Books
Buddenbrooks. Trans. John E. Woods. NY: Vintage, 1994.
Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years. Trans. Denver Lindley. NY: Vintage, 1992.
Death in Venice and Other Stories. Trans. David Luke. NY: Bantam, 1988. [Additional stories in
Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. NY: Vintage, 1989.]
Doctor Faustus. Trans. John E. Woods. NY: Vintage, 1999.
Essays. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. NY: Vintage, 1958.
Lotte in Weimar: The Beloved Returns.
The Magic Mountain. Trans. John E. Woods. NY: Vintage, 1996.
See also . . .
Burgin, Hans, and Hans-Otto Mayer. Thomas Mann: A Chronicle of His Life. University, AL: U of Alabama P, 1965.
1. Little Herr Friedemann (1897) and The Joker (1897)
Little Herr Friedemann A-
A whole life's story: Fell from swaddling table to floor as baby, thanks to neglect of drunken nurse, turning him hunchback; renunciation jarred by Wagner and Frau Commandant; breaks down before Frau who flings him aside; he lets himself fall in the water, which silences the crickets just for a moment.
"Later there came a time when he would often hear them discuss certain matters in the school yard; wide-eyed and attentive, he would listen in silence as they talked of their passions for this little girl or that. Such experiences, he decided, . . . belonged like gymnastics and ball games to the category of things for which he was not suited." (cp. Hanno in B)
The Joker A
Sometimes translated "The Clown." Life story framed by intro and conc in the present.
Autobiographical: mother like Mann's, playing with puppets like Mann.
He doesn't need to work, is disengaged from society, reaches a point where he can't change this, reasons that he has to consider himself happy so as not to despise himself, sees father and daughter and her fiancee at bazaar and cuts in on the conversation and feels from that moment he is doomed because he has lost self-respect:
"Be what you please, live as you please--but put a bold face on it, act with self-assurance and show no qualms, and no one will be moralist enough to point the finger of scorn at you. But once have the misfortune to forfeit your single-mindedness and lose your self-complacency, once betray your self-contempt--and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it."
Buddenbrooks (1901) A
1. Parts 1-2
2. Parts 3-6
3. Parts 7-11
Link to a Summary of the novel.
Details
Napoleon: Old and Hoffstede has seen him, been awed; young doesn't get it. This comes up after story of Mrs. Old Buddenbrook going to drown herself (but being stopped) when French soldiers are into her silver (20-23).
Sesame says her older sister Nelly never had a doubt in her life: "Such words betrayed equal portions of contempt and envy" (83).
The whole story of Grunlich and young Johann's daughter Tony (desperate pleading for her, her meeting Morten Schwartzkopf at Travemunde and having to leave him, Grunlich neglecting her after marries her, his bankruptcy, Johann taking Tony and her child home) is fascinating!
Scene of young Johann calming 1848 revolutionaries.
Notebook in which family events are recorded shows up at key points.
Young Johann dies; his son, the now-practical Thomas, takes over firm--and younger brother Christian joins him but doesn't work much, is highly self-analytical in a creative, weird way, and always joking, making people laugh (258-59); his widow becomes as religious as he had been--Tony's reaction? after singing a bad hymn ("O Lord, please cast a bone of grace / Before this dog so lowly"), she "was so overcome with contrition that she tossed her hymnal aside and left the room" (272) and when bald preacher says worrying so much about curling her hair shows a lack of Christian humility, she tells him to worry about his own curls (275).
Tony marries and divorces again--Alois Permaneder, from Bavaria, translated as if from the American South.
Thomas, explaining to his sister Tony his disappointment after he has moved into his new house: "And when something good we've longed for finally does come along, it lumbers in a little too late somehow, loaded down with petty, annoying, upsetting details, covered with all the grime of reality that we never really imagined, and that is so irritating. . ." (421).
Thomas's four-year-old son Johann: many traits of childhood, incl. "when the impatience of those whom we want so much to love has not yet begun to torment us for evidence, some early token, that we will diligently fulfill our duties" (428).
The German tradition of the Christmas tree room--see my Rilke translations--and Hanno's enthusiasm for opera/theatre after seeing Fidelio and gift of harmonium, puppet theater, and book of Greek mythology at Christmas (519-23).
Old Sesame Weichbrodt's Christmas gifts are her own things she can do without (531-32).
Tony's daughter Erika's husband Hugo Weinschenk sentenced to prison (538). Bad luck with marriages as if handed down from mother to daughter.
Old Madame Buddenbrook has Christian world-view but then when death nears, she wants to live: "She prayed a great deal; but she spent even more of her conscious hours watching over her condition, feeling her pulse, measuring her fever, fighting off her cough" (546).
Long quarrel between brothers Thomas and Christian after latter will go through with marriage now that his mother, who disapproved, has died (554-69).
Hanno looking at casket: "That was not Grandmama. . . . This was a strange wax doll, and there was something gruesome about the way they had dressed it up for this ceremonial occasion" (571).
House ends up being sold to longtime rival Hagenstrom; Thomas explaining to Tony why she shouldn't try to prevent it in order to hurt H (581-82).
Tony will walk by the house and start weeping in the street: "These were the innocent and refreshing tears of her childhood, which had served her faithfully in all the storms and shipwrecks of life" (590). (Great ending to part 9!)
Thomas's life taken up with the trivial; he worries rather than doing, and so has more to worry about (595).
What Hanno sees in his father Thomas's dealings with others: "instead of being an honest and simple interest in the affairs of others, all this appeared to be an end in itself--a self-conscious, artificial effort that substituted a dreadfully difficult and grueling virtuosity for poise and character" (608).
Summer vacation at Travemunde. Hanno in his room: "All he could hear was the even, sedate sound of a laborer raking the gravel down below in the garden, and the buzzing of a fly trapped between the blind and the window and keeping up a steady assault against the windowpane. As it darted about, you could watch its shadow tracing zigzag lines on the striped canvas. Silence--and the lonely sounds of a rake and a monotonous buzz. And the gently animated quiet, well-tended, elegant seclusion of this resort, which he loved more than anything else. No, thank God, here were no shiny worsted suits, worn by earthly incarnations of grammar and ratios. . ." (611).
About summer vacation ending, and not believing the math of the number of days left, and the man in the shiny worsted suit winning in the end (615). And yet Hanno has memories to console him (616-17).
Thomas knows he can trust his son Hanno when he, Thomas, is vulnerable (629).
Thomas thinking about afterlife, finding book (it happens to be Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea) that seems to be answering his questions, never goes back to it because of his focus on appearances and not wanting to seem eccentric (631ff).
Of Hanno starting to laugh at curious-sounding name shortly after his father Thomas dies after going to dentist who pulls off a tooth's crown (665).
