It’s difficult to write about George Gordon, Lord Byron, without referring to the soubriquet ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’, so let’s get that out of the way at the start. His lover Lady Caroline Lamb’s description may have been born out of personal bitterness and distress, but it has clung to Byron like a burr. It is also a phrase of succinct marketing genius. Who would not want to know more about a writer thus described?

Byron’s grotto, Portovenere

As I quickly found with another bad boy, Dylan Thomas, when a poet lives a life that breaks most social norms, it is the life that dominates the writer’s later reputation rather than the nature of the writing itself. Thus it was also with Byron. So can we extricate the writing from the life? This question recurs often when we approach our literary heroes. Byron is an egregious example, since his life was relentlessly dissolute. But it is a question which also occurs with Thomas Hardy, who wrote a heart-breaking series of poems about his wife’s death, after a long coldness towards her for a number of years as they lived in separate parts of the same house. It occurs in a completely different way with Virginia Woolf, who writes with experimental verve and psychological clarity about the existential void that lurks beneath all our lives, while writing letters of breath-taking and pusillanimous snobbery. These two examples bother us because of the perceived mismatch between the work and the life. Can Woolf really have had such insights into a characterizing quality of existence, when she was so dismissive of one section of humanity, or to be absolutely clear, one class? Wasn’t Hardy’s sudden grief rather convenient for a poet?

Dylan Thomas’s is a different case, and more closely akin to Byron’s. Here the lives are self-destructively decadent, appetite-driven, characterized by appalling treatment of those most close to them, without apparent concern for anyone other than themselves. The question here is, should we consider the poetry at all when the life lived is so destructive, of the self but, more notably, of others? As the ‘mad, bad, etc’ description of Byron, and its lure over two centuries, suggest, in fact the problematic personal reputation only piques our interest. But then that reductive description attaches itself also to the work, as it did, damagingly, with Dylan Thomas. Our task then as readers is to try to look at the work afresh and see what contribution it makes, separately from what we know of the life. Once that is done, we can address the more complex question of how our critical and human responses to the work can be, or should be, influenced by what we know of the life.

Lord Byron in Albanian dress

Byron’s writing, rather like Thomas’s, began when he was young. His first collection, Fugitive Pieces, was published in 1806 when he was only 18, followed by Hours of Idleness when he was 19 (and as he pointed out in his Preface, several poems there had been written two or three years earlier – again much like Thomas). These were in the culture of the time tantamount to self-published works, but nonetheless Hours of Idleness attracted notice from the influential Edinburgh Review. It was hostile, but it was a review. Byron was still at Cambridge. He then embarked on his first ‘serious’ work, English Bards and Scottish Reviewers, a hot response to the Edinburgh Review. Here he revealed his talent for comic satire and his abiding interest in complicated verse forms. English Bards and Scottish Reviewers, while very local to its time and culture, is an astonishingly accomplished piece of work and still ranks as one of Byron’s significant poems, at least insofar as it intimates the poetic skills and qualities to come. It shows his fine disregard for offending the poetic establishment, containing clever pen portraits of the important poets of the time. It has William Wordsworth spot on, suggesting that his poem ‘The Idiot Boy’ makes ‘the Bard the hero of the story’, as indeed he is in so many of those encounters with the ‘ordinary’. He further suggests that Wordsworth Lord Byron

both by precept and example, shows

That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose

The fourth edition of the seminal Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge) had been published only four years previously, and here was the upstart, albeit Lord, Byron cocking a snook at its revolutionary attempt to use a plainer language. His preface to the second edition of English Bards, 1809, announced: ‘My object is not to prove that I can write well, but, if possible, to make others write better’. Byron is at this point a mere 21, with little poetic output behind him. Yet he is also showing a true satirical ability, and a clever pen, though perhaps one that owes more to Pope in the century behind him than to the current poetic style. Upon which he ups sticks to take the grand tour.

The grand tour was no ordinary venture at this point, 1809, right in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars. Byron’s crossing of Europe towards his intended destination, ‘the East’, was often arduous, sometimes risky as he skirted areas of conflict, the highlight being his venturing into Albania to be entertained by the warlord Ali Pasha, who may have overestimated Byron’s political influence at home by virtue of his title. This and other encounters are featured in Byron’s major work, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a semi-autobiographical poem which he began during the journey, cross-country and by sea, back to Missolonghi and eventually Athens and thence Constantinople. Thus started Byron’s love affair with Greece. A major element in this passionate feeling was his classical education. The power of the past was immediate to him here. Places and events he had read about in classical epic were actual: Delphi, Parnassus, the Hellespont (which he delighted in swimming across in imitation of the myth of Leander), the site of the city of Troy. His remarks on his sense of the history of place, informed by his reading of classical literature, are echoed by Rupert Brooke when he knows he is being sent to the Dardanelles (what was the Hellespont) in the First World War. Writing to Violet Asquith in 1915, he says: ‘ Oh Violet it’s too wonderful for belief … I’m filled with confident and glorious hopes … Will Hero’s tower crumble under the 15 in. guns? … Will the sea be wine-dark and unvintageable?’ (He is referring to the same myth, Hero being the one that Leander was swimming the Hellespont to reach.) For Byron, this was the time of the stripping of large parts of the sculptures of the Acropolis by Lord Elgin (which took place between 1801 and 1812), the much-disputed ‘Elgin marbles’. Perhaps in thinking about what should happen to these today, we should take our lead from Byron, who was in no doubt that Elgin’s activities were a form of looting. Again, this features in Childe Harold.

J.M.W. Turner: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

It’s worth reminding ourselves that Byron is still only 22 at this point (1810). Whatever the trail of destruction he left during this period in personal and moral terms, there is a serious engagement with literature, with the revolutionary politics of the time, with a sense of the past as it informs the present, and these come to fruition in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Lord Byron

When Byron returned to England in 1811, it was to narrowly miss seeing his mother before she died. In 1812 he gave a significant maiden speech in the House of Lords, and shortly afterwards the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage were published. In Byron’s words, ‘I awoke one morning and found myself famous’. Childe Harold, written in the intricate rhyme scheme of the Spenserian stanza, ironises the mediaeval quest of the would-be knight, here displaced on to the contemporary landscape of Byron’s world. The notion of the Byronic hero – loosely based on Byron himself – is given full expression here, and was to become a characterising dimension of Romanticism. Thus though it is a poem that speaks to and of its time, it can still appeal to the current reader since it expresses the world-weary search for inspiration and purpose. It is also an interesting travelogue for today’s reader, taking us through Spain, Portugal, Albania, Greece, and reflecting as I have said before the underpinning of these places by classical mythology which is brought to life in the poem. There is also a powerful, clever description of a bullfight, with a brilliant evocation of the matador. Byron in this poem is writing as no-one else was at this time. It couldn’t be more different from the worthy Wordsworth Byron had previously skewered (though he came through Shelley’s tutelage to respect Wordsworth’s poetry). Its clever verse form carries the reader along and allows for each stanza to create its own word picture while contributing to the larger narrative. It has emotional depth in terms of its exploration of the inner workings of the ‘hero’ but there is also plenty going on, action, travel, incident.

For all Byron’s exploits, at the heart of his poetry is a sorrowful self:

‘Tis night, when Meditation bids us feel

We once have loved, though love is at an end;

The heart, lone mourner of its baffled zeal,

Though friendless now, will dream it had a friend …

Alas! When mingling souls forget to blend,

Death hath but little left him to destroy!

Ah! Happy years! Once more who would not be a boy?

(Canto II, stanza 23) Lord Byron

Lord Byron on His Deathbed

If there weren’t such moments in his poetry, there would be less impetus to read him. But what makes him ‘Byronic’ is also that which has energy, wit, cruelty even, and above all the ability to laugh at himself and at life. These qualities are most to the fore in his epic Don Juan, written between 1818 and 1823. Following the well-known story of the grand philanderer Don Juan, an obvious alter ego for Byron himself, Byron gives himself free rein in content and approach whilst keeping to another strict verse form, ottava rima. Byron himself made light of the poem, writing to his publisher John Muuray in 1819, ‘You ask me for the plan of Donny Jonny; I have no plan – I had no plan … Do you suppose that I could have any intention but to giggle and make giggle?’ This approach is highlighted in the verse which Byron scribbled on the back of the manuscript of Canto 1:

I would to heaven that I were so much clay,

As I am blood, bone, marrow, passion, feeling –

Because at least the past were pass’d away –

And for the future (but I write this reeling,

Having got drunk exceedingly today,

So that I seem to stand upon the ceiling)

I say – the future is a serious matter –

And so – for God’s sake – hock and soda water!

While this might seem light and shallow, it surely contains something dark and deep. This is, I think, what keeps us reading Byron, the contradiction at the heart of his writing.

Certainly, his end was serious, in that he committed himself to the cause of Greek independence, raising a sort of private army, though he was disillusioned by the infighting amongst the Greeks themselves. Before he could launch a planned attack on the Turkish-held fort at Lepanto, Byron contracted a fever, possibly malaria, and died. His death mirrors that of Brooke’s less than a century later in Skyros, also from a fever (initiated by an insect bite). Neither of them had the heroic deaths in combat they might have wished.

Byron’s personal life is a catalogue of violent sexual and emotional passions, for both men and women, some of whom would have today counted as minors, one of whom was his half-sister Augusta; these were often followed almost immediately by equally violent disconnections, betrayals and hostile rejections of those he had once appeared to love. No wonder he found sympathy for Don Juan. Although his love for Augusta and hers for his seems to have been deep, lasting and true, he wrought havoc for many with whom he was connected. Do we weigh all this against the poetry? Do we accept that the poetry is in part informed by and fired by it? Or do we try to look at Byron’s work dispassionately? That latter adverb is not one that he would have liked.

Melina Mercouri lays a wreath on Byron’s statue 1964

Life is a messy business, and Byron’s was messier than most. His poetry gives us an original voice, a satirical, witty and exuberant one, and his mastery of the complicated verse forms and rhyme schemes which seemed to give him such pleasure was perhaps the one area in which he exerted full control. At times he can shock us not with his lack of concern for conventional mores, but with a deep and tender emotion, as in the Hebrew Melodies, which include ‘She Walks in Beauty Like the Night’, or in the ballad-like ‘So, We’ll Go No More A Roving’, a touching farewell to the pleasures of youth.

For the sword outwears its sheath,

And the soul wears out the breast,

And the heart must pause to breathe,

And love itself have rest.

That could stand as his own epitaph, dead at 36, while engaged in a revolutionary struggle in which he had a deep belief. His own last journal entry was written on January 22nd 1824 in Missolonghi, reflecting on his 36^th birthday, which would, unknown to him, be his last. (The well-read and classically steeped Rupert Brooke must surely have had these somewhere in mind when he wrote ‘The Soldier’/ ‘If I should die…’). These are Byron’s last stanzas:

If thou regret’st thy Youth, why live?

The land of honourable Death

Is here: –  up to the Field, and give

Away thy Breath.

Seek out – less often sought than found –

A Soldier’s Grave, for thee the best;

Then look around, and choose thy Ground,

And take thy Rest!

I am indebted to David Ellis, Critical Lives: Byron, Reaktion Books Ltd, 2023

Wordsworth publish the novels of Thomas Hardy and Virginia Woolf, and the works of Dylan Thomas.

For more information on Byron’s Life and Works, visit: The Byron Society

Our edition is here: Selected Poems of Lord Byron

Main image: Memories of Lord Byron on Island of Kefalonia, Greece Credit: Mike P Shepherd / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 1 above: Byron’s Grott, Portovenere Credit: Chris Pancewicz / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 2 above: Byron in Albanian national dress. Credit: Classic Image / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 3 above: J.M.W. Turner: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Credit: The Print Collector / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 4 above: Lord Byron on His Deathbed. Credit: GL Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 5 above: Melina Mercouri lays a wreath Byron’s statue, 1964. Credit: Keystone Press / Alamy Stock Photo

The post Lord Byron appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

Taylor Swift, Person of the Year 2024

‘Swifties’ (my own fifteen-year-old great-niece numbered amongst them) adore Taylor Swift. It’s no ordinary liking for your average pop star; it’s something consuming, a recognition and at the same time a desire – the music, the voice, the lyrics are all bound up in and with the person herself. I remember that sort of feeling, when someone in the popular eye seems so much what you yourself want to be, or expresses something you hadn’t known you felt. In my day that person was usually a man. In my case, when I was sixteen, it was Adam Faith, and I remember my intense internal feelings of – what? a sort of gratitude and, yes, adoration, when he appeared on Face to Face with John Freeman on television, the ‘Psychiatrist’s Chair’ of the sixties. And he said serious things about life and belief! He was more than just a pop star! I can only imagine what Swifties feel, but maybe it is some of that. Her lyrics and music and the feelings they express are more than ordinary. And now, hurray, it’s a woman.

