‘Most preposterous!’

Re-reading A Study in Scarlet this week didn’t change my opinion that it is the weakest of the four Sherlock Holmes novels, but there was a passage that surprised me. Explaining how he is able to tell that his prospective flatmate is an ex-army doctor who has served in Afghanistan just by looking, Holmes reminds Dr Watson of Edgar Allen Poe’s character Dupin. Holmes is sniffy:

No doubt you think that you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin […]. Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends’ thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour’s silence is really very showy and superficial.

Watson responds by throwing another literary antecedent in his face, Émile Gaboriau’s Lecoq. Holmes’ reaction this time breaks the confines of the story, and speaks, irritably, mischievously, from A Study in Scarlet to Monsieur Lecoq, facing it down, book to book:

‘Lecoq was a miserable bungler,’ he said, in an angry voice; ‘he had only one thing to recommend him, and that was his energy. That book made me positively ill.’

The trick Holmes mentions in the first quote is one he uses himself, in ‘The Adventure of the Cardboard Box’, and it certainly impressed me enough as a boy to stick in my mind long after the references to Dupin and Lecoq were forgotten. I am slightly outraged to find that it is stolen from Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’, even if the debt is acknowledged on both occasions. The moral of A Study in Scarlet is anticipated by Poe, too:

They have fallen into the gross but common error of confounding the unusual with the abstruse. But it is by these deviations from the plane of the ordinary, that reason feels its way, if at all, in its search for the true. (Dupin to the narrator in ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’)

I have already explained to you that what is out the common is usually a guide rather than a hindrance. (Holmes to Watson, in A Study in Scarlet)

It even turns out that the idea of a character acknowledging the sources involved in his own creation is borrowed from the same Poe story, with Dupin saying that ‘Vidocq, for example, was a good guesser, and a persevering man.’ Here again the reference is disguised as criticism: ‘He might see, perhaps, one or two points with unusual clearness, but in doing so he, necessarily, lost sight of the matter as a whole.’ Presumably this chain of influence stops with Eugène François Vidocq, as he was a real man rather than a character in a book.

Calling Orson

at twenty-one or twenty-two so many things appear solid and permanent and terrible which forty sees are nothing but disappearing miasma. Forty can’t tell twenty about this; that’s the pity of it! Twenty can find out only by getting to be forty. (Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons)

At eighteen or nineteen I saw Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons for the first time. You know, the greatest film ever made, and the greatest film ever destroyed by studio cuts. Neither really helped to explain their creator: Orson Welles swaggered in the first, fully in control of a new, wildly ambitious kind of film, bristling with virtuosity and confidence. The second seemed, at the time, a third rate melodrama, mitigated only slightly by its nice camera angles. Soon afterwards I saw him again, on a repeat of Michael Parkinson’s 1974 interview, the 26-year-old boy wonder of 1941 inflated into an unrecognisably grey, podgy 59 (only 59! He looked much older). The interview was fascinating in a way neither film managed, Orson emerging as a vulnerable, infinitely generous raconteur, modest to a fault, and expansive in a thoughtful and endearing way. As he spoke the mannerisms and expressions of Kane lit up the face of this prematurely aged man, it was very moving. I wrote a song about it, which you can hear near the end of Pomp and Circumstance. In the midst of some recent Welles-related repeats on BBC4, I thought to look up the 1974 interview on YouTube, and the whole thing is there.

Also more highly recommended than I know how: Orson Welles – The One Man Band

Sarah Bakewell – ‘How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer’

Stoics and Epicureans […] thought that the ability to enjoy life is thwarted by two big weaknesses: lack of control over emotions, and a tendency to pay too little attention to the present. If one could only get these two things right – controlling and paying attention – most other problems would take care of themselves. The catch is that both are almost impossible to do. (p. 110)

From chapter 6, ‘Q. How to live? A. Use little tricks’. It rings true: the things that are worth doing cannot be approached directly, you have to trick them into happening. The Sundays’ song ‘When I’m Thinking About You’ says much the same thing:

When you’re searching your soul, when you’re searching for pleasure
How often pain is all you find
But when you’re coasting along and nobody’s trying too hard
You can turn around and like where you are

I’ve always thought, too, that My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless embodies this kind of insouciance, in the way it manages to be so overwhelming with apparently no physical effort. And – last ’90s music reference point – Momus seems supremely Montaignian, for his insatiable but detached curiosity. It isn’t that things don’t matter to him, they just generally don’t matter too much. What an efficient, interesting way to live that must be. So how’s it done?

