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TAR reaches readers throughout Canada and the United States, as well as in countries like Germany, Korea, France, Saudi Arabia, England, and the Netherlands. Every year the journal receives more than a thousand submissions from as far away as Afghanistan, the Bahamas, Australia/New Zealand, India, Hawaii, and Brazil.
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Editor: Doug Smith
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The quality of the writing is the chief criterion. We also consider it our mandate to encourage Atlantic Canadians and Canadian writers - although excellent writing can come from anywhere. We also welcome new and young writers.
Long pieces may displace several shorter ones, so the longer the piece the higher its quality should be as there is less chance we will read it through and less chance we will respond with a critique.
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Violet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville- Westedited by Mitchell A. Leaska & John Phillips, Methuen, 303 pp. 1989.
There is no end, but addition: the trailing Consequence of further days and hours, While emotion takes to itself the emotionless Years of living among the breakage Of what was believed in as the most reliable - And therefore the fittest for renunciation. T.S. Eliot's "The Dry Salvages"
The lives of Violet Trefusis and Vita Sackville-West certainly demonstrate Eliot's observation elsewhere that our beginnings never know our endings. Vita tragically went to a painful death from which Harold Nicolson, her husband, never recovered. Nigel Nicolson, her son, wrote after his father's death in 1968, "He was never the same again. He really died with her. Not even her most famous creation, her gardens, survived.
They cannot break the heart, as friend Or love may split our trust for ever. We never asked them to pretend: Death is a clean sufficient end For flower, friend or lover.
Vita's observation was an accurate one. In 1967, Sissinghurst passed into the ownership of the National Trust, and as Victoria Glendinning points out in her excellent biography of Vita, "its future was secure . . . though it 'can never be the same."' Violet's death came from starvation as the culmination of illness on I March 1972. Having survived Vita by ten years, her end too was tragic. Philippe jullian, her biographer in The Other Woman: A Life of Violet Trefusis, summarizes it in his closing chapter, ironically entitled after one- of Vita's novels, All Passion Spent.
The last two months of her life were cruel, and the immense villa (I'Ombrellino in Florence) surrounded by statues, empty fountains, and dead flowers was indeed the perfect setting for the death agony of someone who had never liked doing things halfway.
Vita's ashes are in a "small pink marble sarcophagus that once held her two ink-wells, from Long Barn days," Glendinning tells us, secure "in the Sackville family crypt at Withyham with her ancestors." jullian records that Violet's last wishes for a resting place shout louder.
Most of her ashes are buried close to her parents' tomb in the Protestant cemetery near Florence; the remainder have been sealed in the ancient ruins near the Monk's Refectory below the tower at St. Loup (in France). A marker indicates the spot: 'Violet Trefusis 1894-1972, Anglaise de naissance, Fran@aise de coeur.'
Her chosen epitaph is a poignant and telling one: "She Withdrew.
But that was not the end of either woman. Or of their love affair. As Robert Anderson so wisely wrote in I Never Sang For My Father, death may end a life but not a relationship.
Violet Trefusis first became familiar to many of us when Nigel Nicolson published his fascinating account of his parents' marriage,Portrait of a Marriage, in 1973. Violet was the antagonist. In Nicolson's mother's (now famous) canvas bag, found locked in the corner of her tower at Sissinghurst, was an autobiography written when Vita was twenty-eight. "It was an autobiography . . . a confession, an attempt to purge her mind and heart of a love which had possessed her, a love for another woman, Violet Tiefusis." Afraid that the contents of that Gladstone bag might be destroyed by his father or "it him," Nicolson waited four years after the death of his father before risking publication.
The simplicity of it, its candour, the extraordinary sequence of events which it unfolded, her implicit plea for forgiveness and compassion, for the strength to resist further temptation, stirred me deeply. I had long known the barest outlines of the story (but not from her) and here was every detail of it, written with scarcely an erasure or correction at a moment when the wound was still fresh and painful. . . . Now I think that I should have shown it to him when the agony of her loss had been transmuted into numb acceptance of it. He might well have agreed with me that this was a document unique in the vast literature of love, and among the most moving pieces that she ever wrote; that far from tarnishing the memory of her, it burnished it; and that one day, perhaps, it should be published.
The book was an immediate and runaway success. It was not just the shock of this extraordinary marriage and its troubled patches with Violet but the writing itself which made it such an interesting read.
Although her narrative began uncertainly with a rambling account of her childhood, when she came to the heart of her problem it grew in power and intensity, sharpened by a novelist's instinctive variation of mood and speed, almost as if it were not her own experience that she was describing but another's.
Life does imitate, but rarely superadds, art.
Although V. Sackville-West left no instructions about her autobiography, and as far as I know had never shown it to anybody, I believe that she wrote it with eventual publication in mind. It assumed an audience. She knew that I would find it after her death, but did not destroy it. She wrote it as a conscious work of art, in such a way that it would be intelligible to an outsider, and her use of pseudonyms is itself an indication that she expected, even hoped, that other eyes might one day read it.... There are passages in the manuscript which suggest that the writing of it was for her much more than an act of catharsis. She refers to possible readers' of it. She believes that 'the psychology of people like myself will be a matter of interest' when hypocrisy gives p lace to 'a spirit of candour which one hopes will spread with the rogress of the world.'
Fifty years after the fact, Nicolson felt that the time had come.
The letters of these two fascinating women would be supplementary documentation to their story. And that is the justification for this invasion of such a private matter. The publication of Violet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West is meant to be both an elaboration of theme and a celebration of a unique relationship.
The editors are formidable collaborators. Mitchell A. Leaska, who already has co-edited The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, has this time teamed up with John Phillips. Leaska, with a solid literary background, is on the faculty of New York University. Phillips comes to this project from a more personal level. Having completed an M.A. in English Literature at Duke University, he arrived in Florence in 1960. He fell in love with "old stones," he recounts, and he eventually met Violet Trefusis, and shared a taste in antiques and houses; their friendship lasted until her death when he became her literary executor and co-authored Violet Trefusis, A Biography.
It is from Phillips's biography that we first saw collected together Vita's mound of "Violetiana" which was amongst the Sissinghurst Castle papers. Phillips included there 53 letters, most in full, written from 1910 to 1921.
