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Few experiences are more annoying than a first meeting that does not come off

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Bernard Berenson’s Sketch for a Self-Portrait.  I always enjoy finding two of my favorite writers knew each other in some capacity I’d never imagined – like Edith Wharton taking Henry James on early motorcar tours and terrifying him with the speed.

Few experiences are more annoying than a first meeting that does not come off.  It leaves one exasperated, skinned, and skinned roughly, suspecting it is one’s own fault and wishing it had never taken place. I seldom get over such a failure. Only once did a rasping encounter that left me as if I had fought for hours through nettles and brambles with stinging buzzing flies tormenting and a blazing sun to parch one, only once did I get over such an introduction. And that was due to a ruse. It happened in this way

Years ago, years before the last war, our neighbour Henry Y, Cannon invited me to meet Mr. and Mrs. Wharton. I had heard of her as well as read her and looked forward to the meeting with curiosity, expectation and hope.  Placed next to her I tried in vain to get some human or even passably polite word out of her. She sniffed, she sneered, she jeered, she lost no occasion for putting in the wounding word, the venomous phrase. She left me exasperated and ashamed of my exasperation. I vowed never to see her again and no doubt reiterated this vow whenever her name came up among common friends.

Some years later in Paris, where l was seeing Henry Adams frequently, he invited me to dine with him one evening at Voisin’s. I arrived and instead of finding him at his usual table on the ground floor I was led upstairs. It was in July.  The room seemed full of acquaintances, but there was not enough daylight left to make out just who they were.  Adams led me up to a lady who was seated by a window. She had a  lack lace veil over her face I had no idea who she was. Her voice was pleasant. We fell into talk which got to interest me more and more. We seemed to share the some loves and hates in the realm of art. We agreed about the people whose names came up. I was wondering more and more who this delightful woman could be. Not a newcomer, surely. She was far too much in it for that. American no doubt but a foreign resident. It never occurred to me that she was what the electric light presently revealed, Edith Wharton.

She at once became a friend – a friend whose friendship soon got to be one of the most satisfactory of all my human relations No devoted sister could have been more concerned for my comfort, more eager for my happiness. As an elder sister she never hesitated to reprove and advise, and for that I loved her.  Yet all of a sudden he would begin to praise, to express her desire for the company of this or that person well known to her as being to me of unpleasant association.

One of these, peculiarly obnoxious, was notorious for his much trumpeted hate of Richard Wagner, Arthur Balfour and myself. I should have been flattered to make a third in such a trinity. Unfortunately Wagner was beyond his darts and Balfour beyond his reach, so I was left exposed to his slings and arrows. Edith Wharton knew this; and yet a naughty imp possessed her to tear the skin off a sore not yet healed over.

A limited sector

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From An Evening with Ramon Bonavena in the the Borges and Bioy Casares co-authored Chronicles of Bustos Domecq.  All the sections are simpler versions of the paradoxes of literary creation and content that continued to fascinate him through his solo writings so it’s surprising that none have made it into the various Borges collections I’ve seen or have ever, that I can tell, been reprinted.  This one covers an author who writes a multi-volume descriptive work on the contents of the corner of his own writing desk.

“My plan, at the beginning, did not exceed the bounds of literature, or, even worse, of realism. I wanted—there was nothing out of the ordinary about this, really—to produce a novel of the land, straightforward, with deeply human characters and the usual protest against absentee landowners. … Working my way into my subject, I came to realize that the major difficulty lay not in the characters’ names but rather was of a psychological order. How was I to put myself into my neighbor’s head? How was I to guess what others were thinking without abjuring realism? The answer was clear, but at first I could not see it. Then I considered the prospect of a novel in which the characters were domestic animals. But once again, how was I to intuit the cerebral processes of a dog, how was I to enter into a world perhaps less visual than olfactory? At a loss, I fell back on myself and thought that the one remaining possibility rested in autobiography. But even here lay the labyrinth. Who was I? Today’s self, bewildered; yesterday’s, forgotten; tomorrow’s, unpredictable? What could be more unattainable than the mind? If I am self-conscious as I write, self-consciousness creeps in, a new factor; if I surrender to free association, I surrender to chance. I don’t know whether you recall the story told, I believe by Cicero, of a woman who went to a temple to consult with an oracle and unaware of it spoke the very words of the answer she sought. Something similar happened to me here in Ezpeleta . Not so much in search of a solution but one day looking for something to do, I read over my notes. And there lay the key I was after. There, in the words limited sector. When I wrote them, I was simply using a commonplace; when I reread them, a sudden revelation dazzled me. A limited sector . . . What sector could be more limited than a corner of the deal table at which I worked? I decided then to restrict myself to one corner, to what that corner might offer. I measured with this carpenter’s rule—which you may examine at your pleasure—the leg of the aforementioned table and verified that it stood at thirty-one inches above floor level, a height I deemed adequate. To have gone on indefinitely upward would have meant to knock my head against the ceiling, then the roof, and quite soon astronomy; to have delved down would have sunk me into the basement, out onto the subtropical plain, if not into the very bowels of the globe. The chosen corner, at least, offered no lack of interesting possibilities. The copper ashtray, the blue-and-red pointed pencil, and so on, et cetera.”

