Goethe

"...he is, surely, among all the truly great writers of this world, the least read in the English-speaking world."

-A. N. Wilson, Goethe: His Faustian Life

 

The owl stands tall.

Is that true? It might be! But I've been trying to do my part.

 

Biography 

 

Johann Wolfgang Goethe (not yet von Goethe) was born to a upper middle class family in Frankfurt in 1749; he went to Weimar in 1775 for what was supposed to be a visit to the duke, Karl August; it became his permanent residence until he died.

 

Karl August invited him because at 26 Goethe was already celebrated. His first play, Götz von Berlichingen, was a hit in Germany, but his novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther of 1774, made him famous across Europe. Napoleon, in the middle of his wars, stopped to meet Goethe, and claimed to have read Werther six times.

 

When Goethe shows up in Weimar, Karl August has just turned eighteen and taken over after his mother's regency. He's still a bit of a wild child, and Goethe's first role in Weimar is to provide amusements for the young duke. The most innocent of these is Goethe teaching Karl August how to ice skate; how un-innocent these get is still argued about, but Karl August was pretty much the whole of his life a notorious womanizer. Nevertheless, Karl August's formerly reigning mother, Anna Amalia, is also fond of Goethe, so much so that it was sometimes rumored that Goethe had an affair with Anna Amalia, though neither of those biographies shown above believed it true.

 

In time both Goethe and Karl August steady down, and Goethe becomes a useful privy councillor to the Weimar duchy. The finances there are appalling--Goethe improves them: he regularizes taxation and reforms (shrinks) the army; his attempts to revive an abandoned silver mine in the territory are less successful. He serves on a commission to improve the roads, which is supposed to help the economy as well.

 

But of course he's Goethe, and anyway Anna Amalia was interested in making the duchy a cultural center. Goethe takes over the official court theater, writing plays, directing, acting, but also bringing in other talent, mostly notably Friedrich Schiller in 1787. Goethe and Schiller, though not immediately, become great friends, deeply influential on each others' work, until Schiller's death from tuberculosis in 1805.

There had long been a university at Jena, fifteen or so miles from Weimar, but still in the duchy. It's Goethe who brings in the scholars that make it one of the great German universities. Not just Schiller, but also Fichte, Schlegel, Hegel. I read a book about that a couple of years ago.

 

Goethe travels--but not much really. Switzerland, back home to Frankfurt (though not often). Most famously to Italy, twice: it's the first trip (1786-1788) that is the most important; he spends a long period in Rome, living somewhat incognito, though he also gets to Naples, where he meets William and Emma Hamilton.  He goes a second time to Venice to escort Anna Amalia back to Weimar after her own Grand Tour.

 

After his first trip to Rome he meets Christiane Vulpius, the daughter of impoverished pastor who comes to him seeking help for her brother. She's not the sort of woman somebody like Goethe should marry, but they start living together. She bears him several children, though only the eldest, named August in honor of the duke, survives to adulthood. The court is horrified (well, not the duke himself, who only suggests Goethe keep Christiane out of sight) but not, as it turns out, Goethe's mother, who though she scarcely meets Christiane, likes her. After the battle between Napoleon and Prussia on the outskirts of Jena in 1806, Christiane famously defends Goethe's house from the victorious marauding French troops, and Goethe decides, propriety be damned, I'm marrying that woman. And does.

 

He writes, you know, some famous works. Not just Werther and Faust, both of which I've read, though not recently, but also The Roman Elegies, Dichtung und Wahrheit, which is his autobiography until his move to Weimar,  and a collection of poetry, West-Eastern Divan.

 

Goethe is ennobled, becoming von Goethe, and dies in 1832 at the good age of 82. But this is after his duke, his great friend Schiller, his wife, and his son August, the only child of his to survive until adulthood have all died. (His daughter-in-law and his grandchildren were alive at his death.)

 

Biographies

OK, you may not really need to read three biographies of Goethe, but that's what I did. The first one I finished was by A. N. Wilson, Goethe: His Faustian Life. Wilson is British, a prolific man of letters, who admirably makes his way by writing--with panache--serious books for adults. This was a good biography of Goethe. Wilson was occasionally perverse. Was Goethe a drunk? Hmm, possibly. No doubt he drank more than was good for him. Was Goethe bisexual? Nobody else seems to think so, and the one poem from the Venetian Epigrams which Wilson quotes and might suggest it, is pretty clearly written in imitation of ancient models. The amusing thing about Wilson's biography is the emphasis he puts on how Goethe would have been a nobody had he not wrapped everything up at the end of of his life. Maybe not entirely true? There was already Werther and the first part of Faust. It is true the second part of Faust, Dichtung und Wahrheit, and the ending of Wilhelm Meister were only completed in the last years of his life, but this did feel a bit like Wilson (now 74) writing more about himself than Goethe.

 

Still, I'd cheerfully recommend this biography of Wilson's--it's recent, 2024, it's punchy, it's got the facts--except there's a better choice. So unless you're reading three...

 

The second one I finished was Goethe's autobiography. I've been calling it by its German title, Dichtung und Wahrheit, which is usually translated as Poetry and Truth, but I read it in a 1897 translation by John Oxenford which titled it Truth and Fiction. (You can find it on Project Gutenberg.) It covers the years from Goethe's birth until his move to Weimar at age 26. It's pretty fascinating. Goethe is interested in education--Rousseau was in the air, as weird as he is, Julie and Emile, and gets a discussion in Dichtung und Wahrheit--and the book is about Goethe's education, not just in schools, but in life. Was he going to be a lawyer? Or was he going to be a poet? I thought Oxenford's translation of the prose was good; when Goethe was trying to convey something that depended on a particular German word, Oxenford handled it with particular sensitivity. But Goethe is also a poet, and has a habit of embedding poetry in his prose narratives, and, let us just say, it may have been as well Oxenford did not use the word Poetry in his title of the book. A fascinating work, covering a bit over a quarter of Goethe's life, but I would hope there's a better translation out there.

