The Filter^

Tristram Shandy

Faber Finds

Faber launches Faber Finds today, their print-on-demand book service, and following The Filter^’s celebration of him last year, their poetry list is currently headlined by A.S.J. Tessimond’s collection Not Love Perhaps. I'm told it's selling very well. This is such an exciting project, and it’s easy to see a bright future where the notion of 'out of print' books are a thing of the past.

Magic, Finland and the Hare.

The miller had a great gift for imitating the animals of the forest. He would make a game of it, and the youngsters would compete to see who could be the first to guess which animal he was mimicking. One minute he would become a hare, and then the next a lemming or a bear. Sometimes he would flap his long arms like a night owl, or start howling like a wolf, pointing his nose at the sky and letting out such a heart-rending wail that the terrified youngsters would huddle together for comfort.

Arto Paasilinna, The Howling Miller

I think too often we are a little bit squeamish about the magical. We feel too old for it as if our adult minds have moved onto more serious matters; we are quick to dismiss it as childish and not deserving of our attention. Henry Perowne’s objections to magical realism in Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday: “the recourse of an insufficient imagination, a dereliction of duty, a childish evasion of the difficulties and wonders of the real, of the demanding re-enactment of the plausible” are, I think, what a lot of us might actually feel. There is an awkwardness there – another adult has produced these works, well are they quite… Those words Perowne uses: “insufficient”, “dereliction”, “evasion” are all about deficiency. To accept magic in the way that a child might, is to be somehow mentally deficient. Like another of McEwan’s characters, Charles Darke in the novel The Child in Time, we have an image of an adult escaping from the real world to live as a child. It’s just not proper. It’s unseemly.

And the above passage from Finnish novelist Arto Paasilinna’s novel The Howling Miller explores just that. We (and the villagers in the book) are reasonably comfortable with this man’s impressions of animals for children, but when he begins wildly howling in the night, things become another matter. Notice how it is phrased: ‘one minute he would become a hare’. It is the kind of phrasing we use all the time about impressionists, but if we think about it for a moment it is more than metaphor. The miller becomes a hare because he is hare-like, but then, he is acting like a hare.

Consider that most famous of hares, Albrecht Dürer’s watercolour A Young Hare (1502):

When we look at the image above, we say ‘that is a hare’. We might go on to say ‘that is a watercolour of a hare’, or even ‘that is an extraordinary likeness to a hare’, but our primary response is that it is a hare. Of course it isn’t, it is simply a mass of assembled pigments upon paper, but our mind allows it to become a hare for us. We would not even say that the picture is hare-like, for that would do discredit to the magic that Dürer has woven with his brush. In the same way, the miller is not hare-like, his impression is such that he is for a moment a hare.

Consider then, E. M. Cioran:

Let me live the life of every species, wildly and un-self-consciously, let me try out the entire spectrum of nature; let me change gracefully, discreetly, as if it were the most natural procedure. How I would search the nests and caves, wander the deserted mountains and the sea, the hills and the plains. Only a cosmic adventure of this kind, a series of metamorphoses in the plant and animal realms, would reawaken in me the desire to become Man again. If the difference between Man and animal lies in the fact that the animal can only be an animal whereas man can also be not-man – that is, something other than himself – then I am not-man.

E.M. Cioran, from ‘Not to be a Man Anymore’, Pe culmile disperării

I hear uncomfortable shuffling at the back. Wants to live the life of every species? What’s his game? Wants to be not-man? Calls himself a philosopher? We’ve met his type before. Mostly on public transport. It’s not normal, is it?

Well that’s just the point: it is. Or rather, what Cioran is suggesting there is that to understand the state of normal human existence we must first attempt to understand what it is to be states other than that. We must accept the magical in order to really see what our present state is. To truly understand life as a man, we must first understand what it is to live as a hare.

Which rather neatly brings us to Finland, or rather to a very lovely book about Finland, again written by Arto Paasilinna. Interesting, in Cioran’s essay ‘Not to be a Man Anymore’, is the sense of dropping out of everyday life to pursue these existential ends. It’s a wild fantasy we might have, to one day disappear from the modern world and adopt an altogether more primitive means of existence. We probably doubt we will ever do it, but this is exactly the plot of Paasilinna’s novel The Year of the Hare.

