Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago

“THE STORY OF AN AFRICAN FARM” by  Olive Schreiner (first published 1883)

           

I have two reasons for writing about The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner (1855-1920).

            First, I have often considered writing about books which everybody once read and that seemed on their way to becoming canonical, but which have subsequently dropped firmly out of canon. I was once told by an elderly South African colleague that The Story of an African Farm was required reading in South African high schools; but I somehow doubt that this is still the case for one very obvious reason, to which I will return in due course. At any rate, though it still has its admirers, though it is often reprinted, and though articles are still written about it by academics, The Story of an African Farm is scarcely likely to now be called a masterpiece, as it once was.

            Second, before I got around to reading The Story of an African Farm, all I knew about it was that the author was South African and had, for her day, very advanced feminist ideas. Hence I imagined the book would be a sober, realistic account of life on a South African farm, perhaps showing the toils and travails of women in that place and time. To my surprise I found it to be far from realistic. Indeed much of it can only be described as melodrama, with highly theatrical dialogue even for the late Victorian age in which it was written. And when it is not being melodrama, it is so didactic that it amounts to a series of sermons aimed at the reader. Olive Schreiner certainly had many valid issues to raise, and we can only sympathise with much that she had to say. In her mid-twenties when she wrote the novel, she was living in an age when it was still not considered proper for a woman to speak out frankly on matters of religious belief, marriage and the relationship of the sexes.  Indeed, she and her publishers agreed that the first edition of the novel appear under a masculine pseudonym (“Ralph Iron”). But this context does not alter the fact that the novel is both melodramatic and painfully preachy.

            The Story of an African Farm is set in the 1860s and 1870s , mainly on a remote farm in what was then Britain’s Cape Colony. It was written before the two Boer Wars, in which the British Empire grabbed what had been the two separate Afrikaner republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. Characters in the novel sometimes refer to those two territories as places to flee to.

            The novel is divided into two almost separable parts.

Two young girls, Em and Lyndall, are orphans living with their step-mother the old “Boer woman”, as she is often called, Tant’ [i.e. Auntie] Sannie. The plump woman is devoutly religious; a Calvinist who reads the Bible literally. But she is robust, has already outlived two or three husbands, and has a practical attitude to such matters as courtship. One marries a man to provide continuity and a helpmate in running a farm – not for any romantic reason. Also on the farm in a gentle and thoughtful old German man, Otto Farber, generally known as “the German overseer”, who has as literalist a view of the Bible as Tant’ Sannie but has a much more forgiving temperment. His son Waldo is about the same age as the two girls.

            The three young people Em, Lyndall and Waldo are the focus of the story. Their characters are painted in broad strokes. Em is clearly the compliant little girl, looking forward to growing up, marrying and raising a family – the model of conventional domesticity. But the more forceful Lyndall is from an early age a rebel – and she is also, apparently, Olive Schreiner’s idealised portrait of herself (the maiden name of the author’s mother was Lyndall). Lyndall questions everything, does not readily accept what adults say, and is very sceptical of religious belief. She (apparently instinctively) has a materialist attitude towards the world and believes that being informed and learning about physical realities are the most important things in life. As she says in childhood: “There is nothing helps in this world but to be wise and to know everything – to be clever.” (Part 1, Chapter 2) Her attitude is consistent throughout the novel, right up to her death, as a young adult, towards the end of the novel, when “She died… with her knee unbent, with her hand unraised, with a prayer unuttered, in the pride of her intellect and the strength of her youth. She loved and she was loved; but she said no prayer to God; she cried for no mercy; she repented of no sin!”  (Part 2, Chapter 13) What she embraces is a form of Positivism – the 19^th century creed which said that science alone can answer all moral, ethical and social questions. As for young Waldo, he alternates between periods of intense, almost mystical, religious belief and intense rejection of the God he has been taught about.

            Thus are the characters neatly set up for us – and frankly without much nuance in the characterisation.

            Most of Part One (and here comes the broad melodrama) concerns the arrival on the farm of Bonaparte Blenkins, an Irishman, presented in caricature stage-Irish terms. He is very obviously a boaster and a liar. He claims to be an experienced world traveller and tells Munchausen-like stories of his exploits. It is clear to us that he is also a hypocrite who, in order to weasel his way into Tant’ Sannie’s graces, pretends to be devoutly religious. He even takes over from the local preacher, but the author makes it plain that he is accepted as such only because he has a gullible congregation. When he preaches, she says of his sermon:  “There hung over it that inscrutable charm which hovers forever for the human intellect over the incomprehensible and shadowy.” (Part 1, Chapter 5) He does, however, know how to play the bigot, which is very acceptable to backblock Calvinists. Schreiner describes his law thus: “Whenever you come into contact with any book, person, or opinion of which you absolutely comprehend nothing, declare that book person or opinion to be immoral. Bespatter it, vituperate against it, strongly insist that any man or woman harbouring it is a fool or a knave, or both. Carefully abstain from studying it. Do all that in you lies to annihilate that book, person, or opinion.” (Part 1, Chapter 11)

            The problem with all this is that he is such an improbable figure – half melodramatic villain, half vaudeville comic – that it is hard to believe in him and hard to believe that any real adults would be taken in by him. He schemes to take over Tant’ Sannie’s farm, perhaps by marrying her, and gains power over her by discrediting other people. By false accusations he gets the harmless old “German overseer” run off the farm. Like the hiss-able villain that he is, he stamps on, and destroys, the model of an engine that young Waldo has spent ages designing. He accuses Waldo of theft, and even flogs the boy. He has the two girls locked up, and so on. His downfall (no point in explaining it) is the result of an improbable event of the sort that would certainly have appeared in a stage melodrama. A character just happens to overhear him saying… etc. etc. etc.

            Thus Part One ends with Bonaparte Blenkins sent on his way in disgrace, order restored to the farm, and shallow religion having been satirised to the author’s satisfaction.

            The longer Part Two begins three years later, when the children are young adults, and we now have a tsunami of sermons.