 

The last one I finished is the great one. Rüdiger Safranski's Goethe: Life as a Work of Art was celebrated when it came out in Germany in 2013, and was translated into English by David Dollenmeyer in 2017. Dollenmeyer's translation strikes me as superb and he has no need to avoid the word Poetry: 

Wanderer's Night-Song

Peace lies over

All the peaks.

In all the trees

You sense

Hardly a breath;

The little forest birds fall silent.

Wait, and soon

You too will rest.

 

-Goethe (tr. David Dollenmeyer)

 

I featured this in a couple of other translations a few weeks ago after finishing Wilson's biography. I now think I like Dollenmeyer's version best. 

 

Safranski, too, has a thesis; it's suggested by his subtitle, Life as a Work of Art. He writes, "Goethe returns from Italy with the idea of being a sovereign human being," as if what made Goethe important was his self-actualization, reaching the top of the Maslow pyramid. He probably did reach the top of the pyramid. Still I more think what makes Goethe interesting is that he wrote a bunch of great books. (See above.)

One amusing thing I learned is that Goethe thought the portrait of him by Angelica Kaufmann was too flattering and didn't really look like him. Too bad. I speculated in my post on Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship that Wilhelm's adventures were helped because he looked the Goethe of this portrait. Maybe even Goethe didn't look like the Goethe of this portrait...

 

Anyhoo... Safranski's is the biography of Goethe to read at the moment as far as I can tell, and in Dollenmeyer's translation for those of us who aren't up to reading it in German.

 

This post is now in serious tl;dr territory and I didn't even get to those two books of poetry. Maybe I'll come back to Roman Elegies at some point. So why all this Goethe?  (And the other German things on the blog this year: Heinrich Heine, Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig.) We've got a trip planned to Germany at the end of September--Yay!--and we're concentrating on the southeast, Weimar, Leipzig, Dresden. 

 

Do you like immerse yourself in a place in advance by reading? 

Fragment of a Greek Tragedy

Fragment of a Greek Tragedy

from the lost Alcmaeon of Aeschylus

CHORUS 

 

O suitably-attired-in-leather-boots

Head of a traveller, wherefore seeking whom

Whence by what way how purposed are thou come

To this well-nightingaled vicinity?

My object in inquiring is to know.

But if you happen to be deaf and dumb

And do not understand a word I say,

Then wave your hand, to signify as much.

 

ALCMAEON

 

I journeyed hither a Boeotian road.

 

CHO.

 

Sailing on horseback, or with feet for oars?
 

ALC.

 

Plying with speed my partnership of legs.

 

CHO.

 

Beneath a shining or a rainy Zeus?

 

ALC.

 

Mud's sister, not himself, adorns my shoes.

 

CHO.

 

To learn your name would not displease me much.

 

ALC.

 

Not all that men desire do they obtain.

 

CHO.

 

Might I then hear at what your presence shoots?

 

ALC.

 

A shepherd's questioned mouth informed me that--

 

CHO.

 

What? for I know not yet what you will say.

 

 ALC.

 

Nor will you ever if you interrupt.

 

CHO.

 

Proceed, and I will hold my speechless tongue.

 

ALC.

 

---This house was Eriphyla's, no one's else.

 

CHO.

 

Nor did he shame his throat with hateful lies.

 

ALC.

 

May I then enter, passing through the door?

 

CHO.

 

Go, chase into the house a lucky foot.

And, O my son, be, on the on hand, good,

And do not, on the other hand, be bad;

For that is very much the safest plan.

 

ALC.

 

I go into the house with heels and speed.

 

CHO. [strophe]

 

  In speculation

I would not willingly acquire a name

  For ill-digested thought;

  But after pondering much

To this conclusion I at last have come:

  Life is uncertain.

  This truth I have written deep

  In my reflective midriff

  On tablets not of wax,

Nor with a pen did I inscribe it there

For many reasons: Life, I say, is not

  A stranger to uncertainty.

Not from the flight of omen-yelling fowls

  This fact did I discover,

Nor did the Delphic tripod bark it out

  Nor yet Dodona.

Its native ingenuity sufficed

  My self-taught diaphragm.

 

[Antistrophe]

 

  Why should I mention

The  Inachaean daughter, loved of Zeus?
  Her whom of old the gods,

  More provident than kind,

Provided with four hoofs, two horns, one tail

  A gift not asked for,

  And sent her forth to learn

  The unfamiliar science

  Of how to chew the cud.

She therefore all about the Argive fields

Went cropping pale green grass and nettle-tops,

  Nor did they disagree with her.

But yet, how'er nutritious, such repasts

  I do not hanker after:

Never may Cypris for her seat select

  My dappled liver!

Why should I mention Io? Why indeed?

  I have no notion why.

 

But now does my boding heart,

Unhired, unaccompanied, sing

A strain not meet for the dance,

Yea even the palace appears

To my yoke of circular eyes

(The right, nor omit I the left)

Like a slaughterhouse, so to speak

Garnished with wooly deaths

And many shipwrecks of cows.

