An Unusual Biography

Also: Writing for Craig Raine, revisiting the novels of William Thackeray, Newfoundland in verse, violence in film, and more.

Andrew Young (Source: National Portrait Gallery)

I have just finished a biography of Andrew Young, a Scottish poet and Anglican priest (and former Presbyterian minister) who died in 1971. It was published in 1997, and it is an unusual book.

For starters, it was published in English in Austria by Wolfgang Görtschacher at the University of Salzburg (and founder of the Poetry Salzburg Review) presumably because British publishers were uninterested. Young’s popularity began to decline almost immediately after Philip Larkin declared in 1985 that he was in no danger of being forgotten.

It was also written by Young’s son-in-law, Edward Lowbury, a pathologist and poet, and Young’s daughter, Alison. Lowbury loved Young’s poetry first and Alison second, which is to say he met Alison only after visiting Young to discuss poetry.

Young was apparently a distant father, prone to sudden bursts of anger, self-centered, and shy. The book could easily have been marred by unrestrained complaints against the man or unreserved praise of his work, but it contains neither of these flaws. It is judicious throughout. The authors, writing before the current fad for self-insertion, refer to themselves in the third person and only when they are part of the narrative of Young’s life. In short, they aim for objectivity—a noble goal that always makes for better writing however impossible it may be to achieve.

It is striking, too, to read about the great many people who once played a significant role in British literary life who have now been mostly forgotten—Edward Marsh, James Kirkup, Leonard Clark, John Piper, Norman Nicholson, Kathleen Raine, Viola Meynell, Ruth Pitter, Laurence Whistler, Richard Church, Rupert Hart-Davis, and on the list goes. They were undoubtedly minor figures compared to, say, a T.S. Eliot or a C.S. Lewis (who also get a mention)—at least everyone but Marsh—but significant nonetheless.

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Reading about Kathleen Raine made me wonder if she was related to the poet and critic Craig Raine (founding editor of the now defunct Areté). She’s not, at least as far as I can tell, but I did happen upon Leo Robson’s piece about writing for Craig Raine while I was bumping around the Internet. Here’s a snippet:

I felt excited but nervous when Craig, leaning against the bar of the Cittie of Yorke, on Chancery Lane, a year after our first encounter, asked if I wanted to write a piece for a special issue he was planning on Márquez. He recalled by way of explanation that he’d devoured Love in the Time of Cholera on a long-ago family ski trip – a stronger seal of approval, it appeared, than the legions of imitators or the awarding of a Nobel Prize, and confirmation, as if it were needed, that the subject of Areté issues were indeed chosen at the whim of its proprietor-editor. I told Craig that I wasn’t sure I was equipped to write Areté. But then his colleague, Claire Lowdon, nudged my side, and I realised that they were short of copy.

I followed up to ask if Craig had been “serious about Autumn of the Patriarch” – the novel I’d been assigned – and if so, perhaps he might supply me some basic details. The reply said: “2-3000 words. Deadline 21 July. Payment: nugatory.” (I said that I was disappointed, having read the article he wrote for the New Statesman when he founded the journal, that he’d started paying his contributors and he wrote again to say that the cheque would be cancelled if I mentioned it to “anyone.”) As 21 July came and went, and the only thing I’d written were excuses about moving flat, Craig proved lenient and even empathetic (“I *hate* moving”). When I eventually filed, he made a number of judicious cuts and questioned the taste I exhibited –so non-Areté-friendly that I must have done it just to annoy him – for engaging with works of academic criticism: “You write so well yourself I don’t see why you adopted the strategy of working through [redacted] and the other duds. You may be nervously covering your arse re S American history, but all the same it means you have to first outline some meathead’s erroneous position and then correct it…”

Do read the whole thing, though I wish Robson focused more on Raine’s words and ideas than on what he thinks are his own clever replies.

Stuart Jeffries reviews Agnes Callard’s new book on Socrates. He likes it:

Open Socrates — quite the most gripping new philosophical book I’ve read in years — teems with insights into our world. We too often live like T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, measuring out our lives in coffee spoons, distracting ourselves from the fundamental questions of life with work tasks, Netflix binges and Insta stories. Callard speaks of “taking life fifteen minutes at a time” and of thereby sidestepping answering what she calls “untimely questions” until it is too late.

The great virtue of the book is that the author makes this ugly old Athenian shock us anew with his insights into the things that really matter but that we are fearful of addressing — how to live, love and die. In each case she suggests that we moderns are doing them all wrong.