            All of the very long Chapter 1 of Part 2 chronicles the teenage religious crisis of Waldo. He moves from belief in the imposed Calvinist harshness of a vindictive Old Testament God; to love for a very personalised version of the gentle Jesus of the New Testament; to a vague sense of a self-devised God as the general spirit of all that is good…. And then even that fades away to a conviction that as God’s existence is so dependent on our feelings, then God must really be a figment of the human imagination and hence does not exist. Yet, perforce, he still has some of his old conditioned religious feelings. The author proclaims that his whole experience is a liberation from ignorance. As she comments, in case we haven’t got the point: “When a soul breaks free from the arms of a superstition, bits of the talons and claws break themselves off in him.” (Part 2, Chapter 1)

            But just when we have taken all this in, we are clobbered with another equally long chapter in which all the anti-theist arguments are repeated by an unnamed English “stranger” who, at great length, lectures Waldo. He spins a long, tedious and obviously allegorical story about rising above the Valley of Superstition and entering the clear daylight of Truth. He claims an immutable morality exists without the need of God to prop it up. Thus he preaches to Waldo: “We have been taught all right and wrong originate in the will of an irresponsible being. It is some time before we see how the inexorable ‘Thou shalt and shalt not’ are carved into the nature of things…” (Part 2, Chapter 2) Apparently this “stranger” is an apostle of the Positivism of Herbert Spencer (not that that name is invoked) and believes that God is redundant and “Nature” itself will show each of us how we should behave. One might, incidentally, note an obvious flaw in his reasoning, although Olive Schreiner doesn’t seem to notice it; for the “stranger” also says “…who wrongs another clouds his own sun; and… who sins in secret stands accused and condemned before the one Judge who deals eternal justice – his own all-knowing self.” (Part 2, Chapter 2) In other words, we as individuals are the only arbiters of right and wrong – which might be a comfy thing to think if we ignore the existence of the criminal, the mentally-unbalanced and the plain evil, and assume that everybody has had a benign upbringing.

            So, in these two chapters, we have trudged through over fifty pages of pure polemic. But there is much more to come.

            In Part 2, Chapter 4, Lyndall returns from four years at boarding school and she has blossomed into a full-grown, platform feminist. She lectures Waldo (poor Waldo!) on the desirable state of marriage: “Marriage for love is the beautifullest external symbol of the union of souls; marriage without it is the uncleanliest traffic that defiles the world.” (Part 2, Chapter 4) She lectures him on what will be the status of women and men when her desired Utopia dawns “…when that time comes, when love is no more bought and sold, when it is not a means of making bread, when each woman’s life is filled with earnest, independent labour, then love will come to her, a strange sudden sweetness breaking in upon her earnest work; not sought for, but found.” (Part 2, Chapter 4) Reading this now, one is surprised only that she does not discuss women’s suffrage or women’s role in public life.

Let me make it clear, I am not ridiculing or belittling Lyndall’s ideas in themselves. Most of them would now be accepted as a non-threatening norm. But I am ridiculing the manner in which they are presented. The real characters disappear to become mere walking ideas. Reading them is very much like listening to those dreaded mouthpiece characters who sound off in George Bernard Shaw’s plays with all the ideas that GBS himself wants to express (see on this blog comments on Shaw’s MajorBarbara). I will spare you my account of Part 2, Chapter 8, in which Lyndall converses with a newly-arrived Englishman, Gregory Rose, like a member of a debating team, on the desirable state of marriage. Or, for yet more didacticism, consider the long letter that Waldo writes in Part 2, Chapter 11, to Lyndall, spelling out his feelings.

Nor does the melodrama let up. I sense a certain wish-fulfilment element in the way in which Lyndall, the Olive Schreiner surrogate character, comes to be loved by three separate men – a “stranger” and Gregory Rose and Waldo – so that she can test her ideas on each. I try to restrain my laughter when Gregory Rose disguises himself as a woman so that he can enter a hospital and nurse Lyndall when she is dying after giving birth to a short-lived baby. Yes, I am aware that academic expositors have made up ingenious explanations for this sequence – it is the first-wave feminist author consciously creating a “New Man” who is caring and nurturing in a way that rough sod-breaking farmers and pioneers are not. But it still reads as improbable melodrama.

And yet and yet and yet…. After all my conscious demolition of this dated book, I admit that parts of it have a raw power, despite outbreaks of grandiose rhetoric of the sort that agnostics used to devise when trying to find a substitute for religious terms. There is a real and vivid sense of the desolation and remoteness of the sunburnt farm and the loneliness of isolated characters who long for intellectual company that is not available. Despite the melodrama there are moments of truth. It is easy to see why The Story of an African Farm was once a sensation and it is easy to see why some teenagers might still think it impressive.

BUT alas, we at last come to the reason that this novel is now unlikely to be set as a text in high schools. At least in The Story of an African Farm, in her view of the future liberation of the world and the liberation of the sexes, Olive Schreiner has overlooked one major matter – and that is the matter of race. I have argued before on this blog (see the posting on Joseph Conrad’s Heart ofDarkness) that we should not cut ourselves off from writings of an earlier age that express views, or prejudices, different from our own. But the undertone of dismissiveness towards (black) Africans is both unmistakable and pervasive in The Story of an African Farm. No black African is a major character in the novel and throughout the text, we have the casual appearance of such comments as “the small woolly head of a nigger showed itself” (Part 1, Chapter 6) or the description of a black woman as “a sullen, ill-looking woman, with lips hideously protruding” (Part 1, Chapter 8). A landlady remarks of a black child “Left the door open, but a darkey will be a darkey and never carries a head on its shoulders like other folks”  (Part 2, Chapter 12).

            At one point in the text, Schreiner seems to imply that racism is an attribute of the undereducated. She presents Tant’ Sannie as a woman with a narrow, Bible-literalist mentality, and says of her, when a religious meeting is being set up: “The Kaffir servants were not there because Tant’ Sannie held they were descended from the apes, and needed no salvation. But the rest were gathered for the Sunday service, and waited the officiator.” (Part 1, Chapter 5) This could be read as a condemnation of racism. And yet later in the novel, Schreiner’s mouthpiece, Lyndall herself, seeing a black man in the distance, muses “Will his race melt away in the collision with a higher? Are the men of the future to see his bones only in museums – a vestige of one link that spanned between the dog and the white man?” (Part 2, Chapter 8). Even an agnostic, Positivist, first-wave feminist takes it for granted that Africans are innately inferior to Europeans. Indeed I could go further and say that particularly an agnostic Positivist of the late nineteenth century would harbour such ideas. Whether or not it was Darwin’s intention, the popularisation of the theory of evolution by natural selection immediately unleashed the idea that some races were “less evolved” than others and therefore inferior. This was the accepted “scientific” view of the age. (See on this blog Angela Saini’s Superior– The Return of Race Science). I am encouraged in making these remarks by my knowledge that a much greater South African writer – Nadine Gordimer -  said that while Schreiner’s feminism in The Story of an African Farm is not to be despised, it is ironical that she spoke of liberation but ignored the key moral issue in South Africa: the subjugation of a large African population to a powerful white minority.

