It seems common sense that there is an imbalance between our human apperceptions of future and past. Thomas Nagel hedges slightly when he says ‘human beings​ seem to have a unique relationship to time. We carry within ourselves a sense of our past and future lives extending over decades.’ His use of ‘seem’ records an uncertainty as to whether other crea…

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[William Blake, ‘Portrait of Thomas Otway’ (c.1800)]

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John Keats’s six mighty odes (“Ode to a Nightingale”, “Ode on Melancholy”, “Ode to Indolence”, “Ode to Psyche” “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “To Autumn”, all written during his ‘great year’, 1819) must be amongst the most discussed short poems in the canon. There’s very little prospect of adding anything new to the libraries-ful of critical and personal reaction and reading to these magnificent works. Yet in my hubris here I am, proposing a new take on ‘Ode on Melancholy’.

So: Thomas Otway (1652 – 1685) was a minor Restoration dramatist and poet. His first play, Alcibiades, a tragedy in heroic verse, was produced at London’s Dorset Garden Theatre in 1675 and was a bust, very bad—in the stringent words of Hugh Chisholm, it was ‘saved from absolute failure only by the actors’, one of whom, Elizabeth Barry, was the lover (one of many) of John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester. Despite the badness of this play, Rochester recommended Otway to the Duke of York (later King James II) and his career flourished. Otway, it is claimed, was desperately in love with Elizabeth Barry, who did not return his affections, which broke his heart.

Two of his plays were best known at the time, and for a century and a half afterwards. First The Orphan, or The Unhappy Marriage (1680), a blank-verse tragedy that wrung prodigies of pathos out of its ‘doomed young lovers’ story. A hit, Otway followed it with Venice Preserv'd, or A Plot Discover'd (1682), his most famous play. I talk about this play (which was often quoted by Walter Scott) here.1

Otway is wholly forgotten now, and quite right too—his plays are bad, derivative, the plots illogical, the writing over-the-top and clanging. But during the Romantic period he was very popular, widely performed, read and quoted. Scott considered ‘the talents of Otway, in his scenes of passionate affection’ to ‘excel those of Shakspeare’ (he claimed: ‘more tears have been shed for the sorrows of Belvidiera [in Venice Preserv’d] and Monimia [in The Orphan] than for those of Juliet and Desdemona’).2

In particular Otway was taken by the Romantics as a figure for Melancholy, partly because there’s so much sorrowful pathos in his plays, and partly because of his life story—for despite the success of The Orphan and Venice Preserv’d, Otway died young (thirty-three) in penury. Actually, recent scholarship has challenged the stories of his poverty—he was paid well for his plays: £100 a piece for the Orphan and Venice Preserv’d, with an addition £51 for the copyright of the latter, a lot of money back then. But the Romantics believed he ended his life in extreme financial distress. Dryden is supposed to have said that Otway ‘tho fat, starves’. He enlisted in the army and fought in the Netherlands, but when the troops were disbanded at the end of the campaign he was left to find his own way home and, having been paid with depreciated paper, returned to London poorer than he left, ragged and dirty. He tried to earn money as a tutor (he tutored Nell Gwyn’s son, apparently) but ended up a beggar on the streets. The story of his death, as reported by Theophilus Cibber, is probably untrue, but (again) it was believed by the Romantics. Otway was begging for bread on Tower Hill. A passer-by, learning his name, and being an admirer of his plays, gave him a guinea. Otway rushed to the nearest baker’s shop, bought quantities of pastries, gobbled at them too hastily, choked and died. He was buried on 16 April 1685 in the churchyard of St. Clement Danes.

For the Romantics, the pathos of Otway’s writing and the story of his life became the object of sentimental focus. At the head of this post is William Blake’s portrait of Otway, looking out at us soulfully and mournfully.3 Byron (in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers) praised Otway as part of a lost golden age of theatre—‘Then Congreve’s scenes could cheer, or Otway’s melt/For nature then an English audience felt’—that has been superceded by ‘feebler bards’ (‘taste and reason with those times are past’). Charlotte Smith wrote a number of sonnets about Otway, inspired by the river Arun (Otway’s childhood was spent near Midhurst). Here’s one:

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Sonnet XXXII. To Melancholy

Written on the banks of the Arun, Oct. 1785.

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When latest Autumn spreads her evening veil,
And the grey mists from these dim waves arise,
I love to listen to the hollow sighs,
Through the half-leafless wood that breathes the gale:
For at such hours the shadowy phantom, pale,
Oft seems to fleet before the poet’s eyes;
Strange sounds are heard, and mournful melodies,
As of night wanderers, who their woes bewail
Here, by his native stream, at such an hour,
Pity’s own Otway I methinks could meet,
And hear his deep sighs swell the sadden’d wind!
O Melancholy!—such thy magic power,
That to the soul these dreams are often sweet,
And sooth the pensive visionary mind!

Coleridge’s ‘Monody on the Death of Chatterton’ (1790)—Chatterton was another locus of Romantic sentimentality and pathos, of course—includes the lines (30-32):

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Pity hopeless hung her head,
While mid the pelting of that pitiless storm,
Sunk to the cold Earth OTWAY’s famish’d form! 

And this brings me to Keats.

Keats’s poem is usually taken as being a product of him reading the Classics in translation (in Tooke’s Pantheon and Lempriere’s Classical Dictionary) and the poem is certainly full of classical references—Psyche, Lethe, Proserpine—as all the great odes are. But this is the only one of the odes to address somebody directly. The addressee is not named. But here’s the nub of my argument: I think it is Otway, or more precisely, I think the poem started as an ode addressed to Otway as Melancholy.

It hasn’t hitherto been noticed that this image from stanza two of Keats’s poem:

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But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
...
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

… reworks lines by Otway, from Venice Preserv’d, of ‘melancholy’ as a weeping April raincloud (this is from one of Pierre’s speeches, addressed to Jafeir: Act 1 sc 1):

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Thy Beauteous Belvidera came weeping forth,
Shining through Tears, like April Sun’s in showers
That labour to orecome the Cloud that loads ’em,
Whilst two young Virgins, on whose Arms she lean’d,
Kindly lookt up, and at her Grief grew sad,
As if they catch’t the Sorrows that fell from her. 

And the final lines of that stanza—

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If thy mistress some rich anger shows,
 Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
 And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

—have some relationship to the scene in The Orphan where Polydore, in love with Monimia, presses his suit. She rebukes him angrily for his ‘ill-natur'd purpose’ (that is, seduction) telling him ‘talk not of love, my lord, I must not hear it’, and urging him that there are plenty of women out there to seduce: ‘where you may court, and ruin/A thousand more, why need you talk to me?’ In response Polydore clasps her hands and gazes into her eyes, describing his actions:

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… Thus
Eternally admiring, fix, and gaze,
On those dear eyes. [Otway, Orphan, 1.i]

Monimia is subject repeatedly to ‘the melancholy fit’, wherein she refuses to be consoled (‘Polydore: What mean these sighs, and why thus beats thy heart? Monimia. Let me alone to sorrow’).

Keats’s draft of the Ode contained an additional, opening stanza:

Though you should build a bark of dead men's bones,
And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast,
Stitch shrouds together for a sail, with groans
To fill it out, blood-stained and aghast;
Although your rudder be a dragon's tail
Long sever'd, yet still hard with agony,
Your cordage large uprootings from the skull
Of bald Medusa, certes you would fail
To find the Melancholy—whether she
Dreameth in any isle of Lethe dull.

He was right to cut this egregious Gothicism, with its outré grisliness, bones and blood and shrouds ill-fitting the somber classicism of the rest of the poem. But it is very Otway-esque. In ‘The Poet’s Complaint of His Muse’ (1680) Otway describes the poet (himself) miserable, wandering through a landscape of exaggerated melancholy: a ruined town in whose ‘untrodden streets unwholesome grass/Grew of great stalk, its colour gross,/And melancholic poisonous green’. He encounters not a bone-ship, but a bone-cottage, though a magic one that can move and has travelled ‘by magic art thither from afar’. This house is ‘built of men’s bones, slaughter’d in civil war’ and inside it lives a witch who brings curses and sorrow with her. Where Keats’s poem invokes ‘the beetle, nor the death-moth’, Otway’s bone-cottage ‘harboured beetles and unwholesome bats’. And ‘melancholy’, ever-present in Otway’s plays, often assumes this manner of Gothic trappings. The Orphan [4.1]:

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A heavy Melancholy clogs my Heart,
I droop and sigh, I know not why. Dark dreams,
Sick Fancy’s children, have been over-busy,
Methought I heard the Mid-night Raven cry,
Wak’d with th’imagin’d Noise, my Curtain’s seem’d
To start, and at my Feet my Sons appeared
Like Ghosts, all pale and stiff: I strove to speak
But could not: suddenly the Forms were lost
And seemed to vanish in a bloody Cloud.

Unlike Charlotte Smith’s sonnet, Keats does not name Otway directly in his ‘Ode on Melancholy’. But the second-person addressee, the devotee of the goddess Melancholy, could be him.4 And the poem is saturated in Otwayesque touches, imags and vocabulary.

3

Blake’s image shows Otway flanked by his native Midhurst on the left, and on the right a scene from Venice Preserv’d: this portion of the picture is drawn from Johan Zoffrey’s painting of David Garrick as Jaffeir. Belvidera is played by Susannah Maria Cibber:

Over on the Critical Star Trek substack I have posted on the strange lag by which Starfleet develops ‘transwarp’ in 2285, but then somehow forgets the tech for 120 years. The reason? Humanity’s greatest traitor, whose identity may surprise you.

I was browsing eBay for old copies of Walter Scott, like any normal person does, when I came across a curio: a seller was offering a 1821 edition of A Legend of Montrose (1819). It’s an odd volume, not in particularly good condition, but it was only £5. I have most of the 1830-32 ‘Magnum Opus’ first collected edition of Scott, as you can see here, in their pale brown glory:

The ones with the darker rectangles on the spine are Scott’s poems; the rest are the Waverley novels, from, as you can see, various provenances.1 Most are quite tatty, which I don’t mind, since I use them as reading editions. I’m always looking for the vols I don’t have in that set, which is why I was scrolling online. I also have a few odd other early editions, and this Montrose was so cheap I bought it. The thing is, it advertised itself as an old Scott volume that came with a sketch of ‘No Man’s Land’ made by a soldier on the Western Front in 1918. ‘Evidently the book was one he had taken with him to war’ said the eBay listing. From this I assumed the sketch was on one of the book’s flyleaves.

So I bought it. It came like this:

The book is a genuine 1821 edition of A Legend of Montrose and, though an odd volume, worth more than £5 on its own, so I’m very happy with my purchase.

The sketch, though, is an oddity. It’s on a piece of paper clearly torn from a book, but not from this book, since it’s larger than it by quite a lot. It hasn’t been folded or tucked-in, and came in a separate package. Its connection to the Scott volume seems tenuous.

Is it a fake? I’m not sure how I’d find out. It would be easy enough to rip a flyleaf from an old book, draw upon it a pencil sketch of a photo of the Western Front, and try to pass it off as something a soldier had done.2 But if you were to this, wouldn’t you try and sell it for more than a fiver? It seems an elaborate and rather strange con-job, if so. Or perhaps it is genuine, in which case it must date from before August 1918, when the Hundred Days Offensive broke through the German lines, the war became mobile and ‘No Man’s Land’ a thing of the past. But I suppose that’s possible. And indeed the relative elevation of the point-of-view might support this dating: it was obviously not drawn by someone hunkering down in a trench, but someone standing up, as might be the case if the Germans had been pushed back.

Is that “SP”? “GP”?

To be clear, I wouldn’t in the least be irked if it were proved a fake: it’s no Paul Nash, but it’s a nice enough sketch, in its way, and it was cheap as chips. And if it’s real that’s interesting.

What do you think?

Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) was, I think, the last major Neo-Latin poet. Certainly, in addition to a great quantity of English poems (and prose writing) he composed a great deal of Latin verse, some of it pretty good. In old age he would say: ‘I am sometimes at a loss for an English word — for a Latin, never!’ I talk about his Latin, and also his English, writing in this book, if you’re interested. At any rate, here are three Landorian poems that didn’t make it into that monograph.

First, ‘Ad Suthei’ (1858): hendecesyllabics from Dry Sticks, Fagoted, addressed to Robert Southey Jr, the son of Landor’s close friend Robert Southey, on the occasion of his father’s death (so: it must have been written in 1843).

To Southey

Heu patrum optime, quanta perdidisti
Vitae commoda, filio vocato
Illuc unde homini nefas redire!
At scis qui vocatesse redditurum
Detersis lacrimis in omne seclum.
Si tanta abstulit auferetque paucis,
Paucis, quod superbat tibi, reliquit …
Sublime ingenium, probos amicos,
Et domum unanimam haud dolore solo.
Fles natum pater, atque fles acerbé:
Mox tecum reputes, pius tenerque
Quanto fleret acerbius parentem
Et solatia quae forent ademti!
Non ut parcius hunc minusve amanter
Tandem respicias rogo aut probarem,
Sed suave alloquium venustaque ora,
Quae natura dabat, sinas perisse
Et quodcumque dare assolet juventae,
Impertita licet minore cura.
Tu, quodcunque erat unico his in annis,
Doctrinae bona sanctitudinemque
Morum, qua melius probentur esse
Jam ducas utinam, petoque, Suthei!
Famae pars ea magna sunt paternae,
Perennique perenniora fama.

Alas, strength of our Fathers: how much is lost,
of their upright way of living for that man
on whom men’s evil rebounds — the poet-son!
But be aware who speaks of reclamation,
who has wiped away each generation’s tears.
Since he took away much from those with little
only little remains to give — surpassing you…
of your sublime character, upright friendship,
your well-ordered, never sad or lonely home.
You grieve, son to father, and grieve bitterly:
pressing innocence, kindness and tenderness,
yet how much harsher for the weeping parent
who would have been deprived of suchlike comfort!
Not through any lessening or lack of love
that could at last look, or ever ask to test,
but from these eloquent and graceful mouths
that nature gave, that you never relinquished
and whatever the saying is to give youth,
having fitly communicated small cares.
you alone gave us, through such uncertain years,
the virtue and the sanctity of well-learnt
manners, making us more upright and honest:
lead us now in that, I beseech you, Southey!
May you share the great fame of your parents’ —
Perennial fame that lasts forever.

Next, ‘Amicus Meus, Strenuus Miles, Vulneratus’ (1855)

Perfusa quanto sanguine Hyems tepet
Britannico de fonte! Virilium
Semper fuisti victimarum
Prodiga, Taurica Chersonese!

Quis vulneratum deferet auribus
Nuper relictae celsum animi virum?
Pallebit ut conjux sub Haemo
Vipereo moritura morsu.

Spes insusurret credula credulae
Jam jam reversurum edomito Scythii,
Jam jamque sanandum; salutem
Contulerit popularis aura.

Equus sed idem non revehet domum,
Discerptus ille est sulphureo globo,
Restabat ante atque inter hostes
Solus eques, medius suorum.

Plerosque mortis perpetuus sopor
Pressit : quibusdem cara parentium,
Quibusdam et ipsis cariora,
Nomina contremuere labro.

Sublimiore, O Anglia, anhelitu
Nunquam attigisti culmina gloriae,
Nec fortiores militfirunt
Sub ducibus magis imperitis.

‘To a Friend of Mine, A Hard-Fighting Soldier, Wounded’

So much gushing blood, enough to warm Winter,
flows from British fountains! It was always men
who were your sacrificial victims,
and in great numbers, Tauric Chersonese!

Who will carry such wounding news to her ears
tell the new widow of her hero-husband?
She will pale, like the wife under Haemus,
Bitten by a viper and certain to die.

Hope whispers credible credulity:
Right now he’s coming, leaving conquered Scythia!
And right now: restored to health; delivered!
Or so the general rumour tells the story.

But his own horse can’t carry him back home now,
Ripped to shreds by a sulphurous cannonball;
He stood, enemies before and beside,
The only cavalryman left alive there.

The rest taken by death’s perpetual sleep.
As it pressed them some called for their dear parents,
And some for others dearer than themselves,
Whose names trembled on their dying lips.

Such heights, o England, strenuously achieved
Were never before reached: such peaks of glory;
Never have such brave soldiers
Served under officers so incompetent.

The friend was Major David Paynter. The Athenaeum in 1899 noted the circumstances of this poem: ‘Major (afterwards General) David Paynter was in command of 1-A Battery at Inkerman, when his horse was shot under him. Landor’s Latin verses on this incident were published in the Athenaeum, January 6th, 1855.’ So, yes: this is a Crimean War poem. The ‘Tauric Chersonese’ is the peninsular of Tauris, as in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris: modern-day Crimea. In Euripides’ play, Iphigenia’s opening monologue reveals her duties as the priestess of the goddess: ‘There is a law here. A law that says that if a Greek man sets foot on this land, he will be sacrificed to the goddess. My duty is to purify him and to prepare him for the slaughter. The rest of the work — work that can not be talked about — is done inside. Inside the temple.’ [George Theodoridis’ translation]. Hence the reference to male sacrifices, in the first stanza. Similarly, ‘Scythia’ is the poetic-Latin for ‘Russia’. Other references are equally classical: Mount Haemus is a Balkan peak, whose name means ‘bloody’. The identity of the woman, snake-bitten and dying, is probably Eurydice, who was bitten by a viper and passed into the underworld from where Orpheus later rescued her. Ovid’s Metamorphosis 10:77 has Orpheus grieving for his loss on ‘windswept Haemus’. The point, presumably, is that Orpheus eventually got his woman back; and so too did Landor’s friend emerge from the valley of death. Still: not even Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ was so direct in calling the idiocy of the generals as Landor is, in the last line here.

Finally, a mere couplet (another piece of Landorian Latin from Dry Sticks Fagoted) but something very hard to turn crisply into English. I append several goes. I had several goes at this: it’s a little tricky to get right. In that first line dolendus is the gerundive of deleo (so, ‘to be lamented’, ‘lamentable’) and dolentur means ‘with pain or sorrow, painfully’. The repetition of terminology is hard to recapture idiomatically in English. The sense, broadly, is: ‘Unhappiness itself is when a man unhappily says [dixerit is third-person singular perfect active subjunctive of dīcō, ‘I say’, and the subjunctive is also tricky to put across in English] he had once been a friend, now he is unworthy of that name.’

Dolendus ille qui dolenter dixerit
Erat olim amicus, esse nunc indignus est.

The most painful thing: he who’s pained to say:
He had been my friend once; now he’s unworthy.

Suffering itself: the man who’ll sadly say
He was my friend once, he’s not so today.

Lamentable to grieve the man who must confront
He was my friend once, now he’s an affront.

Grievousness itself is he who’ll say in grief
His passing time as my true friend—it was too brief.

Nope: I’m not getting it.

The Scott reread continues. The Scott reread is always ongoing.1 The Scott reread is the Snowpiercer of blogging.

