Only four books read before MIFF started. A short but quite diverse list.
Elizabeth and her German Garden, Elizabeth Von Arnim.
Jane told me about this book so when I saw it in the Readings catalogue I ordered it. It’s quite famous as is the author. This is her first book; written in 1898 and never out of print. She also wrote novels – around 20 books in all. If ever a book cried out for a hardback cover, beautiful paper and glossy photographs this is it. Unfortunately it doesn’t have any of these attributes. Despite being an ordinary paperback minus pictures it’s quite lovely especially – but not only – for gardeners. She describes how she created a garden at her German husband’s country estate; basically from scratch. It’s quite droll in an understated way. She recounts disputes with the gardener about garden design – she wants free and loose plantings, he’s used to rigid lines. She also wants to get down and dirty; planting things herself, spreading the mulch. The servants are all horrified -such things are not done by a woman of her class – she was a German Countess after all! Successes and failures are recorded. And personal preferences. She has to order everything from catalogues. Lots of roses – many that she mentions are still available. I looked them up. I was a bit disappointed she didn’t like hyacinths but she finally admits they are wonderful later in the season. She intersperses garden life with bits about her family – husband (the Man of Wrath) and five children. Along with neighbours – most of whom don’t share her love of country life – and visitors to the estate; both welcome and unwelcome. This very short and spare account of one part of her life makes you want to know more. She was born in Australia (Kirribilli) but lived overseas all her life. Her husband was later imprisoned for fraud and his estate had to be sold. Later she had an affair with HG Wells and was married (disastrously) to Bertrand Russell’s brother Frank which made her a Countess again. She lived in Switzerland, America and France. There is a website devoted to scholarship about her which is here.
Harvest by Georgina Harding.
This is by the same author who wrote The Spy Game which I liked very much and which I’ve written about here. I read a glowing review about this but didn’t take notice of the detail. If I had I would have seen that this is the third book in a trilogy about a family. The first two are Land of the Living which tells the story of the father and The Gun Room which tells the story of one of the two sons. This third one continues the story of that son who returns home with his Japanese girlfriend and explores the relationship between the two brothers. My enjoyment would have been enhanced if I’d read the earlier two books. As it is there’s not enough detail to make you care enough about any of the characters. And even though it is beautifully written I don’t think I care enough about them to go back to the beginning. Hardly a ringing endorsement, but I think you could do much worse than reading the whole trilogy in the right order.
Pushing Time Away, Peter Singer
Linda loaned me this. It’s a familiar story for anyone who has read things like The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal or closer to home Good Living Street by Tim Bonyhady; both stories of Jewish families caught torn asunder by the Nazis. This is another such tale. It was nicely written with an additional layer of interest for anyone interested in the early days of psychoanalysis. Peter Singer’s grandfather was a member of Freud’s inner circle in Vienna at the commencement of Freud’s career. I’m not so interested in the schisms that occurred in that group which are recounted here. For the rest, knowing what is to come, you find the hesitation about leaving almost unbearable. It amazes me that there are so many letters going to and from Australia and Vienna almost to the end. Another sad story of survival and loss. Important to have on the record.
Yeats & Violence, Michael Wood
I’ve had this book in my kindle for years! Having read the Foster book on Heaney I’ve decided to embark on a bit of a poetry deep dive. I’m terribly pleased to have read this, although it won’t be for everyone. It is actually a detailed analysis of a single poem by Yeats, not a discussion about how he treats violence in his work overall; although other poems are discussed, it is always in the context of the one poem. The poem is Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen, with which I am familiar, but which I have not fully understood – until now, thanks to this wonderful book. It is beautifully written and completely accessible for the general reader, although I suppose it is written for students really. You don’t need any prior knowledge of the poem or of Yeats. But it is all quite literary with lots of cross references to other poems by Yeats and other poets like T.S. Eliot and Heaney and, I’m pleased to say, one of my favourites, Eavan Boland. I’m not one for analysing poems over much, but some are enhanced by a deeper understanding of the references. And this is one such.
Early on there is a definition of what we are talking about. Violence as Yeats helps us to understand it – whether personal, political, or apocalyptic – is always sudden and surprising, visible, unmistakeable, inflicts or promises injury and is fundamentally uncontrollable.
The poem lists things that civilisation offers us and goes on to say that these things have been lost in the course of the war against England that is being waged in Ireland starting in 1919. But that’s not the main idea. In fact the whole of the first part of ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ invites us to a double reading, or tells two stories, the first about loss, the second about the folly of our believing we ever had what we think we have lost.
The anger in the poem comes from an error we have made. Not:did we believe what we believed, but: how could we? That believing we were civilised was an illusion.
We haven’t turned our cannons into plough-shares, but not because we are still learning war; only because we like the imagery of war.
The crack-pated dreamers of the poem are the old Ascendancy in Ireland and everyone who hoped for a non-violent progression to independence; … all the inheritors of the Enlightenment … all the believers in some sort of moral progress running alongside the nineteenth century’s manifest advances in science and technology.
The war against England in Ireland wasn’t the worst, it was Yeats’ reluctant recognition that England may be criminal enough to grant to violence what she refused to reason.
This is what is said about reading poems – which completely accords with my view that what matters is the reader’s initial impressions.
When reading a poem we are guessing if we see ourselves as trying to imagine what went on in the poet’s mind as he wrote. But if we are just tracking whatever intentionality we find in the words and sentences as w see or hear them, we are not guessing, we are reading, we are exercising our ordinary abilities of comprehension, and the court of appeal is the language itself or more precisely our knowledge of the language and the possibility of trying out our understandings on others who know the language well and care about it.
I can’t know Yeats’ mind, while I do know that I need to make sense of these shifting connotations and that my experience of the poem is ricer for my attempt. Yeats’ mind, in other words, is the source of what I am reading and a fascinating subject in its own right, but it can’t help me with the poem; and in reality the language of the poem gives me all the help I need, it is the problem and it is the solution, or it is a solution. The language may speak to me differently on another reading, although the words will remain the same.
Of course they are put together by Yeats and he deserves all the credit for whatever wonder and danger we find in the poem. But the words are not his any more than they are ours, and to be a poet is, among other things, to take one’s chances with language.
When Yeats says, in another famous line from ‘The Second Coming’, that ‘mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’, he does not mean mere disorder. He means what is perceived as a new degree of uncontrollable violence and a new realm of impunity.
Eavan Boland’s poem ‘Yeats in Civil War’ is quoted early on in the book – reflecting a view that Yeats in fact refused to be involved in any aspect of the civil war, which Wood says is not exactly true.
Somehow you arranged your escape
Aboard a spirit ship which every day
hoisted sail out of fire and rape’.
Yeats is a beautiful poet and I’m pleased I now understand his poem Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen better.
Leave a Reply