June 2010 saw the London Review Bookshop’s second annual World Literature Weekend, themed around exile and displacement: both linguistic and geographical, voluntary and forced. In the words of Alain Mabanckou, the festival brought together writers able ‘to create something within the local that is open to the world,’ and The Literateur didn’t miss a thing.

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The Railway: Hamid Ismailov and Robert Chandler, Friday 18th June, 4pm

On 16th June, two days before the Kyrgyz-born Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov spoke at the World Literature Weekend, Kyrgyzstan declared three days of national mourning in response to the country’s recent violence and political unrest. The conflict in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan following the 7th April uprising make this a highly charged time for Ismailov to reflect on his upbringing in the region.

The Soviet Uzbekistan in which Ismailov grew up was a multilingual, multicultural ‘mixed world of everything’. He recalls how, as a boy, he would celebrate Easter with Greek families, Ramadan with Muslim families, speak Tajik with neighbours and Russian at school, and then spend evenings reading the Thousand and One Nights and the poetry of Hafez to his grandmother – about which lengthy readings, he remembers, he was far from excited as a boy.

Throughout Ismailov’s discussion with Robert Chandler, the English translator of his best-known novel The Railway, the immense importance of names to his life and work is clear. As Chandler sees it, the Soviets wanted to change the world and human nature. This proving impossible, they began instead to rename everything – the easiest route to change.

Stalin’s belief in the power of names over reality, traced intriguingly by Chandler to the ideas of the French Symbolist poets, contrasts with the flexibility of names in the eyes of the Central Asian people. Stalin’s redrawing of the region’s borders deliberately avoided divisions along coherent ethnic lines, with many Uzbeks residing in what became Kyrgyzstan and vice versa. ‘Renaming yourself is very easy there,’ Ismailov says – and an important part of survival. ‘Call me whatever, but don’t kill me,’ is how he characterises the world in which he lived.

The Railway’s style is characterised by dense repetition, and both Chandler and Ismailov speak feelingly of the importance of this. It seems that in this repetition the two different characteristics of language in Ismailov’s life combine: the experience of the changeability of names and the Soviets’ belief in their primacy over reality.

According to Chandler, ‘repeating a word is like holding it up to the light,’ watching how it changes as rays catch it from different angles. Yet repetition is a pursuit of permanence as well as of change. One key repetitive passage describes a character’s arrest and imminent execution. With each repeated word, Ismailov says, he is trying to keep possession of the passing moments. Through making language stand still, he is trying to keep hold of his life.

Even before he began The Railway, the very choice of which language to write in placed Ismailov firmly within the multilingual world of renamings the novel portrays. He began writing in Uzbek, before being advised to change to Russian by a friend who declared that no-one would read it otherwise – and indeed, the fact that his works are currently banned in Uzbekistan seems to bear this out.

Ismailov explains why, far from a betrayal of his Uzbek identity, he considers Russian an apt choice of language for the novel. The Railway has been able, he says, to become almost the only Soviet novel: the Russian language is the glue of its ‘mixed world of everything’ Central Asian setting, and it is fitting that it should also glue together a novel tracing a century of its history.

Yet towards the end of the discussion, Ismailov adds that The Railway would have been a ‘totally different’ novel had it originally been written in Uzbek – and this concluding reminder of the linguistic might-have-beens surrounding and permeating his work provides just the right context in which to read it.

Annie McDermott

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Elias Khoury with Jeremy Harding, Friday 18th June, 7pm

Elias Khoury’s not the kind of writer who writes about himself. His stories are other people’s, and the first thing he says is to excuse himself as no more than the signature on his books. But here’s a little about him: one of the most distinguished intellectuals of the Arab world, he’s a novelist, journalist, acclaimed critic, playwright, teacher, and currently literary editor of the newspaper Al-Nahar. Born in Beirut in 1948, in the late 60s he became active in the Palestinian cause and later took part in the Lebanese civil war that began in 1975. This war is the medium in which his novels take place. But in spite of the brutality of this context, his writing has, as Jeremy Harding says (his interviewer this evening, contributing editor at the LRB), a lightness to it. Accordingly, the first question asks, why is he so playful?

Khoury’s reply turns us to the tradition of the Thousand and One Nights, and, relatedly, the oral tradition of story-telling that he grew up with. In these traditions stories mirror each other; one might be a metaphor for another, which is a metaphor for a third. The telling of them is not linear – things emerge, mingle, open then close, and reopen. Characters appear, disappear, reappear. It’s this fluidity that’s playful, as well as the absence or rejection of absolutes, the refusal to accept a simple, fixed truth. Literature’s a combination of memory and imagination, neither of which are reliable, says Khoury, and so it can’t be there to tell us facts, but rather to question, to explore. He cites Gilgamesh, the first great epic: it’s a travel story, an adventure story.

Halfway through the evening Jeremy asks about Yalo, a book he found very hard to read. Yalo’s subject is a young Syriac militiaman who becomes a rapist and is arrested and tortured, not for the rapes, but under suspicion of involvement with Israeli terrorists. It is a nice story, says Khoury, and adds that he ended by becoming friends with the boy. Describing the brutalities Yalo suffered after his arrest, among those that really do take place across the Arab world, Khoury made one up: a psychological punishment whereby Yalo is made to write his life story seven times. Each time he is told he is lying, and tortured for it. It seems unlikely that this technique will be taken up in real interrogation rooms, since both the act of self-definition itself, whether accepted or not, and the possibility of different, even contradictory, versions of a person’s story co-existing are affirmative and strengthening things, not destructive.

Such re-versioning is expressive of the idea that people’s identities are many-layered, which counters the ’stupid idea of the état-nation‘, in Khoury’s words, ‘that was invented in Europe’. His own identities are multiple: Christian, Muslim, atheist, leftist, Lebanese, Palestinian. Of these last, Khoury says, ‘I have two countries: the country where I was born and the country of my choice. Neither country exists!’ But he insists on his self-identification as a Palestinian, as an identification with the victim, and as such an expression of common humanity. Khoury quotes the psychologist Jacques Hassoun, who made a distinction between ‘identity’ and ‘identification’. It’s this last that matters, while the former is simple, reductive, externally imposed. Yalo’s torture, then, is not the repeated writing of his story, but the subsequent denial of his identifications, and the process of forcing him into the limits of a ‘pure’ identity – this, Khoury says, is fascism. His books aren’t laden with a political ‘message’, and he says that novels can’t change anything – though perhaps their readers might. But what he does as a novelist is important exactly in affirming the multiple identities and complexities of all the individuals who populate the stories he tells us. With Khoury around, history won’t only be written by the victors.

Lola Draganescu

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Alain Mabanckou with Helen Stevenson, Friday 18th June, 2pm

Traduction en Direct: Alain Mabanckou, Sarah Ardizzone, Frank Wynne; chaired by Daniel Hahn, Saturday 19th June, 12pm

When asked to produce a translation which would then be discussed and defended ‘live’ at the LRB’s World Literature Weekend, Sarah Ardizzone and Frank Wynne responded in identical fashion: ‘That sounds terrifying, but I’ll do it.’ Why would two experienced and decorated professionals (she has won the Marsh Award for Children’s Literature in Translation twice, he the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize) feel quite so nervous about discussing their craft, something that authors do all the time? Perhaps because we, as readers, couldn’t treat translators and authors more differently. Whilst successful authors are interviewed and adored, the translator is but a ghostly presence who will always be too visible for some, an embarrassing necessity allowing us to access works from around the world but simultaneously barring, through the inconvenient markers of personality or style, our access to the work of what Andrew Stilwell, introducing, called ‘the more glamorous personalities’.

Tightrope walkers, ventriloquists and fraudsters are some of the epithets translators use for themselves, offered to us by Daniel Hahn (Chair of the Translators Association and of Saturday’s event). No doubt because they spend so much time in metaphor and figure, but also because the presence of a translator, always partial or mediating, invites such deviation. The World Literature Weekend thus seeks not only to promote writers from across the globe, but to bring the translators of those works back into view, to argue for the merits of that process so despised in many literature departments, and to acknowledge both that, yes, the work that is created is a new one, distinct from the original, but that this opens the text up to an enormous variety of readers who would be otherwise unable to access it. Alain Mabanckou, the author whose work provides the material for this event, is, after all, himself a reader of world literature, and appeared in conversation with his translator, Helen Stevenson, on the Friday afternoon. It was whilst studying a law degree (‘to satisfy my mother’) that he encountered the works of García Márquez, cited as an influence, along with Russian writers such as Dostoyevsky and Gogol whom he discovered after a move to Europe. Alain cannot speak Russian, but, as he is keen to emphasise, authors don’t only write for their own people. If Dostoyevsky wrote exclusively for Russians, ‘I wouldn’t understand,’ he says. In fact, he felt transported to Russia, felt that it was his country. This is what a really good translation will achieve – perhaps even more effectively than the experience of reading the original which, even with an exceptional grasp of the language, may always feel exaggeratedly exotic.

If that sense of belonging is to be conveyed to us, however, whilst keeping the local specificity of the text, the ‘voice’ must be absolutely right. The real difficulty, Sarah tells us the next day, does not come from a text with awkward syntax or complex ideas, but a text with a strong voice, such as that of Alain’s narrator: knowing, teasing, clever but not formal. And this text is an unusually easy one from Alain’s corpus; on Friday, Helen had described the difficulty of dealing with a novel such as Broken Glass, which incorporates passages from other authors (‘like creases in a sheet,’ Helen called them) ranging from French translations of Steinbeck to African authors unknown in Europe. Without the author’s help, one might find oneself to have embarrassingly translated Hemingway back into a form of English that bears little relation to the original. Frank emphasises just how collaborative each project usually is, for reasons such as these; he will generally present a book length work to the author and editor with 2000-3000 footnotes, all containing queries or alternatives, for discussion.

This does not, however, tend to push a text towards any single, ‘neutral’ interpretation. Although these translations were only rough, we are informed that only one sentence out of however many had been translated identically, and this was ‘Really?’(‘Vraiment?’) The translator’s own manner of speaking will have an influence, and in a discussion like this, one’s individual quirks of language come under attack. When Frank states quite reasonably that he hasn’t “been to a disco since the 1980s,” Sarah has to defend her choice of this slightly embarrassing word for the opening sentence – and she does not altogether succeed in laying responsibility at the feet of the character!

Then there are other words which garner agreement simply by virtue of their troublesome nature. They stumble over cochonneries as euphemism; Frank assigns it a ‘slightly Mary Whitehouse prudishness’, the kind of thing one’s mother would accuse one of, and so went for ‘smutty things’, which Sarah greatly preferred to her ‘a dirty act’. Neither was entirely happy, however, with anything they could come up with at the time.

They discuss at length the cultural aspect of metaphor, which may be one that few of us have properly considered. Frank considered ‘made doe-eyes at’ for ‘convoitait de loin’ (literally ‘coveted from afar’, but lower register), before remembering that the Congo, where the story is set, is devoid of deer. The other side of this attempt to be geographically faithful in metaphor is the desire not to exoticise or, worse, primitivise the text by sticking too closely to metaphors with which the British or American reader is unfamiliar. An unscrupulous salesman ‘n’était pas né de la dernière pluie’ – literally, wasn’t born with the last rains, which is an evocative idiom, but perhaps too much so of wide African savannahs and not enough so of the urban setting where it is being used. Here the usefulness of a grasp of several cultures is once again emphasised: Frank’s Hiberno-English offered up the very close ‘had not come down with the last shower’, whilst Sarah had to go with the far more banal ‘wasn’t born yesterday.’

Despite many differences, much of the discussion between the two translators took the form of mutual praise, usually evolving into another way of phrasing a particular passage which both preferred. When asked about the possibility of two translators working together on the same text, however, both pointed towards the problems of maintaining unity of voice, which Sarah called ‘the signature’ of a work. Frank cited a Penguin translation of Proust, which used more than one translator for obvious reasons, but in which the pet name for Albertine and attitude to the subjunctive varied wildly from one book to the next. Although all present had flirted with group translation, all insisted on the necessity of a very good editor in such a situation. All agreed that the best path is to allow a single translator to ‘sign’ a work, to stamp it with their own personality whilst doing what the author did in the first place: creating an appropriate narratorial voice. In the introduction, translators were described as ‘the mediating angels in Babel’. High praise, but still spectral, still mysterious. Alain, whose precise use of figure so delighted and befuddled his translators across the two events, came up with something characteristically apt as we drew to a close: ‘I gave them a guitar and they’re playing their own rhythm.’

Jessica Stacey

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Hisham Matar and Adhaf Souief, Saturday 19th June, 2pm

In a discussion of the work of Adhaf Souief and Hisham Matar, steering away from the notion of ‘ethnic’ writing might have become a cliché in itself; both writers, reflecting on their past books, audience questions and their works-in-progress, encouraged a view of literature that is transnational, with Matar stating that ‘these questions [of identity] aren’t ones you ever really think about until someone asks you’.

Testament to the thoughtfulness of both writers, though, was the presence of a vast ambivalence toward the notion of ‘ethnicity’ and ‘the universal’, in which both entertained the idea that writing itself was most succinctly represented by the dialogue between a local and a general: Matar argued that contemporary writing is concerned with ‘the place of the native in the globalisation project’, where Soueif, coming from the opposite angle but arriving at much the same destination, commented that good literature was about ‘expanding the discussion so it becomes a universal discussion’.

Native to Cairo, Soueif’s chosen subject was the marginalisation of Egyptian citizens by the state appointed authorities; Matar’s – whose father was kidnapped by the Libyan government – detailed a man’s thoughtful recollections of his childhood and father. Inherent in both readings was a sense of identity: in Soueif’s Cairo, police forbid an Egyptian entry to the national museum on account of its status as a “foreign only” space, and Matar’s protagonist tells his audience of the peculiar rituals of his father and mother. Interestingly, though, Matar’s recollections – necessarily, perhaps, written in the past tense – were sober and almost nostalgic, where Soueif chose humour as her tool, offsetting satire with the peculiar sense of tension that often arises from prose written in the present tense.

In both cases, though, what was clear is that identity, as well as being liberating, leaves a great many alienated. Matar’s narrator seems curiously detached from the world as he outlines his carefully selected memories, and Soueif’s characters are very literally denied the ability to identify with a chosen space.

Indeed, on the restricting nature of power, Mater and Soueif were in agreement: ‘one of the most terrible consequences of occupation is isolation’, said Soueif, and Matar was happy to concur.

Chris Woolfrey

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On Exile and Language: Tahar Ben Jelloun, Atiq Rahimi, Elir Amir, chaired by Adam Shatz, Saturday 19th June, 4pm

Chair Adam Shatz framed this intense discussion on the notion of exile with a particularly pertinent quote from Edward Said: ‘Exile is terribly interesting to think about, but terrible to experience’.

It was interesting, then, that for an audience made up largely of English speakers, the talk represented something of a thought experiment: authors Tahar Ben Jelloun and Atiq Rahimi, exiled from Morocco and Afghanistan respectively, spoke entirely in French for the course of the debate. That both, in discussing the relationship between language and exile, required an interpreter, was both testament to the cultural power of language and an example of the alienating power of identifying meaning through language, as the audience saw itself in some way exiled from the discussion.

Tahar Ben Jelloun was the most vocal in forging a link between language and identity: ‘A writer is his language’, he commented. ‘I don’t think you can ignore your roots; you can go beyond them, but not cut them off.’ At several points in the discussion, he noted that an individual’s identity was defined by their language, defining Joyce as ‘Irish’ (which, of course, has its complications), and Beckett as ‘French and Irish’, and noted that ‘Proust just talked about himself’, but that in so doing, he represented the French society of the nineteenth century; as a nineteenth century French citizen who wrote in French, he was invariably unable to escape that identification.

Eli Amir, born in Iraq but settled in Israel, was less willing to draw such a parallel, noting that whilst his writing would always concern his place of birth, he found the notion of a writer being tied to his nation very limiting; describing with some contempt, and not a little humour, the shelves marked ‘Arabic Writers’ and ‘Oriental Writers’ at his school, he commented that he is ‘always struggling just to be in the centre’. Mediating this, Atiq Rahimi depoliticised the notion of the exile, equating the loneliness and isolation with the act of writing itself: ‘from the moment you’re writing you’re exiled’. In so doing, Rahimi seemed willing to concede that the argument was not polemical.

It was the charismatic Tahar Ben Jelloun who highlighted the inherent ambivalence in the discussion, though, with several contradictory statements. Concluding one round of questions with the statement ‘We are all ethnic writers’, he later reflected that he was ‘just a writer. I only write about Morocco and I’m not a Moroccan writer’. On such a complex issue, the final word should perhaps go to him also: ‘These are questions for the customs officer’, he joked.

Chris Woolfrey

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Lee Valley Poems: Yang Lian, Iain Sinclair and Brian Holton, Saturday 19th June, 7pm

A major theme of Friday and Saturday so far has been concerned with what happens to the literature of a culture when it is displaced, when the ties between language, place and writer are loosened, either by political necessity or by choice. Yang Lian is an exile too, having fled the Cultural Revolution, but, along with Iain Sinclair and his translator Brian Holton, he is at the London Review Bookshop on Saturday evening to talk about place, rootedness and locality.

‘Hackney’ sounds rough and glottal, protruding, for Anglophone ears, from the surface-textures of Lian’s Chinese. The word is lent beguiling unfamiliarity, gaining a syllable, distending: ‘Hack-en-ey.’ Brian Holton’s translation, read afterwards, contextualises the word – ‘In Hackney the river is a hidden God.’ That Hackney is multi-voiced, which Sinclair sees as central to its attractiveness for Lian, and to writers before him. It appealed to Conrad, who lived there, and whose style was forged out of double linguistic exile, from Polish to French to English. John Clare’s asylum could be found a little up the Lea Valley. The poet is in good company.

And it matters that the place of exile is North East London, where there is an industrial-natural tension redolent of modern China; a powerful correlative landscape that ‘looked sufficiently like a Chinese landscape’ to be useful as a metaphor. This combination of familiarity and strangeness, an oppositional stimulus of home/not-home that Lian calls ‘necessary dissonance,’ means that he is able to write and discuss a paradoxically rooted exile. This is thanks in part to his particular Chinese perspective, which allows, as he explains in his introduction to Lee Valley Poems, distance and time to be collapsed by the deployment of an image, so ‘the cry of a wild goose’ recalls ‘the Tang Dynasty at the instant of hearing, making Lee Valley’s waters flow twelve hundred years upstream.’

