It's Always More Complicated

Not for that city of the level sun,
Its golden streets and glittering gates ablaze—
The shadeless, sleepless city of white days,
White nights, or nights and days that are as one—
We weary, when all is said , all thought, all done.
We strain our eyes beyond this dusk to see
What, from the threshold of eternity
We shall step into. No, I think we shun
The splendour of that everlasting glare,
The clamour of that never-ending song.
And if for anything we greatly long,
It is for some remote and quiet stair
Which winds to silence and a space for sleep
Too sound for waking and for dreams too deep.

There was recently a post on AITA about a bloke who wanted to take his toddler son to a cabin of fond family memories on a remote island on a lake in Canada. This involves a journey that I do not think one would want to undertake singlehanded with a child of that age, a cabin rather lacking in amenities (which bloke has not, apparently, over the years, done much due diligence in upgrading, including ensuring clean water supply...), and distance from civilisation. Island has bats, which are a rabies vector (previous visitors have, indeed, had to go and have the full course of relevant injections).

Honestly mother's concerns did not seem dismissable as just about 'a few bugs' and excessive maternal anxieties, this seems over-investment in some kind of nostalgic fantasy .

Somehow this reminded of a recent entry in The Guardian's 'You Be The Judge' feature: Jordan wants a big dog, Jada says it won’t fit in with their city lifestyle. They live in a small flat in a European city:

I’d like a big dog, like a labrador or golden retriever. I’d train it, take it for walks and dedicate lots of time to generally loving it, as Jada and I work from home. I think we have a flexible routine right now, so in my opinion, a dog won’t really change that....

I could do the majority of the dog stuff in the day and she could take over for the evening walk. It would be perfect. There’s really nothing left to do except pop along to the local shelter and make ourselves known. I want to adopt, as it would be great to give a dog a home. Jada keeps stalling but I reckon I can persuade her. Once she’s looking into a dog’s pleading eyes, she won’t say no. Obviously there would be challenges around having a dog, but I’m not worried – I’m mentally prepared. The fact we travel a lot doesn’t bother me either. Dog sitters are cheap where we live, so a weekend here or there won’t set us back loads.

I feel this also fits in here: Anne Enright on the problem with unrequited love, except it's actually about an older scruffy poet and a young woman whom he takes as his muse:

There is a kind of creepiness to all this too – as we now more easily intuit. The artist is almost entirely self-involved, his idealised muse may be admired, but she is also robbed of the right to be real....

She was flattered by the attentions of a poet and was kind to him, even when those attentions became onerous. As his biographer Antoinette Quinn writes, Kavanagh waited for her at certain times in the street, and sat watching her in cafes where she socialised with friends. “He came to know all her haunts and stalked her.”

To all appearances, Moriarty seemed to have the upper hand. Kavanagh may have been highly literate but he was uncouth and she tried to smarten him up a little (he had horrified another date by arriving smelly). In a joking article, Kavanagh described himself as an ill-kempt knight taken in hand by a lovely lady. This, according to Quinn was the kind of infantilism you might expect from a man who had lived with his mother until he was 35. It is a private emotional dependency “at odds with the misogyny he affected in his writings”. By the end of the year, Kavanagh, like the true stalker he was, ignored Moriarty’s attempts to rebuff him, and turned up when she was on dates with other men.... Back in the day, this shift from unwanted to malevolent attention was not called out, because unrequited love was all the rage.

[A] film about the early career of the man who would go on to bag the prize of being anointed poet laureate.

You know, back in the days of my youth when I was somewhat beguiled by Robert Graves's essays, I seem to recall him being somewhat vicious about the very concept of Poet Laureate? or at least it was Death to the Poet's Spirit and Relationship to the Goddess/Muse?

But anyway, he was never actually Poet Laureate, so that's Codslap One.

There is a passing mention that Nancy Nicholson - that passionate feminist who kept her name on marriage - was an artist in her own right - but do we go eeeeeuuuuwww or what over this?

Graves and Nicholson had four children when Riding arrived in their household, but in the film they only have one. This was in part a pragmatic decision.... He didn’t have a huge budget to play with, “and if it had four children, I’d have to write something for them to do, so that was an economic decision”. But he admits that is not the only reason. In terms of the story, “I think, no matter what day and age we are in, a man leaving his wife with four children is a tough one to get sympathy for, and I wanted people to go along with Robert’s journey. It’s really a film about the power of creativity, and, you know, it all comes at a cost for any writer, painter or musician.”