But the great mass of the letters are those written during the years of the "grand passion," from 1918-1921: more than five hundred, ranging from those scribbled in pencil on scraps, frequently impossible to decipher, to those on fine paper with splendid letterheads. The latter are often more brilliant, witty, and very beautiful; they are I believe in the tradition of the best English letterwriters. Above all, the reader feels keenly the sincerity and intensity of Violet's passion for Vita, an all-consuming passion which all but destroyed her. In a sense, it did destroy her: the youthful Violet whose idealism burned with a pure bright flame was transformed into a femme de lettres and femme du monde, who would embrace and conquer - supreme irony - the society which she had thought to reject, the society which was her heritage. She was to pass much of her life amid its pompous facades. But always, there remained in the shadows glimmerings of the 'other Violet,' an ephemeral, fanciful creature.
Phillips also included, in this earlier volume, a dozen letters from Violet to Vita written from 1940-1950 and three from Harold Nicolson (one in 1950 and two after Vita's death in 1962). This shorter selection is, to my mind, the wiser choice. The promise of that first tease from Phillips' cache is, unfortunately, too much like the Violet in these collected and complete letters: more attractive in the speculation than the realization.
The love story is familiar to most enthusiasts of Vita and may be reduced to an outline. The two girls met at school when Vita was 12 and Violet two years younger. Notes - hardly letters were exchanged although the first extant letter is dated 11 September 1910, four years later. Overruling her lust, Vita married Harold Nicolson at Knole on I October 1913 with Rosamund Grosvenor, an early love and jealous rival, for Violet, as maid of honour. The cast of characters for the fiasco to follow seems set with this event. Vita and Violet ran off together; and for a bit, it seemed that Violet's impending marriage to Denys Trefusis, the handsome, charming war hero, might be a decision well deferred. Shame from Harold (already pursuing his own homosexual dalliance) and shocked outrage from the mothers (Violet's mother being Mrs. George Keppel, and maitresse en titre of King Edward VII for the last decade of his life and Vita's mother being Lady Sackville-West and already setting her cap for Edwin Lutyens et al. including J.P. Morgan) eventually brought the women to their senses. But not before the lovers masqueraded around Europe, as travellers and gossip, with Vita exercising not only her new interest in lesbianism but cross-dressing. Vita called ersel "Mitya an Violet was "Alushka." They parted; they reconciled; they parted. Eventually Vita returned to domesticity and Violet married Denys when he promised in writing to a "marriage in name only." The bare bones of the affair are all too sordid (including a rape by Vita) and bathetic - even for a readership which is aware of the atrocities committee daily on afternoon (and evening) soaps. There must be more to warrant the letters in print.
After the affair ended, Violet continued to write agonising letters. Amidst talk of suicide, madness, exquisite pain and mourning, there are some sad, moving thoughts interspersed into the most insane screams of self-indulgence. On 19 March 1920, Violet wrote:
People say they couldn't be seen with me in public. I give you my word of honour this is true. Two people have said it who are by way of being my friends. Try to understand how deeply this hurts me. I come to you all bleeding and hurt, knowing that you have been spared the ghastly day I have just been through, knowing that you are surrounded with sympathy and affection - How can you expect me not to find it unjust? It's as though two people had been caught stealing, but one is put in prison, and the other is not. The one who is in prison can't help feeling the injustice.
And two months later on 7 May, there is this pitiful admission.
... One thing I revel in is my quite remarkable weak grasp on Reality - a little tug, and I should be free for ever, free from what most people term Reality - My realities are quite different, only they're so 'insaisissable' . . . Do you know, Mitya, that my only really solid and unseverable 'lien' with this world is you, my love for you? I believe if there weren't you I should live more and more in my own world, until finally I withdrew myself inwardly altogether.... Because you don't see things as I see them, because you don't really understand, you think I am wicked and immoral and selfish - so I am, according to your standards, but not according to my own. According to my own, I am singularly pure, uncontaminated, and high principled. You will laugh, but it is true. And you can laugh all your life, but it will still be true.
Surely that letter must have softened the heart of Harold who certainly suffered his own lot through the tortuous days of the affair. He referred to Violet as "that little tortuous, erotic, inescapable irremediable and unlimited tease. I don't hate her . . . no more than I should hate opium if you (Vita) took it. " And opium Violet became for Vita. But eventually, as was Vita's pattern, the effects of the drug wore off or were not strong enough. Vita went on to a long list of other lovers and Violet continued her flirtations to the end. Vita settled. Violet reconciled with Denys, but that too came to a tragic end when he died of tuberculosis in 1929. Violet never remarried. But in that year, she published the first of her novels. And that was her salvation. Fiction was finally to become the mainstay of her life. Her form of art took precedent over her misspent youth.
And so with Vita. She had written Challenge with Violet's collaboration during the height of their affair. In it, Vita appears as "Julian" and Violet as "Eve." It is not a particularly good read, apart from its sensational retelling of a "real" story. But Vita had discovered her trump card in the affair; she too was able to convert what aspects of her life she chose to art. (The ultimate irony occurs later when another of Vita's lovers, Virginia Woolf, returned the compliment by giving Vita literary immortality by writing Orlando for and about her.)
Although described by Woolf as one who wrote with "a pen of brass," Vita went on to fame as a popular novelist, poet and journalist. Violet also tried to follow in her footsteps but she never attained the fame or following of " il miglio fabbro" to quote Pound's salute from Eliot. This is largely due to Violet's stunted artistic growth. Violet was, as Glendinning points out in her TLS review ofA Solitary Woman: A Life of Violet Trefusis by Henrietta Sharpe, a fantasist.
Harold Nicolson called her a mythomane - a polite way, says Miss Sharpe, of saying "pathological liar." She never really grew up, nor wanted to. Like Vita she had a charming, dominant mother, and she remained her mother's precious little girl for as long as her mother lived.
Although she lived to be much older than Vita, Violet was always the child in an adult world.
But what a periphery. Her guest book is most impressive: the musicians, George Auric, Arthur Rubinstein, Francis Poulenc; personalities as various as Dior, Beaton, Duff and Diana Cooper, Randolph Churchill, the duke and duchess of Windsor, the princess of Denmark, François Mauriac and François Sagan; the writers, Virginia Woolf, Blixen, Colette, Maugham, Morrand; and her friend to the last, Frangois Mitterand. And there were many more who moved in rarified surroundings: Garden by Charles de Noailles; Frescoes by Bébé Bérard. Thierry de Beaucé, current owner of her former French residence, has noted:
Thus Violet Trefusis ... kept herself constantly surrounded with famous, clever and beautiful people, and they in turn were enchanted by her eccentric view of the world and her perpetual warfare against all forms of stuffiness.
