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

“GULLIVER’S TRAVELS” by Jonathan Swift (first published in 1726)

Or to give it its full title Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver, first a Surgeon and then a Captain of several ships.

Has there ever been a canonical work of literature that has suffered such a curious after-life as this masterpiece by Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)? Accepted on its first appearance as the hard and savage satire it is, and immediately popular in the eighteenth century, being both lauded and reviled, Gulliver’s Travels gradually became demoted to the status of a children’s book, bowdlerised and sanitised. Mention the title now, and most people who have heard of it will immediately think of colourful illustrated kiddie versions, most of which limited themselves to a playful retelling of the Lilliput section. It was in this version that I first encountered it as a child, also seeing two film versions [see Footnote below] which did something similar. Only as a teenager did I get to read the complete, unabridged version, and I encountered it again as an undergraduate when it was part of a course on Augustan and other 18^th century Eng. Lit.

Some months back, I decided to read Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver yet again, because I had just read and reviewed (for the New Zealand Listener) Lauren Chater’s novel Gulliver’s Wife, which uses Swift’s book merely as a pretext to deal with other matters. And it all came back to me – the parody, the savage satire, and in the end the reasoned misanthropy.

I will not teach you to suck eggs by giving you a detailed “plot summary”. You probably already know that Gulliver’s Travels is in four parts as Lemuel Gulliver narrates his four fantastical voyages, sometimes being ironical and sometimes being credulous, putting the Gullible into Gulliver. Giving a quick and totally subjective reaction, I would judge its four parts thus:

Part One is the most whimsical section, even if it does have jabs of satire. True, it begins with Gulliver tied up and constrained by Lilliputians, but the Lilliput section allows us to see, in effect, a human being playing with toys and being in charge of little mannikins. Charming, and therefore easily kiddified. Most children would be delighted by the account of Gulliver capturing the whole of the Blufuscan fleet by dragging it off course. Which children have not played with toys in the way Gulliver plays with the enemy fleet?

Part Two, in Brobdingnag, is a much more unified and compelling work than the first part. The land of Brobdingnag is less pleasant, as a human being is now controlled by giants. Gulliver is found in a [gigantic] farmer’s field and is put in the care of his [gigantic] daughter, who looks after Gulliver as a privileged pet. The farmer exploits Gulliver for profit as a freak to display at fairs. Gulliver has civil conversations with Brobdingnagians only when the [gigantic] king takes possession of him and interrogates him – at which point very sharp satire is released, most of it topical and very political.

For me Part Three, the journey to the flying island of Laputa and other places, is the most unsatisfactory and hardest part to read. It is essentially a grab-bag of satire on many subjects with barbs shot in many directions – not political so much as cultural and existential. Its loose scatter-shot narrative makes it jarring.

But there is a great return to style in Part Four, the journey to the land of the Houyhnhnms, where Gulliver relates to these civilized, reasoning horses and is duly disgusted by his human counterparts, the barbarous Yahoos. Giving another purely subjective reaction, I think this is the greatest section of the book and I suggest it comes closest to Swift’s essential theme – the innate imperfection of human beings.

If that is a neat summary of the narrative as narrative, it of course does not examine the book in a more thematic manner. As I now see it from my most recent reading, I believe there are three major ideas and narrative styles in Gulliver’s Travels. There is parody of other works, there is satire, (political, cultural and existential), and there is what I can only describe as “bodily-ness” – an awarenes of and consideration of the human body, and its strangeness.

To deal first with parody, it may be a relatively minor aspect of Gulliver’s Travels, but it is important nevertheless. Remember Swift was writing at a time when there were published many narratives of voyages to distant countries, some of them authentic, but many of them either exaggerated or completely fictitious. Only six years before Gulliver’s Travels was published, for example, that inspired liar Daniel Defoe had produced his Captain Singleton which purported (as so many of Defoe’s fictions did) to be the true memoirs of an adventurer who had, among other things, crossed the sub-Saharan African continent. In reality, this feat was not achieved by any European until more than a century after Defoe wrote. Jonathan Swift plays with this sort of fraud. Gulliver’s Travels was published with maps of the non-existent lands Gulliver visited. Throughout the book, the narrating Gulliver has the ironical habit of ridiculing lies in other travel books and swearing the truth of his own. The very last chapter of the book is a long defence of his veracity (Book 4, Chpter 12). Read the first three pages of the voyage to Brobdingnag (Part 2, Chapter 1) and you will see how Swift piles on sailing terms as if he were an old sea dog, like the narrators of so many travel books then. In Gulliver’s voyage to Laputa, the long and detailed “scientific” account of  how the island flies ridicules such precise descriptions in traveller’s tales (Part 3, Chapter 3). Not that anybody ever took Gulliver’s Travels to be a true tale, but they did understand the parody.

