It’s incredible how quickly the year is passing! I’m writing this early in July and can’t quite believe half a year has gone by. I had quite a productive month of reading – winter tends to encourage it – as did another, mercifully short, lockdown. And now, just as I’m ready to post this we have our fifth – and hopefully very brief – lockdown! Luckily I have had this to do during the first few days.
Richard III: A Failed King, Rosemary Horrox
The ABC has been showing The Hollow Crown and Joe and I watched the two episodes – Henry VI Parts I and II – preceding the finale which is, of course, Richard III. I’ve seen bits and pieces of the series before and, apart from the fetishised violence, like it. Mostly for the speeches taken directly from Shakespeare. The writers, compressing seven plays into roughly two hour episodes, have modified the plays somewhat; so you are two levels away from the historical record. So I went back to the plays themselves to see which bits were taken directly from Shakespeare and which bits were left out. To discover, of course, that all the best bits come directly from the plays! As well as dipping into this wonderful book by John Julius Norwich which takes you back to the real history. The cover picture is shows Henry VI receiving a manuscript as depicted on an actual fifteenth century manuscript.
History reveals that while Shakespeare took liberties – usually regarding his villains which traduced the reputations of honourable men (Falstaff is the most notorious example) – he mostly takes real characters and events but changes timelines – compressing events or altering the order in which they occur – to fit his narrative. His kings are usually psychologically sound historically.
After Henry we intended to move onto Richard – starring Benedict Cumberbatch – which is why I read this book. I studied the play at school and loved it – reluctantly I now concede Mother Gerard was a wonderful teacher of Shakespeare. This life of Richard was recommended by the Times Literary Supplement as part of a series of short books – it’s about a hundred pages – on all of the English kings. It’s a very good, quick read that takes you through all the machinations that led to Richard’s accession to the throne. On the big controversy of his reign – did he or did he not kill the two young princes in the tower – she comes down on the affirmative; as does most modern scholarship she says. Their bones were found in in 1933. He also had Clarence killed – perhaps in the way depicted by Shakespeare.
Horrox shows how public backing, as well as support from the leading families, was critical for aspirants to the throne. Richard was originally welcomed after the dithering of Henry and so long as he didn’t traduce the reputation of the popular Edward. The disappearance of the princes put paid to that support. All very interesting. Richard was the first English king since the Norman conquest to take to the battlefield and the last to be killed in battle. Who can forget his famous cry: A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!
James Joyce and Italian Svevo: The Story of a Friendship, Stanley Price
James Joyce and Italo Svevo met in 1907 when the latter attended the Berlitz School in Trieste to learn English. He took lessons from Joyce for the next eight years. Joyce was twenty five, Svevo forty five years. Both were unappreciated writers when they met and both went on to achieve fame for their work. This book, in alternating chapters tells the story of their friendship and their lives.
They were opposites in nearly every particular. In size – Joyce tall and gangly; Svevo short and stout. In their circumstances – Joyce living hand to mouth, something of a bohemian; Svevo the epitome of prosperous bourgeois, working in his wife’s family’s paint manufacturing company (famous for its anti-fouling marine paint). In their characters – Joyce the manipulative exploiter of people convinced of his greatness; Svevo generous and loyal to his friends, unassuming but constant in his desire to write.
Their unlikely friendship continued past their Trieste days as they kept in touch via letters and visits until Svevo’s death in 1929. Joyce was writing Portrait of the Artist and trying to get the short stories in Dubliners published when they met; and starting to think about Ulysses, which was to take him seven years. Svevo had already written two unremarked self published novels and was embarking on his third, The Confessions of Zeno
They both had a profound affect on each others work. Italo Svevo by being the model for Leopold Bloom and providing Joyce with information about Jewish customs and beliefs. Bloom, in addition to having Svevo’s Jewish-Hungarian background and physical characteristics , had Svevo’s mature, objective, peaceable temper. Joyce kept a photograph of Svevo on his desk while writing the novel indicates how important his friend was to the development of his most famous character.
