a gallimaufry

Selected Poems, by Sylvia Townsend Warner, edited by Claire Harman

Sylvia Townsend Warner was a published poet before she ever succeeded as a novelist, her debut collection, L’Espalier, coming out in 1925. For about the next decade she interspersed fiction with verse, until the publication of Whether a Dove or a Seagull in 1933/4. Claire Harman explains in this fascinating article about STW’s poetry why this collaboration with her love, Valentine Ackland, effectively ended her career as a poet. STW continued to write poetry for the rest of her life, though not to publish much of it. Shortly before her death in 1978, a Collected Poems was mooted and she wrote excitedly to her prospective publisher, ‘I intend to be a posthumous poet!’ Although all her poetry is currently out of print (with the notable exception of some of her fantastical poems, which are collected along with work by Mary Coleridge and Charlotte Mew in Voices from Fairyland edited by Theodora Goss), some of it is on the internet and second-hand copies of the Collected Poems and Selected Poems can be readily found, so while it’s true that her fiction still overshadows her poetry, the latter is not entirely forgotten.

The poems in the Selected Poems display STW’s ability in a wide range of forms and genres. She was as versatile in her poetry as she was in her fiction. I can’t find an interesting way to write about the collection as a whole, so I have picked out some poems which appealed to me. Overall there is less evidence of her spiky wit in the poetry in this collection, more melancholy.

One of my favourite poems is ‘King Duffus’:

King Duffus

When all the witches were haled to the stake and burned;
When their least ashes were swept up and drowned,
King Duffus opened his eyes and looked round.

For half a year they had trussed him in their spell:
Parching, scorching, roaring, he was blackened as a coal.
Now he wept like a freshet in April.

Tears ran like quicksilver through his rocky beard.
Why have you wakened me, he said, with a clattering sword?
Why have you snatched me back from the green yard?

There I sat feasting under the cool linden shade;
The beer in the silver cup was ever renewed,
I was at peace there, I was well-bestowed:

My crown lay lightly on my brow as a clot of foam,
My wide mantle was yellow as the flower of the broom,
Hale and holy I was in mind and in limb.

I sat among poets and among philosophers,
Carving fat bacon for the mother of Christ;
Sometimes we sang, sometimes we conversed.

Why did you summon me back from the midst of that meal
To a vexed kingdom and a smoky hall?
Could I not stay at least until dewfall?

King Duffus’s awakening immediately follows on from the destruction of the witches; it is surely their power that has held him for six months in this wonderful dream world. The water of his ‘freshet’ tears contrasts with his ‘blackened’, coal-like physique and the ‘smoky hall’ of his responsibilities. These externals are further linked, through the metaphor of fire, with the burned witches and their ashes. King Duffus’s dream was of harmony and flowers, a crown light as ‘foam’, a feast under ‘linden’ trees in a ‘green yard’. There he was nourished as much by the song and conversation he had with poets, philosophers and Christ’s mother as by the ‘fat bacon’ he carved and the ‘cool beer’ he drank. The world to which he wakens is hard and sterile, a ‘vexed kingdom’ of clattering swords. He cries (petulantly?) that he wished to dream longer. But these dreams were also bonds, a ‘spell’ that ‘trussed’ him and perhaps the kingdom is vexed because he has been indulging himself too long in his beautiful fantasies and avoiding his responsibilities.

‘King Duffus’ is a poem containing a story, and another such is ‘Road 1940’. This poem is very different, however.

Road 1940

Why do I carry, she said,
This child that is no child of mine?
Through the heat of the day it did nothing but fidget and whine,
Now it snuffles under the dew and the cold star-shine,
And lies across my heart heavy as lead,
Heavy as the dead.

Why did I lift it, she said,
Out of its cradle in the wheel-tracks?
On the dusty road burdens have melted like wax,
Soldiers have thrown down their rifles, misers slipped their packs:
Yes, and the woman who left it there has sped
With a lighter tread.

Though I should save it, she said,
What have I saved for the world’s use?
If it grow to hero it will die or let loose
Death, or to hireling, nature already is too profuse
Of such, who hope and are disinherited,
Plough, and are not fed.

But since I’ve carried it, she said,
So far I might as well carry it still.
If we ever should come to kindness someone will
Pity me perhaps as the mother of a child so ill,
Grant me even to lie down on a bed;
Give me at least bread.

