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 book published four or more years ago.

“BY THE IONIAN SEA” by George Gissing (first published in 1901)

 

There are two topics that I have tackled a number of times on this blog. One is the nature of travel books and the other is the work of the late nineteenth-century realist novelist George Gissing (1857-1903).

With regard to the nature of travel books, I really said my piece in the posting On the Beaten Track some nine years ago. My basic contention was the obvious one that a worthwhile travel book has to be more than a description of places – a function that has now been usurped by television, photography and guide-books. It must be more in the nature of an extended autobiographical essay, dealing with personal encounters, human interactions and various travel-related topics (social, historical, political etc.) that engage the author. I maintained this view in my postings on older travel books like Henry Fielding’s Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, A.W.Kinglake’s Eothen, and Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps; and more recent ones like Ben Stubbs’ Ticketto Paradise, Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express and The Last Train to Zona Verde, and Robert Carver’s The Accursed Mountains.

And how is travel related to George Gissing? On this blog I have often made postings on his novels, usually stories of the grinding poverty of the working classes, or stories of the lower middle-classes desperately trying to maintain their position. Thus The Nether World, New Grub Street (probably his best-known novel, about hack writers), Born in Exile, The Odd Women, Will Warburton and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. The last-named, probably Gissing’s second-best-known work, is a fantasia of the type of life George Gissing, always short of money, wished he had been able to lead. He depicts his alter ego as a man of leisure, living in the countryside, reading beloved literary texts, taking long walks and aestheticising over nature. How Gissing wished he could have led that life! And how he wished he could have continued with his classical studies, which had been broken off when his tertiary education was abruptly terminated. At the time of his death he was writing, but had not completed, Veranilda, a novel set in classical antiquity.

Which at last, to your relief, brings me to my reason for placing travel books and George Gissing in this one posting.

 

            Even by the standards of our day, George Gissing’s one-and-only travel book By the Ionian Sea, subtitled “Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy”, is a very brief work – about 140 pages of large print in the copy I read. It is an account of Gissing’s weeks in 1897, when he wandered about in Calabria and nearby areas, the “toe” and “instep” of the boot of Italy. Gissing had already visited more northern parts of Italy, but this was his one and only plunge into the deep south. After sailing from Naples, he landed at Paola on the west coast of Calabria, visited Aspromonte, travelled up to Taranto on the north of the Gulf of Taranto and moved back south to Cortone, where he suffered a horrible malarial fever, after which he went to the salubrious mountain town of Catanzaro, to Squillae on the smaller Gulf of Squillae, and eventually embarked for home from Reggio di Calabria.

            Now why did he choose to visit this part of Italy in one of his very rare trips abroad? Obviously it was because of his interest in classical antiquity, and his knowledge, fired by the books of the French archaeologist and classicist Francois Lenormant, that Southern Italy was as much a part of Greek antiiquity as of Latin antiquity. Greek colonists had settled there when Rome was still just a struggling city-state and before it had acquired an empire. Ancient Romans were sometimes called the south of Italy “Magna Graecia” (“Greater Greece”) because of this connection. As Gissing says in his opening chapter:

“The names of Greece and Italy draw me as no others; they make me young again, and restore the keen impression of that time when every new page of Greek or Latin was a new perception of things beautiful. The world of the Greeks and Romans is my land of romance; a quotation in either language thrills me strangely, and there are passages of Greek and Latin verse which I cannot read without a dimming of the eyes, which I cannot repeat aloud because my voice fails me. In Magna Graecia the waters of the two fountains mingle and flow together; how exquisite will be the draught!” (Chapter 1)

So in his journey, Gissing is the amateur antiquarian, sniffing out the tomb of Alaric the Goth; dreaming, when he has the fever at Cotrone, of the defeated Hannibal’s embarkation for Cathage; and breaking off the account of his own journey to give us a chapter on the Roman scholar and statesman Cassiodorus. His happiest single moment seems to be when he sees an orange orchard by full moonlight (end of Chapter 11) and imagines it to be the legendary Garden of the Hesperides which, geographically, should have been in about the same place that Gissing is visiting.

In the modern life of southern Italy, Gissing sees many things that delight him, and seem to him an affirmation that the ancient customs and ancient ways, which he admires, still persist there. Take this account of a pot market:

“I was glad to come upon the pot market; in the south of Italy it is always a beautiful and interesting sight. Pottery for the commonest use among Calabrian peasants has a grace of line, a charm of colour, far beyond anything native to our most pretentious china-shops. Here still lingers a trace of the old civilization. There must be a great good in a people which has preserved this need of beauty through ages of servitude and suffering. Compare such domestic utensils – these oil-jugs and water-jars – with those in the house of an English labourer. Is it really certain that all virtues of race dwell with those who can rest amid the ugly and know it not for ugliness?” (Chapter 3) [Emphasis added]

But, for the modern reader at least, there is a problem with Gissing’s classicist approach. In looking for the ancient, Gissing often denigrates or belittles the living Italian realities of his own time. “It disappointed me that I saw no interesting costume [at Paolo]; all wore the common, colourless garb of our destroying time,” (Chapter 2) he writes of his first landing in the south, as if he expects modern Calabrians to be dressed as ancient Greeks in some sort of theatrical tableau. Of a sea wall, he writes “… it grieves one to remember that the mighty blocks built into the sea barrier came from that fallen temple.” (Chapter 7) Does he expect people, over many generations and centuries, not to have turned to their own uses the materials at hand? Many a traveller in an antique land expects that land to be a species of museum. Yet it is ironical that while Gissing makes the occasional comment on how “progress” is destroying much of the region’s ancient charms, he is as much a traveller by train as by foot.