One night, Vatanen, a hugely successful journalist and his photographer are driving along a country road back towards Helsinki. The car hits a hare. Vatanen goes after the animal into the woods, and the novel begins.

For all this talk of magic that I have made so far in this post, what is striking about this story (apart from the very last four paragraphs of the book) is that actually none of this is magical at all. It is purely the story (however improbable) of a man who abandons the journey back to his former life – his wife, his job, his boat, his means of living – to look after an injured hare in the woods. It merely seems magical because it is so distant from our everyday points of reference.

Which is rather the point. Vatanen feels lost within the modern world so he drops out of it into the wilderness. Throughout the book there is a struggle, at times an ecological one, but more generally a personal one between the modern urban Finland and the wild, untamed expanses of it:

There was an old meadow, full of wild flowers, and a brook murmuring beyond it. Vatanten put the hare down by the brook, stripped off and took a cold dip. A tight shoal of tiny fish, swimming upstream, took fright at the slightest movement, invariably forgetting their fear the next moment.
Vatanen’s thoughts turned to his wife in Helsinki. He began to feel depressed.

In order to escape his past life, Vatanen must learn to live as a hare; as indeed the hare begins to live as a man. For sections of the book they are both on the run, seeking out food and survival. Things that would seem commonplace to modern, urban man, such as the presence of a raven, suddenly become predators to him – the raven almost starving him by daily ransacking his food store. It is an unsentimental book in some ways, and by no means sets out to suggest that this rustic existence is less stressful than Vatanen’s former life, but it is a gently very funny book too – it’s quite wonderful just how innately amusing the circumstances of walking into a bank, or a hotel, or a restaurant, or a taxi rank and happening to have with you a hare, can be.

It is by its nature magical. It’s unexpected. It’s that sense of phantasmagoria that so obsessed Walter Benjamin; the unexpected collision of two disparate worlds in one moment forming a new kind of poetic truth.

Which is more or less how I came by this book. You see, I’ve been thinking about hares for ages, and yet had it not been being asked to write something on Finnish literature, I am certain that I would never have come by Paasilinna. Suddenly upon finding this book, I realised that a lot of things made sense.

The poet William Cowper kept hares. One of the loveliest essays of the eighteenth century is a piece by him titled ‘Epitaph on a Hare’ published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in June, 1784. It details how he came to care for three such animals: Puss, Tiney, and Bess “notwithstanding the two female appellatives, I must inform you that they were all males”. It is a strange piece of writing. One that I am instantly drawn to, but save for taking it as instructions for the care of domesticated wild animals, not one I can see a way of doing much with. As with Vatanen’s hare, between Cowper and Puss we see a strong bond of understanding develop between the animal and its rescuer:

Puss grew presently familiar, would leap into my lap, raise himself upon his hinder feet, and bite the hair from my temples.  He would suffer me to take him up and to carry him about in my arms, and has more than once fallen asleep upon my knee.  He was ill three days, during which time I nursed him, kept him apart from his fellows that they might not molest him (for, like many, other wild animals, they persecute one of their own species that is sick), and by constant care and trying him with a variety of herbs, restored him to perfect health.  No creature could be more grateful than my patient after his recovery; a sentiment which he most significantly expressed, by licking my hand, first the back of it, then the palm, then every finger separately, then between all the fingers, as if anxious to leave no part of it unsaluted; a ceremony which he never performed but once again upon a similar occasion. Finding him extremely tractable, I made it my custom to carry him always after breakfast into the garden, where he hid himself generally under the leaves of a cucumber vine, sleeping or chewing the cud til evening; in the leaves also of that vine he found a favourite repast.  I had not long habituated him to the taste of liberty, before he began to be impatient for the return of the time when he might enjoy it.  He would invite me to the garden by drumming upon my knee, and by a look of expression, as it was not possible to misinterpret.  If this rhetoric did not immediately succeed, he would take the skirt of my coat between his teeth, and pull at it with all his force.