When I started thinking about this, I wondered how these 21^st followers, many of them very young, could grasp the frame of reference in the eponymous song ‘The Tortured Poets Department’: ‘You’re not Dylan Thomas / I’m not Patti Smith /This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel / We’re modern idiots’. The great Patti Smith herself, poet, writer and singer, graciously acknowledged the reference on Instagram with this post:

This is

saying I was

moved to be

mentioned in

the company

of the great

Welsh poet

Dylan Thomas.

Thank you Taylor.

See: This is Patti Smith (@thisispattismith)

Smith accompanied this with pictures of herself reading Thomas’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (actually Thomas’s short stories rather than his poetry). Note that what Smith was most happy with was that she was connected with ‘the great/ Welsh poet/ Dylan Thomas’. But she also sweetly thanks Taylor Swift. No side to Patti Smith. But do the Swifties know who Patti Smith is? Or the complicated cultural history of the Chelsea Hotel? Let alone that of Dylan Thomas.  But then I thought again about my own teenage fandom. We don’t always need to understand a lyric to feel its power. Here we hear ‘Dylan Thomas’, we hear ‘Patti Smith’, they are named as iconic figures; we think of the title ‘The Tortured Poets Department’, and we put Taylor Swift up there and alongside them. If the Swifties get a sense of a world that these references create (that of ‘Tortured Poets’), that’s surely ok. Maybe they are already reading their heroine’s own heroes and heroines, and if not maybe at some point they’ll follow on her heels, and find out about Patti Smith and Dylan Thomas, both formidable poets in their own ways. And both at different times residents of the Chelsea Hotel in New York, famous for the many artists, musicians and writers who at some time stayed there.

The nice thing about Swift’s lyric is that it is self-disparaging. She’s not claiming equity with these poets, quite the opposite: ‘We’re modern idiots’. But there is a depth of cultural, musical and emotional reference there that we should surely be glad of. She’s showing her knowledge, but at the same time recognizing the distance between herself and these big names. The wonders of digital media mean that one of the poets she references, Patti Smith, can actually pop up in her timeline, and that of her countless followers. Patti Smith is still alive, and still very much alive to the culture. But what of the other poet she references, Dylan Thomas? Dead over 70 years now. But Patti Smith is still reading him[1]; and if the lyric is to have any depth, one hopes that Taylor Swift too knows more than his name.

Patti Smith c. 1975

For Swift, Thomas belongs in the ‘Tortured Poets Department’ in which she also places herself. As I’ve been at pains to point out in previous blogs, the notion of Thomas as a tortured poet is not a particularly helpful one, unless one recognizes that the torture is in those punishing rhyme schemes he sometimes subjected himself to. Certainly, in his poetry he is struggling with large emotions and ideas. In his collection Deaths and Entrances, much of it dealing with the subject matter of the Home Front in the Second World War, he confronts deaths in the Blitz, ranging from that of a child to a very old man. But even in those poems he somehow wrenches a triumph out of death. At the other end of the spectrum are his rhapsodically lyrical poems, often those celebrating his October birthday or his childhood holidays. ‘Poem in October’, which in Collected Poems 1934-1952 comes on the page after ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’, is a pure celebration of the joy of life:

        A springful of larks in a rolling

Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling

        Blackbirds and the sun of October

                            Summery

‘Fern Hill’, a paean to his childhood innocence and that of every child, Wordsworthian in its absorption in and celebration of nature, was actually written at the very end of the Second World War. Somehow, out of the horrors of the previous six years, he was able to conjure pure joy:

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,

           The night above the dingle starry,

                    Time let me hail and climb

            Golden in the heydays of his eyes,

And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns

Now in that same collection Deaths and Entrances, from which all the poems quoted above come, there are certainly individual poems which can qualify for the ‘Tortured Poets Department’. Those are the poems about Thomas’s relationship with his wife Caitlin, well-documented as both passionate and destructive, in large part because of their joint dedication to drink.  ‘On a Wedding Anniversary’ is not the poem one would want to receive on one’s wedding anniversary:

Now their love lies a loss

And Love and his patients roar on a chain;

From every true or crater

Carrying cloud, Death strikes their house.

No doubt too Swift is thinking of Dylan Thomas’s own eventual death. Having fallen into a coma in his room in the Chelsea Hotel in November 1953, he died in hospital in New York a few days later.

Dylan Thomas, New York City 1952

Dylan Thomas has, more than most poets, caught the imagination of modern singer-songwriters. The most famous of these is obviously Bob Dylan. Whilst the connection between his assumed name and that of the poet has never been firmly established, everyone knows really that Dylan called himself after Dylan. I might not have quite the Swiftie dedication, but a delight in Dylan is the closest I come to it. He has mirrored my own life in an extraordinarily long musical career. His earliest folk/acoustic albums were coming out in my adolescence when his politics were mine. I remember his electric moment of betrayal, though in fact he was just keeping up with the times, and his music got stronger and richer. I fell out with him at his religious stage. And I have come back to him in my later years. In my sixties I went to see him at the Wembley Arena and he actually sang my favourite  ‘The Ballad of Hattie Carroll’, which he NEVER sings. Of course I felt he was singing it for me. Like any true poet he has developed and developed and developed, and yet stayed himself. When he won the Nobel Prize for Literature I said to myself, quietly, ‘Yes’.

The relationship between popular music and poetry has always been vexed. The lyric of a popular song is one thing, and a poem is another. But sometimes claims are made for song lyrics to be seen as on a par with poetry. The esteemed literary critic Christopher Ricks, acclaimed Professor of Literature in England and America, and writer about and editor of many significant poets, has written a whole book about Dylan’s lyrics. I was once lucky to be in conversation with him, and he described the moment when Dylan summoned him to meet. According to Ricks, Dylan greeted him: ‘So, Mr Ricks, we meet at last’.  Ricks was, happily and unashamedly, a pure fan. This was the moment of his life. Taylor Swift has her own academic groupie. Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare expert and great exponent of the Romantic poets, has recently claimed that she is ‘a real poet’ and can be considered as an interesting re-interpreter of Shakespeare. (see www.independent.co.uk )Well, we are all subject to our own swooning moments when we come close to those we adore. And I say this not critically, but in admiration that Bate admits to being human like the rest of us – in this respect just another ardent fan. Who we choose to be fans of seems to be somewhat outside our control. Tortured Poets Department

While there might seem something slightly embarrassing about making literary claims for what is essentially pop music, that above-mentioned Nobel Prize awarded to Bob Dylan forever put the imprimatur on the song lyric as poetry. After all, in the sixteenth century, the two were intimately intertwined, and folk ballads have always had a special status in literature. Certain poets, such as Robbie Burns, slid easily between both worlds, using Scottish dialect and ordinary language in lyrics that could be both sung and spoken. Think of ‘My love is like a red, red rose’. Thomas himself used extraordinarily simple vocabulary in many of his poems, even though each word may be freighted with symbolic meaning. Many of his best poems are written predominantly in monosyllables. ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ is a superb example – a poem that has lent itself to many a funeral, replacing as it does the impotence people often feel in the face of loss with a restrained fury: ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’.  This has led to his work being set to music. Cerys Matthews, a great proselytizer for Thomas’s work, set both his poetry and prose in her album ‘A Child’s Christmas, Poems and Tiger Eggs’ (2014) and Cerys too recently noted Taylor Swift’s nod to Thomas, this time on Twitter. But his musical inspiration goes right back to the years after his death. Igor Stravinsky, who had been corresponding with Thomas about writing an opera together when Thomas died, wrote a song sequence ‘In Memoriam Dylan Thomas’ based on ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’, while jazz pianist Stan Tracey wrote a Jazz Suite in 1965 inspired by Under Milk Wood. What is notable in the way his work inspired composers, musicians and singers is the evident crossover between, classical, jazz and popular song. Taylor Swift follows on from a prestigious tradition.

Chelsea Hotel, New York City

Dylan Thomas would, I am sure, have been thrilled to be still going strong in popular culture. He wasn’t one for the ivory tower, his pleasure in the world of the pub with its gossip and liveliness of language was as strong a pull for him as the beer itself. Go to his stories – those same ones Patti Smith is holding in her hands on Instagram, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog – to find brilliant evocations of a small town world with characters holding on precariously to their small joys in the midst of quiet desperation. Much of his own poetry, including some of his best-loved poems, was written into notebooks when he was still in his teens, and he was first published in a London magazine when he was only eighteen. ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’, published just before his nineteenth birthday, celebrates the life force at its strongest; it, again, is driven largely by monosyllables. His is a poetry that can certainly speak to the young, and not just about angst, but also about happiness. I expect Taylor Swift does that too, and she has the advantage that her followers can dance to the music of her time and of their own.  From the little I have gleaned from the massive social media buzz that surrounds Taylor Swift, much of it self-generated, this new album is about the breakdown of a love affair. But I gather it is also about recovery, being a strong woman, forging ahead, and so on. So the lyrical and natural pleasures Thomas offers in his poetry might also be called on. Have a look at ‘Fern Hill’, TS, and crest the wave. All power to you and your followers.

Wordsworth Editions publish Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems: 1934-1952 and in a separate volume, Under Milk Wood and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, both with a full Introduction and Notes by Sally Minogue. They can be found here: Thomas Dylan – Wordsworth Editions

[1] Smith has always been a great aficionado of literature, from her association in the 1960s onwards with Allen Ginsberg and the Beat poets, to her 2013 visit to Haworth to pay homage to the Brontës and, while she was there, do a benefit gig.

Main image: Copies of the Taylor Swift album, ‘The Tortured Poets Department’, on clear vinyl, on display in a record store window. Credit: Hazel Plater / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 1 above: Time magazine with a cover photograph of Taylor Swift, the magazine’s 2024 Person of the Year. Credit: Shiiko Alexander / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 2 above: Patti Smith. Promotional photo of US singer about 1975 Credit: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 3 above: Dylan Thomas in the White Horse Tavern, Greenwich Village, New York City, 1952. Credit: Granger – Historical Picture Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 4 above: The Chelsea Hotel, New York City Credit: Victor Korchenko / Alamy Stock Photo

Tortured Poets Department

Tortured Poets Department

The post Dylan Thomas, Taylor Swift, and ‘Tortured Poets’ appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

I’ve always had trouble sleeping; it’s part of my life. I used to listen to the World Service which gave a non-Anglocentric corrective to the standard news, but eventually the reporting of everyday horrors there became too much. In recent years Radio 4 Extra has come to my rescue, providing some gently mindless drama in the middle of the night to lull me back to sleep. Hercule Poirot is particularly effective. I usually avoid anything of high literary quality because I start listening to it properly. But a couple of weeks ago I was electrified by an adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov into a wakefulness that seemed worthwhile. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels are famously big, and this seemed to capture some of his breadth and depth of vision. The dramatisation dated from 2006 and gave the novel a rare five hours of radio time, divided into five meaty hour-long episodes. True, it was rather shouty and the choice of accents a bit strange. But it took me back to my first encounters with the major Russian novels, when I was in my teens and devoured books voraciously. It’s hard to avoid metaphors of food and eating in talking of these works, which you can get your teeth into and which provide nourishment for the mind and the spirit.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Brothers Karamazov was Dostoevsky’s last novel, initially published serially from 1879 to 1880 and in book form in November 1880.  The author, whose health had been weakened by lifelong epilepsy, died the following year at the age of 59. He wrote this final novel astonishingly quickly, given its length, complexity and power. While it is thought that he harked back to the draft of an earlier work, the main writing was started only in the summer of 1878, and in common with other novelists of his time, the serial publication began before he had finished writing the later parts of the work. This undoubtedly gives the writing a freshness and intensity, though it must have been unnerving for the author.

What captivated me in The Brothers Karamazov when I was sixteen is what continues to captivate its readers now – the sense of a fully imagined and realised world, inhabited by complex characters and their relationships, but with the whole somehow backlit with a great theatricality, a sense of large, powerful forces interacting at the same time as the smaller human drama is played out before us. This is in part because Dostoevsky deliberately introduces debates, both internal and external, about the great philosophical, ethical and religious questions, not just of his own time but of all time. If this sounds dry, it is not, because we see them enacted in the lives of the main protagonists. I remember thinking – on that first reading innocent of much of what life can throw at us all – ‘If this is the world, let me into it.’ Quite what I made of the violence of that world, I don’t know, but it seemed to be part of an emotional extremity which was probably on the button for a sixteen-year-old. What most struck me was the sweetness of the youngest brother, Alyosha, who abides as a beacon of hope and goodness in the novel, even as he is marked by the dramatic events within it. I had a similar reaction to the ‘hero’ of Dostoevsky’s earlier novel The Idiot (1868-69), Prince Mishkin, who maintains a similar internal beauty and innocence, even as he is depicted as something of a fool.

