Favourite snatches (3)

A substantial snatch today, from the opening section  of W. H. Auden's The Orators: An English Study (published in 1932 when the author was 25 years old):

I. ADDRESS FOR A PRIZE-DAY

COMMEMORATION. COMMEMORATION. What does it mean? What does it mean? Not what does it mean to them, there, then. What does it mean to us, here now? It's a facer, isn't it boys? But we've all got to answer it. What were the dead like? What sort of people are we living with now? Why are we here? What are we going to do? Let's try putting it in another way.

Imagine to yourselves a picked body of angels, all qualified experts on the human heart, a Divine Commission, arriving suddenly one day at Dover. After some weeks in London, they separate, one passing the petrol pumps along the Great North Road, leaving the dales on his left hand, to take all rainwet Scotland for his special province, one to the furnace-crowded Midlands, another to the plum-rich red-earth valley of the Severn, another to the curious delta-like area round King's Lynn, another to Cornwall where granite resists the sea and our type of thinking ends, and so on. And then when every inch of the ground has been carefully gone over, every house inspected, they return to the Capital again to compare notes, to collaborate in a complete report, which made, they depart as quietly as they came. Beauty of the scenery apart, would you not feel some anxiety as to the contents of that report? Do you consider their statistics as to the average number of lost persons to the acre would be a cause for self-congratulation? Take a look round this hall, for instance. What do you think? What do you think about England, this country of ours where nobody is well?

All of you must have found out what a great help it is, before starting on a job of work, tohave some sort of scheme or plan in your mind beforehand. Some of the senior boys, I expect, will have heard of the great Italian poet Dante, who wrote that very difficult but wonderful poem, The Divine Comedy. In the second book of this poem, which describes Dante's visit to Purgatory, the sinners are divided into three main groups, those who have been guilty in their life of excessive love towards themselves or their neighbours, those guilty of defective love towards God and those guilty of perverted love. Now this afternoon I want, if I may, to take these three divisions of his and apply them to ourselves. In this way, I hope, you will be able to understand better what I am driving at.

To start with, then, the excessive lovers of self. What are they like? These are they who even in childhood played in their corner, shrank when addressed. Lovers of long walks, they sometimes become bird watchers, crouching for hours among sunlit bushes like a fox, but prefer as a rule the big cities, living voluntarily in a top room, the curiosity of their landlady. Habituées of the mirror, famous readers, they fall in love with historical characters, with the unfortunate queen, or the engaging young assistant of a great detective, even with voice, of the announcer, maybe, from some foreign broadcasting station they can never identify; unable to taste pleasure unless through the rare coincidence of naturally diverse events, or the performance of a long and intricate ritual. With odd dark eyes like windows, a lair for engines, they pass suffering more and more from cataract or deafness, leaving behind them diaries full of incomprehensible jottings, complaints less heard than the creaking of a wind pump on a moor. The easiest perhaps for you to recognise. They avoid the study fire, at games they are no earthly use. They are not popular. But isn't it up to you to help? Oughtn't you to warn them then against tampering like that with time, against those strange moments they look forward to so? Next time you see one sneaking from the field to develop photographs, won't you ask if you can come too? Why not go out together next Sunday; say, casually, in a wood: 'I suppose you realise you are fingering the levers that control eternity!'

Then the excessive lovers of their neighbours. Dare-devils of the soul, living dangerously upon their  nerves. A rich man taking the fastest train for the worst quarters of eastern cities; a private schoolmistress in a provincial town, watching the lights go out in another wing, immensely passionate. You will not be surprised to learn that they are both heavy smokers. That one always in hot water with the prefects, that one who will not pass the ball; they are like this.You call them selfish, but no, they care immensely, far too much. They're beginning to go faster. Have you never noticed in them the gradual abdication of central in favour of peripheral control? What if the tiniest stimulus should provoke the full, the shattering response, not just then but all the time. It isn't going to stop unless you stop it. Daring them like that only makes them worse. Try inviting them down in the holidays to a calm house. You can do most for them in the summer. They need love.