Cowper had to formulate for himself the diet of the hare suggesting: “Sow-thistle, dent-de-lion, and lettuce”, “white sand […] I suppose as a digestive”, “green corn […] both blade and stalk”, straw, oats and occasionally aromatic herbs. For Cowper, the separation of time makes it quite unsurprising to us that he should know what to feed his hares, but in The Year of the Hare, this act demonstrates the stark separation between modern man and the natural world.

Vatanen takes the animal to the warden of the South Savo Game Preservation Office, in order to find out what hares actually eat. He is told:

‘Feed it early clover. You’ll find a lot of that almost anywhere now. And for drinking, give it pure water; no point in forcing milk on it. Besides clover, fresh grass may do, and barley aftermath… bonnet grass it likes, and meadow vetchling. In fact, it likes all the vetches, and alsike is something it likes too. In the winter you’d best give it cambium of deciduous trees, and deep-frozen bilberry twigs as well, if you’re keeping it in town.’
‘What sort of a plant is meadow vetchling? I don’t know it.’

That he doesn't know what any of these plants are marks a huge chasm in our world; the false means by which man is able to live on a planet sustained by organisms he is generally ignorant about, is, when we really consider it, a rather disturbing truth. We might be unlikely to be placed in a situation in which we need to look after an injured hare, but our ignorance of these matters is on a level startling. It would be easy to dismiss A Year of the Hare as silly nonsense, a child’s story of a man going off to live with an animal. Within the book itself the account of his journey is met by scepticism by a scientist, and the way that the book is written; a series of very short ‘adventures’ tricks us into this false conclusion that this is merely kid’s stuff. Not the kind of thing we should attend to with our serious, sophisticated brains. The ending – an ending that takes flight from the rest of the book and is purely fantastical – is surely proof of that itself. We could easily dismiss this book as “a childish evasion of the difficulties and wonders of the real, of the demanding re-enactment of the plausible”, but really it is our own base ignorance – our lack of understanding of what it is to live as a hare, our caution at not wanting to appear silly or feeble-minded – it is that that keeps us only as children.

Poor Soul, poor Girl!

Poor Soul, poor Girl!

(A Debutante)

I cannot imagine anything nicer
Than to be struck by lightning and killed suddenly crossing a field
As if somebody cared.
Nobody cares whether I am alive or dead.

The above poem, ‘Poor Soul, poor Girl!’ by the English poet Stevie Smith, imagines the voice of a young woman confronting mortality and her place in the world. It is a short poem. It is somewhat absurd (such nihilistic thoughts placed in the mind of a young girl – more than that, a debutante; a girl on the brink of all that the world has to offer, a figure that represents youthfulness and life itself, wishing to be struck down dead in an instant, imagining that such an act would prove compassion, or interest, or something – well if nothing else, it’s somewhat unexpected). It is nonetheless poignant. It is sad. It is also an awkward poem, strangely informal; the metre of the long second line, followed by the short third, and the colloquial term ‘nicer’, all contribute in producing a sense of the girl’s innocence of speech. Her thoughts are there: ‘Nobody cares’ – these are the somewhat trite sentiments of a girl not yet fully developed in the psychology of adulthood, and yet contemplating the matter of her ‘soul’ as each of us surely must at one time or another.

It is a poem that comes to mind as I read the work of Edith Södergran – a figure who in turn wrestled with mortality at a surprisingly young age – and mentioning Smith here at all, is merely a means of getting around to some poetry from Finland, by way of Hull.

Södergran was born in St Petersburg in 1892. Her early years were spent between schooling in Russia and holidaying in Raivola, Finland, where the family relocated permanently after the death of her father from tuberculosis. The shadow of this disease, which Edith herself was diagnosed with as a teenager, hung heavily upon her working life. All of the five volumes of poetry published in her lifetime, were written in just the four years before her death, as she fought against her declining health. Her work, often ambiguous, always wrestling with the difficult questions is surprising stuff; and for the apparent similarities between her and the figure in Smith’s poem, there is so much more in Södergran. Her poems are short, and often somewhat frightening constructions. A good translation comes from Gounil Brown’s collection of her poems (Zena, 1990). Here, the poem ‘I saw a Tree’ gives an interesting insight into the young woman confronting the apparent injustice of the world:

I saw a tree that was taller than any
        others
and full of unattainable cones;
I saw a great church with open doors
and all who came out were pale and strong
and ready to die;
I saw a woman who smiling held the dice
and threw it once for happiness,
and saw that she lost –

Around these things was drawn a circle
that no creature shall cross.

