in the vaults they were secure so long as the report prevailed of their being haunted

Now I want to touch on the sensation of melting-away that comes to me when I think of Droste-Hülshoff 's book with its production of murders and then the promise of murderers, and then the absence of the murderers who should be there. The murderers are not revealed until the local Jews cut a curse into a beech tree, whereat two people confess, in different ways and at different times, to the same murder. The two confessors are both equally sincere. I mean that the author treats them equally sincerely. But they cancel one another out. What does she want me to think? She does not sound like a mind that is planning a trick; she is not ambiguous; she is not Coleridge.

Giving does not seem to be her intention but withholding is not her intention either.

After a suspicious axe has been discovered she gives us a hint that her interest lies in the equilibrium of information: "It would be wrong to disappoint the curiosity of the reader in a fictitious story, but this is how it actually came to be; I can't add or subtract anything from it" (tr. Jolyon Timothy Hughes).

Heidegger, discussing some lines in Hölderlin's poem The Ister, decides that the river, a noun characterised by flowing, is the location of its own absence from its location. As he pursues that thought he is led to the character of Antigone, whose obduracy he describes with a word that the translators McNeill and Davis give as "unhomely," meaning more or less that she is un-hearthed, or intrinsically unhomed or uncanny. (Hölderlin's Hymn, 'The Ister' (1984), tr. William McNeill and Julia Davis.) All human beings are unhomely, says Heidegger; they are not at home in the world. "As a human being, she not only belongs to the most uncanny that looms and stirs among beings; rather, within the most uncanny, Antigone is the supreme uncanny." By going further into extremity she inhabits the human state more fully than any other character. So she advances to her death. On the other hand Mudpuddle down there in the comments is bringing up The Mysteries of Udolpho, a book in which the magical ghosts turn out to be bankers.

"But why," said Emily, "were not these pirates contented with the cave -- why did they think it necessary to deposit their spoil in the castle?"

"The cave, madam," replied Ludovico, "was open to any body, and their treasures would not long have remained undiscovered there, but in the vaults they were secure so long as the report prevailed of their being haunted."

the different delicate textures of the nuts of meat

Wrongness – I thought: wrongness somehow: there are thoughts in this book that are not – they are not ... what are they not? -- I was trying Rebecca West's second novel, The Judge (1922), the story of a young secretary who meets a charismatic man and his mother, of whom: "everything about her threatened that her performances would be too strange."

Philip E. Ray has argued* that readers would be less likely to misdiagnose the Judge if they stopped thinking of it as exaggerated naturalism and began to look at it instead as a piece of self-consciously Gothic literature, with its isolated house, piratical seducer ("terrifying strength and immensity"), and the naive heroine Ellen Melville who is coaxed out of her home and away into danger after her parent dies, like Emily St. Aubert in The Mysteries of Udolpho.

Ellen doesn't suffer from Emily's "intensity of anguish," not even after her fiance commits a crime at the end of the book; she "broke into sobs" but that's nothing compared to Emily's struggle against dissolution, which she loses and wins and loses and wins over hundreds of pages.

Emily checked the tears, that trembled in her eyes. [...] Her tears were concealed, but St. Aubert heard her convulsive sobs. [...] Emily dried her tears and attempted to speak. [...] Emily, having turned away to hide her tears, quitted the room to indulge them. [...] Emily felt tears swell into her eyes, and then resentment checked them. [...] Valancourt ... learned from the flood of tears, which she could no longer repress, the fatal truth.

Emily is like Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, so fine-tuned that she needs to liquidate herself.

She resurrects, however. "Emily checked her tears, and followed her father to the parlour."

West's heroine cuts her sobbing short when the author wants style and reason to reassert itself: the tears do not stop Ellen speaking, she immediately offers an explanation for her fiance's behaviour, and soon she is thinking in Poetry: "But surely this was far too much to ask of her, who had learned what life was; who knew that, though life at its beginning was lovely as a corn of wheat, it was ground down to flour that must make bitter bread between two human tendencies." West reverts to Style: a tic: she retreats into it: a farce.

"I do mean to commit suicide, though I am getting my tea!" she snapped. [...] It was only because of all the things there are to eat this was a dreadful world to leave. She thought reluctantly of food; the different delicate textures of the nuts of meat that, lying in such snug unity within the crisp brown skin, make up a saddle of mutton; yellow country cream, whipped no more than makes it bland as forgiveness; little strawberries, red and moist as a pretty mouth; Scotch bun, dark and rich and romantic like the plays of Victor Hugo; all sorts of things nice to eat, and points of departure for the fancy.

Dorothy Richardson warned us against literature like this: charming, attractive, assertive, assured of the reader's complicity.

* The Judge Reexamined: Rebecca West's Underrated Gothic Romance (1988)

accident stamped a character upon places

"Details give charm," writes Charlotte Brontë, placing a Romantic landscape in a room and transforming its details into her domestic items: the serene view is boring, the piqued spots of drama are vital, the grotesque detail is a treasure, the frightening vertigo element, the shocking grotto, or not shocking, it doesn't have to be shocking, it can be cattle and ponies as it is in Dorothy Wordsworth's Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, A.D. 1803, after she decides that one lake is a disappointment because it has too much uniformity: "there is an uniformity in the lake which, comparing it with other lakes, made it appear tiresome. It has no windings: I should even imagine, although it is so many miles long, that, from some points not very high on the hills, it may be seen from one end to the other."

"Tiresome," is a word I have seen used about humans but never scenery, which leaves me with the impression that she is disappointed in this lake as if it is a person that has let her down. It is being that way on purpose. It refuses to give her a winding. An accident would have been enough for her, a cow could have done it. "We passed by many droves of cattle and Shetland ponies," she wrote later about a different landscape, "which accident stamped a character upon places, else unrememberable -- not an individual character, but the soul, the spirit, and solitary simplicity of many a Highland region."

The cattle and ponies chewed the grass; the spirit of Accident had passed through them. They had been manifest Accidents as they were chopping up the daisies. The carriage vanished over a hill. Ann Radcliffe's prose comes across the herd in The Mystery of Udolpho where they fill the same role: they "[stamp] a character upon places, else unrememberable -- not an individual character, but the soul, the spirit, and solitary simplicity" of a country region. Functionally they are the same cattle.

These tremendous precipices were contrasted by the soft green of the pastures and woods that hung upon their skirts; among whose flocks, and herds, and simple cottages, the eye, after having scaled the cliffs above, delighted to repose.

The cattle are restful signs of human civilisation, gentle stoics in a paddock; nothing gives scale to a landscape like a sign of human habitation, wrote young Ruskin, though he took it back later when civilisation seemed too industrial for him: these people would not stop at cattle, they'd be in there with factories next. But Dorothy Wordsworth not worried about that, earlier than Ruskin, never anticipating a factory in the field where there is today possibly a supermarket. So she is calm in her pleasure. The Australian women I've been reading -- all born before 1900, all out of copyright -- like to pick up on flowers, I have noted, they tend to see flowers, and they will spend their poems describing flowers.

Bring flowers for the wearied one,
The wearied one of pain;
Bright flowers from the glorious sun,
Will give her joy again.
But, oh! seek them not from gardens,
Nor from the gay parterre,
Wander far into the woodlands,
For blossoms hiding there.

(from VII, in Lyra Australis, or, attempts to sing in a strange land (1854), by Caroline Leakey)

Again above thy fragile flowers
I bend, to bring their perfume nigh;
For only in the evening hours
Thy odors pass thy blossoms by;
But when the ministering day
Deserts thee with the warmth and light
That lulled thee, -- waking thou wilt pay
For these, in sweetness, to the night.

(from To the White Julienne, from Where the Pelican Builds and Other Poems (1885), by Mary Hannay Foott)

Myrtle, myrtle lying low,
With the moss about you creeping,
With the torrent round you leaping,
And the grand old mountain keeping
Vigil as the seasons go,
Still to me your music comes
Set in chords august, specific,
When a storm-voice, weird, terrific,
Beats across the waste Pacific
Like the roll of muffled drums.

(from Mountain Myrtle in the The Horses of the Hills (1911), by Marie Pitt)

They write about the larger items of the scenery as well, the cliffs and so on, "strange green hills and the glint of a far bay" (Marie Pitt again, Doherty's Corner) but they're drawn back to the tiny things in that huge continent, the flowers, always the flowers, little items; Leakey writes about violets, she writes about the primrose, she mentions bluebells, not the wattle, not an Australian flower. They miss British things in their colonial or just-Federated lives, they miss the peaceful cattle, they miss the village smoke coming up from chimneys, they want the churchbell but they see the bushland, Ernestine Hill in the 1930s saw the jungle gym of exhydrated cattle around a dead waterhole, and a character in Catherine Martin's Silent Sea wills herself to death in the salt brush because her mother has died. She loves her flowers, gardens of flowers, she cultivates them, she talks about them, she has opinions on the right colours for orchids, then she leaves the pocket of garden her mother has helped her to inhabit, she goes through the salt brush on a cart, she gets ill, she dies, poisoned by a landscape "gray, voiceless, sinister, for ever the same," or without windings, you could say: tiresome.

