Look at the Harlequins!

Is there not a nice special word for a pigling? ("I am toying with 'snork,' said Professor Noteboke, the best translator of Gogol's immortal The Carrick.)

He was one of those persons who for some reason or other are often interrupted, but whom no force in our blessed galaxy will prevent from completing their sentence, despite terrible new interruptions, of an elemental or poetical nature, the death of the interlocutor ("I was just saying to him, doctor--"), or the entrance of a dragon.

(Vladimir Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins!, 1974)

I'd probably read a half-dozen other Nabokov books before I got to Look at the Harlequins!  It must be a completely different reading experience for someone unfamiliar with his other fiction or a rough outline of his biography.

Until I stumbled across these quotations again, recently, I didn't recall how amusing it was. Its excorciating sarcasm regarding the folly of "reading" an author through his fiction is what really stuck in my mind.

About a Boy

"Fine. Great. Prove it. I just don't think couples are the future."

"Oh, well, thank you...Einstein."

Will had wanted his comeback to be sharper than that. He wanted to think of the name of some sort of socio-cultural marriage expert whose name two twelve-year-olds would instantly recognize, but Einstein was all he could come up with. He knew it wasn't right.

(Nick Hornby. About a Boy)

Nick Hornby does an excellent job of describing the thought process when you know you've failed at making your point, but also suspect you were never going to be able to make that point, no matter how much time you had to craft your response. 

e. e. cummings

outside it was New York and beautifully snowing. Inside
snug and evil
("i was sitting in mcsorley's")

olaf (upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
"there is some shit i will not eat"
("i sing of olaf glad and big")

cause dying is

perfectly natural; perfectly
putting it mildly lively(but

Death

is strictly
scientific
&artificial &

evil & legal
("dying is fine)but Death")

e.e.cummings, with the denial of the tyranny of capitalization and his other graphic rebellions, seems like the kind of poet I should dislike--pretentious, and pretentiously gimmicky, and sort of silly because of that. Yet I admire his balls-out approach to what he thinks poetry should be. He and Auden write some of the best love poetry from the last hundred years (none of cummings's quoted here), but clearly I'm enamoured with the way he uses poetry to gaze at (human) evil, which is often gruesome, but also sometimes suprisingly small.

And cummings can sure put an image together--look at that parenthesis in the first line from "olaf."

Chandler on Writing Fiction

When I started out to write fiction I had the great disadvantage of having absolutely no talent for it. I couldn't get characters in and out of rooms. They lost their hats and so did I. If more than two people were in a scene I couldn't keep one of them alive. This feeling is still with me, of course, to some extent. Give me two people snotting each other across a desk and I am happy. A crowded canvas just bewilders me.

Raymond Chandler

I've always loved Chandler's description of his sense of his own writing. My favourite is the line about everyone losing track of the hats. When I write fiction, I have similar trouble--I'll get most of the way through a scene before I ask myself Where is everybody? My characters tend to have long conversations in unspecified voids.

"Musée des Beaux Arts"

"where the dogs go on with their doggy life" (W.H. Auden, "Musée des Beaux Arts")

I have an old notebook-journal featuring pages with an upper margin; for a year or two, I took note of quotations I liked by scribbling them in that margin. A surprising number of quotations came from poets, although the language is rarely particularly beautiful or spectacular.

In all likelihood, I noted this Auden line not because the poem "Musée des Beaux Arts" spoke to me--although I do quite like some of Auden's other poems--but because this line illustrates a phenomenon in a particular school of painting that I've adored.

Whenever I go to the National Gallery in Ottawa, I insist that my companions examine one or two of the paintings in one particular room, by (or in the style of) Canaletto or Belloto. In the street scenes depicting urban Italian squares, I can always find one or two dogs, usually white or cream-coloured, most of them with the same curved, fringed tails. In "The Piazzetta" on this page, for example, I spotted two of those canine fellows, right off the bat.

The people from different eras sometimes look very alien, while the dogs are always familiar.

Ulysses, Mentally Revised

For some reason, I decided that I needed to know which word Joyce used to describe the nature of Leopold Bloom's fondness for the "tang" of urine in cooked kidneys--"savoured"? "relished"? "liked"?--so I pulled down the Ulysses I used for a grad class on Joyce several years ago. The sentence wasn't where I expected to find it; I could have sworn it was the first line of Ulysses, but in fact the first line is:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. 

I'd assumed that people quoted that line so often because they liked the assonance/consonance in the first four words, but it turns out that it's significant for entirely different reasons: it's the one sentence that everyone who has tried to read Ulysses is guaranteed to have finished.

Apparently, I so dislike the character of Stephen Dedalus that I've mentally edited his role down and otherwise minimized his significance to the text. In preferring Leopold, I've mentally inserted Leopold into the book's starting position, so to speak. 

To give my fuzzy memory a little credit, although the tang-of-urine line doesn't begin the book, it does begin Part II ("The Wanderings"); however, I also misremembered the quotation as a single line, rather than as two separate statements in a brief paragraph. The actual sentences are:

Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.

And:

Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

Also, the verbs are more delicate ("ate," "gave to his palate") and the description of the flavour is slightly more graphic than I remembered.

Overrall, the description exhibits a little more warmth than I usually associate with Joyce's renderings of Leopold's consciousness, but I kind of assume that the affection is for the organ meats rather than for Leopold.

Philip Larkin

I've never been a fan of poetry, given my (increasingly) limited patience with "opaque" language in general. (An impatience that also explains my difficulties with most of the literary theory texts I'm obliged to read.)

Philip Larkin is a rare poet to have piqued my interest, most likely because he pretty consistently works in accessible language.  The man himself seems to have had serious issues (* sigh *), but the poems don't bring the most deplorable of his issues to the forefront.

I think his work is sometimes characterized as sour; I'm struck more by the pervasive melancholy, and his speakers' frustration with their own cynicism, while also apparently feeling that such cynicism is the only way to cope with their circumstances and their insights into their own character. This Be The Verse is probably his most famous poem, possibly because the first line is startling--not because of the f-bomb (although that may have been a little shocking when the poem was first published), but by the bluntness of the opening sentiment, which is about as transparent as you can get, in poetry.

It's the first two lines of the last stanza that get to me:

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like the coastal shelf.

He's not talking about depression here, per se, but I suspect depression informed the image. So many people who've suffered from depression seem to opt for water imagery to describe it--not characterizing the experience as suffocation, but more of a sense of going under, amplified by the sensation of a vast immense sadness always waiting. Even when the water isn't yet closing over your head, it's still out there, deepening off the coastal shelf.

Other People: A Mystery Story

Despite going on a Martin-Amis-reading jag a while back, I never appreciated him much. I recognize that he's a hell of a writer, but his narrative perspective tends to be on the chilly and clinical side, which rarely appeals much to me. So, after burning through four or five of his well-written but remote books, I gave up on his fiction. (His non-fiction is more hit-and-miss for me.)

Nonetheless, I've had one brief passage from his Other People: A Mystery Story stick in my memory for years now:

[Mary] turned, and Russ sauntered into the kitchen--loose-shouldered, sidling Russ, with his glamourous black T-shirt, his chunky blue jeans, and his extraordinary shoes, which resembled a pair of squashed rats. To Mary's eyes, these rats were far from satisfied with their role in life and always seemed to be resentfully contemplating their comeback. (1981 Penguin paperback, pages 79-80)

It's such an odd description; I can't picture this character as anything other than a perambulating cubist sketch, and that's before I even try to factor those shoes into the equation.