Abstract
The nineteenth century continues to patrol our thoughts. Perhaps no other period has exercised such a hegemony over its successor, or been so deeply rewarded by the backward glance. Shaw called it ‘the wickedest of all the centuries’;1 Marx has been invoked as saying that its dead tradition ‘weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living’.2 The onus of modernism has been to construe the nightmare of that wickedness, looking, like Janus, backwards to the roots of its problems and forwards to their solution. At its epicentre, the nineteenth century predicated modern man aghast at his image in the mirror; the iconography of the twentieth would be a hall of recurring ghosts: men, ideas, events, all indiscriminately besieging the roots of memory.
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Notes and References
G. B. Shaw, introduction to Dickens, Hard Times (London: Waverley [Waverley edition], 1913).
Karl Marx, quoted by F. Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Soceity’, in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. H. Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983) p. 115
Cf. M. de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life (London: Macmillan, 1921) discussed in Pine, The Dandy and the Herald, pp. 91–2, 117.
SIUC 42/9/5; cf. also Steven Marcus, Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis: Studies in the Transition from Victorian Humanism to Modernity (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984) p. 254: ‘Freud was one of those figures from the old culture who postulated in his theories an external world that was real and an internal world that was also real. This internal world partly depended on the external world and was partly independent of it.’
Cf. Pine, The Dandy and the Herald, ch. 2, ‘The English Renaissance: Art and Politics 1840–95’ and ch. 3, ‘Vortex, 1895–1920’.
D. Carradine, ‘Time Gentleman, Please’, review of S. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918, London Review of Books, 19 July 1984.
Pine, The Dandy and the Herald, pp. 55, 91–2, 219.
cf. Kundera, op. cit., ‘The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes’, pp. 3–20.
E. M. Forster, Pharos and Pharillon (London: Hogarth Press, 1923) p. 75.
A. Storr, Solitude (London: Flamingo, 1989 [originally published 1988 by André Deutsch as The School of Genius]) p. 64.
Conversation with the author; cf. also SP 36–8.
Cf. Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment, p. 4: ‘the acquisition of skills, including the ability to read, becomes devalued when what one has learned to read adds nothing of importance to one’s life’.
SIUC 42/15/6 (a notebook for Clea).
H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. A Mitchell (London: Macmillan, 1911) p. 219.
Conversation with the author.
Bettelheim, Uses of Enchantment, p. 5.
C. G. Jung, ‘The Development of Personality’, Collected Works (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul) vol. 17, para 284.
W. Pater, quoted in L. Evans, Letters of Walter Pater (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970) p. xxix.
W. Pater, ‘Imaginary Portraits: 1: The Child in the House’, Macmillan’s Magazine, August 1878; cf. also Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (London: Macmillan, 1885) vol. 1, p. 24: ‘that beautiful dwelling-place lent the reality of concrete outline to a peculiar ideal of home, which throughout the rest of his life he seemed, amid many distractions of spirit, to be ever seeking to regain’. Cf. also M. Levey, The Case of Walter Pater (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978) p. 22.
SIUC 42/19/8; cf. Bettelheim, Uses of Enchantment, pp. 74–5: in the fairy tale ‘every figure is essentially one-dimensional, enabling the child to comprehend its actions and reactions easily. Through simple and direct images the fairy story helps the child sort out his complex and ambivalent feelings, so that these begin to fall each one into a separate place, rather than being all one big muddle. … Even Freud found no better way to help make sense out of the incredible mixture of contradictions which coexist in our mind and inner life than by creating symbols for isolated aspects of the personality.’
S. P. Rosenbaum, Victorian Bloomsbury: The Early Literary History of the Bloomsbury Group (London: Macmillan, 1983) pp. 17–18.
Skandha: for further discussion of the term, see part 5.
L. Durrell, introduction to Pen and Pencil: Drawings and Paintings by British Authors, catalogue of an exhibition at the International Cultural Center, Antwerp/Brussels 1973/74 (National Book League); the exhibition included nine items by Durrell under the pseudonym ‘Oscar Epfs’.
SIUC 42/19/8.
E. Pound, ‘A Retrospect’ in Blast 1, ed. P. Wyndham Lewis, 1914.
L. Durrell, White Eagles Over Serbia (London: Faber and Faber, 1957).
MM/ts, p.12.
Ibid., p. 15.
Letter to the author.
Campbell, op. cit, p. 101, refers to ‘those unseen libidinal ties without which no human groups could exist’.
Pater, Marius, vol. 1, p. 25.
Groddeck, op. cit., p. 59.
MM/ts, p. 6.
This act of faith on Durrell’s part constantly recurred: in late life he expressed the same belief in the form of a wish: ‘right up to the last minute, the last drawn breath, the options are open, the miracle is available’ (conversation with the author).
SIUC/LD/Accession II holds: Baroness Orczy, A Joyous Adventure; John Buchan, Castle Gay, Huntingtower and the stories The Moon Endureth; and Anthony Hope [Hawkins], Prisoner of Zenda.
Kundera, op. cit., pp. 15–16.