Couple this antiquarian bias, this sense that modern Italians are simply living on the ruins of something greater than themselves, with his frequent complaints about stinky hostelries and awful, unhygienic Italian food (except in the delightful town of Cantanzaro), and you almost have the formula for the ghastly Englishman abroad, seeing these natives as merely cluttering up the classical landscape.

This impulse is, naturally, most to the fore when Gissing comes up against the locals’ Catholicism. When he reads an 1896 announcement by Pope Leo XIII of 300 days of indulgence, Gissing bursts out: “Probably he repeated a mere formula learnt by heart. I wished he could have prayed spontaneously for three hundred days of wholesome and sufficient food, and for as any years of honest, capable government in his heavily-burdened country”. (Chapter 8)

His account of his presence in a church in Catanzaro on a feast day, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, is almost a catalogue of Protestant distaste: “At the hour of high mass I entered the sanctuary whither all were turning their steps. It was not easy to make a way beyond the portico, but when I had slowly pressed forward through the dense crowd, I found that the musical part of the service was being performed by a lively string-band, up in a gallery. For seats there was no room; and a standing multitude filled the whole church before the altar, and the sound of gossiping voices at moments all but overcame that of the music. I know not at what point of the worship I chanced to be present; heat and intolerable odours soon drove me forth again, but I retained an impression of jollity rather than of reverence. Those screaming and twanging instruments sounded much like an invitation to the dance, and all the faces about me were radiant with cheerfulness. Just such a throng, of course, attended upon the festival of god or goddess ere the old religion was transformed. Most of the Christian anniversaries have their origin in heathendom; the names have changed, but amid the unlettered worshippers there is little change of spirit; a tradition older than they can conceive rules their piety, and gives it whatever significance it may have in their simple lives.” (Chapter 12) [Emphases added] You see, these “unlettered” and “simple” people are uncouth enough to actually enjoy their religious ceremonies and rejoice at them. They should be singing doleful hymns of lament and listening to overlong hortatory sermons, like the puritans of northern Europe. And besides, their religion is just modified paganism anyway…

But I do not wish to over-emphasise this element of Gissing’s outlook. Though he does have his moments of sneering at local “superstitions”, Gissing is probably much kinder to Italians than most of his English contemporaries would have been. In one section he remarks:

“Legitimately enough one may condemn the rulers of Italy, those who take upon themselves to shape her political life, and recklessly load her with burdens insupportable. But among the simple on Italian soil a wandering stranger has no right to nurse national superiorities, to indulge a contemptuous impatience. It is the touch of tourist vulgarity. Listen to a Calabrian peasant singing as he follows his oxen along the furrow, or as he shakes the branches of his olive tree. That wailing voice amid the ancient silence, that long lament solacing ill-rewarded toil, comes from the heart of Italy herself, and wakes the memory of mankind.” (Chapter 10)

A little “purty”, perhaps, but at least showing some fellow-feeling.

Gissing does describe some of the ancient places he visits, but reading By the Ionian Sea, I was most struck by the fact that he is more concerned with anecdote than with (purple prose) descriptions of the sort that filled many travel books of his time. For example, he tells us of the local urchins who assume, because he is inspecting ruins, that he must be an architect come to fix their church, which has been damaged by an earthquake. The locals are sometimes bullied by “dazio” (excise men), which suggests some of the ongoing tension between Calabrians and the forces of the newly-unified Italian state, which really served the interests of more northern Italians and tended to see the southerners as barbarians to be tamed. Yet it was clearly the promise of scenic sights and interest in antiquities which motivated Gissing to travel to this country in the first place. There is, incidentally, no sense that Gissing has a travelling companion,. He is all alone, and the only people he speaks with are the chance acquaintances of the journey.

            A very brutal conclusion: despite its felicitous moments, this short book is also a very “slight” book, with no great moments or revelations. One almost gains the impression that Gissing wrote a travel book to order – to make sure he got the most out of his brief holiday.

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.   

                               THE FLIES CRAWLED UP THE WINDOW

 

            This, dear reader, is going to be one of my vague and evocative meditations upon the past and how we react to it. But fear not. I am not delving into the very deep historical past. I am delving only into a piece of cheerful vulgarity from early in the 20^th century and I am going to, as I have so often done on this blog, express bemusement at how the tastes of the relatively recent past are so different from the tastes of today. Not being the sort of person who feels superior to people of the past, I am not going to belittle their defunct tastes. I know that before too long, the tastes of today will smell like mouldy cheese. I am simply going to express my bemusement.

            Are you sitting comfortably?

Right. Here goes.

It happened like this. Some weeks ago, for no particular reason, the song “The Flies Crawled Up the Window” popped into my head. If you are younger than me, I might have to explain what that song was. It was a cheerful and nonsensical music-hall-type song recorded in the early 1930s, thus

“The flies crawled up the window

They had nothing else to do

They went up in their thousands

And came down two by two”.

And so on for five or six more equally witty verses.

Why, pray tell, did I come to know this song which was recorded two decades before I was born?

Because it was often played on radio when I was a child in the 1950s. And there was something odd about it. The recording began with a Frenchman introducing, in French, the Englishman Jack Hulbert who sang the song. Jack Hulbert then, in very halting and ungrammatical French, and with a strongly English accent, apologised for having forgotten most of the French he had learnt at school. Then he launched into the song. But between every verse he shouted “Bonsoir!” and a very French audience shouted back “Bonsoir!”