Even Nancy Mitford, who had turned her acid pen on Violet in Love in a Cold Climate, lived to become a friend and one of those who respected Violet's humanity, her culture and 'the fact she lived her life to the hilt... writes de Beaucé.
If Violet's literary skills were limited, her letter-writing abilities were not. Glendinning has observed:
... Her letters to Vita, even as a young girl, are fluent, fanciful, multilingual, inspired. Vita's, in comparison are dull. (There is no more vivid account of an archiprivileged Edwardian childhood than Violet's. She also published modish novels in both French and English; but her letter-writing and conversational brilliance never properly transferred itself to her fiction.)
Violet herself was aware of her superior talent in this area. In her guarded autobiography, Don't Look Round, Violet comments on Vita's correspondence.
I bombarded the poor girl with letters which became more exacting as hers tended to become more and more of the 'yesterdaymy-pet-rabbit -had-six-babies' variety. Clearly no letter-writer.
Vita obviously had other, and larger, more disparate, fish to fry. Violet did not. As Glendinning writes: ... Real life' could never match up the expectations of (her) beginnings."
The greatest limitation (apart from the very cheap and tawdry paperback edition compared to the splendid cloth-bound book) ofViolet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusts to Vita Sackville- West is that we are only presented with one side of the story: Violet's. This is no fault of the editors who have done a fine job in selection and commentary. Violet often writes that Vita does not write as much or as many letters in return. That was not ultimately to matter. Denys Trefusis, in a pique of rage (small wonder), destroyed all of Vita's letters. Violet subsequently reported this to Vita.
He has done you a good turn by burning every single one of your letters - the ones that were either in his or my father's possession and the ones that were in my writing table drawer. He has read them all so he can have no illusions left.
Fortunately, in contrast, Vita seems to have thrown nothing out. "Virtually all" of the letters which she received from Violet are reprinted here by Leaska and Phillips.
With the end of the affair, the letters became less frequent. And life had not ended in spite of Violet's anguish that it might as well have done. The relationship cooled in 1921 because Vita changed her mind and passionate commitment was never her long suit. Violet remained constant, it seems, to the end. Vacillation occurred but Violet was resigned to loneliness and social ostracism and homelessness in the capitals of Europe which for all their joys and pleasures remained empty to her. Denys, never the comfort or support that Harold was for Vita, is the mysterious player in the drama. His letters have not survived. Sharpe, in A Solitary Woman, describes him as finding comfort with Russian ballerinas and extraordinary trips to Russia. When he died, Violet was with him and she mourned him but ultimately offered too little too late as her tendency and "real instinct was to run away." Discreet liaisons with both sexes followed until she died.
Her friendships were solid and long-lasting. She inspired loyalty and support.
Violet returned to England during the war and different letters were exchanged with Vita. There were even luncheon meetings. Vita, never one to pass up on a metaphor, described her reaction to Violet's presence so near to her in England: "You are the unexploded bomb to me." (German bombs just happened to be falling round Sissinghurst at the time and invasion seemed inevitable.)
After the war, Violet moved between her parents' home in Florence and her own tower, St. Loup-de-Naud, southeast of Paris. Like Sissinghurst, it too had served as a military barracks and had all the romantic associations of Vita's tower in Kent. Given to Violet by her friend, the princess de Polignac (and that appears to be another story), a refuge was found in France. De Beauc6's description of it is apt to my recollection of first seeing it and demonstrates the attraction it must have held for Violet.
There was nothing particularly enticing about it; rather the opposite, because everything looked terribly bare in the cold light of February.... There was the tower rising out of the mist, with the clock tower nearby ... two starkly vertical structures in the middle of a vast romantic plain stretching all the way to Poland. And all this in an area regularly visited by many species of migratory birds.... The last thing I wanted to do was unsettle the shades of all those vanished people who had left races of themselves in it.
But a house is not a replacement for a person, a beloved. All the romantic fantasy of the tower was inadequate. Glendinning believes that:
Violet never recovered from the disillusioning loss of Vita, who remained always the 'gold thread' - perhaps the only one - in her life. She never risked total love, or even social disapproval, again. She learnt to wear a mask. The romantic vision was never re-created.
Glendinning's conclusion was drawn ten years ago. Violet To Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville- West would confirm and document it. Geography also throws light on life.
Edmund Clerihew Bentley has an interesting little rhyme in hisBiography for Beginners.
The art of Biography Is different from Geography. Geography is about maps. But Biography is about chaps.
The bias of sexism aside, is there truth in th' is nonsense ver.-. What can' geography tell us about the end of biography? Both Violet and Vita were aesthetes. Both submerged themselves in lives which were false to their natures. Both searched for emotional bonds in houses and places - Vita with more success and satisfaction than Violet. Both "battled and half succeeded in ignoring the realities' of mundane existence so that their worlds of fantasy might triumph" as Phillips concludes.
Even her unique grande passion, her love for Vita, was for her - as her letters reveal - an aspect of her quest for an Ideal Beauty ... I shall always remember the intensity with which on several occasions, she summed it up for my benefit: "Nothing but the Best shall content my soul."
Perhaps that is the ultimate tragedy of Violet's life, her passion, and these letters: her grasp exceeded her reach. George Woodcock has noted that "we preceive . . . according to our general preconceptions of life and . . . what we find . . . is in fact what we have gone to seek." The two women met, loved, lost and parted. Perhaps human, mortal, love was not what either was searching for at all. For the rest of their lives they each moved through great rooms, towers, countries which echoed with ruminations and ghosts of bygone passions.
Leaska and Phillips have a very disquieting ending to the story. One of Violet's favourite books, The Unquiet Grave by 'Palinarus' - her friend Cyril Connolly - is inscribed to her. Violet has marked vehemently with a red crayon the following passage:
We love only once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving: we may appear to ourselves to be as much in love at other times - so does a day in early September, though it is six hours shorter, seem as hot as one in June. And on how that first great love-affair shapes itself depends the pattern of our lives.
And when Mitterrand paid her a last visit, he left profoundly shaken and recorded this in his journal:
... in the great house the memory persisted of singular passions of which I had registered the last cries.... There appeared occasionally . . . the signs of ancient storms and torments that half a century had not entirely dispelled. I knew that an epoch was drawing to an end, or rather, were fading away the traces of a time elsewhere already vanished, althougl- until now preserved here by the firm hand of Violet.