Next the defective lovers. Systems run to a standstill, or like those ship-cranes along Clydebank, which have done nothing all this year. Owners of small holdings, they sit by fires they can't make up their minds to light, while dust settles on their unopened correspondence and inertia branches in their veins like a zinc tree. That tomato house blown down by the autumn gales they never rebuilt. Wearers of soiled linen, the cotton wool in their ears unchanged for months. Often they are collectors, but of what? Old tracts, brackets picked up on the road, powders, pieces of wood, uncatalogued, piled anyhow in corners of the room, or hidden under tea-stained saucers. Anaemic, muscularly undeveloped and rather mean. Without servants. Each hour bringing its little barrowful of unacted desires, mounting up day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year has made a slag heap miles high shutting out air and sun. It's getting rather smelly. The effort required for clearance will be immense. Dare they begin. Well, you've got to show them they'd jolly well better dare. Give them regular but easy tasks and see that they do them properly. Hit them in the face if necessary. If they hit back you will know they are saved.

Last and worst, the perverted lovers. So convincing at first, so little apparent cause for anxiety. A slight proneness to influenza, perhaps, a fear of cows, traits easily misunderstood or dismissed. Have a good look at the people you know; at the boy sitting next to you at this moment, at that chum of yours in the Lower School. Think of the holidays, your father, the girl you met at that dance. Is he one? Was she one? Yes, they are charming, but they've lost their nerve. Pray God, boys, you may not have to see them as they will be not so very long from now. 'What have you been up to?' you'd think; 'What did you ask for to be given that?' Faces in suffering so ugly they inspire feelings only of disgust. Their voice toneless, they stoop, their gait wooden like a galvanised doll so that one involuntarily exclaims on meeting, 'You really oughtn't to be out in weather like this.' In some a simple geometrical figure can arouse all the manifestations of extreme alarm. Others haters of life, afraid to die, end in hospitals as incurable cases. These are they who when the saving thought came shot it for a spy. Unable to sleep at nights, they look at watches as the train passes, pushed struggling in towards a protracted deathbed, attended by every circumstance of horror, the hard death of those who never have and never could be loved.

©  The Estate of W. H. Auden. The Orators is published by Faber and Faber

James Hadley Chase

George Orwell called it 'a brilliant piece of writing, with hardly a wasted word or a jarring note anywhere'. Graham Greene was equally enthusiastic - but who these days reads No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase?

Published in 1939 it was widely condemned for its explicit depictions of sex and violence, a British take on the pulp excesses of James M. Cain. This of course did no harm at all to sales but it was bad timing - that year saw new developments in violence that eclipsed the most lurid of hard-boiled fictions.

After the war No Orchids was successfully adapted for the stage and filmed (atrociously) in 1948. t may be the film version that sunk the novel's reputation - it was, according to Leslie Halliwell, a 'hilariously awful gangster film [and] one of the worst films ever made'.

The sedate-looking first edition

It became, in those years before the Lady Chatterley Trial, a byword for a literary depravity. Chase substantially re-worked the original in 1962 as he felt the post-war generation would find his descriptions and plot obsolete. I recently read the book n Kindle (and assume it was the 1939 version) It's really very good, and I'd like to see what changes Chase introduced to the revised version - it might reveal something of cultural shifts in the year before 'sexual intercourse began'.

James Hadley Chase (1906 – 1985) was born René Lodge Brabazon Raymond and unsurprisingly adopted several pseudonyms, including James L. Docherty, Raymond Marshall, R. Raymond and Ambrose Grant. Even by the hectic standards of pulp genre writing he was astonishingly prolific, publishing over ninety novels of which fifty were made into films. More then thirty of these were French movies. Imagine that! He's the anglophone Georges Simenon and one of the few British writers to have a large following in France - and there's surely a book to be written on the reputation of English language writers in mainland Europe. In Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century (a bizarre list that's worth a slack-jaw'd look) it comes immediately behind The Catcher in the Rye.

Anyway - back to No Orchids for Miss Blandish. The main character is a psychopath, Slim Grissom, and the plot involves a kidnapping . . . but read it for yourself. Below is a sample passage . . .