‘Lee’ is also, Lian tells us, a common Chinese surname, leading his Chinese readers assume that the valley is a place in China, and the poetry a continuation of Classical Chinese landscape poetry. In a way his Chinese characters provide a way of re-making the Lea Valley waterways within an ‘extreme artificial form…deeply rooted in the linguistic nature of Chinese,’ a kind of appropriated Chinese verbal landscape. As Sinclair points out, the misty, reed-bedded cover of Lee Valley Poems connotes China, while being London. Whilst the canal-ways, memory-retaining respiratory channels for the city (Sinclair again), are physically part of London’s land and waterscape, they are also, and without apparent contradiction, a re-creation of China, embedded in the tradition of Chinese poetry.

This duality, a familiar psycho-geographic relationship between subjective mind and place refined by its precise Chinese context, is technically reliant on the process of translation. Each poem has a root, Lian says, and though the place referred to may shift, it is the translator’s role to find that root, and ‘make another tree’ in a new language. Doing so from the Chinese places an unusual further emphasis on the translator, because, we learn, Chinese characters are tenseless and numberless, so Holton is responsible not only for replication of the sense, but must also decide as to tense and numerical relation between semantic units. This information suggests a much a greater role in the creation of a quite fundamental aspects of meaning than we are usually comfortable with assuming for the translator. After all, says Holton with a smile, ‘we begin by pretending to be poets. I have been accused of poetry myself before now. The black box that lies between language in and language out is very mysterious.’

Dan Eltringham

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On Vasily Grossman: Ekaterina Korotkova-Grossman and Robert Chandler, Sunday 20th June, 2pm

Ekaterina Korotkova-Grossman has been for most of her adult life a translator of English literature into Russian. Now entering her ninth decade, and in her first visit to London, she reveals to Robert Chandler that her famous father the war correspondent and novelist Vasily Grossman shared her appreciation of Dickens, citing in particular the figure of Pickwick, a man who might otherwise appear ridiculous but who is redeemed, and redeemed entirely, by his kindness. Kindness is a word that appears several times during the conversation between Ekaterina Vasilieva and her father’s translator. It was, she says, a quality that Grossman came to value far more highly than intelligence; it is, argues Robert Chandler, the quality that makes a comparison between Grossman’s Life and Fate, a book that deals more clear-sightedly with unkindness than perhaps any other 20th-century novel, and Tolstoy’s War and Peace, ‘not grotesque’. Vasily Grossman was, despite the horrors he witnessed, fundamentally optimistic about human nature, his daughter believes. Speaking both in English and through an interpreter, she describes her relationship with him, as well as her own early life, spent in Tashkent during the war and then in Lvov, immediately after the Ukrainian/Polish city had been absorbed into the Soviet Union. Her book about Tashkent remains a work in progress, and her memoir of Lvov can be sampled here: http://www.stosvet.net/12/korotkova/

Movingly, Ekaterina also describes her father’s futile attempts to get Life and Fate published in Russia during his lifetime, and her own attempts (ultimately successful) to revive Grossman’s reputation in the wake of Perestroika in the late 1980s. Grossman was, Chandler and Korotkova-Grossman conclude, a great writer whose greatness is manifested in a constant ability to surprise his readers: where we lazily expect darkness and gloom, Grossman provides lightness and humour; what might seem at first glance to be narrow polemic turns out, when paid more attention (Chandler cites in particular the portrait of Lenin in the recently translated Everything Flows), to have the grandeur of tragedy. Grossman was a truly courageous writer, never doing what we expect, and usually exceeding our expectations; and in the brutal mid-20th-century world in which the bookish and unathletic author found himself, to be kind, and to celebrate kindness, was an act of the utmost courage.

David Lea

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Central European Classics: Michael Hoffman, Georges Szirtes, Tomáš Zmeškal, chaired by Simon Winder, Sunday 20th June, 4pm

Assembling a series entitled ‘Central European Classics’ is attended by a central difficulty: how to reconstruct the conceptual geography of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but without empire-nostalgia, and ‘not in a Hapsburg way’?

These are questions that Hungarian-born poet and translator George Szirtes, Czech novelist Tomáš Zmeškal, and poet and translator from the German Michael Hoffman, discussing Gyula Krúdy’s Life Is a Dream, Josef Škvorecký’s The Cowards, and Thomas Bernhard’s Old Masters, respectively, succeed in raising and complicating, bringing the World Literature Weekend to a close. Stephen Vizinczey is absent due to illness, so Szirtes also discusses György Faludy’s My Happy Days in Hell. Simon Winder, Penguin’s series editor for the Central European Classics, chairs the discussion.

Defending the charge of canon-formation while using the moniker ‘Classics’ is tricky, and no one likes to seem pedagogic. Simon Winder is aware of the problem, saying near the beginning that the ten books selected – a list of which can be found here: http://www.lrbshop.co.uk/home.php?cat=390 – are not intended to be definitive or canon-forming, but are instead to be read as a way of understanding the strangeness of daily life behind the iron curtain.

Part of the physical area the talk and series cover was Soviet, part Western European, and much of both under Hapsburg rule before that. As these interlocking tensions are teased out, the picture that emerges is one of a division between a former aristocracy and its decline, and new literatures produced under Communism. According to Szirtes Hungarian literature is characterised by two dominant states of mind – the shrug, gestural, denoting something like ‘so what; what next?’, and the reverie, in which mundane Soviet existence is transformed in surreal ways. Krudy’s Life is a Dream falls into the latter category, a series of bizarre stories where dream can shade into nightmare, in which a queen sticks her tongue all the way down a knight’s throat, killing him with a ‘kiss,’ and a man exasperates his waiter by eating an infinite amount of food and dispensing advice on how each dish might have been better cooked.

Stefan Zweig, and Michael Hoffman’s unfavourable review of his republished memoir The World of Yesterday in a recent LRB, lurks behind the conversation, referenced obliquely at the end as ‘an article on a certain writer.’ If Hoffman’s assault on Zweig can be more generally applied, as the panel suggests, to a need to ‘clear away dead wood’ from the large body of ex-empire, German-language writing available to an Anglophone readership, then the literatures of Soviet Europe are not, as Szirtes says of Hungary’s slim translated canon, ‘ in the luxurious position to be pruned.’

Perhaps Hoffman likes Bernhard because he bucks the trend. As an Austrian, he should fall into the aristocratic camp, but instead he is that rare thing, a ‘Western dissident,’ who, with no oppressive state apparatus to react against, is nevertheless dissatisfied and ‘exacting.’ The implication appears to be that we can learn from this attitude, later made explicit. The Central European condition of re-adjustment to the loss of a formerly great empire should feel familiar to the British, argues Hoffman, and these books provide a way to ‘precisely and delicately and ironically understand…the best way for England to understand what’s happening to it, why it doesn’t feel good.’

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2010’s World Literature Weekend was characterised by a remarkable cohesion. Certain themes proved recurrent between events given by very different writers and translators, focusing on very different parts of the world, and taking place on different days. The umbrella theme of exile and displacement worked well to unify the discussions without reducing their necessary complications to the simple or obvious.

For those who attended most of the events, striking parallels emerged. Exilic distance, combined with memory and perhaps nostalgia, proved to be a powerful aid to the writing process. ‘You can’t write about a place until you regret it,’ Alain Mabanckou said of his native Congo. Repetition had stylistic significance for Elias Khoury’s arabesque-influenced prose rhythms; retaining Ismailov’s distinctive repetitions was important for Robert Chandler’s translation of The Railway. Elias Khoury and Alain Mabanckou were both happy to admit that literature can offer a substitute home, or indeed an alternative ‘way of travelling’ (Khoury). Camus and Proust were cited frequently as important influences, perhaps unsurprising given the large number of Francophone writers. Political, ethnic and religious identities were persistently figured as non-unitary, and nationalism as an imposition hostile to this pluralism. ‘In reality there is no one pure identity,’ said Khoury. In both Central Europe and Central Asia nationality has been re-allocated, and nationalisms created by fresh divisions of physical geography. The land can seem to shift, changing how people relate.

Lastly, translators were billed at least equally with writers, and the craft of the translator, building on 2009’s panel discussion, was subject to a great deal of examination. Given the very small number of books that are currently translated into English from other languages, the most subtly telling measure of the World Literature Weekend’s success may just be how much of the extremely engaged and knowledgeable festival audience are pondering a new career.

Dan Eltringham

Today, I bought a green tie on ebay. Not green in the trendy ‘Green’ sense, but it might be that too. It might be an ecologically-responsible, fair-trade, biodegradable, organic, non-conflict, planet-friendly, environmentally-aware tie, and I rather hope it is; but that might well be too much to expect (given the unfair-trade peanuts I paid for it), and, for now, the important thing is that the tie was a rather nice shade of green. I don’t want to get too excited, but I do have a sense that the green-coloured tie offers something new. Get a green tie, be a new man. A green tie says spring is coming. Spring! Green shoots. Today I will be different. Or, at least, when the green tie arrives from ebay. So tomorrow I will be a new man. Or maybe the next day. It could be the start of something beautiful. And about time too.

Things begin with a green tie. Aestheticism began with one. In one green flash, Walter Pater went from dull Oxford don to the ‘alma pater’ of Art for Art’s Sake when, as Edmund Gosse tells us, he chose one day to wear a green tie:

The costume of Walter Pater had been the ordinary academic dress of the don of the period, but in May 1869 he flashed forth at the Private View of the Royal Academy in a new top hat and a silk tie of brilliant apple-green. This little transformation marked a crisis; he was henceforth no longer a provincial philosopher, but a critic linked to London and the modern arts.

Lord David Cecil, not a man to dress like the average scholar, looked later at that green tie, seeing it as the mark of the artist as well as evidence of Pater’s precocity. Green was certainly Pater’s colour. In Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street, on his first day at university, the first day of a brilliant new life, Michael Fane buys a nine-volume set of Pater ‘in thick sea-green cloth and richly stamped with a golden monogram’: ‘It was the greatest contentment he had ever known to see the glowing of his fire, and slowly to untie under the red-shaded light the fat parcels of his newly bought books.’ That first day he also buys ‘seven ties of knitted silk’ – surely one of them was green, to match his new Pater, and maybe they were seven shades of green, ‘apple-green’ and ‘sea-green’ included.

The White Dress – John Duncan Fergusson

When Oscar Wilde wanted to come out as an aesthete he started wearing a pale green tie. Green ties get noticed it seems. And for both Wilde and Pater going green also meant not quite ‘coming out’ in our modern sense but something pretty damn close to it. Their love might not have dared to speak its name but it did quite happily wear the club tie. ‘The ties are coming into leaf like something almost being said’, as Philip Larkin almost said. I’m fairly sure that that’s not why I bought a green tie but, well, maybe my subconscious is trying to tell me something. Hey ho. If it supports my thesis, I’ll go with it. There’s an old phrase, ‘to give a lass a green gown’, meaning, first, ‘to roll her, in sport, on the grass so that her dress is stained with green’ and, then, euphemistically, something more than that, where the green gown was a declaration of heterosexual experience. I can imagine that ‘to give a lad a green tie’ could be a homosexual equivalent.

But the green tie makes me think of another coming out, at the start of The Wind in the Willows:

So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged, and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, ‘Up we go! Up we go!’ till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow. ‘This is fine!’ he said to himself. ‘This is better than whitewashing!’ The sunshine struck hot on his fur, soft breezes caressed his heated brow, and after the seclusion of the cellarage he had lived in so long the carol of happy birds fell on his dulled hearing almost like a shout. Jumping off all his four legs at once, in the joy of living and the delight of spring without its cleaning, he pursued his way across the meadow.

Green is spring, rebirth, rejuvenation, a new leaf. Mole may well be gay in an Alan Bennetty way (indeed, I suspect that Ratty, Toad and Badger are gay too) but it is the discovery of spring and sunlight and the green fields that is rather more important – at this moment, Moly’s more likely to be, if anything, hedgerowsexual. I’m not sure that Mole wore a green tie, but he should have done. And who does he meet when he comes out? Ratty, the representative of spring and of Mole’s new life. In the cosy 1983 film version by Cosgrove Hall (the only decent film version), Ratty appears in a green cravat. It’s the new tie of friendship. Get a green tie, be a new man. Or be a new mole.

The Grey Hat – John Duncan Fergusson (Self-Portrait)

Or a new woman. The New Woman of the 1890s, she who escaped from the stuffiness of the Victorian wardrobe and then cycled off somewhere, Cambridge probably, in search of personal liberty, could be seen in a white blouse, practical skirt and green tie. The green tie was a fine accessory for fin-de-siècle feminism and the Edwardian lady. When John Duncan Fergusson painted White Ruff, the striking portrait of Anne Estelle Rice, in 1907 (the year before The Wind in the Willows scrabbled and scratched and scraped into the world), she wore a green tie. Rice was herself an avant-garde artist, a modernist who painted a famous portrait of Katherine Mansfield in 1918 – Mansfield is not wearing a green tie, but she has a big green shadow on her neck and she did write a poem, ‘Jangling Memory’, about a tie with ‘Sea-green dragons stamped on a golden ground’, a tie that represents youth and ‘Those were the days when a new tie spelt a fortune: / We wore it in turn’. So of course Rice wore a green tie in 1907. And when the wonderful Fergusson painted self-portraits in 1907 and 1909 he too wore a green tie, a colourful focus for the eyes against the general greyness (one of the them is called The Grey Hat but it’s the tie that dominates). In these self-portraits, the tie tells us, as Pater’s tie had done, that the wearer is an artist, if we hadn’t already guessed, and it represents the wild, earthy spirit of this Fauvist who had discovered both the avant-garde and his own style. I’m expecting a great deal from my green tie aren’t I? Green is the colour of hope.

Click here to read ‘A Pocket Guide to Red Trousers’ by the same author

Dan Eltringham

T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize Readings, Southbank Centre, Sunday 17th January 2010

All quotation from the performances.

‘It was a cold coming we had of it/Just the worst time of year/For a journey,’ intones Simon Armitage, speaking as he walks onto the reading platform, northern vowels flattening the familiar lines from Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi.’ In the refined surroundings of the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall (pictured, left) this business-like dispensing with formalities such as a proper introduction makes people sit up. After that, the format is simple – the ten poets competing for the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry each read a handful of poems from their nominated volume, presumably in a last attempt to persuade the panel of their case, as the final judges’ meeting takes place the following day. There is a photograph of Eliot with head slouched over on his hand, expression ambivalent, watching over tonight’s performances. The event is very much in-house – Eliot, as we are reminded, founded the Poetry Book Society (PBS) – and the evening is peppered with compeer Daljit Nagra’s repeated plugs for PBS membership. Eliot’s beneficently smiling photograph only confirms the curious twin sense of establishment and coterie that surrounds the poetry world as we find it here.

First to read is Phillip Gross, whose volume The Water Table centres round the ‘body of water’ that is the Severn estuary, and on the protean quality of that estuary’s position ‘between’ land and water, solid and liquid. Gross’ reading has a strange and engaging awkwardness, coupled with a serious concern for the practicalities of living with and using his favoured element. Gross is followed by the Irish poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, whose poems range across subject matter as diverse as Irish history, a story-telling cat who will speak ‘in Irish or Russian,’ and a witch emerging from a wardrobe into a flooded house. Her similes are sometimes slightly laboured – ‘The silk scarves/Came flying at her face like a carwash’ – in a way that suggests the badly digested influence of Martian poetry, but such instances are minor flaws. Next is Fred D’Aguiar. The poems he reads from Continental Shelf revolve around family lore in his native Guyana, for example the extremely local specificity of cure-all product ‘Limocol,’ which demands an explanation about the same length as the poem. There are some pleasing metaphorical moves which vary the slightly flat textures – children who ‘speak in water trickles’ – and the impression of a land where ‘If there is/mercy…it is accidental’ is deftly conveyed.

Jane Draycott also writes about the domestic – her daughter learning to drive in her car, and an improvisation on the ‘Girls’ Book of Model Making’ – but her more interesting material is a translation of the opening stanzas of the Medieval poem Pearl, by the same poet that wrote the earliest known English version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Hugo Williams is typically sharp in introducing his poems, commenting that the ‘main thing in this book,’ West End Final, is a sequence of twelve ‘pillow poems’ that are spoken by a man, lying in bed, watching a woman undress. Williams quips that he first wrote one, and then eleven more the same, but with ‘different words.’ The witticisms continue, albeit unintentionally, as the poem ‘Marital Visit,’ concerning his bachelor existence in London, is prefaced with the explanation that ‘my life lives in France.’ He swiftly amends this to ‘wife,’ and earns a laugh. With Williams, it seems, the poems and the life are interchangeable material for his creation of a career-long mythology of self. When it’s as engaging as in West End Final, this approach is completely justified.

Following the interval, poems from Sharon Olds’ One Secret Thing are read by Jo Shapcott, with Olds unable to be present. Her poems are full of a seriousness it is hard to deny when executed with her technical skill, but it’s a shame not to hear them from the poet’s mouth. Following Shapcott onto the stage is one of the three previous winners of the prize on this year’s shortlist, Hungarian poet George Szirties. Perhaps it is just because we heard it read out so recently, but Szirties’ first poem, ‘Seeking North,’ with its structural focus around a journey to frozen places and historical and textual basis on the travels of Sir John Mandeville, bears strong similarity to ‘Journey of the Magi.’ Even if the comparison is suggested by Armitage’s opening reading, it is stronger for it. Szirties displays a consistency of voice across these poems, and reads them with practiced assurance. Alice Oswald seems less comfortable, and quite serious, but there is surely a performative quality to the austerity of her reading. She is the only poet who doesn’t talk around her poems, tapping her right boot while reading to keep time, and reciting incongruously childish lyrics from her illustrated Weeds and Wildflowers. Christopher Reid is probably the favourite, his The Scattering the recent recipient of the Costa Prize. It is a series of poetic meditations on the death of his wife, Lucinda Gane, and is replete with detail that builds a slow and sombre awareness of ‘the precise cadence/into silence/that argued the end.’ It is discomforting, and very moving, to listen to so much being revealed so publicly. Last to read is Sinéad Morrisey, whose set piece is an imagined letter in verse between the characters Amelia and William, as an alternative ending to Thackery’s Vanity Fair. As somebody sitting behind points out, this conceit might have been disastrous, but she manages to create a blend of kitschy Victorian humour and genuine emotion, contained between and behind self-consciously mannered lines. In doing so she wins the only round of applause for a single poem, which might suggest some kind of movement in the camp of this PBS-recommended poet for the Eliot prize? Not to be, however.