 

I therefore in a Cissian strain lament

  And to the rapid,

Loud, linen-tattering thumps upon my chest

  Resounds in concert

The battering of my unlucky head.

 

ERIPHYLA [within]:
 

O, I am smitten with a hatchet's jaw;

And that in deed and not in word alone.

 

CHO.

 

I thought I heard a sound with the house

Unlike the voice of one that jumps for joy.

 

ERI.

 

He splits my skull, not in a friendly way,

Once more: he purposes to kill me dead.

 

CHO.

 

I would not be reputed rash, but yet

I doubt if all be gay within the house.

 

ERI.

 

O! O!  another stroke! That makes the third,

He stabs me to the heart against my wish.

 

CHO.

 

If that be so, thy state of health is poor;

But thine arithmetic is quite correct.

 

-A. E. Housman

 

Well, I did have The Shropshire Lad off the shelf the other day, and in it was folded this photocopy of 'Fragment of a Greek Tragedy'. I was laughing out loud, and the Other Reader said, what? So I had to hand over my copy.

 

It's not so hard to find this on the Internet these days, but once upon a time it was passed around like samizdat among classicists. Apparently while Housman didn't mind it circulating, he did feel it was not something to be profited from, and it's not generally included with his poetry. There are several versions, the first one written when he was 24 which appeared in his former high school's literary magazine. This is a later version. One semester I was reading Aeschylus' Agamemnon with my favorite undergraduate teacher, and she asked, did I know this? I did not. This photocopy was ready for me at our next class.

 

There really was an Alcmaeon by Aeschylus, which is lost. Alcmaeon was the son of one of the Seven Against Thebes, and his mother Eriphyla encouraged his father Amphiaraus to join that assault even though everybody knew perfectly well it was going to fail and Amphiaraus was going to die. In this Alcmaeon returns to kill his mother, which will lead to the usual Greek tragedy sort of outcome. Aeschylus was considered a bit of a windbag even by the ancients: see Aristophanes' Frogs.

 

Housman does it all properly, too: the dialog is in iambics, as it would be in the original, and he uses a choral meter for strophe and antistrophe. The ancient Greeks located thought and feelings differently. While we might have our hearts broken or feel something in our gut, for the ancient Greeks thought occurred in the diaphragm and the liver was where you felt the deeper emotions. Hence Cypris--a cult title for Aphrodite--should stay away from the speaker's liver.

Look not in my eyes, for fear

XV

Look not in my eyes, for fear

  They mirror true the sight I see,

And there you find your face too clear

  And love it and be lost like me.

One the long nights through must lie

  Spent in star-defeated sighs,

But why should you as well as I

  Perish? gaze not in my eyes.

 

A Grecian lad, as I hear tell,

  One that many loved in vain,

Looked into a forest well

  And never looked away again.

There, where the turf in springtime flowers,

   With downward eye and gazes sad,

Stands amid the glancing showers

  A jonquil, not a Grecian lad.

 

-A. E. Housman

 

I was googling poems about eyes earlier in the week and reminded myself of this. The second stanza is a reference to Narcissus, who, of course, fell in love with his own image in a pond, and was so stationary from that time on, he was turned into a flower. A Shropshire Lad comes out in 1896, when Housman was 26, and presumably the first verse refers to the great, almost certainly Platonic, love of his early life, Moses Jackson.

 

I can't think of Housman without thinking of two other things. One is the Wendy Cope poem:

 

Another Unfortunate Choice 

I think I'm in love with A. E. Housman

Which puts me in a terrible fix,

No woman ever stood a chance with Housman

And he's been dead since 1936.

 

-Wendy Cope 

 

And the other thing Housman's very name brings to mind? The hilarious Fragment of a Greek Tragedy, of course. But that's for another day.

Lord Lucky

Lord Lucky

Lord Lucky, by a curious fluke,

Became a most important duke.

From living in a vile Hotel

A long way east of Camberwell

He rose, in less than half an hour,

To riches, dignity, and power.

It happened in the following way:

The Real Duke went out one day

To shoot with several people, one

Of whom had never used a gun.

This gentleman (a Mr Meyer

Of Rabley Abbey, Rutlandshire),

As he was scrambling through the brake,

Discharged his weapon by mistake,

And plugged about an ounce of lead

Piff-bang into his Grace's Head--

Who naturally fell down dead.

His Heir, Lord Ugly, roared, 'You Brute!

Take that to teach you how to shoot!'

Whereat he volleyed, left and right;

But being somewhat short of sight,

His right-hand barrel only got

The second heir, Lord Poddleplot;

The while the left-hand charge (or choke)

Accounted for another bloke,

Who stood with an astounded air

Bewildered by the whole affair

--And was the third remaining heir.

After the Execution (which

Is something rare among the Rich)

Lord Lucky, while of course he needed

Some help to prove his claim, succeeded.

--But after his succession, though

All this was over years ago,

He only once indulged his whim

Of asking Meyer to lunch with him.

 

-Hilaire Belloc

 

The poem is mostly written in iambic tetrameter couplets, but two of the three deaths get a third rhyme. Poor Lord Poddleplot doesn't even get that third rhyme.

Whenever I think of this poem I'm always reminded of Kind Hearts and Coronets, though Lord Lucky is lucky in ways the Alec Guinness character--in any of his shapes--is distinctly not...

 

 

 

van de Wetering's Tumbleweed

"Have you noticed that nothing ever happens in Amsterdam?"

Doesn't that just tell you something's about to happen?

