Quote of the Day (Lewis Carroll, on ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’)

“The Walrus and the Carpenter
   Walked on a mile or so,
And then they rested on a rock
   Conveniently low:
And all the little Oysters stood
   And waited in a row.
 
"‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,
   ‘To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
   Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
   And whether pigs have wings.’"—English children’s book author, poet, mathematician, and photographer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)
 
By now, you’d think I’d know better than to listen to sports radio. I keep tuning, for instance, to my local version of the form, WFAN-FM, hoping for news or insights into my favorite sports teams—the Yankees, the Knicks, the Giants.
 
But as often as not I have to put up with idiotic ravings that fill up the airspace featuring the hosts’ hobbies, family lives, or, God help me, political leanings.
 
Even so, I was a little surprised the other day when, on WFAN’s afternoon show, Craig Carton and on-air partner Chris McMonigle, in a not particularly inspired bit of free association, came up with “the carpenter and the walrus.”
 
These two figures, the pair thought, were from a “fable.” If that was the case, Carton believed, maybe it was from Aesop’s Fables, as he was “an Aesop man.”
 
By now, their producers perhaps have told them this is not the case. Not that this would matter, because next week the pair could come up with an equally wrongheaded misattribution and make their schoolteachers roll over in their graves.
 
Even so, maybe someone can tell them that the Walrus and the Carpenter don’t appear in a fable but in a narrative poem enclosed in the fantasy novel Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll’s sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland? Better yet, could someone please send them a copy of these verses?

By the way, the image accompanying this post, of the Walrus and the Carpenters speaking to the oysters, was created by English illustrator Sir John Tenniel (1820-1914) for the original edition of Through the Looking-Glass.

Quote of the Day (William Shakespeare, on Moonlight and ‘The Sounds of Music’)

“How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank.
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still choiring to the young-eyed cherubins.
Such harmony is in immortal souls,
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.” — Lorenzo from English playwright-poet William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Merchant of Venice, Act V, Scene 1 (1596-98)

Quote of the Day (Robert Browning, on How ‘Truth is Within Ourselves’)

“Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise    
From outward things, whate’er you may believe.     
There is an inmost centre in us all,    
Where truth abides in fullness; and around,  
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in,            
This perfect, clear perception—which is truth.         
A baffling and perverting carnal mesh          
Binds it, and makes all error: and, to KNOW,          
Rather consists in opening out a way
Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape,               
Than in effecting entry for a light      
Supposed to be without.”—English poet Robert Browning (1812–1889), Paracelsus (1835)

Quote of the Day (P. G. Wodehouse, on a Desperate Young Man)

“A young man with dark circles under his eyes was propping himself up against a penny-in-the-slot machine. An undertaker, passing at that moment, would have looked at this young man sharply, scenting business. So would a buzzard.” — English humorist P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975), The Luck of the Bodkins (1935)

Appreciations: Graham Greene, With a Poignant Tale of a Holiday Affair, ‘Cheap in August’

“It was cheap in August: the essential sun, the coral reefs, the bamboo-bar and the calypsos – they were all of them at cut-prices, like the slightly soiled slips in a bargain sale. Great groups arrived periodically from Philadelphia in the manner of school-treats and departed with less bruit after an exact exhausting week when the picnic was over. Perhaps for twenty-four hours the swimming-pool and the bar were almost deserted, and then another school-treat would arrive, this time from St Louis. Everyone knew everyone else: they had bussed together to an airport, they had flown together, together they had faced an alien customs; they would separate during the day and greet each other noisily and happily after dark, exchanging impressions of ‘shooting the rapids’, the botanic gardens, the Spanish fort. ‘We are doing that tomorrow.’”— British novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter Graham Greene (1904-1991), “Cheap in August,” originally printed in The London Magazine, August 1964, reprinted in May We Borrow Your Husband (1967)

The exotic seaside setting might be familiar to readers of the globe-trotting Graham Greene, but the melancholy that gradually supplants the light wit in this short story? It’s a far different variety than the tortured moral dilemmas elsewhere in the Greeneland landscape in novels like The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair.