As with Smith’s poem, it is the economy of expression here that is most moving; the final line, ‘that no creature shall cross’ is so binding. We are told that this is the way of the world; health, happiness – these things are not guaranteed and may be lost with the roll of dice – and yet despite its pathos, the poem does not rail against the injustice as Smith’s debutante might, it is coldly accepting. The figures leaving the church are ‘pale and strong / and ready to die’; it is a haunting image, the juxtaposition of the words ‘pale and strong’ place the figures already in the midst of death and yet held up by what we presume to be faith.

What Södergran’s poetry confronts is the uneasy inevitability of death, written by a woman painfully aware from her teenage years of her shortening days; and as a result there is only ever acceptance, as here in the poem ‘The Moon’:

How strangely wonderful are all things dead
and calmly silent:
a dead leaf and a dead person
and the moon’s disc –
[…]
that the moon’s course around the earth is
        the path of death –
and the moon weaves her magical web that
        flowers cherish
and the moon spins her fairy net around
        all that lives –  […]

With time comes death, and Södergran’s poetry serves to remind us that living is the course of dying. On midsummer’s day in 1923, in the Finnish town of Raivola, Södergran succumbed to her illness and died aged 31. She has fared well since then, her writing translated into all of the world’s major languages and is she is often held up as the premier female Scandinavian modernist poet.

Books are too important to actually be read

The Economist's review of How to talk about books you haven't read.

The librarian in Robert Musil's “The Man Without Qualities” explains that reading any particular book distracts from what is truly important: the relationship between all books.

Beautiful Libraries

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the most aesthetically pleasing libraries in the UK aren't in London, and there aren't any libraries that are suitable for thrilling research in my fields. The LSE and the SSEES (at UCL) have great collections, but are hard to work in. The BL is useful, but does have a poor range and awful usability, and is faux-business. Anyway, Tyler Cowen links to a Compendium of Beautiful Libraries. It's just a shame that functionality and grandeur never seem to come and in hand. Except for here:

Happy Birthday, Mr Tessimond

105 years ago today the poet A.S.J. Tessimond was born, and today marks the end of our celebration here of his work. It has been a curious process for me putting this together, a slow journey discovering how completely a life might disappear in less than fifty years. There is still very little known on the man himself; Hubert Nicholson’s introduction to the Collected Poems, and a tiny six page pamphlet by the artist Frances Richards (which coincidentally had a print run of 105) remain our only main sources on the poet’s life. In total there are less than twenty items of Tessimond’s correspondence held in library archives, and the Hubert Nicholson Archive in Hull (though at time of writing, inaccessible due to flooding) appears not to hold any materials either. What has become of the Tessimond’s personal papers is at present unknown, but I would be grateful to anyone who has any information on the poet getting in touch.

It is surprising that a poet who throughout the 1930s and 40s was such a regular name in the poetry presses, should slide from our consciousness so quickly. There is a short, touching poem that appears in the posthumous collection Morning Meeting about half forgotten women in hotel lounges:

The lonely women in hotel lounges

Pity us,
Us the unloved, unlovely and unloving,
Half-loving a cat, our morning tea, jewels in a trunk,
Warmth and a little ease.
Pity our too much peace;
Our absence of release;
Our long days falling without cease;
Us who have missed and still at moments know we miss
Life’s bonfire and his kiss.

It is a poem as good as any for expressing a sense of what Tessimond is about. A sad, poignant portrait of a way of life; observed with the precision of good satire, but ultimately not mocking. There is humour here; ‘Half-loving a cat, our morning tea’ seem trivial things for a person to love – love in the sense suggested in the line before, perhaps – but the feeling of having missed out in life is moving. It is the same thing felt in ‘The Man in the Bowler Hat’; the desire and fear of rising up and making something of a life. I love the phrase ‘our too much peace’, it is that simple yet weighty kind of expression that stirs you when you read his poetry, and perhaps ‘too much peace’ is what has befallen Tessimond himself these days.