So finally the life and the relationship ended. Whatever our personal or moral reaction to this story, Mitchell A. Leaska and John Phillips have, in Violet to Vita.- The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West, given Violet, for the moment, the last word.
The Divine Ryans by Wayne Johnston, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 1990
In 1986, at the age of twenty-eight, Wayne Johnston won the Books in Canada First Novel Award for The Story of Bobby O'Malley. His second book, The Time of their Li'ves, showed that he was a promising writer. His latest work, The Divine Ryans, is his best performance to ate and proof positive that Mr. Johnston is one of the country's finest story writers.
As in his previous novels, johnston's subject is the family and his narrator is a young male who reminisces in a deceptively casual manner, making us laugh (frequently aloud) again and again while at the same time focusing us to confront many of life's brutal incongruities. Like The Story of Bobby O'Malley, this is a comic novel of the most serious sort. It deals with a youth's coming-of-age. The protagonist, nine-year-old Draper Doyle Ryan, has serious problems. His father, former editor of the family newspaper, "The Daily Chronicle", a strange combination of scandal sheet cum church bulletin, has just died. The young boy and his sister and mother move in with Aunt Phil who rules the Ryan residence (and Reg Ryan's Funeral Home) with an iron fist. Also living in the house is Uncle Reginald, an eccentric who drives the family hearse. Complicating matters is the fact that Draper's growing sexual awareness results in his having weird dreams about the two important woman in his life (Momary is a hybrid of his mother, who appears to him,naked from the waist up, and his sister, Mary, who appears naked from the waist down). Too, the confused nine year old is being visited repeatedly by his father's ghost, who, for some mysterious reason, always holds a hockey puck. Concerned about these "visitations" ' Aunt Phil insists on keeping young Draper in line by putting him in tow with another Ryan uncle, Father Seymour, who runs the local orphanage and is famous about town for his 'Number', a group Of boys who sing, dance and box - "a cross between the Vienna choir boys and the Hilter Youth". Father Seymour's Number is to the parish "what the musical ride is to the Mounties."
In addition to a deadly accurate eye and ear, the author has a clear sense of form which controls what he sees and hears. Draper Doyle's refreshing voice records the world as it is. He speaks with a somber wisdom of family members (even the skeleton in the family closet), of clergy, of neighbours, of school, of hockey, of bedwetting, of everyone and everything. Once or twice, the narrator lapses into commentary that is surprisingly sardonic for a nine year old but, for the most part, the humorous voice is relentlessly honest, forcing us to laugh at characters' follies while at the same time prompting us to empathize with their pain. Time and again I was reminded of the authentic narrative voices of Holden Caulfield and Huck Finn. In the following passage, which occurs when Father Seymour attempts to fasten a necklace, his Christmas gift, around the neck of Draper's mother, we witness the keen observations of a youth alone in the phoney adult world:
There was an awkward moment, or more like an awkward ten minutes when, on Aunt Phil's insistence Father Seymour tried to put the necklace around my mother's neck. He was tall enough, but unfortunately tried to put it on from the front and stood for an embarrassing amount of time more or less face to face with my mother's bosom, more or less embracing her, while she tried to smile and he struggled to join the clasp of the necklace for perhaps the first time in his life. No one wanted to acknowledge the awkwardness of what was happening by telling him to put it on behind.
The confessional account too has the authentic ring of Salinger and Twain.
When Father Seymour had heard Sister Lousie, he would come out across the altar, his confession stole about his shoulders, and hurry down one of the side aisles, taking great care not to look into the pews, acting as if he didn't know that it was Wednesday, that among those penitents who were waiting for him was his entire family with whom he would have dinner afterwards ... As for me, I dreaded what Uncle Reginald called my "two minutes in the box" with Father Seymour. I hated the waiting. I remember the murmuring voices from inside the box ... But Father Seymour always recognized my voice - I could tell by the tone of his voice, in which there was a warning against my being in any way familiar with him.
Moments later, Draper reflects in a manner reminiscent of Huck:
Each week, I stared at my mother, wondering what she had told Father Seymour. Did she worry too, about what Aunt Phil might or might not have told him? ... Had she foolhardily confessed to some embarrassing sin and was now regretting it, or had she given so glowing an account of herself that Father Seymour had guessed that she was lying. I never felt more guilt-ridden than I did when leaving the confessional, what with all the lies I told while I was in there.
Draper Doyle can lie as effectively as Huck en route to Goshen. The encounter with the sales clerk at Woolworth's is just such a scene. But like Huck and Holden, he refuses to commit the big lie, the adult lie. In fact, Draper's world is a kind of comic hell because of his struggle with the family's attempt to hide the truth about his father's death. He cannot lie to himself even when the price is either a private nightmare resulting in chronic bed-wetting or public humiliation. Nowhere is this clearer in the book than in the concert scene when Draper Doyle has to choose between feigning reality (he is forced to lip-sync in Father Seymour's choir in order to impress his family) and making an honest attempt at communicating with an illusion, his father's ghost, which appears at the back of the hall. He chooses the latter, the consequence of which places him iii direct conflict with the archbishop around whom the adult world "acted as if the point was not to impress (him) but to refrain from doing anything which would startle him into an awareness of his surrounding." This book is packed with wonderful comic moments. Johnston is a wordsmith who effectively charges his language with witticisms, aphorisms, puns, and conceits. Typical of his humour is the Dickensian interplay between Draper and Uncle Reg at Christmastime.
I often played Tiny Tim to Uncle Reginald's Scrooge, or Uncle Scrooginald, as he called himself. "Please, Mr. Scrooge," I'd say something to eat for my little sister." "I will give you," Uncle Scrooginald would say, "in exchange for your wheelchair and your sister's crutch, and all the clothes that you and your sister have on your backs, one cup of lukewarm water." "Oh, God bless you, Mr. Scrooge," I'd say. "God bless you, you're a saint." Other times, I played Scrooge's nephew, blurting out "I say, Uncle, make merry," whenever Uncle Reginald was looking glum. Uncle Reginald would respond, "I say, nephew, if you persist in this nauseating cheerfulness, I shall make pudding of your plums."
As in his earlier works, there is a strong undercurrent of pathos in this novel. Among the many tender moments are the confrontation between Mom and Aunt Phil, and the tenderest scene of all, when Draper attempts to surprise his Dad on his father's birthday and literally gets the surprise of his life. There are dark strokes throughout the book but, on the whole, the colours are extremely bright. Mr. Johnston is first and foremost a comic writer. And this reader hopes we haven't seen the last of Draper Doyle's amusing antics and the comic capering of his mad-hatter relatives.
