Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys

I was going to go on to read some Joyce Cary bringing in more of the Anglo-Irish literature side of things but having started Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys (1929) Internet Archive have lots of his work:
Wolf Solent
I'll continue with it. I feel the need to nourish my soul at that fount of oddness and really for precipitate alteration of focus that is yet somehow right he has no equal. Don't look for a pattern, that's what a tornado does. Yes, of course, but if you go out far enough out and squint according to a theory you will see it. Rely on it, Powys will be there before you in earnest colloquy with the myrmidons of his kingdom - Selena Gault and Darnley Otter. But no one is left unnoticed.

He gave up his ticket to an elderly station master whose air, at once fussily inquisitive and mildly deferential suggested the manner of a cathedral verger.

The technique of creative absence which Wolf practises he calls 'sinking into his soul'.

This 'sinking into his soul' - this sensation which he called 'mythology' - consisted of a certain summoning up to the surface of his mind, of a subconscious magnetic power which from those very early Weymouth days, as he watched the glitter of sun and moon upon the waters from that bow window, had seemed to answer such a summons.

This secret practice was always accompanied by an arrogant mental idea - the idea, namely, that he was taking part in some occult cosmic struggle -- some struggle between what he liked to think of as 'good' and what he like to think of as 'evil' in those remote depths.

I'm going down the universe, I may be gone for some time.

Palladian by Elizabeth Taylor

Palladian was Taylor's second novel (1946) and it is a playful homage to some of the themes which have concerned the great English women writers. The heroine is Cassandra Dashwood aged 20. She is to be a governess to Marion Vanbrugh's child Sophy. He,Marion by the way is pronounced Merrion, is the owner of a mouldering demesne and a residence with a Palladian applied front. Marion is still grieving over the death of his wife at the birth of Sophy who is now about 11. He reads Greek verse in the original and has a fin-de-siècle aestheticism which marks him as vaguely effeminate. His household is composed of Tom his cousin, drunkard, artist specialising in surreal anatomical sketches, failed medical student, handsome and dissolute. Also there is Tom's sister Margaret, a medical doctor, residing for the duration of her pregnancy and Tom's mother who is the housekeeper and an ancient Nanny. Clearly the big house regiment has fallen in strength but it still has representative members from all ranks.

The amusing thing about this book is that the ancient women retainers and staff are used as a hag's chorus gibbering by the range in the kitchen sustained by stewed tea and grievance, sinking betimes into the unity of weird sisterhood and then bethinking themselves to grovel or assert distinctions. The sister Margaret is a monster of tactless confrontation and sublime greed. Being pregnant she has to eat for four and her sorties against a gooseberry pie and a latticed jam tart in the larder together with her inept covering of tracks in the matter of assaults on bread and dripping are depicted with transgressive fascination. Being a lady she massacres the bread.

How far can you take homage before it turns into pastiche? Any writer but Elizabeth Taylor would have gone into that area and succumbed to it. She is able to manage it by an ironic subversion. Marion is no brute Rochester, Tom is no Heathcliffe howling on the moor but the lover of Mrs.Veal the Landlady of the Blacksmith's Arms. She is first met on the train in the compartment with Cassandra:

She had a way of settling her blue fox across her breast and smiling down with pleasure and approval - it might equally have been pleasure at the fur or the bosom, since both were magnificent. A dusky, pleasant perfume came from her as she stirred, and the little charms hanging from her bracelet jingled softly.

The other Elizabeth Taylor. Quite!

Cassandra, a bookish girl whose recently deceased father was a schoolmaster with a personal library of 2000 volumes, is well prepared to adhere to the template and fall in love with her employer particularly when he turns out to be a scholarly man. He is haunted by the death in childbirth of his wife Violet who he claims read Homer in the original at the age of 8. Will their love be crossed? Now there's an expression that Taylor would never permit herself.