Inspired I should think by the German invasion of France in May 1940, it’s a poem in which a woman laments picking up an abandoned baby on what is presumably her flight ahead of the invading troops. Her initial act of kindness has soured, as war sours the generous impulses in us. The child, already depersonalised as ‘it’, is nothing but a burden comparable to a soldier’s rifle or a miser’s pack. Its only use might be as a means to food or somewhere to sleep for the woman. The woman despairs that the child is just one of a multitude in an overpopulated world, destined either to be a hero who will ‘die or let loose / Death’ or a starveling, faceless worker. Yet she too is depersonalised, an anonymous woman on a road with thousands of other refugees. Why should she deserve succour and not the child? She knows that her best hope of charity is to make herself less anonymous by using the child to garner pity, otherwise she remains just another face in the crowd. Repenting of rescuing the child strips her of some of her humanity though it is sadly understandable in her desperate circumstances.

(Photograph of refugees in France, 1940, from here)

Everything should come in threes so the final poem that I’ve chosen the last poem in the book, ‘How fare my ash-trees now?’ Like many of the poems included in this collection, it is about death and about life continuing anyway, and seems to form a conversation between a ghost and someone still living who loved them:

‘How fare my ash-trees now?’

How fare my ash trees now?
Do my fruit-trees bear?
The gnarled apple and the stately pear –
How do they grow, and I not there, not there?

Neither more nor less
Than when you walked below.
Apple and pear tree fruit, and ash-trees grow,
And the ripe fruit falls, and leaves begin to snow.

Yes, I remember well
The plunge of apple and pear,
The whirled whisper of ash-elaves flocking down air –
But is it all as when I was there, was there?

Yes and no.
Nettles and weeds grow tall
Muffle each fruit fall:
Unsought-for lie apple and pear, and rot one and all.

(Andrew Wyeth, In the Orchard, 1972; watercolour and pencil on paper; Adelson Galleries; from here)

 

(Picture of King Duffus from here, where you can read more about him and the witches)

Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week begins!

Welcome to Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week! (I feel like a game-show host, typing that...)

Almost as soon as I had decided to host this I was consumed by panic and also a weird reluctance to read anything by STW, as if I were turning her into A Project and thus draining out all the fun. I kept accidentally reading Edgar Wallace... Fortunately, I was able to overcome this reluctance and actually read quite a bit of her work so we won’t be confronted with an embarrassing blank space here this week. And after all, it has been fun and I am as enthusiastic about the work as I was before I began.

So if you haven’t yet started, do rush to your bookcase and seize one of her books and join in...

Here is the plan. I am going to post here six times this week. If you’ve written a post somewhere on the internet – your blog, facebook, goodreads, whatever – leave the link in the comments to any of my STW posts and I’ll collect them all together in the final post so we can find each other more easily.

If you don’t have anywhere on the internet, you can write something in the comments and I’ll copy/paste it into the final round-up post. Or you could email it to me and I’ll put it up here as a guest post.

STW wrote in different forms and I’ve tried to reflect that in what I’ve read and written about. This is my posting schedule. Excitingly, I haven’t actually finished The Corner that Held Them yet but am terror-reading in the hope I can have something ready in time for Friday.

• Later today: After the Death of Don Juan (novel)
• Tuesday: The Innocent and the Guilty (short stories)
• Wednesday: Selected Poems
• Thursday: The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner
• Friday (I hope!): The Corner that Held Them (novel)
• Sunday: round-up post with links to all your posts

So put up your feet with a cat or two to hand, pour yourself a generous glass of sherry and light a Sobranie. Happy reading!

(Sylvia Townsend Warner by Cecil Beaton; bromide print, 1930; NPG P182; National Portrait Gallery, London; from here)

of damp hens and lavender

It’s Valentine’s Day, the sun is shining and our kitchen is fragrant with the scent of wet hen, since I spent a portion of this morning washing Daisy’s bottom and drying it with the hair-dryer. Meanwhile, my tiny study is fragrant with the scent of dusty lavender, after a book avalanche knocked over a bowl of dried lavender I had imprudently balanced on the edge of the cupboard. The lavender is everywhere: all over the desk, books, heaps of paper and alas inside a drawer or two as well as I hadn’t closed them. I don’t even know where the bowl is, it seems to have slipped into another dimension. Anyway, perhaps this is a hint that I should tidy up.

