Thomas Hardy's country folk on the roads

Following on from the last post on the gradual privatisation of England's land, and the resulting dispossession, here is the opening to Hardy's great novel 'The Mayor of Casterbridge' in which the protagonist Michael Henchard,  and his wife and child, are walking the country roads in search of seasonal work. The turnip-hoer they encounter relates how the village Weydon-Priors is on the decline, its houses being pulled down due to economic forces beyond their control. It is typical Hardy; a melancholic autumnal setting, estranged people, here an estranged couple, small dimished human activity on a backdrop of grand natural forces at work since the dawn of time. 

The Land Grab (suite)

In the post below, on the Northamptonshire peasant poet John Clare, I spoke of the traumatic effect on the inhabitants of rural England of the accelerated privatisation of the Common Land of the country. John Clare himself never got over this, and some of his most moving poems were written in response. This process of Enclosure gathered pace in the eighteenth century, and later, in the Victorian Age, the novelist Thomas Hardy would depict and lament the situation of the rapid disintegration of rural communities and their ancient customs, which came about when country folk were thrown off the land. In Hardy's novels, it is common to see people walking the country roads in search of seasonal employment and habitation. Yet this process began much earlier...

Poetry and Tradition

Yesterday I gave a talk on 'Kathleen Raine and Tradition' at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3, with my colleague Claire Tardieu, who wrote her thesis on the poet in the 1980s. A big thank you to the Atelier Poem, chaired by Sarah Montin, who welcomed us so warmly.

John Clare: ‘its only bondage was the circling sky...’

A little difficult to find a moment to post something! But as we will soon be looking at Romantic poetry in class, John Clare came to mind this evening. He is a truly great poet in the Romantic tradition, lesser known unfortunately. A man of little formal education, and humble peasant origins, he lived in the time of England’s brutal Enclosures, a ‘land grab’ by the wealthy, confiscating the open Common Land of the people of England, and leaving it in the hands of exploitative private owners. This was a traumatic experience for hundreds of thousands of country folk at the end of the eighteenth century, as they were thrown off their ancestral land, or forced to pay extortionate rents. And one which John Clare, with his poetic hypersensitivity, never got over. It had a deep and terrible effect on this man, who as a boy enjoyed roaming the free open spaces around his village which were now enclosed by fences and hedges. We all surely have an innate sense that this Earth is for us all to share; we look up at the wide open sky, and take in the magnificent views of our countrysides, and the heart leaps in freedom and the knowledge that this is no-one's and everyone's: ‘its only bondage was the circling sky...’. 

Poetry and Philosophy

Here is an excellent essay (click on the link below) written by my friend Joseph Milne, Honorary Lecturer at the University of Kent.

With great clarity, he explores the distinctive characteristics of poetry and philosophy, the inherent tensions between them, and how they complement each other as modes of knowing.

Insurgent poets

Thank you Cécile and Stephan, for your very interesting contributions! (see comments on the Poe post below).  I’ll put a reply here. I’m not sure what Poe means by placing this story within his story. What is clear, as you have said, is that the creation of the painting has been brought about at the expense of its subject and, I would say, through the disconnection of the artist from his source of inspiration. Is Poe saying this is the nature of art itself, that it is a danger to our relationship to reality at the same time as being a representation of it ?

Poe’s imaginative world is in many ways close to Baudelaire’s. As was said in a previous post, Nature in its broadest sense, the phenomenal world, from being a place of succour for the Romantic, and in much traditional Western art before the modern age, a reflection of spirtual presence, even a theophany, has become ‘sublimated’ into an imaginative world. This imaginative world in Baudelaire becomes ‘artificial’, a place of refuge from a reality perhaps too difficult to bear, or at least too grey and one-dimensional, a place of disenchantment. In this sense, finding le fleur in or from le mal is the act of sublimating what is ugly, sinister, bleak, into a new creation - as Poe does in this story, through his description of the castle and the telling of the tale within the tale. It is an act which fails in the incipit of The Fall of the House of Usher. The narrator, facing the terrible house at the beginning of the story hopes, ‘It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression’. But the small lake in front of it only reflects back, inverted, the same horror. 

The Moon, like to a silver bow new bent in heaven...

This week I went with friends to the wonderful Moon exhibition at the Greenwich Maritime Museum, celebrating fifty years since the first moon landing:

"The Moon is the UK’s biggest exhibition dedicated to Earth’s celestial neighbour.

Charting the cultural and scientific story of our relationship with the Moon, the exhibition features over 180 objects, including artefacts from Nasa's Apollo 11 Mission.

