Our Spy in NY

Enid Stubin

Summer reading: that prismatic prospect for nine-to-fivers, the leisure class, and those academics possessed of three-month vacations. I’ve always been resistant to or envious of the notion of seasonal reading – what, I wonder, do literate folks do the rest of the year? I refuse to make a list of books I’d like to collect in May, June, and July, when, as an adjunct, I’ve been teaching remedial writing throughout the supposedly idle and therefore idyllic months of college vacation. But in response to an early-August repertory-house screening of Visconti’s The Leopard, I pawed through my grimy shelves for the Pantheon paperback (I know it’s here somewhere) of the di Lampedusa novel. I couldn’t find it but did turn up a copy of Malamud’s A New Life, ‘the National Bestseller at $4.95, now 60 cents’, whose cover features a voluptuous odalisque sprawled among the haystacks of some collegiate pastoral and a Montgomery Clift lookalike turned away in existential torment. It’s one of those books I’d managed to read as a sullen adolescent before I could understand it. A word on its provenance on my double-stacked shelves: in 1965, when my brother was courting the young woman who is now his wife, I inherited a short list of titles – A New Life, McCarthy’s The Group, Updike’s Couples, and Nabokov’s Lolita – and was invited into a casual book club that has informed what tastes I have today. These books were sophisticated, literary, and racy, and the act of reading them seemed to invite me into an alluring, adult world of possibility. Recently my sister-in-law told me that they were chosen by her mother – an intriguing literary inheritance.

Because I’d last read A New Life as a pre-teen, I riffled through the now-brittle orangey pages of the Dell paperback and entered the world of S. Levin, academic refugee from New York City making his way westward to Cascadia College, where he finds a crucible of overheated departmental politics: conflicted loyalties to the freshman writing director who hired him, a catalogue of misfit colleagues, the utilitarian squelching of the humanities and humanism, aching sexual and philosophical loneliness. Why does no one talk about this wrenching comic novel, sad and satirical, authentic, and somehow defiantly exultant? Maybe because the world it illuminates is that of academe, and academic satire doesn’t sell. Maybe not even to academics. When I first read A New Life, the impression it made on me was immediate, but how could that be? The world it limned so sardonically wouldn’t be mine for decades. And yet it was a world I knew before I knew it.

Malamud and Levin were on my mind as I hurtled south and east to my new teaching job, no mere provisional adjunct gig (part-time instructional staff, anxious and uninsured, like to claim solidarity with jazz musicians) but a full-time, tenure-track position at the prettiest campus in the city University of New York system – ‘Four days a week at the beach’, as a friend termed it. Catch the number 6 to Bleecker, dash downstairs to Broadway-Lafayette for the B train, and take it to the end of the line, Brighton Beach, where the salt air intoxicates and the signs dazzle, even if three-quarters of them are incomprehensible. I found myself in front of the Caviar Kiosk, which offered comically huge tins of beluga, sevruga, and malossol, along with Brobdingnagian plastic containers of plebeian salmon roe. What wondrous life is this I lead!

But I had deeper connections to Brighton. As a child I would clamor to spend whole weeks of the summer in Brooklyn with my glamorous cousin Eileen, a spirited hoyden with the after-school and summer social schedule of an aluminum heiress. Although I lived in Far Rockaway, bordered by beach and bay, I routinely begged to visit East Flatbush, from which, provisioned with salami sandwiches, nectarines, and second-tier towels, we would set forth via bus (the B49 to Sheepshead Bay) for a day at tony¹ Manhattan Beach. The sand was newer and coarser than the Rockaway stuff, but it reliably lacked the glittering green edges of broken soda bottles and the odd bit of latex detritus (‘What’s that?’ I’d ask one of my older brothers who, wise in the ways of the world, kept discreetly silent but hustled me on with a light blow to the back of the head). Eileen held court among her cronies, a posse of animated girls from Samuel J. Tilden High School. And I would come equipped with a squashy grownup paperback from her snazzy Danish-modern wall-unit: the autobiography of Gypsy Rose Lee (tidily titled Gypsy, to coincide with the release of the Natalie Wood film); Dr. Benjamin 