The beautiful Maria van Buren is found murdered on her houseboat when a neighbour becomes worried about her cat, who doesn't seem to be getting food at home.

It's Grijpstra and de Gier, Amsterdam detectives, hanging around, bored at the office, who catch the case when the request comes to check up on von Braun. That's Grijpstra complaining above.

But they'd already been keeping an eye on the von Braun houseboat since the Dutch Secret Service had asked them to. So they arrive with a warrant, break a window, and discover the dead woman with a British commando knife that has been thrown, not plunged, into Maria von Braun's back. 

Maria von Braun had her luxurious houseboat because she was sleeping with three well-to-do men, a senior American Army officer, a Belgian diplomat, and a Dutch industrialist. That combination was why the Secret Service was interested. She was estranged from her family in Dutch Curaçao who disapproved of her lifestyle. And she was engaged in sorcery.

All that provides a decently satisfying list of suspects. Who wanted to do it? Who has an alibi? Who had access to a commando knife and knew how to throw it?

Grijpstra and de Gier are protagonists of a series of fourteen novels, plus a volume of short stories, by Janwillem van de Wetering. Grijpstra is the bachelor who likes motorcycles and has a cat of his own; de Gier is the married one, a bit more sensible, though now running to fat. They make a good team. The Commisaris (which, I assume, is Dutch for commissioner) who is their boss, has a significant part in this one. He's never given a name, but he's a likeable character. This is the second in the series and dates from 1976. It was a strong entry, I thought, and may be the best of the ones I've read. I'd say the series is more about mood than particularly tricky or thrilling plots, though this had both some trickiness and thrills.

I haven't been reviewing many books lately (though reading lots) and need to knock off a few for my European Reading Challenge:

Hadn't been to the Netherlands yet this year, but now I have!

 

Sportif

Scottie is glowing with excitement.

 

Sportif

Prescott, press my Ascot waistcoat--

Let's not risk it

Just to whisk it:

Yes, my Ascot waistcoat, Prescott.

Worn sub-fusc, it's

Cool and dusk: it

Might be grass-cut

But it's Ascot,

And it fits me like a gasket--

Ascot is the waistcoat, Prescott! 

Please get

Off the spot of grease. Get

Going, Prescott--

Where's that waistcoat?

It's no task at

All, an Ascot:

Easy as to clean a musket

Or to dust an ivory tusk. It

Doesn't take a lot of fuss. Get

To it, Prescott,

Since I ask it:

We can't risk it--

Let's not whisk it.

That's the waistcoat;

Thank you, Prescott.

 

-David McCord

 

There was a comment  on my blog the other day that referenced the Library of America Poetry Project volume American Wits, edited by John Hollander, and I thought there's a book I haven't looked at in a while. (Twenty years ago, says the database.) I nearly read it through again tonight. Lots of fun stuff.

 

You'll have to decide how Prescott should be pronounced. Among other things it's a town in Arizona. I can only note that, after my parents retired there in '95, I told a colleague at work (who was from Arizona) that they'd moved to Press-cot, and he told me they'd actually moved to Press-kit. And it's quite possible our servant is, at least some of the time, Press-coat. 

Hilaire Belloc

Ballade of Hell and Mrs. Roebuck

I'm going out to dine at Gray's

  With Bertie Morden, Charles, and Kit,

And Manderley, who never pays,

 And Jane who wins in spite of it,

 And Algernon who won't admit

The truth about his curious hair

  And teeth that very nearly fit:--

And Mrs. Roebuck will be there.

 

And then tomorrow someone says

  That someone else has made a hit

In one of Mister Twister's plays,

  And off we go to yawn at it;

  And when it's petered out we quit

For number 20, Taunton Square,

  And smoke, and drink, and dance a bit:--

And Mrs. Roebuck will be there.

 

And through each declining phase

  Of emptied effort, jaded wit,

And day by day of London days,

  Obscurely, more obscurely, lit;

  Until the uncertain shadows flit

Announcing to the shuddering air

  A darkening, and the end of it:--

And Mrs. Roebuck will be there.

 

Envoi

 

Prince, on their iron thrones they sit,

  Impassable to our despair,

The dreadful guardians of the pit:--

  And Mrs. Roebuck will be there.

 

-Hilaire Belloc

 

 

Ooh. That awful Mrs. Roebuck. One wonders what she's actually done.

 

Fortunately I'm not often forced into proximity with high society--and this week, when this post appears, least of all. We're off to the Internet-free zone and it's more likely Mrs. Beaver than Mrs. Roebuck. Should we see any species of deer, it will be white-tailed rather than red.

 

I do like Hilaire Belloc's light verse as well as the ballade form. 

 

Pretty off-topic, but thoughts of High Society always remind me of:

 

Rivier-eh and Missour-eh is such a great rhyme. The original Tammy Wynette and George Jones version is pretty good, too, but since I've seen both John Prine and Iris DeMent live...

And while I have the Belloc volume in my hand:

Habitations

Kings live in Palaces, and Pigs in sties,

And Youth in Expectation. Youth is wise.

 

-Hilaire Belloc

 

Matthew Hollis

Beck

The brim that broke the river came on land.

Its skirts were vast from so much rain and made

the grass beneath it dance, wild hair of the drowned.

We trailed it to the road, where a cattle grid

gulped it down, and where a hedgehog whirled

it its mitten of thorns. Back then, we sought

such life, and found a plank and edged it in

but the urchin would not climb to his escape.

 

By morning the grid had emptied, the wood

had snapped clean in two. You suppose a fox

or brock had dug the creature out.