But he remains loved, lovely and loving. His view on life is beautifully human, he has warmth for transgression and failiure:

Heaven

In the heaven of the god I hope for (call him X)
There is marriage and giving in marriage and transient sex
For those who will cast the body’s vest aside
Soon, but are not yet wholly rarefied
And still embrace. For X is never annoyed
Or shocked; has read his Jung and knows his Freud,
He gives you time in heaven to do as you please,
To climb love’s gradual ladder by slow degrees,
Gently to rise from sense to soul, to ascend
To a world of timeless joy, world without end.

Here on the gates of pearl there hangs no sign
Limiting cakes and ale, forbidding wine.
No weakness here is hidden, no vice unknown.
Sin is a sickness to be cured, outgrown.
With the help of a god who can laugh, an unsolemn god
Who smiles at old wives’ tales of iron rod
And fiery hell, a god who’s more at ease
With bawds and Falstaffs than with Pharisees.

Here the lame learn to leap, the blind to see.
Tyrants are taught to be humble, slaves to be free.
Fools become wise, and wise men cease to be bores,
Here bishops learn from lips of back-street whores,
And white men follow black-faced angel’s feet
Through fields of orient and immortal wheat.

Villon, Lautrec and Baudelaire are here.
Here Swift forgets his anger, Poe his fear.
Napoleon rests. Columbus, journey done,
Has reached his new Atlantis, found his sun.
Verlaine and Dylan Thomas drink together.
Marx talks to Plato. Byron wonders whether
There’s some mistake. Wordsworth has found a hill
That’s home. Here Chopin plays the piano still.
Wren plans ethereal domes; and Renoir paints
young girls as ripe as fruit but not yet saints.

An X, of whom no coward is afraid,
Who’s friend consulted, not fierce king obeyed;
Who hears the unspoken thought, the prayer unprayed;
Who expects not even the learned to understand
His universe, extends a prodigal hand,
Full of forgiveness, over his promised land.

It is an intensely kind voice that runs throughout his work, frequently sad but also with playful wit and irreverence. It is a shame for us all he is not more read. It’s a Victorian idea, but I suspect Tessimond is an ‘improving poet’ (a notion he would probably have hated). The Collected Poems, though out of print, is still obtainable through second-hand bookshops and libraries. I’d like to thank Anthony for giving over a fortnight of The Filter^ to a long and obscure reflection, and to those who have read and commented on these posts. Finally: Happy birthday, Mr. Tessimond.

On the death of a great man

He goes. You, world, are poorer for his going;
And poorer yet again, world, for not knowing
Your loss … ‘Tis well, world. You deserved to lose
That which you neither sought, nor cared to use!

Pets

Pets

An indoor elephant
Seems irrelevant.
Keeping a seagull
Is not legal.

Armadillos
Nest in pillows.
Hungry llamas
Eat pyjamas.

Hippo and rhino
Damage the lino.
Crocodiles stay
In the bath all day.

Women are flustered
If a large bustard,
Eagle or lion
Watches them iron.

Such birds as grouse
Flap through the house
And polar bears
Block up the stairs.

Sheep are loafers
On chairs and sofas
And few sane men
Can love a hen.

Most people therefore
Prefer to care for
A dog or cat;
And that is that.

A frayed but silver rope

Gordon had a big job on hand at the moment. The Queen of Sheba Toilet Requisites Co. were sweeping the country with a monster campaign for their deodorant, April Dew. They had decided that BO and halitosis were worked out, or nearly, and had been racking their brains for a long time past to think of some new way of scaring the public. Then some bright spark had suggested, What about smelling feet? That field had never been exploited and had immense possibilities. The Queen of Sheba had turned the idea over to the New Albion. What they asked for was a really telling slogan; something in the class of ‘Night Starvation’ – something that would rankle the public consciousness like a poisoned arrow.
        George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, p.271