Selling the estate for less than it's worth (673ff).
Ends with description of a day at school (which seems oddly arbitrary but also somehow fitting, because for someone like Hanno who then dies of typhoid in his teens, a day at school is his life, repeatedly). There are also long descriptions of his improvisation at the piano after school and of the symptoms of typhoid before the closing little debate (Tony doubts) about whether we'll see family again in a next life. The ending lacks the form and grandeur of the earlier novel. Just form matching content? A tired, facile argument. Still, overall, a truly great novel that creates a world that you regret having to leave.
4. The Road to the Churchyard (1900), Gladius Dei (1902), Tristan (1903), Tonio Kroger (1903), and The Blood of the Walsungs (1905)
The Road to the Churchyard A
I prefer the translation (esp. of the ending) in The World's Greatest Short Stories. Life's thoughtless reaction to the suffering Piepsam is Mann's critique of Nietzsche's notion of Life as the supreme value (even though Mann was in many ways influenced by Nietzsche).
Gladius Dei B
Excellent notes here.
If Road is Life vs. suffering, this is Art-that-merely-replicates-Life vs. suffering. Hieronymus is like (and quotes) Savonarola, Munich is like Florence. See David Luke's comment in the intro that the story embodies the irony that Munich is from the Latin for "monk."
Tristan A
Connections:
--Wagner (e.g. Spinell mentions it's getting darker earlier this day, which leads into the playing of Tristan und Isolde on the piano and the Night-Love vs. Day-Separation theme from Act 2; the sleigh excursion that leaves Spinell and Gabriele alone is like the hunting expedition in Act 2)
--Schopenhauer (Beauty vs. brute Life--symbolized here by the name Kloterjahn, from a low German dialect word for "testicles," and by Gabriele's infant son)
--Buddenbrooks ("artistic transfiguration" seen as practical, successful family declines; the infant laughing when his mother is dying, just as Hanno laughed after his father's death in B)
Spinnell: "We hate everything that is useful . . . . And nevertheless our bad conscience so gnaws at us that it leaves not one spot on us unscathed. . . . And so one has recourse to certain little palliatives, without which it would all be quite unendurable. For example, some of us feel the need for a well-conducted outward existence, for a certain hygienic austerity in our habits. To get up early, cruelly early; to take a cold bath and a walk out into the snow. . . . My early rising is really hypocrisy" (104).
Of mysteriousness of sylph-like dream woman who "goes off and marries some fairground Hercules, some butcher's apprentice. And there she comes, leaning on his arm, perhaps even with her head on his shoulder, and looking about her with a subtle smile as if to say: 'Well, here's a phenomenon to make you all rack your brains!'" (106).
A line used in composition, taken out of context, made to apply to writers in general when in fact it is merely an as if statement applied to Spinnell when he is writing his outrageous letter to Gabriele's husband: "no one could have watched him without reaching the conclusion that a writer is a man to whom writing comes harder than to anyone else" (122).
From Spinnell's letter--that Gabriele's son will be "a normally functioning philistine type, unscrupulous and self-assured, strong and stupid" (125).
Ending, with Gabriele's son's laughter (Life) meeting Spinnell (Beauty): "and something in his gait suggested that it cost him an effort to walk slowly--the effort of a man intent upon concealing the fact that he is inwardly running away" (132).
Tonio Kroger A-
Excellent notes here.
Infatuation w/ Hans at beginning gets tedious, and the coincidence of seeing his two infatuations, Hans and Ingeborg, together in Denmark hard to believe. But wonderful passages about art, esp. about the artist's relationship to the "normal," healthy people, and the closing assertion (page 191-92) that the feelings (of envy, contempt, and much innocent admiration) toward those people make a cold writer with talent into someone truly great.
Of dance instructor's "proud bearing": "Yes, it was necessary to be stupid in order to be able to walk like that; and then one was loved, for then people found one charming" (146).
When Ingeborg does not come to him after dance-class embarrassment, the simple statement: "Such things did not happen on earth" (148).
"those minor hacks . . . little suspecting that good work is brought forth only under the pressure of a bad life" (152).
For creative writing students: "Because, of course, what one says must never be one's main concern. . . . If you attach too much importance to what you have to say, if it means too much to you emotionally, then you may be certain that your work will be a complete fiasco. You will become solemn, you will become sentimental, you will produce something clumsy, ponderous, pompous, ungainly, unironical, insipid, dreary and commonplace; it will be of no interest to anyone, and you yourself will end up disillusioned and miserable" (155). Cp. Auden on how young writers should not be intent on subject matter but on playing with words.
The Blood of the Walsungs B+
Twin brother and sister Siegmund and Sieglinde, talking to each other in a witty and affected manner and sapping energy (esp. Siegmund) devoting time to outward appearance, named after incestuous twins in Wagner's Walkure, see the opera again (after asking Sieglinde's fiancee's permission) and back home they duplicate the incest as kind of revenge on fiancee for intruding on their relationships in which they had been each other's only friend. Siegmund (Mann notes he shows the marks of his race: Jewish, and thus the possible interpretation of the story as critique of supposed Jewish decadence led the lines to be omitted from German editions until the mid-50s) says of Beckerath, "he ought to be grateful to us. His existence will be a little less trivial, from now on."
5. Felix Krull (1911), Death in Venice (1912), A Man and His Dog (1918), and the essay "Goethe and Tolstoy" (1922)
Felix Krull B+
Mann said was in tradition of Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit--confession of aristocratic artist. Refers to wanting to expand it beyond FK's childhood.
Felix (felicitous) praises own pedigree, own self (including fingernails), own special gifts (clearly placing him above his schoolfellows). Pretended to be the Kaiser, a prince, to be sick (because he hated school). Stole chocolate from store. Refers to posing nude for painter-godfather Maggotson. Of seeing famous actor backstage naked, just as a firefly is ugly when not phosphorescent. Refers delicately to very early sexual thoughts, and fulfillment with housemaid Genoveva, although he emphasizes that he is "convinced that he has but a crude notion of enjoyment whose activities are directed only and immediately to the definite goal. Of envying sister Olympia because she'll get the variety of a new last name. Of ruin falling on father (thanks in part to rumors leading people not to buy his wine). Everything sold; device that plays "Wine, Women, and Song" every time a door is opened "still jingled unmindful of the desolation." Father shoots himself.
Death in Venice A
Excellent notes here.
Mann said he read Goethe's Elective Affinities five times while working on his story.
Reference to Ganymede (236), Hyacinthus (239), and Narcissus (241).
Aschenbach's Apollonian self-discipline; paraphrase of a passage in his work that is key to it: "nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite" (202).