A final note! While reading this delightful fiction, I stopped more than once to consider what a wonderful film the Codco crew could make of The Divine Ryans. Both Mr. Johnston and Godco paint credible pictures of 'growing up Catholic' in St. john's in the fifties and sixties. What howls and belly chortles we'd be treated to were Codco given the opportunity to televise some of the hilariously funny episodes. To name but a few: Uncle Reg using the lift to get the kids ready for school; the family meals; Draper's psychooralysis sessions with his eccentric uncle; the goalie show-down between Draper and his sister; the concert; the boxing match; Draper's trips to Woolworth's to purchase underwear; and that splendid finale, the Apuckalypse. These and so many more marvelous moments in this fine book deserve to be put on the screen, if for no other reason than to bring this delightful collection of characters to those who do not read.
Black and White Tapestry by Fred Cogswell. Ottawa: Borealis Press. 1989. Unpriced.
Domestic Economy by John Donlan. Ilderton: @ Brick Books-Coldstream. 1989. $9.95.
Winter by Patrick Lane. Regina: Coteau Books, 1990. $8.00 paper; $21.95 cloth.
Fred Cogswell's forceful, passionate and convincing attachment to the strictness of such apparently archaic forms as the sestina and villanelle permits him to continue to be at over seventy years a vital and interesting poet. Black and White Tapesig contains poems about marriage and long love, about loneliness, teaching, and the heroism in any real attempt to live, but most of all about poetry and the poet's rage, even in old age. The rage is fiercely under control in his own case, but fully admitted; wild and uncontained and at last fatal in that of his friend and fellow artist Milton Acorn, who is the object of a fine elegiac sestina, as perceptive of Acorn's flaws as it is compassionate and forgiving.
In old age Cogswell senses an upwelling of forces, energies, passions that put before him the deep appeal of chaos, of letting go. In these poems, using these strict, intricate forms, he is able to look at the experience, to know it and survive it. The poetry is not always beautiful, nor often even very handsome, but there is a solidity of execution which grows on the reader and an unpretentious seriousness that commands respect. The pleasure one gets from this book is quite like that one has in finding one of the few remaining genuine hardware stores: a quiet, darkish place, with a settled sense of work and a notion of order that honours the idea of craft, knowing, as it does, that all serious craft is in the service of the beautiful and, in so far as we can make it, the true. I suppose it is a man's poetry, but one of those rare men strong enough to love and to absorb the hurt in loving. Perhaps Cogswell is responding to and challenging what is likely the best known villanelle in this century: the higher courage may be to go gentle into that good night, having so long acknowledged and mastered one's rage.
But strength comes back as I remember well What a gypsy said at the county fair; "Don't quit on love, boy. Though it hurts like hell, How much you live depends on how you care." (Loneliness)
There are bigger and even better poems in this book, but "Lost and Found" gives I think the quickest picture of the man and the sources of his art.
With the unconscious importance That money plays in an old man's life I take the credit card from my purse And in two seconds sign away Sixty-nine dollars and fifty cents, An evening's food and drink for two, Plus ambience and a waitress' tip. But as I sign -I smile. In the glass Beyond the cashier's head I see The white flash of my own false teeth And in my brain a memory-tape Unrolls a cloudless weekend In the fall of nineteen thirty-eight When a long two days of searching brought The greatest satisfaction I yet had known. On hands and knees, face near to the ground, Foot by foot, I searched among the stubble Of an eight-acre field of barley, Hoping to find a porcelain tooth That fell from my bridge during the day When I gathered the shears into stocks. On the second day in late afternoon My eye picked it out from the tiny rocks It resembled. I was ecstatic. A new one would have cost six dollars. At a dollar a day, the going rate For labour, my time had been well spent. Besides this, I had the satisfaction Of proving all the folk wrong Who called me a fool for looking.
The straightened youth, proud enough to look the fool, has lived to be a wise, old lover. Cogswell's sense of value is gold standard. The human rightness of this, the mix of memory and desire, is humanity at a very high, even extraordinary level. How selfdisciplined the boy, how wisely extravagant the older man. It is in this sense, and in this sense only, that law is the basis of freedom.
Patrick Lane's Winter is a weak, bad book, but it is the weak, bad book of a determined and ambitious poet. It is always a struggle to write and the struggle here is ghastly to watch, but one does watch it, ghastly as it is; which argues for some fundamental strength underlying the sloppy writing, the indulged bad habits, the absurdly portentous self-regard. Whatever else it may be about, Winter is not about the weather in Canada. Nothing in this collection is as good as Lane's "Winter Kill" (in The Measure, his best book), which, besides being a beautiful poem, is so deeply part of its place you expect to turn it over and find Property of Hudson Bay Company stamped on it. Winter is made up of forty-five sketches, each in turn titled "Winter", which seems to be a kind of universalizing term for a confused agglomeration of unhappy states, dominated by the most dreadful of them, the incapacity to feel anything at all and the perverse will to make that kind of impotence into a strength: "sitting perfectly/still/and only remotely human". Phyllis Webb's lines which Lane uses for an epigraph are an accurate epitome of the intention.
No one, not even a poet, is obliged to feel more than he or she actually does feel. Keats knew the 'feel of not to feel it', and it was a drowsy numbness that pained his sense; Coleridge's finest poem addressed his own awareness of his creative and emotional impotence. Lane is essentially a romantic, and exhaustion has always shadowed the romantic. It is not what Winter is about that is the problem; what is perplexing is the intellectual shambles consequent upon Lane's attempt to deal with it. In this book he seems to work from a notion that poetry is simply a matter of saying any damned thing you want, so long as it is sufficiently excessive and narrowly self-regarding. One would like to think that the abstract, anonymous 'he', who is the hero of these fragments - as if 'he' were less a pronoun than a mere cold, masculine syllable, a sort of degree zero morpheme - was other than autobiographical, but it isn't,likely, and the presence of a stifling egotism is hard to avoid. Like all egotisms, it is death-centered, death-obsessed. Dying, in terror of dying, but attracted, not entirely surprisingly, by a flight toward death, this kind of ego cannot bear either the happiness of courage, or even the anguish of others.
He has already decided on the north He will die only when everyone else is suffering the simple deprivations in the season where the weak have no place. (Winter 32) a sharp lean hero, immaculate and alone. Already he is practising his cool walk, hands in pockets, his cold clean eyes staring through all the pain there is at nothing. (Winter 43)
Nor will it surprise to find this cold self-centredness accompanied by a truly bathetic sentimentality.