That's more like it

Slim, still grinning, held the knife-point just below Riley’s navel and put his weight on the handle. The knife went in slowly as if it were going into butter. Riley drew his lips back. HIs mouth opened. There was a long hiss of expelled breath as he stood there. Tears sprang from his eyes. Slim stepped back, leaving the black hilt of the knife growing out of Riley like a horrible malformation. Riley began to give low, quavering cries. His knees were buckling but the cord held him up. His weight on the ropes pushed the knife handle up so that the blade slowly cut deeper inside him.

Slim sat on the grass a few feet away and gave himself a cigarette. He pushed his hat over his eyes
and squinted at Riley.

‘Take your time, Pal, We ain’t in a hurry.’ He gave him a crooked smile as his fingers traced the sky. ‘Ain’t them clouds pretty?’

Favourite snatches (2)

Anything at all from Wodehouse. But what? I remember yelping when I first read his description of a certain type of girl as 'the sand in civilisation's spinach'. 

Years later I read a very good essay on Wodehouse by V. S. Pritchett who singled out that very phrase and said it 'enriched the mind'. Well, yes. The phrase has everything - wit, compression, truth and startling originality. I expect there's a Greek word for such a figure of speech.

What, though, to choose? Stumped, I flipped open my copy of The Code of the Woosters (1938) and here's an  exchange between Jeeves and one of the girls who provide the sand in Bertie Wooster's spinach:

          “Jeeves, you really are a specific dream-rabbit."

          "Thank you, miss. I am glad to have given satisfaction.” 

"Specific dream-rabbit". You can just see her, can't you?

Favourite snatches (1)

Reposted following technical hoo-hah. Apologies.

I thought I might do a short series of blogs featuring my favourite snatches of prose, so here's the first. It's from Nicholas Nickleby, and is the letter written to Ralph Nickleby by Fanny Squeers on behalf of her wicked father Wackford (proprietor of Dotheboys Hall, the prison-like boarding school in Yorkshire) following the escape of Ralph's 'nevew' Nicholas (briefly employed there) and his friend Smike, 'a boy of desperate caracter'.

Since reading this at the age of fourteen I'm afraid cannot see any object made of 'tortershell' without imagining how it might affect the brain if violently inserted. The best line comes with perfect timing more than half way through - 'I am screaming out loud all the time I write and so is my brother . . .'

DOTHEBOYS HALL, THURSDAY MORNING.

SIR,

My pa requests me to write to you, the doctors considering it doubtful whether he will ever recuvver the use of his legs which prevents his holding a pen.

We are in a state of mind beyond everything, and my pa is one mask of brooses both blue and green likewise two forms are steepled in his Goar. We were kimpelled to have him carried down into the kitchen where he now lays. You will judge from this that he has been brought very low.

When your nevew that you recommended for a teacher had done this to my pa and jumped upon his body with his feet and also langwedge which I will not pollewt my pen with describing, he assaulted my ma with dreadful violence, dashed her to the earth, and drove her back comb several inches into her head. A very little more and it must have entered her skull. We have a medical certifiket that if it had, the tortershell would have affected the brain.

Me and my brother were then the victims of his feury since which we have suffered very much which leads us to the arrowing belief that we have received some injury in our insides, especially as no marks of violence are visible externally. I am screaming out loud all the time I write and so is my brother which takes off my attention rather and I hope will excuse mistakes.

The monster having sasiated his thirst for blood ran away, taking with him a boy of desperate caracter that he had excited to rebellyon, and a garnet ring belonging to my ma, and not having been apprehended by the constables is supposed to have been took up by some stage-coach. My pa begs that if he comes to you the ring may be returned, and that you will let the thief and assassin go, as if we prosecuted him he would only be transported, and if he is let go he is sure to be hung before long which will save us trouble and be much more satisfactory. Hoping to hear from you when convenient

I remain 

Yours and cetrer FANNY SQUEERS.

P.S. I pity his ignorance and despise him.

How about that? It's all good, and "two forms are steepled in his Goar" never fails to raise an admiring smile. Dickens is astonishingly funny when he lets rip, and I like the undertow of genuine loathing he feels for the Squeers clan. He pities their ignorance and despises them.