It also leaves him on a relatively high note of having having given All For Love and Poetry, and does not venture further into the toxic cesspit of the Graves/Riding/and assorted other people who were dragged into their mess in Mallorca.

Not to mention the bit where Riding drove the wife of the man she'd set her sights on into a psychiatric institution...

That, I guess, would be the horror movie? Graves' weirdo Goddess woo-woo would really fit with that.

In fact skips right over all that, though does mention

Graves continued to have his “muses” in New York, while married to Beryl. “I wonder whether [descendants of the second marriage] would have been as happy if I wanted to pursue that angle of an old man chasing young muses around in New York.”

I feel Clare is a particularly appropriate poet to cite in present circumstances:

With an admiration of nature and an understanding of the oral tradition, but with little formal education.... born into a peasant family.... the work he did out of financial necessity consisted largely of manual labor such as gardening, ploughing, threshing, or lime-burning.

So, thinking about poems and poetry -

Okay, this is maybe not One of the Great Poems of All Time, and I'm not even sure it's one of my as it were poetic touchstones, but I am fond of it for an entirely adventitious reason, which is that I first heard it when my father used to quote the opening lines -

- slightly wrong, i.e. 'Beyond the East the mountains, beyond the West the sea/And East and West the wanderlust that will not let me be'.

But anyway, I eventually found the actual poem in an anthology somewhere - I'm not sure if it was actually in any of the various anthologies we had about the house:

Wander-thirst by Gerald Gould
BEYOND the East the sunrise, beyond the West the sea,
And East and West the wander-thirst that will not let me be;
It works in me like madness, dear, to bid me say good-bye;
For the seas call, and the stars call, and oh! the call of the sky!

I know not where the white road runs, nor what the blue hills are;
But a man can have the sun for a friend, and for his guide a star;
And there's no end of voyaging when once the voice is heard,
For the rivers call, and the roads call, and oh! the call of the bird!

Yonder the long horizon lies, and there by night and day
The old ships draw to home again, the young ships sail away;
And come I may, but go I must, and, if men ask you why,
You may put the blame on the stars and the sun and the white road and the sky.

So I should - What that doesn't mention is that his wife was Barbars Ayrton Gould, the daughter of Hertha Ayrton!!!

It is perhaps ironic to be hymning wander-thirst when I've hardly been out for such ages and have no particular intentions of venturing forth in the very foreseeable future.

I can think of plenty of her male contemporaries (including one or two of her fanboys), who were a lot more troubling/troubled, no? (P Larkin, I'm looking at you in particular): This excellent cradle-to-grave biography of a much loved novelist who goes in and out of fashion captures her alarming habits and tormented love affairs. Also, unlike certain esteemed writers of the 1930s, she stayed in the UK and did war service, just saying...

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If you go down to the woods today - write one book in which a woman gets it on with a bear, and they never let you forget it: First published in the 70s, Marian Engel’s novel about a lonely librarian’s relationship with a bear interrogates boundaries between men and women, humans and animals. Well, yeah, maybe, but I seem to recall somebody pointing out if not immediately at the time, very shortly afterwards, there was a minor flurry of works (especially by Canadian women novelists??? I believe Atwood had one?) in which women Got In Touch with Nature in a very primeval way and Had Epiphanies.

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I liked this: Dead Women Poets Are Not Your Punchline - there are so many Russ points hit there, in particular the one about women just splurge it all onto the page, men craft it, with a side of women are about their trivial girly issues, men are about the deep recesses of the human heart and its angsty sorrows:

There is an unhinged emotionality tethered to “confessional.” But this is only if you’re not a man. Conroy, Steinbeck, Lowell, Nabokov, Vidal — they’re never “confessional,” only daring and forthright.

And Wendy Cope on inventing a struggling male bad poet as a voice to write in:

The book also includes the work of the invented poet Jason Strugnell. His poems are poor imitations of a number of his contemporaries, including Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Craig Raine. He also wrote some Shakespearian sonnets bemoaning his fate as an unpublished bard.

National Portrait Gallery to feature more women in its collection: Curators will increase representation of female artists and sitters and seek overlooked stories: yay, I guess? Having been to various exhibitions there on particular groups of women (e.g the Bluestocking circle) and particular artists (Cindy Sherman) either being or making art. A bit miffed - okay, not everybody is entirely au fait with early C20th wymmynz herstry, but Ray Strachey wrote important histories of the suffrage movement: and was secretary to Nancy Astor when she was first woman MP to actually take her seat when she succeeded to her husband's, which (Bulletin of I think I heard this at a conference panel one time) Strachey took on as Her Duty to The Cause, now women were actually in the halls of government.

