a gallimaufry

What’s Bred in the Bone, by Robertson Davies

Reading the second volume of a trilogy when you haven’t read the first is perhaps not the greatest plan, but I decided to read this second part of the Cornish trilogy for Lory’s Robertson Davies Reading Week purely because all my other RDs are in three-in-one volumes and I was going on holiday and didn’t fancy heaving a huge book about with me. I have What’s Bred in the Bone as a single-vol. Waterstone’s freebie and that is what went into the suitcase. And I am here to say that although I am ready to believe it would be better read in sequence after The Rebel Angels it certainly works perfectly well as a standalone novel.

The novel begins with a row between the three trustees of the Cornish Foundation for Promotion of the Arts and Humane Scholarship. One of them, Arthur Cornish, a respectable banker, has commissioned another of them, the Reverend Simon Darcourt, to write the autobiography of his recently deceased uncle, Francis Cornish. Darcourt complains that the book is proving impossible to write because Francis was such a private man. He can discover nothing about Francis’s childhood and childhood, Darcourt believes, is fundamental to understanding a person, ‘the first key to the mystery of a human creature’. Even worse, the little he has discovered is scandalous and reveals Francis to be not at all the reclusive and rather unwashed art collector of moderate wealth they all knew. Faced with the prospect of making ‘the Foundation and the Cornish name stink’, Arthur is now keen to suppress the book:

‘Oh my God!’ said Arthur Cornish. ‘First you suspect he was a picture-faker and now you tell me he was a poofter. Any other little surprises, Simon?’

Invoked during this conversation are the Lesser Zadkiel, who is the Angel of Biography (and also the Archangel of Jupiter, which fits with the novel’s astrological concerns), and the Daimon Maimas, who was ‘the Tutelary Spirit, the Indwelling Essence’ assigned to Francis. They agree that Darcourt will never know the half of it and together recreate the life of Francis, which forms the core of this novel.

(Angel and demon chatting over a deathbed; Bohun Psalter, Egerton MS 3277, British Library; found here)

The title comes from a mediaeval English proverb, ‘What’s bred in the bone will not out of the flesh’, given as an epigraph by Davies at the start of the novel. A later version of this is ‘What’s bred in the bone will come out in the flesh’, suggesting that ‘Lifelong habits or inherited characteristics cannot be concealed’ (Oxford Reference). The earlier proverb emphasises the inescapability of a person’s genetic inheritance and childhood experiences and the novel devotes much of its energy to exploring Francis’s genesis and childhood in the backwater Canadian town of Blairlogie. It also gives importance to the stars and to the practice of astrology: Francis’s astrological chart and his painting The Marriage at Cana are the two keys to understanding him (and to some extent understanding this novel).

The title also touches on another concern in the novel, the difference between the inner (the bone) and the outer (the flesh). Francis’s life appeared uneventful and the trustees do not consider him a ‘great man’. Yet in fact he was both a spy and a considerable artist. Both these rôles remained hidden: a spy is necessarily a secret job but Francis’s artistic talents went unrecognised because they were directed – not exactly into forgery, but into the creation of two paintings which were passed off as by an undiscovered Old Master and to which he therefore could never lay claim.

In fact, this novel could be subtitled ‘Art and Lies’. Deception, through spying, faking and smuggling, riddles the story. Art and beauty can trick the eye and confuse the mind. Illegitimate babies are passed off as legitimate. Francis appears to be the eldest surviving son of his parents. However, there was a first Francis, whose death as a baby was faked. This first Francis, the Looner, is kept secretly in the attic. The Looner is illegitimate and none of the characters ever know his true father; his mother and grandmother try unsuccessfully to induce a miscarriage and this affects him, leaving him with mental and physical disabilities. The Looner is described in ways that emphasise his animal-like nature, yet he inspires great love and tenderness in those who take care of him. In the Jungian symbolism of which I am too ignorant to discuss in any meaningful way, but which forms an important element of the novel, the Looner may be Francis’s shadow self and he is one of the forces which shape Francis’s character.