Spock’s Baby and Child Care; Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind; the ‘deft and daring comic novel’ by John Tessitore, which provided the screenplay for That Touch of Mink (a favorite Doris Day vehicle, with Cary Grant on board); and if not the complete oeuvre of Harold Robbins, certainly The Major Phase: 71 Park Avenue, Never Love a Stranger, A Stone for Danny Fisher, and the magisterial Carpetbaggers. Propped up on one of my aunt’s chintz comforter covers and anointed with the musky orange glaze of Bain de Soleil (‘for the Saint Tropez tan’), I negotiated the perilous transition from vaudeville to burlesque, prepared some unfortunate toddler for the rigors of toilet training, and followed the picaresque reversals of Robbins’s gritty guys and vulnerable vixens. All the while I was inviting the solar radiation that would culminate, twenty-five years later, in the odd basal-cell carcinoma. Along with the Howard Beach shelf of modern masters, this reading shaped my literary choices long before I took up ‘serious’ literature seriously. Cheesy covers wrapped incandescent prose; a schlocky Bildungsroman offered a glimpse into the mysterious realm of adulthood; lurid blurbs trumpeted contemporary fiction that has endured.  The crummy and the crafted both stayed with me.

Lugging a manila envelope filled with my benefits package (largely offers for ‘catastrophic’ insurance and long-term nursing care), course syllabi, departmental requirements, and the author-ization for an ID card that would affix my squinting, haggard visage for all time under plastic laminate, I sniffed the air of Oriental Boulevard like a spaniel, off to fresh woods and pastures new. Will Eileen’s daughter, now seven, one day open one of her mom’s books and find, sifting out of the crackly, acid-laden bindings, some antique sand from my orgies of summer reading? I hope so. Let the kid form her own canon.

–
1. [Ed.] ‘tony’ is American for ‘posh’. Enid explains: ‘Manhattan Beach is posher than most NY beaches and compared with my native Rockaway and Coney Island, it’s the Riviera.’

*drumroll*

1.  Robert Louis Stevenson.
2.  Maxim de Winter.
3.  Howards End.
4.  Charles Dickens.
5.  Mr Bingley.
6.  Charles Pooter, Diary of a Nobody.
7.  Stevens.
8.  Lady Chatterley.
9.  Thrushcross Grange.
10.  Walter Scott.
11.  Dr Johnson.
12.  Rudyard Kipling.
13.  Brideshead.
14.  Bleak House.
15.  A Doll’s House.
16.  7 Eccles Street.
17.  Bertie Wooster.
18.  Miss Shepherd, Lady in the Van.
19.  Briony Tallis, Atonement.
20.  Guiderius, son of Cymbeline.

More than 10? Help yourself to a biscuit.
More than 15: Make it a chocolate biscuit.
A perfect 20? Pick a star, any star, and call it your own.

Thanks for playing; there’ll be more from Our Back Pages soon.

*drumroll*

1.  Robert Louis Stevenson.
2.  Maxim de Winter.
3.  Howards End.
4.  Charles Dickens.
5.  Mr Bingley.
6.  Charles Pooter, Diary of a Nobody.
7.  Stevens.
8.  Lady Chatterley.
9.  Thrushcross Grange.
10.  Walter Scott.
11.  Dr Johnson.
12.  Rudyard Kipling.
13.  Brideshead.
14.  Bleak House.
15.  A Doll’s House.
16.  7 Eccles Street.
17.  Bertie Wooster.
18.  Miss Shepherd, Lady in the Van.
19.  Briony Tallis, Atonement.
20.  Guiderius, son of Cymbeline.

More than 10? Help yourself to a biscuit.
More than 15: Make it a chocolate biscuit.
A perfect 20? Pick a star, any star, and call it your own.

Thanks for playing; there’ll be more from Our Back Pages soon.