Anyway, with this song in my head for no particular reason, I turned to Youtube and Wikipedia. I found the song and listened to it and it was just as I remembered it from childhood, French interventions and all. I then looked up its particulars and discovered that Jack Hulbert first introduced the song in the English film Jack’s the Boy made in 1932. Where did the French element come in? Because Hulbert sang only one brief verse of the song in the film; but it was so popular that the recording company to which he was contracted chased him down to the south of France where he was holidaying, and recorded him singing the whole song in front of a French audience. The original 78 RPM recording declared on its label that it was recorded at Monte Carlo.

Jack’s the Boy was, I soon found out, a big commercial hit in England in 1932; one of the year’s most popular films. I discovered it starred both Jack Hulbert and his wife and life-long theatrical partner Cicely Courtneidge. 

 

 

That rang a bell for me. Often, as a child, I heard my father say how funny the team of Hulbert and Courtneidge were. In fact I can remember him once acting out an hilarious scene in which the two of them, walking down palatial stairs, were about to sing a romantic song on a balmy summer’s night but then had to start slapping themselves because of all the mosquitoes that were attacking them.

Ah! Slapstick! A very hard genre to reproduce. I had to take Dad’s word for it that it was funny.

Anyway, having tracked down “The Flies Crawled Up the Window” on Youtube, I decided to see if Youtube had this hilarious, money-making 1932 Hulbert and Courtneidge film Jack’s the Boy. It did and I watched it.

Oh dear! Oh dear! Oh dear!

I am very tolerant of the primitive film techniques that prevailed in the early talkie era. Some of my favourite movies are silents and early talkies. But, even by the standards of its day, Jack’s the Boy reeked of “quota quickie” – one of those cheap British films that were made to meet the requirement, in the 1930s, that cinemas in Britain had to show at least as many British films as American or other foreign ones.

Stagey. Long sequences with a static camera simply staring at the action. Few close-ups. Over-acting even as farces go.

And it was a farce.

Jack Hulbert (a man with an elongated chin of the sort that P.G.Wodehouse once described as “like the ram on a battleship”) plays a ne’er-do-well playboy who is the despair of his stern father, a high-ranking police officer. Jack sings a tiny scrap of “The Flies Crawled Up the Window” in the opening sequence when he is rolling home late at night with some of his drinking pals. To win his father’s approval, Jack covertly joins the police as an ordinary constable on the beat. And, so the tale goes, he rounds up some crooks and does eventually win his father’s approval as well as getting the girl – though oddly the girl is Winifred Shotter, not Cicely Courtneidge. En route there is much obvious (and clumsy) slapstick, a few attempts at comic dancing by Courtneidge and Hulbert, and many obvious puns.

It was, quite simply, painful to sit through but, heroically, I persisted watching it to the very end – a very unconvincing stand-off between crooks and police in Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks and then the happy-ending-with-girl.

I do not think it would be acceptable as a mere supporting feature even a decade or two after it was made. How on Earth did it become a hit? And why on Earth did my father regard Hulbert and Courtneidge as hilariously funny?

But at this point my profound reflection on tastes of the past has to kick in.

Let’s transport our minds back 90 years.

In 1932, my father would have been 16. Talking films had been around for only five or so years, and they were introduced a little later in New Zealand. They were still a cause for wonderment. People did not have television. Seeing a film would for most people have been a once-a-week experience. Audiences were not bombarded with comedy routines 24/7 on TV, the internet and podcasts. In one sense, it was easier for comedians to win an audience. And in New Zealand, there was the miracle of seeing on screen famous performers from the other side of the world. “Stagey” films were quite acceptable – I can remember my parents and some of their contemporaries chuckling over remembered bits of the filmed Aldwych Farces that were appearing on New Zealand cinema screens at about the same time as Jack’s the Boy.

            So I reconstruct in my mind my father, a teenager with some of his pals, sitting in a picture-theatre in 1932, watching on the big screen well-known British farceurs and laughing at all their jigs, gags, songs and clumsiness. It was novelty. It was new. It was the week’s entertainment.

            That we judge it differently now means only that we live in a different context and time zone. And we should consider humbly how our current entertainments will be judged by the audience of the year 2111.

 

Something New

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

SOMETHING NEW

“GHOSTS” by Siobhan Harvey (Otago University Press, $NZ27:50); “THE WILDER YEARS – Selected Poems” by David Eggleton (Otago University Press, $NZ40); “BURST KISSES ON THE ACTUAL WINDS” by Courtney Sina Meredith (Beatnik Publishing, $NZ30)

 

            I rarely comment on the covers of books; but the cover photograph (by Liz March) of Siobhan Harvey’s Ghosts is so striking, and so faithfully conveys the mood and feeling of the text(-s), that it deserves a mention.

            In subdued lighting and black-and-white, it shows a fireplace and a large mirror, both of a design from many decades ago, probably mid- or early-20th century. And to one side of this composition, head bowed, eyes down, is the poet. But she is dressed like a child in a very short shift and carrying a very small case. A double exposure makes her transparent and insubstantial. Is she a ghost? Is she, with regret, leaving behind the solid house of her childhood? Has she been cast out of it? Or is the ghostly image suggesting the persistence of childhood in the adult?

            From this image, we could make up many scenarios, but a mood is conveyed. Sorrow. The weight of the past. The things that stick in our memory and shape us, whether we like them or not… My literary mind immediately summons up Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, with its depiction of an unhappy family inheriting the weight of sins bequeathed them by their elders. These are the ghosts that really haunt us, and these are the stuff of this collection.

            Ghosts is a symphony in four movements, with prologue and epilogue bracketing four distinct sections.

