for me, is a story, a poem, and a picture all at once, minimally wordy but maximally expressive, piquing every sense.

“Dame Polly required but two things from the novelist’s art, a rattling good yarn or a jolly good laugh. She declined to read books by girls of fifteen, proletarians or aliens, subtle evocations of childhood were thrown at cats in her garden, exquisitely sensitive portrayals of lunacy served as fuel for the boiler and a whole literature of protest by crazy mixed-up kids of forty-two lay cemented beneath the Chinese pagoda on the bank of her stream.”

Honor Tracy, A Number of Things

The Little Professor is spluttering incoherently, and with good reason! I can’t believe they said “pesky.”

Grammar sticklers, be vindicated. (Thanks to Coudal for the tip.)

In between novels in A Dance to the Music of Time, I’m reading around in Anthony Powell’s captivating Memoirs. As in the fiction, the portraits here are sharp and indelible, and several are of notable writers. For instance, F. Scott Fitzgerald at the MGM commissary in 1937:

He was smallish, neat, solidly built, wearing a light grey suit, light-coloured tie, all his tones essentially light. Photographs–seen for the most part years later–do not do justice to him. Possibly he was one of those persons who at once become self-conscious when photographed. Even snapshots tend to give him an air of swagger, a kind of cockiness, which, anyway at that moment, he did not at all possess. On the contrary, one was at once aware of an odd sort of unassuming dignity. There was no hint at all of the cantankerous temper that undoubtedly lurked beneath the surface. His air could be thought a trifle sad, not, as sometimes described at this period, in the least brokedown.

…Fitzgerald took a pen from his pocket, and a scrap of paper. On the paper he drew a rough map of North America. Then he added three arrows pointing to the continent. The arrows showed the directions from which culture had flowed into the United States. I am ashamed to say I cannot now remember precisely which these channels were: possibly the New England seabaord; the South (the Old Dominion); up through Latin America; yet I seem to retain some impression of an arrow lancing in from the Pacific. The point of mentioning this diagram is, however, the manner in which a characteristic side of Fitzgerald was revealed. He loved instructing. There was a schoolmasterly streak, a sudden enthusiasm, simplicity of exposition, qualities that might have offered a brilliant career as a teacher or lecturer at school or university.

Not only that, but the day Powell lunched with him, Fitzgerald began his scandalous affair with Sheilah Graham. Next is Ford Madox Ford:

Another Duckworth author, though only intermittently, was Ford Madox Ford. As the work of an old acquaintance, Gerald Duckworth was prepared to publish Ford’s books from time to time, but they were not popular with Balston [a Duckworth director], who did not regard their small sales as redeemed by the author’s undoubted interest in literary experiment. Ford’s novels usually deal with a similar social level to those of Galsworthy, though Ford is far more aware of the paradoxes of human nature, the necessity, at that moment, of exploring new forms of writing. An immense self-pity–in general an almost essential adjunct of the bestseller–infected Ford adversely as a serious novelist, while at the same time for some reason never boosting his sales. His misunderstandings and sentimentalities on the subject of English life (half-German himself, he very nearly opted for German nationality just before 1914) make him always in some degree a foreigner, marvelling at an England that never was.

And, at length, George Orwell:

Orwell was in his way quite ambitious, I think, and had a decided taste for power; but his ambition did not run along conventional lines, and he liked his power to be of the