Far more important, however, is the satire. The dominant satire is political satire and political commentary. It is relatively mild in the Lilliput section.  The Emperor of Lilliput makes any minister looking for preferment dance on a rope (Part I, Chapter 3), ridiculing both court etiquette and the irrelevant reasons for men of little talent or ability to be given responsible positions in government. Lilliput’s war with the kingdom of Blefuscu (separated from it by the sea) resembles wars between England and France. After Gulliver has defeated the Blufuscan fleet, there is in Lilliput a conspracy against him, led by a Lilliputian admiral who thinks he has been cheated out of winning a victory himself. Thus court intrigues and cabals are satirised. There is a foolish confllict between Big-Enders (those who believe a boiled egg should be cut open at the big end) and Small-Enders (those who believe a boiled egg should be cut open at the small end). This ridicules both party factions in England’s parliament and the trivial reasons that are sometimes given as justification for war between nations. Again, we recall that Swift was writing at a time when political parties were only beginning to be formed, and political tendencies were more in the nature of loose factions. Swift himself was Tory as opposed to Whig. His satire here is still relevant, although there are doubtless some topical references that would now be unnoticed by most readers (including me).

When Gulliver reaches the land of Brobdingnag, the political satire is revved up considerably and becomes more shrill. Introduced to the Queen of Brobdingnag, Gulliver flatters her by using the most elaborate and obsequious forms of address and titles  – clearly parodying court etiquette in England (Part 2, Chapter 3). After Gulliver praises what he sees as the greatest achievements of England, the King of Brobdingnag turns to his first minister and says, as Gulliver reports, “how contemptible a thing was human grandeur which could be mimicked by such diminutive insects as I” (Part 2, Chapter 3). The climax of direct political satire comes when Gulliver gives an encomium on how wonderful the English constitution and system of government are – but when the king quizzes him, he has to admit that in England there is corruption, cronyism, faction, back-stabbing, unjust laws, routine violence and the like, leading to the giant king’s well-known and oft-quoted riposte “By what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pain extorted from you; I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of odious little vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth” (Part 2, Chapter 6). Gulliver makes it even worse in the next chapter when he dares to say how gloriously war is waged in Europe, and how often victory has been won by firearms, cannon and bombardment, all of which merely appals the king (Part 2, Chapter 7). Anti-war satire emerges again in Part Four, where the intelligent Houyhnhnms are strictly pacifistic with regard to their own species. It is Gulliver himself who explains to his Houyhnhnm “Master” all the derisory reasons for going to war and concludes “A soldier is a Yahoo hired to kill in cold blood as many of his own species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can” (Part 4, Chapter 5). And of course in Part 4, Gulliver, now converted to the Houyhnhnms’ way of reasoning, attacks government and profiteering first ministers; lawyers who speak gobbledegook and spin out cases to increase their fees; barbarous medicine; the ruination of the country by the importation of luxury goods; aristocrats who are indemnified against prosecution for crime and many other corruptions.

However, satire is aimed at quite a different set of targets in Part Three, where we get what I have called cultural and existential satire. The main targets of satire in the account of the flying island of Laputa are intellectuals who are so attached to abstract ideas (mainly mathematical and astronomical) that they do not understand concrete realities. Therefore they are so far removed from the common people, dwelling in the land of Balnibarbi beneath them, that they do not hesitate to rule them by fear. Jonathan Swift is the conservative Tory satirist when Gulliver visits the Academy of Balnibarbi and meets all the “Projectors” – that is, the theorists who insist they have rational plans to improve the world, but whose strange innovations are merely fantastical (extracting sunlight from cucumbers etc.). Swift’s satire here, like Alexander Pope’s, is that of a man looking back to the Renaissance where all knowledge could [reputedly] be held by one well-informed man. In contrast, the “Projectors” herald the world of specialists, whose interests are divorced from the world in the sense that they focus on only one small part of reality, and ignore other equally important contingencies. In some ways, this satire foreshadows one of the major ideas in John Ralston Saul’s 1992 intellectual bestseller Voltaire’s Bastards – that specialisation and the misuse of reason create an elite divorced from the common good.

There is further conservative satire when Gulliver visits the land of Glubbdubdrib, and sorcerers summon up the spirits of the past. Gulliver, upon seeing them, concludes that we have degenerated greatly from the time of the celebrated people of classical antiquity (Part 3, Chapter 8).

Even if some of Swift’s satire belongs to his own age, I was, in my most recent reading of Gulliver’s Travels, shaken by Swift’s account of a “project” to reduce all language to a few essential words and to have books written mechanically (Part 3, Chapter 5). To me this anticipates such projects as mid-twentieth century “Basic English” and in our own times the diminution of real literacy, even in the educated part of the population.

Much more could be said about the novel’s satire, but what I have said so far will do to make the point.

It is what I have identified as the third element in the novel’s conception that most struck and startled me in my recent reading. This is what I have called the “bodily-ness” of it – the way Gulliver’s Travels works as a reflection on the human body and its strangeness

Obviously Gulliver encounters smallness in Lilliput and hugeness in Brobdingnag. He is seen as a giant in Lilliput and seen as a mannikin to be displayed in fairs in Brobdingnag. In the land of the Houyhnhnms, his body is equated with those of brutish, unreasoning creatures (the Yahoos). In each of these cases, the human body is conceived in a different way. Large and important in the universe; then tiny in the universe; then disgusting in the universe. When in Brobdingnag, Gulliver at once understands how vulnerable he is: “I apprehended every moment that he [the first giant he sees] would dash me against the ground, as we usually do any little hateful animal which we have a mind to destroy.” (Part 2, Chapter 1) The (relatively) tiny Gulliver is menaced and threatened at different times by [giant] rats, a puppy dog, a frog, a disgusting monkey and a vindctive dwarf. The Brobdingnagians make for him a sort of doll’s house in which he can be safe – a situation which reminds me irresistibly of a sequence in the old science-fiction movie The Incredible Shrinking Man, which also posited the idea of a human being tiny in the vastness of the universe.

