Saturday Links
The Powells at home, great sea books, the gods of Hölderlin and Rilke, adapting Marilynne Robinson’s “Home” for the big screen, and more.
Good morning! In The Hudson Review, Hilary Spurling writes about Lady Violet and Anthony Powell—but particularly Lady Violet—and how she and the home she made shaped Powell’s work:
That first meeting was followed in the autumn by an invitation from Lady Violet, asking me and my husband down for a weekend at the Chantry. The place itself was a shock. Nothing had prepared me for its singularity. I’d never come across any house remotely like it, nor one that so powerfully reflected its owners’ personalities. The atmosphere was overwhelming and quite indescribable but somehow familiar to anyone who knew the Dance well.
The impact was collective, generated not just by the fierce wallpapers, or the many busts of all sizes indoors and out, or the countless portraits—painted in oil or water color, sketched in charcoal, pencil or pen, etched, engraved, reproduced in photos, prints, chromolithographs, black-on-white Victorian silhouettes—or indeed any of the multitudinous things coming at you from every side like advancing armies. In our bedroom we had whole regiments of lead soldiers in the uniforms of various British imperial campaigns drawn up in a glass case, with drawings, cartoons, medallions and miniatures hanging frame to frame on the walls. I made a list of the myriad contents of this one small spare room in handwriting, which got tinier and tinier the harder I tried to cram everything onto a single small blue sheet of Chantry writing paper. The list was lost long ago, but I still remember that crowd of miscellaneous faces. Dating back presumably to an earlier phase of the Powells’ marriage, they provided a kind of pictorial counterpoint to the great company of fictional characters—four or five hundred of them in the end—that people the Dance.
Violet’s contribution to the production process was multifarious and many-layered. On a superficial level the narrator’s in-laws in the Dance—the large Tolland family with their casual intimacy, their shared history, their long-running feuds and rivalries—owe something perhaps to Violet’s innumerable Pakenham relations. She herself certainly contributed elements to the character of Jean Templer, later Jean Duport, whose passionate affair with the narrator in The Acceptance World follows the basic outline of Powell’s own premarital fling with Marion Coates. But the electric atmosphere of that encounter came according to Violet from her own first brush with Tony in Ireland. Looking back nearly half a century later, she said that, out of the twelve volumes of the Dance, The Acceptance World remained for her always especially moving
More:
In the 1970s my husband and I fell into the habit of stopping off for lunch at the Chantry on the way to stay with my parents in Bristol. These visits always followed the same routine. After lunch, we two would go for a walk round the lake, returning around four o’clock to find Tony installed on the chaise longue, and Violet seated bolt upright with a tea tray on the sofa beside the fire. They were engaged in the long conversation begun four decades earlier in Ireland, which had become a highly polished double act by the time we caught up with it in the drawing room at the Chantry . . . John Powell told me that once he accidentally interrupted his parents at work. He’d opened the door of the drawing room to find his father taking one of his mother’s books apart with such methodical brutality that their son was shaken and shocked. “That was ferocious,” John said to his mother afterwards: “I never heard anything so excoriating in my life.” “You wait until I get going on your father,” said Violet.
It was the extraordinary power, energy and extreme subtlety of Powell’s imagination coupled with what he himself described as a cold, hard, almost mathematical intelligence that drove the novel forward. I was amazed by a glimpse of his makeshift writing room with its inadequate little table standing in the small empty area between the bed and the door, but in fact this apparently provisional arrangement perfectly suited the capacious, accommodating, open-ended nature of the Dance with its fluid perspective that enabled the narrative to contract and expand, moving forwards and backwards through time and space.
Edward Short writes about the influence of Thomas Hardy’s first wife, Emma, on his work: “If Emma came of a superior social class, the gentry as opposed to Hardy’s rural working class, she shared her husband’s delight in literature, though the couple never saw eye to eye on religion, the solicitor’s daughter being an impassioned Christian. Indeed, all of London’s ultra-Protestant societies counted her as a member. Hardy, for his part, might have wished to believe but never managed it . . . When Emma died unexpectedly in 1912, she left behind voluminous journals, most of which her husband burned after discovering that they abused him directly. A highly disciplined author, Hardy dedicated so much of his time to his writing desk that Emma finally chose to live in the house’s attic, where she abandoned herself to aggrieved prayer when not deploring what she regarded as her husband’s monstrous solipsism. This is one reason why she might have felt impelled to burn all the love letters that she and Hardy had exchanged during their courtship. Another was the chilly reception she received from Hardy’s mother and sisters, who bristled at Emma’s airs of superiority. Still another was his irreverence. The rabid Protestant in Emma could not abide her husband’s swipes at Anglicanism, which he considered a derisory national Christianity. What she seems not to have realized was that her husband’s blasphemies were distress signals. “I have been looking for God for fifty years,” he joked, “and I think that if he had existed, I should have discovered him.” This persistence, however contemptuously expressed, suggests that Hardy’s attitude toward religion amounted to something more than disdain. After his wife’s death Hardy’s guilt became the handmaiden of not only contrition but renewed artistry.”
