Classical Bookworm

What is Stephen Harper reading?

Last year the Canada Council for the Arts celebrated its 50th year of supporting Canadian artists, and as part of the celebration they invited 50 of those artists to Parliament Hill to be recognized by the House of Commons. Yann Martel, author of The Life of Pi, was one of those Canada Council artists, and describes the experience thus:

The Honourable Bev Oda, Minister for Canadian Heritage, whose seat on the government benches is as far away from the Prime Minister’s as is possible for a member of the cabinet, rose to her feet, acknowledged our presence and began to speak. We stood up, not for ourselves but for the Canada Council. Her speech was short. There was a flutter of applause. Then Minister Oda sat down, our business was over, MPs instantly turned to other things, and we were still standing. That was it. Fifty years of building Canada’s dazzling and varied culture, done with in less than five minutes.

We should have been prepared. How many Members of Parliament do you think showed up at a reception the previous day on Parliament Hill meant to be a grand occasion on which the representatives of Canada’s people would meet the representatives of Canada’s artists? By my count, twenty, twenty-five—out of 306—with only one cabinet minister, the one who absolutely had to be there, Bev Oda. There we fifty stood around, for two hours, waiting, each one of us a symbol for one year of the Canada Council’s fifty. I, for example, was 1991, the year I received a Canada Council B grant that allowed me to write my first novel. I was 27 years old and the money was manna from heaven. I made those $18,000 last a year and a half (and compared to the income tax I have paid since then, an exponential return on Canadian taxpayers’ investment, I assure you). By comparison, the equivalent celebration of a major cultural institution in, say, France would have been a classy, flashy, year-long, exhibition-filled affair with President Chirac trying to hog as much of the limelight as possible. No need to go into further details. We all know how the Europeans do culture. It’s sexy and important to them. The world visits Europe because it is so culturally resplendent. Instead, we stood around, drank our drinks, and then petered away in small groups.

The Agony and Ecstasy of Writing

This goes out to all the bloggers who are brave enough to try writing...

via Book Chase

Gabo Turns Eighty

Gabriel García Márquez was honoured at the International Spanish Language Congress in Cartagena, Colombia over the weekend in honour of his 80th birthday. Kings, Presidents, and thousands of adoring fans showered him with admiration for his work, particularly Cien Años de Soledad (100 Years of Solitude), which was called the most important novel in Spanish since Don Quixote. The Real Academia Española presented Gabo with a new annotated 40th anniversary edition of Cien Años. (The only other book they've published in this way is, you guessed it,  Don Quixote).

You can read his address here, that is, if you can read Spanish. Since this is also the 25th anniversary of his Nobel Prize, Anglophones may enjoy reading his address at that august occasion. There are also photos of the festivities in Cartagena, and may I say, I hope I am in that kind of shape at 80!

via Latin Americanist

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that Amazon has the Real Academia Española editions of Don Quijote de la Mancha and Cien Años de Soledad at insanely low prices. When was the last time you got a 1300 page hardcover critical edition for ten (US) bucks? Even with my shaky Spanish it's too good to pass up.

Lattimore on Translation

For Mark 7.1–5 I have written:

"Then the Pharisees gathered to him, and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem, seeing that some of the disciples were eating their bread with profane, that is, unwashed, hands: for the Pharisees, and all the Jews, will not eat unless they have washed hand against first, thus keeping the tradition of their elders; and when they come from the marketplace they will not eat unless they have purified themselves, and there are many other observances that are traditional with them, the washing of cups and vessels both wooden and bronze: the Pharisees and the scribes asked him: Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of our elders, but eat their bread with profane hands?"

Let me try to put this into what is more like a contemporary idiom:

"The Pharisees, with some of the scribes, went out from Jerusalem to visit him. They noticed that some of his disciples ate without first washing their hands, which made their hands profane. The Pharisees and the Jews in general observe a tradition handed down from their ancestors not to eat without first washing their hands thoroughly. When they come in from the marketplace they will not eat until they have purified themselves. They have many other traditions, like washing their cups, whether these are made of wood or bronze. Because of all this the Pharisees and the scribes asked Jesus: Why do your disciples disobey our ancestral tradition by eating with profane hands?"

Now, other modern translators have modernized this passage much  more successfully than I have. My heart is not in this kind of rearrangement of the syntax. Still, all the essential meaning is there. But to me it reads much less like Mark than the version which stands in my translation.