These characters counterbalance the darker souls who predominate in the novels. In The Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha’s legitimate brothers, Dmitri (Mitya) and Ivan (Vanya), represent diifferent sides of the human condition. Dmitri, closer in nature to his father, is driven by his desires, for his inheritance, for the flighty Grushenka; he uses his betrothed Katerina/Katya, in a relationship founded on the exchange of money for moral assuagement; he puts himself before others, until the very end of the novel. Ivan, meanwhile, struggles constantly and in certain ways admirably with the large questions of religious faith and human suffering, but nonetheless, or perhaps as a result, acts cruelly in many ways. The illegitimate fourth brother, Smerdyakov, who has been despised by everyone, is a sort of alter ego to Ivan, and in key chapters the two talk frankly to each other, Smerdyakov revealing to Ivan that he has acted on his, Ivan’s, ideas in killing their father. Thus Ivan is as guilty as the actual perpetrator, and this fuels a central idea in the novel, that as human beings we are all responsible for each other, and thus we are all in some sense guilty of any individual act.

But such a summary entirely misrepresents the emotional, moral and psychological complications and involvements of the novel. Dostoevsky appears not to judge, and this is a fundamental characteristic of his novels. I say appears, because certain characters are seen as beyond the pale – the brothers’ father Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov has no redeeming features. But that this moral reprobate is the father of such different sons is itself part of the way the novel questions any pat assumptions about human behaviour.

The women Dostoevsky places centrally in the novel are as surprising as their male counterparts. The two key female protagonists, Katerina and Grushenka, take power into their own hands, Katerina by offering herself up to Dmitri to save her father’s reputation, Grushenka by using her appeal to men to keep control of her own life. As is the case with the brothers, both women are changed by their experiences as the novel progresses. One wants to say they are changed for the better, except that we feel Dostoevsky always keeps us guessing as to what ‘better’ is. In the final stages of the novel, they each confront their own feelings, acting in certain ways self-sacrificially, in certain ways selfishly. Sometimes the two coincide. This is the great power of Dostoevsky’s novel. He never shows human motive as simple, rather he shows the interweaving of the many different forces – some of them social and historical, which I have barely touched on – which led human beings to behave as they do. What he reveals most tellingly is the way that those forces are often unknowable to the beings themselves. The Brothers Karamazov 

Dostoevsky’s apartment where he wrote ‘The Brothers Karamazov’

Dostoevsky, addressing queries from a reader who did not fully understand some of the movements of his plot, replied ‘Not only the plot of a novel is important for a reader, but also a certain knowledge of the human soul … which each author has a right to expect of his reader’. A large expectation to answer to the largeness of ambition of his novels. It’s intriguing to think of Dostoevsky answering (by letter, of course) individual queries from his audience. This was in part a product of the serialisation system, where readers could comment midstream. Dickens regularly altered the progress of certain novels, or the development of certain characters, in response to popular demand. But the serialization system in Russia was rather different to that in Europe.  There it was the practice to have ‘thick’ journals, which allowed Russian novelists more length for instalments. These could be between 30 and 100 pages, with the whole novel out in the journal within a year, so the audience could go on to the next one. That voracious appetite again. Whilst the shorter episodes in English journal publication led to cliffhanger endings, Dostoevsky resisted the serial writer’s tricks. Instead, the Russian ‘thick journal’ system led to each episode having a sense of completion, an identity in itself. ‘Each instalment would, [Dostoevsky] promised Liubimov, his long-suffering editor, have “a finished character, … it would include something whole and finished”’.[1] This also added to the depth and detail of the novel as a whole, as the author sought to make each published serial episode almost a mini-novel in itself.

So what to look out for in what is undeniably a long and demanding read? Well, that itself is, I’d argue, its main pleasure. When we start reading The Brothers Karamazov we enter a world, much of it foreign to us since it is the world of nineteenth-century Russia, but therefore fascinating in its difference. At the same time we encounter movements of the human mind and heart which we will all recognize. But it’s no good thinking we’ll know what to expect – the shifts and turns lead us into unexpected territory, challenge our understanding of ourselves and others, and sometimes confront us with things we don’t want to know about. At times Dostoevsky enters uncharted seas, as with Ivan’s encounter with the devil late on in the novel. On the one hand this is a hallucination brought on by Ivan’s madness. On the other, it gives the novelist the opportunity for Ivan to confront the very force he has himself denied in denying a belief in God; for if God does not exist, neither does the devil. This particular devil is dismayingly ordinary, appearing shabbily dressed, but in once well-made clothes, ‘a poor relation of the best class’, ‘accommodating and ready to assume any amiable expression as occasion might arise’. The devil tempts Ivan as he once tempted Christ. It is of course Alyosha who rescues Ivan.

There is a certain playfulness in Dostoevsky, evident in the above example. Alyosha saves Ivan from the devil by the simple everyday act of knocking on the door, but only to bring the news that Smerdyakov has hanged himself. The ironies of the narrative lend a grim humour to light the darkness of the subject. It was not for nothing that the 20^th century Russian literary theorist Bakhtin used Dostoevsky’s novels as a central example for his important ideas about fiction. Bakhtin commended their ‘plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices’. To put it in more straightforward terms, Dostoevsky is giving his characters full rein, their voices cutting against each other (polyphony), their ‘plurality’ allowing the reader to make their mind up – or indeed not.

Dostoevsky’s tomb

My own copy of the novel, an Everyman edition first published in 1927, is translated by Constance Garnett, who brought many Russian novels to an English audience. The introduction is by her husband Edward Garnett, who describes the experience of reading the novel thus:

Immersed in this book one has the sensation of being carried along in a turbulent flood, engulfed in whirlpools of passionate feeling, whirled along in rapids of thought, caught up and held fast in fresh currents of mystical speculation. And the atmospheric pressure increases till the climax is reached.

When we emerge from the maelstrom of this fictional world, we are, I think, changed just by being exposed to it in all its richness and difficulty. But through it all rings the hopeful voice, spirit and presence of Alyosha. He perhaps is a counter-example to Bakhtin’s emphasis on polyphony, since he exemplifies an essentially monolithic view of humanity. Fortunately it is a determinedly optimistic one.  In the earliest chapters of the novel we are introduced to Alyosha thus:

There was something about him which made one feel at once (and it was so all his life afterwards) that he did not care to be a judge of others – that he would never take it upon himself to criticize and would never condemn anyone for anything. He seemed, indeed, to accept everything without the least condemnation though often grieving bitterly… The Brothers Karamazov

The novel also ends with Alyosha, exhorting the young schoolboys he has encountered through their cruelty to one of their number (who has now died), and whom he has befriended, encouraged, and changed:

“Ah children, ah, dear friends, don’t be afraid of life! How good life is when one does something good and just!”

This comes after the many horrors that have been recounted in the previous pages. Dostoevsky is similarly unafraid of life, similarly unwilling to judge, and when we step into his world we do, I think, emerge as better human beings.

[1] William Mills Todd III, ‘The Brothers Karamazov and the Poetics of Serial Publication’, Dostoevsky Studies, Vol 7, 1986

The Wordsworth edition (styled as The Karamazov Brothers in line with the introducer’s preference) is here: The Karamazov Brothers

For more information on Dostoevsky’s life and works, visit https://dostoevsky.org/

Main image: Fresco of Dostoevsky in the Moscow Metro station Credit: Sergey Dzyuba / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 1 above: Credit: Lebrecht Music & Arts / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 2 above: Dostoevsky’s memorial apartment in Kuznechny Lane in Saint Petersburg, where he wrote the book. Credit: Azoor Photo Collection / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 3 above: Tomb of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Credit: Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo

The post Book of the Week: The Brothers Karamazov appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

Sculpture of Dylan Thomas by Eric de Maré

Most of you reading this blog will already know lines from or titles of some of Dylan Thomas’s poems. In the majority of his poems, the title is simply the first line of the poem, and he has a genius for first lines. They stick in the mind and the memory. ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’, ‘In my craft or sullen art’, ‘It was my thirtieth year to heaven’, ‘Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs’, ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ – these are a few of his first lines, and they also belong to some of his best-known poems. Their appeal is immediately evident. They are almost all conversational in tone, yet they seize us too with an unusual twist of vocabulary: ‘sullen art’, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’, ‘thirtieth year to heaven’, ‘green fuse’.  Conversational – but also unexpected. The vocabulary itself is disarmingly simple: no less than 34 of the words in those lines are monosyllables (leaving 6 with two syllables, and only one with 3).  So no wonder that they are easy to remember. The poet has drawn us in with what seems the simplest, most personal, even intimate form of address. Yet those surprise words, or the surprise of their multiple connotations, turning the words round on themselves, mean that by the end of the poem we too have to double back, to think again. ‘Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea’

Both the memorable simplicity, and the dual doubling-back aspect, are characteristic of Thomas’s poetry as a whole, and this may be why his poetry has been seen on the one hand as easily accessible and on the other as obscure – and sometimes condemned on both counts! None of the poems whose first lines I mention above could be called obscure. But neither is their meaning always as plain or simple as those colloquial openings suggest. I want to argue that both the direct and the less direct aspects of Thomas’s poetry are important in our enjoyment of his work. But above all I want to stress that word enjoyment. Thomas’s most remarkable and consistent achievement as a poet writing in a period of existential uncertainty, in the aftermath of the First World War and the midst of the Second World War, and then in the knowledge of the holocaust, is that he celebrated life. He did that with a gusto that is embodied in the pleasure he takes in poetic language, and which found its most unfettered expression in his joy in the natural world and the larger movements of life itself. Even when he is urging us to ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’, there’s an extraordinary energy in his fury against that dying, and it is the repeated ‘light’ which ends alternate verses and is the last word of the poem.

Dylan Thomas’s 5th notebook on display at Swansea University

The Collected Poems follows the trajectory of Thomas’s writing life; it is almost wholly chronological, following the run of his published collections. As he himself put it in November 1952 at the point of publication, ‘This book contains most of the poems I have written, and all, up to the present year, that I wish to preserve’. It is the summation, then, of his poetry-writing life. Of course, he was not to know when he wrote those words that there would be no more poetry. Thomas was 38 – roughly the halfway point of a standard life – so there is a poignancy in the unwritten ‘second half’ which reverberates into the emptiness when we close Collected Poems. That said, this is a remarkably rich and substantial oeuvre for a short life, in part because Thomas started writing poetry when he was only 15. Well, many of us have done that, and it’s usually adolescent nonsense. But at that age Thomas began to enter what he saw as finished poems in a set of exercise books, now known as his Poetry Notebooks. Scholarship on Thomas’s poetry has been based on the four known Notebooks, dating from April 1930 to April 1934, with Notebooks three and four, 1933-1934, written between the ages of 18 and 19, providing the rich seam that Thomas mined when he burst on to the literary scene. In 2014, however, a previously unknown fifth Notebook suddenly came on to the market, containing drafts of a significant 10-poem sonnet sequence in Collected Poems, ‘Altarwise by Owl-light’, originally published in his second collection, Twenty-Five Poems.[1] This Notebook dates from April 1934 to August 1935, when Thomas was between the ages of 19 and 20. What the Poetry Notebooks reveal is that a substantial number of the poems he published in his first two collections, 18 Poems (1934) and Twenty-Five Poems (1936), were written before he was 21, and a considerable number date from his teens. Of course, he revised and redrafted for later publication but sometimes the published poem is close to its Notebook form. One such is the famous ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’, one of the poet’s earliest celebrations of the life force, here driving the ink through the poet’s pen in the same way that light-synthesising chlorophyll drives growth through the plant’s stem and leaves, ultimately producing the flower. This poem was drafted into Notebook 4 in October 1933 when the poet was still only 19, published in the Sunday Referee on October 29th 1933 just after his 20^th birthday, and won that paper’s annual best poem prize – which launched his poetic career, since the prize was publication of a collection. That collection was 18 Poems, published in December 1934.