She could see the sky growing darker, even the sunset flush trembling into wanness, as the dust-storm raged with the fitful wails of a wind that rushes at its own wild caprice over boundless plains, without a solitary wall or hill, or even a line of trees, to impede its course.

"Not even herds," says Dorothy Wordsworth, passing in a carriage and looking, "it has neither cow nor pony." But Ernestine Hill journalistically struck and solemnly exultant about the hollow animals in the dead land.

ebb and flood

So, say Paolo is allowed to talk, he talks so much he becomes a first person narrator, he feels independent, he doesn't want to be a servant any more, he leaves the country estate where the married couple employs him, those two, Vivaldi and Ellena, the former protagonists whose prominence he has usurped, it's the 1800s, democracy is in the air, he goes to the city, where, in Radcliffe, characters are corrupted, and he is still a Radcliffe character, in spite of this new first-person narration technique, whose seeing eye observes smart-mouthed city-people summing up their fellows in a businesslike and greedy way, they're well-dressed, he's dressed like a clod, he realises that he has spent years being treated like a moron, he remembers himself prancing around with the peasants, shouting, "O giorno felice!" and he is flooded with shame, so much shame that he becomes the narrator of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, "I'm a sick man," he says, "a mean man. I think there's something wrong with my liver," but he has never been sick before, living in the countryside of a Radcliffe book where good health is everywhere, and yet now he's in the city, he is suffering, he has joined the stream of human beings from country to city, the movement of the nineteenth century, he roams through Balzac's city, "a terrible desert," he feels thirsty; through Baudelaire's' city "time to get drunk", he buys champagne; through the city of Cesário Verde, "The gas from the streetlamps makes me queasy," he reels, his head swims, the street rolls like a wave; through James Thomson's city, "The mighty river flowing dark and deep, / With ebb and flood from the remote sea-tides / Vague-sounding through the City's sleepless sleep, / Is named the River of the Suicides," then plunges into the cold water, is hauled out downstream by Gaffer Hexam, who, looming, bundled in clothes, frisks his pockets and reminds him of a monk, and the monks at home, Paolo recalls, could say anything they liked, due to their habit of gliding (always gliding) up to his old master Vivaldi under a ruined archway and murmuring threats, and there, he muses, is a set of people who knew how to represent themselves verbally with minimum effort, thinking this as the boatman drops him again, he drifts through the mud to the bottom of the river, he is drowned.

of the most irrational

Vivaldi's servant Paulo deserves a further mention, so I'll mention him: he is a man who makes virtue out of necessity and turns the borrowed tic (by which I mean prolixity) into a mania, smart move, since talking means that the author has to give him things to talk about, which means that he has a character, or something closer to a character than's possessed by Peter or any of the other servants, who are more likely to do as they're told. The Inquisition arrives to drag his master away and Paulo talks them into arresting him too, then goes on shouting as they're carrying him to the relevant place, "I demand to be sent to the Inquisition! I demand to be sent to the Inquisition!" Even the fulfillment of his desires doesn't keep him quiet, because his real desire is to talk. As long as he talks he's present, and the author's tone becomes affectionate towards this unshutuppable servant who is also herself writing him. He is Sheherazade, he stays alive with his voice. She lets him keep going. She gives him the last word. There are one hundred and sixty-three words in the final paragraph and one hundred and thirty-seven of them come out of him. Three of them are other characters repeating him.

"O! giorno felice! O! giorno felice!" repeated Paulo, as he bounded forward to mingle in the dance, and "O! giorno felice!" was again shouted in chorus by his joyful companions.

I say that as if I think Paolo's persistence is a miraculous character trait, but when the Jehovah's Witnesses were being persistent, and coming around every weekend for months to push tracts around the door, and even handwritten messages -- sample text --

We come by but you
are not available. I want to
invite you to a special talk
this Sunday. Hopefully you
can come & if you do give
me a call [telephone number redacted].
Hoping to talk to you soon.


Friend,
[names of Jehovah's Witnesses redacted]

-- then persistence was as lovable as demons, I wished they had the reticence that Vivaldi tries to inflict on Paolo, I wanted them to give up, and yet I still like persistence when I see it on the page, where Paolo is resisting a clear desire beamed from the rest of the book's universe in his direction. He is one man against the hero, the author's pet; he stands also against an army of all thoses. "I wish that all those, who on this night are not merry enough to speak before they think, may ever after be grave enough to think before they speak" -- he says -- butting against the forces of the sober universe the writer has constructed around him, this universe that would like him to be endlessly told off (and the Jehovah's Witnesses too, perhaps humiliated by doors shut in their faces, and the universe resistant), yet he treats this like an opportunity to make something out of himself (them too I suspect and yet I love them not); then I read in Graham Robb's biography, Balzac, about the writer persisting, sitting writing for hours, up till four a.m. with coffee, dressed in his monk's robe, writing even when he was writing pulp novels, at first, continuing to go, persevering through debt and disaster, the collapses of his businesses and the falling price of his shares in French railways -- which, Robb suggests, was a subconscious tactic to keep bum on seat, because as long as he was in debt he had a reason to write. Debt was a stimulus. Why did Paolo persist? His speeches get longer as the book goes on, he speaks more often, he speaks more nonsensically, and the spectacle of him demanding to be taken to the Inquisition at the same time as he's being taken to the Inquisition, by people who tell him that he's being taken to the Inquisition, is one of those rare moments when Radcliffe seems to be inspired by something outside her own tone. The talkative servant was a convention of the Gothic genre, explains Chloe Chard in the notes to Romance of the Forest, but a man who wants to start a quarrel with with the law because it won't arrest him, and continues this quarrel while he's in the middle of being arrested, is a representation of the one force in the universe that Radcliffe was explicitly and constantly against, which is unreason.

Paolo babbles, but her ethos is anti-babble, her god is reason, thoughtfulness, self-control; her protagonists are good because they are able to control themselves, her villains are bad because they can't; she has an Updike serenity in her sentences.

Ellena, had she obeyed the dictates of her heart, would have rewarded his attachment and his services, by a frank approbation of his proposal; but the objections which reason exhibited against such a concession, she could neither overcome or disregard.

Reason is the language she calls on when she wants to denigrate the Inquisition, saying,

Can man, who calls himself endowed with reason, and immeasurably superior to every other created being, argue himself into the commission of such horrible folly, such inveterate cruelty, as exceeds all the acts of the most irrational and ferocious brute.

The Italian (release date, 1797) was her last book while she was alive, though she published another one posthumously, three years after her death in 1823, of asthma, her husband said, of brain-fever said the rumourists who thought that, for Gothic authors, going mad was the only appropriate way to die; call it a tribute, one of The Italian's sinister monks gliding up to her in a ruin and murmuring, "Go not to the villa Altieri. That way lies DEATH," upon which, insanity struck. *

But pretend, imagine, that she spent those last twenty unpublished silent years being dragged in two directions, reason one way, unreason the other; the unreason of Paolo, the lure of humour, disconcerted her, I, Ann Radcliffe, could be funny -- I could be a funny writer if I went in this direction further, and babbled. It was there, it was a possibility, it tormented her on the country estate where she lived; Paolo let her enjoy herself in a way that no other character did, not the villain, not the heroes and heroines, so she lost faith in reason, the reasonable style had a crack in it, and her internal see-saw between rational neatness and voluminous chatter was represented in the Italian itself -- one tilt was indicated by the flood of Paolo's speech -- the other tilt represented by the master asking him to dial it down -- the dumb-servant dialogue that was meant to bore other characters by being prolix -- bore and annoy them to the point where they said, shush now, cut it short -- she liked it -- she enjoyed writing it -- she wanted it to keep going -- don't shut him up, she might have said if she was speaking the thoughts of her heart: I want him to talk.




* "Go not to the villa Altieri," says a monk in the book, "for death is in the house." Gliding is the ultimate verb of locomotion for all monks in this book. Glide, glide, they go. Glide glide glide glide glide. Mad gliding.

it is not necessary

Ann Radcliffe takes that one Nurse-trait, prolixity, and doles it out to more than one character, and yet her servants aren't actually unreasonably prolix (she doesn't carry it a long way, she hints at the prolixity they could achieve if they were allowed, "Well, Peter, it is not necessary to repeat what you said --" the other party reacts as if the servant is talking more than they do --), and the relationship between master and servant is always superior to inferior, and not, as in Romeo and Juliet, a to and fro between companions who have known one another for years. The masters in Radcliffe expect an instant answer -- they've inserted their money in this particular vending machine so where is the can? -- is their tone -- though if you note the words on the page you can see that they talk more than the servants. And this makes them seem cruel, which is not the dynamic in the Shakespeare.

