Four Different Ways of Looking at How “Things Fall Apart”

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
 The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

These four lines are half of the opening stanza of William Butler Yeats’s 1919 poem “The Second Coming.” Composed of twenty-two lines in two stanzas, “The Second Coming” is one of Yeats’s most beloved and often-read works. Written in 1919 and published the following year, the poem is commonly thought to be an interpretation of the savagery of World War I and the apocalyptic moment Europe had reached immediately following it. Earlier versions (several of which survive) are more specific, as though Yeats had national instead of continental or worldwide upheaval in mind. Literary critic Harold Bloom has submitted that the poem refers to the Russian Revolution of 1917. Either way, it is quite clear that “The Second Coming” is about a moment in history when the past has been obliterated and the future is unknown but arriving any dark minute now. There is great fear in the land Yeats has created—fear borne not of the inescapability of change but of the uncertainty of exactly what that change will be. Yeats ends with this immortal image:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Yeats has reached all the way to the birth of Christ for much of the poem’s visual power. The title and double repetitions of the phrase “The Second Coming,” the references to “twenty centuries” and “Bethlehem” recall the Book of Revelation and the coming of the apocalypse. The apocalypse and the Second Coming of Christ are of course another fulcrum where one eon is ending, another about to begin. But as any believer will tell you, “the future” of the Christian Second Coming is not uncertain at all. You just have to go through hell to get there. The phrases “widening gyre” and “beast” complicate what kind of future we are to expect even more. Will the era to come be governed by beasts? A “widening gyre” is a spiral getting bigger and further away from center, never to return to its point of origin, what it once was and knew.

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Entertaining Mr Pooter - The late Victorian stage and its audiences.

GEORGE GROSSMITH’S MR Pooter, in The Diary of a Nobody (1892), enjoys a pipe, a trip to a guildhall ball and the occasional séance; his world of entertainment is based on a culture of aspiration and this is created by a range of acceptable leisure activities. These have their limits, and one of the unacceptable activities is having the kind of fun his son, Lupin, enjoys:

Lupin informs me, to my disgust, that he has been persuaded to take part in the forthcoming performance of the “Holloway Comedians.” He says he is to play Bob Britches in the farce, Gone to My Uncle’s; Frank Mutlar is going to play Old Musty. I told Lupin pretty plainly that I was not in the least Degree interested in the matter…’1

Pooter just wants to be an acceptable member of the new middle class – those who were at the time living in the London suburbs and travelling into the city to work, generally pushing pens. This new class hungered for self-improvement. Pooter is anxious to do the right thing, and desperate not to make a faux pas in the ‘best’ company. His reading, his entertainment and his recreational activities are carefully considered. His tastes are middlebrow, and that is exactly what the accelerating new media set out to satisfy. Yet, he has no time for a farce; he would attend a Shakespeare performance or the latest serious play in town, but low comedy was beyond his cultural boundary.

In contrast, we have Mr Leonard Bast, in E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End. Here is a man of that same class of clerks – descendants of Bob Cratchit but with an enriched lifestyle and some leisure time. Bast is inspired by Ruskin and wants to improve through study. His disposition is to analyse and discuss, to read widely and absorb anything considered to be ‘high’ culture. The crusade to educate the working class, from the 1870 Forster Education Act and later legislation on elementary education, had given the writers and performers of the page and stage a new and enthusiastic audience, eager for the kind of enlightenment their ‘betters’ had always had by birthright. In chapter XIV of Howard’s End, Bast is eager to express his thoughts about books and ideas, and his gushing enthusiasm fails to impress the Schlegel sisters. After Bast’s talk about three different books in half a minute, Forster adds this:

Tibby, who preferred his comedy undiluted, slipped from the room. He knew that this fellow would never attain to poetry…2

The Basts of the new world of the class of clerks and commuters wanted their entertainment, but with more than a dash of high culture. The dichotomy of popular and highbrow entertainment was to persist through this period. In Max Wall’s autobiography, Fool on the Hill, he describes the musical entertainment in which his parents (music hall acts) worked around 1900: ‘ The music hall was then predominant in the world of entertainment. There were plenty of “legit” theatres where the great star actors like Irving, Harvey and Tree could parade their talents, but for the common run of humanity the music hall was the thing.’3

THE CONTRAST BETWEEN the two literary characters of Pooter and Bast presents an interesting dichotomy: Pooter cultivates a social self, making friendships and sharing experience; there is a place for popular entertainment in his life, despite his choosiness. On the other hand, Bast turns in on himself, yearning for scholarship and depth of knowledge, longing for the acquisition of cultural knowledge and accomplishments which are in categories very much in contradistinction to anything for the crowd, for the masses. Each wants a certain sensibility, but Pooter’s is sufficient merely as a thin patina, something which is part of his appearance, whereas Bast wants to be the peer of Oxbridge men, to read and discuss philosophy and literature with a proper acquisition of the bedrock of learning such involvement requires.