So, too, does Tim Clare, writing for The Guardian:

A less serious author would have devoted a great deal of time to establishing how their subject’s ideas might grant us practical advantages when dealing with the minutiae of everyday life. There’s something rather bracing and brilliant about how rapidly Callard sweeps all that off the table, confronting us with the terrible existential torment that hit Tolstoy at 50, right at the peak of his material success. He was revered as a writer, financially prosperous, he had his health and family, yet he claimed that one question brought him “to the point of suicide”. It was: “What will come from my whole life?”

Callard calls this the “Tolstoy Problem”. It belongs to a whole category of “untimely questions”: issues of huge gravity we can spend our whole lives avoiding. They’re not merely hard to answer, but hard to ask. As Tolstoy’s case shows, they can be actively dangerous, especially if the work is left half-done – as if you had started rewiring your house only to leave bare cables trailing over the floor. Callard shrewdly argues that Tolstoy’s error wasn’t in raising such intimidating questions, but in responding too hastily: there is a “simultaneity of question and answer”, where he at once concludes his problems defy meaningful enquiry.

First Things has a beautiful new website. Check it out. And while you’re there, why not read Peter Leithart’s short piece on Élisabeth-Paule Labat and the theology of music: “Labat was an accomplished pianist and composer when she entered the abbey of Saint-Michel de Kergonan in her early twenties. She devoted her later years to writing theology and an ‘Essay on the Mystery of Music,’ published a decade ago as The Song That I Am, translated by Erik Varden. It’s a brilliant and beautiful essay, but what sets it apart from most explorations of music is its deeply theological character.”

Nicholas Bradley writes about Mary Dalton’s Newfoundlandic poetry in The Walrus:

In Interrobang, Dalton is drawn to the evocative objects and heirlooms of that island: the shop bell that “announces an entry,” the money box that keeps “news of unpaid bills, unkept / promises to itself,” a blue bottle of “Gerald S. Doyle’s Newfoundland Cod Liver Oil” with its “stinking / gut-churning goodness.” Or, if not objects, specimens: “Tansy,” “Stinging Nettle,” “Dog Rose,” “Joe Pye Weed.” She alludes to the plants’ medicinal properties, largely forgotten now, as carefully as she documents the names of Holyrood clubs: “The Butterpot Tavern, Mother Hickey’s, Mary Anne LaCour’s, Davises’, Fureys’, Crawleys’.” Here, poet and community historian are virtually the same. But Dalton is no singer of shanties. Rather, she is an observant, almost anthropological poet whose scrupulous attention to her home place resists the flattening of language and culture. Her poetry captures what she calls “the tang and texture” of local speech.

If this sounds a touch quaint, rest assured that Dalton’s poems are rarely sentimental. They have few epiphanies and no grand pronouncements. Her poetry is cool, reserved, and seldom, despite its subject, folksy. A line from Interrobang could be a motto for Dalton’s eventual Collected Poems: “nostalgia be damned.”

Clellan Coe visits Cudillero: “Cudillero is a fishing village on the Asturian coast in northern Spain, halfway between the cities of Luarca and Avilés. Other towns and cities of the region are far grander, yet none is more celebrated than Cudillero, which shows up on every list of what to do or see in Asturias. Tucked into an inlet between mountains, the village nestles on the slopes, almost invisible from land and sea. Invisible, yet full of visitors who have found it.”

Eve Tushnet reviews Revolution in 35mm: Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema From the Arthouse to the Grindhouse: “Revolution in 35mm is the rare political history that can refuse to resolve its contradictions without giving you the impression that it’s cheating. Some of the movies it examines present political violence with commitment (several of the filmmakers had experience as, or worked closely with, left-wing and partisan fighters), others with irony. Violence in these pictures can provoke pleasure or doubt, catharsis or analysis. Filmed violence can be a call to real violence, or a substitute for it, or a vaccine against it, or a dream of it—and often several of those at once. Underlying these oppositions there's a deeper and sadder one: the opposing magnetic pulls, which few political films resist, of either propaganda or despair.”

Adam Roberts explains why he has changed his mind on William Thackeray: “I was never Bill Thackeray’s greatest fan. Indeed, since what follows is mostly praise, I could say that a number of the reasons I used to dislike him remain for me (I mention several of these, below). But I have recently been re-reading him—and reading for the first time those of his novels to which I hadn’t got around before—and it turns out: Thackeray is great, actually. He has, I think, fallen into the shadow. People don’t read him any more, Vanity Fair perhaps excepted—and even then, I’m not sure it’s a particularly current novel. But he is worth reading.”