She (Cassandra) had come a long way from the life of yesterday, of the day before that - the shabby home, the traffic, the bush full of tram tickets, the crowds on the pavements, clotting, thinning out, pressing forward; travelling across time, Marion had called it, but they were really going to work, or going home from work, or shopping, or wooing one another. 'Quite separate', she thought. 'Each quite separate. That is the only safe way of looking at it. And we can never be safe unless we believe we are great and that human life is abiding and the sun constant and that we matter. Once broken, that fragile illusion would disclose the secret panic, the vacuity within us. Life then would not be tolerable.'

This is a short novel of 191 pages with plenty of white. It's quite good. The Virago edition I borrowed from the library has an Introduction by Paul Bailey that is littered with spoilers. Taylor has written better novels, Angel and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont in my opinion, but her good is very very good and she's never horrid.

House Arrest in Paris

Having finished The House in Paris and not wishing to spoil your reading of it; if you haven't already read it, I will reserve my remarks to generalities.  In the crime novel of the puzzle sort everything is explained in the library at the end by the Poirot like figure who shows you that everything you needed to discover the killer was given to you in the plot.  There is no knowledge that is his alone.   Realistic fiction is different, like life itself motivation 'unknown' to the reader/observer can sometimes lead to strange and uncanny twists.   People do the unexpected and swerve without signalling.  The great writers can depict that without leading us by the nose, others place finger-posts so that we don't get too much of a shock.  That sort of writing need not concern us here.   How did Bowen manage in that test of writers justification?  Very well I think, but it is a fact that you have to sink into the characters and below the surface fabric of the novel to feel the greater archetypal tides.  Mme Fisher as malign anima  is how 'unknown' earns its quotes.  She is one of those spiders in Baudelaire's 'Spleen'

And the dumb throngs of infamous spiders spin
Their meshes in the caverns of the brain,

But she herself is webbed down by illness and can only marshal her minion, Miss Fisher, by rapping on the ceiling, like a communication from beyond that does not lack authority.
Mrs. Michaelis, Karen's mother is also of the sort who manages by creating default avenues of permission, that channels the lives around her into patterns that she considers appropriate. She eliminates from consideration that of which she does not approve:

On Sunday night, when - '
Mrs. Michaelis put a hand to her face. 'You know I never ask you to tell me everything, Karen.'
'On Sunday night when I came in, I really did see Ray's letter. I left it where it was because I felt bad, because I am not going to marry him.'
'I think you will want to, Karen.' said her mother

Karen's aunt Violet, her mother's sister has kept from Karen's parents the fact that she is very ill and is to undergo an operation that she may well die from. They live in Ireland and when at the start of the Past section Karen visits them her uncle Colonel Bill blurts it out but his wife says nothing. The complex pattern of secrets is another way of webbing down.

Mme. Fisher tells Leopold much more than he needs to know as a form of post-mortem oppression. But now I'm telling and here I am re-reading it already.

The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen

The Anglo in Anglo-Irish is very different from the Anglo in Anglo-Indian. The latter is a racial mixture, the former is a marked racial aloofness that when mingled with the native Irish loses caste as definitively as a Brahmin who has touched a plough. The Vikings and the Normans went bush early and became more Irish than the Irish themselves the only trace being their towns and castles and of course that strange uvular r that lingers round some areas. Brendan Behan, puer Borstalus for his Republican sins, referred to the Anglo Irish as a protestant on a horse. Yeats tried to identify with 'hard riding country gentlemen' whereas his stock was of the clerical protestant, professional adjuncts to the land owing class. Perhaps it is that wariness and otherness, that aloof noting of the correct distance that brings out the writer in a group that discovers when they go to their putative mother-country that they really are not English at all. They need to be in Ireland to feel that they are after all English.

I've been reading Joyce Cary and Elizabeth Bowen recently and though it may seem that their connection with Ireland is exiguous, their writing has a specific gravity, a weighting that is Irish and a glancing off the surface that is unmistakable. I'm reading The House in Paris from 1935 at the moment. It is achieved in the sense that it creates precisely those harmonics between Past and Present which form the structure of the book. The Present is represented by the young of the Past and the interplay between the 11 year old girl and the 9 year old boy has some of the fatality of replication.

She thought, young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate; they like to have loud chords struck on them. Loving art better than life they need men to be actors; only an actor moves them, with his telling smile, undomestic, out of touch with the everyday that they dread. They love to enjoy love as a system of doubts and shocks.