            Harvey’s Prologue, “Night, a Place of Regeneration”, might at first lull readers into thinking it is an idyll of night and nature… but it segues seamlessly into comment on what is lost as generations come and go, what homely and familial values disappear, and how. When houses cease to exist, communities cease to exist. This is a major theme in what follows.

            The First section, All the Buildings that Never Were begins, in the poem “Ghosts” by defining what “ghosts” means in this text: “still our ghosts / exist for what is and what remains, their disembodied / faces watching over us from pictures of prize-giving, / childhoods gone and funerals as we drift through / our thin lives, as if they’re illusory, as if they’re real.” Ghosts are both what we remember and what we misremember. Is this collection therefore going to move into studied wistfulness? No. Bit by bit poems in this first section become laments for loss of family homes in New Zealand. Of course there is a protest element in this, including verbal castigation of the prime minister who started selling off state houses, but the protest is in elegies for houses that have been demolished, tenants who have been uprooted, and property developers giving priority to profit rather than community. This is not sloganeering, which is never Harvey’s style, but analysis worked through piquant imagery.

            The Second section, Ghost Stories, takes a more cosmopolitan view. In “The Evicted”, Maori and Pasifika communities are moved on in the different dwellings they have had, uprooted from traditional lives but also, the poem suggests, uprooted from suburbs that have gentrified. (At least this is what I infer, but I may be wrong. I think of Ponsonby.) Other poems in this section reflect on Manus Island refugees, on thousands of graves in Singapore that have been removed for development, on closed railway stations in old East Berlin, gradually suggesting a universal malaise – the burial of the past. Then, shockingly, the poem “My Ghosts Rise Up in Lockdown” puts us in the present, “ghosts” becoming memories we have to conjure up of other places when we are forced to stay in one place.

            The Third section, My Invisible Remains, brings us into very confessional poetry, mainly in the first person and in many ways revisiting more forcefully the themes Harvey raised in her 2011 collection Lost Relatives. It begins with a six-part sequence “Building Memories”, which replays the poet’s sad – sometimes traumatic  - memories of family relationships in her English childhood, physical abuse and her rejection by her parents, all of which left lasting images. This sequence most closely relates to the collection’s cover image. A separate poem, “My Mother is a Ghost Living in My Mind” speaks of “her silence and haunting / judgement born by me as eternal cut.” Here, as in other sections of this collection, there are suggestions that memories of the past can be more worrying when one is (as Harvey is) an immigrant from far away. “Ulysses Syndrome” suggests that the “ghost” lives of immigrants and refugees are really symptoms of dislocation; and in  “Someone Other Than Myself” the poet suggests that she had another self in another country. It’s also fair to note some poems in this section hint that sometimes a past is well lost.

            Yet there is some resolution in the Fourth and final section Safe Places for Ghosts. Poems here suggest in a more antiseptic, machine-controlled future, where the familiarities of older homes are no longer present. Only memories, dreams and “ghosts” will be what keep human beings truly human. Memory and “ghosts” are both a blessing and a curse; doing something to cement the continuity of human being; in a way, a sort of dark nostalgia. And perhaps in all this there is a desire for things to have been other than they were.

            The Epilogue “Poem, a Place Where Regeneration is Complete” echoes and answers the Prologue with the suggestion that we resolve our past in art.

            Appended to all the poetry, however, is an Afterword, the essay Living in the Haunted House of the Past in which Siobhan Harvey contrasts and compares the process of her house in New Zealand being renovated and made brighter with the grim English house she lived in as a child, where she was physically abused and rejected by very unhappy parents – a situation addressed less directly in the sequence “Building Memories”.

            I have, in this review, fallen into my tiresome habit of giving you a bibliographic survey of the collection without analysing in detail any of the poems, and I have said woefully little about the poet’s style. I apologise. This is one of the most fully-felt and carefully-structured collections of poetry I have read this year. Its subject may be regretful, even melancholy, but it is good at both direct address and sustained imagery which implies much. It is also accessible, and sometimes even funny in its satire. It gave me the uplift of real poetry.

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            There’s a problem which has vexed me more than once on this blog. It is how extremely difficult it is to survey the whole career of a distinguished and very capable poet in one brief review. I struck this problem when, for example, reviewing Fleur Adcock Collected Poems , Peter Bland’s Collected Poems 1956-2011  and even when reviewing the selected poems misleadingly called Collected Poems of Alistair TeAriki Campbell . I shipwreck on the same rock as I set about assessing David Eggleton’s The Wilder Years – Selected Poems. And I fully understand Eggleton’s satiric ire at the glibness of book reviewers, vented in his poem “The Book Reviewer” (p.158).

            The Wilder Years is a handsome be-ribboned hardback, admirably presented with wide and generous margins. It gathers together the poet’s own selection of his work from the nine collections he has had published between 1986  and  2018, with eight new poems added at the end. The title The Wilder Years at once suggests an older man (Eggleton is now in his 69^th year) looking back from the vantage point of more-settled, less-wild years. “The Wilder Years” is also the title of a poem (found on p.269) from Eggleton’s 2018 collection Edgeland; a poem which is deeply satiric about (Pakeha) New Zealanders’ shaky sense of identity.

            While volumes like this are produced only when a poet is both well-known and well-established, it is to Eggleton’s great credit that he has not used the occasion to write some sort of explanatory Foreword or Afterword, as other poets have been tempted to do in similar selections. The poems can (as they should) speak for themselves. I must admit that as a reader, I was late in discovering Eggleton’s poetry. Indeed, he was well into his prolific career before I read and reviewed any of his work, but I have had the pleasure of reviewing The Conch Trumpet (2015) and Edgeland (2018) on this blog.

