the transformation imposed on reality

I found a secondhand Vintage Books reprint of Dunnett's King Hereafter with the words "stunningly realized novel" on the back: "the celebrated author of the Lymond Chronicles peels away a thousand years of legend to to uncover the historical figure of Macbeth," but after the first few pages I was reading the language rather than the story because the language was biting me while the story was not and I think it makes sense for animals to pay attention to anything that attacks them (myself a book-animal) so that they can stay away, in future, from the bushes in which that enemy hides itself, and the caves where it sleeps; my animal mind nipped back and now it will express itself in quick barks and bite a flea under the back leg where fleas hide.

I was comparing her to my memory of Henry Treece, whose books I do not have here, but he was a historical novelist too, and one whose work I read when I was a child or teenager, and I was absorbed in them, especially the end of Man With a Sword, in which Hereward believes he is talking to someone when he is in fact falling over dead. For a few words Treece lets you think that the character really is speaking, then he slides up to you with the news that he is not; his death arrives in your mind while you're still occupied by the idea of his dialogue. Reality in Henry Treece's books is made up of these acts of surrealism. I am going to call this effect magical, by which I mean that he uses sleight of hand to show you things you know are impossible; you know they're impossible even while they're happening. Hereward is not dead and alive at the same time because this is not that kind of book; your brain has to turn the idea over and conclude that he is dead or else you can't finish and will be stuck forever mentally at the second-last page.

But reality in Dunnett's book is simple and a person does not hallucinate; instead the colour of their hair is noted truthfully, and they smile or frown to show their moods; every bit of behaviour is measurable, any action can be set out along her invisible ruler, as in, for example, "she parried them, thoughtfully, in different ways. Several places along the table she could hear the Earl her husband doing the same, but more skillfully." "Different ways," being unnumbered, might be infinite; her husband is more skilfully infinite, talent is limitless but even the infinite can be judged; and the author is an utter judge, squinting and saying, "This is less skilful, this more so," but by what measurement?

And like this her language removes her from the world of the characters to an environment of particulate estimation of the vague where she can write, "The ceremony was not a success, and neither was the banquet afterwards, at which the King's mother found herself seated staring across two tables at the young King of Alba, who had the good sense to stare woodenly back."

It was this appeal to alienated assessment that agitated me, these words that measure invisible things so absolutely, a phrase such as "good sense," for example, and then the extension of that evaluating sensibility through the entire book at the level of a white-noise hum with phrases like "perfect teeth" ("Lulach's perfect teeth showed in his slow, charming smile"), or the news that a man in a ship "made no mistake about his landing," or that another man decided to "dwell rather longer than was convenient" in someone's house when he could have gone elsewhere, all these words staving off an opposite existence, sadder and sharper, where teeth are not perfect but scratched or mucky, and a man landing a ship might not be perfect either, a wooden stare might not be good sense or even bad sense but only an ambiguous thing with inestimable consequences, that the success of a ceremony might not be able to be measured in a summary, that the length of a man's stay might not be able to be described with urbane words (that the anger and shame of the host might crack through), and that no one could ever say confidently, "It was a good answer, and a correct one," as the author does at one point, and again, "It was good advice" -- denial, I say, and wring my hands: it pretends to be a world like my real world, but it is not; it is an alien that will not admit itself, staring me in the face -- (I point, it wears an innocent expression, it is a lamb ) -- uncanny animal -- bright -- prose like plastic surgery -- it doesn't know what it is --

This is one of the reasons why I don't write book reviews. Whenever I don't agree with a book I feel frantic and not methodical; I am extinguished by outrage, and I am not like Proust, who attacks Sainte-Beuve in well-paced sentences translated by Sylvia Townsend Warner. He is angry but the speed of the prose in translation is the speed of reason. "Style is so largely a record of the transformation imposed on reality by the writer's mind that Balzac's style, properly speaking, does not exist." (Calm, sharp, thoughtful man, arming himself for the next sentence, rolling up a little ball of trust in the reader's heart, yus, ya, I'll trust him --.) "Here Sainte-Beauve is completely off the scent."

profuse, even if inaccurate

I was on the plane before I had time to read a book again, and the book I read was Henry Treece's Dylan Thomas. "This," says the flap inside the cover, "is a fully revised edition of the first full-sized critical work on Dylan Thomas to appear." The revised edition came out in 1956; the first edition came out in 1949. Thomas died in 1953, riddled with bronchitis and pneumonia. "His stanza patterns, though individual, are usually uniform, and his use of balanced alliteration and half-rhyme is unoriginal," writes Treece. "His technical innovation lies rather in his vocabulary, in his imagery, which affects the reader primarily and principally through the emotions."

