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.   

“DON QUIXOTE” by Miguel de Cervantes (first part published in 1605; second part published in 1615; at least twelve full-length English language translations have been published since 1620)

            This month marks the 400^th anniversary of both Shakespeare’s death and Miguel de Cervantes’ death. For quite a long time, I have contemplated writing something about Don Quixote on this blog. Cervantes’ novel looms large in my mind as one of the Great Canonical Novels that I actually like very much. And even if I cannot read it in the original Spanish, I have twice enjoyed making my way through its 900-odd pages in both the 18^th century translation by Charles Jarvis, and the 1950 translation by J.M.Cohen (the one that held sway for years in the Penguin Classics). There are at least ten other full-length translations of the novel into English, three of them made in the 21^st century alone. As I have remarked before on this blog (see the post on War and Peace), any new translation of a great novel will trumpet its own worth and probably have a translator’s introduction explaining how other translations have missed noteworthy things in the original author’s style. I am sure that there are many nuances of Cervantes’ great work which I, as a non-speaker of Spanish, have missed. Even so, I think that reading both the Jarvis and the Cohen translations has given me some knowledge of the novel.

But how do I write about it without telling you what you already know?

You already know that this is a picaresque (or at least episodic) novel in which the hero, his mind turned by reading too many romances of knightly chivalry, imagines he is a knight riding out to right wrongs, even if it is incongruous to do such things in the Spain of the Golden Age. You know about his charging the windmills (which occurs only about 20 pages in, before the novel has really got going). You know about the very worldly peasant companion he picks up as his squire, fat little Sancho Panza, who sees things with shrewd peasant common sense and yet is fully convinced that his master will lead him to his “island” where he will be ruler. Perhaps you know of Sancho’s wife Teresa and of Sancho’s donkey Dapple, just as you know of Don Quixote’s bony stallion Rocinante. Perhaps you know of the way Sancho Panza endlessly spouts proverbs. You almost certainly know of Dulcinea, the simple peasant girl whom Don Quixote takes to be the lady to whom he dedicates his chivalric deeds. And there is at least an outside chance that you know about the barber’s basin, which Don Quixote turns into the Helmet of Mambrino; and of the barber and the priest who purge Don Quixote’s library in an attempt to cure his delusions. You might even have heard of Samson Carrasco, the university-educated chap who spends much time trying to reason, and then to frighten, Don Quixote out of his perceived madness. And, at the limits of possibility, you might know that the story of the knight and the squire is interspersed with a number of self-contained stories, detached from the main narrative and capable of being presented as “novels” on their own – not to mention all the parodies of writings about shepherds and shepherdesses in sylvan settings.

But all this you might know without having once read the novel.

You see, like Hamlet and Faust and Don Juan, Don Quixote is now an archetype. He is the dreamy and unrealistic idealist with the generous heart, who really wants to do good in the world even if he often messes things up in a farcical way. We’ve even created an adjective out of him in the English language – “quixotic”, meaning inclined to a dreamy, unrealistic but always well-intentioned view of the world, and perhaps engaging in noble but fruitless causes. (The existence of the adjective “quixotic” also fires up those pointless debates among English-speakers about whether you should pronounce the hero’s name Spanish-style DON KEY-HO-TAY or English-style DON QUICK-SOAT. I myself favour the English style.)

And because Don Quixote is an archetype, and is apparently known by people who have never actually read the novel in which he appears, there are all sorts of misconceptions about him abroad. I remember once hearing a woman, who had clearly not taken the merest glance at a word Cervantes wrote, boldly proclaiming “I never got the point of this silly little man wandering around imagining things.”

Oh dear.

Then there are those who think the whole spirit of the novel is captured in the mediocre Broadway musical Man of La Mancha, that one-hit wonder with its song about dreaming the impossible dream.

Double oh dear.

So I am reluctant to expound at length on this novel, except to state the obvious.

Don Quixote is a fitting place in which to find the profoundest philosophy. The pairing of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza is indeed an essay in epistemology – the soul set with the body; reason set with the appetites (or senses); Rationalism set with Empiricism – and in the end the two melding into one as Don Quixote has to adopt some of the worldliness of Sancho Panza and Sancho Panza has to adopt some of the idealism of Don Quixote. If the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance is Plato and Rene Descartes, then his fat little squire is John Locke and David Hume. And the novel itself is Emmanuel Kant, finding a middle way between polarised epistemologies.

Don Quixote is the protest of the imagination against the finality of death – at least this was the view of the early-20^th-century Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (look up the piece on Unamuno’s TheTragic Sense of Life on this blog.)