The similarities in the situations of Tessimond and the character of Gordon Comstock in George Orwell’s novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying are surprisingly close. Both worked in bookshops, and then as advertising copywriters, both struggled with becoming published poets. The joke of Orwell’s novel is that Comstock is a much better copywriter than he is a poet, but the similarities are still striking. Tessimond’s poem ‘Money’ could stand as a preface to the book: ‘I am your master and your master’s master, / I am the dragon’s teeth which you have shown’, and both Tessimond and Orwell take a similarly grim view of advertising:

Advertising

You, without gleam or glint or fire,
You cannot know your own desire.
But I will tell you. I will look through your eyes. Now listen!
Here are the toys that please, the almost-gems that glisten! …
I am your wish and I its answer.
I am the drum and you the dancer.
I am the trumpet-voice, the Stentor.
I am temptation, I the Mentor
Who tells you that ten million men have long
Called a stone bread – and can ten million men be wrong?
I am the voice that bids you spend to save and save to spend,
But always spend that wheels may never end
Their turning and by turning let you spend to save
And save to spend, world without end, cradle to grave.

The Ad-Man

This trumpeter of nothingness, employed
To keep our reason full and null and void.
This man of wind and froth and flux will sell
The wares of any who reward him well.
Praising whatever he is paid to praise,
He hunts for ever-newer, smarter ways
To make the gilt seem gold; the shoddy, silk;
To cheat us legally; to bluff and bilk
By methods which no jury can prevent
Because the law's not broken, only bent.

This mind for hire, this mental prostitute
Can tell the half-lie hardest to refute;
Knows how to hide an inconvenient fact
And when to leave a doubtful claim unbacked;
Manipulates the truth, but not too much,
And if his patter needs the Human Touch
Then aptly artless, artlessly naive,
He wears his fickle heart upon his sleeve.

He takes ideas and trains them to engage
In the long little wars big combines wage.
He keeps his logic loose, his feelings flimsy;
Turns eloquence to cant and wit to whimsy;
Trims language till it fits his client's pattern,
And style's a glossy tart or limping slattern.

He uses words that once were strong and fine.
Primal as sun and moon and bread and wine,
True, honourable, honoured, clear and clean,
And leaves them shabby, worn, diminished, mean.

Where our defence is weakest, he attacks.
Encircling reason's fort, he finds the cracks,
He knows the hopes and fears on which to play.
We who at first rebel, at last obey.
We who have tried to choose accept his choice.
Tired, we succumb to his untiring voice.
The drip-drip-drip makes even granite soften.
We trust the brand-name we have heard so often
And join the queue of sheep that flock to buy;
We fools who know our folly, you and I.

A slightly more sympathetic view is put across in this later poem, not published during the poet’s lifetime:

Defence of the ad-man

He brings us aims and dreams and drugs; he tells
Us fairy-tales that half come true or might.
The patent panaceas that he sells
May be placebos, but placebos can
Act like elixirs; syrups have their spells,
And coloured water sometimes can assuage
A thirst for draughts from unattainable wells.

He binds us with a frayed but silver rope.
He peddles jewels false perhaps but bright.
He kindles flares that beckon eyes that grope.
His ‘you, you, you’ consoles the lonely man
And humble woman. With permitted dope
He medicines the sickness of our age;
Offers the ugly, glamour; the hopeless, hope.

Before the inept lips open.

Meeting

Dogs take new friends abruptly and by smell.
Cats’ meetings are neat, tactual, caressive.
Monkeys exchange their fleas before they speak.
Snakes, no doubt, coil by coil reach mutual knowledge.

We then, at first encounter, should be silent;
Not court the cortex but the epidermis;
Not work from inside out but outside in;
Discover each other’s flesh, its scent and texture;
Familiarize the sinews and the nerve-ends,
The hands, the hair – before the inept lips open.

Instead of which we are resonant, explicit.
Our words like windows intercept our meaning.
Our four eyes fence and flinch and awkwardly
Wince into shadow, slide oblique to ambush.
Hands stir, retract. The pulse is insulated.
Blood is turned inwards, lonely, skin unhappy…
While always under all, but interrupted,
Antennæ stretch … waver … and almost … touch.