His tears quickly freeze, forming delicate icicles on the pale hair of his lip. If he stands perfectly still in the wind he can breathe their small impossible music. (Winter 19)
Self-approval flirts dangerously with the ludicrous here; you can't contemplate the imagewithout wanting to laugh. It is doubtful that even Pater would have aspired to such exquisiteness. Or, further, given the current agony of the Roman Catholic priesthood in Canada and its victims, how could Lane permit himself these lines from Winter 10:
he watches the people enter The Sacred Heart just before midnight, just before mass ... He likes to stare at the priest standing behind them, the one who touches with great gentleness the choir boys in the sanctuary.
That's not far enough away from a thousand old jokes to stand as poetry at any time; at the moment it is either mindless or vicious. Nor will the picture of Christianity in the poem be recognized by anyone who actually practices the religion; it seems to be derived from the more expensive kind of Christmas card.
The real problem with Winter is that one cannot read it, if by reading one implies some possibility of understanding. This is not to speak of current critical notions of the impossibility of reading or the aporias of expression. One can, I suppose, move through the images, letting them register as they will. But the moment one asks what has been said, the trouble starts. Poetry has a certain responsibility to the facts, no matter what it may eventually want to do with those facts, even to the point of denying them; which is a different thing from just getting it wrong as Lane so often does. From Winter 16
The old moon sleeps with the young moon in her arms. Words like that are like reaching out in the darkness ... to find nothing at the end of the hand but cold.
But what the bard who made the grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spense wrote was
the new Moon With the Old Moon in her arms.
The difference matters. To what degree Coleridge's great Dejection Ode, which takes those lines for its epigraph, sponsors or lies behind Winter is not clear, but it would have been worth Lane's more careful study. From "Winter 27"
Everything is so thin, a leaf, a thought, that moment in Kings when the woman lies with the leper and he is not made whole.
There is a leper in Kings (there are several), but no woman lies with him and he is made whole.
delphiniums because the temple in the rock and the oracle singing her enigmas as she tricked men (Winter 29)
But the etymology of "delphinium" brings you to the dolphin, not the oracle at Delphi.
The host is sitting in his study, staring at a painting from the Ming Dynasty ... so much like the porcelain of the period, pale with only the faintest of green buried beneath the pure hard surface.
But Sung celadon ware is not Ming enamelled cloissonné. It goes on.
The doubtful echoes of Bataille, the gratuitous slighting of Alex Colville, surely a greater poet of essential cold than Lane, the patronizing appropriation of a laughing old "Eskimo", the whole atmosphere of intellectual self-satisfaction resting on such shaky foundations is depressing; far more so than the attempt to write a book of poems out of Alden Nowlan's hyperbolic pronouncement that "we live in a country where simply to go outside is to die." You can freeze to death in the Sahara; it isn't just snow or cold that kills. If we have lost meaning -
But what does it mean? The old Eskimo laughing at such a strange request,
we didn't begin to lose it at Cape Dorset, N.W.T. For us the question of meaning, the questioning of meaning, was posed in Tubingen, or Paris, or New Haven. Primitive art is always meaningful, just as everything is invested with meaning in the universe of the primitive. Nothing is gained by suggesting it is otherwise. It is precisely part of Colville's power that he is able to show us the uncanny quality of an ordinary present drained of meaning, but filled with an anxious absence that is almost palpable.
Perhaps having written this ugliness out of himself, Lane can make a new start. He is a poet of many starts, too many of them in the wrong direction. His real strength is narrative; as Marilyn Bowering so perceptively said at the beginning of the career, it lies in the "looking for something to share poems", in the "details of here". One gets these in the early poems; they are most fully achieved in The Measure. If you want to know how good Lane can be, put his "Just L' ing" from that book beside Frost's "Out, Out" and watch the Frost poem reveal itself for the more or less worked-up-out-of-the-newspaper thing that it is, while Lane goes for, and gets as nearly as a man can, the whole truth: a truth that includes the crazy, almost in admissible, surreal beauty of someone's tossing a severed hand from a bridge at night, only because there seemed to be no rational alternative.
I knew I couldn't keep it and I couldn't give it to his wife. Bury it? What for? The life was gone and he was still alive. It was cold and it was night and I had shift-work in the morning. I threw it high off the bridge and for one moment it held the moon still in its fingers before it dropped into that darkness below.
Lane might have stopped there; many poets would have, but he goes on to bring that strange moment back under the pitiless laws of production. The man who lost his hand loses his wife and his job as well, because "there is no work for a man/with a stump. And Claude, the boss,/didn't want him there. You can see why." I can't think of anyone who has captured the voice of working class stoicism better than that. It is Lane's subject and his real vocation:
First-Aid-Man to this village of slaves and broken lives. (Blue Valley Night)
Canada still needs a poet who can tell the truth about those lives, since it so little wants to hear of them, and when Lane forgets himself he can tell that truth with powerful conviction. But, it should be added, only when.
John Donlan's Domestic Economy is a remarkable book; one way or another, it will be an important one. No one who cares for or about poetry, especially perhaps, poetry in this country will be disappointed in it; and there is a deep temptation in reviewing it to say only that if you do care, you will buy it; pointless even to single out or name poems, since none misses the extraordinary intelligence of the whole or the sheer, triumphing pleasure of the poet's sense of having broken through to statement:
Tunnelling out of occupied space each barky trunk leaves its grave of ground writing in its green calendar Congratulations on finding your voice. (Missing)
Domestic Economy constitutes one of the most assured, as well as the most beautiful, depictions we have of post-modern Canada; nor is it easy to say which is the more astonishing: the easy command of everything philosophical and cultural that has gone into bringing about the post-modern or the intimacy and immediacy with which the daily facts of life in this country are brought to art.