I could add, by the way, that in The Story of an African Farm, Schreiner’s racial and cultural prejudices are not confined to black Africans. Why, after all, make the villain of the first part of the novel an Irishman, if not to play to the Anglo prejudice that the Irish are both charming and devious? Why are the “Boer” (Afrikaner) characters in the novel depicted, in the main, as less sophisticated than the Anglo characters? (See, for example, Part 2, Chapter 6, “A Boer Wedding”, where an Afrikaner celebration is clearly not to the taste of the Anglo characters.) Again, I am aware of the attempts of some academics to interpret the character of Waldo as a surrogate for black Africans, or as the young Schreiner making a protest against prejudice in the only way that would have been acceptable to the reading public of her day. But this strikes me as a desperate ploy to distance the author from prejudices she clearly held when writing this novel.

In fairness to Oliver Schreiner, I have to note that she did not hold fast to her racial prejudices throughout her life. She opposed the two wars the British Empire fought to take over the Boer Republics (and their mineral resources). For a short time she admired the arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes (who greatly admired The Story of an African Farm) – but she broke with him when he advocated harsh punishments for African prisoners. She later modified (but did not completely abandon) her assumptions on white superiority.

But I am commenting here on The Story of an African Farm, and not on later developments in the author’s life. All the way through reading this novel, I kept thinking “This is not really the story of an African farm. If it were, it would tell us more about the people doing the everyday labour and fetching and carrying – namely those marginalised Africans.”

So, melodramatic, didactic, preachy and blind to one major reality, this is not a masterpiece of world literature. It is a novel of great historical interest, with vivid descriptions of landscape, moments of insight, much overblown rhetoric and the expression of many real concerns related to women at the time it was written. In other words, it is a period piece.

Genuinely Grotesque Footnote: If old novels express attitudes that are no longer acceptable, they are usually sanitised or completely revised when they are turned into films. One of the most grotesque examples would have to be the 2004 South African film version of The Story of an African Farm. Completely omitting the second half of the novel, where agnosticism and feminism take over the narrative, the film told only the story of Bonaparte Blenkins and his plotting against the “old German overseer” and the three pre-pubescent children Lyndall, Em and Waldo. In effect it became a children’s movie about a bad man foiled by children, and was marketed as such in the United States, being retitled (I’m not kidding!) Bustin’ Bonaparte. It also removed the novel’s implicit racism by making Waldo a little black African boy, romping happily with the two white girls. Described by some as a “post-apartheid” version of the novel, it was apparently a box-office success in South Africa itself. It figures. Most countries prefer to see sanitised versions of their past.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

PUBLIC RADIO

If you’re not a New Zealander, you will probably not have heard of the recent and ongoing controversy about the possible downsizing – or even extinction – of a publicly-funded radio network.

Here in New Zealand we have a plethora of commercial radio stations, funded mainly by advertising revenue, and broadcasting what is the standard diet of commercial stations in most parts of the world – pop or rock music, talkback, sports commentaries, news (often supplemented by news commentaries from popular – or populist – pundits), and, of course, plenty of commercial breaks.

But we also have the two publicly-funded Radio New Zealand (RNZ) networks, neither of which carries advertisements.

RNZ National – still known to many listeners as the National Programme – is the broad interest network. Much to the annoyance of commercial rivals, it still attracts a larger listenership than any other station in the country, and it serves a very broad diet. Its weekday “Morning Report” is the most detailed reporting and real analysis of national and international news (as opposed to opinionated commentary) currently available on air in New Zealand. It is noted for the incisive and insistent style of its journalists when they interview politicians. Its Saturday morning programme consists largely of interviews with noted national or international figures in the arts or science or sociology – as well as interviews with local musicians in popular fields. It frequently broadcasts serialised readings from notable or acclaimed New Zealand novels. Its afternoon and evening sessions are rather more laid-back and almost populist - panel discussions, “light” music (quite a bit of pop now) and news bulletins, although the evening shows regularly have science programmes and philosophical discussions – I mean with real philosophers who know they are talking to a mass audience. You could say RNZ National is the mainstream broadcaster for the intelligent listener who doesn’t want to listen to advertisements.

The other RNZ network is RNZ Concert - still known to many listeners as the Concert Programme. It is, by design and intention, more high-brow. Most of its air-time consists of classical music. It has regular jazz programmes, and even programmes analysing pop or rock music. Certainly it carries recorded concerts from overseas – including operas from the Met – but it also broadcasts live concerts by New Zealand orchestras and ensembles and is, in effect, the network that lets us hear more New Zealand musicians than any other. Its interviews tend to be with people in the arts.  RNZ Concert is an easy target for populists – especially those who are affiliated to commercial stations – who like to label it as “elitist”; but although its audience share is modest compared with the audience share of  RNZ National, it is not negligible and it is larger than some of the smaller commercial stations. RNZ Concert broadcasts on FM.

The recent threat to RNZ Concert consisted of an ill-conceived proposal, publicly announced by a top RNZ administrator (who later claimed that it was all "miscommunication"), to strip the network of its FM frequency and reduce it to an AM station without announcers, without live broadcasts, but broadcasting only a playlist of pre-recorded (imported) classical music as dictated by a robot. In other words, it would become the mere shadow of a “classical music” station, with all its live broadcasts and spoken intellectual content gone. The FM frequency which RNZ Concert occupied was going to be handed over to a publicly-funded “Youth” channel. Some weeks later the disingenuous claim of "miscommunication" was publicly debunked by the exposure of documents which showed in full what this destructive plan was in its original and full form.

As it has played out so far – because the game is not over yet – this proposal has been met with a loud outcry from most of New Zealand’s intellectual community. It was pointed out that (a.) “youth” was already well served in terms of pop and rock music by all the commercial stations; (b.) as evidence swiftly showed, there is no such thing as one homogenous “youth culture” anyway, and many teenagers and young people belong to the country’s hundreds of school orchestras which train them in classical music. Some even spoke up to protest that Concert FM was and is essential to their musical education. Most telling of all, however, was (c.) the fact that in the main, non-classical-music-listening “youth” now tend to bypass any form of radio and listen to their preferred music on podcasts, down-loads, Spotify and their ilk. The campaign to save Concert FM is now well underway and very vocal. It appears to have been boosted by the intervention of a former Prime Minister, a great advocate of Concert FM,  who seems to have influenced our present Prime Minister to intervene when she had previously been sitting on the fence.

There have, of course, been the standard grumblings from commercial radio pundits about the “elitism” of RNZ Concert, often with the characterisation of the network’s listeners as “cardigan-wearing” old fogeys. But in an election year, when politicians now understand what a strong lobby supports RNZ Concert, the campaign to save the network in its present form is going to have much influence.

