Morning Read: Work and Play
A staggering number of pages today. Melville surprised me with a very long chapter — twelve pages, that is, after a string of two- and four-pagers. Squillions threw up a long “Intermission” about Noël Coward’s professional relationship with Gertrude Lawrence. I’m afraid that I’ll still be writing it all up at dinnertime.
¶ To start simply, or, rather, “simply,” with La Rochefoucauld. Maxim 23 is nothing if not theatrical:
Peu de gens conaissent la mort. On ne la souffre pas ordinairement par résolution, mais par stupidité et par coutume; et la plupart des hommes meurent parce qu’on ne peut s’empêcher de mourir.
Few people are familiar with death. The don’t submit to it with resolve, but rather stupidly and according to habit; and most people die because they can’t help dying.
They don’t call it the Grand Siècle for nothing.
¶ In Lord Chesterfield, a few letters, two of them to his son, full of the usual sterling advice:
Consider, then, which you would choose; to attend diligently while you are learning, and thereby excell all other boys, get a great reputation, and have a great deal more time to play; or else not mind your book, let boys even younger than yourself get before you, be laughed at by them for a dunce, and have no time to play at all: for, I assure you, if you will not learn, you shall not play.
What saves Chesterfield from priggishness, and even makes him attractive at times, is the evident match between his station and his ambition: he is forever living up to being what he already is: an earl. Or, as he was for a while in 1745-6, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.
The Earl of Grandison’s application for a Viscountship for his daughter, Lady Betty Mason, seems to me so reasonable with regard to him, and of so little consequence to anyobyd else, that I own I have given him some reason to hope for that mark of his Majesty’s favour. His estate here is at least eight thousand pounds a year. Mr Mason, who married his daugher, has four; all which will center in the son by that daughter. Lord Grandison’s present Viscountship goes at his death to Lord Jersey. This request of his, therefore, seems to be a very common, and, so far at least a pardonable, piece of human vanity, often indulged in other cases, and I hope will be so in this.
¶ Today’s chapter of Moby-Dick, “The Ship,” reads like a silent-movie scene, with loads and loads of fustian over-acting, as if words were merely meaningless gestures requiring further explanation. Ishmael does at least board the Pequod to sign up for the next voyage, so we must be getting somewhere. I resolve not to take further advantage of the short chapters, but to read several whenever they come in clumps, as they’ll do tomorrow.
¶ In Don Quixote, an exhausting bit of bedroom farce. The electric light really put an end to such goings-on. The poor knight has hardly begun to recover from his Yaguesan-inflicted wounds than he’s pummeled by his dorm mates and taken for dead by an officer of the Holy Brotherhood of Toledo. I’m worn out.
¶ Squillions is turning into the book that I dread every morning. Noël Coward himself is if anything more attractive than I expected him to be: certainly he’s a man of great good sense who only pretends to be silly (and not very often at that). But Barry Day’s method, if that’s what it is, exasperates me. As noted, today’s reading is an account of the professional relationship between Coward and Gertrude Lawrence. That is pretty much all it is. There’s no thorough independent take on Lawrence. It’s clear from the photographs that she must have been a great interpreter of Coward’s work, but it ought to have been clear from the writing, too. What we get instead is a dithering diva who, because she only appeared on the stage together with Coward for three shows over the years, seems not to merit the space allotted here.
¶ It’s a small world. A N Wilson quotes that Noël Coward line of Hernia Whittlebot’s that I quoted a few days ago — the one about Art being an Oblong on the Curve of Life. The Sitwells come in for a fairly thorough dry-cleaning: “Such is the human capacity for self-deception, that all three Sitwell siblings believed in their collective and individual genius, though neither Edith nor Sacheverell (“Sachie”) left anything behind them in written form which was evidence of any particular talent. Edith wrote what she thought were poems…”
T S Eliot particularly cringed at the Sitwells’ “poems” since, somewhere in the minds of the public, or the Sitwells themselves, there existed a false syllogism. Deep, modern or high-falutin’ verses which mean nothing at all are “difficult.” Eliot’s poetry is difficult. Therefore the Sitwells are in the avant garde with Eliot and Pound.
I see that I am never to be allowed to live down my youthful enthusiasm for Façade. “See the tall black Aga on the sofa in the alga mope.” What is an “alga,” anyway? I wonder if Ammon Shea knows.