 Don Quixote is also, as Herbert Grierson argued, a novel attuned to the Christian concept of charity, which is why it was more often imitated in the days when writers still admired practical charity and altruism, and before the post-romantic notion of the alienated artist (at odds with his/her fellow human beings) kicked in. Even if he often goes crazily wrong, Don Quixote is at least trying to do good for others.

Don Quixote is certainly a comic masterpiece. Indeed much of it is pure slapstick and farce and the “mistakes of the night at the inn” variety of comedy. But I have never read its best episodes without seeing how Cervantes is also playing with bigger and more resonant ideas. Is it the triumph of the imagination over material reality when the lion released from its cage does not attack Don Quixote? Is it the revenge of material reality over imagination when Don Quixote is knocked down by a herd of bulls? Are we deep into the realms of subjectivism and rationalism when Don Quixote is lowered into a cave, clearly falls asleep, and yet emerges telling of the wonderful things he has seen? How clearly does Cervantes comment on the suspension of disbelief in theatre when Don Quixote slashes with his sword at the puppet show? How satirical is he being about war and warriors when Don Quixote mistakes two flocks of sheep for two armies? One could almost read such examples as parables.

I do admit that I find the two parts of the novel not to be a perfect match. Part One, published in 1605, is the more purely comic part – the part which often simply invites us to laugh at the crazy things done by a deluded old man. Part Two, published ten years later in 1615, is the part which waxes more philosophical and certainly has some of the sequences I enjoy most as Cervantes reconsiders his knight and squire and has them more often melding into each other in the ways they see reality. It also has Sancho at last getting his “island” and ruling it; and it has the best conflicts in the whole opus when Samson Carrasco confronts Don Quixote with a more challenging view of what reality is.

I have noticed that many critics take the second part to be more considered and more smoothly written.

And yet Part Two has a certain self-referentialism which I find arch. Often knight and squire are greeted by people who recognise them because they have read about them in the first book; and in the long episode where the duke and duchess entertain Don Quixote, they are playing games that they think will amuse him because they have read of such games in Part One. (Embedded in this, there is the historical fact that Cervantes was, in the text and narrative of Part Two itself, asserting his authorship after certain plagiarists had produced their rip-off versions of Part One.)

One thing is very clear, however. The whole work is the work of a mellow and mature man who has seen much of life, and whose attitude throughout is forgiving and benign. Cervantes was 57 when the first part of Don Quixote was published and 67 when the second part was published. He was no rebellious kid.

As a whole, Don Quixote is the most benign and least malicious Great Book ever written. This is probably my main reason for liking it so much.

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.  

CERVANTES: AN INVITATION

22 April 2016 will mark the 400th anniversary of the death of Miguel de Cervantes, Spain's greatest literary genius, who happened to die within eleven days of William Shakespeare.

To mark this special occasion, I will be giving an illustrated presentation in the Auckland Central Library entitled "Don Quixote and the English Imagination", in which I first examine what the great appeal of "Don Quixote" itself is, and then examine how often it has been imitated, parodied or used as a source of inspiration by English writers, from Shakespeare to Graham Greene.

Beginning at 5:30 pm, Friday 22 April, Central Auckland Library. 

Something New

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

“RUSHING FOR GOLD – Life and Commerce in the Goldfields of New Zealand and Australia” Edited by Lloyd Carpenter and Lyndon Fraser (Otago University Press, $NZ45)

I have always found it difficult reviewing collections of academic essays written by many hands. Each essay will be so dense with information and meaning that it really requires a “close reading” – or perhaps a detailed counter-argument, if it is on a topic about which I know something. And yet any review which gave a “close reading” to all the contributions in such a collection would become unwieldy and over-long. This problem rears its head again as I look at this heavy (nearly 400 closely-printed pages) collection of twenty essays written by 23 people. [There are two contributions written in collaboration.]

Rushing for Gold has been jointly edited by Lloyd Carpenter (Lincoln University) and Lyndon Fraser (Otago University) and looks at New Zealand’s nineteenth century gold rushes with special – but not exclusive – reference to the trans-Tasman connection. These gold rushes were as much Australasian affairs as solely New Zealand ones. This fact was noted in Stefan Eldrid-Grigg’s racy and populist history of New Zealand’s gold rushes Diggers, Hatters and Whores (2008) and has also been glanced at in such recent works of fiction as Charlotte Randall’s Hokitika Town (2006) and of course Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (2013). I have noticed that in the last decade there has been a growing interest in the gold-rush era of our history, by writers of fiction as much as by historians. Perhaps it is because our gold rushes can be framed as the nearest things in our history to the “wild frontier” phase of American history.