I should make it clear where I stand in all this. You will see what my tastes are if you look up a posting I wrote four years back called Elitist and Proud of It. I am all in favour of commercial-free, publicly-funded radio networks. True, I lsten to much of my preferred music on CDs (a form that is now being superseded), and when I go for walks, I’m usually listening to jazz on Spotify via hearing plugs. But where radio is concerned, my car radio is permanently tuned to RNZ Concert to accompany me in long or short car journeys, and the radio in my study is likewise always tuned to Concert FM. And the radios in my bedroom and kitchen are permanently tuned to RNZ National, so that I can listen while shaving or making breakfast or dinner.

To many neo-liberals, and certainly to those who personally profit from commercial radio, the very concept of publicly-funded radio is abhorrent. They are always ready to equate publicly-funded radio with the state-controlled systems of totalitarian states. Indeed some populist pundits mischievously refer to RNZ as “state” radio. This ignores the fact that RNZ operates as a corporation separate from the government of the day. It also ignores the fact that between them, RNZ National and RNZ Concert are now the only networks where intellectual content of any worth can be heard.

Something New

We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“MEZZALUNA – Selected Poems” by Michele Leggott (Auckland University Press, $NZ 35) 

Reviewing Michele Leggott’s Mezzaluna – Selected Poems is not like reviewing the 86-year-old Fleur Adcock’s Collected Poems which were presented to us in 2019. Adcock will probably write more poems before the final bell rings, but her Collected Poems are still the summation of a whole career. The same is, of course, true of collections (or selections) of the works of deceased poets, which have also been presented to us in the last few years – KatherineMansfield, Allen Curnow, AlistairCampbell, Charles Brasch etc. But Michele Leggott’s Mezzaluna – Selected Poems is clearly a different beast from all these. Not only is Mezzaluna “selected” poems, but Leggott is only in her mid-60s and still very active as academic, writer, editor and public reader of her own works.

She is, in effect, in mid-career as a poet.

So Mezzaluna – Selected Poems is a provisional survey of her work so far. Together with a new “Coda”, this selection represents all nine collections that Leggott has produced over 32 years, from Like This? in 1988 to Vanishing Points in 2017. When I reviewed the Collected Poems of Alistair Te Ariki Campbell on this blog, I regretted that the poems were presented thematically, rather than in chronological order of their production, thus denying readers the opportunity to see how the poet developed over the years. I’m happy to report that the poems in Mezzaluna – Selected Poems are presented in chronological order of first publcation, and that is the way I have read them.

As a generalisation, after reading Mezzaluna – Selected Poems, I see Leggott’s work as developing from – often opaque – experimentalism and loose strings of imagery to greater accessibility and greater confessionalism. Personal experience, the past, ancestors and other writers become thematically more dominant as the years pass.

In selections from her first collection Like This? (1988), the shorter poems read like frozen, single images, which might have captured a mood for the poet, if not for readers. The long, disjunctive poem “An Island” could be read simply as a concatenation of ocean-related images, but its totality suggests an odd sort of guilt – here we are enjoying these oceanic and littoral things, but also perhaps despising those other Pakeha who have come before us; indeed perhaps even seeing ourselves as superior to them. The younger poet has not inserted herself into the situation. Much better is the poem “Road Music”, which appears to relate more recent journeys with road trips which the poet experienced as a child. It is filled with recognisable images of childhood as experienced by many of us in the late 1950s and early 1960s: “the barley broth is in its third day / boiled clean of its bones   thick / with orthodoxy the spoons dredge up and convey / to mouths that have learned a rich language / of gristle and fat.”

Leggott’s second collection Swimmers, Dancers (1991) has as one of its key poems “Dear Heart”, far more directly confessional about both nostalgia and the poet’s mother. On the other hand “Oldest and Most Loyal American Friend” presents both an aesthetic and an ethical problem. It appears to entertain, but resist, the temptation to run away from poetry into idle hedonism. It is in this phase of Leggott’s work, however, that her poems become most obscure to the uninitiated. Her “Reading Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers” would make most sense to those (presumably not many in number) who had read the poetry of Zukofsky, the subject of Leggott’s doctoral thesis. Likwise the poem “Merylyn or Tile Slide or Melete” was, according to an endnote, triggered by a work of visual art; but it is most expressive of the frustrations of somebody trying to write while looking after a baby… or is it? Here is my problem with much of Leggott’s earlier work. It is not just that many poems resist interpretation, but that one is not sure of what there is to interpret. In this phase, too, Leggott experiments with “shape” poems and typographical patterns wherein words may be meant to appeal to the eye as much as to the ear.

This interest in “shape” poems is carried over into her third collection DIA (1994). But, interestingly, from this point on, Leggott adopts more traditional forms. “Blue Irises”, for example, is a sequence of 21 unrhymed sonnets [or at least 14-line poems] which, as an endnote tells us, borrow liberally lines from eight or nine other women poets. It begins as a kind of vague sensual rhapsody as the poet revels in images of a bright, Grecian sort; a sense of joie de vivre about the physical world and sensual experience. But it blends gradually into a more sober – almost melancholic – tone where rougher, more modernistic, imagery takes over. This is by no means the end of the poet’s capacity to rhapsodise, though it does modify the impulse, and “Blue Irises” is one of Leggott’s greatest achivements.

From “Blue Irises” onwards, I found myself reading Leggott’s work with more respect and attention, understanding that the ostentatiously experimental stage was now past. Immediately following “Blue Irises” is “Keeping Warm”, a very good poem in terse three-line stanzas, which suggests the difficulty – but not impossibility – of maintaining love and affection when the world of work intrudes.

It is hard to refer to Leggott’s next collection, As Far As I Can See (1999) without referring to the biographical fact that, from the mid-1980s onwards, Leggott was losing her sight. As its title suggests, at least a part of her fourth collection was a reaction to impending blindness. This is represented in the imagery of the opening poem of this selection: “swimming in the black river a tale emerges / twists and turns about her sometimes urgent / sometimes mirror blank” .This is part of the five-sonnet sequence “dove”. It is by no means dominated by the idea of blindness, but it does elsewhere contain such images as “I was asleep dreaming in a dark place     it pressed / on me and I was afraid”. Blindness is certainly not the preoccupation on the following sequences “Torches” and “Hesperides”, which are also loose sonnets. After this point, the selection shifts to prose poems, apparently plucked from a longer sequence  called “a woman, a rose, and what has it to do with her or they or with one another?” It is really in this prose-poem sequence that blindness is the theme, and a sense of anguish is expressed: “When I couldn’t thread a needle, when I could no longer see the faces of my children or trim their nails, when the colour of money disappeared (and I bareheaded in the midday sun) then falling began and I cried out against it… what is the sight of my eyes to the great oratory of the labyrinth?”