All of this has turned my thoughts to James Elroy Flecker, and so I thought I would post a bit of ‘The Golden Journey to Samarkand’ from Hassan here. I became slightly obsessed with James Elroy Flecker as a teenager after my school put on a production of Hassan. It has been a while now though since I read him and while his attitudes towards the Middle East are disappointing to say the very least, the romantic lushness of much of his work cannot be denied.

Everyone rightly knows the beautiful Epilogue, so here is the Prologue.

We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage
And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die,
We Poets of the proud old lineage
Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why,—

What shall we tell you? Tales, marvellous tales
Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest,
Where nevermore the rose of sunset pales,
And winds and shadows fall toward the West:

And there the world’s first huge white-bearded kings
In dim glades sleeping, murmur in their sleep,
And closer round their breasts the ivy clings,
Cutting its pathway slow and red and deep.

II

And how beguile you? Death has no repose
Warmer and deeper than that Orient sand
Which hides the beauty and bright faith of those
Who made the Golden Journey to Samarkand.

And now they wait and whiten peaceably,
Those conquerors, those poets, those so far:
They know time comes, not only you and I,
But the whole world shall whiten, here or there

When those long caravans that cross the plain
With dauntless feet and sound of silver bells
Put forth no more for glory or for gain,
Take no more solace from the palm-girt wells.

When the great markets by the sea shut fast
All that calm Sunday that goes on and on:
When even lovers find their peace at last,
And Earth is but a star, that once had shone.

(Uncredited illustration for T.E. Lawrence, An Essay on James Elroy Flecker and Forgotten Warfare; Southampton, Mark Valentine, 1988; found here)

The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, by Frances Wilson

We lay upon the sloping Turf. Earth & sky were so lovely that they melted our very hearts. The sky to the north was of a chastened yet rich yellow fading into pale blue & streaked & scattered over with steady islands of purple melting away into shades of pink. It made my heart almost feel like a vision to me.

Dorothy Wordsworth, wrote the literary critic Ernest de Sélincourt, was ‘probably the most remarkable and the most distinguished of English prose writers who never wrote a line for the general public’. I appreciate that is a fairly defined category, but the excerpts of her Grasmere Journal quoted in this brilliant biography reveal a truly great nature writer who has not had her due.

(Silhouette of Dorothy Wordsworth, taken in 1806 when she was thirty-four. From the Wordsworth Trust)

Wilson focuses on the two and a half years of the Grasmere Journal, the pinnacle of Dorothy’s literary achievement, written while she and her brother William were living in Dove Cottage in the Lake District. She is a sensitive reader of what Dorothy writes – and what she doesn’t write – and always works from Dorothy’s own words to discuss Dorothy’s childhood, her life before moving to Grasmere and her life after William married Mary Hutchinson, as well as Dorothy’s own character. The woman who emerges from these pages is complex, passionate and creative: Wilson describes her as a Cathy to William’s Heathcliff.

When Dorothy was six and William seven, their mother died, and Dorothy was separated from her four brothers and sent away to live with an aunt in Halifax. Aunt Elizabeth was kind but Dorothy was never to see her childhood home in Cockermouth again, she wasn’t even allowed back for Christmas. It’s hard to imagine the traumatic effect this must have had on her; it certainly laid the ground for her lack of self-esteem and her need to construct a happier existence through writing. At the age of fifteen, three years after her father’s death, she was sent to live with her grandparents as ‘a professional poor relation’. The grandparents were a ‘joyless’ pair who found Dorothy ‘wild and intractable’; however, Dorothy was now able to become reacquainted with her brothers, whom she had not seen for nine years. She immediately formed a close bond with William, a bond that was to have many of the elements of romantic love in it, for they found themselves in each other.

When William went away to Cambridge to study, Dorothy missed him enormously. Fortunately, after eighteen months she was invited to live with her uncle and his new bride in Norfolk, where she quickly became indispensible as ‘head nurse, housekeeper, tutoress of the little ones or rather superintendent of the nursery’ as her aunt gave birth to a new baby every year. However, she and William corresponded constantly and became even closer. In 1794, aged twenty-two, Dorothy left her uncle’s Norfolk rectory to go for a ‘pilgrimage’, a long walk, through the Lake District, and after this they set up house together in a string of different places, ending in Dove Cottage.