I specify these dates to remind us of Dylan Thomas’s extraordinarily precocious talent. The first poem he published in a national journal (the New English Weekly, May 1933), even before ‘The force that through the green fuse’, was ‘And death shall have no dominion’, still one of his best-known and most powerful poems. (Unusually, this poem was not included, as it could have been, in his first collection 18 Poems, but did appear in Twenty-Five Poems.) It is not that being precocious is in itself a good; it is rather that these early poems are in themselves so good (rare in any poet’s output). The proof of that is that they have remained fresh in the public imagination to this day. And perhaps the youth of their author gives them that particular intensity and freshness which still move us today. ‘Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea’

‘Deaths and Entrances’. Published by Dent & Sons London 1946

Thomas then drew on his Poetry Notebooks for his important first two collections, represented in Collected Poems from pp. 9-78, as he did for his mid-way and mixed-genre collection, The Map of Love (1939), containing both stories and poems. (The poems from that collection can be found in this volume from p. 79 to p. 101.) But at this point Thomas’s poetry takes a different turn. The Poetry Notebooks and the imaginative furnace of his youth are left behind as the Second World War creates both a personal crisis for him as a writer, and turns his poetic imagination in a darker and more profound direction. Deaths and Entrances (1946) is the collection that results, represented in Collected Poems from p. 102 to p. 161. The second poem in the wartime Deaths and Entrances is ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, By Fire, of a Child in London’. That uncompromising title tells us that Thomas was not about to write a conventional elegy, rather he was refusing to do so. In this and other poems in that important collection, including the eponymous ‘Deaths and Entrances’ (pp. 119-120), ‘Ceremony After a Fire Raid’ (pp. 131-133), and ‘Among those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred’ (p. 137), Thomas takes a complex stance, refusing standard consolations yet through the poetry’s own grandeur somehow monumentalizing the dead, and even showing their deaths as redemptive. These are powerful and complicated poems, answering to a historical moment, and are in my view some of Thomas’s best work. Yet remarkably, in the very same collection, and also to be regarded as amongst that best work, are two poems of celebration of the natural world and lyrical joy in the very act of being alive: ‘Poem in October’ and ‘Fern Hill’ (the final poem in the collection).  ‘Poem in October’ is one of several birthday poems – almost its own separate genre in his oeuvre – which at times more full-throatedly, at times more mutedly, sing a paean to being alive. These poems also take stock at key points of the poet’s own life of himself both as man and writer, and so are illuminating markers through the Collected Poems. ‘Fern Hill’ is simply a joyous catching-hold of that moment of being ‘young and easy’, ‘happy as the grass was green’, ‘green and carefree’, ‘green and golden’, and ‘happy as the heart was long’. The repeated ‘green’ takes us back to ‘the green fuse’. A small note of trouble enters in at the very end – ‘Time held me green and dying’ – but as ever the life force and the poetry force triumph: ‘Though I sang in my chains like the sea’.

The last few poems in the volume are Thomas’s own last poems and include what would be his final birthday poem, ‘Poem on his birthday’ (pp. 168-171), a poignant mixture of the valedictory and the stubbornly life-affirming. Here as ever in his best poems the verve and sheer imaginative play of the language gives the poem a buoyancy and optimism even as it pronounces otherwise:

…. The closer I move

To death, one man through his sundered hulks,

The louder the sun blooms

And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults (p. 171)

‘Over Sir John’s Hill’ (pp. 166-167) has some of the best writing he ever did about the natural world. We can see the influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins, but none of that poet’s agonizing over his love of the beauty of the world:

Flash, and the plumes crack,

And a black cap of jack-

Daws Sir John’s just hill dons, and again the gulled birds hare

To the hawk on fire, the halter height, over Towy’s fins,

In a whack of wind. ‘Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea’

The author’s well-read copy of ‘Collected Poems’.

This rhapsodic writing about nature, and the sheer joy of being alive, has not always fitted easily into the poetic aesthetic of the last 70 years since Dylan Thomas’s death. Spareness of language, suspicion of over-emotionality, an inherent scepticism and a tendency to pessimism, these were the watchwords of  the poetry which, with a few notable exceptions, dominated the latter part of the twentieth century, and indeed that fitted with the mood of the times. In this, Thomas’s Welsh origins have worked against him in two directions. English academia has been suspicious of what they have characterised as bombast and over-emotionality of content and language (seen, unstatedly, as characteristically Welsh), whilst Welsh academia and culture have proclaimed Thomas not Welsh enough because he eschewed the Welsh language. In my Introduction to Collected Poems 1934-1952, I propose an alternative non-Anglocentric poetic tradition that might have thrived if Thomas had survived and continued writing, rather than the post-Modernist, post-Movement tradition against which he has been unfairly measured. Thomas reaches back to a Romantic Wordsworthian tradition, but he reconfigures it with a twentieth-century eye and voice, without being embarrassed about a full-blooded embrace of the pleasures of language and of life. Contemporary beneficiaries of that ghost tradition are poets such as Daljit Nagra, who has said that Thomas’s ‘shadow looms happily over my work’, and Seán Hewitt, whose language is rhapsodic and philosophical in one and the same breath.

The very last poem that Dylan Thomas wrote is actually the first poem in this volume since it is the poem that he wrote to act as a prologue to the Collected Poems, and is simply entitled ‘Author’s Prologue’ (pp. 5-7). There is a nice symmetry about his last poem being his first, something he would have taken pleasure in given his sensitive understanding of the circularity of the life process, and the inevitability in it of death. But ‘Author’s Prologue’ has few intimations of mortality; rather it is an unashamed call to arms for poetry, for nature, and for life. It is also an intimate celebration of his own locale, Laugharne and its surroundings. For him the particular was important, because it spoke of and had its special place in the large: ‘Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea’

Hark: I trumpet the place,

From fish to jumping hill! Look:

I build my bellowing ark

To the best of my love

As the flood begins …

My ark sings in the sun

At God speeded summer’s end

And the flood flowers now. (pp. 6-7)

The poet is nothing less than Noah, poetry is the ark, and it will carry us all on the flood and keep us alive. A high ambition, but one that I think Dylan Thomas fulfils.

Useful websites are www.discoverdylanthomas.com and www.dylanthomas.com.

See also: Michael Sheen performs ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ on YouTube

Seán Hewitt’s second poetry collection, Rapture’s Road, is just out from Jonathan Cape; his first, also Cape, was Tongues of Fire. Daljit Nagra’s most recent collection is indiom; his first collection was Look We Have Coming to Dover. Both are published by Faber.

Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood (including his short story collection, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog) is also recently published by Wordsworth Editions and can be found here: Under Milk Wood

[1] This was purchased by Swansea University and eventually published in 2021 by Bloomsbury.

Main image: Taf Estuary, Laugharne, Carmarthenshire. Credit: Simon Whaley Landscapes / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 1 above: Sculpture of Dylan Thomas at the Royal Festival Hall, South Bank, Lambeth, London, c1951-1962. Artist: Eric de Maré Credit: Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 2 above: The Dylan Thomas fifth notebook, on display at the Council Chamber in the Abbey at Swansea University in May 2015. © James Davies

Image 3 above: Deaths and Entrances Poems by Dylan Thomas. Published by Dent & Sons London 1946 Credit: Contributor: Antiques & Collectables / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 4: Image courtesy of Sally Minogue

‘Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea’

‘Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea’

The post ‘Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea’ appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

Dylan Thomas’s best-known and best-loved work, Under Milk Wood, is the principal text in this volume. Dylan Thomas’s self-styled ‘play for voices’ is the last mature work to come from his pen; he was still revising it on the run, having fresh copies typed as he changed the words, for the performances in America in both May and October 1953 in which he himself took the part of First Voice. The work has become inextricably linked with his early death only weeks after that October performance, in a New York hospital far from home. There was not even a definitive final manuscript. The first radio broadcast of the play took place six weeks later, on January 25^th 1954, and was an instant success. The young but already famous Welsh actor Richard Burton, with his richly beautiful vocal delivery, took the part of First Voice, and the play brought an entirely fresh approach, interweaving voices and highly poetic narrative to create a word-picture of twenty-four hours in the life of a small but bustling Welsh coastal village, Llareggub.

The new Wordsworth edition of ‘Under Milk Wood’

Under Milk Wood had a long gestation, the very first conception of it appearing in a short story he read to his old Swansea comrade Bert Trick in 1933; Trick recounts that ‘the story was then called Llareggub, which was a mythical village in South Wales’. So do great works have their first seeds. The schoolboy joke of the name ‘Llareggub’ (‘bugger all’ backwards) remained the one constant in a work that had many stages and revisions over the 20 years to its fruition. (It should be said that there are various spellings of this name in various places, and in the text itself Thomas uses ‘Llaregyb’ because it looked and sounded more Welsh.) The radio script ‘Quite Early One Morning’ (1945) opened in a similar way to the eventual radio play and nodded to some of its characters. In 1950 a version of the first half of the play was submitted formally to the BBC under the title ‘The Town that was Mad’. And in 1951 Thomas submitted a version of this first half for possible publication in Botteghe Oscure, an Italian periodical recently founded by Marguerite Caetani (an index of Thomas’s European leanings). Thomas sketched in to Caetani the way the work was to develop, and as he was writing persuasively to his potential editor, we have an unusually full account of Under Milk Wood as a work in progress. It would feature ‘all the activities of the morning town – seen from a number of eyes, heard from a number of voices – through the long lazy lyrical afternoon, through the multifariously busy little town evening of meals and drinks and loves and quarrels and dreams and wishes, into the night and the slowing-down lull again and the repetition of the first word: Silence’. There couldn’t be a better characterisation of the eventually completed play. The only part missing was the night-time and dawn sequence already there in the first half he was sending, which was published in Botteghe Oscure in April 1952.

Douglas Cleverdon, the BBC producer who had worked regularly with Thomas, nurtured the last stages of the development of the play and indeed rescued the final extant manuscript just before Thomas left for his last trip for America, the author having left it in a Soho pub. Cleverdon worked in the Features department of BBC radio where many of Thomas’s broadcasts originated, and he maintained that this influenced the writing of Under Milk Wood considerably. Under the aegis of Drama it might have been straitened by generic and historic considerations, whereas Features already had a tradition of fluidity and openness of form and technique. ‘Narrative, dramatization, actuality, documentary, verse, song, music, electronics, sound effects’ – these were for Cleverdon the multi-dimensional materials of Features. We find them all in Under Milk Wood, woven together by Thomas’s brilliant use of language and an imagination which flows in and out of the external and internal worlds. His ‘play for voices’ generously represents the range of human experience in a way that remains fresh today.

Under Milk Wood has a comic spirit and this makes it an essentially optimistic text, exploring the human comedy of which we are all part, necessarily including elements of pathos and tragedy, balanced by a corresponding compassion. In that way it is like Shakespearean comedy, which takes us into a semi-illusory world where things are often turned upside down and then righted again. This is a fundamentally beneficent universe, where even the lonely Bessie Bighead, ‘born in a barn, wrapped in paper, left on a doorstep, big-headed and bass-voice’ is briefly illuminated by the play. And in ‘the White Book of Llareggub’ (a nod to the early manuscripts which were part of the founding culture of Wales) ‘the one poor glittering thread of her history [is] laid out … with as much love and care as the lock of hair of a first lost love’. In Under Milk Wood then Thomas shows us that the lives of even the humblest of individuals have worth. By contrast anyone with pretensions is punctured. Yet even the local aristocrat, skewered by his name Lord Cut-Glass, is shown as endearingly eccentric as he ‘squats down alone to a dogdish, marked Fido, of peppery fish-scraps and listens to the voices of his sixty-six clocks, one for each year of his loony age, and watches, with love, their black-and-white moony loudlipped faces tocking the earth away’. Bessie Bighead and Lord Cut-Glass are not so far from each other. Of course much of the comedy of the play comes from the way Thomas lays bare the inherent weaknesses and foibles of his characters, but that ‘with love’ is always there. Dylan Thomas

Statue of Captain Cat, Swansea Docks

Of the 65-plus characters and voices in the play (a number are anonymous, or stand as groups), certain ones are pivotal. Polly Garter opens her arms to all manner of men in Milk Wood, but keeps her heart for little Willy Wee who is ‘dead, dead, dead’; Captain Cat is the constant onlooker, viewing events from his ‘ship-in-bottled, shipshape best cabin of Schooner House’; Willy-Nilly postman  goes from house to house giving people their news before he delivers the letters (and so is also a useful narrative device). The two Voices, First and Second, are the omniscient narrators, ever present to fill in the action, to introduce characters, or to take us into their inner consciousness. Then there are multiple couples. Myfanwy Price and Mog Edwards play out their romance at a distance from one end of the town to the other, with Willy-Nilly as intermediary. Mr Pugh is constantly planning to murder Mrs Pugh, in as horrible a manner as possible (Willy-Nilly reports that he has just delivered to him Lives of the Great Poisoners). But his deadly desires may be as phantom and unfulfillable as the delicate Gossamer Beynon’s lust for Sinbad Sailors. Much of what Thomas shows us of the inner selves of the people of Llareggub are dreams of that kind, and even when they are expressed, as in the letters of Myfanwy Price and Mog Edwards, they are not acted upon. The threnody underlying these lived lives is provided by the voices of the dead, the Drowned who open the play, and Rosie Probert who is the double of Polly Garter (‘Come on up, boys, I’m dead’). In the way of the play with its constant ebb and flow of voices, no distinction is made between living and dead, which gives us a sense of past flowing into present and vice versa. Captain Cat is more at home amongst the Drowned, removed as he is in his eyrie looking down. And holding it all together is the all-seeing First Voice, who begins and ends the play in darkness and: Silence. Dylan Thomas

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, a collection of short stories linked by the central narrator/subject, is the companion piece in this volume.  By contrast with Under Milk Wood it is an earlier work, but a mature one. These stories were written in a concentrated period of time between March 1938 and September 1939. Thomas had written and published short stories before, but this collection marked a change of style and a new maturity, as Thomas drew on his own early life to reflect not just on that, but on the whole business of how we write about our past selves. While the writer’s own early life and his growth into adolescence and adulthood are the central inspiration and subject matter, he used these as a jumping-off point to explore universal thoughts and feelings. These stories were written when the author was at a relatively settled period in his life. He had been married to Caitlin Macnamara in July 1937; they settled in Laugharne, Carmarthenshire in April 1938; their first child, Llewellyn was born in January 1939. Thomas’s belief in the importance of his writing had been confirmed by early success with his poems, his first collection 18 Poems published in 1934 and his second, Twenty-Five Poems, in 1936. His commitment to writing full-time meant that he was chronically poor, as are many artists in their early lives. But he and his family received lots of support from those who valued his work, and this period in Laugharne was relatively comfortable. In this environment Thomas worked at full pitch on the stories for this new collection. He wrote, again to Bert Trick, that they were ‘stories towards a provincial autobiography. … They are all about Swansea life: the pubs, clubs, billiard rooms, promenades, adolescence and the suburban nights, friendships, tempers, and the humiliations’. This reminds us of his letter about Under Milk Wood to Caetani: the multiplicity and variousness, the sense of excitement about his projected writing, the emphasis above all on the ordinary. And yet the stories in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog are far from being only ‘all about Swansea life’. This is the one thing Dylan Thomas does in all his writing. He draws on the local, the particular, the ordinary; but he seamlessly moves from that to what lies beyond.