‘Tis strange that she should thus confess it

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From Donne’s imitation of Horace, Persius, and Juvenal we move to his of Martial:

A SELF-ACCUSER

Your mistress, that you follow whores, still taxeth you ;
‘Tis strange that she should thus confess it, though’t be true.

ANTIQUARY

If in his study he hath so much care
To hang all old strange things, let his wife beware.

PHRYNE

Thy flattering picture, Phryne, is like thee,
Only in this, that you both painted be.

KLOCKIUS

Klockius so deeply hath sworn ne’er more to come
In bawdy house, that he dares not go home.

Without espousing the cause of any party, I have attempted to moderate the rage of all

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Healthy thoughts from Oliver Goldsmith’s dedicatory letter to his brother for The Traveller

…. Poetry makes a principal amusement among unpolished nations; but in a country verging to the extremes of refinement, Painting and Music come in for a share. As these offer the feeble mind a less laborious entertainment, they at first rival Poetry, and at length supplant her; they engross all that favour once shown to her, and though but younger sisters, seize upon the elder’s birthright.

Yet, however this art may be neglected by the powerful, it is still in greater danger from the mistaken efforts of the learned to improve it. What criticisms have we not heard of late in favour of blank verse, and Pindaric odes, choruses, anapaests and iambics, alliterative care and happy negligence! Every absurdity has now a champion to defend it; and as he is generally much in the wrong, so he has always much to say; for error is ever talkative.

But there is an enemy to this art still more dangerous, I mean Party. Party entirely distorts the judgment, and destroys the taste. When the mind is once infected with this disease, it can only find pleasure in what contributes to increase the distemper. Like the tiger, that seldom desists from pursuing man after having once preyed upon human flesh, the reader, who has once gratified his appetite with calumny, makes, ever after, the most agreeable feast upon murdered reputation. Such readers generally admire some half-witted thing, who wants to be thought a bold man, having lost the character of a wise one. Him they dignify with the name of poet; his tawdry lampoons are called satires, his turbulence is said to be force, and his frenzy fire.

What reception a Poem may find, which has neither abuse, party, nor blank verse to support it, I cannot tell, nor am I solicitous to know. My aims are right. Without espousing the cause of any party, I have attempted to moderate the rage of all. I have endeavoured to show, that there may be equal happiness in states, that are differently governed from our own; that every state has a particular principle of happiness, and that this principle in each may be carried to a mischievous excess. There are few can judge, better than yourself, how far these positions are illustrated in this Poem.

God! How have I sinn’d, that thy wrath’s furious rod, this fellow, chooseth me?

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From John Donne’s Satire 4 – a visit to the court.  At least quarantine keeps you from these sorts of social strappado-ings:

towards me did run
A thing more strange, than on Nile’s slime the sun
E’er bred, or all which into Noah’s ark came;
A thing which would have posed Adam to name; 20
Stranger than seven antiquaries’ studies,
Than Afric’s monsters, Guiana’s rarities;
Stranger than strangers; one, who for a Dane,
In the Danes’ massacre had sure been slain,
If he had lived then; and without help dies, 25
When next the ’prentices ’gainst strangers rise;
One, whom the watch, at noon, lets scarce go by;
One, to whom th’ examining justice sure would cry,
‘Sir, by your priesthood, tell me what you are.’
His clothes were strange, though coarse, and black, though bare; 30
Sleeveless his jerkin was, and it had been
Velvet, but ’twas now—so much ground was seen—
Become tufftaffaty; and our children shall
See it plain rash awhile, then nought at all.
The thing hath travell’d, and, faith, speaks all tongues, 35
And only knoweth what to all states belongs.
Made of th’ accents and best phrase of all these,
He speaks one language. If strange meats displease,
Art can deceive, or hunger force my taste,
But pedants’ motley tongue, soldiers’ bombast, 40
Mountebanks’ drug-tongue, nor the terms of law
Are strong enough preparatives, to draw
Me to bear this, yet I must be content
With his tongue, in his tongue, called compliment;
In which he can win widows, and pay scores, 45
Make men speak treason, cozen subtlest whores,
Outflatter favourites, or outlie either
Jovius, or Surius, or both together.
He names me, and comes to me; I whisper, ‘God!
How have I sinn’d, that Thy wrath’s furious rod, 50
This fellow, chooseth me?’