Joyce by encouraging Svevo in his desire to be a writer. According to Stanislaus Joyce: more than his sincere admiration for Svevo’s work, the example of my brother’s overweening confidence in himself was useful to Svevo … at no time did my brother ever lose faith in his work or consent to any changes in it it. Joyce admired Svevo’s first two books and encouraged him to keep writing his third. After leaving Trieste Joyce gave Svevo’s work to the French literary critics who admired Ulysses. This ultimately led to the publication of all three of the books written by Svevo.
Both writers lived to see their work recognised as masterpieces – Ulysses having been published in 1922, The Confessions of Zeno in 1926. Although Svevo enjoyed his fame for only three years, dying in a car accident. Joyce, continued to bask in his fame from Ulysses but tragically (in my view) spent his last years writing the unreadable Finnegan’s Wake before finally dying, of a duodenal ulcer, in 1941.
There’s not much that is new about Joyce’s life in this book, but it’s well put together. It can be distressing reading. His hopeless father who he, alone in his family, continued to have affection for – I got from him his portraits, a waistcoat, a good, tenor voice, and an extravagant and licentious disposition (out of which the greater part of any talent I may have springs). Joyce’s own serious character deficiencies – his profligacy with other people’s money, his drinking and utter inability to provide the basics for his family – are recalled. As with other biographical studies there’s not much to balance the bad with the good – to explain why so many people were devoted to him.
Notably Nora; who was the one most affected by his faults. Their closeness comes across in lots of ways. He slept in a camp bed beside her hospital bed in Paris, and was fearful for her safety on a visit to Ireland during the Irish Civil War. She always said she’d have preferred him to be a singer than a writer. And she resolutely refused to read Ulysses; to his distress. He wrote to his Aunt: Nora has got to page 27, counting the cover. That this upset him comes through in a letter he wrote to her: O my dearest, if you would only turn to me even now and read that terrible book which has broken the heart in my breast, and take me to yourself alone …
Price writes that their Paris friends thought she actually read more than she admitted to and she was proud of him. When asked about her memories of literary Paris in the twenties and thirties and whether she had met Proust, Cocteau or Gide she said “Sure, if you’ve been married to the greatest writer in the world, you don’t remember all the little fellows”.
You get quite a bit here about his brother Stanislaus who had encouraged James to come to Trieste and who was subsequently terribly put upon – both financially and emotionally – by his brother and was occasionally bitter about it. Stanislaus was astute about James’ strengths and weaknesses: my brother has a way of observing without appearing to observe being one insight. He recognises Svevo in Bloom and is interesting about the contrast between the two writers; noting James’ inflexibility was firmly rooted in failure. Prosperity was as near to being fatal to Svevo’s artist conscience as indigence was to my brother’s.
Svevo himself had insights into Ulysses which he shared in a lecture in Trieste. According to him Bloom and Stephen Dedalus become a sort of father and son to each other, which is plausible because Bloom has lost his son and Stephen would like to find some substitute for his own living father whose tenor of life is enough to explain Stephen’s mood of despair. Also because The Jews and the Irish are both nations whose languages are dead. Stephen moreover feels a relief in communion with one who eschews all the culture that obsesses Stephen.
Joyce was an incorrigible character. Italo Svevo comes across as a delight; urbane, cosmopolitan, progressive, modest – just like Bloom. I enjoyed this book a lot – but it’s probably for Joyce afficiandos.
Confessions of Zeno, Italo Svevo
I then thought I would dip into Svevo’s book; not really intending to read it all. I’ve had this copy on my bookshelf for ages; having found it left on the street to be picked up. I did so only because I knew about the author’s friendship with Joyce. I didn’t like its description as a comic masterpiece and I’m not keen on books written as interior monologues – or in this case, one long (580 pages) letter. But in the end I did read the whole thing and enjoyed it a lot.
