Comedy

I recently heard an interview with Woody Allen on his latest film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which has been called a comedy by some. Allen said it started out as purely a drama, with - to his mind - no comic elements, but when the film was finished he could see that there were elements of humour in it. None of the characters end up happy or fulfilled, he said, and that the film had comic elements in it by accident. This reminded me of something Anthony Burgess observed in an essay called 'What Makes Comedy Comic?': 'Comedy is more of a technique than a genre"

Walking ghosts

It is wonderful to see some work from Clive Faust in the latest number of The Merri Creek. Eleven short prose statements are collected.

Here is #8: "In age you are treated as a walking ghost well before you die. And you see the world like one too, with its distant affairs of not much interest to you." ... which has a classic grace to it, although I am a little troubled by "walking ghost" ... partly I suppose because walking is what ghosts typically do. Herrick in a poem spurred by the approach of death ...

Age calls me hence, and my gray hairs bid come,
And haste away to mine eternal home

gave Perilla a sequence of detailed instructions, the end of which was to prevent his ghost from walking ...

Then shall my ghost not walk about, but keep
Still in the cool and silent shades of sleep.

Another part of my trouble with "walking ghost" is the clear echo of John Todhunter's 'Maureen' ...

O, you plant the pain in my heart with your wistful eyes,
Girl of my choice, Maureen!
Will you drive me mad for the kisses your shy, sweet mouth denies,
Maureen?
Like a walking ghost I am, and no words to woo,
White rose of the West, Maureen.

That repeated one word refrain 'Maureen' reminds me of an ad for Arnott's Assorted Cream biscuits that used to be on the television; the inept ditty went something like this:

There are Monte Carlos and Shortbread Creams
There are Orange Slices and Delta Creams
And there are Melting Moments and Swiss Creams
In Arnotts Assorted Creams.

In the first of Faust's small statements he takes a retrospective view on youth & reflects on the conversations of young poets, solving the world's problems together "... Yes, I know that scene, and it's very attractive. Wouldn't particularly want to re-hear the conversations ..." The old man not wanting to interfere with the forward-looking enthusiasm of those remembered young men. "I don't like sniffing out hope --even past hope."

Dreamy youth and walking ghosts, its all in Yeats' 'Song of the Happy Shepherd' which ends ...

I must be gone: there is a grave
Where daffodil and lily wave,
And I would please the hapless faun,
Buried under the sleepy ground,
With mirthful songs before the dawn.
His shouting days with mirth were crowned;
And still I dream he treads the lawn,
Walking ghostly in the dew,
Pierced by my glad singing through,
My songs of old earth's dreamy youth:
But ah! she dreams not now; dream thou!
For fair are poppies on the brow:
Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.

The most fantastic language conveying the most trivial thoughts

In a recent post Don Share quotes an excerpt from a letter from Jack Spicer in which he asserts: "Invention is merely the enemy of poetry". There's a passage in one of Drayton's Idea sonnets, which Coleridge calls 'odd' ...

As other men, so I myself do muse,
Why in this sort I wrest invention so;
And why these giddy metaphors I use,
Leaving the path the greater part do go;
I will resolve you: I am lunatic!

Coleridge brings this up in the context of his thoughts on the faults of poets:

the characteristic fault of our elder poets is the reverse of that, which distinguishes too many of our more recent versifiers; the one conveying the most fantastic thoughts in the most correct and natural language; the other in the most fantastic language conveying the most trivial thoughts. The latter is a riddle of words; the former an enigma of thoughts.

A more substantial & true air

Clive James, in a recorded conversation with Peter Porter, remarked upon the way that words magically give the strength of reality to what they are expressing: "Words are magic, that's the problem. It doesn't matter how violent a drawing of you - a caricature could be as violent as you can imagine and you'll still want to buy the original because the drawing doesn't matter. Words matter, and sometimes people say something about you and it's very hard to get it out of your head."

Charles Darwin put it elegantly in his Beagle Diary, in an entry dated 26 May 1832. He was in Rio de Janiero at the time and rereading Alexander von Humboldt's Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Year 1799-1804: "I know not the reason why a thought which has passed through the mind, when we see it embodied in words, immediately assumes a more substantial & true air."

Clive v. Cyril - journalism built to last

In his memoir North Face of Soho, Clive James describes how reading Orwell's collected journalism led him to realize that 'periodical journalism could be built to last' ... 'Here was the proof that it took effort to write plain prose but, if you could do so, the results might have the effect of poetry.'