Buck’s Quiz 28
Be It Ever So Humble…

1.      ‘Home is the sailor, home from the sea/ And the hunter home from the hill’. Whose lines are these?
2.      Who owned and lived in Manderley?
3.      What was the name of the house bequeathed to Margaret Schlegel?
4.      Which author lived at 48 Doughty Street?
5.      Which gentleman of fortune came to live at Netherfield Park?
6.      Which fictitious diarist lived in Brickfield Terrace, Holloway?
7.      Who was the butler at Darlington Hall?
8.      Who lived at Wragby Hall with her husband who had been disabled in WW1?
9.      Where did Isabella and Edgar Linton live?
10.    Who lived in Abbots Ford until his death in 1832?
11.    Whose address was 17 Gough Square from 1748-1759?
12.    Naulakha was the name of which English author’s home in Vermont?
13.    Where did the Marchmain family live?
14.    Where did Ada Clare and her companion Esther go to live?
15.    In which play does the heroin, Nora forge the signature of her dying father as security for a loan?
16.    On 16th June 1904, where did Leopold Bloom live?
17.    Whose aunt lived at Brinkley Court, Brinkley-cum-Snodsfield-in-the-Marsh, Nr Market Snodsbury, Worcs?
18.    Who lived in a Robin Reliant in Gloucester Crescent, Camden Town?
19.    Which 13yr old girl’s home was ‘bright orange brick, squat, lead paned baronial Gothic’ and had a fountain in the garden with ‘a half-scale reproduction of Bernini’s Triton in the Piazza Barberini in Rome’?
20.    Who sings ‘Thou thy worldly task hast done,/ Home art gone and ta’en thy wages’?

We will print the answers in a few days…

Buck’s Quiz 28
Be It Ever So Humble…

1.      ‘Home is the sailor, home from the sea/ And the hunter home from the hill’. Whose lines are these?
2.      Who owned and lived in Manderley?
3.      What was the name of the house bequeathed to Margaret Schlegel?
4.      Which author lived at 48 Doughty Street?
5.      Which gentleman of fortune came to live at Netherfield Park?
6.      Which fictitious diarist lived in Brickfield Terrace, Holloway?
7.      Who was the butler at Darlington Hall?
8.      Who lived at Wragby Hall with her husband who had been disabled in WW1?
9.      Where did Isabella and Edgar Linton live?
10.    Who lived in Abbots Ford until his death in 1832?
11.    Whose address was 17 Gough Square from 1748-1759?
12.    Naulakha was the name of which English author’s home in Vermont?
13.    Where did the Marchmain family live?
14.    Where did Ada Clare and her companion Esther go to live?
15.    In which play does the heroin, Nora forge the signature of her dying father as security for a loan?
16.    On 16th June 1904, where did Leopold Bloom live?
17.    Whose aunt lived at Brinkley Court, Brinkley-cum-Snodsfield-in-the-Marsh, Nr Market Snodsbury, Worcs?
18.    Who lived in a Robin Reliant in Gloucester Crescent, Camden Town?
19.    Which 13yr old girl’s home was ‘bright orange brick, squat, lead paned baronial Gothic’ and had a fountain in the garden with ‘a half-scale reproduction of Bernini’s Triton in the Piazza Barberini in Rome’?
20.    Who sings ‘Thou thy worldly task hast done,/ Home art gone and ta’en thy wages’?

We will print the answers in a few days…

The Untold Truth:
Poetry of the First World War

Angela Macmillan

On March 4th 2002, The Times carried an article about the proposed construction of a road in Belgium which would desecrate six First World War cemeteries. Harry Patch, aged 103, one of the very last survivors of the Great War, had not spoken of it for eighty years, but felt so strongly that the dead should be left in peace that he broke silence to tell of the deaths of his three closest comrades during the Third Battle of Ypres: ‘A shell came over and burst among us. I was wounded, it killed my three mates, although I didn’t know it at the time. Nothing was found of them, they were simply blown to pieces… I’ve never forgotten them’.

More than 200,000 British Empire soldiers died on that Belgian stretch of the Western Front. 200,000 voices forever silenced, and Harry Patch representing just one of many survivors unwilling to speak the unspeakable. The disturbance of that memory prompted this old man to give voice to untold truths at last. His simple language, made eloquent by the gravity of its subject, outlines only bare facts. The rest remains in an eighty year silence.