(Karen from The Past section)

It is a subtle book requiring a vigilant meditativeness to enjoy.

Spots of Time

There's a steroscopic aspect to realisation. What gives depth and fullness to experience is an an ability to immerse ourselves in it in a non-dual way. The object of experience is set against the subject of experience but at the same time what makes experiencing possible is the underlying ontological unity. The object can come to be in the subject. Clearly this non-dual realisation is a rare event in the lives of most of us but as Wordsworth has said in his 'spots of time' passage they are vital.

There are in our existence spots of time,
Which with distinct pre-eminence retain
A vivifying Virtue, whence, depress'd
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repair'd,
A virtue by which pleasure is enhanced
That penetrates, enables us to mount
When high, more high, and lift us up when fallen.
This efficacious spirit chiefly lurks
Among those passages of life in which
We have deepest feeling that the mind
Is lord and master, and that outward sense
Is but the obedient servant of her will.
Such moments worthy of all gratitude,
Are scattered everywhere, taking their date
From our first childhood: in our childhood even
Perhaps are most conspicuous.

(Bk.XI. ln.258 foll.)

There is no claim in this passage that such epiphanies are the domain of elite adepts. We all can visit and experience recreation and renewal yet there are what the Buddhists call 'upaya' or skillful means. Alienation and banishment from the garden is always a possibility. I shall have to look at the later poems in the era after the great decade to find if there is a clue to Wordsworth's decline in them.

Prelude to Reality

The challenge of realism is to show that we experience reality even if this experience has limitations. There is always the possibility of error and there is always more to know. Contrasted with this is idealism which is never naive perhaps because it is all naive. Idealism turns our conviction that we are experiencing reality into an experience of experience and the perception of perception and reduces 'common' sense into a complete mystery which arose we know not why from we know not where. Obviously there is an 'internal' side to experience, neuronal traffic and the like, and there is an 'external' side, the conceptual, the common. Wittgenstein ought to have put paid to the excessive weight that idealism puts on the internal beam of the scales with his beetle in the box but like a powerful virus it is a cunning adversary that mutates. However I don't think that it is the business of philosophy to deal with every manifestation of ontological error however solidly empirical it seems. Don't panic, it's perfectly safe to remain in your armchairs.

There is that perennial conundrum – if you can pose the question, can you not by that very fact resolve the question? Yes I would reply if you accept realisation as a comprehension. The aporia of how there can be a non-numerical identity between the experience and the reality is resolved by the fact of poetry.

Nor should this, perchance,
Pass unrecorded, that I still lov'd
That exercise and produce of a toil
Than analytic industry to me
More pleasing, and whose character I deem
Is more poetic as resembling more
Creative agency. I mean to speak
Of that interminable building rear'd
By observation of affinities
In objects where no brotherhood exists
To common minds.
.....
......
To unorganic natures I transferr'd
My own enjoyments, or, the power of truth
Coming in revelation, I convers'd
With things that really are, I, at this time
Saw blessings spread round me like a sea.

(The Prelude Book II. 396 foll.)

The Prelude by William Wordsworth

I am reading The Prelude by Wordsworth regularly and consecutively. The bathos that attends excessive solemnity like an awkward acolyte is there but for me it humanises the lofty and impassioned passages that are normally anthologised. "Keep her going Liamie, don't stall the digger", I cry from the pit.

Nor will it seem to thee, my Friend! so prompt
In sympathy, that I have lengthen'd out,
With fond and feeble tongue, a tedious tale.

(Bk.1.645..)

Not so Dear William inveterate companion of my earlier years,
A form glimpsed in the tumbling cataract of Glencar,
hanging in the mist, its own moment,
given, complete and no presage of future states.

Wordsworth often asks, was I being led on, was this part of an unfolding initiation? In the monist philosophy which he informally espoused everything already is whatever it's going to be. 'Become who you are' said Kierkegaard somewhere. The end or final cause, the telos of Aristotle is not an objective to be attained but what is the case now. Everything is to the point.