Few canonical novels have been as concerned with bodily functions, as soaked in urine and as befouled by excrement, as Gulliver’s Travels. In Lilliput, Gulliver has difficulties in finding a place to piss and poo, and tiny Lilliputians have to carry away his ordure in a wheelbarrow (Part I, Chapter 2). The Lilliputian army marches between Gulliver’s legs, and some of the tiny soldiers look slyly up through his ragged and torn trousers to see his huge dangling member (Part I, Chapter 3). Gulliver puts out a fire in the Lilliputian royal palace by urinating on it (Part I, Chapter 6). In Brobdingnag he hides discreetly from gigantic women when he has to piss. Also in Brobdingnag, huge flies excrete on food – their droppings unseen by the giants who devour the food anyway (reminding us that we too must sometimes eat fly-blown food). The huge flies also excrete on Gulliver. In Balnibarbi, Gulliver encounters a  “projector” who is attempting to reconstitute food from excrement and who is himself covered in excrement, causing an unholy stench (Part 3, Chapter 5). In the land of Luggnagg, he has to lick the floor when obsequiously approaching the king (Part 3, Chapter 9). On his first day in the land of the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver is surrounded by shitting Yahoos, some of whom climb up the tree against which Gulliver is leaning, and shit on his head (Part 4, Chapter 1).

In the general grossness of all this, the human body itself is presented as particularly gross in Brobdingnag, where Gulliver can, in effect, see human bodies in minute detail. This leads to such sights as occur when he watches a Brobdingnagian nurse suckling a baby: “I must confess no object ever disgusted me so much as the sight of her monstrous breast, which I cannot tell what to compare with, so as to give the reader an idea of its bulk, shape and colour. It stood prominent six foot, and could not be less than sixteen in circumference. The nipple was about half the bigness of my head, and hue both of that and the dug so varified with spots, pimples and freckles, that nothing could appear more nauseous… This made me reflect upon the fair skins of our English ladies, who appear so beautiful to us, only because they are of our own size, and their defects not to be seen but through a magnifiying glass…” (Part 2, Chapter 1)

Later, he says it is a “nauseous sight” when he sees the huge queen eat so much (Part 2, Chapter 3). He sees among beggars “a woman with a cancer in her breast swelled to a monstrous size, full of holes, in two or three of which I could easily have crept, and covered my whole body. There was a fellow with a wen in his neck, larger than five woolpacks…” accompanied with monstrous lice crawling on them (Part 2, Chapter 4). He is disgusted by the huge ladies-in-waiting who play with him by stripping him naked and laying him upon their breasts, where he is almost overcome by their smell and once again repelled by the huge grossness of their bodies (Part 2, Chapter 5).

In all this, we cannot help noticing that there is a strong strain of misogyny in Gulliver’s observations, as all the most disgusting people he describes are women. (Some ingenious critics have attempted to argue that men are similarly caricatured, and besides, these are the observations of the narrator but not of Jonathan Swift. I’m not sure that I agree with this).

Apart from inspiring disgust, the human body has another limitation. In Luggnagg, Gulliver sees “Struldbrugs”, who can live to extreme old age – but this is no blessing as extreme old age means living through years and years of pain and suffering as the body decays but death does not come. Death is a release. (Part 3, Chapter 10). (Incidentally this theme, of the disadvantages of [apparent] physical immortality, is one of the main ideas of Tennyson’s poem Tithonus and of Aldous Huxley’s novel After Many a Summer.]

The concepts of the grossness and physical limitations of the human body reach their fullest expression when Gulliver encounters the Yahoos: “My horror and astonishment are not to be described, when I observed, in this abominable animal, a perfect human figure.” (Part 4, Chapter 2) By implication, WE are disgusting Yahoos. The noble reasoning horses, the Houyhnhnms, see things this way. The calm reason and pacifism of the  Houyhnhnms contrasts with the barbarism, filth and brutality of the Yahoos, of whom Gulliver is assumed to be one. Houyhnhnms have no conception of lying or deceit, as if they are in some sense in a prelapsarian state. They believe they act in accordance with nature. They are amazed that Gulliver wears clothes, which they have never seen before. When Gulliver explains that modesty requires clothes, the Houyhnhnms say that nature would not require such a thing.

