[AMENDED MON 19/11/2007]

STAINED GLASS TELLS OLD STORY

From "Lost New York", the first essay in The Last Empire. Gore Vidal is reviewing a novel called Many Mansions by Isabel Bolton, published 1952 and set in 1950:

The old lady finished her reading: 'If her book should fall into the hands of others addicted as she was to the habitual reading of novels, what exactly would their feelings be?' One wonders - is there such a thing now as a habitual reader of novels? Even the ambitious, the ravenously literary young Adam seems to have a suspicion that he may have got himself into the stained-glass window trade.

Of course, Vidal has been raising this question for all of his career, and continues to do so today. I think it's certain that there are fewer and fewer literary references in public discourse, and that people in general don't have a literary common ground (other than Harry Potter). When I was at university I met an old fella who told me his father would meet with friends of an evening to read aloud their favourite passages from Thomas Hardy, and that this wasn't at all an unusual pastime. But then I suppose Dickens was the TV of his day, and followed with the kind of unifying, street-emptying attention people would one day give to Z Cars.

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In 1876 Vidal kind of provides his own answer, through the mouth of his narrator Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler:

My pen delays...Stops. Why write any of this? Why make a record? Answer: habit. To turn life to words is to make life yours to do with as you please, instead of the other way round. Words translate and transmute raw life, make bearable the unbearable. So at the end, as in the beginning, there is only The Word.

I don't quite agree with this, but it's a good answer. Not quite as pithy as the beginning of his answer to a long, rambling and (to judge by the reaction) irritating question I posed to him when he was on a book tour in 1998: "Writing is basically an extension of thinking."

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I posted a little while back that 1876 was much taken up with the buying of American politicians, but despite the massive and widespread corruption which Vidal depicts, I wasn't prepared for the thrilling change of gear in the final section, when the presidential election goes to the wire. Up to this point, grand theft has seemed wrong but still sort of fun, committed by boring or jovial rascals; in any case, everyone does it, fortunes are there to be made in the Gilded Age and only the terminally unlucky or foolish suffer (we are talking here about the elect, the members of the American oligarchy which, of course, did not and does not exist - not the Civil War veterans who occasionally intrude on the narrative with their raggedness and missing limbs.) And then, having jollied and joshed us, Vidal gets serious, and it's like a slap in the face.

-- SPOILER ALERT 1876 --

The candidates are Governor Samuel Tilden (Dem, dry, highly intelligent but somewhat charmless, a reformer) and Rutherford B. Hayes (Rep, a man seemingly without qualities other than being the one candidate his party can unite behind). Tilden will neither take bribes nor buy favours; Hayes is no more corrupt than any of his peers, which is still saying a great deal. Tilden has already won the popular vote by a quarter of a million, has 184 electoral college votes, and one more will secure him the presidency; Hayes is on 165, and needs all of the 20 remaining votes from Oregon, Louisiana, South Carolina and - yes - Florida. The results from all four of these states are in dispute.

Tilden addresses the press:

With altogether too much delicacy Tilden referred to the current "subject of controversy," making the point that in the twenty-two previous presidential elections, the Congress had simply recorded the votes sent them by the Electoral College. But now the Congress must choose between two absolutely conflicting sets of votes sent them by four states.

Tilden reminded the audience that three years ago the Congress had declared illegal the present Government of Louisiana, whose Returning Board has just seen fit to reverse the state's popular vote. Tilden also spelled out the illegality of the South Carolina and Florida boards. But where he ought to have thundered his contempt for the most corrupt and now tyrannous Admininstration in our history and unfurled his banner as our rightful lord, he was throughout his address very much the dry constitutional lawyer and in no way the outraged tribune of a cheated people.

All the way through this final section, Tilden is almost, almost there, but not quite. It should be his, it must be...and yet he seems to be unable to clinch it, despite the egregious nature of Republican attempts to pervert the count. By the time I got to this part, I was already experiencing a serious case of deja vu:

During the week since the electoral commission was given the two (actually, because of a technicality, three) sets of Florida returns, things did not appear to go well for us despite the brilliance of Charles O'Conor.