—Richmond Lattimore, The Four Gospels and The Revelation

I'm with Dr. Lattimore. And the Pharisees. Wash your hands or you may be forced to commit the idolatry of worshipping the porcelain goddess!

Anne Labastille: A Canoe of One's Own

When I first started writing, I discovered an interesting metabolic pattern. Mornings are my best time for writing. Time at the desk or on the sun deck is the equivalent of an executive's hours in an office composing letters, writing memos, researching, and editing. However, instead of coffee breaks and committee meetings, my work is broken by such distractions as meeting the mail boat, tramping to the outhouse, putting fresh wood in the stove, or admiring the hummingbirds. I am alone with time yet never really alone. On sunny, calm days I may even work in the bottom of my canoe, floating on the lake. My portable typewriter just fits on the seat like a stenographer's desk. And a yellow pad works anywhere. No word processors for me! I want no machinery or electricity between my brain, hand, pen, and paper.

—Anne Labastille, Woodswoman II: Beyond Black Bear Lake

Woolf on Reading

A million thanks to Danielle (A Work in Progress) for bringing Virgina Woolf's essay, How Should One Read a Book?, to my attention. It is a welcome antidote to the pedantic and mechanistic How to Read a Book by Adler and Van Doren. Although her approach is generally the same, she expresses it much more beautifully and from the perspective of a fellow reader, rather than an omniscient teacher who may not be questioned.

Like Adler and Van Doren (and Susan Wise Bauer), she describes two phases of reading, the first devoted to understanding, the second to criticism. Unlike these other authors, Woolf feels it is a mistake to begin by categorizing books and forming expectations based on even the most general classification.

Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticise at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read. But if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other. Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this, and soon you will find that your author is giving you, or attempting to give you, something far more definite.

Step by step procedures for dissecting different types of book would obviously be anathema to this approach. Woolf continues:

The first process, to receive impressions with the utmost understanding, is only half the process of reading; it must be completed, if we are to get the whole pleasure from a book, by another. We must pass judgment upon these multitudinous impressions; we must make of these fleeting shapes one that is hard and lasting. But not directly. Wait for the dust of reading to settle; for the conflict and the questioning to die down; walk, talk, pull the dead petals from a rose, or fall asleep. Then suddenly without our willing it, for it is thus that Nature undertakes these transitions, the book will return, but differently. It will float to the top of the mind as a whole. And the book as a whole is different from the book received currently in separate phrases. Details now fit themselves into their places. We see the shape from start to finish; it is a barn, a pigsty, or a cathedral. Now then we can compare book with book as we compare building with building. But this act of comparison means that our attitude has changed; we are no longer the friends of the writer, but his judges; and just as we cannot be too sympathetic as friends, so as judges we cannot be too severe. Are they not criminals, books that have wasted our time and sympathy; are they not the most insidious enemies of society, corrupters, defilers, the writers of false books, faked books, books that fill the air with decay and disease? Let us then be severe in our judgments; let us compare each book with the greatest of its kind.

It's true that I generally have to 'let the dust settle' after reading a book before I can form any impression of it as a whole, and in fact those impressions do seem to materialize fully formed in my mind as if by magic. But mere impressions are not enough:

It would be foolish, then, to pretend that the second part of reading, to judge, to compare, is as simple as the first—to open the mind wide to the fast flocking of innumerable impressions. To continue reading without the book before you, to hold one shadow-shape against another, to have read widely enough and with enough understanding to make such comparisons alive and illuminating—that is difficult; it is still more difficult to press further and to say, “Not only is the book of this sort, but it is of this value; here it fails; here it succeeds; this is bad; that is good”. To carry out this part of a reader’s duty needs such imagination, insight, and learning that it is hard to conceive any one mind sufficiently endowed; impossible for the most self-confident to find more than the seeds of such powers in himself.

All is not lost, however, for we have some guides:

…in order to steady ourselves in this difficult attempt, it may be well to turn to the very rare writers who are able to enlighten us upon literature as an art. Coleridge and Dryden and Johnson, in their considered criticism, the poets and novelists themselves in their considered sayings, are often surprisingly revelant; they light up and solidify the vague ideas that have been tumbling in the misty depths of our minds.