Many of us, if we care to look back through our family history, will find we have grandfathers, great-grandfathers, great-uncles, someone, who took part in The Great War. If we are fortunate there will be some personal, written testimony in the form of diaries, letters or notebooks but these will rarely record more than day to day concerns – the weather, the food, the waiting about, the messages of love and hope. The awful reality was rarely communicated. What many of us now know of the soldier’s experience of war comes from the literature of the time and in particular from the poets. For when the terrible enormity of actual experience goes beyond the powers of human understanding, perhaps then the only adequate response is poetry. The best of the war poets, most of whom were already writing poetry before the war, realized that the function of poetry itself had to be reconsidered in the face of experience, as Wilfred Owen famously declared in the summer of 1918 in his Preface to a book never completed:

       This book is not about heroes. English Poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War.
       Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
       My subject is War and the pity of War.
       The Poetry is in the pity.
       Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.

Poetry now had to be a response to real experience rather than an aesthetic response to the muse or to abstract ideas. At Craiglockhart, the hospital for wounded minds, Owen began to find the means to express the very thing that was threatening to silence him. Taking war as his subject, he saw how the reality of suffering forces a new imperative in the use of language:

I have made fellowships –
Untold of happy lovers in old song.
For love is not the binding of fair lips
With the soft silk of eyes that look and long,

By joy, whose ribbon slips, –
But wound with war’s hard wire whose stakes are strong;
Bound with the bandage of the arm that drips;
Knit in the webbing of the rifle-thong.

In the first five lines of this extract from ‘Apologia pro Poemate Meo’, poetic language aesthetically heightens the experience of love. But in the last three lines, in crucial reversal, it is the very experience of love that lends real significance to language of war – barbed wire, bandages, blood and guns, ultimately affirming and honouring the stronger bonds. In other words the poet does not go outside the experience in order to present it in purely poetic image or metaphor, but stays purposefully within it. This poem descends from the remote, foreign language of its title to a familiar, authentic language that all soldiers speak and comprehend.

Owen never simply abandoned the poetic tradition he knew and loved. After 1917 his poetry would assimilate to war the images and idiom of the Romantic poets. Thus ‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / my sense’ becomes in ‘Exposure’:

Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us…
Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent…
Low drooping flares confuse our memories of the salient…
Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous,
       But nothing happens.

The first line carries distorted echoes of a Keatsian voice and an impression of a lost fluency of language and of rhythm. Words (‘Merciless iced east’) sit uncomfortably beside one another, not only conveying the sense of unease but a refusal to let poetry betray the reality of experience. ‘Knive us’ rhymes only half-fittingly with ‘nervous’ as if language is able only partly to convey the reality of trench warfare. ‘My heart aches’ is transformed into ‘Our brains ache’ the vital difference being the movement from the subjective ‘my’ to the collective ‘our’: the we who have the experience.

Owen did not survive the war. For many of the soldiers who did, home meant the loss of that fellowship of ‘our’; they returned to their old lives only to find themselves as strangers there. From his retirement home Harry Patch’s singular, private experience is further enforced by his unusual longevity:

After I came out of the Army I never saw a war film; I never spoke of the war for 80 years. Occasionally we get 40 or 50 people here with a pianist and they sing old wartime songs. It amuses them. They don’t realise the memories they bring back to me:

Keep the Home Fires burning,
While your hearts are yearning
Though the lads are far away
They dream of home.

What ‘they’ don’t realise, of course, is the chasm of difference between the amusing songs of ‘lads’ far away, and the actual experience of that far away dream of home. ‘Exposure’ continues:

Slowly our ghosts drag home: glimpsing the sunk fires, glozed
With crusted dark-red jewels; crickets jingle there;
For hours the innocent mice rejoice: the house is theirs;
Shutters and doors, all closed: on us the doors are closed, –
                  We turn back to our dying.

Since we believe not otherwise can kind fires burn;
Nor ever suns smile true on child, or field, or fruit.

The soldiers’ glimpse of home fires being allowed to die out and of homes from which they find themselves locked out does not, paradoxically, alter their belief in sacrificing themselves in order to keep the home fires burning and they turn back in a body of ‘we’ as if instinctively to the exclusive responsibility of brothers in arms and the real business of war – the dying. This poem is hard to understand, for what it says seems not to make sense. Yet war does not make sense and the best of the war poets realise that paradox and contradiction are their very subjects. If things are inconsistent and confused then poetry can respond to the inconsistency and confusion not explaining, not justifying, not trying to resolve ambiguities, but creatively expressing the otherwise inexpressible. Nor should poetry be expected to provide answers. Owen’s questions reveal others behind and ahead, as if all that questioning can do is breed more questions simultaneously bewildering for the soldier and powerful for the warning poet:

But what say such as from existence’ brink
Ventured but drave too swift to sink,
The few who rushed in the body to enter hell,
And there out-fiending all its fiends and flames
With superhuman inhumanities,
Long-famous glories, immemorial shames –
And crawling slowly back, have by degrees
Regained cool peaceful air in wonder –
Why speak not they of comrades that went under?

