Language become gesture

From Colm Toíbín, On Elizabeth Bishop:

In certain societies, including rural Nova Scotia where Bishop spent much of her childhood, and in the southeast of Ireland where I am from, language was also a way to restrain experience, take it down to a level where it might stay. Language was neither ornament nor exaltation; it was firm and austere in its purpose. Our time on the earth did not give us cause or need to say anything more than was necessary; language was thus a form of calm, modest knowledge or maybe even evasion. The poetry and the novels and stories written in the light of this knowledge or this evasion, or in their shadow, had to be led by clarity, by precise description, by briskness of feeling, by no open displays of anything, least of all easy feeling; the tone implied an acceptance of what was known. The music or the power was in what was often left out. The smallest word, or the holding of breath, could have a fierce stony power.

Lost sound

At the LRB, a great piece by Colm Tóibín on two new books about the eighteenth-century castrati:

The French soprano Emma Calvé wrote in her autobiography about hearing the castrato Domenico Mustafà in 1891: ‘He had an exquisite high tenor voice, truly angelic, neither masculine nor yet feminine in type – deep, subtle, poignant in its vibrant intensity … He had certain curious notes which he called his fourth voice – strange, sexless tones, superhuman, uncanny!’ Another writer wrote of a castrato voice that it was ‘so soft, and ravishingly mellow, that nothing can better represent it than the Flute-stops of some Organs’, which themselves were ‘not unlike the gentle Fallings of Water’.

Nonetheless, as Feldman writes, ‘we still lack access to the sound of the castrato’s voice, save some early recordings of the last castrato.’ It is as though we had the letters of Wordsworth and Coleridge and some reviews of their work, or some wonderful descriptions of Impressionist painting, but not the things themselves – the poems or the paintings.

Rage, grief

Colm Tóibín on the literature of grief (I am eager to read his new novel):

A few years later, in her introduction to her translation of Sophocles' Elektra, one of the great plays about grief, Carson's tone seemed less certain as she wrote about the scene in which Orestes returns and hands his sister an urn with ashes which he says are of her dead brother Orestes. Orestes listens to Elektra mourn at some length before he announces that he was just fooling and that he has, in fact, been alive all the time and is now in front of her. Carson quotes the actor Fiona Shaw saying that she found the "deception/recognition scene between Elektra and Orestes 'unspeakably impossible to play'."

"Critics and scholars (and translators)," Carson goes on, "agree, this scene is a hard nut to crack. Why does Orestes decide to trick his sister into thinking he is dead? Why does he give it up in the middle? What does Sophocles want to achieve here? The alternation of lies and truth, high emotions and low, is bewildering and cruel, the tug of war over an empty urn almost bizarre." So, too, Philip Vellacott, who translated Euripides's version of the play, wonders about this scene and identifies the point "where Orestes should reveal himself … He does not reveal himself. Why?"

Surely the solution is simple. Surely Orestes' trickery is the very currency of grief. Orestes, having lost his father, is unable to come clean. The issues of life and death have entered his spirit and poisoned him so that his approach to re-meeting his sister will be all gnarled. He cannot deal simply with emotion. As Carson writes about Euripides's version of him: "All in all, Orestes is a peculiar customer – not exactly insane but strange and unknowable. His consciousness is entirely his own." Thus his response will be filled with doublespeak and trickery about the very things – the difference between being dead and being alive – that he cannot manage to come to terms with. Becoming "bewildering and cruel", as Carson puts it, and "bizarre", are what has happened to his personality under pressure. While his sister has been doing all the shouting, Orestes has let the pain seep silently into the very core of his being so that nothing he does will ever be easy to explain. While people are busy avoiding his sister because of what she says, they have been perhaps even busier avoiding Orestes because of his silence.

Table to table

Colm Tóibín is a person of great virtue!  Here's a bit of the interview I especially liked:

These CDs (pictured) are all different recordings of A German Requiem. But I'm not allowed to listen to any of them until I finish the novel I'm working on – I started it in April 2000. There will be a moment at the end of the novel where the woman will say, 'I'm going to sing in A German Requiem.' I haven't written that scene yet and until I do, I can't listen to my CDs. Everywhere I go I find another recording of A German Requiem and I have them piled up as a warning to myself: get on with your work.

Breaching the peace, lightening the load

At the LRB, Colm Tóibín on the importance of aunts (he moves to this point from an argument about Austen's treatment of Lady Bertram in Mansfield Park):

The novel, after all, is not a moral fable or parable; it is not our job to like or dislike characters in fiction, or make judgments about their worth, or learn from them how to live. We can do that with real people and, if we like, figures from history. They are for moralists to feast on. A novel is a pattern and it is our job to notice how the textures were woven and the tones put in place. This is not to insist that a character in fiction is merely a verbal construct and bears no relation to the known world. It is rather to suggest that the role of a character in a novel is never simple. A novel isn’t a piece of ethics or sociology. It is a release of certain energies and a dramatisation of how these energies might be controlled and given shape. Characters in fiction are determined by the pattern, and they determine the pattern in turn.

Brother of the more famous Jack

At the Guardian, Colm Tóibín on Jack Yeats. I remember the first time I saw an extensive array of (reproductions of) the pictures of Jack B. Yeats - they are some of the loveliest and most haunting things I have ever seen...

Bonus link: James Lasdun on Chekhov's stories.

A structuralist's lament

This poem really made me laugh - so true!

The light and the dark

Recent bits at the LRB by Colm Tóibín and Jenny Diski.

The Urning men

A very interesting LRB piece by Colm Tóibín on Sheila Rowbotham's new biography of Edward Carpenter. Lots there worth pondering, but because I am a frivolous person I will give only the part that's most like gossip:

Forster compared Carpenter’s personality to that of a religious teacher, a guru perched in Sheffield: ‘It depended on contact and couldn’t be written down on paper, and its effect was to increase one’s vitality, so that one went away better able to do one’s work. One’s own work not his; it was an influence, not a doctrine. It suggested the direct transference of power.’ The charm was not universally received, however. Lytton Strachey always greeted Carpenter’s name ‘with a series of little squeaks’ and, according to Rowbotham, ‘disdained the Carpenterian simple life nearly as much as heterosexual copulation’.

Of all the young men who came to stay, the one who left the most interesting account was a rich and rare young American, Chester Alan Arthur III, who was on a mission to study homoerotic activity among the volunteers of the Irish revolution. This, as we can fully understand, did not take him long and so he returned to see Carpenter when the sage was 80. More than forty years later he gave Allen Ginsberg an account of Carpenter’s sexual skills. ‘At last his hand was moving between my legs and his tongue was in my belly-button. And then when he was tickling my fundament just behind the balls and I could not hold it any longer, his mouth closed just over the head of my penis and I could feel my young vitality flowing into his old age.’ In the morning, the old goat did it again, after which Merrill arrived with two cups of tea and another lodger sponged Carpenter and the young American down with a wet towel.

Chester Alan Arthur III also recounted that Carpenter told him that he had had sex with Whitman in 1877. If this is the case, it is of considerable interest because Arthur went on to have an affair with Neal Cassady, the inspiration for Dean Moriarty in On the Road. This connects the great old poet of the roads with the Beat Generation with only two degrees of separation – Carpenter and Arthur. It is a sign of Rowbothom’s seriousness and scrupulousness as a biographer that she is careful with this material and, with good reason, suspicious of its complete accuracy. For my own part, I believe every word of it.