Rushing for Gold is not a “wild frontier” book or a piece of mythologising. Its sets of essays are grouped thematically into five parts.

The four essays of Part One are the ones which deal specifically with the Australian connection. Chris McConville, Keir Reeves and Andrew Reeves collaborate to chew over the issue of how much gold rushes in Otago and in the Australian colony of Victoria produced similar societies and mentalities. In his essay, Daniel Davy takes the more direct path of chronicling exactly how many Australians rushed to Otago and what social impact they had. “Victorian capital and commerce flooded into the province with a rapidity that stunned Otago colonists,” he notes, adding that the rushes “pulled Otago closer to Melbourne.” (p.45) In a dense demographic reading, Terry Hearn shows how the Tuapeka rush produced as much disillusioned movement of miners away from New Zealand as influx into the province. Finally, John Angus explains why, despite their populism and their desire to participate in politics, the influx of miners into Otago did not set off the type of political clashes that had happened in Ballarat in the 1850s. As one would expect, the figure of Vincent Pyke looms large in this chapter.

The next four essays deal with two ethnic groups who were involved in New Zealand gold rushes. One of these groups has been amply documented in relation to the gold rushes, and made the subject of films, TV documentaries and so forth. These were the Chinese, who are commemorated in three essays by James Ng, Joanna Boileau and Paul Macgregor. Ng is mainly concerned with the physical conditions under which the Chinese miners worked. He writes:

“When the Chinese miners arrived in Otago, European miners held the best claims and water rights, so newcomers got the rest, including worked-over and abandoned ground. In poor-yielding land, the work had to be methodical, and the Chinese miners excelled at this by working in cooperative parties. They readily took up poorer auriferous ground, which was apparently plentiful and mostly free when they first arrived, a practice which minimised competition and irritation between Europeans and Chinese.”( p.107)

Joanna Boileau talks about how the Chinese provisioned themselves and established a local tradition by producing both their own food and food for trade in market gardening. Paul Macgregor takes a broader picture on the social impact of Chinese in the area. This is a particularly nuanced essay, as Macgregor does touch on some Pakeha antagonism towards the Chinese, but also notes how well Chinese were able to establish themselves in local business and indeed how various the Pakeha response to them was. On the whole, the law protected the Chinese from the type of racially-inspired attacks to which they were sometimes subject.

The other and, oddly, less-often-discussed ethnic group involved in New Zealand gold rushes were the Maori, the subject of an essay by Lloyd Carpenter. Among other things, Carpenter makes what should be the obvious point (but is often overlooked) that Maori were aware of some of the local gold deposits before the gold rushes began. He also documents some of the Maori diggers involved in the rush, and the fact that a very few Maori goldminers made it to overseas rushes in such places as the Yukon.

If the broad picture of the international nature of the gold rushes, and the various ethnicities involved, are dealt with in the first two sections, then Part Three turns to the matter of gender, without which no respectable modern socio-history can appear. Specifically, there are three essays on women in the goldfields of Otago and the West Coast. Sandra Quick takes on the large topic of how women were involved as hoteliers and illegal purveyors of liquor for the whole of the late nineteenth century. Julia Bradshaw’s contribution, entitled “Forgetting Their Place”, is one of the most nuanced in the collection. Discussing women of “abandoned character”, Bradshaw comes close to refuting the view that the goldfields swarmed with prostitutes. Many women thus labelled, she argues, were women who lived unconventionally (not married to their male partners, for example) but who were not necessarily career prostitutes. This is an interesting chapter as much about perception as about the objective facts of the case. As Bradshaw notes: “The courts and public opinion were relatively unforgiving if women stepped out of the sphere of what was seen as acceptable behaviour for women at the time.”(p.167). She instances the case of a hotelier’s wife being fined by a magistrate for using foul language as she attempted to eject forcibly a drunken customer. The magistrate suggested that her actions would have been perfectly acceptable had they been performed by her husband. On quite a different tack, Lyndon Fraser, who has twice published volumes about the early Irish in New Zealand, combines the themes of gender and ethnicity with an essay on Irish women in the West Coast rush, a sober account of how these deracinated women made careers in all spheres of life.

If I have been able to tick off the Aussie connection, ethnicity and gender as being the subjects of the first three parts of Rushing for Gold, it is harder to characterise the five essays of the fourth part. Part Four is headed “Goldfields Society”, but this seems to refer to the matter of social class and profession. Professor Tom Brooking’s essay “Harsh Environment, Softer Sociology” looks at the whole story of goldmining in the Dunstan area of Otago, from the first rush through the long period when an established gold-mining “industry” was operating there. Brooking laments the lack of real sociological analysis of people involved. Rosemary Marryatt observes what was, for one social class, the negative impact of the gold rushes. She tells the story of the run-holder (large-scale pastoralist) William Rees and his family, whose way of life was disrupted by the arrival of all the diggers. Lloyd Carpenter considers the number of businesses that were set up, either to support and provision gold-diggers or to “grubstake” them and finance them with loans. But he concludes that those who prospered on the back of miners’ toil were not a class apart – generally the goldfields’ merchants and bankers were no wealthier than the toilers in the goldfields themselves.