Treece pitches up and down between praise and condescension. He writes like a man who wonders if his opinion might be unpopular. He thinks it might be -- he isn't sure. He hedges. He says: "Such exciting rhetoric and imagery grow out of a rich and profuse, even if inaccurate, word-sense." The book is filled with bits of business like that "even if inaccurate" -- the good opinion being modified and qualified before it can take its final shape -- the whole thing muffled, or puzzled, maybe, or baffled, as the writer keeps coming up against the idea that Thomas, a simple poet to like, is a difficult poet to write about. Treece's evaluations can be heroic, "He rolled [words] on his tongue as a lesser spirit might roll a wad of chewing gum," but afterwards he pulls back. A paragraph later he's calling Thomas' vocabulary "limited."

And these qualifications do seem to me to be pullings back, not simply continuations of the critic's opinion, because one tone follows the other, regularly, all the way through the book. There's a pattern to Treece's criticism and it goes like this --

1. Dylan Thomas was a natural, musical poet, unique, a genre of one,

but

2. Dylan Thomas was underdeveloped. Dylan Thomas was unadventurous. Dylan Thomas kept using the same repertoire of tricks

-- stated over and over again in different ways, this one see-saw rocking away under everything else -- such as -- the comparisons between Thomas and the Surrealists, the examination of Thomas' debt to Gerard Manly Hopkins, and the consideration of Thomas as a prose writer. I came away from Dylan Thomas believing that Treece's one great discovery was this: he could not deal with Dylan Thomas. He couldn't dissect him, he couldn't praise him, he couldn't dismiss him, and so his decision to write about Thomas trapped him in a cycle of movement that pushed him forward and back, first, the poet is good, then, and yet the poet is not good.

Treece (I thought, reading) is smart enough to see the bind he's in, he wrestles with it, he keeps trying to banish it, he comes at it from new directions, he sees other people wrestling with it,* and he's still caught in it. He doesn't have Thomas, but Thomas has him.

The next book I started was Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, with its theories about thought, about the human habit of sorting information into categories so that it seems united and can be judged. "But we can reduce all acts of the understanding to judgments, so that understanding may be represented as the faculty of judging." And looking back through the lens of Kant, it occurs to me that Treece's problems might be described mathematically. The critic has approached his book with a critical sense that divides writers into x and y. A poet who writes in a certain way is sufficient and admirable and should be discussed in certain critical terms, and this is x. A poet who writes in certain other ways is insufficient and must be discussed in certain other terms, and this is y. A critique shouldn't =0 but x+y=0.

Treece can come up with endless ways to turn Thomas into a y -- "His stanza patterns, though individual, are usually uniform, and his use of balanced alliteration and half-rhyme is unoriginal", his vocabulary is "limited," he is unadventurous, he is passive, he refuses to be influenced by Hart Crane** -- and yet he is also an x. The two categories shouldn't coexist but in Thomas they do. He is neither sufficient nor insufficient. Then how can Treece discuss him? The answer is this see-saw.

But as I read the Antimony of Pure Reason section of Kant's book I concluded that a better response would have been this: stop trying to find ways to answer the question, Is Dylan Thomas x or y, and ask yourself instead, Is this an answerable question?

On the evidence of Dylan Thomas you'd have to conclude, No. Treece could have escaped his trap if he had begun the process of evaluation by questioning his own understanding of criticism. What is criticism? How does a critic sound? What do they think? And should he try to mimic them or not? (His book is a failure of mimicry.) Would it help him to reach his goal? What is his goal? I, Henry Treece: what is my purpose here, as I think about writing Dylan Thomas? I am not a critic, I am a man with an aim; I am Henry Treece. (Drums and trumpets.) Now what? (Matthew Arnold: "to have the sense of creative activity is the greatest happiness and the greatest proof of being alive, and it is not denied to criticism to have it; but then criticism must be sincere, simple, flexible, ardent, ever widening its knowledge.")








My Everyman copy of Pure Reason is a revision by Vasilis Politis of the 1887 translation by J. M. D. Meiklejohn.

* "He had the critics confused too, for, whether or not they approved of his work, its force demanded their consideration."

** a weird moment. In summary:

Treece: Dylan Thomas has been influenced by Hart Crane

Dylan Thomas: No I haven't.