I wanted to believe he'd made it home.

But faith in faith is not enough.

We go on love alone.

 

-Matthew Hollis

 

I was reading a review of Matthew Hollis' most recent book, The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem, and it sounded interesting, but I wasn't quite sure I was prepared to read a 500 page book about 'The Waste Land'. 😉But in looking up who this Matthew Hollis was, I found a couple of his poems, and decided he was worth reading, so I got hold of and read his two volumes of poetry. I especially liked his second one, Earth House, from 2023, which this poem is from, but his earlier volume, Ground Water, of 2004, was also good.

 

His two non-fiction books are about the poets T. S. Eliot and Edward Thomas. I felt T. S. Eliot strongly present in Earth House, but I would have said he was reading The Four Quartets more than A Waste Land and Other Poems. 'Beck' is sonnet-ish, depending on how strongly typed you like your sonnets. It's fourteen lines, with a clear turn after the eighth line, but it goes from pentameters at the beginning to a trimeter at the end, and if you were to say it rhymes at all, they slant a whole lot. Though I did find the 'made it home/love alone' near-rhyme to be pretty effective myself.

 

'Brock' is derived from the Celtic word for badger, and means badger--I had to look that up. A 'beck' is a North of England word for a small stream, particularly one in a valley. He gives notes about the places the poems represent at the end of the volume. Of this one he says, 'Pelter Bridge, Under Loughrigg, River Rothay, Cumbrae, 13 October 2005.' I suppose the Rothay was in flood on that day, but I didn't look it up. 

 

 

The Old Philosopher

The Old Philosopher

Sixty-seven years now I've banged my hard-thinking brains

  'round the world. So, still a kid in the pink?

Meh, maybe. In truth there were those first twenty-five years

  when I did not even bother to think.

 

-Reese Warner (after Xenophanes)

 

This poem of mine came out at the webzine The Asses of Parnassus recently. It's an adaptation (not really a translation) of a short poem by the philosopher Xenophanes, who was born in Asia Minor (the west coast of Turkey) and died in Syracuse. His years are approximately 570 - 478 B.C. The poem was preserved as evidence that Xenophanes lived to be at least 92 years old.

 

The Greek original:

ἤδη δ᾽ἐπτα τ´ἔασι και ἐξήκοντ᾽ενιαυτοί
  βληστρίζοντες ἐμὴν φροντίδ᾽άν Ὲλλάδα γῆν
έκ γενετῆς δὲ τότ᾽ἦσαν έείκοσι πέντε τε πρὸς τοῖς
  εἴπερ ἐγω περὶ τῶνδε οἶδα λέγειν έτυμως.

The fun word in this is blastrizontes (the word that begins with a B at the beginning of the second line). It's an unusual word and  means something like to toss and turn, and is usually used of someone suffering from a fever. I didn't exactly preserve that metaphor.

 

The poem shows up in Diogenes Laertius' brief biography of Xenophanes in The Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. Here's Pamela Mensch's more literal translation:

 

Seven and sixty years have by now been

  Buffeting my thought up and down the land of Greece;

And since my birth there have been twenty-five more,

  If I may speak truly about these matters.

 

-Xenophanes (tr. Pamela Mensch)

 

Not much is actually known about his philosophy.

"When Empedocles said to him that the wise man remained undiscovered, he replied, 'As one might expect, since it takes one to find one.'"

I don't know that Gumby is actually an eminent philosopher, but still he managed to photobomb my picture.

The old philosopher shown above is from Raphael's 'School of Athens' in the Vatican, reproduced on the cover of my copy of Diogenes Laertius. He's usually identified with Carneades, and not Xenophanes

Hengist and Horsa

Hengist and Horsa

Hengist was coarser than Horsa

And Horsa was awfully coarse.

Horsa drank whiskey,

Told tales that were risqué,

But Hengist was in a divorce.

 

Horsa grew coarser and coarser,

But Hengist was coarse all his life.

That reprobate Horsa

Drank tea from a saucer,

But Hengist ate peas with his knife.

 

-Desmond Carter

 

 

Search the Internet for Hengist and Horsa and you end up with some informative article about the possibly mythical German brothers who led an army of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes to invade England in the 5th Century AD. They did what they could to bring us English. Geoffrey of Monmouth writes:

"About this time there landed in certain parts of Kent three vessels of the type we call longships. They were full of armed warriors and there were two brothers named Hengist and Horsa in command of them."

The brothers show up in Bede as well. 

But did I care about that? I did not! I was looking for Desmond Carter's inspired bit of nonsense about the brothers, and it was harder to find on the Internet than it should have been. Carter was a British lyricist who worked with composers such as George Gershwin and Ivor Novello. He also wrote the English lyrics to Gloomy Sunday, covered by Billie Holiday and Paul Robeson.

 

And why did this occur to me? Well, the Other Reader and I were out for lunch, and I ordered the fish and chips, with peas, which are in season for us, and there I was pushing peas on to my fork with my knife--not, quite!, eating peas with my knife--and while I couldn't remember the rest of the poem, I did manage, "But Hengist ate peas with his knife..."

 

Wanderer's Nightsong (#poem)

 

Wanderer's Night-song

O'er all the hilltops

Is quiet now,

In all the tree-tops

Hearest thou

Hardly a breath;

The birds are asleep in the trees:

Wait, soon like these,

Thou too shall rest.