Even the sweet heroes and heroines adopt that impatient master-mode when the relevant scene arrives, noble and sensitive creatures otherwise but changing like werewolves when this brand of conversation rises full-mooned into the plot. Vivaldi, hero of The Italian, tells his servant Paulo to be quiet, be quiet Paulo, be quiet, all right Paulo, keep it short Paulo, that's enough Paulo, Paulo, we're being held by the Inquisition Paulo will you stop antagonising them. Of course master, says Paulo, who adores his master with berzerk sincerity like all of these mistreated sods, it's just that they're idiots. Paulo, they're standing right there. I know master, and what idiots they look.

And this is a nexus of artificiality, the fact that a character can be called sensitive, thoughtful, kind, a hero, and also engage in behaviour that is unkind, patronising, abrupt, insensitive, going from one assigned role into the other without any reflection from the author, or any sign that there is supposed to be reflection from the reader either, we are expected to switch brains, forget the old and embrace the new, or decide that this new set of cruel tags fits naturally onto the same skeletal prose-framework as the old kind ones, take the master's side and roll our eyes, even when the master is La Motte, who, in most of the rest of the novel, we're expected to despise, weak man, unworthy man, but for the purposes of this convention he is suddenly ourselves.

Conclude that for the duration of the servant-scene we are supposed to forget that one human being snapping at another for trivial reasons is repulsive and not heroic or sympathetic; we want a blind spot here, Radcliffe had that blind spot, her readers might have had it too unless she misjudged them: the conversation is a black hole where assumption rules, the clouds part to reveal the pointing neon hand, and the mutual game of pretending that these scraps of deployed description are human beings, trembles.

words are a very fantastical banquet

Servants in Radcliffe aren't often allowed to answer a question without being interrupted -- that's true in Romance of the Forest and true in The Italian as well, the two books of hers I've recently read -- "I got a sound drubbing," says servant Peter in the Forest, as he's telling La Motte about a reconnoitering expedition to a nearby village, "but then it was in your business, and so I don't mind. But if I ever meet with that rascal again --" then the master steps in, "You seem to like your first drubbing so well, that you want another, and unless you speak more to the purpose you shall soon have one," and soon again, "Is it impossible for you to speak to the point?" snips La Motte, and "Do be less tedious if it is in thy nature," and this pattern recurs, not only with Peter and La Motte, but with other servants and other masters, in different combinations; Peter enters the role of the one who exasperates people; he can barely say a line without somebody having a go at him, and it's played for laughs, it seems brutal.

This is the Nurse and Juliet, I thought when I came across it the first time -- the servant who keeps talking about themselves ("Fie, how my bones ache! what a jaunt have I had!" says the Nurse, "Would thou hadst my bones, and I thy news," says Juliet) and the master trying to extract some specific piece of information -- "although," I said, "probably an everyday comedy trope at the time and borrowed from other literature without coming through Shakespeare" -- and I still believe, without knowing for sure, that it must have been a contemporary habit that she picked up -- believing this because she picked it up, when she's not a funny writer; easiest to take what's there -- but I noticed that the pattern was accompanied by bits of language that seemed to indicate an older presence inhabiting Radcliffe's brain, "thy" in La Motte's "thy nature" when the characters use a normal "you" in other conversations, and also his "speak more to the purpose," which appears in Much Ado About Nothing: "He was wont to speak plain and to the purpose," says Benedick in the garden, Act Two, Scene Three, "like an honest man and a soldier; and now is he turned orthography; his words are a very fantastical banquet, just so many strange dishes." Benedick at this point has sent a servant Boy to bring him a book; the words "He was wont," etc, are not referring to this Boy, but Benedick began the speech by telling the Boy to stop faffing around and obey.

Benedick:
In my chamber-window lies a book: bring it hither
to me in the orchard.

Boy:
I am here already, sir.

Benedick:
I know that; but I would have thee hence, and here again.

Exit Boy

And I suspect (though I can only suspect) that the conjunction of actions, servants being told to hurry up, masters giving orders, and "his words are a very fantastical banquet," suggested that other phrase to Radcliffe's mind, namely, "to the purpose," and I suspect also that in The Italian she is thinking of Macbeth when one character urges an accomplice to stab a person to death, then, when the accomplice baulks, tells him to hand over the dagger, saying, "Arouse yourself, and be a man!" So too, Lady Macbeth tells her husband to hand her his daggers when he baulks: "Infirm of purpose! / Give me the dagger." Meanwhile the accomplice suffers bloody visions. Macbeth has bloody visions. In another part of the book the murderer who says, "Arouse yourself!" is in cahoots with a woman who is unnaturally firm and murderous (thinks the author) for a woman; and so Shakespeare seems to disintegrate and scatter himself through the two books, emerging from the author's brain at different times.

I know, I know, I know, I'm aware: people reading a book are often amazed when they see how nicely it reflects something they already know. "Look at this sentence here, they've been reading my favourite --" "Nuh," says the author, interviewed, "never heard of it. Total coincidence. Bizarre."

But whether she thought about Benedick or not is less interesting than the idea that she could have done so, that these conjunctions leading to results are possible, and that evolution therefore is capable of mysterious courses.

with whom we had in idea mingled

Ann Radcliffe's romantic country landscape, crags, cliffs, always "varied" ("the varied landscape, rich with wood," "the varied features of the landscape amused her fancy," "a scenery of varied and romantic beauty," "a sweep of sea and land, so varied," "its varied margin sprinkled with villas") -- convert this into brick and this is an aspect of Balzac's city, his Paris, also varied, cliffed, cragged; and the city's devotees have their romantic aesthetic reaction to its pits and details: it is their sublime, but at the same time it is filthy, "not having one single clean corner." And Radcliffe's landscapes are terrible, large, stern sometimes, and melancholy on occasions.

For the length of the first page in Balzac's History of the Thirteen I thought that the characters in the Thirteen gang, if they switched books, would never manage to be Radcliffe villains, even though they were "versed in guile," "never having trembled before public authority, the public hangman, or even innocence itself" -- which is villainous, but they were too self-controlled, I thought, "endowed with sufficient energy to remain faithful to a single purpose," where her villains are unrestrained; the evil Marquis in The Romance of the Forest has deliberately decided to unrestrain himself. He makes a speech praising lack of restraint; he has probably been reading Rousseau, who died in 1778, two decades before Romance was published. The natural human is free, etc, kills enemies when he likes, etc, think of the wonderful Indians in distant America, etc, and while we're on the subject does La Motte happen to have a vial of poison? La Motte does not. Poison is an expediency he thinks not of. Meanwhile good Clara is resisting her lute. "I am determined not to touch it at all this day. I will prove that I am able to control my inclinations when I see it is necessary so to do." But La Motte has been in the city, he has been gambling, he is weak, he is in debt, he couldn't control his inclinations in front of the card table, now he can't control them in front of the Marquis, who, rich, keeps the impoverished man under his thumb, where he makes readers so angry that they refer to him as Asshole in blue pen on the one hundred and twenty-fifth page of my copy of the book, price, one dollar at the local library bookshop.

I volunteer there regularly, and every time I do I meet the same man, who tells me what his mother said to him before she died, which was, "Don't rush," though last time I was so busy that he never had time to say anything except, "How much are the National Geographics?"

Balzac mentions Radcliffe, he seems to be impressed by her ("Since the death of Napoleon, an accident concerning which the author should still preserve silence, has dissolved the bonds of this life, as secret and curious, as the darkest of the romances of Mrs. Radcliffe"), but the History continues, he disagrees with her ideas about goodness, he doesn't see a point in restraint (turn away from Romance and the fragile idea of the angelic heroine Adeline dissolves, its body was made of the author's steadiness), he is excited when "their long repressed urges had become inescapable" -- the Thirteen really are Radcliffe villains -- and he goes through complicated exasperations over the cherishable Auguste de Maulincour whose grandmother has brought him up with the character of a Radcliffe protagonist, as previously discussed: see older posts below.

At one point, like her, he brings up Ossian, but he is placing that representative of melancholy, myth, mood lighting, etc, in the conversation of a shop assistant who wants a customer to put black feathers in her hat to make it look mysterious. The gang of Thirteen is Gothic in itself, baffling, supernatural, ferocious, but the Gothic is also a tool for an advertisement for there's nothing untouchable in Balzac, even the genre he loves can be violated, he does it himself, thrilled, language rising, really excited when he points out that love "needs gold too" -- this would be pollution in Radcliffe's Forest; she would not have a sense of thrill or humour but he is moved. He is excited by outrage, even his own outrage, he has a character in Father Goriot say that people, for money, will fight and devour one another like spiders in a pot, a sentence quoted on the jacket flap of my copy of Christina Stead's House of all Nations. "Balzac is the one writer that I feel as a man," she wrote to her love William Blake, "every word he wrote seems to be spoken in my ear."

