Court cites Lewis Carroll as precedent

It’s not often you hear Carroll’s ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ quoted in open court, but it’s a habit that should be encouraged.

An American federal appeals court found that accusations against a Guantanamo Bay detainee who had been held for more than six years were based on slim, unverifiable claims, the New York Times reports. A three-judge panel said the government was affectively contending that its accusations against the man should be accepted because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.

The court compared that to the declaration by the Bellman in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Snark’: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”

The Justice Department declined to comment. It is known, however, what Lewis Carroll would have thought.

Maugham and literary ambition

Lately I saw the film of W. Somerset Maugham’s ‘The Painted Veil’. Completely against my initial prejudice, I liked it very much and found that the landscape, the oppressive sense of heat and lack of air and its studied atmosphere hung with me for several days afterwards.

I especially liked the way its unpromising plot kept eliding my expectations and going places that were unlikely and surprising. I wondered about Somerset Maugham, who I’ve never read, and why no one seems to read him any more, when at one point in the Twentieth Century he was one of the staples of any enthusiastic reader.

I had his ‘Cakes and Ale’ on my shelf. I read it with relish and it is funny and dry and flattered me into thinking that I too would know a literary poseur when I saw one.

The narrator is an apparently successful author who is unexpectedly contacted by Alroy Kear, an old acquaintance and social climbing literary figure in London. He leaves us in no doubt about Kear’s lack of talent:

“Though I have finished few of his novels, I have begun a good many, and to my mind his sincerity is stamped on every one of their multitudinous pages.”

The urge to add italics to that withering second-last word is difficult to suppress.

Sincerity is of course a necessary precondition for the creation of kitsch. Lovely. A joy on every page.

Snobs and snobbism

In an irritating article on Gore Vidal that I found on The Independent’s website, I came across a word I couldn’t forget:

“In his memoirs, rarely for a North American, it is sometimes possible to discern snobbery – or as Vidal prefers to say, ‘snobbism’ – of an almost English intensity.”

Does this mean a person indulging in snobbery is a ‘snobbist’?

Happy Birthday Philip

Happy Birthday to Philip Larkin. No doubt he would have hated birthdays, miserable bugger that he was.

The great poems like ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ and ‘Aubade’ no doubt recommend themselves without any mention from me, but here is one of my favourites, a poem not often mentioned but great in its own exquisite way.

First Sight

Lambs that learn to walk in snow
When their bleating clouds the air
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare.
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the fold,
Is a wretched width of cold.

As they wait beside the ewe,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth’s immeasureable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.

Dostoyevsky’s epilepsy

A very interesting recent piece I found almost at random on the nature of Dostoyevsky’s epilepsy.

I had known that he was believed to be epileptic, but I didn’t know that the condition was self-diagnosed. Relatively little was understood about the condition in the 19th Century, causing Freud to disbelieve the diagnosis on the grounds that it was found only among the mentally feeble. He thought the condition was a straight case of hysteria. Yes, but then he always believed that…

On the basis of recent comments, it seems the consensus is that it was in fact temporal-lobe epilepsy. He described his seizures in such great detail both in his correspondence and in the mouths of his characters, that modern researchers have a remarkably complete account of his condition.

His auras were ecstatic in nature. The sensation was so powerful, that:

“For several moments,” he said, “I would experience such joy as would be inconceivable in ordinary life – such joy that no one else could have any notion of. I would feel the most complete harmony in myself and in the whole world and this feeling was so strong and sweet that for a few seconds of such bliss I would give ten or more years of my life, even my whole life perhaps.”

The author (I can’t find a name attached to this piece), conjectures a connection between the nature of Dostoyevsky’s ecstatic states and his religiosity, his pervasive sense of guilt, his feeling of dread.

Because of his epilepsy, Dostoyevsky was, to borrow the title of his second novel, a “double man”; a rational, exalted being on the one hand, and, because of his illness, a mystical and base creature on the other. It seems that as his life progressed, and his epilepsy became more severe, the latter persona prevailed, as evidenced by the increasingly mystical nature of the work produced later in his life.

Words were my only love and not many

I will drink some Irish whisky on April 13th, the centenary of Samuel Beckett’s birth.

There was a nice piece about him in the Guardian this week from Edna O’Brien, who knew him. I think she gets him about right in this passage, in words I should use the next time I’m trying to justify my once-obsessive interest in the man to friends who think him nothing but a whining Irish existentialist:

Much is made of Beckett’s despairingness, his Cartesian soul nailed to its Cartesian cross, yet he is not a depressing writer, not depressing in the way Henri de Montherlant or Thomas Bernhard can be, because, as with Shakespeare, his darkest words are shot through with beauty and astonishment, his impassioned keenings the best witness that there is to the human plaint, his disgusts brimful with exhilaration. He was a maniac who managed with consummate skill to convert that mania into lasting poetry.

I also think of Francis Bacon’s decription of what he was trying to achieve in art: “exhilarated despair.”

Once upon a time, I collected every play and small bound volume I could get with Beckett’s name on the cover. I discovered there were scores of tiny books, often no longer than a few dozen pages, all of them possessing a power I couldn’t describe when I was 21 years old, but found oddly comforting.

I will get out “The Unnameable” or “Embers” or “Company” or “Not I” on April 13th and have another look.

I was looking at high waves

I would normally be loath to simply reproduce something I’d seen elsewhere, but this is just too good to go unrecommended. I am still too much of a teacher to avoid yanking peoples’ collars towards good things.

Reading this I was reminded of how much I loved reading Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry; surely a one-man argument against the notion that the Victorians were a bunch of stuffed shirts uninterested in sensual things. This is an excerpt from his journal:

“Aug. 10 [1872]. –I was looking at high waves. The breakers always are parallel to the coast and shape themselves to it except where the curve is sharp however the wind blows. They are rolled out by the shallowing shore just as a piece of putty between the palms whatever its shape runs into a long roll. The slant ruck or crease one sees in them shows the way of the wind. The regularity of the barrels surprised and charmed the eye; the edge behind the comb or crest was as smooth and as bright as glass. It may be noticed to be green behind and silver white in front: the silver marks where the air begins, the pure white is foam, the green / solid water. Then looked at to the right or left they are scrolled over like mouldboards or feathers or jibsails seen by the edge. It is pretty to see the hollow of the barrel disappearing as the white combs on each side run along the wave gaining ground till the two meet at a pitch and crush and overlap each other.

About all the turns of the scaping from the break and flooding of wave to its run out again I have not yet satisfied myself. The shores are swimming and the eyes have before them a region of milky surf but it is hard for them to unpack the huddling and gnarls of the water and law out the shapes and the sequence of the running; I catch however the looped or forked wisp made by every big pebble the backwater runs over–if it were clear and smooth there would be a network from their overlapping, such as can in fact be seen on smooth sand after the tide is out–; then I saw it run browner, the foam dwindling and twitched into long chains of suds, while the strength of the back-draught shrugged the stones together and clocked them one against the other.

Looking from the cliff I saw well that work of dimpled foamlaps – strings of short loops or halfmoons – which I had studied at Freshwater years ago.

It is pretty to see the dance and swagging of the light green tongues or ripples of waves in a place locked between rocks.”

Thanks to Michael Leddy.