Human beings, as the Houyhnhnms see them, are basically thinking, but corrupt, animals  - “Master” Houyhnhnm’s view, which he expresses to Gulliver, is “that, he looked upon us as a sort of animals to whose share, by what accident he could not conjecture, some small pittance of reason had fallen, whereof we made no other use than by its assistance to aggravate our natural corruptions, and to acquire new ones which nature had not given us.” (Part 4, Chapter 7) Gulliver comes to agree, and comes to see himself as a Yahoo – a fallen and disgusting being. He lives willingly with the Houyhnhnms for three years and when he eventually returns home to England he is as disgusted by all human beings, including his own family, as he would be by any Yahoo.

Although it was not Swift’s intention, I admit that I find something repellent in the pure and perfectly reasoning Houyhnhnms. For all the narrator’s assurance that their whole outlook is based on Friendship and Benevolence they, to this reader, sound like a bad nightmare born of Plato’s Republic. These wonderful horses mate rationally and have only two offspring each to stabilise the population. Their offspring are not raised by their parents, but from infancy are nurtured and taught by the whole of Houyhnhnm society. They do not fear death and they do not lament it, as it is part of the cycle of life – so no tears at funerals for them. What a sterile Utopia this sounds. Indeed, how inhuman. But then, that may have been Swift’s point. Humanity does not admit of such perfection.

There have been many attempts to account for Swift’s radical misanthropy (and misogyny) in this novel, most of them centring on the personality of Swift himself. The Anglican clergyman (Dean of St Patrick’s cathedral in Dublin) has been depicted as a neurotic bachelor who never married, but who had odd relationships with two woman who were both much younger than he - Esther Johnson whom he called “Stella” in his correspondence; and Esther Vanhomrigh, for whom he invented the name “Vanessa”. There used to be rumours that he secretly married “Stella” – in his lectures The English Humourists of the 18^th Century, Thackeray assumed Swift’s marriage was an established fact -  but there is no proof of this, and the likelihood is that Swift lived and died a virgin, never knowing women intimately and perhaps even fearing the sexual side of women. Yet to explain the novel’s misanthropy in these biographical terms seems to me very glib. Rather, I would place Gulliver’s Travels among those works that really force us to ask what a human body is and how it works – including the puzzle that we know our minds and bodies are connected, but somehow persist in thinking that our reasoning minds are separate from our decaying bodies. In this respect I would pair Gulliver’s Travels with Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis before I would pair it with the satires of Voltaire.

And yet the satire is there and it is more savage than anything since Juvenal. Like Juvenal, Swift recklessly and brilliantly smashes everything that is wrong with the society that he knew, without suggesting a remedy. Though he lived to a good age, the anger and effort that went into such condemnations must have been exahausting. The monument to him in St Patrick’s cathedral was earned, saying in his death he had gone “Ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit”; “Where fierce indignation can no longer rend his heart”.

Literary Footnote: After my most recent reading of Gulliver’s Travels, I went back and read again George Orwell’s 20-page essay “Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels” (published in 1946). Basically Orwell spends most of his essay picking apart the topical political satire in Gulliver’s Travels, and then damning Swift as a cranky, reactionary Tory who was opposed to “progress” and who can therefore be equated with all the political ideas in the modern world that Orwell detests. While – as he always does – Orwell scores some valid points, and while nobody can deny Swift’s conservatism, much of this essay appears to me wrong-headed, over-stated, and missing the real point of much of Swift’s satire. After spending about 17 pages attacking Swift’s world-view, Orwell suddenly backtracks in his last two or three pages, and says that, in spite of everything, he still admires Swift as a great satirist. His reason for doing this is a valid one – we should be able to admire the style and force of a work of literature, even if we disagree with its ideas. I agree.

Cinematic Footnote: The first two film adaptations I saw of Gulliver’s Travels were both very entertaining examples of the kiddification of Jonathan Swift’s work. 

The British live-action film The Three Worlds of Gulliver, made in 1960, dealt only with Lilliput and Brobdingnag, added romantic love interest, and made it a wholesome adventure story by bowdlerising furiously. Gulliver puts out the fire in the Lilliputian palace by spitting a mouthful of wine on it, not by urinating on it.

Some years later I saw on television Max Fleischer’s cartoon version of Gulliver’s Travels, made in 1939 and dealing only with a sanitised version of the  Lilliput section. Its sentimental story centred on Gulliver bringing peace to Lilliput and Blefuscu by brokering a marriage between the prince of one kingdom and the princess of the other, whereupon they combine their national anthems and sing the rousing ditty “Faithful Forever”. Apparently it was a box-office success in its day.

The only version I have seen that was more-or-less faithful to Swift’s original conception was the 1996 television mini-series Gulliver’s Travels starring Ted Danson and an all-star cast and covering all four of Gulliver’s journeys. It was not nearly as savage as Swift, but it included some of the novel’s satire, even if its ending had the “out” that Gulliver is mentally affected. In this version, Gulliver is finally reconciled with his family. In Swift’s novel, Gulliver remains disgusted with, and alienated from, the whole human race.

