Day 40: Robert Creeley, Lu Xun, Hall Caine
Robert Creeley - The Crisis
I worked out that Creeley spaces out his lines in a way that suggests the intake and exhalation of breath. He writes that in another poem Le Fou:
who plots, then, the lines
talking, taking, always the beat from
the breath
This poem comes later on and paints a universal picture of relationship squabbles.
I won't take it apart too much, but I love the last line: "Laughter releases rancor, the qualoty of mercy is not strained."
Lu Xun - A Happy Family
A very funny story that has Lu Xun experimenting with stream of consciousness.
In the story a hack writer is desperately trying to devise a story that will appeal to the masses and earn him some money. He calls it "A Happy Family" and moves through a list of convoluted decisions about where this attractive and "intellectually exquisite" married couple will live, study, and what books they will read (he settles on giving both of them a copy of Wilde's An Ideal Husband because he has heard it is popular in academic circles.) The part where he decides on their dinner is the a very good bit:
‘Now, what should they eat? Something just a little bit recherché. Sautéed tenderloin, or shrimp roe and sea slugs? Far too mainstream. It has to be the Battle of Dragon and Tiger – but what is that, exactly? I heard somewhere that it’s snake and cat – a Cantonese delicacy, served only at the best banquets. But I’ve seen it on the menu in Jiangsu restaurants, and I don’t think people eat snake and cat in Jiangsu. So it might be frog and eel – who was it who told me that? Where did I say this couple comes from?… Doesn’t matter. Everyone likes a nice bit of snake and cat, or frog and eel – wherever they’re from, it won’t stop them from being a happy family. That’s settled then: Dragon and Tiger it is.
His writing keeps being interrupted by his own unhappy family. His wife needs more money for the firewood and his daughter has knocked over the lamp and is crying after getting a smack from the mother. In a savage line, he decides that his happy family should have no children and then that a happy family should just be one individual.
It ends on something nonsensical and symbollic. In a way it feels very 1920s modernism (but it was published 1924). That is okay with me- that was a good time for literature and this is one of my favourite Lu Xun stories so far.
Hall Caine - The Story of the Manx People
Hall Caine may be the only Manx author who was ever well-known. His book The Manxman was apparently a blockbuster in his time, but is now obscure.
I found this small book of Manx history in the library yesterday and was struck by how good, clear and irreverent Caine's prose is. Published in 1891 under the sentimental title "The Little Manx Nation", there is no real sentimentality in his chapter on the island's people.
He describes the Manx people as "poor, simple, and rude"; a largely practical and unimaginative people:
We are the prosiest of the prosy. I have never in my life met with any race, except icelanders and Norwegians, who are so completely the slave of hard fact. [...] that anything could come out of nothing, that there is such a thing as imagination, that any human brother of an honest man could say that such a thing had been, which had not been, and yet not lie— these are bewildering difficulties to the modern Manxman.
Caine admires the mostly extinct language of manx.
Manx must have been the language of a people with few thoughts to express, but such thoughts as they had were beautiful in their simplicity and charm, sometimes wise and shrewd, and not rarely full of feeling. Thus laa-noo is Manx for child and it means literally half saint. Laa-bee is old manx for bed, literally half-meat, a profound commentary on the value of rest. the old salutation at the door of a manx cottage before the visitor entered was this word spoken from the porch: Vel peccaghs' thie? Literally: Any sinner within?
Looking through the dictionary of manx-anglo dialect, there is a strong sense of wry humour in every proverb. A kind of dark amusement. Says Caine:
Where the pure Celt will hope anything and promise everything, the max man will hope not at all and promise nothing. "Middling" is the commonest word in a Manxman's mouth. Hardly anything is entirely good, or wholly bad, but nearly everything is middling. it's a middling fine day, or a middling stormy one; the sea is middling smooth or middling rough; the herring harvest is meddling big or middling little; a man is never much more than middling tired, or middling well, or middling hungry, or middling thirsty, the place you are travelling to is always middling near or middling far. The true Manxman commits himself to nothing.
Nice!