The genius of John Cowper Powys

 He himself beheld the whole episode in that special light with which we look at something that reaches us through a glamour quite extraneous to the nature of the experience itself; for between these shrill-voiced puppets and his search for pennies, as both the girls held their forlorn poles towards him, hovered the enigmatic presence of Curly Wix herself, not so much her actual figure as an emanation of poignant sweetness upon the air.  (from ‘Weymouth Sands’ by John Cowper Powys’)

I was reading ‘The Woodlanders’ by Hardy which is a very fine novel but it is a Hardy novel built with high precision ruthless machinery.  It’s quite plain what will happen as clear as if you looked out your window and saw it transpire pitilessly.  I took up ‘Weymouth Sands’ and there read that passage that has all the contours of a living consciousness.  A gauze has dropped which fixes the scene in a magical luminescence.  Revealing the contours of experience is Powys’ special genius.  That shadow on your inner map is the declivity where fear lurks.  Then the sun sweeps over it and it was just a trick of the poor light and clumps of heather.  

James Tartaglia, Thomas Hardy, William Blake and the Wraiths of the Real

 Nay, from the highest point of view, to precisely describe a human being, the focus of a universe—how impossible! But, apart from transcendentalism, there never probably lived a person who was in herself more completely a reductio ad absurdum of attempts to appraise a woman, even externally, by items of face and figure. (from ‘The Woodlanders’ by Thomas Hardy)

James Tartaglia’s dance with reality is a two step transcendentalism.  There is ‘experience’, the what it’s like, and the objective shared world.  The world of the dream is one for which experience is  transcendent and the experiential world has consciousness as its transcendent. The concepts that we employ in our descriptions of experience are shadow concepts borrowed from the objective where they really apply.  Borrowing the term from Advaita Vedanta you could say that those simulacra of the objective are superimposed on experience.  Is experience then simply the wash of consciousness over those wraiths of the real?  In what does the individuality reside, Hardy’s ‘focus of a universe’?  The soul has been described as the way we live our world, our context or meaning though that latter is impugned by Tartaglia as the title ‘Philosophy in a Meaningless Life’ implies.  

For Hardy of course the attempt to change your soul for a new improved version is doomed.  Education or an altered status is not a conversion.  The roots of the psyche do not strike in an alien soil.  

What is the price of experience?

Do men buy it for a song?

Or wisdom for a dance in the street?

No, it is bought with the price

Of all a man hath, his house, his wife, his children.

Wisdom is sold in the desolate market

where none come to buy,

And in the wither’d field

where the farmer plows for bread in vain.

It is an easy thing to triumph in the summer’s sun

and in the vintage

and to sing on the waggon loaded with corn.

It is an easy thing to talk of prudence to the afflicted

To speak the laws of prudence to the houseless wanderer

To listen to the hungry raven’s cry in wintry season

When the red blood is fill’d with wine

and with the marrow of lambs.

It is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements,

To hear the dog howl at the wintry door,

the ox in the slaughterhouse moan;

To see a god on every wind and a blessing on every blast;

To hear sounds of love in the thunder-storm

that destroys our enemies’ house;

To rejoice in the blight that covers his field,

and the sickness that cuts off his children

While our olive and vine sing and laugh round our door,

and our children bring fruits and flowers.

Then the groan and the dolour are quite forgotten,

and the slave grinding at the mill,

And the captive in chains, and the poor in the prison,

and the soldier in the field

When the shatter’d bone hath laid him groaning

among the happier dead.

It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity:

Thus could I sing and thus rejoice:

but it is not so with me.

Mary and the Bat

 I have always thought of Idealism as a mind virus that constantly mutates.  It seems to be coming back again not as an epistemic pandemic but with isolated pockets of highly resistant forms.  Nevertheless I have tried to understand it and to this end I have been dropping in to the books of James Tartaglia; ‘Philosophy in a Meaningless World’ and ‘Philosophy in a Technological World’. I will have more to write on my take of the first mentioned in particular, probably a wrong take but that is how it goes with philosophy - true takes and mis-takes.  

Two significant areas of discussion seem to facilitate the swing back towards idealism, the what it’s like i.e. the phenomenal feel and Jackson’s Mary.  The fuzzy red of a ripe tomato that sings to me, that is my particular individual experience that somehow fuels the objective world.  

Where does these concepts of ‘red’, ‘fuzzy’, ‘tomato’ come from if not from the shared intelligibility of a common world.  They would lack a name otherwise.  As a dualism adjacent event that starts in the mind it must be suspect.  That would be the tomato in a box to alter Wittgenstein. 

Jackson’s Mary and the Molyneaux Man share the pertinaceous empiricism of how do you know.  Distemper brush there.

