Ellis Meredith: The Master Knot of Human Fate

The resume of this Librivox audiobook grabbed me, and so I downloaded it to listen to in the car.

A natural cataclysm of some sort – never truly explained or clarified – isolates a man and a woman, who knew each other in their previous existence – on an island some where California and the western US used to be. Luckily (!) everything necessary for their basic survival is on hand…

I was interested to learn about the cataclysm, and was disappointed. I was interested to see how their Robinson Crusoe or Swiss Family Robinson existence panned out, but, apart from everything going just swimmingly, I learned little. A home and smallholding, conveniently abandoned, was to hand.

I wondered if anyone else had survived. Our heroes hope against hope for a sign, a ship; after a year one appears on the horizon, and they signal to it – perhaps rather foolishly, it might seem – but next morning it is revealed to have been an abandoned wreck, and not even useful supplies can be gleaned from the wreck, as Robinson managed three centuries ago. So they are alone.

A twenty-first century reader would wonder about the possibility of emotion and sexual attraction between them, isolated for the duration. Clearly they were fond of each other in their previous world, and they do grow closer. They realise that they may be the only humans left alive, and reflect on whether they have a duty to continue the species. And they engage in interminable religious and philosophical discussions about this, and about what faith their putative offspring should be raised in…. Everything is sauced and spiced with liberal doses of nineteenth century religion (the novel was written in 1901); they must be sure they ‘love’ each other and have absolutely no doubts about what they are about to undertake, before they devise a wedding ceremony for themselves, and she happens to find an old wedding-dress in a trunk.

And then the story ends.

Reader, do not waste your time either reading or listening to this book: it really isn’t worth it. Maudlin, tiresome and sentimental, it should have stayed forgotten. Librivox and Project Gutenberg do a great job of restoring access to forgotten literature of the past, but this one could have quite well stayed lost, I think.

Balance-sheet of the First World War – 16

Losses in particular time periods This table is again pretty self-explanatory and so I haven’t translated it fully. The war has been divided into separate time-slots, dominated by a particular battle or action, and the losses are listed in three categories under each head:

Died on the battlefield, missing or taken prisoners

Died in first aid/ dressing stations

Died in hospital (behind the lines)

For us to notice again is the huge proportion of casualties in the opening months of the war.

(continuing the series of posts I introduced here)

Balance-sheet of the First World War – 15

The war cost France: costs of the war 989,483,000,000/debts and reparations 137,111,000,000 francs. Total = 1,126,594,000,000 francs.

The war cost the belligerents: According to calculations by the League of Nations, spent or destroyed the value of ten trillion (10,000,000,000,000) francs.

(continuing the series of posts I introduced here)

Balance-sheet of the First World War – 14

The first wounded Frenchman in the war was customs-officer Lalbe. On 2 August 1914 – before war was declared – at about 9am, he was at Suarce (Belfort territory) where horses and cars were being requisitioned. A patrol of uhlans commanded by Lt Mayer arrived, and he took a bullet. This first injury did not prevent him taking part in combat, being mentioned in dispatched several times, and receiving the military medal. He dies 20 November 1932 aged 57.

The first Frenchman killed: the first death of the war was Cpl Andre Peugeot of the 44^th infantry regiment, a teacher and son of a teacher, born at Etupes (Doubs department) 11 June 1883. On 2 August 1914 – before war was declared – he was killed at 10am at Joncherey, 2km from Delle, by Lt Mayer of the 5^th horse chasers Garrisoned at Mulhouse. [same Lt Mayer as above?]

(continuing the series of posts I introduced here)

Balance-sheet of the First World War – 13

Material losses:
number of communes entirely destroyed 1699
number of communes 3/4 destroyed 707
number of communes half-destroyed 1656
number of houses completely destroyed 319,269
number of houses partially destroyed 313,675
number of factories 20,603
kilometres of railway destroyed 7985
bridges destroyed 4875
tunnels destroyed 12
kilometres of road destroyed 52,754
hectares of uncultivated land destroyed 2,060,000
hectares of cultivated land destroyed 1,740,000

(continuing the series of posts I introduced here)

Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre

I don’t exactly remember how, at a recent family gathering, we ended up with a lively discussion of the character of Mr Rochester, but I did end up agreeing to re-read Jane Eyre and remind myself of what I thought. The heavy-duty gothic elements of the novel had faded somewhat since I’d last read it – the dreams pregnant with significance, the weighty use of pathetic fallacy, as had the super-sized lashings of Victorian Christianity. On the one level, the author displays outrage at the more hypocritical aspects of such religion and the attendant ‘charity’ (Lowood School, obviously) and its meanness, but the whole of Jane’s life is driven by the need to be ‘good’…

As a bildungsroman it’s worth consideration as we do see how her character is formed by certain crucial events – Lowood, Helen Burns’ friendship, Miss Temple, encounters with Rochester and St John Rivers – and she moves quite convincingly from timidity to self-confidence and self-reliance through her experiences of love and trust, as well as hardship and deprivation.