They are meant for individuals, but speak to all mankind.

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From The Race to Reach the South Pole in Stefan Zweig’s Shooting Stars:

The Dying Man’s Letters

In those moments, facing invisible but now imminent death while the blizzard attacks the thin walls of the tent like a madman, Captain Scott remembers all to whom he is close. Alone in the iciest silence, silence never broken by a human voice, he is heroically aware of his fraternal feelings for his country, for all mankind. In this white wilderness, a mirage of the mind conjures up the image of all who were ever linked to him by love, loyalty and friendship, and he addresses them. Captain Scott writes with freezing fingers, writes letters at the hour of his death to all the living men and women he loves.

They are wonderful letters. In the mighty presence of death all that is small and petty is dismissed; the crystalline air of that empty sky seems to breathe through his words. They are meant for individuals, but speak to all mankind. They are written at a certain time, they speak for eternity.

He writes to his wife, asking her to take good care of his son, the best legacy he can leave her, and above all, he says, “he must guard and you must guard him against indolence. Make him into a strenuous man.” Of himself he says—at the end of one of the greatest achievements in the history of the world—“I had to force myself into being strenuous, as you know—had always an inclination to be idle.” Even so close to death he does not regret but approves of his own decision to go on the expedition. “What lots and lots I could tell you of this journey. How much better it has been than lounging in too great comfort at home.”

And he writes in loyal comradeship to the wife of one of his companions in misfortune, to the mother of another, men who will have died with him when the letters reach home, bearing witness to their heroism. Although he is dying himself, he comforts the bereaved families of the others with his strong, almost superhuman sense of the greatness of the moment and the memorable nature of their deaths.

And he writes to his friends, speaking modestly for himself but with a fine sense of pride for the whole nation, whose worthy son he feels himself to be at this moment. “I may not have proved a great explorer,” he admits, “but I think [this diary] will show that the spirit of pluck and the power to endure has not passed out of our race.” And death now impels him to tell one friend what manly reserve and his own modesty has kept him from saying all his life. “I never met a man in my life whom I loved and admired more than you, but I never could show you how much your friendship meant to me, for you had much to give and I had nothing.”

He writes one last letter, the finest of all, to the British nation, feeling bound to give a reckoning of what he did for the fame of the country on the expedition, blaming only misfortune for its end. He enumerates the various accidents that conspired against him, and in a voice to which the echo of death lends pathos he calls on “our countrymen to see that those who depend upon us are properly cared for”.

His last thought is not of his own fate, but of the lives of others. “For God’s sake look after our people.” The remaining pages are blank.

Captain Scott kept his diary until the last moment, when his fingers were so frozen that the pencil slipped out of them. Only the hope that the pages he had written would be found with his body, as a record of what he had done and of the courage of his countrymen, enabled him to make such a superhuman effort. The last thing he wrote, his frozen fingers shaking, was, “Send this diary to my wife.” But then, in cruel certainty, he crossed out the words “my wife”, and wrote over them the terrible “my widow”.

Some footnotes

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

These are all the footnotes from Borges and Bioy-Casares’ Six Problems for Don Isidoro.  Like the excerpt a few days ago mocking trends in experimental poetry, the authors here are playfully taking the piss on a practice that has only grown worse since their time – the useless footnote.

[1] Affectionate nickname for H. Bustos Domecq used among his intimates. [Footnote by H.B.D.]

[2] See footnote 2. [Footnote by H.B.D.]

[3] Carlos Anglada’s commendable bibliography also comprises the following: the crude naturalistic novel Drawing-Room Flesh (1914), the magnanimous palinode Drawing-Room Spirit (1914), the long since superseded manifesto Words to Pegasus (1917), the travel notes In the Beginning Was the Pullman Car (1923), and the four numbered numbers of the review Zero (1924-27).

[4] Mario is sometimes so aggressive. [Footnote contributed by Dona Mariana Ruiz Villalba de Anglada.]

