Stiffening fingers (more on John Petty)

If you want to read the literary profile equivalent of listening to Leonard Cohen songs, I just found another article on the depressing life of the Black Country writer John Petty (1919-1973). This one comes from a 1967 Books & Bookmen, written after the publication of his 1966 dystopian SF novel The Last Refuge, and before his 1972 autobiography The Face.

"The Baby was an anachronism"

Mirrored from A Wren-Like Note, as potentially of geeky interest:

A while back I mentioned the versatile and prolific Scottish writer Andrew Lang - see Andrew Lang: a sampler - and in particular his 1890 Old Friends: Essays in Epistolary Parody (Internet Archive ID oldfriendsessay00langgoog) which imagines correspondence between various literary characters.

In the light of the current MG project, I re-read "From Mr. Paul Rondelet to the Very Rev Dean Maitland" (see pages 121-125). Dean Maitland we know from The Silence of Dean Maitland: the cleric who gets a young woman pregnant and accidentally kills her father in a fight, his guilt only revealed a couple of decades later. Paul Rondelet is a major character in a distinctly forgotten novel, the social satire The Monks of Thelema (Walter Besant and James Rice, Chatto & Windus,1878, Internet Archive monksthelemaano00ricegoog). Lang has Rondelet - an aesthete turned hack journalist, and apparently based on Walter Pater - escape his responsibilities by doing a runner to a Pacific island, and his letter advises the disgraced Maitland to do the same.

The bit that intrigued me was this footnoted sentence:

[Rondelet writes to Maitland] "And, in your time, no doubt you have loved?" 1

1 Alas, not wisely! But any careful reader of "The Silence of Dean Maitland" will see that the Baby was an anachronism. —Ed. 

Lang is presumably referring to some problem with the chronology of the conception and birth of Alma Lee's baby by Cyril Maitland, and I thought I'd check this out. It wasn't wildly difficult, but nevertheless takes close reading; Maxwell Gray is an author prone to subliminal chronologies that take some piecing together from details chapters apart.

The novel starts with Alma Lee hitching a wagon ride to Malbourne on an autumn day. We know it's autumn by the cold weather and the clematis being in seed:

the high tangled hedges, draped with great curtains of traveller's joy, now a mass of the silvery seed-feathers which the country children call "old man's beard"

On this day, Cyril Maitland first meets Alma Lee in Malbourne - they're mutually attracted (in his case, despite his engagement to another woman) - and offers to escort her home from his sister's regular Bible class. Then:

Rather more than a year after Alma Lee's evening ride in the waggon

Maitland (after some months away) returns to Malbourne, where the general gossip is that Alma Lee is now pregnant. It's a few days before the New Year, and another character thinks:

" I shall long remember sixty-two," he thought ; "it has been a good year ..."

We're then told the chronology of Maitland's temporary break-up with his fiancée Marion in that year.

Cyril wrote back to release her from an engagement which he said he perceived had become distasteful to her ... This was in March. At Whitsuntide, Everard spent some time at Malbourne, whence Cyril went to Belminster for ordination at Trinity ... and got himself placed on a mission staff in the East of London, where he led a semi-monastic life in a house with his fellow-curates ...

On New Year's Day (referred  to as that of "sixty-three"), Alma gives birth to a son.

So this connects up to place Alma's first meeting with Maitland as autumn 1861; Maitland's split with his fiancée as March 1862; his leaving Malbourne as Whitsun 1862 (Google finds this to be June 8th); and the birth as January 1st 1863. Thus, given a normal 40ish weeks pregnancy, this timeline easily accommodates Alma's son being conceived in early April 1862. Unless I've missed something, the baby doesn't seem to be an anachronism; I'll probably never know what precisely Lang meant.

- Ray

Magic Merganser metafiction

While checking out one of the titles in the previous post, William Black's 1877 Madcap Violet (Internet Archive madcapviolet01blacgoog), I ran into a comment in William Lyon Phelps's litcrit collection Essays on Modern Novelists. Phelps describes various instances of novelists addressing the reader - what we'd now call "breaking the fourth wall" - and singles out Black as an egregious example, implying Black wasn't quite taking the novel seriously:

William Black once wrote a novel called Madcap Violet, which he intended for a tragedy, and in which, therefore, we have a right to expect some artistic dignity.
- page 14, Essays on Modern Novelists (1910, Internet Archive cu31924027206170).

Black's authorial excursion is worth quoting in full:

CHAPTER XXII.
THE MAGIC MERGANSER

At this point, and in common courtesy to his readers, the writer of these pages considers himself bound to give fair warning, that the present chapter deals solely and wholly with the shooting of mergansers, curlews, herons, and such like fearful wild-fowl; therefore those who regard such graceless idling with aversion, and are anxious to get on with the story, should at once proceed to the next chapter. There is no just reason, one might urge, why fiction should speak only of those days in a man's life in which something supremely good or supremely bad happened to him — jumping over the far greater number of days in which nothing particular happened to him — and thereby recording the story of his life in a jerky, staccato, impossible manner. Destiny is not for ever marching on with majestic stride ; even the horrid Furies sometimes put away their whips. Give a man a gun, place him on a Highland loch on a still day in August, show him a few dark specks swimming round the distant promontories, and he will forget that there is even such a thing as to-morrow. To write out the whole story of his life in this fashion would, of course, be impossible ; for it would be twenty times as long as the longest Japanese drama in existence ; while the death rate among the readers — say twenty-four in a thousand per annum — would interfere with the continued attention demanded by the author. But occasionally, in the briefest story, one of these idle and unmemorable days ought to come in, just to show that the people are not always brooding over the plan of their existence. Anyhow — and this is the long and the short of it — three out of five of the passengers onboard the Sea-Pyot are going in pursuit of mergansers ; and the gentle reader is entreated to grant them this one holiday, which will be the last of its kind.
- pages 214-15, Madcap Violet.

I've only skimmed so far, but far from this aside being an aberration, it marks out Madcap Violet as having metafictional elements, which appear elsewhere in the book. At the beginning of Chapter IV, for instance, Black brings slightly dizzying multiple layers to the text by quoting from a highly autobiographical romance about a "Virginia Northbrook" written by the protagonist, Violet North - then noting that it might be plagiarised from some un-named original, which in turn may itself be unconsciously plagiarised.

CHAPTER IV.
FLUTTERINGS NEAR THE FLAME

A secret rumour ran through the school that Violet North had not only got a sweetheart, but was also engaged in the composition of a novel. As regards the novel, at least, rumour was right ; and there is now no longer any reason for suppressing the following pages, which will give an idea of the scope and style of Miss North's story. The original is written in a clear, bold hand, and the lines are wide apart — so wide apart, indeed, that the observant reader can, if he chooses, easily read between them.

"It was a beautiful morning in May, and the golden sunshine was flooding the emeraid meadows of D—, an ancient and picturesque village about two miles nearer London than the C—  P—. Little do the inhabitants of that great city, who lend themselves to the glittering follies or fashion — little do they reck of the verdant beauties and the pure air which are to be had almost within the four-mile radius. It was on such a morning that our two lovers met, far away from the haunts of men, and living for each other alone. In the distance was a highway leading up to that noble institution, the C—  P—., and carriages rolled along it ; and at the front of the stately mansions high-born dames vaulted upon their prancing barbs and caracoled away towards the horizon.*

* This sentence, or the latter half of it, may recall a passage in a famous novel which was published two or three years ago ; and I hasten to say that Miss North had really never read that work. The brilliant and distinguished author of the novel in .question has so frequently been accused of plagiarism which was almost certainly unconscious, that I am sure he will sympathize with this young aspirant, and acquit her of any intentional theft.

I shall give this a bit more attention.

- Ray

Habitation One: guilty pleasures

This is one for Felix Grant, who commented recently,

One of my favourite guilty pleasures is reading potted reviews of one and two star rated films.

A conversation elsewhere, that touched on dystopian books and movies, brought to mind a definitely one-star SF novel I read years back, Habitation One (Frederick Dunstan, Fontana, 1983), and I found a few juicy reviews online.