Dylan Thomas at the BBC

There are ten stories in the collection, and seven of these are written in the first person, thus involving the reader directly with an individual consciousness.  Thomas’s title, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, seems to refer overtly to James Joyce’s novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Thomas denied any influence by Joyce on the title or the collection; one can only think he was deceiving himself. But there is no problem with such an influence. Thomas draws on Joyce (especially his short story collection Dubliners) as a model, but is completely original in his own writing on similar subjects. He extends the Joycean tradition rather than copying it. What Thomas adds is a sense of joy. His stories are infused with a pleasure in living, in landscape, in the imagination, in moments of epiphany – yes, like those of Joyce but optimistic rather than pessimistic. Stories to look out for particularly here are the first one, ‘The Peaches’, a master-class in the short story; ‘Patricia, Edith, and Arnold’, those very commas telling a tale of a triumvirate of lovers; and ‘Old Garbo’, with its insight on old age, the insistent power of enjoying life, and an almost unnoticed sadness. But the best way to read this collection is from beginning to end, following the development of the protagonist from child to young adult.

Many of the stories are centred on Swansea, where Thomas was born and grew up, the ‘lovely, ugly town’ as he described it. This gives a realist base for the subsequent flights of fancy the narrator takes at times. In a similar way Under Milk Wood was loosely based on both New Quay, where Thomas developed it, and Laugharne, where he completed it. At one time or another in the stories we are taken beyond the realist confines and into an imagined world, just as we are in Under Milk Wood. This is perhaps the quality that most marks Dylan Thomas’s writerly imagination, and which links the two works in this volume. Although Under Milk Wood and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog have in common that they are both set in Wales, they range far beyond that. Dylan Thomas

Thomas had a complicated relationship with the country of his birth; when he left it to try his luck in London for the first time he reputedly said: ‘The land of my fathers; my fathers can keep it.’ But this belied what was in fact a deep connection. He constantly returned to Wales, wrote much of his best work there, and took inspiration in particular from its landscape, and from the sea which embraced it. But Thomas was in no way a parochial writer, and certainly not a nationalist one. He did not speak Welsh, but in any case at that particular cultural moment, English would have been his choice of language as a writer. His impulse was always to cross borders, he was international in his thinking, and he found a wide audience, most notably in America. Both Under Milk Wood and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog may have their roots in his native culture, but their vision is universal.

Grave of Dylan Thomas, St Martin’s Church, Laugherne

Dylan Thomas died in 1953 at the upsettingly young age of 39. Indeed he was only just 39, as his birthday was October 27^th 1914 and he died on November 9^th 1953. These are the bare facts of his birth and death, but between those dates Thomas squeezed in a rich and complicated, and sometimes problematic, personal life, and a hugely productive writing life. Dying at 39 would be unhappy for anyone. But dying so young when one has already produced a large body of writing, and been recognized as an important artist, brings in another dimension – the work that might have been written, which is lost by that death. Thomas, had he lived, might have expanded his writing in several different directions. He left behind him a large, wide-ranging body of work and unusually he excelled in several different genres. This volume reflects two of those genres, the radio play and the short story. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog has a claim to be one of the significant story collections of the twentieth century. The radio historian Peter Lewis said of Under Milk Wood on its 25^th anniversary that it was ‘the most celebrated full-length play for radio … that the BBC has produced in more than fifty years of broadcasting’. In March 2024, his Collected Poems will be published by Wordsworth. It is now for current readers to judge these works as we look at them from a 21^st century position. But to my mind, the boy from Swansea done good.

For more information, visit: http://www.dylanthomas.com/

Our editions of his work can be found here

Main image above: New Quay in Wales, the inspiration for the village of ‘Llareggub’. Credit: Keith Morris/Alamy Live News/Alamy Stock Photo

Image 1 above: Our edition of Under Milk Wood

Image 2 above: Statue of Captain Cat, Swansea Docks. Credit: Mauritius Images GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 3 above: Thomas at the BBC. Credit: CPA Media Pte Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 4 above: Thomas’s grave, St Martin’s Church, Laugherne. Credit:  Bill Robinson / Alamy Stock Photo

XXX

Dylan Thomas

The post The Life and Works of Dylan Thomas appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

Seventy years ago this November, Dylan Thomas died a deeply distressing and horribly early death in a New York hospital thousands of miles away from his native Wales. That seventy years distance means that his work now comes out of copyright, which affords us the opportunity to look at his work afresh and in a more objective light. Though he was only 39 when he died, Thomas left behind a quite remarkable, large and wide-ranging body of work. We think of him principally as a poet, but he was unusual in that he excelled not just in that field but also in the writing of short stories, and of a unique radio play, Under Milk Wood.

Dylan Thomas directing Under Milk Wood

Under Milk Wood is Thomas’s last major work; he was still revising it in the months before his death, and took the role of First Voice in New York just two weeks before he died. The play had not yet even been published when it was broadcast on the radio in Britain as a tribute to Thomas in a now-famous production (January 25^th 1954) with rising star Richard Burton taking the role of First Voice. It had always been intended as a radio play – a ‘play for voices’ as Thomas himself dubbed it – and it was an immediate popular success. Because it is written in a non-visual medium, relying on the power of the words themselves to paint a picture through First Voice’s narrative and the voices of the characters themselves, as readers we can join Thomas’s vividly conjured world and share his imagination. We are aided in this by the structure of the play, with First Voice setting the scene, and the subsidiary Second Voice leading us into the minds, hearts and lives of a multifarious set of characters. They weave in and out of each others lives, and that of the reader, some taking small parts, some lead characters who recur through the play, and some simply a chorus of anonymous voices.  These latter – the Drowned, the Neighbours, the Women, and later the voices of children – act rather as a Chorus in a Greek play would have done, providing a commentary which lies as a backdrop and counterpoint to the named voices that are given more prominence.

The play takes place over a notional 24 hours, and again like Greek drama it observes the unities of time (the aforesaid 24 hours), place (here the Welsh village of Llareggub which lies under Milk Wood) and action (one continuous narrative starting in night-time darkness and moving through the day towards night again). This produces a powerful concentration and distillation, but at the same time there is a floating quality about the movement of the play. As one voice takes over from another, a rhythm arises which carries us lightly above the action, which is anyway largely internal. Thomas takes his cue from the tidal rhythms of the waters that surround Llareggub (and which lapped the shores of Laugharne and New Quay, the two Welsh towns where he lived and on which he based the play). After the narrating First and Second Voices, the first characters we hear from are the Drowned, speaking from the dead to Captain Cat as he plumbs the depths of his own memory from ‘the sea-shelled, ship-in-bottled, shipshape best cabin of Schooner House’. The distance between past and present is eclipsed, and the dead seem as alive as those we go on to meet on the streets of the small town, for example Polly Garter who grows ‘nothing … in our garden, only washing. And babies’. The very-much-alive Polly and the dead Rosie Probert (‘Come on up boys, I’m dead!’) have a sexual generosity which stands for a larger warmth and magnanimity. Indeed, generosity might be the watchword of the play.

The transcript of Under Milk Wood

It is written in a comic spirit, so that even where there is an undertow of tragedy, a sense of the ridiculousness of the human condition comes through – though characters are never laughed at, but laughed with. Mog Edwards and Myfanwy Price live at the opposite ends of Llareggub; they conduct a passionate love affair in letters, and always at a distance – even though one or the other could walk up or down the hill and meet to fulfil the fantasies expressed in their letters. These include Mog’s touchingly domestic ‘I will warm the sheets like an electric toaster, I will lie by your side like the Sunday roast’. The same spirit pervades Thomas’s collection of short stories, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, published on the eve of the Second World War. These are semi-autobiographical stories based on Thomas’s childhood and adolescence in Swansea, and his regular visits to his aunt’s farm in Carmarthenshire, the latter providing a pastoral dimension to set against the incipient urban gloom of the Swansea stories. Thomas spent his life up to the age of 20 living in or based in Swansea, the ‘ugly, lovely town’ as he described it in his nostalgic broadcast ‘Reminiscences of Childhood’ for the Welsh Home Service in 1943. In the stories he evokes beautifully the life and detail and even the geography of a well-known place and time. Yet these stories can, I think, be placed on a par with James Joyce’s Dubliners (similarly partly autobiographical, and capturing a specific place and time) since they speak of and to the universal themes of the human heart.  They are similar too in that each collection follows a trajectory from childhood to adulthood (in Joyce’s case ending with death), so that there is a sense of linked narrative from one story to the next. This is more thorough-going in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, where seven of the ten stories have a first-person narrator, a character who also figures in the other three, but objectified and put at a distance by the third-person narrative. Thomas himself is identifiably the model of this central character, but he is unfussed by issues of historical accuracy, sometimes giving his characters the same names as actual people who were part of his life, sometimes giving them a fictional name and status. The stories are based on reality, but they contain such flights of imagination that they also feel experimental at times. In the true tradition of modernism, Thomas enters the consciousness of his characters, and from there he leaps off into worlds both past and future, often hyperbolic, sometimes comically so, but always linked to a fully realized actual world.

The new Wordsworth edition of ‘Under Milk Wood’

There are moments of tragedy in these stories too. ‘The Peaches’ turns on the clash of two worlds, as the young Dylan’s friend Jack visits the family farm where Dylan is spending his holidays. The world of the farm is threadbare in monetary terms, but rich in both love and eccentricity, and its beautifully evoked landscape carries a wild freedom for the young boys. But the arrival – in a Daimler! – of Jack with his mother ‘fitted out like a mayoress or a ship’ upends the natural order of goodness that Aunt Annie represents. The Daimler world is really the paltry one, but it is poor Annie who feels worthless at the end of the encounter, her quiet crying only half-heard and half-understood by the boys eavesdropping from their beds above the kitchen.  Thomas is a master of restraint in evoking such heart-aching moments.

The keynote of these stories, however, is a resounding joy in life, much as it is in Under Milk Wood. There is often a brief epiphany at some point in a story where the central character feels himself ‘in the snug centre of my stories’ (‘The Peaches’), rapturously at home with himself and with the world. There is something enormously enjoyable at the heart of these stories, in part because they focus on childhood and youth, where there is still an unmarked optimism and appetite for life. The exuberance of the language can carry us away into the world of imagination, but it can also celebrate the ordinary world in which these stories are based. There is a determined openness of spirit and a marked lack of judgementalism, just as in Under Milk Wood.  In that play, human frailty is seen as part and parcel of the human endeavour, and as the Reverend Eli Jenkins says in his ‘sunset poem’ as we draw towards the end of the play, ‘We are not wholly bad or good/ Who live our lives under Milk Wood’ (the one time those titular words are used in the play).  Or as Polly Garter puts it, in a different way, ‘Isn’t life a terrible thing, thank God?’ Thomas is at his best when shining a brief loving light on the ordinary or the neglected in the world, as he does both in his radio play and in his stories.

This volume then encompasses, in two different genres, the movement of life from childhood to adolescence in the stories, and the span of a day in the existences of a whole lifetime of people in the radio play. Both genres are inherently optimistic, comic in spirit, but allowing into their tidal rhythms the tragic undertow of existence – as all good comedy should. In these pages readers will meet ordinary people, speaking in their own words. They will laugh at the human comedy, and be moved by the mis-steps and frustrations of desire as it struggles with the fear of declaration or the failure of concealment. Most of all, they will be engaged, just as the writer Dylan Thomas was, with the ways in which a vividly experimental language can express the complexities of the human heart and mind. Seventy years on from his death, Thomas’s own rich and extraordinary voice speaks to us still – the best sort of immortality.

