Life Itself

 One thing leads to another. How do you get from the Daily Poem in the Paris Review to a re-read of The Loved One and an exploding portable toilet courtesy of Evelyn Waugh?

Here’s the Annmarie Drury poem that caught my attention:

Walking in Hills of Which One Has Seen Many Paintings

Your task differs: to leave
the world to its own particular
fragility: not to turn it to emblems the way

shadows of cows in a pond once
became emblems of the heat
of a summer day. Within borders of your

vision, imperfect frame, the sun
sets, shadows are allowed
to darken away. Others knew this landscape,

but you know there must
always be those who only watch
and, watching, wander off; while quietly,

quietly even the most suggestive
fragility undertakes its own slow
transformation, cedes to its own complexity.

So things are seen on a walk, in life, are the things themselves – not a sign, a symbol, an image, representation or emblem of something else. As the things themselves. Wallace Stevens put it this way; “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself”. 

Is it possible to disconnect what we see from our ideas about what we see and from the things (art for example that have created those meanings and associations? Like the paintings of cows in a pond signaling the heat of summer. It’s every country walk through a cow pasture in summer with the cows seeking shade by a stream or pond, their tails flicking the flies, and the ground slick with cow pats. Careful! Don’t worry about your shoes. Don’t slip!

Drury’s poem ends with the knowledge that others have been here before us. They walked the landscape and saw the sunset and gave it meaning.

Sunset

It was Paul Fussell who put me onto sunsets. In The Great War and Modern Memory, he comments on how the literary tradition of the Romantics and the Victorians had imbued the sunset with meaning and significance,

The experience of living in the trenches of the Western Front and the ritual of stand-to at the beginning and the end of the day established a new awareness of sunrise and sunset.

What one stared at twice daily for years on end, thus, was sunrise and sunset. “We have a unique opportunity of viewing sunrise and sunset in the trenches,” writes Hugh Quigley, “owing to the decree that men must stand-to at daybreak and nightfall.” And if Flanders was flat and wet, it had the distinction of offering terrain and weather productive of superb dawns and dusks. “I have never seen such glorious vistas of sunset or sunrise as in this country,”

It was a cruel reversal that sunrise and sunset, established by over a century of Romantic poetry and painting as the tokens of hope and peace and rural charm, should now be exactly the moments of heightened ritual anxiety. What literate young man could forget, during the hour of stand-to, the sunrises of Blake and Shelley, of Tennyson and Arnold, the sunsets of Wordsworth and Byron and Browning, and even of Sir Henry Newbolt? Those attentive to the history of taste know that sky awareness is a fairly late development. There is little of it, for example, in the eighteenth century, which felt no pressing need for such emblems of infinity as sky or sea.

As we can see from the Nash paintings, sunrise and sunset lend meaning to our perceptions of the scenes. The hopeful optimism of the title (We are Making a New World) is rendered ironic by the scene of utter desolation of a ruined lifeless landscape. The sun is rising on what exactly? The huge red watery sunset contributes melancholy to the Totes Meer (Dead Sea) graveyard of the downed plane. 

In Fussell’s view, the key document in the history of British awareness of the sky is the influential five volumes of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1843-1860).

Here Ruskin asserts that hitherto no one has paid sufficient attention to the sky, and that we have thus missed much of what Nature has to tell us for our moral benefit. The effects of the sky, he says, are “intended” by their “Maker and Doer” for our pleasure as well as our moral instruction. The sky speaks universally to the human heart, “soothing it and purifying it from its dross and dust.” And the great exponent of the sky’s moral work is the painter J. M. W. Turner. His renderings of sunrise and sunset are far superior to those of Claude Lorraine, and for Ruskin the painter of such effects is a master artist whose achievements in light and color imitate those of God himself in His most earnest pedagogic moments.

We had some spectacular sunsets when we lived in Duchess County. Here’s one magnificent example from November 2015.

Modem Painters was immensely influential in establishing the visual taste of the Victorians and their successors. Charlotte Bronte wrote of it: “This book seems to give me eyes,” and she was followed by several generations uniquely devoted to observing sunrise and sunset with an almost mystical enthusiasm.

As Fussell notes – the literature of WW1 is stuffed with sunrises and sunsets.

Emphasized as objects of close attention by the daily rituals of stand-to, sanctified as morally meaningful by the long tradition of Ruskin, these sunrises and sunsets, already a staple of prewar Georgian poetry and the literature of the Celtic “Twilight,” move to the very center of English poetry of the Great War. They are its constant atmosphere and its special symbolic method.

Marlene was presumed to be a year younger. But for Micky’s violent denials she might have been taken for his twin. She was the offspring of unusually prolonged coincident periods of liberty in the lives of her parents which the sociologist must deplore, for Marlene was simple. An appeal to have her certified imbecile was disallowed by the same inspecting doctor, who expressed an opinion that country life might work wonders with the child.

There the three had stood, on the eve of the war, in Malfrey Parish Hall, one leering, one lowering, and one drooling, as unprepossessing a family as could be found in the kingdom.

Our hero finds an ingenious way to manage the family while making a handsome profit.  This is not the finest hour of the British Blitz spirit, but classic Waugh. He was not of the #BeKind brigade.

It’s also very much in the spirit of the set of evacuee playing cards produced at the same time featuring some very unflattering of evacuees. It reflects the well-documented culture shock of the meeting between the middle class of the English shires and the urban poor.

And to add to the fun Waugh gave his evacuees the surname Connelly, not an accidental choice. Waugh made a habit of teasing and tweaking his friend and literary rival Cyril Connelly. It’s almost a running joke of his novels. In Black Mischief (1932) there is a General Connolly an Irish mercenary and former gamekeeper who has scandalously married a native of the African nation of Azania.  Men at Arms (1952) has a comic set piece involving an exploding portable toilet on the inside lid of which was embossed ‘Connolly’s Chemical Closet’. 

For a full detailed accounting of Waugh’s war on Connelly read Duncan McLaren  

The Loved One begins with a funny scene that mentions the “out-dated” Horizon – the literary magazine that Connolly founded in 1940.

Waugh had visited California in early 1947 and become fascinated with the extravaganza of the Forest Lawn cemetery and its mortuary practices. 

He asked if  Connolly would publish it as a special but regular edition of Horizon. Connolly agreed,  and so the book appeared in February 1948.

The first edition of the book came with illustrations by Peter Boyle who took detailed instructions from Waugh on what the they should show.  As McLaren points out the ridiculing of Connolly continued in the prose (the character Sir Francis the Hollywood ex-pat and  Mr Joyboy the embalmer) and the illustrations.  

As chance has it the latest Times Literary Supplement has a review of a new edition of The Loved One. This Oxford University Press edition, edited by Adrian Poole comes at the bargain price of  £130 (US $170)

This edition is part of OUP’s Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh and comes with all the reverential minutiae required by the true Waughian scholar. It also has the original set of illustrations by Stuart Boyle.

Raw Anarchy and Independent Systems 

The review concluded with these words from Waugh from 1946:

I have come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as normality. That is
what makes story-telling such an absorbing task, the attempt to reduce to order the anarchic raw
materials of life. The artist’s only service to the disintegrated society of today is to create little
independent systems of order of his own.