The Forsyte Saga

I’ve just finished reading The Man of Property by John Galsworthy being the first volume of The Forsyte Saga. Absolutely first rate as one of his characters might think but not say, after all it doesn’t do to be too enthusiastic. The Forsytes give nothing away; they amass, they collect and finally surrender only to take a profit. When the novel opens it is 1886 just before the Jubilee Year of 1887 and the family meet up for the engagement party of June Forsyte at the house of her Grandfather Jolyon. His brothers and sisters with all their children are there. The family saddle of mutton is also there, for they love succulent, simple and ample food, floury potatoes and the gourmand brother Swithin drinks champagne by the pint. Collectively they live in those areas like Park Lane and Kensington where property values are on the rise and their family conversations are like moves in real monopoly.

Soames Forsyte son of James the brother of old Jolyon is married to the beautiful Irene. They are not happy and there is talk of separate bedrooms. She has brought nothing to the marriage but her beauty which is in itself an indication of a lack of judgment on his part. Her father was a professor, not much money in that, and after the death of her mother he remarried a much younger woman. The step-mother was anxious to have Irene off her hands and enhance her own chances. Pertinacious Soames wore her down after several refusals. They have been married for 3 years and she is now about 25. He is 32 or so and his name is in the style and title of a firm of solicitors.

It’s an interesting thing how the intentions of the author often fail to coincide with the depiction of his character. Irene suffers from what we can today easily recognise as Dickens disease. Under that sanctified plaster we wonder whether there is functional plumbing. A little thought suffices to reassure ourselves when we recollect that the refined love of the best of everything has been traded for conjugal rights with a man that physically repelled her even in her days of chaste courtship.

But I will say no more; these short reports are merely an incitement to read. Find it on Gutenberg Project (Complete Saga)http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4397

Room by Emma Donohue

Emma Donnohue's Room is not a book that I normally would have read being allergic to Booker hype but I was staying in a house that had a copy so I took it up. I hardly left it down until it was read. It is told from the perspective of Jack a just 5 year old and the setting is that of a garden shed in which he and his mother are the captives of a man that is referred to as Old Nick. Jack has been born into captivity and to him the TV which they have is no more than images from the dream time with no connection to any free reality. Ma knows that from now on this reality must be adjusted and the real nature of their predicament made clear so she begins to raise that magical diaphane on the misty neverland of Dora the Explorer.

It seems to me that Donohue has brought us into a world that does not bear thinking about, one of profound horror and anxiety as we jog along in the banality of evil hoping that they may somehow escape and that their captor will in turn get a room of his own in the big house. Good read.

Weighting for the Barbarians

So I finished Waiting for the Barbarians and I've been thinking about it. The first thing that occurred to me was that in an age of muskets and bows, empire and Barbarian horde, in a time of danger, no god is invoked. When I looked to check it struck me that god is all through it in the form of god's own tense, the nunc-stans of the continuous present. That this hadn't been apparent to me before because I normally can't abide the intrusiveness of it, that buttonholing, is an indication of the skill of the writing. So if God is in the grammar, where's the devil? In the diction, Mo.

The magistrate narrator is a weighing scales. The sentences are perfectly weighted to the dynamic of the action, he is balanced between the meddling Empire and the nomadic Barbarians. His attachment to a Barbarian girl who has been partially blinded and lamed by the emissaries from the centre causes the pointer to tilt in the direction of folly. He mounts an expedition to return the girl to her people.

Henry James's Big Ask

I am now it seems at the stage in the bog of The Golden Bowl where I think I previously lost my wellingtons some 30 years or more ago. Does ones taste change so little or is it that the vast indetermination and fog grows so thick that the continent that is Henry James is cut off. There are so many ‘big asks’. The chief one is that an American who is a billionaire by 47 simmered in the ruthless stews of the Gilded Age would buy a prince in a poke. This Adam is a figure of great wealth sanitized by benevolence, a Carnegie or Mellon or Beattie. James was insulated from ‘getting and spending’ by grandfather’s money. This patriarch was Scots Irish, an Ulster Presbyterian from Cavan.. The Cavanman is reputed to eat his dinner from an open drawer in readiness for unexpected callers. Whether that elder endowed anything or not we can be grateful that he established a line that produced the other James boys.

The other novel I’m reading might be said to be an antidote - Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee. It is crisp, precise, direct although so far there is no indication whether the Barbarians or the Colonists are generic or specific to a time and place. Muskets are mentioned and torture is routine. It is realism but not of the coarse sort. Distance makes types and that’s fine because when you move closer they become individuals though so far they have remained unnamed.

Transmission of Wisdom

Poetry is a medium that is suited to the transmission of wisdom which is the aim of philosophy. Compression and densification of meaning is its primary mode. The full range of reference of the word is used and the metrical form makes it memorable so that dwelling in the the poem is made easy. This dwelling is necessary for the meaning in all its complexity to emerge. Moreover the alien rule of metre forces the mind away from the economy of effort which is cliché and the new way of saying something is the mother of new thinking.

cf. Four Quartets by T.S.Eliot

Blessing

What goes around comes around. What does that mean? Is it a reference to moral mechanism, the seeking of balance in the account, the perfect lack of entropy in the karmic?

This happened in India on the ashram of X. Jerry got a letter from his mother which he read and then threw in the wastepaper basket that was on the veranda where he was sleeping. These baskets were cleared away regularly by the sweepers. On the following day Jerry bought some oranges from a fruit seller in the market which were carefully wrapped up individually. It is only when he gets back and unwraps the fruit that he notices the wrapping is with the pages of his mother's letter. Nothing is wasted.

As I wrote in my last post I laughed to think that I'd missed the opportunity to give a blessing on our walk in the hills. Last week we were walking in the same area on a bog and forestry road. The very top of the hill for miles is a raised bog. In Ireland bogs are found on the heights not in the hollows. Walking up we met a tall man of the age of second reason, of review. He looked at me closely . M. told me later that he said in a soft voice 'God bless you all'. This is not commonplace in Ireland any more though I will grant that there are recusants.

God bless you all.

A Funny Thing happened on the Way to the Bog.

Just past the last house on the bog road we parked the car and got out for a walk. My wife and daughter marched on ahead of me in seven league mode and I dawdled behind soon losing sight of them on the twisty road. The boreen was only wide enough for a single car and an alert pedestrian. Who's rushing? The steep banks are thick with heather, ferns, woodbine, hazel and dusky ringlets abound like flying shadows. Hanging on a tall fern what do I see only a rosary beads of an unusual construction, made with brown nylon cord with knots around the Our Fathers and the Hail Marys loose together. Somebody must have dropped this as they were out walking I thought. It looks a few beads short. To check I held it up and was counting the beads when I suddenly became aware of the shadow of a car behind me. (I am a little deaf) Turning around still holding the beads up, I saw the couple in the car smiling in a good humoured way as though they had caught me in a Franciscan moment.

Later we had a good laugh about this. I said:
- I missed my opportunity to give them a blessing, wearing a black top I looked like a priest at home on holidays from the missions in Africa or the Far East, a bit mad.