Remarks Carpenter: “Although a divide existed between miners and merchants on the goldfields, the divide was not one of wealth or even of the degree to which earnings were hard-won. The divide was simply along the nature of urban resident and mining-cottage dweller, of business-owner and miner. The nature of their respective operations produced a naturally dichotomised society, but the relationship between each was more symbiotic than adversarial.”(Carpenter, p.239)

Jeremy Finn considers the careers of fifteen lawyers who practised in the goldfields while Andre Brett analyses the impact of the gold rushes upon the rise (and later fall) of the New Zealand provincial system, and especially upon the development of railways in Otago and Southland.

When an historical process passes out of living memory, it enters the realm of legend. This is very much what the fifth and final part of Rushing for Gold deals with. Warwick Frost’s unexpected contribution considers the way tourists are encouraged to interpret and “act out” a mythologised version of the American Old West and of Australian colonialism in the USA and Oz, and what principles underlie such presentations. Implicitly, these principles could be applied to the Otago goldfields. Neville Ritchie’s chapter is the most matter-of-fact: a methodical survey of archaeological sites in Otago related to goldfields. And at the other end of the creative spectrum, the final chapter is the playscript of a musical entertainment devised by Fiona Farrell, concerning a group of entertainers who toured the goldfields putting on shows for miners. Their chief is Charles Thatcher, an historical figure from the goldfields, noted for his ability to whip up satirical songs for all occasions. Some of Thatcher’s songs are quoted in earlier chapters in this book.

You have got to the end of this review probably as exasperated as I am. Given the variety of its contents, Rushing for Gold has led me to do what is a very bad habit of mine. I have listed conscientiously and name-checked diligently the various contents of this volume like a good bibliographer but a bad reviewer. You see, I have barely passed reasoned judgment on the volume at all. I have simply told you what is in it.

Time to ‘fess up. Some of the essays really held my attention for the human stories they told and the vivid accounts they gave of living and working conditions a century-and-a-half ago. Others are more in the nature of academic exercises. From that point of view, Rushing for Gold is a mixed bag. As always in a well-illustrated book, the many images are fascinating. I am always intrigued by the way outdoors photographs taken in the nineteenth century, because of the primitive nature of early cameras, wash out backgrounds so that panoramic shots of towns and settlements leave them floating in blank-space, like revenants. Thus it is with the photo of the boomtown of Naseby in the 1860s. I am sorry that the front cover presents us with a rather cluttered design. But apart from that gripe Rushing for Gold succeeds in its aim of being the highly informative tome it is.

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. 

“ISABELLA; or THE POT OF BASIL” by John Keats (written 1818; first published in 1820)

            Going back to literature that you loved as a teenager can be a chastening experience. “Did I really like that?” you say to yourself in disappointment or bemusement as your adult eyes scan critically what your youthful eyes once devoured uncritically. And yet it is not always a negative experience. Sometimes you give your younger self points for good taste, even if your taste has moved on.

            The first grown-up narrative poem that I read by choice and for pleasure, and not because some teacher had told me to, was John Keats’ Isabella or the Pot of Basil.

I think I was about fifteen. Why this poem? I’m not sure, but probably because it appeared in an old Collins Clear Type edition of Keats’ poems, to which I still give shelf space. The edition was illustrated and I was still of an age when I looked at the pictures in books before I read the text. This poem was represented with what I now see to be a rather crude image of Isabella weeping over her pot of basil. Anyway, it intrigued me enough to read the poem and I did, a number of times. All 63 stanzas of ottava rima (eight lines with three sets of crossed rhymes followed by a couplet, a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c).

I loved it.

John Keats (1795-1821) wrote this poem when he was 23, although it was first published when he was 25. It was therefore written before the annus mirabilis for which he is so often praised. He adapted his story from Boccaccio’s Decameron.