Against this we can set Cyril Connolly's remark in The Unquiet Grave: 'All excursions into journalism, broadcasting, propaganda and writing for the films, however grandiose, are doomed to disappointment. To put of our best into these forms is another folly, since thereby we condemn good ideas as well as bad to oblivion.'

'To put of our best' is clearly what James aims at. He is conscious of this, writing of 'the standard accusation, often levelled at my prose, that I was putting everything I had in the shop window'.

Connolly's remarks were first published in the periodical Horizon, so that now they seem to go some way to offering their own refutation.

Monstrous Certainty

Janice Harayda has given her 'Gusher Award' for hyperbole in reviewing to Clive James for a recent essay in Poetry. She points out sentences, such as “Nobody who has ever read that poem can possibly have forgotten that moment.” Interestingly, James can spot a similar tendency in others: "Though Grigson was an excellent editor and an unrivalled anthologist, his own poetry, nervously echoing Auden's oratorical verve, was never distinctive enough to establish his credentials for such an ex cathedra confidence."

In his wonderfully wide-ranging, entertaining, and enlightening Cultural Amnesia James maintains a tough line on intellectuals who failed to stand up against the totalitarianism of the 20th century - Sartre and Borges for example get the treatment; Camus gets a commendation. But James' tone is ex cathedra - more so than Camus' at times whose doubts and uncertainties show through his pronouncements - and it was Camus who said the only party he'd belong to is the one that's not sure that it is in the right. I'm rather vague as to the source of this pseudo-quote of Camus' - but then James remarks that Borges was often very approximate about the details of his enthusiasms, as if to score a point, although James himself elsewhere writes: "Listening on the same day to the Lester Young quintet and a string quintet by Ravel ... " A wonderfully eclectic playlist no doubt, but is there a string quintet by Ravel???? I am reminded of some lines from Geoffrey Hill "I tell myself don't wreck a good phrase simply to boost sense."

Camus is on the money - certainty and ex cathedra judgement is where the danger lives. I'll leave the final words to that great polymath & humanist Jacob Bronowski, in his 'Knowledge and Certainty' episode of The Ascent of Man:

The Principle of Uncertainty is a bad name. In science--or outside of it--we are not uncertain; our knowledge is merely confined, within a certain tolerance. We should call it the Principle of Tolerance. And I propose that name in two senses: First, in the engineering sense--science has progressed, step by step, the most successful enterprise in the ascent of man, because it has understood that the exchange of information between man and nature, and man and man, can only take place with a certain tolerance. But second, I also use the word, passionately, about the real world. All knowledge--all information between human beings--can only be exchanged within a play of tolerance. And that is true whether the exchange is in science, or in literature, or in religion, or in politics, or in any form of thought that aspires to dogma. It's a major tragedy of my lifetime and yours that scientists were refining, to the most exquisite precision, the Principle of Tolerance--and turning their backs on the fact that all around them, tolerance was crashing to the ground beyond repair.

The Principle of Uncertainty or, in my phrase, the Principle of Tolerance, fixed once for all the realization that all knowledge is limited. It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930s it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it, the ascent of man, against the throwback to the despots' belief that they have absolute certainty.

Bronowski concludes the episode by wading in his suit into the mud and slime of a pool of water at Auschwitz into which the ashes of the slaughtered were flushed, his final imploration that we must 'touch people' made as he reaches down and drags up a fistful of the greasy mud:

It is said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That is false: tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality--this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods. Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken." I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leó Szilárd, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died here, to stand here as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.

A kind of Jingle in his Words

The 2008 Lady Margaret Lectures are available as mp3 files on the Christ's College site. Geoffrey Hill's lecture - entitled 'Milton as Muse' is a highlight.

Here is Addison in The Spectator, of Saturday, February 9, 1712, pointing out Milton's defects, although for us it helps reveal the similarities with Hill's work:

A second Fault in his Language is, that he often affects a kind of Jingle in his Words, as in the following Passages, and many others:

And brought into the World a World of woe

- Begirt th' Almighty Throne

Beseeching or besieging -

This tempted our attempt -

At one Slight bound high overleapt all bound

I know there are Figures of this kind of Speech, that some of the greatest Ancients have been guilty of it, and that Aristotle himself has given it a place in his Rhetorick among the Beauties of that Art. But as it is in itself poor and trifling, it is I think at present universally exploded by all the Masters of polite Writing.

So to Addison, Milton was no Master of polite Writing. One suspects that he might have considered Geoffrey Hill downright rude.