After Phillip Gross’ The Water Table was announced the unexpected winner of the £15,000 on Monday evening, what further reflections arise? Even if ‘water’ is a shop-worn theme in English poetry, Gross’ concern for the pragmatic life of a community which both exploits and is dependent upon the element constitutes a fresh take on the alluvial. The panel’s choice probably also reflected a current vogue for writing and reading literature in terms of human and nonhuman interaction, and the processes that link them. Certainly Gross’ detailed examination feels more purposive than Oswald’s sometimes fanciful anthropomorphizing, which is perhaps its nearest comparison. Gross was favoured, it seems, because his book has a clear delineating idea that binds the whole. Simon Armitage, one of the three poets that comprised the judging panel (the others were Colette Bryce and Penelope Shuttle), commented that The Water Table is remarkable because it is ‘so obviously a book.’ The establishment of such a firm conceptual frame, which also acts as a limiter, forces the poet’s ingenuity, and crucially drives him away from a concern with biographical self. The other poets would probably argue that they too had produced books, but Armitage’s comment is astute, and the choice of an outside bet such as Gross indicates real depth in current British poetry.

The Poets’ Gulf

Nicoletta Asciuto

Did sea define the land or land the sea?

This is the question Seamus Heaney asked himself back in the Sixties while standing on the wild, sea-tormented coasts of the Aran Islands, which have challenged proudly the Atlantic Ocean and its endless waves from time immemorial.

I always think of this line by Heaney when going back in mind to the Golfo dei Poeti, that is, the Poets’ Gulf, in Liguria, Italy. Liguria is very famous for its gulfs but the Poets’ Gulf is possibly the most closed and the most embracing of all, seeming in its smallness almost a lake – if not for a little break right where the two ends should meet. Was it the land that stretched endlessly towards the sea and managed to impose itself on it? Or was it the sea that broke the land and took partial possession of it?

This incredible environment, contended by land and sea, was once the inspirational background for two great English poets: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron. Somehow this Ligurian scenario is emblematic of their Romantic attitude. However, the two poets were extremely different in their relationship with nature. An episode in Shelley and Byron’s life together in Switzerland exemplifies this: on the 22nd June 1816, during a tempest at sea, Shelley didn’t even try to save himself and his boat, and waited for death to come. Byron, on the other hand, did all he could to save himself, Shelley and the boat: he was successful. This is indicative of a certain tendency to surrender on Shelley’s part (which actually will lead him to death in 1822) and of a determined restlessness on Byron’s. Still, what bound these two authors indissolubly together and to the other great English poet of the period, John Keats, seems to be water.

Shelley couldn’t swim but was irresistibly attracted by water. Both in Switzerland and in Italy he owned a house by water (Lake Geneva in Switzerland and Ligurian Sea in Italy) and consequently boats, too.

Byron was an amazing swimmer, as the legend says, and swimming for him was his own way to show the world (especially the female world, we should perhaps add) his great strength. A grotto in Portovenere (Poets’ Gulf, Liguria) was named after him, “the immortal poet who as a daring swimmer defied the waves of the sea from Portovenere to Lerici” as the epigraph says. Apparently, what most astonished the poor Ligurian fishermen of that time was that Byron, that whimsical Englishman who says he is a poet, was actually a strong, extraordinary and almost unrivalled swimmer.

Keats, after his exhausting voyage to Naples, decided to use a sea image for his epitaph: the famous line “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water”. If water for Shelley is almost a force, an entity (“the blue Mediterranean”) to which he decides to surrender, and conversely a source of energy for Byron, then for Keats water is almost the symbol of his vanishing hope to become a great poet.

Writing in water is, we all know, rather a nonsensical activity, as nothing that we shall write there will remain to our posterity. Still, if we throw something into water, be it sea, ocean, or lake, we know that what we have just thrown away might come up again on another shore, in another country, in another time. Keats’ hopeless last line seems less hopeless in this way. He thought his poetry would be soon lost and forgotten, but perhaps somewhere in his heart he had the feeble hope that his poetry would be one day regained, though when or where he could not know.

John Keats came to Italy in 1820, with the fleeting hope that the milder Italian climate should cure him. But all he found was a deathbed. He had longed for a journey to Italy for some time, and always had a great love for the Italian language and culture. He was unfortunately unable to express this fully when he was there, unlike Byron and Shelley. Their stay in Italy decidedly influenced them and their work: Italy is actually the background of many of their poems, including Shelley’s “Baiae’s bay” in Ode to the West Wind with all its “Italianness”.

I often have asked myself, why Italy? Why of all places? Italy was very fashionable at the time because of the “Grand Tour”, of course, and it was certainly a beautiful place to visit or live. But why Italy and not France, Spain, or Greece? They too house incredible monuments of ancient cultures, but do not seem to have held the same fascination for the poets. Italy, either with its presence or its absence, has charmed an incredible number of poets, Shakespeare, Milton and Ezra Pound to name a few others. Italy has charmed them with its refined poetry, its magnificent past and with its wildness and chaos: inglese italianato, diavolo incarnato, John Donne used to say. He seems to mean that Italy, with its powerful contradictions, manages to make the prissy Englishmen express their true identity – a little devilish. To use Nietzsche’s words, Italy seems to embody the Dionysian spirit: wild, enraptured and enrapturing, whereas England captures a more Apollonian element, which is completed only by its most rebellious opposites. Shelley and Byron came to Italy for more or less political reasons, and they may have found that they could express themselves better as foreigners, away from their native element. Perhaps the magnificent shores of Liguria helped them to give voice to their most passionate, and sometimes most hidden, natures.

Dimitry Sayenko’s Absurd ABC

Ling Low

The Fine Press Book Association (FPBA) are a group of people dedicated to the art of fine printing.  Once every two years, they hold a fair, and then many people who know a lot about obscure, intricate printing techniques like “chromolithography” get together to display and discuss their publications.  As they were kind enough to invite The Literateur, I went along to have a look.

I very soon felt out of my depth.  I should have known even before I arrived that I was entering highly specialist territory.  The catalogue sent to me in the post informed me that it was printed on “Rives artist pale-cream paper”.  It soon became clear that this Rives paper stuff was soft-core by FPBA standards.  There were over fifty stalls at the fair, and at one of them, I came across a book printed on “Bockingford 190gsm and acid-free tissue, laid on Khadi handmade cotton rag 480gsm.”

Then there was the matter of what was actually printed on the paper, and how: I was confronted with an array of linocut, letterpress, woodcut, and that elusive chromolithography (which is something involving acid on metal plates).  These were books which had been lovingly crafted and printed in handfuls of editions.  I wandered between the stands mumbling ‘lovely’ in my total ignorance, while worrying that I would inadvertently crease the pages of the books with my philistine fingers.

When the intimidation started to wear off, however, I reminded myself that this enterprise had been brought about by people who, ultimately, really like beautiful books.  I like beautiful books too, so I could relate to this.  I also remember, as a child, being fascinated by paper and certain books that did something special with it.  I loved (and still love) The Jolly Postman by Janet and Allan Ahlberg.  As fellow afficionadoes will know, the story is interleaved with envelopes – some of which even contain small books. My child’s mind boggled at this meta-textual wonder, and I have never fully recovered.

While there wasn’t a specialist edition of The Jolly Postman at the fair, there was a significant amount of children’s literature around.  Lewis Carroll, Hans Christian Andersen, and Phillip Pullman were all present, bearing intricate woodprints and brilliant illustrations.  There were also several alphabet books.  My favourite of these was Dmitry Sayenko’s Absurd ABC (above), in which every letter of the alphabet represents a phobia. Printed in block colours using woodcut and linocut, it inverts the ubiquitous innocence of the alphabet, while pointing out tongue-in-cheek that our fears come from childhood.

The thought that these FPBA people were really just grown-up children still fascinated by beautiful books was quite comforting, and helped to make them seem less strange and scary.   I started to identify books I really liked, and even spoke to the people who made them.  I was won over by the sensory loveliness of a book by Shirley Sharoff, based on Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. Sharoff had printed extracts from The Waves on leaves of cream and white paper of different textures and shapes. With its interfolding, undulating pages, the book resembled a piece of coral.

I was also charmed by Claudia Cohen’s book Chasing Paper, on sale at one of the rare book dealer stalls. A book actually dedicated to paper, this was really the apotheosis of the specialist bookmaking obsession, and found its own meta-textual layer in its mostly unadorned pages. These were different samples of paper Cohen had collected from childhood years of pursuit, and ranged from patterned origami squares to plain packing paper, and antique wallpaper to currency notes. Bound together, they reminded me of a sort of uber-scrap book crossed with an intensely lovely carpet swatch.

Chasing Paper was on sale for £950, making it a rather expensive scrapbook.  I think it was an indication I’d been at the fair too long that this price tag had started to seem almost reasonable to me.  In two short hours, I had not only overcome my fear of this intricate dedication to fine press printing, but I had been sucked in.  My dormant childhood love of beautiful books and craft bags filled with paper ends had been awakened and threatened to combine with dangerous results.  I thought it would be fun to try this for myself.  As I left the fair, I wondered whether I should choose Bockingford 190gsm paper, or go for something a little more unusual.

Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Allen Ginsberg, and the Inheritance of a Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry

Jess Chandler

Walt Whitman was a paradoxical figure. The (purportedly heterosexual) father of American poetry, progenitor of ‘a great original literature’[1] was simultaneously claimed by an emerging homosexual tradition as the creator of a discourse of homosexual poetics. The critical history surrounding Whitman’s work testifies to the persistent negation of a homosexual presence in literary standards. Critics consistently denied the possibility of Whitman’s homosexual poetics in order to preserve the stability of his position as America’s national bard. But Whitman was instrumental in the evolution of a language of male-male love that was distinct and identifiable from the conventions of heterosexual literary discourse. Hart Crane and Allen Ginsberg are Whitman’s ‘Recorders Ages Hence’, inheritors of an alternative tradition who maintained its existence by continual reference to their precursors as a form of validation and solidarity. Both lament Whitman’s ‘lost America of love’[2], extending their hand to the great ‘Meistersinger’[3], and searching for the visionary potential by which they may continue his utopian prophecy of ‘adhesive’ democracy.

“There is that in me – I do not know what it is – but I know it is in me.

…

I do not know it – it is without name – it is a word unsaid,

It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol.”

- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Whitman’s writing exhibits a self-conscious awareness that the construction of sexuality is equally dependent upon language as upon the act itself, and his early poetry constructs the search for ‘a word to clear one’s path ahead’. Essential to the process of validating homosexual love was the development of a ‘pass-word primeval’ (SM:87).  for ‘the love that dare not speak it’s name’. Whitman’s use of the term ‘adhesiveness’ first appeared in his “Song of the Open Road”: ‘Here is adhesiveness, it is not previously fashion’d, it is apropos’.[4] It was through the modification of the Friendship tradition that Whitman saw an avenue to homosexual consciousness, and through this the path to a new political order. Whitman’s ‘adhesive’ love restricted the term to refer exclusively to same-sex love that would ‘[rival] the amative love hitherto possessing the imaginative literature, if not going beyond it’.[5] ‘Adhesive’ love was established as the foundation of a language of differentiation. ‘Walt Whitman’ proclaims himself as spokesman, a conduit for the ‘many long dumb voices’:

Through me forbidden voices, Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d

and I remove the veil,

Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d. (SM:87)

His egocentric poetics aspire to prophetic proportions, and the poet is seen as the receptacle of change. Leaves of Grass is a self-revelatory exploration of the self as both marginal and all-inclusive; by placing the self in a position of continual flux and fluidity, Whitman resists definition: ‘Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion’ (SM:80); ‘I am not what you supposed, but far different’(C:148), ‘the mate and companion of all people’ (SM:69), ‘Maternal as well as paternal’ (SM:79). True to his vision of interrelatedness, Whitman denies singular definition. However, there is an exclusivity in his celebration of adhesive love, and despite all attempts for democratic equality, his utopian ideal solidifies the categories he strives to deny. Whitman’s universality is challenged by his determination to speak for and to his adhesive comrades, which often reaffirms the patriarchal inequalities of a homosocial order.

Whitman’s poetry oscillates between points of concealment and revelation, relying upon the protection of ambiguity but with a powerfully suggestive undertone that reveals according to the perception and intention of the reader. Hart Crane is one of Whitman’s perceptive readers, alert to the ‘homotextual’[6] implications of his every word, asserting himself as one of Whitman’s adhesive comrades. His poems search explicitly for a mode of expression through which to communicate homoerotic experience. The evasions and obscurity of his poetry reflect a fear of exposure, resulting in the need to formulate a metaphorical language of implied meaning. Crane’s poems often read like whispers, ‘tremorous’ ‘white falling flakes’, with a tenderness and delicacy that contrasts with the ‘cleaving’ and ‘burning’ of his stifled passions.[7] “Possessions” is concerned with the metaphysics of homosexual desire, seeking ‘a visionary love that can accommodate the homosexual and no longer isolate him as an example of lust.’[8] The poem begins with the image of a ‘key’, a closet metaphor which also evokes an image of entry and penetration. This key must sift,

Through a thousand nights the flesh

Assaults outright the bolts that linger

Hidden, –  O undirected as the sky

That through its black foam has no eyes

For this fixed stone of lust …[9]

Imagery of concealment characterises the blind lust that strives to overcome the fixity of definition. The phallic and totemic ‘fixed stone of lust’ is a plural image of patriarchal power and domination, of the perception of homosexuality as degrading lust, and of the permanent insistence of desire. The speaker is ‘Wounded by apprehensions out of speech’, with a desire that ‘[l]acks all but piteous admissions’. The poet is calling for ‘New thresholds, new anatomies!’[10], a changed perception of homosexual love, expressed through highly metaphorical language, always evading epistemological certainty. “Recitative” develops the homosexually coded imagery of the narcissistic reflective gaze in an exploration of the division of self, and the notion of self and other that Crane posits as facets of homosexual identity. The poem’s title, with its denotation of music and a sung form, is a reminder of Song of Myself, suggesting that Whitman’s omnipresent self has been fragmented by the ‘Janus-faced’ modern world, and this poem is Crane’s search for what has been lost.[11]

Crane’s homosexuality is constructed as mythology, a result of his acute awareness of the illusory nature of definition. Allen Ginsberg, writing amidst an established discourse of sexuality, was no longer striving for linguistic identification, but rather for the unsettling language of indiscretion and explicit description. Howl and other Poems was taken to court on charges of obscenity; the verdict of its ‘redeeming social importance’[12] was a pivotal moment in admitting an explicitly homosexual vocabulary into the national lexis, as well as in affirming the right to freedom of speech in America. Ginsberg, like Whitman, believed in a universal, spiritual love, denouncing the ‘tendency among gay people…to plaster labels over everybody’, advocating instead ‘the nameless love that everybody is.’[13]

His depiction of homosexual experience is focused upon the eroticism of physical love, and the acts of homosexual men, rather than the proclamation or self-identification of sexuality, which is taken for granted. Ginsberg persistently violates the barriers of acceptable speech, thereby confronting public prejudice. “Many Loves” begins with an epigraph from Whitman’s Calamus poems: ‘Resolved to sing no songs henceforth but those of manly attachment.’ The poem that proceeds from this proclamation of adhesive love may imitate the basic subject and stylistics of Whitman, but its revealing honesty illustrates the developed possibilities for linguistic expression. Instead of Whitman’s tenuously controlled statements of there being ‘something fierce and terrible in [him] eligible to burst forth’ which he ‘dare not tell…in words’ (C:164), Ginsberg’s commitment to honesty leads him to depict exactly those things that Whitman did not dare. He is not confined to metaphor. Perhaps what is most revolutionary about Ginsberg’s poetry is his fearlessness in proudly exposing his own sexual experiences, ‘[accepting] his own constitution as the very condition of his life and poetry.’[14]

While the evolution of the language of homosexual poetics may seem to culminate in Ginsberg’s explicit poetry of social protest, in his references to Whitman and Crane, Ginsberg identifies himself as the progeny of an alternative American tradition, proclaiming the candid sincerity of his poetry as the cumulative result of those who spoke before him. Though Ginsberg’s poetry refuses the obliquity of his predecessors’ work, his use of the Whitmanian line, and references to tropes of the homosexual tradition (Melville and Crane’s sailors, Whitman’s comrades), shows a consistent awareness of the encoded communication that characterises the tradition. In Song of Myself, Whitman’s erotic passages leave the gender of the sexual partner unspecified, with undertones that encode a homoerotic meaning. In Section 11, as ‘twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore’, the poet assumes the female persona of the twenty-ninth bather, allowing him to indulge in erotic fantasy:

The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from

their long hair,

Little streams pass’d all over their bodies.

An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies,

It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.

The young men gloat on their backs, their white bellies

bulge to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,

They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant

and bending arch,

They do not think whom they souse with spray. (SM:73)

Bathing itself is an established trope of homosexual fantasy, and water is figured as a baptismal locale for homoerotic experience. The visual focus is entirely upon the young men, drawing attention to the democratic experience of non-directed sex, of hands unseen, and lovers unknown. Both hetero- and homosexual fantasy may be interpreted from this scene, a dual intention that characterises much of Whitman’s poetry, as he utilizes the ‘resource of encoding ‘forbidden’ texts in ‘permissible’ ones.’[15] His exploitation of the friendship tradition functions in order to encode more explicit sexuality beneath established tropes of homosocial comradeship:

O camerado close! O you and me at last, and us two only.

[…]

O something ecstatic and undemonstrable! O mystic wild! (SP:63)

In Crane’s poetry, homosexuality is ‘textually obscure, hidden in a multitude of oblique references that encode it as the authorizing secret of the text.’[16] According to Crane’s ‘logic of metaphor’, symbolic meaning takes precedence over literal, referential meaning, and so the reader must be acutely alert to metaphorical suggestion. Crane was aware of the forbidden nature of homosexual love, and the severe punishment of homosexuals in history, acknowledging that his ‘modern love were / Charred at stake in younger times than ours.’[17] “C 33” is codified by its very title, which indicates the number of Oscar Wilde’s cell number at Reading Gaol, where he was imprisoned on charges of gross indecency. For those who decode this, the poem may be read as a poetic alignment of the alienation of the artist with the persecution of the homosexual, figuring Wilde as a rejuvenative force, able to create ‘transient bosoms from the thorny tree’, who by suffering for love, became a testimony to its intensity. In “The Tunnel” section of The Bridge, Crane again draws attention to encoded signs of homosexuality, ‘A burnt match skating in a urinal’, referring to the sign of a lighted match used by gay men to make themselves known to one another.[18] The interpretation of queer texts requires shared recognition. The poetry of Whitman and Crane ‘challenges heteronormative meaning’[19], oscillating between lucidity and obliquity, refiguring and undermining the signification of normative tropes, unsettling hermeneutic certainty in order to create a poetry of multiple signification, unrestricted and undefined.