And finally there is the truly odd one which, amazingly, I was able to find, in full and subtitled, on Youtube as I was researching this “Something Old”. The New Gulliver was made in 1935 in Stalin’s Soviet Union. After marching along with his young friends in a Komsomol (Young Pioneers) troop, singing a song in praise of Lenin, a boy is rewarded for being the most productive in the group by being given a copy of his favourite book – Gulliver’s Travels. He falls asleep and imagines himself as Gulliver, helping the oppressed proletarians of Lilliput to overthrow the tyrannical royal government. Of course the stop-action animation of the tiny Lilliputians was primitive by our standards, but in an odd sort of way the film was quite charming, even if one was aware of its propagandistic purpose.

In 2010 there was an updated, Americanised Gulliver’s Travels starring Jack Black and again confining itself to the Lilliput part of the story. I have not seen this, but the consensus of critics was that it relied on a very juvenile series of gags.

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.

HOUYHNHNMS  AND YAHOOS

My wife and I have never kept or owned horses. Among other things, we don’t have the money. Only in early childhood did either of us ride on horseback. We both remember being taken on fairground rides for little children, and doing a turn on some retired, placid old horse as it went at a slow clip-clop, led around by its owner. Quite an adventure when you are four or five, but not exactly a display of equestrian skills. Most of our children have had the same sort of fairground experience. But that is the extent of our acquaintance with horse-riding.

However, my wife has a curious habit. If we are going on a long car journey, she will always point out the handsome horses in fields. More than once, she has asked to stop because she wants to see, close-up, some sturdy dobbin with its nose poking through a fence. She admires the placidity of such animals, and so do I. Occasionally we have ventured to stroke a horse’s nose.

There is something very calming about a quiet, ruminating horse. Perhaps their long faces make them seem thoughtful and a little solemn. It is easy to imagine them as philosophical creatures who have, by accident, become beasts of burden. My recent re-reading of Gulliver’s Travels makes me at once think of them as Houyhnhnms. They are resigned to their role of being ridden or occasionally pulling a carriage, though their days of pulling ploughs or being everyday transport have long gone. Compared with their slow ruminative walk, we are the thoughtless, barbarous Yahoos, rushing about pointlessly.

Houyhnhnms came into my mind when we were visiting Prague in December 2018. We saw two tired, submissive and obviously over-worked horses harnessed to a carriage which took tourists on a short ride around one of the city’s main squares. Looking at them, I thought it was the daily sight of such patient working horses that probably inspired Jonathan Swift.

Later, in February 2019, I was on my own in Toulouse, and I visited the city’s natural history museum. Again, Houyhnhnms occurred to me. Displayed was the skeleton of a horse being ridden by the skeleton of a human being. What an impertience, I thought, for the little ape creature to be riding on the larger and more majestic Houyhnhnm.

Elsewhere in the museum was the skeleton of one of our simian cousins. That, I thought, is what we essentially are. Yahoos.

But I thought that only for a moment. Misanthropy is not for me, but I do get Jonathan Swift’s point about us and about horses.

Something New

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

 

“EVERY NOW AND THEN I HAVE ANOTHER CHILD” by Diane Brown (Otago University Press,  $NZ29:95); “THE SONG OF GLOBULE” by Stephen Oliver (Greywacke Press, no price given); “NO TRAVELLER RETURNS – the selected poems of RUTH FRANCE”, edited with an introduction by Robert McLean (Cold Hub Press, $NZ27:50)

            As I have done so often before, I begin with an obvious apology. Apart from all being collections of poetry, the three books I am considering on this post have very little in common. Each has a different focus, a different style and a different purpose – and they are gathered together here only because I have recently read them.

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Rimbaud was certainly onto something when he said “Je est un autre”. As soon as pen meets paper or finger reaches keyboard, a poet is creating a fiction even if writing in the first-person. Any sort of autobiography is selective, smooths down (or jazzes up) reality, and ignores things that don’t fit the writer’s design. Yet at the same time, all poets reveal something of themselves in the poems they write.

These are all commonplace truisms. But I am trying to suggest delicately how difficult it is to review poetry written, confessional-style, in the first-person. Back in October 2015, I reviewed on this blog Diane Brown’s Taking My Mother to the Opera, her poetic account of her childhood and her relationship with her parents as they grew old, written in the first-person. Every now and then I have another child is also confessional, first-person and about the narrator’s life. But here is the problem. Ignoring the clearly surreal and dreamlike sections of this collection, much of the narrator’s CV matches publicly-known details of the poet Diane Brown’s life. So are we to read Every now and then I have another child as straight autobiography, and then busy ourselves psychoanalysing it and drawing conclusions about the poet’s state of mind? Or are we to see it more as a kind of fantasia, mixing autobiographical details with what is consciously fiction?

In this review, I’ll take the latter option and refer to the narrator as Joanna, the name she is given in Every now and then I have another child. This collection is the length of a short novel (approximately 150 pages), although its nine long sections do not make a sequential narrative. The tale often curls back upon itself, and there are spaces for rumination and reflection. But the essential situation is clear enough.

