Ivory Towers

Unpacking cases of books prompts gloomy reflections about the poets I haven't read, and will never get around to reading; then of those poems I suppose I must have read many years ago, but have now entirely forgotten - Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel, say, which squats there on the top shelf, gazing down at me reproachfully. Who are the poets I haven't read yet, or even heard of? Where to begin? And how long have I got? 

Of course it's never been easier to catch up, what with online resources and specialist websites and even a few remaining bookshops and libraries, although I get the impression that reading serious poetry (and you'll know what I mean by that) is these days rather infra dig. It goes against the commercial and consumerist thrust of our times. More people, one suspects, write poetry than read it, and either activity is seen as an ivory tower pursuit, and who in their right minds wants to live in an ivory tower? I do, as it happens, and we'll get to that in a moment.

It was the critic Charles-Augustin Saint-Beuve who first used the phrase, and pejoratively, in his 1837 poem Pensées d’Août, à M. Villemain, comparing the poetry of Alfred de Vigny with that of the more socially engaged Victor Hugo. ('Et Vigny, plus secret, comme en as tour d’ivoire, avant midi rentrait.'). What Hugo didn't know at the time was that Saint-Beuve would later conduct an energetic affair with his wife, Adele. What Saint-Beuve didn't know at the time was that de Vigny would later inherit his mother's estate near Angoulême, take up residence in a literal tour d'ivoire and there write La Maison du berger, regarded by Proust as the greatest French poem of the 19th century. (Proust's apartment on Boulevard Haussmann was a cork-lined variant on an ivory tower, not least in its enveloping silence and hermetic enclosure, its confident denial of the metropolis.) 

Proust disagreed profoundly with Saint-Beuve's view that literature can best be judged through a knowledge of an author's personal circumstances and historical context, and to prove the point wrote Contre Saint-Beuve (published posthumously) which championed the aesthetic perspective briskly summed up by Flaubert in a letter to Georges Sand: 'l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout'. This is often misquoted, and not only by the English.

Both Proust and de Vigny clearly found their private sancta productive and congenial environments and we, their beneficiaries, can hardly grumble at their retreat from the world. Before reading any further you should track down images of de Vigny's bolt-hole, the Manoir du Maine Giraud. It's a serene refuge, the tower itself attached to a spellbindingly lovely single-storey 18th century house, with views over a tree-shaded garden courtyard. Who wouldn't want to shack up in a cool and airy room, lined with books and pictures and (expanding the fantasy), a magnificent cellar and an even-tempered chef?

By the revolutionary year of 1848 Saint-Beuve's pejorative usage had become commonplace in French. The Parnassian poet Leconte de Lisle, visiting Brittany to rally support before the impending election, found himself stranded in Dinon and disowned by his faction. A contemporary described the result of this setback thus: 'The missionary returned home disgusted with action and ever after kept his revolutionary faith, with his other dreams, under lock and key in his ivory tower.' an image  here combining disillusion, loss of faith, political inaction and a retreat from reality. Residence in an ivory tower is also depicted as an evasion of one's true nature, the occupant a dissembling Rapunzle.

Saint-Beuve's phrase has, confusingly, two Biblical sources. The first comes from the Song of Solomon (7:4): 'Your neck is like an ivory tower'. This is a symbol of purity and nothing at all to do with intellectual self-absorption. (It's also a rotten image, and reminds me of those schoolboy jokes: "Your eyes are like petals. Bicycle petals".) The second source, in the First Book of Kings (7:5), describes the dead King Ahab's palace as 'inlaid with ivory' and this, lexicographers agree, is the more likely origin of the phrase as used by Saint-Beuve. 

Some hard-to-follow logic linked ostentatious architectural decoration with elective intellectual retreat from the world, and while the 'tower' makes sense as a symbol of isolation, I can't see why ivory (of all things) has to embody or express this value - it's a rather unromantic material, associated with teeth and tusks, of course, but also with such humble applications as piano keys, dice, dominoes, billiard balls and the prosthetic leg of the Pequod's captain, which explains Melville's use of the name. 

The figurative sense of ivory tower is a late arrival in English, first appearing in Brereton and Rothwell's 1911 translation of Henri Bergson’s Le Rire. Essai sur la signification du comique [Laughter: an essay on the meaning of the comic]:

Il faut que chacun de ses membres reste attentif à ce qui l’environne […] évite enfin de s’enfermer dans son caractère ainsi que dans une tour d’ivoire. Et c’est pourquoi elle fait planer sur chacun, sinon la menace d’une correction, du moins la perspective d’une humiliation qui, pour être légère, n’en est pas moins redoutée. 