"A conservative Christian allegory ... whose gratuitous cruelty is equalled only by its tedium" — Mary Gentle, Interzone
- quoted in The Ultimate Guide to Science Fiction, David Pringle, 1995

Another new name in 1983 was that of Frederick Dunstan, whose Habitation One is both extraordinary and alarming. It describes the life and death-throes of an inbred community occupying the top of a vast tower three and a half centuries after the nuclear holocaust that drove its ancestors up there. Heavy with gruesome and macabre incidents,  mutilations, impalings, cannibalism and necrophilia, the book obviously intends to alarm, in the grand old Gothic manner. More disturbing than that, this murky brew of tobacco-fug, misogyny and Christian cant was dreamed up not by the usual decrepit don or febrile cleric, but by a nineteen-year-old Birmingham schoolboy. Having now graduated in English from Brasenose College, Oxford, Dunstan doesn't intend to write any more SF: he doesn't regard it as 'a serious genre'. Thank goodness we shall be spared Habitation Two and Three. One is plenty.
- British Book News - Page 138, 1984

And there's the extended White Dwarf review by David Langford, reprinted in The Complete Critical Assembly:The Collected White Dwarf (And GM, and GMI) SF Review Columns:

The book is a wondrous cornucopia of things for young writers to avoid ... lumpish prose and wooden characters ... gratuitous nastiness ...
...
Hurled skyward and pulverized from the waist down by an immense steam-catapult, one public hero nevertheless retains consciousness throughout his flight, successfully shoots an arrow into the madman who (for reasons never all that clearly explained) is dangling from a rope high up, fields the small nuclear device with which said madman planned to destroy the entire plot, and arcs onward, nuke in hand, to glorious immolation somewhere over the edge of the world. I forgot to mention earlier on that he was tortured by having his moustache ripped off with hydraulic jacks.
...
... a cringingly sententious epilogue which ascribes the unlikely happy ending to divine intervention. I don't see why God should carry the can for the ineptitudes of F. Dunstan. A real running sore of a book, this.
- for full review, see pp 48-49, The Complete Critical Assembly, David Langford, Wildside Press LLC, 2002

Don't get the idea that Habitation One is so bad as to be amusing and worth seeking out; it isn't. I read it once, and don't intend to again. The worst part of it, for me, was not the nastiness, but its excruciating pomposity, which was echoed in author interviews with the pipe-puffing 21-going-on-middle-age Dunstan. I remember particularly loathing that he should get validation as an author via this execrable book inexplicably getting into print. But it's consolation that there's no evidence of his having written anything else that was published. Perhaps, like Grunthos the Flatulent, "his own major intestine—in a desperate attempt to save life itself—leapt straight up through his neck and throttled his brain" to save the world from further works.

There's a certain poignancy in coming across a copy of Frederick Dunstan's Habitation One, a curious post-apocalyptic novel, in Derek's Bookstall in Preston, and reading in the author biography of Dunstan's "lifelong desire to be an author" and that in 1983, when Habitation One was published, he was "at work on his second novel". No second novel ever appeared.
- Nicolas Royle, Lives & Letters, The Guardian Review, January 12, 2013

- Ray

Petty gripes

More on the late Walsall author, John Petty (see previously John Petty: The Face and The Last Refuge). I just found this 1958 article by Petty, which starts with an attack on another writer, briefly digresses to a description of his writing schedule, then concludes with a lengthy anti-intellectual diatribe hostile to, well, every writer of the time more successful than, or who had it easier than, Petty. Enjoy ...

SF and other text source visualisations

Via MetaFilter: The History of Science Fiction, a lovely infographic by Ward Shelley that was one of the winning submissions to 7th Iteration of the Places & Spaces: Mapping Science Exhibit on "Science Maps as Visual Interfaces to Digital Libraries" (2011).

"History of Science Fiction" is a graphic chronology that maps the literary genre from its nascent roots in mythology and fantastic stories to the somewhat calcified post-Star Wars space opera epics of today. The movement of years is from left to right, tracing the figure of a tentacled beast, derived from H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds Martians. Science Fiction is seen as the offspring of the collision of the Enlightenment (providing science) and Romanticism, which birthed gothic fiction, source of not only SciFi, but crime novels, horror, westerns, and fantasy (all of which can be seen exiting through wormholes to their own diagrams, elsewhere). Science fiction progressed through a number of distinct periods, which are charted, citing hundreds of the most important works and authors. Film and television are covered as well.

It has a number of works of proto-SF that I keep meaning to read, and suggests some intriguing "genetic" paths for the origins of genres. For instance, treating the Western as an offshoot of Gothic seems a strange but by no means unarguable theory, given the tropes of Westerns: wild landscapes, imperilled heroines, clear-cut good and evil, grotesque villains, and brooding Byronic "man with no name" heroes.

See also the Winning Entries page for Places & Spaces: Mapping Science, which leads off in other interesting directions, such as Chris Harrison's projects on Visualizing the Bible (maps of "social networks" created by plotting people and places occurring in the same Bible verse).

Journal of Religion and Film

Journal of Religion and Film: I just ran into this very interesting University of Nebraska journal via the MetaFilter thread Shinto Perspectives in "Spirited Away".

Even in secular Western culture, religion is still deeply intertwined with cultural memes and the tropes of storytelling, such as representations of good and evil in film, as the statement of purpose explains:

The Journal of Religion and Film examines
the description, critique, and embodiment of religion in film.

Many films, directly or indirectly, serve a "religious" purpose. Like religions, they present meanings that people give to life. They portray people and the values people embrace in life. The films themselves, then, are a part of the fundamental religious "struggle with the ultimate problems of human life."

Articles in the JR & F, then, are not restricted to a denominational list that equates religion with a commonly accepted set of rituals, beliefs, and laws. "Religion," in contemporary times and in the issues of the Journal, is much more personal and interactive than that. It is the living of values constructed in a dialogue between an individual and a culture. A particular worldview is received, adjusted, reapplied, and lived by the individual.

So the JR & F will consider not only films that explicitly highlight traditional religious images and themes. Although there will be analysis of films that consider such religious themes as sacred space, sacred times, savior-figures, images of god(s), and battles between good and evil, there also will be investigation of notions and assumptions that underlie everyday, "secular," human talk and action.

Better still, JR & F is free-access.  Check out its index of films.

Just skimming, the "A" section I find: "Angels Carrying Savage Weapons:" Uses of the Bible in Contemporary Horror Films, by Mary Ann Beavis; Mozart & Salieri, Cain & Abel: A Cinematic Transformation of Genesis 4, by Gregory Allen Robbins; The Devil We Already Know: Medieval Representations of a Powerless Satan in Modern American Cinema, by Kelly J. Wyman; Archetypes on Screen: Odysseus, St. Paul, Christ and the American Cinematic Hero and Anti-Hero, by John Fitch, III; Anti-feminism in Recent Apocalyptic Film by Joel W. Martin; Any Gods Out There? Perceptions of Religion from Star Wars and Star Trek by John S. Schultes; and James Cameron's Cathedral: Avatar Revives the Religious Spectacle by Craig Detweiler.

- Ray

Salutation Inn

Salutation Inn, Topsham

A book on my search list: Salutation Inn. A novel (Richard Gray, pub. Michael Joseph, 1941). I stumbled across some reviews, and found from one that the novel's setting is actually Topsham's Salutation Inn. Here's one:

Although it is a first novel, "Salutation Inn" is a powerful story that shows its unknown author as a gifted writer. It is a psychological study that depends largely on atmosphere for its success. The author uses an old inn in a lonely marshland English village as a retreat from a murderer for whom the police are hunting. At this "Salutation Inn," Inigo Orton, a man of strange passions, who calls himself Mr. Crawley, finds an understanding, appreciative soul in the barmaid, and a welcome from an eccentric old woman. But he can find no peace of mind, and. inevitably, tragedy results when his identity is discovered. This is a decidedly unusual book, with a pervading and inescapable atmosphere that only artistry and true feeling could produce.
- The Advertiser (Adelaide), 20 September 1941

It looks strange enough to be a good yarn, and I'd love to read it. The Catalog of Copyright Entries for 1941 identifies "Richard Gray" as Jasper Salwey, a sufficiently unusual name to be most likely the artist and architect Jasper Philip Salwey (1884-1956).