Anguish receives its fullest expression in Leggott’s fifth collection Milk & Honey (2005), in the sequence “Faith and Rage”, which is divided into sections pointedly called “chaosmos” and “tourbillon”, suggesting a fractured view of the hostile world. Related in the first person, the sequence is essentially a despairing journey, where both tangible reality and certainty are stripped away. It is also in this collection that Leggott takes a literary turn, more frequently finding inspiration in existing texts. In a completely different mood from “Faith and Rage”, “Cairo vessel” is a two-part poem where first a Girl, then a Boy, speak. We are told that it is a free adaptation of (a reconstruction of) an ancient Egyptian text. (Free indeed  - it filches three lines from Cole Porter in its opening and doubtless has other such borrowings). I salute the pure game-playing fun of the thing.

As for Journey to Portugal (2007), Leggott’s sixth collection, I make the personal comment that I found it very relatable as I matched it with my own warm memories of that country. By this stage in her development as a poet, it is interesting to note that Leggott sometimes adopts an orderly, almost documentary, style of expression in assessing a foreign environment. Take the opening of the poem “verde, verde, verde” which goes thus: “we walk in a jardim botanico first / to a fountain with four gates / and cardinals in procession     doves roll / over the white paths and water splashes / in the centre of the mata / then we ascend to the terrace and read / under a tree so big it could be / the carousel of the world going round…” There is no forced syntax nor visual games with typography. This is not a simple accounting of the literal, however, for it moves in its four long stanzas to a meditation on the power of words to evoke both the distant past, as well as a sense of delight. Really the same technique – beginning with the literal and the documentary, but moving on to the symbolic and evocative – is how the other three poems presented from this collection move: “she counts ten angels” “domingo” and “house of the fountains”. Again [says an endnote] there are interpolated quotations from another poet, but they are not disruptive in terms of the poet’s meaning.

The poems of Leggott’s seventh collection, Mirabile Dictu (2009) are sometimes, in a very general sense, more “public” poems, being written during Leggott’s laureateship (2008-2009). They are not, however, rhetorically declarative in the way Laureates of old would have been. The poem “work for the living”, in honour of Hone Tuwhare who had just died, is impressionistic, working through anecdotes and references to other poets to express a sense of great loss. The poem “mirabile dictu” may be one of Leggot’s reflections on her blindness but, wonderful to relate, the body still feels and perceives and the voice is still able to tell. It is not a lament but an affirmation of the poet’s ability still to relate meaningfully to the world. “Tell your mama” is really an elegy for the poet’s mother. “Primavera” begins as a mash-up of Dante first meeting Beatrice, by way of another poet’s take on it; but it turns into general delight in the city of Florence – and like the poems of Journey to Portugal, it is in part as documentary, as in: “behind the wall of an Oltrano garden / we find magnolias with slender leaves / and jasmine climbing over porticos / above the eschatological roar / of vespas in formation turning into  / Via Maggio…” “Peri poietikes” is a poem again beginning with blindness but working through a relationship with nature that may involve a redefinition of poetry.

I freely admit that reviewing on this blog Leggott’s eighth collection Heartland (2016), when it was first published, I questioned the poet’s definiton of what poetry is (in the poem “tiger moth”), and also found some of the familial references oblique and hard for the general reader to grasp. Re-reading the nine poems from this collection which are now included in Mezzaluna – Selected Poems, I do not resile from that view – but I’m interested to find that “tiger moth” isn’t in this selection and neither are most of the oblique poems about ancestry.

The most obvious stylistic development in Leggott’s ninth collection Vanishing Points (2017) is her shift to prose poems . “The Fascicles”, however, does continue a theme that was one of the keys to the full text of Heartland – a desire to link with ancestors. In this long poem, the poet identifies herself with a great-great-great aunt who witnessed parts of the New Zealand Wars of the 1860s, in the same geographical spaces that the poet knew in childhood. “Emily and her sisters” again delves into the (imagined) past, although in this case it tends to emphasise the matter of artistic creation. And as for that literary turn I noted in some of her earlier work, we have here “Figures in the Distance”, in which borrowings from nearly 30 poets are credited.

The “Coda” to  Mezzaluna – Selected Poems is “The Wedding Party”, again a delving into the past with a nineteenth century scene, set in Auckland, mixing two languages (Latin and English) and implying a new sort of imperial Roman attitude in the Pakeha (English) overclass that is prepared to look down on other inhabitants of these islands.

There now. I have given Michele Leggott’s works the old bibliographical treatment for which I am so notorious – that is, telling you, in sequence, about the contents of this volume. This is very plodding and cloth-eared of me, but I still consider my approach preferable to the vague, undocumented rhapsodising that so often passes as poetry criticism, where critics give subjective, emotional reactions without analysing anything specific. Their’s is the type of thing that often ends up quoted in blurbs. At least you will know from my survey what Mezzaluna – Selected Poems contains and what Michele Leggott’s preoccupations are. And I hope that I have conveyed clearly that I like her poems more as she moves away from early experimentalism and into a more mature, accessible view of life.

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“THE MAIAS” by Eca de Queiroz (first published in Portuguese as Os Maias: Episodias da Vida Romantica [“Episodes of Romantic Life”] 1888; first English translation by Patricia McGowan Pinheiro and Ann Stevens, 1965; second English translation by Margaret Jull Costa, 2008)

            How ethical is it for a book’s blurb – or a book review – to give away something that the author clearly intended to be a major surprise for the reader?

I’ll leave you pondering that question before I give my opinion on the matter late in the notice you are now reading.

As you may be aware, in 2017 and 2018 I wrote, for this blog, critiques of five of the novels of Portugal’s canonical novelist Jose Maria de Eca de Queiroz (1845-1900). They were his anti-clerical satires The Sin of Father Amaro (also known as The Crime of Father Amaro) and TheRelic; possibly his most-read novel, the Flaubert-esque tale of adultery Cousin Bazilio; the account of a decaying aristocracy The IllustriousHouse of Ramires; and the very light-hearted comedy The City and the Mountains. Why was I reading Eca de Queiroz’s novels? Because I planned to spend three weeks in Portugal as part of a longer European journey, and I wanted to get some Portuguese lit. under my belt before going there.

But there was one Eca de Queiroz novel on my shelves that I didn’t get around to reading before visiting Portugal (in January 2019) - and that was The Maias. The reason was very simple. All Eca de Queiroz’s other novels are as long as the average modern novel – between 200 and 350 pages. But The Maias is much longer – 633 closely-printed pages in the 1965 translation by Patricia McGowan Pinheiro and Ann Stevens that I eventually read. Somehow I never found the time to tackle it before my long summer break this year (2020).