Here’s a small thing, that leads to something somewhat larger, with regards to Scott’s Old Mortality (1816)—or I would suggest so. It’s one of Scott’s best novels, this: an immersive, often thrilling historical romance set in the 1670s during the Scottish Covenanter rebellion. The novel is 44 chapters (plus an introduction and conclusion), and, as is always the case with Scott, each chapter opens with an epigraph, almost always rhyme or blank verse, quoted from various places. Often these are famous: Chapter 13, for instance, opens with ‘O, my Lord, beware of jealousy! OTHELLO’. Some are more obscure. Scott was enormously well read and possessed and extraordinary memory: he could recite whole ballads after one reading. As Angus Calder notes, when selecting epigraphs for his chapters Scott generally didn’t bother checking the relevant text; he trusted his memory and wrote the quotation straight down:

The mottoes at the heads of chapters display very interestingly the sorts of literature Scott himself had found inspiring and memorable. His debt to Shakespeare’s comedies and histories and his wide knowledge of seventeenth-century plays and poetry are especially germane to the success of the novel. The mottoes show how amazing Scott’s memory was. He quotes time and again with enough general accuracy to make it an easy business to track the original down, but with particular slips which make it quite clear that he didn’t bother to consult his bookshelf.2

Scott’s memory, impressive though it was, often distorts the line, misremembers. The epigraph to Chapter 8 is from Twelfth Night, though, as Calder says, it is ‘grievously misquoted’ (Scott has ‘the devil a puritan, or anything else, he is, but a time-server’; the actual line is Maria’s ‘The devil a Puritan that he is, or anything constantly but a time-pleaser’). Occasionally, when he can’t find anything fitting in the canon, Scott makes up a tag or quotation appropriate to the action of the chapter and attributes it to ‘Old Play’ or ‘Old Ballad’: this happens quite a lot in the later novels. I don’t think he does it very much in Old Mortality, although for two of the novel’s forty-four epigraphs Calder thinks he did, because he can’t otherwise track down the quotation. The first is chapter 5, which carries this motto:

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Arouse thee, youth!—it is no human call—
God’s church is leagur’d—haste man to the wall;
Haste where the Redcrosse banners wave on high,
Signal of honour’d death or victory! JAMES DUFF

Having assiduously sifted through the works of James Duff, Calder draws a blank here, annotating accordingly: ‘these lines cannot be found in James Duff and seem remote from the sub-Burnsian vein of this very minor poet. Perhaps Scott invented them.’ Perhaps he did.3

More relevant to my purpose is the epigraph to Chapter 29:

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And, to my breast, a bodkin in her hand
Were worth a thousand daggers.

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MARLOW

Calder, somewhat crossly, annotates: ‘neither Professor Welsh nor I can find these lines in the works of Christopher Marlowe (1564-93), and their rhythm is not Marlovian. Perhaps Scott invented them.’

I don’t think he invented them, although they are not from Marlowe. So where are they from?

Well: the very next chapter of Old Mortality opens with a quotation (a 100% accurate one, which leads me to think Scott actually consulted the volume) from Thomas Otway’s once-famous-but-no-longer tragedy Venice Preserv’d or A Plot Discover’d (1682):

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The curse of growing factions and divisions
Still vex your councils!

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Venice Preserved.

This is Act 4, line 263-4. I think the ‘thousand daggers’ line heading the previous chapter is Scott’s memory reshaping something from the same play—this, in fact:

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Jaffeir. A thousand daggers, all in honest hands!
And have not I a friend will stick one here?

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Pierre. Yes, if I thought thou wert not to be cherished
To a nobler purpose, I would be that friend.

Jaffeir, the hero of Otway’s play, is a noble but impoverished young Venetian, married to the beautiful Belvidera. He is persuaded by his bosom-friend Pierre to join a rebellion against the corrupt and autocratic Venetian Senate. As pledge of his fidelity to the revolutionary cause he hands his wife, Belvidera, over to the band of revolutionaries, surety for his loyalty. One of the group, the villainous Renault, attempts to rape Belvidera. She escapes, tells her husband what has happened, and persuades him to betray the rebellion to the authorities. Though outraged by the way the revolutionaries have treated his wife, Jaffeir doesn’t want his best friend Pierre executed as a rebel. Belvidera tells him he can use his information about the plot as leverage, make his intelligence conditional upon the Senate sparing Pierre’s life. This, however, goes wrong: Jaffeir does betray the rebellion, but when the Senate requires Pierre to confess before sparing his life, he refuses. So it’s to the gallows for Pierre. Jaffeir is driven to distraction by the thought that he has been the cause of his friend’s death; although actually Pierre is stoic in the face of hs execution. The one thing he regrets is that he is to expire shamefully at the end of a rope, and not honourably in battle, as a soldier should.

At this point in the play key characters go mad. It seems arbitrary, but there you are. First Jaffeir, driven to distraction by the impending death of his friend, draws a dagger on his wife, convinced that if he threatens her severely enough she can somehow get the Senate to alter its judgment on Pierre. That Jaffeir loves Pierre more than he loves Belvidera, his many professions of devotion to his wife notwithstanding, seems clear enough.

[Johan Zoffrey’s painting of (greatest actor of his generation) David Garrick as Jaffeir. Belvidera is played by Susannah Maria Cibber].

.

Monstered by the threat, Belvidera herself goes mad. This is the bit of the play Coleridge mocks in the Biographia Literaria. The way STC sees it, when a great artist, like Shakespeare, portrays madness on the stage, it is potently imaginative (Lear seeing Poor Tom in his rags and asking ‘what, have his daughters brought him to this pass?’); when a lesser writer, like Otway, does so, it’s random fanciful gubbins:

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Say not a word of this to my old father,
Murmuring streams, soft shades, and springing flowers,
Lutes, Laurels, Seas of Milk, and ships of Amber.

Cluck, cluck, gibber, gibber, my old man’s a mushroom, et cetera.

As Pierre is brought up to the scaffold Jaffeir rushes in, to express his remorse at having betrayed his friend. Pierre reiterates his regret that he will not die in battle on the end of a blade.

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Pierre. Daggers.

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Jaffeir. But where are they?

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Pierre. Oh! a thousand
May be disposed, in honest hands, in Venice.

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Jaffeir. Thou talk’st in clouds.

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Pierre. But yet a heart, half wronged
As thine has been, would find the meaning, Jaffier!

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Jaffeir. A thousand daggers, all in honest hands!
And have not I a friend will stick one here?

This, I think, was in Scott’s mind when he was casting about for an epigraph for chapter 29, and explains the ‘thousand daggers’ of that quotation. What happens next in Otway’s play is that Jaffeir stabs Pierre to death on the scaffold, then stabs himself, and Belvidere dies of grief. That’s your tragedy.

Of this passage, I think Scott misremembered the friend as a lover, and reorganised the sentiment around that idea: the woman who can do more damage with her little bodkin that a thousand daggers, because of the power of love. He is writing, at speed as ever, and doesn’t bother to consult his library. He knows the line is from an old tragedy, doesn’t think too hard about it, attributes it to Marlow, moves on. Then it’s time for the next chapter. Now Scott thinks: wait a minute—was that thousand daggers line from Marlowe after all, or maybe from somewhere else. Otway? He takes down Venice Preserv’d from his shelves and, skimming through it, finds a different line that will serve as motto for the chapter he’s now writing. In it goes.

It’s interesting (at least it’s interesting to me) that Scott is thinking, even subconsciously, of Otway as he writes Old Mortality. To be clear, Venice Preserv’d is a bad play, for all that it was very popular in its day and for a hundred years or so. Coleridge is right, Otway is not ‘imaginative’ in a profound way; his writing is derivative, synthetic, a mishmash of confected sub-Shakesperian flubs and shifts. The overall plot really doesn’t make sense: Pierre’s revolutionary instincts have to do with the fact that one of the Senators, the corrupt and despicable Antonio, has been paying for sexual relations with Pierre’s inamorata, Aquilina: a personal, rather than a political, motivation. The other revolutionaries want to overthrow the corrupt regime for we presume political reasons, but it’s not spelled out. But why does Jafeir throw in his lot with the revolution? And why, doing so, does he, on a sixpence, swing about and betray it? Not because he is a volatile and changeable person, since Otway goes to great lengths to characterise him as noble, honourable, virtuous, heroic etc.

The thing about Otway’s play is that it is an exercise in pathos, aiming for intensities of affect. The plot and character-motivations are secondary to this aim. Moody Prior’s The Language of Tragedy (Columbia University Press,1947) characterises the work of Otway, and his contemporary Nathaniel Lee, as ‘pathetic tragedy’, identifying the centrality of pity to the playwrights’ aims. Candy Schille summarises:

Lee and Otway do not seem to care about developing coherent characters or plots, nor about the meaningfulness that these can yield; instead, they want only to ‘rouse emotion, the more the better,’ and busy themselves solely with designing local expressions of passion in clumsy imitation of Beaumont and Fletcher. To say this of pathetic tragedies is to say that they are not really tragic and perhaps not even dramatic. Their emphasis on distressed innocence, their stock of unstable characters, their philosophical poverty, and their determination to get tears any way they can, mark them as packets of trivial and overheated set pieces, bundled together to fill out five acts.4

Schille actually thinks better of these plays than this (her essay is a reappraisal of their effectiveness) and Otway’s Venice Preserv’d has certainly had high-profile admirers,5 Scott not least. Venice Preserv’d supplies mottoes for several of his novels (Redgauntlet, St Ronan’s Well) and he once said ‘the talents of Otway, in his scenes of passionate affection rival, at least, and sometimes excel those of Shakspeare. More tears have been shed for the sorrows of Belvidiera and Monimia [from The Orphan] than for those of Juliet and Desdemona’.6

Venice Preserv’d, a product of the 1680s, is from the same period Scott narrates in Old Mortality. As is often the case with Waverley novels, Scott thinks formally in a five act structure—[we might say: Act 1, the popinjay; Act 2, the Battle of Drumclog; Act 3, the Battle of Bothwell Bridge; Act 4, aftermath and Morton’s exile; Act 5 Morton’s return—and derives much of his modes of novelistic representation from classic drama. His well-born characters speak in prose that approximates blank verse, his low-born speak as rude mechanicals, many on them in the broad Scots for which his fictio is famous. His approach to narrative moves characters from scene to scene, where they they talk at one another fairly stagily—although Old Mortality makes use of the non-stagey freedom of the novel form: the two battle sequences are fluid and panoptic, and towards the end he specifically claims the right of a novelist, denied to the playwright, to fast-forward through many years:

It is fortunate for tale-tellers that they are not tied down like theatrical writers to the unities of time and place, but may conduct their personages to Athens and Thebes at their pleasure, and bring them back at their convenience. Time, to use Rosalind’s simile, has hitherto paced with the hero of our tale; for betwixt Morton’s first appearance as a competitor for the popinjay and his final departure for Holland hardly two months elapsed [this all happens in 1679]. Years, however, glided away ere we find it possible to resume the thread of our narrative, and Time must be held to have galloped over the interval. Craving, therefore, the privilege of my cast, I entreat the reader’s attention to the continuation of the narrative, as it starts from a new era, being the year immediately subsequent to the British Revolution [that is, 1688]. [Old Mortality, ch. 37]

The protagonist, Henry Morton, has been raised as a Presbyterian, though his innate gentility, nobility and manners set him apart from the other Presbyterians in the novel—variously Cameronians, Covenanters, People of God and to their enemies ranting rebels—whom Scott portrays as fundamentalist narrow-minded, vulgar, cruel and violent, and whose speech, confected of great scads of the most vehemently unforgiving and bellicose parts of the Old Testament (the Covenanters and their preachers rarely quote from the New Testament) is thornily monomaniacal. They are led by the savage John Burley, a historical figure: he was the principal actor in the assassination of Archbishop Sharp in 1679, and fought ferociously at the Battle of Drumclog (which the Covenanters won) and at Bothwell Bridge (where they were defeated). Against them are the Scottish nobility, and the King, predominantly John Grahame of Claverhouse and The Duke of Monmouth (both historical figures). Scott does not stint descriptions of the retributive violence inflicted by the royalist army upon the rebels, and though his Claverhouse is in many ways an heroic figure, the novel shows us why he was known by Scots as ‘Bludie Clavie’.

In the middle of this conflict is Morton, who wavers as per the standard Scott protagonist’s fate (there’s a reason the books are called Waverley). He chooses to join the rebellion, not for reasons of religious fundamentalism, but because of an attachment to an ideal of individual freedom, which he thinks threatened by the heavy-handed treatment of religious dissent in Scotland.7 But in other regards Morton’s allegiance is with the other side, He is, for instance, in love with Edith Bellenden, granddaughter of the royalist Lady Margaret Bellenden whose brother-in-law, the superannuated Major Bellenden, leads a troop on the Royalist side, and who defends the Bellenden castle, Tillietudlem, against a siege by Covenanters (with Edith inside it, to Morton’s alarm). The defence is successful, and the middle of the novel—Acts 2 and 3, we might say, in the dramatic structure—concerns two battles, in both of which Morton fights for the Covenanters, the first a Cameronian victory, the second their catastrophic defeat. Morton also has a relationship with the noble Lord Evandale, a young man also in love with Edith, whose suit she holds-off (for, though she respects Evandale, she is in love with Morton). Conscious of him as a rival in love, Morton nonetheless respects and admires him, and in a key scene at the battle of Drumclog he enables the wounded Evandale to escape rather than killing him (and so freeing up his path to marriage with Edith).

[Frontispiece from the ‘Magnum Opus’ volume (the first collected edition of Scott’s works) of Old Mortality]

.

This act of mercy means that, after the Covenanters’ final defeat and the execution of many of them as traitors, Morton is spared, Evandale intervening on his behalf with Claverhouse. Morton is sent into exile in the Netherlands.

We come to what I’m calling the novel’s fifth ‘act’—prefaced by the fast-forward paragraph quoted earlier—which has been deprecated by critics.8 Morton returns, older, to a changed Scotland. Edith, believing him dead, has finally agreed to marry Evandale. This is the most ‘pathetic tragedy’ portion of the novel, the most Otwayesque. Two scenes in particular foregound plot-illogical moments of intense pathos and bizarre madness.

Since Edith has not been in contact with him during the years of his exile, Morton believes she has given up on him. He nobly relinquishes her, content that she marry the worthy Evandale and live happily ever after—he will in no way interfere with this procedure, or attempt to ‘claim’ Edith as his own. Nevertheless he returns to Scotland, just before the wedding, and manages to get himself seen by Edith, framed in a window. Why does he do this? Scott’s narrator throws up his hands: it can’t be explained (‘why then did he seek the cottage which their broken fortunes had now rendered the retreat of Lady Margaret Bellenden and her granddaughter? He yielded, we are under the necessity of acknowledging, to the impulse of an inconsistent wish’ [ch 39]). Seeing Morton, and realising that he is not dead after all, Edith collapses in hysterics, and is close to death. Evandale, who also believes Morton to be dead, assumes his betrothed has seen a ghost, or hallucinated a vision of the man she truly loves, and goes on to release her from her promise to marry him, since, he tells her, M Morton remains too large a figure in her heart to allow a happy marriage between Evandale and her.

Meanwhile, Morton, seeing that Edith has seen him, and clocking her distress, leaps upon his horse and rides away like an automaton:

So soon as her wild scream made this known to the unfortunate object of a passion so constant, and which seemed so ill-fated, he hurried from the place as if pursued by the furies. He passed Halliday in the garden without recognising or even being sensible that he had seen him, threw himself on his horse, and, by a sort of instinct rather than recollection, took the first by-road. [ch. 39]

In this zombie state he rides his horse straight over a cliff and into a river below. The cold water recalls him to himself, and he berates himself: ‘“I am a fool and worse than a fool! … But whither,” said Morton, in the bitterness of his heart, “am I now to direct my course? or rather, what does it signify to which point of the compass a wretch so forlorn betakes himself? I would to God, could the wish be without a sin, that these dark waters had flowed over me, and drowned my recollection of that which was, and that which is!”’ He affirms his resolution:

“No, Edith!” was his internal oath, “never will I add a thorn to thy pillow. That which Heaven has ordained, let it be; and let me not add, by my selfish sorrows, one atom’s weight to the burden thou hast to bear. I was dead to thee when thy resolution was adopted; and never, never shalt thou know that Henry Morton still lives!”

… to which one is tempted to reply: well, Henry, maybe coming all the way to Scotland and loitering outside your beloved’s window on the eve of her marrying another guy wasn’t the best way of achieving this oath. But here we are: a moment of intense pathos, howsoever illogically arrived at in narrative terms—banished Morton has given up the hope of ever being with the woman he loves—she believes him dead—they are framed, for an instant, in the same place—but she is betrothed to another. Alas! Hélas! Eheu! Etc.

The second Otwayesque tableau concerns Morton visiting the now older but still intensely fundamentalist and violent Burley. He does so because, for complicated and not-well-motivated plot reasons, Burley has a document that will restore Edith Bellenden’s property of Tillietudlum to her (it has been illegally appropriated by a villainous character called Basil Olifant), which would mean she could marry Evendale in financial security—noble, of Morton, this. Burley has not reconciled with the post-1688 settlement, even though it has granted him and his ilk religious freedom. He has instead retreated to a cave, located in a cliff over which a great waterfall tumbles, reachable only via a precarious tree-trunk that has fallen and lodged, just, between a crag in the cliff and the mouth of the cave. When Morton enters he finds not just that Burley is plotting a Covenanter rebellion revival, but that he has gone mad—stark mad, hallucinating demons with which he swordfights, gabbling about the ghosts of those he has killed in a ‘never shake thy gory locks at me’ manner (“Ha! ha!—there—there! … thou art come in all thy terrors; come with mine own evil deeds … What mutterest thou of grey hairs? It was well done to slay him,—ha! ha! ha!”). Scott’s understated way of describing this: ‘this unhappy man’s mind had been so long agitated by desperate schemes and sudden disappointments that it had lost its equipoise, and there was now in his conduct a shade of lunacy’.

This whole scene, with Morton nobly attempting to recover a legal document (Burley burns this, to spite him) and Burley ranting and raving, makes little sense in terms if plot logic or character consistency. The mise-en-scène is also melodramatically exaggerated: we are expressly told the only way into or out of the cave is along the lengthy, narrow, wet walkway provided by the fallen tree-trunk. When Morton, frustrated in his attempt to obtain the needful legal document, turns to leave, Burley kicks the whole tree-trunk away from the cave mouth, to trap them both inside, inviting Morton to sword-fight him. Rather than do so, Morton leaps from the cave mouth all the way to the top of the cliff, in a single jump, and goes on his way. You might think Burley, much older and less agile, is now stuck in his cave: but a few pages later he’s out and about, fighting with government soldiers and, eventually, getting shot in the river and going down with his hand so tightly gripped in a soldier’s throat (‘as a dying tiger seizes his prey’) that when both corpses are recovered, half a mile downstream, his ‘grasp could not have been unclenched without cutting off his hands’ so ‘both [bodies] were thrown into a hasty grave.’ How he ended up with the crucial legal document that would resolve the hastily-inserted inheritance plot at the end is never explained. The whole episode is, frankly, extraordinary. To say it beggars belief is to understate matters.

After this the novel disposes of Evandale—he is shot by Basil Olifant, who is then himself shot, which short-circuits the inheritance tangle (Olifant dies intestate so his estate reverts to Edith)—providing one last Otwayesque scene of intense pathos. Morton isn’t there to defend Evandale against attack because he’s ridden to Glasgow to get, in effect, the cavalry. He turns up at the head of this just too late: Evandale is dying, but has just enough energy to bestow his blessing on Morton and Edith’s marriage:

Morton had flung himself from his horse upon perceiving his situation, to render his dying friend all the aid in his power. He knew him, for he pressed his hand … [Edith] hung over the dying man; nor was she aware that Fate, who was removing one faithful lover, had restored another as if from the grave, until Lord Evandale, taking their hands in his, pressed them both affectionately, united them together, raised his face as if to pray for a blessing on them, and sunk back and expired in the next moment. [ch 44]

In the ‘Afterword’ Scott wraps-up the story strands on this, his novel’s fifth act—unsurprisingly, we might say, the ‘wavering’ character, having moved from one side to the other and back, finds a dialectical-synthesis of the two moving forward into modernity: György Lukács’s in-a-nutshell definition of the characteristic Scott dynamic, and the reason why Lukács, as a Marxist, thought Scott the first and greatest historical novel (which is to say: though he was himself a Tory, Scott intuitively grasped, Lukács says, the material dialecticism of history as such). More to the point is the way this ‘pathetic’ (in the strict sense) denouement not only replays the kinds of illogical-but-affecting dilemmas of ‘pathetic tragedy’, but more to the point the way male-male desire and bonding is mediated via a representative female whom both the men love. This curious triad is, as Eve Sedgwick shows in her still-brilliant Between Men, all over 19^th-century literature. This dynamic intersects with Otway, whose drama faces the same historical dynamic and retreats from it into pathos and affect.9 But pathos and affect are the currency of Old Mortality’s final act too. It seems to me to resolve the novel’s various tensions into Douglas Sirk-esque moments of garish intensities that speak to the true emotional throughline of the story: men whose love for one another is mediated through the notional goal of ‘marrying desirable woman’.