For one thing, the commission has never seriously tried to examine any of the initial voting frauds in Florida. The Republican case is based on the fact that the Hayes returns are the only valid ones because they have been signed by the carpetbag Republican governor of the state, while those favouring Tilden were only signed by the state's attorney general. For a whole week the number of angels able to dance on that pin's head have been counted and re-counted.

The entry for Tilden on Wikipedia notes:

While the Republicans boldly claimed the election, Tilden mystified and disappointed his supporters by not fighting for the prize or giving any leadership to his advocates. Instead he devoted more than a month to the preparation of a complete history of the electoral counts over the previous century to show it was the unbroken usage of Congress, not of the President of the Senate, to count the electoral votes. [Bigelow v 2:60]

The italics are mine.

-- SPOILER ENDS --

I came to 1876 totally cold (apart from recognising the name of Rutherford B. Hayes), began it with mild trepidation, continued with pleasure, raced through the end, and put it down with real satisfaction. A thirty year-old novel about a one hundred and thirty year-old scandal, which shines a powerful light on America today. Yup, I'd say that's a vindication of the stained-glass trade.

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It's accepted that the presidential election in 2000 was 'troubled', 'controversial' - that's to say, stolen. But no-one describes the 2004 election in those terms, which is astonishing given the number of complaints of irregularities. Gore Vidal wrote the introduction to Rep. John Conyers' report What Went Wrong in Ohio, which goes into these concerns in depth and is available as a PDF.

MEMORY AGAINST FORGETTING

Another use of literacy:

I keep thinking of Anna Akhmatova, outside the prison in Leningrad where her son was being held by Stalin. She wrote:

In the terrible years of the Yeshov [head of the NKVD] terror, I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once, someone recognized me. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me...woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there):

“Can you describe this?”

And I answered: “Yes, I can.”

Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face.

From the excellent fifth and final chapter of Writing in an Age of Silence by Sara Paretsky, which I've just read for the second time within a few weeks.

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There's quite a lot of useful learning in it, not least this snippet: apparently in the 19th century in America, schemes for the establishment of public libraries and schools were regularly denounced as socialist/communist. And this, in a section addressing the reduction in the number of publishers and news orgnaisations to a handful of conglomerate-owned companies:

Forces of silence can come more subtly from the market than from the edicts of a totalitarian state.

Which Roth and Klima also noted.

INVOKE AND SURVIVE

Continuing the theme of the role of literature, if it has one, in the aftermath of an environmental catastrophe:

A work of imagination shares with a living creature or the ecosystem itself the characteristic of not being reducible to its parts, or explicable in terms of the technique of its manufacture. It cannot be exhausted by analysis. It is a system of interrelationships which, since it extends far beyond the words on the page, engages with everything else in the reader's conscious and unconscious experience, and is therefore virtually infinite.

The Laughter of Foxes: A Study of Ted Hughes by Keith Sagar

This seems to me a rather hopeful prescription, rather than a description of an art-form, however sympathetic I am towards it. When it comes to literature, so much depends on how you read, or listen. How have you been trained? What prejudices, expectations, paradigms, what baggage do you bring to the work? How open are you to being shaped by it? Can you see the intention behind the words? It assumes that one does not read for entertainment, for a vicarious thrill which ends as soon as you put the book away. Instead one exposes oneself to it - there is an element of risk.

One other point - I'm not alone in having had times when I've been ill or depressed, and it's been story which has helped to carry me. Story as a means of healing, of restoration. That too is a use of literacy. There's a line of Sam Neill's to that effect in Until the End of the World, but it took me years to appreciate it. Hughes, of course, drew extensively on myth forms and saw his own role as shamanistic.

THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

I didn't enjoy the second volume of Anthony Burgess's memoirs, You've Had Your Time, as much as the first, but there are many memorable stories, and these lines, right at the end, made an impact:

Milan Kundera defines a European as one who is nostalgic for Europe, and he is probably right. Evelyn Waugh's words about the dismemberment of Christendom refer, proleptically, to that nostalgia. If, living out of Great Britain for more than twenty years, I have become a paying guest of Europe rather than a European, it is the better to indulge the soft-centred dream of belonging to a culture that I do not wish to believe is dead...

That identification of nostalgia may well be right - I know I look back more than forwards, and read very little modern fiction, though my defence is that it simply hasn't yet proved itself. By which I don't mean that not enough people have come to the opinion that a given work is a classic over a long enough period of time, though I admit to being as easily-led as the next fella. More that the contribution that any particular work has to give to the dream-life of the nation, the continent, the culture, has to be given time to work.

Literature is, for want of a better phrase, a big conversation, and by reading, writing and thinking, we take part in it. I was very pleased indeed to read recently that Borges thought of it in the same way - a conversation going back and forth in time.

However, when seen in the context of the whole of human history, that conversation is terribly young, even assuming a starting point with the ancient Greeks, and it is now under a greater threat than that of mass philistinism. There are any number of books at the moment telling us that we are in deep, deep trouble, and from previous examples of civilization-collapse it seems that we are virtually programmed to create progress traps and then walk into them. I can't recommend too highly Ronald Wright's A Short History of Progress for an account of this, though Clive Ponting's A Green History of the World covered this ground first, and Jared Diamond's Collapse does the same at greater length.

In a recent article in the London Review of Books Susan Sontag was said to have wanted to spend more time trying to write a novel, because she believed the novel to be more relevant, more immediate and more necessary than politics or history. Well, from a certain perspective. The meme survives where an individual human will not, but it won't survive species extinction.

It's not that the conversation of our European civilization is not important, or not beautiful, or not great, but it is just far smaller than those of us who still partake think it is. I'm not optimistic.

TOCSIN

I hope that [Other Men's Flowers] may continue to give some pleasure and afford some help in these difficult days. I have a great belief in the inspiration of poetry towards courage and vision and in its driving power. And we want all the courage and vision at our command, in days of crisis when our future prosperity and greatness hangs in the balance.

- A. P. Wavell, April 1947 introduction to Other Men's Flowers, originally published March 1944.

I've been wondering what the uses of literacy will be, in the coming global environmental catastrophe, and I suspect we will see a return to poetry, song, the story, the fable, myth - those creations which are portable, condensed, and above all, can be transmitted orally. I've always said that when it comes to books you need to be ready to burn them for fuel if you have to, and indeed, we may have to.

CONCRETE POETRY

Been after the full context of the following quote for some time, as it's mentioned by Heaney and Hughes in essays. Found it in the introduction to Penguin edition collected Milosz poems:

The work of human thought should withstand the test of brutal, naked reality. If it cannot, it is worthless... A man is lying under machine-gun fire on a street in an embattled city. He looks at the pavement and sees a very amusing sight: the cobblestones are standing upright like the quills of a porcupine. The bullets hitting against their edges tilt and displace them. Such moments in the consciousness of a man judge all poets and philosophers. Let us suppose, too, that a certain poet was the hero of literary cafés, and wherever he went was regarded with curiosity and awe. Yet his poems, recalled in such a moment, seem diseased and highbrow. The vision of the cobblestones is unquestionably real; and poetry based on an equally naked experience could survive triumphantly that judgment day of man’s illusions. In the intellectuals who lived through the atrocities of war in Eastern Europe there took place what one might call the elimination of emotional luxuries. Psychoanalytic novels incite them to laughter. They consider the literature of erotic complications, still popular in the West, as trash. Imitation abstract painting bores them. They are hungry - but they want bread, not hors d’oeuvres.

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Found this site on Scottish lullabies. Warms me to see they're operating out of my home area.

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Won't be doing a lot of posting for a while. Baby daughter born 14th May at 12.22 am. Good lungs, feeds and sleeps a lot. Parents less so. Her older brother is, blissfully, attentive and (so far) not jealous.