Reconnect with the wonders of the Moon through artefacts, artworks and interactive moments, and discover how it has captivated and inspired us throughout history."

 (from the Museum webpage)

Poe, Baudelaire and the break with the Romantics

Poe stands out quite starkly from his Romantic predecessors. The Romantics see Mankind as essentially good, especially the children before society has corrupted them. ‘Redemption’ would come from reconnection with Nature from which we have become estranged. Nature provides solace and strength, and epiphany lies in seeing its spiritual goodness, and the healing that can flow from it. The poets, like Wordsworth or Coleridge, wanted to show the spiritual significance of simple, even banal things by elevating the ordinary. Poe breaks radically from all this. The ordinary becomes extraordinary, and not a source of succour and goodness at all. In many ways, and this is why Baudelaire must have been so drawn to Poe, both men share a common ‘anti-Romantic’ vision. Baudelaire does not reject the spiritual, but the Rousseauian belief that man is by nature good. He admires Poe for declaring ‘the natural wickedness of man’ :

La plupart des erreurs relatives au beau naissent de la fausse conception du dix-huitième siècle relative à la morale. La nature fut prise dans ce temps-là comme base, source et type de tout bien et de tout beau possibles. La négation du péché originel ne fut pas pour peu de chose dans l’aveuglement général de cette époque...La nature ne peut conseiller que le crime… [Dans] toutes les actions et les désirs du pur homme naturel, vous ne trouverez rien que d’affreux.

(Eloge du maquillage)

Here is an Arte four minute video version of The Oval Portrait. It captures something of Poe's unique atmosphere:

Edgar Allan Poe

We are studying one of Poe's many remarkable short stories in class; a lesson in how to write in compressed form! The artistry is extraordinary, it is Gothic in atmosphere, completely mysterious, full of suspense, and a reflection on the creative act. Below is the story, and below that, Charles Baudelaire's translation. It would be interesting to consider the great French poet's choices when putting Poe's writing into French.

Charles Taylor on the development of art - Romanticism, Modernism

Following on from considerations of the previous post, here is an extract (click on the link below) from Charles Taylor's excellent Sources of the Self (Cambridge University Press,1989). It comes in the middle of a much wider reflection on the development of subjectivity in artistic expression, but I think it is understandable on its own. It does of course need some real engagement when reading it; it is complex, and yet very clear at the same time. The overarching idea is that of the "epiphany", which is common to much art over the centuries; the opening up to a deeper meaningful dimension to life, beyond the day-to-day more one-dimensional experience we have. And why ideas of epiphany have so changed over the years. This could be religious, or in a time of unbelief, more generally a sense of transcendence, going beyond habitual limits. It might be useful to comment further on this in future posts. It does take us through some of the important shifts over time in thinking and feeling.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LLFVJm8HbaGl3PkEC9Tn4QQcghbchVCG/view?usp=sharing

Art and mutability

It is all too easy in our times, and just looking back in time, to see humanity as a blot on the landscape, our history a story of crime. The twentieth century, in spite of ideas of human progress, brought the two most terrible wars we have known. And now we are faced with new unprecedented ecological and economic disaster. What have we done, what are we doing, to the Earth and to each other? Yet, how resilient we are, how essentially loving and creative we can be, ceaselessly rebuilding in the face of all odds, creating too in the arts in spite of or perhaps because of the odds.

It has always struck me, when looking at our artistic creations, how exciting this human adventure is, and has always been, how courageous and often so beautiful. We should sometimes stop the self-flagellation and condemnation, and look at our 'monuments of magnificence', the wonder of our creations. 

Never one for seeing things in categories, I think nevertheless it is difficult not to make out grand movements, and overarching tendencies, or yearnings. Above all, the human spirit battles on: ‘I will not cease from Mental Fight’, said Blake. There may be differing, even conflicting schools of thought, points of view, especially in modern times, when unity of culture can seem all but gone. Yet we look back at the Renaissance, the Romantics and what they tried to do in all their indefinable complexity, then the Victorians, and the Modernists of the last century, each moment often opposing and upturning what had gone before - and what abundant creation resulted for us all! Often at great personal cost for the artists. But what was going on, what were the undercurrents bringing such upheavals in style, in vision? What has happened to us, what meandering, daring often tortuous paths have we taken? I am not sure, today, we are quite aware of what they exactly have been - these paths, and why we have taken them - from the isolated fragmented perspective of our time, which more than any other time in history is cut off, divorced from the traditions which have upheld our civilisation for millennia. 