An Englishwoman, Mary Watson, has come to a Jamaican resort: i.e., when it is “cheap in August.” At 39 years old, in a marriage to an American academic that has become increasingly lifeless, she has concocted an excuse to escape for the kind of “holiday affair” that friends her age have talked about.

She does not expect three weeks with “no opportunities for infidelity, only for writing post-cards” to her husband—a period in which she finds herself increasingly isolated from the “jolly bunches” at the resort who have abandoned any attempt to look attractive.

Nor does she expect at the end of that time to find herself being propositioned by an especially unprepossessing fellow tourist, an obese 70-year-old old enough to be her father who goes by the name of Henry Hickslaughter.

He is hardly an attractive figure: unsuccessful in business, distant from his siblings, and, as becomes increasingly apparent, lonely (“I don’t write love letters. Never did and I’m too old now”). Yet in spite of herself, she finds herself drawn to this “old shoe comfortable to wear.”

In terms of brevity or intensity of passion, what they share this night is not even a brief encounter but a temporary reprieve against the desolation encroaching on their lives. They will never see each other again, but Mary, out of pity, has alleviated the plight of “the fat old frightened man whom she almost loved.”

For Greene, cinema not only provided at times a livelihood (a short-lived stint as a critic in the late 1930s) and the extra assignment (his classic screenplay for the 1949 thriller The Third Man), but an eye for telling details that reveal character.

His use of simile and metaphor is especially pronounced in “Cheap in August,” such as, in the paragraph leading off this post, “like the slightly soiled slips in a bargain sale”; rear ends that “lurch by like hippos on the way to the water”; and, most surprisingly (to me, anyway), “the air-conditioners made a continuous rumble in the starry palmy night like over-fed hotel guests.”

Collectively, these go far towards depicting the dense humidity and downscale resort in which Mary and Henry, disappointed in where they are in their lives, take stock of themselves.

Moreover, in detailing so carefully these 24 hours in a pair of lovers thrown together by subdued discouragement with life, Greene demonstrates what he meant in this passage in perhaps his best-known novel, The Power and the Glory:

“When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality God's image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”

In recent years I’ve seen several screen adaptations of Greene’s work, including Our Man in Havana, The Fallen Idol, and, of course, The Third Man. (I would like to see the September 1975 Thames Television adaptation of “Cheap in August,” but it doesn’t look like it’s currently available on mainstream streaming services, or on DVD.)

But I haven’t read him since high school and college, when I went rapidly through The Power and the Glory, A Burnt-Out Case, The Honorary Consul, Doctor Fischer of Geneva, The Human Factor, and his second memoir, Ways of Escape. Clearly I knew to go back for more of his voluminous output, especially two of his most famous novels, The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair.

Quote of the Day (William Morris, on Art)

“Art is the expression by man of his pleasure in labour.”—English textile designer, poet, artist, essayist and fiction writer William Morris (1834-1896), The Art of the People (1879)

Quote of the Day (Hilary Mantel, on ‘A Silence Full of Words’)

“You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, holds a concord. A shriveled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out, can still be loud with ghosts.”—British novelist, short-story writer, and memoirist Hilary Mantel (1952-2022), Wolf Hall (2009)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (George Herbert, on Prayer, ‘The Church’s Banquet’)

“Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth.”—English “metaphysical poet” and Anglican minister George Herbert (1593-1633), “Prayer,” in The Complete Poetry, edited by John Drury (2015)

Quote of the Day (Laurence Sterne, on Error and Human Nature)

“The laws of nature will defend themselves;⁠—but error⁠…error, Sir, creeps in thro’ the minute holes and small crevices which human nature leaves unguarded.” —Anglo-Irish novelist and clergyman Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759)

And these days, with all the attempts to make human labor obsolete, error creeps into AI, too. 