Tragedy, it’s tragedy, nearly tragedy, it must be nearly tragedy. Generically speaking, I mean. What is Fin de Partie/Endgame about, after all? It is about meaninglessness, absurdity, yes yes, no question. But it is about play, a play about play, about the end of the play. Chess pieces are stylised figures that are moved according to limited rules about a simplified board. Endgame suggests that our reactions (for in Beckett we always react and we never proact) to suffering are as ritualised and constrained, which they probably are. Theatrical performance entails learning lines and repeating them, on cue, whether or not you want to, whether or not you understand them, just to fill up the time allotted; and life, says Beckett, is the same. ‘Ah, the old questions, the old answers, there’s nothing like them!’ enthuses Hamm. And although Hamm’s first words gesture towards some mode of game (‘Me—[he yawns]—to play’), it is Hamm’s second comment that turns out to be the more relevant, actually:

[He holds the handkerchief spread out before him.] Old stancher! [He takes off his glasses, wipes his eyes, his face, the glasses, puts them on again, folds the handkerchief and puts it neatly in the breast-pocket of his dressing gown]

That is also how the play ends, of course: ‘[he holds the handkerchief spread out before him.] Old stancher! [Pause.] You ... remain. [Pause. He covers his face with handkerchief, lowers his arms to armrest, remains motionless.]’ We can believe he’s dead at last, or perhaps that he’s been dead the whole time and has now moved into a different, stiller phase of death. Death is the end of all things and the game of things. Fin. A handkerchief is a stancher in the sense that it stanches the flow of tears, snot, blood. The word is from the Latin, stāns, stāntis: standing, staying, remaining, from stō (“stand”) Archimedes very place from which the whole world could be leveraged—if only you could reach it. What stands, in the flow of life? Death. What can be leveraged from death? Nothing very much but, maybe, something after all; and that something we bracket as tragedy.

Why a handkerchief? Because Othello. Why is Hamm blind? Because Oedipus Coloneus. Why are the two main characters called ‘Hamm’ and ‘Clov’? Because Beckett is playing name-games in theatre’s most celebrated graveyard. Hamm is a half-Hamlet, mouthed at the point where the name is cut in two so to draw out the mm; Clov is the Gravedigger, and here the severance is more pedantically precise, taking the character’s moniker as used in the First Folio, ‘CLOWN’ and bringing the cleaver down to isolate the middle of the middle of its Renaissance orthography, ‘CLOVVNE’. Hamm gets his medial ‘M’ doubled, because to those that have (even when those that have have very little) shall be given; Clov gets his upturned medial ‘W’ sliced rudely in half because from those that have not shall be taken away, even when there’s nothing to be taken away. Very Beckettian that.1 Endgame is located in the ruins of civilisation (‘the setting must be after a nuclear war’ the critics speculate), in the ruins of life itself, but above all it is located in the ruins of canonical literary greatness. We’re in the bone orchard with Hamm and Clov and Beckett is cutting his Shakespeare-in-modern-clothes dialogue directly from the original fabric:

HAMLET. I will speake to this fellow: whose Graue’s this Sir?
CLOVVNE. Mine Sir:
O a Pit of Clay for to be made,
for such a Guest is meete.
HAM. I thinke it be thine indeed: for thou liest in’t.
CLOV. You lye out on’t Sir, and therefore it is not yours: for my part, I doe not lye in’t; and yet it is mine.
HAM. Thou dost lye in’t, to be in’t and say ‘tis thine: ‘tis for the dead, not for the quicke, therefore thou lyest.
CLOV. ‘Tis a quicke lye Sir, ‘twill away againe from me to you.
HAM. What man dost thou digge it for?
CLOV. For no man Sir.
HAM. What woman then?
CLOV. For none neither.
HAM. Who is to be buried in’t?
CLOV. One that was a woman Sir; but rest her Soule, shee’s dead.
HAM. How absolute the knaue is?

All this sort of laugh-thin, pointless, time-filling roundabout of chatter and jokes is, entirely, Beckett’s play. That potentially endless roundel of talk circling the big hole in the ground into which we are pitched at the last, unhoused, uncoffined (‘put me in my coffin’, Hamm orders, near the end; to which Clov replies ‘there are no more coffins’), unfleshed, just our bones like Yorick’s naked skull, your-[Be]ck’s naked skull. It’s about tragedy and that means it’s about death, because tragedy is about death. Momento mori, hammenti clovi. All these little self-referential in-jokes: ‘let’s stop playing!’ shrieks Clov (‘imploringly’, says the stage direction), immediately before Hamm requests his coffin: ‘this is slow work’; ‘this is not much fun’; ‘why this farce, day after day?’ ‘“What’s happening, what’s happening?”—“Something is taking its course”’. A play about playing, about players, and the play of the play is a tragedy. It’s about tragedy in the sense that it is about specific tragedies. It returns us to the origins of the mode: back to Aeschylus himself and the earliest of all plays, when a play was a chorus and two actors, before Sophocles came along and contaminated it with a third player. Two actors and a chorus, and that chorus as limited as possible: just two people (do two grains together count as a heap? do two individuals add-up to a chorus?), Nagg and Nell, father and mother, alternately provoking and grieving, hectoring the actors and uttering a lament for them, alternately (that is) nagging and sounding the knell. It’s a father’s job to nag, and a mother’s to grieve. When we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.

Freud noted how alike are laughing and weeping, physiologically: the bared teeth, the involuntary gasping sounds, tears in the eye. If you don’t have the whole context can you even be certain whether somebody is laughing or crying? ‘When I fall,’ says Clov, ‘I’ll weep for happiness.’ Conversely, tragedy is hilarious. ‘Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,’ says Nell, from her bin. ‘Yes, yes, it’s the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will.’ With a Will whom? There’s only one Will that matters, really, in this play’s DNA: the Shakespearian will. (Watson and Crick had made their widely celebrated discovery five years before this play was first staged: eDNAgme). The play is called Absurd and though there’s a tendency to bracket Absurdism with Existentialism the movements’ key players didn’t see it like that. Camus, for example, resisted the tag Existentialist, and expressed surprised that people always linked his name with Sartre’s (‘je ne suis pas existentialiste’ [Les Nouvelles littéraires, 15 November 1945]). You can see where the confusion creeps in. Camus, like Sartre, believed that there was no external power or deity that could guarantee meaning and purpose for our lives. He thought we have to generate that in ourselves. Le Mythe de Sisyphus (1942) famously argues that there’s only one serious philosophical problem nowadays: ‘le seul problème philosophique vraiment sérieux: est-ce que la réalisation de l’existence du non-sens et de l’absurdité de la vie entraîne nécessairement le suicide?’ Does understanding that our lives are meaningless and absurd mean that we should commit suicide?

Camus answers his own question with an heroic no, in thunder: Est-ce que la réalisation de l'absurde nécessite le suicide? Non, elle nécessite la révolte. We must revolt, not commit self-slaughter with a bare bodkin. We're all Sisyphuses, rolling our great bolder up the hill. None of us will ever reach the top. But we can claim this labour as the basis of our liberation. Sisyphus, says Camus, at least has his task. Even considering all his misery, which is also our misery (trapped as we are in ‘cet univers désormais sans maître, ni stérile, ni fertile’) we must believe that Sisyphus is happy: ‘il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.’ I've always assumed that this is the Camusian rewiring of Voltaire's recipe for happiness: il faut cultiver notre jardin, with the twist that we don't get to choose our garden. We don't roll plymouth rock along the land; plymouth rock lands on us. Actors and patients. Beckett's characters are always patients, not just in their passivity (though obviously that) but in the fact that there's always something medically wrong with them. And though these patients had to be played by agents, by actors, Beckett liked to constrain the way his play is performed: all those endless pettifogging stage directions, all that fuss and refusal of permission when directors try anything new.

There's something austere and rather forbidding about Camus, I'd say; or maybe it's just me. Is it just me? Beckett used to drink in the same Parisian bars as Camus, but that doesn't mean they were friends. And whatever else it is, Endgame has never seemed to me a very Camusian play. It is, for one thing, and above all things, just funny. Those bickering men. Clov rolling Hamm around the walls of his room and then setting him in the middle, for Hamm to complain that he's not in the middle enough, and when Clov moves him just a nudge in this or that direction to start complaining again.

Take Sisyphus, Camus's tragic hero-figure. Which is the greatest, and far and away the greatest, twentieth-century adaptation of that myth? The answer's clear: this one, of course:

Laurel and Hardy's The Music Box (1932): twenty of the funniest minutes ever put on screen. And that's the point: Sisyphus's predicament is hilarious not despite but because it is so painful and frustrating. Beckett loved Laurel and Hardy, and Chaplin too, and stole bits and pieces from various film comedy for his plays (think of the bowler-hat-swapping sequence in Waiting for Godot: a direct lift from L&H). And that's Beckett's Myth of Sisyphus: two mismatched individuals, one (Hamm) stouter, bossier, mock-pompous, the other (Clov) subordinate, skinny, picked upon, sometimes complaining. Claurel and Harmmdy. And here they are, as-it-were pushing this Sisyphean burden up the slope only for it repeatedly to slip from their hands. Only they're not pushing up a Music Box so much as a Silence Box: a coffin full of soil (‘put me in my coffin’, ‘there are no more coffins’), death itself being hauled contrariwise up the entropy hill. If only we could heave this monstrously heavy bolder, death, to the top of Entropy Hill we'd be free of it! And death is so fearful: so we struggle and push and try. We'll never do it, of course. But that doesn't stop us. It doesn't because we're not really doing it to get to the top. We're doing it because it makes us laugh.

I am, I confide, bald—not ideally bald, like Nabokov’s Pnin, or indeed Nabokov himself, but pretty bald. This story spoke to me not just as a fellow baldie, but as capturing something important about how febrile political life can get under the rule of a decrepit dictator, when the succession is in doubt. Politics, the same yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Towards the end of Cassius Dio’s great history of the Roman empire the narrative comes up to his present day: for Dio was a senator under Commodus and Septimius Severus. That means he can tell the following story from first hand.

The year is AD 203. Severus, the emperor, is old, and there is uncertainty about what will happen when he dies. His two sons Caracalla and Geta are dissolute, spoiled, ‘they outraged women and abused boys, they embezzled money, and made gladiators and charioteers their boon companions, emulating each other in the similarity of their deeds, but full of strife in their rivalry’— that rivalry being for the succession, for each thinks he, and not his brother, should be the next emperor. They fight amongst themselves, and lead two factions in Rome. There are plots and assassination attempts. Senators are being arrested and executed. This is the context for the affair of Apronianus, the governor of the province of Asia who was — unjustly, Dio says — accused of wanting to overthrow Severus and seize power himself.

After this came the dénouement of the case of Apronianus, — an incredible affair even in the hearing. This man was accused because his grandmother was reported to have dreamed once that he should be emperor and because he was believed to have employed some magic to this end; and he was condemned while absent at his post as governor of Asia. Now when the evidence concerning him, taken under torture, was read to us, there appeared in it the statement that one of the persons conducting the examination had inquired who had told the dream and who had heard it, and that the man under examination had said, among other things: “I saw a certain bald-headed senator peeping in.” On hearing this we found ourselves in a terrible position; for although neither the man had spoken nor Severus written anyone’s name, yet such was the general consternation that even those who had never visited the house of Apronianus, and not alone the bald-headed but even those who were bald on their forehead, grew afraid. And although no one was very cheerful, except those who had unusually heavy hair, yet we all looked round at those who were not so fortunate, and a murmur ran about: “Its So-and‑so.” “No, it’s So-and‑so.” I will not conceal what happened to me at the time, ridiculous as it is. I was so disconcerted that I actually felt with my hand to see whether I had any hair on my head. And a good many others had the same experience. And we were very careful to direct our gaze upon those who were more or less bald, as if we should thereby divert our own danger upon them. [Cassius Dio, Roman History 77.8; translated Earnest Cary]

This image of Cassius Dio anxiously feeling his own receding hairline to check on whether he could be the accomplice in this plot against the emperor is excellent: a rebus of how febrile and irrational a political situation can become, paranoia shaping irrationality into social actuality — Stalin executing doctors left and right; McCarthyite trials, Trump punishing Republicans for insufficient personal loyalty. That Dio doesn’t know whether he is bald or not — which is to say, not that he is unaware of his own hirsuiteness, but that he doesn’t know whether he will be suspected and executed or not, since the grounds for condemnation are so arbitrary — is a splendid touch.

A further detail emerges: the baldy is not just any Senator, but an aedile.

We continued to do this until the further statement was read that the bald-head in question had worn a purple-bordered toga. When this detail came out, we turned our eyes upon Baebius Marcellinus; for he had been aedile at the time and was extremely bald. So he rose, and coming forward, said: “He will of course recognize me, for he has seen me.” After we had commended this course, the informer was brought in while Marcellinus stood by, and for a considerable time remained silent, looking about for a man he could recognize, but finally, following the direction of an almost imperceptible nod that somebody gave, he said that Marcellinus was the man. Thus was Marcellinus convicted of a bald-head’s peeping, and he was led out of the senate-chamber bewailing his fate. When he had passed through the Forum, he refused to proceed farther, but just where he was took leave of his children, four in number, and spoke these most affecting words: “There is only one thing that causes me sorrow, my children, and that is that I leave you behind alive.” Then his head was cut off, before Severus even learned that he had been condemned.

Off with his head! So much for Marcellinus.

Canaletto's ‘London: Westminster Bridge from the North on Lord Mayor's Day’ (1747).

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There were several projects to build a bridge across the river at Westminster in the late 17th- and early 18th-centuries, all stymied by the Corporation of London, who wanted to preserve the rights and income of the barge- and ferrymen who worked the crossing. But eventually, in 1736, an Act of Parliament approved the project. Privately financed (including by selling tickets in a public lottery) construction started in 1739 under the supervision of Swiss engineer Charles Labelye, who had invented a new technology, ‘caissons’—sealed underwater structures supplied with air from above in which workman could dig the foundations for the bridge’s piers into the riverbed. The bridge opened on 18 November 1750.

It was on this structure that Wordsworth stood, early in the morning of September 3rd 1803. From that vantage he wrote this very famous sonnet:

Earth has not any thing to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

The date of composition is in the title of the poem.

There’s a nice piece of wordplay, a mode actually of irony, here. The poem is ‘On Westminster Bridge’, and the poet is actually standing, physically, on Westminster bridge. This doubled sense of on as meaning ‘positioned physically upon’ and ‘concerning, about’ reverts on (!) the poem itself which, famously, doesn’t talk about the bridge at all: it’s all the houses and temples of London, and the river passing through, gliding at its own sweet will—it is, really, ‘From Westminster Bridge’, not on it at all. Although by the same token, Wordsworth could hardly write the poem without the bridge supporting him. And, as we read the sonnet, we can hardly avoid being struck by its poised tensions of contradictions: the city, an urban space, described entirely in pastoral terms, as if it were a natural phenomenon. The city is somehow both clothed in a ‘garment’ and naked, ‘bare’: its ‘majesty’ is low-key touching, hardly the affective response usually provoked by the awe-inspiring sublime force of majesty. And that final image of a heart lying perfectly still takes calmness too far into death.

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The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

1877 is when this famous sonnet was written although, of course, it wasn’t published until 1918.

We can say that Hopkins is interested in the very large—in things like God, and His ‘grandeur’ (His grandness, scale, size as well as His majesty) by way of the very small, or more exactly by way of the very closely-observed, the intricate, the inward: hence ‘inscape’. Waking through nature he can pick a violet, and then as-it-were fall into the flower’s small-scale gorgeousness as into a wormhole: as he wrote in his journal ‘the bluebells in your hand baffle you with their inscape, made to every sense’.

Still I trip up, in this poem, over foil, and the oozing oil. Is the sublimity of God’s fire really to be compared to some aluminium foil? Does divine grace really ooze? It may be that my problem involves a chain of associations which would never have occurred to Hopkins (as it might be: a primary school nativity play, of the kind which I have more than once attended when my kids were that age: with silver-foil folded over cardboard cut-out angel wings for the little-ones to wear).1 What does Hopkins mean by foil, here? And why so oily?

I’m not alone in objecting to the words. Yvor Winters considered the ‘shook foil’ and ‘ooze of oil’ ‘almost grotesquely trivial as illustrations of the first line of the poem’

The first line offers a major concept, in impressive phrasing. Instead of developing the concept as a concept, however in the manner of a poet of the Renaissance. Hopkins proceeds to illustrate it with two descriptive figures … if we assume that the second line is grammatically correct then foil is a quantitative word and refers to tin-foil or to something of that nature, and we have what amounts, in effect, to an image of a mad man (or at least of a remarkably eccentric man) brandishing a metal bouquet.2

Winters goes on to consider the possibility that Hopkins meant instead a fencing foil, but finds that reading even more ‘defective’. Critics have, at least with the ‘crushed oil’ reference, tried to dignify the image chrismatically: Nicholas MacKenzie thinks the reference is to what was in the late 19^th-century a luxury product, pressed virgin olive oil, which had a number of liturgical functions.3 Unction, in other words.

Dan Brown (not that one) has a complex reading of ‘ooze of oil’ as ‘an object rather than its action’, which articulates a specific Hopkinsian ‘inscape’ by virtue of its texture:

Particular instances of determinate being cohere as distinctive natures: an ‘instress’ necessarily involves a peculiar ‘inscape’. This specificity is another condition of determinate being which the ‘ooze of oil’ image presents with almost abstract simplicity. The nature of olive oil as a pure essence makes it an apt emblem for the ‘inscape’ of specific creatures, while it is also, through its liturgical identification with the Holy Ghost, continuous with divine Being. The viscous property of oil, the capacity by which it ‘gathers’, is like the distinctive qualities of the creatures referred to in ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’, enacted spontaneously by the thing itself: ‘What I do is me’ … in being ‘crushed’ the essential oil which inheres within the olive as a potentiality is brought forth, actualized.4

That this discussion goes on to a lengthy account of ‘viscid imagery’ in the fiction of Jean-Paul Sartre need not disqualify it. My problem is that it takes no account of the way the poem, on a sixpence, turns from taking the viscid ooze as God’s grandeur to denigrating the oozings, as trampling out of the vintage (perhaps that same where the grapes of wrath are stored): ‘Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;/And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;/And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell.’ Physical labour (like treading the grapes) makes us dirty, renders us smelly, a blearing of the cleanly ideal.

Perhaps the way into ‘foil’ is via the famous opening line. In ‘the world is charged with the grandeur of God’ what does charge mean? It might mean, simply, ‘full’: the world is replete with God’s grandeur: OED:

charge, v. transitive (frequently in passive). To put something on or into (something), esp. to capacity or with what it is meant to hold (e.g. fuel); to pack, stock, or supply. Usually followed by a prepositional phrase introduced by with, indicating with what something is filled, stocked, or supplied.

That might work. Then again, it might (the usage was common by the 1870s) refer to electrical charge, as if the cosmos is electrified by God’s grandeur, and hence to foil as metallic and therefore a conducting medium—but this has nothing to do with oil, which is not electrical.