***

It is also gratifying to see that For the First Time Ever, the Rijksmuseum Will Hang Works by Female Dutch Masters in Its Most Prestigious Gallery:

Finally acknowledging women’s considerable contributions to art history, the museum has hung a trio of paintings by Dutch women artists Judith Leyster (c. 1600–1660), Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750), and Gesina ter Borch (1633–1690) alongside their better-known male counterparts.
....
That visibility has long been denied female artists, who were all-too-often dismissed as amateurs, their accomplishments forgotten after their deaths, and their works frequently misattributed to their husbands, fathers, or male teachers.

Also women and art-related: Edmonia Lewis, the first professional African-American sculptor: 'Her father was a free African-American and her mother a Chippewa Indian. Orphaned before she was five, Lewis lived with her mother’s nomadic tribe until she was twelve years old'. Later hung out with the arty boho (and at least partly sapphic) ladies' set in Rome.

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Was astronomer Caroline Herschel’s success down to extreme politeness? I think the term you mean is 'the deferential behaviour considered appropriate to her gender and status' (compare/contrast the situation of Ada, Countess of Lovelace). I also have a feeling (from other things I've read about Herschel) that what those diaries might have contained was a record she perhaps didn't want kept of familial tensions - the Herschels back home in Hanover had wanted her to stay there as a domestic drudge, and while William had liberated her from that, it was in service to his ambitions in music and astronomy, and his marriage was particularly difficult for her.

***

Amy Levy: A London Poet:

Innovations in public transport offered women greater mobility and independence within the limits of respectability. Levy herself was one of the first to reject the convention that women should travel inside an omnibus, pointing out to her shocked family that she had been accompanied on her initial journey on the top deck by the granddaughter of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
....
Oscar Wilde.... had noticed a promising volume of poetry, Xantippe, and Other Verse (1881), published while she was a student: ‘The modest little paper-covered book, which contains only thirty pages, was published in Cambridge, and was, we believe, never advertised. Its merit, however, attracted a good deal of attention, and the whole edition was sold out.’2 This volume contains a dramatic monologue, ‘Xantippe’, in which Levy voices the despair and fierce grief of Socrates’ wife, a woman known to history only as a scold. Her Xantippe has entered into marriage with a man she saw as a mentor, and is bitterly disappointed to realise that Socrates wanted a submissive wife and not an equal. When Plato, Socrates and Alcibiades contemptuously dismiss her attempt to contribute to their philosophical conversation, she disfigures the white marble of the idealised Hellenic scene in a maenadic frenzy.... In ancient Athens, Xantippe’s lonely rage turns to icy despair and withdrawal. Levy, in 1880s London, could turn to sympathetic peers. She encountered writers and journalists like Eleanor Marx, Clementina Black and Olive Schreiner at the British Museum, a publicly visible space associated with professional labour,

An act of resistance that went (perhaps) further than intended: “I wish the old devil was dead”: murder and master-servant relations in the East Midlands.

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A different servant story: a long life of companionship that seemed to end up producing social advancement: From Downstairs to Upstairs: The story of Ellen Lester.

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I was distressed to read this: It has been home to literary legends, psychoanalysts and activists, but now residents at the Mary Feilding Guild home in north London have been told they have to leave at the end of May after it changed ownership. I thought I'd posted about this place before, but can't find it.

What I read

Finished Ellis, Masculinity and Science in Britain, 1831-1918, and makes a case that really, up until the Great War, when the military applications of SCIENCE proved their manly credentials, there was a constant murmur of dubiousness about the proper masculinity of nerdy scientist bods - lurking solitary and speculative, and even if they started to go out into the world and socialise together, somehow were perceived as doin it RONG and probably to attract wymmyn, if not being somehow effeminate themselves... Not to mention in-fighting between different groups of scientists, sometimes on a generational basis.

There was a Literary Review winter double issue.