In Renaissance Florence, Isabella loves Lorenzo and Lorenzo loves Isabella, but Isabella’s two brothers are ambitious merchants who want their sister to make a wealthy marriage. They disapprove of poor Lorenzo, who is their lowly employee. Therefore they take desperate measures. Luring Lorenzo away on the pretext of taking him on a business trip, they murder him and bury him in a forest. Returning home, they tell Isabella that Lorenzo will be away on business for a very long time. But Isabella has a dream in which Lorenzo’s ghost tells her how he has been murdered and where he is buried. With a servant, Isabella hastens to the spot, uncovers the corpse and (bizarre detail) cuts off the head, which she preserves in a pot of the herb basil. She clings to this pot, tending it and weeping over it, so obsessively that her brothers notice. In a moment when the pot is unguarded, they steal it, discover its contents, and flee, knowing that their crime has been discovered. The poem ends with Isabella, unhinged, lamenting that her beloved basil pot has been taken from her.

When I first read this poem, I was puzzled that Isabella did not confront her brothers with their crime and took such an eccentric course in honouring her dead lover. I think I get it now. She is a powerless young woman whose life is controlled by her brothers and whose word (as a woman) wouldn’t be believed in a law court. She is also not focused on revenge (or justice) but on love and lament.

And besides, John Keats was following Boccaccio’s brutal little story.

Ahead of writing this notice, I checked out Boccaccio’s story (Decameron, Fourth Day, 5^th story) in the two translations of the Decameron that sit on my shelves. Boccaccio’s story is set specifically in Messina (in Sicily) and the basil plant comes from Salerno. Lorenzo is Lorenzo, but the girl is called throughout Lisabetta, not Isabella. She has three brothers, not two. The story is curt and does not dally over the fine feelings of the lovers. In both the (1903) Everyman’s library translation by J.R. Rigg, and the (1972) Penguin translation by G.H.McWilliam, it runs to a mere four pages. It is a sharp little anecdote, emphasising horror and the grotesque. By the way, Isabella/ Lisabetta’s final lament over her basil pot is based on a Sicilian folk song from before Boccaccio’s time, and it may have been the folk song that inspired Boccaccio to write his tale.

While he does indeed tell the same story that Boccaccio told, John Keats changes some minor points – he shifts the setting to somewhere near Florence and the River Arno (Stanza 27) and gives Isabella only two brothers. More important, Keats shifts the emphasis from pure horror to the feelings of the lovers for each other, and to the inwardness of Isabella’s grief. He also interpolates things that do not concern Boccaccio  - such as a long condemnation of Isabella’s brothers (Stanzas 14, 15, 16) and apostrophes to Melancholy (Stanzas 55 and 61). Therefore, while staying true to Boccaccio’s narrative framework, the poem becomes a (sometimes uneasy) mixture of Romantic passion and sentiment with grotesque horror.

Now what, in this Romantic poem, appealed to a teenaged reader?

            The poem opens thus:

“FAIR Isabel, poor simple Isabel!
Lorenzo, a young palmer in Love’s eye!
They could not in the self-same mansion dwell
Without some stir of heart, some malady;
They could not sit at meals but feel how well
It soothed each to be the other by;
They could not, sure, beneath the same roof sleep
But to each other dream, and nightly weep.” (Stanza 1)

Immediately we know from the word “palmer” (pilgrim) that the poem will have an exalted view of romantic love as religious experience. Yes, that is the way adolescents often see it. But there is also the issue of sex. Isabella and Lorenzo ache to consummate their love sexually:

“A whole long month of May in this sad plight
Made their cheeks paler by the break of June:
‘To morrow will I bow to my delight,
To-morrow will I ask my lady’s boon.’ -
‘O may I never see another night,
Lorenzo, if thy lips breathe not love’s tune.’ -
So spake they to their pillows; but, alas,
Honeyless days and days did he let pass.” (Stanza 5)

Lorenzo wails “I cannot live / Another night, and not my passion shrive.” (Stanza 8), again making sexual love a religious experience. “Shrive” means to have your sins cleansed by confession. In effect, Lorenzo is saying  “I will relieve myself of my passion in your body, just as a penitent relieves himself of sins in the confessional”. Unfulfilled sexual drives – that was another major attraction to the teenaged male reader, who spent much time speaking to his pillow.

And then the poem speaks to adolescent angst  - the persistent sense that “My family are controlling me! I’m not allowed to do what I want” etc. I remember, as a teenager, lingering over the stanza in which the ghost of Lorenzo departs, leaving Isabella to her lonely bed:

“The Spirit mourn’d ‘Adieu!’ - dissolv’d, and left
The atom darkness in a slow turmoil;
As when of healthful midnight sleep bereft,
Thinking on rugged hours and fruitless toil,
We put our eyes into a pillowy cleft,
And see the spangly gloom froth up and boil:
It made sad Isabella’s eyelids ache,
And in the dawn she started up awake…” (Stanza 41)

            That phenomenon of lying awake in the darkness and seeing the “spangly gloom” dancing before my eyes – yes, I spent many teenage nights in that state.