 

-Goethe (tr. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

 

 

I just finished A. N. Wilson's recent biography of Goethe (pretty good!) and came across this poem. Goethe wrote the poem on the wall of a gamekeeper's hut in the mountains of Thuringia, Germany in 1776. He mentioned it in a letter, and friends copied it out and later published it without his approval. He never thought to include it in one of his own books, but now it's sometimes considered the most perfect lyric in German and was set to music by Schubert.

 

Six months before his death with his health failing, Goethe insisted he could still climb the mountain to where the hut was, and did, and read the poem he'd written there fifty years before.

 

Another version, by John Whaley, an English translator who died in 2005:

 

Over all of the hills

Peace comes anew,

The woodland stills

All through;

The birds make no sound on the bough,

Wait a while,

Soon now,

Peace comes to you.

 

-Goethe (tr. John Whaley)

 

And warum nicht? The German:

 

Wandrers Nachtlied

 

Über allen Gipfeln

Ist Ruh,

In allen Wipfeln

Spürest du

Kaum einen Hauch;

Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.

Warte nur! Balde

Ruhest du auch.

 

-Goethe

Heinrich Heine's The Lotus Flower

The Lotus Flower

The lotus flower is frightened

By the sun's majestic light;

With downcast eyes and dreaming

She longs for the quiet of night.

 

The moon, he is her lover,

He wakes her with silver rays;

To him she unveils her friendly

Devoted flower face.

 

She blooms and sparkles, gazing

Silently up to his glow;

In fragrance she weeps and trembles

From rapture of love and woe.

 

-Heinrich Heine (tr. Ernst Feise)

 

Heine was a German poet, born in 1797 in Düsseldorf, when the revolutionary French forces occupied the town. His parents were Jewish. In 1831, he moved as a political exile to Paris, where he lived the rest of his life. In 1848, he suffered a paralytic stroke and was confined to bed (his 'mattress-grave' he called it) from then until his death in 1856, but still writing all the time.

 

The German:

 

Die Lotosblume

 

Die Lotosblume ängstigt

Sich vor der Sonne Pracht,

Und mit gesenktem Haupte

Erwartet sie träumend die Nacht.

 

Der Mond, der ist ihr Buhle,

Er weckt sie mit seinem Licht,

Und ihm entschleiert sie freundlich

Ihr frommes Blumengesicht.

 

Sie blüht und glüht und leuchtet

Und starret stumm in die Höh;

Sie duftet und weinet und zittert

Vor Liebe und Liebesweh.

 

-Heinrich Heine

Pangloss' Song by Richard Wilbur (#poem)

 

Pangloss' Song:

A comic-opera lyric

 

I

 

Dear boy, you will not hear me speak

  With sorrow or with rancor

Of what has paled my rosy cheek

  And blasted it with canker;

'Twas Love, great Love, that did the deed

  Through Nature's gentle laws,

And how should ill effects proceed

  From so divine a cause?

 

Sweet honey comes from bees that sting,

  As you are well aware

To one adept in reasoning

Whatever pains disease may bring

Are but the tangy seasoning

  To Love's delicious fare.

 

II

 

Columbus and his men, they say,

  Conveyed the virus hither

Whereby my features rot away

  And vital powers wither;

Yet had they not traversed the seas

  And come infected back,

Why, think of all the luxuries

  That modern life would lack!

 

All bitter things conduce to sweet,

  As this example shows;

Without the little spirochete

We'd have no chocolate to eat,

Nor would tobacco's fragrance greet

  The European nose.

 

III

 

Each nation guards its native land

  With cannons and with sentry,

Inspectors look for contraband

  At every port of entry,

Yet nothing can prevent the spread

  Of love's divine disease:

It rounds the world from bed to bed

  As pretty as you please.

 

Men worship Venus everywhere,

  As plainly may be seen;

The decorations which I bear

Are nobler than the Croix de Guerre,

And gained in service of our fair

  And universal Queen.

 

-Richard Wilbur

 

Somehow it seemed time for a little light verse, even if it's verse in celebration (?) of syphilis. 

 

Richard Wilbur wrote this for Leonard Bernstein's operetta Candide, the first version of which was performed in 1956. This song for Dr. Pangloss (he was the young Candide's tutor) didn't make it into the operetta--I suspect Bernstein thought it would be too hard to sing and so didn't write music for it--but did make it into subsequent volumes of Richard Wilbur's poetry. But the majority of the lyrics in the operetta were by Richard Wilbur, including its most famous song, 'Glitter and Be Gay', sung by Cunegonde.

 

Frank O'Hara's A City Winter (#1952Club, #Poem)

Poem

Let's take a walk, you 

and I in spite of the

weather if it rains hard

      on our toes

 

we'll stroll like poodles

and be washed down a

gigantic scenic gutter

     that will be

 

exciting! voyages are not

all like this you just put

your toes together then

     maybe blood

 

will get meaning and a trick

become slight in our keeping

before we sail the open sea it's

     possible--

 

And the landscape will do

us some strange favor when

we look back at each other

     anxiously

 

-Frank O'Hara

 

A City Winter: 1

 

I understand the boredom of the clerks

fatigue shifting like dunes within their eyes

a frightful nausea gumming up the works

that once was thought aggression in disguise.

Do you remember? then how lightly dead

seemed the moon when over factories

it languid slid like a barrage of lead

above the heart, the fierce inventories

of desire. Now women wander our dreams

carrying money to our sleep's shame

our hands twitch not for swift blood-sunk triremes

nor languorous white horses nor ill fame,

  but clutch the groin that clouds a pallid sky

  where tow'rs are sinking in their common eye.