"The observations and encounters of a devotee of solitude and silence are at once less distinct and more penetrating than those of the sociable man" (215).
Normally, "Aschenbach did not enjoy enjoy himself" (231).
The man who wrote the book on abjection is now wallowing in it: analysis vs. experience. Cp. the contrast between the "delightful vision" (Socrates and Phaedrus) (235) and the "terrible dream" (the Stranger-God, clearly Dionysus) (255) followed by Socrates and Phaedrus again (260), this time going on to the destructive consequences of the path to the spiritual passing through the senses.
Tadzio walking on a sandbar (elevated, almost as if walking on water; separated from the shore) as Aschenbach dies.
"Goethe and Tolstoy" A
Of Weimar man Julius Stotzer links the two: born same year as Tolstoy who saw Goethe as a boy and had Tolstoy come to Weimar school where he taught.
G and T as nature/classic vs. Schiller and Dostoevsky as spirit/romantic, which Mann connects to disease (96ff).
Romanticism insights (96-97).
Other G and T similarities: influence of Rousseau, disappointing to visitors expecting flashy greatness, autobiography (see Goethe using name Hatem where his own name is the one that would rhyme in that spot) and pedagogy linked by "parental tenderness" toward the self, mother earth as key source, sympathy with organic life (G: interest in science; T: interest in the body and death), sensitivity (G: weather/distant earthquake; T: smells), incorporating conflict and confusion,
Of Tolstoy's game "Numidian horsemen," leaping from chair and running around room waving hand in air (125-26).
Of educational theory: Tolstoy thinking children would behave if freed: "let them all out of their benches." Similar to his political anarchy. Goethe more traditional: individuality within structure.
The artistic principle is not RESOLUTION but RESERVE: speaks of reserve in music and in the intellectual sphere, where it is irony (177-78). Compare Keats's "Negative Capability" and "beauty reclining . . . ."
The Magic Mountain (1924)
6. Parts 1-4
7. Part 5
8. Part 6
9. Part 7
10. "Disorder and Early Sorrow" (1925), "Mario and the Magician" (1929), the rest of the Essays (1930s), and Lotte in Weimar: The Beloved Returns (1939)
11-13. Doctor Faustus (1947)
14. Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence-Man: The Early Years (1954)
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Sunday, June 10, 2012
THE POWYS BROTHERS a reading schedule and notes
Here's an inscription from John Cowper Powys to poet Raymond Garlick I found in (of all places) a Ball State University (Muncie, Indiana) library copy of Powys's The Brazen Head.
1872: JCP born
1875: TFP born
1879: Rothesay House, South Walk, Dorchester
1884: LP born
1885-1918: Montacute
1918: Mother dies
1918-23: Father retires to Greenhill Terrace, Weymouth (of him going to birthplace of Stalbridge--89)
From LP's auto The Joy of It, re Montacute and parents (7-8).
JCP at school in Sherborne; TFP to Aldeburgh, Suffolk, where later father bought him a farm (9).
One of few books at old Hardy's bedside: Visions and Revisions (15).
LP's Skin for Skin = "the most perfect autobiographical essay in English" (32).
JCP's def of culture in The War and Culture: Culture "is no smooth, placid, academic thing. It is no carefully arranged system of rules and theories. It is the passionate and imaginative instinct for things that are distinguished, heroic and rare. It is the subtilizing and deepening of the human spirit in the presence of the final mystery" (37).
Chaldon: TFP (Beth Car) c. 40 yrs; LP (Chydyok)14; JCP (Down Barn/Rat Barn) for a short time (51).
From JCP's "Knowledge": "The wild kite over the wold's edge knows / To what piteous end / All joy, all hope, all love, all wisdom, all desire / In swift procession tend-- / Yet none the less it soars and flashes free / Across the glaciers of eternity!" (59).
From JCP's The Secret of Self-Development: "Culture is simply the name we give to a premeditated and calculated response to the mystery of life when such a response is directed toward life as a whole rather than toward any practical end . . . . The most uneducate peasant or factory-hand, if he has developed an original and sensitive response to life, is in reality more cultivated in the truest sense of that term than many a college-bred professor" (65-66).
LP in Arizona desert imagining "William Blake walking here naked, holding high converse with Los" (68).
Little Blue Books of JCP published by E. Haldeman-Julius from Girard, KS (75).
TFP: movement/action, obj characters; JCP: slow, subj characters (107).
Early 30s: JCP at Phudd Bottom, Hillsdale, NY (naturalist/writer Alan Devoe then lived in house and would write about his life there).
LP and wife Alysse Gregory (who had been managing editor of The Dial) in winter 29-30 (interrupted by trip to West Indies) visited Millay/wrote some of Impassioned Clay in cottage, a substantial wood-frame house actually, a little downhill from main residence, at Steepletop. Millay would later visit East Chaldon. LP essay mentions sledge rides, reading of Malory, buckwheat honey and brown bread: "in the mountains above the small village of Austerlitz I know that I was given many chances of touching in time the flying wings of eternity. In the dead of winter on moonlit nights I used often to visit a ruined farmhouse. I would feel my way up the creaking narrow stairs, cross the floor of the upper room . . . and send my spirit out into the night. . ." (144-46).
4 Patchin Place, Greenwich Village: LP and AG had lived there, JCP did, later Cummings (152).
GR, JCP's "greatest novel," begun at Phudd Bottom April 1930 (156). Followed by WS and then Auto (177).
TFP: "if he had written 'The Tortoise and the Hare' he would probably have shown that the race is to the swift, but that it is better not to win" (163).
WS: characters make do with second best; MC: with nothing (191).
TFP to Mappowder in 1940, in house called "The Lodge," near the churchyard (211).
1934: JCP to Corwen, Wales
1955: Blaenau-ffestiniog, Wales
Philobiblon features JCP about time in New York state.
LP buried on Dorset downs near home
TFP in Mappowder churchyard
JCP cremated, scattered on water at Chesil Beach
BOOKS BY THEM
1. Llewelyn Powys. A Baker's Dozen. Intro by John Cowper Powys. London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1941.
Intro: Lovers of humanity = lovers of the past; LP = "a heathen love for earth-life, just as it is, and for all the creatures of earth, just as they are" (13).
The New Year: different ways of celebrating; memories revived by steeple bells ringing in year.
The Village Shop (JCP's favorite): Deborah Sparkes's shop w/ two counters in middle of Bishopston, a main st of Montacute; parrot in garden in back.
The Memory of One Day: Lodging in Brunswick Terrace, Weymouth, when LP and brother caught whooping cough. Excursions to Portland Bill, Upwey Wishing Well, Swannery at Abbotsbury, White Nose.