“And so it was I entered the broken world

To trace the visionary company of love.”

- Hart Crane, “The Broken Tower”

Whitman, Crane and Ginsberg are visionary poets, formulating utopian ideals of spiritual renewal and political equality founded upon a reconfiguration of sexual freedom and adhesive democracy. Homosexual love holds the potential for liberation, as the ‘counterbalance and offset of [the] materialistic and vulgar American democracy.’[20] Whitman aspires to write ‘spiritual poems’ of the ‘soul and of immortality’, focusing on an ‘ideal of manly love’ (SP:53). By speaking ‘the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy’ (SM:87), he declares, claiming visionary powers through which an ideal may be forged. In Song of Myself, the poet is tormented by his unspeakable love, but once he has affirmed his ‘new identity’, his visionary poetics commence: ‘I am afoot with my vision’ (SM:95). Whitman intertwines the spiritual and mystical with the physical and sexual, for ‘the body includes and is the meaning, the main concern, and includes and is the soul’(p.58). His poetry is invigorated by the ecstasy of possibility, and reads at times like an incantation, as paratactic phrases culminate in euphoric celebration:

O something unprov’d! something in a trance!

To escape utterly from others’ anchors and holds!

To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous!

To court destruction with taunts, with invitations!

To ascend, to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me![21]

Whitman conceives sexual expression between men as ‘a means to a mystic penetration of the universe and a more democratic vision of the American future.’[22]

In Crane’s Platonic utopia, love is conceived of as spiritual experience, able to transport the lover into a visionary world. The “Voyages” sequence presents a quest to inscribe homosexuality as unmediated existence amidst ‘the great wink of eternity’.[23] The sequence is transcendental and sublime, forcing a poetic encounter beyond the boundaries of reality. The third poem announces the ‘Infinite consanguinity’ of homosexual love, a ‘tendered theme’ ‘enthrone[d]’ in a temporary suspension of disorder:

And so, admitted through black swollen gates

That must arrest all distance otherwise, –

Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments,

Light wrestling there incessantly with light,

Star kissing star through wave on wave unto

Your body rocking!

and where death, if shed,

Presumes no carnage, but this single change, –

Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn

The silken skilled transmemberment of song;

Permit me voyage, love, into your hands… [24]

The homosexual body becomes the trope for an ordered universe, and passage through the ‘black swollen gates’ enacts the movement from the caress of hands to active love-making. The ‘whirling pillars’ and wrestling light, the movement of the waves, the metaphysical love of the kissing stars, create an impassioned sense of desire and urgency. This, infused with the imagery of ethereal light, leads to the transfiguring ‘transmemberment of song’ and the final moment of desire to escape into the visionary world of love. The sequence’s final section focuses on the possibility of utopian escape to the ‘still fervid covenant, Belle Isle’, where love may transcend the physical and achieve pure spirituality:

The imaged Word, it is, that holds

Hushed willows anchored in its glow.

It is the unbetrayable reply

Whose accent no farewell can know.[25]

The word becomes the material and physical representation of spiritual love, a corollary to the ‘logic of metaphor’, a linguistic expression of visionary experience that transcends traditional linguistic signification, the incarnation of something beyond language.

The visionary poet is the linguistic creator of imaginative potential. While Crane’s poetry is trailed by the despair and disappointment of reality, Whitman and Ginsberg ground their prophetic visions in political prospects, proposing utopian realities that rely upon the rejuvenative force of liberated sexuality. The utopian rhetoric of these three poets poses a problematic dissociation from traditional discourses of American utopias, the ‘American dream’ having been founded upon institutional, and therefore patriarchal and heterosexual norms. Writing prior to the solidification of a homosexual discourse allowed Whitman a semiotic uncertainty that enabled him to wed homosexuality to the utopian. For Crane and Ginsberg however, as ‘America’ and ‘homosexuality’ become fixed in their signification as distinct geopolitical and social categorisations, they ‘lose the elasticity that allowed Whitman to make them utopian.’[26] Crane responded by the search for visionary transcendence; escape rather than fulfilment. He gestures toward Atlantis and Belle Isle as utopian spaces, with the recurring motif of travel indicating the desire for removal from ‘the broken world’. He is ‘twisted by the love / Of things irreconcilable’,[27] finally resigned to the incompatibility of his ‘modern love’ amidst present reality. The perfect love he yearns for may only be found in release from the physical world. Ginsberg’s ‘mystical visions and cosmic vibrations’,[28] his Blakean insistence on the poet as prophet, celebrate the escape of metaphysical experience, but always return to social reality, asserting and believing in the real possibility of change. Ginsberg makes dystopia the American, Cold-War reality, vehemently rejecting it and positing Whitmanian adhesive revolution as a restorative alternative to the ‘fall of America’:

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!

gone down the American river!

dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole

boatload of sensitive bullshit![29]

Visions and dreams are ‘sensitive bullshit’ in Moloch’s fallen world, but when ‘Truth breaks through!’[30], new prophecies will form.

The antithetical relationship of homosexual and utopian discourses is a result of power mechanisms, the product of a traditional association between homophobia and nationalist sentiment, maintained by institutional (religious and legal) castigation. Whitman and Ginsberg are highly political poets, and the homoerotic component of their poetry is fundamental to the social reforms they propose. Whitman’s Democratic Vistas places adhesiveness at the centre of his vision of America:

It is to the development, identification, and general prevalence of that fervid comradeship, (the adhesive love, at least rivalling the amative love hitherto possessing the imaginative literature, if not going beyond it,) that I look for the counterbalance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American democracy, and for the spiritualization thereof.[31]

Calamus is the poetic expression of this ideal; the poet will ‘teach robust American love’ (C:162), for ‘the main purport of these States is to found a superb friendship, exalté, previously unknown’. (C:165). “For You O Democracy” announces the poet’s role as author and creator of democracy:

Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,

I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,

I will make divine magnetic lands,

With the love of comrades,

With the life-long love of comrades. (C:150)

The ‘love of comrades’ is the foundation of the ideal potential of American politics, a social, democratic virtue, and an antidote to all that is degrading. Whitman’s democracy celebrates anonymity, in which passing strangers are loved as brothers, or erotic partners, like the ‘young fellow [who] drives the express wagon (I love him, though I do not know him;)’ (SM:76). In his Preface to the 1876 edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman announced that the ‘special meaning of the “Calamus” cluster…mainly resides in its political significance…[For] it is by a fervent, accepted development of comradeship…that the United States of the future…are to be most effectually welded together, intercalcated, anneal’d into a living union.’[32]

The emphasis of the Beat poetry of the 1950s lay with forms of social protest, and Ginsberg’s political dialectic is consciously informed by his attitude to sex. Homosexuality was still ideologically suppressed in American society, despite its linguistic identification, and so remained a focal point for social protest.[33] For the American homosexual of the mid-twentieth century, the state posed as an intrusive, discriminating and controlling force. Ginsberg saw that ‘emotional giving between men’ had been ‘repressed by the spirit of competition and rivalry characteristic of capitalist home economics.’[34] The homosexual is one of those ‘destroyed by madness’; he is the ‘figure of angelic innocence, his love a protest against the insensitivity and madness which surround him.’[35] He is one of those,

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly

motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,

who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,

the sailors caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean

love,

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose-

gardens and the grass of public parks and

cemeteries scattering their semen freely to

whomever come who may [36]

The language is designed to shock, the celebratory response calculated to assert homoerotic possibility. Ginsberg’s anarchic sensibility underlies his political and sexual project, a revolutionary and subversive incarnation of Whitmanian homosexual democracy. “Howl” is not simply a cry of pain, but an exclamation of the need for a reconfiguration of society, and a reminder of the redeeming features of humanity, beginning with our primal state as physical, sexual beings:

The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy!

The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand

and asshole holy! [37]

In prophetic tones, Ginsberg constructs a vision to oppose and surmount the reality of political oppression, a world in which the homosexual label is removed, and in which sexuality is free.

“What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman.”

- Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California”

Literary traditions are the product of collective sensibilities bound by a commitment to a particular mode of expression. The marginalisation of homosexuality as antithetical to normative social mores, paradoxically facilitated the emergence of a fervently committed tradition, unified by its sense of alienation. With the exception perhaps of Herman Melville, there was no self-conscious tradition of homosexuality amongst Whitman’s American predecessors, and it became his self-appointed task to venture into ‘paths untrodden’, to speak of ‘standards not yet publish’d’, to ‘announce adhesiveness’ – for ‘who but I should be the poet of comrades?’ (SP:54).

Leaves of Grass came to operate ‘as a conduit from one man to another of feelings that had, in many cases been private or inchoate.’[38] The emblematic symbol of the Calamus-root, a planted seed waiting to bloom, became ‘the token of comrades’, given ‘only to them that love as [Whitman himself was] capable of loving.’ (C:152) The appeal to Whitman’s authority, the evocation of his symbolic tropes, continues to function for the homosexual poet as an announcement of inheritance, and as a claim to the continuity of a tradition. Whitman’s poetry establishes great intimacy with its reader, the poet’s ‘camerado’, to whom ‘I tell things in confidence, / I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you’ (SM:81). His readers are called upon to inherit and continue the tradition he has begun:

Eleves, I salute you! come forward!

Continue, your annotations, continue your questioning! (SM:108)

The image of the bridge became Crane’s symbol in imagining an interlinking between past, present, and future. While writing The Bridge, Crane began to feel himself ‘directly connected with Whitman.’[39] His alignment to Whitmanian poetics was objected to by most in his literary circle: Allen Tate’s discomfort with his friend’s admiration for Whitman was inseparable from his homophobic prejudices:

Hart had a sort of megalomania: he wanted to be The Great American Poet. I imagine that he thought by getting into the Whitman tradition, he could carry even Whitman further. And yet there’s another thing we must never forget – there was the homosexual thing, too… The notion of ‘comrades’, you see, and that sort of business.[40]

What complicates this issue is Whitman’s stature as ‘The Great American Poet’, founder of a patriarchal, heterosexual, national tradition. Even Ezra Pound was forced to concede the influence of his ‘pig-headed [poetic] father’, making a poetic pact with the man who ‘broke the new wood’ of American poetry.[41] For Crane, the homosexual visionary, to claim Whitman as the ‘Great Navigator’, the ‘joyous seer’[42], is to undermine and reconfigure the American canon.

“Cape Hatteras” is Crane’s ‘ode to Whitman’[43], taking its epigraph from Whitman’s “Passage to India”. The poem is structured roughly as a sonnet sequence, carrying traces of a love poem. Allegiance to Whitman is announced, before proceeding to lament the apparent failure of his ideal, as Ginsberg was to do in The Fall of America. Crane’s world is ‘a new realm of fact’, a mechanical, technological age, in which ‘[d]ream cancels dream’, and man sees himself as ‘an atom in a shroud’ (CH:43.45). Crane’s aviator is Whitman’s Columbus, questing after truth. Whitman is addressed in familiar, even sentimental terms, evoked in his role as lover on the road to Paumanok:

“ – Recorders ages hence” –  ah, syllables of faith!

Walt, tell me, Walt Whitman, if infinity

Be still the same as when you walked the beach

Near Paumanok – your lone patrol – (CH:47-51)

Reference to the Calamus poem “Recorders Ages Hence” demonstrates Crane’s understanding of Whitman’s intended legacy, and his undertaking to assume the poet’s role. The plane crash that forms the climax of the poem implies the destruction of Whitman’s myth; but after the silence that proceeds the devastation, the poem turns to an image of Whitman’s re-ascension, as rebirth is symbolically engendered:

O Walt! – Ascensions of thee hover in me now

As thou at junctions elegiac, there, of speed

With vast eternity, dost wield the rebound seed!

The competent loam, the probable grass…

… O, upward from the dead

Thou bringest tally, and a pact, new bound

Of living brotherhood! (CH:159-67)

Evoking the Calamus-root symbol (‘probable grass’) with which Whitman ‘[bound] us throbbing with one voice’ (SM:83), Crane affirms his pact with the re-ascended Walt, in an impassioned apostrophe that celebrates the hope of rejuvenation, which, as Whitman claimed, will be founded upon comradeship and brotherhood. Whitman is the conductor of future poets, whose ‘wand / Has beat a song…there and beyond!’ (CH:73-4). The poem is a powerful rebut to Eliot’s sterile waste land, affirming rebirth out of the dead ground of modernity. It is Whitman who,

Stood up and flung the span on even wing

Of that great Bridge, our Myth, whereof I sing! (CH:206-7)

Whitman was the great preacher of Crane’s ‘living brotherhood’ and originator of the great Myth of America. Whitman’s bridge is ‘the rainbow’s arch’, and with The Bridge, his ‘vision is reclaimed!’ (CH:221). A bridge of flesh is formed as the poem ends, Whitman taking the poet’s hand in his, ending with a gesture to an indefinite but hopeful adhesive future:

Yes, Walt,

Afoot again, and onward without halt, –

Not soon, nor suddenly, – no, never let go

My hand

in yours,

Walt Whitman –

so – (CH:223-235)

In this ‘mystical synthesis of “America”’, it is the fusion of Mythology and homoeroticism that will enable rejuvenation.[44]

Crane’s suicide seems tragically symbolic of the failure of the Whitmanian dream, or perhaps confirmatory of its essentially mythical and visionary nature. Ginsberg inherits the tradition at a point of even greater loss, amidst the continuing persecution of homosexuals in the McCarthy era. His verse is infiltrated with the memory of Whitman and Crane, affirming his awareness of and affinity to the homoerotic bases of modern poetry. References to his predecessors become a means both of lamenting what is lost, and of understanding how things may be regained. “A Supermarket in California” is Ginsberg’s most direct address to Whitman, placing his ‘lost America of love’ in symbolic comparison to Whitman’s dream. Ginsberg allows Whitman to transcend his historical moment, thereby suggesting his potential to reinvigorate the present. ‘What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman’, the poet asks, as he walks self-consciously down the marginal ‘sidestreets’, ‘looking at the full moon’, that traditional poetic symbol of love. Whitman is imagined as a ‘childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys’, and as the poet follows his ‘Angel’, he is ‘followed in [his] imagination by the store detective’. It is a dream marred by guilt, trailed by the possibility of persecution, and accompanied by fear of the loneliness and non-procreative nature of homosexual love. The poem expresses loss amidst the degradation of consumer society, and the need for an American poet to direct the future:

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors

close in an hour. Which way does your beard point

tonight?

(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in

the supermarket and feel absurd.)

The poet’s America seems absurdly incompatible with that of Whitman’s ‘America of love’. The final line proclaims Whitman’s role as ‘dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher’, looking back to his America, and lamenting society’s forgetting of his dreams, immersed in the ‘black waters of Lethe’.[45] Ginsberg’s realization of his part within a tradition solidifies his relation to the past, while making him aware of ‘a future to which he has an obligation.’[46]

The existence of a literary tradition functions both as an indicator and means of direction for prospective inheritors, and as a self-conscious, recognisable signal towards identification. By developing within a specialised canon of intertextuality, a poetics is created which proudly exhibits its heritage and the influence of its predecessors. Whitman’s ‘adhesive’ ideal of ‘[i]ntense and loving comradeship, the personal and passionate attachment of man to man’[47], ‘so fitly emblematic of America’[48] is not merely a dream of democracy, but a proclamation of literary companionship, a desire for adhesiveness between poets, and an erotically charged plea for immortality and solidarity through the continuance of his ‘limitless, unloosen’d’ dream:

Camerado, this is no book,

Who touches this touches a man,

…

It is I you hold and who holds you,

I spring forth from the pages into your arms – [49]

[1] Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas, in The Complete Poetry and Prose (New York: Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1948) p.210. All further references will be to this edition.

[2] Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California”, in Selected Poems 1947-1995 (London: Penguin Classics, 2001) p.50. All further references to Ginsberg’s poetry will be to this edition.

[3]

Hart Crane, “Cape Hatteras’, in The Complete Poems, ed. Marc Simon (New York & London: Liveright, 2001) p.83. All further references to Crane’s poetry will be to this edition.

[4] Whitman, “Song of the Open Road”, pp.182-3

[5] Whitman, Democratic Vistas, p.262

[6] Term coined by Jacob Stockinger in his 1978 article “Homotextuality: A Proposal”

[7] Crane, “Legend”, p.3:l.6,8,11

[8] Thomas E. Yingling, Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) p.124

[9] Crane, “Possessions”, p.18:l.5-9

[10] Crane, “The Wine Menagerie”, p.25,l.29

[11] Crane, “Recitative”, p.25:l.17,22,28,1

[12] “Howl” obscenity trial transcript, in Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, ed. Barry Miles (New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1987) p.174

[13] Allen Ginsberg, Gay Sunshine Interview, with Allen Young, (Bolinas: Grey Fox Press, 1974) p.7

[14] Mark Shechner ‘The Survival of Allen Ginsberg’, in Lewis Hyde (ed.), On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984) p.335

[15] Michael Moon, Disseminating Whitman (London: Harvard University Press,1991) p.25

[16] Yingling, Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text, p.110

[17] Crane, “Modern Craft”,p.142:l.11-12

[18] Crane, “The Tunnel”, p.99:l.60

[19] John Vincent, Queer Lyrics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) p.xv

[20] Whitman, Democratic Vistas, p.262

[21] Whitman, “One Hour to Madness and Joy”, p.141

[22] Robert K. Martin, The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (1979) (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998) pp.xvi-xvii

[23] Crane, “Voyages” II, p.35:l.1

[24] Crane, “Voyages” III, p.36:l.1-4,9-19

[25] Crane, “Voyages” VI, pp.39-40:l.25,29-32

[26] Ibid.,p.141

[27] Crane, “The Bridge of Estador”, p.174:l.22-3

[28] Ginsberg, “America”, p.62

[29] Ginsberg, “Howl”, II,p.55

[30] Ginsberg, “Wichita Vortex Sutra”, p.161

[31] Whitman, Democratic Vistas, p.262

[32] Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass, 1876 edition, in The Complete Poetry and Prose, p.294

[33] The House UnAmerican Activities Committee was charged with ridding American institutions of homosexuals as well as Communists.