Dorothy began writing the Grasmere Journal for William to read. Far from being artless, her diary entries were the products of intense and accurate observation and careful selection of words. Wilson contrast them with her letters to her childhood friend Jane Pollard. In the letters, Dorothy’s ‘emotions are fashionably exaggerated’; they are ‘so different from the sharpness, shyness, and indirection of her journal entries that it is sometimes hard to believe they are by the same woman’. Wilson notes that occasionally Dorothy wrote two versions of the same day’s events in her journal, evoking quite different emotions. She portrays Dorothy and William’s intense love for each other as symbiotic and feeding off each other. There are echoes of the journals in William’s poetry of the time. Had Mr Mybug been a feminist, he would have undoubtedly claimed that Dorothy wrote William’s poems. The more likely explanation is that William and Dorothy discussed their impressions together before writing them down, or that William read her journal entries and used phrases from them in his own work. Dorothy was valued not only by William, but also by Coleridge and De Quincey, by all who knew her, for her great responsiveness, her sensitivity to what she saw and heard.

(A page from the Grasmere Journal, showing a description of daffodils at Ullswater; the Wordsworth Trust; found here)

After William’s marriage the fire went out of Dorothy’s writing and she seems to have subsided into a more conventional rôle as maiden aunt, helping with the upbringing of the children. Wilson argues that she should not be seen as a ‘victim of nineteenth-century femininity’, yet it is simply impossible not to wonder what her literary career might have been had she had the opportunities of her brother. It does seem at least she has finally received the biography she deserved; Wilson really is an exemplary researcher and writer and as well as looking out for a copy of Dorothy’s Grasmere Journal, I’m keen to read more of Wilson’s work.

what makes a good poem?

(Carl Spitzweg, De Arme Poet [The Poor Poet], 1839, oil on canvas; Neue Pinakothek; found here)

I’ve deleted the post I originally wrote here. It was a long-winded and dull answer to Rebecca Watts’s article in PN Review entitled ‘The Cult of the Noble Amateur’ criticising the work of three poets, most particularly Hollie McNish; you can read more about it in the Guardian. Since writing my post, I saw better arguments elsewhere, such as this and this slightly barbed riposte by Don Paterson. I should just add here that I thought Watts had every right to write her piece and to review Hollie McNish’s poetry. However, I disliked the personal tone of her attack (ironic as she was complaining about the cult of personality), and her failure to interrogate her own standards and even try to engage with McNish’s aims. I also thought that greeting the work of three poets as being the advent of the Poetry Apocalypse was ridiculous.

Instead I want to pick up the point that I was reaching at the end of the first version of this. Watts had a clearly defined set of criteria of what a poem (and, less defensibly, what a poet) should be. She measured McNish’s poetry against these criteria and found it wanting. That approach is not always the best way to read literature, I find. Usually you have to take work on its own terms – usually it tells you how to read it, if you’re paying attention. But that’s not always the case and anyway, it’s not easy to do.

I’m reading Edmund Gordon’s stellar biography of Angela Carter at the moment. In it, he records the reactions of many critics to Carter’s work as it was published. Irrespective of whether they like the books or not, some critics are more sensitive to what Carter was trying to do than others. But how do you judge something like The Passion of New Eve when you’ve never encountered anything like it before? If you do not understand the writer’s purpose, is that your failure or hers?

What I am thinking about here is how ‘wrong’ Watts and some of Carter’s critics are in applying existing standards to work which challenges those standards. Must we change our ideas of literature every time we open a book? I am inclined to say that yes, we should. But all of them? Is that realistic? And how then do we define what is ‘good’ and what is not if we do not have consistent standards? Is it possible to separate ‘good literature’ from ‘I liked this book’? I wibble around this subject; what do you think?

 

‘The Haw Lantern’, by Seamus Heaney

The poems in The Haw Lantern have always had a special place in my heart because I studied them for A-level (all my English A-level texts have remained very dear to me, I suppose from that intense immersion in them and also because it was then that I started learning how to read critically and look at how texts work). For National Poetry Day I’ve typed out the titular poem (ignoring as best I can my 17-year-old self’s excruciating commentary on it):

The wintry haw is burning out of season,
crab of the thorn, a small light for small people,
wanting no more from them but that they keep
the wick of self-respect from dying out,
not having to blind them with illumination.

