Overwhelming question

Something that's been nagging me: what does the 'J' stand for in 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'?

Eliot's poem, written in 1910-11 and first published in the June 1915 issue of Poetry magazine, attracted mixed reviews. According to the TLS: 'The fact that these things occurred to the mind of Mr. Eliot is surely of the very smallest importance to anyone, even to himself. They certainly have no relation to poetry.' Its original title was 'Prufrock among the Women' - in later years Eliot claimed to have no memory of how he came upon the name of his diffident and ageing mouthpiece.

The form of the name may reflect Eliot's habit at the time of writing his name as 'T. Stearns Eliot' (and this was a not unusual practice in Edwardian Britain - one thinks of the flour miller and film mogul J. Arthur Rank). Prufrock-Litton was the name of a furniture store in St. Louis, Missouri, the town where Eliot grew up, although this appears not to have any particular significance.

But here's my whimsical theory: perhaps that upper case J was merely hanging around waiting to be used - belatedly - in a notorious line from Eliot's 'Gerontion' (Poems, 1920), a line in which Eliot was criticised for using a disparagingly lower case initial 'j' for 'Jew' in the lines:

          And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner

          Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp

He eventually amended this to capitalise the Jew (although it hardly renders the lines any less offensive, with their dehumanising 'squats' and 'spawned'.) I suppose we're expected to bear in mind that the old man who narrates the poem is a mouthpiece and no more Eliot's representative than (say) Browning's Bishop Bloughram or Larkin's landlady at the Bodies. It's an expression of anti-Semitism rather than an endorsement of the view. 

I recall reading with great interest and some irritation Anthony Julius's book about Eliot's anti-Semitism, because although Julius is a very able barrister he's not much of a literary critic. (To be fair few literary critics could hack it at the Bar.) Julius rightly sees more troubling evidence of anti-Semitism in Eliot's 'Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar' and, while he builds a strong case and ultimately sees Eliot's anti-Semitism as a troubling quality rather than a disabling flaw, the case for the prosecution rests upon a couple of lines taken from a very large body of work. Troubling lines to be sure, and offensive - but art should always make us uncomfortable and the fact that they continue to shock is a sign of their continuing value.

As a novelist friend pointed out to me the other day, Joyce never capitalises Jew or Jewish in Ulysses - the main character of which is a Dublin Jew. Or jew, in Joyce's philosemitic formulation.  Nobody could accuse Joyce of anti-Semitism.

Quotation © The Estate of T. S. Eliot

1914

The centenary, today, of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo.

Here's his gun:

We're about to enter years - years - of Great War commemoration. It certainly won't be over by Christmas. How, though, do we mark (say) the outbreak of the Battle of the Somme? What kind of event is appropriately solemn and momentous?

And what's planned for the centenary Armistice Day on 11 November 2018? And (this troubles me) what happens after that?

And what if (it's hardly beyond the realms of probability) a Senior Royal happens to die at some point in our four-year marathon remembrance? We'd all be plunged even deeper into mourning - on top of the commemorations. What then?

Martin Amis on James Joyce

If you go to Nabokov’s house, metaphorically speaking, you get his best chair, in front of his fire, with his best wine. If you go to James Joyce’s house, you come into this big drafty edifice, and there’s no one there. And then you find him tinkering around in some scullery. And he offers you two slabs of peat around a conger eel, and a glass of mead.

Adlestrop

One hundred years ago yesterday, on 23 June 1914, the poet Edward Thomas was a passenger on the  Oxford to Worcester express which stopped 'unwontedly' at the remote rural station of Adlestrop

He wrote a poem about the moment. We used to have to learn this by heart at school, and why on earth not?


Adlestrop


Yes. I remember Adlestrop

The name, because one afternoon

Of heat, the express-train drew up there

Unwontedly. It was late June.


The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform. What I saw

Was Adlestrop—only the name


And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,

No whit less still and lonely fair

Than the high cloudlets in the sky.