Dylan Thomas’s actual voice can be heard on the remarkable Caedmon recordings which began with his performance of First Voice in Under Milk Wood on his penultimate visit to New York. The complete Caedmon recordings, which have all of Thomas’s recorded work including readings of his own poems and those of others, and of his stories, are cheaply available and they are an extraordinary resource for anyone interested in his work. The Caedmon Collection, Caedmon/HarperCollins, 2002

The original BBC broadcast of Under Milk Wood, January 1954, can be found on The Essential Dylan Thomas, Naxos AudioBooks, 2005, with interesting liner notes about the context of that broadcast.

www.dylanthomas.org is the online presence of all things Dylan

Our new edition is here: Under Milk Wood – Wordsworth Editions

Main image: View of Dylan Thomas’s writing shed in the town of Laugharne. Credit: Aled Llywelyn / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 1 above: Dylan Thomas directing Under Milk Wood. Photographer: Rollie McKenna. Credit: Science History Images / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 2 above: The transcript of Under Milk Wood on display at the Dylan Thomas Centre 2014. Credit: D Legakis/Alamy Live News

Image 3 above: The new Wordsworth edition

The post Sally Minogue looks at Under Milk Wood appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

Portrait of Yeats by his father.

W.B. Yeats was 58 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature – a good age, one might think, the right sort of age for such a prize. But much of what is usually regarded as his best work was still to be written: ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, ‘Leda and the Swan’, the mighty ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, the self-reflective ‘Among Schoolchildren’. And those are just from one collection, that of 1928, The Tower, which followed on from his award in 1923. There were five more collections to be written and published after that.

I have been dwelling on poets’ ages lately as I have been writing the Introductions to the two volumes of Dylan Thomas’s work to be published by Wordsworth early next year. If Yeats at 58 still had a third of his poetic life to live when he received the Nobel Prize, poor old Dylan Thomas was dead by the age of 39, still well below the Nobel radar. The Prize’s youngest recipient remains Rudyard Kipling who was named Nobel laureate in 1907 at the age of 41. Age does matter in the Swedish Academy, but only within a broad spectrum, the reason being that it’s unlikely that a writer will have built up a sufficiently substantial body of work before a certain age. As it happens, Thomas is an excellent counter-example to that, since he began writing (really rather good poems) by the age of 16, and already had a significant oeuvre across several genres of writing when he died.

The Swedish Academy’s imprimatur isn’t all about achieved work, it is also about spotting a good bet. Yeats, though 58, certainly turned out to be that. Possibly Kipling did also; he it was who wrote some of the memorial lines forever associated with the First World War, derived from Biblical sources but honed by him: ‘Their Name Liveth Forever More’ on the Stones of Remembrance in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries, ‘The Glorious Dead’ on the Cenotaph, and ‘Known Unto God’ on the graves of the bodies of unidentified combatants. All a form of poetry which both answered to and helped to form the public mood.

One of the effects of the Nobel Prize is that it attracts the public’s attention.   Readers turn towards the anointed writer as sunflowers turn to the sun.  Perhaps too, receiving the Prize imbues the writer with confidence so that s/he can assuage that needy gaze – though it has to be said that it also robs the recipient of time, perhaps the thing most important to a writer. Everyone wants a piece of a Nobel winner. Yeats had done good work, but he was also a good bet – aided, as it turned out, by his living a reasonably long life. He was also poised at the centre of a hugely significant cultural and political moment. The Swedish Academy has always denied any political intent, yet it remains remarkably canny about cultural politics. To me, that is one of its strengths and interests. The number of times when the winner is announced and everyone says ‘Who?’ is a marker of this, balancing out the number of times when the winner is announced and everyone says ‘Yes!’ The Academy somehow achieves a balance between the well known and well recognised and the little known and little recognized, and makes us feel that both are equally worthy of the Prize. It is usually in the less well known category that cultural politics comes into play. The 2023 winner Jon Fosse writes in the less common form of written Norwegian, Nynorsk, so he is in a linguistic minority, and Norway itself may be seen as in a geographical and cultural minority, though in fact there have been three previous Norwegian winners of the Literature Prize.

Mural of Maud Gonne MacBride, Sligo Town

Yeats was the first Irish recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was born (in Dublin) into a Protestant family, and educated in England, so was part of the establishment which had kept a predominantly Catholic Ireland subjugated. However, through his writing and his cultural politics he became a key figure in the Irish cultural revival, which was in itself an expressive arm of the revolutionary struggle for Irish independence. Maud Gonne, whom he loved, was in the thick of that movement. In his poetry, Yeats wrote of that struggle, in a way that understood the complexity of its violent politics but never endorsed them. After the Easter Rising of 1916, the Irish War of Independence (against British forces) ended with the partition of Ireland under the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, and though it was signed by Michael Collins as a representative of the Irish Republic, it was seen by those seeking full independence for Ireland as a betrayal. Under its terms, the Irish Free State was established in the South, with the six Northern Counties, under partition, remaining fully British (as they still remain). The Irish Free State had self-government but was, crucially, still a dominion of Britain. In 1922 Yeats became a Senator of the Upper House of its main Parliament, the Dail, thus taking the conservative, pro-Treaty side in what became a bloody civil war between opposing wings of the revolutionary movement. Yeats had by that time already been nominated several years running for the Nobel Prize. However, in 1923 he was nominated by the full membership of the Nobel Committee for Literature. Perhaps not surprising then that he won the Prize. Yeats’s nationality was specifically mentioned in his Nobel citation: ‘for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation’. That nation was Ireland. Whole nation of course it wasn’t, and still isn’t. The Nobel Prize being awarded at that precise moment lauded the poet for what was certainly a magnificent body of work already, implicitly recognized his importance in the Irish cultural revival which was a part of the Independence movement, but also by its timing endorsed his distancing himself somewhat from that movement. At the same time, the establishment of the Irish Free State was a large step towards the inevitable independence of Ireland/Eire and in being party to it, the Britain bowed to the eventual loss of a significant part of its Union. Thus Yeats’s Nobel Prize landed in his and Ireland’s lap at a political crux, whose unresolved complications and tensions are still evident today.

25 years earlier, Rudyard Kipling had received the Prize for work that undoubtedly supported colonial values, however he might have disrupted and ironised them. In 1907, irony wouldn’t have played much part in the way his work was seen, even though his extraordinary novel Kim is full of it, as it is full of questioning of Empire as well as consolidating it. The Academy’s citation for Kipling desired ‘to pay homage to the literature of England, so rich in manifold glories’. It singled out Kipling’s narrative art for praise, narratives that are set firmly in the midst of Empire. It’s remarkable that 25 years later the poet of a nation that had once been part of that Empire was being cited by the Academy for giving ‘expression to the spirit’ of that ‘whole nation’.

Coincidentally Kipling and Yeats were born in the same year, 1865, which reminds us that they were firmly Victorian figures, but Yeats’s involvement in the cultural politics of the Irish struggle for independence undoubtedly turned his work in a different direction, as did his later disengagement with it as his poetry became more and more clearly Modernist. Where Yeats’s writing changed and developed, making him a notably modern poetic voice of the first half of the twentieth century, Kipling remained stuck in his imperial identity.

In a previous blog about Yeats in 2021 I have talked about a number of his best-known poems, including those associated with Irish politics such as ‘Easter 1916’, but his is such a wide-ranging and richly diverse body of work that there is really something there for everyone. He was a master of the short lyric poem, a form that runs through his oeuvre from beginning to end. Here is the first of the two stanzas that form one of his earliest poems, from his first collection Crossways (1889), ‘The Falling of the Leaves’:

Autumn is over the long leaves that love us,

And over the mice in the barley sheaves;

Yellow the leaves of the rowan above us,

And yellow the wild wet strawberry leaves.

Plaque at 82 Merrion Square, Dublin

As I look out of the window on to a wet Autumn garden, those lines could be describing what I see; their voice is direct and personal, their images timeless, their poetics assured. The poet was 25. A later poem, ‘All Things Can Tempt Me’ is a poem about poetry, about his own craft. Dylan Thomas too writes several poems in this vein, and a poet making poetry about their own practice of poetry is always revealing. Yeats’s poem dates from 1910, his fifth collection, and he is also reflecting on the elements in his life that pull him away from his central task of poetry:

All things can tempt me from this craft of verse:

One time it was a woman’s face, or worse –

The seeming needs of my fool-driven land …

The woman was Maud Gonne, Ireland his ‘fool-driven land’. But he continues:

Now nothing but comes readier to the hand

Than this accustomed toil.

Poetry remained the one constant.

In the collection The Tower (1928), his first post-Nobel collection, which coincides with his final year serving as a Senator, there is a marked change of poetic tone. Yeats is now 63, and there is a preoccupation with growing old and at the same time an opposing fascination with the immortality of art.  ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ (1927) which seemed to me when I was younger to be all about the eternals of beauty, now strikes me as full of anguish about aging. ‘That is no country for old men’, it begins, and later continues, ‘An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick’. True, against these more-than-intimations of mortality ‘soul’ can ‘clap its hands and sing’.  ‘The Tower’ (1926) likewise begins

What shall I do with this absurdity –

O heart, O troubled heart – this caricature,

Decrepit age that has been tied to me

As to a dog’s tail?

Yeats’ tomb, Drumcliff, County Sligo

But the rest of the poem is a profound yet conversational reflection on a whole life, from boyhood under Ben Bulben to the characteristically distanced tones of ‘It is time that I wrote my will’ in the third section of the poem. Yet, as he has announced at the start, whatever the depredations of age, ‘Never had I more / Excited, passionate, fantastical/ Imagination’.

Here in the late 1920s Yeats seems to be willing a sort of peace with himself, as well as taking on an oracular quality in the voice. Last Poems (1936-39) takes that poetic voice to its conclusion. The personal, autobiographical, reflective voice of ‘The Tower’ and ‘Among Schoolchildren’ has all but disappeared. But one poem in this final collection that I particularly love goes back to that voice, combining regret and gladness. ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’ takes as a brilliant vehicle the poet’s return to the Dublin Municipal Gallery to look at the many portraits of those who had figured in the history of Ireland. It gives him the opportunity to reflect upon them, on himself, and on the history of Ireland and its future. In a public lecture given when he was writing the poem, Yeats said:

For a long time I have not visited the Municipal Gallery. I went there a week ago and I was restored to my friends. I sat down, after a few minutes, overwhelmed with emotion. There were pictures painted by men, now dead, who were once my intimate friends. There were portraits of my fellow-workers … Lady Gregory … John Synge … there were portraits of our statesmen; the events of the last thirty years in fine pictures; Ireland not as she is displayed in guide book or history, but the glory of her passions’. The poem is both personal and public. As Yeats does in some of his best political poems, he names names, but here to trace a complex national history, through the frame of the portrait.

The year was 1937 – the year that Ireland gained full constitutional independence from Britain. The Nobel had placed a good bet: here indeed is a poem that ‘gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation’. Yet it is also one that ends personally:

Think where man’s glory most begins and ends,

And say my glory was, I had such friends.

Yeats died two years later. This year we doff a cap to him as we celebrate the centenary of his Nobel Prize; but the real prize is the poetry.

My previous blog on the Nobel Prize for Literature can be found here

Main image: Thoor Ballylee, former home of W. B. Yeats. Credit: Vincent MacNamara / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 1 above: A portrait of Yeats by his father, John Butler Yeats. Credit: De Luan / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 2 above:  Mural of Maud Gonne MacBride, Sligo Town, County Sligo. Credit: Piere Bonbon / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 3 above: Plaque at 82 Merrion Square, Dublin, Co Dublin, Ireland Credit: Design Pics Inc / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 4 above: Yeats’ tomb, Drumcliff, County Sligo. Credit: Mauritius Images GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo

For more information on Yeats’ life and work, visit: Yeats Society Sligo | The Official Yeats Website

Our edition is here: https://wordsworth-editions.com/book/collected-poems-of-w-b-yeats/

The post W.B. Yeats and the Nobel Prize appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

George Orwell’s reputation both as man and as writer has been placed under re-examination of late. New biographies of both him and of his first wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy have re-evaluated his standing, and I have just finished listening to this week’s Open Book on BBC Radio Four (repeated August 31^st, 15.30) where his character was comprehensively impugned – to my mind with a bit too much appetite, and without enough balance or critical acuity. One of the important new commentaries is D. J. Taylor’s Orwell: The New Life, 2023 (so-called because he had already published Orwell: The Life in 2003). Taylor’s conclusion is that ‘Orwell remains an indispensable reference point today’ and Blake Morrison (The Guardian, June 1 2023) agrees – with a caveat: ‘But in a changing moral climate [Orwell] has ceased to be Saintly George and become a murkier figure’. That murkiness was the burden of the Open Book programme, issuing charges of anti-semitism, homophobia and misogyny. Meanwhile Douglas Kerr has concluded in his Orwell and Empire (2022) that though Orwell was undoubtedly anti-imperialist, he could never fully escape an Anglo-Indian mindset, i.e. that of the colonizer rather than the colonized.