Months ago I started Chiara Beccalossi's Female Sexual Inversion: Same-Sex Desires in Italian and British Sexology, c. 1870-1920 (2011) (yet another Palgrave Macmillan cybersale item) and put it to one side, and picked it up again. There's quite a lot there generally on medicine and psychiatry and other specialisms and their status in post-Risorgimento Italy - a v different setting to the UK - but anyway, it led to a fairly explicit, if also quite complex (or maybe just confused), discourse on female same-sex desires. Whereas the discourse in British medicine remained evasive and muted: I had a few quibbles (including what I thought was a bit of a misreading of what I was actually doing in one of my articles) with what she was saying on the UK side. I also think one has to ask what would have been the response to Ellis's Sexual Inversion if it hadn't become the subject of a cause celebre prosecution, which was not at all inevitable, and how far the medprof were doing careful dissociation because of that.

I broke off part-way in reading this to re-read Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede (1969), as a result of watching the movie of The Nun's Story (realised that reading the book, many years ago, I did not really consider the whole Belgium/Congo colonialist context! - in particular the old doc at the Tropical Diseases Institute who was 'there in the early days'....). Anyway, this still held up: for one thing, it avoids some of Godden's recurrent tropes, and while there are a few things one might cavil at, it works. (I was wondering about the RC Ethiopians, but apparently there is an Ethiopian Catholic Church as well as the ancient Coptic branch of Christianity practised since Time Immemorial.)

On the go

Well, Susan Chitty, Playing the Game: A Biography of Sir Henry Newbolt (1997) has arrived and I've started it. The copy has a fair amount of underlining and scribbled annotations - ? a review copy. Not entirely taken with the style, but the material is interesting so far.

Up next

No idea. No sign of the things I have on order.

I think it's actually a major blooper to write about a modernist poet and his wife's automatic writing and spiritualism more generally in an early C20th/interwar context, and head up your article: In the Victorian era, a different kind of ghostwriting became popular—largely because it allowed men to take all the credit.

I don't know when ye author of the piece thinks the Queen died? Because in the first para she mentions Yeats and his young missus ('Georgie! run, girl, run!') on their honeymoon in 1917.

And goes on to describe various other well post-the Queen Empress's demise mediumistic phenomena.

WOT I say WOT.

I can make a case, along the lines of 'long eighteenth century' for a 'long Victorian era' in certain social and cultural attitudes, but even so, I would not actually describe the 1920s/30s/50s as 'the Victorian era'.

I was also a bit *SIGH* when I read this piece How “A Wrinkle in Time” Changed Sci-Fi Forever (admittedly it is not a book I read in my youth and thus did not have any formative impact on me). But I am always just a little bit irked when I read something like this: 'At the time, science fiction for and by women was a rarity'.

Are we not always, alas, deploring the erasure of the presence of women in the genre going back beyond, well, the last five minutes or so, apart from one or two women who are always the same ones who get cited? The SF Encyclopedia entry for women writers name-checks a number of women working in the field prior to the 1960s, though sometimes under initial or androgynous names.

People - especially perhaps women, since this is often cited as their claim on attention - can be interesting even if they weren't the first or the only.

What I read

Finished In Byron's Wake, which was very good, on the whole, told me stuff about both Lady Byron (nee Annabella Millbanke) and Ada Lovelace that I had not previously known (had not realised what poor health Ada suffered even before her early death), was definitely on Annabella's side even while conceding that she could be a difficult woman (but with her life, who would not be?), and was v readable. My only quibble was that it did not really address the 'did Lord B impose Horrid and at the time Illegal sexual practices upon his wife?' question (the one allusion is ambiguous and could refer to the gossip about Byron's homoerotic leanings): all the discussion about the 'unmentionable' are taken to be about the incest. But Lord B's sexual practices, in and out of the marriage bed, were extensively ventilated in the pseudo-Byronic poem Don Leon (i.e. not a much later construct). Odd.

Also read, Selina Todd, Tastes of Honey: The Making of Shelagh Delaney and a Cultural Revolution (2019). I have oft deplored that biographers of literary figures tend to fall down on matters of their broader historical context: Todd is a historian of class, the 50s, and social mobility and gets this all very well for Delaney - the complex intersections of class, gender, specific time, and particular place, as well as personal background. A whole lot there that I think could also bear looking at alongside other women writers/artists of the period - the move between genres, the working in popular modes that had little critical cred. I was a little surprised - but not necessarily, maybe she wanted motherhood - that Delaney had a child out of wedlock, given that she moved in theatrical/boho circles in which, even pre-67, I am sure there were contacts for reliable abortionists. This was also very readable.

On the go

Still on Ancestral Night and realise that it is some while since I got my teeth into something in sff that wasn't a novella or at least fairly short - this is dense and complex and has intertwining mysteries going on.

Up next

Have a couple of things on pre-order due very shortly.