Rochester’s appearance is trailed well in advance, and I was brought up short by the fact that he’s twice her age: another cradle-snatcher, almost, like Emma Woodhouse‘s Mr Knightley. What is it about women and older men in novels of that century: is it crudely reductionist to see a sublimation or even repression of youthful sexuality here? What is the attraction? He behaves oddly at their initial encounter: he is awkward, forward, forthright, abrupt and domineering, it seemed to me. Quickly they are established as intellectual equals, yet her supposed superior morality – through her religion – is underlined, and contrasted with the rakish behaviour tolerated in males of the time.

Rochester is unconventional, and this makes him interesting, and attractive to Jane. But he is a flawed character and must suffer for his offences, even though she has fallen in love with him. The portrait of an ageing playboy lumbered with an insane wife (and, importantly, his ensnarement into this marriage goes some way to excuse his behaviour) does show us a tormented and tortured man craving happiness when he recognises its possibility, but he is surely wrong – whatever century we are in – when he seeks to beguile Jane into a bigamous relationship.

There is rather too much coincidence in all the long-lost family connections and money for this modern reader, and the creepiness of St John Rivers palls very quickly, as the author again criticises – though mildly and carefully now – Victorian religion and missionary fervour, while making her case for a woman’s right to real love and happiness on her terms. The maiming of Rochester goes too far for me, as does his conversion to religion in the maudlin and sentimental conclusion to the novel; I was confirmed in my feeling that Villette is the superior novel, and also very surprised at how the two novels end so similarly, with the deaths of potential lovers…

So, Mr Rochester: a lively and attractive mind but not sexy as that wouldn’t do in the 1850s; a forthright and open-minded character (perhaps as a would-be bigamist, too open-minded); a match for Jane intellectually, but a life-partner? possibly. There I’m not convinced.

 

Balance-sheet of the First World War – 12

The war goes on… The war is not over for the combatants. The war continues, because it is still killing them. It has been calculated that the mortality of the wounded and mutilated is higher than that of other categories.

Here are the figures:

mortality of wounded and amputees = 76.5 per thousand

mortality of mobilised non-combatants who fell ill = 44 per thousand

mortality of unwounded ex-combatants who spent more than 6 months at the front = 34.5 per thousand

mortality of mobilised non-combatants who were never ill = 23 per thousand

mortality of those not mobilised, from illness = 14 per thousand

R C Sherriff: Journey’s End

 

It struck me that it’s a century since the start of the final German offensive of spring 1918, and consequently of the events R C Sherriff dramatised in his play Journey’s End, which I taught to more GCSE English Literature groups than I can remember…

It’s a very simple play, in many ways; a small troop of officers and soldiers holds a small section of the front line somewhere near St Quentin. We get to know them; they have to make a raid on the German lines to gain information, lose an officer and some men; the German offensive begins, and they are wiped out.

Sherriff was on the Western Front, and his experiences make the play ring true. The play was a sell-out in 1929 when it was first performed, and the novelisation of the play was a best-seller, although it’s now long been out-of-print. So how did Sherriff succeed?

At a time when most people in Britain would have a family member who had served, been injured or killed in the war, there was clearly an enormous amount of knowledge about and experience of the war, some of which had been shared with family members and some which had been deeply buried as ex-combatants sought to forget. The grotty conditions of trench-life, and little attempts to make it bearable, are there; humour is injected in small doses by Mason, the officers’ cook. The cameraderie of shared discomfort, when men who don’t know each other but are forced into intimacy by conditions, convinces. And the meaninglessness of the conflict is underlined – not through Sherriff’s desire to spread any kind of pacifist message, though after four years of war this might be understandable – by the isolation of the small group. They are somewhere on the front line; there are other companies alongside them; battalion HQ is somewhere, but they are disconnected from all that, somehow, anonymous and annihilated, and the audience is forced to ask ‘why?’…