Treece: Ssh.

half-blind, twin-boxed

Wondering if there is someone reading this tonight who is in or near Melbourne, I'll say again that City Basement Books is closing at the end of the month, in other words: tomorrow, at six o'clock. Is it six? I believe it's six. They've priced the remains of their stock down to a dollar a book. I bought a bag of them today and my right arm is aching. Now every time I look around the room I see a title that I never expected to see outside that shop, and I feel a fresh surprise. Benito Pérez Galdós' Doña Perfecta has startled me at least three times now. Am I the first person to have bought Henry Treece's book about Dylan Thomas because it had Treece's name on the front and not Thomas'? "That stinking book," Thomas called it after it was published. Victor Paananen believes that the poet was offended because Treece dismissed his socialist credentials.

Professor William York Tindall of Columbia University, offered an important report that has been ignored by Thomas’s biographers. "Thomas told me (in 1952) that he was a Communist. My disbelief was shaken, however, at a party a few days later. Here Thomas suddenly arose, kicked the cat which turned and bit me and, to the embarrassment of our hostess, called a distinguished and once radical American novelist, who was also a guest, both ‘renegade’ and ‘prick’."

"One must regret," continues Paananen, "the unfortunate outcome that Thomas’s explosion had for the cat, but the incident does point to convictions passionately held by Thomas. No doubt Thomas had, as so often, been drinking, but in vino veritas."

Skimming through Treece's book I've come up with another theory: Thomas might not have been utterly flattered when his friend (they were friends) told the world that he was a "scallywag" with "the glutinous smile of a young boy."

We let society hamstring us in a hundred ways ... But Dylan just remained himself, his honest scallywag self, and was inevitably destroyed, like all other perpetual boys -- the beachcombers, the divers for pennies, the lion tamers, the test pilots, the climbers of mountains ...

The tone here is similar to Mervyn Peake's somewhere in the Gormenghast books. Where have I seen him making a list like this? I'll try to remember to look it up later. Thomas knew Peake, too. One day the poet turned up at the door, ill, and Peake put him to bed and called a doctor. Later Thomas borrowed his clothes.

Not long after [writes Mervyn's wife Maeve] a note was pushed through the door.

Mervyn, dear Maeve

Will you please lend me coat and trousers for a day. Any coat and trousers as long as they aren't my own. I am supposed to speak at a public platform tomorrow, Sunday, just after lunch. May I call early morning --

Love, Dylan.

On the other side, with a scribbled drawing:

I must unfortunately call for coat and trousers -- doesn't matter that M is taller than D before 11. Say 10.30.

My copy of Dylan Thomas is a green hardback, the same shade of green as the Bodley Head book of essays covering Treece, Beatrix Potter, and C.S. Lewis. But the publisher is different and the book a little shorter. At the back there are lists of the compound words Thomas used in his poems. They've been arranged under headings, so you have

Number Compounds
two-gunned, four-stringed, twelve-winded, one-sided, half-blind, twin-boxed, three-coloured …

for example, and

Eye- Compounds
Mothers-eyed, tallow-eyed, red-eyed, scythe-eyed, womb-eyed, salt-eyed, bull's-eye, eye-teeth, penny-eyed …

and so on. The last group of words is the largest one.

Other Compounds
clayfellow, winding-sheets, year-hedged, hang-nail, Christward, planet-ducted, skull-foot, goblin-sucker, marrow-ladle, breast-deep, bread-sided, close-up, arc-lamped, sheath-decked, black-tongued, deadweed, bible-leaved, wind-turned, bell-voiced …

So it runs on down the page. Treece has compiled another list too, one that puts Thomas' compound words next to compound words used by Gerard Manly Hopkins.

Class: Alliterative
Hopkins: May-mess
Thomas: sky-scraping, fair-formed

Class: Triple-compounds
Hopkins: day-labouring-out
Thomas: hero-in-tomorrow

Coincidentally, one of today's other books was a compendium of Gerard Manly Hopkins.

1866

For Lent. No puddings on Sundays. No tea except if to keep me awake and then without sugar. Meat only once a day. No verses in Passion week or on Fridays. Not to sit in armchair except can work in no other way. Ash Wednesday and Good Friday bread and water.