I've never heard this read aloud - would it be better performed by an actress or an actor? For some reason the voice I hear in my mind's ear is that of the late Les Dawson . . .

On perfume

One spring afternoon thirty-five years ago I was floundering alone along the rue de la Trinité in Paris when I suddenly became aware of an extraordinary fragrance. It set my nerves jangling, my head spinning, my pulse racing. Looking around, I saw a small dark-haired woman in a fur coat walking towards Odéon. I was nineteen, she perhaps in her late forties, and intimidatingly chic. In a moment of uncharacteristic bravado I trotted after her and in stammering schoolboy French (it's got worse since then) asked her what in the name of God it was that made her smell like that (a pretty accurate translation of my gauche interrogation). She shrugged and said 'Mais . . . c'est Vol de nuit, bien sûr,' and walked away, haughtily I expect. I hope I made her day, because she certainly made mine. I continued my walk along the street in the cool shadow of the grey mass of the great church, rendered light-headed by the gorgeous sense-enhancing aftermath of her passing.

Later that week in the (now closed) department store Samaritaine I tracked down the perfume. Faced with a sceptical and brightly-enamelled assistant I somehow blagged a sample, dabbing it self-consciously on my left wrist. I walked out of the store, smelling like a high class tart, crossed the Pont Neuf and walked eastwards along the Quai de l'Horloge. It was like being in the company of a vapourous spirit guide. I could still catch a wistful trace of the fragrance in my hotel room the following morning. Vol de Nuit has remained my favourite perfume ever since. Here's the bottle:

The creation of Jacques Guerlain, it was launched in 1933 and named after Antoine Saint Exupery's novel Night Flight (an account of the early days of aviation from the author of Le petit prince). The chunky bottle represents a rapidly spinning aircraft propeller and is a lovely example of 30s modernism. The top notes (and I had to look this up) are bergamot, galbanum and petit grain; below that jasmine, daffodil and spices; the base combines earthy woodsy notes of iris, vanilla. It's the most alluring and complex aroma, or succession of aromas,  you can possibly imagine.

Legend has it that the perfume was concocted for, or at least worn by, professional courtesans flying overnight from Paris to North Africa between the wars. Imagine that. It has a fabulous sillage which lasts for hours.

Sillage - pronounced see-yage - is a wonderful word for a wonderful thing: the scented trail left by the wearer of a fragrance. It translates more or less as 'wake' in English - as in the vapourous trace left in the sky by an aeroplane. The wearer makes her mark on the room, on the street, on the air, on the world, by activating the most elaborately complex creation of the parfumier's art using only the heat of her body. 

Samuel Beckett on film

This week's short film is a surprising find: Samuel Beckett interviewed in 1987.

Ford on Lawrence

Ford Madox Ford, editor of the English Review, recalls the time he discovered D. H. Lawrence


I received a letter from a young schoolteacher in Nottingham. I can still see the handwriting—as if drawn with sepia rather than written in ink, on grey-blue notepaper. It said that the writer knew a young man who wrote, as she thought, admirably but was too shy to send his work to editors. Would I care to see some of his writing?

In that way I came to read the first words of a new author:

   The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down from Selston with 
   seven full waggons. It appeared round the corner with loud threats of speed but the colt that it   
   startled from among the gorse which still flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon, 
  outdistanced it in a canter. A woman walking up the railway line to Underwood, held her 
  basket aside and watched the footplate of the engine advancing.

I was reading in the twilight in the long eighteenth-century room that was at once the office of the English Review and my drawing-room. My eyes were tired; I had been reading all day so I did not go any further with the story. It was called 'Odour of Chrysanthemums,. I laid it in the basket for accepted manuscripts. My secretary looked up and said: 'You've got another genius?' I answered: 'It's a big one this time,' and went upstairs to dress. (Ford Madox Ford, Portraits from Life (Boston, 1937), 70-71. 

Ford then goes on, line by line and word by word, to explain why that short paragraph, those three sentences, were enough to convince him that the writer was a genius. It's the best piece of literary criticism you'll ever read, and changes the way we (or at least I) approach any new writer. More on Lawrence tomorrow . . . but do look up Ford's many volumes of (mostly unreliable) memoirs.