[Each member must be ever attentive to his social surroundings . . . he must avoid shutting himself up in his own peculiar character as a philosopher in his ivory tower.Therefore society holds suspended over each individual member the threat, at all events the prospect of a snubbing, which although it is slight, is none the less dreaded.]

The prospect of a slight snubbing (a rather mild rendering of 'humiliation', don't you think?) seems to me a small price to pay for a timeshare in such a gorgeous cell. My current surroundings, though far from intolerable, aren't a patch on de Vigny's, which would be the perfect setting in which to re-read Absalom and Achitophel. Poetry, as we are constantly reminded in regular and jocular campaigns, is for everyone, not just a fuddy-duddy cultivated elite. Who in their senses would dare to argue otherwise? Well I would. A more thoughtful position is that poetry (like all the arts) should be for anyone. 

As the very idea of a private life led in a private space is assaulted by phone-hacking, CCTV, noise pollution, invasive marketing and the assumption that nobody should be left to their own devices, the ivory tower option is increasingly attractive. Like a well-appointed bedsit, it's designed for single occupation - there's no room for Connolly's dreaded 'pram in the hall' because there's no hall. In fact there's no family life at all, no distraction from the sustained interrogation of whatever arcane subject most absorbs the dweller (and one always 'dwells' in an ivory tower). The only interruption to the contemplative life would (in my scenario) be superb meals and occasional medical check-ups. No daily commute, no queues at the check-out, no mayoral elections, no coalition, no celebrity culture . . . am I selling this to you? Aspiring tower dwellers may contribute to, but will not find much fulfilment in, our cultural mainstream. A Tower would not, I think, accommodate a television. I admire The Wire but I don't need well-paid actors to persuade me that things could be better in Baltimore. And I've not read much of Henry James come to that, but I know where my cultural allegiances and priorities lie, or at least should lie, when offered a choice between Downton Abbey and Washington Square. So, not telly. James died before completing a novel entitled, as it happens, The Ivory Tower, and I may as well own up to a long-standing evasion of 'The Master' - that awe-inspiring nom de plume has put me off for decades. I await a well-earned snubbing from his readers.

The present day equivalent of the ivory tower is less exclusive and marks the place where privilege and sense of entitlement meet - the air-conditioned stretch limo, that plug-ugly symbol of success and fame available to all, briefly, and for a price. The occupants are shrieking Rapunzels, forever letting their hair down. The millionaire footballer in his gated Cheshire estate and the dodgy oligarch on his super yacht have both retreated from the affairs of the world, though without an ambitious intellectual agenda, yet their isolation (and threat of litigation) attracts general approval and admiration from our media. Academics, on the other hand, far from enjoying the productive seclusion of uninterrupted tenure, are routinely derided for their snooty and impractical other-worldliness and subjected to the bean-counting indignity of the Research Excellence Framework, measuring the 'impact' of their work on the outside world through appearances in the media. Wittgenstein wouldn't get a look-in when it comes to churning out publications or nattering to Melvyn on In Our Time. But of course he's no Professor Lisa Jardine.

A view that seldom gets an airing because, on a first reading. it seems to endorse elitism, is that ivory towers are not about isolation, they're about individual difference, about diversity - something we are enjoined constantly to celebrate. 

Last meals

Talking of the condemned man's last meal (see 31st January's blog 'Elizabeth David on Death Row') I suppose it's not only the content of the morbid nosh-up that's of interest, but also the venue. 

Prisoners facing execution presumably eat their last meal in their cell, or in a cell adjoining the room where the sentence is to be carried out, by gas or needle or electric chair (and it strikes me as likely that whatever dishes are served will be liberally sprinkled with a powerful sedative, and that perhaps this is  why a last meal - traditionally described as a 'hearty' one - has become part of the ritual). So the question is: 'where would you choose to eat your last meal?' assuming, that is, you're not actually on Death Row.

The restaurant of a Cunard liner; a wagon lit speeding along the Riviera to Menton? Both, ideally in the 1920s. Or in an airship gondola over 1930s New York. Or perhaps - a shade more realistically - a corner table in St John, Clerkenwell, or (yes!) the courtyard of the Manoir du Maine Giraud.

The last of these will feature in tomorrow's blog.