Balzac's point of view is represented by one of Radcliffe's predecessors, another Gothic author, Sophia Lee, in her 1783 book, The Recess.

We were delighted with a playful group of fawns and deer, with whom we longed to frolic, and stole through Mrs Marlow's chamber into the park, by a passage she had pointed out to us the day before. What was our surprize when we saw those with whom we had in idea mingled, were large fierce creatures, and that had they not run from us, we must from them; that every bird feared its natural protector, and that men lived in continual warfare with every living thing in creation, even to his own species!

that arch suspended between two rocks

Connections! says Carlyle -- you act without knowing where your act will travel or what it will do after it's out of you. It's true that I wouldn't have read his Diamond Necklace if Ann Radcliffe hadn't borrowed the name La Motte, perhaps, or not. "[T]he name which La Motte [...] is given is one which had become notorious in the seventeen-eighties as a result of the trial, in France, resulting from "the affair of the queen's necklace" (a scandal which did some harm to the standing of the French monarchy) in which one of the accused was Jeanne de Luz, de Saint-Remy, or de Valois, comtesse de la Motte," explained Chloe Chard in the endnotes to Romance of the Forest. "This name might also have been suggested , however, by that of the 'Monsieur De La Motte' (the French poet and critic Antoine Houdart de la Motte, 1672 - 1731) whose fables are cited as the source of several poems in Dodsley (an anthology which contains a number of the works quoted in The Romance of the Forest)."

Fictional gambler, La Motte suggested both of these men to Chard, her brain saying, aha, and two antennae quivering off the gambler in two directions. (Is there money in this? he asks, cunning, cunning, cunning. Then what's the point?) Ann Radcliffe took out a sheet of paper and dipped her quill, gestating (not in herself but in time and history) future endnotes, which, now that she was writing, would be published in 1986 by Oxford University Press (herself not realising), nor did she foresee the life of Chard, "a lecturer in English literature at the university of of Osijek, in Yugoslavia" -- a country that didn't exist when Radcliffe was alive and doesn't exist now either -- nor would she have pictured the clean bloc biography that begins, "Ann Radcliffe (née Ward) was born in London in 1764. Her father was in trade ..." which is printed on the first page under a cardboard cover whose invention she would not have predicted, any more than Claudius Aelianus in the second century A.D. could have known that his description of a stingray would remind me of Steve Irwin every time I look at it.

The barb of the Sting-ray nothing can withstand. It wounds and kills instantly, and even those fishermen who have great knowledge of the sea dread its weapon. For no man can heal the wound, nor will the creature that inflicted it; that was a gift vouchsafed, most probably, to the ashen spear from mount Pelion alone.

(translated by A.F. Scholfield: On the Characteristics of Animals)

But my Steve Irwin is nothing but reports of Steve Irwin, since I never watched the show, only heard about it from others.

My thoughts run on in chains, and even the word "chains" would not have made it into this sentence if I hadn't found a copy of Paul Muldoon's New Selected Poems 1968 - 1994 at a secondhand bookshop that was going out of business on Tropicana Avenue, far down by Goodwill and a petrol station. If you open this book casually, without aiming for a specific area, then it will flip open automatically at page one hundred and twenty-five where you can read his 1987 poem Something Else, which ends with --

hanged himself from a lamp-post
with a length of chain, which made me think

of something else, then something else again.

Twelve lines earlier the poem starts with a lobster --

When your lobster was was lifted out of the tank
to be weighed
I thought of woad

-- and runs through other scenes before it reaches the lamp-post. The poet must have known that the human mind can connect these things, will do so willingly, and wants to. (Carlyle in On History, prefers webs to chains and now that I've mentioned it I think I do too.) In Radcliffe's last book, The Italian, the hero manages to accuse a monk of villainy by mentioning the word "friar" near the word "banditti" during a conversation about scenery.

"That arch," resumed Vivaldi, his eye still fixed on Schedoni, "that arch suspended between two rocks, the one overtopped by the towers of the fortress, the other shadowed with pine and broad oak, has a fine effect. But a picture of it would want human figures. Now either the grotesque shapes of banditti lurking within the ruin, as if ready to start out upon the traveller, or a friar rolled up in his black garments, just stealing forth from under the shade of the arch, and looking like some supernatural messenger of evil, would finish the piece."

Schedoni, sneering, hostile, bitter, detects the accusation instantly, and reacts with, "I cannot but admire the facility with which you have classed the monks together with banditti," but I am distracted by the hero's name, which I never can read without believing, for a second, each time, that he composed the Four Seasons. Because I am a human being who recently read Hazlitt's Table Talk I perceived a connection between his essay on actors and these sentences from Carlyle's book about the necklace: "As in looking at a finished Drama, it were nowise meet that the spectator first of all got behind the scenes, and saw the burnt-corks, brayed-resin, thunder-barrels, and withered hunger-bitten men and women, of which such heroic work was made: so herewith the reader. A peep into the side-scenes shall be granted him, from time to time. But, on the whole, repress, O reader, that too insatiable scientific curiosity of thine; let thy esthetic feeling first have play." But their points of view are too different, only editing makes them seem similar, you can only maintain the connection if you leave it pristine, deciding, pause here, do not feed your brain any material that might push it on to more advanced conclusions and take you away from the position you already hold: stand in that position and stay with that link, which reminds me of the unicyclist who told me that a unicycle will not coast when you stop pedalling.

The brain goes on, I pick up my copy of Balzac's History of the Thirteen whereat pages zero to seventy drop out in a fall of brown dry glue, an action that could be used, if I were writing a story, to suggest the disintegration of an attachment, perhaps a marriage between my characters, whoever they are, in other words this emblematic disintegration would not exist separately, it would be embedded in the chain or web of remarks that made up my book, not free, but hauled up and nailed into place, in my last paragraph maybe; maybe I could borrow it for a portentous ending.

the Thing Done will come to use

Ann Radcliffe's La Motte, just as an aside, may or may not owe his name to a French con artist of the 1780s, Jeanne de la Motte, who tried to heist a diamond necklace and became famous because the queen was involved; Marie Antoinette, innocent in fact, but the French public didn't completely believe it, and angry feeling was building toward the Revolution. Jeanne de la Motte had "a character, which the present Writer, a determined student of human nature, declares to be undecipherable," wrote Thomas Carlyle in 1837 for his short book about the heist, The Diamond Necklace (published by himself and his wife in limited edition); he was not helped by her three volumes of memoir.

"As to Lamotte the husband, he, for shelter against much, decisively dives down to the 'subterranean shades of Rascaldom'; gambles, swindles; can hope to live, miscellaneously, if not by the Grace of God, yet by the Oversight of the Devil, for a time," he writes, which are also the words you would use to describe the progress of La Motte in Radcliffe's book (gambles, swindles, tries to thrive), but every human being was a melodrama to Carlyle at this point in his life (so anybody can see by reading his essay, On History, published in 1830), with a mysterious story and plot, each person hurtling through the universe on this earthly cannonball, sending out star-beams of action (who knows where the light ends up), each person a concentrated history and fractal image of the larger history: "Is not every memory written quite full with Annals, wherein joy and mourning, conquest and loss manifoldly alternate; and, with or without philosophy, the whole fortunes of one little inward Kingdom, and all its politics, foreign and domestic, stand ineffaceably recorded?" -- he asks in the essay, which came out in Fraser's Magazine.

History should be treated poetically, he said, philosophically, musically, because it was humanity's "chief inheritance," each historical narrative evidence of our "spiritual nature" -- he explained the high dramatic style of Necklace to his brother in a letter --

My attempt was to make reality ideal; there is considerable significance in that notion of mine, and I have not yet seen the limit of it, nor shall till I have tried to go as far as it will carry me. The story of the Diamond Necklace is all told in that paper with the strictest fidelity, yet in a kind of musical way.

His song is called Force. "Work," he tells the audience in Necklace, "lies not isolated, stranded; a whole busy World, a whole native-element of mysterious never-resting Force, environs it; will catch it up; will carry it forward, or else backward: always, infallibly, either as living growth, or at worst as well-rotted manure, the Thing Done will come to use. Often, accordingly, for a man that had finished any little work, this were the most interesting question In such a boundless whirl of a world, what hook will it be, and what hooks, that shall catch up this little work of mine; and whirl it also, through such a dance ?"

Carlyle, who was a lover of Great Man-ism, makes his Lamotte-husband dive "decisively" and court the Devil, possessing not just ordinary badness, but badness almost worthy of Devil-attention: let Jeanne's husband have the bliss of extremity if he couldn't have any other kind. The husband is a listless figure in the Diamond Necklace saga, drifting out of sight and leaving the notoriety to his wife, who made her way eventually to Britain and published the three volumes.