Joanna has two adult sons, but “every now and then”, although she is well past menopause, she wonders what it would be like to have a daughter. The poem “After the Facts” (p.95) begins: “In this dream I am plotting a child, planting the seed / in my lover’s mind, then remember I can’t recall the date / I last bled, five years ago at least. My stomach is swollen / but without craving or nausea. Menopause, not pregnancy…” In fact she imagines giving birth to and nursing and carrying a daughter, who invades her dreams. But there are many things in her past that trouble her. Her mother deserted her when she was very young, so she also wonders what it would be like to have a mother. Joanna feels deeply the lack of a mother’s support and approval, noting she is “Secretly praying every book of mine, every child might / flush her out to the surface. Imagining her appearing / at the hospital or my book launch, swanning in, all dolled up, / the same age as when she left, exclaiming, ‘My daughter, / I’m so proud of you.’ ” (“Ways of processing” p.140). And Joanna never had a sister, lamenting in  “Selected Fragments” (p.88): “I wanted a sister, but my mother said / I was her lovely only”. No daughter, no mother, no sister – Joanna, now of mature age, suffers from a lack of female intimacy in her moulding as a person. She has also been through a divorce and there is an ex-lover to think about.

Much of this is in the key of regret, lost opportunities and “if only…” and “it might have been…”. But then there is the surreal element. Early in the piece, a Doppelganger called Anna begins to butt into Joanna’s life. Is she Joanna’s imagined sister? Or (as she sometimes appears) is she a vision of what Joanna’s life would have been had she continued with the apparently disorderly life she led whan she was a young adult? She could be the part of Joanna that wants to shout out tactless things at a funeral or behave like a spoilt child. The Doppelganger Anna is Joanna with the “Jo” removed, as is noted at one point; so Anna takes over parts of the narrative to criticise or ridicule things Joanna says and thinks. Sometimes she is bad conscience, and sometimes she is evil angel. Late in the piece, one of Joanna’s writing students is apparently murdered. Was this done by the evil Anna? (And if so, isn’t she in fact the dark side of Joanna herself?) A genial young cop called Dave comes to quiz Joanna about it.

It is clear that the title Every now and then I have another child refers to the whole process of writing fiction and imagining characters. The non-existent baby daughter sometimes soliloquises. So does the imagined Anna. So does the picture of a boy whom Joanna sees on a wall – an alternative version of Joanna’s sons, perhaps. So does Detective Dave. Each is the poet’s “child” after all. The narrative arc is not random. There is a sort of cathartic ending and things that allow Joanna’s spirit to settle a bit (or, as the current cliché puts it, “reach closure”) but this ending is for the reader to discover and not for me to reveal.

As you will have noted, Joanna (like Diane Brown) runs a writing class and this brings many comments both on the writing process itself and on her attitudes towards her students – not always complimentary. In fact, she can be quite satirical about writing classes and hip academe and its attitudes. In “Maintaining the Mask”, she recalls being a panelist at a literary event, and describes the other panelists as “Younger, well published with permanent jobs in universities / … I surmise I’m the token speaker outside their circle. / ‘I taught here’, I say to the audience, ‘night school, when anyone / could attend, before creative writing classes became an industry / and kudos for institutions. / A long line of students anxious for a piece of paper to hang / on the wall to prove they can write. And everyone denying / anything therapeutic about it.’ ” (p.16)

Of course it’s hard not to equate these lines with Diane Brown’s own frank views of academic hauteur… but then again, there’s that danger of confusing the narrator with the poet. Maybe Joanna is, in toto, another of the poet’s “children”.

So how do I sum up this very capacious poetic excursion? Parts of it are funny intentionally. Parts are rather raw and unhappy. Despite the final catharsis, there is much unresolved regret here. I did not enjoy all of it, because I felt many of the reflections repeated themselves. But I did keep reading – and that is the effect of a good book, isn’t it?

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A pity the Monty Python people turned the words “and now for something

completely different” into a comic catch-phrase, because I really would like to use those words now. Stephen Oliver’s The Song of Globule is a very different sort of poetry from the colloquial-confessional of Diane Brown. Stephen Oliver is a prolific poet (this is his twenty-first collection) who bills himself as “Australasian” – New Zealand-born, but resident in Australia for twenty years and now back in New Zealand. I first became aware of his work when I reviewed his collection Intercolonial, specifically about “Australasian” connections, in Poetry New Zealand back in 2014. More recently, there was his collection Luxembourg (reviewed on this blog), which I nominated as one of the year’s best collections of poetry in my “Poetry Picks” round-up for 2018 in the now defunct New Zealand Listener. Stephen Oliver can write colloquially, but he brings to his work a wide knowledge of classical and canonical literature and a respect for traditional poetic forms. Let us say that he is sometimes downright erudite.

The Song of Globule comprises 80 sonnets – real sonnets in full 14-line form, all with rhyme-schemes ( well, sort of – the rhyme schemes can be erratic), and nearly all of them following the Shakespearean rather than the Petrarchan structure, and so ending with a rhyming couplet. Mind you, many of the concluding couplets are internal rhymes or para-rhymes, and a few sonnets (Numbers 37 and 47, for example) do not have a concluding rhyme at all, unless you can see a way that “chick” rhymes with “hip”; or “soothsayers” with “bartenders”.