[34] Ginsberg, Gay Sunshine Interview, p.14

[35] Martin, The Homosexual Tradition, p.166

[36] Ginsberg, “Howl”, I,p.51

[37] Ginsberg, “Footnote to Howl”, p.57

[38] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) pp.205-6

[39] Crane to Gorham Munson, March 2, 1923, in Selected Letters, p.137

[40] Allen Tate, in an interview with John Unterecker, in Langdon Hammer’s Hart Crane and Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) p.177

[41] Ezra Pound, “A Pact”, in Selected Poems 1908-1969 (London: Faber and Faber, 1975) p.45

[42] Crane, “Cape Hatteras”, pp.77-84,l.56,224. Further references will be given in parentheses in the text, indicated by ‘CH’.

[43] Crane to Otto H. Kahn, September 12, 1927, in The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane, ed. Brom Weber (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1966) p.348

[44] Crane to Gorham Munson, February 18, 1923, in Selected Letters, p.131

[45] Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California”, p.59

[46] Moracarmo on Ginsberg, in On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg, ed. Lewis Hyde (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1984) p.227

[47] Whitman, Democratic Vistas, p.250

[48] Whitman, “Preface” to Leaves of Grass, 1876 edition, p.294

[49] Whitman, “So Long!”, pp.512-3

Wivenhoe Bookshop found here

Ling Low

When a branch of Ottakars opened up in my hometown about ten years ago, I was snobbishly high minded about its various distractions. Among the bookshop’s colourful and – I thought – superfluous diversions there was an interactive contraption in the children’s section, and shelves full of toys on prominent display. I thought all this a cheap and cynical ploy to get people to stay in the shop. But then, I was the kind of child who liked lining up Penguin Classics in alphabetical order*.

Alongside the bookshop’s child-friendly amusements, there were adult-friendly sofas and chairs which reconciled me to it somewhat. In particular, there was a sofa which was located just opposite the Erotic Fiction section. If you sat there for a while, you would see male customers veer towards the shelf, then sidle to an indeterminate point nearby as soon they saw you perched there. Fortunately, the Science Fiction section was the next shelf along, and provided a handy refuge.

I rather liked that sofa. More than its opportune locale, there was something nice about having sofas in general in a bookshop. Sofas seemed to say, “Come in from the cold and sit awhile. Enjoy that feeling of being surrounded by things to read and look at. Ignore the screams of children fighting over the big interactive toy.” With sofas, you could spend time idly browsing: whether you were getting sucked into the first chapter of a really good book, or furtively reading a self-help manual.

Ottakars was, in time, taken over by Waterstones. And bookshops were overtaken by the internet. Now, I hardly ever go into a bookshop to find a particular book. It’s easier to look online first, in the internet’s cheap and infinite stockroom. But I still go into bookshops to do that kind of idle browsing which can lead to unplanned purchases. Picking up an appealing volume by chance can lead to finding a book you’ll love. That’s a feeling which can’t be replicated by an automated message that tells you, “Customers who bought this, also bought that”.

When I drifted most recently into the bookshop in question, I found that all the sofas had disappeared. I took the absence of the one near Erotic Fiction to heart the most. But further investigation revealed a deficit, a veritable desert, of sitting furniture. Even those round step stools (usually my last resort) were missing. The interactive centrepiece of the children’s section was gone too, and there was not a single fun beanbag to be fought over.

I don’t know when this erosion of sofas happened. It may have been gradual. But to make the cynicism of it all the more apparent, the coffee shop upstairs was resplendent in sofas, behind a cordon clearly demarcating its territory. Entering the coffee shop with an unpaid-for book is one of those taboo things. Though I’ve never seen it written down, I’m sure there’s a rule that you have to buy the book first. Then you have to buy a coffee.

I know that bookshops are being squeezed hard at the moment, and that the recession has added to their asphyxiation by the internet. Encouraging customers to ‘sample’ the books might lead to bent spines, creased corners, etc – books that cannot be sold. But it would be nice to go into a bookshop and not to feel as though it exists solely to process the purchasing of minor celebrity biographies and cookbooks. It would be nice if there was a place for the wayward reader.

More than that, it is necessary if bookshops want to survive. If we can’t handle books and browse through their actual pages, then bookshops will have nothing over online stores. And then they really will be reduced to warehouses full of celebrity biographies, cookbooks, and celebrity chef biographies. As this won’t be to the advantage of anyone apart from Antony Worrall Thompson, it is crucial that bookshops fight back by improving their reading environments. As the first part of the bookshop rescue plan, I propose that all sofas should be returned to the shop floor, with extra padding if possible. Let’s start with the one next to Erotic Fiction.

*By author surname, in case you were wondering.

Archaeology of Words: Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns

Louise Kemeny

‘I ran slowly; the landscape flowed back to / its source’ (VI)[1]

In Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns the concepts of time and space are vague, defined by their interaction with words and movement. History and memory are mixed in moving pictures, tugging always at the connections between the different planes of reality contained within the sequence. These are namely the life and doings of King Offa who ruled Mercia from 757 to 796 AD;[2] Hill’s own childhood and his experience of the Second World War; Hill’s present life (at the time of writing, 1968-71). These temporal realities are connected, and given sharper definition by the different poetic forms Hill manifests within the sequence.

Mercian Hymns is a sequence of thirty prose-poems, each of these ‘hymns’ subdivided into what Hill terms ‘versets’[3] – ‘short sentences, usually taken from the Psalms and of a precatory nature’.[4] Hill’s versetsdo bear resemblance to the versets in the Psalms; they are of similar length, rhythm and grammatical structure. The other forms which shape Mercian Hymns are those employed by the Anglo-Saxons – the elegy, riddle and panegyric, used to tell both fictional and historical[5] heroic stories.

The first hymn is a panegyric – ‘The Naming of Offa’ – and eches the way such poems open in the Anglo-Saxon tradition: ‘Æthelstan cyning, eorla dryhten, / beorna beag-giefa’[6] [King Æthelstan, lord of earls, / ring-giver to men’]. Our introduction to Offa in the first hymn rings similarly with accolades: ‘King’, ‘overlord’, ‘architect’, ‘money-changer’, ‘martyrologist’. The colons which divide the accolades make them seem equal and coexisting. As David Lloyd argues, ‘Hill uses colons so that one accolade generates the next’:[7]

King of the perennial holly-groves, the riven sand-
aaastone: overlord of the M5: architect of the his-
aaatoric rampart and ditch, the citadel at Tamsworth,
aaathe summer hermitage in Holy Cross: guardian of
aaathe Welsh Bridge and the Iron Bridge: contractor
aaato the desirable new estates: saltmaster: money-
aaachanger: commissioner for oaths: martyrologist:
aaathe friend of Charlemagne.

‘I liked that,’ said Offa, ‘sing it again.’

That he is ‘King’ of the ‘perennial holly-groves’ suggests continuity of rule, a presence which, remaining in the region of Mercia, extends in time to the present day Worcester, constantly living and green like the ‘holly-groves’ which are still at large in Hill’s homeland (‘a / bonfire of beer-crates and holly-boughs whistled / above the tar’, III). Offa’s power is reinstated as the ‘overlord of the M5’, extolling him as the supreme ruler presiding over a strategically vital road into his kingdom, which links him with the present time.

Offa was a famous ‘money-changer’ in the sense that he introduced ‘a new type of coin which became ‘the model for all subsequent coinage in the Old English period, and even beyond it’.[8] A ‘martyrologist’ – though ostensibly one who keeps ‘a list or account of martyrs’ – is also one who keeps ‘a register of deaths kept by a religious house’,[9] attributing Offa with a sense of personal and local history. The title of ‘architect of the historic rampart and ditch’ refers to ‘Offa’s Dyke’, ‘the most impressive monument of Anglo-Saxon antiquity’ and despite the fact that there is no ‘direct evidence that it was built by Offa, both English and Welsh knew it by his name (Old English Offan dic, Welsh Clawadd Offa)’.[10] This nomenclature of King Offa, the notoriety he experienced in life and death, shape his identity within Mercian Hymns; in the second hymn Hill makes a riddle of his name.

Riddles in the Anglo-Saxon period relied heavily upon the manipulation of idiom and phonetic word play to convey their subject; the riddle in the second hymn is comprised of clues that do precisely this. A ‘curt graffito’ could be ‘fuck/piss off’, ‘A laugh’ is a ‘scoff’, ‘a cough’, ‘A syndicate’ could be an ‘office’, ‘A specious gift’ could be a ‘special offer’. ‘The starting cry of a race’ could be ‘and they’re off!’ The ‘Scoffed-at, horned phonograph’ is a more complex construction. In the phonetic shorthand created by Sir Isaac Pitman the ‘o’ of ‘Offa’ would be represented by the phonograph ‘?’, and the consonant ‘f’ by ‘?’, so that it would indeed appear as a horned phonograph. The word ‘phonograph’ is also the name Thomas Edison gave to the first instrument for recording sound; and the manually operated Edison Cylinder Phonograph of 1899, with a large protruding horn, was initially scoffed at.

The last clue, ‘A name to conjure with’, does many things. Whilst expressing the respect worthy of the Offa depicted in the first hymn, it also describes what the riddle has been doing – playing magically with ‘Offa’, conjuring words from the sound of it. Then, once the idiomatic sense of the phrase wears off, the word ‘conjure’ throws the balance of the whole hymn. The primary meaning of the word ‘conjure’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, is to ‘swear together; to conspire’,[11] rendering Offa a close friend or even an accomplice to the riddler. The word also has a precatory undertone – ‘To entreat (a person) by something for which he has a strong regard; to appeal solemnly or earnestly to; to beseech, implore.’ Hymn I ends ‘‘I liked that,’ said Offa, ‘sing it again’’; Hymn II responds in jest, toying with Offa’s name, by making him the comic subject of a riddle. Yetin the word ‘conjure’, Hill very deliberately summons all of Offa’s power as a King back to him. Hill has said that in ‘handling the English language the poet makes an act of recognition that etymology is history. The history of the creation and the debasement of words’.[12] He wants us to be aware of the overpowering abundance of meaning in the words he has chosen and leaves us free to decode them.

I was invested in mother-earth, the crypt of roots
aaaand endings. Child’s-play. I abode there, bided my
aaatime[...] (IV)

[...] I wormed my way heavenward for
ages amid barbaric ivy, scrollwork of fern.

Exile or pilgrim set me once more upon that ground:
aaamy rich and desolate childhood. (V)

There is an unmistakeable echo here, of ‘The Wife’s Lament’:[13]

Heht mec mon wunian on wuda bearwe,
under actreo þam eorðscræfe.
Eald is þes eorðsele, eal ic eom oflongad.
Sindon dena dimme, duna uphea,
bitre burgtunas brerum beweaxne,
wic wynna leas. (27-32)

[Someone commanded me to dwell in a forest’s grove, under an oak tree, in an earth-hall. Old is this earth-hall, I am all seized with longing; The valleys are dark, high are the hills, (these) bitter enclosures, overgrown with briars, a joyless place.]

The abstract nature of the landscape is a common characteristic Anglo-Saxon elegiac poetry, where the narrator (often an exile) seems enclosed by the very land itself. In saying ‘I was invested’ Hill suggests a kind of unwilling envelopment – one meaning of the verb ‘invest’ is ‘To clothe, robe, or envelop (a person) (…) with a garment’, and by extension ‘To cover, envelop, or coat, as a garment does.’ It may also mean ‘To enclose’ ‘with a hostile force, so as to cut off approach or escape’ ‘to besiege, beleaguer; to attack.’ The ‘barbaric ivy’ in Hymn V heightens the sense of a threatened isolation, like the ‘bitter enclosures overgrown with briars’ in ‘The Wife’s Lament’.

A ‘crypt of roots / and endings’ connotes the ‘earth-cave’ ‘under an oak tree’. The many-faceted word ‘crypt’ – from the Latin crypta, a covered galley – creates different resonances within the line. A ‘cavern’ or an ‘underground cell’ sounds like the wife’s ‘earth-hall’. However it may be a ‘recess’ or a ‘secret hiding-place’, which gives rise to the word ‘encrypt’ – ‘to conceal’ by converting ‘into cipher or code’ ‘in order to prevent unauthorized access’. In this context ‘a crypt of roots / and endings’ is a linguistic code, where the ‘roots’ and ‘endings’ of the words change depending on their inflections and tenses. The word is also imbued with mortality; a crypt as a chamber particularly suggests ‘one beneath the main floor of a church, used as a burial-place’. In this sense a ‘crypt of roots / and endings’ may be a picture of King Offa’s death, or of the deaths of Hill’s own ancestors, or of the cumulative death of the war he lived through during his ‘rich and desolate childhood’.

Time and space are drawn together in the word ‘abode’. It has come to mean a ‘Habitual residence, dwelling’, but its original meaning is the verb ‘To presage, prognosticate, be ominous’, which, given the syntax of the clause – ‘I abode there’ – would seem to be Hill’s intention. The word ‘bide’ literally means to wait, though it can also mean ‘to face’, to ‘await submissively’, to ‘endure, suffer’. Both words stem from the Anglo-Saxon verb bidan (‘to wait’) which comes up in ‘The Wanderer’ (‘Beorn sceal gebiden’ [A warrior must wait] (l.71)); ‘The Seafarer’ (‘gebiden in burgum (…) in brimlade bidan’) [wait in the city (…) in the sea-path wait] ( l. 28-30)); and is the last word of ‘The Wife’s Lament’: ‘Wa bið þam þe sceal / of langoþe leofes abidan’ [Woe is he who must, out of longing, the loved one await’] (l. 53)).[14] Having used ‘abode’ and ‘bide’ in such close proximity, Hill seems to emphasise the words’ etymology and therefore their significance in Anglo-Saxon elegy. This gives ‘roots / and endings’ yet another dimension: the origin of a word, and its present location, after its journey through time and different usages.

There is a gravity about the first verset of Hymn IV which makes the passing of time – the waiting – seem sad and menacing. Different stretches of time are united in this place – the abstract ‘earth-hall’ – and the notion that ‘I wormed my way heavenward for / ages amid barbaric ivy’, means something to each. Literally, there is a sense of remission and escape, though moving ‘heavenward’ also suggests death in the ascension of the soul. The idea that the speaker has been moving for ‘ages’ is initially a colloquial hyperbole; however taken literally – a slow progression through epochs – has the effect, again, of linking these times. Again, movement is the connecting force between time and place.

The first verset of Hymn VII seems to place us in Hill’s time: ‘Gasholders, russet among fields.’ Gasholders – large cylindrical metal structures containing natural gas – are often, due to oxidation, russet coloured. The word ‘russet’ is not only an adjective denoting colour; it is also a ‘variety of eating apple,’ a ‘variety of pear’ and a ‘species of noctuid moth’. If we accept this sentence as hypotactic, Hill has used a word ascribed to organic things to depict a man-made landmark that is young by the standards of the Mercian Hymns timescale; the time of writing, alluding to the ‘fields’, must also necessarily allude to the fields of eighth century Mercia. The primary meaning of ‘russet’, however, is ‘A coarse homespun woollen cloth (…) formerly used for the dress of peasants and country-folk’; we remember this in Hymn XXIII when we read of the ‘Opus Anglicanum’,[15] ‘In tapestries, in dreams’, and imagine the women of Offa’s reign making tapestries. The russet fields of Hymn VII are broken down during the first verset, into smaller details: ‘Milldams’ and ‘marlpools’; ‘a ditchful’ of ‘Coagulations of frogs’. There is a great sense here, of the deathly calm after a violent act; milldams, eel-swarms and marlpools all ‘lay unstirring’;

Coagulations of frogs: once, with branches and half-bricks, he battered a ditchful; then sidled away from the stillness and silence.

The first clause with the colon describe the aftermath, a forensic photograph at the scene of the crime whose action is then described. Simply, the process of coagulation is the ‘clotting, curdling’ or ‘setting’, usually of milk, albumen and blood, lending the description a distinct sense of physiological texture: of raw flesh and of protein-rich bodily-generated fluids. More specifically, coagulation necrosis is ‘a type of necrosis in which dead tissue becomes swollen and firmer’; we feel the dead frogs and the reformed, glutinous presence of their flesh (in the first clause) before the story of their death has even been told (after the colon).

The strange calm of this description is echoed in the third verset, where again, after an instance of violence, ‘he’ ‘leaves’ Ceolred ‘calm and alone’. The action of second and third versets of Hymn VII use ‘Ceolred’ (adviser to King Offa) as the offending school friend in what must be a childhood memory – by the 1940s ‘biplanes’ were indeed, as the verset, suggests, ‘already obsolete’, ‘already’ implying this as a recent change. We may therefore assume that the event did not happen later than 1942, when Hill would have been ten years old.[16] The loss of the model plane moves Hill/Offa to ‘lure’ Ceolred ‘down to the old quarries’ and ‘flay’ him, before leaving him ‘calm and alone’, reminding us of the still, coagulated ditchful of frogs in the first verset. We should note the use of ‘coagulation’ and ‘ditchful’ (from dic) and Hill’s particular choice of the Latinate and Old English words.

The relationship between the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin etymologies in Mercian Hymns has divided critics into two camps: there are those that see it as a partnership and those that see it as frictional cohabitation. Peter Robinson and William Wootten, of the latter camp, acknowledge Seamus Heaney’s argument that the idioms ‘go hand in glove’ in Mercian Hymns.[17] Robinson argues that ‘rather than conspiring together, here there is an impacted conflict between etymologies’,[18] whilst Wootten holds that ‘It is rare (…) that Latin and Anglo-Saxon English can meet in Mercian Hymns without a trace of blood’,[19] and that Hill’s ‘diction relentlessly veers between (…) the Anglo-Saxon and the Latinate’.[20] However both arguments rely on the observation that the two etymologies come together only at instances of violence: Robinson cites Offa’s witnessing of Boethius’ death in Hymn XVIII. Wootten refers us to Thor’s outburst in Hymn XXVII, and the synthesis of the red juice of ‘butchered’ strawberries and the ‘red in the arena’ as ‘ancient bloodshed brought forth in a clash of Latin and Anglo-Saxon dictions’.[21] Quite apart from the fact that Thor would represent a clash of Latin and Old Norse dictions (as opposed to Old English), Wootten, like Robinson, falls down in assuming that we are to judge Hill’s intentions in Mercian Hymns only on these instances of violence. There undoubtedly is a combative element to the combination of the two etymologies – as we have seen from Hymn VII – but there are instances where they conjure, as we have seen in the use of the word ‘crypt’ to bolster the power of the Anglo-Saxon elegiac form in Hymn IV.

