Monthly Archives: February 2022

The Iliad: Progress report 3

Posted on 28 February 2022 | 7 comments

Homer, The Iliad (translated by Robert Fagles, ©1990, Penguin 1998), Books 7 to 9

With some interruptions, I’ve kept up my daily reading of The Iliad over the past month.

Natalie Haynes’s 24-minute version of the epic (link here) summarises some Books with a single word: ‘Fighting.’ The fighting in those books has a hideous physicality, as we are told precisely which body parts are pierced or hacked off. This month’s reading has included a couple of such books. Perhaps because of the current news from Ukraine, I wasn’t enthralled by the violence or by the descriptions of beautiful armour and bickering gods that punctuated it. I began to wonder if the full text actually added much to the Classics Illustrated comic I read when I was 11 or 12.

Then along came Book Nine, and I’m enthralled. At the end of Book 8, the Greeks/Achaeans have suffered terribly at the hands of the Trojans, who are led by Hector and backed by the capricious Zeus, and are in danger of having their ships destroyed. Book 9 is the night that follows, and it boils down to a series of persuasive speeches. Agamemnon sends a delegation to plead with Achilles to return to the fight. The delegation is welcomed by Achilles as friends. They eat and drink before getting down to business (I don’t remember who is supposed to have the motto, ‘First we eat, then we do everything else’, but they may have stolen it from the ancient Greeks). Odysseus lays out his case; then Phoenix, who regards Achilles as the son he never had, makes his appeal. Achilles firmly, civilly, even affectionately, hold firm and sends them packing, and all the time Achilles’ friend Patroclus is a silent presence, behaving like a head servant who ensures that the guests are made welcome and oversees the preparation of bedding for Phoenix, who stays the night.

The speeches are long, and persuasive. It feels that Achilles must yield. Then he answers, revealing the imperviousness of his hatred for Agamemnon, the intensity of his wounded pride, and – this was the revelation to me – the depth of his love for Briseis, the enslaved woman who was taken from him. One way or another, women are definitely chattels in the Iliad, but individuals stand out: not just Helen and Andromache, but also the women taken as booty. When the delegation have left and Achilles and Patroclus go to bed for the night, Homer tells us the names of the woman that each of them sleeps with – in case you’re interested, they are Diomede daughter of Phobus, and Iphis from Scyrus respectively.

You know how I like to compare translations. I looked up Alexander Pope’s version of the sleeping arrangements and was interested to find that while Pope definitely suggests sexual activity, Fagles is careful to remove any such suggestion. Here’s Pope(I probably don’t need to say that here ‘Lesbian’ means ‘from Lesbos’):

But in his inner tent, an ampler space,
Achilles slept; and in his warm embrace
Fair Diomede of the Lesbian race.
Last, for Patroclus was the couch prepared,
Whose nightly joys the beauteous Iphis shared

Fagles, line 810–814, has this:

And deep in his well-built lodge Achilles slept
with the woman he brought from Lesbos, Phorbas' daughter,
Diomede in all her beauty sleeping by his side.
And over across from him Patroclus slept
with the sashed and lovely Iphis by his side

Naturally I looked further, and found Samuel Butler’s 1898 translation (link here):

But Achilles slept in the innermost part of the well-builded hut, and by his side lay a woman that he had brought from Lesbos, even the daughter of Phorbas, fair-cheeked Diomede. And Patroclus laid him down on the opposite side, and by him in like manner lay fair-girdled Iphis

And lest this be seen as contemporary US and Victorian prudishness joining forces, I found a 2009 translation by Englishman A S Kline (here) that likewise refrained from mentioning Pope’s embraces or nightly joys. I don’t know what this means, unless that 18th century Englishmen saw sex everywhere while we moderns are much less obsessed with it. Hmm.

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Sarah Holland-Batt’s Fishing for Lightning

Posted on 8 February 2022 | 2 comments

Sarah Holland-Batt, Fishing for Lightning: The spark of poetry (UQP 2021)

Between March 2020 and March 2021 Sarah Holland-Batt had a weekly column about poetry in the Weekend Australian. Each column focused on a recent book of poetry, all but two of them Australian, and was accompanied by a poem from that book. University of Queensland Press has done a great favour to those of us who don’t read The Australian by collecting those columns into this richly engaging book. Here’s how Holland-Batt describes the book:

I offer some suggestions about how to learn to pay attention to poetry and what poets do. In these essays, I am writing for readers who are out of touch with poetry, or who want to learn more about it, and even those who think they hate it, as well as for those who have already found a place for poetry in their lives. Some of these essays focus on opening up and demystifying poetic forms – the elegy, the ode, the sonnet, the villanelle – while others focus on poetic style and techniques. Many also offer some historical context. Poetry is, after all, an ancient art so durable and powerful that it has lasted millennia. Much of what poets do today still connects to prehistoric poetry that was sung and spoken prior to the invention of the written word; where I can, I illuminate those historical links.