In the latest issue of First Things, Algis Valiunas revisits the “gods” of Friedrich Hölderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke:
If Heidegger was the philosopher most fascinated by poetry, Hölderlin was the poet most allured by philosophy. At the Stift, the Protestant seminary in Tübingen, he was fast friends with fellow students Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Schelling. Under their influence the poet became enamored of the pursuit of wisdom by application of the mind alone. (Hölderlin’s mother would long persist in her hope that the Lutheran ministry was his true calling, but it definitely was not. He would always launch himself toward the Most High in his own inimitable way.) Later, at the University of Jena, Hölderlin attended religiously the lectures of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the most seductive philosophy professor of the age and spokesman for the intellectually ambitious youth of the emerging German nation. The ironclad demands of pure rationality could not hold Höderlin, however, for he was meant to be a poet who wrote with his soul. And he knew it.
Hölderlin’s writings are those of an enthusiast, in the largest sense of that word. They are full of God, or rather the gods. Christ, Dionysus, and Heracles are joined together in his poems, a triumvirate of vanished divinities whom he recalls to something like life after death. Gods populate his odes and hymns the way lovely and willing women do the ballads and erotic knockabout of his contemporary Lord Byron.
Hölderlin aims to revive in men the powers they naturally felt in the days when they dwelt in the company of such deities . . . His whipsawing between transport and desolation would eventually exact a terrible price. On the threshold of insanity after the death of the woman he loved, Hölderlin was accosted by Apollo as he walked along a country road, an encounter that changed his life, decidedly not for the better. The second half of his life can be called a posthumous existence. Abandoned by his mother, neglected by his sometime friends, subjected to brutal medical attention, he experienced the customary measure of misery available to psychotic sufferers in those psychiatrically benighted times.
Something like salvation arrived in the person of a Tübingen carpenter, Ernst Zimmer, an admirer of Hölderlin’s epistolary novel, Hyperion, or the Hermit in Greece. Zimmer took the poet into his home and treated him with respect and wondrous kindness.
Francisco Garcia reviews Orlando Whitfield’s All That Glitters—on the con artist Inigo Philbrick—for The New Statesman: “It’s true, as Whitfield muses in the book’s introduction, that we are living through a golden age of scammer literature. Our collective, apparently insatiable, thirst for tales of grifters and con artists has taken us to some strange places in the past decade, from the epic grimness of the Fyre Festival portaloos to the boardrooms of corporate America. Any such story’s success partially depends on the characters at its heart. And Philbrick is a compelling foil, a hyper-modern cautionary tale of the declension of talent and charm into moral corruption.”
I review Ann Schmiesing’s biography of the Brothers Grimm in the latest issue of World:
The first edition of Children’s and Household Tales was published in 1812, followed by six subsequent editions in their lifetimes. While other collections of folktales were highly stylized (they “do not allow the old to remain old,” Jacob complained), the Grimms presented their tales as the unadulterated stories of the people, despite collecting many of them from aristocratic families. Only minor edits for style and moral content were provided for the first edition, but these increased over time. The volume never became a bestseller, but it contributed to a renewed interest in an idealized German past.
Schmiesing does an excellent job showing how the brothers—both pious Calvinists—were part of a larger German Romanticism. Goethe assisted them at a crucial moment in collecting their tales, and the philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher provided copyediting assistance. Jacob’s work on German mythology had a pronounced influence on the composer Richard Wagner.
America’s oldest auctioneer: “Here’s how it goes, Michael R. Corcoran said on a recent morning, summarizing his take on the cycle of life: ‘It’s doctor, undertaker, lawyer, then me.’ Mr. Corcoran is an auctioneer. Born in 1928, just as Herbert Hoover was elected president, he is both the proprietor of and the force behind Gustave J.S. White Estate Auctioneers in Newport, R.I. If he is not, at 96, the oldest person still actively plying his trade in the area — although that seems likely — he may be the best known and connected.”
