The Sojourner: Carson McCullers

The Sojourner is a short story by the great Carson McCullers. I am somewhat happy because the doorstep to the exclusive club of my favourite authors has been darkened by her shadow. She looks set to enter!

I read this story as a child in one of those voluminous Reader's Digest collections, "The World's Best Short Stories" or some similar title it had. It's amazing when they come back to you in fragments. Songs, poems, stories, pictures. .  half forgotten and suddenly recognised. Oh the happiness of that moment!

Carson writes beautifully. Just the language I love. She almost joined Juilliard as a girl and it shows in her work. Rich with music, the narrative like a glissando, the unforgettable images! Filled with musical phraseology, metaphor.

The Sojourner is a simple story about a man who is a world traveller, a 'newspaperman' who has returned to Georgia for his long ailing father's funeral. On his last day in New York, before he returns to Paris, from his hotel window he sees his ex-wife crossing the street, and on an impulse calls her. She invites him over for dinner where he meets her new family. The next night, back in Paris, he goes to his lover's house. Her little boy is home alone, he has never before bothered much with the child but now, "[w]ith inner desperation he presse[s] the child close - as though an emotion as protean as his love could dominate the pulse of time."

Oh gorgeous, gorgeous!

It is one of the stories in 'The Ballad of the Sad Cafe'. I have two more to read in the volume, but very possibly, this one is already my favourite!

Quotefest: Absalom and Achitophel

Because I did not want to flood everyone's twitter feed.

And because I like this space better.

John Dryden,  important man! Poet Laureate!Once the madness of submissions subsided in Dundee, I felt an urging to read him. This was partly because in the second year of my undergraduate degree, I changed colleges and had missed quite a few classes. One of our papers offered us a choice between MacFlecknoe and The Rape of the Lock . The former had been covered in my absence by the lecturer and when I laid my hands on Pope's work, I could no more attend to Dryden's.

Another reason might have been the felt presence of a laureate's ghost glowering reproachfully at me. ( Lack of imagination I am not guilty of!) 
Well, as it was, after all these years, I decided to assuage the guilt about having ignored Dryden so utterly for entirely superficial reasons. And read MacFlecknoe and Absalom and Achitophel. A&A, I approached with some trepidation. It is a long poem (1031 lines), a political satire in heroic couplets. It is public poetry not something I am generally drawn to. . But I have found reading it quite a rewarding exercise.

Here I've decided to share some of the interesting quotes, and my trite opinions on them, where I have any.

God help the soul that comes searching for sparknotes stuff here!

All quotations are from NAEL:

Absalom and Achitophel [pp. 2091-2111]

1.  'A fiery soul, which, working out its way,

Fretted the pygmy body to decay,

And oér informed the tenement of clay.' (156-159)

2. 'Great wits are sure to madness near allied,

And thin partitions do their bounds divide;' (163-164)

3. 'The ambitious youth, too covetuous of fame,

Too full of angels' metal in his frame. . .' (309-310)

4. 'Why am I scanted by a niggard birth?

My soul disclaims the kindred of her earth;

And made for empire, whispers me within,

'Desire for greatness is a godlike sin.' " (369-372)

Notice, that in quotation one and three, essentially the same fiery spirit is being referred to,filled with ambition and desires for glory. But if you're Achitophel, it is a case of something wrong with your very soul, not so if you're Absalom.

This is what is called being politically correct! True poet laureate stuff!

5. " 'Tis Nature's trick to propagate her kind.

       Our fond begetters, who would never die,

       Love but themselves in their posterity."  (424-426)

Harsh, but true. The sanskrit word for a son is 'Atmaja', born of the soul. The desire for children is an expression of the innate desire for immortality. This is vedantic philosophy. Well, obviously, some part of Dryden agrees.

 6. " 'Though now his mighty soul its grief contains,

 He meditates revenge who least complains;

 And, like a lion, slumbering in the way,

 Or sleep dissembling, while he waits his prey,

 His fearless foes within his distance draws,

 Constrains his roaring, and contracts his paws,

 Till at the last, his time for fury found,

 He shoots with sudden vengeance from the ground;

 The prostrate vulgar he passes o'er and spares,

 But with a lordly rage his hunter tears.' "

Points to note:

This is Achitophel speaking about the next in line to David's throne. In other words, the historical Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, speaking about James II.

Dryden has a delicate and difficult task here. He has to let Achitophel criticise the man in question, and yet criticise in such a way that the reader is not alienated from the next in line to the throne.

