Batter'd Caravanserai

Think, in this batter'd Caravanserai
Whose Doorways are alternate Night and Day,
How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp
Abode his Hour or two, and went his way.

Another illiterate literate essay in the Toronto Star

I think a new word is needed for articles written about books for the Toronto Star in which the author clearly hasn't read the books that he is writing about.

http://www.thestar.com/News/Ideas/article/471759

Mr. Kidd did not read Conrad's Secret Agent, or if he did it was a long long time ago, he didn't much enjoy it, and he has recently spent most of his time listening to the latest center-right fulmination from the New York Times or Barack Obama.

More on why he is wrong later.

Barbara Pym’s Unsuitable Attachment: General Thoughts

I have just given Barbara Pym's Unsuitable Attachment (London: Macmillan London Ltd, 1982) a second reading. Unsuitable Attachment is, of course, the book that, for more than a decade, ended Pym's career as a novelist, as it was apparently considered insufficiently hip for the swinging sixties when she sent this, her seventh novel, to her publishers in 1963. Of course, I don't have access to the version of the novel which her publisher, and all subsequent publishers, rejected, but only the novel as first edited by her (in preparation for finding a new publisher) and then revised once more after Pym's death by Hilary Walton with possible association of the poet Phillip Larkin (who also wrote the preface to the book). I cannot therefore judge absolutely whether the publishers were right to reject it in as crude a way as they did. I must say I rather suspect hip, faux-cosmopolitan laddishness. As Phillip Larkin says in the preface to Unsuitable Attachment, even if the novel was absolutely ghastly their behaviour to a novelist who had published six novels with them is absolutely absurd:

 

If her publishers are correct, it is surprising there was not someone at Cape prepared to invite Barbara Pym to lunch and say that while they had enjoyed publishing her books in the past and hoped to continue to do so in the future this particular one needed revision if it was to realize its potential value. It was the blanket rejection, the implication that all she had previously written stood for nothing, that hurt (page 9-10)

It is unfortunate that such scholars as I have read concerning the Unsuitable Attachment seem desperate to justify the publishers' actions. Following the original editions of her novels, at least, I must say that these critics' estimations of the work strike me as absolutely fantastically wrong. Even Larkin, who rightly accuses the publishers in this case of unforgivable rudeness, vacillates:

 

The book's chief failing is that the 'unsuitable attachment' between Ianthe Broom, the well-bred librarian with ladylike stockings and brown court shoes, and the younger John Challow, whose own shows 'seem a little too pointed – not quite what men one knew would wear,' is not sufficiently central to the story and not fully "done," as Henry James would say. Potentially the story is full of interest: John's soppy, rather threatening advances, coupled with his borrowing money from her, seem faintly threatening ("John had been intended to be much worse," Barbara wrote apologetically), and their relation at one time seemed poised for disaster. When this does not happen, its unsuitability becomes rather academic, something felt more by the other characters than Ianthe herself, who "lets love sweep over her like a kind of illness" rather than agonize over differences of age and class.

Larkin her shows hints of Sophia, in the same novel, wishing that Ianthe would stay forever a spinster of good breeding, acting in ways expected of her, rather than muddy the waters through links to somebody not of her class. It seems to be a common failing of critics of the novel.

On this, more later.

 

The Title of this Blog

The title of this blog comes from the first line of a poem attributed to Hwang Chini (?-1530), a Korean kisaeng sijo poet.

山은 녯山이로되 물은 녯물 안이로다
晝夜에 흘은이 녯물이 이실쏜야
人傑도 물과 같도다 가고 안이 오노뫼라.

Rough translation: The mountains are the old mountains, but the water is not the old water
It flows day and night, so how could it be the old water?
Great people are like water: They go and never return.

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

I have been re-reading Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, and was amazed by how attractive the description of the corruption and irrationality of small-town Ontario politics at the turn of the last century. The technique for grabbing the rural vote is to have a meal with every single farmer in the surrounding countryside? The overall picture is of an engaged citizenry who actually have generally met their Member of Parliament even though he is described as generally not travelling to the town very often. And how many newspapers? In the pre-blog era, most towns only had one, and that was not nearly as vigorously or openly partisan as the newspapers described in Sunshine Sketches.

환영합니다

Hello all. This might eventually be a blog