(Bronzino, Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, oil on wood, c. 1545; National Gallery, London; found here; the painting is called Allegory of Love in the novel but is also known as An Allegory of Venus and Cupid and The Triumph of Venus)

Art is profoundly important to Francis, from the religious prints in his grandparents’ house, to his own talents in drawing and painting, to his deep expertise in the history of art. In this novel, art’s fundamental significance derives from two things: its beauty and its symbolism. Bronzino’s Allegoory of Love attracts Francis for its beauty but when explained to him helps him to understand his mother: it has beauty and truth, meaning. The two paintings Francis paints – Drollig Hansel and The Marriage at Cana – are his greatest achievement in life: they are rich and beautiful and symbolic. Ironically though, as modern paintings they would be considered anachronistic (like the work of the Pre-Raphaelites whom the young Francis so loved) and without much merit. Their value in the eyes of the world lies in their age. (Another irony is that Francis complains that most modern art contains symbolism which is personal to the artist and often inaccessible to the viewer: his own two paintings contain portraits of his family and acquaintances and thus also layers of meaning inaccessible to anyone who believes them to be sixteenth-century artworks.) But Francis is out of step with the times, unable to paint in a ‘modern’ manner but only in a style taken to be that of a Renaissance artist.

I too find this double standard in art perplexing. A painting may triple in value when someone decides it is by someone famous, yet actually it remains exactly the same thing as before.

So beauty and truth can be found in fakes. And surprisingly – or perhaps, not surprisingly – the picture that remains closest to Francis’s heart throughout his life is not a Renaissance oil but a cheap print of a sentimental Victorian painting, Love Shut Out by Anna Lea Merritt. And other neglected art forms are promoted in this novel. Francis learns to draw first by copying from a book on caricatures by Henry Furniss, an Irish illustrator. Caricatures reveal the inner truth of a person, disguised by the flesh. Francis improves his ability by sketching corpses in a funeral parlour, while his great friend Zadok practises another art form, painting the faces of the dead and arranging them ‘for the viewing. At the end they must look as they’d have looked on their wedding-day, or better. Probably better,’ Zadok tells the boy Francis. Here too a sort of falsification reveals a deeper truth about the deceased and winkles forth a ‘best’ version of them.

(Harry Furniss, pen-and-ink drawing showing himself barring the door to his studio to Lewis Carroll, whose Sylvie and Bruno he illustrated and who proved a trouble to Furniss; before 1901; National Portrait Gallery, London; found here)

Neither fake nor ‘authentic’ art, high art nor these other art forms, is presented as ultimately ‘better’ than the other. Davies is happy to let them sit together. The novel is packed with dualities, and they are dualities which enrich each other. The Marriage of Cana exemplifies this. Saraceni, the art expert, master artist and forger who taught Francis all he knew, interprets it as being both Christian and alchemical and both Bride and Groom seem to be portraits of Francis. They stand with portraits of his parents, his aunt and brother, his grandfather, even Saraceni himself. The painting depicts the union of the male and female aspects of Francis and comments on the figures in his life who have made him who he is.

As this long rambly post indicates, What’s Bred in the Bone is complex and interesting as well as being entertaining, and I haven’t even touched on the use of Jungian archetypes, astrology and the Grail legend. Read it! Thank you so much to Lory, for hosting Robertson Davies Reading Week and for prompting me to read him again. Now that I am home, I am contemplating getting stuck into those big trilogies I was too feeble to pack for my holiday.

(Anna Lea Merritt, Love Locked Out, oil, 1890; Tate Britain, London; found here)

The Last Unicorn, by Peter Beagle

(The Unicorn in Captivity, South Netherlands, 1495–1505, tapestry of wool, silk, silver, gilt; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; found here)

The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam, but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she till moved like a shadow on the sea.

Although this is a classic of American fantasy, I had never heard of it until a couple of years ago when my daughter became obsessed with the animated film of it; I too found it compelling, somewhat to my surprise. It’s what the offspring of Harry Clarke’s imagination would have resembled had it married prog rock and,  believe me, that is no bad thing at all. Despite sometimes weak animation and drawing, it is an exceptionally good film.