Anyway I am enjoying Tartaglia’s metaphysical world creation.  It’s like a novel with nice twists in the story.  

'Lady Audley's Secret' by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (pub. 1862)

 Given that we are told in the title that Lady Audley has a secret and given that there are hints from the nature of the dramatis personae that there are intimate connections between events known as coincidences, the broad nature of the secret is apparent to the attentive reader who is outside the action.  But inside the story there is only fog and confusion.  What led to the disappearance of George Talboys?  He seemed rapt before the portrait of Lady Audley which is in the locked room only entered by a priest’s hide that is under the floorboards.  Why did she lock her room.  Lady Lucy is a mysterious woman, antecedents unknown,  who has appeared out of nowhere to be the governess in the house of a local surgeon/doctor.  Vivacious, fascinating and a great beauty she has won the heart of Sir Michael Audley who marries her though there is a great disparity in age and her rank is unknown.  He is fifty and she twenty two or so.  He has a daughter Alicia only a little younger who is not delighted with her stepmother.  She’s a hard riding gentlewoman of the barbarian class as Matthew Arnold termed them.  Rest easy we are spared a Trollopian hunting scene.  Alicia is in love with her first cousin the only son of Sir Michael’s brother and therefore heir presumptive of the lands and wealth of the Baronet.  Robert Audley is a barrister who does not practice plies his forensic intelligence to unravel the secret.  How everything is traced back to the source is quite credible and Robert himself is a well drawn character.  Out of the great love for his missing friend which draws him out of his indolence and aimless drift he sets on the trail of Lady Lucy whom he feels is in some way the key to what has happened to George Talboys.

As I said this is an outside/inside story a rather clever device by the brilliant author of a mere twenty seven when the serialised book was published.  Like all serials cliffhangers are plentiful.  How will this impasse be overcome?  Has the trail gone cold and so on.  Never mind Braddon conjures up credible breakthroughs.  She is a superb writer with a mastery of the short observation followed by a long descriptive sentence.  A stylistic tic perhaps but it adds to the rich texture of the story.  She like all the Victorians can precisely delineate the class of the characters.  This is not just a sensation novel.  It’s a classic.

'The Portrait of a Lady' by Henry James

 ‘Do you know where you’re drifting?’ Henrietta pursued, holding out her bonnet delicately.

‘No, I haven’t the least idea, and I find it very pleasant not to know. A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see – that’s my idea of happiness.’

It’s like the movies where you see the gophers sticking their heads out of their burrows as the coach races on chased by miscreants.  There is going to be a crash.  James likes to tell you what he is going to tell you and then he tells you.  There is no sugar coating of the pill.  Willful innocence will be punished, silly over subtle thought will not save you.  The gift is to be simple, over elaborate idealization will be a trap for the unwary.  In the end:

She could live it over again, the incredulous terror with which she had taken the measure of her dwelling. Between those four walls she had lived ever since; they were to surround her for the rest of her life. It was the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation. Osmond’s beautiful mind gave it neither light nor air; Osmond’s beautiful mind indeed seemed to peep down from a small high window and mock at her.

If the ending stuns you can’t say James didn’t warn you.  She ought to have heeded one of the many maxims which he offers throughout his works.  “The great point is to be happy as possible”.  The very American love of affirmations.  Remember they are all American in this novel no matter how acculturated they are.

The amount of critique of ‘The Portrait’ scholarly and lay is extraordinary.  May I offer a couple of points which somehow seems to have escaped attention.  Isabel has Daddy issues.  James makes it clear that her idealization of the man is out of sync with reality big time.  He is in the argot of the era a cad:

Edward Rosier remembered Isabel as a little girl; it had been his father who came to the rescue of the small Archers at the inn at Neufchâtel (he was travelling that way with the boy and had stopped at the hotel by chance), after their bonne had gone off with the Russian prince and when Mr Archer’s whereabouts remained for some days a mystery.

‘Russian prince’ - a nice touch.  Much older men are an emotional focus for her, Daniel Touchet, Gilbert Osmond.  Her sexuality is somewhat blocked.  Again James tells us:

The girl’s prayer was very sufficiently answered; something pure and proud that there was in her – something cold and dry an unappreciated suitor with a taste for analysis might have called it – had hitherto kept her from any great vanity of conjecture on the article of possible husbands.

Another thing that is missed is the reference on a few occasions to the mother of Osmond who was a minor poetess as the American Corinne.  The novel ‘Corinne, or Italy’ by Madame Germaine de Stael tells the story of an Italian poetess and an English nobleman.  The  romance, published 1807,  was translated by Isabel Hill. Wikipedia’s entry:

The novel includes both observations and reflections on Italy, its history, its culture and the customs of its inhabitants. Influenced by Enlightenment thought, the novel is part of the French Romanticism movement. The novel is Madame de Staël's most famous work, and is the first aesthetic romance not written in German.