But sometimes when your breath plumes in the frost
it takes the roaming shape of Diogenes
with his lantern, seeking one just man;
so you end up scrutinized from behind the haw
he holds up at eye-level on its twig,
and you flinch before its bonded pith and stone,
its blood-prick that you wish would test and clear you,
its pecked-at ripeness that scans you, then moves on.

This was originally published by Faber & Faber in 1987 and remains beautiful and apposite. I’d like to email it to all our political representatives, for a start.

'Farewell', by Katharine Tynan

(John Atkinson Grimshaw, The Harvest Moon, oil on canvas, found here)

Not soon shall I forget – a sheet
Of golden water, cold and sweet,
The young moon with her head in veils
Of silver, and the nightingales.

A wain of hay came up the lane –
O fields I shall not walk again,
And trees I shall not see, so still
Against a sky of daffodil!

Fields where my happy heart had rest,
And where my heart was heaviest,
I shall remember them at peace
Drenched in moon-silver like a fleece.

The golden water sweet and cold,
The moon of silver and of gold,
The dew upon the gray grass-spears
I shall remember them with tears.

Katharine Tynan was an Irish poet about whom I know no more than Wikipedia tells me.  I found this poem in Walter de la Mare’s lovely anthology Come Hither. It is a bit weepy, but I love its music, and the image of the veiled moon. The first line, ‘Not soon shall I forget’ – but forget I shall, one day – is challenged by the repeated ‘I shall remember’ – and yet what might be several distinct memories (although perhaps not: before I saw the Atkinson Grimshaw painting I could not imagine a yellow sky and silver moonlight at the same time, yet there they are) are already bleeding a little into each other. It reminds me a bit of ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’.

Does anyone know more about Tynan? Do you like this poem?

‘Bermudas’, by Andrew Marvell

Where the remote Bermudas ride
In the ocean’s bosom unespied
From a small boat, that rowed along,
The listening winds received this song.
    ‘What should we do but sing his praise
That led us through the watery maze,
Unto an isle so long unknown,
And yet far kinder than our own?
Where he the huge sea-monsters wracks,
That lift the deep upon their backs,
He lands us on a grassy stage,
Safe from the storms, and prelate’s rage,
He gave us this eternal spring,
Which here enamels everything,
And sends the fowls to us in care,
On daily visits through the air.
He hangs in shades the orange bright,
Like golden lamps in a green night,
And does in the pom’granates close
Jewels more rich than Ormus shows.
He makes the figs our mouths to meet,
And throws the melons at our feet,
But apples plants of such a price,
No tree could ever bear them twice.
With cedars, chosen by his hand,
From Lebanon, he stores the land.
And makes the hollow seas, that roar,
Proclaim the ambergris on shore.
He cast (of which we rather boast)
The gospel’s pearl upon our coast,
And in those rocks for us did frame
A temple, where to sound his name.
Oh let our voice his praise exalt,
Till it arrive at heaven’s vault:
Which thence (perhaps) rebounding, may
Echo beyond the Mexique Bay.’
Thus sung they, in the English boat,
A holy and a cheerful note,
And all the way, to guide their chime,
With falling oars they kept the time.

Sometimes I post poems here (though only those out of copyright!) and today I felt like posting this one. I like Marvell’s poetry and I like the fact that much of it is so ambiguous – ‘Bermudas’ is, in my opinion, no exception. At first glance it seems a hearty seventeenth-century endorsement of colonialism and of the paradisical nature of the Bermudas, which it seems had long been associated with Puritan emigrants. Marvell probably wrote it in 1653, when he was living in the house of John Oxenbridge, a Non-conformist divine and commissioner with responsibility for the Bermudas. It draws particularly on the Psalms. But there are complications. We know that the rowers are in an English boat but not who they are or where they are going (not far, presumably, since it’s a small boat). Nor is it clear at all why they are keeping time with their oars in order ‘to guide their chime’, rather than singing to help them keep time with their rowing as would seem natural.

