Reading Note:
This & That
24 June 2014
It has been a good season for pulling books down from the shelf and reading them for the first time. There was David Nasaw’s Going Out, and then Kate Colquhoun’s Taste: The Story of Britain Through its Cooking. I’m in the middle of that. (Did you know that currants — as in Zante Currants, the small raisins — started out in English as grapes of Corinth?) Today, looking for something to read at lunch, I lighted upon Jean Strouse’s biography of Alice James. It’s a real treat to come at the James Family story from a slightly different angle.
I’d have liked to read The Ambassadors, but I’m reading that in French. I read a chapter in English, and then, right away, the same chapter in French. I do not consult the dictionary, but I do look back, now and then, at the original. Jean Pavans’s recent translation is as complex syntactically as the original, but the vocabulary is, naturally, more contemporary. Thus Maria Gostrey’s term for Mrs Newcome and Lambert Strether, in their native Woollett, “swells,” which I found somewhat obscure, becomes “select(e)” in French: quite clear. This bilingual project forces me to pay very close attention to the original, as it’s to be my only key to uncertain words in French. I’d have certainly been obliged to look up “éclaboussures boueuses” if I hadn’t just read “fresh damp gusts.” Actually, I just did look up the French, sensing, upon closer inspection, that the translation is rather free on this point (“muddy splatters”). Interesting detail: words appearing in French in the original are marked with an asterisk. Bon!*
Pleasant as it is to go back and forth, I can only do so much at a time without flagging. Reading about Henry James’s invalid sister is an excellent stand-in.
Over the weekend, I read the three novellas by Michel Faber that are collected as The Courage Consort, the title of the first. “The Courage Consort” and “The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps” are the most clearly literary works of Faber’s that I’ve read so far. Under the Skin is as unliterary as a well-written book can be. The story sounds in science fiction (although it doesn’t really read as such, strange as it is), and the style is overtly workmanlike. But it is well-written, and there are unobtrusive nuances to be found. In this, Faber is the opposite of Stephen King, at least for me; King’s writing always breaks down into careless, almost clumsy bits, and leaves the impression that King doesn’t give a damn about language. He certainly doesn’t give my kind of damn! Faber does, so I’ll read anything. I was hooked by his Victorian melodrama, The Crimson Petal and the White. It made me feel almost sorry for Wilkie Collins, who could never have published anything remotely as carnally frank — but that he would have done, had it been possible, Faber’s artful re-creation left me in no doubt.
“The Courage Consort” is about a five-singer a capella group that retires to a Belgian chateau in the middle of a deep forest, in order to rehearse a difficult new work in a noise-free environment. The novella is told from the point of view of the group’s soprano, Catherine Courage, wife of Roger, the baritone and group leader (the pun, or double-meaning, is almost gracious). Catherine is very much lacking in courage at the start; the desire to go on living has somehow been drained out of her. Faber being Faber, there is shadow of Gothic menace in the woods that surround the chateau, and a good deal of play with the sense of being cut off from the world: despite being routinely flouted, this air of dangerous isolation persists. The story takes a surprising, but, in retrospect, perfectly natural turn toward the end, and “The Courage Consort” story closes with the prosperous satisfaction of an old New Yorker story. The same is true of “The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps,” set in Whitby, notorious as the point of entry into England for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Vampires are not the story’s objects of curiosity, however; an apparently grisly deathbed confession is. Again, the point of view is that of a woman, and at the end I realized that the same is true of Under the Skin and The Crimson Petal and the White. I’ve never read Fifty Shades of Grey, but I would bet that Faber’s view of the male of the species through the eye of the female is as far as you can get from that of E L James, without being simply lesbian.
The final entry in The Courage Consort, “The Fahrenheit Twins,” is not so much a novella as a fable. At the very start, the realism so persuasive in the preceding fictions is called into question.
At the icy zenith of the world, far away from any other children, Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain knew no better than that life was bliss. Therefore, it was bliss.
By the end of the story, which is terrifying without the aid of any special effects, the twins know better. The only thing missing is an embossed invitation to decode the tale. For the time being, I’m content to take it at face value. I relish the sensation that Faber is up to something that is somehow beyond me. In a writer less fluent and interesting, such mystification would annoy me. Let that attest to my admiration for this Nederlander who writes in English and lives in Scotland.
That leaves only Some Rain Must Fall: And Other Stories for me to read before Michel Faber’s new book comes out in the fall.
***
Stopping in at Crawford Doyle on Friday, I was arrested by a book on the front counter, James Turner’s Philology: the Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities. The French word for this book, at any rate with regard to me, would be incontournable: there is no way that I can get around reading this book. Happily, it is lucid, and authoritatively historical as well.
Why Philology? Ever since I read Auden’s remark about Hannah Arendt — that The Human Condition is an “etymology,” explaining the proper meaning of certain words — I’ve been considering Arendt not as a philosopher but as a philologist. Turner’s book unpacks what philology is and is not. Just as “philosophy” doesn’t mean, simply, “the love of wisdom,” so “philology” means more (or less) than “the love of words.” Turner’s account of grammar, as it developed in Alexandrian times (but in Pergamum), is particularly rich.
But in antiquity grammar meant much more than parsing sentences. Dionysius [Thrax] divided grammar into six parts. His pupil Tyrannion separated it, more influentially, into four modes of treating a text: recitation, explanation, emendation, and evaluation. This program boiled down to teaching people how to read, with sophisticated grasp, in a culture of oral reading where voice mattered as well as comprehension. Yet here grammar gains almost the breadth of philologia itself. And why should it not? What did a refined ancient reader need, besides well-modulated vocal cords? He … required a scroll purged of errors, mastery of the language written on it, and knowledge of the historical and mythological lore to which the writer referred. Add some arguments about etymology and you have a summary of Hellenistic philology and its associated antiquarian research.
Now you know why, even in Shakespeare’s day, they called it grammar school.
More to come: I’m only in the middle of Turner’s second chapter.
And on that note: Daily Blague news update: “Jirble.”