            I am not looking at the poem now solely to rebuke my teenage self. I can appreciate in it much of Keats’ real skill. I note, for example, the way he is focusing on Isabella and her sorrow, and hence does not dwell on grisly details of Lorenzo’s murder. “So the two brothers and their murder’d man / Rode past fair Florence…” (Stanza 27) says one admired line, deliberately taking any suspense out of what the two brothers are going to do. Of the actual murder all we get is “There was Lorenzo slain and buried in, / There in that forest did his great love cease.” (Stanza 28). I also note flashes of psychological acuteness. Romantic and sexual love may be exalted in the poem as a quasi-religious phenomenon, but it always has its selfish side. When Isabella first learns that Lorenzo is not coming back (but before she knows that he is murdered), she laments first of all “pleasures not to be”; but then Keats comments “Selfishness, Love’s cousin, held not long / Its fiery vigil in her single breast”. (Stanza 31).

“Selfishness, Love’s cousin”? In other words, in matters of sexual attraction, self-gratification is also a reality, as strong as an idealisation of the beloved.

Yet having noted the self-evident skill of a great poet, there are those points where the mature eye can see the joins. Keats eschews the “horror” aspect when he narrates Lorenzo’s murder but – for all his focus on Isabella’s anguish – he can’t forbear to drop in some gruesome Gothick elements. When Lorenzo’s ghost appears to Isabella, Keats suggests the awful decay of the murdered man’s corpse and the unearthliness of its voice (Stanzas 35, 36, 37). And hints of the true Gothick intermesh with the sweetly (or passionately) Romantic, when Isabella finds the forest grave where her lover is buried:

“Who hath not loiter’d in a green church-yard,
And let his spirit, like a demon-mole,
Work through the clayey soil and gravel hard,
To see skull, coffin’d bones, and funeral stole;
Pitying each form that hungry Death hath marr’d,
And filling it once more with human soul?
Ah! this is holiday to what was felt
When Isabella by Lorenzo knelt.” (stanza 45)

            Then there are the three consecutive stanzas that stick out like a sore thumb as a hindrance to the poem’s narrative drive. Keats denounces Isabella’s rapacious mercantile brothers in words that are among the most impassioned in the poem:

“With her two brothers this fair lady dwelt,
Enriched from ancestral merchandize,
And for them many a weary hand did swelt
In torched mines and noisy factories,
And many once proud-quiver’d loins did melt
In blood from stinging whip; - with hollow eyes
Many all day in dazzling river stood,
To take the rich-ored driftings of the flood.

For them the Ceylon diver held his breath,
And went all naked to the hungry shark;
For them his ears gush’d blood; for them in death
The seal on the cold ice with piteous bark
Lay full of darts; for them alone did seethe
A thousand men in troubles wide and dark:
Half-ignorant, they turn’d an easy wheel,
That set sharp racks at work, to pinch and peel.

Why were they proud? Because their marble founts
Gush’d with more pride than do a wretch’s tears? -
Why were they proud? Because fair orange-mounts
Were of more soft ascent than lazar stairs? -
Why were they proud? Because red-lin’d accounts
Were richer than the songs of Grecian years? -
Why were they proud? again we ask aloud,
Why in the name of Glory were they proud?” (Stanzas 14, 15, 16)

Is this the Romantic poet reacting against the industry and early capitalism that was overwhelming England in his own day? In the “industrial revolution” the Romantic (and therefore radical) young Keats forgets his aim and goes off topic. After doing so, he asks Boccaccio’s pardon: “O eloquent and famed Boccaccio! / Of thee we now should ask forgiving boon…. Grant thou a pardon here, and then the tale / Shall move on soberly as it is meet…” (Stanzas 19 and 20) But the damage has still been done. There is a similar sense of the material going over-the-top and getting out of the poet’s control in Keats’ apostrophes to Melancholy (Stanzas 55 and 61). And, alas, there are stylistic breakdowns into bathos, as when Isabella is first told that Lorenzo will not return for a long time, and Keats slaps us with these limp lines: “To-day thou wilt not see him, nor to-morrow, / And the next day will be a day of sorrow.” (Stanza 29). The rather too hasty dismissal of Isabella’s brothers from the story is also bathetic (Stanza 60); though I am still in two minds as to whether the poem’s last words are: “O cruelty, / To steal my Basil-pot away from me!” (Stanza 63)

At least I can salute Keats’ fruitful ambiguity in the way he depicts Isabella’s obsessive care of her basil plant:  

“And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun,
And she forgot the blue above the trees,
And she forgot the dells where waters run,
And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;
She had no knowledge when the day was done,
And the new morn she saw not: but in peace
Hung over her sweet Basil evermore,
And moisten’d it with tears unto the core.” (Stanza 53)

            Is this the epitome of grief and romantic love, or is it mania – a collapse into madness and a separation from the realities of the world?