Svevo’s real name was Ettore Schmitz. According to Stanley Price in his book about his friendship with James Joyce, the pseudonym Svevo translates as Italian Swabian and neatly summed up his hybrid background – which is very mittleuropa: Italian by language, Austrian by citizenship … and by ancestry and education German.
He wrote in literate Triestine as opposed to the traditional classic Tuscan which is why his work was disregarded until James Joyce promoted him in Paris in the nineteen twenties. In the preface we are told he has been likened to Kafka and if not as widely read; his books and reputation never went away. Hoffman calls the novel; nicely sprung and upholstered, describing the wonderfully capacious grand bourgeois world of the provincial nineteen century.
The protagonist is named Zeno – who as we, and Svevo know – was the father of Stoicism. He’s writing to his analyst, who he’s dismissed as ineffectual, about his efforts to stop smoking. Schmitz, unlike Joyce who feared he’d be seen as influenced by him, was keen on Freud. Which makes it ironic that his book has been interpreted as a send up of Freudian practices.
In any event we follow Zeno Corsini in his many guises; as a suitor of sisters all with names starting with the letter A, as a husband happily, as it turns out, married to a sister other than the one initially sought, who, it also turns out, is a very wise woman. Then as a lover, as a friend, as a surprisingly competent businessman. Throughout it all he is trying to give up his addiction to cigarettes. In all of these guises he suffers endless complications. Our hero never quite gets what he wants, but things turn out in the end. Although he never actually manages to give up smoking.
The Price book is that on his death bed, with family all around, Schmitz asked for a cigarette and when it was refused him, quoting the hero of his most famous novel,Zeno, sighs: Ah that would have been my last cigarette.
The book, published in 1926 was translated into English in 1930 – Hoffman prefers the Beryle de Zoete translation to the later American one titled The Consolations of Zeno. Upon publication it was not very well received in English literary circles. I was interested that the Times Literary Supplement, according to Price, managed to find a pro-Italian fascist critic who claimed: Italo Svevo has a restricted vision and a slipshod style …his recollections of an imaginary invalid’s state of mind (unlike Proust) … are nothing more than the voluble communications of a confessed futile and despicable person.
I didn’t find it so; rather to my surprise I thought it was compelling and read it all.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce,
Having explored Svevo’s work I thought I should go back to Joyce. It’s ironic that this much thumbed edition of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has been issued with a painting of the elderly James Joyce on the cover. Quite inappropriate for the contents. And Joyce was quite attractive as a young man. It has three dates on it – two by Joyce on the last page – Dublin 1904, Trieste 1914 and the publication date of 1916.
It remains an astounding book for a Catholic to read. I remembered it well – which is a bit unusual. The Price book tells us that Joyce, uncertain about the retreat chapters early in the book asked Svevo what he thought of them. Thankfully Svevo thought they were good and they were retained. Would Joyce really have binned them had judgement been otherwise? Hard to imagine. In any event we are left with the most compelling writing I think I’ve ever read. Maybe because of my Catholic education. It’s in the form of speeches made during a school retreat to adolescent boys warning them of the temptations of the flesh and risk of eternal damnation should they give in to them. Thundering rhetoric striking fear into the heart of the schoolboy hero – and many a Catholic reader. Amazing writing goes on without a paragraph break for pages and pages. Mesmerising. Almost frightening enough to make you repent!
I think my children should read it so that they’d understand their parents better. That was our education! I heard exactly those same speeches during retreats at Mary’s Mount – though mine were from Redemptorist not Jesuit priests, so not as wily or persuasive. Absolutely incredible writing – and once read, never forgotten.