And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.



Five days later the Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princep shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand  of Austria and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, in Sarajevo.

Marie Osmond and Dada

Reading the novel Flametti by Hugo Ball, soon to be published in English for the first time. It's a fascinating period piece about a ramshackle theatre troupe performing in neutral Switzerland during the Great War.

Ball, a German poet resident in Zurich, was co-founder (with Tristan Tzara) of the Dada movement and performed on stage at the short-lived Cabaret Voltaire. This place was the Burgess Shale of modernist performance art - and its cultural impact is still with us, all the time, for good or ill.

Of all the strange things to be found on the internet this, I think, is the strangest: Marie Osmond (of the Osmond Family) delivering one of Ball's trailblazing sound poems straight to camera (and doing it really well). It's like seeing Jimmy Tarbuck read passages from Finnegans Wake (and doing it really well).

Watch it here

Verlaine in Lincolnshire

PV

The entire Wikipedia entry for the tiny village of Stickney in Lincolnshire reads thus:

Stickney is a linear village and civil parish in the East Lindsey district of Lincolnshire, England. It is situated on the A16 road, 8 miles (13 km) north of Boston and 10 miles (16 km) south-east from Horncastle, and at the centre of the Lincolnshire Fens. The parish church is dedicated to Saint Luke. Local amenities include the Rising Sun public house and a miniature railway. William Lovell CE Secondary Modern School and Stickney Primary School are on Main Road. Stickney is in the middle of the main bus route between Spilsby and Boston, which runs down the A16. Stickney was home to the famous Priscilla Biggadike who was accused of murdering her husband later executed and then was found innocent.

For some reason the village's most famous resident  - more famous even than Priscilla Biggadike - isn't mentioned. Paul Verlaine lived and worked here in 1875, teaching French, Latin and drawing at William Lovell's school. He had spent eighteen months in prison for shooting and wounding his lover Rimbaud and, when released in January that year, considered becoming a Trappist monk before deciding (the next best thing?) to become a school master in England. He came to London, registered with an employment agency and was soon heading north to this remote and, on the face of it, inhospitable backwater.

More on this to follow . . .

Bloomsday blog

The 'Aeolus' episode of Ulysses opens with a description of the Dublin City Council's tramway terminus by O'Connell Bridge, the hub of what was in 1906 the most modern and complex system in Europe. Here it is, with all its wonderful urban bustle:

IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS

Before Nelson's pillar trams slowed, shunted, changed trolley, started for Blackrock, Kingstown and Dalkey, Clonskea, Rathgar and Terenure, Palmerston Park and upper Rathmines, Sandymount Green, Rathmines, Ringsend and Sandymount Tower, Harold's Cross. The hoarse Dublin United Tramway Company's timekeeper bawled them off:

—Rathgar and Terenure!

—Come on, Sandymount Green!

Right and left parallel clanging ringing a doubledecker and a singledeck moved from their railheads, swerved to the down line, glided parallel.

—Start, Palmerston Park!

Between 1938 and 1940 the trams - all 330 of them - were decommissioned and replaced with 220 double-decker buses built by the Leyland Company in England whose promotional slogan could have come from the pages of Finnegans Wake:  ‘When you bury a tram, mark the spot with a Titan’. 

Of the  countless books inspired by Ulysses the most engagingly eccentric is surely The Bloomsday Trams: Dublin's Tramway Fleet of James Joyce's Ulysses, by David Foley. M. A.. The author modestly admits in his introduction that he 'was unprepared for how difficult this task was to become' although he is is undaunted by any slight reputation Joyce may have established as a tramway expert. The first chapter lists 'those tramway references that need explanation and in some cases correction from Joyce'. 

The most startling fact (and there are many) is that Dublin trams carried symbols instead of numbers from 1903 to 1922 - presumably to cater for the illiterate.  Here they are in all their baffling glory - and I wonder if there's any connection to the cryptic sigla of Finnegans Wake?