Fraser, op. cit., p. 130.
‘From the Elephant’s Back’ and in conversation with the author.
W. B. Yeats, quoted in R. Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Mask (London: Macmillan, 1948) p. 12.
Bradbury and McFarlane, op. cit., p. 26.
G. Hough, ‘The Modernist Lyric’ in Bradbury and McFarlane, op. cit., pp. 312–13.
H. S. Hughes, Consciousness and Society (Brighton: Harvester, 1979) p. 34.
T. Mann, Doctor Faustus (London: Secker and Warburg, 1979) p. 378.
S. Nalbantian, chapter title in Seeds of Decadence in the Late Nineteenth Century Novel (London: Macmillan, 1983); cf. also Pater, ‘Coleridge’s Writings’, Westminster Review, no. 29 (1866) p. 132: ‘Coleridge … represents that inexhaustible discontent, languor, and homesickness, the chords of which ring all through our modern literature.’
Pine, The Dandy and the Herald, ‘The Mediaeval Character of the Victorian Era’, pp. 43–50.
cf. TCL 33/3, p. 373; Durrell also owed much to Remy de Gourmont: cf. R. Morrison, ‘Remy de Gourmont and the Young Lawrence Durrell: A Creative Nexus’ in Deus Loci, n.s. 1 (1992), ed. I. MacNiven, pp. 97–109; cf. also K. Brown, op. cit., p. 100, where attention is drawn to the fact that in the 1930s Durrell possessed a copy of Gourmont’s The Natural Philosophy of Love.
cf. John Danby, Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1965) p. 16: ‘the economy of Letters as a profession in Elizabethan-Jacobean times might still be said to be late-feudal. But … in another respect we are at the beginning of the modern age’; L. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962) p. 16 speaks of ‘the double aspect of the age (‘medieval’ and ‘modern’), and (p. 259): ‘to understand the development of the language between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries … is to understand the Progress of Civilization’.
T. S. Eliot, ‘Christopher Marlowe’, in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1951) p. 123.
SIUC/LD/Accession II contains much of this material. As a brief indication of these extensive notes (which Durrell continued throughout his life) cf.: ‘Notes and biographical matter compiled for a projected book on the Elizabethan Literary Man and the circumstances of his ordinary life’ to which end Durrell had assembled a wide-ranging selection of facts and data, together with quotations, on almost all the dramatists of the era; for example, a notebook entitled ‘Elizabethan notebook’ containing alphabetical entries on forty-five writers, from Edward Alleyn to Sir Henry Wotton, suggests that Durrell was at some stage (the style of handwriting points to an early date, perhaps the 1930s) near to executing the projected work. In addition, Durrell had an extensive library consisting not only of many texts from the period (e.g. the complete works of Marston, Nashe, Webster, Tourneur, and issues of The Baconian and proceedings of the Hunterian Club which reprinted ‘lost’ texts in the 1870s) but also commentaries on them, e.g. G. R. Hibbard, Thomas Nashe: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962) in which Durrell had noted the use of the term ‘hangman’ (p. 173), the relevance of which will become evident in Part 4
J. M. Robertson, Montaigne and Shakespeare (London: A. and C. Black, 1909); and two volumes which must have caused him a wry jealousy
Edwin Haviland Miller, The Professional Writer in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1959) and its predecessor, Phoebe Sheavyn’s The Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1909). His notes on these volumes are replete with verbal and intellectual images (such as the recurrence of the notion of the ‘black book’) which find echoes right through his own work. Furthermore, CERLD holds a common-place book (uncatalogued item marked ‘Quotes’) containing ‘Images from the Poems of Shakespear [sic]: contemp Connotations’ which include Astrology, Lameness, Pheonix [sic], Boys as Girls, Darkness and Fairness, Shadows. The same page contains a quotation from Jung on the relevance of the ‘caput mortum’ which reappears at the opening of Monsieur. On 13 December 1959 Richard Aldington wrote to Harry T. Moore ‘he wanted to write a long critical book on the Elizabethan drama, which we all besought him not to do, as it would annoy his novel-readers. But if he can do one or two successful plays, the pot will boil, and he will be kept out of literary mischief’: SIUC collection 24/1/59.
Published in 1675: ‘Parr’ reappears as a character in a novel by Pursewarden in the Quartet.
Cf. Pater, Marius, vol. 1, p. 4: ‘one exclaimed involuntarily, in consecrated phrase, Deity is in this Place! Numen Inest!’
W. Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1893) 4th edn, pp. 131–2
cf. Gerald Monsman, Walter Pater’s Art of Autobiography (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980) p. 5: ‘Pater’s recognition that the categories of space, time, matter, identity, causation, and memory are tentative, incomplete, arbitrary, and relative dictates a unique kind of fiction that swallows up veridical reality.’
Pater, Renaissance, p. 109.
Quoted by M. Praz, The Romantic Agony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970) 2nd edn, p. 59.
Pater, Renaissance, p. 162.
Cf. Praz, op. cit., pp. 335, 351, 388.
