Showdown at the Library of Babel

THE HOUSE of Knowles-Smith is in disarray. We have been found out as charlatans and thugs; such is our standing in the community that Cyril Pollockill, a local fishmonger who owns the butchers, threw a bucket of unusable offal over my brogues as I walked past his shop the other morning. Indeed, such was his outrage that he ran out a good few minutes after I passed his window, not having a bucket of such slop readily close to hand, and stopped me in the street. His reproach was an unusual - as we are miles from London, and he’s no cockney - ‘Take that, guv’nor’. A cheer went up from the other passing villagers and I hurried away up the hill to lament our familial fall.

Our great shame, if I dare utter it, is this: we have been discovered as a house with not a single work of Jorge Luis Borges and none-but-one volume of Emile Zola, and that’s in the original French. Who knew that the tastes of provincial village-folk were so exacting? Once the word was out, we had a crowd rampaging through the library and other bookshelves, pissing on the Stephen Donaldson, tossing the Isabel Allende aside, desperately trying to see if maybe even an inferior Giovanni translation of Borges’ Fictions had been pushed behind some other volumes, but, alas, no. Before I blacked out from shock, I vaguely recall the village wolf-keeper, with a hint of pity in his milky eyes, dropping several works by Marmaduke Pickthall at my feet before straightening his flat cap and waddling off home for some beans and sausages on toast.

My neighbouring friend Edmund Prygge, lepidopterist and bigwig at the local amateur-Gilbert and Sullivan company, offered a kind word and a cup of weak tea but I could tell he thought we’d brought it on ourselves, and that he laid the responsibility with me. After all, hadn’t he warned me about the 93 year-old woman who had been thrown into the river by a mob last May for having a disproportionate ratio of Flaubert to Julian Barnes novels? Good man that he is though, Edmund didn’t bloviate for too long, he just passed the Battenberg.

The Journals of John Cheever

THE JOURNALS OF JOHN CHEEVER By John Cheever. 399 pp.
London: Vintage.

WHEN THE calendar rolls into November and it’s cold enough for me to wear my luxuriant winter coats again, I always turn to John Cheever’s Journals. I have read them about four times and this year will be my fifth. Returning home from the cold I pour coffee to drink with some hot muffins or crumpets and put my feet up by a fire and let his captivating melancholia envelop me. It could be that they evoke the season or that I first read them at this time of year but, to me, everything about Cheever; Journals; Letters; and the brilliant short stories of American suburbia; strikes a certain autumnal chord. I think of him, wrapped up, walking in upstate New York, his cheeks reddened by the wind, leaves blowing over his brogues.

There is a certain patrician elegance to the bobbled sweater Cheever is pictured wearing on the front of Blake Bailey’s biography of the writer. For me it seems to evoke everything about Cheever’s faded suburbia, a culture that I, by virtue of being born on the other side of the Atlantic, could never truly be part of.

However, as I am quite suggestible, there is one danger to the Journals: I’m sorely tempted to drink gin or mix a martini every time he mentions the hard stuff – which is often (drink-along-a-Cheever, anyone?) - but this isn’t so bad, it just means that I, like him, wake up on the couch and then clamber through the cold dark into bed.

“I am a solitary drunkard… At four or half past four or sometimes five I stir up a martini, thinking that a great many men who can’t write as well as I can will already have set themselves down at barstools.”

- 1958

Of course there are other perils to reading Cheever, he is a paragon of the self-involved writer, a serial adulterer and he propounds a speciously tempting religious faith of adoration and thanksgiving:

"What am I doing here on my knees, shaking with alcohol and the cold? I do not pray, but I hope that my children will know much happiness. I believe that there was a Christ, that he spoke the Beatitudes, cured the sick, and died on the Cross, and it seems marvellous to me that men should, for two thousand years, have repeated this story as a means of expressing their deepest feelings and intuitions about life. My only noticeable experience is a pleasant sense of humility."

- Palm Sunday, 1967

Cheever chiefly enjoyed the liturgy and there is admittedly something attractive about ritual but surely he was just saving face – and his aforementioned drinking and philandering must have put him at odds with his faith.

In spite of, or because of, all of his virtues and vices I would recommend Cheever’s reflective Journals to anyone and expect that they would find them a rewarding exercise of time. (Particularly as a Christmas gift for any reflective writers in your life.)

Prisoner of first class

THERE IS no more loathsome part of travelling on the Great British railway system than occupying first class. That is, apart from the delays, surly staff, frequent demoralising changes, overcrowding and lack of facilities. Within this cesspool of disappointment there is a haven – of sorts – to be found in first class, but not for the reasons you might expect. To whit: on one occasion a young man passing through the 15 seat allotment set aside for first class passengers on a TransPennine Express service remarked, “A few tables and some chairs, what’s so first class about this?” and indeed how was he, going home to Manchester, to know that first class wasn’t a cross between the Orient Express and a pagan-Rome bathhouse? True, we all wish for a nymph-like courtesan to feed us fruit as we recline on an adjustable chaise longue brushing up on our Ernest Dowson but in reality no one invests in first class for luxury or comfort but rather for peaceful quiet isolation.