[5] Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitate—Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity. [Footnote submitted by Dr. William Ockham.]

[6] Not at all. We—contemporaries of the machine gun and biceps—repudiate this delicate rhetoric. I should say, with the finality of a bullet, “I put salesroom and atelier on the ground floor. I lock the Chinamen upstairs.” [Footnote written in the hand of Carlos Anglada.]

[7] In fact, the doctor smiled and gave a greeting. [Author’s note.]

[8] The duelists have crossed swords. The reader can already hear the clash of rival steel. [Marginal note by Gervasio Montenegro.]

[9] A bucolic touch. [Original note by José Formento.]

Footnote 1 – the ‘author’ references himself in third person.

Footnote 2 – points recursively to itself.

Footnote 3 – for no logically apparent reason continues an unfinished list started in the main text.

Footnote 4 – a useless aside from a recurring character in the stories

Footnote 5 – a quotation ‘submitted’ by the semi-disguised fourteenth century philosopher William of Ockham.

Footnote 6 – another useless aside from a recurring character.

Footnote 7 – ‘author’s’ correction of his narrator’s sequence – “the face that now greets you and smiles.”

Footnote 8 – a third useless aside from a third recurring character.

Footnote 9 – a fourth useless aside from a fourth recurring character.

Doubt wisely, in strange way to stand inquiring right, is not to stray

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From John Donne’s Satire 3.

…. though truth and falshood bee
Neare twins, yet truth a little elder is;
Be busie to seeke her, beleeve mee this,
Hee’s not of none, nor worst, that seekes the best.
To adore, or scorne an image, or protest,
May all be bad; doubt wisely, in strange way
To stand inquiring right, is not to stray;
To sleepe, or runne wrong, is: on a huge hill,
Cragg’d, and steep, Truth stands, and hee that will
Reach her, about must, and about must goe;
And what the hills suddennes resists, winne so;
Yet strive so, that before age, deaths twilight,
Thy Soule rest, for none can worke in that night,
To will, implyes delay, therefore now doe.
Hard deeds, the bodies paines; hard knowledge too
The mindes indeavours reach, and mysteries too
Are like the Sunne, dazzling, yet plaine to all eyes;

Some Borgesian banter

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From The God of the Bulls in Six Problems for Don Isidoro by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares.

Unlike the reader, Parodi was unacquainted with Carlos Anglada. Don Isidro had not looked into the sonnets of The Senile Pagodas (1912) or the pantheistic odes of I Am All Others (1921) or the capital letters of I Spy with My Little Eye (1928) or the telluric novel The Cahiers of a Cowhand (1931) or a single one of the Hymns for Millionaires (five hundred numbered copies, plus the popular Catholic Boy Scouts Press edition, 1934) or the Antiphon of the Loaves and Fishes (1935) or—outrageous as it may seem—the learned imprint of Test Tube Editions, Inc. (Loose Leaves of a Diver, Collected and Edited by the Minotaur, 1939).* It pains us to confess that in the course of twenty years of imprisonment, Parodi had not had time to study Carlos Anglada’s Itinerary, The Genesis and Development of a Lyric Poet. In this indispensable study, José Formento, advised by the master himself, documents Anglada’s various periods: his modernist beginnings; his assimilation (at times transcription) of Joaquin Belda; his pantheistic fervor of 1921 when, thirsting for complete communion with nature, the poet rejected any sort of footwear and limped, bruised and bleeding, among the flower beds of his attractive villa out in Vicente López; his rejection of impersonal intellectualism—those now celebrated years when Anglada, in the company of a governess and a Chilean version of D. H. Lawrence, paid many an intrepid visit to the lakes in Palermo Park, childishly dressed in a sailor suit and armed with a hoop and a scooter; his Nietzschean reawakening, which germinated in Hymns for Millionaires, a work that was based on an article by Azorín and upheld aristocratic values but which Anglada would ultimately disown when he became the popular catechumen of the Eucharistic Congress; and finally, his altruistic forays into the provinces, where the master submits to the scalpel of criticism the latest unpublished generation of poets, for whom Test Tube Editions, Inc., provides a forum thanks to its nearly one hundred subscribers and projected handful of thin-nish booklets.

*Carlos Anglada’s commendable bibliography also comprises the following: the crude naturalistic novel Drawing-Room Flesh (1914), the magnanimous palinode Drawing-Room Spirit (1914), the long since superseded manifesto Words to Pegasus (1917), the travel notes In the Beginning Was the Pullman Car (1923), and the four numbered numbers of the review Zero (1924-27).