Childhood Memories: Going from Chaldon Down to spend weeks at Brunswick Terrace. Memory of going to Weymouth in 1893, lodging at Invicta House, facing a square at bottom of st going steeply down from Waterloo Place.
Weymouth Harbor: romantic; winding its way to heart of town.
The Haymaking Months: "In Dorset, the grass is often mown down to the salt sea's edge, green against blue, so that on late mackerel evenings, fishermen laying lobster-pots on subaqueous rocky beds far out to sea can still smell the land of that lovely county. . . ."
Herring Gulls: a sound that can "shock the mind into a remembrance of the planet's long travail," many ages before us.
Tintinhull Memories: two miles from Montacute; very old church(yard); grassy lanes; tavern.
A Montacute Field: Field between Batemoor and Bagnel called Witcombe, where medieval hamlet existed; monks, Thomas Shoel, field-laborers have known the field.
The Harvest: growing of wheat comes from Syria, is ancient, is thus sacred; of Herrick following behind last wagon and his poem ("Drink, frollick, boyes, till all be blythe") reminding that animals must feast too. Regrets the fading of Harvest Home celebration. "Ambition, envy, avarice are the sneak-thieves of our hours. Because gold sparkles we must needs snap at the bait like so many jack-pike with chilled bellies clapped to the mud at a pond's bottom. Life is to be accepted and honoured upon its lowest terms. If we can sit undisturbed in the sun but one hour the drudgery of a whole day's work can be redeemed."
Buffalo Intruders: Africa. Buffalo among cattle all right for a while. Brother fires shot. The two buffalo fight each other. Close proximity makes them easy to shoot.
Montacute Hill: St. Michael's Mount above Montacute. Timber with large King-rookery. Timber cut. Now growing again.
A Somerset Christmas: At Montacute, children into dining room to wait for carolers; John Scott buried in churchyard, epitaph alluding to his drinking, two curt lines added: "And now, God wot, / He has got his lot." Of Christmas tree ready in school-room. How tree was almost unknown in England until Prince Albert, from Germany, introduced it.
1. From Llewelyn Powys. Llewelyn Powys: A Selection. Ed. Kenneth Hopkins. NY: Horizon, 1961. [Sections labeled "Autobiographical" and "Philosophical." Also "Memories of Thomas Hardy."]
Intro
LP owned Edward FitzGerald's shawl.
A Somerset Christmas (see above)
Out of the Past
Of father walking from Weymouth to Stalbridge, where he grew up.
August
A Struggle for Life
Of walking at least 10 miles a day for health around Montacute after return from Switz.
Of his "revolving shelter" east of Weymouth; of sleeping on New York rooftops.
A Sheepman's Diary
Place in Africa where English turned coast to golf course, but can't corrupt the sea.
Philistine conformity of existences in Durban.
Beauty of Montacute upon return.
The Rocky Mountains
With James S. Watson of The Dial in spring 1924.
Albert Reginald Powys
Sale of Hardy ms. allowed ARP to restore Winterbourne Tomson church.
Montacute: Of playing in plot of pear trees behind kitchen garden wall. Thinks of it when wants to "regain serenity."
From Impassioned Clay
Awe inspired by stars. "To be ever aware of the sun as he moves from horizon to horizon is a form of prayer to us who are ignorant of other Gods."
Change your life, with its goal of happiness, undeterred by worldly ambition. Much quoting of Lucretius.
From The Cradle of God
Jesus of Nazareth
Romans' materialism: focus on justice, great roads, spiritually vanquished by others, phallic signs ("ordered their pleasures wholesale without restraint or discrimination").
Few have put Jesus' teachings into practice in part because they are by nature impractical.
Says unpleasant people have locked him up in their churches.
Says his sayings mixed with misconceptions.
But LP just boldly states things about Jesus and Christianity, with no standard for deciding what is wise and what is misconceived: dismisses beneficent God, resurrection (if were true, divine intervention could alter circumstances whenever we wanted: really? why?) , life after death, end of world. And yet (minor point, I know) he capitalizes pronouns when referring to Jesus, and refers to spiritual realm.
Points to the irony of founding a religion on "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?"
The Grave of a God
Of going to Palestine to the Holy Sepulchre.
When I Consider Thy Heavens
History of studying and naming (and misfortune of not knowing names) the stars. Reassurance for wanderers of always seeing the constellations.
The Poetic Faith
Against Christianity for making us despise this world.
Against churches and priests, with worship not even in the open air.
Goal should be personal happiness, found in attention to simple things that modern world masks.
But he ends with how this happiness allows us to "touch for a moment the linnet wings of the eternal"-- Self-contradiction?
Memories of Thomas Hardy
Of how fitting H's cottage at Higher B. was.
Of JCP's ode addressed to (and sent to) H.
H and first wife visited Montacute.
LP visited H when was working on Dynasts.
Praises Hardy for signing letter petitioning for shortening of Wilde's sentence though W's manners so remote from H's. (Meredith would not sign it.)
LP arranged Clarence Darrow's visiting H.
When LP wrote of H's fanciful notions (shared in conversation) of a local Keats being related to John and John coming to West Country to see relatives, and Amy Lowell reading it and putting it in her bio of H, and second Mrs. H being upset.
Reconciliation with H. Visit to Mrs. H. after H's death.
2. T. F. Powys. Mr. Weston's Good Wine. 1928.
Plot
--Mr. Weston and Michael in Ford car w/ title on side sits before hotel in Maidenbridge on 11/20/23; later, will move on to Folly Down, the lanes of which form a cross with the church where the head of Jesus should be, and project its ad into sky, and Michael will talk about townspeople to whom they will try to sell their wine.
--Mrs. Vosper, who slept around early in life and is now jealous of the young, arranges for rape of Jenny Bunce, daughter of inn-keeper who is merry because he blames God for everything, but the sign in the sky distracts the boys.
--Tamar Grobe, daughter of rector, caused her mother's death when her card with a painted angel fell on tracks, she ran to get it, mother pushed her out of the way only to be hit by train herself. Now rector does not believe in God (but does preach His son).
--Mr. Vosper thinks of inn as paradise, where God may appear to show him how to load a hay wagon; talk there about whether Mr. Grunter (who believes end of the world is at hand because he heard Luke Bird say this to geese whom he tried unsuccessfully to baptize because he wanted geese in heaven) or God is to blame for maidens getting pregnant.
--Grandfather clock stops (chapter title: "Time Stops"), suggesting end of the world, but talk continues. Then Weston enters.
--Weston looks familiar to everyone, plus good omens and visions--e.g. Mr. Vosper feeling himself riding safely on load of hay that safely turns a dangerous corner.
--Mr. Grobe drinks wine (it stays full) that is where his Bible had been until he believes in god; later he drinks dark wine (death) which reunites him with his wife.