These are all arguments of our historical moment, born out of larger ideological activist movements such as Black Lives Matter and Me Too, which have promulgated revolutionary critiques of attitudes which in earlier years might have been taken for granted. Orwell stands pretty tall above the cultural parapet, as once he stood too tall in Spain and attracted a sniper’s bullet. His work has also been long connected with our sense of him as a person occupying the moral high ground (hence Morrison’s ‘Saintly’). So it’s not surprising that some critics finally have him in their sights. My principal concern in this blog is his attitude to women, in so far as we can discover that in his writing and in his life. But there are three key principles which can be applied when considering any of the areas of critique mentioned. One of these is to distinguish between the writer and the person. The second is to distinguish between kinds of writing. The third is to take into account the difference between our historical moment and that of the writer. I felt the Open Book programme fell short in all three of these areas.

So, the writer and the person: we are familiar with many writers who lived reprehensible lives, and whether someone can be a good writer while being a ‘bad’ person is a frequent topic of discussion. In this respect Orwell is scarcely a ‘bad’ person; the question is whether he is a less good person, and particularly in certain areas, than we once thought. Next, different kinds of writing: Orwell is unusual in that his essays are as significant as his fiction. Essays necessarily express a personal view while the relationship between fiction and the novelist’s own ideas is a much more complicated one. Finally, the historical moment of the writer and the writing vis-à-vis that of the reader: one view here is that a writer can be forgiven for sharing positions that were the norm in the writer’s time, but in this respect I’ll argue Orwell can’t be excused since he saw very clearly the wrong-headedness of many of the attitudes of his own time.

Eileen O’Shaughnessy

Let’s look then at Orwell’s attitude to women, with these principles in mind. A new book which has made a splash is Anna Funder’s Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life (2023), which shines a light on Eileen O’Shaughnessy, Orwell’s first wife. It was Book of the Week recently on Radio 4 (now available on BBC Sounds) and Funder contributed to the Open Book programme. It has had mostly glowing reviews. I have listened to the abridged radio reading (but not read the full work). I took against it immediately and am now asking myself why. I know and resent the fact that women have been written out of the story so many times, which is at the heart of this book, and I like Funder’s reflections on her own ‘wifedom’ in relation to that of Eileen’s. I was already familiar with Orwell’s absolute commitment to his work, which enabled him to blank out everything else, including the needs of his new wife, and the way she dealt with the many things in his life that he didn’t have time for because of his writing. These things Funder was revealing in detail, something I would normally applaud. So why am I unsympathetic? I think because Funder didn’t take account of any of the principles I’ve outlined above. Of course, principles don’t necessarily make a successful book. Undoubtedly Funder’s style grabs the reader. It is parti pris, it works via vignettes in which Orwell is pretty much the monster while Eileen is the put-upon wife who is doing all the work. In her section on the Spanish Civil War, Funder certainly highlights Eileen’s political role and her endangered position in Spain, which are much underplayed in Homage to Catalonia (where she is referred to by Orwell only as ‘my wife’).  But the premise of this book, as signalled by the title, and its introductory passages, is that Eileen’s life has been invisible. In fact, there is an extant, recent biography of Eileen by Sylvia Topp, published in 2020, Eileen: The Making of George Orwell (her debt to which Funder acknowledges). [1] That work draws on substantially the same material as Wifedom, so really, since 2020, Eileen has not been invisible. Topp however follows much more standard biographical lines, quoting chapter and verse; sadly for her, the Guardian reviewer (Susie Wyndham, July 6 2023) of Funder’s Wifedom notes that, partly as a result of its very careful detail, Topp’s work ‘lacks the synthesis and panache of Wifedom’.

I’d argue that Funder’s work, concomitantly, lacks the attention to evidence that Topp shows. Wyndham notes in her review, without demurring, indeed perhaps admiring: ‘To fill gaps, Funder imagines nuanced novelistic scenes’. In other words – she makes things up. The difficulty is knowing when that is happening and when not. One example of this sort of imaginative speculation (which certainly occurs in all biographies, but which is usually marked out by phraseology such as ‘It is likely that …’ or

George Orwell’s former home – The Stores at Wallington

“X might at this point have thought…’) occurs when Funder describes in detail an occasion early in the marriage when they are living in an unheated cottage in a small village, Wallington, with no electricity. Eileen has to clean out the filthy latrine (outdoor lavatory) while George happily writes in his upstairs study. With the preamble, ‘He hadn’t felt well enough to do it’, Funder employs a Woolfian free indirect style to describe events through Eileen’s thoughts. Midway through her work, with ‘dark muck flowing over the seat … in his green fishing waders … covered in shit’, she hears his voice float down –‘“Teatime – don’t you think?” … Her blood was ice.’ Readers and listeners to Wifedom will leave with an impression of Orwell as a monster (indeed the chair of the Open Book discussion described the scene as ‘monstrous’) because they will think these ‘novelistic’ scenes are on a par with the factual ones.  Immediately after this scene George comes downstairs, ‘blood all down his old blue shirt … faced with blood and death, she finds herself firmly on his side.’ So clearly Orwell wasn’t ‘well enough to do it’. Somehow, though, it’s the shit that makes the impression.

So that is Orwell the husband, the person. Being that person enabled his writing ; but being a bad husband does not make his writing less important. What matters when we read it is that we understand, through the good offices of writers like Funder and Topp, what sacrifices his wife made to help him to produce that writing. If we take a hard line, we might want to say that we shouldn’t read the writing: the female sacrifices were too great, in the same way we might say that we shouldn’t read colonialist writings, because the human sacrifice was too great. Here, I’d argue for a more nuanced reading. Marriages are opaque at the best of times, and I want to allow for some agency on Eileen’s part in this marriage. The choices were hers as well as his. Of course those choices were in part socially determined and not free to either of them. That does not justify the choices each made, and the odds were always stacked against Eileen. But here we have Funder interpreting Eileen, determining what she might have been thinking, and then presenting that as the truth (it is a different case, obviously, when she is quoting her letters). The major complaint against Orwell should be made not in loaded word pictures, he in his writing eyrie, Eileen below shovelling shit, appealing as that contrast is for Funder’s case – but in terms of his understanding of principles of fairness and equality. He could recognize the careless exercise of power as an officer of colonialism, and could paint it in words; if in his own life he failed to see that he was exercising the same power over someone by virtue of their gender and legalistic relationship to him, that is a fault. A cooler take in these terms by Anna Funder would have been in the end more telling.

Our edition of ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’

And so to different kinds of writing. Orwell’s essays are important when judging him in relation to ideas about empire, nationalism, socialism; on the whole they say little about women, which is perhaps in itself revealing. The Open Book programme drew principally on his fiction to talk about his attitude to women, and conflated uncritically Winston’s view of Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four with Orwell’s. This is such a crass error that it is hard to imagine that it would have been made except in the larger context of looking at Orwell from an ideological perspective. All writers of fiction reserve the right to depict views they do not themselves share! Novels would be a dull place otherwise. It was the view of the Open Book panelists that Julia is a simplified figure, and that Winston has a patronizing view of her. I don’t agree with either judgement, but even if correct, Orwell could be writing to show us Winston’s viewpoint, rather than his own. As it is, I think Winston has an entirely sympathetic understanding of Julia. He loves her promiscuity, because it opposes the Party; he loves her youthful daring; and he loves her simple, revolutionary message: ‘I love you’. That is left out of account if we see Julia as a cipher, which I think she is very much not. It is she who instigates the connection with Winston, she who is full of energy and imagination and courage. It’s a brilliant stroke of Orwell’s to make her love for Winston both powerfully and vulnerably human, and a political act. On their first real meeting, engineered by Julia, in Victory Square squashed together in a crowd suddenly gathered to watch Eurasian prisoners passing in a convoy, Winston gazes on the prisoners and notices one in particular with ‘a mass of grizzled hair’. When he and Julia need to separate, ‘at the last moment, while the crowd still hemmed them in, her hand felt for his and gave it a fleeting squeeze’. As he explores her hand, a microcosm of her body, he reflects that he does not know the colour of her eyes. ‘To turn his head and look at her would have been inconceivable folly. With hands locked together, invisible amongst the press of bodies, they stared steadily in front of them, and instead of the eyes of the girl, the eyes of the aged prisoner gazed mournfully at Winston out of nests of hair’. Julia is more than just Julia, their love is more than just love, and the Eurasian prisoner who makes up an unlikely triumvirate here reminds us of both why totalitarianism is anti-human and how human love can be anti-totalitarian.

If I see Julia as a more rounded character than the radio discussion allowed, the stereotyped characterization of the massive prole woman, hanging out her washing, singing her sentimental song, can be queried in terms of Orwell’s attitude to class as well as gender; I have written about this in the Introduction to Nineteen Eighty-Four.  Even here, we must distinguish sharply between Orwell writing about Winston, and Orwell himself. It is inherently problematic to conflate the two.

Finally, then, there is the issue of how much allowance we make for the writer’s cultural and historical moment and the way it differs from our own as readers. This is a defence regularly employed in current debates, especially regarding Empire, but also in relation to race and gender, that a writer – say, Kipling – was reflecting only the current attitudes of his time and couldn’t be expected to challenge them. There are two problems with this argument, one generally applicable, one applicable particularly to Orwell. The general one is that there are always counter-examples, i.e. there are always writers who have challenged the status quo; so if one person can think differently, so can others. Elizabeth Gaskell, for example, had a much more inward understanding, and a better linguistic representation, of her working-class characters than did Charles Dickens. His comical caricatures or sentimental depictions are a choice. Hardy’s understanding of women, and working-class women at that, is far ahead of his time – a phrase we use which proves my point. And shouldn’t writers by their nature be ‘ahead’ of their time rather than ‘of’ it?

Richard Blair, Orwell’s adopted son, with the statue of his father

Regarding Orwell, he is hoist by his own petard here. He shows time and again in his writing and self-reflection, especially in the extraordinarily good essays, that he is able to be critical of and stand outside the thinking of his time. His striking remaking of himself, and his commentary on that in Part II of The Road to Wigan Pier, addresses directly the way in which he turned on his own class and its ideas, and rethought his approach from first principles. As he wryly notes in the very first sentence of Part II, ‘The road from Mandalay to Wigan is a long one and the reasons for taking it are not immediately clear’.  So we can’t let Orwell off with any traces of misogyny, because he’s already shown that he’s not bound by the thinking of his time. Again, I address the misogyny shown in parts of Down and Out in Paris and London in my Introduction to the joint volume, Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier.

Where does this leave us with George Orwell and women? Honesty compels me to wonder whether I’m inclined to forgive Orwell for attitudes that I’m not prepared to forgive in other writers. I do so, I think, because Orwell more than any other writer I know is attuned to the complexities of thinking in these areas. Seldom does he take a standard or unthought position. His fiction has well and truly been ‘ahead of its time’. But more significantly, his ideas have remained somehow of the moment – this moment as well as his own. I don’t defend his somewhat careless attitude to the women in his life, but neither do I believe that is the whole story. The women themselves were actors in that story – and in Eileen’s case, the script is not necessarily exactly as it has been written by Anna Funder. There is an irony that the latrine vignette, which she indeed writes very well, inevitably calls to mind Orwell’s vignette in The Road to Wigan Pier, where he exchanges a gaze with a young woman on her knees cleaning out a drain: ‘She knew well enough what was happening to her – understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe.’  The scene is based on an encounter recorded in his diary, and for the published version it is expanded and changed for dramatic effect. But the moment of understanding is the same. This occurs not long before he moves into the ill-equipped cottage at Wallington, and the year before he marries Eileen. What do we do with this? Perhaps we shrug our shoulders and think, ‘Writers!’ Perhaps we share Funder’s view and see an exploited Eileen and an oblivious George, able to write about a woman’s misery but unable to see it in his own marriage. Perhaps we remember the blood on his shirt and the sacrifices he made to his own health for his writing. Perhaps we remember his tireless devotion after Eileen’s death to their adopted baby Richard, who is remarkably still with us, himself a tireless advocate for his father’s work and legacy. For myself, I think – Orwell got something right in that passage. He understood the woman; more than that, he truly saw the woman; he understood himself and how much more freedom he had than her; and he put it into words in a way that leads us to understand all that too. That’s what good writing does.

Orwell works mentioned, published by Wordsworth: Nineteen Eighty-Four, Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. A selection of Orwell’s essays is included in these volumes.

George Orwell, Essays, Penguin, 1984

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938), Penguin, 1962

Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life, Penguin, 1980

Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, Hamish Hamilton, 2023

Douglas Kerr, Orwell and Empire, Oxford University Press, 2022

D. J. Taylor, Orwell: The Life, Vintage, 2003

D. J. Taylor, Orwell: The New Life, Constable, 2023

Sylvia Topp, Eileen: The Making of George Orwell, Unbound, 2020

The participants in the Radio 4 Open Book programme were Adam Biles, Anna Funder and Sylvia Newman. It was chaired by Chris Power. It is available on BBC Sounds.