Update: see Salutation Inn revisited for more on this book.

The Salutation Inn in Topsham has been closed as a pub for around two years, but I was delighted to be given a tour today by the new owner Ed Williams-Hawkes, who is renovating it as a top-of-the-range hotel. I'd previously only seen the ground floor and a handful of the first floor rooms, but it's an amazing 26-room labyrinth over three floors, and architecturally very interesting underneath the many (often hamfisted) modifications over four centuries.

Reverting to Topsham at the time of its prosperity, a further development of the vernacular is to be seen in the Salutation Inn, famous as an hostelry for travellers by road from North to South Devon as well as a rest-house for those travelling by sea to the Continent. This building which, in its external treatment as in the interior details of the Assembly Room and other apartments, follows the mode of 1720, marks another and later stage of the formative development. By this time the Dutch influence had become completely anglicised. The main feature of the design is the prominence given to the Assembly Room, which is placed over the coach entrance and in former days was supported on two timber Doric columns of proved substance. The original stone pedestals are in situ, but the corpulent supports have in the last twenty years been replaced by modern brick piers which lack grace and character, apart from their efficiency as structural supports.
- Regional Architecture of the West of England, Sir Albert Edward Richardson, Charles Lovett Gill, 1924.

Cat mummy, Salutation Inn

It's quite gothic in places, and in the attic there's a mummified cat (above) such as are found occasionally in old buildings. It has been nicknamed "Tonic", because it has a gin trap on one foot. It's unclear if this is how it died, or if this was added as a scary detail posthumously.

The showpiece of the Salutation, however, has to be the Assembly Room that overhangs the frontage, and is a prominent feature of Topsham's Fore Street.  The Salutation must have seen some memorable junkets. As I've mentioned before, in the late 1700s the Salutation was the headquarters for Colonel Robert Hall's Devonshire and Cornwall Fencibles during the War of the First Coalition (see Samuel Carter Hall visits Topsham); and the Assembly Room was the venue for the upper-crust booze-up ...

The officers of the navy and army, resident at Topsham, and the Gentlemen of the town, repaired to the Assembly Room, at the Salutation Inn, to drink the King's health; and the Rev. Mr. Carrington being unanimously requested to take the chair, and having complied in a very obliging and polite manner, many loyal toasts were drank, and many excellent songs were sung, particularly one printed and dispersed amongst the company upon the occasion.

... following the hanging of Tom Paine in effigy in Topsham in 1793 (see Tom Paine hanged in Topsham).

Assembly Room, Salutation Inn, Topsham

See Exeter Memories - The Salutation Hotel - Exe Street, Topsham - for a bit of the history.  A skim of the British Library 19th Century Newspapers archive finds the Salutation had extremely varied use in the 19th centuries: for balls, property auctions, society dinners, coroner's inquests and even as unofficial mortuary for people found drowned in the Exe.

Addendum: 1st August 2011.

Renovation of the frontage is now visible, involving restoration to historically authentic appearance (slate blue, not black, paint; exposed wood on the gate; and the paint removed from the brick pillars).

Addendum: 21st August 2012

See Salutation.

- Ray

"It was a dark and stormy night"

As explained at Wikipedia - It was a dark and stormy night - the opening paragraph of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1830 novel Paul Clifford is generally considered the nadir of purple prose.

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

However, having just read part of Maxwell Gray's 1899 story collection The World's Mercy, I have to conclude Bulwer-Lytton to be an amateur at the genre. Here are the intros to a couple of the stories:

The night was stormy ; a wan moon rode through masses of black and gold, swift-sailing cloud, through lakes of clear blue space and threads of opal and silver film, thus producing a wildly beautiful and impressive series of sky pictures. Now and again the dim wet streets were swept empty and dark by a scud of rain, then as suddenly flooded by clear, pale moonlight, when the wet flags and streaming runnels became a dazzling silver brilliance, making the light from houses appear duller and dimmer than before.
- An Old Song, from The World's Mercy

A bitter wind swept the dim-lighted street, along which a few stragglers passed with bent heads and swift steps, and through which wheels rattled drily at intervals. It shook windows in sudden gusts; it rose from time to time to howl savagely round the house, and died down in groans and mutterings of impotent rage. Stars glittered with fiery brilliance in a steel-blue sky that seemed to shudder in the fierce blast; trees shivered and moaned in the bear [sic] garden.
- The World's Mercy, from The World's Mercy

The World's Mercy comprises some rather odd stories; the title story in particular reads like a pious temperance-themed melodrama of a format that went out of fashion decades before. It opens on the above-described chilly night in a small town, and introduces us to Isabel Arnott, a wife who is caring for her sick baby (the only survivor of several children) and waiting with trepidation for the arrival of her husband George, who is a doctor and drunkard. He turns up in the small hours and - a regular habit - locks her and baby Harry out on the street. With no-one else to to turn to, she is rescued by Arthur Hedley, a student lodging opposite, who takes her and the child in.

Arnott wakes with a hangover the next day to find Isobel missing and Harry laid out dead in his cot. The maid, Charlotte, explains that Harry had been left dead on the doorstep. Arnott is guilt-stricken and swears that he will never drink again. He persuades Charlotte to keep quiet about the night's events, on grounds that his imprisonment would leave Isobel destitute.

The next day, his colleague Dr Marston visits and is also informed of the true story; shocked, he nevertheless, pledges to help Arnott turn his life around. In this, Arnott succeeds over the next few months, materially at least. Isobel, however, remains missing, and Arnott still suffers badly from guilt. Charlotte seeks the aid of a visiting missionary, Philip Sternroyd of the Upton Fathers. Sternroyd comes to the house, and Arnott is surprised to find that he knows him: he was Sternroyd's fag at public school. The charismatic Sternroyd gives him absolution, and Arnott lives a sober and religious life from that point.

Five years later, we are introduced to a lady called Belle Harris, who lives in an idyllic country cottage with her daughter Pansy. Her husband Arthur, generally away on business, is due to arrive. On his return, it's revealed that "Mr and Mrs Harris" are Arthur Hedley and Isobel Arnott. She was pregnant at the time of her rescue, and Pansy is her daughter by George. Her relationship with Arthur is already distinctly chilly, but Arthur has further bad news; he has to end it, as he too is suffering from guilt, and his strict Puritan parents want him to marry someone else. He gives her six months' lease on the cottage, and leaves.

A further five years have passed, and George Arnott is living an exemplary life. His medical practice has recovered and, still friends with Sternroyd, he is physician for Hill House, a hostel for alcoholics. In the autumn, Sternroyd suggests he and Arnott take a holiday at St Egbert's, a mission house in Portsmouth run by their friend Father Anstey ("a sort of slum menagerie, a combination of socialism and monkery"). During their stay, there's an altercation in the street, and Arnott is called to attend on a flower-seller who, in a drunken fight, has hit her head on a curbstone. It turns out to be the long-missing Isabel. Gravely injured, she recovers consciousness enough to tell her story - how she turned to crime and drink after Hedley abandoned her - and to evidently forgive George, before dying. Sternroyd then introduces George to his daughter Pansy.

Then, with a sob of unspeakable thankfulness, he took the lonely little thing in his arms and kissed and blessed her. And in the deep peace that fell upon him he knew that his penitence was accepted and her pardon sure. So he tasted the sweetness of God's mercy, which is not as the world's mercy.