Kathleen Raine poem

The extraordinary thing about poetry is it cannot leave us feeling indifferent. If we make the effort to engage with it, whether we like it or not, it shakes up our way of seeing the world. What does it bring up in us?

It would be good to hear from those out there who connect to the site, and read it. Whatever you think or say is precious! Feel free to leave a comment. 

So here is a poem by Kathleen Raine. It captures something of those precious moments of aloneness when we can connect with what is beyond the usual daily restricted sense of self, and open to greater spaces. Music is the perfect comparison here. It can happen when we listen to music, and generally when we listen to the depth of life. 

 

                                 As a Child Forgotten... 

                                                               For Herbert Read

As a child forgotten in a room filled with dusk

Sitting before a mute keyboard strikes one piano key

Then listens as the throbbing note diminishes and vanishes

And into silence passes with the sound,

So those who listen after with a longing that goes beyond

The dying away for ever of the most beautiful and dear

May follow the heard into the unheard, into the stillness

Of incorporeal mental spaces unbounded, the heavens

Whence and whither the fleeting music of the world is speeding.

                       Kathleen Raine (1908-2003)

'Women in Love'

D.H. Lawrence is one of the great artists of the industrial age. In his writing his characters feel the urge to question the life-denying mechanised forces at work at the beginning of the twentieth century, where we still are, and enjoy a new-found freedom in communion with the deepest human instincts, and the natural world. He will give us characters who are on the edge of something bigger than themselves, far beyond the petty defining notions of modern society, something they don't understand but which disturbs, and draws them on.

In Women in Love (1920), two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, venture out into a colliery town and see the working class world of coal dust, hard labour and poverty. Although amused and detached in their superior middle class ways, we can sense their greater malaise regarding themselves; Ursula cursing her familiar home surroundings, as she is drawn to the streets of the industrial coal-mining Midlands. There is a dark beauty in the description of these ‘ugly’ surroundings : ‘hills with cornfields and woods, all blackened with distance, as if seen through a veil of crape. White and black smoke rose up in steady columns, magic within the dark air’.

The young women appear to be more imprisoned in themselves and their petty judgements than the more natural folk around them : ‘No one thought to be ashamed. No one was ashamed of it all’. It makes Gudrun think. Although she sounds detached in her amused observations about everything being ‘a ghoulish replica of the real world...’, the experience brings home to her the restricted narrow life she leads. Being out here is like a ‘violation of a dark, uncreated, hostile world’, leading her to ask, ‘then what was her own world, outside?’ Her own clothes feel out of place, artificial, like a thick suit of armour separating her from a greater reality she has always shut out, the gritty world of working people :’She was aware of her grass-green stockings, her large grass-green velour hat, her full soft coat, of a strong blue colour.’

As the sisters move out of and beyond the colliery town into the countryside round about, Lawrence paints a striking picture of the gradual fading of industrial dirt and pollution, ‘Still the faint glamour of blackness persisted over the fields and wooded hills...’, followed by complete freedom, from both middle class and industrial constriction, the glorious inimitable Lawrentian description of bushes and flowers bursting forth with life! Such delicacy of observation, as if he can feel the essence of the vital, natural life he describes. 

Here is the extract:

L.S. Lowry: Visions of the City

It is interesting that many artists come from modest backgrounds, the working class or the simplest middle class environments. Lawrence's father was a miner. 

I watched a wonderful film the other night, Le Facteur Cheval. It is about a country postman in the Drôme region of France who one day decided to build 'le Palais Idéal' on a plot of land he bought for the purpose. It took him 33 years. He had no prior knowledge of building, or architecture, only the vision in his mind and an incredible determination. The enormous, elaborate structure still exists and can be visited. Ferdinand Cheval (1836-1924) was finally given official recognition, as it was classified as an historical monument by De Gaulle's culture minister André Malraux in 1969, who described it as "le seul représentant en architecture de l'art naïf (…) Il serait enfantin de ne pas classer quand c'est nous, Français, qui avons la chance de posséder la seule architecture naïve du monde et attendre qu'elle se détruise…".

Thinking about 'naive art', created by artists with no formal education or training, often from very modest backgrounds, one English 'naive' artist came to mind, although he is not always considered ‘naive’ by the specialists : L.S. Lowry (1887-1976)... 

My best teacher, by Jeremy Vine

Following on from the last post. Here is a touching article published in the Times Educational Supplement written by BBC broadcaster Jeremy Vine on the occasion of the sad passing of his English teacher. Neil Laing also happened to be my best teacher, and I thought this a beautiful tribute to him, a way to say thank you. I recognise everything in it, down to his well-behaved dog in a basket by his desk! 'Laddie' Laing was a very special man. Teachers really can be...