I am not a huge fan of The Great Gatsby, though I don’t dislike the novel. Jonathan Clarke is a fan, and he takes a shot at explaining why: “No piece of American literature has fused with our sense of who we are as a people—our fullest, gaudiest, most tragic and lachrymose sense—the way The Great Gatsby has. Melville’s Moby Dick might be the more universal achievement, but it exacts a greater tribute in boredom and obscurantism than most of us are willing to pay. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is a candidate, too, but Americans don’t read much poetry anymore, and Whitman asks us to meet him with a strenuous spiritual effort of our own that fewer still are willing to make. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn helped make the American language, but its Southern antebellum setting embarrasses us now, even if Twain was satirizing it. Only Gatsby seems to take us as it finds us and—to quote the novel’s description of Gatsby himself—‘to believe in [us] just as [we] would like to believe in [ourselves].’ It is a grandiose and self-regarding novel for a grandiose and self-regarding people—American exceptionalism carried to the summit of high art.” I don’t buy it.

In Compact, Ryan Zickgraf revisits Hanna Rosin’s 2012 book The End of Men and the Rise of Women, in which Rosin observes that “American men had declined economically and socially while women had quietly gained the upper hand for the first time in human history”:

“The most distinctive change of the last decade,’’ Rosin declared, “is probably the emergence of an American matriarchy, where the younger men especially are unmoored, and closer than at any other time in history to being obsolete—at least by most traditional measures of social utility” . . . Few were willing to heed her warnings at the time. Though Rosin was a liberal feminist in good standing, The End of Men was demonized by critics as propaganda for the still-thriving “broligarchs.” In the NPR interview, the author herself all but apologized for it.

More:

A funny thing happened in 2012 after the liberal media and the educated professional classes dismissed The End of Men as regressive tripe in service of the ossified male power structure. Over the next decade, they successfully fomented a decade-long moral panic against men that took hold everywhere in corporate culture and pop culture. The patriarchy is dead, long live the patriarchy!

Those driving this trend didn’t stop with targeting the excesses of the boorish men of #MeToo. Masculinity itself became a primal, oppressive force to be overthrown. The patriarchy, we were told, was suddenly everywhere and nowhere: Like an invisible toxic chemical, it infected frat houses, manspreaded next to you in the subway, hid in the corner office of every corporate headquarters, in the motivations of mass shooters. The term of endearment “bro” was refashioned into a winking half-slur, and a whole new vocabulary lept from elite female-centric humanities classrooms and Tumblr pages into a pop phenomenon: rape culture, the male gaze, and mansplaining, oh my! The Democratic Party’s insistence that “The Future is Female” wasn’t just a mere slogan during the elite panic around Trump’s rise to power. It was a mandate that accelerated the exorcism of masculinity and men from media, academia, tech, and NGOs—the economic and intellectual power brokers of the Democratic Party.

But because all politics is now a perverse projection, the Republican men on the other side of the aisle have been busy devouring their own tail. There has been a resurgence of a particularly resentful form of male chauvinism among lonely and atomized men that has curdled into something darker in male-dominated online spaces like multiplayer video games, 4Chan, and a wide swath of YouTube. Many right-leaning men mistakenly see women’s empowerment as the primary driver of their decline rather than an elite failure (of both sexes), and many of the aggrieved bro celebs in the MAGA orbit are happy to brandish the very “toxicity” they’ve been accused of like a badge of honor.

Kate Weinberg remembers her father’s nightly practice of reading bedtime stories: “It’s half an hour before lights out when my dad arrives at my bedroom door holding Roald Dahl’s Danny the Champion of the World. He kicks off his shoes, loosens his tie and wedges himself next to me in my small single bed, his toes waggling in their socks as they regain freedom after a long day in the office. In the evening he smells of the menthol toothpicks he always carries in his top pocket (in the morning, when he drops me off at school, he smells of the spicy pink toothpaste which I once tried and which burned the roof of my mouth) . . . My father was a South African businessman who had lost his young wife abruptly to a brain tumor, leaving him with three little girls and not much idea of what to do. Like the father in Danny the Champion of the World, my dad was an ‘eye-smiler’ with twinkling eyes. We never doubted he loved us. But he wasn’t given to expressing his emotions, much less talking to us about grief and loss, his or ours.”

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Assisi, Italy. Image via Wikimedia Commons.