I can't disagree with the general thrust of reviews: that the book was mostly a turkey. The sarcastic Pall Mall Gazette review is worth quoting in full:

VERY FINE WRITING
When at page 4 we found a boy of a year old called a "noble babe," we instinctively tightened our grasp of "The World's Mercy" and applied ourselves with new diligence to the assiduous and conscientious study of every page that followed, in the active hope that "Maxwell Gray" would afford us more entertainment than is her wont. For a while our search was unrewarded, although it was with a pleasurable thrill that we found an old gatekeeper described as "castellan;" but in the fullness of time, and after some wearisome plodding, we came, in a waking interval, on this lofty and soaring passage: "Oh! rosemary ... your fragrance is the scent of unforgotten youth, which was sweet, and is bitter in retrospect ... which was gloomy with despair, and is now, seen in the arid meridian of life, glorious with auroral hues of hope." Even the doubt whether the reference is to youth or a visible perfume cannot conceal from us the sublimity of this description. To those who enjoy this style of thing, since there is more of it, we can recommend the book, but as for the tales themselves, we can but give praise to the last of them, "The Widow’s Clock," which is simple, unaffected, and pretty. The rest are generally without plan or purpose, the incidents are not worth the chronicling, the dialogue is still, awkward, and frequently impossible, and the characterization indistinct and colourless. Moreover, although we expect no graces of style from "Maxwell Gray," we note with surprise how much the construction of her involved sentences leaves to be desired, even in the matter, even in the matter of gramma. It must, however, be admitted that she is powerful and convincing in the account of Isabel Arnott's horror of her drunken husband, and of that husband’s remorse on finding that he is responsible for the death of his baby boy, "the noble babe" aforesaid. But the strongest impression the book leaves on the reader’s mind is that "Maxwell Gray" had better keep to the writing of the religious novel, and leave the writing of short stories to others.
- The Pall Mall Gazette, March 28, 1900

- Ray

Dilemna

I don't often read the Daily Mail, apart from the puzzle page; however, a few days back I spotted an interesting reader's letter from a correspondent who recalled having been taught, in his very traditional Scottish school, a misspelling of "dilemma" as "dilemna".

No doubt of it: "dilemma" - etymologically from Greek δί-λημμα ("double proposition") - is correct, and the Oxford English Dictionary - quoted at the discussion at Wordwizard - confirms this. But a look on the Web finds many other people with a distinct recollection of having been taught otherwise.

I believe them, because this seems more than just an occasional misspelling: on Google Books "dilemna" gets 8,870 hits to 2,333,000 for "dilemma" (i.e it accounts for about 0.4% of occurrences in published books), and Google Ngram Viewer finds it to be long-standing (British English / American English). It's not limited to low-quality publications; examples include scholarly texts (e.g. here and here); Punch magazine (here); the works of William Pitt (here); the works of Washington Irving (here); and English classics such as Fielding's Amelia (here), Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (here), Swift's Gullliver's Travels (here) and Smollett's The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (here).  It's hard in particular to believe that the last batch of writers, and their proofreaders, would all make the same spelling mistake, so I can only conclude "dilemna" to be a genuine variant spelling that has been propagating, undocumented,.for centuries.

How it arose is hard to say. The earliest book examples I can find are in Latin texts in the 1500s (dilemna / dilemma), which is the same period, according the the OED, when "dilemma" itself entered English.  I rather wonder if it originated as a misreading from Gothic script. In some of its forms, as in the above example from Medieval Writing and Scripts, words tended to consist of horizontally-condensed and very similar verticals: "mm" and "mn" wouldn't look much different.

Alternatively, maybe the error crept across from mathematics teaching.  Euclid's Elements in Latin was a standard text that persisted long after Henry Billingsley's first English edition came out in 1570.  The Dutch-printed 1692 edition by Henrik Coets spells "lemma" - a mathematical proposition - as "lemna" (examples).

(There is, by the way, a Greek word "lemna" - but it's duckweed).

- Ray

"A Plea for the Silence of the Novelist"

More from Maxwell Gray. In 1902, a number of newpapers reported her as saying that it wouldn't matter much if no more novels were written for the next fifty years.

"People write too many novels now, and they write hastily and badly ... Novel-writing has become a trade; it is no longer an art. Writers ought not to live by literature. It should be a staff, not a crutch. The moment an art is pursued for gain, it is lost".

- Literary Notes, Otago Witness, Issue 2515, 28 May 1902, Page 66

She probably should have let that lie, but she nevertheless expanded on the comment later in 1902 in an extended article in the weekly American periodical Littell's Living Age - an astonishing rant whose targets include bad novels, cheap periodicals, writers who write for money, bad proofing and printing, sex in fiction, the vulgarity of the reading public, the educational system, steam power, advertisements, people who write novels too young, and the weaker works of famous novelists. Oh, and she thinks "the great Boer War a lesson to the world in gentleness, magnanimity and self-restraint, and an era in human progress".

A Plea for the Silence of the Novelist

Once I said in my haste, following an august example, that it would be a matter of small moment if no more novels were written for the next fifty years. On leisurely reflection I am inclined to endorse that opinion, though half a century appears an excessive term of silence to impose upon our vast army of Scheherazades, many of whom, like the Arabian story-teller, tax their powers of invention and stimulate their flagging energies to the utmost to gain respite, if not actually from death—by starvation—at least from financial dissolution. But no more novels, say for twenty years, during which a generation might be reared with a taste for something nobler than novels, or at all events for the fine works of fiction that already exist and are so seldom read; or even for ten or five years, what a boon that might be!

It is not that all the tales have been told; they had all been told many times over long before letters were invented. They always will be told in some form or other in prose or in verse, in speech or in writing, till the end of time, and they will always, these same old tales, be pleasant to tell and pleasant to hear till the end of time, because they tell of things that can never grow old, of the relation of man to man, and of the relation of man to the seen and to the unseen that surrounds and moulds him. Also of the relation of man to his time, for, though you will say times change, yet man's relation to his time is constant. But surely man changes? Man never changes; he takes polish and mould, but continues the same forever; the elementary passions are inalterable; every subtlest, most exalted emotion of which we are capable is based upon them. But manners change? Aye, truly, but effect no alteration in the eternal human; they are but lines fretted upon durable stone or letters cut in beech rind, leaving the rock or tree beneath as before. Still, this perpetual changing pageant of manners is among the most variety-giving elements in the novelist's material, and the nice adjustment of the eternal human to his casual environment makes no small part of the literary craftsman's skill.

No; the tales may be told and re-told from every point of view and in every variety of detail and amplification, with every embroidery of thought and fancy and manifold beauty of setting, and never fail to charm, nor, if rightly told, to edify and instruct; though amusement and not edification is the novelist's proper aim.

A good fiction writer must have a specially organized brain, of which in the nature of things there can be but few; yet our tale-writers are innumerable. And, while the most gifted do their art injustice by hasty and therefore crude production, the Press teems with novelettes, newspaper-corner serials made by the yard, and magazine stories with nothing to recommend them beyond a knack of putting together what arrests the flaccid attention of vacuous and brainless indolence, unable to endure a second without external diversion from inward monotony. It is weariness to think of these productions; the sight ot the empty stuff piled on railway bookstalls produces moral and mental nausea. Some of the cheap periodicals fluttering on the stalls consist entirely of short stories, rarely enlivened by a spark of wit, a gleam of fancy, a glow of humor or a touch of life. The same may be said of many six-shilling and three-aud-sixpenny novels turned off at the rate of three or four a year, made to sell and for nothing else. Some of these are very clever, many give token of much undeveloped power stifled by haste. Many show considerable knowledge, though rarely of human character; others display a smart style, a ready buffoonery, or a pert flippancy in touching subjects that should only be approached with reverence and delicacy, which passes for wit and humor; while others, clever in a way and always fluent, win favor by sheer vulgarity and indecency. It must be confessed that a large proportion of this great flood of novels are well put together; they show a technical skill which accentuates their inherent want of vitality. They give token of special training. Lessons in the art of writing fiction are actually given to literary aspirants by professors, who make a living, or at least turn an honest penny, by this singular trade. It was a sad moment for literature when the notion that novel-writing was a lucrative craft first got about, thanks partly to papers by James Payn, suggesting the training of average middle-class youth for this simple, inexpensive and well-paid profession; partly to the genial and. large-hearted Sir Walter Besant, who never tired of representing the literary profession, and especially fiction, as a profession, like any other, to be learnt and practised as an exclusive means of gaining a livelihood by the moderately endowed, such as swell the lower ranks of the medical, legal, and clerical professions. A man with no marked aptitude for his special profession and of general ability even beneath the average, may still be a respectable and useful lawyer, doctor, soldier, or clergyman, great numbers of which are needed to carry on the ordinary affairs of life, though exceptional power and even genius is requisite in the higher walks of these vocations. But, while the rank and file of most callings can do very well with industry, training, and moderate intelligence, no one wants a mediocre novel, poem, or picture; unlike the hard-working doctor in a difficulty, the hard-working novel-writer cannot call in a recognized head of the profession to disentangle a plot, supply a true conception of character, or give sparkle and music to a dull and dragging style. And a feeble novel is a serious evil.