(‘Spring Offensive’)

It is a mistake to think of Wilfred Owen as simply speaking for the common soldier, who cannot or will not speak. What he does instead is to incorporate the question ‘Why speak not they’ into the theme of his poetry. The unanswered question is poised at the very end of this poem of Apocalyptic vision. Its position on ‘existence’ brink’ suggests it is finally unanswerable and yet in asking it at all, various and multiple possible reasons ‘why’ echo in the answering silence: the gulf between those who had the experience and those who did not: the impossibility of humanly representing the inhumanity of war, of speaking the unspeakable, of making sense of the senseless; a callous and indifferent world: the silent and unprotesting ranks of soldiers; the fear; the shame; the love for comrades.

In September 1918 Wilfred Owen sent a draft of ‘Spring Offensive’ to Siegfried Sassoon saying ‘Is this worth going on with? I don’t want to write anything to which a soldier would say “No Compris!” In 2002, is Harry Patch’s eighty-year silence his validation?

 
ASK THE READER

Brian Nellist

Q 

I go to Stratford regularly and read George Eliot and Anne Michaels for CE classes but for my own pleasure I used to read John le Carré and nowadays it’s John Grisham; in those complicated plots I forget everything else. Yet this is condemned as escapism. What’s wrong with that?

A 

Calm down; don’t be so defensive. From what you have just said I rather suspect that you yourself could hazard a guess at two things that are slightly askew. It is not that you refer to Shakespeare as though he is a medicine to be taken for one’s mental health (‘regularly’) which is true in a way but rather that you are limiting the meaning not of Shakespeare but of pleasure. I am reminded of the use of the term by Wordsworth who is the great apostle of its gospel. In the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads he credits poetry with only a single limitation, ‘the necessity of giving immediate pleasure’. The harm comes from trivialising the word, he believes, because in essence man is a creature who seeks pleasure; ‘the grand elementary principle of pleasure by which he knows, and feels, and lives, and moves.’ Pleasure always involves the satisfaction of desires, so the argument goes, and the deepest pleasure must be given by what meets our profoundest, not our most immediate, needs. Hence for Wordsworth, surprisingly, all acts of sympathy, even with those in intense pain, whether in literature or in life, are grounded in pleasure because they embody our need for kinship, fellow feeling, pride in human endurance. Of course, we should not pervert this into pleasure in suffering itself but grant that in its acts of understanding literature encourages a tenderness and fineness of feeling that fulfils a need in us; ‘wherever we sympathise with pain it will be found that the sympathy is produced and carried on by subtle combinations with pleasure’. So, feel free to acknowledge that Stratford and Middlemarch, without any juvenile sense of schadenfreude, are also sources of pleasure.At the moment you are turning literature into hard slog for which you compensate by guilty weekends of holiday reading. As you know, the greatest pleasures demand effort as much as the greatest anything else. It is natural if you enjoy playing bowls that the pleasure will be increased if you work seriously at your game.

But the second thing, from what you say, that you are not taking seriously enough is that word ‘escapism’. To get out of gaol is generally classed as beneficial to the prisoner. All literature in its attempt to make sense of things, even in expressing the fear they make no sense at all, is to that extent a liberation from the cell of non-meaning. We use this accusation too easily. I note from the dictionary that Punch (!) in December, 1939, significant date of course, thought the reading of the big Victorian realist novel an ‘escape’; ‘Many a publisher has had the good idea of advising you to escape thoroughly by way of an eighthundred-and-fifty page novel about family life in the Victorian era.’ Yet I remember after World War II being told by someone from GCHQ (or whatever it was called then) that the World’s Classic Trollope had preserved for him a sense of moral normality that very directly helped to sustain a belief in what he was doing.