--Mr. Bunce visits Mr. Grobe, because Weston said to ask him who was getting girls pregnant. Later, Bunce says it was Weston.
--Tamar Grobe, wanting an angel, drinks wine and marries Michael; later she dies when lightning strikes oak tree Grunter cursed; is taken into heavens.
--Mr. Bunce says Luke Bird (who thinks animals, not people, have souls, until he sees Jenny) can marry Jenny Bunce if water in well turns to wine; Weston visits, read from his book (104th psalm), it does, he marries them.
--Grunter drinks wine, no longer wants to be known for sinning. Weston has Grunter open Ada Kiddle's grave, where he finds his lost boot. Later, sees Ada in sky as a star.
--Lion let loose from Weston's car scares Mumby boys and kills Mrs. Vosper; Weston chains it up again with small chain he bought at Woolworth's.
--Mr. Weston and Michael leaving. Drop match in gas tank, turning their enemy into fire, as they go up in smoke.
Quotations
"Town children, as is well known, will watch anything, however ordinary and commonplace it be, and that for a very good reason, for a town child has always a lively hope in its heart that some extraordinary and uncommon beast--an ape, a dog-faced woman, or an armless man--may appear from a hidden corner when least expected, and provide the watchers with the sudden and brisk joy of a hasty flight."
"the clouds that had once travelled so swiftly round the world were now stopped dead and were hanging, a stupid, grey mass, over the town."
"The rich and prosperous, alas! are so often filled with so many expensive wines that, when they come to ours, they pretend that it tastes a little sour."
"Many have belied our good wine . . . and it is certainly strange that even those who should know my book the best have the poorest opinion of what we sell." (Weston)
When told that clock has stopped, "Mr. Weston smiled blandly, as though Time were nothing to him and Eternity his usual wear."
When Mrs. Grobe was alive, she would want to make love during Lent, saying God wouldn't mind: "You needn't be so afraid of Him; He isn't a goose." "I fear He is a goose," Mr. Grobe replies.
Mr. Grobe drinking wine: "he believed in God. He had but buried Him, a little too deeply perhaps, but in a very good and suitable grave--the heart of a man."
Weston to Grunter: "And so, if I am not mistaken, you only live to be talked about. . . ." Grunter: "That 'tis a mortal pity . . . that any woon should try to lead a good life, for when a man do do good, there bain't nothing more to be said."
3-4. John Cowper Powys. Autobiography. 1934. Hamilton, NY: Colgate UP, 1968.
1. Shirley / 2. Weymouth and Dorchester / 3. Prep. School / 4. Sherborne
18-visiting aged relative at Penn House, Brunswick Terrace, Weymouth / bow window of drawing-room facing Esplanade
28-to a real child, cheap (because imagination counts) and old (memory) toy is best; a medium to enter kingdom of heaven
36-encounters cruel people who aren't sadistic like him: they lack imagination; "sadism is . . . imaginatively aware"
42-when Rothesay House, Dorchester, was being built, lived to rear of Brunswick Terrace
48-father would walk 8 mi from Penn House to Rothesay House
83-"first public literary triumph": "A Voyage round my Chamber" (de Maistre)--wrote about family drawing-room
100-01-going with first walking stick to amphitheater in Dorchester
101-OCD stage-wanting to wash hands, have others open doors, washed handle of walking stick he named "Sacred"
104-Never fight against your madness.
117-Montacute: 11 children around mahogany dining-room table
119-Ally Sloper: cutting out pictures of your women: early lust, the opposite of indecency
120-always annoyed by men who turn lust into comedy
122-learned early the consolation of playing out a part for self, being both performer and audience
129-plum-colored Euclid very important (cps/cts Proust's madeleine): taught him could enjoy essences of life "in the scope of some negligible fragment of matter"
139-buying Ally Sloper at Weymouth Station
142-fearing others/wanting to be liked--combination of cold, analytical judgment and fear of conflict
145-at Penn House, shortly after learning the word, saying "Ennui--Sick-of-Everything!"
10. America [15 yrs, lecturing, 1902-17]
446-reading Dostoevsky: "the overpowering intimation that you do not have to go outside the mind in order to find God and the devil"
446-47-skepticism as, paradoxically, the attitude closest to being a saint
450-lectures admired by Dreiser, Masters, Darrow; met Vachel Lindsay and EAR
454-"deep superstitious mania for trying to make every living entity I encounter think more highly of itself (incl. animals, of praying for an enemy)
455-Catholics, Communists, and Jews liked his lectures best--all "intensely religious"
457-entering nerves of author he was lecturing on (not academic criticism)
462-could summon "Druidic hypnotism of speech" like Mr. Geard in GR
465-sympathy with Tertullian's "I believe because it's impossible"
469-76-"slot-machine girls" and burlesque shows
477-82-of asceticism (error) superseding nympholeptism
481-prefers American to French stage maybe because [in Puritan society] "evasive and delicate nuance entirely comprised of imaginative suggestion . . . liable to be destroyed in a moment by the bare truth [as in France]"
484ff-of Pittsburgh
487-getting "anti-fashionable malevolence" from his father
487-88-"as my own idea of Paradise would be an eternal burlesque show from which all burlesque have been eliminated, so my idea of making people happy was to create for them an atmosphere from which all criticism was eliminated"
502-03-beautiful Arkansas
508ff-of "black race" in U.S. redeeming human race for him
509-dislike for modernistic religion with ethics replacing angels and First Cause replacing Christ
509-"the average American is essentially moral, but essentially irreligious"
510ff-some "queer paralysis" at Claypool Hotel, Indianapolis (continuing with him to Chicago)
511-looking in vain in U.S. cities for Henry James novels
517-walks in U.S. cities, learning to enjoy "the most dilapidated specimens of grass" etc.
518-"kindest aura" of memory around [of all places] Springfield, Ohio, walking from Bancroft Hotel to "cemetery by that pleasant river"
524-Dostoevsky as much greater than other novelists as Shakespeare is greater than other dramatists
527-"If I have any psychic power at all it is the power of melting God and Devil into One person, and then of letting this person loose and making Him run amok among moralists."
12. "There's a Mohawk in the Sky" [upstate NY, 1930-34]
608-friendship with Arthur Ficke (see Millay) led him upstate
609-Edna and Eugene "princely" but closer to LP than to JCP
614-15-4 yrs there happy, mostly free of vices (even sadistic thoughts mostly gone)
616-17-more like England (Shropshire/Derbyshire) than any other place in U.S.