Woolf seems to understand the desire (which is my desire) to penetrate the beautiful mysteries of the literary arts. She gives her advice so charmingly that I am inclined to follow it and seek out other authors who have written on "literature as an art." Would it be too much to ask for an anthology of such writings? [She googles madly...] Ah. Perhaps not.

Muriel Spark: “Curriculum Vitae”

Curriculum Vitae is Muriel Spark's attempt to answer what she calls the essential poet's question: Who am I? Like a true professional she researched her own life, digging up old documents and consulting friends and family to corroborate her own memories. The autobiography describes the first 39 years of her life, from her birth to the publication of her first book, The Comforters, in 1957. If there is an answer in Curriculum Vitae to the question of who she was, it is simply that she was a writer.

Muriel Spark was born in Edinburgh in 1918 to an English mother and Scottish father, and although her family was poor, her formative years were rich with experience—perfect for a future writer. Spark's parents included her in their vibrant social life, and she encountered a great variety of interesting and memorable people before starting her formal education. I suspect she picked up part of her penchant for observing people from her parents who would talk about their acquaintances in front of their daughter, often making fun of them and giving them nicknames.

The main beneficiary of Scottish philanthropy over several centuries was education, so Spark was able to go to a good school at little or no cost to her parents.

Education was held in awe, and the Scottish idea was that nobody should be denied this privilege.

At Gillespie's Girls' School she was taught by many excellent teachers, including the "exhilarating and impressive" Miss Christina Kay who was the model for Miss Brodie. Miss Kay lived a rich and adventurous life and shared it with her girls, stimulating Muriel's imagination and thirst for experience of her own.

What filled our minds with wonder and make Christina Kay so memorable was the personal drama and poetry within which everything in her classroom happened.

From a young age Spark showed an aptitude for poetry and literature, and was encouraged and supported in this at home and at school.

Miss Kay predicted my future as a writer in the most emphatic terms. I felt I had hardly much choice in the matter.

She read all the poetry and fiction she could get her hands on, and sought feedback on her poems and stories from friends and teachers. By the time she left school she was already an award-winning and published poet. Despite her obvious talent and intelligence, she did not pursue a university degree, partly due to a lack of money, and partly because she preferred to study on her own. She did take some writing and secretarial courses that enabled her to enter the working world and gain more of the life experience she was looking for.

At the age of 18 she met and married Sydney Spark and moved to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) where he was posted as a teacher. The marriage was "disastrous." She calls her husband "mentally ill," but what she describes, in very detached language, is a violent, abusive man. Spark never describes what he did to her or anyone else, nor does she say how she felt about it. She does say she feared for her life, which propelled her to obtain a divorce.

Spark longed to leave Africa, partly because of her domestic situation, and partly because she could not tolerate the hideous racism of the white colonists. "Life in the colony was eating my heart away." By this time the war had started and civilian transport was restricted, but with a little trickery she did secure a passage home for herself. She had to leave her son behind because children could not be transported in to the UK; indeed many were being shipped out for safekeeping. Friends and relatives questioned whether she wouldn't be safer in Africa, but she wanted to "experience" the war. In fact she chose to settle in London rather than Edinburgh in order to witness the bombing.

All women under 45 without family obligations were required to join the war effort. Spark's employment agent turned out to be an avid reader, and as they conversed about literature and poetry the agent soon realized Spark had a superior intellect. As a result she was posted to intelligence work, helping to create and distribute anti-Nazi propaganda via fake German radio stations. Spark began to feel a "definite desire" that gaining experience was no longer enough, but that she wanted to "give experience" to the reader with her writing. It was a vague feeling, however, and she didn't feel ready to try it yet.

After the war she worked in publishing, eventually becoming the editor of Poetry Review. Her attempts to raise the quality of the journal and welcome more modern poets was met with fierce and underhanded resistance and she was eventually forced out. After that she became a "hoarder" of all her records, papers, letters, etc. so that she could submit "documentary evidence" the next time she was attacked. This apparently continued for the rest of her life, and now that she has passed I imagine her archives will be of great interest to Spark scholars.

She also had another unsuccessful relationship with a possessive and vindictive man. She cobbled a living together by working for magazines and writing literary biography and criticism, but it was barely enough to keep body and soul together. A combination of post-war rationing, self-neglect, and Dexedrine (an appetite suppressant) led to malnourishment and she eventually had to leave London to convalesce. There are hints that alcohol was also a problem, but no more than hints. It was her friends that kept her afloat through all her troubles, and she remembers them with great fondness.