But I am evading the issue now, I agree, because your point concerns not the use to which we put books that are ambitious in their aims but what used to be called light literature, a branch of the entertainment industry, to be dismissive of it. Those complicated plots by which you ‘escape’ are often the means by which the sense of friends and foes are identified with good and evil but by complicated routes to make the belief tenable to our sceptical minds, so that their identities become fluid and there are crossovers between the categories. The modern thriller has to complicate the sense that judgement was once a lot easier yet the resolution of the plot, however tentatively, gives you the reassurance that in the end the balance works out on the right side. Popular literature is often close to myth in the clarity with which it will work out its resolutions and a part of your guilty delight in it, I suspect, is the desire for an easier life than more complicated literature allows. Fairy stories do that, of course, and John Grisham may be closer to ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ than to Middlemarch but that does not make it necessarily suspect. Behind the excitements of the Lord of the Rings, for example, we notice that Sauron is destroyed less by action than by suffering, including Frodo’s own corruption, that indeed fighting is part of that corruption and that unless it is registered as suffering there is no value in the fight. When we read quickly for plot and event we do not necessarily register these things but that does not mean they are not being noted somewhere inside us or that we do not feel refreshed in consequence.

Yet if it is a pleasure sometimes to read quickly, be conscious that you may have to do that because otherwise not enough is going on to hold the attention and also to avoid being irritated by how much better you could have expressed it yourself. Inattention in the reader can begin as an excuse and end as a habit; take care that you do not blunt your capacity for still greater pleasure, Paradise Lost or Women in Love.

(Remember: you can purchase all of these books, plus many others, through The Reader Organisation’s Online Bookshop.)

(Hester is an Oxford World’s Classics paperback, edited by Philip Davis and Brian Nellist, and is available here at The Reader Bookshop.)

The Reader Recommends:

AN UNKNOWN MASTERPIECE
Margaret Oliphant, Hester

Philip Davis

Hester is a magnificent novel whose story and characters are guaranteed to keep the reader turning the pages from first to last. The principal character, Catherine Vernon, is what we would now call a career woman: an unmarried Victorian lady who has become chief executive of a bank, the family bank which she stepped in to save when her cousin John had brought it to the edge of ruin. He then absconded to France. At one time, it had looked as if she might have married this cousin, but he jilted her for a more beautiful young woman. From then on, the disillusioned Catherine has devoted her life to the bank, along with a host of poor and dependent relatives whom she houses and supports. We first meet this formidable Catherine when she is 65, and though she is beginning to take a back seat in the business of the bank, she remains the matriarchal centre of her provincial world and, indeed, the protagonist of Margaret Oliphant’s long-neglected novel of 1883.

So why isn’t this novel called Catherine and who is Hester? Hester is the fourteen-year-old daughter of cousin John. We first encounter her on her return from the family exile in France, her father now dead, her widowed mother seeking refuge in Catherine’s family charity. Hester doesn’t know the story of her father’s disgrace. A firebrand and a spitfire, she is already a proud and powerful young woman, determined to find something to do in the modern world. The one woman she knows who has really achieved something is, of course, Catherine. Although she admires her, Hester also resents Catherine, for her power and her control. Too alike to get on well together, they are like an older and younger version of each other. Anyone interested in the paradoxical love and hate, life and death conflicts of young and old will be absorbed in the deep psychological realism of Hester.

It is not called Catherine, because increasingly as the story develops, it is clear that the future of the modern world must lie with the younger people. But Hester herself is not the centre of the novel either, precisely because she is young and unformed – and because in this novel the character of the young is all too conventionally rebellious against the conventions of the old. Margaret Oliphant is expert at seeing both sides, in putting herself and her reader in the place of both characters almost simultaneously. The reader doesn’t quite know who to feel for most, because the author has thoroughly immersed us in life’s complexity. As one of the book’s older characters magnificently puts it: though ‘right and wrong, are like black and white’, the things that baffle us ‘are those that perhaps are not quite right but certainly are not wrong’.

The third major character in this novel is the young male relative to whom Catherine increasingly yields the running of the bank. Edward Vernon is the one person left whom she trusts, like the son she never had. He is her faith, her religion. And yet, secretly resentful of his benefactress, he threatens to repeat the old story of cousin John, by privately gambling his customers’ deposited money on the fortunes of the new Stock Exchange. It is Edward who drives the desperately compelling plot of this novel in a new modern world of money and of sex, combining as he does the pursuit of wealth with the pursuit of Hester herself. What happens virtually kills Catherine. In another story, in the happier parallel existence that shadows this book, Hester would have been Catherine’s daughter by cousin John – and that is partly why Catherine resents her.