Every person was a participant in a strong force, so Carlyle suggested; their actions entered that force when they were acted, the force flew through the world and the Great Man is a kind of pure focus. Great Mannery was a current of thought that ran through Europe during the 1800s: great tug of war between democracy and great despotism, the mass of workerdom here, Napoleon there, and various artists supporting either side, Carlyle arguing for a kind of chaos with multiple intense points, motionful not static, he died, time went on, others argued, then the Great Man hove up and it was Hitler.

But even an encounter with a diabolical Great Man couldn't knock the idea out of the human head immediately. E.R. Eddison was publishing books about fascistic Great Men while World War II was running (I know: I've made that point on this blog before), and perhaps did not see what he was writing about; like Lucien in Balzac he couldn't estimate the prospect that was standing in front of his eyes: all normal and human, when you put it like that and try to frame him as Lucien, and what unconscious spite I saw the other day online -- one person unemployed, and another saying, You should have done what I did when I was seventeen, I foresaw everything accurately and studied subject X -- but if everybody had studied subject X then you wouldn't be in the position you are now, a desirable commodity. There's nothing more infallible than luck.

to admit a view

Ann Radcliffe's calm tone in Romance of the Forest is the voice of the person who can see differences from a distance: she surveys each state clearly with her voice, the villain's badness is evident, the heroine is detectably good, and La Motte enters and exits obvious states of goodness and badness. La Motte's progress through the story is unique, lone twitch, he moves like a coin being flipped. Which side will be facing upwards when the end arrives? The decision to end the book won't be his. It will belong to the characters who move directly. He probably suspects it, powerless man, if characters can suspect anything, which they can't, but it would explain his moodiness if they could. "Why are you like that, La Motte? Why are you sneaky and grouchy and wayward?" "Because I know I have no power in this book, I'm going to be everybody's pet idiot, and readers will write abusive pen notes next to my name when all I'm trying to do is keep myself viable to the end of the chapter." "All right, that makes absolute sense."

If Lucien de Rubempré could separate out his states and foresee the consequences as clearly as Hazlitt, he would be happier.

Lucien would have been happier if he'd stayed home in his village, says Balzac, and Ann Radcliffe agrees, yes, innocence should stay away from the cities. "Here is the village!" indicates an honest servant at the end of Forest. "God bless! It is worth a million such places as Paris." Rustic dances forthwith and the protagonists retire to a chateau. "Here, nature was suffered to sport in all her beautiful luxuriance, except where here, and there, the hand of art formed the foliage to admit a view of the blue waters of the lake, with the white sail that glided by, or of the distant mountains." Adeline the virtuous heroine from Forest appears in Balzac's History of the Thirteen, where he is a man and his name is Auguste de Maulincour. Auguste was raised by his grandmother. "She transmitted all her own delicacy of feeling to him and made a timid man of him and apparently a very stupid one. His sensibility was preserved intact, was not blunted by contact with the world and remained so chaste, so vulnerable that he was acutely offended by actions and maxims to which mundane society attached no importance."

This is Adeline through other eyes, an intact sensitivity, chaste and "acutely offended" in exactly that way.

Misguided, easily outraged, Auguste becomes suspicious of a married woman; he spies on her, he wants to tell; he fills the role of Iago, suggests the translator Herbert J. Hunt in the introduction, he is a suspicion-spreader: Iago guileless. (Graham Robb, in his Balzac: a Biography, says that Hunt is "one of [Balzac's] most scrupulous translators," and they are alike, Robb and Hunt, they are both opinionated, they are both scrupulous, and they both admonish less scrupulous people. Hunt's footnotes and Robb's biography of (even more than the Balzac one) Victor Hugo have a similar rigorous critical tone, which Robb has found a word for, here, where he comments on Hunt: this behaviour is "scrupulous.")

But this Iago's Desdemona's father is a member of the untouchable Thirteen and he attacks Auguste in revenge, with hair-poison. Ann Radcliffe is right, her kind of innocence should stay out of the cities, it will be destroyed there, or impurified, it won't be able to live in the protagonist any more, it will have to migrate. If Adeline-innocence wants to survive then it should put its hands on the steering wheel of its vehicle-human and drive that body away.

And Hazlitt is right, presume: the state of fairy innocence he has described will be ruined too, if he goes backstage, he will have seen "the half-lighted candles stuck against the bare walls" "this insight into secrets I am not bound to know" but I still think, in spite of Lucien, that whatever will replace it might not be worse; in Dickens it is not worse, it gave him the Crummles in Nicholas Nickleby.

But we do not all have the same character, Hazlitt points out to me: I am not Dickens. "The stage is not a mistress that we are sworn to undress," he writes, and he might also (following that idea) have thought that other mysteries should not be penetrated, women's clothing for instance (since he is talking about mistresses and undressing), but nothing is alien to Balzac, and so when he wants to put Madame de Bargaton's intelligence and skill in perspective for us in Lost Illusions he can tell us how quickly she learnt to wear a hat, and how challenging it is, this hat-wearing. "There is an indefinable art in wearing a hat: wear it too far back, and it gives you a bold expression; too far forward, it has a sinister air; too far to the side, it gives you a jaunty look; but well-dressed women can put a hat on just as they like, and yet it will always look right. Mme de Bargaton had instantly mastered that curious problem."

I am not Balzac either, says Hazlitt.

There might have been some compensation for you, I say to him, if you had seen how Cato painted, or how Caesar combed, and you might have written another essay afterwards: "There is an indefinable art in brushing hair. This is how Caesar mastered that curious problem." No, replies Hazlitt. I would not. Now go and pester La Motte, he's used to it.

meet the prompt-boys in the passage

A Radcliffe villain is energetic and unfrugal; they love cities, which makes them Dickens and Balzac but not so much Hazlitt, who was a city man too, but a quieter one. Actors, he wrote in his essay Whether Actors Ought to Sit in the Boxes, from the 1822 collection Table Talk, actors should never sit prominently in the audience where everyone can see them; they should be subtle and sit in the pit. "For them to thrust themselves forward before the scenes, is to drag us behind them against our will, than which nothing can be more fatal to a true passion for the stage, and which is a privilege that should be kept sacred for impertinent curiosity." Oh! he wrote

while I live, let me not be admitted (under special favour) to an actor's dressing-room. Let me not see how Cato painted, or how Caesar combed! Let me not meet the prompt-boys in the passage, nor see the half-lighted candles stuck against the bare walls, nor hear the creaking of machines, or the fiddlers laughing; nor see a Columbine practising a pirouette in sober sadness, nor Mr. Grimaldi's face drop from mirth to sudden melancholy as he passes the side-scene, as if a shadow crossed it, nor witness the long-chinned generation of the pantomime sit twirling their thumbs, nor overlook the fellow who holds the candle for the moon in the scene between Lorenzo and Jessica! Spare me this insight into secrets I am not bound to know. The stage is not a mistress that we are sworn to undress. Why should we look behind the glass of fashion? Why should we prick the bubble that reflects the world, and turn it to a little soap and water? Trust a little to first appearances -- leave something to fancy.

Let secrets be hoarded, let there be a hoard and a hoard, and let there be some ignorance so that there can also be some wonder and amazement, a conservative position, the person wants conservation, they want to conserve and keep, and contemplate, and feel assured that there is always something in reserve, some secret they do not know -- they don't know the answers to those secrets but they want them to stay under their control as if they did -- and Radcliffe wants her characters to stay away from urban areas, always having the city there as a distant mystery they will never investigate, living instead in the country, having interior enjoyments, the source of pleasure coming through the eyes to the brain where it rarifies the emotions like a good sieve; and most of the exterior vigour can be spent on a lute. Her Clara dwells so much with her lute that she is ashamed. "This lute is my delight, and my torment!" Consternation over the lute. "This reflection occasioned her much internal debate; but before she could come to any resolution upon the point in question, she fell asleep."

The romantic landscape in Radcliffe is a mystery too, kept in reserve; the characters admire a mountain without wanting to climb the peak or study geology, they spy a crag, the eyes fill with tears, and melancholy floods the system gently, the absence of knowledge gently disincarnates the body, so that, detached from the solid, it achieves the sublime.

But Dickens goes behind the stage and in front of it and never wonders whether he should save some for later, and never behaves as though the lake of wonder might be drunk up if he comes too close to the backstage area, and yet he still has "fancy." Hazlitt's idea seems like logic until I look for examples and then there are plenty against it. I have been into the back area of a casino, and did that make the public area seem less strange, and did it feel as though a vital illusion-bubble had been pricked? It didn't; the front of the casino seemed more like a wonderful apparition, now that I knew how it had been segregated, the eccentricities seemed more pronounced now that I had seen the ordinary offices on the other side of the wall, the specifics of the difference were visible; I was not disillusioned after I spotted the costumes of a singing act inside a row of plastic bags on a rack in a corridor; I saw inside the walls between Harrah's and the Imperial Palace when the shops there were being knocked down (and our coupon for a free sundae at the chocolate shop would be useless now even if it hadn't expired already), iron spars crossed over one another, and a date written in chalk on the side of one beam, but that didn't make intact buildings seem smaller. I'm not convinced that anything can be more interesting if you know less about it.