But there’s another meaning of the verb, again transitive, and this relates to painting: ‘charge: to render (a colour, a figure, etc.) in an extravagant or exaggerated manner. The OED cites Bailey’s Dictionarium Britannicum (1730) where ‘exaggeration in Painting’ is defined as ‘ a method of representing things, wherein they are charged too much, or marked too strong; whether in respect of design or colouring.’ They also quote painter James Barry —from Ralph Wornum’s Lectures on Painting by the Royal Academicians: Barry, Oppie and Fuseli (1848)—‘Nothing is unskilfully charged for the purpose of obtaining grandeur.’ Barry, here, is discussing Raphael, whom he praises for charging his paintings without over-charging them: ‘his women in general are charged and heavy with comeliness … his woman carrying water in the Incendio del Borgo is … charged and truly sublime by the expressive energy of her action’. Raphael’s portraits of Saint Cecilia and Magdalen are ‘faultless’ ‘not over-charged.’ The line quoted by the OED is Barry’s judgment on Raphael’s ‘The Calumny of Apelles’. I’ve no idea if Hopkins read Wornum’s book, but he was certainly very interested in the visual arts, as a practitioner as well as a viewer: a collection of Hopkins’s drawings is in the Harry Ransom Center.

If we take ‘God’s Grandeur’ as employing a number of specifically painterly tropes into its celebration of the grandeur of God’s world, then foil and oil fall into place. The world as art is sublimely charged by its creator; the gold foil is applied to the image, as in medieval sacred art; the oils that ooze relate to the paints applied to the canvas—still wet, the implication would be, in their freshness and vividness (or perhaps the ‘oil’ is a reference to ‘gold size’, an oil-based glue that was used to adhere the sheets of foil—shaken out so as to be applied—to the canvas). The final image of the Holy Ghost brooding over the world, with warm breast and angelic wings, suggests the many medieval atrworks that gild portraits of sacred subjects, such as the angelic figure at the head of this post.

I must concede that this reading is less persuasive as a way of reading the middle section of the poem: if the world is a divine artwork, how does humanity ‘tread’ upon it? We could, perhaps, read the ‘searing’ of trade, the blearing, smearing and smudging as the kinds of wear and tear to which even the greatest artworks are prone, bought-and-sold, damaged, buffed and blurred—but how does a beautful medieval painting, gilded and charged with beauty, ‘shares man’s smell’? In what sense do we apprehend art with our bare feet, such that wearing shoes blunts our ability to do so? Perhaps this is to bring in a second field of imagery unrelated to painting, which can hardly avoid being somewhat jarring. Or perhaps I’m barking up the wrong tree entirely.

I’m ignoring something obvious, I know (you will surely have come here to tell me so, I know). The opening comparisons are primarily sonic and only secondarily semantic: charged, an important and importantly placed word, shifts by a fraction into the ‘sh’ alliteration of shining, shook and crushed. The ‘g’-alliteration of ‘grandeur of God’ and ‘gathers to a greatness’ act as architectonic support and connectivity for these four words and therefore their meanings. The oil oozes for alliteration as much as unction (which word also, almost, alliterates). Each of these sonic strategies gets picked up (the sh in ‘shared’, ‘shod’; the hard g in ‘Ghost’, but also pricking out the ‘ck’s in ‘reck’, ‘black’; the oily oi/oo in the substantive vocalics in ‘toil’, ‘soil’, ‘foot’ and the terminal ‘broods’. That these things link sonically, that is musically, and therefore meaningfully, semantically, is Hopkins’s whole point.

Over on the Critical Star Trek Studies substack, where I am an occasional contributor, I have a new post. It is an account of James Blish’s Trek tie-in Spock Must Die, the first adult Trek spin-off novelisation—there had been earlier write-ups of specific episode scripts, in a series of books running from the collection Star Trek (1967) to Star Trek 11 …

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[A still from Silver Bullet (directed by Dan Attias, 1985)]

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So, we know what a ‘silver bullet’ is: a projectile made of silver which is able to, as no other type of bullet can, dispatch a werewolf, and possibly also kill-off a vampire (though a wooden stake through the heart is the more conventional termination strategy here). Regular leaden bullets have no effect of the Wolfman; you need a silver bullet. From this particular cultural usage the phrase ‘silver bullet’ has entered discourse to mean any unusual and singular remedy, any immediate solution with notable effectiveness.1

I was curious where the phrase originated. Obviously silver has folkloric significance that goes back a very long time, for this metal has long been thought to have charmed powers against evil forces.2 But silver bullets, specifically, must perforce be a later development. They cannot, obviously, predate the spread of firearms, from c.1500 and onwards (in Europe). This is what the OED has to say.

It’s not clear that first two usages cited have any supernatural element to them. The third, from John Trumbull’s satirical poem The Progress of Dulness, or the Rare Adventures of Tom Brainless (1772) is more to the point, since silver bullets only wound ’em means not that silver bullets only inflict wounds rather than fatalities upon witches, but rather than it is only silver bullets that can in any way wound witches.

Is this the earliest? I think the notion goes back a hundred years earlier, to Scotland. Specifically, I think it goes back to the Covenanter wars of the seventeenth-century, when Scottish religious enthusiasts clashed with the armies of royalist loyalists. I wonder if this is because, in addition to being an as-it-were ‘regular’ war, this was a clash of quite particular religious sensibilities, where, especially on the Covenanters’ side, everything was interpreted as divinely sanctioned, having a supernatural aspect, and as liable to fold-in older, folkloric, often pagan assumptions and buried beliefs.

The Covenanters were those Scots who signed the National Covenant of 1638, pledging to maintain the religious supremacy of their Presbytarian Protestantism against the authority insisted upon by Charles I with respect to the Established Churches and their practices. The so-called ‘Bishops Wars’ were fought across Scotland 1639-1640, and after what amounted to Covenanter victory therein they allied with Cromwell’s Roundheads during English Civil War, signing the ‘Solemn League and Covenant’ in 1643. But after the Restoration religious dissent was punished north of the border, the authority of the Established Church reasserted, and there was further warring. In 1679 a Covenanter army defeated the royalist troops, lead by John Graham of Claverhouse, at the Battle of Drumclog, in South Lanarkshire. This victory was short-lived: a mere three weeks later Claverhouse, marshalling a much bigger force under the Duke of Monmouth, crushed the Covenantor rebellion at the Battle of Bothwell Brig.

Claverhouse pursued Covenanters assiduously and with brutality, earning the nickname ‘Bluidy Clavers’. His enemies were struck that he seemed invulnerable upon the battlefield, such that the rumour started that no merely leaden bullet could harm him because he was not a human but a devil.3 Here is John Howie’s account of Claverhouse’s death, from ‘God’s Judgment on Persecutors’ [in the Biographia Scoticana (‘The Scots Worthies’ 1775)]. It’s worth noting that Howie is not a neutral historican, but rather a partisan in favour of the Covenanters, whom he calls ‘the people of God’:

JOHN GRAHAM of Claverhouse in Angus, a branch of the house of Montrose, [was] another champion for the prince of the kingdom of darkness. To improve the cruelty of his nature, he was sometime in the French service. He returned to Scotland 1677. The vivacity of his genius soon recommended him to Charles and James, who bestowed upon him the command of a troop of horse: and then he began the spoiling and killing the people of God; wherein he was alway successful, except at Drumclog. One of his exploits was at Bewly-bog, where he killed 75 and took many prisoners. After Bothwel, had Monmouth granted it, he would have killed the prisoners, burnt Glasgow, Hamilton and Strathaven, and plundered the western shires. To enumerate all the cruelties, bloodshed and oppression committed by him, while he ranged up and down the country for ten years space, were a talk here too tedious: in which time it is said, he killed near 100 persons in cold blood. In Galloway, he and his party ravished a woman before her husband’s eyes, took a young boy, tied his two thumbs with a cord, and hung him to the balk or roof of the house. In 1682, he pursued and shot one W. Graham when escaping from his mother’s house. In 1683, he shot four men on the water of Dee, and carried two to Dumfries, and hanged them there. In 1685, he caused shoot one in Carrick, and in the same year most cruelly shot John Brown at his own door in Moor-kirk, and a little after shot A. Hyslop in Annandale. These and such services procured him a higher title of honour: he was created Viscount Dundee, and made privy counsellor. In York’s reign, his conduct was much of a piece, running up and down the country, making people swear they would never lift arms against the King. He was alway staunch to popery, and when the convention met at Edinburgh, he went off with some horse to the north, and raised the clanships for James’s interest; where he shifted from place to place till June 13, 1689, that he came to a pitched engagement with Gen. Mackay on the braes of Gillicrankie on the water of Trumble. The battle was very bloody, and by Mackey’s third fire Claverhouse fell … it has been said for certain, that his own waiting man taking a resolution to rid this world of this truculent bloody monster; and knowing he had proof of lead, shot him with a silver button he had before taken off his own coat for that purpose. However he fell, and with him popery and king James’s interest in Scotland.

But here’s an instance of a silver bullet (that is, a silver button being used as a bullet) being fired at a demonic adversary, from four decades earlier. I quote from Robert Chambers’s Domestic Annals of Scotland (1859), which text comes with a citation, although the footnote simply says ‘from tradition’:

In the year 1649, as is believed, a cateran named Mac-Allister, with a band of followers, kept a large portion of Caithness in terror. The people of Thurso having somehow given him offence, he determined to revenge himself by suddenly coming down upon them on a Sunday and burning them in church. He and his men had provided themselves with withes of twigs to fasten the doors, in order to keep the people in, while fire should be set to the building. Some one remonstrating with him for contemplating such an unholy design on the Sabbath-day, he avowed that, in spite of God and the Sabbath both, he would shed blood. Fortunately, some humane person became aware of the design, and set off at speed to give the alarm. This had scarcely been done, when the caterans, twenty in number, arrived. There were seven doors to the church, as may be verified by an inspection of the ruins at this day. An old woman dexterously thrust her stool into one near which she sat, so as to prevent it from being closed; the people were eager to defend the rest as far as they could. Mac-Allister himself came to the door of a gallery at the south-west angle of the building, accessible by an outer stair. Here sat Sir James Sinclair of Murkle, an able and determined man, who made a practice of coming to church armed. Meeting the robber in the doorway, he thrust his sword through him, but with no apparent effect. His servant, however, superstitiously fearing that Mac-Allister was impervious to cold steel, cut a triangular silver button from Sir James’s coat, and with that shot the fellow in the head. He tumbled over the stair, saying in Gaelic: ‘Hoot-toot, the bodach has deafened me!’ It was a mortal wound in the ear. The rest of the party were then set upon by the congregation, and after a hard contest, overpowered, many of them, like their master, being killed.4

This diabolic McAllister, invulnerable to swords but slayable by a silver bullet, is the earliest example of this specie of death I have found. I urge any future makers of Werewolf movies to include his last words at their climactic scene: hoot-toot the bodach has deafened me indeed!

Why buttons? The first citation from the OED makes clear that from the earliest days of firearms actual bullets have been made from a variety of metals. Lead is not only cheaper than silver but has greater penetrative capacity when discharged, and so became the standard; but a variety of other metals were deployed as ordnance. The idea that a Scotsman fighting what he took to be a devil might pull off a silver button and fire it from their musket has the attractive literality of needs must when the devil drives. But buttons had another valence at this time. It was, it seems, common for Jacobites to use buttons to display their allegience to the king over the water without being too dangerously blatant about it: a small silver button with some Jacobite insignia upon it could pass unnoticed to all but the most specific investigation.5 Maybe this has something to do with these stories.

In 1844 Browning, in Rome, visited the church of Santa Prassede. Amongst the various artworks and relics (the church has on display what it claims is the actual pillar to which Jesus was tied to be flogged, prior to his crucifixion) he saw the tomb of Cardinal-Bishop Alain de Coëtivy, known in Italy as Cardinal Cetti. Browning was inspired to write a poem: ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church’. On the 18th February 1845 he posted a copy of this to E O. Ward in England (‘I send you one poem as long as the two I promised ,’ he wrote: ‘I pick it out as being a pet of mine, and just the thing for the time — what with the Oxford business, and Camden Society and other embroilments.’) It was published in the March edition of Hood’s Magazine, and then collected in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845). John Ruskin later commented upon it in Modern Painters IV, praising Browning’s portrait of Renaissance Italy, ‘its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin. It is nearly all I said of the central Renaissance in thirty pages of The Stones of Venice [1851–3] put into as many lines, Browning’s being the antecedent work.’

Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity!
Draw round my bed: is Anselm keeping back?
Nephews — sons mine . . . ah God, I know not! Well —
She, men would have to be your mother once,
Old Gandolf envied me, so fair she was!
What’s done is done, and she is dead beside,
Dead long ago, and I am Bishop since,
And as she died so must we die ourselves,
And thence ye may perceive the world’s a dream.
Life, how and what is it? As here I lie
In this state-chamber, dying by degrees,
Hours and long hours in the dead night, I ask
“Do I live, am I dead?” Peace, peace seems all.
Saint Praxed’s ever was the church for peace;
And so, about this tomb of mine. I fought
With tooth and nail to save my niche, ye know:
— Old Gandolf cozened me, despite my care;
Shrewd was that snatch from out the corner South
He graced his carrion with, God curse the same!
Yet still my niche is not so cramped but thence
One sees the pulpit o’ the epistle-side,
And somewhat of the choir, those silent seats,
And up into the aery dome where live
The angels, and a sunbeam’s sure to lurk:
And I shall fill my slab of basalt there,
And ’neath my tabernacle take my rest,
With those nine columns round me, two and two,
The odd one at my feet where Anselm stands:
Peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe
As fresh-poured red wine of a mighty pulse.
— Old Gandolf with his paltry onion-stone,
Put me where I may look at him! True peach,
Rosy and flawless: how I earned the prize!
Draw close: that conflagration of my church
— What then? So much was saved if aught were missed!
My sons, ye would not be my death? Go dig
The white-grape vineyard where the oil-press stood,
Drop water gently till the surface sink,
And if ye find . . . Ah God, I know not, I! …
Bedded in store of rotten fig-leaves soft,
And corded up in a tight olive-frail,
Some lump, ah God, of lapis lazuli,
Big as a Jew’s head cut off at the nape,
Blue as a vein o’er the Madonna’s breast …
Sons, all have I bequeathed you, villas, all,
That brave Frascati villa with its bath,
So, let the blue lump poise between my knees,
Like God the Father’s globe on both His hands
Ye worship in the Jesu Church so gay,
For Gandolf shall not choose but see and burst!
Swift as a weaver’s shuttle fleet our years:
Man goeth to the grave, and where is he?
Did I say basalt for my slab, sons? Black —
’Twas ever antique-black I meant! How else
Shall ye contrast my frieze to come beneath?
The bas-relief in bronze ye promised me,
Those Pans and Nymphs ye wot of, and perchance
Some tripod, thyrsus, with a vase or so,
The Saviour at his sermon on the mount,
Saint Praxed in a glory, and one Pan
Ready to twitch the Nymph’s last garment off,
And Moses with the tables . . . but I know
Ye mark me not! What do they whisper thee,
Child of my bowels, Anselm? Ah, ye hope
To revel down my villas while I gasp
Bricked o’er with beggar’s mouldy travertine
Which Gandolf from his tomb-top chuckles at!
Nay, boys, ye love me — all of jasper, then!
’Tis jasper ye stand pledged to, lest I grieve.
My bath must needs be left behind, alas!
One block, pure green as a pistachio-nut,
There’s plenty jasper somewhere in the world —
And have I not Saint Praxed’s ear to pray
Horses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts,
And mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs?
— That’s if ye carve my epitaph aright,
Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully’s every word,
No gaudy ware like Gandolf’s second line —
Tully, my masters? Ulpian serves his need!
And then how I shall lie through centuries,
And hear the blessed mutter of the mass,
And see God made and eaten all day long,
And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste
Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke!
For as I lie here, hours of the dead night,
Dying in state and by such slow degrees,
I fold my arms as if they clasped a crook,
And stretch my feet forth straight as stone can point,
And let the bedclothes, for a mortcloth, drop
Into great laps and folds of sculptor’s-work:
And as yon tapers dwindle, and strange thoughts
Grow, with a certain humming in my ears,
About the life before I lived this life,
And this life too, popes, cardinals and priests,
Saint Praxed at his sermon on the mount,
Your tall pale mother with her talking eyes,
And new-found agate urns as fresh as day,
And marble’s language, Latin pure, discreet,
— Aha, ELUCESCEBAT quoth our friend?
No Tully, said I, Ulpian at the best!
Evil and brief hath been my pilgrimage.
All lapis, all, sons! Else I give the Pope
My villas! Will ye ever eat my heart?
Ever your eyes were as a lizard’s quick,
They glitter like your mother’s for my soul,
Or ye would heighten my impoverished frieze,
Piece out its starved design, and fill my vase
With grapes, and add a vizor and a Term,
And to the tripod ye would tie a lynx
That in his struggle throws the thyrsus down,
To comfort me on my entablature
Whereon I am to lie till I must ask
“Do I live, am I dead?” There, leave me, there!
For ye have stabbed me with ingratitude
To death — ye wish it — God, ye wish it! Stone —
Gritstone, a-crumble! Clammy squares which sweat
As if the corpse they keep were oozing through —
And no more lapis to delight the world!
Well, go! I bless ye. Fewer tapers there,
But in a row: and, going, turn your backs
— Ay, like departing altar-ministrants,
And leave me in my church, the church for peace,
That I may watch at leisure if he leers —
Old Gandolf, at me, from his onion-stone,
As still he envied me, so fair she was!

The expertly rendered admixture of piety and lasciviousness, the muddling of improving Biblical allusions and hedonistic Greek myth, the veil slipping (nepotistically appointed sons crowding round his death-bed: ‘nephews — sons mine . . . ah God, I know not!’), the Bishop’s love of luxury and the finer things in life, his petty rivalry with and point-scoring antagonism against Gandolf, even though the other is already dead — it’s all splendidly done. Sex (the Bishop’s love of fleshly pleasures, recalling the mother of his children, the dirty pictures he anticipates decorating his tomb ‘one Pan/Ready to twitch the Nymph’s last garment off’) and aesthetic indulgence (the best marble for his tomb, not onion stone; that lump of blue lapis) are versions of one another, and, as Ruskin says, of a part with his snobbery about the best Latin. Gandolf’s ‘elucescebat’ is a sort of typo: it should be ‘elucebat’, ‘he was notable’ (from eluceo) — an appropriate legend to put upon a tomb. But in going for the showier, longer form of the word Gandolf has blundered, for elucescebat can actually only come from elucesco, ‘to shine, to dawn’ (so: ‘it was dawning…’). Ha ha!, as Nelson Muntz likes to say.

Still: I think it misunderstands this poem to see it as a straightforward satire on religious hypocrisy. There is, it’s hard to deny, a degree of Protestant anti-Catholic disdain about it—but there’s something else here. The Bishop’s incapacity to imagine death as anything other than a kind of diminished, continuing life, as if his human body will grow slowly fossilised, petrified into a stone version of itself, whilst his consciousness continues to reside, speaks to his vitality: ‘by such slow degrees … stretch my feet forth straight as stone can point,/And let the bedclothes, for a mortcloth, drop/Into great laps and folds of sculptor’s-work.’

Even on his deathbed, he is a man of extreme aliveness and energy, and he cannot think outside of that. Though much of this poem reveals him as venal, petty, self-indulgent, lustful and avaricious, there is — appropriately, given its literally sacramental character — something genuinely mysterious and wondrous about him imagining his postmortem self observing the eucharist being offered up to future congregants:

And then how I shall lie through centuries,
And hear the blessed mutter of the mass,
And see God made and eaten all day long,
And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste
Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke!

As the Bishop’s body is miraculously metamorphosed into stone, so the bread of the wafer is miraculously changed into the body of Christ. Life is a flame, and the Bishop cannot conceive of that flame being altogether snuffed out. Then again, he can’t — as he really ought, being a Bishop — make that other imaginative leap, and conceive of death as a passage into a wholly other kind of life, because he is too mired in his own self, his own ego, his existential inertia. Still, there is magic in these lines: the murmurous plosives of blessed mutter of the mass, the silky sibilance of that steady taste, strong stupefying incense-smoke. Any Catholic will tell you that even a bad priest can be a vehicle for grace: it is the grace itself, rather than the character of the individual priest, that is the crucial thing.