Apparently the author spent longer writing this novel than any of his other works. He laboured over it, on and off, for ten years from 1878 to its publication in 1888. Though it concerns particular characters it is clear that he intended it to be a (largely condemnatory) portrait of a whole society. So it is capacious, panoramic and has a large cast of characters.

To strip the plot down to its essentials, it goes something like this. Old Afonso da Maia was a radical in his youth, but he has aged into a conservative aristocratic gentleman. Now widowed, his hope for the future of his family is his only son Pedro. But Pedro impulsively marries a woman who tires of him. She runs away with another man, leaving her young son Carlos with Pedro, but taking her infant daughter with her. Heartbroken, Pedro commits suicide and all communication with his wife is lost. Old Afonso takes on the duty of raising his grandson Carlos, who is now the sole heir to this noble family.

Thus the premise, covered in the novel’s opening two chapters. What follows is the life of Carlos as a young man, he being the novel’s focus.

Carlos studies medicine at the university of Coimbra, qualifies as a doctor, and sets up a practice in Lisbon, as well as writing a couple of academic papers. Carlos aspires to do “something brilliant” and make a name for himself. But as we are told: “For Carlos, in whom the man of fashion was mingled with the man of learning, [“something brilliant”] could mean a combination of social success and scientific activity; a profound ferment of ideas amid the pampered influences of wealth; the lofty detachment of philosophical study alongside refinements of sport and taste… At heart he was a dilettante.” (Book 1, Chapter 4) In short, he is no scholar and not really committted to medicine. He is more interested in idling and in seducing fashionable women, sometimes under cover of medical consultations. He has an affair with the (married) Countess de Gouvarinho, whom he sees at first as the love of his life and whom he pursues to Cintra (sometimes spelled Sintra), the picturesque town where the upper crust holiday. But then he meets Maria, the wife of the Brazilian businessman Castro Gomes. And suddenly Maria is his ideal woman. Dumping the countess, who still annoyingly clings to him, he now embarks on a passionate affair with Maria, enabled by the fact that Maria’s husband is away on a long business trip. At her persuasion, he buys her a love-nest in the country. The author elides actual copulation under sensuous descriptions of the love nest and its furnishings. Carlos is so besotted with Maria that he plans to run away with her and leave Portugal forever.

And that, in brief, is an outline of most of the novel. But like all outlines it is reductive and misleading, because The Maias has many, many characters and the dandyish, decadent circle in which Carlos moves reflects many aspects of late nineteenth-century Portugal. (Background historical details tell us that the story is set mainly in the late 1870s and early 1880s). Apart from his grandfather, chief among Carlos’ familiars are the self-proclaimed philosopher and progressive thinker Ega, who claims to be writing an epic of human consciousness; the hyper-romantic poet Alencar, always harking back to Portugal’s glorious past; the composer of operettas Cruges, who is urged by friends to write something more serious; the Maia family’s steward Vilaca, who has to do all the family’s messy paperwork; and the gossip and tittle-tattle dandy Damaso, who proves to be a destructive force. To each is attached a complex story.

The novel opens with a description of the Maias’ stately home Ramalhete.  Throughout the novel, the author characterises people by their style and that includes their residences. There are long and leisurely descriptions of the décor and furnishings of the main characters’ domiciles, in each case revealing old aristocratic, or bourgeois, or dandyish-bohemian tastes.

Social satire and commentary are to the fore, although in this novel Eca de Queiroz goes light on the anti-clericalism. Priests in this case are generally figures vaguely in the background.  There are just a few anti-clerical jabs. In Book 1, Chapter 3 there is the comic clash between Brian, English tutor of Carlos when Carlos is a boy, and the priest Father Custodio, who wishes to drill the boy in the Catechism. There are repeated jokes about the pious boy Eusebio, hated by Carlos in his childhood, who proves to be a Tartuffe and is caught out, holidaying with two tarts. And, having a bit of fun at the expense of Protestants, there is very gentle satire of a pious Englishwoman who hands out tracts in the hopes of turning Portugal Anglican (opening of Book 1, Chapter 10).

 More important, though, is a growing awareness of the country’s unimportance. Hanging over Portugal and its doddery monarchy, there is the sour realization that what was once a proud imperial power has become a second-rate backwater. Other European nations do not heed anything the nation has to offer. As a character reflects in the very last chapter “What did being a Portuguese diplomat really mean? Just another form of idleness passed abroad, with a permanent conviction of one’s insignificance.” (Book 2, Chapter 8)

For modern sophistication and culture, Portugal looks north. A character called Steinbroken, a diplomat from Finland, makes some pungent comments on Portugal’s backwardness. To Carlos and his circle, the greatest influences are England and France. Lisbon’s high society take their manners from the English but they banter in French. The English are admired for their practicality and statecraft and parliamentary system. John Stuart Mill is invoked and there is an English character called Craft [what a name!] whose level-headed views often trump romantic Portuguese nostalgia. (It is worth noting the Eca de Queiroz served as a Portuguese consul in Bristol, and wrote much of The Maias there.) The French are admired for their style and their republicanism and radicalism and inspirational literature. Voltaire and Victor Hugo and Zola and Balzac are invoked (Ega’s house is called the Villa Balzac), and some characters frequently express their admiration for Gambetta, the man who proclaimed a new French Republic after the fall of Napoleon III. Paris is still the destination of choice for chic Potuguese travellers. (And the word “chic” is often used as a term of approbation.)

But Portugal’s upper classes are vain and venal. This is made rudely clear in an elaborate, semi-farcical scene (in Book 1, Chapter 10), set at race meeting, where the wealthy playboy Carlos bets against the favourite just for the fun of it, and has the amusement of seeing aristocrats and bourgeoisie following his lead in the hope of quick riches.

The newspapers are corrupt – either they toady to the monarchy and current ministry or they butt into private life and print salacious gossip. Late in the novel the swinish Damaso is able to plant in a gossip column an article about Carlos’s liason with Maria. In revenge, Carlos gets material humiliating Damaso printed in a rival paper. In both cases, the newspapers prove very easy to bribe

The direct satire on politics is broad. Conservatives and progressives meet in salons and drawing rooms where radical or liberal ideas prevail and the more conservative people either grumble or hold their peace. Of course, after all their radical talk, the liberals wouldn’t think of giving up any of their elite privileges for the common good. There are pointless discussions between the Positivist Ega and the neo-Romantic Alencar. There is make-believe talk about revolution which none of the chattering class would actually support if it came to the crunch. Instead, in their leisure time, the young salon chatterers congregate in (obviously second-rate) opera houses and flirt with, or idolise, or plan to seduce young women – especially married ones.