There are also instances where the two etymologies, adjacent to one another, create sadness; in the fourth verset of Hymn X, Offa//Hill ‘wept, attempting to master ancilla and servus.’ This image is perhaps the one in which the definition between ‘King Offa’ and ‘Geoffrey Hill the Child’ becomes most blurred: as W. S. Milne has pointed out, ‘a king as well as a child may weep in the difficulty of learning Latin’.[22] In Hymn V, Hill speaks directly about his ‘childhood’: ‘I who was taken to be a king of / some kind, a prodigy, a maimed one’. A ‘prodigy’ could refer to King Offa and the laws and coinage he pioneered, whilst the term also specifically refers to ‘a precociously talented child’, which it seems Hill was. The son of a police constable and a long line of nail-makers, Hill’s abilities (his attendance at grammar school and Keble College, Oxford) are seemingly anomalous to those of his family. Why he was a ‘maimed’ prodigy is unclear; perhaps his so-called ‘working class’ origins hindered him in his education, making him self-conscious. Perhaps it was the burden of his very unique way of thinking, as a young poet. Either way both he and King Offa seem to have been maimed or at least troubled by their lack of Latin at some point. This notion is realised in Hymn XXIX:

‘Not strangeness, but strange likeness. Obstinate,
aaaoutclassed forefathers, I too concede, I am your
aaastaggeringly-gifted child.’

So, murmurous, he withdrew from them. Gran lit the
aaagas, his dice whirred in the ludo-cup, he entered
aaathe last dream of Offa the King.

Martin Dodsworth believes the phrase ‘staggeringly-gifted child’ is comic in its self-admission, and intended to lighten the seriousness of Hill’s confession,[23] yet the term is more than an awkward joke stating his surprising ability. It depicts a genuine faltering movement, as only a ‘maimed’ ‘prodigy’ ‘staggers’ under the weight of his gift. It seems, however, that the sentence is about Offa as well as Hill: if we take the second sentence (of verset two) as being subordinate to the first, it is Offa who leaves them. It seems that king and child, past and present are united again by the movement (a stagger and a withdrawal), in this hymn. Something new arises from the departure from the ‘Obstinate / outclassed forefathers’.

Thomas Day has made a lengthy comparison of Hill and T. S. Eliot,[24] and Milne sees the appended notes to Mercian Hymns as the ‘furthest edge’ of Hill’s modernism.[25] There are similarities between The Waste Land and Mercian Hymns: the quality of the sound of the poetry read aloud, the obsession with etymology and idiom, the active response to the past. Yet it is hard to see that the comparison can go further than this. Where Eliot sought to break down and smash the forms used by his literary ‘forefathers’ into ‘a heap of broken images’,[26] Hill wishes to tease apart and realign, to make a patchwork of old tapestries. He has used Anglo-Saxon forms to a great extent, and, calling the poems ‘hymns’, he has used liturgical prose. The overall impression created by The Waste Land is one of frantic desperation and fear, whereas the power of the Mercian Hymns lies in the meticulous fascination with words, meanings and history – it feels almost like archaeology. John Needham, in his essay on Hill’s idiom in the Mercian Hymns, calls this an ‘historical imagination’: ‘the density of his language, packed at different historical levels, is the sign of very fully imagined effects’.[27] Arguably though, this idea could be taken further; Hill’s idiom, the words he uses, are history. He creates a profound awareness of his poetic specificity, of his choice of words and their power to connect us to different eras and places.

A word, he proves, become a palimpsest of its historical usages, just as a place becomes a palimpsest of the historical events that have happened there. Hill believes that ‘The arts which use language are the most impure of arts’;[28] when one thinks of the tangibility of experience of colours in painting, or the clarity and directness of sound in music, Hill’s point about words becomes clear. However there are, in Mercian Hymns, words of varying clarity; some words are resonant with plethora of definitions – a ‘quarry’, in Hymn VII, may be ‘Certain parts of a deer placed on the hide and given to the hounds’; ‘the reward given to a hawk which has killed a bird’; ‘A heap of deer killed at a hunting’; ‘A heap of dead men; a pile of dead bodies’; ‘The attack or swoop made by a hawk upon a bird’; as well as ‘An open-air excavation from which stone is obtained’. The word ‘quarry’ resounds with its semantic possibilities. Other words, by contrast, are quiet – a ‘predator’, in Hymn VIII, may only be defined as ‘A person who plunders or pillages’ or ‘An animal that preys on other animals’.

Sentences can be deafening with semantic echoes, which is why Hill chooses words of varying semantic resonance. The forms used in Mercian Hymns are necessarily defined and specific and, although they make for a beautiful poetic aesthetic, are a vessel for, and ultimately expedient to the power of the words. As we have seen the relationship between time and place is embodied by movements and actions, the most powerful of which, perhaps, is the final departure of King Offa from Hill’s consciousness (XXX). ‘Entering the dream of Offa may be something that happens to the child, or it may be something that happened to Offa, dreaming of the future’,[29] but either way, it is the decisive movement of the king which tells us that he and Hill have been occupying some of the same time and space, and that he is now leaving it. The odd, mutual acknowledgement of this final exchange is reminiscent of A. E. Housman’s[30] description of seeing and feeling the past in ‘On Wenlock Edge the Wood’s in Trouble’:

Then, ’twas before my time, the Roman
At yonder heaving hill would stare:
The blood that warms an English yeoman,
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.[31]

Bibliography

Collected Poems, Geoffrey Hill, (Middlesex: Penguin, 1987).

Old and Middle English Poetry, ed. By Elaine M. Treharne and Duncan Wu, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002).

Introduction to Old English, Peter S. Baker, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005).

Old and Middle English: An Anthology, edited by Elaine Treharne, (Oxford : Blackwell Publishers, 2000).

Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work, ed. Peter Robinson, (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985).

An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England, Peter Hunter Blair, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

An Introduction of Geoffrey Hill, W. S. Milne, (London: Bellew Publishing Company Limited, 1998).

Modern Critical Views – Geoffrey Hill, ed. Harold Bloom, (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986).

The Lords of Limit – Essays on Literature and Ideas, Geoffrey Hill, (London: Andre Deutsch, 1984).

Style and Faith, Geoffrey Hill, (New York: Counterpoint, 2003).

The Riverside Chaucer, Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, ed. J. A. Cuddon, (London: Penguin Books, 1998).

The Bible – Authorized King James Version, ed. Robert Carroll & Stephen Prickett, (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998).

The Norton Anthology of Poetry (Fifth Edition), ed. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, Jon Stallworthy, (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005).

Selected Poems, T. S. Eliot, (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1976).

Selected Poems, Ezra Pound, (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1977).

The Consolation of Philosophy, Ancius Manlius Severinus Boethius, trans. P. G. Walsh, (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2000).

Online Researches
OED online.

Extracts from an interview with Geoffrey Hill by John Haffenden from Viewpoints, (London: Faber, 1981), posted on http://homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/tchg/wby/GHill.htmlThe Public and Private Realms of Hill’s Mercian Hymns, David Lloyd, Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 34, No. 4. (Winter, 1988), pp. 407-415.The Word as Bond: Money and Performative Language in Hill’s Mercian Hymns, Michael North, ELH, Vol. 54, No. 2. (Summer, 1987), pp. 463-481.Poetic Omissions in Geoffrey Hill’s Most Recent Sequences, Merle Brown, Contemporary Literature, Vol. 20, No. 1. (Winter, 1979), pp. 76-95.Sensuous Intelligence: T. S. Eliot and Geoffrey Hill, Thomas Day, Cambridge Quarterly, 2006, vol. 35, p. 55-280.Rhetoric and Violence in Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns and the Speeches of Enoch Powell, William Wootten, Cambridge Quarterly, 2000; XXIX, p. 1-15.

—————–

[1] Geoffrey Hill, Mercian Hymns (1971) in Collected Poems, (Middlesex: Penguin, 1987), p. 110. *All further references will be to this edition, contained within the main body of the text.

[2] Peter Hunter Blair, An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 52. *All further references will be to this edition.

[3] Martin Dodsworth, ‘Mercian Hymns: Offa, Charlemagne and Geoffrey Hill’, from Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work, ed. Peter Robinson, (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985), p. 56. *All further references will be to this edition.

[4] OED online.

[5] Such as The Battle of Maldon and The Battle of Brunanburgh.

[6] Old and Middle English: An Anthology, edited by Elaine Treharne, (Oxford : Blackwell Publishers, 2000).

[7] David Lloyd, ‘The Public and Private Realms of Hill’s Mercian Hymns’, from Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 34, No. 4., (Winter, 1988), p. 408.

[8] Dodsworth, ‘Mercian Hymns: Offa, Charlemagne and Geoffrey Hill’, from Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work, p. 50.

[9] OED online.

[10] Hunter Blair, An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England, p. 37.

[11] OED online. *All further definitions in this essay will be from this resource unless another is specified.

[12] Extracts from John Haffenden’s interview with Geoffrey Hill (Viewpoints, (London: Faber, 1981)), posted on http://homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/tchg/wby/GHill.html.

[13] Peter S. Baker, Introduction to Old English, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), p.211.

[14] Old and Middle English Poetry, ed. By Elaine M. Treharne and Duncan Wu, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), p. 18-25.

[15] ‘Work of the English’, refers to the Anglo-Saxon needlework by English women which was famous throughout Europe at the time.

[16] Hill, Collected Poems, p. 1.

[17] 1. Peter Robinson, ‘Reading Geoffrey Hill’ in Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work, p. 213.

2. William Wootten, ‘Rhetoric and Violence in Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns and the Speeches of Enoch Powell’, Cambridge Quarterly, 2000; XXIX, p. 7. *All further references will be to this text.

[18] Robinson, Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work, p. 213.

[19] Wootten, ‘Rhetoric and Violence in Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns and the Speeches of Enoch Powell’, p. 8.

[20] Ibid, p. 2.

[21] Ibid, p. 8.

[22] W. S. Milne, An Introduction of Geoffrey Hill, (London: Bellew Publishing Company Limited, 1998), p. 52. *All further references will be to this edition.

[23] Dodsworth, Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work, p. 54.

[24] Thomas Day, ‘Sensuous Intelligence: T. S. Eliot and Geoffrey Hill’, Cambridge Quarterly, 2006, vol. 35, p. 255-280.

[25] Milne, An Introduction to Geoffrey Hill, p. 97-8.ß

[26] T. S. Eliot, Selected Poems, (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1976), ‘The Burial of the Dead’, l. 22.

[27] John Needham, ‘The Idiom of “Mercian Hymns”’, in Modern Critical Views – Geoffrey Hill, ed. Harold Bloom, (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986), p.77.

[28] Geoffrey Hill, The Lords of Limit – Essays on Literature and Ideas, (London: Andre Deutsch, 1984), p. 2.

[29] Milne, An Introduction to Geoffrey Hill, p. 55.

[30] One of Hill’s favourite poets and the first he ever read.

[31] The Norton Anthology of Poetry (Fifth Edition), ed. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, Jon Stallworthy, (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005), p. 1176.

The Lancelot Dilemma in Malory’s Morte Darthur: How Can the Greatest Knight in the World Have Sex with the Queen?

Eric Lacey

Sir Thomas Malory’s Lancelot was a ‘trew knyght’[1] because he was exemplary in all facets of his character. [2] Indeed, Malory was so eager to emphasize this, that Lancelot is referred to as a ‘trew’ knight four times within the first seven leaves of the Winchester manuscript (the manuscript thought to be closest to Malory’s original), three occurrences of which come from the knight himself in the repetition of “as I am trew knyght” (and this is continued throughout the Le Morte Darthur).[3] In each case, the statement “as I am trew knyght” is not made in arrogance, but rather made when swearing to fulfill a just purpose; a fitting oath for a noble endeavour. By putting these words into the mouth of his favourite knight, and then having him fulfill his vows, Malory holds him up to be a ‘trew knyght’ by example of his deed. Lancelot is a brave and ‘trew’ warrior admired not only by Malory, but by the audience of Le Morte Darthur who see the promises and their fulfillment in progress. This is not to say, by any means, that the narrative is unbiased –in a later chapter entitled ‘Slander and Strife’, we find a bias that “no modern author could get away with”: [4]

So sir Launcelot departed and toke hys swerde undir hys arme, and so he walked in hys mantel, that noble knyght, and put hymselff in grete jouparté.

(XX.3)[5]

Malory also specifically creates the episode of ‘The Healing of Sir Urry’ in order to emphasize the greatness of his favourite knight[6]. The structure of the story is, in the words of one critic, “totally illogical”[7], and Lancelot, who due to his high rank at the Round Table should be one of the first to try and heal Sir Urry, is delayed till last, so as to enhance the dramatic healing and irrefutably demonstrate him as being of the caliber stipulated in the curse’s cure:

…[Sir Urry] shulde never be hole untyll the beste knyght in the worlde had serched hys woundis.

(XIX:10)[8]

Nor can we neglect the various battles in which Lancelot demonstrates his feat of arms, in chapters that Malory rather unimaginatively entitles ‘The Great Tournament’ and ‘A Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot Du Lake’. Malory is also eager to ensure that Lancelot is admirable by feat of character and dedicates an entire chapter to his humility; ‘The Knight of The Cart’ describes how he rides in a dwarf drawn vehicle and suffers the humiliating laughter of all witnesses as he races to save his queen. As Beverly Kennedy succinctly and rigorously demonstrates, throughout the entirety of Malory’s Morte Darthur Lancelot epitomizes the qualities of both the battle-hardened ‘True Knight’[9] and the courtly and personable ‘Worshipful Knight’.[10]

There is just one tiny problem amidst this however. How can Lancelot be a ‘trew knyght’ when he is having sex with his king’s wife? In both the Christian and the Heroic codes this would be deemed, to say the least, undesirable and inappropriate; Christian marriage is monogamous by nature and Roman and Germanic law only permitted married men to partake in extra-marital relations with women who were not “another man’s property rights – that is, his wife”. [11] From the Christian perspective, he should not be violating the sanctity of marriage; from the Heroic, the trust and relationship between himself and his lord. The problem is compounded when we recall that not only Lancelot is not just any ‘trew knyght’ – he is the greatest in the world, as the healing of Sir Urry unequivocally demonstrates – but that by English law, his adulterous relationship amounts to treason.[12] How can one so celebrated for his excellence in knighthood, indeed, for his nobility and righteousness, be reconciled with this adultery – and with this treason?

Nobility in general is perhaps the most firmly stressed quality in the entire Morte Darthur, and Hyonjin Kim remarks on the frequency of the word’s appearance. [13] Lancelot and the other knights are descended from royalty not only to raise their social status, but also to make all the knights equals.[14] However, Malory consistently depicts Lancelot as being nobler than his peers. When Gawain is lying on his deathbed, in spite of his vehemence against Lancelot for the slaying of his brother, he concedes:

…for had that noble knyght, sir Launcelot, ben with you, as he was and wolde have ben, thys unhappy warre had never ben begunne; for he, thorow hys noble knyghthode and hys noble bloode, hylde all youre cankyrde enemyes in subjeccion and daungere. And now… ye shall mysse sir Launcelot.

(XXI:2)[15]

Not only is Lancelot referred to by the adjective ‘noble’ no less than three times in four lines, but he emphasizes Lancelot’s loyalty to his king and his prowess in battle: he will be missed by the king because he is such a valuable and mighty knight. To give Lancelot even more credit, Malory has Gawain write a letter to him under the authority of ‘the Freynshe booke’ (an invented source Malory invokes to refer to a multitude of French texts to give his anecdotes an authoritative air. I should clarify that Gawain’s letter is indeed found in the French Vulgate sources – though nowhere near as obsequious as here):[16]

Unto the, sir Launcelot, floure of all noble knyghtes that I ever harde of or saw by me dayes, I, sir Gawayne, kynge Lottis sonne of Orkeney, and systirs sonne onto the noble kynge Arthur, sende the gretynge…com over the see in all the goodly haste that ye may, wyth youre noble knyghtes, and recow that nobly kynge that made the knyght…

(XXI:2)[17]

As can be seen by the above quotation, Lancelot’s retinue and King Arthur are referred to as ‘noble’, however, in terms of sheer frequency, Lancelot trumps them both. “The repetition of the keyword noble”, Kim remarks, “contributes in each case to the enhancement, rather than the reduction, of the emotional intensity of the scene”.[18] The use of such a keyword, in what is one of the most memorable scenes in the entire Morte Darthur, is testimony both to the importance of the quality itself, and of its presence in Lancelot. As if the above is not praise-worthy enough, Gawain refers to his slayer two more times with words of praise; firstly he is acknowledged as having dealt Gawain his death blow: “for of a more nobelar man myght I nat be slayne”, [19] which, when we bear in mind the important part Gawain played in Arthur’s battle against the Romans earlier in the Morte Darthur and Gawain’s own reputation for strength in arms, is a mighty compliment indeed. Secondly, and conclusively, Gawain signs off with: “therefore I requyre the, moste famous knyght of the worlde, that thou wolte se my tumbe.”[20] Not only is Lancelot unequivocally designated the “moste famous knyght of the worlde” by a most worthy peer, but his strangely religious nature is appealed to here. This “strangely religious nature” is attested to in the divine properties of his son Galahad and his miraculous healing of Sir Urry, which he undertakes in a most humble manner by invocating God ‘secretely unto hymselff’:

“Now, Blyssed Fadir and Son and Holy Goste, I beseche The of Thy mercy that my symple worshyp and honesté be saved, and Thou Blyssed Tryeté, Thou mayste yeff me power to hele thys syke knyght by the grete vertu of The, but, Good Lorde, never of myself”

(XIX:12)[21]

We see here an admirable humility, which Lancelot has demonstrated before, towards the beginning of the Grail Quest:

“I make unto you a remembraunce that ye shall nat wene frome hensforthe that ye be the best knyght of the worlde”.

“As towchyng unto that,’ seyde sir Launcelot, ‘I know well I was never none of the beste.”