In the two we have glimpses of the extremes of the vast spectrum of entertainment available to people in the late Victorian and Georgian years. Yet of course, the performers and writers who worked hard to meet these new needs and pleasures of the expanding audience were from very mixed backgrounds; many of them could pass from one very low level to more respectable ones, as was the case with the noted actress Adelaide Nielson, who was commented on by Colonel Frederick Wellesley (nephew of the Duke of Wellington) when he ‘slummed it’ in a drinking house in 1860, a place known then as a ‘night house’ as he explains:

… they were most of them situated in streets near the Haymarket. One that I remember was called Kate Hamilton’s and another Coney’s. The first was a very large room studded with small round tables… It is said that it was serving here as a barmaid that Miss Adelaide Nielson, who subsequently became a great actress, was first seen in London.4

There was always going to be a struggle to try to add a little ‘culture’ and refinement to the popular entertainments of London. The challenge may be seen in the early history of the Old Vic. The Victoria Hall, as it was in the nineteenth century, reopened in 1880 after having a first life as a place for rough entertainment and drunken brawls. Lilian Baylis’s aunt, Emma Cons, took over, and as Richard Findlater explains, Cons had to work with the London County Council in order to broaden her entertainment offerings, catering for more ‘civilised’ customers:

Emma Cons and the Council did not want to deter, by too much uplift and Education, the possible family audience in search of good, clean music hall fun. So they presented variety ‘purged of innuendo in words and action’ (as far, that Is, as Miss Cons could tell). The clearest indications of her intentions were Signalled by the programme, which carried in the first two years improving Quotations from Shakespeare…’5

IN THE YEARS between c. 1870 and 1900 there was a stunning amount of variety available, and the different audiences, with very varied needs in terms of the social use of their experience ad of reader reception, had a multiplicity of choices for a night out. An illustration in The Daily Graphic newspaper in 1890 supports this view, and depicts the sheer diversity involved: there is the Ballet Cecile offering The Dancing Lesson; Dan Leno as The Railway Guard; the Selbini Troupe of Bicyclists; negro minstrel Chirgwin, and comic sketches by the Brothers Poluski. We may add to this dozens of advertisements for classical recitals, so say nothing of amateur productions such as an entertainment given at the Kensington Town Hall in aid of the Metropolitan Police Orphanage and Relief Fund.6

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'You Ain't Ruined': How Thomas Hardy Took On Victorian-Era Purity Culture

Last week at The Atlantic, Abigail Rine described a backlash by some evangelical Christians against equating a woman's worth to her sexual purity, and against the common use of the "damaged goods" metaphor by abstinence advocates to describe a woman who loses her virginity outside of marriage.

Despite the poignant and compelling points made by some of these young women in the article, I'd argue that the case they're making is not new. A century and a half ago, the late-Victorian novelist and poet Thomas Hardy questioned the connection between virginity and virtue in a way that's still fresh and relevant to today's discussion. Hardy challenged a number of his society's failings. In particular, he attacked the hypocritical sexual double standard that came to characterize Victorian morality and which unflinchingly equated a woman's moral character with her virgin status.

The first such challenge appears in a wicked little poem Hardy wrote in 1866 (not published until decades later) called "The Ruined Maid," which satirizes his society's deeming a woman who lost her virginity before marriage as "ruined" (the Victorians' version of "damaged goods"). The poem is a dialogue between two rustic girls who meet up after the long absence of one of the girls. The first girl hardly recognizes her friend, Amelia, who is now dressed in finery and putting on airs:

"O 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!
Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?
And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?" —

Amelia responds:

"O didn't you know I'd been ruined?" said she.

The jealous friend continues to admire Amelia's improved state and finally laments,

"I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,
And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!"

To which Amelia proudly replies in the closing lines of the poem,

"My dear — a raw country girl, such as you be,
Cannot quite expect that. You ain't ruined," said she.

Hardy's point is that in a culture that commodifies virginity as his did, the market value of virginity depends on the price it can fetch. In the case of the rustic girl who will never marry out of her class, her virginity will fetch far less than what Amelia gets in being "ruined." More broadly, the poem satirizes the valuation of virginity apart from a holistic view of the person who possesses it. Thus a person is not "ruined" by the loss of virginity per se, but by the society that views her as such as a result. This idea forms the central theme in Hardy's later masterpiece, Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

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Rabindranath Tagore - By Ezra Pound.

THE APPEARANCE OF “The Poems of Rabindranath Tagore”1 is, to my mind, very important. I am by no means sure that I can convince the reader of this importance. For proof I must refer him to the text. He must read it quietly. He would do well to read it aloud, for this apparently simple English translation has been made by a great musician, by a great artist who is familiar with a music much subtler than our own.