            I am, of course, both arrogant and presumptuous to criticise a canonical poet like this – but I am consoled by the knowledge that Keats would have agreed with me. Keats was “dissatisfied with the poem before he had ended it” says Robert Gittings, the Keats scholar and biographer. Keats had to be argued into letting it be published in the 1820 volume which contained his more mature poetry. Keats wrote: “I will give you a few reasons why I shall persist in not publishing The Pot of Basil. It is too smokeable. I can get it smoak‘d at the Carpenters shaving chimney much more cheaply. There is too much inexperience of life, and simplicity of knowledge in it. […]. Isabella is what I should call  were  I  a  reviewer ‘A weak-sided Poem’ with an amusing sober-sadness about it.” The word “smokeable” was one Keats often used to mean ill-formed, unfocused, cloudy, immature and irresolute. As a poet who developed very fast, Keats himself saw Isabella or the Pot of Basil as not being worthy of his more developed poetic skill.

So how do I conclude this inquisition of one of Keats’ lesser works? Of course it is not his greatest. As a narrative poem, it does not have the power of The Eve of Saint Agnes or even the defective Lamia (though – Lord save us – it is not as tedious as Endymion). Certainly it is nowhere near the great odes for which Keats is best remembered. But it is still an excellent poem for a teenager to fall in love with, bathos, overblown apostrophes and all. You are lying in your single bed yearning for the opposite sex. What could console you better than this sad tale of lovers’ despair  – which also tells you how rotten some grown-ups can be?

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It’s a very curious fact that John Keats’ immature and imperfect poem became a favourite with Pre-Raphaelite and other Victorian-era painters. Look up the title Isabella or the Pot of Basil on Google Images and you will find literally dozens of nineteenth century paintings on the subject, most of them depicting Isabella weeping over her basil pot.

Curiously, the first and probably most famous painting derived from the poem does not depict the pot of basil. It is John Everett Millais’ Isabella (also known as Lorenzo and Isabella) exhibited in 1849. It shows the young lovers at the dinner table opposite Isabella’s brothers and it is heavy with symbolism. Lorenzo hands Isabella a cut blood orange on a plate – a premonition of the later decapitation of his corpse.

The most  famous depiction of Isabella with the basil pot is by another Pre-Raphaelite. It is William Holman Hunt’s 1868 painting which I had the pleasure of seeing in the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle-on-Tyne in 2014. In fact it was seeing this that made me go back and read the poem for the first time in years.

In 1879, the painter John Melhuish Strudwick took another tack. He did not show Isabella weeping over the basil pot, but showed her (remarkably languid and composed, I can’t help thinking) discovering that the pot has been stolen, while through the window behind her we can see her brothers sneaking away with it.

            And then there is the depiction of Isabella and her pot by the late 19^th/early 20th century artist George Henry Grenville Manton. This is the one heaviest with the oblivion of grief – Isabella is clad in black and her eyes are closed as if grief has exhausted her.

            By the time Manton produced his version, Keats’ poem was already being produced in de luxe illustrated editions, like the one William Morris’s disciple W.B.MacDougall produced in 1898.

            It is possible that some of these artists saw themselves as illustrating Boccaccio’s story rather than Keats’ poem. But I doubt that there would have been so many depictions of the story if Keats had not written his poem. My cynical side notes, too, that Victorians would have been happier to illustrate this story than most of the other tales that fill the Decameron. After all, anecdotes of monks bonking nuns and priests bonking penitents would not have been able to be exhibited in a Victorain gallery. And yet, of course, the image of a grieving woman clinging to a solid upright thing has its own erotic charge, as I’m sure many of these artists fully understood.

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.    

NEW WAVE TODAY, OLD HAT TOMORROW

A free night and the lure of Youtube.

We sit down to watch an old French film made in 1959. Julien Duvivier’s Marie Octobre. It’s no great shakes, but we enjoy it. “Marie Octobre” is the wartime code-name of a woman who was in a cell of resisters in occupied France during the Second World War. But she has recently learned that the beloved leader of the resisitance cell was dobbed in to the Gestapo by some other member of the cell.

So now, 14 years after the war, she summons to her chateau the other nine members of the cell. They think they are coming for a reunion dinner, but after some preliminary chat she makes it clear what her purpose is. She wishes to expose the traitor.