The luxuriantly sensual nature of the imagery doesn’t seem to be quite the sort of thing that Puritans and Non-conformists fleeing England should be celebrating. There is perhaps something rather oppressive in the abundant fertility, the figs pressing themselves to ‘our mouths’ and the melons being thrown at ‘our feet’, or so it seems to me; in any case, it’s all slightly comical and over the top. It was by then known in England that the Bermudas were not at all like this and were distinctly lacking in pomegranates stuffed with jewels, so if this is supposed to be propaganda, it’s odd. And while the oarsmen celebrate the Bermudas, they are not there, only nearby, at sea, working so that they can sing.

Since Marvell’s other poetry is riddled with complications and ambiguities to the point that his own views are often obscured, I don’t think accepting this poem at face value really works. But what is it really about? Is it a sort of allegory of life and are the rowers souls seeking Heaven – but, erroneously believing that Heaven is filled with fleshly delights and riches, unable ever quite to reach it? Does that interpretation even begin to work? I really don’t know, but I love the poem.

There’s an interesting article about ‘Bermudas’ here.

(‘The Tree of Life’, embroidered canvas, British, from the first half of the seventeenth century; given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1964 by Irwin Untermeyer and found here. The Tree of Life shown here is a multi-fruiting tree which grows in the City of God and is described in Revelations; it is entwined with a vine symbolizing the Passion of Christ and the promise of eternal life. Isn’t it lovely?)

Fairy Tale, by Miroslav Holub

He built himself a house,
                his foundations,
                his stones,
                his walls,
                his roof overhead,
                his chimney and smoke,
                his view from the window.

He made himself a garden,
                his fence,
                his thyme,
                his earthworm,
                his evening dew.

He cut out his bit of sky above.

And he wrapped the garden in the sky,
and the house in the garden
and packed the lot in a handkerchief
and went off
lone as an arctic fox
through the cold
unending
rain
into the world.

(Translated from the Czech by George Theiner, from The Rattle Bag, edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, Faber and Faber, 1972)

The Napoleon of Notting Hill, by G.K. Chesterton

My exposure to G.K. Chesterton, until now, has been limited to his lovely poem ‘The Donkey’. As a child, I learnt it off by heart and I still think it’s terrific:

When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born.

With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil’s walking parody
On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.

On a recent visit to Ipswich I found a second-hand copy of three of his novels published as A G.K. Chesterton Omnibus and having always meant to read The Man Who Was Thursday, which it contains, I bought it. However, I decided to start with The Napoleon of Notting Hill for the exciting and original reason that it was first in the book.

Well, it is a very odd novel, not at all what I expected (which was something Wodehousey, actually) and I am unable to think of anything it resembles. Written in 1904, it is set in 1984: a 1984 which is very similar to 1904 largely as a result of apathy. Democracy requiring too much effort for the British, they have decided on despotism, so much less bother than democracy and arguing about everything in Parliament. The king – women don’t seem to be eligible – is chosen by lot on the death of his predecessor and everything chugs gently along as one king is very much like another. Until Auberon Quin is chosen to be the next king. Quin considers it all to be a huge joke and uses his privileges to poke fun at the bland, dull society around him. Under his pet project, Charter of the Cities, he decides to strengthen the boroughs of London, granting to each its own provost, walls and private army: the powers of mediaeval city states. No one else really likes this idea and no one likes observing Quin’s redundant ceremonials or strutting about in robes at all, but no one takes the trouble to oppose him. It all seems quite harmless, anyway.

And so ten years pass. A large new road is proposed linking Hammersmith with Westbourne Grove; people are bullied and land is purchased and properties demolished and coincidentally a number of the provosts stand to make a tidy profit from its construction. But then Notting Hill acquires a new provost: the romantic, passionate Adam Wayne, who refuses to relinquish Pump Street to the developers. The other boroughs send in their armies but are repelled; barricades are built and swords are drawn. Suddenly the joke of the Charter is being taken very seriously indeed.