I worked in a lower position for years, said a supervisor to me recently, and now that I see the job from here I realise that everything is different.

the indistinct and airy colours of fancy

So Ann Radcliffe believed that emotions could be understood, and then, a few years later, in one of his essays, not answering her but making an independent statement, William Hazlitt said that the feelings we don't understand are the ones we prefer. Baruch or Benedict de Spinoza in his Ethics (1677, posthumous, published by his friends) decided that anyone who thought God planned chains of events so that they would lead to an outcome addressed to human beings, was impious. These people, he said, chase every accident back toward its source until their imagination is exhausted and then they think they have found evidence of the divine. I suspected that Hazlitt had been reading Spinoza and became almost sure that I was right when I came across this sentence in his 1822 essay, On Going on a Journey: "We measure the universe by ourselves, and even comprehend the texture of our own being only piece-meal." Radcliffe, in her books, wrote a description of each character's emotion as it moved from cause to effect or vice versa, and doing this she imitated the manners that Spinoza described as impious, although there is no evidence as far as I can see that she was pursuing or proving the divine. What was she pursuing? Reason? She loves reason, as any reader can see for themselves. And the same reader, coming later to Hazlitt's essay, remembers that she loved reason and suspects therefore that it was far away from her; she did not possess it; it was distant -- reading thus -- "Distant objects please, because, in the first place, they imply an idea of space and magnitude, and because, not being obtruded too close upon the eye, we clothe them with the indistinct and airy colours of fancy." So says Hazlitt. Radcliffe was pleased by reason and her heroes and heroines were those characters who chose to view their situation through a reasonable frame of mind and not one of the other frames they might have chosen, for example, exasperation (which is one I select for myself very easily and normally and as proof I offer this vision of me standing in the bedroom yesterday exclaiming, "This is stupid, everything here is stupid," and otherwise denigrating the state of Nevada, which has done what exactly to deserve it I ask you, beyond being hot, this poor long state with the shape of a knife?). They do choose, it doesn't come naturally, they select it. The villains see that reason exists but decide to live unreasonably. Assume that each villain in Radcliffe is the same person, since they all reject reason, and you see she is testing (probably unconsciously) Boethius' suggestion that a bad person confronted by good people may on some occasions become good. The villainous Marquis in Romance of the Forest performs a good deed on his deathbed. Radcliffe, hopeful in her faith, has prepared for his change of heart, the story allows it to take place, and a balanced ending grows calmly from that root. The good characters not only succeed, their success is well-proportioned. Triumph is not excessive, which means that, according to the unstated calculations underneath her fiction, it is not villainous. No character can be good in Romance of the Forest unless they adhere to a set of nonextravagant proportions. A Radcliffe villain who managed to fit his wickedness into a set of reasonable proportions couldn't be a villain. He would have to be something not-quite.

reason, by anticipating the future, brought before her mind the full picture

Pulling a name out of nowhere, or pulling anything out of nowhere, is contrary to the spirit of Radcliffe, a writer who surrounds the emotions in Romance of the Forest with calm explanations and can describe the movement of any character's mind from one state or feeling to another -- the plot twitches with shock sometimes, when banditti appear, or ghosts, but the prose itself is indomitable -- the plot tries to smack it in the head and it never raises an eyebrow, it cruises on serenely like the swan of folklore, a spectacle I have seen myself, in Australia, where the black swans heaved around on the salt waves like carved stoics, brave as a doll nailed to a rocking horse -- for example --

Adeline, mean while, in the solitude of her prison, gave way to the despair which her condition inspired. She tried to arrange her thoughts, and to argue her herself into some degree of resignation; but reflection, by representing the past, and reason, by anticipating the future, brought before her mind the full picture of her misfortunes, and she sunk in despondency.

There is no despondency in the voice though, this murmur that asserts itself. No decision in her book comes from nowhere, and no behaviour is spontaneous. Her prose doesn't imitate the speed of the events but always moves at its own pace. Her commas soothe thought by dividing it into portions. Each sentence proceeds like a menu. One item then another. Characters are startled, the writer is never startled. "Adeline was surprized and shocked," she observes, "at this careless confidence, which, however, by awakening her pride, communicated to her an air of dignity that abashed him," moving on serenely from surprize and shock to the product of surprize and shock and then to the result, the abashment of a villain, one thing connected so logically to another that the abashment in retrospect was always his imperative destiny, laid down by a creature that is like the idea of God in Boethius, a being that can see past, present, and future as though they were all happening at the same time; it's only mortals who have to move through time to catch up with events.

Jane Austen read Radcliffe, and the reasonable tone surfaced again in her like a dolphin (and not only her, though English society at that point had loved Reason so much that it was also abandoning it and loving Romance, the long century of Enlightenment becoming Counter-Enlightement as they wrote), yet Radcliffe never made a Mr Collins, and Austen did not write an Adeline; and there is no sign that Radcliffe ever joked as Austen joked in a letter to her sister: "Here I am once more in this scene of dissipation and vice, and I begin already to find my morals corrupted." (Sent from Cork Street, Mayfair, London in 1796.)* I haven't seen the biographical Austen movie Becoming Jane but I know that it represents the meeting between them by using actors, which sounds like a sane way for a film to engineer an encounter, even if one of the actors was really playing a book, Austen in reality speaking to the book and listening to the book, and not the real woman, who was reclusive in her husband's house.

Two users on imdb.com have submitted this dialogue:

Mrs Radcliffe: Of what do you wish to write?
Jane Austen: Of the heart.
Mrs Radcliffe: Do you know it?
Jane Austen: Not all of it.
Mrs Radcliffe: In time, you will. But even if that fails, that's what the imagination is for.

The Romance of the Forest has an implicit message that goes like this: I, Ann Radcliffe, I believe that "all of it" could be known and explicated if you took the time to think your behaviour through one step at a time. Nothing but the constraints of space and literary convention prevent me following every one of my characters' emotions to its ultimate progenitor, whatever that is.

A woman who can go a little way so clearly could go the whole way if she had enough time. She would follow the stages of each feeling until the start was revealed. The moment beating in her hand.




* I wouldn't have thought of the letters if Whispering Gums hadn't written a post about them yesterday.

subject us further to its power

Whatever is going to be, is learning from what is; whatever is happening is possessed by whatever has already happened, and "If each word wins us a victory over nothingness, it is only to subject us further to its power", wrote Cioran the pessimist. Nothing is fated until it happens. Everything present is its own premonition. The ruin from Ossian occurred to the writer of Romance, and I was interested to see that Ann Wroe in her book on Shelley described the poet working in a way that was not like that Radcliffian leap from one phrase into another; instead, she said, he would mark down the rhythm of the poem (that was the main thing, the propelling thing) and spaces were often left blank, waiting to be filled in later with some word that wouldn't sound out of place.

Before this I imagined Marguerite Young rolling from word to word in her sentences but Miss MacIntosh, My Darling depends so much on rhythm that the Shelley method could have been used instead and it would have had the same result: she could have written it one way or the other way, and there is no rule that says you have to write one word after another, or even a book in order. John Crowley once said that he starts his books in the middle, and the landscape to right and left of that island a whitened tundra where the moss whistled to the wind.

So the shape of a finished thing doesn't always let you know how it was done, and mystery novels, no matter how many observed details they include, will never be realistic; they are attuned to an a-real philosophy, or a hopeful one.

All of Young's words are her own, she's not a quoter, or if she's quoting or misquoting excerpts then she doesn't give herself away. She resuses herself but not anyone else; large areas of Miss MacIntosh are made of words that have already been used, as all books are, if you want to be pedantic, everybody lifting everybody else's "the" and "but" and "I", doing this without remorse or shame because nobody ever detects them, or everybody does but nobody calls them out, we are this collective of thieves, and you have to reach a higher status of word before people start shouting plagiarism or sequel. You have to reach the arena of proper names, and even then you can disguise it. I could write a serious book about a girl named Alicia and, as long as I was careful, nobody would know that she belonged to Lewis Carroll, whose own name cannibalised the words Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.

"This pseudonym was a play on his real name; Lewis was the anglicised form of Ludovicus, which was the Latin for Lutwidge, and Carroll an Irish surname similar to the Latin name Carolus, from which the name Charles comes," explains somebody on his Wikipedia page. They refer you to Morton Cohen's 1996 book Lewis Carroll: a Biography for proof, but none of the Carroll biographies I've been able to actually get my hands on around here will support the theory, although they don't support any other theory either, they just don't mention it at all. In my local Carroll biographies it's as if he pulled the name out of nowhere and relied on nothing, nothing inspired him, there was no forerunner, only pure Carroll.