            It is important that the Auckland-born, now Dunedin-resident, poet is of mixed Tongan, Fijian and Pakeha heritage. A concern with the viewpoints of different cultures and ethnicities in New Zealand has consstently been one of his main themes.

            And now, after all this throat-clearing, here are my brief and inadequate comments on what is selected from each of his collections, as read by me over a week.

            In his first collection South Pacific Sunrise (1986), nearly all the poems are Auckland-based and and present themselves as celebrations of different ethnicities. “Wings Over Ponsonby” depicts a suburb in early stages of gentrification (would that he could see it now!). “Painting Mount Taranaki” is this first collection’s “epic” poem, long and and rattling with a profusion of diverse imagery.

            In People of the Land (1988) satire is more to the fore, but there is also more formal structure and deployment of rhyme. The “Meditation on Colin McCahon” is a solemn, rhymed elegy, published the year after the painter’s death and one of Eggleton’s poems of undiluted seriousness.

            Empty Orchestra (1995) yields, among much else, one of the best pieces of practical criticism in the form of a poem, “Death of the Author”, a cutting statement on literature as social game and on literary pretensions.  As an Aucklander, this reviewer declares confidently that Eggleton’s “I Imagine Wellington as a Delicatessen” is very much the Aucklander’s view of Wellington – the capital city is a mixture of the chic and the quaint with a faintly musty odour. Moving further from Eggleton’s home base is “Waipounamu: The Lakes District” in which, judging only from these selected poems, Eggleton for the first time takes, without irony or condescension, a Pakeha view of history and culture.

            It is notable that the selections from these first three collections are relatively few, whereas selections from the following collections are very generous, sometimes reproducing over half of the original volumes.

            The poems of Rhyming Planet (2001) again show respect for traditional stanzaic forms, though free verse also persists. Given that Dunedin has becomes the poet’s chosen home, it is ironic that “If Buccleugh Street Could Talk” takes a chilly and somewhat negative view of the city. There is much disquiet in this collection. The form and vocabulary may be far from it, but the dyspeptic tone of “Poem for the Unknown Tourist” is like Baudelaire in his “Spleen” moods. It is in this collection that Eggleton becomes more international, with poems (usually rather scathing) based on visits to Australia, iconoclastic about Anzac Day etc. Yet “Republic of Fiji” is one of his best poems for conjuring up a particular milieu while giving it an historical and political context.

            In Fast Talker (2006), one sometimes feels that Eggleton’s love of the land and of landscape strives to be purely celebratory, but he is pulled towards some strand of satire to balance his view and ward off the conventions of traditional pastoral poetry. This is certainly true of poems in this collection related to Auckland and its environs. The free-form poem “The Bush Paddock”  has a go at Pakeha rural traditions, with each line ending “down the back of the bush paddock”. It is one of the many of Eggleton’s poems that would probably work best in live performance. In fact, to state the very obvious, the great majority of Eggleton's poetry is designed for the ear rather than the eye, bouncing along with enough alliteration and assonance to make Dylan Thomas envious. “Golden Boomerang” is condemnatory satire on Aussie habits and manners and “In the Godzone” has a similar tone as it launches into New Zealand politics and mores.

            Time of the Icebergs (2010) has much more Dunedin and Otago imagery. “The Harbour” is almost pure celebration, and “Dada Dunedin” appears to shadow Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno with its anti-strophes. “Ode to the Beer Crate” is pure nostalgia for a time of practical carpentry and blokey blokes knocking it back, and “Spent Tube”  (on smoking cigarettes) has a similar nostalgic tone – perhaps symptoms of an older man looking back

            Quoting my own earlier review of The Conch Trumpet (2015) I noted that “Eggleton is working from the primeval, the landscape at first untouched, though seen in terms of Maori mythology, then touched by the colonial experience, then developing some sort of Pakeha culture and finally in collision and collusion with the greater world of modern global politics and media.” Much of this schema survives in the generous selection of 36 poems given in The Wilder Years. As for the selection from Edgeland (2018), it includes 41 of the original 61 poems found in that collection. Again, I lazily, I refer you to my review of Edgeland.

            Finally, there are the the eight New Poems (2020), which are inevitably more topical. “Two Mosques, Christchurch” is a stately elegy, condemning the terrorist but giving the foreground to the dead and in the end sounding like liturgy. The tone of “The Burning Cathedral”, about the burning of Notre Dame, is hard to determine. Is it written in mockery or regret? “President Fillgrave” is direct satire on Donald Trump. And appropriately, The Wilder Years ends with the purely playful “The Letter Zed”.

            In this ramble I have name-checked a small fraction of all the poems selected in The Wilder Years, and have doubtless distorted the main course of Eggleton’s poems over more than three decades. Sometimes I have been caught up in his wonderful profusion of imagery, scattering like spring rain. And sometimes I have thought this profusion shows a loss of control. In the blurb of The Wilder Years, Nick Ascroft is quoting as calling Eggleton’s poems “word-blasts”. This is both Eggleton’s glory and occasionally his weakness. I read his poetry out loud and then wish I could hear many of them performed live by the poet himself.  That way, I think I would like them even more than I already do.

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            And here is a study in contrast. Courtney Sina Meredith works in the form of concision rather than profusion. Her poems are short, lean and cut to the bone. Burst Kisses on the Actual Wind is not a “selection” of her published work, but it is clearly the work of a number of years. (It re-prints a few poems which appeared when she was “featured poet” in the March 2013 number of Poetry New Zealand, which I guest-edited.)