My best teacher

What made Neil Laing such a special teacher was that he was so cool. And because he was cool he could explain Shakespeare and Marlowe and Webster and poetry to spotty teenagers who couldn't see the relevance of any of it and somehow engender great enthusiasm. We realised that you didn't have to be a wimp to enjoy things that were artistic and complicated.He had a dog called Jack who sat passively in a basket under his desk throughout lessons, never once causing any distraction. Jack was so respectful I think all of us potentially uproarious boys looked at the dog and thought if he's going to obey this guy, we certainly will. The dog was white with brown spots and long ears. Appropriately, being an English master's pet, I think he was an English setter. Neil Laing was also cool because he was married to someone who worked for The Times. His wife was a sub-editor in the days before careers officers had heard of the media.

Nobody ever tried it on in Neil Laing's lessons, and they tried it on in lots of other classes. He was an accessible, likeable person and he took me through English O- and A-levels at Epsom College. He was about 6ft, lean with a well manicured moustache, a jutting brow and a slightly intense look. He had what Tom Wolfe would describe as a lantern jaw. He was the model of courtesy, and very neat. He looked as though he had come out of a Thomas Hardy period drama.

He knew how to trigger boyhood interests by focussing on the sexual imagery in the texts we were studying. And when we were discussing King Lear, I remember him saying we needed to understand the interiors and that what goes on inside people is more important than what is on the outside. Twenty years later I still vividly remember him telling us that physical illness is a picnic compared to mental illness.

He got us reading aloud in lessons and I liked that. There is some sort of actor gene in me; my brother is a comedian and my sister an actress. But he was very cross with me once when I read Hamlet in a silly accent. My school reports always said things like: "He is clearly interested in things other than the class he is doing."

English was the only subject which spurred me and which I wasn't doing just to pass exams. I still love poetry, and it was quite an achievement to get adolescent boys not to think it was sissy. Neil Laing would go off on flights of fancy and sometimes in a class which lasted an hour, he would spend 50 minutes talking about just one line in Shakespeare. I remember once asking him whether we were reading too much into these plays, which set off a discussion that lasted a double lesson.

I didn't enjoy school. I was very bad at sport, which was humiliating in a public school culture that was very sporty. Now, I realise of course that the people who were good at sport are working as clerks in pension firms or middle managers, so their lives ended when the school bell rang for the last time, which is hugely satisfying.

I was set on a career in the media from the age of 12. I saw myself on the radio and playing records. My heroes were people like Roger Scott and Kenny Everett. When we had a careers session at school and I said I wanted to go into the media there was real shock. But Neil Laing encouraged me. He invited me round to his house to meet his wife and have a chat about her work as a journalist. And when I started playing records on the radio station at the local psychiatric hospital in Banstead once a week, he thought it was a great idea to get cracking early.

Neil Laing had absolutely the right balance as a teacher between the chummy and the personal, and the authoritative, which is a difficult balance to get. I owe him and never told him, and this is a great opportunity to do so.

Broadcaster Jeremy Vine was talking to Pamela Coleman

Published in the Times Educational Supplement Newspaper on 11 August, 2006

More of Autumn - Lawrence's 'Autumn Rain'

As a teenager I got obsessed with D. H. Lawrence, largely thanks to my A-level English teacher Mr 'Laddie' Laing, who remains the best teacher I ever had. He made everything passionately interesting, and we read together the very great novels The Rainbow and Women in Love. We began with Women in Love, although chronologically it comes later, and I think it is the better introduction to Lawrence, if not the earlier Sons and Lovers. Later, I came to appreciate Lawrence the modernist poet. In his writings he wanted to break through the constraints of Victorian morality still prevalent at the beginning of the twentieth century with a fresh expression of sexuality. This brought him condemnation as a 'pornographer', and Britain only allowed publication of his more explicit novel Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) in 1960 after the trial of Penguin publishers.
He saw mankind as having taken a wrong turn in excessive industrialisation, wanting to dominate and control others and the natural world, trapped in a mechanistic way of seeing the world. This links with thoughts on Shakespeare's more animated nature of Sonnet 97 below.