(n.b. Wroe's book is an alchemical biography, Becoming Shelley, devoutly researched, which is more than I did for those Carroll biographies, scuffling around in the UNLV library among the England 1800s shelves under D, Dodgson, with the black weight of Dickens falling to my left and Eliot nesting like Eagles on the right.)

by the fall of the walls

After I had finished Melmoth I opened William Hazlitt's Table Talk and voilà, he was making quotes as well, in the same slang way as Maturin, and the identical for Ann Radcliffe in The Romance of the Forest, which is flattened out right now on the chair beside me with the word Asshole written by the last owner in blue pen under one of La Motte's speeches to Adeline. "Your father may ere this have commenced these measures, and the effects of his vengeance may now be hanging over my head," says La Motte. "My regard for you, Adeline, has exposed me to this; had I resigned you to his will, I would have remained secure," and the top of the exclamation mark after the e in Asshole is almost touching the bottom prong of the r in secure. People insult fictional characters; sometimes they insult real ones through fictions, example, racist insults directed at groups of people you've never met; or they praise them too, through fictional names.

All three of those authors were alive at the same time, they crossed the bridge between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: deduction: quotes were a fashion in fiction back then: and when did they die out? On the first page of Chapter II Radcliffe makes a description of a ruined abbey longer by borrowing a sentence from the Songs of Ossian, by the Scotsman James Macpherson, which was published in 1765, when she was one year old, the same age that a child was when it died in Las Vegas a short while ago, bitten in the head by the family dog, and it was also the age of another Las Vegas child who flew two storeys into the arms of the crowd during a fire a day later, and survived, although, as if the disaster had happened in a mirror, the same fire killed a dog.

"The lofty battlements," Radcliffe says, "thickly enwreathed with ivy, were half demolished, and become the residence of birds of prey. Huge fragments of the eastern tower, which was almost demolished, lay scattered amid the high grass, that waved slowly to the breeze. 'The thistle shook its lonely head; the moss whistled to the wind.'"

The original author of the thistle shook its lonely, etc, is describing a ruined building too, so here, between Macpherson and Radcliffe, is the thematic connection that I couldn't see in Maturin's Bible quotes. "The stream of Clutha," writes Macpherson, "was removed from its place by the fall of the walls. The thistle shook there its lonely head: the moss whistled to the wind. The fox looked out from the windows, the rank grass of the wall waved round its head. Desolate is the dwelling of Moina, silence is in the house of her fathers."

And if I were following this theme of ancient ruined buildings for my own pleasure I would go now to the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book of the late 900s, where a ruined building is the end of the world. "[T]hroughout this middle-earth walls are standing wind-blown, rime-covered, the ramparts are crumbling, the rulers are lying dead, deprived of pleasure, the whole proud company has fallen near the wall; some war snatched away and carried of along the onward road; one a bird bore away over the deep ocean; one a sad-faced man buried in a grave in the earth. Thus the Creator of men laid waste this earthly abode until, bereft of the sounds of the citizens' revelry, the ancient gigantic structures stood desolate." (Translated by S.A.J. Bradley.)

The priest in the Mishima novel burns down a building, the loss of a building starts the descent of the Pollitt family in The Man Who Loved Children, and all of the worthwhile people in the world will live in new buildings after Ragnorok, according to the Wise Woman in the Poetic Eddas. The most loving and generous character in Melmoth the Wanderer is the only person in the book who doesn't have to worry about buildings, for she lives on an island without them, off the coast of India. There are the crumbled remains of a temple but she ignores the bricks and prefers to live "amid the leafy colonnades of the banyan tree." And her serenity is explicable when you see how buildings treat people in this novel, constantly looming over them, trapping them, hugging them in cells, locking them up, trying to kill them in fires, and shoving them down underground tunnels in company with parricides who sing licentious songs and lose patience with you totally when you faint. Buildings in Maturin are bad news. If I'm ever in a Gothic novel I will avoid anything with walls.

the shortness of the time left me no opportunity for deliberation

Here's a quick idea: a plot is a question made larger with stories, or a story is a question made larger with plots.

The word "compelled" in the Olga Masters paragraph is a door to a side-story but that door never fully opens, which is an author's way of saying that it can't fully open, because if anything can be done in their book then they will be the ones who do it -- why does the aunt feel compelled? -- why does the ordinary desire to look at someone who is irritating you deserve this strangely powerful word? I can't get off the subject; it niggles at me.

I don't know how Masters (over years and years) came up with the tone of voice that brought her to the moment, raw and flaming, when she decided that "compelled" was going to be the perfect word to use there, with nothing else to support it in its work except hints: compelled would carry the main weight, compelled had to be strong.

There might even have been a time in her life when she would have thought about using the Charles Maturin approach to "compelled," which I've quoted before: "The precipitate vigour of Juan's movements seemed to impel me without my own concurrance, and as the shortness of the time left me no opportunity for deliberation, it left me also with none for choice." Maturin opens the side-story door wider without pretending to have opened it all the way, ie, without pretending to have explained everything about the character's compulsion, ie, he writes a long explanation but uses the word "seemed" to let you know that he isn't pretending to interpret, exactly, only to hint or sketch, or dramatise without commitment -- a tone that Gothic literature seems to like, I muse, remembering that none of the ghosts in Udolpho are genuine and that the ending of that book is a Scooby Doo or Hitchcock's Psycho, an entry in the annals of science-minded characters sitting down at the end of a tale to explain away its mysteries, because, you see, they say, sighing, strangers happen to enjoy wandering through the forest just there with sheets over their heads every night at three a.m., screaming and playing a lyre, and so everything is logical, your fear is due to ignorance, and if you knew everything down to the habits of the local amateur lyre-playing collective, then there would be no mysteries in the world; if we lived long enough to learn everything then Gothic literature would be impossible, and therefore Ann Radcliffe is uncontroversial proof of human mortality, not only in the fact that she is dead but also because she wrote as she did, with the ideas she did, and the horrors she did. Without death we would have to find different horrors.

Masters might have decided that Maturin was trying to pin compulsion down too hard, "untruthfully," she might have thought: "A person who believes they can separate an emotion into its component parts like that is not being honest. I won't play these old games," she thought, "I won't pretend that I can do the impossible, I will be honest." I think this same frame of mind could be one of the inner differences between the work of John Kinsella and Les Murray, both Australian poets, though they separate themselves onto different sides of the continent. Murray, in his poetry, often inhabits another creature, or travels imaginatively inside a mountain but Kinsella's voice tends to stay in his own human throat, he doesn't often occupy the brains of animals, or put words in the mouths of creatures besides himself -- this is my impression, although I should point out that I haven't read a lot of Kinsella.

There is rectitude in Masters, there is rectitude in Kinsella too. The novelist in her rectitude omits any explanation except hints, she writes without splurge. And Kinsella too writes without splurge, but Murray splurges, and he even wrote a poem about splurge.

Argue that Masters' "compelled" might be the result of self-doubt. Thinking she can't do it, she doesn't do it. It's a shy literature, and the hints punctured by a blurt are shyness speaking, first withdrawn, sampling the sound of its own voice, then rushing forward awkwardly with too much power. The point of Maturin's long sentence is crushed down to "compelled," which swells there like a balloon crammed with helium because it is really three lines' worth of sentence stuffed into nine letters.

Here is a fantasy story. Every word in Masters' book is the severely compressed equivalent of a sentence in Maturin's. They are the same book.

a statue in each corner

Reading Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture last night, I came across a sentence that made me think, "Oh Proust," and "Oh, E.R. Eddison," and finally, "Oh, Anne Radcliffe." The sentence was this:

The rolling heap of the thunder-cloud, divided by rents, and multiplied by wreaths, yet gathering them all into its broad, torrid, and towering zone, and its midnight darkness opposite; the scarcely less majestic heave of the mountain side, all torn and traversed by depth of defile and ridge of rock, yet never losing the unity of its illumined swell and shadowy decline ; and the head of every mighty tree, rich with tracery of leaf and bough, yet terminated against the sky by a true line, and rounded by a green horizon, which, multiplied in the distant forest, makes it look bossy from above; all these mark, for a great and honoured law, that diffusion of light for which the Byzantine ornaments were designed; and show us that those builders had truer sympathy with what God made majestic, than the self-contemplating and self-contented Greek.

I'll add the next three sentences as well, because they're beautiful together:

I know that they are barbaric in comparison; but there is a power in their barbarism of sterner tone, a power not sophistic nor penetrative, but embracing and mysterious; a power faithful more than thoughtful, which conceived and felt more than it created; a power that neither comprehended nor ruled itself, but worked and wandered as it listed, like mountain streams and winds; and which could not rest in the expression or seizure of finite form. It could not bury itself in acanthus leaves. Its imagery was taken from the shadows of the storms and hills, and had fellowship with the night and day of the earth itself.