Despite my enjoyment of the film I held off acquiring the novel for a long time. I had been burned by my experience with The Princess Bride. Friends, please don’t hate me for this, but I disliked that novel intensely. I couldn’t finish it, the tone and the humour, which I found both lumpen and smart-alecky, grated on me so much. I entirely concede that it’s well-plotted, it’s original, I enjoyed the frame story, I appreciated the narrative vigour and ingenuity; I just hated something about the writing. However, I did worry that I had set it up for failure with expectations that were too high. I did not want that to happen with The Last Unicorn. In fact, by the time I actually started Peter Beagle’s novel, my expectations were so low I’d have been grateful if he could string a sentence together.

Good news: he can. Maybe I should try The Princess Bride again, because I was enchanted by The Last Unicorn, which is charming and thoughtful. The plot is fairly simple: a unicorn becomes conscious that all the other unicorns in the world have disappeared and that she is the last, so she starts on a quest to learn what has happened to the others. She is accompanied by Schmendrick, a failed magician working in a freak show, and Molly Grue, the discontented lover of the leader of a forest-dwelling band of outlaws, as she traces the unicorns to the barren castle of King Haggard.

The book is elegaic, nostalgic, and written in a consciously poetic language which deftly remains just this side of overly portentous. (Though there are also nice little jabs of humour that made me laugh.) The unicorn is immortal but experiences the horror of old age through the magic of the old witch, Mommy Fortuna, who runs the freak show, and mortality itself when she is changed into a human:

‘I am myself still. This body is dying. I can feel it rotting all around me. How can anything that is going to die be real? How can it be truly beautiful?’

On the other hand, being immortal in a world of mortals sometimes leads the unicorn into a sense of dislocation and loneliness:

The unicorn was weary of human beings. Watching her companions as they slept, seeing the shadows of their dreams scurry over their faces, she would feel herself bending under the heaviness of knowing their names. Then she would run until morning to ease the ache; swifter than rain, swift as loss, racing to catch up with the time when she had known nothing at all but the sweetness of being herself. Often then, between the rush of one breath and the reach of another, it came to her that Schmendrick and Molly were long dead, and King Haggard as well, and the Red Bull met and mastered – so long ago that the grand-children of the stars that had seen it all happen were withering now, turning to coal – and that she was still the only unicorn in the world.

She is further troubled by the fact that most human beings cannot see her for what she really is; they mistake her for a beautiful white mare, although they are also disturbed by her. Thus, in the freak show, Mommy Fortuna affixes a fake horn to her forehead before she displays her as a unicorn. Mommy Fortuna knows very well that the unicorn is a real unicorn, but most people can only perceive and understand a fake unicorn. Later, disguised as a woman, the unicorn begins to lose herself and become human in spirit as well as in shape: you become what you appear to be.

In the greenwood, Schmendrick spends an uncomfortable evening with Captain Cully and his outlaws. Cully is preoccupied with his own fame: ‘How do they speak of me in your country? What have you heard of dashing Captain Cully and his band of freemen?’ and Schmendrick lies:

‘They sing a ballad of you in my country [...] I forget just how it goes –’

Captain Cully spun like a cat ambushing its own tail. ‘Which one?’ he demanded.

‘I don’t know,’ Schmendrick answered, taken aback. ‘Is there more than one?’

‘Aye, indeed!’ Cully cried, glowing and growing, as though pregnant with his pride. ‘Willie Gentle! Willie Gentle! Where is the lad?’

A lank-haired youth with a lute and pimples shambled up. ‘Sing one of my exploits for the gentleman,’ Captain Cully ordered him. ‘Sing the one about how you joined my band. I’ve not heard it since Tuesday last.’

In the ballads lies Cully’s chance of immortality and his ‘true’ reputation, sadly not matched by his ‘real’ acts. Far from being a brave and noble outlaw, he is just a petty robber who steals from the poor and pays a monthly tribute to the local mayor to stay out of gaol. Schmendrick conjures a vision of Robin Hood and his Merry Men and the outlaws are so delighted and entranced that they run off through the forest after them, moved but also deceived by art – and yet the deception is a noble as well as a ridiculous deception, the outlaws respond to the beauty and nobility of the phantom Robin Hood even if they can’t respond to the real beauty and magic of the unicorn.