No one should be trained to write novels and nothing else; the best training for a novelist, after the school of life, is the exercise of some other profession, and of course such knowledge of literature as is included in what is called a liberal education, the more of such knowledge the better. Nor should any write fiction in cold blood or of set purpose as a toil or task, for joy is necessary to artistic creation, but only when impelled by some strong inward compulsion, when he has characters to depict, a story to tell, or the need of disburdening himself of some message or imparting some irresistible gaiety concealed in the story. It is said that but for the need of money few would write, paint, sing, or act at all. Rather it seems that a strong bent to any art or craft creates a necessity for its active exercise that flags with time, more or less according to individual temperament, and is quickened by the stimulus of material and other rewards such as fall to the successful artist. When the stimulus is too keen and jaded or out-worked powers are spurred to over-activity by actual need of money for the day's wants—as is usually the case when literature is the only source of income— the work must be poor, the artist's talent enfeebled and his genius gradually atrophied. That spontaneity is a first condition of artistic creation, and that fine imaginative work can only be produced in an atmosphere of freedom and mental repose, is well known.

Still greater is the deterioration of art when pursued for gain. Money for its own sake, to furnish luxury and gratify pride, is a venomous thing; nothing corrodes so surely and debases so effectually. When a man sets himself to build up a fortune by honest commercial or industrial enterprise, he does no ill tiling, providing that he plays the game fairly. He uses special powers to the end to which they are fitted and benefits mankind as he goes; his joy is not so much in possessing wealth, which he may apply to noble and unselfish ends, as in playing a skilful and exciting game and exercising conscious powers of no mean order; It is well for the community that wealth should be produced; it is his part; his delight is in doing it well. Though even commerce with no end but gain is corrupting.

But when an artist, whose part is to minister to man's higher nature; to reveal the beauty of the visible world and of the relations between man and man and to trace out the hidden springs of action; and, in the novelist's case, to furnish wholesome amusement through the medium of imagination, fancy, emotion, and reflection; to turn fine pointed satire upon human folly; to create heart-easing mirth by a genial presentment of sudden incongruities of character, circumstance, incident, and conduct; to inspire high aims, pure ideals and noble emotion; to widen our sympathies and enlarge our charity; to create living human characters and represent them in action not too much above or too much below reality, too commonplace or too elevated, and by the power of art to present a just and accurate, though never literal, picture of human life as it is, has been, or might be—when one so charged with high and sweet responsibility sets up gain as the first enki of art, it Is a kind of simony and the work must deteriorate. Of course fiction may furnish unwholesome amusement and evil mirth, inspire vile ambitions, ignoble ideals and base emotions, narrow our sympathies and destroy our charity, and yet present a fairly accurate picture of human life and character; but the picture will never be complete, the wit and humor never quite honest, the life and character necessarily one-sided; the writer's art and genius will be lessened and weakened by his moral limitations. Because all things evil tend to death and all things good are In the direction of vitality; because the main tendency of human life and character Is right and noble, and because It is against human nature in the main to love what is morally bad and degrading. For God certainly made the world and he made man in his own image.

Yet he who ministers at the altar should live by the altar. Truly; and the loaves and fishes were ungrudgingly distributed: but those who came for the sake of them were sternly rebuked.

Some of the best work in the world is done gratuitously; roughly speaking, all political and public work in Englaud is unpaid. Nor can such emoluments as fall to the lot of public men ever be a main object with those who take office. A considerable part of every medical man's work is gratuitous; pay is not what attracts men to the two Services; those who devote themselves to the higher walks of literature, to philosophy, to scholarship, and to scientific research know well that in doing so they turn their backs upon wealth. On the other hand many fine intellects are lost to science, philosophy, learning, and literature, as well as to the arts, by the obligation of a bread-earning profession. No doubt these callings might be adequately endowed by the richest nation upon earth. And why should not fiction be endowed?

Broadly stated, the present overflow of fiction is characterized by clever mechanism and mediocrity, facility of execution and poverty of mutter, the natural result of inadequately gifted writers taking fiction as a lucrative career; a rarer characteristic is excellent material crudely worked out, leaving great possibilities of character and situation undeveloped, the equally natural result of haste. Everybody knows how to write novels in these days but nobody can. In the same way everybody can paint pictures yet nobody does—or next to nobody. For writers must keep abreast of the tide; nobody has time to read what few have time to write. Even printing is now too hurried to be accurate. Authors beg to be allowed to correct their work and often in vain. Such trifles as unverified quotations, punctuation throwing whole periods out of meaning, lines inserted in wrong order, words transposed, false spelling, the endless array of compositor's blunders and emendations worse than blunders, nre nothing to the man in the train, the woman on the pier, the boy in tbe baker's cart. Really fine works sometimes bristle with misprints rarely noticed by reviewers. The unkempt disarray of the reading vulgar seems to reflect itself upon works of power and distinction and the dignity hitherto associated with literature to be falling into the general decadence of the period.

Another note of hurried fiction and one still more significant of intellectual decay and degraded taste, is a lack of reticence concerning all that portion of our animal life upon which civilized intercourse agrees to be, except under grave necessity, entirely silent, a silence stricter and more characteristic of Teutonic than of Latin races and literatures, and most of all characteristic of our own.

It is not easy to account for the present undoubted vogue for what is so foreign to English character and taste. No doubt there is a corresponding laxity of morals Just now in some classes, but not enough laxity to be an adequate cause. After all, it is a question of taste, more than of morals, and agrees with the decline of dignity and reverence and the free and easy, uncourteous manners that rob social intercourse of charm and life of beauty in these democratic days. This taint, insensibly growing upon us all and lowering all our standards, in morals as well as in taste, together with other notes of the intellectual decadence of the agelove of ugliness and horror, and delight in all that degrades and is painful, absurdly called realism; as if nothing can be real that is not revolting or natural but dirt—this taint, it may be hoped, will not permanently stain our literature. In part a recoil from early Victorian prudery, it may be greatly due to excessive production: straining after what is new and startling, and then after what is newer and more startling, is inevitable and perhaps unconscious in the effort to attract attention in such a crowd. "The most daring writer of the day," Is a selling epithet; "grapples with the problem of sex," another. As if sex were the newest modern discovery and had not discomfited Adam long before it put up the sale of the last novel. People will soon be tired, if not incapable, of being shocked by anything, but not before many minds have been indelibly stained and filled with ugliness and many lives made less tolerable than they might have been.

Yet realism, vulgarity, and everything that is third-rate in thought and style and subject, in all that is essential to art, will always attract the majority of readers, because in days of cheap education and cheap reading matter the majority will consist of the uncultured and unthinking, of those whose mental powers are atrophied by disuse or mechanical (not manual) toil and monotonous occupations, and of those who are just cultured enough to set some value upon letters and intellectual gifts, without being able to follow or grasp their measure; of such as read papers full of incoherent snippings from every writer under the sun and often almost meaningless without the context, under the impression that they are nourishing and training their minds. We all know what the populace loves in drama and music, and how insensible to beauty the masses appear to be, also what a perennial charm they find in vulgarity. It is doubtful if an education that can, by the necessity of things, go little farther than teaching to read print and manuscript, to reckon, and to write, is a benefit; it unquestionably creates a demand for literature that is not literature.

A far better education might be given without reading or writing by committing orally to children's memories passages of the Bible and Shakespeare and Milton and ballad poetry, and in like manner teaching history and things that bear upon practical life. Then, if the use of steam, except in simple domestic matters, could be suddenly and irrecoverably forgotten by the whole human race, and all but very simple machinery made useless— but this, perhaps, is Utopian.