That’s pretty much a perfect description. Sarah Holland-Batt has racked up an impressive list of awards and honours as a poet herself and she’s an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at QUT. While these essays benefit from her broad knowledge of poetry and her love for it, they don’t patronise their readers or leave them eavesdropping at the door of a closed shop conversation – both things that tend to happen in critical writing about contemporary poetry.

Take, for example, the essay first published on 11 July 2020, ‘The Sonnet Sequence: On Keri Glastonbury’, which begins:

In the winter of 1962, stoked by amphetamines, the American poet Ted Berrigan compulsively wandered the streets of Manhattan at all hours, and began writing his first book, The Sonnets: a book length sequence that sings up New York’s Lower East Side in all its grimy, fast-and-loose glory.

The essay spends a lively page on The Sonnets, its role in Berrigan’s subsequent career as a poet, and its status as ‘a touchstone of a poetic generation’. Having deftly evoked this precedent (no need to belabour us with the history of sonnet sequences from Petrarch to Christina Rossetti), it spends roughly two pages on general description of Keri Glastonbury’s Newcastle Sonnets, and rounds off with a page-long reading of one poem, ‘The Pink Flamingo (of Trespass)’: how it exemplifies the preceding generalities, how it is an exception, and how the poem itself works. It ends with an observation that arises from this close (but not too close?) reading:

Like many of the poems in Newcastle Sonnets it leaves you both with the feeling of having been let in on a joke by an insider, but also left slightly on the outer too: like Newcastle itself, as Glastonbury suggests, this is both a comfortable and disorienting place to be.

By the time we reach the poem itself, we are well equipped to read – and enjoy – it.

I picked this essay because I blogged about Newcastle Sonnets (here), and the comparison is instructive. While I hope I communicated my enjoyment of the book, most of my blog post was taken up with its difficulty, with my own sense of being an outsider. Reading Sarah Holland-Batt – on this poem and on any number of others – I realise (again, at last) that reading poetry isn’t about nailing down a clear meaning: not quite understanding, or even being mystified, can be part of the enjoyment.

Anyhow, I can endorse Holland-Batt’s own sentiments: whether you are out of touch with poetry, or want to learn more about it, or think you hate it, or have already found a place for it in your life, I’m pretty sure you could find some joy and light in this book.

Added later: I have one major discontent with the book, namely that there doesn’t appear to be a sequel in the works. I’m pretty sure another 50 new poetry books would be there for the SHB treatment if she were up to it. She could ‘do’ Jennifer Maiden, Adam Aitken, Kit Kelen, Pam Brown, Ouyang Yu … to name just the poets near the top of my To Be Read/To Be Blogged pile.

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The Book Group in Second Place with Rachel Cusk

Posted on 1 February 2022 | 8 comments

Rachel Cusk, Second Place (Faber & Faber 2021)

Before the meeting: I borrowed a copy of the book from my local library and just had time to read it and return it before heading out of town over the New Year. So I scanned a random page, intending to focus my pre-meeting blogging on that page.

Then the Book Chooser sent around a WhatsApp asking how we’d all feel about changing to Transit, an earlier book that ‘gives a better sense of how Rachel Cusk has transformed the novel form’. After some discussion, it was agreed that each of us could read either or both of the books, and we’d let the discussion play out as it would. I decided to stick with just Second Place.

‘Second Place’ is the name given by the narrator to a kind of guest dwelling on her property on the edge of a darkly beautiful marshland. As she spells out for the benefit of slow readers, it also refers to the status of women under patriarchy – and there you have the subject of the book. When she was young, the narrator – known as M – fell under the spell of landscapes by L, a celebrated painter, and she now believes he is perfectly suited to capture the beauty of her marshland. She writes to invite him to stay as her guest in the Second Place. After some pretty rude back and forth, he accepts the invitation, turns up with an unexpected female friend, and continues as he has begun, the guest from hell. Somewhere along the line, we realise that M, without quite admitting it to herself, hopes that his paintings of her marsh will reveal something of her to herself. This develops into wanting him to paint a portrait of her, which he eventually does, devastatingly.

The story, we are told in an end note, was inspired by Lorenzo in Taos, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 memoir of the time D. H. Lawrence came to stay with her in Taos, New Mexico. I haven’t read that book, but it feels as if the note explains a lot: maybe this book is not so much a novel in its own right, as a response to – a retelling of, a meditation on – that other book. In the early parts of Second Place, M tells her story to someone called Jeffers. We are given no information about Jeffers at all, but Lorenzo in Taos was addressed to the US poet Robinson Jeffers. It seems that this device is a straight lift from the source material, a little Easter egg for the scholarly reader (or for someone like me who google-skims reviews).

By and large, the book left me cold. The characters don’t feel fully imagined. What I take to be the thematic concern about art and artists could be boiled down to the familiar warning: ‘Never meet your heroes. They’re sure to disappoint.’ M does a lot of introspecting, and the dialogue generally feels stilted. If something is being said about sexism, it’s that some men are cruel, and some women are vulnerable. Not exactly a revelation, and not exactly leading anywhere interesting.