            Burst Kisses on the Actual Wind begins with an introduction by the poet’s mother Kim Meredith, expressing first her bemusement then her pride in her poet daughter. As she is of Samoan, Mangaian (Cook Islands) and Irish descent, Courtney Sina Meredith has a strong interest in Pacific ethnicities and how they fare in New Zealand. In her poem “How about being a woman?”, she describes herself “a young brown queer single educated professional creative woman”, and that identity is essential to her work, although the “single” part might be redundant as she now has a partner and children. The title poem “Burnt-kisses-on-the-actual-wind” appears to express the need for caution she sometimes felt about openly expressing her sexual orientation; and “Aroha Mai” appears to be addressed to her partner.

            The poet likes shape poems (“How about being a woman?” ), list poems (“Honolulu”), poems set out like official directions (“Magellanic Clouds”) and poems fragmented into short phrases (“Shower head / Drip drip drip”).

            But more than these she likes confessional poems in the first person (“I”), or direct address in the second person (“you”). However, sometimes the “you” is a reference to herself, as if she is addressing part of herself to jog her memory. Thus it is in the poem “Remember when you were with a woman?”

            Many things pass through these terse texts. Love and broken relationships are presented in the form of a cowboy movie (“Cowboy”). More poignantly, in “Love is a resurrection”, she visits Ponsonby and declares “my blood is in the soil / my elders have a pact with this land” as this was where her family and parents lived. There is a strong contrarian streak in “The internet told me to go for a run”, an assertion of self and of confidence, but then “November in New York” and “I was having a conversation with you” suggest unease with foreign cities. That everything cannot be resolved in words is confirmed by this collection’s longest poem “STOP SENDING POEMS”, which ends abruptly or rather which does not end at all.

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.  

“TOILERS OF THE SEA” by Victor Hugo (Les Travailleurs de la Mer first published in 1866; many English translations)

 

            Eight years ago on this blog, I reviewed L’Homme Qui Rit (The Laughing Man) by Victor–Marie Hugo (1802-1885). In passing I noted that 50-plus years ago, as a schoolboy, I found in my school’s library an old copy of an English translation of Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea / Les Travailleurs de la Mer. I remember consuming some afternoons reading it and enjoying it before returning it to the school library. About four years ago, holidaying in Raglan, I found in a little second-hand bookshop an old Everyman’s Library copy of Toilers of the Sea and I snapped it up. I noted that it was printed in 1928, but it came complete with one of those original old Everymen’s Library orange-coloured wrappers. Indeed so well-preserved was this copy that I couldn’t help wondering if it had ever been read in the 90-plus years since it was printed. 

 

            Recently I got around to reading it, partly to recapture my schoolboy appreciation of it, but also to test how I would now react to Hugo’s prose.

            Consider, if you will, this paradox. If we are to judge by the number of films and TV adaptations made of his work, Victor Hugo is still the most popular French novelist of the 19^th century, rivalled only by Dumas. Les Miserables had, literally, been filmed more often than any other novel of any language before anyone decided to turn it into a musical. Notre-Dame de Paris / The Hunchback of Notre Dame has also been filmed and re-filmed in both Hollywood and Europe, including the crass Disney feature-length cartoon version. Even L’Homme Qui Rit / The Laughing Man has been filmed a couple of times. But how much is Hugo’s work popular more for the stripped-back versions of his melodramatic plots as depicted in the movies, rather than for the texts he actually wrote? In other words, how many people who have seen all the movie versions have ever read the novels themselves?

            The fact is, even in France, Hugo is now rarely seen as a great novelist by most literary critics. Of course he is still a figure of great historical interest, and left-wing commentators quote him with approval for his progressive beliefs – opposing the death penalty and the slave trade, promoting republicanism and universal suffrage as well as attacking the church. He is applauded for his poetry. He is honoured as the man who – after Chateaubriand – introduced Romanticism to France, especially in the plays he wrote early in his career (well do I remember having to study Hernani and Ruy Blas when doing an undergradute degree in French.) But he is not regarded as a serious novelist is the same way as Stendahl, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola or even de Maupassant and Huysmans are. His novels, modern criticism says, are entertaining melodramas with an overload of preaching and orating and nothing resembling real human beings as their main characters.

            How fair is this verdict?

While enjoying the yarn as a yarn, I used my recent re-reading of Toilers of the Sea to make my own judgment.

 

Victor Hugo wrote Toilers of the Sea during the fifteen years (1855-70) that he lived on the Channel Islands, in exile from France after he had criticised the dictatorial Napoleon III.  (It was also there that, three years later, he wrote The Laughing Man.) The main thread of plot is simplicity itself. Gilliatt is a social outcast – a fisherman who lives alone, keeps to himself and is regarded with suspicion by the rest of the people of Guernsey, where the tale is largely set. Gilliatt falls in love  - at first sight – with the beautiful Deruchette, though he never speaks to her. Deruchette is the niece of the wealthy Mess Lethierry. The time is the 1820s, when steamships are still a rare and wondrous novelty. Lethierry prospers because he owns the steamship “La Durande”, which is able to ply between Guernsey and St Malo, the major port of Brittany, much faster than any sailing ships can. Lethierry can therefore deliver cargoes of fish and other produce to this important market more quickly than any rival can. But disaster strikes. In a thick fog and on stormy seas, “La Durande” is shpwrecked. All hands get away safely in a lifeboat, but the captain, apparently, stays nobly on the ship and perishes as it goes down. (Actually, we know that Captain Clubin is a treacherous criminal who has deliberately engineered the shipwreck in the belief that he will be able to abscond with his employer Lethierry’s wealth.) Yet, while the storm has smashed up most of the ship’s wooden superstructure, it has left jammed between two towering rocks out in the ocean, the mechanical heart of the ship – its iron engines, paddles and funnel. Lethierry is financially ruined. As people gather to commiserate with him, the beautiful Deruchette declares that she will marry any man who is able to salvage her uncle’s engine. Fired by his unspoken love for her, Gilliatt alone takes up the challenge. The second half of the novel is Gilliatt’s heroic, titanic, single-handed salvage mission as he battles tiredness, hunger, storms, huge waves and an octopus, rescuing what remains of the ship’s engine. In effect, everything that precedes Gilliatt’s lonely heroic endeavour is Victor Hugo’s build-up to this image of the solitary hero at his heroic work.