Quote of the Day (Virginia Woolf, After Encountering a Very Important Person in Her Life)

“Not much to my severer taste—florid, moustached, parakeet coloured, with all the supple ease of aristocracy, but not the wit of the artist. She writes fifteen pages a day…knows everyone. But could I ever know her…She is a grenadier; hard; handsome; manly; inclined to double chin.”—English novelist and critic Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), on first meeting novelist and future love Vita Sackville-West [pictured], in a Dec. 21, 1922 entry in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Two: 1920-1924, edited by Anne Olivier Bell, assisted by Andrew McNeillie (1978)

I think it was one phrase—"florid, moustached, parakeet coloured”—that grabbed my attention in this passage about the stunning androgyne Vita Sackville-West. After this, it was that bit about a new acquaintance who “writes fifteen pages a day.” (I wish I could equal that output!)

I can’t imagine describing anyone this way. But then again, that was part of the acute perception and sensibility of Virginia Woolf.

Quote of the Day (George Eliot, on ‘Golden Moments in the Stream of Life’)

“The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.”—English novelist Mary Ann Evans, a.k.a. George Eliot (1819-1880), quoted in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Quote of the Day (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, on What It Takes ‘To Move the Masses’)

“I hold you will not compass your poor ends
Of barley-feeding and material ease,
Without a poet's individualism
To work your universal. It takes a soul,
To move a body: it takes a high-souled man,
To move the masses ... even to a cleaner stye:
It takes the ideal, to blow a hair's breadth off
The dust of the actual.–ah, your Fouriers failed,
Because not poets enough to understand
That life develops from within.”— English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), “Aurora Leigh” (1856)

Quote of the Day (William Shakespeare, on a Fearful People ‘Possessed With Rumors’)

“But as I traveled hither through the land,
I find the people strangely fantasied,
Possessed with rumors, full of idle dreams,
Not knowing what they fear, but full of fear.” —English playwright-poet William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King John (1594-6), Act 4, Scene 3 

William Shakespeare died on this day in 1616 at age 52, but his influence reverberates to this day.

Following decades of Tudor authoritarianism, Shakespeare knew that it was safer to project his insights into distant times (King John’s death predated the playwright’s by four centuries) and even distant lands (in the case of The Tempest, a small, remote island in the Mediterranean).

His history play King John is one of his thornier and less performed works, but such was The Bard’s genius that even in this passage from the play, he served as a profound analyst of how corruption and tyranny at the highest government levels lead inevitably to rampant conspiracy theories and contagious fear.

Quote of the Day (Sir William Watson, on April’s ‘Golden Laughter’)

“April, April,
Laugh thy golden laughter,
But, the moment after,
Weep thy golden tears!”—English poet Sir William Watson (1858-1935), “Song,” in The Poems of Sir William Watson (1936)
 
I had never heard of this poem until last week, when I watched Katharine Hepburn reciting these lines in Without Love (1945), the third of her nine films with Spencer Tracy. I’m not sure who was responsible for including this literary allusion: screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart or Philip Barry, who created the original Broadway play.
 
All of this got me wondering about other instances of poetry used in films. “S.G.,” the creator of the blog “Rhyme and Reason,” had a useful May 2016 post, “My Top Twelve Poems in Movies.” I’d like to add just one more: Joyce Kilmer’s “Rouge Bouquet,” recited movingly by the actor portraying him, Jeffrey Lynn, in this clip from the 1940 movie The Fighting 69^th.