He would have been twenty-two.

not sat in his hall

Prompted by Amateur Reader after yesterday's post, I hunted down The Green Man on my shelves (by the end of this digging and scuffling I'd thrown books all over the bed and the floor and discovered that I own twice as many Thea Astleys as I thought I did) and checked my Roman to find out if he was Ovid or not-Ovid. Not only was he not-Ovid but he was not the civil servant I thought he was. The man is a monk. In the prologue he sends a begging letter to a duke, asking for a horse and a mule and a small amount of silver so that he can travel northwards to convert the heathen. "The land northward of Frankish Colonia lies in darkness, and there I would journey (by my Patron's good will) so as to cast Christ's light through that obscurity," he writes. So the superiors I imagined punishing a misbehaving employee do not exist. I imagined them, and I imagined him. I invented him almost completely.

His Christian mission to the northerners comes to a halt when he's picked up by the king who, in Shakespeare's version of the story, will be known as Claudius -- I'll call him Claudius too -- so: illiterate Claudius decides to spare this monk's life because he needs a letter written to King Arthur in Britain. He, Claudius, intends to get rid of his stepson, Hamlet, by sending him to Arthur's court on a ship owned by the pirate named Beowulf. When Claudius gives the monk to Beowulf as a gift he becomes the pirate's war-strategist and multilingual scribe.

"So I would set down the saga of Beowulf. I would tell how he sailed into Heorot, slew the marsh-monster and her son, swam in the cruel sea among the drowned ships, then grew to be a Caesar and slew the dragon of the fiery breath. Yes, I would even claim for him a great funeral pyre with all the folk bewailing him. And so I would set him down for all time, to stand beside the Caesar and the Pharaohs."

He glanced sideways at the Geat-king to see whether he was listening; then he added, louder than before, "God knows what Agammemnon would seem now if the scribe Homer had not sat in his hall with him to write down his life."

Beowulf gives him a gold cup, promises him slaves, and so on. "The rude northern style [of poetry] was almost too much for him," Treece adds. "He cursed the uncouth words, the rough metre." Reading some of these pages again, I'm reminded of the ease with which Treece managed his heightened language. There's always a touch of formality in his prose, enough to lift his characters into a slightly more rarified, simple atmosphere, where their brutality and their faith in gods and sacrifices starts to seem natural. His voice doesn't have the very deliberate sculptural beauty of ER Eddison, that other lover of the Ancients, or the sometimes clumsy combination of middle-class English and saga vocabulary of a Tolkien -- Tolkien, with his ponderous 'smote.' Treece is never ponderous. He doesn't write long, grand passages, instead he'll do as he's done in that quote, above: he'll follow a moment of portentousness with a quick aside, some moment of comedy or earthy human behaviour, greed or smallness: the monk's speech about Caesars and Pharaohs offset by his calculating glance.

I wonder (idly, I have no proof) how much of this he owed to his years as a schoolteacher, how much of his willingness to divert and entertain, how much of his readiness to embrace the ancient world's blood and drama and dirt, came from time spent in front of young children, who would likely be enchanted by a place where everyone was constantly in action, and where you could be an adult, a king, and still get away with burping and punching people in public.

[Claudius] nodded, then belched … [Claudius] got up from his chair and took Gilliberht by the beard and said, "Now, little piglet …" [Claudius] spat upon the rushes.

The monk's second letter to the duke, which is also the book's afterword, starts with the flourish of titles I remembered. The monk is still trying to convert people to the true religion (now it's, "Odin, Thor, Freyja and Frigg look with pity upon you"), and the up-yours is there ("I will say no more but leave you humble, I hope, before my revelation"), but everything else I thought I remembered has changed. The odd thing is that this new man hasn't wiped out the Roman in my head, he hasn't replaced or evicted him: he's still there, I can feel the shape of him as clearly as I did on the beach. Where did I find him?

selected stories

Feeling sad I went to the sea. With me I had Alice Munro's Selected Stories, which was not the most perfect choice for depressed evenings, I realised, as I read it, for in the space of one hundred and ten pages we had one person dying of cancer, one murder-suicide, one drowning, one near-drowning, one death from a paralytic illness, two children dying of a fever, their mother dying of sorrow, the father dropping dead in his store one morning for undisclosed reasons, the remaining daughter perishing in a chair, and two more miscellaneous deaths.

Everyone who wasn't dead was melancholy or rueful, which seemed fair enough, swamped by corpses as they were, although it wasn't corpses that made them melancholy but ghostishly encroaching thoughts about the muddled complexity of Life. (Munro handles all of this with great & delicate restraint and a stippling effect, that is, an accumulation of discrete incidents not necessarily arranged in chronological order. Elizabeth Jolley stipples too.)