Beagle likes playing little meta games about literature throughout the novel, poking at that fourth wall with asides on heroes and how stories work, never plainer however than in this episode. (And he writes excellent pastiche ballads and songs – it is in fact a very musical book.) He shows himself conscious of his story’s roots in fairy tale and myth – I am writing about a band of outlaws in the forest and look here is Robin Hood, über-outlaw! – and in that consciousness lies a sadness – Robin Hood is not ‘real’ – and a nostalgia – for a time when it was possible to believe in a noble and heroic figure like Robin Hood. Nowadays we can only accept him as a mythical figure, not a ‘real’ person: instead we have the cowardly and venal Cully as a more ‘believable’ character. Beagle’s meta-fictional nods allow him and us to enjoy a fairy tale about a unicorn while still remaining ‘grown-up’ and knowing: they make a magical children’s story into something sophisticated enough for us to read without being mistaken for children ourselves, yet all the time that we are reading we feel sadness that it is not ‘true’ and that we can only see beautiful white mares, not unicorns. Like J.M. Barrie, like A.A. Milne, Beagle mourns the loss of childhood.

(Roelant Savery, Orpheus with Beasts and Birds, 1622, oil on copper; Fitzwilliam Museum, found here)

merry Christmas!

(Bicci di Lorenzo, Nativity, 1430/1435)

It’s the shortest, darkest day of the year today, and very cold and frosty. I’ve been meaning to write something here, but never seem to have had the time. Triumphs at work – I finally learnt how to use the laminating machine – have been offset by disasters – I locked myself in the staff loos and had to be rescued by Eric the handyman with a hammer. Clara fell off the porch roof – she gave a terrible cat shriek and I saw her tabby body plummet past the window – but it is indeed true that cats land on their feet and she was perfectly fine. And who else was on the porch roof? Yes, ’twas next-door’s black cat, Mister Puss’s nemesis in the ongoing Cat Wars which shake this neighbourhood and leave clumps of orange and black fur strewn across our garden. Did Clara fall, or was she pushed? She’s not saying, and Mister Puss is too busy washing his bum to investigate.

Nothing says Christmas like a novel about the possible end of days, so I am reading The Place of the Lion, a hypnotically bonkers novel by Charles Williams in which angels in the forms of Archetypes infiltrate the world, which cannot handle them. The cats are swinging on the Christmas tree, half my Christmas presents haven’t been delivered (and whoops, I forgot to order some others), the charming little Richmond Maids of Honour I baked for my students look leprous and have massive holes in them, my daughter is singing Christmas carols but replacing half the words with ‘poo’ which apparently is a hilarious thing to do; in other words, life here is much as usual and we are very lucky to have that. I hope that you are all similarly fortunate and my thoughts are with those who are not. I wish you all a very merry Christmas, full of peace and joy and Brussels sprouts. Keep away from the eggnog though, that’s vile stuff.

happy easter!

(Giotto, Noli me tangere, c. 1304–1306; fresco, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua)

happy new year!

I hope that 2016 has started joyfully for you all, and that it brings you lots of good things and happiness.

Things are quiet here at Gallimaufry Towers. We enjoyed the holidays (except for Mister Puss, who is still a bit cross about an unfortunate incident involving a cup of cold coffee but it was an accident and he did exact a bloody revenge on me) and of course I did no work to prepare for returning to school and am now regretting that, ah well.

I’m also failing to feel much inspiration about writing here. I rather feel that it’s pointless and I can’t be bothered. Maybe I need to change something? I am thinking. Any suggestions warmly welcomed.

(Sandro Botticelli, Judith Returns to Bethulia, oil on panel, ca 1472; Uffizi Gallery, Florence; found here)

happy Easter!