Quote of the Day (Samuel Butler, on ‘True Inspiration’)

“Inspiration is never genuine if it is known as inspiration at the time. True inspiration always steals on a person; its importance not being fully recognised for some time. So men of genius always escape their own immediate belongings, and indeed generally their own age.”—English novelist and critic Samuel Butler (1835-1902), Samuel Butler's Note-Books, edited by Geoffrey Keynes and Brian Hill (1952)

Quote of the Day (William Shakespeare, Marking the Passage of Time)

“O God! methinks it were a happy life,
To be no better than a homely swain;
To sit upon a hill, as I do now,
To carve out dials quaintly, point by point,
Thereby to see the minutes how they run,
How many make the hour full complete;
How many hours bring about the day;
How many days will finish up the year;
How many years a mortal man may live.
When this is known, then to divide the times:
So many hours must I tend my flock;
So many hours must I take my rest;
So many hours must I contemplate;
So many hours must I sport myself;
So many days my ewes have been with young;
So many weeks ere the poor fools will ean:
So many years ere I shall shear the fleece:
So minutes, hours, days, months, and years,
Pass'd over to the end they were created.”—English playwright-poet William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King Henry VI, Part 3 (1595)

Quote of the Day (Percy Bysshe Shelley, on a Cloud Sifting ‘Snow on the Mountains Below’)

“I sift the snow on the mountains below,
And their great pines groan aghast;
And all the night 'tis my pillow white,
While I sleep in the arms of the blast.”— English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), “The Cloud,” originally published in 1820, reprinted in The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1994)
 
As I type this, some form of winter precipitation is falling outside my window. I’ve thrown up my hands on whether, or how much of, it will amount to snow. (Forecasts for my county predict anywhere from 4 to 9 inches, but the “Weather” app on my iPhone says my town will get 1 to 3 inches, with the rest being rain or “wintry mix.”)
 
I have certainly had my share of snow in my lifetime, though it has diminished in the past couple of decades. Even so, that experience consisted of at best short hills in the northern New Jersey suburb where I have long resided. I had nothing like the experience that Shelley and his young wife Mary had in 1816 when they were staying in the Swiss Alps.
 
(The image accompanying this post, of Jungfrau in the Swiss Alps, was taken on Apr. 10, 2011, by Carlosvi04london.)

This Day in Literary History (V.S. Pritchett, Wildly Versatile British Man of Letters, Born)

Dec. 16, 1900--Victor Sawdon Pritchett—or, as readers came to know him across multiple genres across the 20th century, V.S. Pritchett—was born in a lower-middle-class household in Ipswich, Suffolk, England.

Though Great Britain has had at least several examples of the term applied to Pritchett, “man of letters” (see: Samuel Johnson, G.K. Chesterton, Matthew Arnold) I’m not sure there are (outside of, say, Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling) many Americans who fit the bill.

Perhaps, reflected Ronald Gottesman in a June 1987 review of Pritchett’s essays in The Los Angeles Times, “These men of letters--all of them fictionists or poets as well as critics—were independent, flexible, liberal, morally serious in the practice of discrimination and judgment—the chief marks of criticism before Literary Theory banished authors, vaporized texts, and called readership into doubt.

Over 75 of his 97 years, Pritchett’s output was enormous: five novels, two memoirs; approximately 100 short stories; travel books; major studies on several European writers; and thousands book reviews. Writing as much as he did in any one of these genres would have challenged other authors; producing all of it combined was mind-boggling.

And that’s just what he published: there were also thousands of letters sent to lucky recipients.

Though the author attributed the impetus for all this activity to a spendthrift father who endangered the family’s financial security, his anxiety about not having enough funds lasted well into adulthood, according to biographer Jeremy Treglown. “Even in his most celebrated years,” observed British literary critic Frank Kermode in a February 2005 article for The New Republic, “he could not live by his books alone, and remained dependent on journalism.”

In Brian John Spencer’s “The New Irishman” blog, I was especially interested to discover one of Pritchett’s formative journalistic experiences: covering the Irish War of Independence for the Christian Science Monitor and how the writers in Dublin’s literary circle at the time influenced his own short-story writing.

Quote of the Day (Joseph Conrad, on Judging a Man)

“You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends.”— Polish-born British novelist Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), Lord Jim (1900)

Quote of the Day (Tom Stoppard, on Life, ‘A Gamble’)

“Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it.” —Czech-born English playwright and Oscar-winning screenwriter Sir Tom Stoppard (1937-2025), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)