About Félix Fénéon

Félix Fénéon (1861 - 1944) was an anarchist, a dandy, the editor of Rimbaud's Illuminations, the first publisher of James Joyce in French, an influential art critic (he discovered Seurat and came up with the the term 'neo-impressionism'), a brilliant literary journalist and - this is the point - an anonymous hack responsible for short news items appearing throughout 1906 in the daily newspaper Le Matin. 

He developed and perfected a technique of condensing regional news items into miracles of compression, deadpan wit and surreal melancholy. They were first assembled in 1940 but only appeared in English as recently as 2007. They're best read in quantity, so do try and find a copy of Novels in Three Lines (Nouvelles en trois lignes), a collection of around a thousand of these faits divers, edited and brilliantly translated by Luc Sante. (Publication details at the end of this blog.)

Fénéon's concise reports are mostly, though not exclusively, about murder, suicide, adultery, robbery, political conflict and lunacy. The cumulative effect over many pages and hundreds of disasters is mesmerising.

Some examples:

There was a gas explosion at the home of Larrieux, in Bordeaux. He was injured. His mother-in-law's hair caught on fire. The ceiling caved in.

Nurse Elise Bachmann, whose day off was yesterday, put on a public display of insanity.

Scheid, of Dunkirk, fired three times at his wife. Since he missed every shot, he decided to aim at his mother-in-law, and connected.

Scratching himself with a revolver with an overly sensitive trigger, M. Edouard B. removed the tip of his nose in the Vivienne precinct house.

He had bet he could drink 15 absinthes in succession while eating a kilo of beef. After the ninth, Theophile Papin, of Ivry, collapsed.

Louis Lamarre had neither job nor home, but he did possess a few coins. At a grocery store in Saint-Denis he bought a litre of kerosene and drank it.

Novels in Three Lines, edited and translated by Luc Sante. © The New York Review of Books. ISBN: 9781590172308

The original French versions can be found here:
http://asl.univmontp3.fr/e54slm/FeneonNouvellesEn3lignes.pdf

An excellent London Review of Books article on FF by Julian Barnes is here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n19/julian-barnes/behind-the-gas-lamp

Horace de Vere Cole - prankster

The brouhaha surrounding the Australian DJs whose dim prank led to the suicide of a troubled and vulnerable nurse seems to have subsided, or faded, or whatever it is that brouhahas do. At least it's no longer a daily concern for those of us not directly involved. Pranks and their aftermath were the subject of my unpublished review of The Sultan of Zanzibar – The bizarre world and spectacular hoaxes of Horace de Vere Cole by Martyn Downer (Black Spring Press):

Practical jokes, and the jokers who perpetrate them, are never funny. Against the odds Martyn Downer has produced a deeply absorbing account of Horace de Vere Cole, ‘prince of jokers’, who organised the once-famous Dreadnought hoax, in which he and some Bloomsbury cronies (including Virginia Woolf, between mental breakdowns) blacked up as Abyssinian royalty and duped the Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Navy into giving them a tour of his flagship.

Virginia Woolf (extreme left) and Horace de Vere Cole (extreme right) ready to
perpetrate the Dreadnought hoax, posing beforehand at a London photographic salon.

The jape lasted around an hour and caused a good deal of fuss but, despite the best efforts of de Vere Cole, never quite matured into a scandal. His life was thereafter to consist of interminable pranks punctuated by hopeless love affairs, and a cultivated lack of seriousness that in time became his defining characteristic. A buffoonish Old Etonian who appealed to readers of the Daily Express, he would be at home in today's celebrity culture at a point where privilege, chutzpah and gormless irresponsibility intersect. He would also by now be Lord Mayor of London and the bookie's favourite for future Prime Minister

Born to great wealth (his grandfather might be described as a quinine baron), he combined lengthy periods of affluent idleness with an energetic commitment to Socialist (or at least Fabian) causes. Of Anglo-Irish ancestry, he was ever the privileged fringe-dweller, never really at the centre of things. He haunted rowdy music halls in pursuit of teenage chorus girls and was a fixture at the Café Royal, along with a host of now mostly-forgotten names. He was a bully and sentimentalist, enjoying spiteful feuds with (among many others) Jacob Epstein. 

de Vere Cole was a very odd fish. Downer’s optimistic claim is that the pranks form part of a pre-war cultural continuum that encompasses Surrealism, Dada, Vorticism and Futurism, all of which movements involved subversion, violent reversals and the predictable urge to shake up a complacent bourgeoisie. Of course the impending carnage of the Great War trenches puts all these movements into perspective and de Vere Cole’s antics have acquired a particularly bleak and pointless air, summed up in a telling sentence:

‘With his friends dying at the front [sic], Horace kept up the frenzied partying’.