One thing I’ve never been sure about, with this poem. When the Bishop says:

And this life too, popes, cardinals and priests,
Saint Praxed at his sermon on the mount,
Your tall pale mother with her talking eyes

… he’s mixing-up Praxed, after whom the church is named, and Christ, who delivered the sermon on the mount. But he’s also mixing up Praxed’s gender: for Santa Prassede was a woman, not a man. Is this the Bishop’s error? Or Browning’s? It could be either, though it seems a strange thing for the Bishop, whose church this is, to get wrong. But then, it would be a strange thing for Browning to get wrong too: he visited the actual church, and its altarpiece is a painting of Saint Praxed herself:

The name, at any rate, has a long e: Praxēd — though that’s not hitherto how I’ve been pronouncing the poem’s title (I shall amend my pronunciation going forward).

Saint Praxedes or Praxedis — in Greek the name is Πραξηδίς — is a Christian saint of the 2nd century. She and her sister, Saint Prudentiana, assisted fellow Christians during a period of Roman persecution under Emperors Marcus and Antoninus II: they buried the bodies of the dead, distributed food and eventually were martyred themselves for refusing to worship the pagan gods. But we can see from their names that the two sisters embody two different approaches to life: Sister Prudence the more contemplative life, inward and considered; Sister Praxed (her name comes from πρᾶξις, which means ‘work, deed, doing, action’) the more outward, active, engaged. Like Rachel and Leah, they embody these complementary versions of Christian living: the life contemplative (for instance, sealed away in a nunnery) and the life active — out in the world, doing good works. As to whether it is faith or good works that saves us: this was a major fault-line between different branches of Christian faith, and one of the issues at stake in the whole Oxford movement, Camden society kerfuffle.

What really interests me, in relation to this poem, is the semantic field of πρᾶξις as a word. Did Browning know (it’s very possible he did) that as well as meaning ‘act, action, activity, deed, doing’, Ancient Greeks used praxis to mean ‘business dealing’, ‘success’, the collection of debts? And also that it was a euphemism for sexual intercourse? All these things seem to speak to the life the Bishop, in this poem, has led.

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As our consciousnesses become more and more online, like a tree-trunk expanding around and swallowing a nearby iron lampost as it grows, online sources will become more and more central to our sense of how the world is. Here is Wikipedia the Much Cited (to deploy the Homeric epithet) on the ‘toothbrush moustache’:

The toothbrush moustache is a style of moustache in which the sides are vertical (or nearly so), often approximating the width of the nose and visually resembling the bristles on a toothbrush. First becoming popular in the United States in the late 19th century, it later spread to Germany and elsewhere. Comedians such as Charlie Chaplin and Oliver Hardy popularized it, reaching its heyday during the interwar years. By the end of World War II, the association with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler made it controversial, leading to it being colloquially termed the 'Hitler moustache'.

This entails some common-sense observation: obviously once this style of ’tache became more associated with Hitler than Chaplin it would retreat from fashionability. But what evidence is there that it ‘first became popular in the United States in the late 19th century’? The article cites but one source, and not a scholarly one: ‘Rich Cohen, “Becoming Adolf” Vanity Fair (November 2007)’. Not that I would want to impugn Cohen’s scholarship, but this is probably not enough. Was North America the origin-place of the toothbrush moustache, whence its popularity spread to the UK and Germany? Or might it be that two movie stars, one of them English and one in a world-famous duo with an Englishman, were the vector of fashion-spread? When he was a young man Hitler sported a much larger moustache, the kaiser-style. Here he is, on the far right (appropriately) in this World War 1 photo:

His clipped toothbrush dates from the 1920s. He is supposed to have trimmed his facial hair so as to copy the look of Gottfried Feder, German economic theorist whose lectures inspired Hitler to found the Nazi party (which Feder later joined).

Chaplin’s ‘Tramp’ character, with the abbreviated ’tache, debuted in 1914 (in Kid Auto Races at Venice). Ollie Hardy should have had more sense began wearing his in the mid-1920s.

If ‘German moustache’ suggests something more horizontal, waxed and prominent, there is evidence that the type of moustache under current consideration was known as the ‘English moustache’, never mind what Vanity Fair might say. ‘I happened,’ says a character in Sholokhov’s Cossack epic Тихий Дон (Tikhii Don, 1928-40), ‘to run up against a Kornilov officer in a fight—a brisk little colonel, with his moustache trimmed English-fashion, two streaks like snot under his nose.’ [The Don Flows Home to the Sea, 410]. This portion of the novel was published in 1932, although it relates the kind of exchange Sholokhov would have had in the actual Russian civil war, from the early 1920s. Snot is a disparaging, if not inaccurate, way of talking about this style of facial hair, but what interests me is that this was regarded in Russia as an English style.

What other evidence is there? Here’s an article in The Lady’s Realm (a British magazine) from the 1890s, itemising various aspects of male couture and fashion, including what the magazine specifically calls ‘the toothbrush moustache:’1

This, qua toothbrush, is rather more horizontally extensive than we might associate with the moustache-terminology—though it does look like a toothbrush.

My sense is that the clipped, constrained ‘toothbrush’ was an English compromise. When Victoria married Albert, and the now Prince Royal brought to Britain his whole-lip tache (along with Christmas Trees and cartes des visites) there was some suspicion: ‘it is said that the mustache worn by Prince Albert was the cause of a great deal of the distrust and suspicion with which many of Her Majesty’s subjects long regarded her consort,’ said Current Literature in 1897. We’re in the long shadow of the Regency fashion for clean-shaven male faces (‘it was strictly forbidden for many years that a man with a beard should present himself before an English sovereign. This rule was in fashion as late as the Sepoy rebellion in India [that is, 1857] …’).2 Albert’s moustache covered the whole of his upper lip, and such moustaches, and bigger ones (such as the winged one sported by Kaiser Wilhelm which ‘triggered a major moustache fad’ according to Allan Peterkin, though more on the Continent than in Britain)3 were not to be directly adopted. But a smaller ’tache, trimmed to fit more neatly under the nose, could be. There were, it was believed, health benefits to this.

The mid-nineteenth century brought new anxieties about air quality in industrial, urban environments and the injurious effects of climate, environment and atmosphere upon the body … for advocates of facial hair such anxieties offered a further and handy opportunity to bolster their claims for the supposed utility of [facial hair]. It seems no coincidence that, by the 1860s, the supposed benefits of moustaches and beards had widened to include protection of the voice and throat for the clergy and public speakers and a protective shield for workers in dusty environments, cementing in the public mind their important role as a natural filter.4

Comparing facial hair to ‘The Respirator’, a device patented by Julius Jeffreys in the 1830s, designed to help breathing and filter out impurities, Withey dilates upon the ‘beard craze’ of the 1850s and 1860s when

the idea of the beard as ‘nature’s filter’ was given full vent. For Erasmus Wilson and Edwin Chadwick, ‘the Mustachio was a natural respirator defending the lungs against the inhalation of dust and cold’ as well as a protector against heat. Wilson notes the utility of the moustache in both hot and cold climes … Alexander Rowland noted the prevalence of moustaches in cavalry regiments that ‘act like a respirator’. [In 1876] the aptly-named physician George Beard also allowed that facial hair could be a useful appendage for sufferers of hay-fever, in directing the ‘irritating particles’ away from the nasal passage.

A neat little moustache directly under the nostrils would furnish these benefits without making too ostentatious a show of itself.

So I think Wikipedia is wrong: the toothbrush moustache is a late Victorian and Edwardian style particularly associated with the English that spread, in part because of the success of English comedian Charlie Chaplin, around the world. Its associations were neatness and hygiene.

I could ‘correct’ the Wikipedia entry, of course, but at the moment I’m busy adding ‘universally acclaimed as the greatest writer since Shakespeare’ to this entry. Incidentally the image there shows me clean-shaven, although I presently sport an English moustache, over an English goatee.

Relatedly, the funniest thing I ever said off-the-cuff relates to the toothbrush moustache. Some years ago my wife and I were visiting author James Lovegrove and his wife Lou, and drinking Pimms in their garden in the sunshine. We were discussing, for some reason, the habit some women have of trimming their pubic hair into a narrow vertical line, the so-called ‘Brazilian wax’. ‘Some women go further,’ said James. ‘They top-and-tail it, so that it resembles nothing so much as a Hitler moustache.’ ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘that’s called a Boys-from-Brazilian.’

I’m here all week. Try the veal.

A recent post on BDM’s Notebook, ‘sometimes books are hard to read’ (capitalless, sic) revisits the question of difficulty. Morrison’s Beloved is presented as an example: a great novel certainly, though surely not that difficult. The essay also discusses Ulysses, which—again—really isn’t that hard (as opposed to Finnegans Wake, which genuinely is). But fair enough.

There’s a certain kind of readerly person who really hates admitting that some books are hard to read. If I were to armchair speculate about this kind of person’s psychology—and I am doing that—I’d say that at some formative time they became defensive about their tastes, in particular over being accused of being pretentious and not really enjoying what they said they enjoyed. … This is ancient news in internet terms, but back when Pete Buttigieg was running for president he said his favorite book was Ulysses and this statement was, impossibly, an entire discourse cycle, to the point where declarations were being made that nobody would ever read Ulysses for fun. Of course, that’s a stupid claim. People do lots of things for fun, many of which I find harder to imagine than reading James Joyce. (There are people out there who run marathons.) You can be having a blast inching through Ulysses at ten pages a sitting, which might not be “fun” in the sense of “easy” but is “pleasurable” in the sense of “you enjoy doing this.” Saying your favorite book is Ulysses might come off as “try hard” but at BDM Industries we are fans of try hards.

There may be someting in this—in, that is, the sense that that ‘difficult’ literature is out of fashion because it is perceived as elitism, as pretentious, as ‘try-hard’, where ‘easy’ literature, in the sense of: accessible, widely-read, popular-culture is in, not least because nobody now wants to give the impression of being a snob and turning their nose up at it. The old Bourdieu argument in Distinction—in essence, that upper class people like ‘high art’, middle-class people like the middlebrow and working class people like popular culture—no longer applies. Anthony Burgess despised The Beatles, but now people think of them as high culture; Hollywood films are objects of elevated critical discussion; Bob Dylan is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and so on. Adorno loved Schoenberg and hated Jazz, because Schoenberg provides resistance and therefore aesthetic pleasure, where pop music provides only commodified smoothness and repetition that actualises the deracinated, repetitive, wage-slave labour of industrialised capitalism. Resistance is, in an aesthetic sense, congruent with ‘difficulty’.

I love The Beatles, many Hollywood movies, and spend much of my creative and critical live in the groves of science-fiction, that degraded, adolescent and low-rent genre, so I am not essaying any kind of de haut on bas gesture here. At the same time, I once translated Finnegans Wake into Latin and I wrote a science-fiction novelisation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, so ‘try-hard’ and ‘pretentious’ are not labels I’m going to be able to slough off. I like the easy stuff, and I like the hard, and I wonder if the trick isn’t putting the hard into the easy, somewhat along the lines of William Empson’s definition of pastoral.

But that’s not what this particular substack is about. Rather I’m intrigued by a particular hole in BDM’s argument. Overall I would agree that there has been a cultural shift towards simpler accessibility and away from more ‘difficult’ textual strategies, or at least there have in some areas: music, the novel, cinema. But in one magisterium that’s not true: video games.

Some years ago, John Lanchester published an essay about called ‘Is It Art?’1 It’s an essay that deserves to be better known than it is. Lanchester considers gaming as a sort of invisible seismic shift in culture, and one of the things he’s good on is precisely the difficulty of most video games. Here he is on Ken Levine’s 2K Boston/2K Australia game Bioshock, which he likes a great deal:

As a video game, BioShock fully subscribes to the conventions of the medium, and if you as a non-gamer were to pick it up and give it a try, it is these you would probably notice most. Not just the conventions of which buttons and levers you press to move about the world of the game (annoying and hard to recollect as these often are) and not just the in-game mechanics, such as the ‘plasmids’ which you have to inject to give your character the powers he needs, or the tapes which are conveniently left around for you to discover and play back to hear the story of Rapture; but also the whole package of conventions and codes and how-tos which become second nature to video-game players, but which strike non-gamers as arbitrary and confining and a little bit stupid. Northrop Frye once observed that all conventions, as conventions, are more or less insane; Stanley Cavell once pointed out that the conventions of cinema are just as arbitrary as those of opera. Both those observations are brought to mind by video games, which are full, overfull, of exactly that kind of arbitrary convention. Many of these conventions make the game more difficult.

Gaming is a much more resistant, frustrating medium than its cultural competitors. Older media have largely abandoned the idea that difficulty is a virtue; if I had to name one high-cultural notion that had died in my adult lifetime, it would be the idea that difficulty is artistically desirable. It’s a bit of an irony that difficulty thrives in the newest medium of all – and it’s not by accident, either. One of the most common complaints regular gamers make in reviewing new offerings is that they are too easy. (It would be nice if a little bit of that leaked over into the book world.)

As to why it should be that is, the same fans who actively prize ‘difficulty’ in their video games spurn it as they might spurn a rabid dog when it crops up in their novels and movies and music—well, that’s a profound question.

Here’s Martial, Epigrams 6:54:

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Tantos et tantas si dicere Sextilianum,
Aule, vetes, iunget vix tria verba miser.
‘Quid sibi vult?’ inquis. Dicam, quid suspicer esse:
Tantos et tantas Sextilianus amat.

The epigram hinges on the phrase ‘tantos et tantas’, twice repeated, which is styled as being something Sextilianus is always saying, and which Martial’s friend Aulus wishes he’d stop saying. Martial tells Aulus: it’s no good—if we could get Sextilianus to stop saying tantos et tantas, why then he wouldn’t be able to string three words together! You ask why? It’s because he simply loves ‘tantos et tantas’.

What’s going on here is that Sextilianus has a sexual preference for big men who have big penises, and won’t stop telling the world about it. Tantus is an adjective that means ‘of such size, of such measure, so much, so great’. It is used as a substantive to suggest ‘hugeness’.

How to translate ‘tantos et tantas’? Nigel Kay goes with: ‘huge men hugely endowed’ which has the virtue of clarity, but which misses the idiomatic euphemism, evasively phrased yet obvious, of the original.1 One way of approaching it would be to deploy a Carry-On style. As it might be:

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Stop Sextilianus saying “oh he’s big—and he’s big (if you know what I mean)”
Aulus? The poor guy would hardly be able to string three words together!
“Why is he always on about it?’ you ask. I’ll tell you my suspicion:
Sextilianus simply loves them big—and big (if you know what I mean)!

This is a bit ungainly, for an epigram. The old Loeb2 takes a strange tack:

If, Aulus, you forbid Sextilianus to say the words “so tall!”—masculine or feminine—he can put scarcely three words together, the wretched fellow. “What is the matter with him?” you say. I’ll tell you what I suspect. Sextilianus has “so tall” attraction of both genders!

Bisexuality was, perhaps, fairly racy for 1920 (Victorian editions of Martial tended simply to omit the more obscene epigrams altogether), but this is misleading. It does reflect the fact that tantos is the accusative masculine plural of ‘tantus’ and tantas the accusative feminine plural—but that’s not because Martial is referring to men and women, but because an adjective has to agree in number and gender with its (in this case implied) noun. Here the noun for the first tantus is homines, which is masculine, where the noun for the second is caudas (singular cauda, ‘penis, cock’) which is, perhaps surprisingly, a feminine word in Latin. So old Loeb is more-or-less a bust translation wise.

Try again:

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Big lads with big “lads” Sextilianus keeps saying:
You’d stop him, Aulus? Poor guy wouldn’t say three words!
‘Why’s he always banging on?’ you ask. Tell you what I think:
Sextilianus simply loves big lads with—big lads.

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Sextilianus keeps saying big jocks with big cocks
You’d veto that, Aulus? He’d have nothing to say!
Why does he keep saying it? I’ll tell you my theory:
Sextilianus just loves big jocks with big cocks!

‘Veto’, there, maybe looks a little formal (though that is what the Latin says: Aule, vetes (vetes is the second-person singular present active subjunctive of veto, ‘I forbid, prevent, prohibit, veto’). Maybe rhyme will help:

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Well strong and well-hung: Sextilian’s catch-phrase—
You’d shut him up, Aulus? He would be struck dumb!
‘Why though?’ Here's my best guess for that which he says:
Sextilian likes them well strong and well-hung.

Hmm: harder than you’d think. Maybe you can do better.

Philip K Dick had, we can be honest, a precarious grasp on sanity. In 1974 he had what he believed to be a divine intervention into his life: answering the door an attractive young brunette had a tremendous effect on him: she was wearing a Christian ‘fish’ symbol around her neck, and for Dick the light glinting off this was freighted with significance. He saw a strange pink gleam, and heard God speaking out of the Beatles’ ‘Strawberry Fields’ playing on the radio. He was informed that first century Rome and twentieth century California existed in a supratemporal superposition, that Dick himself was actually the apostle Simon, or perhaps Thomas, or else a thought-control device implanted by the CIA, or a spirit entity called ‘Firebright,’ or Buddha. God told Dick his kid had an undiagnosed hernia—this, it seems, turned out to be true—and told him that the FBI and the Moscow KGB (the latter via a long-distance telepathic ray) were persecuting him. These messages, he came to believe, emanated from a ‘Vast Active Living Intelligence System’, ‘VALIS’, located somewhere in outer space. Jonatham Lethem:

In February, after oral surgery for an impacted wisdom tooth, during which he is given sodium pentothal, [PKD] experiences the first of a sequence of overwhelming visions that will last through and intensify during March, then taper intermittently throughout the year. Interpretation of these revelations, which are variously ascribed to benign and malign influences both religious and political (including but not limited to God, Gnostic Christians, the Roman Empire, Bishop Pike [a friend of Dick’s who had died in 1969], and the KGB), will preoccupy Dick for much of his remaining life. “It hasn’t spoken a word to me since I wrote The Divine Invasion. The voice is identified as Ruah, which is the Old Testament word for the Spirit of God. It speaks in a feminine voice and tends to express statements regarding the messianic expectation. It guided me for a while. It has spoken to me sporadically since I was in high school. I expect that if a crisis arises it will say something again . . . “ He begins writing speculative commentary on what he comes to call “2-3-74.”1

Dick worked this series of visions into his later fiction, and also wrote out a non-fiction account, selections of which have been published as The Exegesis of Philip K Dick (edited by Lethem and Pamela Jackson. Selections only are all that we are likely to get: the entirety is a million words and not, apparently, in a very coherent state). But Dick’s mental health was frail long before 1974. A lifelong user of amphetamines (initially prescribed for him as a child to help his asthma) he developed the unsalutary habit of pepping himself up in the morning with speed to get his writing done, and then bringing himself down at the end of the day with large amounts of alcohol. He had periods of anorexia, frequent anxiety attacks, several times attempted suicide or engaged in parasuicidal activity, and experienced episodes of intense paranoid mania. During one of these he managed to persuade the police that his third wife, Anne, was a dangerous psychotic out to kill him (she was incarcerated). In 1971 Dick’s house in San Rafael was broken into and ransacked, his safe blown open and all his private papers missing. Dick spiralled into persecution mania, spooling endless theories about the perpetrators: it was the Internal Revenue Service, it was the CIA, it was undercover cops, it was a neo-Nazi gang. We can’t be sure exactly what happened, but the explanation I find most likely is that of clinical psychologist Kyle Arnold: that Dick trashed his own house in a paranoid frenzy, and then either construed elaborate persecutory fantasies to hide the event, or possibly actually forgot he had done so in his amphetamine craziness.2 Speed certainly made Dick immensely productive—he published scores of short stories and multiple novels every year from the 1950s and into the 1960s: but his regimen didn’t do him any good—physically (he died at the age of 53) or mentally.