It is a little over a month since I went to Mr. Yeats’ rooms and found him much excited over the advent of a great poet, someone “greater than any of us.”

It is hard to tell where to begin.

BENGAL IS A nation of fifty million people. Superficially it would seem to be beset with phonographs and railways. Beneath this there would seem to subsist a culture not wholly unlike that of twelfth-century Provençe.

Mr. Tagore is their great poet and their great musician as well. He has made them their national song, their Marseillaise, if an Oriental nation can be said to have an equivalent to such an anthem. I have heard his “Golden Bengal,” with its music, and it is wholly Eastern, yet it has a curious power, a power to move the crowd. It is “minor” and subjective, yet it has all the properties of action.

I name this only in passing, to show that he has sung of all the three things which Dante thought “fitting to be sung of, in the noblest possible manner,” to wit, love, war and holiness. The next resemblance to mediaeval conditions is that “Mr. Tagore” teaches his songs and music to his jongleurs, who sing them throughout Bengal. He can boast with the best of the troubadours, “I made it, the words and the notes.” Also, he sings them himself, I know, for I have heard him. The “forms” of this poetry as they stand in the original Bengali are somewhere between the forms of Provençal canzoni and the roundels and “odes” of the Pleiade. The rhythm arrangements are different, and they have rhymes in four syllables, something, that is, beyond the “leonine.”

Their metres are more comparable to the latest development of vers libre than to anything else Western.

The language itself is a daughter of Sanscrit. It sounds like good Greek than any language I know of.

It is an inflected language, and therefore easy to rhyme in. You may couple words together as you do in Greek or German. Mr. Tagore tells me that there is scarcely a poem where you do not make some word combination.

I write this to show that it is an ideal language for poets; it is fluid, and the order is flexible, and all this makes for precision. Thus, you may invert in an inflected language, for this will not cause any confusion as to your meaning.

It makes for precision, since you can have a specific word for everything. For example, one of Mr. Tagore’s friends was singing to me and translating informally, and he came to a word which a careless lexicographer might have translated simply “scarf,” but no! It seems they wear a certain kind of scarf in a certain manner, and there is a special name for the little tip that hangs back over the shoulder and catches in the wind. This is the word that was used.

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The Dreams of Italo Calvino

If you don’t count Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino (1923–1985) is the postwar Italian prose writer who has had the largest and most enduring impact outside his own country. (As a sign of this, it’s worth noting that this is the tenth consideration of his work to appear in these pages since 1970.) Calvino’s refined, gently pessimistic, humane irony rode the wave of the deconstruction of realistic fiction the way the more programmatic French nouveau roman and OULIPO writers could not, gently unmasking narratorial trade secrets and reminding readers of the self-reflexive nature of the fictional game, while continuing to deliver appetizing fabulist delights.

Postwar Italian fiction offered an embarrassment of riches as substantial as that of any other European country, starting with Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s magisterial, posthumously published The Leopard (1958)—though it might arguably be considered the last great novel of the old school. Before the war, Elio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese had been greatly influenced by Hemingway and American realism; they were followed by a generation that included Giorgio Bassani, Alberto Moravia and his wife Elsa Morante, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Natalia Ginzburg, Leonardo Sciascia, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Primo Levi, to name only the most prominent—most of whom make appearances in this consistently absorbing and suggestive selection of Calvino’s letters, chosen by Michael Wood from the several thousand pages of his literary correspondence published in Italy.

These writers portrayed a still near-feudal society emerging into industrialization; their various achievements were inflected by cold war politics in an American client state with an independent, competent, and popular Communist Party in active opposition to the ruling Christian Democratic coalition, where left- and right-wing values competed day in and day out on every front. In his own way, Calvino exemplified these tensions in Italian cultural life, even perhaps in his nonideological response to them.

Calvino was born in Cuba, where his botanist parents were working at an experimental station outside Havana, but he grew up in San Remo on the Italian Riviera. He set out to be an agronomist, and his early letters to his boyhood friend Eugenio Scalfari, later one of Italy’s most important newspapermen, are alive with youthful enthusiasm for literature, philosophy, and girls. But after fighting with the partisans in the civil war that followed the fall of Mussolini, an experience that provided the material for his first novel, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (1947; translated as The Path to the Nest of Spiders, 1956), Calvino emerged as a committed Communist at the end of the war. He resigned from the Party in 1957 in protest against its hard-line conformism, writing that he “had hoped that the Italian Communist Party would put itself at the head of an international renewal of Communism, condemning ways of exercising power which have been shown to be a failure and deeply unpopular.” Still, he came to feel that Italian Communists had displayed “a little bit more intelligence here than in other countries,” and, as he wrote the editor of The New York Review, he remained faithful to an idea of the Italian Party as “a very disciplined and efficient organization vitally interested in the defense and development of democracy.”