Still, the charm of a world undefiled by advertisements, except the necessary and picturesque signs—like the bush over the wine-shop—suitable to unlettered, but not unintelligent, working people, and unvexed by the yell of the newspaper fiend, the peace of it! In sober earnest, knowledge gained more from observation and bodily experience, from the seen, the touched, the heard, and less from printed books and chalked blackboards, would tend to a far completer mental and physical development of children, especially of those of hand- and body-workers. Mind and body would act and re-act more harmoniously one on the other, brain and muscle would be better balanced; the long superiority of the clerk or penworker over the hand- and body-worker would disappear. The craftsman would approach the artist's level, the anaemic book student, half blind and ignorant of all that concerns the art of living, be known no more. Reading and writing, instead of being the earliest, might well be later rungs in the ladder of learning.

For the chief perceptible result of general primary education is a generation of ignorant and unthinking people, to whom the power of deciphering printed words is a doubtful boon. On the other hand, we have in the field a great army, every man in the ranks of which can read and write, an army of men whose abstention from every kind of excess and violence, hitherto deemed inevitable accompaniments to war and whose humanity and self-restraint under difficult circumstances, besides filling all thinking minds with amazement and admiration, have helped to make the great Boer War a lesson to the world in gentleness, magnanimity and self-restraint, and an era in human progress. Many other causes, the greater care now given to the soldier's moral and physical welfare, the superior class from which he is drawn and the possibility the veldt affords of keeping drink from him, may be assigned for this; but the fact that he can read and write must not be ignored. For must we be too severe upon the scant benefit the civilian populace derives from reading, when we remember the splendid qualities of our reading and writing soldiers, who are at the present moment cheerily laying down their lives and facing every species of suffering and privation for us. But in addition to their mastery of the alphabet soldiers enjoy the great advantages of discipline and physical training.

In the event of this hastily desired temporary silence of the novelist becoming a reality, the novel manufacturer would probably disappear and betake himself to more remunerative trades, while the creator of character, the master of style, the builder of wellbalanced story and harmoniously linked incident, the true magician, under whose subtly woven spells enchanted palaces and gardens of exquisite delight arise unbidden —that is to say the maker or inventor as distinguished from the manufacturer—would take breath and recover waning strength after undue toil. No longer forced, his conceptions would mature silently, his humor mellow, his wit brighten, his imagination recover elasticity and strength of wing. The pageant of life, whether in tragic robe or comic mask, would unfold itself before eyes at leisure to observe and enjoy, and. preserved in memory, would silently impregnate brains that in due time would unconsciously reproduce the slowly developed pictures. There would lie leisure not only to study but to assimilate the life of the past and of other countries and classes, time to enrich overwrought minds by learning and meditation. Even the reviewer might be made something of. Relieved from the necessity of noticing ten novels a day in paragraphs of three lines each, he might be introduced to classic works of fiction and instructed in the elements of literature and first principles of criticism. People with views might convey them to mankind by some more suitable channel than that of fiction, the present conduit for everything, and this would be equally good for the views and the fiction. Readers would have time to discriminate and select from the enormous mass already before them, and many of the best works, at present hurried through or altogether passed over in the headlong gallop down the serried ranks of fresh publications now necessary, might emerge from undeserved and undesirable obscurity. The newly risen generation might be introduced to the immortals: to Scott, Jane Austen, Thackeray, Dickens, Charlotte Bronte. George Eliot, all of whom, it is said, are strange to the young goddesses who cycle and play hockey and tennis and wear such an astonishing variety of hats and gowns, and to the young mortals, cigarette in mouth, who earn opprobrious epithets at wickets and goals, many hurts at polo and much satisfaction on golf-links, and who wear hats and coats of no variety at all. Even poetry might once more form part of the reading of the better educated classes in the vast spaces of leisure created by a few years suspension of novel-writing, and in that case poetry might once more be produced by some "mute, inglorious" Tennysons and Keats, now keenly aware that little but preciosity, brutality, slang, and doggerel charms the public. The young novelist of the future, instead of hurrying, crude, and unteinpered, into print and stereotyping his worst points and cheapest effects because they best please the unlettered masses, might store his mind, train his powers of expression and mature his conceptions during that blessed truce to production, trying his 'prentice hand on works which in a few years he would gladly burn instead of delivering to the eternal damnation of print. Really fine novels are seldom written in youth. From thirty to fifty is the age at which most of the masterpieces of fiction have been produced, an age when intellect has been matured, experience grown and observation developed, and before imagination has weakened or feeling grown cold. It is true that the finest words of Dickens are youthful productions; but Dickens is not so much a great novelist as a great humorist and master of fanciful grotesque. Nor have the greatest writers of fiction been prolific: Dickens, yes; but the later, out-written Dickens to the earlier is as lees to sparkling wine. Thackeray's really fine works are quickly counted; Lovell the Widower and the Adventures of Philip might be spared. How few are George Eliot's at her best, how few the whole of Hawthorne's! After the collapse of many trashy magazines, the greatest good in the proposed silence might be the abatement, even extinction, of over-advertisement. That dishonest commercial trick, the boom, can only be applied successfully to work devoid of distinction; an element of commonness is essential to please readers only educated enough to like to think they are thinking and easily persuaded that they are. And while the boom almost forces such work upon the reading masses, it pushes true literature out of sight of the saving remnant; thus, puffing and booming, together with cheap and inferior magazines, have killed the idea of literature in average minds. But verbose commonplace and cheap effect might no longer content readers fed upon ripe fruits of genius, and neither perpetually importuned to swell prodigies of gigantic circulation nor tempted to dissolve' their intelligence in endless scraps of anecdote and startle their lethargic imaginations by prurient and realistic detail. There might be a literary renascence in England: and even reading would become a means of education if it gave the power of enjoying literature.

But in the event of such a silence, how would poor Scheherazade keep alive, or is there any Fund for the Support of Silent Novelists?

- Maxwell Gray, The Living Age, page 705, No. 3024, June 21 1902

It's hard to imagine the jaundiced frame of mind that led to that piece: MG was not a happy bunny.

- Ray

Grace Dorrien: any relation?

Just an idle observation concerning the heroine of The House of Hidden Treasure: its heroine's name, Grace Dorrien, appears elsewhere in literature.

While Googling, I ran firstly into Tait's Edinburgh Magazine for 1856, which features a serialised story, Grace Dorrien: a tale. This rather wordy romance involves Grace, a pretty and pious young woman, who rejects a suitor, George Lambe, after her father goes unbalanced and takes against George following the death of Grace's little brother. At church, she meets and marries another man, Mr Keith. A year later, her father recovers his senses and wishes to apologise to George, but they go to his house and find he has pined to death, leaving Grace a guilt-tripping note.  Grace realises that she loved him, and ends the story sadder and wiser. (The story seems in part a vehicle for the uncredited author's religious views, particularly in its hostile descriptions of the services and procedures in Independent Chapels).

Then there's the Grace Dorrien who appears in Duffield Osborne's The Wisdom of the Serpent, which appeared in Harper's Magazine, Volume CIII, No. 614, 1901. It's a rather nice story of US society social games, in which a society Queen Bee, Mrs Van Santvoord - who disdains ordinary social traditions as "the wisdom of the serpent" - attempts to engineer a match between Tom Kennicott and Mabel Strange. Mabel has refused Tom, so Mrs Van Santvoord advises him to court the flirty and inconstant Grace Dorrien to engage Mabel's jealousy. It goes entirely counter to plan, as Tom and Grace become a genuine item and marry happily. "The wisdom of the serpent" proves more powerful than Mrs Van Santvoord's schemes.

Given there's such a vast information space in English literature, these three Grace Dorriens may be coincidental, but it is such an unusual name that I'd love to know for sure if there was any conscious or subconscious borrowing of the name from the 1856 tale to Maxwell Gray's 1898 novel and Osborne's 1901 story.

Google Books finds, incidentally, a real-life Grace Dorrien in 1811, among subscribing members of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. The surname, though very rare, did have its profile increased by Julia Kavanagh's 1875 novel John Dorrien.