Beyond that, as if it weren't enough, Domestic Economy forms the most penetrating and serious criticism, certainly the most creative, yet made of the major poet of our time, John Ashbury. I suspect Donlan is a young poet - all that one can learn from the biographical material accompanying the book is that he lives in London, Ontario, and has a silver tabby cat - but he is a young poet who has given himself the hardest task of all: to unlock the technical secret of a master with such absolute authority that he is free to speak as he will with it; to do in fact what the master himself seemed incapable of or unwilling to do. Like Ashbery's Shadow Train (1981), Domestic Economy is a sonnet sequence: fifty poems make up Shadow Train; Domestic Economyhas forty-nine. This sonnet form, of which there were two or three instances in Ashbery's earlier collections (though they attracted no attention as the possible solution to the problem of the sonnet, a form which English poetry seems not able to do either with or without for very long), is made up of four unrhymed quatrains, whose verse has completely abandoned a metrical base. Rhythm is controlled solely through phrasal patterns measured with exacting tact by enjambment and caesura: here is Donlan on the "Wire"
Making choices, we flex risk like a muscle, launch out over the near-absolute zero between solitudes. Another day, another universe to feed like an insatiable child who forgets the last time he was full. His attention wanders like a searchlight, hates shut doors more than a cat, barges in with wet feet, sings as it flies its spaceship into a de Kooning. The figures of grace we shape in the air are necessary. That they're performance too makes them invitations to a brief freedom from what most people consider possible. After the show, let's have a drink: let's have whatever the spruces are having if it'll make us as wild as them.
The effect is an exhilarating release into intelligence and inclusiveness - this is a poetry whose door is always open - without surrendering any of the luminous pleasure that comes from tight formal beauty. The aesthetic gain of closure comes almost miraculously without that sense of things being forced or foreshortened: the "frantic completeness, as Ashbery described it in "Grand Galop", of Surrey who with Wyatt brought the sonnet into English.
Let us find out, if we must be constrained, Sandals more interwoven and complete To fit the naked foot of Poesy: Let us inspect the lyre, and weigh the stress Of every chord, and see what may be gained by ear industrious . . . , ("If by dull rhymes our English must be chained")
Keats proposed nearly two centuries ago, endeavouring as he said he was, "to discover a better sonnet stanza than we have." No poet in the language has had a more industrious ear than Ashbery's; there is a sense in which it might be said (he has archly said it himselo that as a poet he has done anything but listen, but of course it was the listening of genius, and the reward has been immense for the vitality of the art. There is no more going around Ashbery than there was a way to go around Wordsworth or Eliot. Ashbery is never mentioned inDomestic Economy, nor in any direct way alluded to, unless it be in an anonymous bit of verse, more or less Ashberyesque, which makes up the second quatrain of the first and title poem. Eliot said good (we would now say strong) poets steal, weaker ones borrowed. Domestic Economy is an appropriation of a form, not the imitation of a style. Far from being a piece of ventriloquism or tour de force of pastiche, Donlan's Domestic Economy grants the highest kind of confirmation to the older poet's technical discovery: it now belongs to the book of forms as solidly and as certainly as Milton's breaking the "turn" (volta) at the sestet in the Petrarchan sonnet.
Donlan's own discovery is that the form is not necessarily wedded to the notorious Ashberyian obscurity, that apparent flight from meaning, the "leaving out business", which has reduced more than one critic to complaining that often there is nothing more going on in his work than an airless, somewhat supercilious display of bravura syntax, signalling little beyond its own virtuosity. Sufficient acquaintance with all of his work would of course limit that view, but one knows where it comes from. By contrast Donland is as direct, real and as simply 'there' as the
bright Cutlasses, Challengers, Z28's! - hard as the Precambrian Shield we abandon, leaving its lakes beaming along neglected sideroads ... (Cold Pastoral)
At the same time the cars are wonderfully and distantly commented on by the title's allusion to Keats and by the full phrase, "Put up your bright/Cutlasses . . . ", where Othello steps in for a cameo appearance. Donlan is a post-modern, but his security in the canon is consummate. His is a world in which a meditation, witty as Donne but gentler, on the Heideggerean notion of Venvindung (the historical 'overcoming' or healing which recognises that health is a kind of belonging and the beginning of responsibility though of course Donlan breathes no word of Heidegger) begins in history and ends in the new A&P that has replaced the old pool hall:
Doctoring history is one way we keep the present manageable, racking the pool balls into a tight triangle before the next hard break shatters their order as'far as the table's rubber boundaries. The old poolhall, where so much that is irreplaceable happened is gone. But in the new A&P some faces still shockingly connect. You hadn't expected so much to survive, the important parts, the human memories that contradict or duplicate yours, those others who contain you as they live. (The Past)
The pleonastic insistence of the book's title ("economy" is literally,oikos, nemein, domestic management) is deliberate. ehind it lies indeed plenty of "homework" of the other sort; though their names, like Heidegger's, are never mentioned, the intellectual presences of Levi-Strauss, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Kristeva, the whole poststructuralist pantheon can be felt, but in no conceivable way as intimidating. They have to rub shoulders with ". . . Ti-jean, Stompin Tom, What's-his-ears,/play[ing] it for us again in our cheap kitchens . . . " We have come perhaps to that "condition of complete simplicity/(Costing not less than everything)" which Eliot at the end of Four Quartets sets as the prerequisite to "arrive at where we started/And know the place for the first time."
Does anything know us better, more prophetically, or with more troubled love, than "Stable", written two years ago, the day after Canada day
There must be something I forget to worry about.
That panic trying to lodge behind your breastbone
is useful energy, like the Reversing Falls,
for the right person. Who are you, anyway?
After several days on the respirator your sense of identity
can slip, leaving all that buoyed you up
unknowable. You drown in your strange body,
a terrified machine among machines.
You come out of it a step closer to the stars,
each self a story among other stories.
It's surprising how little your spirit really needs:
my letters to Santa went into the stove,
blackened to negatives, restless, flew up the chimney
on hope to the North Pole. 0 Canada
during your fireworks last night
many of us felt ash fall on our upturned faces.
If Domestic Economy is apprentice work, it is the apprentice work of an enormous talent. For the moment we can only be grateful for the compensation and consolation it offers to a country that has all but lost its soul.
In a relatively short time Christopher Hitchens has achieved the status of being England's preeminent journalist, and with his recent appointment as Washington editor for Harper's Magazine many would argue that he also deserves to hold that title for America.1Blood, Class and Nostalgia (his seventh book) does much to support the case for Hitchens as our generation's Muggeridge2 or, as some would have it, Orwell. The book is a critical survey of the historical, social, political and cultural relationship that existed and exists between Britain (large and small b) and America (small and large A). What Hitchens illustrates most of all in this work is his ability to do what many of the historians warn us not to do generalize and judge. Here he is on a period of history that is of some interest to us at the moment:
The period of decolonization and receivership, which saw the United States take over the former position of the Belgians in the Congo, the French in Indochina, the Dutch in Indonesia, and the British in the Mediterranean and the Middle East ... At such times, there was liable to be grumbling about American "imperialism" from the British Establishment and sanctimony about British "colonialism" from the Washington side.... As in the case of the Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence on Iranian and Saudi oil, both nations rightly suspected the other of self-interested designs. (United Fruit lobbyists in Congress had played on this memory artfully, pointing out that British oil assets were being menaced by nationalization in Iran, that American assets in Iran might be I next, " and that the habit of nationalization should not be allowed to spread to or from Guatemala. If they could see the connection, so could others.) Iran was to be the alternative scenario in the drama of "receivership."