Book 2 Chapter 6 contains the most sustained direct satire on Portugal’s ailing monarchy. A public meeting is addressed by a conservative orator who is applauded for a speech consisting of pious platitudes. And, showing how nothing will change easily in this society, Alancar reads a poem in praise of a Republic, but it is expressed in such florid and unreal terms that even the aristocrats and comfortable middle-classes applaud. Presented as an unreal and unrealisable dream, a radical republic can’t harm them.

The (ruling) society that de Queiroz paints is decadent, nerveless, static, decaying and incapable of improving itself.

But when all this is noted as the tale’s milieu, de Queiroz’s chief mode of satire is his systematic dissection of the romantic illusions of upper-class Portuguese males. It is surely ironic that the novel’s original subtitle was “Episodes of Romantic Life” because de Queiroz spends so much space ridiculing amorous rhetoric, excessive romanticism and obsolete codes of honour as men conduct their sexual affairs. These are all parts of the country’s decadence.

In Book 1, Chapter 9 there is the almost self-contained story of Ega, dressed as Mephistopheles, crashing a party put on by the Jewish banker Cohen, because he wants to seduce Cohen’s wife Rachel. Instead he is very readily kicked out by Cohen and stomps off impotently, swearing revenge and threatening a duel… neither of which he can really undertake. Instead, from the author’s point of view, he is a figure of fun, acting like a character in a melodrama and easily argued out of his notions of revenge by the Englishman Craft and by Carlos himself. And besides, Ega’s regard for the desired Rachel diminishes when he discovers that she has never cheated on her husband in all the time he was pursuing her. Isn’t his romanticism little more than the thrill of competitiveness with another man?

As for Carlos himself, despite all the scenes of passion, his romantic affairs are step by step shown to be shallow and self-deluded. He claims to himself that he idolises each woman he loves. When meeting an earlier lover for the first time, we are told: “Carlos could not distinguish her features; all he could perceive amid the marble splendour of her flesh was the profound blackness of two eyes that fixed themselves on him. Insensibly he took a step after her… As she moved away she seemed to him taller and more beautiful; and that false, literary image of a goddess reaching the earth gripped his imagination… Yes, she was certainly a goddess.”  (Book 1, Chapter 7) Note de Queiroz’s eagerness to tell us that his attraction is a “false, literary image”, not rooted in reality.

When Carlos is with the Countess de Gouvarinho, but before he actually beds her, he has the same reaction : “And little by little, there began to arise in his soul a romantic idylly that was radiant and absurd: a breath of passion, stronger than human laws, would toss then violently and join his destiny to hers; then, what a sublime existence hidden in a nest of flowers and sun, far away in some corner of Italy. Every sort of idea of love, absolute devotion, sacrifice invaded him deliciously…” (Book 1, Chapter 8)

So Carlos puts the countess on a pedestal and wraps her in a romantic haze. But as soon as he gets bored with her, we are told: “The Countess was becoming absurd with her eager, audacious determination to invade his entire life, to assume the largest and deepest place in it, as though that first kiss they had exchanged had united not only their lips for one instant, but also their destinies – and for ever…” (Book 1, Chapter 10). Note how he fears she intends to take over “his entire life”. So what price his early claims to an all-absorbing worship of her?

But the essential vacuity of his life is clear in such passages as: “After supper Carlos leafed through the Figaro, read a page or two of Byron, tried his hand at billiards in the empty room, whistled a malaguena on the terrace, and finally went out with no destination in mind…”  (Book 2, Chapter 4) Love is a pastime, a game, a way of killing time, despite all the overblown rhetoric attached to it.

Where Carlos’ amorous affairs are concerned, Eca de Queiroz is a master of double-edged irony. Take this passage in which Carlos’ staid grandfather Afonso regrets that Carlos is taking up with a woman of little social standing: “Carlos was going off with Maria, was going to achieve perfect felicity; but he was going to destroy once and for all old Afonso’s happiness, and the noble peace and calm which had brought him such a contented old age. He was a man of bygone eras, austere and pure, one of those strong souls which would never know a moment of weakness, and in this frank, manly, clean-cut solution to a problem of indomitable love he could see only – libertininsm! The natural espousal of souls, as something over and above fictitous civil laws, would mean nothing to him; and he would never understand this subtle, sentimental ideology, with which they, like all transgressors, tried to cloak their errant ways. As far as Afonso was concerned he would be simply a man who was taking away another man’s wife and another man’s child, who was disrupting a family, destroying a home, and descending into concubinage….” (Book 2, Chapter 4) At first this seems to satirise the old fogey and his old-fashioned values… until we refect that the novelist has already been hammering away at the shallowness of the sentimental passions of his grandson. Carlos’ self-justifying motives are being equally condemned.

The rich irony is reinforced just a few pages later in this overwrought, and I would suggest tongue-in-cheek, description of the lovemaking of Carlos and Maria: “Outside, far out over the sea, a roll of thunder sounded slow and heavy. But Maria no longer heard the night, for she was in Carlos’s arms. Never had she desired him, adored him so much! It seemed her avid kisses wanted to reach further than the flesh, penetrate and devour his very soul. And all night, amid these splendid brocades, with her hair loose, and looking divine in her nakedness, she seemed to have turned into the goddess he had always imagined her, and she had at last claimed him, clasping him to her immortal breast, soaring with him now in a celebration of love, high above on clouds of gold.”   (Book 2, Chapter 4) We have already been warned that his conceits about goddesses are shallow, and all we are really seeing here is his canonisation of an orgasm in a moment of passion.

We also note that when Maria’s “husband” at last confronts Carlos, he turns out not to be her husband and makes it clear that he regards Maria as merely a woman whom he bought with his wealth. Carlos’s amour propre is punctured somewhat as he realises he has mistaken a lower-class woman for someone of the elite. However, his snobbery is later overcome by her tearful narration of her deprived life.

And thus far we have come in the narrative before we reach that ethical matter I raised at the opening of this notice, to wit “How ethical is it for a book’s blurb – or a book review – to give away something that the author clearly intended to be a major surprise for the reader?”

Only on p.554, of the 633-page novel I read, do we first discover that Maria, the woman to whom Carlos passionately makes love, is in fact his sister – the daughter of his long-lost mother who had cut all contact with the Maia family and whose later life was unknown to them. So, in the last eighty pages of the novel, we have a case of incest. Only the most alert readers might have picked up the subtle hints that Eca de Queiroz drops earlier in the novel, such as this passage when the unknowing Carlos is first getting to know Maria: “He found he had made a full confession of his own life, and yet knew nothing of her past, not even where she had been born, nor the street she had lived in in Paris. He never heard her mention her husband’s name, nor speak of a friend or a joyous event in her household.”  (Book 2, Chapter 1)

Yet the publisher’s blurb of the edition I read loudly proclaims the element of incest in the novel, as if it were the heart and soul of The Maias – so Carlos’ painful position in the last few chapters came as no surprise to me. And the woefully inaccurate “summary” of the novel given by Wikipedia ignores over five-sixths of the novel and suggests that it focuses on incest.