And he manages with such lightness as though whistling at his newly-manicured nails!

Then the poetry: the description of the lion , 'slumbering. . . Or sleep dissembling'; lots of alliteration!  I think Dryden loved alliteration like few have.

In three lines, he leaves the verb till the end to keep the sentence hanging, and show us the lion in slow motion.

'His fearless foes within his distance draws'

Constrains his roaring. . .

The prostrate vulgar he passes o'er and spares,

But with a lordly rage his hunter tears.'

The lion is avenging himself but sparing the vulgar, that is the common people, and it is with 'a lordly rage' that he tears his hunters apart. Well, who can blame such a lion? And would you not admire him the more for it? The hunter is getting no more than what he deserved, I feel, just as Dryden wants me to!

I do dare to question one thing, I'm not sure why Dryden didn't use 'claws' instead of 'paws'.

It gives more alliteration (surely, being Dryden, there is no such thing as too much alliteration!)

and claws have a ferocity which paws, in my mind, do not. But this is just a quibble. 

Also what is interesting to me is, in this image of a lion, there is no forest. There is no 'feral forest' or 'woods wild'. But such is the Augustan preoccupation with human nature.

7.  '. . . Zimri . . .

     A man so various, that he seemed to be

     Not one, but all mankind's epitome.

     Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong:

     Was everything by starts, and nothing long;

     . . .

     Railing and praising were his usual themes;

     And both (to show his judgement) in extremes:

    So over violent, or over-civil,

    That every man, with him, was God or Devil.(544-568)

   . . .' 

I can say little about it except quote Dryden. 'The character of Zimri in my Absalom is, in my opinion, worth the whole poem: it is not bloody, but it is ridiculous enough; and he for whom it was intended was too witty to resent it as an injury.' Twenty-four odd lines versus a thousand and thirty-one! Quite a ratio. And yet, how true it is! Such deftness of stroke, such little parries and thrusts that if you were to worry about them, the more fool you would seem. And like all great art, how universally applicable! I know people who fit phrases of this description. Perhaps a few sit on me as well. And such a tickle! Such a chuckle! This is how you insult someone!

8.  '. . Innovation is the blow of fate.

      If ancient fabrics nod, and threat to fall,

     To patch the flaws, and buttress up the wall,

     Thus far 'tis duty; but here fix the mark;

     For all beyond it to touch our ark.'

I like it because it seems like the Augustan manifesto of art in some ways. Not that they didn't improvise, but just how much they did revere the greats from whom they were descended. Possibly a passage that a Romantic would hate!

9. ' The tampering world is subject to this curse,

      To physic their disease into a worse.'

Universal truth. Squeeze it into a conversation, and how learned will one be thought . . .

10. 'Some let me name, and naming is to praise.'

Just a gorgeous line, I wish I could write it! Simple and so beautiful. A name is a caress after all.

                                                         ***

If you care to read the poem: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173436

1031 lines well-worth it!

One difficulty, if you're a lax reader like me, is to discern the change in voice.

When is it the Speaker and when is it Achitophel whose speaking to us?

Of course, Achitophel never speaks to us in the poem, he only speaks to Absalom but sometimes

in a very general fashion. You know, the whole demagogue routine!

And Dryden does give us inverted commas! But I wonder if such a poem went up

for appraisal today, would the reader complain? That the voices are not psychologically distinct enough?

Just a thought. . .

So here is my ounce worth of reading from Dryden. His plays do not interest me so I will not read them. (Unless his ghost comes and sulks at me in a few years time such as I rather suspect him of having done recently.)

If there's anybody who has and would like to share,that would be amazing. I would be grateful!

Dryden's other poem (his other important poem to me) Mac Flecknoe is so fun to read. That is what everyone should do to their enemies. If they have lives which are interesting enough to be making enemies in the first place. Sherlock would know!

Mac Flecknoe is shorter, lesser convoluted, and more plainly just Dryden taking off some steam.

So if A&A seems a bit much, MacF is easy to read! 

I'd chosen Pope's The Rape of the Lock over Dryden's MacFlecknoe years ago. Was I right? Yes, I was. But was I missing something? Yes, I was.

Cheers!

P.S. No no, MacF is not just Dryden taking off some steam! Essentially he has insulted a rival poet into eternal infamy. If you ever read this poem, you will never remember Mr. Thomas Shadwell for anything else! Dryden was the finest critic of his time and the poem is the greatest demonstration of his critical tenets on satire. It is not just taking off some steam; to punch Shadwell would have been simpler.