In a chapter entitled Greece to Their Rome Hitchens remarks that the ' literary mirror is often the most precise." And it is the sections of the book in which he discusses Edmund Wilson, Evelyn Waugh, Henry Adams, Henry James and especially Kipling and Mark Twain - that show us his extraordinary erudition and insight into British and American culture:
When Kipling aimed for the sublime, he always stuck at the imperial. This Was a form of temptation which Twain, as it turned out, was well able to resist. When, a decade or so later, Kipling became the semi-official laureate of the Roosevelt-Lodge set, with his verses urging white solidarity and the conquest of the Philippines, Twain emerged as the greatest and most scornful opponent of the new imperialism. Striking at the very point that Kipling had made his own - the emulation by Americans of the trailblazing British - he wrote witheringly that his fellow countrymen should "let go our obsequious hold on the rear-skirts of the sceptred land thieves of Europe."
Hitchens the cultural and literary historian is no less perceptive than Hitchens the contemporary journalist. He describes the night in Washington when the Churchill Club had Prince Philip invest Ronald Reagan with the silver medallion and chain of the award.
The occasion draws to a surreal close with the singing of Rosemary Clooney, whose evocations of Killarney and Cloghamore have reduced many a St. Patrick's night to maudlin and lachrymose demonstrations. The Irish-American community has been the slowest to succumb to the general insipid Anglophilia (being one of the few ethnic American groups polled, for instance, that did not instinctively side with Britain in the Falklands conflict). But tonight Ms. Clooney eschews the green in favor of what looks like a jacaranda tent, and when she does sing of Cloghamore there is nothing in her rendition to discompose the Crown. Faced by an alliance between "the quality" from both sides of the Atlantic, even Fenianism succumbs to sentimentality.
One could argue that this is comedy but Hitchens has real moments of comic brilliance. His report on the correspondence between Evelyn Waugh and William F. Buckley is a case in point.
Shortly before the showing of Brideshead, Mr. Buckley had printed a defense of his own close relations with Evelyn Waugh, and a reply to the detractors and mockers of those relations, in the National Review of November 14, 1980. His indignation had been aroused by a review of Evelyn Waugh's Letters written by John Kenneth Galbraith. Galbraith had made much of the fact that in 1960 Waugh wrote to his old schoolmate and friend Tom Driberg as follows:
Can you tell me: did you in your researches come across the name of Wm. F. Buckley Jr., editor of a New York, neo-McCarthy magazine named National Review? He has been showing me great and unsought attention lately and your article made me curious. Has he been supernaturally "guided" to bore me? It would explain him.
There is much more comedy in Hitchen's work, as Gore Vidal and others have pointed out, but these are grim times. As I write, America and Britain have all but bombed Baghdad and Iraq out of history.3 At present there is more "blood" than class or nostalgia in these Anglo-American ironies.
On April 19, 1988, Hitchens flew to Yorktown and boarded the USS Iowa. The enormous Second World War battleship "named for America's most pacifist and isolationist state." The ship had been recommissioned by the Reagan-Weinberger rearmament administration and was returning from a tour of duty in the Persian Gulf:
Amid the Iowa's array of martial features is one incongruity. The admiral's quarters boast a large, luxurious sunken bath. This fitting, which is found on board no other ship, was installed for the comfort of the disabled Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In November 1943, he boarded the USS Iowa and steamed at top speed across the Atlantic and through the Mediterranean to meet Winston Churchill. Their first place of rendezvous, ironically enough, was Tehran. In those days, Persia was a semi-colony of the British, and in 1944 it became the site of a squabble between Churchill and Roosevelt over competing British and American oil concessions. Later, in the 1950s, it became the site of an Anglo-American cooperative covert operation to overthrow a nationalist government and secure the Pahlavi [the Shah of Iran] dynasty. It was to deal with the direct consequences of that folly that the USS Iowa and her sister ships had again been seen in Middle Eastern waters. The USS New Jersey had spent some days off the coast of Lebanon in 1984, tossing shells as heavy as Volkswagens from her sixteen-inch muzzles at the supposed positions of Iranian sympathizers. I wasn't the only person to be reminded, by this classic gunboat demonstration, of Joseph Conrad's bizarre evocation in Heart of Darkness:
Once, I remember, we came across a man-of-war anchored off the coast.... In the immensity of earth, sky and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.
Later Hitchens is given a personal demonstration of the old ship's power, a demonstration that Iraqi men and boys have been experiencing for the past few weeks:
As the huge, beautiful ship cut its way through the water toward its new home port on Staten Island, I stood on the bridge to watch a few demonstration broadsides (saying a silent valediction to those faraway Druze villages, as the gigantic shells went screaming off toward the horizon) and talked with Seth Cropsey, Under Secretary of the Navy and an occasional defense essayist for Commentaty, The Public Interest, and other organs of neoconservative reflection. "I think you'll find," he said, "that most of our people have studied and admired the British example."
Hitchen's book should be standard reading for every American, British and Canadian student.
Heart of Darkness, indeed!
Notes
1. Hitchens also has a tentative connection with Canada. The Canadian businessman Conrad Black recently bought The Spectator so he could personally fire Hitchens. Hitchens had been writing nasty things about Black's friend, Ronald Reagan. Black, as it turns out, was just too late in acquiring The Spectator as Hitchens had already moved on to another paper.
2 . Like Muggeridge, Hitchens has taken on the cult of the Monarchy in England. His book, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favorite Fetish, has not brought him the kind of hate mail that Muggeridge had received from an earlier generation.
3. The impact of the bombing of Iraq upon the American psyche has yet to be calculated, but we might do well to remember the American poetiames Merrill who talked about the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in his poem The Changing Light at Sandover. Merrill, who expressed a belief in the transmigration of souls, felt that the souls of'those in the two bombed-outjapanese cities had been so annihilated that they were not reusable in the cycle of reincarnation.