But all of the book is wonderful. I loved the very small boy listening to his elders arguing about Irish politics – Parnell versus the priests – at the dinner table. Another section remembered from my first reading. And I loved the rendering, through his eyes, of the little boy’s early days at boarding school. All brilliantly evoked. Perhaps you have to have an Irish background. But I loved it all over again. Including the closing lines from Stephen Dedalus, who is leaving Ireland for studies in Paris: I go to experience for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
R. F. Foster On Seamus Heaney
Having rediscovered my Irish roots I read this. I don’t know anything about R.F. Foster who is an historian and biographer and says his book is written from that standpoint. On the strength of his writing in this book he’d be worth investigating. However I was already familiar with the series that this is part of; Writers on Writers which is being issued by Princeton University Press. I’ve got Colm Tóibín on Elizabeth Bishop which is also very good. That one is in hardback and very handsomely presented. I got this one on my kindle but will buy the hardback if I ever see it.
Notwithstanding the format, the content is wonderful. These books are, intentionally, brief; both mine are around two hundred pages. As Foster says in his preface his is neither a work of exhaustive literary criticism nor a comprehensive biography. He also notes the difficulty of writing anything about someone who wrote so well about himself. There’s a lot of material out there for anyone interested. Both published and online; including lots of interviews. But this is a very accessible and easy place to start.
I’ve never read much biographical material about Heaney and it is good to have the relatively small part that is included here; helping understanding the poems but not over-egging the relationship between life and work.
I have found with both this and the book on Elizabeth Bishop, that it helps if you have the actual work because I found, at any rate, that I often wanted to read the whole of an excerpted poem. As it happens, being an early admirer of his work, I have all but two of Seamus Haney’s books.
I am drawn to his poetry because of its elevation of the quotidian, the ordinary. I love his evocation of the small things in life that mean more than is immediately apparent and generally unstated. Like the expertise in digging evident in the daily work of his father and grandfather beautifully rendered in one of his most famous poem Digging. Or love expressed not in words but in baking scones, waiting for them to rise, and the glimpse of a tinsmith’s scoop in a bin of flour in a poem dedicated to his aunt, Sunlight. There are many beautiful examples of his close observation of, and respect for, ordinary objects, activities, incidents – things that can give meaning to a life, a relationship, a place. And I love the gentle, oblique way he illustrates both friendship and the deepest experiences we have – friendship, courtship, marriage, birth, death.
I was aware that he was criticised by some, especially in Ireland, for not being more political in his early work, being a Northern Irish Catholic, but that didn’t interest me particularly. Foster has illustrated how in his own way, and in his own time, Heaney has always been political. His whole body of work has been very sensitively explored. This book is a great introduction to it all. Highly recommended.
The book has taken me back to the poems and I’ve written about what I found in those little books in this blog here.
The Salt Path, Raynor Winn
A self pitying tone that kept breaking through made reading this a bit dispiriting. Which was disappointing because it could have been quite engrossing. The author and her husband lose their home and livelihood; the innocent victims of other people and the legal system she says. Although not very convincingly. Then the husband receives a devastating medical diagnosis.
So homeless, poverty stricken and in ill-health they embark on a mammoth walking trip. Apparently they were great walkers in their youth although not quite enough detail is given about that to explain why, in these fairly drastic circumstances, they would decide on this course of action.
The walk is a well known one that takes them around the South-West coast of England to Lands End and back. Unfortunately descriptions of what must have been an extraordinary landscape are crowded out by repetitive and downbeat episodes of anxieties about money, the discomforts of camping and physical discomforts.
They meet other walkers and campers, but unfortunately here again, the author focuses a bit too much on negative. She goes into great detail about unpleasant interactions they have with people. A self-righteous tone intrudes; disparaging tourists who are flocking to the holiday spots along the coast and finding residents of the local towns they travel through snooty and condescending to the bedraggled looking duo the walkers present to the world. I’d have liked a bit more description of the beauty of places like St Ives that they go through. More balance between positive and negative experiences would have been better.
It was best when it concentrated on the beauty of the places they were walking through and the interesting people they met. So, by and large a disappointment.
L’Affaire, Diane Johnson
I needed cheering up after The Salt Path and this little romance provided just what I needed. For some reason I can’t photograph the cover properly from my iPad, so this will have to do. I enjoyed it, although if my memory serves me well – and it might not – this wasn’t as good as the two other books by Diane Johnson that I’ve read – Le Marriage and Le Divorce. The titles accurately set the tone. these are lighthearted novels; which is not to say they are any the less for that.