622-can walk across fields without bothering neighbors, more so than in England [sounds more like England to me]
624-forgetting "exterior reputation" and seeing self as old, saintly and old, lecherous: connected to nature and thankful for the miracle of girls' legs
625-26-"sacred malice" which could call "Cowperism": assertion of identity against the too-human mask
628-in upstate NY, felt for first time the full swing of his personality
632ff-how spent day in NY
636ff-for past 2 or 3 years, no natural bowel movements!-enemas, which he prefers [a result, we know, of his diet]
-wrote lying down with board on knees, black spaniel Peter under couch
-of walking out, playing God, projecting spirits/angels over nature and to victims (this is like prayer, which given its age he thinks must have validity, but he isn't praying to)
-naming places--e.g. "Tintern Abbey" because the place is like hill-ridge near Montacute they named that
647-favorite before-breakfast walk 1/2 mile from house along river by edge of spinney (copse)
647ff-how he has changed
650-certain that astronomical universe is not all there is; uncertain about afterlife
650-willow near stream to which transfers troubles (his focus on symbol, ritual, to and past point of something like sacrament: as he says, outward sign of inward reality)
651-52-two great currents of his life: strengthening inmost identity / losing self in continuity of generations; the combination offers Power against which Evil fights [last words of the book] "a losing battle"
BOOKS ABOUT THEM
Kenneth Hopkins. The Powys Brothers: A Biographical Appreciation. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1967.
1872: Father, Charles Francis, a Dorset man, from church in Bradford Abbas to Shirley. Mother, Mary Cowper Johnson, related to Cowper and Donne.1872: JCP born
1875: TFP born
1879: Rothesay House, South Walk, Dorchester
1884: LP born
1885-1918: Montacute
1918: Mother dies
1918-23: Father retires to Greenhill Terrace, Weymouth (of him going to birthplace of Stalbridge--89)
From LP's auto The Joy of It, re Montacute and parents (7-8).
JCP at school in Sherborne; TFP to Aldeburgh, Suffolk, where later father bought him a farm (9).
One of few books at old Hardy's bedside: Visions and Revisions (15).
LP's Skin for Skin = "the most perfect autobiographical essay in English" (32).
JCP's def of culture in The War and Culture: Culture "is no smooth, placid, academic thing. It is no carefully arranged system of rules and theories. It is the passionate and imaginative instinct for things that are distinguished, heroic and rare. It is the subtilizing and deepening of the human spirit in the presence of the final mystery" (37).
Chaldon: TFP (Beth Car) c. 40 yrs; LP (Chydyok)14; JCP (Down Barn/Rat Barn) for a short time (51).
From JCP's "Knowledge": "The wild kite over the wold's edge knows / To what piteous end / All joy, all hope, all love, all wisdom, all desire / In swift procession tend-- / Yet none the less it soars and flashes free / Across the glaciers of eternity!" (59).
From JCP's The Secret of Self-Development: "Culture is simply the name we give to a premeditated and calculated response to the mystery of life when such a response is directed toward life as a whole rather than toward any practical end . . . . The most uneducate peasant or factory-hand, if he has developed an original and sensitive response to life, is in reality more cultivated in the truest sense of that term than many a college-bred professor" (65-66).
LP in Arizona desert imagining "William Blake walking here naked, holding high converse with Los" (68).
Little Blue Books of JCP published by E. Haldeman-Julius from Girard, KS (75).
TFP: movement/action, obj characters; JCP: slow, subj characters (107).
Early 30s: JCP at Phudd Bottom, Hillsdale, NY (naturalist/writer Alan Devoe then lived in house and would write about his life there).
LP and wife Alysse Gregory (who had been managing editor of The Dial) in winter 29-30 (interrupted by trip to West Indies) visited Millay/wrote some of Impassioned Clay in cottage, a substantial wood-frame house actually, a little downhill from main residence, at Steepletop. Millay would later visit East Chaldon. LP essay mentions sledge rides, reading of Malory, buckwheat honey and brown bread: "in the mountains above the small village of Austerlitz I know that I was given many chances of touching in time the flying wings of eternity. In the dead of winter on moonlit nights I used often to visit a ruined farmhouse. I would feel my way up the creaking narrow stairs, cross the floor of the upper room . . . and send my spirit out into the night. . ." (144-46).
4 Patchin Place, Greenwich Village: LP and AG had lived there, JCP did, later Cummings (152).
GR, JCP's "greatest novel," begun at Phudd Bottom April 1930 (156). Followed by WS and then Auto (177).
TFP: "if he had written 'The Tortoise and the Hare' he would probably have shown that the race is to the swift, but that it is better not to win" (163).
WS: characters make do with second best; MC: with nothing (191).
TFP to Mappowder in 1940, in house called "The Lodge," near the churchyard (211).
1934: JCP to Corwen, Wales
1955: Blaenau-ffestiniog, Wales
Philobiblon features JCP about time in New York state.
LP buried on Dorset downs near home
TFP in Mappowder churchyard
JCP cremated, scattered on water at Chesil Beach
BOOKS BY THEM
1. Llewelyn Powys. A Baker's Dozen. Intro by John Cowper Powys. London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1941.
Intro: Lovers of humanity = lovers of the past; LP = "a heathen love for earth-life, just as it is, and for all the creatures of earth, just as they are" (13).
The New Year: different ways of celebrating; memories revived by steeple bells ringing in year.
The Village Shop (JCP's favorite): Deborah Sparkes's shop w/ two counters in middle of Bishopston, a main st of Montacute; parrot in garden in back.
The Memory of One Day: Lodging in Brunswick Terrace, Weymouth, when LP and brother caught whooping cough. Excursions to Portland Bill, Upwey Wishing Well, Swannery at Abbotsbury, White Nose.
Childhood Memories: Going from Chaldon Down to spend weeks at Brunswick Terrace. Memory of going to Weymouth in 1893, lodging at Invicta House, facing a square at bottom of st going steeply down from Waterloo Place.
Weymouth Harbor: romantic; winding its way to heart of town.
The Haymaking Months: "In Dorset, the grass is often mown down to the salt sea's edge, green against blue, so that on late mackerel evenings, fishermen laying lobster-pots on subaqueous rocky beds far out to sea can still smell the land of that lovely county. . . ."
Herring Gulls: a sound that can "shock the mind into a remembrance of the planet's long travail," many ages before us.
Tintinhull Memories: two miles from Montacute; very old church(yard); grassy lanes; tavern.
A Montacute Field: Field between Batemoor and Bagnel called Witcombe, where medieval hamlet existed; monks, Thomas Shoel, field-laborers have known the field.
The Harvest: growing of wheat comes from Syria, is ancient, is thus sacred; of Herrick following behind last wagon and his poem ("Drink, frollick, boyes, till all be blythe") reminding that animals must feast too. Regrets the fading of Harvest Home celebration. "Ambition, envy, avarice are the sneak-thieves of our hours. Because gold sparkles we must needs snap at the bait like so many jack-pike with chilled bellies clapped to the mud at a pond's bottom. Life is to be accepted and honoured upon its lowest terms. If we can sit undisturbed in the sun but one hour the drudgery of a whole day's work can be redeemed."