Was it the priest who (before he took holy orders) was in love with Marie and jealous of the admired resistance chief whom she loved? Or was it the butcher who did business deals with the occupying forces? Or was it the lawyer who was a Fascist in the 1930s, even if he turned against the Nazis when they violated the conditions of their armistice with France in 1942? Or was it the publisher who suddenly became rich just before the war ended? Or was it….?

Okay, one quickly recognizes what sort of film this is. We are about a quarter way in when we begin making remarks on how this seems the nearest thing a French film has ever come to being the classic Agatha Christie-type country-house whodunnit. The suspects are lined up in the large and sumptuous drawing room and the spotlight is turned on each, one after the other, until the identity of the guilty party is at last revealed.

Playing “Marie Octobre”, Danielle Darrieux, one of France’s biggest film stars, has the mature beauty of a woman then in her early ‘40s. Really the essence of chic. She is surrounded by many of France’s best character actors – Bernard Blier, Paul Guers, those two Franco-Italian stars Serge Reggiani and Lino Ventura and others. There is a maid who wanders in and out of a few scenes, but really Danielle Darrieux and nine men are the whole show. The camera often groups the men around her, emphasising that she is the queen bee and the star attraction. Indeed the camera sometimes lines up the characters as if they are appearing on the stage. The film is sometimes like the dreaded “canned theatre” although, as it happens, it was not based on a stage play.

Given this cast and given this director, this was clearly a “prestige” film of its year. But it was made in a style that even then was regarded as theatrical and old hat – not to mention the highly formulaic nature of its script. So when it was released, and despite being a popular hit in France, it drew a chorus of raspberries from most reviewers. I have accessed a 1959 review of the film by Bosley Crowther in the New York Times, where he dismisses the film with a yawn. I note that in his film guide, Leslie Halliwell awards it no stars and describes it as a “stultifying one-set talkfest”. French reviewers were just as unimpressed in 1959.

            And this is the point of my little sermon this week.

1959 was also when the younger nouvelle vague (new wave) directors were beginning to flex their muscles. Julien Duvivier had been at his peak as a director in the 1930s, when he came up with such classics as Pepe Le Moko and Un Carnet de Bal. Along with Jean Renoir, Marcel Carne, Rene Clair and Jacques Feyder, he was regarded as one of France’s greatest directors. But twenty years later, the bright young cineastes of Cahiers du Cinema were denouncing him and his peers as belonging to “le cinema de papa” (“Dad’s cinema”) and producing films that were out-of-touch, old-fashioned and stultifying. The era of Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Melville, Claude Chabrol and others was dawning. In 1959 Francois Truffaut’s moving study of a lost youth Les Quatre Cent Coups (The 400 Blows) was shown at the Cannes film festival and Truffaut was awarded the gong for best director. (Ironically, Duvivier was on the jury that awarded Truffaut the gong.) So how could Duvivier’s old-fashioned formulaic movie compete in the critics’ eyes?

And yet, mes amis, here is my point.

57 years after Les Quatre Cent Coups, the nouvelle vague is itself old hat.

I ask you to look now, with a dispassionate eye, at the likes of Jules et Jim (Truffaut), Le Mepris (Godard), Le Beau Serge (Chabrol) and other films of that era. You might feel a twinge of nostalgia for them, and even enjoy the skill of their making. They are not rubbish. But you have to admit that their world-view is now antique. They are as dated as “le cinema de papa”, which their makers derided.

This is the inevitable swipe of time, of course. Everything dates. But the poiint is that the techniques of Duvivier, Renoir, Carne, Clair and Feyder now look no more dated to us than those of Truffaut, Godard, Melville and early Chabrol. Inded in some respects the techniques of the latter bunch (over-lapping dialogue, hand-held cameras etc.) are now more the clichés of film; and the stately pacing of the former bunch is more welcome.

And here’s this final kicker. I look up more recent French reviews of Duvivier’s Marie Octobre – reviews tied to VHS and DVD releases of the film – and I find that it has been widely reassessed by French critics as a skilful piece of movie-making, with Duvivier’s use camera now likened to the long takes that Hitchcock used in his Rope. French reviewers mean it as a compliment when they compare it with Rene Clair’s 1945 film version of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (which the French still tactlessly call by its original title, Dix Petits Negres). Clair, like Duvivier, was a refugee in Hollywood during the Second World War. For the record, Marie Octobre has been re-filmed more recently, and adapted for the stage, where it is apparently a frequent crowd-pleaser in French repertory theatre.

Does this mean the original film is a great film?

Um – no. It’s a competent and entertaining example of a formulaic genre. No more nor less. But it’s only as dated as the movies by younger directors that were made at the same time.