Phew!

(There, there Mr Dryden, I've said it correctly now. Leave me be! )

With Reading, Comes Writing: Whom are they writing for?

Whom to Write for?

This is under the broad heading of "How to Write."
Anyone who has spent any quality time on writing knows there are no rules.
Except the ones we choose to follow. Or the ones we break.
Grammar is also not an exception.

So the very act of putting words on page. It is an act of expression, it is pregnant with a sense of 'otherness'. I need to get the words out! Even if it's only the therapeutic presence of a journal. How many of them start with an invocation of the Witness? "Dear Diary..." or "Dear X. . ."
'X' being one's own self. The part which either needs to be told or needs to do the telling.
So, there is an otherness intrinsically present.

How much does that, or how much should that presence factor into our writings?
Will being aware of this make us better writers?
Should we actively engage with this 'Other' when we write?

Janice Galloway was here in Dundee recently and she said,

" If you're not writing for a reader, I can't imagine what on earth you're doing!"

To this she added something even more interesting,

"You forge the reader from a part of yourself."

It is a gesture, a wave when your drowning in this world, a gesture which says, "This is what it's like over here. Does anybody recognise that?"

And I realised then, she had articulated exactly what had been stirring in my subconscious. I was in the thick of writing essays and I was writing with a voice that would become a nervous squeak if I let my consciousness of the actual readership (Professors!) infiltrate my writings; alternately, the voice would come raspingly out if it was speaking to no one. It would lack conviction.

So I realised that I was writing for me, but not in an implosive way. I as a reader, was on the other end of the page. Waiting for the words, looking to find the hidden signals, and so on.

But this is NOT the only way.

Matthew McVarish was here in October and he said,

"Write the shit that scares you!" 

"If you write something that you don't want anyone to read. . . it's probably good."

And it sounds impressive. This is in line with the theory, and a valid theory it is, that write without ever intending to show it to anyone. And I know excellent practitioners of the art who practice this with great success.

A third perspective is writing as though it's a letter to a friend. An intimate conversation where you have the openness, the freedom to be vulnerable, and silly and profound and very truly yourself.

I suppose the bottom line is simply: Write! Get it out! 

We have to think about writing in a way that makes us more confident.
Will writing for a friend elicit a stronger response?
Will writing as if no one will ever read it make our words bolder?
Or will we choose to carve an ideal reader who is but a reflection of our selves to invoke the very best in us?

There are no rules. How glorious is that!




Whom do you write for?

P.S. This is an entry from my other, now exclusive, blog. I just think that questions on writing and reading are closely related. It is a strange and possibly not very good writer who is not also a close and reverential reader.

Poem by Matthew Prior: A Better Answer

Matthew Prior, a lesser known Queen Anne wit, friend of Pope and Swift, a poet and as nearly all poets of the age were, a public man of affairs.

I am reading excerpts from the Augustan age. I like the credentials they sought to judge art by: good sense, classicism, criticism, a delicacy of wit, and their perennial occupation with Nature; human nature, which studied with care in one, could reveal truths about all.

And although I meant to write here about John Dryden, I felt that in my current state of mind (where Messrs. Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hiddleston are jostling with each other for space) Dryden would not get his due. And while mulling over whether he ever would on this blogspace, I stumbled onto this poem by Prior:

A Better Answer

Dear Cloe, how blubber'd is that pretty Face?
Thy cheek all on fire, and thy hair all uncurl'd:
Pr'ythee quit this caprice; and (as old Falstaf says)
Let us e'en talk a little like folks of this world.

How can'st thou presume, thou hast leave to destroy
The beauties, which Venus but lent to thy keeping?
Those looks were design'd to inspire love and joy:
More ord'nary eyes may serve people for weeping.

To be vexed at a trifle or two that I writ,
Your judgment at once, and my passion you wrong:
You take that for fact, which will scarce be found Wit:
Od's Life! must one swear to the truth of a song?

What I speak, my fair Cloe, and what I write, shews
The diff'rence there is betwixt Nature and Art:
I court others in verse; but I love thee in prose:
And they have my whimsies; but thou hast my heart.

The god of us verse-men (you know child) the sun,
How after his journeys he sets up his rest:
If at morning o'er earth 'tis his fancy to run;
At night he reclines on his Thetis's breast.

So when I am weary'd with wand'ring all day,
To thee my delight in the evening I come:
No matter what beauties I saw in my way:
They were but my visits; but thou art my home.