Buffalo Intruders: Africa. Buffalo among cattle all right for a while. Brother fires shot. The two buffalo fight each other. Close proximity makes them easy to shoot.
Montacute Hill: St. Michael's Mount above Montacute. Timber with large King-rookery. Timber cut. Now growing again.
A Somerset Christmas: At Montacute, children into dining room to wait for carolers; John Scott buried in churchyard, epitaph alluding to his drinking, two curt lines added: "And now, God wot, / He has got his lot." Of Christmas tree ready in school-room. How tree was almost unknown in England until Prince Albert, from Germany, introduced it.
1. From Llewelyn Powys. Llewelyn Powys: A Selection. Ed. Kenneth Hopkins. NY: Horizon, 1961. [Sections labeled "Autobiographical" and "Philosophical." Also "Memories of Thomas Hardy."]
Intro
LP owned Edward FitzGerald's shawl.
A Somerset Christmas (see above)
Out of the Past
Of father walking from Weymouth to Stalbridge, where he grew up.
August
A Struggle for Life
Of walking at least 10 miles a day for health around Montacute after return from Switz.
Of his "revolving shelter" east of Weymouth; of sleeping on New York rooftops.
A Sheepman's Diary
Place in Africa where English turned coast to golf course, but can't corrupt the sea.
Philistine conformity of existences in Durban.
Beauty of Montacute upon return.
The Rocky Mountains
With James S. Watson of The Dial in spring 1924.
Albert Reginald Powys
Sale of Hardy ms. allowed ARP to restore Winterbourne Tomson church.
Montacute: Of playing in plot of pear trees behind kitchen garden wall. Thinks of it when wants to "regain serenity."
From Impassioned Clay
Awe inspired by stars. "To be ever aware of the sun as he moves from horizon to horizon is a form of prayer to us who are ignorant of other Gods."
Change your life, with its goal of happiness, undeterred by worldly ambition. Much quoting of Lucretius.
From The Cradle of God
Jesus of Nazareth
Romans' materialism: focus on justice, great roads, spiritually vanquished by others, phallic signs ("ordered their pleasures wholesale without restraint or discrimination").
Few have put Jesus' teachings into practice in part because they are by nature impractical.
Says unpleasant people have locked him up in their churches.
Says his sayings mixed with misconceptions.
But LP just boldly states things about Jesus and Christianity, with no standard for deciding what is wise and what is misconceived: dismisses beneficent God, resurrection (if were true, divine intervention could alter circumstances whenever we wanted: really? why?) , life after death, end of world. And yet (minor point, I know) he capitalizes pronouns when referring to Jesus, and refers to spiritual realm.
Points to the irony of founding a religion on "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?"
The Grave of a God
Of going to Palestine to the Holy Sepulchre.
When I Consider Thy Heavens
History of studying and naming (and misfortune of not knowing names) the stars. Reassurance for wanderers of always seeing the constellations.
The Poetic Faith
Against Christianity for making us despise this world.
Against churches and priests, with worship not even in the open air.
Goal should be personal happiness, found in attention to simple things that modern world masks.
But he ends with how this happiness allows us to "touch for a moment the linnet wings of the eternal"-- Self-contradiction?
Memories of Thomas Hardy
Of how fitting H's cottage at Higher B. was.
Of JCP's ode addressed to (and sent to) H.
H and first wife visited Montacute.
LP visited H when was working on Dynasts.
Praises Hardy for signing letter petitioning for shortening of Wilde's sentence though W's manners so remote from H's. (Meredith would not sign it.)
LP arranged Clarence Darrow's visiting H.
When LP wrote of H's fanciful notions (shared in conversation) of a local Keats being related to John and John coming to West Country to see relatives, and Amy Lowell reading it and putting it in her bio of H, and second Mrs. H being upset.
Reconciliation with H. Visit to Mrs. H. after H's death.
2. T. F. Powys. Mr. Weston's Good Wine. 1928.
Plot
--Mr. Weston and Michael in Ford car w/ title on side sits before hotel in Maidenbridge on 11/20/23; later, will move on to Folly Down, the lanes of which form a cross with the church where the head of Jesus should be, and project its ad into sky, and Michael will talk about townspeople to whom they will try to sell their wine.
--Mrs. Vosper, who slept around early in life and is now jealous of the young, arranges for rape of Jenny Bunce, daughter of inn-keeper who is merry because he blames God for everything, but the sign in the sky distracts the boys.
--Tamar Grobe, daughter of rector, caused her mother's death when her card with a painted angel fell on tracks, she ran to get it, mother pushed her out of the way only to be hit by train herself. Now rector does not believe in God (but does preach His son).
--Mr. Vosper thinks of inn as paradise, where God may appear to show him how to load a hay wagon; talk there about whether Mr. Grunter (who believes end of the world is at hand because he heard Luke Bird say this to geese whom he tried unsuccessfully to baptize because he wanted geese in heaven) or God is to blame for maidens getting pregnant.
--Grandfather clock stops (chapter title: "Time Stops"), suggesting end of the world, but talk continues. Then Weston enters.
--Weston looks familiar to everyone, plus good omens and visions--e.g. Mr. Vosper feeling himself riding safely on load of hay that safely turns a dangerous corner.
--Mr. Grobe drinks wine (it stays full) that is where his Bible had been until he believes in god; later he drinks dark wine (death) which reunites him with his wife.
--Mr. Bunce visits Mr. Grobe, because Weston said to ask him who was getting girls pregnant. Later, Bunce says it was Weston.
--Tamar Grobe, wanting an angel, drinks wine and marries Michael; later she dies when lightning strikes oak tree Grunter cursed; is taken into heavens.
--Mr. Bunce says Luke Bird (who thinks animals, not people, have souls, until he sees Jenny) can marry Jenny Bunce if water in well turns to wine; Weston visits, read from his book (104th psalm), it does, he marries them.
--Grunter drinks wine, no longer wants to be known for sinning. Weston has Grunter open Ada Kiddle's grave, where he finds his lost boot. Later, sees Ada in sky as a star.
--Lion let loose from Weston's car scares Mumby boys and kills Mrs. Vosper; Weston chains it up again with small chain he bought at Woolworth's.
--Mr. Weston and Michael leaving. Drop match in gas tank, turning their enemy into fire, as they go up in smoke.