By the mid-50's she started making a name for herself in the literary world and was commissioned to write her first novel, an unusual thing in that day. The timing was right because she was already shifting her work towards story-telling.

I was now moving, myself, from lyric poetry to narrative verse. This was the start of my move in literature towards the short story and then the novel.

The book ends with the success of her first novel, The Comforters, which is based on the word hallucinations she had while taking Dexedrine, and also on the Book of Job. She writes of that book:

I didn't feel like 'a novelist' and before I could square it with my literary conscience to write a novel, I had to work out the novel-writing process peculiar to myself, and moreover, perform this act within the very novel I proposed to write.

As a Catholic convert myself I was looking for what she would say about her own conversion experience. I find it difficult to explain why I became a Catholic and it seems to be no different for Spark.

The simple explanation is that I felt the Roman Catholic faith corresponded to what I have always felt and known and believed. … The more difficult explanation would involve the step by step building up of a conviction. … Indeed, the existential quality of a religious experience cannot be simply summed up in general terms.

Some of those steps undoubtedly took place with Father Frank O'Malley, who counselled her during her illness, and during her convalescence at two Carmelite monasteries. Unfortunately for the curious, she keeps the details of those experiences to herself. Indeed she keeps a lot to herself, relating the facts of her experiences without much emotion or personal comment. Some crucial moments are described only through her friends' comments. She says next to nothing about her son, and as I mentioned earlier, very little about her marriage. Perhaps this reflects her Anglo-Scottish background. She writes that "It was certainly an attitude typical of Edinburgh to deny feelings for the sake of principle," and the English are not known for emotionality.

One has to read between the lines to infer where her feelings were involved. Loyal friends are clearly one thing she feels passionate about, particularly, I imagine, since her romantic relationships were so disappointing. (A friend called her "a bad picker" of men.) The book was also written in part to "put the record straight" after a former friend and writing partner wrote unauthorized accounts of her that were filled with inaccuracies. She does the research into the facts of her life that he did not, and she refutes his work through her narrative and directly in her account of her (non-romantic) relationship with him. A word to the wise: take any works about Spark by Derek Sanford (and works based on his works) with a grain of salt. She describes his "disregard for the truth" as "very uncharitable towards students and scholars," but I believe she herself felt betrayed and deeply hurt. This book is her public response to that betrayal.

In the last chapter she writes:

Since I wrote my first novel I have passed the years occupied with ever more work, many travels, and adventures. Friends, famous and obscure, abound in my life-story. That will be the subject of another volume.

Sadly for us she did not write that volume before her death this year. Let's hope her next biographer will be as scrupulous as she was in writing Curriculum Vitae. Muriel Spark, rest in peace.

Muriel Spark: Priorities

Soon after arriving in London I registered at the Kensington Public Library and took out some books.
…The morning after, I went to the local Employment Bureau in Ladbroke Grove to see about a job.

—Muriel Spark, Curriculum Vitae: Autobiography

A reminder to the Slaves of Golconda: your posts on The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (and your second Spark book, if applicable) are due Friday, June 30, after which we will repair to MetaxuCafé.com for discussion.

Muriel Spark on Writing

I have always found writing the most pleasant form of expression. I know that I have a talent for giving pleasure with my writing. It has become my constant profession, and through the written word I have realized my life and livelihood. I have drawn the greatest possible happiness from the pursuit, especially of creative work.

I write by hand as I have always done, and enjoy opening an empty notebook waiting to be filled in.

—Muriel Spark (1918–2006)

Decommissioning Gabo

Tying up more loose ends...

Some of you may have noticed the sidebar with resources for the Slaves of Golconda. Since we are moving on to Wilde now I wanted to collect those resources here for future reference.

The book: Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez

The background: Literary Masters: Gabriel García Márquez
A compact but comprehensive guide to Gabo's life and works. Too bad there isn't one like this on Oscar Wilde.

The discussion: MetaxuCafé Forum

The online resource: Macondo
An extensive (and beautiful) website about Gabriel García Márquez.

From the man himself: Living to Tell the Tale (Vivir Para Contarla)
The first volume of Gabo's three-volulme autobiography.

A bit about Colombia: on Wikipedia