- Ray

Let me count the ways ... of writing cliches

An Unreal Nature posting today, Power Source, had an interesting quotation about poetry:

Bad poetry is almost always bad because it attempts to claim for itself the real power of whatever it describes in ten lines: a sky full of stars, first love, or Niagara Falls.

- Living by Fiction by Annie Dillard (1982)

This jogged my memory to dig out a clipping on the same subject that we've had around for probably a couple of decades: specific attribution lost, but I think it's from a US or Canadian writers' magazine:

The Poem You Must Not Write

1. It's Hell To Be A Poet.
This poem celebrates writing as a divine calling and the poet as a suffering, misunderstood bearer of truth in a cruel, indifferent world. Self-pity rarely interests readers, and when a poet blames his failure on forces other than himself, he only compounds his poem's problems.

2. I'm An Intellectual.
This poem combines high-sounding, philosophical, didactic and literary observations and allusions, usually in trite, archaic phrases of rhyme and metre. Poems whose main purpose is to impress usually don't.

3. Let Me Tell You How It Is.
This poem states obvious truths or preaches a little sermon urging readers to accept what is already generally believed: God is good, death is deadly, good is better than evil, nature is lovely, etc. Commonplace and preachy poems are never successful.

4. Look What I Can Do With My Computer.
This poem's typographical gymnastics may make a good ad for print fonts, but they don't hide careless writing.

5. Guess What This Means.
This poem is simply obscure (intentionally or otherwise), written in a private symbology about a situation or event that readers can only guess at.

6. Echoes Of The Past.
This poem is often, but not always, written in a correctly structured form, yet is heavily laced with poeticisms, grammatical inversions and archaic phrases and usages that went out of style more than a century ago.

7. Open Heart Purgery.
This poem has many variations covering all aspects of loving and losing, birth and death, and every other sort of emotional experience. Writing such poems may be therapeutic for the writer, but the work is generally too private to be of interest to other readers.

- John D Engle

I'm fairly sure that this John D Engle is the Kentucky-born poet, author and editor John D Engle Jr., who died in 2006 (see obituary), so I'm inclined to think the advice is sound. I'd be grateful if anyone could supply attribution and publication date.

Addendum: I just found a second clipping from a prose equivalent in Christopher Derrick's Reader's report on the writing of novels. Part of Derrick's work was as a book reviewer and publisher's reader, and the book crystallised his experience into advice for would-be novelists. I can't say I like the sexist tone in places, but it's a nicely barbed snapshot of overdone novel-forms that were turning up in publishers' slush-piles 40 years ago. After preamble about the flood of submitted Kingsley Amis imitations folowing the popularity of Lucky Jim, Derrick continues with:

Here are some further examples, some novels or novel-elements that have become cliches:

(i) The imaginative reconstruction of a remote past, prehistoric or mythological, as understood in the light of archaeology, anthropology, and comparative religion. This is a highbrow genre, calling for a certain amount of background study. At its best it makes magnificent reading, and notably in the hands of its high priestess, Mary Renault; but she and others have set an alarmingly high standard. The great mistake is to regard it as a soft option. When this kind of novel fails to be outstanding, it tends to be rubbish : the colourful background and properties draw attention to any central imaginative weakness, rather than making up for it.

(ii) A more lowbrow version of the same thing. A grand rowdy mix-up of sex, violence, and religion in some ancient world, real or imagined: gladiators, bosoms, toppling disasters, temples and sinister priesthoods with their rituals and their schemings: slave-girls being whipped to death. Much is commonly made of the fact that in a society conceived on these lines, people can be plausibly represented as not wearing many clothes, and also as carrying swords and spears all the time, with little public restraint upon the use thereof.

Sometimes we are taken right back to cave-man days, with uncouth characters called Ug and Pong spearing one another and having babies in ditches and stumbling about in swamps and forests. It can be good fun if you're in the mood.

(iii) The novel that is too simply and thinly derived from the fact that its author read English Literature at his university. Often he was a poet or novelist by vocation, but then had to go into some dismal job because he had a family to feed and couldn't get much money by writing. Typically, he became a copy-writer in an advertising agency: the point and tension of this story — which is plainly an autobiographical complaint — arises from the fact that while this job was, in a way, related to the author's education and ambitions, it also involved some loss to his integrity, his bright vision.

In another version that's commonly American, this becomes the campus-novel: the faculty-members who occupy the foreground invariably have Literature for their field, never Biology or Economics.

Literary studies at university level tend to generate a particular kind of stress or disappointment in later years. The same may be true of other fields of study; but where Literature is concerned at least, this is over-familiar territory to the publisher's reader.

(iv) The politico-military thriller of tough action, unless it takes the following principles into account: (a) If there ever were any 'atom secrets', we don't believe in them now: we find it hard to believe in military secrets of any sort. (b) Nobody believes in a dualistic world any more, with Good Us in total and righteous opposition to Bad Them, (c) We shall take it for granted that the Organisation — the one that employs your conscience-harrowed agent — is blind and absurd. If your story is to depend on his gradual and upsetting discovery of this, you have to account for his stupidity in not seeing it from the start. (d) You won't be able to curdle our blood with any newly-invented bomb, gun, ray, germ, or whatever. We're too hardened.

(v) The painfully Irish novel. Glory and heartbreak of wild uproarious youth in Dublin, with students and poets and poverty and fine whirling talk, and Guinness and the Gardai, and people being sick at parties, and mad-eyed mistresses and dotty peers, and great crumbling Georgian mansions where pigs loiter in the drawing-rooms, and everybody hallooing off into the night in some overloaded rackety old car, while the inescapable Church hovers over all.

(vi) The painfully American novel, in which everybody makes a full-time job of acting out — in roaring titanic fashion — some role selected from a Jung-styled repertoire of ancient myths and symbols. This is sometimes a poetical and prophetical lament for the world's despair and for the hellishness (erroneously seen as total) of modern American life; sometimes it's a great raw bleeding slice of history, full of violence and filth. Sometimes it's both. Two things tend to be wrong with Americans, affecting their novels disadvantageously. One is that they worry too much about being American: the other is that they take book-psychology much too seriously.

(vii) The holiday novel. How I — a nice English schoolmarm — was quite bowled over by the hot Mediterranean sun and the garlic and the bottom-pinching Italians.

(viii) The satirical danse macabre: a derisive raiding of dry puppets, a jubilantly sick capering through vistas of dimness, inspired by a vision of modern society' as corrupt (obviously), and also as phoney and daft in the highest degree, and indeed as actually dead, though unaware of the fact. There is usually some suggestion of nostalgia for grand colourful old reality, which is there all the time, if only people had the energy to reach out for it.

Smugness is the fault of this novel: its writer tends to be young and censorious.

(ix) The solemn and weighty D.Porn. thesis, in which the service of Venus is endlessly described in detail, and is made to seem like a necessary but very unpleasant kind of medical treatment.

(x) The young girl's novel about how I got seduced.

(xi) The young girl's novel about how I didn't get seduced.

(xii) The agonised Catholic novel about birth control. This is always written by a lady.

(xiii) The agonised Catholic novel about clerical celibacy. This is never written by a priest.

(xiv) The female novel which is too simply a complaint about how beastly men are to girls. You're right, dear; but it isn't a new discovery.

(xv) The novel that is based too simply upon this further fact: that each sex can, with some plausibility, accuse the other of being essentially predatory in amorous relationships.

(xvi) The novel that is based too simply upon the end of adolescent self-centredness and the learning of compassion. Usually it involves the late and upsetting discovery that this girl isn't just a luscious sex-machine but an actual human being as well, despite appearances.

(xvii) The novel that brings a group of strangers together in some confined and stressful environment for a prolonged ordeal, so that their shams and acts collapse and it becomes apparent what they really are.

(xviii) The army novel: though the English version of this has become rarer since conscription ended. It depends upon the conflict or tension between a young recruit who's cultured and sensitive and a bull-necked sergeant who isn't. Its weakness is that it tends to labour the obvious. War is a barbaric and irrational business, and if there are to be armies at all, they plainly can't be run on civilised and reasonable lines. Your discovery that the army is not so run is very far from being a new one: don't proclaim it too excitedly.