It’s tempting to think of Dick as an outlier, but in fact this period—the 1950s-70s—saw a number of major writers go mad. Take Evelyn Waugh, a very different person, and writer, to Dick. His reputation had been established by Decline and Fall (1928), A Handful of Dust (1934), and Brideshead Revisited (1945), but he was not happy. Commissioned into the Royal Marines in 1940 he had found, an unfit man in his late 30s, the physical training very hard and believed it provoked rheumatism throughout his body (he had ‘so stiff a spine that he found it painful even to pick up a pen’). After the war he suffered from physical instability, rheumatic pains, insomnia, and he often talked in letters of his ‘p.m.’, his abbreviation for ‘persecution mania’. To address his physical debilities and sleeplessness he was taking large doses of chloral. In 1954 he boarded the SS Staffordshire bound for Sri Lanka via Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, hoping that rest and weaning himself off the chloral would improve his health and enable him to get back to writing. At sea he wrote a letter to his wife Laura suggesting that his ‘nut’ was ‘clearing’: ‘it is clear that I have been poisoning myself with chloral in the last six months. I will come home and lead a luny bin life’—whether this eccentric spelling of loony-bin means he was thinking of actually committing himself to an institution, or just that he would lead a more straitened life at home, isn’t clear. But his ‘nut’ was not clearing. A radio playing in the next-door cabin disturbed him: ‘my p.m. took it for other passengers whispering about me.’ The voices intensified as the voyage went on: he heard them as various accusations—that he was homosexual, impotent, a Jew, a fascist, a snob—and things got so bad that he abandoned the voyage at Port Said and took a room in a Cairo hotel. From here he wrote again to his wife: ‘I have been the victim of an experiment in telepathy which made me think I was really going crazy’.

Waugh at first believed that what he called ‘Tanker’s Box’ had interfered with his mind, projecting the voices or opening his consciousness to telepathy. Tanker was his nickname for Diana Oldridge, a neighbour of the Waughs, who possessed a Radionics Box, a pseudo-medical device the size of a wireless, covered in knobs, that supposedly cured illness by means of radio waves (there were lots of these kinds of devices around in the 20^th-century: Wilhelm Reich’s ‘Orgone Accumulator’ was another). Waugh wrote that Oldridge absolutely ‘believed in “the black box”, a contraption which was supposed to cure both men and beasts from a distance if a sample of blood or hair were submitted. Many successes were reported.’ But now he came to think that the box had somehow opened his mind to telepathic receptivity, and that he was hearing what the world really thought of him.

In the grip of his psychosis Waugh flew on to Colombo, but, as he wrote to Laura, the voices followed him: he now came to believe not that he was telepathic but that he had been possessed by demons. Finally he flew back to London where his doctor diagnosed him as suffering from bromide poisoning from his drugs regimen. His medication was changed and the voices and other hallucinations went away. Waugh was relieved that he had not been taken over by a demon, but had been merely mad: ‘clean off my onion!’ He went on to write-up the experience in fictional form in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957).

Around the same time, and unrelatedly, Muriel Spark was having her own psychotic episode. During the war she had found herself, after a happenstance sequence of events, wandering around the London house of poet Louis MacNeice in the small hours, during the Blitz (MacNeice and his family were not home at the time). She later reported this as a profound experience, shaping her decision to become a writer. As Frances Wilson notes, in her excellent biography (from where I am taking much of this) Spark’s night in MacNeice’s empty house ‘became the driving force in her imagination and she continued to reframe it and recast it for the rest of her life.’

In the later 1940s and early 1950s Spark enjoyed some success as a poet. Before she published her first novel (The Comforters 1957), Spark had a psychotic episode. She was living a complicated, unstable life, her relationship with her lover Derek Stanford (who refused to marry her) was breaking up. She went up to Edinburgh in June 1953.

She was taking Dexedrine [an amphetamine] in order to lose weight and her mind was moving at 100 mph: in a seventeen-page, double-sided letter she wrote to Stanford [from Edinburgh] she describes being ‘at sea’ among the crowds and unable to ‘grasp’ her surroundings: ‘… the “here and now” bewilders me. I can’t grasp what is actually happening in the present tense.”

In this state of mind Spark went to see a performance of T S Eliot’s then-new work The Confidential Clerk—a weak play, certainly not one of Eliot’s significant achievements, but a text that spoke very directly to Spark. She believed Eliot (whom she had never met) had put coded messages into the play in a bid directly to communicate with her. ‘Muriel, scribbling rapidly throughout the performance, returned to Bruntsfield Place [in Edinburgh] to decode the messages which, she believed, had been addressed to her.’ Back in her London flat Spark found words and letters literally leaping about on her desk as she worked. She deciphered feverishly, both Eliot’s writing and the Biblical Book of Job. Frances Wilson attributes the psychotic episode to ‘Dexedrine poisoning, the separation from Stanford, plus spiritual overload, excessive work, a potato and baked-bean diet’ and a mental reversion to her wartime work amongst the coders and decoders of British military intelligence.

The Confidential Clerk had opened in London at the Lyric Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue and on 25^th March Muriel saw the play again, this time finding messages from Eliot in the programme notes. Further messages were secreted to her, Muriel told Christine [Brooke-Rose], in the blurbs he wrote for Faber. Eliot was posing as their window cleaner, she warned her friends Neville and June Braybrooke, so as to pry into their papers … [she said Eliot claimed] that Danny Abse was ‘out to get them’; an encrypted message to Muriel herself, she told Christine, read ‘Dirty Yid’ … Muriel thought Eliot had broken into her flat to steal her food, and in Eliot’s collection of essays The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1935) Eliot described a poem’s ‘meaning’ as nothing more than a tactic to keep the mind of the reader ‘diverted and quiet while the poem does is work upon him: much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a bit of nice meat for the house dog.’ The extraordinary image of the poet as burglar and the poetic ‘work’ as theft that occurs through the mediation of a distraction was both terrifying and thrilling to Spark: the image recalls her description of creeping around the house of the famous poet ten years earlier, unable to attach any meaning or ‘system of thought’ to the things she touched until she knew to whom they belonged. Muriel’s psychotic episode, in which a famous poet now came into her house, had its roots in the night she spent in MacNeice’s study, and the idea of the burglar in the inner sanctum recurred in her writing like a mantra.3

Eventually a doctor intervened: Dr Lieber of Wimpole Street took Spark off her Dexedrine, instructed her to eat a balanced diet, to stop writing and prescribed Largactil—that is, Chlorpromazine, in 1954 a brand-new anti-psychotic. This had side-effects that Spark found disagreeable, but it did stop her hallucinations and her persecution mania. She wrote to Stanford : ‘I don’t feel my inward sufferings so acutely—“my sorrow, my sorrow” as I used to call it.’ On the 1^st May she was received into the Roman Catholic church.

These three cases have various things in common. They’re all major writers. All three were hepped-up on drugs, under strain in their personal lives, living through the febrile postwar world in the shadow of mass death. All at moments of transition in their careers. Waugh, having outgrown his early fame, was on the cusp of the second act of his career, and greater public esteem and recognition (although Gilbert Pinfold, the book he made out of his psychosis, was not well-received). Spark, having experienced small-scale fame as a poet and served for a tumultuous period as president of the Poetry Society was in the process of reinventing herself as a novelist, which is where she would achieve her greatest fame. Dick, who in the 1950s nursed ambitions to be a ‘proper’ novelist (his six realist non-sf novels were all rejected) had settled into the round of pulp science fiction in the 1960s, earning some but not much money: in the later 1970s he moved in a different direction, writing what amount to accounts of his psychotic episode, but ahead of him lay the big cinema breakthrough of Blade Runner, and the many other Dickian film adaptations which raised his reputation to global levels (though Dick didn’t live long enough to see most of this).

But there’s another things at work here. The lineaments of these psychoses are writerly, or more precisely readerly-writerly. The nature of these individuals’ psychoses is that they read their environments with extraordinary attention, taking random and non-deictic signifiers as personally meaningful and deictic: a decoding of the various texts that surround; and then all three write their experience into their fiction and non-fiction. Spark was always fascinated by codes and decoding, by secrets and blackmail, ciphers and spies, which occur and reoccur in her novels, and she wrote her life into her fiction repeatedly. Dick wrote ‘2-3-74’ into his VALIS trilogy, where he himself appears under the pseudonym Horselover Fat. Waugh wrote Gillbert Pinfold. Madness as close-reading.

The point is that these psychotic breakdowns are intensifications of being a writer. I have never had a psychotic or schizoid interlude like these three, but in milder form I am certainly familiar with their shape of them, with the compulsion to ‘read’ the world, and other texts, in immense, personalised and perhaps productive ways.

We can, of course, be confident that a Vast Active Living Intelligent System was not beaming thoughts into Philip Dick’s mind, that there were no entities whispering disparaging comments into Waugh’s ear, and that T S Eliot did not encode hidden messages directed at Muriel Spark in The Cocktail Party. But sometimes reading our incoming sense data in detail does reveal truths.

Elyn Saks’s autobiography, The Centre Cannot Hold: My Journey through Madness (2007) describes her own experience with psychosis as nightmarish: ‘all the bizarre images, impossible things happening, and utter, utter terror’. She relates her first experience, when she was eight years old, describing a kind of existential ‘disorganisation’ that followed on from her asking her father if they could go swimming, and he snapping at her. From this her identity dissolved: something the reverse of the accounts summarised above:

My awareness (of myself, of him, of the room, of the physical reality around and beyond us) instantly grows fuzzy. Or wobbly. I think I am dissolving. I feel—my mind feels—like a sandcastle with all the sand slicing away in the receding surf ... The ‘me’ becomes a haze, and the solid centre from which one experiences reality breaks up like a bad radio signal. There is no longer a sturdy vantage point from which to look out, take things in, assess what’s happening. No core holds things together, providing the lens through which to see the world, to make judgments and comprehend risk. Random moments of time follow one another. Sights, sounds, thoughts and feelings don’t go together. No organising principle takes successive moments in time and puts them together in a coherent way from which sense can be made. And it’s all taking place in slow motion.

The contrast of this with the writers (in a sense Saks is also a writer, the author of her autobiography; but I am positing the descriptor as a more core identity than ‘sometimes writes books’) is instructive. There were voices, a feature of schizoid psychosis often reported: Saks believed that houses were talking to her, saying for instance: ‘look closely. You are special. You are especially bad. Look closely and ye shall find.’ Saks found treatment, a diagnosis of schizophrenia, although the medical establishment tended then to see Saks’s psychosis in everything she did. She had a brain haemorrhage, and her doctor took her report of head-pain to be part of her illusions. She happened to be seeing her therapist on the morning of 9/11, who assumed that she was psychotic when she started talking about planes flying into towers.

One thing that strikes me about Dick, Spark and Waugh (the ‘shag, marry and kill’ of literature) is the way their respective psychoses involve communication: other people (or other beings) initiating communication with the sufferers and then they themselves writing out their experiences for, we can assume, the benefit of others. Writing is a kind of communication, from the author to the readers. These psychoses invert that dynamic. The author becomes the audience, their madness a hermeneutic intensity, interpretimania—as opposed to the insanity of furor, angry-madness like Achilles’ in the Iliad, or melancholy madness—and then turn the reception around into a textual broadcast, a reconnection with the rest of the world. When Saul Bellow’s Herzog goes mad he writes many elaborate letters, to the living and the dead.4 In writerly psychosis meaning is retained, meaning is dispersed, and the twin poles of ego (you are important enough for the century’s greatest poet to single you out!—you are Thomas the Apostle!) and abjection (you’re nobody: contemptible, T S Eliot thinks you’re a ‘dirty Yid’; the whole world thinks you a snob, a fascist, impotent) construe a distinct lamination of the important and the trivial.

Nabokov’s short story ‘Signs and Symbols’ (1948) deals with this matter. Nabokov talks of ‘referential mania’ and the story, brief as it is, brilliantly pins the psychosis to a specific character in the tale and to us, the reader, parsing Nabokov’s expert prose and succession of vivid moments and images for ‘significance’. The tale achieves this with its cleverly mid-leap ending. An elderly married couple, émigrés in New York, refugees from Hitler, have an insane son, who is sequestered in an asylum. The couple are poor, beaten-down, subsisting on the charity of the husband’s brother Isaac (a successful businessman, who had emigrated decades earlier). The son suffers from this referential mania. Everything around him means intensely, and means him, in some sinister overwhelming manner:

The system of his delusion had been the subject of an elaborate paper in a scientific monthly … ‘Referential mania’ Herman Brink had called it. In these very rare cases the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence … Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must interpret. Everything is a cipher and of everything is he the theme … He must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very air he exhales is indexed and filed away. If only the interest he provokes were limited to his immediate surroundings—but alas it is not! With distance the torrents of wild scandal increase in volume and volubility. The silhouettes of his blood corpuscles, magnified a million times, flit over vast plains; and still farther, great mountains of unbearable solidity and height sum up in terms of granite and groaning firs the ultimate truth of his being.5

The story is not long. The young madman’s elderly parents travel to the mental institution to visit their son, bringing him a birthday gift: a basket of various fruit jams (‘jellies’, Nabokov calls these, after the American manner). Arriving they are told they cannot see him: he has, for a second time, attempted suicide. He is not to be disturbed, so the couple return home without delivering their gift. Back in their dingy apartment, the old man cannot is unable to sleep, worrying vocally about their son. The old woman, who has accepted her lot in life, a universe of disappointment and unhappiness, looks through a photo-album, pictures of their child when he was younger. Although it is much too late for a telephone call, the phone rings. The old woman (whose English is better than her husband’s) answers: a young woman has dialled the wrong number. She puts the phone down and the story tells us: ‘her hand went to her old tired heart. “It frightened me,” she said.’ She was scared the call, at this unlikely hour, was the asylum ringing to report that their son had attempted suicide a third time, this time successfully. And then the phone rings again. It is the same young woman: ‘the same toneless anxious young voice asked for Charlie.’ ‘You have the incorrect number,’ the old woman tells her. ‘I will tell you what you are doing: you are turning the letter O instead of the zero.’ At this the couple sit down to tea. The old man, having decided they must bring their son out of the mental institution to live with them in the apartment, is happier. This is how the story ends:

They sat down to their unexpected festive midnight tea. The birthday present stood on the table. He sipped noisily; his face was flushed: every now and then he imparted a circular motion to his raised glass so as to make the sugar dissolve more thoroughly. … While she poured him another glass of tea, he put on his spectacles and re-examined with pleasure the luminous yellow, green, red little jars. His clumsy moist lips spelled out their eloquent labels: apricot, grape, beech plum, quince. He had got to crab apple when the telephone rang again.

The imputation is that, since the previous wrong number has been corrected, this will not be a repetition of that caller (although, perhaps, it could be) and therefore must be something else: something more dreadful.

John Lane’s reading of the story stresses how it both positions us, the reader, as outside the referential mania looking in, and also surreptitiously recruits us to the paranoid over-interpretation of details that characterises it. All the details build to a sense that the phone call at the end will communicate bad news about the son. The third paragraph opens: ‘That Friday everything went wrong’ and all the day’s malfunctions—it is raining; the subway train taking to the asylum breaks down; their bus is late and crowded; they notice a ‘tiny half-dead unfledged bird twitching in a puddle’—seems to speak to the circumstance of the mad boy. If ‘everything’ goes wrong on Friday, then are we licensed to believe that this everything includes the boy’s suicide? Lane astutely points out that the third phone call actually comes after midnight, so not on Friday; and we might think the things listed under ‘everything went wrong’ are trivial enough, more like wrong-number phone calls than bereavement: rain, inconveniences, petty annoyances. Perhaps the third phone call is merely another wong number—of perhaps it is the old man’s brother calling for some reason. Lane goes through the story in immense detail, providing possible readings for all its details, right up to the implied sourness of the ‘crab-apple’ in the final sentence and whether that sourness signifiers tragedy for the old couple (he also notes the way Nabokov plays throughout with pairs and tripets of things, items, adjectives, setting up the expectation of a narrative rule-of-three into which the final phone call seems to play.6 The extent to which such a reading aligns us with the mad boy, that interpreting the ‘signs and symbols’ of a literary text can become referentially manic, is also part of his analysis—as is his acknowledgement of Nabokov’s own dislike for ‘symbolism’ and his detestation of Freudian analysis, with its manifest and latent symbolisation, as if the soul can be ‘decoded’.

I think there is something else going on here. When the old woman settles down with her photo album the story gives us not only a potted history, in captured images, of her son’s growth and descent into insanity, but of the couple’s peripatetic life and of something else looming, huge and terrible, in the background.

When he had gone to bed she remained in the living room with her pack of soiled cards and her old albums. … She pulled the blind down and examined the photographs. As a baby he looked more surprised than most babies. From a fold in the album, a German maid they had had in Leipzig and her fat faced fiancé fell out. Minsk, the Revolution, Leipzig, Berlin, Leipzig, a slanting house-front badly out of focus. Four years old, in a park: moodily, shyly, with puckered forehead, looking away from an eager squirrel as he would from any other stranger. Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about. Age six—that was when he drew wonderful birds with human hands and feet, and suffered from insomnia like a grown-up man. His cousin, now a famous chess player. He again, aged about eight, already difficult to understand, afraid of the wallpaper in the passage, afraid of a certain picture in a book which merely showed an idyllic landscape with rocks on a hillside and an old cart wheel hanging from the branch of a leafless tree. Aged ten, the year they left Europe. The shame, the pity, the humiliating difficulties, the ugly vicious, backward children he was with in that special school. And then came a time in his life, coinciding with a long convalescence after pneumonia, when those little phobias of his which his parents had stubbornly regarded as the eccentricities of a prodigiously gifted child hardened as it were into a dense tangle of logically interacting illusions, making him totally inaccessible to normal minds.

The details are laid out, like cards placed on a table for a wise woman to interpret: we can intuit that the boy had artistic talent but that it was stifled by his psychosis; that for him images are interpretable in dire ways: aspects of the real world, the pattern on some wallpaper, the illustration described as ‘idyllic’, but with the cartwheel elevated in a tree suggestive, it seems to me, of death.7 The development of his insanity tracks the family’s exile, first fleeing the Russian Revolution, then the rise of Nazism: if the boy was ten when (let’s say, in 1940) they left Europe, he would be 18 at the time of the story. But as with Saks believing the buildings were talking to her and trying to tell her something tremendously important, and her analyst believing her account of 9-11 was simply an extension of this delusion rather than an actual, monumental event in which the buildings were indeed saying something extremely loud and significant—so, here, the sentence about Aunt Rosa speaks to the ‘truth’ in the boy’s wider delusion. Aunt Rosa lived her own mild mania, a common form: every piece of news is bad news, financial difficulties must mean bankruptcies, train journeys must invite accident, any illness must be cancerous growths ‘until,’ as Nabokov says, heartbreakingly ‘the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about’. There was something over and above the trivial inconveniences of day-to-day life that Aunt Rosa magnified in her anxious imagination, something much larger and more dreadful, and it lurks, not as referential mania but as ghastly, inescapable historical fact, over this story.8 The Holocaust, as madness, positioned Jews as simultaneously tremendously significant and important, such a threat that they must be eradicated to save the world, and as beneath contempt, as vermin, insects, abject creatures, nothing. Its psychosis was collective.

7

I’m thinking of those cartwheels-on-poles that litter Early Modern northern European landscape pictures, such as Brueghel’s ‘Triumph of Death’ (1562) and which I’d wager Nabokov is glancing at here.