‘No one will even mention me in the same breath with George Eliot,’ lamented Mrs Oliphant in Autobiography. But Hester should take its place beside the novels of George Eliot. In addition, it is the disguised and transmuted story of the author herself: a caustically rueful but determinedly powerful widow, left in debt by her artist-husband to bring up three children by the earning power of her pen. As a single parent, she felt she had perhaps sacrificed the quality of her work for the sake of her family. But worse, for all that sacrifice, her two boys still went wrong, just as Edward goes badly astray in the novel, leaving the mother wondering whether that too was partly her fault, through the very desire lovingly to protect them. In Hester, Margaret Oliphant turns round on her own motherly concerns, on her own powerful intelligence, and even on her own capacity for satiric bitterness. ‘Human nature may be easy to see through, but it is very hard to understand.’

Hester is bitter, pained, moving and sad, yet also often satirically funny and alive at the expense of its men; absorbingly exciting in story, profound in character and relationships. When you cannot find another novel by George Eliot or Elizabeth Gaskell, when you find yourself vainly wishing that the Brontës had written more, read Hester.

(You can find more information, plus how to subscribe to the magazine here.)

READING A DIFFICULT POEM
Robert Browning’s ‘Two in the Campagna’

Sarah Coley

It’s inevitable that at some point you will be faced by a poem that scares you with its remoteness and difficulty. There’s no predicting what kind of poem it will be since all readers are different, but that feeling of a mind that simply won’t grasp hold of the words should be familiar to everyone. What can you do? How can you make your mind start to work in the poem? Here’s a difficult poem to be going on with, in which the poet himself seems to be pursuing a thought or sensation that is eluding him:

Two in the Campagna

I
I wonder do you feel to-day
As I have felt, since, hand in hand,
We sat down on the grass, to stray
In spirit better through the land,
This morn of Rome and May?

II
For me, I touched a thought, I know,
Has tantalised me many times,
(Like turns of thread the spiders throw
Mocking across our path) for rhymes
To catch at and let go.

III
Help me to hold it: first it left
The yellowing fennel, run to seed
There, branching from the brickwork’s cleft,
Some old tomb’s ruin: yonder weed
Took up the floating weft,

IV
Where one small orange cup amassed
Five beetles, – blind and green they grope
Among the honey-meal, – and last
Everywhere on the grassy slope
I traced it. Hold it fast!

V
The champaign with its endless fleece
Of feathery grasses everywhere!
Silence and passion, joy and peace,
An everlasting wash of air –
Rome’s ghost since her decease.

VI
Such life there, through such length of hours,
Such miracles performed in play,
Such primal naked forms of flowers,
Such letting Nature have her way
While Heaven looks from its towers.

VII
How say you? Let us, O my dove,
Let us be unashamed of soul,
As earth lies bare to heaven above.
How is it under our control
To love or not to love?

VIII
I would that you were all to me,
You that are just so much, no more –
Nor yours, nor mine, – nor slave nor free!
Where does the fault lie? what the core
Of the wound, since wound must be?

IX
I would I could adopt your will,
See with your eyes, and set my heart
Beating by yours, and drink my fill
At your soul’s springs, – your part, my part
In life, for good and ill.

X
No. I yearn upward – touch you close,
Then stand away. I kiss your cheek,
Catch your soul’s warmth, – I pluck the rose
And love it more than tongue can speak –
Then the good minute goes.

XI
Already how am I so far
Out of that minute? Must I go
Still like the thistle-ball, no bar,
Onward, whenever light winds blow,
Fixed by no friendly star?

XII
Just when I seemed about to learn!
Where is the thread now? Off again!
The old trick! Only I discern –
Infinite passion and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.

When a poem or a book fills your head with numbing fear, it’s the whole sense that is lost – the underground impact or the precisely urgent feeling that the poem was a bid to convey. The details on the other hand stick around and look confusing. So you’re left struggling with scraps of alliteration, or rhyme, or the tense in which the poem’s written, while your more honest mind is saying that you do not know how to begin.

