The Poet's Scissors

My final call at the book festival was the Tennyson Research Centre. We were treated to a short talk on its holdings, and it’s amazing what’s there – a piano which may have belonged to Emily Tennyson, the majority of the Tennyson library (his father’s, his wife’s, his own), and some surprising memorabilia. Grace Timmins, who gave the talk, made it clear that any collection of Tennysonia (a real word?) is self-conscious, since even before he died people were hanging onto anything that might possibly have been connected with him, as he was such a celebrity (and not a fake tan in sight…) I suppose this is how they come to have two small pairs of scissors labelled "The Poet’s Scissors", which amused me, as well as numerous pipes and quills (enough DNA to recreate him?)
The insight into Tennyson's father (alcoholic, unstable, rather mad vicar, extremely educated) impacts upon one's understanding of the poet; and Tennyson scholars are fascinated by the books he had access to in his father's library. It's also amusing to think of this mad, clever man giving impenetrable, erudite sermons to Lincolnshire peasants who probably didn't understand a word of it. There's also what could be considered to be Tennyson's first work - his translations of Horace, and some fascinating marginalia - doodles, genealogies of the Greek gods, and some workings out of the number of ships that were sent to rescue Helen of Troy!
It's sad that the library of the remarkably intelligent and educated Emily Tennyson consists largely of religious books and novels, but of course she would have had access to her husband's library and read much more widely than this. Tennyson's own library is, it appears, rather selective - the Research Centre owns far more than they display, and despite the poet being a well-known voracious reader of novels, it's the more serious works that are on display. Of course when space is limited choices must be made, but this does seem a rather fascist way of editing his 'legacy'! - it's quite comforting to know that Tennyson indulged in the Victorian equivalent of EastEnders!
His family life, with 10 siblings, seems chaotic and dream-like, reminiscent of the Brontes. I love the vision of his mother being pulled around in a cart drawn by a Newfoundland mastiff, pausing unpredictably while the children recited poetry; and of the young Tennyson taming an owl to sit on his mother's shoulder, which is lovely until it fights with the monkey... When three of the Tennyson brothers had their first volume of poetry published, they hired a coach to take them to Mablethorpe to shout their joy to the world! People just don't seem so interesting today, sadly.
The Centre has many editions of Tennyson's work, though few manuscripts (most are at Trinity College Cambridge or in the States), but they do have a ms of 'In Memoriam', which is so valuable it's kept in a safe, and I was disappointed that we didn't get to see it. We did get to see multiple proofs of 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', though, and it's amazing how many times he changed his mind about where in the poem the famous "Half a league..." stanza should appear. One almost pities his publishers. In fact he was rather careless with his manuscripts, since he had excellent recall. Apparently he once asked Coventry Patmore to look for something he had written, and it was found in the grocery box, written in the butcher's book. He also had an uneasy relationship with illustrators, only liking Julia Margaret Cameron. The Centre has a 6th edition of The Princess, illustrated by Maclise, with a comment in Tennyson's writing next to an illustration which simply reads "Wrong!" I was intrigued by an 1866 edition of his poems with a remarkable, intricate fore-edge painting which shows Farringford when bent one way, and Somersby the other.
There are also some excellent letters to view, including comically illustrated correspondence between Emily and Edward Lear, and a sincere letter of condolence from Queen Victoria on the death of his son, Lionel, not to mention an autograph-seeking letter from Prince Albert! This archive provides a wonderful insight into the ways of Victorian celebrity! There is also an unsent letter to the soldiers in Sebastopol, who (rather surprisingly) had asked for copies of 'The Charge of the Light Brigade'. Tennyson sent 1000 copies, and wrote them a letter talking patriotically of the glory of the soldiers - but there's a little note on it by Emily suggesting that "while it might be pleasant to write to soldiers, one is afraid to seem too regal"!! I could go on, as there was so much to see and so many anecdotes told to us, but the most important thing is that I now have a strong desire to reread Tennyson and to think about his poetry and not just the physical things he left behind.