(Fra Angelico, Noli me tangere, 1442, fresco on the wall of the Convent of San Marco, Florence; from here)

merry christmas!

(Sandro Botticelli, bookless detail from The Madonna of the Book, 1480–81, tempera on wood; in the Casa Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan)

In an attempt to impress my three-year-old daughter I have been indulging in Christmas craftiness this year, without notable success.

The clay stable collapsed.

The Christmas stocking is something only Frankenstein’s monster could wear. I actually have to say, ‘It’s a stocking!’ helpfully, to surprised observers. (Because of course I am too lazy to attempt an improvement. Maybe next year.)

I also made a Christmas angel. But she looks like a zombie, which isn’t quite the festive spirit I had hoped to capture.

But I don’t care! It was all fun.

Merry Christmas! Thank you for commenting here and for writing your own wonderful weblogs, from which I’ve learned so much and had so much fun. May 2014 be magical for you all, filled with books and beauty, of course.

(Zombie! I am not going to show you the stocking)

the space between us

(Giuseppe Arcimboldo, The Librarian, ca. 1570, oil on canvas; to be found in Skokloster Castle; from here)

Hayley of Desperate Reader has written an interesting post about a novella by Wilkie Collins, Miss or Mrs?. She picked up on two elements which made her, as a modern reader, feel uncomfortable: the youth of Nathalie, the heroine (she is fifteen, but eligible for marriage since the age of twelve – I was astounded that as recently as the 1870s the age of consent was so low) and her rôle as property, first of her father and then of her husband.

This is a good reminder that we can never read literature of the past as a contemporary would have read it. We can read footnotes and cultural histories and literature written during the period as much as we like, but we’ll always be twenty-first-century readers peering over the fence. Not that a novelist’s contemporaries would all read a novel in the same way as one another: as we know, every reader responds differently to a text. Yet all the paraphernalia which comes with reading ‘classics’, the footnotes and histories and biographies, suggests that we consider reading like a novel’s contemporaries to be desirable. Many of us want to suck out of a text all the meanings and allusions that an educated reader of the time would have savoured, to enrich our enjoyment.

Of course, there are plenty of readers who don’t bother with footnotes or context, reading only through their own cultural lense, and others who dismiss such interpretations as facile. Although I think everyone should be free to read and enjoy as they please, for myself I prefer an ‘enriched’ reading, I find it more interesting. But what Hayley’s post made me realise is that actually that gap between the experience of the reader of the past and our experience now, the gap which we attempt to narrow through the ‘paraphernalia’, is in itself interesting and can even be the point of a reading. Miss or Mrs? is intriguing to me precisely because of the gap between my sensibilities and the sensibilities of Collins’ time, the consciousness of our difference.

***

Something has changed here at a gallimaufry – for the first time ever, it has been read by someone who knows me in real life. Hello Jayne! [waves] I never meant to keep it a secret, but I have never found a way of telling people about it.

Moomins and memories

It’s the last week of term, I’m finishing my paperwork, waiting for my exam results and thinking about the future and what to do next (learning to drive a car is definitely featuring here; I keep telling  myself that it can’t be as difficult as following a teacher-training course in Dutch, please don’t disillusion me!). Writing more here, and more about books and less about me, is also part of the future. But today I lack energy, time and focus, so instead here are three links for you.

(The Moomins and the Great Flood; detail from the cover art from here)

The first is Jeanette Winterson, writing about the Moomins, and remembering how Finn Family Moomintroll affected her as a ten-year-old. 

I wrote out random words and stuck them on the wall above my bed with flour and water. This got me into trouble but I didn’t care. The words, random, alive, were making a kind of leaf mould in my mind. From that rich and fertile place came language of a different order.

Poetic disorder is how language is made. Only later is it codified. Naming starts as joy. Think of the pleasure a child has in finding words and inventing words and forming sentences that are also shapes. Words are ear and mouth before they are pen and paper. Words run away; you have to catch them.

 

The second is Medieval Memoria Online.