Even the best of his pranks tend to hover at the good-enough-for-Punch ‘collapse of stout party' level. There is a certain antic energy and inventiveness at play but, despite Downer’s eloquent championing, can de Vere Cole really take his place alongside Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and the other big beasts of modernism? 

‘Sudden collapses, playing dead, loud farting and scatological outbursts were his new method of provocation’. 

This was at the age of thirty-two, and there were decades more of this behaviour to come. There is nevertheless, and despite the desperation of the man's weird lust for notoriety, much to enjoy in the author’s well-written account of a rather sad life, which ended in abject poverty and social isolation. The brief appearance of Dick Innes and the hilarious description by Oliver St John Gogarty of Horace’s Catholic wedding are both outstanding recreations of a fugitive moment. 

'Getting known'

'Getting known' - another line from Krapp's Last Tape, as the wearish old man reflects glumly on the sales (not at all high) of his book.

Three weeks on this blog now has (indeed boasts) thoughtful and attractive readers in Britain, the United States, Canada, Japan, Germany, Malaysia, Russia, the Czech Republic and the Ukraine. I'm not sure how this all works but there appear to be many of you. Hundreds.

And what a helter-coaster, roller-skelter white knuckle ride it's been! From those early days - remember them? - when a handful of primed initiates read about Auden's wish to be roasted and eaten after death, to yesterday's entry on whatever the hell it was. A reg'lar charivari.

I have no shortage of eloquent balls at my disposal but I don't want to badger you unless you're eager to be badgered. So here's what I'd like you to do if you want to have daily doses -

a) bookmark http://davidjcollard.blogspot.co.uk and you can then read all my perpetrations at your leisure and in the comfort of your own mind.

b) become a follower. I have no followers as yet, and am not sure in what way having them might go to my head. You could be the first or among the first. Imagine how satisfying that will be. I mean, just think. There were only twelve apostles, you know. It just goes to show.

Come February I plan to change the name of the blog from Salvete! to something else entirely, something more crowd-pulling, more come-all-ye, and without the exclamation mark.

Good evening

For Annie Janowitz

The clocks turned back the night before and so

Arriving late (a thing I hate), 

That dim-lit Sunday afternoon,

I sat there in the bright, low-ceilinged hall

Waiting to hear my friend Professor Janowitz

Tell all of us about her man Newton, 

And the Poetic Sublime

Her drawly voice, unamplified 

Mid-century Manhattan, 

Late of Muswell Hill and Barbican,

Treated competently of space, of time,

Surrounded by her departmental peers,

All charming folk, all making notes, 

And me (a bloke), inadequate,

Adopting a pose of serene entitlement

Without a pen, pencil, paper or a clue 

Apart from Auden's line about

That apple, 'falling towards England',

Was pleased to see my pal so easily work the room.

‘The guy was a guy’, she says, by way of

Hermaneutic.  We try and get it straight away,

And ripple approvingly, as if to say

The Principia Mathematica gets our vote

And makes us all feel good about our lot,

Thanks to her graft and insight, eloquence and tact. 

Questions were lobbed, sliced back with ease,

Calling on Milton, Anna Barbauld, a French savant

Whose name I didn't catch, and others, many others. 

Scores were gently settled, things broke up

And some of us then went for supper in a pub.

I had pork belly, roast parsnips and red wine,

And talked more than I listened

And having split our bill we all went out into the cold 

Dark night, paired off in huddled bundles

To walk along the Mile End Road.

Above our little group the old white stars,

Unseen beyond our city sodium,

Were still there for the knowing,

Glittering as they always have to do.

Later, fumbling with the key, I looked up,

Launching half-cut thoughts through

The firmament, the swerve, the cosmos if you will 

And ending up, but knowingly, alone.

Old Bob and Aldous Huxley

One sunny Thursday evening in June 2009 I found myself at the LRB bookshop in Bloomsbury celebrating the launch of Zachary Leader's book The Movement Reconsidered. This was a sprightly collection of essays about the pre-eminent group of post-war poets assembled in the  1956 New Lines anthology by Robert Conquest (who doubled as editor and contributor) along with Kingsley Amis, Thom Gunn, Philip Larkin and illustrious others.