J.-K. Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. R. Baldick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959) pp. 82, 176, 181.
Cf. Raymond Williams, The City and the Country (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973).
Title of a poem by James Thomson (1834–82) which characterised a Victorian attitude to urban values, e.g. in the work of his namesake, Francis Thompson (1859–1907); cf. also the expression ‘dark night of the soul’, employed as a title for work by St John of the Cross, which finds its way into Tunc: ‘for many a month I wallowed in the dark night of the soul’ (p. 57).
Cf. Kipling, Something of Myself, pp. 43, 45, 84–5.
Hamilton is an apposite example of the genre from which Durrell emancipated himself by escaping from ‘Pudding Island’ but with which he continued to have some connection: his first three novels describe an initiation into, and escape from, the squalid London of the inter-war years and are extremely close in temperament, if not in style, to Hamilton’s trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (London: Hogarth Press, 1987), and in particular the first volume, The Midnight Bell; the public house which gives the novel its name is similar to the ‘Regina Hotel’ of The Black Book in its ambience and the vulgarity of its characterisation: people are types rather than individuals. The reminiscence of prostitution, venality, a beer-stained existence which persisted throughout the artistic life of Fitzrovia, for example, was also an element which Durrell carried away with him to the Mediterranean. Hamilton’s bar-maids and whores and Durrell’s night-club dancers are thus cognate: the upstairs room is the ultimate destination of both. Shabbiness in the male, indicated by both writers by means of the mackintosh, tawdriness in the female by means of the cheap jewellery, are a peculiar index to an exhausted society at large (what we shall see Spengler describing on a much grander, but not so remote, canvas as ‘the metaphysically exhausted soil of the West’). The method of dealing with emotional response is something the two writers seem to have in common: the whore’s kiss — ‘there had never been such a kiss in the history of the world’ (Hamilton, p. 82) — is not far from the ‘paraphrase’ effected by the kiss in the Quartet (p. 368).
I. MacNiven, ‘Steps to Livia: The State of Durrell’s Fiction’, in Deus Loci, vol. 5, no. 1, ed. M. Cartwright (1981) pp. 330–47.
Construire, op. cit.
A. David-Neel, My Journey to Lhasa (London: Heinemann, 1927); With Magicians and Mystics in Tibet ([first published in French in 1929] London: John Lane, 1931); Buddhism (London: Bodley Head, 1939).
A. Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1958) p. 9.
David-Neel, Journey to Lhasa, p. xvii.
Ibid., p. xix.
Durrell’s commissioned interview (for Elle) is described in his foreword to B. and M. Foster, Forbidden Journey: The Life of Alexandra David-Neel (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987) pp. ix–x.
R. Kipling, Something of Myself, p. 116.
R. Kipling, Kim (London: Macmillan, 1908) pocket edn, p. 12.
Ibid., p. 14.
Ibid., p. 168.
Ibid., pp. 112–3.
Ibid., p. 326.
Cf. Tao Te Ching, XIV, 33: ‘Its upper part is not dazzling, its lower part is not obscure. Dimly visible, it cannot be named, and returns to that which is without substance’: compare this to Vaughan’s ‘deep but dazzling darkness’.
Ibid., XXI, 48ff: ‘In his every movement the man of great virtue follows the way and the way only. As a thing the way is shadowy, indistinct, yet within it is an image; … within it is a substance, dim and dark, yet within it is an essence. This essence is quite genuine and within it is something that can be tested. From the present back to antiquity its name never deserted it. It serves as a means for inspecting the fathers of the multitude.’
A. A. Mendilow, Time and the Novel (London: Peter Nevill, 1952).
Steiner, Real Presences, p. 53.
Maeterlinck’s La Vie de l’Espace is in SIUC/LD/Accession II.
Knights, op. cit., p. 148; cf. also Steiner, Real Presences, p. 95: ‘to ascribe to words a correspondence to “things out there”, to see and use them as somehow representational of “reality” in the world … makes of language a lie’; and p. 132: ‘without having either to affirm or to deny the “death of God” — such affirmation or denial being merely oratorical gestures on behalf of a vacant simile — deconstruction teaches us that where there is no “face of God” for the semantic marker to turn to, there can be no transcendent or decidable intelligibility’.
cf. Steiner, Real Presences, pp. 70–1, 76: ‘The notion of “indeterminacy” … has put in critical doubt the deterministic classical conditions of proof, of experimental verification. … Together, indeterminacy and complementarity presume an interference by the observer, by the process of observation, with the phenomenal material. … The two principles. … are at the heart of all interpretative and all critical proceedings and acts of speech in literature and the arts.’
cf. M. Béja, Joyce, the Artist Manquée and Indeterminacy (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1989).
Writers at Work, op. cit., p. 277.
H. Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: Allen and Unwin, 1910) pp. 128–9.
Ibid., pp. 133–4.
Ibid., pp. 238–9.
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© 1994 Richard Pine
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Pine, R. (1994). The Child and the House. In: Lawrence Durrell: The Mindscape. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23412-7_4
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