Autumn Rain was first published in The Egoist under the editorship of Dora Marsden and Harriet Shaw Weaver, in February 1917. It is written in free verse, a sign of modernist poetry at the outset of the twentieth century. Lawrence captures the vitality of the natural world as a dynamic creation, and here he interestingly inverts the world, placing in the 'heaven' what you would see below, fields, sheaves of corn, a 'muffled floor', seeds dropped down in a transformative process as rain on the face. The 'dead men that are slain' might be a reference to the industrial slaughter going on in the trenches at the time, or not. In any case, the image embodies the pain we feel, 'the grain of tears', 'the sheaves of pain', which are gently transformed by the workings of the sky as the pain is "winnowed soft". The last lines remain ambiguous, as does the whole poem, but I feel a sense of the gentle rain falling as a balm to our individual and collective hurt, the manna of autumn's healing power.

As flies to wanton boys

In the last post on autumn, Shakespeare speaks of the season ‘bearing the wanton burthen of the prime’.

By ‘wanton’ he means here unrestrained, and he often uses the word in this sense. It also has other, later meanings.

It exists in verb form, ‘to wanton’, meaning ‘to revel, frolic unrestrainedly’.

The Old English prefix ‘wan-’ means wanting, lacking, deficient.

‘-ton’ comes from the Middle English ‘towen’, from Old English ‘togen’, past participle of ‘teon’, meaning to train, discipline, literally to pull or draw, as in today's verb ‘to tow’.

So ‘wanton’ can also mean ill-bred, naughty, rude, badly brought up, ill-disciplined, as in the line from King Lear about our relationship to the gods :

‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,

They kill us for their sport.’

Autumn and the poets

I love autumn. People often find it depressing, and it is true that Nature loses the glorious colours of spring and summer, the skies cloud over and temperatures drop. Or at least they used to, at quite distinct moments of the year. For some time now we notice the seasons disturbed, and on a beautiful autumn day like today it is good at last to feel the ‘right’ seasonal weather at the ‘right’ time. Autumn has always been a favourite season for the poets, especially the Romantics, who of course associate it with loss, with death or just absence. There is a gentle melancholy to it, more so than winter, which is less subtle in this respect, in its stark bareness. But the association of autumn with loss and melancholy of course predates the Romantics; Shakespeare saw in it, as he saw in all seasons, a mirror of the human soul and its endless shifting moods.

In Sonnet 97, the speaker expresses his sense of loss during his absence from his beloved, and he does this through the seasons. Although the time of absence was summer, it felt like winter. And when autumn came, without his beloved, the riches of autumn came to ripeness for nothing :

And yet this time remov'd was summer's time,

The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,

Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime,

Like widow'd wombs after their lords' decease:

Yet this abundant issue seem'd to me

But hope of orphans and unfather'd fruit;

Shakespeare sees the natural world as dynamic, inhabited by spirit, animated in the original sense of having a soul; autumn is ‘big with rich increase’, pregnant, yet a pregnant widow because the ‘lord’, the beloved, is no longer there to welcome the ‘issue’, the offspring. It is beautiful to consider the autumn ‘bearing the wanton burthen (burden) of the prime’ ; nature is almost over-abundant in its generosity, it is ‘wanton’ - meaning here without restraint, and it carries the burden, like a pregnant mother, in an act of giving its ‘child’ to the world. This sense of nature as ‘spiritful’ and animated differs greatly from our modern view, based largely on the scientific reduction of nature to a series of discrete separate objects to be observed from "the outside", mere parts of a mechanism whose sole purpose is regarded as a closed circuit of material self-perpetuation. And not as bearer of meaning. 

Here is the whole sonnet:

Graeber (suite)

As a follow-up to the reflections on the world of work by Dickens in previous posts, on his Circumlocution Office, Coketown, and David Graeber, a friend put me on to this BBC Radio 4 broadcast, one of a series of three about the changing landscape of the modern world of work. The interviews are interesting, Graeber himself speaks, as do the hordes of people on their way to the office in the morning. What are we doing with our lives? A healthy question to ask.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0003rlp

From the site:

"What do we want from work? Millions of people are now reinventing their working lives. Ruth Barnes presents the first in a new series exploring the changing world of work.

There are now five million self-employed people in the UK, it’s the fastest-growing group of workers. Sometimes it's a case of "needs must" as conventional industries collapse - but the evidence suggests that most are doing it because they want to, they see themselves as breaking free.

The internet is full of inspirational talks from the late Steve Jobs and others, exhorting us to take risks, set out on our own, make our fortune. But with the average freelancer earning only £240 a week - about half the earnings of the average employee - what is the price of freedom?

In this first programme, Breaking Free, Ruth hears from people who have reinvented their working lives, becoming taxi drivers, brewers or cleaners. She talks to David Graeber, an anthropology professor who tapped into something really big when he published his book 'Bullshit Jobs'."