Sherriff’s greatest success comes from his careful creation of a small group of officers, and the interplay between them; he clearly had a good eye to what would make effective theatre. Commanding the company is Stanhope, a young officer who has been in France for four years, is clearly very effective in his role but who has turned increasingly to heavy drinking to be able to cope with the horrors of what he’s involved in; his second is a schoolmaster in his forties, Osborne, who is nicknamed ‘Uncle’ by his fellows, and who seems to survive by talking with everyone, being friendly and offering fatherly advice. He has a wife and small son back home, is chosen to lead the raid on the German lines and knows it means almost certain death, but does his duty – and is blown to bits by a German grenade. Trotter is the only officer who is working class, and has clearly risen up through the ranks unlike the others; his interests and attitudes provide a contrast, and he clearly enjoys eating and drinking; after Osborne’s death he becomes second-in-command and focuses on doing his duty. Hibbert is a coward or malingerer or suffering from shell-shock depending on your point of view, and Stanhope’s efforts are concentrated on preventing him going sick just before the German offensive. Everything is complicated by the arrival of a young replacement officer fresh out of training – Raleigh – who went to the same public school as Stanhope, who was his hero. Will Stanhope stand up to the image he formerly had? And, of course, through Raleigh, Sherriff teaches the audience about the routines of life in the trenches…

An enormous amount is crammed into the ‘two-hours traffic of our stage’; much quiet, calm and waiting; shared conversation, reminiscence and genuine friendship; swift and sudden action; the crassness of the higher ranks comes across through the figure of the Colonel who arranges the raid, and the raid itself, which cannot, of course, be re-created onstage, is instead brought to life through sound and light effects. We are fully involved in the life and death of these few men from start to finish, and the closing moments are truly powerful.

Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities

I really liked If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, and have read it a couple of times. I wondered why I’d never read Invisible Cities, and something else I was reading recently re-awakened my interest and prompted me to get it and finally read it, and it was marvellous. The concept itself is astonishing: a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, in which the traveller describes a range of imaginary cities to the great Khan in a series of prose poems. All the cities are named after women, fall into a range of different categories, and are woven symmetrically into the whole. Interspersing the nine chapters of the book are conversations between the pair, reflecting on a range of connected ideas.

I found myself very quickly reminded of Jorge Luis Borges in a number of ways. Firstly, the writing is in short sections or chapters; like poetry, each deals with a single subject, or here, city. And the slightly magical, slightly ethereal style is also reminiscent of the great Argentinian writer, although, of course, my judgement is limited as I can read neither in the original.

Each city is different, disturbing, dislocating; each contains enough in itself, in its own story, to shake you up, make you reflect and ponder. Some will truly enchant you, others will hardly move you at all. At one point the great Khan realises that in each city Marco Polo may be describing a different aspect of Venice, his home city; equally he is contemplating aspects of our life journey in the world. Sometimes a city verges on the truly surreal, in a way in which the language itself seems to lose its meaning – rather along the lines of Ben Marcus‘ bizarre The Age of Wire and String – you read the words, and they are words you can comprehend individually, but the ways in which they are related to each other challenges perception…

Each city is its own prose poem: the cities are weird and the magic of Calvino’s words and images conjures up vivid if implausible, unreal or insane places, at times in a drug-like haze. Many of the places have a very seductive appeal, and even though the travels are going nowhere, for these places do not exist, the magical and haunting lyricism of the cities timelessly suspended in eternity carries you along in a trance.

How does it work? We listen to an intriguing story-teller; we are in the territory of myth; we are travellers visiting unknown places along with him. Words create vivid pictures, and ideas make us think. The ethereal nature of the places and the encounters carry us effortlessly along… and yet there’s more to it than that. It’s a lovely book, and I don’t use that word about many books.

Balance-sheet of the First World War – 11

Massacre of the Infantry
The infantry – queen of the battlefield – was particularly tested during the 
1914-18 war. One infantryman in 4 was killed.

Proportionally, infantry losses were 
3 times greater than cavalry
4 times greater than artillery
6 times greater than the combined aviation, supply train teams 
and other front-line services

Finally, General Percin calculated that 75,000 Frenchmen were cut down by 
our own artillery (friendly fire)

(continuing the series of posts I introduced here)