Authentic solidarity with workers was not all that easy, for him, however—an ambition perhaps more than an achieved reality. In 1950 we find him writing that “for four days I managed to feel very closely tied up with and in a certain sense essential to the working-class struggle, something that has not happened for some time now.” In 1951, he protests, perhaps a bit too much, to a fellow writer that “the writer is someone who tears himself to pieces in order to liberate his neighbor.”

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Nizar Qabbani: A Brief Love Letter

My darling, I have much to say
Where o precious one shall I begin ?
All that is in you is princely
O you who makes of my words through their meaning
Cocoons of silk
These are my songs and this is me
This short book contains us
Tomorrow when I return its pages
A lamp will lament
A bed will sing
Its letters from longing will turn green
Its commas be on the verge of flight
Do not say: why did this youth
Speak of me to the winding road and the stream
The almond tree and the tulip
So that the world escorts me wherever I go ?
Why did he sing these songs ?
Now there is no star
That is not perfumed with my fragrance
Tomorrow people will see me in his verse
A mouth the taste of wine, close-cropped hair
Ignore what people say
You will be great only through my great love
What would the world have been if we had not been
If your eyes had not been, what would the world have been?

Can She Be Loved? On “Washington Square”

Henry James’s “Washington Square” wasn’t a particular favorite of its author. James called the short novel “poorish” and, in a letter to his daunting older brother, William, wrote, “The only good thing in the story is the girl.” Near the end of his life, when he selected work to revise for his culminating New York Edition, he didn’t pick “Washington Square,” dismissing it as one of his “unhappy accidents.”

But we pick it, again and again. Among posthumous readers, “Washington Square” is a pronounced favorite, both with James connoisseurs, (who don’t often return to “Daisy Miller,” James’s most popular book during his lifetime) and the wider public. “Washington Square” has inspired many adaptations. (The playbill of the recent “The Heiress” attributed the play to Ruth and Augustus Goetz, with no mention of “Washington Square.” There’s a Jamesian irony to this omission: in the eighteen-nineties, the writer had hoped to revive his reputation and replenish his income by writing for the theatre, but was hissed off the stage, and shortly thereafter left London for Rye, which was cheaper.)

James wrote “Washington Square” to complete a trilogy, for Cornhill Magazine, which began with “Daisy Miller,” and its blithe accessibility no doubt partially explains why the book is so often assigned in courses. But I’d venture that it’s the passion of James’s excavation that sustains our interest. Reading this hundred-and-thirty-year-old book, we still feel the intensity of James circling an obsession. His great subject, beneath, between, and everywhere around his characters’ complicated tricks and liaisons is the terrible condition of being unable to love.

We don’t read James for his stories. Despite their formal symmetries, they feel jerry-rigged. He borrows from melodrama, but lops off that genre’s gratifications, going realist on us at exactly the wrong moment. If Americans want a tragedy with a happy ending, Henry James delivers something more like a comedy with a haunting close.

We don’t return to James for his characters, either. It’s not quite possible to love them the way one may love Leopold Bloom or Mrs. Dalloway or even Lily Briscoe. They don’t feel real, exactly, though they’re the opposite of cardboard—a term suggesting characters made of appearances. James’s characters are all soul; they’re closer to ideas than to bodies. We know their sensibilities but not their details. One would have a hard time describing what any of the central characters in “Washington Square” look like, despite how much is made of Catherine’s clumsy lack of beauty. James has already strayed from classical realism, which depends on a belief in an ordered and materially stable world. In a narrative about attraction, looks, and charm, those qualities are never definite. They waver. As internal as the narratives of “Ulysses” and “To the Lighthouse” feel, there’s no doubt as to the vibrancy of the characters in those modernist masterpieces of the generation that followed James. We believe in their characters more than we believe in real people. In James, we believe in the characters a little less. While you could venture a guess as to what Mrs. Ramsay would eat for breakfast, (a jam sandwich, standing up) one can hardly imagine John Marcher eating at all.

We read James not for his stories or for his characters but for the one thing that can’t be adapted: his mind. We know it, in its arguments with itself, its endlessly refining discernment, its flickering shifts and glints of wisdom. We know those details the way we know Bloom’s love of organ meats and Mrs. Ramsay’s tendency to slough off her beauty with haphazard clothes.

No one else has given such fine attention to personal life as it’s thought, that wave and flutter in consciousness. Our stray wishes, our abiding hopes, our shame and constant fears—James attends to all the component parts of what we loosely call love, if only to show his characters coming up against their limitations.

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