 

-Frank O'Hara

 

Frank O'Hara was an American poet (1926-1966). He was born in Baltimore, grew up in Massachusetts, was in the Navy in the Philippines and elsewhere in the Pacific during World War II, used his GI Bill benefits to get a Harvard education and then moved to New York City where he was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art and an art critic. He was gay. He died when he was hit by a (presumably drunk) driver in a dune buggy on Fire Island.

 

His first published book of poems, A City Winter and Other Poems, came out in 1952. (There was an earlier privately printed volume.)  O'Hara is usually viewed as a spontaneous chronicler of his life in a sort of primitive poetry. John Ashbery says, in the introduction to the Collected Poems, "Dashing the poems off at odd moments--in his office at the Museum of Modern Art, in the street at lunchtime or even in a room full of people--he would then put them away in drawers and cartons and half forget them." Hmm. Maybe. But I would note that 'A City Winter: 1' is a perfectly fine sonnet, and is one of five sonnets in a sequence that is the title poem, and that the first poem quoted while, not in a nameable form, has form, something close to Sapphics. Maybe he did think about them a little bit...

 

He's also capable of fun: 

 

Poem

 

At night Chinamen jump

on Asia with a thump

 

while in our willful way

we, in secret, play

 

affectionate games and bruise

our knees like China's shoes.

 

The birds push apples through

grass the moon turns blue, 

those apples roll beneath

our buttocks like a heath

 

full of Chinese thrushes

flushed from China's bushes.

 

As we love at night

birds sing out of sight,

 

Chinese rhythms beat

through us in our heat,

 

the apples and the birds

move us like soft words,

 

we couple in the grace

of that mysterious race.

 

-Frank O'Hara

 

One of my favourites from O'Hara, also from A City Winter and Other Poems.

 

A great discussion of what's probably O'Hara's most famous poem (but from his later book Lunch Poems) 'Having a Coke With You' by A. O. Scott can be found here, though you'll need access to the New York Times to read it.

 

Sadly, while I put a photo of the first edition of A City Winter and Other Poems up at the top, that's not what I have. I poached that picture from AbeBooks where an autographed copy was listed for £27000. Instead what I have is 😉 this:

 

 

which is where that Ashbery quote comes from.

It's the week of Simon and Kaggsy's 1952 Club! It's also National Poetry Month in Canada and the US.

 

 

 

Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano (#1952Club)

"He knew with all his heart the human situation was a frightful botch, but it was such a logical, intelligently arrived-at botch, that he couldn't see how history could have possibly led anywhere else."

Doctor Paul Proteus is the manager of the Ilium Works, "the most important, brilliant person in Ilium." He's only thirty-five, and he's expected to only move up from that triumph. After all his father was Doctor George Proteus, a man second in importance only to the president of the United States.

The time is after the third world war; industrial planning and robotics were so important and successful in enabling the U.S. to win those wars, that now everything is given over to managers and engineers--and the machines that replace most people's jobs. 

It's a meritocratic society--examinations determine each individual's capabilities--and your punch card determines the sort of job you can have. If you're not qualified for any of the jobs, you're not tossed aside--exactly. You're offered a position in the Army--though there are no more wars after that last one--or the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps, the 'Reeks and Wrecks'. It'll keep you from starving. But everybody knows both are just make-work.

The quote above is Proteus thinking about the current state of the U.S. Something's not right.

There's a rebel organization, the Ghost Shirt Society, that aims to do something about it. From their manifesto:

"Men, by their nature, seemingly, cannot be happy unless engaged in enterprises that make them feel useful. They must, therefore, be returned to participation is such enterprises."

Proteus is drawn to the ideas of the Ghost Shirt Society, but he's also an engineer and finds it hard to approve inefficiency for its own sake. But then his superiors want him to infiltrate the Society, and publicly fire him to ease his infiltration. What does he decide to do?

Player Piano is Vonnegut's first novel and it's definitely 1952. Processes that improve to such a degree there won't be enough work for all the workers is probably more a risk now than in 1952, but in the novel it happens with punch cards and tape, and the majority of the jobs replaced are assembly line-style work. (No LLMs or general AI.) There are a few women that work, but mostly their opportunities are limited to marriage. (Vonnegut is sympathetic to women not having anything to do, but he doesn't really see around the problem in this; their usefulness is ruined by automatic washers.) But the novel does examine real issues with a human setting, and is unpredictable in its outcome.

Still, while it's not the equal of Vonnegut's later greater novels--the prose is flatter, the construction isn't as tight, it doesn't have those flights of inspired absurdism--it is pretty solid, and better than I expected it to be. (It's usually dismissed.) It does have the Shah of Bratpuhr, the 'spiritual leader of 6,000,000 members of the Kolhouri sect,'  an amusingly ridiculous character who could show up in Cat's Cradle. There's humor:

"I think I can say without fear of contradiction that I earned that degree. My thesis was the third longest in any field in the country that year."

A different character has all his academic degrees revoked because it's discovered he never passed gym. (Noooooo!)

A contribution to the 1952 Club. Thanks to Kaggsy and Simon for hosting!

 WordPress has been sending my comments to the spam folder again, it seems.

Angus Wilson's Hemlock and After (#1952Club)

"Dear Sands, I am pleased to be able to tell you that official agreement has been given to the grant for Vardon Hall."

Bernard Sands is a 'Grand Old Man of Letters', perhaps even a 'Grand Enfant Terrible'.  He's in his late 50s and has written a number of successful novels. The old manor house in his English village of Vardon was on the market; it wasn't good enough for the National Trust, and Sands has decided it should become a retreat for young writers. As the novel starts he's just gotten word of his success.