Books in Lincoln

I have recently returned from a lovely trip to Lincoln. I'd never been there before, but have a friend who recently moved there, who lured me to visit him by supplying me with a brochure for the Lincoln Book Festival. I'm pleased to say that Lincoln struck me as a remarkably literary city, but my view may be warped by the things I did while I was there...So many excellent secondhand bookshops! I particularly liked this one, halfway up Steep Hill (they're not kidding) - Reader's Rest; how appropriate! I'd hardly been in Lincoln for two hours when I went to my first event, a talk by Joanne Harris about her new book, The Lollipop Shoes, which I have to admit I haven't read yet, but she's an engaging speaker whom I've been to hear before (and you can read about that here). She suggests her new book is about fear, and managing what we are afraid of, which is often reflected in fairytales and European folklore, which has permeated Western thinking and affects every story we tell. Perhaps we're not as sophisticated as we'd like to be, she says; we still believe there are monsters out there, be they disease, stalkers or other threats; and so we also need to think that there are people who can fight for us and vanquish these dangers. As she put it, we're still sitting round the campfire hoping the light will extinguish the darkness.
The next day I went to a discussion on A S Byatt's Possession, one of my very favourite books. Actually I didn't feel it covered a great deal that I didn't know, though I was intrigued by the suggestion that Christabel LaMotte is signposted by Byatt as being based on Christina Rossetti by referring to her as the "Monna Lisa" instead of the "Mona Lisa", thus referencing Rossetti's sonnet sequence "Monna Innominata". Much could be made of that, in terms of gender roles in romantic relationships etc, but this was sadly skipped over - and besides, Byatt says she intended to base LaMotte on Rossetti but eventually settled for Emily Dickinson (for rather odd reasons, I think, but I won't go into that now!). What did strike me from the talk, though, is how you can read Byatt's book as a kind of puzzle she's set, for those with the patience to unravel it. It's an enormously intertextual, referential, erudite volume, drawing on classical and Norse mythology, Victorian literature and history, genre boundaries, academic mores and so on - you could spend a lifetime unravelling it.
After an exciting day of bookshops, tea and the cathedral, of which Ruskin said: "I have always held and proposed against all comers to maintain that the Cathedral of Lincoln is out and out the most precious piece of architecture in the British Isles", we went to hear the linguist David Crystal lecture. Like most linguists that I have come across, he is afflicted with an enormous fascination for place names, with which he entertained us for a while (did you know that Bricklehampton is the longest place name in the world - I think - that is a first order isogram?) We also learned some interesting terms such as an unkindness of ravens, a puddling of ducks (really!), and a wisp of snipe (which may be specific to Snitterfield.) I was fascinated to hear about the Americanisation of Harry Potter, which has changed crisps for potato chips, crumpets for English muffins, wastepaper basket for trashcan, and so on, but his (and my) favourite is that the nicely English "That's a bit rich coming from you!" has been changed to "You should talk!" American English seems so pointless when you compare it like that...We also heard about naming places (why don't we have a town called Shakespeare? The Russians even renamed a town Gagarin, to honour Yuri). Equally, why do we name objects? In the course of researching his book, Crystal came across Yorrick the Yucca (Alas, poor Yorrick...but apparently he lived longer than the owner anticipated); Tardis the garden shed, Cedric the ashtray, and a butter knife called Marlon. The best, though, is a car called Simon because of the Rattle...and a teddy called Isaiah, because one eye's higher...I have to confess, I went through a stage in my teens of calling things Engelbert; the last, I think, was Engelbert XIII, who was a potted baby Christmas tree. I loved the Victorian phrases that people learning English were taught: "Unhand me, Sir, for my husband, who is Australian, waits without." "The postillion has been struck by lightning." But the most uproarious moment of the evening must have been Hamlet's soliloquy delivered in words which began with H, concluding with "Head holy housewards!" I have a feeling I may be working on King Lear with words starting with L...

Firing at the Canon...