The South Walesian branch of my ancestry, via my mother, is a lot of Bevanses (Roberts, my father’s surname, is a North Walesian name).1 As I say here, the family was divided between those who farmed and those who went down the pit. My mother’s great-grandmother (my great-great gran) was Gwenllian Phillips, née Bevan, of Trebryn, who had fourteen children. She ran away with a sheep shearer that her father, Evan Bevan, would not allow her to marry. She later returned to Trebryn and gave birth to Sarah, my great-grandmother; then ran away again, returned to give birth to another baby, a boy. Eventually her father relented, allowed her to marry her sheep shearer, and she went on to have another twelve kids. ‘Never lost one,’ my Nan (that is: my maternal grandmother) used to boast when I was a child. I’m not sure I grasped, as a youngster, what an achievement that was in the nineteenth-century.2

There is only one heirloom in my family, and this is it: a copy of the Bible in Welsh. It is William Morgan’s 1588 translation, Y Bibl cyssegr-lan sef Yr Hen Destament, a’r Newydd, ‘The Holy Bible, that is the Old Testament and the New’, revised and completed after Morgan’s death by Bishop Richard Parry and Dr John Davies (1620).

This edition was printed, as you can see, in 1746, by Joseph Bentham, a Cambridgeshire printer (Caer-grawnt is the Welsh for Cambridge).

It has been in my family since then or thereafter: a note from Evan Bevan occupies the rear flyleaf—written, interestingly, in English:

Mary Bevan, the daughter of Thomas Bevan by Catherine ’s[?wife] was born April 27th, Year 17[—]. Evan and Gwenllian Bevan son and daughter of the said Thomas and Cath[erine] Bevan, who died in their infancy. Catherine the daughter of Thomas Bevan by Catherine [?his] wife, was born year 1798.

Margret Bevan, born May 13th 180[-]

Ann Bevan, born August 17th 18[--]

Evan Bevan, second son of Thomas Bevan of Trebryn born March 25th 1810. Also Gwenllian again the daughter of Thomas Bevan by Catherine his wife, born Feb 7th 1816.

It was common to record these family events in a Bible, of course, although I’m intrigued that Thomas and Catherine, having named two children Evan and Gwenllian and losing them in their infancy, went on to reuse those names for later arrivals. Is that a little morbid? Perhaps it was also common practice.

Catherine Bevan her Book. The gift of her sister after her Death, Magret Edwards, July 19 1829. Written by me, E Bevan.

This may be my grandmother’s grandmother (my grandmother was born in 1901, and I wonder if more generations intervened between 1829 and the 20th-century than two, so perhaps it is my grandmother’s grandmother’s mother, or even gran).

The binding is not original: the book was in a poor way and in 1981 my parents paid a Canterbury bookbinder to re-do it. It was, he said, one of his most challenging jobs, requiring all the original threads removing and new thread carefully re-sewed through the old holes, the pages mended in many places and the whole carefully retooled in leather.

[Note: I was very sorry to hear of Ian Watson’s death last week. I knew Ian a little: we met from time to time and corresponded more often, but I admired his writing very much, from the sheer linguistic brilliance of The Embedding, through dozens of extraordinary, varied and thought-provoking novels, scores of amazing short stories, to his late but undimmed output, pretty much up until he died. There was nobody like Ian in British SF. I have read, I think, all his novels, and quite a few of his shorter pieces, and have recorded my reactions to many of these on a couple of blogs—one I have since shuttered completely, another I had folded away into privacy (but which I’ve now reopened, for the time being). At one point I was planning a short-ish critical account of Watson’s oeuvre, working title Unelementary, and though that stalled and got overtaken by other things, and though it’s hard to imagine a press picking it up (for it would hardly sell) I might revisit it—that he never got the critical attention he merited, never mind the commercial success, seems to me inarguable, and an engagement with his distinctive contribution to science fiction over more than half a century would be worth undertaking. I to my scattered blogposts go and pull this longer one on Watson’s duo of Kalevala-themed fantasias, Mana, in memoriam. I have not edited the present-tense with which I refer to him, here.]

I’ve been holding back writing about Watson’s two Mana books, for reasons to do with that mode of debilitation called ‘but where to start?’ Given my peculiar academic background, and the topic of my PhD lo these many years since, excuse me if I open with a completely left-field comparison: Robert Browning. A critic once described Pauline, Paracelsus and Sordello as like ‘three dragons, guarding the entrance to the gold of Browning’s mid-career poetry’. You see what he means: however much you might enjoy ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘Andrea Del Sarto’, you know that you can’t get a proper sense of Browning’s work without tackling the three brontosaur-sized texts with which he commenced his career. And I don’t mean to sound grudging: these are three Browninesque masterpieces: fascinatingly freaked and weirdly textured, hard and gnarly wonders. Just hard to get into.

The Mana books are mid-career rather than early for Watson; but there’s something in them that justifies the comparison I think. Lucky’s Harvest (1993) and The Fallen Moon (1994) are lengthy (uncharacteristically so for Watson, who is usually more at home in the 200-250-page bracket), dense with character and impacted with story—the overarching story is made up of characters who spend much of their time telling one another stories, or being seduced by story, and the for-want-of-a-better-world theology of the novel is of a God addicted to the stories humanity comprise. There’s lots to say about these novels. A dense-textured cake, or biscuit, of Watsonian almond bread.

That said, my first experience of reading them was choppy. I tried three times to get into them, and three times was bounced out by a dense opening suite of chapters set at a festival in a castle, laying dozens of characters and both backstory and worldbuilding all in one go. It was easier re-reading them, which is what I have now done. Indeed: re-reading them has given me some sense of what manner of friction caused my initial difficulty.

Mana (as I’m going to shorthand these two novels) is sort-of an epic fantasy: a quasi Dark Age or Medieval world, mostly forests and lakes, human settlements dotted here and there, socially feudal and conservative, rural livelihoods interpenetrated with magic—the ‘mana’ of the title. It is, if we wanted to periodic-tabulate it, an example of that mode of Fantasy that provides a pseudo-scientific rationale for its transports: the world, Kaleva, is a distant planet colonised by humans (and later also colonised by the humanoid alien species known as the Juttahat; although they turn out to be not independent agents but slaves to another, ophidian alien lifeform called the Issi). Access to Kaleva is not through conventional space travel—neither sub-light spaceships, nor any of the various FTL transportations—but through what we assume at first is an alien artefact discovered in the solar system. This enables people to pass through ‘mana’ space direct to Kaleva, said mana-space having weird and random effects on people’s DNA.

The first person to enter the artefact was an astronaut of Finnish extraction, and her memory of her grandmother’s recitals of the Suomi national epic, the Kalevala, shaped the reality of the destination planet. Hence: magic (‘mana’), the immortality of Lucky herself, and her more-than-a-hundred daughters—marrying and deflowering a daughter of Lucky confers immortality on the man involved—and the power of some mages to command things by ‘proclaiming’ them and adding ‘this is spoken!’. Hence also weird mutations that result in talking animals, canny cuckoos, mutants with powers to curse or bless, farsight or strange glamour. All the splendid Fantasy bag-and-baggage.

That said, and although this is a sort of Fantasy novel, it’s not like any other Fantasy novel I know. That, of course, is very much the Watsonian USP. He is never comfortable doing the expected thing, even though he knows (he is no fool) that doing the expected thing is exactly where commercial success nests. The publishers of Mana, Victor Gollancz, try their blurbing best with the beautiful monster they have agreed to unleash upon the world: ‘a work that rivals Frank Herbert’s Dune in scale, richness and complexity’, it says on the back of my copy of Lucky’s Harvest:

But the Mana books are really nothing like Dune, which—love it though I do—adopts a wholly conventional approach to its matter, narratively speaking: consecutive storytelling predicated on ‘what’s going to happen next?’, different p.o.v.’s braided into alternate chapters with cliff-hangers at the chapters’ ends and so on. That’s not what Watson does here. (Mana is a little more like Aldiss’s Helliconia, although denser and weirder and more formally complex.)

Since we’re talking Fantasy, I’m going to risk anachronism and compare the books to the current big beast in the Heroic Fantasy stockade, G R R Martin. Martin’s books were turned so successfully into a TV series in part because (and I intend no denigration of Martin’s talent when I say this) Martin’s instincts are those of a televisual storyteller. He’s very good at creating exactly the right size of character pool for his audience to grok all of them, and to give his audience choice to pick-and-choose which ones they’re going to identify with and care about the most; and he’s very skilled and stirring the story-pot so that things move on in a way that leavens the what’s-gonna-happen-next?-ness (which, let’s face it, is limited) by throwing curveballs at us and killing off characters willy-nilly. And fanny-nilly too. Really, I come to praise Martin not to bury him, because he’s achieved a remarkable thing, technically. It’s just a little ... disposable, after the event.

This is not what Watson does in these two novels. Martin’s strategy depends, as does most commercial Fantasy, upon a fundamentally linear narrative elaboration:—A happens and then B happens and then C happens, the readerly pleasure inhering in not being sure (until it happens) what C will be, exactly. Watson’s Mana formally as well as thematically, eschews linearity. Hence unfamiliarity and a certain stickiness in the onward process of reading. Hence also the unusual density and complexity. Two twinned novels. Embeddable they.

If this looks like a critic abdicating the responsibilities of simple ‘plot summary’, it’s probably because it is. There is a linear narrative threaded through the vesicles of the twin-novels, but it misrepresents the reading experience to over-emphasise it. There are about a hundred characters in play overall, human and alien; book one, Lucky’s Harvest concentrates upon a few of these: Osmo Van Maanen, one of the world’s most powerful Proclaimers and Lord of the castle at Maananford (the novels are notionally narrated by Osmo’s bibliophile and superannuated father) is one; Lucky herself another; and one of Lucky’s many daughters, Jatta, is a third. Jatta has been seduced by an alien Juttahat in disguise, and has given birth to ‘demon Jack’, a young boy with copper-coloured skin who grows at a vastly accelerated rate; by the second book he is having kids of his own. Osmo is a slightly unhinged nobleman, liable to tumble into love, or lash out at someone with a proclamation (‘it is spoken!’) that immediately assumes the iron force of inevitability. His near phobia where mutants are concerned leads him to banish Jatta and her uncanny child. Lucky, meanwhile, is trying to locate a second ‘Ukko’, like the one that transported them all to Kaleva in the first place, which she thinks is growing somewhere on the planet. Book two pays off some of the tensions developed in book one, with Kaleva falling into war, Lucky widowed, Osmo on the rise and the mysterious plotting of the alien races—of which impregnating Jatta was one play—becoming clearer.

There is an elaborate, and in places even an over-elaborate, placement at work in this book, which in turn leads me to wonder if Mana isn’t actually about balancing past and future, remediating the interaction of Fantasy and SF, situating the geometry of the imaginary—about, in other words, centralness. The work stands at its (as it were) centrally in the Watson canon not merely by virtue of its chronological position in his career from the late 1960s to the present day. It is a work formally embedded simultaneously in the mythic tradition of the Finnish Kalevala and in Watson’s own oeuvre—the intricate interweaving of myth and science pick up fascinations from the earliest books, just as the ‘mockymen’ mutants look forward to the thus-titled 2003 novel.

We could put it this way: the Mana books are ‘embedded’ in the larger frame of the various Kalevala stories, much as Joyce’s Ulysses is embedded within a structurally- and thematically-conceived framing version of the Odyssey. One way of reading a novel like this is to test our experience against our knowledge of the frame text, such that we mark the similarities and differences between (for instance) Väinämöinen and Watson’s Osmo. In fact, this frame is recursive in Mana in a way not true of Ulysses, because the SF conceit of the whole gives Watson an in-story rationalisation for why his alien world so closely resembles the Finnish national epic—because the first human astronaut to enter the Ukka ‘portal’ (or whatever it is) connecting our solar system with this alien world had a head full of the Kalevala. The Ukko, it seems, is story-hungry:

The Ukko likes to hear stories over and over again. That’s how it directs itself. It finds a place in the galaxy where stories can belong, and come to life. To the world where they were belong, and come to life. Then it heads back to the origin of the stories. To the world where they were born. It travels to and fro. And people emigrate in it, like fleas in a dog’s coat. Talkative fleas—telling it over and over again the stories that please it and propel it. Always the same stories. It insists on that. Different stories might lead elsewhere. [Lucky’s Harvest, 114-15]

This is a nice-enough satire upon SF Fandom, of course—‘always the same stories’—given piquancy by the fact that Watson is just the writer not to peddle his readership the same stories over and over again. But it’s a recursive conceit as well; the talkative fleas glancing at those famous insects that have smaller fleas upon their backs to bite ’em/Which smaller fleas have smaller fleas/And so—I forget how this rhyme ends. Mana is a story about stories, or a set of interlocking stories about Story; but what sets it apart from this, we can be honest, fairly crowded subgenre of the metatextual involutes is its choice of Frame. Because the Kalevala is both the ancient Suomi mythic poetry (the ‘Matter of Finland’) and the Joseph Smith-like confection of a specific 19th-century individual Elias Lönnrot. Of all the national epic poems, the Kalevala is the closest to a work of contemporary fantastika; as if The Lord of the Rings were taken by the English instead of Beowulf as the actual repository of national storytelling and identity. (Something like that may actually have happened, or may be happening at the moment in my homeland, now that I come to think of it). I daresay there are Finns who will not be flattered at the comparison between Lönnrot and Smith. Still, it’s a suggestive linkage. Though born within three years of one another they were, of course, very different sorts of person. Having written a quite skilfully pastiched neo-KJV, Smith’s next move was to present it to the world as transcendentally inspired, as proceeding literally from out of the world. Harold Bloom has some fascinating things to say about the way Mormonism mediates a set of specifically American concerns, and The Book of Mormon exists in a strange tension between its archaic manner and purported history and its theology—of a new testament, the New World and an open-ended future. To read The Book of Mormon as a Fantasy novel (however impertinent believers are liable to consider such a textual strategy) is to be struck by how of its time it is: a kind of ‘High Fantasy’ equivalent to Marie Corelli’s spiritualist planet-odyssey Science Fiction productions, with Smith playing ur-Tolkien to Corelli’s ur-Asimov. And actually to delve into the Mormon theo-cosmology as Smith went on to develop it is to be struck by a shift towards a (what we might call) science-fictional logic that anticipates that other distinctively American neo-religion, Scientology: all is matter, including God; pre-mortal Jesus created all the planets and stars under the direction of God the Father as testing grounds for God’s creatures; God the Father himself once passed, like Jesus, through a mortal existence, to die and rise again. ‘The prevailing view among Mormons is that God once lived on a planet with his own higher god.’

You don’t need to be unusually endowed with critical insight to see a structural parallel here: the post-Romantic inspired ‘poet’ (in the broadest sense) who sub-creates his/her own spiritually significant world in his/her books of course also prises open the vertiginous mis-en-abime, fleas on the backs of fleas on the backs of fleas; or angels piggybacking angels. If you create a world in which God creates a world, and part of that world is that God’s world (and thus yours) was also created by a higher God, then there’s no reason to stop there. Turtles all the way down has always struck me as just as potent a notion, and in many ways as more sublime, than the idea of one monotheistic Superturtle.

Lönnrot is a different matter. He researched diligently and presented his work not as ‘inspired’ but carefully assembled out of folk poetry. And much of it was made that way, from assiduously gathered variant versions of folk poems scrupulously collated (just as much of Smith’s writing proceeded from his intimate knowledge of the KJV). Still, to quote this impeccable scholarly resource

Very little is actually known about Elias Lönnrot’s personal contributions to The Kalevala. Scholars to this day still argue and hypothesise about how much of The Kalevala is genuine folk poetry and how much is Lönnrot’s own work. During the compilation process it is known that he merged poem variants and characters together, left out verses that did not fit and composed lines of his own in order to connect certain passages into a logical plot.

Finnish scholar Väinö Kaukonen thnks suggests that 3% of the Kalevala is brand-new Lönnrot’s with an additional 14% being Lönnrot’s adaptations and recompositions. But its not possible to know. Unlike Scott, who published his Minstrelsy researches as a separate volume to his (prodigiously successful) Minstrelsy-inspired Scots national poems), Lönnrot silently adds-in the one thing—unity—lacking from his source material.

This is in no way to denigrate the Kalevala, of course; or to underestimate its importance to Finnish culture and self-identity. On the contrary, it is to use that very importance to (as the contemporary idiom has it) big up the way 20th-century SF and Fantasy embed their authorial vision in a matrix of actual myth and theology. It is to say that Watson’s game in the ever-ludic Mana books is more than aridly intertextual. It is an attempt to breath a kind of cultural vividity into what was, by the 1990s, the stolidly clichéd structure of Sword and Sorcery.

That the books did not quite do this speaks less to Watson’s skill (these two novels constitute, probably, his single most technically accomplished and textually rich writing) than to the marginalised nature of Finnish epic to the European mainstream. The Fantasies that have struck chords with readers have been ones that tickle the buried nerve-knot pre-cultivated in the Western reader’s minds by Christianity (Middle Earth, Narnia), or else by the comforting social substructure of class and education—I’m thinking of Harry Potter’s school Fantasy, but also the myriad Fantasy books that posit structurally reliable ‘magic systems’ or caste-defined worlds. Even Grimdark, from George RR Martin to Abercrombie, does something like this (although the comforting certainly of their worlds is, precisely, violence: that man can reliably be assumed to be wolf to man). Mana is not like this. Magic in most Fantasy novels is a simple-enough proxy for power—good power in the hands of Gandalfy characters, bad power-over in the hands of the Sauronic. In Watson’s Mana books magic is a weird, slippery and unpredictable business. Mages are given to arbitrary and sometimes baffling actions; magic spells have unpredictable consequences. Magic, for Watson’s novel, is not a system of rules and a metaphor for power so much as it is the externalised principle of short-circuitry, of certainty-dissolving self-reflexivity.

This is precisely the unelementary embedding that characterises Watson’s writing more generally conceived, and in the Mana books it takes the form of a serpent eating its own tail strategy—appropriately enough in an imaginary realm where the primary alien entities take the forms of gigantic telepathic snakes. I put it this way to try and get at two thing. One is the elaboration of a kind of circularity, rationalised in the in-story logic of the books as the world-accessing and possible dimension-spanning technology of the Ukkos (as one of the alien Juttahats puts it: ‘all Ukkos are surely connecting … within an Ukko, desire is becoming reality. Routes are becoming illusion, bending back upon themselves’ Lucky’s Harvest, 234). It appears formally in the way Watson structures his story, too: from the largest scale of Finnegans-wakey dream-to-reality recirculation of story to the many moments in the novels when the onward march of the narrative is interrupted by a loop of backstory, usually styled as memory or dream. But the second thing is more thoroughly worked-through, thematically and storywise. It is recursion as a mode of devouring—the eating part of the ‘snake eating its tail’. These are novels that spend a lot of time describing the food characters eat and the liquor they drink. It starts at a big feast and ends with Lucky and her anti-self, a weird twin called Paula, effectively devouring one another in a physically rendered magical union.

A key character is an immortal called Gunther Beck, who eats all the time and has become prodigiously fat as a result. He’s doing this for a reason: to build up enough body-fat to enable him to sleep for a year or more, in order to plunge deep into the magic realm of dreams, deeper indeed than any previous mage. But his endless appetite, and the repeated descriptions of him eating, serve a particular textual aim—they trope story itself, as both a linear process of chomping through a narrative, as we might bite along a cob-corn (after I had gotten into the story I read books that way, I must say: hungrily), and as an involuted process of internalising the stories that construe us. Early in Lucky’s Harvest Gunther is gobbling gingerbread men, and Watson pauses to point-up this second reading:

Scooping up a fistful of the gingerbreads, the dream savant chewed one of the soft rich biscuits thoughtfully As though abruptly re-addicted to that syrupy blend of ginger and orange peel, cinnamon and cloves—his appetite renewed—he munched three more in succession. Quizzically he held up the fourth between his fingertips … a flat fat little body, buttock-cleft at the base … two diminutive button arms jutting from its waist. A globular head with tiny round topknot.