Poem: Matthew Buckley Smith, “Spontaneous Loss”
Anthony Paletta writes about sea books in The Washington Examiner: “Books that occur on the high seas are fairly common. Books about specific seas are rather less so. There are extremely dry books on these damp subjects, on, say, resource management in the Barents Sea. You don’t need to read those. Oceanic histories always at least contain anecdotal deckchair delights. There are tales of Trollope’s time in Jamaica or the Khedive’s son’s wild enthusiasm for macaroni. Many of these accounts of specific oceans are basically travelogues — generally sunny and full of excellent cuisine. These can be rather shallow but, even then, hard to put down, books of the Tyrrhenian: Bathtub of Civilization variety. The right narrator can ensure a pleasant voyage. Who knew that George Gissing of New Grub Street wrote a book By the Ionian Sea? Naturally, he had a good time. But I’m thinking of titles such as The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean, History of the Adriatic: A Sea and its Civilization, and The Baltic: A History. Unless you’re a Njarl-tier Viking Cruises passenger, you likely haven’t been reading that many of these. And likely not even then. But I have, and the habit becomes difficult to shake. If you read the better class of these ocean books, you might soon find yourself convinced of the considerable historical merits of this angle of approach.”
Martin Scorsese told AP that he wanted to adapt Marilynne Robinson’s Home for his next film: “Scorsese told AP that while his A Life of Jesus film has been optioned, he is working around the ‘scheduling issue’ of adapting Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robinson’s book. ‘It’s an option but I’m still working on it,’ Scorsese said of A Life of Jesus, adding, ‘There’s a very strong possibility of me doing a film version of Marilynne Robinson’s Home, but that’s a scheduling issue.’”
Michael C. Legaspi reviews Christopher Hays and Richard Hays new book on sexuality in the Bible:
Over the course of a long and fruitful career, Richard Hays has distinguished himself as one of the premier biblical theologians of his generation. A highly regarded New Testament scholar, the Duke divinity professor (now emeritus) has led the way in developing scholarly approaches that put high-level exegesis in the service of Christian theology. As a virtuosic interpreter who takes the authority of Scripture and the classic Christian theological tradition seriously, Hays has bridged the gap between the Church and the academy like few others. In short, he has been a game changer.
With The Widening of God’s Mercy, Hays seeks to change the game yet again. He has teamed up with his son Christopher, an Old Testament scholar at Fuller Seminary, to argue that, because God has changed his mind about the sinfulness of sodomy, the churches must now do the same.
The Wertheimers sat for a dozen paintings by John Singer Sargent. Who were they? “What had drawn Sargent to this family? How had they met? I associated him with portraits of British aristocrats and Boston Brahmins, not with Jews. Did he have other Jewish patrons and friends? Why was the painting of the eldest Wertheimer son, Edward, unfinished? What became of the elegantly dressed second son, Alfred, looking like an Edwardian aesthete with one hand on a stack of books? Why were there glass flasks on a wall beside him?”
Forthcoming: Rebecca Charbonneau, Mixed Signals: Alien Communication Across the Iron Curtain (Polity, December 31): “In the shadow of the Cold War, whispers from the cosmos fueled an unlikely alliance between the US and USSR. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (or SETI) emerged as a foundational field of radio astronomy characterized by an unusual level of international collaboration―but SETI’s use of signals intelligence technology also served military and governmental purposes. In this captivating new history of the collaboration between American and Soviet radio astronomers as they sought to detect evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations, historian Rebecca Charbonneau reveals the triumphs and challenges they faced amidst a hostile political atmosphere . . . This is not just a story of radio waves and telescopes; it's a revelation of how scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain navigated the complexities of the Cold War, blurring the lines between espionage and the quest for cosmic community. Filled with tension, contradiction, and the enduring human desire for connection, this is a history that transcends national boundaries and reaches out to the cosmic unknown, ultimately asking: how can we communicate with extraterrestrials when we struggle to communicate amongst ourselves?”
Rereading Dance now. It is an underrated work of genius. Thanks for that excerpt about the Powells at home.
"Mercy" seems to be the wrong term for the Hays' argument. In most cases mercy is for those who have done wrong. Their argument seems to be that the logos of what it means to walk with God, to submit to his authority, has changed. God gives mercy when we falter and strive to do better.