I’ve dipped into it. Turbid I think would be kind but it was popular.  

Nothing was left of the impetuous Corinne.  The active powers of her life were all exhausted and this annihilation, for which she could scarcely account, restored her composure.  Grief had subdued her.  Sooner or later all rebellious heads must bow to the same yoke.

Indeed.  Isabel is true to her vow as she sees it though she is the prey of the expert stalkers Merle  and Osmond who have thoroughly studied her for the purposes of the con.  She flatters herself if she thinks that he may have loved her in the beginning.  Lacking empathy Osmond merely mirrors her fascinated state.  He is remote from feeling even for his daughter Pansy; the irony of a common flower being hothoused.    

A very great novel.  Is it the pinnacle of James’s achievement?  I find the later stuff unreadable but I may have another go at ‘The Ambassadors’. My attention foundered not very far in. 

Somerset Maugham's Reality

 I was saying that in his collection of short stories entitled ‘Creatures of Circumstance’ Maugham has a story entitled ‘Appearance and Reality’ in which he mentions the famous book of the same name by the Idealist philosopher F.H. Bradley.  This is not just a flaunting of his extensive reading or a mere adventitious entree into a story told him by a Frenchman which bizarre as it sounds makes sense to the French.  If you want to be technical this is a ‘detached observer’ framing. ‘This is what I was told, you may believe it or not.  To my native informant it makes sense.  Let me then commence’.

There is no filler or narrative putty applied to present a smooth surface to the reader in the work of Somerset Maugham. In his ‘Writers Notebook’ and ‘The Summing Up’ he refers to the compression, simplicity, precision, and exactitude of his favourite writers.  How then does ‘Appearance and Reality’ apply to the story?

Bradley asks: where does the reality of what is presented to us by our perception reside.  In the object?  We can’t by definition know that.  That would be the God’s Eye view.  Essentially what we experience is an appearance or the object as it appears to us.  How he deals with Berkeley’s demurral on this point I don’t know, I haven’t come to that point yet in the book.  A chapter at a time savoured for its clarity is the way to read this extensive work which includes reality. 

The idea as  Maugham develops it is that we are informed by our experience.  What pops out as significant for us depends on our souls or the way we live our world.  There is a collectively learned aspect to this which we can recognise as French soul, Irish soul, Black soul.  It is an internally coherent way of living the world which the denizens of any particular cultural sector can recognise.  There are no neutral data.

Now read on.

'Flotsam and Jetsam' by Somerset Maugham from the collection 'Creatures of Circumstance'

 I think of Somerset Maugham as the consummate story teller.  You are brought in to a well lighted place shown the furniture which reflects the characters who go on their way as dumb as falling stones beset by their constitutional gravity.  He doesn’t often love his personae but anyone with knowledge by acquaintance, as Bertie Russell said, knows that distaste is a standard correct response.  His Malay stories are often a vision of humid hell.  

In the story entitled ‘Flotsam and Jetsam’ from the collection called ‘Creatures of Circumstance’ Skelton,a youngish anthropologist on his way to the Borneo coast, a three week trip, is struck down by malaria.  A rubber planter Grange and his wife who live nearby take him in while he recuperates.  Aha I thought anthropologist now gets to study OP (orang putay/white man) in his native habitat.  I won’t go into the story which is classic Maughamish  operative secret.  During the day while the anthropologist is recovering he talks to the wife who at one point seems to be about to reveal the source of the extreme nervous ticks that oppress her.  She tells a lot but holds that back.

When the sick man recovers he departs:  

“He was glad now that Mrs. Grange had not told him the story that was on the tip of her tongue to tell.  He did not want some tragic tale of sin or folly to connect him with them in a recollection that he could not escape.  He wanted to forget them as one forgets a bad dream.

It is left to Mrs. Grange to tell us the story talking to herself in the mirror as if in her past as an actress she was delivering a soliloquy.  A secret that is untold retains its power to trap one in that continually recurring scene of horror.  Skelton does not want this unloaded on to him even if this might free the teller of the secret.  Anthropology has its limits.

Is that direct address to the reader a weak ending, though I will grant screen playable?  Has Maugham slipped?  I’m not entirely happy that an observer has been removed from the scene but yes the response to incontinent sharing of ‘please don’t tell me, I don’t want to know’ is a real one.

The next story in the collection is called ‘Appearance and Reality’ which sent me to F.H. Bradley’s book.  Maugham was a reader of philosophy and he liked the book.. The title of his novel ‘Of Human Bondage’ is taken from Spinoza’s ‘The Ethics’.

I’ve just started that and I have the distinct feeling that there may be more of appearance than reality in this tale.