Now that I’ve broached the topic, we have to ask why incest figures in the novel at all. Was Eca de Queiroz simply introducing a sensational topic to give the novel a dramatic ending? OR (and I think this is really the case) was the incest element used symbolically to suggest an ultimate decadence in this under-developed society?  

The author shows his technical skill by having not Carlos, but his friend Ega, first discovering and reacting with shock to the incestuous situation. It is in Ega’s thoughts that we are given the clearest summary of Carlos’ situation: “He could feel now the torture in which poor Carlos was struggling, under the sway of a passion which had till then been legitimate and which at a bitter moment had suddenly turned monstrous, though without losing anything of its charm and intensity. He was human and weak and unable to stop being swept along by that violent impulse of love and desire which drove him before it like a tempest! He’d yielded, succumbed to those arms which innocently continued to call him. And there he was now, appalled at his sin, driven out of the house, spending the day away from his family and friends, wandering tragically around like an excommunicated man who fears to encounter pure eyes which reflect the horror of his sinfulness…” (Book 2, Chapter 7)

Carlos had committed incest unknowingly in his liaison with Maria. Yet be it noted that, before he nerves himself to tell her what the real situation is, Carlos cannot give up the chance of sleeping with her one more time before they part. This is the novel’s ultimate judgement on all his fine and florid idealisations of romantic love. Essentially he is motivated by lust, competition with other men and the call of his penis… and always aware of his own material self-interest.

The last chapter of the book (Book 2, Chapter 8) is, after the great emotional upheavals that precede it, deliberately bathetic and a big let-down. Ten years later, Carlos is simply filing his relationship with Maria under “experience”. It is clear that (Ega and) Carlos will never be shaken out of their complacency. Carlos now lives as a boulevardier in Paris, and, echoing the novel’s very opening, there is a description of the family home Ramalhete now unrepaired and decaying – symbol of a society’s decay. Ega and Carlos are last seen scrambling to catch a tram. They are just like Portugal, scrambling ineptly to catch up with the modern world.

In my typically grim, censorious and po-faced review, I have given you the impression that The Maias is a deeply serious novel, offering a grim critique of the author’s home country. Certainly it does just this, being a more lacerating account of the Portuguese ruling classes than anything Dickens ever wrote about the English ruling classes. But I have neglected to emphasise that, in its satirical and ironic way, much of The Maias is very funny, once we have caught on that the characters are not the influential people in the world that they think they are. And, of course, its frankness about sex made it untranslatable in the English-speaking world until nearly 70 years after its first publication.

Pompous and self-important footnote… as most footnotes are: If you go on line, you will find many of those sad “reader’s reviews” attached to publicity for certain books. These “reader’s reviews” are generally one brief paragraph wherein readers give unconsidered accounts of their subjective reaction to a book. I scanned the “reader’s reviews” of a translation of The Maias, and found some describing it as a  “passionate love story”. Rubbish! The ironical Eca de Queiroz is systematically kicking the pants out of “passionate love stories” by showing what social realities underlie them and how much they are simply the pastimes of jaded roues.

Totally frivolous and silly footnote for the very few of you who have bothered to read this far: Halfway through The Maias, there is mention of an English governess, “the daughter of a clergyman, [who] had fourteen brothers and sisters: the boys were in New Zealand and they were as strong as athletes.” (Book 2, Chapter 1) Interesting to see that, even for a Portuguese writer in the late 19^th century, New Zealand already had a reputation as the appropriate place for hardy, athletic blokes.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

SOMETHING THOUGHTFUL

HOW NOT TO HONOUR AUTHORS

            I’ve just been commenting on Eca de Queiroz’s novel The Maias, and it has set me thinking about how authors are sometimes honoured in public places. I don’t mean with awards, grants and speeches or obituaries. I mean with statues. If statespersons, military persons or scientific persons are honoured with public statues, then I see no reason why important writers shouldn’t be. My problem is, however, how godawful so many attempts to thus honour authors are. By the end of this little rant, you will see where Eca de Queiroz comes into it.

            I’ll begin by saying that some funerary monuments to authors are sheer abominations. Visiting the Pere Lachaise cemetery  in Paris three years back, I recoiled in horror from the hideous tomb that Jacob Epstein made for Oscar Wilde. I have nothing against Jacob Epstein and admired those few of his other sculptures I have seen. But this square and ugly monstrosity was not be to admired. It doesn’t exult. It weighs the man down with a solid block. Poor Oscar is much better honoured in the lazy, laid-back statue of him found in Merrion Square in Dublin.

            Some  statues of authors are unsatisfactory because of historical circumstance. The statue to Heinrich Heine in Hamburg is a mediocre piece of modernism, halfway  representational, but moving towards cartoonish caricature. How did this happen? In the early 20^th century there was a fully representational statue of Heine here – but it was pulled down and destroyed by the Nazis. They weren’t going to honour a Jew as Germany’s best lyrical poet.  So we now have what is a replacement. It depicts Heine in the same pose as the original statue had, but reduces it to weak-lined silliness.

            Some authorial monuments are a little pompous and pretentious, but do at least witness to the author’s importance. See the red stone tomb of Emile Zola, looking like yesterday’s idea of the future,  which I snapped up in the Montmartre cemetary. 

            Some are almost poignant in their accidental irrelevance. The tomb of Charles Baudelaire in the Montparnasse cemetery is really the tomb of three family members; and the one given greatest prominence in the epitaph is Baudelaire’s step-father General Aupick, who would now be completely forgotten if it were not for his connection with the poet.

            Just to show how puerile and uncouth I can be, let me note that in the same Montparnasse cemetery there is a perfectly adequate double-tomb for that charlatan pair Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. I took great delight being photographed poking my tongue out, and making an extremely vulgar gesture to, this pair. But that was because of them – not because of the tomb’s commonplace and functional design.

            So at last to why writing about Eca de Queiroz made me think of monuments to authors – and give a gasp of distaste.

            In Lisbon in January of 2019, I sought out the little square in which there is a statue dedicated to Eca de Queiroz. The statue  is representational. It shows de Queiroz himself with almost photographic reality. But – oh dear! – what a silly thing it is. Apparently the sculptor intended to show the author being inspired by his muse. But his muse is a naked young woman whom the author appears to be sizing up. It resembles an old roue gazing at a young woman with seduction in mind. A dirty old man, in fact. I let myself be photographed in front of it, but sighed a bit.