I spent a lot of time in the sea when I was little, and being near it made me think of the books I'd read when I was somewhere under ten; my father gave me Enid Blyton, G.A. Henty, and Henry Treece. Treece's Man with a Sword had the most memorable ending of any book I read when I was that age. I call it memorable because I've remembered it, where I don't remember others. Roald Dahl's endings are easy to remember because the books are being reprinted, talked about, turned into films, and so on, but is anyone reprinting Man with a Sword? I don't think so.

It wasn't until years after Man with a Sword that I came across The Green Man, one of Treece's adult works, and the strangest book he ever wrote - at least I haven't read any that were stranger. Treece was the co-founder of a forgotten 1940s poetry movement named the New Apocalyptics but his fiction was superior to his poetry. (He was responsible for the first book-length assessment of Dylan Thomas, Dylan Thomas: Dog Among the Fairies. Thomas hated it. "Stinking book," he said.) As I sat there on a rock looking at the sea, the sand, a school of small fish, and the usual dead transparent jellies, an idea came to me. "I could write about Green Man in Pykk. What would I say? The Hamlet thing," I thought, "and the Gertrude-character in a cage being eaten by pigs at the end - and the hall on fire - and the tone - that outré combination of realism and over-the-top, that circus garishness told with a straight face. What could I compare it to?" Only one thing, the kitchen scene in Evil Dead II, Bruce Campbell beating himself unconscious with plates and then cutting off his possessed hand with a chainsaw. "Hamlet and Beowulf. Was it Beowulf? A legendary ancient hero. I forget exactly who." Turning it around in my head I wasn't sure if it was Beowulf, but the book wasn't nearby and I couldn't check, so for convenience I thought of this character as Beowulf.

(I am going to tell you all of this from memory.)

So. The Green Man is a book about Hamlet and Beowulf, although neither of them are called by those names. This Hamlet is a tribal prince in an imagined Ancient Denmark, a dark, smelly, coarse place ruled by tribal customs. Shakespeare's prince mucks around in marshes. The author never tells you that this is Hamlet. You're left to notice the similarities yourself, slowly working it out until the penny drops. Once this happens it becomes a joke between the two of you. This is one of the things that makes the book so strange. Treece, who was an excellent history teacher (we have quotes from librarians praising his effect on students), constructs his setting with solemn and bloody fidelity, but you know and he knows that it's built over a monstrous goofy joke.

Beowulf in this story is an Anglo-Saxon (I think) pirate (was he? A brute of some kind: I'll stay with pirate) captain with a lone Roman on his ship. The Hamlet narrative takes up most of the book, but every now and then we read a letter from this Roman to his employers in Rome. Sitting on my rock (igneous, black, and rough with the ghosts of dead bubbles), I tried to remember what led to this part of the story. "Why was he on the ship? I think his masters sent him there. To punish him? Did they owe Beowulf a favour? Did the pirates capture the Roman's ship? No, I think he was there on purpose. It was a punishment. He'd been exiled." At first the Roman is disgusted and disdainful, finicky, a pest, a snob, complaining because he's been sent away to hobnob in the wilderness. Please let me come home, he begs his employer, who seems to be getting a mean pleasure out of his suffering. As the book goes on he finds a purpose for himself - he begins to write heroic verse about this pirate. The Roman becomes a PR man - he creates the legend of Beowulf, or whoever it was, and the pirate rewards him for it. By the end of the book he's fallen so in love with his new role that he sends his employers a big fat gloating up-yours letter and signs off with his new Anglo-Saxon pirate name and a flourish of titles.

There are several jokes in this. (I sat on the rock, sorting them out.) One, a snob embraces the thing he despised. Two, an abused employee turns the tables on his bosses. Three, the man at the end is still the same as he was at the beginning, only now he's a barbarian pirate snob instead of a Roman snob. His lack of moral progress mocks the idea that experience makes a person wiser, and that advancement is the proper reward for wisdom. He advances without improving a bit. Four, the sheer pompous glee of that up-yours I-quit. Five, this failed gentleman had to travel to the outer reaches of civilisation to find himself a job in that most urban of fields, advertising. Six. Anachronisms are funny. Seven, the heroic legend we know today was the creation of a prissy and unheroic moaner. Eight, our hero was a shabby thug. By the time I'd worked all of this out I realised that I'd distracted myself so much that I wasn't miserable any more, so I walked home and read another Munro (a man's head got whisked off by a saw).