At the moment I'm writing a paper ambiguously titled "Christina Rossetti and the Problem of the Canon" for a conference, and I'm finding it remarkably easy to be side-tracked by the canon debate, so here are a few of my overflow thoughts...
The online OED describes a canon as "a list of literary works considered to be permanently established as being of the highest quality". I could take issue with that, but will resist for the moment. Actually, no, I won't resist, it seems a good starting point. The canon is generally accepted as being works (of fiction - I can't cope with anything else now!) which are deemed to be of such high quality and lasting value that they are always in print and - the key bit - available to the reading public (so although the canon is a notion that only academics care about or debate, it's meant to be much wider than that). So far so good - and everyone (that I've read) more or less agrees that Shakespeare is the centre of the canon - as Harold Bloom says in The Western Canon, Shakespeare invented us, or how we think of us and are constructed as social creatures - so it stands to reason he should be the spider who created the web, as it were. But the canon changes (hence my taking issue with the OED). No work, no author, can be assured of a permanent place in the canon. The secular canon (as opposed to the somewhat inflexible list of books in the Bible) is by definition an open canon - in many ways (more of this to come) it follows fashions, it's subject to constant change. Some authors are always there, some come and go.
My paper points out that initial reception is no guarantee of a lasting place in the canon: not many people read the once immensely-popular Felicia Hemans now, for example. (Though they should, in my opinion). The problem with Rossetti's work is that it comes and goes - very popular, then rather sneered at by the Moderns (though Virginia Woolf deigned to patronise her), then seen as sweet and flowery, a bit of a period piece, in the middle years of the 20th century - and then, trumpets, put out the flags, she's rescued by the feminists because she was a victim of patriarchal repression...Yes, she was. Well, aren't we all? (I'm very much the feminist, but feminist criticism can't encompass everything). But this means that the most- (if not only-) read of her poems is 'Goblin Market' - which is amazing, and both precise and ambiguous in a way which has lent itself to pornography (yes, PlayBoy 1978), opera, lesbian interpretations, depictions of a female Christ, and so on. All no doubt valid in their way, but what about her other work? Germaine Greer said that apart from 'Goblin Market', Rossetti 'wilfully' wasted her life - but how dare anyone say that a life of faith - which produced some devotional poems comparable to George Herbert, precise, witty, structured yet personal poems - is wasted? So although Rossetti's now canonical, really it's only a handful of her poems which are - those which serve a social purpose, that of feminism.
And this is Bloom's biggest concern about the canon. Surely the canon should be largely about aesthetics - encompassing works which are generally agreed to be 'great' works, poetry and novels which change lives and world-views, which use language sublimely and rescue us from the moral mires of contemporary society? Yes, but then...we have to teach literature, and the predominant way of teaching seems to be in historical context (valuable) but often to the exclusion of admitting the beauty of the work (pointless). So, Bloom argues, we are 'reducing aesthetics to ideology', promoting content over form, turning literature into no more than social documentation - and it also means, of course, that the canon is beginning to encompass work that (ahem) isn't that good, because it makes a point (the favourite points being the repression of women, post-colonialism, ethnicity and so on). This is mere tokenism, and is as insulting to the writers who become ciphers for a social agenda as it is to those who have earned their place in the canon.
So should there be more than one canon, since the canon already seems so fractured? (People sometimes argue there shouldn't be a canon at all, especially feminists since the canon is a patriarchal institution like...marriage? but then, you can destroy the word, the idea, but you can't actually stop certain books being read and taught more than others. It's not as though there's a website somewhere that lists all the books in the canon, which you can just shut down.) A multiplicity of canons would allow for a feminist canon, a religious canon (broken down into different religions?), a canon of ethnic writers (again subdivided), oh, there could be so many...And who would ever read it all? You'd only end up with a canon of canons.
Finally, what is the relation of the canon to popular literature? Where do the (widely-read and available, but not that aesthetically agreeable) books in the best-seller lists of the day fit in?
I don't have any answers; this is just a way of musing, really. If there's anyone out there reading these, please let me know what you think!

Read more about The Western Canon: http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtbloom.html

Hysteria in Birmingham!

Hysteria by Terry Johnson, Birmingham Repertory Theatre, 24 April to 12 May 2007

About ten years ago, I queued for a long time in the West End to get to see this play, but never managed to get a ticket. So when I heard it was coming to my favourite place in Birmingham, I booked tickets immediately. Sad to say, when we saw it, four days after it opened, it wasn't a sell-out, but it should have been. I won't do the usual reviewing stuff about the actors, since I don't watch enough TV to even know who they are, but let's just say they were very good, and all the multiple meanings of the play were nuanced but definitely present. It is, of course, a bit of a farce - that's the point, you know, Freud and humour and all that, and there are a few uncomfortable laughs as well as some audience-freezing dramatic/sad moments. But if humour is about what makes us uncomfortable, what we feel strongly about, and our repressed desires (with sex being top of all lists) then a farce is the obvious background.