“Yes,” seyde the damesell, “that were ye, and ar yet, of ony synfull man of the worlde…”

(XII:5)[22]

Terrence McCarthy informs us that “Lancelot’s modest admission of inferiority and the maid’s disagreement are Malory’s own addition to the scene”. [23] The reasons for depicting Lancelot modestly are obvious: we already know that he is the greatest knight in the world, just as we are already more than aware of his combat abilities, his greatness in the eyes of his peers and his nobility- a humble demeanor on top of this only serves to depict Lancelot as a more admirable character. Indeed, modesty endows Lancelot with a trait found commonly in courtly knights, keeping in line with Malory’s characterization of him as embodying all the greatest knightly qualities. Kennedy concludes in Knighthood in the Morte Darthur that Lancelot encompasses three distinct types of knight; heroic knighthood, [24] as shown by his prowess in battle and interaction with Gawain in the last book of Le Morte Darthur, courtly knighthood, [25] shown through his humility and piety, and finally ‘true knighthood’, [26] as is evidenced by Malory’s blatant narrative statements.

So are we to expect, then, that Lancelot’s virtues compensate for his adultery, or elevate him above such a level? To assume either of these would be to drastically simplify the situation; we must also take into account the nature of the affair between Lancelot and Guinevere. In light of this, it is of primary importance to remember what Malory says in a rare moment of commentary on the problematic relationship:

For, as the Freynshhe booke seyth, the quene and sir Launcelot were togydirs. And whether they were abed other at other maner of disportis, me lyste nat thereof make no mencion, for love that tyme was nat as love ys nowadayes.

(XX:3)[27]

Unlike a previous citation in this essay, and indeed unlike most of its occurrences in Le Morte Darthur, Malory’s reference to ‘the Freynshhe booke’ in this case is not an appeal for authority, but rather an excuse for the compromising situation his favorite character now finds himself in. As Eugene Vinaver points out in a footnote at this point in his edition of the Morte Darthur, Malory follows neither the French nor Le Morte Arthur in explicitly stating that the two lovers go to bed together[28] – instead he avoids elaboration and famously says “love that tyme was nat as love ys nowadayes”, immediately dismissing and distancing the lovers from any notions of love a contemporary audience may undesirably apply. However, to have left the explanation at this would have been both inartistic and unsatisfactory, and thankfully, a closer reading of the text yields some potentially fruitful explanations. The notions of different kinds of love, in addition to Lancelot’s perfect knightliness, give the reader another lead into which they can investigate the problematic relationship.

The best place perhaps to begin these considerations is at the end. Guinevere, taking ‘grete penaunce… uppon her[self]’ (XXI:7)[29], ordains herself into a nunnery in order to repent for the wrong-doings of her adultery in a Christian context. It is through this demonstration of commitment to her husband post-mortem[30] that Lancelot, heart-broken, takes to wearing religious vestments too and embraces priesthood. Likewise, as Cherewatuk also notes, when Lancelot, according to her wishes, buries her next to King Arthur (XXI:11-12),[31] “her atonement severs the adulterous triangle even as… Lancelot still shows his commitment to it”. [32] As committed as he may be to it, it takes two to commit adultery; and thus when she repents for it and severs the triangle, she truly does atone for it. Lancelot, whilst emotionally inclined to Guinevere still, has by her passing, truly been released from the sinful nature of their love. Although arguably there was nothing sinful about it from the very moment Arthur died, through the actions of Guinevere they fittingly redeem themselves for the illicit affair during his lifetime. Viewed in this way, their love takes on a religious nature that one could see, if they pried hard enough, in the way it was previously “ennobled by constance and patience”[33] –mostly, it must be added, by that of Lancelot. His expression of his love towards her in a typically courtly manner and his constant defence of her stand testimony to this. [34] This constancy on Lancelot’s behalf is emphasized by the increased blame upon Guinevere in each occasion he comes to her aid in the final book of Le Morte Darthur. These instances are: 1) against Mador’s false accusation of Guinevere committing murder in ‘The Poisoned Apple’, 2) against Mellyagaunce’s somewhat justified, though personally motivated accusation of her treason in ‘The Knight of the Cart’ (it should be noted that Mellyagaunce himself is in love with Guinevere) and 3) Arthur’s (very justified) accusation of her treason following the exposure of her infidelity.

This unfailing loyalty towards Guinevere is perhaps the most ennobling aspect of their love, noted by Kim as exemplifying Malory’s ideal of ‘vertuouse love’, [35] but this loyalty does not stem from their love alone. The basis for Lancelot’s loyalty towards his Queen may be found at the very beginning of their history, during Lancelot’s knighting:

“My Lorde,’ seyde sir Launcelot, ‘wytte you well y ought of ryght ever [to be] in youre quarrell and in my ladyes the quenys quarrell to do batayle, for ye are the man that gaff me the hygh Order of Knyghthode, and that day my lady, youre quene, ded me worshyp. And ellis had I bene shamed, for that same day that ye made me knyght, thorow my hastynes I loste my swerde, and my lady, youre quene, founde hit, and lapped hit in her trayne, and gave me the swerde whan I had nede thereto; and ells had I bene shamed amonge all knyghtes. And therefore, my lorde Arthure, I promysed her at that day ever to be her knyght in ryght othir in wronge.”

E B Leighton's Queen Guinevere and Sir Lancelot

(XVIII:7)[36]

Lancelot is respectful and decorous in his speech towards his lord; he acknowledges and emphasizes through repetition the hierarchy of the King and the knight, and is careful to couple any reference to Guinevere being his lady with a reference to her being Arthur’s queen. The latter however is not just done diplomatically – Lancelot is emphasizing the dual basis of his loyalty: ‘ye are the man that gaff me the hygh Order of Knyghthode, and… youre quene ded my worshyp’. Just as he is indebted to Arthur for initiating him into the Round Table, so he is indebted to Guinevere for saving him from being shamed in the initiation ceremony[37]. Indeed, one could say that it is Guinevere who gets Lancelot knighted – without his sword the ritual which would lead to his ordination into the knighthood could not commence.[38] I emphasize that this is not to say, however, that Lancelot is not loyal towards his king. Through both deed and word Lancelot proclaims his dedication to the king – we can see one instance in ‘The Healing of Sir Urry’, when Lancelot is beseeched by his lord to attempt to heal the wounded knight: “My lorde Arthure, I must do youre commaundemente, which is sore ayenste my harte” (XIX:12). [39] Likewise we see Lancelot’s unflinching loyalty towards his lord in refusing to fight against him, or let his retinue fight against him, even when pursued in ‘The Siege of Benwick’:

“…therefore I pray you, sirres, as ye love me, be ruled at thys tyme as I woll have you. For I woll allwayes fle that noble kynge that made me knyght: and whan I may no farther, I muste nedis deffende me.”

(XX:20)[40]

Nothing short of necessity would push Lancelot to fight against his lord, even in such hard-pressed circumstances. Returning to the matter of Guinevere however, one could see the love between Lancelot and herself in two different lights; firstly as an extension of the love a knight should have towards his lord in a comitatus (‘war-band’) in view of the origins of his loyalty towards her, secondly, as a spiritual love that allows the two of them to embrace Christianity and repent for the sinful path which, antithetically, lead them there.

Even if it could be irrefutably concluded that the love between Lancelot and Guinevere is morally admirable, it still does not account for why they should be allowed to have sex, especially since Lancelot’s duty is not just to his queen, but (primarily) to his lord King Arthur. The answer to this may lie in the actual reasoning behind the view that a relationship of this nature is treason. In the Treason Statute of 1352 the primary concern was interference with the bloodline of the throne; [41] and this is not a problem in Malory’s world of the Morte Darthur for the simple reason of Guinevere’s infertility. Whilst it is a far from popular view both contemporarily (seeing as Guinevere in The Alliterative Morte Arthur has a son with Mordred), [42] and in modern scholarship, I find more than enough proof in a handful of critics and close readings of Le Morte Darthur to support it. Immediate suspicion should be roused from the fact that Guinevere bears children for neither Arthur nor Lancelot. Both have children by other women; Arthur has, quite notably, his future slayer Mordred, and Lancelot has Galahad by Elaine of Corbin – thereby dispelling any possibility of their sterility. Elaine of Corbin, in the eyes of Cherewatuk, [43] provides further evidence for Guinevere’s barrenness by taking a sly shot at the queen: “for he hadde my maydynhde and by hym I have borne a fayre sonne,” (XI:9). [44] Similarly, when Guinevere asks Galahad about his parentage, it is difficult not to see jealousy behind the queen’s clearly awkward enquiry:

So aftir thys the quene com unto sir Galahad and asked hym of whens he was and of what contrey. Than he tolde hir of whens he was. “And sonne unto sir Launcelot?” she seyde. As to that he seyde nother yee nother yay…

Than sir Galahad was a lityll ashamed and seyde,,

“Madame, sithyn ye know in sertayne, wheredore do ye aske hit me?”

(XIII:12-14)[45]

However, it is her infertility that works in favour of justifying the relationship between Lancelot and Guinevere – because of the lack of concern of a contaminated bloodline. As cited above, the Treason Statute of 1352 was concerned with the presence of illegitimate heirs – markedly ironic when we consider that during the crusade led against Lancelot towards the end of Le Morte Darthur, Arthur’s own bastard son Mordred gathers an army with which to seize the throne; Arthur himself brings about his own downfall through the very reason for which Lancelot and Guinevere are guilty of treason. On this political note, it is worth noting that the marriage between Arthur and Guinevere has been seen as purely political, notably by Cherewatuk, as Guinevere hails from a family of no small importance – and her dowry is the Round Table. The evidence points towards the table and the knights who sit around it as being more important to Arthur, for as we hear him lament later in Le Morte Darthur:

“…and much more I am soryar for my good knyghtes losse than for the losse of my fayre quene; for quenys I myght have inow, but such a felyship of good knyghtes shall never be togydirs in no company.”

(XX:9)[46]

If, as this suggests, the Round Table and the fellowship of knights are of primary importance to Arthur, then Guinevere fulfills the purpose of their union by marriage by providing the Round Table – in which case the love between Lancelot and Guinevere is emotionally justified. That is not to say that Arthur is not emotionally inclined towards his wife – we see a headstrong Arthur earlier in Le Morte Darthur desiring her hand in marriage in spite of Merlin’s protest:

“I love Gwenyvere, the kynges doughtir of Lodegrean, of the londe of Camelerde, the whyche holdyth in his house the Table Rounde that ye told me he had hit of my fadir Uther…”

But M[e]rlyon warned the kyng covertly that Gwenyver was nat holsom for hym to take to wyff. For he warned hym that Launcelot scholde love hir, and sche hym agayne…

(III:1)[47]

Arthur, aware of the fact that Guinevere and Lancelot will fall in love, pursues the marriage because he covets the Round Table – it is a political marriage for a political gain. Does this mean with her political role fulfilled, she can go on to fulfill the personal? This seems to be the implication here.

That the marriage is acknowledged for its political purposes would explain why a blind eye is turned on the Lancelot-Guinevere affair. Arthur is aware from the very beginning of Book III of Le Morte Darthur, but ignores the intimate relations between his wife and his best knight in order to maintain the fellowship of the Round Table. When viewed in this way, it is even advantageous for Arthur to have his wife intimately involved with his best knight – as Cherewatuk writes, she is able to “arm and disarm her husband’s best knight… Guinevere is able to tie the strength [of Lancelot] to the crown.”[48] In fact, the only times when the relationship between the two of them is not overlooked is when there is an ulterior motive towards Guinevere on the prosecutor’s behalf. Mellyagaunce is himself in love with Guinevere, and Aggravayne is jealous of Lancelot’s access to Guinevere. [49]

In fact, in the grand scheme of Le Morte Darthur, the blame seems to lie squarely on Guinevere’s shoulders. Her faults of jealousy, possessiveness, and pride have led many critics to find Malory placing the blame for both the moral collapse of the knights of the Round Table and the disintegration of her relationship with Lancelot. [50] She falls into the role of the temptress, leaving Lancelot with little blame – the precise details of which cannot be dealt with sufficiently here. Malory does, however, grant Guinevere the opportunity, which she seizes, of redeeming herself when she joins the nuns’ convent. This is obviously Malory putting Guinevere in a favourable light – something he has actually been playing towards throughout the entire Morte Darthur – as unlike the Alliterative Morte Arthur, she is not mother of a child with Mordred, for example.

What conclusion can one draw from this? Obviously that Malory tries to provide a host of reasons to render the illicit relationship between Lancelot and Guinevere permissible, but does he solve the dilemma of Lancelot? The affair in itself suggests something about the characters involved – in that not only does it give us insight into their inner machinations, but it helps us assemble an accurate approximation of their priorities. King Arthur is more concerned about the Round Table and the knights that populate it rather than his wife, Guinevere is haughty and demanding of Lancelot, and the famous knight himself is fully committed to her in all the ways that he can be, but his misdeeds are still difficult to justify. Are we to see Lancelot as more human for his flaws? We can see easily that Malory intends for Lancelot to be a role-model of ‘knyghthode’ in his excellence in all things knightly, but what about the more mundane, quotidian, even human, aspect of his character?

The answer may lie in Lancelot’s religious redemption – and in its parallels with the generic Saint’s life ending. By offering a religious solution to Lancelot’s sinful ways, he becomes a role model not just as a knight, but as a human being. Just as ‘love that tyme was nat as love ys nowadayes’, and that ‘felyship of good knyghtes shall never be togydirs in no company’, the audience is not expected, or encouraged, to follow in the knightly footsteps of these characters; as their deeds are celebrated for their passing in a more heroic time and place. However, Malory offers religious repentance as a noble practice which the contemporary audience could take as exemplary: Gawain, Lancelot and Guinevere all follow this course of action, and all repent of the more problematic actions they committed during the collapse of King Arthur’s court. The dilemma of Lancelot, in short, is solved in a method exemplary of how all the problems of the contemporary imperfect man were to be solved – through embracing faith and repenting.

Bibliography

Primary Texts

Vinaver, E., ed., Malory Complete Works (Oxford: OUP, 1971)

Secondary Texts

Cherewatuk, K., Arthurian Studies LXVII: Marriage, Adultery and Inheritance in Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006)

Crofts, T.H., Arthurian Studies LXVI: Malory’s Contemporary Audience (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006)

Hodges, K., Forging Chivalric Communities in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2005)

Kennedy, B., Knighthood in the Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985)

Kim, H., Arthurian Studies XLV: The Knight without the Sword (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000)

Loomis, R.S., The Development of Arthurian Romance (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1963)

McCarthy, T., Arthurian Studies XX: Reading the Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1988)

Putter, A., and Gilbert, J., ed., The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance (Harlow:

Pearson Education Ltd., 2000)

Whetter, K.S., and Radulescu, R.L., ed., Re-viewing Le Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2005)

- - Tolhurst, F., ‘Why Every Knight needs his Lady: Re-viewing questions of Genre and Cohesion in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur’

Whitaker, M., Arthur’s Kingdom of Adventure (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 1984)

[1] Kennedy, B., ‘True Knighthood’, Knighthood in the Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985), p.111. Specific page and line references read: p.153, ll.11-12, 156.24 and 159.39-40. All references to Le Morte Darthur will come from Vinaver, E., ed., Malory Complete Works (Oxford: OUP, 1971) unless otherwise stated.

[2] ‘Trew’ in this sense is comparable to modern English ‘just’, ‘righteous’ or, though infinitely more emphatic, ‘good’.

[3] e.g. in Book VI Chapter 4, VI:7 and VI:9

[4] McCarthy, T., ‘Against Interpretation’, Arthurian Studies XX: Reading the Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1988), p.112.

[5] 675.41-3.

[6] McCarthy, T., ‘Against Interpretation’, Arthurian Studies XX: Reading the Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1988), pp.109-112.

[7] Ibid., p.110

[8] 663.34-5.

[9] See also VI:4 (153.11-12) and VI:7 (156.24).

[10] Kennedy, B., ‘True Knighthood’, Knighthood in the Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985), pp.98-127 and pp.148-210 respectively.

[11] Cherewatuk, K., ‘The King and Queen’s Marriage’, Arthurian Studies LXVII: Marriage, Adultery and Inheritance in Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006), p.49

[12] Ibid., p.50.

[13] Kim, H., ‘The Myth of Gentility and Gentleness’, Arthurian Studies XLV: The Knight without the Sword (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), p.125.

[14] Kennedy, B., ‘True Knighthood’, Knighthood in the Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985), pp.99ff.

[15] 709.36-40.

[16] 710.2-3.

[17] 710.4-7, 19-21

[18] Kim, H., ‘The Myth of Gentility and Gentleness’, Arthurian Studies XLV: The Knight without the Sword (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), pp.125-6.

[19] 710.16-17.

[20] 710.31-32.

[21] 668.22-26.

[22] 520.28-33.

[23] McCarthy, T., ‘Love and License’, Arthurian Studies XX: Reading the Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1988), pp.97-8.

[24] Kennedy, B., ‘True Knighthood’, Knighthood in the Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985), pp.102-110.

[25] Ibid., pp.127-147.

[26] Ibid., pp.102-147.

[27] 676.1-4

[28] Vinaver, E., ed., Malory Complete Works (Oxford: OUP, 1971), p.774, n.676.

[29] 717.43

[30] Cherewatuk, K., ‘The King and Queen’s Marriage’, Arthurian Studies LXVII: Marriage, Adultery and Inheritance in Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006), p.54.

[31] 722-725.

[32] Cherewatuk, K., ‘The King and Queen’s Marriage’, Arthurian Studies LXVII: Marriage, Adultery and Inheritance in Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006), p.54.

[33] Loomis, R.S., The Development of Arthurian Romance (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1963), p.172.

[34] Tolhurst, F., ‘Why Every Knight needs his Lady: Re-viewing questions of Genre and Cohesion in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur’, in Whetter, K.S., and Radulescu, R.L., ed., Re-viewing Le Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2005).

[35] Kim, H., ‘The Economy of Love’, Arthurian Studies XLV: The Knight without the Sword (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), p.26.

[36] 620.21-30.

[37] Cherewatuk, K., ‘The King and Queen’s Marriage’, Arthurian Studies LXVII: Marriage, Adultery and Inheritance in Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006), p.44.

[38] Ibid.

[39] 668.20-21.

[40] 702.19-21.

[41] Cherewatuk, K., ‘The King and Queen’s Marriage’, Arthurian Studies LXVII: Marriage, Adultery and Inheritance in Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006), p.50.

[42] Ibid., p.42.

[43] Ibid., p.37.

[44] 488.6-7.

[45] 528-32, and Cherewatuk, K., ‘The King and Queen’s Marriage’, Arthurian Studies LXVII: Marriage, Adultery and Inheritance in Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006), p.37.

[46] 685.29-32.