The Radcliffe connection was the easiest to work out. Ruskin's rolling heap had reminded me of the clouds at the beginning of Udolpho.

To the south, the view was bounded by the majestic Pyrenees, whose summits, veiled in clouds, or exhibiting awful forms, seen, and lost again, as the partial vapours rolled along, were sometimes barren, and gleamed through the blue tinge of air, and sometimes frowned with forests of gloomy pine, that swept downward to their base. These tremendous precipices were contrasted by the soft green of the pastures and woods that hung upon their skirts; among whose flocks, and herds, and simple cottages, the eye, after having scaled the cliffs above, delighted to repose.

As for Eddison -- I'd finished his Worm Ouroboros a few days before, with its Ruskinian way of tying the personal and moral qualities of an object to its appearance, and its Ruskinian enthusiasm for things that are beautiful and noble, and its sentences that are sometimes long and always grand.

Day was fading as they stood above the cliff. All the forest land was blue with shades of approaching night: the river was dull silver: the wooded heights afar mingled their outlines with the towers and banks of turbulent deep blue vapour that hurtled in ceaseless passage through the upper air. Suddenly a window opened in the clouds to a space of clean wan wind-swept sky high above the shaggy hills. Surely Juss caught his breath in that moment, to see those deathless ones where they shone pavilioned in the pellucid air, far, vast, and lonely, most like to creatures of unascended heaven, of wind and of fire all compact, too pure to have aught of the gross elements of earth or water. It was as if the rose-red light of sundown had been frozen to crystal and these hewn from it to abide to everlasting, strong and unchangeable amid the welter of earthborn mists below and tumultuous sky above them. The rift ran wider, eastward and westward, opening on more peaks and sunset-kindled snows. And a rainbow leaning to the south was like a sword of glory across the vision.

In order to reach the "deathless ones", which are mountains, Juss and his friends have to work their way through a forest inhabited by tigers, dormice, ravens, unicorns, lemurs, and wombats. "It is very pleasant," says Lord Brandoch Daha. Seven pages later he is smacked off a cliff by a manticore. Juss fights the manticore to a terrific end. The comparisons to everyday lemons and wasps give the animal a wonderful actual meatiness. Eddison's philosophy of life is inhumane, but there is no denying the man's manticores.

So when that noisome vermin fell forward on him roaring like a thousand lions, Juss grappled with it, running in beneath its body and clasping it and thrusting his arms into its inward parts, to rip out its vitals if so he might. So close he grappled it that it might not reach him with its murthering teeth, but its claws sliced off the flesh from his left knee down ward to the ankle bone, and it fell on him and crushed him on the rock, breaking in the bones of his breast. And Juss, for all his bitter pain and torment, and for all he was well nigh stifled by the sore stink of the creature's breath and the stink of its blood and puddings blubbering about his face and breast, yet by his great strength wrastled with that fell and filthy man-eater. And ever he thrust his right hand, armed with the hilt and stump of his broken sword, yet deeper into its belly until he searched out its heart and did his will upon it, slicing the heart asunder like a lemon and severing and tearing all the great vessels about the heart until the blood gushed about him like a spring. And like a caterpillar the beast curled up and straightened out in its death spasms, and it rolled and fell from that ledge, a great fall, and lay by Brandoch Daha, the foulest beside the fairest of all earthly beings, reddening the pure snow with its blood. And the spines that grew on the hinder parts of the beast went out and in like the sting of a new-dead wasp that goes out and in continually.

Proust, of course, loved Ruskin, and translated Ruskin, and, according to Wikipedia, which footnotes this fact back to a book called Proust as Interpreter of Ruskin: the Seven Lamps of Translation, by Cynthia J. Gamble, he knew The Seven Lamps of Architecture by heart. When I looked for Proust as Interpreter I found parts of it at Google Books. Gamble dedicates a page to the question of cathedrals* --

Luc Fraisse and Richard Bales both stress the importance of cathedrals in Proust's attraction for Ruskin. Fraisse suggests that Proust had a pre-existing, keen interest in cathedrals in 1895, which his encounter with Ruskin reinforced: "his interest in Ruskin had its roots in his study of cathedrals." However this contradicts Maurois, who believed that Proust discovered cathedrals because of Ruskin: "It was as a result of his love for Ruskin that he discovered the treasures of our Cathedrals."

-- which sent me off to Monsieur Proust, a reconstruction, by the French journalist Georges Belmont, of an interview with Céleste Albaret, the woman who served as Proust's confidant-housekeeper for the last ten years of his life. Barbara Bray translates.

One night he said to me: "You know, Céleste, I want my work to be a sort of cathedral in literature. That is why it is never finished. Even when the construction is completed there is always some decoration to add, or a stained, glass window or a capital or another chapel to be opened up, with a statue in each corner."

Monsieur Proust is a loving book, a fact that sends me back to Gamble again, and a letter that she quotes. Proust wrote to Georges Goyau about his Ruskin translation:

You know how I love Ruskin. And since I believe that each of us has a responsibility for the souls he particularly loves, a responsibility to make them known and loved, to protect them from the wounds of misunderstanding and darkness, the obscurity as we say, of oblivion, you know with what scrupulous hands ... I handled that particular soul.

Love is one of the reasons why I blog.









* Later in the book Gamble provides us with a passage from The Lamp of Memory, an excerpt from the Seven Lamps of Architecture. This excerpt, she says, was Proust's "first catalyst … for translating Ruskin." It catches my eye because Ruskin is surveying mountains at sunset, just like Lord Juss. Any moment now they'll be off together into the forest of tigers and wombats.

The quote she gives us in the book is a shorter version of this:

Among the hours of his life to which the writer looks back with peculiar gratitude … is one passed, now some years ago, near time of sunset, among the broken masses of pine forest which skirt the course of the Ain, above the village of Champagnole, in the Jura. It is a spot which has all the solemnity, with none of the savageness, of the Alps ; where there is a sense of a great power beginning to be manifested in the earth, and of a deep and majestic concord in the rise of the long low lines of piny hills ; the first utterance of those mighty mountain symphonies, soon to be more loudly lifted and wildly broken along the battlements of the Alps. But their strength is as yet restrained ; and the far reaching ridges of pastoral mountain succeed each other, like the long and sighing swell which moves over quiet waters from some far off stormy sea. And there is a deep tenderness pervading that vast monotony. The destructive forces and the stern expression of the central ranges are alike withdrawn. No frost-ploughed, dust-encumbered paths of ancient glacier fret the soft Jura pastures ; no splintered heaps of ruin break the fair ranks of her forest ; no pale, defiled, or furious rivers send their rude and changeful ways among her rocks. Patiently, eddy by eddy, the clear green streams wind along their well-known beds ; and under the dark quietness of the undisturbed pines, there spring up, year by year, such company of joyful flowers as I know not the like of among all the blessings of the earth. It was spring time, too ; and all were coming forth in clusters crowded for very love ; there was room enough for all, but they crushed their leaves into all manner of strange shapes only to be nearer each other. There was the wood anemone, star after star, closing every now and then into nebulae ; and there was the oxalis, troop by troop, like virginal precessions of the Mois de Marie, the dark vertical clefts in the limestone choked up with them as with heavy snow, and touched with ivy on the edges ivy as light and loyely as the vine ; and, ever and anon, a blue gush of violets, and cowslip bells in sunny places ; and in the more open ground, the vetch, and comfrey, and mezereon, and the small sapphire buds of the Polygala Alpina, and the wild strawberry, just a blossom or two, all showered amidst the golden softness of deep, warm, amber-coloured moss. I came out presently on the edge of the ravine : the solemn murmur of its waters rose suddenly from beneath, mixed with the singing of the thrushes among the pine boughs ; and, on the opposite side of the valley, walled all along as it was by grey cliffs of limestone, there was a hawk sailing slowly off their brow, touching them nearly with his wings, and with the shadows of the pines flickering upon his plumage from above ; but with the fall of a hundred fathoms under his breast, and the curling pools of the green river gliding and glittering dizzily beneath him, their foam globes moving with him as he flew. It would be difficult to conceive a scene less dependent upon any other interest than that of its own secluded and serious beauty ; but the writer well remembers the sudden blankness and chill which were cast upon it when he endeavoured, in order more strictly to arrive at the sources of its impressiveness, to imagine it, for a moment, a scene in some aboriginal forest of the New Continent. The flowers in an instant lost their light, the river its music ; the hills became oppressively desolate ; a heaviness in the boughs of the darkened forest showed how much of their former power had been dependent upon a life which was not theirs, how much of the glory of the imperishable, or continually renewed, creation is reflected from things more precious in their memories than it, in its renewing. Those ever springing flowers and ever flowing streams had been dyed by the deep colours of human endurance, valour, and virtue ; and the crests of the sable hills that rose against the evening sky received a deeper worship, because their far shadows fell eastward over the iron wall of Joux, and the four-square keep of Granson.