(St Jerome in the Desert, outer panels of an early sixteenth-century triptych made for the Van Beesd Van Heemskerck-Van Diemen family, from the Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum, Aachen; MeMO memorial object ID 504, 25-06-2013)

MeMo is a newly established database of inventories and descriptions of pre-1580 commemorative objects and texts from the Netherlands. It has been set up by the University of Utrecht, and includes images, inscriptions, epitaphs, altarpieces, tomb monuments and archival sources.

Researchers of medieval memoria consider the commemoration of the dead (i.e. memoria) a complex phenomenon, in which prayer for the care of the souls of the deceased, the care for the poor and the sick, commemoration of the deeds of the living and the dead and political aspects are inextricably linked.

It is fascinating...

(Claire Loder, big face, ceramic; from here)

The artist Claire Loder has been working with elderly people in the rural Cotswolds, ‘to help learn or rekindle skills while reminiscing and creating lasting memories in clay’. She has also created ceramic portraits of them, which are being shown in ‘Making Memories’ at New Brewery Arts in Cirencester. Her work is lovely; do go and see it if you have the chance. A commemoration of the living.

Two mysteries for Twelfth Night

(Photo credit: Chris Scott on flickr)

An unknown someone has been surreptitiously leaving works of art in Scottish libraries, delicate paper sculptures carved from books, as a gesture of support for libraries (via Terri Windling).

And I have been gripped by Charles Nicholl’s investigation into the killing of Christopher Marlowe in The Reckoning. In 1593, the playwright was stabbed to death in an upper room in Deptford during an argument over the dinner bill, according to the coroner’s report. The killer, Ingram Frizer, pleaded self-defence and was acquitted. Nicholl has picked away at this story, revealing the three witnesses to be a secret agent and two conmen who spent eight hours with Marlowe before his death. What was the meeting about? Why would Marlowe have been there? Although I am less than halfway through the book, the trail has already taken him through the Elizabethan criminal underworld, literary spats and international espionage. It’s as exciting as a detective novel, whose witnesses are court records, wills, poems and government documents. On the way, we encounter famous Elizabethan figures – spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham; the writer Thomas Kyd, in terror of his life incriminating Marlowe to the secret police; Henry Percy, the ‘Wizard Earl’ of Northumberland, with his love of the occult; Sir Anthony Babington, plotting to snatch Elizabeth’s crown for Mary Stuart – and a host of now-forgotten people whom Nicholl fleshes out through his careful scholarship and sympathetic imagination, such as the sinister and treacherous Robert Poley, infiltrator of Catholic networks, betrayer of the Babington conspirators and one of the three men present at Marlowe’s death. With its backdrop of war, treason, religious hatred and plague, the society Nicholl presents is the shadow world to the Elizabethan Golden Age. Nicholl very occasionally over-states the significance of his evidence, and the publishers decided not to bother with indicators in the text for the end notes which I find deeply annoying, but these are minor quibbles.

Here is the famous supposed portrait of Marlowe at Corpus Christi:

(Unknown artist, 1585, oil on wood; from Wikipedia)

And here is a reminder of just how beautiful and violent his writing could be – it’s part of Faustus’s speech at the end of Dr Faustus:

Ah, Faustus.
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damn’d perpetually!
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,
That time may cease, and midnight never come;
Fair Nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul!
O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn’d.
O, I’ll leap up to my God! – Who pulls me down? –
See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul, half a drop: ah, my Christ! –
Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!
Yet will I call on him: O spare me, Lucifer! –
Where is it now? ’tis gone: and see, where God
Stretcheth out his arm, and bends his ireful brows!
Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!
No, no!
Then will I headlong run into the earth:
Earth, gape! O, no, it will not harbour me!
You stars that reign’d at my nativity,
Whose influence hath allotted death and hell,
Now draw up Faustus, like a foggy mist,
Into the entrails of yon labouring clouds,
That, when you vomit forth into the air,
My limbs may issue from your smoky mouths,
So that my soul may but ascend to heaven.

And so, on that cheery note, a belated, happy new year to you, dear readers! I hope you enjoyed the holidays, and that 2012 brings you all good things (and not eternal damnation like Faustus).