[47] 59.25-7, 56-8.

[48] Cherewatuk, K., ‘The King and Queen’s Marriage’, Arthurian Studies LXVII: Marriage, Adultery and Inheritance in Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006), p.27.

[49] Hodges, K., Forging Chivalric Communities in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2005).

[50] See Cherewatuk, K., Arthurian Studies LXVII: Marriage, Adultery and Inheritance in Malory’s Morte Darthur (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006), pp.46ff, Loomis, R.S., The Development of Arthurian Romance (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1963), pp.184-5 and Whitaker, M., Arthur’s Kingdom of Adventure (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 1984)p.103.

Bibliomania

: A rage for collecting and possessing books. (OED)

: An obsessive–compulsive disorder involving the collecting or hoarding of books to the point where social relations or health are damaged. (Wikipedia)

Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872) was nothing if not a bibliomaniac. “He was quite bonkers, I mean he was completely barking,” Mr Horne* tells me. We are sitting in the bookcase-lined living room of the central London residence from which Mr Horne runs his antiquarian book dealing business. And he’s right; Phillipps referred to himself as “a complete Vello-maniac” (as the manuscripts tended to be on vellum). By the time he died he had amassed the largest ever private collection of over 60,000 manuscripts. In doing so he ‘endeavoured,’ as his father-in-law accused him, “to ruin the future prospects of your younger children, by the most ridiculous expenditure of your property perhaps of any Man living!!!!!!’[1]

Yet this obsessive – and destructive – collecting, however barking, has preserved myriad important artefacts, and Phillipps’s motive for doing so is rarely given the attention it warrants.

A French manuscript chronicle of the ancient world, late 15th century, illustrated vellum; one of Mr Horne's finest artefacts.

I ask Mr Horne where, in his opinion, the human compulsion to collect and preserve comes from. “I think there is especially a compulsion to do so at times when old things are being lost or destroyed. Phillips was so horrified by the losses of medieval manuscripts that were occasioned by Napoleon’s armies sacking monasteries around Europe, that he decided to save every manuscript he could … he was completely impassioned by the idea of saving them.”

In fact, Phillips did not begin rescuing manuscripts until he was in his thirties, by which time he was already a hardened bibiomaniac. Bibliomaniacal behaviour was so manifest in Phillipps by the age of twenty that his father wrote angrily to him at university: ‘…I highly disapprove of your going to an auction when you have no money to pay for what you buy … therefore draw in, and if you are wise spend somewhat less than your Income instead of three or four times as much … you will be sorry you have squandered away your property so foolishly…’ [2]

Thus, Thomas Phillipps senior, ‘apprehensive of his son’s continuing extravagance, left the estate in trust, giving his heir access to only the income’. Combined with the honour of baronet secured for Phillipps by his father-in-law in 1821, this provided him with the very decent income of £6,000 p.a. Despite this, he had bought enough within a year to put himself into a debt from which he never emerged. Ironically, his serious spending began in 1822 when he moved to the Continent, being ‘obliged to economize’.

But Europe in the 1820s was a dangerous place for a bibliomaniac; the book-buying climate post-Napoleonic Wars ‘had no previous parallels, and have never been equalled again’.[3] Due to the ‘dispersal and … the destruction of many libraries … it has been computed that [at the time of the Revolution] in the private libraries of France, a nation which led the world in bibliophily, there were thirteen million volumes, ten million of which were destroyed or had changed hands within five years’.[4] This is where Mr Horne’s account takes precedence; undoubtedly the prospect of the destruction of so many manuscripts sent Phillipps into a frenzy.

“And he bought them by what we would now call the container-load,” says Mr Horne. “When he died there were hundreds of cases unopened, of manuscripts … the sales from his libraries took place annually for over a century.”

The last sale of Phillipps’s remaining collected stocks were to the New York dealers H. P. Kraus in 1977, over a century after his death. A. N. L. Munby believes that ‘the lifetime of Sir Thomas Phillipps exactly spans the critical period [of] change [...] When he was born, the collecting of books and manuscripts was the occupation of the dilettanti … When Phillipps died … book-collecting had become a professional business.’[5]

I ask Mr Horne if he’s ever bought a book in which he has no personal interest but which he knows will sell well.

“Yes. That’s the difference between being in business and being a collector. As a collector you can allow your personal tastes to dictate … But I’m fairly spoilt really because I deal in the period that I enjoy … You can get dealers who are just making extensions to their collection. I think it’s very wrong, I think for a start you shouldn’t deal and collect in the same field.”

Why?

“I think you end up actually doing both badly … If you’re collecting in the same field that you deal in, you have a tendency to want to collect the nicest things. In that case you’re actually collecting against the interests of your customers … they undoubtedly would like to buy the nicest things. And the two aren’t really compatible. So I think you have to be quite strict.”

When I ask Mr Horne how the recession has affected his business he tells me “a very interesting – if slightly worrying – story about that. There’s a German auctioneer, who had only just started in the business at the time of the 1929 crash … he said in 1930 the German business was unaffected, in 1929 it had been unaffected, in 1931 there was no German book business. There was a lead-in period of two years. In the preceding years, people had been spending the money that they’d actually earned in the two years before that, when everything had been fine.”

Given the implications this has for the current climate I queried as to how he had survived recessions in the past. “Yes… but this one’s probably worse … This year we’ve done three international fairs so far – one in California, one in Milan and one in New York – and historically New York has been much the biggest for us. In California we did much the same as we often do, not very exciting, but pretty good, ditto Milan, New York… we probably did between 10-20% of the business we’d done in the preceding year.”

At this point I’m interested to ask if the internet – and the increasing availability of manuscript facsimiles online – has impacted this recession in a different way from the last, from his perspective. “I think if anything the long term effect is beneficial because it actually stimulates an interest in what is a rather obscure market, where the entry level now is quite high. If facsimiles have helped to introduce people to manuscripts then I think they’re doing a very good job … if [the antiquarian book trade] becomes too rarefied, and too exclusive, then it dies.”

By this point it has probably emerged that Mr Horne is an antiquarian book trader of international stature with little competition in his specific period of interest. He was given “a very nice sixteenth century book in Latin” by a family friend as a boy, which bit him with the book bug. When he grew up there were four antiquarian book shops within a bus ride of his home. “Sadly”, he says, this “is now more or less impossible”.

I ask him why he thinks this is the case and the response is depressingly familiar. “The real answer is costs. Their rents and business rates. Their businesses are simply not profitable enough, and if you compare the profit margin on a sweater that costs 50p to make in China which is then being sold for £50 on the high streets, and bookseller who if he’s going to get net more than 50% thinks he’s doing very well…”

The antiquarian book trade certainly seems like a very small world now. Where I grew up, in Chiswick, there is one antiquarian bookshop, on the high road. Fosters’ Bookshop is probably what the remembered shops of Mr Horne’s childhood were like: ‘the oldest shop on Chiswick High Road’,[6] books line every wall of the narrow, low-ceilinged space, with jenga-like formations of vintage Folio Society volumes towering on the desk, obscuring Mr Foster from view when you first walk in.

I phone Fosters’ in search of a nice edition of the 1936 classic children’s book Ferdinand the Bull, by Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson.[7] Although it is now out of print it continued to be extremely popular into the 1960s so I’m hopeful about finding a later, cheaper edition. Unusually, Mr Foster says, he doesn’t have it in stock, and advises that I try Marchpane[8] (Rare Children’s and Illustrated Books). Marchpane, as it turns out, has a mint-condition, 1938 edition which, at £60, is a little too dear for me. They advise that I try Nigel Williams (Rare Books), who also specializes in children’s books. When I call Nigel Williams I am disappointed; they do not have it either. “Have you tried Marchpane?” Yes. “It’s a bit further afield, but have you tried Fosters?” Yes. “Right. Sorry…” In the end, I’m ashamed to say, I buy an unused, later edition from Amazon, for £7.10.

When I go to interview Stephen Foster, he confirms for me just how small the antiquarian book trading world is. If a book is stolen, there is a good chance that the thief will be caught if they try to sell it on the market: “they will gravitate towards the specialists in that field” who are, based on my experience so far, likely to know each other. It would be difficult to actually profit from such a theft; should he come across a book from the right period, Mr Foster believes he might even be able to recognize the handwriting of the last trader to mark it up and therefore probably the trader from which it was stolen.

‘Established in 1968, our family-run business has just passed to a second generation of booksellers’, Fosters’ website proudly proclaims. Stephen Foster, unlike Mr Horne, did not go to university. “If you’d asked me when I was seven, what I wanted to be, I’d have said a bookseller … it’s what I’d always wanted to do”. He started working in the family business at eighteen, effectively managing the shop for the next five years, before setting up by himself. His first shop was in Wandsworth, after which he took over the Bell Street shop, which he has now run for twenty years, taking over the Chiswick shop when his parents retired three years ago; his weeks now divided between Chiswick and Bell Street, his father “still pops in occasionally, tells me what I’m doing wrong!”

I ask him how the trade has changed since he’s been in business. “The change in the way books are sold over the last ten, fifteen years, as in with more internet sales… we don’t run internet sales from this shop at all. Predominantly that’s run from the bell street shop because it’s a little bit more central, its quite handy if people see something on the internet, that it’s ten minutes from the British Library, from Oxford Street – people can come in and look at what they’ve seen [online].’ Typing this up in the Rare Books reading room of the British Library I can certainly see his point.

Has the internet helped in that respect? “It’s not necessarily improved our business, all that’s happened is we’ve followed the customers … we used to sell lots of books to people that walked through the door, but as those customers have looked on the internet we’ve followed them to the internet. We’re [not] selling that many more books, what’s happened is fewer people come in the shop and we send out more parcels. So it’s just a different distribution. It’s more time consuming because the internet is quite time consuming. We don’t sit and do the crossword in the morning drinking coffee, which is actually what I probably did do twenty years ago!”

Mr. Foster

When I enquire about the difference between the two shops, it proves a complex distinction for Mr Foster to define. “[At Bell Street] we’ve got a lot of art books which we’re relatively well known for, more academic books, we keep some of our very antiquarian things there … But the thing about the Chiswick shop is it’s still very much a high-street shop, people still shop locally here. I’ve got people who come in this shop … with their children and they were being brought in by their parents, because they’ve always lived in the area.” This is certainly the case, I myself am one of these locals and it transpires during the course of our conversation that I even went to the same local comprehensive school as Mr Foster. I tell him that in April I came in and bought a perfect, hard-backed, signed, first edition of Iain M. Banks’s Excession for my boyfriend (for a very reasonable £15).

“Exactly. Those sorts of things we sell here, nicely bound volumes, poetry, children’s illustrated books, first editions, things that people like to collect, so it’s a range here. This shop I always feel… having been in my own shop for nearly twenty years, when I came and started working in here again, it felt like going back twenty years. Because actually it felt like the way we used to run shops.”

“We do other things as well, we do a bit of furnishing work with interior decorators, for film companies… it means that there are a number of little pigeon-holes for me to think about when I’m buying which gives you a broader range. Fingers in lots of pies is probably the way forward.” I ask him if he thinks this kind of adaptability has helped his businesses to flourish. “If you have a shop which is just doing walk-in trade, you will have suffered from the internet – there’s no two ways about it. Those customers that you had coming in have drifted off but you’ve not replaced it with any other form of income. It depends what sort of business you are. I’m a general bookseller, I mean literally we do everything from Penguin paperbacks through to seventeenth century medical books. In some ways I think if you are very specialist you’re maybe less affected because you have a very particular knowledge in a very particular area. You have your academic customers, your collectors who are buying from you… I suspect you could be very specialist and not worry about the internet too much.”

He is right on the money. Mr Horne said himself that the “long term effect is beneficial”, and indeed his manuscripts and early printed books are bought by “a mixture of private collectors, academic libraries, public institutions, and other dealers … they’re international, so England would only be a small part of a market.”

Whilst Mr Foster does trade overseas – he is currently in discussions with a client in Baghdad and has in the past sent books to aid workers in Afghanistan – the majority of his clientele is English and London-based. Mr Horne diagnosed the dying breed of high-street antiquarian bookshop with inflated rent and business rates whilst Mr Foster’s family-owned high-street shop avoids the issues that would normally affect it in an affluent area such as Chiswick. I believe, however, that the real secret to Mr Foster’s success is his breadth of interest and his ability to evolve in an increasingly tough climate; he may feel that he spends half his week working in a time warp but constantly switching between two very different shops keeps him on his feet and alive to the changing market.

I ask Mr Foster how one goes about valuing a book. “There’s an important distinction: rarity means that there are very few of them, scarcity means that there are fewer copies than the market desires. There are lots of rare books, but the scarce books are the ones worth the money. A good example is Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. Notoriously it’s got a candy pink, Brighton Rock-coloured dust jacket, but underneath it’s got a cherry red cloth. So as the jacket got chipped this red glared through the pink and looked hideous, so people took the jackets off. Consequently, a nice copy of Brighton Rock in a jacket is a ridiculously scarce thing. They hardly ever turn up, and it’s worth tens of thousands of pounds, whilst you can buy a nice first edition without a jacket for a few hundred quid.”

When I ask Mr Horne this question, he answers “With difficulty. To a great extent it’s a matter of experience. Most relatively important books are not rare. There will be plenty of copies, and the copies will be sold from time to time. And so you’d know from being in the business for a long time what sort of prices copies go for, so that gives you a range. And then after that it’s a question of judgement in relation to the individual copy. A copy in its original binding would be worth more than one that’s in a modern binding, generally. A copy that’s particularly large and handsome, that hasn’t been cropped and trimmed, will be better commercially than one that’s been cut down to the mean text block size. One that’s got an interesting early association, interesting annotations, interesting ownership or provenance, is probably going to go ahead of one that is naked and just sort of a bare text. Now, that’s a question of fashion.”

I have asked both dealers what they believe is so special about a first edition. Mr Horne is “a bit cynical about first editions, to be perfectly honest … I think in many cases they’re actually rather overrated. But I understand the appeal where it’s the first appearance in print of something that either is universally important or important to you. Because even if the second appearance is more beautiful, more correct textually, which it often is – somebody’s noticed all the printer’s errors, it’s maybe even revised by the author so it conforms to what he actually had in mind – it’s still not the first time that this book has appeared. I think if it’s a book that makes a great impact when it first appears, then there is a logic to saying ‘I really want the first’. If it’s a book which doesn’t, then actually it’s slightly silly. It’s sort of stamp collecting. There’s a work of Galileo’s, for example, that was printed first in Italian, and it was not much read in Italy, it wasn’t read at all outside it, and nobody apart from a few professionals in the field took much interest in it. Then later on the same year the Latin edition came out which was disseminated very widely, had a huge impact, got Galileo into trouble with the church and the inquisition, famously, and was the work that everyone was talking about, and the work that had the lasting effect. So actually the first, there, was relatively inconsequential and it was the first edition in Latin that actually had the effect”.

Mr Foster also acknowledges the potential for the “stamp collecting” aspect, though he emphasises the personal significance of a first edition for the individual – like the signed, first edition Excession – particularly as a bookseller who works in the gift trade.

I noted with interest that despite all hardship, this year’s Antiquarian Book Fair at London Olympia saw a new record for a 20^th-century first edition. A signed, unopened copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses – which had a huge impact and was banned in the UK for over a decade – was sold by dealer Pom Harrington for £275,000. Of this Mr Foster says that “something truly marvellous will always attract a premium.”

When I inquire as to what the most “truly marvellous” artefact is that he has ever acquired he responds, “It’s not always about value… I had – I’ve kept it actually. (I bought it and tried to sell it and nobody wanted it and I don’t care now.) It’s a vellucent binding – a painted vellum binding – and it’s beautiful. It’s by one of the ladies who worked for Cedric Chivers – he had half a dozen women artists working for him, including Jessie M. King. It’s the Book of Job, illustrated with lovely angels with trumpets… it’s a beautiful binding. The killing thing about it is the inscription inside. It’s someone writing to say ‘I give this book back to you, it was given to me by your father, who fell during the First World War’. They’ve obviously had this painted and then given it to their godson – or whoever it was – it’s lovely.”

I ask Mr Horne what is, or has been, the most interesting artefact that has come into his possession. “Interesting…?” Interesting, inspiring, beautiful, valuable, it’s up to him. “Terribly difficult. It’s ever such a long time, isn’t it? I suppose there’s one at the moment which is the first edition, or first edition in Latin more accurately, of the letter that Columbus wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella telling them about his new discoveries across the oceans. It’s a lovely late sixteenth century Roman binding, which was very appropriate – and it’s a complete fake. It’s a deliberate nineteenth century fake. Designed to be sold to the American billionaires of the late nineteenth century who were collecting anything that related to America.” When I ask how this affected the sale he replies, “I haven’t sold it at all, I’ve kept it.” Although he continues to explain that he has only recently managed to “finally settle” the origins of this fake first edition, I do find it intriguing that neither dealer has yet “managed to sell” his treasure.

The cover of the faux, 15th century, Latin first edition of Christopher Columbus's letter to Ferdinand and Isabella.

...and the watermarks that helped to give it away.

It is hard to discern whether they have not yet found the right clients for their marvellous books, or whether they are both subconsciously retaining them. Either way it could well be a symptom of bibliomania.

If one takes into account the period of strange flux in which Thomas Phillipps was buying books and manuscripts, he was not only indulging an irrational, irresponsible excess; he was clearly also safeguarding against the future, conscious that ‘much of what he gathered was at risk of destruction. He bid high in the rooms and forced the market upwards against himself, but he recognized that higher prices would encourage preservation.’ Famously, Phillipps himself had tried to rescue records from the flames when the Palace of Westminster burnt down in 1834. When Mr Foster and I talk about Phillipps, he tells me “an old customer of mine was a psychiatrist, who once said to me ‘you do realise that Bibliomania is a condition – a very mild one, but it’s still a condition!’”

[1] Excerpt from a letter dated 9/4/1833, A. N. L. Munby, Portrait of an Obsession: The Life of Sir Thomas Phillipps, the world’s greatest book collector (London: Constable, 1967), p.13-14. All further references will be to this edition, contained within the main body of the text.

[2] Excerpt from a letter dated 26/6/1812, Munby, Portrait of an Obsession, p. 5.

[3] Munby, Portrait of an obsession, p. 15.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid, p. xvi.

[6] http://www.fostersbookshop.co.uk/

[7] Watch the fantastic 1938 Disney animation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGTVRbpAuRo

[8] http://www.marchpane.com/