The premise is that Freud, living in Hampstead in 1938 having escaped Nazi-infested Vienna, is visited by Dali. This much we know is true, and Dali said he had to meet Freud because he was the father of Surrealism, while Freud said afterwards that the meeting changed his views on modern art. But Johnson makes sure we see the relevance of other contemporary events, referring to Kristallnacht and, at one point, having a troop of mostly elderly Jews (denoted by the Star of David on their coats) creeping across the back of the stage. Yahuda, his friend and doctor, is also trying to get Freud to destroy a manuscript of a book which denies religion, particularly the Jewish religion, by saying that "Now is not the time to destroy what people are dying for".

Freud is of course most famous for his work on hysterics, nearly always women, initially attributing it to a childhood sexual trauma. Though he was usually gentle towards his patients, they were, of course, just patients to him - case-notes. So when a young woman turns up and declares her mother was just such a set of case-notes - and that she subsequently killed herself, Freud has to look very carefully at his work, because he later denied his theories of hysteria. Johnson suggests this is because he felt this could cast a shadow over his own family, and indeed one of his last actions in the play is to ask Yahuda to delete a few words that suggest he might incriminate his own father. Integrity, then, in the work of someone who has had such an enormous impact on Western civilisation, is a vital pivot in the play. In a way, this is about the collision of worlds that the eve of World War Two precipitated: the Victorians and the Moderns, thinking and feeling. Dali and Freud represent two extremes, yet extremes that go well together and can discover much common ground.

One point that the play highlighted to me is that paintings that paint from life, that are not trying to represent the subconscious, such as the Pre-Raphaelites, reveal a great deal about the subconscious - a tiny flick of the brush, a choice of setting and colour and props can speak a thousand words. But in Surrealism, when the intention is to draw out the subconscious, perhaps the attempt to explicate the id in fact makes it simply more opaque, though what Dali's paintings depict is certainly difficult to describe in words. For the first time, though, I saw a huge appeal in Surrealism as something which doesn't obey the rules, which the logic of the psychoanalyst cannot deconstruct. There is a Surrealist denouement to the play, when suddenly the walls fly away, the young woman turns into Freud's daughter, the clocks melt, the telephone becomes a lobster and the doorhandles turn to rubber when one tries to open them. It's like a dream, or nightmare, because the rules even of physics have gone wrong and nothing is what it seems, and yet we have to believe it's real life. Anything is possible, and that's the world of the creative imagination - to go beyond the rules.

At the end, I was left unsure if perhaps none of this happened. When Yahuda gives Freud his medication at the end of the play, he warns him that he may hallucinate. And then, it starts all over again... So did all that really happen, or was it the product of Freud's fevered imagination, worrying that he may have done the wrong thing by some of his patients, concerned about the collision of thinking and feeling that imminent death had brought him to? A play that requires you to make up your own mind is usually a good thing, though - there's no point in having it handed to you on a plate. So, I think it was a product of Freud's id. Which, of course, makes it even more significant, and certainly no less real, than if it had really happened.

One more thing. I'm working a lot on Gothic literature at the moment, and, despite being a farce, this represents to me a good example of modern Gothic. All the action takes place within an enclosed space, in which a hysterical woman is confined, trying to find a way to be (mentally) free. There is the family drama (the possibility of childhood abuse, the unknown and somewhat feared mother, the alienation of the small child grown into a young woman); there is the horror (of childhood abuse again, of the secrets of the id, of the nightmarish Surrealism, and of course of the imminent death of Freud); and there is the fact that 21st century Gothic does rely on the surreal, as much as 18th and 19th century Gothic relies on the apparently supernatural or unexplainable. When the walls fly away and the outside world is exposed, it is of course even more Gothic - with the Jewish women, the horrors of impending war; and suddenly the domestic space seems like the best place to be.