The twenty chapter titles of this book give various answers, including ‘Read a lot, forget most of what you read, and be slow-witted’, ‘Philosophise only by accident’, ‘Reflect on everything; regret nothing’ and ‘Do a good job, but not too good a job’. Montaigne’s father, an energetic man given to half-completed projects, would not have been sympathetic to this goal-free (or trick-goal) outlook, but his decision to have his son brought up with Latin as a first language nonetheless fitted in with it. Montaigne absorbed the language from a tutor before he knew what was happening, and so was perfectly placed, once he had rejected the school curriculum Horace and Cicero, to wander off into the richer pastures of Ovid and Plutarch, in distinctly un-academic fashion:

he took up books as if they were people, and welcomed them into his family. […] He collected unsystematically, without considering fine bindings or rarity value. Montaigne would never repeat his father’s mistake of festishising books or their authors. (p. 67)

The man who venerates literature doesn’t appreciate it; the man who loves it knows that veneration is not a fertile attitude to take. It’s a dead end, a goal, and why bother with those when there are so many interesting digressions to explore?

How to Live doesn’t just tell you how Montaigne thinks you should live, it is also a biography (as advertised); a history of the times, covering the Catholic / Protestant civil wars that ran from 1562-98; a history of the philosophy which led to Montaigne’s book, the Essays; a history of the book itself, as attitudes towards it shifted. The Essays influenced Descartes and Pascal (who fought against its insights into human fallibility) and Rousseau, in contrast to whom Montaigne

does not want to show that modern civilisation is corrupt, but that all human perspectives on the world are corrupt and partial by nature. (p. 192)

In its own time, the Essays met with the approval of the Catholic Church, which in its antipathy towards Protestantism wanted to discourage enquiring thought in favour of faith. Montaigne’s undermining of reason, as long as it was not applied to the Church itself, could be interpreted as support for the elevated position of priests, cardinals, the pope. A century later, in Pascal’s time, attitudes were different: doubt ‘belonged to the Devil’ (p. 143), and Montaigne’s insurmountable insistence on it, and the ‘disreputable crew of fops, wits, atheists, sceptics and rakes’ (p. 152) which constituted much of its seventeenth century readership, meant that it was placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books in 1676, where it remained until 1854.

Montaigne did not see doubt this way, of course. For him it was a constant pleasure to be able to re-examine subjects from different angles, which may have been inconsistent but which could never be wrong. Doubt was liberating, and liberal:

The qualities he valued were curiosity, sensibility, kindness, fellow-feeling, adaptability, intelligent reflection, the ability to see things from another’s point of view, and ‘goodwill’ – none of which is compatible with the fiery furnace of inspiration. (p. 200)

Something real, cool, and solid, lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning.

Recent Reading

I seem to be having some time off from blogging at the moment, but here are the books I haven’t been writing about:

Peter Carey – Oscar and Lucinda

Part three in a book chain, if such a thing exists. Claire Tomalin’s Thomas Hardy biography recommended Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, which forms the basis for much of the early portion of Oscar and Lucinda. If the chain were to extend further, it would loop back and take in Philip Henry Gosse’s A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast, which makes an appearance here. Chunky and satisfying, with a neat line in justifying gambling from a clergyman’s perspective: ‘Our whole faith is a wager, Miss Leplastrier’.

Honoré de Balzac – At the Sign of the Cat and Racket, The Ball at Sceaux and Letters of Two Brides

Two novellas and an epistolary novel, the first three stories in La Comédie humaine. I was feeling ambivalent about caving in to gadgetry / consumerism and buying a Kindle, so this is my justification. Now, I know almost nothing about Balzac except that Proust rated him highly, and that he is associated with the French branch of nineteenth century realism, so I was surprised by how rarefied these stories are. All turn on love, and all ooze money. In The Ball at Sceaux the aristocracy, having spent a fortune repelling Napoleon, is engaged in clawing back its affluence through marriage with rich commoners, and the elegant, spoiled Emilie de Fontaine refuses to play along, eventually throwing over the man she loves when she finds him behind the counter in a draper’s shop. The novellas are both beautifully plotted, fairytale-like in their twists and comeuppances. The novel went on for rather too long about the greatness and perfection of love vs. the greatness and perfection of family life (because obviously you can’t have both), but it hasn’t put me off wanting to read more. A thin, elegant soup.

Joe Boyd – White Bicycles

The best music memoir I’ve read in a long time, if not ever. Tied with Bill Drummond’s 45 and Julian Cope’s Head On, and closer to the former for the behind-the-scenes manager shenanigans. Boyd’s producer credits include Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter and Vashti Bunyan’s Just Another Diamond Day, which I knew about; Nico’s Desertshore and Pink Floyd’s Arnold Layne, which I didn’t. He was there at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when Bob Dylan invented the modern world (or at least annoyed a lot of folk fans), running between factions during the short, cacophonous set. The anti-Dylan faction included Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger; the pro- had Albert Grossman (Dylan’s manager) and, oddly, Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul & Mary. It was Yarrow who said no, they weren’t going to turn it down. That is just one example of how absurdly well placed Boyd is to tell the tale of a certain strand of ’60s music, and he does it with self-deprecation and wit (it is his tone, more than anything, which reminds me of Drummond). The sections on Nick Drake are fascinating, and it was a surprise to discover just how much Bryter Layter is the product of him as a producer and Witchseason as a label, from whose other bands it took its musicians. Once it was done, Nick told Joe he wanted to make his next album much more spare, with no arrangements, and Joe took a job in America, feeling that the acts he cared for most (Nick and Fairport Convention) no longer needed him.