[1] Bernard Crick in his now 43-year-old biography, George Orwell: A Life, is really quite critical of Orwell in respect of Eileen’s death and gives a full account of Eileen’s letters around this time. He does make her visible.

Main image: Bronze statue of Orwell by Martin Jennings outside BBC Broadcasting House in London. Credit: Wirestock, Inc. / Alamy Stock Photo 

Image 1 above: Eileen O’Shaughnessy  (1905-1945) first wife of George Orwell  Credit: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 2 above: George and Eileen’s former home – The Stores at Wallington Credit:  Jason Ballard / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 3 above: Our edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four ISBN 9781840228021 can be found here: Nineteen Eighty-Four

Image 4 above: Richard Blair at the unveiling of a bronze statue of his father. Credit: PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo

Details of the Orwell Foundation can be found here: The Orwell Foundation

The post Orwell and Women appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.

A couple of weeks ago I was wandering through the cool paths of the Cimitero Acattolico – the Protestant Cemetery – in Rome, with fellow-blogger and friend Stefania Ciocia as my companion and guide. It was our very first point of pilgrimage, as we both wanted to pay our affectionate respects to John Keats, who is perhaps the most famous resident of this cemetery. If this place, and this starting point for my blog, seems a long way from the current celebrations of Pride in this country, stay with me on my wanderings, dear reader, and the path from one to the other will become clear.

Keats’s grave is much-visited, belying his bitter, self-chosen epitaph, ‘here lies one whose name is writ in water’. But so it seemed to Keats when he died, and he was sadly never to know what fame would come to him. That tugs at the heart, as it did for an earlier visitor, Oscar Wilde, who naturally wrote a poem upon the subject.

The Grave of Keats by Oscar Wilde

It’s not a terribly good poem, but Wilde can be forgiven for that – hard to get the tone right with such an obviously emotional subject, especially in the languorous poetic traditions of 1877 when he wrote the first draft, after his visit to the grave in late April (revised a while later to the final form illustrated here). Furthermore, Wilde was only 22, a Classics student at Oxford with his serious work as a writer still before him. The day was already a momentous one, since earlier Wilde had been vouchsafed an audience with the Pope, arranged by his travelling companion David Hunter Blair.  This rather extraordinary event was clearly not enough to justify the day; in the evening he visited Keats’s grave, and by Blair’s account, threw himself on the ground before it – or possibly on it![1]

The histrionic gesture is not surprising from Wilde, who was already performative in his appearance and dress, but possibly too it was an expression of genuine feeling. It is indeed a most moving spot. In 1818, writing to his brother George, Keats had opined, ‘I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death’ (though he couldn’t have envisaged how soon that death would be). Only three years later, he feels that his poetic ambitions are all dashed, his name ‘writ in water’. The gulf between his sense of failure when he died and his subsequent supremacy ‘among the English Poets’ leaves us little consolation, other than the poetry itself.

Is Wilde’s cleaving to Keats, and his manner of expressing his sense of loss in his sonnet, part of his gay sensibility? Of course the grief he felt at that graveside, and the love of the poetry, might be shared by anyone; if there’d been no-one to see, I might have flung myself down in the same way. But certainly the romanticism of early or tortured death combined with the life of the artist has found a significant place in gay culture, particularly if it involves the beauty of the male body. No surprise that Wilde conjures the luckless, arrow-pierced, but very beautiful Sebastian as a counterpart to Keats – ‘Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain’ – and when he later writes about the visit he notes that ‘the vision of Guido’s St. Sebastian came before my eyes as I saw him at Genoa, a lovely brown boy, with crisp, clustering hair and red lips’.[2]

Saint Sebastian by Guido Reni

But he also invokes Mitylene, a little-known classical (female) figure: ‘O sweetest lips since those of Mitylene’. Many an adolescent reader has had a secret crush on Keats, roused by the sensuousness of his language (Christopher Ricks in Keats and Embarrassment is particularly good on this), but also by his beauty as shown in various portraits. So this is by no means peculiarly queer territory. But the dwelling on the kissable lips may be more so. Wilfred Owen, who echoed Keats’s ambition to be among the English poets, and shared his early death, wrote no poems overtly expressing male/male desire. But there is a constant trope of lips and kisses, sometimes combining the redness of the mouth with the blood of death. The critic Santanu Das is very insightful on the role of the male kiss in the history, culture and writing of the First World War, devoting a whole chapter to it in his superb Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature. Wilde didn’t like the plaque to Keats on the wall near his grave because he thought it represented his face as ‘ugly, and rather hatchet-shaped, with thick sensual lips’. I disagree – it seems to me a very affecting portrait in low relief, and on the day we visited jasmine hung freshly flowering around it, and the air was full of its scent.

Keats’ Grave

Wilde however preferred to see Keats as having either the lips of a classical female figure from mythology, or the ‘red lips’ of the martyred Sebastian. And ‘sweetest lips’ implies touch and taste – a desired kiss.

For all Wilde’s flamboyance and the way in which he seems sometimes to have flaunted his sexuality, he lived at a time when it was illegal to love as he did. He couldn’t at that point write openly about his desires, and the bravery with which he constantly pushed at the boundaries of social mores was promptly rewarded with humiliation, imprisonment, two years’ hard labour, and a subsequent early death. 46 years old, for goodness’ sake. Writing about an implied kiss seems almost absurdly innocent in the light of what was to happen to him, and from which stemmed some of his best writing, ‘De Profundis’ (1905) and ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ (1898).

Wilde did by his own account share an actual kiss on another iconic poet of male/male desire, Walt Whitman. This was in New York in January 1882, only a few years after the visit to Rome; Whitman was already a grand literary figure, Wilde still in his late twenties giving a somewhat unsuccessful lecture tour. The conversation was not witnessed, but Wilde told a friend years later that ‘the kiss of Walt Whitman is still on my lips’.

It is a kiss that Virginia Woolf also dramatises in Mrs Dalloway (1925), that between Clarissa Dalloway and Sally Seton in their youth. Woolf writes very openly here about Clarissa’s love for Sally, through the device of her self-narrated retrospective consciousness (sometimes called free indirect narration):

The strange thing, on looking back, was the purity, the integrity, of her feeling for Sally. It was not like one’s feeling for a man. … it had a quality which could only exist between women.

…she could remember going cold with excitement, and doing her hair in a kind of ecstasy …

And while she emphasises the difference of the feeling from that she might feel for a man, she also compares herself with Othello (this is a book pulsing with Shakespearean reference), invoking his words, “‘if it were now to die ‘twere now to be most happy’”. This is unmistakably romantic and sexual love from a woman to another woman. So that when we get to the kiss, it is invested with great dramatic power, though described very simply as a natural act:

She and Sally fell a little behind. Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers on it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it – a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up …

It remains wrapped up, however. It may be ‘the most exquisite moment of her whole life’ but she ends up married to Richard Dalloway, an exquisitely boring, self-important man, for whom the most important thing in the novel is that the Prime Minister arrives at his party. And when Sally also arrives she turns out to have ‘married, quite unexpectedly, a bald man with a large buttonhole who owned, it was said, cotton mills at Manchester. And she had five boys!’ The five boys are oft-repeated, both by a triumphant Sally and a disappointed Clarissa; Woolf has a cruel eye.

If there is a social commentary here it would be surprising. Woolf rather lays before us what once was and what now is. The kiss and the desire and the most exquisite moment are all real; but so too are the worthy husbands, the boys at Eton, and the comfort, affluence and reassurance of being of a certain class. There’s no doubt that the moment of the kiss is the zenith of Clarissa’s experience, but it doesn’t eclipse the rest except in memory.

Was Woolf freer to write about same-sex love and desire between women because that was never criminalised? Possibly so, though Radclyffe Hall had her novel The Well of Loneliness (1928 – only three years after Mrs Dalloway) banned, in spite of its actually being less explicit than the passage quoted from Woolf. Her novel dwelt on overtly lesbian themes and depicted a woman somewhat like herself, occupying a male identity. It also included the plea, ‘Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole world. Give us also the right to our own existence!’ Jonathan Cape took the novel on, but it came under immediate attack from the Sunday Express and was eventually judged obscene because it defended ‘unnatural practices between women’. It was eventually republished in England in 1949. Radclyffe Hall’s mistake was to make her novel a plea for a particular sort of sexuality. Woolf by contrast includes that theme alongside and threaded through many others; she normalises it.

It’s a mark of a rich text when it is taken up and reinterpreted imaginatively by a later writer. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998) did that with Mrs Dalloway in a most interesting way, weaving in contemporary gay subtexts and placing both Woolf’s private world and her fictional one alongside the Aids epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s. Usually I hate meta-fictions. But this was one that really worked, and was then transmuted into a film which reached a wide audience. Woolf lived again in another guise.

And now we are in 2023. Pride is a month, not a day. Pride has no adjective, it is instantly recognisable. And then again, having no adjective skirts the problem of which adjective to use. Of late, the politics of sexuality have become polarised and problematic. I even wonder whether I should be writing about these matters as a (notionally anyway) straight person. But my whole life has been spent in the love and service of literature. It remains my central belief that the power of literature is its ability to step into other lives – any other lives. A writer imagines. A reader enters that imagined world. It’s what writing does. Some writers will imagine better than others, and some of those writers will do so because of their experience of what they are writing about. Others will have had no experience of what they imagine. And if we think that the power of the writer depends on or is determined by their experience, that must also apply to the reader. Once a stop is put on the powers of invention of the writer, and the powers of reception of the reader, we might as well kiss imaginative literature goodbye.

The Gramsci tomb

I started with the Cimetero Acattolica, and I used the Italian deliberately, because it conveys better than the English translation the way the cemetery is defined against Catholic orthodoxy. The place is somewhere and somehow other. It is at the edge of Rome, only just within the Aurelian walls. Its atmosphere of peace and quiet, its shady paths and monuments, the sense of order and harmony are in direct contrast to the noisy, lively, hot historic centre of the city. While it has been associated with the burial of non-Catholics, and so with the English visitors who died in Rome, it is also home to non-believers and has, through the very variety of those represented and the monuments that represent them, an air of the secular. For example, Gramsci, a vitally important Italian thinker, Marxist philosopher, and victim of Mussolini is buried there. He died in prison in 1937, also at the age of 46.

The Protestant Cemetery is at the edge of Rome (like Keats’s grave, on what is now the very edge of the cemetery, though once it was near the only entrance). That on-the-edge-ness still characterises much of queer writing, as perhaps it also characterises the experience of what is still defined (for example by Pride itself) as sexually other. At the same time, Pride month has become almost corporate, and I wonder whether that is true to the spirit of Pride. I went to collect a train ticket at my local station; the machine was bedecked with rainbow bunting. I went into Waitrose to get some shopping; their customer service counter had a Happy Pride banner.

Waitrose Pride

When I politely asked if I could take a photograph of it, the young man behind the counter said “Of course!”, as though it was daft to ask. Of course, along with the corporate commodification comes a social acceptance, an obvious contrast to the incarcerated Wilde. That is without question progress. The television programme I Kissed a Boy (there’s that kiss again) puts gay relationships into the same category as Love Island heterosexual ones, with a touch more of sweetness and innocence (though I found it ultimately rather a sad programme).

But let’s not end on a sad note. One of the abiding images of Pride locally for me is the video footage of our newly-appointed Lord Mayor in Canterbury, Jean Butcher, a long-time councillor, dancing with abandon in the procession. Whatever happens the rest of the time, and in spite of terrible legal strictures in some other countries, here in the month of June we celebrate Pride together, and honour those writers who were at the forefront of what was not yet even a movement, and when lives were on the line. We salute you.

My blog for last year’s Pride gives chapter and verse for writers published by Wordsworth who explore these areas. A further blog on Walt Whitman examines closely the extent to which his poetry expresses male/male desire.

Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment, Oxford, 1974

Santanu Das, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature, Cambridge, 2005

[1] I’m indebted to James Kidd and his blog for the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association website, 5 February, 2021, ‘“The Grave of Keats” by Oscar Wilde’, keats-shelley.org, which gives a lengthy and interesting account of these events.

[2] Oscar Wilde, ‘The Tomb of John Keats’, the Irish Monthly, July 1877

Main Image: Pride Festival, London. Credit: Mark Thomas / Alamy Stock Photo

Images 1,3,& 5 above courtesy of Sally Minogue

Image 2: Saint Sebastian, 1615 by Guido Reni. Credit: GL Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

Image 4: Catholic cemetery, Rome. Credit: Andrea Sabbadini / Alamy Stock Photo

The post Celebrating Pride appeared first on Wordsworth Editions.