Then finish, dear Cloe, this pastoral war;
And let us like Horace and Lydia agree:
For thou art a girl as much brighter than her
As he was a poet sublimer than me.

***

Beautifully playful isn't it? Cowper said of Prior that he could 'make verse speak the language of prose without being prosaic.' (NAEL, 8th Ed.) And the Augustan age was an age of the cities, where consummate ease was the hallmark of art and conversation. I think those who say they don't like poetry because they don't get it will especially love this poem. It's just like an easy conversation!

Some times, after people read poems by Donne or Marvel or Herrick, they seem to state by way of criticism that , "He is just asking her to climb in to bed with him." Well, alright, that is true. . . just as it is true that a mango's juice is essentially carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms in a certain ratio. And yet is not the fruit so much more than that?

So here the Gentleman (let us not call him Prior, please no) is just making an excuse for having flirted and philandered all day. But he knows just how to! So pleasing! 
I like it for other reasons: in a poem itself, the speaker asks, 
"Od's Life! must one swear to the truth of a song?
This one line walks in wearing layers and layers of meaning, and we must cajole it with our attention to give them up. I love that sort of play!

And another really beautiful element of this poem, for me, is the reference to Horace and Lydia. Horace, in one of his poems has a dalliance with a girl named Chloe, before returning to Lydia.

(I haven't read Horace yet, gleaned this from the footnotes, which are a treasure trove). 
Prior rescues Chloe in this poem by giving her his Speaker. A philandering but charming speaker.

Just, lovely.

What should I read?

First post. Long due.

I thought I'd post titles and opinions on books I'm reading from time to time.
Because books are awesome.
Because, no one has the memory to remember everything they hear just once.
So there are books.
Which, as mentioned above, are awesome.

With me so far?

So inspite of having that worthy thought I didnt act on it. I'm not sure why.
Procrastination has trillions of faces.
However something is prodding me to post now. The same something has
left a half done unblogged post on my other blog and now wants to print its thumb on
this one. If you know this something well, then you know better than to ignore it.
I call it inspiration.

What do you call it?

Well so, I write now. Which means I must not only read but read more and read better.
And I love sharing the intangibles! Such as knowledge.

Where I am (Dundee), our University (a pretty good one) organises salons.
What are salons? Intellectual gatherings with the aim of teaching and delight.

So we had this last one by Janice Galloway. Honestly, from the moment I landed here I've been hearing it's the big one and no one should miss it. So there I was, knackered from essay pressures, but there.

And she went on, like any decent writer would, about books she loves:
Essays by Montaigne, Candide, Locke's works.

Have you heard people rave about intellectual pleasures?
(If not, what are you doing here?)
It's like if you were single and resentfully listening to a lovely couple rave about each other; the only difference here being you can get just the same pleasure for yourself!
Just by hearing that person rave!

Yes, I know, rather cool.

Well, I haven't read any of these books. I only know of them in a second or third telling fashion.
But I would like to!Janice Galloway urged us, (us being literature lovers), to read these books! Without them we were incomplete.

And so it made me think, "Really?"

Now, I would love to read Montaigne. I might some day wound around to Candide and Locke also. But none of them are high priority.
Because there are SO many books! I do intend to read widely, yes. And then learn to read what helps me onward not only to write, but to live.

And more important than reading widely is to read deeply. I used to disagree but not so anymore. I remember reading an anecdote about Winston Churchill and a young man. The latter boasted about how many books he had read etc etc. Churchill listened quietly and then asked, "Very well, of that, how much do you remember?" And the young man replied that he couldn't possibly remember when he had read as much as he had. And Churchill ( I imagine he tut-tutted) said, "What a waste of reading!" He possibly delivered a mini homily on that later. Now this is from memory but you get the gist.

I have realised that I have to read Shakespeare if only to hate him. (I do not though, I love Shakespeare, finally, after all these years!) Atleast I know that much. In the foggy seas of self-knowledge which is ALL our project on earth, hating Shakespeare gives me definition.
I am a little less blurred around the edges, and my world is clearer.

Shakespeare is an example.

I shall say this: I think we should start from the canon.
Whichever country one comes from. Whichever religion one is called to. Whatever language one may speak.
We can start there.
A mother's and a grandmother's bedtime stories are canon.
So is folklore.
So are the stories one tells oneself. One's friends and siblings.

But if we start from the grand trunk road of any literature, we will be safe. It makes one a fascinating travelling companion.
One such as I would love to have.

Toodle-pip!