On the random page I scanned (page 74), M and L run into each other walking by the marsh very early one morning. She asks him, pretty much out of the blue, if he will paint her portrait:

He looked at me with a faintly quizzical expression.

‘But I can’t really see you,’ he said.

‘Why not?’ l asked, and I believe it was the utterance that lay at the furthest bottom of my soul, the thing I had always been asking and still wanted to ask, because I had never yet received an answer.

That line about the utterance at the furthest bottom of her soul reads just as awkwardly in context as it does here. All too often the characters are going about their business and then there’s a little introspective interjection, sometimes addressed to the mysterious Jeffers, to explain the significance of what we’ve just read. The reader can’t ‘see’ the narrator either. When she talks about the furthest bottom of her soul it’s hard to take her seriously, but maybe that’s the point. Maybe she’s a needy person who has no idea about art but wants to be immortalised, a risible figure; or maybe we’re meant to take seriously her introspective misery and the way she turns to art as a way of feeling seen and perhaps understanding herself. I didn’t know at this point of the story, and I still didn’t know, or much care, by the end.

Back to page 74: She doesn’t get an answer from L, because Brett, L’s young female friend, turns up and interrupts them:

She was holding a bundle in her hands, which turned out to be all the linen from the bed in the second place, and she tried to offer it to me as I stood there in my nightdress on the wet grass.

‘Would you believe it,’ she said, ‘but I can’t sleep against this fabric. It irritates my skin – I woke up this morning with a face like a broken mirror! Do you have anything softer?’

She stepped closer, across the line that generally separates one person from another, when they’re not intimately acquainted. Her skin looked perfectly fine even at close quarters, glowing with youth and health. She wrinkled her little nose and peered at my face.

‘Do you have this fabric on your bed too? It looks like it might be having the same effect on you!’

L ignored this basic piece of effrontery, and stood with his arms folded looking at the view

Unlike all the other characters, the obnoxious Brett is realised with almost cinematic clarity, bringing a welcome element of waspish comedy to the narrative. But this slightly surreal interruption doesn’t so much move the story forward as expand, a little baldly, on the novel’s thematic concerns. Unlike L, Brett thinks she can see M. M wants to be seen, but not like this, close up: this is effrontery. As it turns out, the exchange foreshadows the climactic moment when the narrator stumbles upon L and Brett, probably high on something, collaborating on a viciously unkind representation of her.

Though my Leavisite lecturers in Eng Lit in the 1970s did this sort of thing with relish, it’s unfair to judge a book by one randomly selected page. But the thing is I don’t remember much else about the book. Harsh? Yes. Sentence by sentence I enjoyed reading it, and I expected my view to soften as a result of the Group’s discussion.

After the meeting: Thanks to Omicron, we were back on zoom. There were eight of us, and unlike when we meet in person, the discussion was fairly disciplined – generally only one person spoke at any given time, and we didn’t spend a lot of time on other subjects.

All but one of us had read Second Place. One had read In Transit. Only one (I think) had read both. It sounds as if In Transit was a much better experience, as we were treated to a number of readings from it, whereas no one was to be persuaded to read more than an odd phrase from Second Place.

One chap took vehemently against M. In his reading, she was a wealthy woman who decided it would be fun to have a famous artist as a scalp – so that she could boast of having had him stay, and have a painting of her place and perhaps of herself on her wall. This chap knows a number of famous people and has witnessed first-hand the effect of ‘fans’ intruding on their privacy, so his sympathy lay with the obnoxious L.

Another had read a review in the Guardian that, he said, read the book as somehow referring to Rachel Cusk having sold a house for millions of pounds and left England in protest over Brexit. Neither he nor the rest of us were clear how the book and the life were related, but it fitted the generally perplexed mood.

Another had read a little Rachel Cusk a couple of years ago and couldn’t bring himself go back to it for this meeting. He couldn’t remember anything of the books except a general sense of turgidness. The word ‘turgidness’ struck a chord with many of us.

A number of people said they appreciated the perceptive writing about art and life, life and death, men and women. An overlapping number said they were irritated or bored by tedious writing about the same subjects. Some read it as a strong feminist text. One man read quotes that, the antithesis of feminism, described the cruelty of men and the suffering of women as inherent, part of the essential nature of things. Which brought us to the question of whether we are to take M seriously or see her as a dire warning.

Those who had read In Transit spoke of Cusk’s splendid skewering of social cruelty. They were delighted by the way she dispensed with a narrative arc and with the depiction of rounded characters. I couldn’t understand what they said she did instead – I’ll have to read the book to find out. Perhaps the things I found exasperating about Second Place are a feature rather than a bug, but I still can’t see it.

In the one noteworthy straying from the subject, one chap who has recently moved into a new home, which he is in the final stages of renovating, gave us a quick guided tour. It’s a house we met in when it was newly bought a couple of major lockdowns ago, and it was a joy to behold the transformation he had wrought.

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