An end-note (also printed in the blurb) tells us that these 80 sonnets “pursue the oneiric preoccupations of a young female protagonist in Sydney who, if not suffering from multiple personality disorder, is certainly a fantasist”. So they present a floating consciousness in a sort of dream state. We soon work out that the young woman in question comes from a comfortable middle-class background (father a chartered accountant on Sydney’s fashionable North Shore), but that she longs for grunge, freedom, in a word, bohemia; and she goes roving in the wilds of Sydney seeking her thrills and kicks. “Her face, friendly as – in the mirror’s clutch, / hungered for a grip on life, love and lies. / Just one more girl in search of some hero.”(Sonnet 6, p.8). But, from the beginning of her ramblings, she knows that there can be huge disappointments. “Life doesn’t give a rat’s arse how we feel. / We nose-balance our hopes much like a seal; / dreams may be free but some turn out crappy. / So Globule learnt that life is a mixed dish.” (Sonnet 2, p.4). This hardens her shell and leads her to a dangerous insouciance: “If life proved to be nothing but a farce, / on balance – she didn’t give a rat’s arse.” (Sonnet 28, p.30).

To jump to assessment, some of these sonnets are gems. See Stephen Oliver’s skill by comparing Sonnets 15 and 16 (pp.17 and 18) where two different moods are evoked by the same stimulae. In Sonnet 15, Globule is bored by the sight of a kiddies’ playground; then in Sonnet 16 we get the joy children feel there: “Each hour is a newly dug treasure hoard / that rolls on like an endless ball of string.” Sonnet 24 (p.26) gives an effectively creepy sense of the young woman’s friendless solitude, while Sonnet 30 (p.32) is a psychologically accurate rendering of the way people often save their public dignity, and sense of self-worth, by pretending that they have not been hurt by others (in this case, the young woman knows she has been discarded by lovers). As for Sonnet 50 (p.52), it shadows perfectly the protagonist’s youthful lack of care: “Globule resided in the here and now, / a handful of dreams, a few basic skills; / she saw herself living inside a cave. / The sun sank on the hillock of her hip.”

There is, however, one major obstacle that might come between the reader and the text. The Song of Globule is so specifically about Sydney, that to appreciate it fully one would have to know Sydney well. Many of the copious end-notes tell us about Sydney, its arcania, the locations which some sonnets describe and (often) the poet’s regret that recent property development has destroyed much of Sydney’s old bohemia. But all this explanation simply reminded me how much I, as a non-Sydney-sider, do not know that metropolis.

Stephen Oliver strains the consciousness of his bohemian wandering young woman by, late in the day, having sonnets about women who represent martyrdom (Sophie Scholl) or who combine fervent religious belief with sensuality (Mary Magdalene, Thecla). Then, for 15 sonnets (Sonnets 64 to 78), he gives his rendering and re-phrasing of Ovid’s Heroides (but in a metre that Ovid would never have known). In these sonnets, women from Greek legend address, and rebuke, men from Greek legend. Penelope regrets how long it is taking Odysseus to get home, and wonders if he has taken up with some floozie; Phaedra still hungers for the erotic love of her stepson Hippolytus; Ariadne rebukes Theseus for abandoning her after she has shown him how to get through the labyrinth; and of course Medea gives a piece of her mind to Jason etc. etc. You get the message here – men can be deceiving bastards who leave women in the lurch.  With one of these vignettes I would, however, take issue. In Sonnet 70 (p.72) “Dido to Aeneas”, the spurned queen of Carthage calls out the self-righteous Trojan wanderer who has sailed away. But her billingsgate is redundant. Read the Aeneid, Book 6, and you discover that the silence of Dido’s ghost, when Aeneas encounters her in the underworld, says more than any rant could. When Dido’s ghost turns wordlessly away from Aeneas, you already have possibly the greatest dismissal of a faithless lover in all literature. Rant is redundant.

I do note that the last two sonnets of The Song of Globule bump us back into the more mundane world of a lost soul in Sydney; and I do understand that these classical tales of abandonment could relate to Globule’s desolation. But I do think the 15 Heroides sonnets are not quite in synch with the rest of the text, and may have been conceived by the poet separately from The Song of Globule.  (Indeed Sonnets 64 to 78 had earlier been published on their own). Even so, I enjoyed Oliver’s concatenation of the demotic, the surreal and the classical, and I enjoyed The Song of Globule for all its skill and the intellectual games it plays.

Personal, petty footnote: The blurb of The Song of Globule features comments from three people endorsing Stephen Oliver’s work. One is a gentleman who now bills himself as “Nicholas Reid of Canberra” to distinguish himself from me. I’ve mentioned this confusion between the two of us before when, seven years ago, I posted on this blog Who is this Ghost who Walks Beside Me? However, I categorically refuse to now start billing myself as “Nicholas Reid of Auckland”. I had the name first, dammit.

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In his introduction to No Traveller Returns – the selected poems of Ruth France, the poet and editor Robert McLean really throws down the gauntlet. He points out that Monte Holcroft once referred to Ruth France (1913-1968) as “among the finest minds of her generation”. But, says McLean, it would be hard to claim that many of our current New Zealand poets have fine minds. Indeed those who “read deeply of contemporary essayists, philosophers, and historians eschew poetry because there seems to them no exercise of intellect in it.” What McLean champions is the type of poetry that he himself and only a handful of his peers now write – poetry which deals directly with philosophical concepts, makes use of traditional forms of structure and metre, draws on a real knowledge of canonical literature and the Classics, assumes that the readership consists of informed adults, and is not merely loose, confessional observations.