This is fairly easy to achieve on the larger Virgin trains but less so on the aforementioned TPEx where its afterthought of a first class compartment is constantly under siege from youths and drunks - both of whom usually flee like primitive life forms in the wake of the conductor (if and when he shambles along) but provide edgy distractions until that time. However, at peak times, when your regular commuter knows the score, it’s easy to feel like a 19th century aristocrat fearing for your neck as the huddled masses press up against the glass divides from their cramped standing compartments. The truth is that first class isn’t all that expensive but seems to be just expensive enough to keep 97% of people at bay and I can only assume that this is the product of stubborn British thrift. A stubbornness that takes gleeful delight in five words that leave me and other first class inhabitants stricken with terror: ‘first class has been declassified.’ When I hear these words statically transmitted over the intercom I develop an otherwise deeply-repressed involuntary facial tick which only increases as the packs of Geordie hen-partiers with their cava and footie lads with their Tennent’s lager waddle into their newfound seats.

All of this we endure for a stale biscuit or dry piece of fruitcake, a cup of putrid coffee and the faint hope that we might have that rare, perfect journey where we can doze over The Spectator for an hour or so. Perhaps our salvation lies in hiking up the prices so that armed silence-enforcement guards can be hired?

Perfecting the work - W. B. Yeats

“The intellect of the man is forced to choose perfection of the life or of the work.”

William Butler Yeats (13 June, 1865 – 28 January 1939)

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all.

from ‘In Memory of William Butler Yeats’ by W. H. Auden

THE ABOVE quote from Auden’s elegiac poem no doubt refers to the fact that William Butler Yeat’s was influenced throughout his entire life by occult, mystical and astrological interests. In 1911 Yeats became a member of “The Ghost Club” – a paranormal investigation society – and joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1890 (where he made an enemy of that infamous scamp, Aleister Crowley). He would remain in a splinter branch of the Order until 1921. Yeats was also, like many 19th century figures, influenced by the famous extoller of flimflam and humbug Emmanuel Swedenborg. Fortunately for us, however, he was also influenced by the unrivalled visionary William Blake (who renounced Swedenborg) and so, as Auden states, despite this belief in tarot, ghosts, magic/magick, angels, etc., the work survives all of this. (Both Yeats’ secretary, Ezra Pound, and his patient wife, Georgie, both deemed his occult proclivities hokum but those who wish to further explore Yeats’ ideas should consult A Vision (1925).)

Yeats was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1865 into a prosperous and artistic family: his father, John Butler Yeats, was a law-student-turned-artist and his brother, Jack, would became an accomplished painter. Indeed, Yeats himself studied at the School of Art, Dublin, but quickly lost interests in any artistic ambitions involving a brush. His first significant poetry publication was the collection The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889) which is bogged down in peaty Irish mythology; this, and much other early work, is capable of overwhelming the Yeats neophyte. Thus, those discovering him for the first time should go straight to the best in The Collected Poems: everything post-1918 is a treat of Brobdingnagian scale and The Tower (1928) is the cream; which includes hit after hit of genius, such as:

On the soul’s journey. How it is whirled about,
Wherever the orbit of the moon can reach,
Until it plunge into the sun;
And there, free and yet fast,
Being both Chance and Choice,
Forget its broken toys
And sink into its own delight at last.

from ‘All Soul’s Night’

As a symbolist Yeats’ poems are wrapped up in layer after illusory layer and are open to as much debate and interpretation as one has breath and patience for – language, especially such as is mystical in nature, is often chosen to suggest both abstract and concrete themes. Yeats is also one of the greatest masters of the traditional forms and eschewed modernism; though, he did experiment later in life.

Maud Gonne and George (Georgie) Hyde-Lees were the two great loves of Yeats’ life. He first met Gonne in 1889 and pursued her until his last proposal to her in 1916; however, they had consummated their relationship in 1908 though, sadly, Gonne encouraged a relationship of abstinence thereafter but, if nothing else, their one-night tryst yielded the poem ‘A Man Young and Old’:

Though nurtured like the sailing moon
In beauty's murderous brood,
She walked awhile and blushed awhile
And on my pathway stood

Yeats, at the age of 51, married the twenty-four year old Georgie in 1916 and gave him the children, Anne and Michael, he had long desired. The marriage was, by all accounts, a happy one and Georgie an indulgent wife: even to the extent of admitting a small army of mistresses to weep at his deathbed. Yeats died in Menton, France, on 28 January 1939. Initially his body was buried at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin but was later, as per his wishes, moved to Sligo, Ireland. His epitaph, taken from a late poem, ‘Under Ben Bulben’, reads:

Cast a cold Eye
On Life, on Death.
Horseman, pass by.


Notes and asides:

- As playwright, Yeats was instrumental in creating an Irish national theatre and his nationalist play ‘Cathleen ni Houlihan’ is credited as having incited the 1916 Easter Rising

- Yeats served as a senator of the Irish Free State from 1922-1928

- Upon hearing that he had won the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature Yeats’ first reaction was to ask “How much is it worth?”

Key collection:

The Tower (1928)

Key Poems:

All Soul’s Night
The Sorrow of Love
The Wild Swans at Coole
Sailing to Byzantium

Further reading:

- Foster, R. F. (1997). W. B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. I: The Apprentice Mage. New York: Oxford UP

- Foster, R. F. (2003). W. B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. II: The Arch-Poet 1915–1939. New York: Oxford UP

(Until Foster’s two volume biography of Yeats is surpassed it remains the go-to source, but it is not insurmountable.)