Quotations
"Town children, as is well known, will watch anything, however ordinary and commonplace it be, and that for a very good reason, for a town child has always a lively hope in its heart that some extraordinary and uncommon beast--an ape, a dog-faced woman, or an armless man--may appear from a hidden corner when least expected, and provide the watchers with the sudden and brisk joy of a hasty flight."
"the clouds that had once travelled so swiftly round the world were now stopped dead and were hanging, a stupid, grey mass, over the town."
"The rich and prosperous, alas! are so often filled with so many expensive wines that, when they come to ours, they pretend that it tastes a little sour."
"Many have belied our good wine . . . and it is certainly strange that even those who should know my book the best have the poorest opinion of what we sell." (Weston)
When told that clock has stopped, "Mr. Weston smiled blandly, as though Time were nothing to him and Eternity his usual wear."
When Mrs. Grobe was alive, she would want to make love during Lent, saying God wouldn't mind: "You needn't be so afraid of Him; He isn't a goose." "I fear He is a goose," Mr. Grobe replies.
Mr. Grobe drinking wine: "he believed in God. He had but buried Him, a little too deeply perhaps, but in a very good and suitable grave--the heart of a man."
Weston to Grunter: "And so, if I am not mistaken, you only live to be talked about. . . ." Grunter: "That 'tis a mortal pity . . . that any woon should try to lead a good life, for when a man do do good, there bain't nothing more to be said."
3-4. John Cowper Powys. Autobiography. 1934. Hamilton, NY: Colgate UP, 1968.
1. Shirley / 2. Weymouth and Dorchester / 3. Prep. School / 4. Sherborne
18-visiting aged relative at Penn House, Brunswick Terrace, Weymouth / bow window of drawing-room facing Esplanade
28-to a real child, cheap (because imagination counts) and old (memory) toy is best; a medium to enter kingdom of heaven
36-encounters cruel people who aren't sadistic like him: they lack imagination; "sadism is . . . imaginatively aware"
42-when Rothesay House, Dorchester, was being built, lived to rear of Brunswick Terrace
48-father would walk 8 mi from Penn House to Rothesay House
83-"first public literary triumph": "A Voyage round my Chamber" (de Maistre)--wrote about family drawing-room
100-01-going with first walking stick to amphitheater in Dorchester
101-OCD stage-wanting to wash hands, have others open doors, washed handle of walking stick he named "Sacred"
104-Never fight against your madness.
117-Montacute: 11 children around mahogany dining-room table
119-Ally Sloper: cutting out pictures of your women: early lust, the opposite of indecency
120-always annoyed by men who turn lust into comedy
122-learned early the consolation of playing out a part for self, being both performer and audience
129-plum-colored Euclid very important (cps/cts Proust's madeleine): taught him could enjoy essences of life "in the scope of some negligible fragment of matter"
139-buying Ally Sloper at Weymouth Station
142-fearing others/wanting to be liked--combination of cold, analytical judgment and fear of conflict
145-at Penn House, shortly after learning the word, saying "Ennui--Sick-of-Everything!"
10. America [15 yrs, lecturing, 1902-17]
446-reading Dostoevsky: "the overpowering intimation that you do not have to go outside the mind in order to find God and the devil"
446-47-skepticism as, paradoxically, the attitude closest to being a saint
450-lectures admired by Dreiser, Masters, Darrow; met Vachel Lindsay and EAR
454-"deep superstitious mania for trying to make every living entity I encounter think more highly of itself (incl. animals, of praying for an enemy)
455-Catholics, Communists, and Jews liked his lectures best--all "intensely religious"
457-entering nerves of author he was lecturing on (not academic criticism)
462-could summon "Druidic hypnotism of speech" like Mr. Geard in GR
465-sympathy with Tertullian's "I believe because it's impossible"
469-76-"slot-machine girls" and burlesque shows
477-82-of asceticism (error) superseding nympholeptism
481-prefers American to French stage maybe because [in Puritan society] "evasive and delicate nuance entirely comprised of imaginative suggestion . . . liable to be destroyed in a moment by the bare truth [as in France]"
484ff-of Pittsburgh
487-getting "anti-fashionable malevolence" from his father
487-88-"as my own idea of Paradise would be an eternal burlesque show from which all burlesque have been eliminated, so my idea of making people happy was to create for them an atmosphere from which all criticism was eliminated"
502-03-beautiful Arkansas
508ff-of "black race" in U.S. redeeming human race for him
509-dislike for modernistic religion with ethics replacing angels and First Cause replacing Christ
509-"the average American is essentially moral, but essentially irreligious"
510ff-some "queer paralysis" at Claypool Hotel, Indianapolis (continuing with him to Chicago)
511-looking in vain in U.S. cities for Henry James novels
517-walks in U.S. cities, learning to enjoy "the most dilapidated specimens of grass" etc.
518-"kindest aura" of memory around [of all places] Springfield, Ohio, walking from Bancroft Hotel to "cemetery by that pleasant river"
524-Dostoevsky as much greater than other novelists as Shakespeare is greater than other dramatists
527-"If I have any psychic power at all it is the power of melting God and Devil into One person, and then of letting this person loose and making Him run amok among moralists."
12. "There's a Mohawk in the Sky" [upstate NY, 1930-34]
608-friendship with Arthur Ficke (see Millay) led him upstate
609-Edna and Eugene "princely" but closer to LP than to JCP
614-15-4 yrs there happy, mostly free of vices (even sadistic thoughts mostly gone)
616-17-more like England (Shropshire/Derbyshire) than any other place in U.S.
622-can walk across fields without bothering neighbors, more so than in England [sounds more like England to me]
624-forgetting "exterior reputation" and seeing self as old, saintly and old, lecherous: connected to nature and thankful for the miracle of girls' legs
625-26-"sacred malice" which could call "Cowperism": assertion of identity against the too-human mask
628-in upstate NY, felt for first time the full swing of his personality
632ff-how spent day in NY
636ff-for past 2 or 3 years, no natural bowel movements!-enemas, which he prefers [a result, we know, of his diet]
-wrote lying down with board on knees, black spaniel Peter under couch
-of walking out, playing God, projecting spirits/angels over nature and to victims (this is like prayer, which given its age he thinks must have validity, but he isn't praying to)
-naming places--e.g. "Tintern Abbey" because the place is like hill-ridge near Montacute they named that
647-favorite before-breakfast walk 1/2 mile from house along river by edge of spinney (copse)
647ff-how he has changed
650-certain that astronomical universe is not all there is; uncertain about afterlife
650-willow near stream to which transfers troubles (his focus on symbol, ritual, to and past point of something like sacrament: as he says, outward sign of inward reality)
651-52-two great currents of his life: strengthening inmost identity / losing self in continuity of generations; the combination offers Power against which Evil fights [last words of the book] "a losing battle"
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