(xix) The psycho-clinical case-history. The writer of this novel supposes himself to have achieved the whole of a novelist's task if he has successfully conveyed to us the nature and flavour of (say) schizophrenic experience. It tends to be fascinating, in an awful way, since we're all amateur psychologists; but it seldom works as a novel.

(xx) The vast family chronicle, with a family tree that unfolds at the back and tends to get torn. It begins with old Josiah Heckthornthwaite, who indomitably founded the Mill in 1762, and who now glares down in disapproval, from his dark portrait on the boardroom wall, upon the disintegration of the modern world and the scruffy antics of the young.

(xxi) The novel that devotes all its energies to playing elaborate games with the novel-convention. As a novelist, you are fully entitled to be clever in any way that takes your fancy and lies within your powers; but don't overact the part of the man who, writing a clever novel, builds it around the character of a clever novelist, in whose work he himself features, and writes a novel that is in fact this one, the one that you're now reading, so that the narrator becomes a character within a novel written by a 'himself' who is (in a sense) a quasi-fictitious character in a novel written by anybody, except that ... After a certain amount of this, we all run lunatic and drop the book.

Each of these games has been played very often indeed, and possibly by yourself. If the novel that you wrote last year falls into one of the categories just listed, don't take it too personally: you aren't the only one.

- Christopher Derrick (Reader's Report on the Writing of Novels: a publisher's reader examines the pitfalls facing the aspiring novelist. London: Gollancz. 1969. ISBN 0575002662)

Christopher Derrick, incidentally, died only recently in 2007: interesting character, who knew a number of literary figures including CS Lewis and GK Chesterton (connected in part by religious interests - most of his published works related to Catholic philosophy). He was the younger brother of the Catholic journalist Michael Derrick.
- Ray

Mathematics and Fiction

Kindly forwarded by Felix: the announcement for Mathematics and Fiction, a themed weekend conference run by the British Society for the History of Mathematics which will "will explore the various uses of mathematics in fiction, novels about mathematics or mathematicians, and novels based on mathematical structures". Here are some quick thoughts and associations arising from the topic list:

Melanie Bayley: "Free will and statistics in Middlemarch and Jude the Obscure".

This explores the relation of these novels to "statistical fatalism", a 19th century intellectual scare:

As more and more statistics were gathered during the first half of the nineteenth century, and crime figures were shown to be roughly constant from year to year, influential commentators began to announce that statistics were driving people to behave against their will. Mad as it may seem, the public seized on the idea that people would act in a particular way to fulfil a statistical quota.

See Society prepares the crimes in The taming of chance (Ian Hacking, Cambridge University Press, 1990, ISBN 0521388848) which mentions the particular influence of the Belgian social statistician Adolphe Quetelet.

David Bellos: author, Georges Perec: a life in words, on the Oulipo.

I'll refrain from a wealth of digressions here: this refers to the "Ouvroir de littérature potentielle" group of writers and mathematicians that specialised in bizarrely creative works produced under various constraints of style or content, such as Perec's novella Les revenentes, in which "e" is the only vowel allowed. See this section of Emily Apter's book The translation zone for a section of Ian Monk's translation, The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex.

William Goldbloom Bloch: "Navigating Labyrinths in Jorge Luis Borges' story The Library of Babel".

The Library of Babel is perhaps [Borges'] most famous story, and in its scant seven pages, he deploys simple combinatorial ideas to help create a miasmic atmosphere in the service of raising issues about the meaningfulness of our existence.

See The Library of Babel for a translation by James Irby; as the Wikipedia article explains, the Library contains books comprising all possible permutations of text, thus all possible truths, untruths and gibberish. Another Borges story, The Book of Sand, offers much the same in a single infinite book; you can read the text if you care to reconstruct it via Maximus Clarke's hypertext puzzle.

Andrew Crumey, novelist, author of Sputnik Caledonia and Mobius Dick

See the Guardian reviews It's Scotland, but not as we know it and Spatial awareness, and Meltdown moments.

Marilyn Gaull, "Romantic numeracy"

The paper covers a range of allusions from statistics to time, geometry and accounting, even the sizing of clothes and interpreting temperature, all new to fiction during this period as they were new to the culture. My thesis would be that novelists such as Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott used contemporary mathematical concepts and applications to create an illusion of fact in their fiction, which also helped their readers learn and adapt to mathematics. In turn, mathematicians used literary examples and fictional style to explain mathematical concepts culminating in Russell's Tristram Shandy paradox.

Dorothy Ker, composer, "the 19th step: Borges, Maths and Music"

the19thstep project brought three artists together with Marcus du Sautoy to explore Borges' virtual universe. Composer Dorothy Ker introduces the project and talks about how working with a mathematician stimulated new ways of thinking about space in live performance.

Donald Knuth on his novel Surreal Numbers.

See Knuth's own page Surreal Numbers: How two ex-students turned on to pure mathematics and found total happiness. Knuth is an eminent computer scientist whose work explores the skill and art of programming. His Metafont system, which defines fonts mathematically, thus enabling continuous morphing of fonts through a passage - as in Carroll's The Mouse's Tale - has given rise to some delightful typographic explorations such as Daytar's Surrealey, "The poem/song Die Loreley by Heinrich Heine in a form which was inspired by the works of Guillaume Apollinaire".

Nikita Lalwani, novelist, author of Gifted

Nikita Lalwani's Gifted tells the story of a maths prodigy conflicted by her situation as the daughter of Asian immigrants in Cardiff. It was longlisted for the Booker, and won the Desmond Elliott prize (whose brief is to reward debut novels that combine "intelligence" and "broad appeal"). See the Guardian review, Freedom by numbers.

Ann Lingard, novelist, "The Embalmer’s Book of Recipes (with a nervous nod towards quasicrystals)".

Ann Lingard ... is founder of SciTalk, the free national resource that helps fiction-writers to find and talk to scientists, engineers and mathematicians
...
One of the characters in Ann Lingard’s fifth novel is a mathematician, who works on quasicrystals. Why? Ann will talk about the fun and challenges of making this decision.

The Embalmer's Book of Recipes page at Ann Lingard's website has an interesting tour of the cultural and scientific background to the novel, such as the strange anatomical dioramas of Frederik Ruysch and Frans Lemmens' remarkable aerial photos of Dutch tulip fields

Mark McCartney, "James Clerk Maxwell: A Poetic Life"

I'd run into one or two of Maxwell's poems, particularly his Valentine by a Telegraph Clerk ...

The tendrils of my soul are twined
With thine, though many a mile apart.
And thine in close coiled circuits wind
Around the needle of my heart.

Constant as Daniel, strong as Grove.
Ebullient throughout its depths like Smee,
My heart puts forth its tide of love,
And all its circuits close in thee.

O tell me, when along the line
From my full heart the message flows,
What currents are induced in thine?
One click from thee will end my woes.

Through many a volt the weber flew,
And clicked this answer back to me;
I am thy farad staunch and true,
Charged to a volt with love for thee.

... but I didn't know just how prolific he was. See PoemHunter for 44 of them (unfortunately minus date and context); the whole batch is available as a PDF download. This Selected Poetry of James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) page has a few with in-references to academia and physics explained. James Clerk Maxwell: Maker of Waves at the Victorian Web quotes Peter Guthrie Tait, the Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh University:

"Maxwell's early skill in versification developed itself in later years into real poetic talent. But it always had an object and often veiled the keenest satire under an air of charming innocence and naive admiration. No living man has shown a greater power of condensing the whole substance of a question into a few clear and compact sentences than Maxwell exhibits in his verses"

BTW, while the telegrapher poem is whimsical, romance by telegraph was as real as a phenomenon in its time as that by Internet now; see Tom Standage's excellent book The Victorian Internet (Phoenix, 1999, ISBN-10: 0753807033), which explores the telegraph/Internet analogy in depth.

Scarlett Thomas, novelist, author of PopCo and The End of Mr Y.

There are summaries of PopCo and The End of Mr Y at Alex Kasman's Mathematical Fiction site, which is a large browsable compilation of the many works relating to mathematics.
- Ray