As sole survivor of What-Was-Never-Really-a-Movement, Conquest was to be guest of honour at the launch. I had long admired his deadpan New Lines introduction in which he said that all the poets were linked by 'a negative determination to avoid bad principles', a shapely phrase that means a lot or nothing at all. I was excited at the prospect of seeing a literary and cultural hero who had, quite incredibly, first appeared in print over seventy years before, in 1937. I was also curious. What, I wondered, did a Thirties writer look like? What did a Thirties writer sound like? 

To complicate matters he was - and is - arguably our finest living historian on the strength of The Great Terror, his ground-breaking and harrowing account of Stalin's show trials, purges and all-round wickedness. Conquest's view, that Stalin's grim tyranny was not a ghastly and anomalous perversion of Lenin's political theories but their inevitable outcome, rattled a generation of Marxist intellectuals and provoked furious debate, although it is now a widely-accepted orthodoxy. He was also (and remains) a master of pungent and instantly memorable limericks, his two fields of expertise combining thus:

There was a great Marxist named Lenin

Who did two or three million men in.

That’s a lot to have done in,

But where he did one in

That grand Marxist Stalin did ten in.

So I found a seat and hung around for half an hour as the room quickly filled, mostly with celebrated (though not celebrity) poets. The famous writer Martin Amis arrived late, looking like a famous writer. This was, I realised, the only place to be. Conquest sat in a wheelchair, looking spry and quietly amused, or possibly aghast. It was hard to tell. He reminded me of George Smiley (as played by Alec Guinness), a bland cryptic everyman, hard to place, and watchful. He was dapper in a dark blue open-collar shirt and olive-green sports jacket, cool in the timeless way that very old people can sometimes appear to be. Things kicked off. After the usual launch flummery and speeches and readings (by a starry cohort of admirers I mentally labelled los Conquestadores), Leader wound things up by reciting Conquest's miraculous condensation of Jacques' speech in As You Like It:

  Seven ages, first puking and mewling

  Then very pissed off with one's schooling;

  Then fucks and then fights;

  Then judging chaps' rights;

  Then sitting in slippers; then drooling.

The author sat imperturbably throughout this impromptu tribute and the warm applause that followed. I remember thinking that in Shakespearean terms he had already been once around the block, so to speak, was now experiencing the third age for the second time, and therefore likely to be very pissed off. He had written The Great Terror. He knew Solzhenitsyn, for pity's sake. Would he, would anyone, choose to be remembered for an admittedly magnificent limerick? As the audience clustered around Leader and his readers, I made a bee-line for Conquest who, temporarily overlooked by the rest of the room, was now sitting quietly alone and apparently happy to be ignored.

Closing in on him with all the queasy assurance that comes from a second glass of publisher's plonk I blabbered some complimentary preamble and, prompted by his earlier recital of a very fine poem about a lamented basset hound named Bluebell, we chatted about dogs. Conquest likes dogs and writes very well about them. I don't, so I don't, but we hit it off just fine. He had by far the quietest voice of anyone I've ever met, little more than a murmur, compared with which his barely-audible reading had been delivered at a roar. Standing, I had to crane solicitously in his direction so as not to to miss a word.   

Our conversation turned to the once-notorious opening lines of an unfinished limerick by Aldous Huxley:

 There was a young man of East Anglia

 Whose loins were a tangle of ganglia

Huxley reportedly promised that all royalties from his 1923 novel Antic Hay would go to anybody who could polish off the next three lines, given that (in his view) no third rhyme was possible after 'ganglia'. It so happened that a few weeks earlier a friend of mine had risen to the challenge and after a moment's reflection come up with:

'When touched by a tart

He awoke with a start

And said: 'Do that again and I'll stranglia'.

Conquest smiled faintly. This, I immediately convinced myself, was not only a clear indication of his approval, but an overture to a profound and lasting friendship. He would leave the venue that evening buoyed by our encounter, his wavering faith in the cultural values of my generation agreeably and definitively boosted. 'There was one fellow over there,' he would murmur, back at home in Palo Alto, 'who seemed the right sort. I should be sorry not to hear from him again.' A mutually-enriching correspondence would ensue. He would read my poetry, I would read his and I might in time get to call him 'Old Bob', as Kingsley used to do.

Our first encounter had reached an end, and we shook hands. Not having a business card I scribbled my address on a bookstore flier so we could continue our burgeoning relationship, but Bob was now surrounded, hemmed in by his admirers. They were all craning solicitously so as not to miss a word.  It was getting late. I stuffed the flier in my pocket and left.

'Seven ages' limerick © Robert Conquest