Further listening: Joe Boyd’s ‘Lucky 13’ podcast, for Resonance FM.

Edmund Gosse – ‘Father and Son’

Mentioned by Claire Tomalin in her Thomas Hardy biography as ‘one of the most powerful autobiographical books ever written’, and I can never resist a tangential recommendation like that. It is a surprising conclusion to a paragraph that otherwise depicts Edmund Gosse as a socialite with literary pretensions which his talent did not justify. It tells the story of Edmund’s childhood, spent mostly in rural Devon, and dominated by his father’s attempts to bring him up in accordance with his own Christian faith (he was a minister with the Plymouth Bretheren, who were / are Baptists with some sort of doctrinal difference or other). The Wikipedia entry on the father, Philip Henry Gosse – somewhat longer than his son’s page – gives several examples of critics doubting the truth of Edmund’s account, implying that it is self-serving. It also reports that Ann Thwaite, biographer of both men, ‘argues that Edmund could only preserve his self-respect, in comparison to his father’s superior abilities, by demolishing the latter’s character’. I’m not sure he quite does that, though. By the end, Philip Henry has certainly become a suffocating presence, and one that Edmund needs to escape in order to grow up himself, but that is hardly unusual, at the end of adolescence. There are plenty of moments, too, during which he forgets to be godly and is very charming:

Sometimes in the course of this winter, my Father and I had long cosy talks together over the fire. Our favourite subject was murders. I wonder whether little boys of seven or eight, soon to go upstairs alone at night, often discuss violent crime with a widower-papa?

A potent anecdote told just before this has Philip Henry singing a folk song, delighting his son with his ‘strange, broad Wessex lingo’, when some carpenters overhear and comment on the contrast between the song and the minister’s station. ‘I saw his eyes darken. He never sang a secular song again during the whole of his life.’ Christianity is always a limiting factor in this book. It gets in the way of life (and especially social life) as it should be lived.

It also gets in the way of Philip Henry’s professional life as a natural scientist. He is a man very specifically out of time. Towards the beginning of the book, after his wife’s death, he nobly rises to the financial challenges which ensue by undertaking a lecture tour: ‘The captain of a vessel in a storm must navigate his ship, although his wife lies dead in the cabin’, is how Edmund dramatises it. The lectures were a success, and had their audiences fascinated by the new possibility of being able to observe marine wildlife in aquariums. In any earlier age, this interest would not have been incompatible with religious faith, but this was 1856: Lyell and Darwin were in the process of changing the way the public thought about the creation of the world, and humanity. Gosse’s response was characteristically brave, misguided and bloody minded:

My Father, after long reflection, prepared a theory of his own, which, as he fondly hoped, would take the wind out of Lyell’s sails, and justify geology to godly readers of ‘Genesis’. It was, very briefly, that there had been no gradual modification of the surface of the earth, or slow development of organic forms, but that when the catastrophic act of creation took place, the world presented, instantly, the structural appearance of a planet on which life had long existed.

This was the subject of his book Omphalos, which did not sell well, being on the wrong side of the zeitgeist.

A similar rigidity runs through Philip Henry’s entire approach to bringing up Edmund, who acknowledges, ‘It was not in harshness or in ill-nature that he worried me so much; on the contrary, it was part of his too-anxious love’. Which makes sense: you don’t want the people you love to be eternally damned, after all. He eagerly rushes his son into baptism in his early teens, and Edmund complies, takes it seriously, becomes quite big headed about it. Gradually, though, he lets his natural inclinations take him upon a more sociable, and a more literate path. The sad thing is that you feel that these would also be Philip Henry’s inclinations, were it not for his faith. He delights in reading a poem of Scott’s out loud to Edmund, but will not allow him to read any of his novels. Relenting a little he allows him The Pickwick Papers, on the grounds that Dickens ‘exposes the passion of love in a ridiculous light’. On the subject of his second marriage, Philip Henry has to endure the fruits of his advice to Edmund to ‘testify “in season and out of season”’, and his son grills him about Miss Brightwen’s religious unsuitability – which he does purely as a duty, being fond of her personally. His father fudges the issue for once, an admirable exception to ‘his determination to pull the veil of illusion away from every compromise that makes life bearable.’