Of course it doesn’t end well. (Please remember, I am allowed to give “spoilers” while discussing a novel this old.) Gilliatt, after all the dangers he has overcome, makes it back to Guernsey with the engine he has rescued. But he discovers that in his absence Deruchette has fallen in love with another man, a handsome young clergyman called Ebenezer Caudrey. Nobly and heroicially, Gilliatt foreswears his love, steps aside and even arranges for Deruchette and Caudrey to marry. Then, as the happy couple sail off together, he climbs up an offshore rock and waits for the tide to rise and drown him. Just as Victor Hugo had a penchant for grotesque, outcast characters (the dwarf court jester Triboulet in his play Le Roi S’Amuse; the hunchback Quasimodo in Notre-Dame de Paris; the mutilated Gwynplain in L’Homme Qui Rit), so did he have a penchant for suicide as an appropriately tragic ending to a novel (Gwynplain drowns himself rather than living without Dea; Quasimodo – apparently – dies of starvation as he clings to the corpse of Esmeralda).

In one sentence then, Toilers of the Sea is about a man who performs an heroic feat but whose reward is thwarted by Fate. In making this synopsis I have deliberately elided some side issues, such as the criminal dealings of the treacherous Captain Clubin with smugglers and with the embezzler and thief Rantaine.

 

Reported as I have synopsised it, Toilers of the Sea sounds like a novel of action and event, and at his best Victor Hugo can deal with action vividly. The episode of “La Durande’s” shipwreck is masterly, with the drunken helmsman losing control and the panic of the passengers, lost in the fog and fearful of the sea. Hugo’s descriptions of early steamships, and the almost magical effect they had on their beholders, are both credible and informative. We might not quite believe in Gilliatt never talking to Deruchette but nevertheless faithfully standing by her garden wall and frequently playing Bonnie Dundee on his bagpipes because he has heard her playing it on the piano. Indeed, to some modern sensibilities, this may sound suspiciously like “stalking”. Even so, it makes for a memorable sentimental tableau. Hugo was also adept at the cliffhanger though (unlike routine-cliffhanger-deviser Charles Dickens) he was not writing for serial publication. The biggest cliffhanger in Toilers of the Sea, and the one that holds us in suspense for the longest, concerns the disappearance of the criminal Captain Clubin. In the fog, he steps off the foundering “La Durande”, imagining that he will be able to swim safely to shore. Instead, we are told that his leg was grabbed by something… and we hear nothing further of his fate until near the novel’s denouement, a couple of hundred pages later, when Gilliatt confronts the “Devil Fish”, finds Clubin’s skeleton in an undersea cavern, and realises that the “Devil-Fish” killed him. Incidentally, Gilliatt’s fight with the “Devil-Fish” (clearly described as an octopus, though some mistaken postings refer to it as a giant squid) is brief, brutal and credible – a masterly example of narrative compression.

 

I could add to this list of good, vivid things that I found in Toilers of the Sea as I re-read it, firing the same sort of pleasure I had in it as a teenager.

But, to an adult reader, the negatives really do pile up. There is an odd naivete about Hugo’s Romantic-era writing (already falling out of favour when this novel was being written). Characters are presented in broad, unsubtle strokes, with Hugo all the while trying to nudge us into believing that they are of epic proportions. Their conversations tend to become long, windy orations. As I remarked in reviewing The Laughing Man, they resemble operatic arias waiting for somebody to compose the score.

Captain Clubin cannot be simply a cheat and a liar. He has to be a monster of titanic wickedness. Thus Hugo launches into a page dissecting his diabolical impulses: “ His conscience rejoiced in the sight of its own monstrous nakedness, as it stepped forth to take its hideous bath of wickedness. The long restraint of men’s respect seemed to have given him a peculiar relish for infamy. He experienced a certain lascivious enjoyment of wickedness. In those frightful moral abysses so rarely sounded, such natures find atrocious delights…” and so on and so on through a tiresomely long paragraph. (Part One, Book 6)

Gilliatt himself, chained to a rock and toiling away heroically, is frequently compared with Prometheus in his defiance of Nature, or Job in his suffering. Even before his long ordeal begins, we are told how wonderfully gifted he is in so many crafts – fisherman, carpenter, worker in iron, wheelwright, boat caulker, engineer – a paragon of practicality. So when he is alone on the barren outcrop of rock, surrounded by the sea and with few tools to hand “He put the forge in operation at once. Tools were wanting; he set to work and made them. For fuel he had the wreck; for motive force the water; for his bellows the wind; for his anvil a stone; for art his instinct; for power, his will.”  (Part Two, Book 2)