Sands is married with two children he's somewhat estranged from. His son James aspires to a Conservative political career; Sands is a bit closer to his daughter Elizabeth, a journalist.

The reason for the estrangement is that Sands has decided he's homosexual. His wife Ella has had a nervous breakdown, though she's gradually recovering. His son James is worried about the scandal; his daughter feels her mother's injury.

His first affair was with a graphic artist Terence Lambert who aspires to do stage design. That affair is over though they remain on good terms, and Sands is now interested in Eric Craddock who works in a bookshop. Is this grants scheme for young writers just a procurement mechanism? It's not, but the rumours do fly. (And somebody else is running a procurement scheme.) Mr. Greenlees, the first young writer for Vardon Hall, would definitely appear not to be a sex object.

The first high point of the novel, Sands is waiting in Leicester Square for Terence Lambert, when he's approached by a young man who asks him for a light. The young man has clearly got something more on his mind, but Sands isn't interested in cruising. But moments later, the still nameless young man is arrested 'for importuning', and the detective asks Sands if he would like to offer evidence. Sands says, "Certainly not," but he's torn between helping, as if there was anything he could do, and throwing the young man to the dogs to save himself. The stress of it all leads to a heart attack, just as Terence Lambert is arriving.

The second high point of the novel is the speech Sands gives at the opening of Vardon Hall. James and his wife have been inviting Conservative grandees, hoping to make connections, various London homosexuals show up, and, from the neighbourhood, the odious Mrs. Curry--Sands' original rival for Vardon Hall--and her circle appear. The hall is jammed; the weather is an uncharacteristic broiling, and a mad imbroglio breaks out.

The novel is funny and sad both. Those with good intentions act, but mostly don't succeed, though the worst do fall.

Sands may have been a grand old man of letters, but this is Angus Wilson's first novel. It was a success from the start; its open discussion of homosexuality, though not unknown in the English novel--Brideshead Revisited came out in 1945, for instance--was still pretty shocking. I do think from what I've read, his later novels are better. His Anglo-Saxon Attitudes made it to the blog here.

It's the week of Simon and Kaggsy's 1952 Club! My organizing post is here. There's one other 1952 book on the blog, Edmund Wilson's The Shores of Light.

Thanks to Kaggsy and Simon for hosting! I hope to get one or two more books this week.

#1952Club Candidates

Once again it's time for Kaggsy & Simon's year club and this spring its 1952:

 

I've heaped up a pile of books, not all of which I'll read:

Left, then top to bottom:

A. J. Liebling/Chicago

Liebling wrote several articles about Chicago for The New Yorker in early 1952; the book came out later that year. I've read this one before, but something I read recently about the Mob in Chicago referenced it and I've been thinking about rereading it. When I first read it, my thought at the time was, enh, a New Yorker writing about Chicago--what did he know? But we can see if that's true! (Liebling at his best is amazing.)

Angus Wilson/Hemlock & After

Bernard Sands is a 50-something novelist who wants to start an arts centre. Wilson's first novel.

Kurt Vonnegut/Player Piano

Also Vonnegut's first novel. I've never read it but I think it's harder sci-fi than a lot of his later novels.

Henry Green/Doting

Henry Green's last novel. Witty and dialog-heavy? I suspect. I've read a couple of Greens, but not this one.

Yasunari Kawabata/Thousand Cranes

Hopeless love and the Japanese tea ceremony says the cover. I've also read a couple of Kawabata's and not this one--the Other Reader is a fan and we have a stack, which I haven't made my way through.

Vassily Grossman/Stalingrad

Well, this one is here, but I'd have to have started it already to actually read it in time for this week. But I've been thinking about it since I recently read Edwin Frank's Stranger Than Fiction and one of his chapters is devoted to this and the amazing Life and Fate. So I could be reading it soon.

Van Wyck Brooks/The Confident Years

Brooks' history of the American literary scene in the years 1885-1915. Late Henry James, Edith Wharton, Lafcadio Hearn, early Theodore Dreiser. Brooks' whole Makers and Finders series on the history of American literature is pretty great.

I've already read one and a half of the books on that pile (in addition to the Liebling which I read some years ago). First post on Monday!

But of course I won't read all of them this week, alas...

There's one book I've read from 1952 since I've started the blog:

Edmund Wilson's The Shores of Light. It's a pretty great collection of Wilson's criticism, bookended by two essays he wrote in 1952, on Christian Gauss, the literary critic and his (and F. Scott Fitzgerald's) professor at Princeton, and on Edna St. Vincent Millay, with whom Wilson had been in love at one point.

Some other '52 books I've read and enjoyed in the past: Invisible Man, Martha Quest, East of Eden, The Old Man and the Sea, Wise Blood, The Cloven Viscount, Men at Arms (from Evelyn Waugh's Swords of Honour trilogy).

And if I want to sneak in a mystery toward the end of the week, some possible rereads:

I remember the Queen pretty well--well, it is one of his most striking solutions--so I probably won't reread that. The Lew Archer and the Perry Mason I scarcely remember and so they'd practically be like new mysteries. One of those is likeliest.

I'm pretty sure I've also read the two Christies from that year, but I don't have them and would have to hunt them up. Though the Poirot from that year seems vague to me and it's possible I've never read it.

Are you joining in? Which look good to you? Which should I be sure not to miss?

Thanks to Simon and Kaggsy for hosting!