But there has to be a beginning. If the poem is in stanza form, it may help to give each stanza a kind of ‘chapter heading’ by taking a phrase from each verse that impulsively seems central. ‘Two in the Campagna’ could go into these headings: I. ‘Do you feel?’; II. ‘I touched a thought’; III. ‘Help me to hold it’; IV. ‘Everywhere… I traced it’, and so on. Settle quickly on the phrase and write it down, or underline it on your copy. There has to be a way to make the tangled experience manageable and direct, and to isolate patterns of thought and feeling. Look at how words that are related to one another develop. So it’s interesting here how ‘Two in the Campagna’ splits into the separate threads of ‘you’, ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘it’. There’s something dynamic or at least unequal in the relationship that the poet is trying to use to get his own mind working.

There are other things you can do, but at this stage, it’s important to say that you must trust your impulse, even if it’s an angry rejection of the poem. Your impulse came in response to the poem and it doesn’t matter if that response was conscious or instinctive, you have to take it seriously.

You might well think, ‘I don’t like this poem, it’s got too many words in it… He’s too much in his own head.’ He is thinking restlessly throughout the poem and that is striking in a poem about a love relationship. So he writes about spontaneity in a way that makes it seem not quite simple feeling: ‘How is it under our control / To love or not to love?’ Though at the same time, it does appear that it’s the simple feeling he wants. On the other hand you might react against the poet’s almost too-full responses, his ‘primal naked forms of flowers’ and his ‘Silence and passion, joy and peace, / An everlasting wash of air’. Why can’t he just say plainly what he means? That actually would be a terrific question to ask of this poem.

So let’s ask it. Why can’t he be plain? Something seems to be preventing him from saying simply what he wants to say. It’s a rare and fleetingly private thought and yet it’s as if he needs the other person to see and feel it too in order to be sure of it. ‘I wonder do you feel to-day… For me, I touched a thought, I know, / Has tantalised me many times…’ It is exactly that appeal to be understood, but contradictorily, the phrase itself evades sense. He uses the physical word ‘touched’ to show direct contact with mental stuff, and only recovers the language of mind, ‘I know’, when he’s talking about the earlier remembered encounters with the thought. It’s as if the sense of the idea were too fresh to sustain knowledge. It’s only when it belongs in the past that he can talk securely about it. He can’t be plain because the idea is too young or too full of its own energy to settle into words, and his language – for all its zest – comes helplessly after the event.

That’s better isn’t it? He’s not being willfully obscure but struggling to entice the experience into words. In many ways, it feels as if the outward relationship between ‘you’ and ‘I’ is really a secret way to tangle with that inward relationship between the poet and the tantalising sense. It’s a tremendously active poem, in which the ‘I’ is trying to get the spider-thread sense into open present tense.

Just as with the chapter heading idea, try tracing the ways in which the poet attempts to capture the thought: ‘Help me to hold it’, ‘Hold it fast!’ The first attempts are grasping, and it’s a wonderfully physical picture, a kind of butterfly-netting expedition in which the lady is asked to assist: ‘it left / The yellowing fennel, run to seed / There…’. Then later in the poem, almost as soon as he’s said ‘Hold it fast!’, two things happen that over-turn those terms. She gets equal billing (‘us’ now rather than ‘you’ and ‘I’), and the attempt becomes a matter of alignment to the colossal pattern of the universe rather than that tableau of nineteenth-century playfulness: ‘Let us; O my dove, / Let us be unashamed of soul, / As earth lies bare to heaven above. / How is it under our control / To love or not to love’.

It’s grand language. I’m not altogether sure what it means, but it’s fine in its expression. It feels as though he has got something clear – though from this position, perhaps it is really a poem of seduction rather than a poem about that fleeting thread of feeling. Whichever it is, it’s a big arrival to understand that the desired element comes where the mind stops trying, as something beyond ‘our control’. It’s true about reading poetry too. It’s when you read without distance, unashamed of soul, hearing in the poem your own immediate worries and wants, that the poem really is getting read. Then the difficulty is not that of hard language only, but the more serious difficulty of life-size attention. Being scared, in that context, makes perfect sense.