Johnson is an American who has, I assume lived in Paris. And these novels are good fun. All focus on the manifold differences in character, temperament, traditions, and culture between Americans and the French. They are quite acutely observed and agnostic about which nation is better than the other.
This one has a very self sufficient, accomplished, financially independent woman at its centre. Having made her money establishing – without getting full credit from her partners – a dot.com start up, she feels she is inadequate in other spheres of life. So she’s decided to come to France to undergo some serious self improvement.
She’s decidedly ignorant for a multi-millionaire but let that pass. And overall something of a classic inimitable American innocent amongst these so superior Europeans. But its nicely written and keeps your interest.
Staying at an up-market ski chalet she finds herself taking courses on gourmet cooking and the attributes and carer of antique linen. Back in Paris she is taken in hand by some local Americans who instruct her in house decoration, hairstyles and fashion. You wait for the promised affair to materialise and it does; but not in the way expected.
There’s a storyline that links the various characters – a man dies leaving three different families – and nationalities – American, English and French – mulling over possible legacies. As well as some discussion of French inheritance laws which are quite interesting. Our American naif involves herself in a spot of do-goodery which might have unintended consequences. There is a degree of bed-hopping. People are suave and devilishly good looking and dressed to the nines.
All good fun but nothing deep and meaningful or memorable.
Letters To Camondo, Edmund de Waal
Now for something deep and meaningful. I loved The Hare With Amber Eyes, but was disappointed when I read that this second book by Edmund de Waal was written in the form of letters to the titular Count Moïse de Camondo. I thought the form would be arch and distracting. Which was a pity because I was very interested in the place that is the central feature of the book.
This is the Musée Nissim de Camondo which Joe and I visited when we were in Paris. It’s is a spectacular house full of the most exquisite things. So I was interested in that; but not inclined to buy it. But when I saw it I couldn’t resist this beautifully presented book which includes some very fine photographs, which con’t quite do justice to the museum but are lovely to have – as a belated memento of our visit.
Like this one of the Porcelain room. I’ve been there. The cabinets contain the most exquisite Sèvres porcelain. de Waal, who is a potter describes it as from les services aux oiseaux; each piece has the lightest of green borders – the colour of spring – studded with oeil-de-perdrix pattern. The eye of a partridge. The images of the birds come from Buffon’s Histoire maturelle, générale et particulière. Who knew? Not we, when we were there. We did appreciate their beauty.
Back to the book. My uncertainty about the epistolatory style intruded a little at the start, but eventually I got used to it and by the end I was deeply involved in the story told. Which is about the de Camondo family who were part of the same wealthy Jewish set to which Edmund de Waal’s Ephrussi Parisian forebears – described in The Hare With Amber Eyes – belonged.
This is a story about a cultured Jewish family living in the very heart of Paris and the upper echelons of French society and the creation of a magnificent house full of exquisite furniture, furnishings, paintings and objets d’ arts. A place that was meant to be the home of the son of the house, Nissim. When he was killed, in the service of his country in the First World War, his father left house and contents to the French state. It has been preserved as it was in 1936.
Edward de Waal writes beautifully. At the start you wonder why he has chosen to focus on this bit of the house, this painting, this carpet, this sculpture. But as he builds the story of the de Camondo family – from the ground up as it were – we realise the intent behind the choices. Things come together as we follow the lives of each family member – their schooling, work, relationships, hobbies and interests. We know that it will not end well – the family, distressingly doesn’t. And you understand why they couldn’t foresee it, couldn’t bear to leave it. Who could?
The final chapters, when we finally get to the end days, are almost unbearable. We’ve read of these things before; but the way de Waal has built this house ensures we have an emotional connection to its inhabitants; and we read about their fates with horror. Beautifully written. Brevity notwithstanding. Strongly recommend.
Leave a Reply