Verily, he is a superman. Indeed Hugo turns him into a force of nature -  “The very ocean seemed astonished. He passed to and fro across the tottering wreck, making the deck tremble under his steps, striking, cutting, hacking with the hatchet in his hand, pallid in the gleam of the lightning, his long hair streaming, his feet naked, in rags, his face covered with the foam of the sea, but grand still amid that maelstrom of the thunderstorm.” (Part 2, Book 4)

His endurance is extraordinary – almost beyond belief: “There was no form of distress with which he had not become familiar. He had been compelled to execute great works without tools, to move vast burdens without aid, without science to solve problems, without provisions to find food, without bed or roof to cover it, to find shelter and sleep.” (Part 2, Book 4)

What drives Gilliatt on? Apparently it is the triumph of the will, upon which subject Hugo’s rhetoric takes on a Nietzschean tone: “Exhaustion of the bodily strength does not necessarily exhaust the will. Faith is only a secondary power; the will is the first. The mountains, which faith is proverbially said to move, are nothing beside that which the will can accomplish. All that Gilliatt lost in vigour, he gained in tenacity. The destruction of the physical man under the oppressive influence of that wild surrounding sea, and rock, and sky, seemed only to reinvigorate his moral nature.” (Part Two, Book 2)

Unless such oratorical pronouncements put you under some sort of rhythmic spell, your rational mind will soon note the implausibility of many of the things Gilliatt is said to be able to do single-handedly.

At the other end of the unreality spectrum, Deruchette and Ebenezer Caudrey are so thinly characterised that they are little more than picturesque paper cut-outs. The novel’s ending, with Gilliatt giving Deruchette away in marriage, is both illogical and ridiculous. Isn’t Gilliatt the man whose titanic, solitary endeavours were inspired by his burning desire for Deruchette? Wasn’t she his motive for all that superhuman work devising tools, hauling loads, fighting storms, killing the octopus etc. etc? So are we meant to believe that this titan among men would so meekly surrender his desire in the face of a pale and timid rival?.... Ah, but then if the tale were to end with him marrying and settling into domesticity, wouldn’t that mess up Hugo’s Romantic and very theatrical image of the solitary, brooding Byronic (or Nietzschean) superman spurning society? Best allow him his solitary suicide by drowning which, to my adult reader’s eyes, now sounds awfully like an expression of teenage self-pity.

Now I grant you that Hugo could sometimes produce quite good splenetic satire, even if it is rather broad. Consider this portrait of a minor character, a sea captain: “He had enriched himself by serving all causes. No man in this world could have been more Bourbonist, more Bonapartist, more absolutist, more liberal, more atheistical, or more devoutly Catholic. He belonged to that great and renowned party which may be called the Lucrative Party.” (Part One, Book 5) Too often, however, Hugo’s satire is predictble and repetitive, especially when he launches into one of his anti-clerical rants. He is an equal-opportunity anti-clerical, taking pokes at both Catholics and Calvinists. But in his zeal to mock he sometimes reveals his limited understanding of such matters. For example, Ebenezer Caudrey is introduced into the novel in company with a clergyman whom Hugo calls a Puseyite, that is, one of those 19^th century Anglicans who wanted to insert Catholic liturgical practices into Anglican worship. Having established this, Hugo then has the clergyman talking like a hard-core Calvinist, lauding the work ethic and material profit and not for one moment raising the key concerns of Pusey’s followers. (Incidentally, this character is also anachronistic, given that the novel is set in the 1820s when the young Pusey had barely begun on his theological career and was little known in the Anglican church.)

This raises another negative matter in Hugo’s work. Regularly he veers away from his narrative to lecture us on sundry matters – about the superstitions of the Channel Islanders; about meteorology and the nature of winds; about engineering; about commerce; about heroes of the past. Apart from so often appearing “mugged up”, these interludes also often come across as bogus. Hugo is attempting to impress us with his erudition often on subjects about which he clearly knows little. Worst of all, however, are the long, long, long descriptions inserted into the text. Hugo cannot note the existence of a house without describing it in detail that flows over many pages, whether or not it is important to his story. When it comes to the wind and weather and seas that Gilliatt faces, the descriptions reach a baroque complexity, so long, so filled with vague evocations and blur words, that after a few pages one realises that he is talking about nothing at all. The appropriate word is bombast. I suspect that many readers simply skip these passages, which are in such profusion that they smother the story.

If I were to sum up the effect Toilers of the Sea now has on me, I would say that it tells a good melodramatic story, sturdy enough to hold the reader’s attention even if its characters are puppets; but that in the end its prose style is overblown, bombastic and unconvincing – and certainly not conveying any high philosophy about humanity, such as Victor Hugo imagines he is giving to us. Good reading for a literate teenager, perhaps.

All this may simply mean that I am out of sympathy with some of the conventions of Romantic-era novels, which were already passe when Hugo wrote Toilers of the Sea. While I stand apart from the addled camp aesthetic of Jean Cocteau, I can’t help citing his much-quoted witticism: “Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo”. I get the point. Victor Hugo was always trying to live up to the image he had created for himself as the great oracle who confronts the mighty universe. What it leads to is verbal fudge.

 

For the Record: Unlike Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Toilers of the Sea has hardly ever been filmed, and never with any success. There were a couple of  film adaptations in the 1920s, when films were still silent; and a cheaply-made British film in the 1930s, where all the characters were given English names. Wikipedia tells me that in 1953 there was a Hollywood “adaptation” of the novel called Sea Devils, but a glance at a synopsis of its swashbucking plot and you find it has nothing to do with Hugo’s novel. Bizarrely, though, the characters are given the names from the novel.