McLean sees these strengths in the poetry of Ruth France who, dead now for over half a century, certainly belongs to Hamlet’s “undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns”.  France wrote two well-received, but now largely forgotten, novels; and she produced two collections of poetry, Unwilling Pilgrim (1955) and The Halting Place (1961), in both cases using the pseudonym “Paul Henderson”. A third collection, No Traveller Returns, was left in manuscript at the time of her death. On the whole, she has been overlooked by anthologists, including what McLean calls “a recent book about New Zealand women poets”.  No Traveller Returns – the selected poems of Ruth France contains selections from all three of her collections, with the poems from the third collection No Traveller Returns being published here for the first time. McLean and Cold Hub Press are making an admirable effort to restore to the canon work by poets that has been neglected or overlooked (including the hitherto uncollected poems of R.A.K.Mason). Thus this welcome selection.

Ruth France’s poetry deals with the physical world, with South Island or Wellington landscapes and seascapes apprehended and described in detail. But the physical details of nature are nearly always the occasion for abstract thought. One of her best poems, “After Flood”, ceases to be about the described flood itself and becomes a reflection on human fallibility and the tendency to take for granted our fragile, constructed circumstances. “The Young Legend” may apparently celebrate early seafarers around our coasts, but really asks how we can attach inherited European images and mythology to New Zealand (or to put it biblically, “how can we sing our songs in a strange land”?). “Mouth of the Waimakariri” does convey awe at the river’s collision with the sea, but the situation is rationalised as philosophy where “Wind / Is cold reason, parting grass, re-sifting sand, / Plunging trees through the sky, breaking the sun / Till light and matter are fragments, and reason / Cries which is the one truth?” In effect, the objective scene before the poet becomes a symbol of the workings of the human mind.

Ruth France looks at floods, clouds, New Year bonfies, or the mouth of a great river, but none of these is a Ding-an-Sich. Each is a cue to some process of thought. Without exception, all of France’s poems require close reading and re-reading.

What I detect in France’s work is a mind not fully at ease with the physical world. She rationally registers nature’s awe and beauty, but she does not submit to it emotionally. All the while, there is the ever-questioning mind of the rationalist (in the Platonic and Cartesian sense), which says that the senses may be cheats and that each emprical observation is subjective and probably unreliable (see the poems “Object Lesson” and “Road Map”).  Empiricist she is not, for all her powers of observation. Yet there are times when the rational mind is not enough, and she aches for a more emotional approach (see especially the poem “How Shall I”). The repeated theme of the toll of time does make much that she writes pessimistic. All must end. Yet in longer, more discursive poems such as “New Year Bonfire”, “Ghost Ships” and “The New Journey”, there are sparks of hope.

Keen eyes might notice that the only poems I have cited so far come from France’s first collection Unwilling Pilgrim. But the traits I detect therein are consistent with her later work. From her second collection The Halting Place comes a strong statement of her philosophical rationalism in “I Think of Those” where “The mind in its lonely prison forfeits today / As well as its yesterdays…” We are all imprisoned in our minds. A halcyon scene of summer collapses into the threat of winter in the collection’s title poem “The Halting Place”. In the hitherto unpublished No Traveller Returns, the title poem tells us that we cannot revisit the past any more than we can step into the same river twice. Even more severely, “The Letter” seems to despair of the possibility of real communication between people. Given that she sees the mind’s interaction with the physical world as the only ontological (and epistemological) reality, Ruth France has great difficulty dealing with death. Her attempts to make something uplifting find her, willy-nilly, stumbling into religious imagery. “When All the Flames” collapses into incoherence when she tries to wed Biblical imagery with a death-ending view of evolution and a critique of masculinity. “On the Death of a Young Girl” denies, but still strains after, an idea of immortality.

I hope I am not overstating this case. In emphasising that Ruth France is an epistemological rationalist, that she feels a great barrier between herself and the physical world, and that she is often pessimisitic, I am not saying that these are the only keys in which she plays. Nor am I suggesting that her perspective is one I dismiss. It often makes for exemplary poetry. I note that in her second collection The Halting Place, there is more sense of other people rather than just her isolated ego. In “Always, on Waking”, her boat-building husband is seen as being part of her protection against the outer storm. The hitherto unpublished “While Trying to Study Phonetics on a Spring Morning” crosses into the Baudelairian country of “Correspondances” with its empirical construct that all the senses relate to, and feed upon, one another. And lest any reader imagines that France is a forbidding stylist with contorted ratiocination, I would point out the beautiful, straightforward clarity of “Elegy”, a long, unadorned account of a boy’s death by drowning; and the wonderful “Three Bulls”, noted by McLean in his introduction, where a simple childhood memory moves seamlessly into the idea of the power of mythology.

McLean has not ‘talked up” France’s work in his introduction, however. She really is a poet who deserves to be rediscovered.