‘The Mandelbrot Man,’ said Gunther, ‘that’s who our gingerbread fellow really is. Suppose you magnify the cleft between his chin and his shoulder many times, presently you discover a bay of spiralling inlets. Suppose you magnify a fraction of that bayou find fjords indented within fjords. And down there, hidden deep in the hairy curlicues, in the follicles of fjords, a miniscule gingerbread man—who is the selfsame damned insinuating gingerbread man!—lurks, to commence the cycle again.’ [Lucky’s Harvest, 60]

Perhaps this description of what a Mandelbrot set is a touch as-you-know-Bob (such geometries may have been less generally known in 1993); although the connection between it and the fjords of Scandinavia is a canny touch. Of all the coastlines in the world, the land of the Kalevala boasts the most recursive. And the dream savant concludes his gourmandising meditation by bringing the point home:

Gunther nibbled the head off the cookie, then bit its body in half. ‘That is how events flow, my friend. Not onward, but inward, repeating.’ He slapped his brown-clad, prominent midriff, and belched gently. [Lucky’s Harvest, 60]

‘Not onward but inward’ might be the watchword for the whole Mana cycle of stories; and, indeed, of Watson’s career as a whole.

This has an unavoidable of-its-time aspect, too. After all, the 1990s was the heyday of Postmodernism, when complexly intertextual involutions were being praised by the academy. The pop group ‘Pop Will Eat Itself’ was often invoked (actually: only their name was invoked—but, hey: it’s a great name for a band) as symptomatic of the cultural logic of this time. If this looks a little dated now it is only because, latterly, pop has regurgitated itself in an endlessly emetic series of talent and ‘reality’ shows by which the commodification of musical product is laboriously displayed for all to see, and we love manufactured bands not despite their artificiality but precisely because we have been privy to all the ins and outs of the process of manufaction in the first place. A new ingenuousness has taken the place of the tricksy old postmodernism ludic complexity, leaving writers like Watson (he’s not alone) stranded by the retreating tide.

There are (it seems to me) two masterpieces of the ‘Fantasy Will Eat Itself’ kind: Delany’s Nevèrÿon books (four titles published 1979-1987) and Watson’s Mana dyad (1993-94). Of the two, and much though I admire Delany’s, I prefer Watson’s—Return to Nevèrÿona can’t quite rid itself of the odour of the schoolroom, a slightly strenuous application of Derridean recursion to the logic of heroic fantasy. Mana flies freer, though still densely and not without some friction. It is fascinating but also a little (deliberately) repulsive to see a creature eat itself. Here is a fable from the folk-wisdom of the alien Juttahat, offered in part as aetiology for the subaltern relationship of these creatures to the telepathic, serpent-like Isi. For the humanoid Juttahat, the voice of their master snakes constitute a ‘second self’ that raises them above a purely machinic existence.

There being a story about the Juttahat who was lacking a second self. When this Juttahat was being told by its kin to be doing anything it would be continuing the same task for ever, unable to stop. Nothing inside was telling it to stop. If it was beginning digging it was continuing digging. If it was starting to walk it was continuing to walk. Lacking its Isi-self it was being a mere mechanism. One day its kin were tiring of telling it to be starting and stopping all the time. They were wanting rid of it, so they were saying to it, be eating yourself.

And it began eating itself, until only its mouth was remaining. Its mouth was sinking upon the ground. Its lips, swollen with nourishment, were becoming part of the ground.

Then it was beginning to consume the ground itself. Sand and soil were flowing into it. Those lips were growing ever larger. The mouth was devouring trees and boulders. The mouth was drinking streams. The whole world was flowing into those lips. Its kin were crying, Stopping, but the mouth having no ears to be hearing them. The mouth was sucking them in too when they were venturing close. [Lucky’s Harvest, 218]

What eventually stops this catastrophic recursion is the arrival of one of a serpentine ‘Isi mage’. ‘What is happening here?’ the mage asks. ‘Why is there being a vast hungry valley with no bottom to it? Why is it eating the world?’ When the situation is explained the Isi mage throws himself, like Marcus Curtius in full armour, into the void. The chasm them vomits up the swallowed Juttahat, and seals up; and the Isi is magically transferred somehow inside the Juttahat species—as well as outside (‘and somewhere else too’ [219]). Listening to this, the mutant poetess Eyeno (so called because she lacks one eye), comments: ‘that’s a strange story … almost a poem’ and tries to rationalise it.

A poem in a strange, timeless tense. It could become a poem. The person who was swallowing himself ... The story only made confused sense otherwise. Maybe to the Juttahats the tale was beautiful and true. Maybe it had persuasive force. Force, almost, of law. Of authority. The Juttahats seemingly had an Isi-mind inside them, a part of them which thought what the Isi would wish them to think, and advised their main mind accordingly. In a sense the Juttahats had swallowed the Isi. In another sense the Isi had swallowed them. [Lucky’s Harvest, 219; ellipsis in original]

‘The story only made confused sense otherwise’ speaks to the way Watson embeds a prosy quasi-scientific (or more precisely: metaphysical) textual artefact inside a poetic logic, or expresses what is fundamentally a poem through the de-confusing sequential logic of a story (‘maybe to the Juttahats the tale was beautiful and true’, with its glance at the final couplet of Keats’s Grecian Urn ode, draws sly attention to this iterated dialectic). In places this aspect of the Mana books becomes almost too ripe … pungent gobbets of prose often flash gaudily from the text, presumably deliberately so: either overplayed simile, as when the dome of a building is described as ‘of callipygian dimension and rotundity, like a buttock presented to the sky’ [Fallen Moon, 308], or the alliteration becomes over-stressed (‘Lucky stamped her boot crossly to crush such a concept’, [Lucky’s Harvest, 406]); or both combine in a kind of feral Manley-Hopkinsness of description—

Critic odour of puzzlement lacing pepper of purpose and unctuous oil of imminent accomplishment aboard Velvet Isi sky-boat. Sky boat having landed by searchlight and sickle-light on frozen pasture to be solving condundrum of captured Minkie-Kennan. [Fallen Moon, 507]

There’s also a fair amount of what we might call ‘actual’ poetry: quoted in-text, sung by characters and so on. I don’t think this is Watson’s instrument running away with itself. On the contrary, and however arch it feels, I take it to be a deliberate loading of selected rifts with ore. This mutual embedding of Juttahat and Isi, which redirects the otherwise sterile recursion of mere machine logic into the richness and roundedness of actual thought—soul, we could say—is one of the key things these novels are about. Indeed, this Jattahat The person who was swallowing himself tale is brought up again in volume 2, and this time glossed differently: ‘was this a Juttahat definition of love?’ [Fallen Moon, 125]. This is to intimate the mutuality of love, where each partner simultaneously (metaphorically) consumes the other, thereby embedding a second soul in their body; the way life is redirected from barren repetition into purposeful creativity. It’s a conceit worthy of a John Donne poem.

There are several other tropes in the novels that articulate this in-wovenness; too many, indeed, to explore in any detail here. One that comes out in The Fallen Moon is an apparently contraceptive charm whereby one attempts to ‘tie a knot in the egg’. This being so food-fascinated a novel, the egg is both the human ovum and something tastier. Jatta sexually encounters a girl called Anni (herself erotically linked to the telepathic Isi) via a hen’s egg ‘full of sweet chocolate. A mignon egg a darling egg’ (‘Anni rotated the egg till she spied the plug where the molten sweetness had been poured into the snowy white receptacle’ [Fallen Moon, 53]). ‘Shall we crack it and both of us lick it and bite it at once?’ she suggests. ‘Until,’ the narrator adds, ‘their lips might meet’. This romantic pairing off is ‘tying the knot’ in another sense.

The second book also introduces us to the Kalevan notion of ‘the trap story’.

‘A trap-story!’ Hilda cried. Her goat-hide boot kicked out. The ivorywood table flew over … That final apple rolled squashily across the waxed boards for a short distance. Snow whirled briefly in the air, a flurry of white flakes quite like petals of icing sugar.

June asked excitedly: ‘What’s a trap story?’

‘Next it would be a nest within a nest!’ exclaimed the wise-woman. [Fallen Moon, 42]

Hilda explains: ‘a trap story snares you into running on and on compulsively … a story-trap, on the other hand—that’s what I meant by a nest within a nest—is when part of a story causes a new story to start within itself. Then that story opens another story till you can never find your way back to the beginning.’ What, we wonder, might a novel look like that tried to embed the former inside the latter?

The plot works through some of these manifestations. Clever machine-maker Elmer fashions a machine that can make any other machine. The Ukko is birthing another Ukko. The dreaming man dreams of a dreaming man, who is also dreaming of a dreaming man. The Mandelbrot geometry of life begetting life freaks the web of character interactions. In fact Elmer, though he has married one of Lucky’s daughters, proves sexually impotent in the marriage bed, despite acting out a series of increasingly extreme B&D scenarios. He is finally seduced and appropriately stimulated by ‘Goldi’, a Juttahat so-called ‘Girlem’ seductress bred by the Brazen Isi. Goldi achieves this in part via a story-trap-y anecdote concerning tattoos.

‘I am spinning many stories,’ Goldi said brightly. ‘I tell many tales. Once there was a beardless youth who loves a maid. Ever since he was a boy secretly he has watched the maid, so upon his chest beneath his shirt he wears the tattoo of an eye. At last he entices her to a bower. But when he shed his shirt she cries out “oh, I cannot have that strange eye watching us!” She shuts her legs as tightly as a pair of pliers’. [Fallen Moon, 123]

The boy rushes to the tattooist, who hides the eye by folding it into the larger design of a bird. But back in bed the girl again objects: ‘oh that’s a robberbird! It’ll loot me and fly away!’ So he enlarges the tattoo to hide the bird, and returns with a cat on his chest (‘oh,’ she objects, ‘but its claws will scratch me’). The tale continues in this fashion, each tattoo larger than the one before—a lamb, a goat—until finally the boy hits on the solution. ‘Eventually there was nothing else for the youth to do but tattoo the whole of his skin with a life-size picture of himself. How the golden lass grinned. “Oh yes,” the maid exclaimed. “that’s who I want—and it’s you.”’ [Fallen Moon, 124]

This is an almost Borges-like conceit: the map becoming the territory, Pierre Menard rewriting the Quixote word for word. Except, of course, that the tattooed image of a person, even when tattooed upon that person, is not the same thing as the person himself (that’s also the point of Borge’s ‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’, of course). This misrecognition is the whole point. Watson’s world is, precisely, not a mere replica of the Finnish national epic.

The machine that can make anything, including other machines, is described as a three-dimensional iteration of the 2D Mandelbrot set that Gunther, earlier, saw in the circular gingerbread men:

A fat sphere twice as large as a very big pumpkin squatted upon a rotundly bifurcated base. On top, balanced a smaller sphere the side of a human head. Centrally upon the head was set a fist-size metal topknot Scores of similar protuberances studded the flanks of the apparatus, inviting fiddling and twisting. [Lucky’s Harvest, 405]

The second Ukko, when Eyeno finally locates it, is a grotesque flesh version of this same shape; a living being having absorbed, or somehow expressed, dozens of Lucky’s daughters in its growth. It lives in a pool at the navel of the world.

The pool was no more than thrice the width of its massive occupant … the torso that rested in the water was a rounded tawny vat of flesh. Dugs bulged from bosoms and gorbelly. Little hands waggle incapable of reaching anywhere. The head which balanced upon this mass was a great brown globe with a moist split of a mouth. Henna hair rose coiled in a topknot so tight it might as well be solid: a knob. [Fallen Moon, 199]

Viewed with the material eye, this being is a weird cluster of globulating flesh; but seen with the ‘mana’ inner-eye of magic she becomes ‘a sylph composed of stars’, an astral ear cupped within a larger ear like ‘a creamy waxen flower’, a giantess like something out of Baudelaire or Swinburne. The echt principle by which a human egg-cell quickens in the womb.

All was contained within a cave which was woven vibrantly of emptiness and space, a great bubble glistening with reflections of itself; for of itself it was made and of nothing else. Briefly the bubble divided into a hundred glassy-walled bubbled. Then it rejoined. The bubble was a vast eye looking inward (for inward was the only perspective) … [Fallen Moon, 200]

In the climax to The Fallen Moon the Ukko new moon falls upon the world in a slow and dream-ish catastrophe; and the nature of ‘mana space’, and the means by which the Ukko is able to transport people, come clear. A character Wex sees distant trees on the horizon, visible against the descending moon, ‘frosted trees like eruptions of iron filings pulled upward by a force rather than growing organically’ and muses: ‘a tree in the distance is truly smaller than a tree close by. When you arrive in the distance you have become smaller.’ And this leads to his revelation

This is precisely how the Ukkos travel the vast distances between the stars, by shifting scale in mana-space, upwards, then downward again—but downward elsewhere. I have an announcement. … The whole universe must in a sense be an Ukko of space-time—of which we’re all reflections on a miniscule scale, yet equally intricate. The whole universe is within an Ukko, yet the outer limit—which is nowhere definable—is also the very core. We are within the universe but the universe is within us. Adjust our perception of scale and we can shift a moon across a galaxy— [Fallen Moon, 516]

What prevents this sounding like mere Hippy spiritual blather is the way it frames a precisely conceived sense of infinite geometry. Counter-intuitive but topographically accurate, it is the shape of this doubled twin pairing of fictions. Watson carves weird crenulations into the turrets of Fantasy; not all of these achieve the full Mandelbrot, but a high proportion do, and that’s what makes the Mana novels so uniquely memorable.

How does this connect with the ‘postmodernism’ I mentioned above? Well, I found myself thinking, from time to time, of another big, complex novel from the 1990s, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996). Tonally quite a different work, and with a very different set of emphases (on sport, on ‘authenticity’ and on modern America). But formally an interesting parallel. Watson, I’ve been arguing, has structured his novel as a sort of dyad of circular mandelbrot-sets (the gingerbread man, the Ukka, the everything machine—the big sphere with smaller spheres set upon it, each with a smaller set upon them). This is a mode of infinite geometry compatible with the finite space in which we live (and so I return to Browning, who once defined poetry as ‘putting the infinite into the finite’). It is the decision to put the books together according to this logic that in part explains the bulbous, freaky and endlessly intricate textual structure of the Mana books. Foster Wallace was also fascinated by infinity—so much so that he wrote a book about it (2003’s Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity). In a 1996 interview with radio-show-host Michael Silverblatt, Wallace claimed to have carefully structured Infinite Jest according to an infinite, fractal logic.

It’s actually structured like something called a Sierpinksi Gasket, which is a very primitive kind of pyramidical fractal, although what was structured as a Sierpinksi Gasket was the first—was the draft I delivered to Michael in 94, and it went through some I think “mercy cuts”, so it’s probably kind of a lopsided Sierpinksi Gasket now. But it’s interesting, that’s one of the structural ways that it’s supposed to come together.

Here’s a Sierpinksi Gasket:

It’s an illuminating way of viewing Wallace’s novel I think; but it has a particular interest when set alongside Watson’s similarly conceptually ambitious, also fractally-structured work. Because there is a suitably tech-mechanical look about the Gasket, it fits a more SFnal work like Infinite Jest (and of course Infinite Jest is SF!). The more organic, almond-bread-y curlicues of the Mandelbrot set suits Fantasy better. And what Fantasy Watson’s Mana is!

Over on Bluesky I counted 22 dead in Queen’s best-selling ‘Another One Bites the Dust’, and wondered if it was the most bloodthirsty charting single (the ensuing thread came up with various songs with higher, and in some cases much higher, body-counts). To ‘bite the dust’ is to die. But where does the phrase originate?

It’s from Homer, via Samuel Butler, says Google. In Iliad 2, Agamenon prays to Zeus that he might that very day bring down Troy and kill its greatest warrior, Hector and all his companions (Zeus does not heed his prayer):

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‘Ζεῦ κύδιστε μέγιστε κελαινεφὲς αἰθέρι ναίων
μὴ πρὶν ἐπ᾽ ἠέλιον δῦναι καὶ ἐπὶ κνέφας ἐλθεῖν
πρίν με κατὰ πρηνὲς βαλέειν Πριάμοιο μέλαθρον
αἰθαλόεν, πρῆσαι δὲ πυρὸς δηΐοιο θύρετρα,
Ἑκτόρεον δὲ χιτῶνα περὶ στήθεσσι δαΐξαι
χαλκῷ ῥωγαλέον: πολέες δ᾽ ἀμφ᾽ αὐτὸν ἑταῖροι
πρηνέες ἐν κονίῃσιν ὀδὰξ λαζοίατο γαῖαν. [Iliad 2:413-19]

“Zeus, most glorious, most great, lord of the dark clouds, that dwellest in the heaven, grant that the sun set not, neither darkness come upon us, until I have cast down in headlong ruin the hall of Priam, blackened with smoke, and have burned with consuming fire the portals thereof, and cloven about the breast of Hector his tunic, rent with the bronze; and in throngs may his comrades round about him fall headlong in the dust, and bite the earth.”

That’s the old 1924 Loeb translation (by A. T. Murray and William F. Wyatt), and you can see that what Hector bites (or what Agamemnon boasts he will bite, when he kills him) is γαῖα, the earth—the last word in the extract. But here’s Samuel Butler’s popular 1898 translation of Homer:

“Zeus, most glorious, supreme, you who dwell in heaven, and ride upon the storm-cloud, grant that the sun may not go down, nor the night fall, till the palace of Priam is laid low, and its gates are consumed with fire. Grant that my sword may pierce the shirt of Hektor about his heart, and that full many of his comrades may bite the dust as they fall dying round him.”

Here Hector’s men bite the dust, and so the phrase enters English as an idiomatic way of saying ‘die’. The Queen song (written, interestingly, not by Freddy Mercury or Brian May, as were most of the band’s hits, but by bassist John Deacon) is, in this sense, eminently Homeric, or Homeric-Butlerian.

But wait: although the Internet—that infallible and faultless source of information—tells us that ‘bite the dust’ is a Butlerian jihad coinage, here’s an earlier example:

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[hew] the breast of Hector, splitting it with steel
And may his fellow-warriors, many a one,
Fall round him to the earth and bite the dust. [William Cullen Bryant The Iliad of Homer (1881)]

And Charles Anthon’s The First Three Books of Homer’s Iliad (1846) also uses the phrase ‘bite the dust’ (Anthon helpfully glosses: ‘or, in other words, be dashed to the ground by an opponent’, 239).

Smollett’s 1748 translation of Alain-René Lesage’s Gil Blas (1715-35) uses the same phrase: the boastful Captain Ronaldo tells that novel’s hero ‘I went with my troop to Mansilla … we met the son of the corregidor of Leon, attended by four men on horseback, well armed, following his carriage. Two of his people we made to bite the dust, and the other two ran away!’ That doesn’t mention Homer, but here’s Lord Chesterfield, on January 15th 1754, writing to his son thanking him for the gift of a wild boar which ‘now that he is dead’ he promises to devour, ‘though I am not sure I should have had that personal valour which so successfully distinguishes you in single combat with him, which made him bite the dust like Homer’s heroes’ [Letter 305]. This isn’t, as we have seen, exactly what Homer says (Dryden translates Vergil’s Aeneid with ‘bites the ground’: Turnus to his sister: ‘These eyes beheld Murranus bite the ground:/Mighty the man, and mighty was the wound’) but it seems to have entered the discourse as if it is.

So where does the phrase originate? The Gil Blas instance might suggest: French. The actual phrase from Lesage is ‘nous sommes mordre la poussiere à deux de ses Gens’. This it seems derives from Racine, in whose La Thébaïde, tragédie en cinq actes (1664) we find ‘j’ai fait mordre la poussiere à ces audacieux.’ [Act 1, sc 2] Presumably Racine, writing on a Greek mythological subject, was thinking of Homer when he came up with this phrase. But this seems to be where bite the dust originates.