(‘In the dark entrance there appeared a flaming figure’, illustration by W. Graham Robertson for The Napoleon of Notting Hill, London and New York: John Lane the Bodley Head, 1904; found here)

The world of the book is very strange, not least because it’s 1904 masquerading as the future but with the mediaeval past (or 1904’s idea of the mediaeval past), in the shape of the Charter and Adam Wayne, breaking in on it. Men are walking around dressed in top hats and frock coats but brandishing halberds or belting up swords. Then there are no women – not one, not even a woman walking past in the street or serving a man a cup of tea or darning a sock. This is actually quite peculiar, although I’m not sure that Chesterton consciously intended it to be. And then there’s the tone. Auberon Quin is a joker and a cynic, who despises the outlook of the businessmen around him. He longs for romance and his ministers don’t provide that. Adam Wayne, however, does. Like a Pre-Raphaelite knight made flesh, he speaks in a heightened, mediaevalish way, cherishes honour and courtesy, and takes the Charter seriously. He is able to inspire men who were not really bothered about whether Pump Street is knocked down or not, and inspire them to fight to the death. This is another oddness: there is fighting, the streets literally run with blood, but only one death is actually described. The violence is veiled and there is no pain or grief. Everyone seems like toy soldiers, to be knocked down as part of a game. And everything is described in a wry, comical tone.

Quin is at first amused that someone is taking his Charter seriously; later he grows to admire Wayne despite his ridiculousness since he believes deeply in something, and this elevates him above everyone else, with their practical and material outlook. Both Chesterton and Quin describe Wayne as a ‘fanatic’. His fanaticism is particularly disturbing because it isn’t for a moral, spiritual or social end but for the upholding of his own powers as provost under the Charter. From the outset, it’s made pretty clear that most of the inhabitants of Notting Hill are quite happy for the road to be built and Pump Street to be knocked down. It is Wayne who objects and for no other reason than that he is entitled to object: ‘That which is large enough for the rich to covet, is large enough for the poor to defend’ – it’s mine and you can’t have it. This struck me as a petty principle for which to expect men to die. The painlessness of the fighting seemed at times like Chesterton disguising this.

But I think there’s another reason too. At the very end, Quin and Wayne talk together. Where are they? The story suggests that it may be the afterlife. On the other hand, this novel began with a preface discussing the futility of predicting the future, it continually and jokily resists realism and it includes a long despatch from Quin who at one point masquerades as a journalist reporting on the fighting in Notting Hill. In other words, we’re constantly being reminded of the artificiality of the story. None of the characters in it is ‘real’: none is more than a toy soldier constructed of words. There’s no ‘real’ death. So, at the end, Quin and Wayne may be in the afterlife, or they may have stepped outside outside the story, and are now looking in. They talk about their different perceptions of the world. Quin confesses that the Charter was conceived as a joke. He says:

‘Suppose I am God [...] and suppose I made the world in idleness. Suppose the stars, that you think eternal, are only the idiot fireworks of an everlasting schoolboy. Suppose the sun and the moon, to which you sing alternately, are only the two eyes of one vast and sneering giant, opened alternately in a never-ending wink. Suppose the trees, in my eyes, are as foolish as toad-stools. Suppose Socrates and Charlemagne are to me only beasts, made funnier by walking on their hind legs. Suppose I am God, and having made things, laugh at them.’

‘And suppose that I am man,’ answered the other. ‘And suppose that I give the answer that shatters even a laugh. Suppose I do not laugh back at you, do not blaspheme you, do not curse you. But suppose, standing up straight under the sky, with every power of my being, I thank you for the fools’ paradise you have made. Suppose I praise you, with a literal pain of ecstasy, for the jest that has brought me so terrible a joy. If we have taken the child’s games, and given them the seriousness of a Crusade, if we have drenched your grotesque Dutch garden with the blood of martyrs, we have turned a nursery into a temple. I ask you, in the name of Heaven, who wins?’ [...]

‘But suppose, friend, [...] it was all a mockery. Suppose that there had been, from the beginning of these great wars, one who watched them with a sense that is beyond expression, a sense of detachment, of responsibility, of irony, of agony. Suppose that there were one who knew it was all a joke.’

The tall figure answered: ‘He could not know it. For it was not all a joke.’

Wayne goes on to say that he, the fanatic, and Quin, the satirist, are essential to the world, ‘and they went away together into the unknown world’. All of which adds up to an interesting and terrifying theology. Are satire and fanaticism both essential (especially when the satire is in love with the fanaticism, as in this novel)? If God is in fact an idle joker then are humans actually greater than God? And must we spill blood to prove our seriousness? As I say, I found this a profoundly disquieting book.

(Also, what is a Dutch garden?)