Impending weather

that baleful and livid tint

predictive of a storm

-- Washington Irving, “Mountjoy”

 

 

There was a queer, lurid sort of sky

over the garden,

though there was a fair amoung of   fitful sunshine

almost as capricious as lightning.

-- G. K. Chesterton, The Paradoxes of Mr Pond (1936)

 

 

The bright  hot  morning

had changed slowly to a grey,

oppressive afternoon;

a heavy bank of clouds,

with the yellow tinge  of coming thunder,

had risen in the south.

The branches of the trees

drooped motionless …

-- John Galsworthy, The Man of Property (1906)

 

Nightfall

the twilight-loving bats    begin to flit about

-- Washington Irving ,“The Legend of the Enchanted Soldier”, in The Alhambra (1832)

The shadows of the valley

grew deeper and deeper,

until all was dark.

-- Washington Irving ,“The Legend of the Moor’s Legacy”, in The Alhambra (1832)

They sat on the boarding-house porch  and saw the sun plunge  into the same crack in the earth  from which the night emerged.

-- Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Le Comité de salut public, then and now

During the French Revolution, it was the Comité de salut public that administered La Terreur, to the happy satisfaction of les tricoteuses.  Chez l’Etat islamique, a similar service is provided by the Hisbah (حسبة).  Chez nous, analogous informal entities have developed spores.

Thus anyone who, within CONUS today, would make so bold as to utter… anything at all, must reckon with reconnaissance by an army of thin-skinned, gimlet-eyed, flinty-spirited Robespierres, tirelesssly scanning all human output both visual and verbal, written or oral, for any hint -- any whiff -- any least scintilla  of aught that might possibly be construed (if you twiddle your tunings of reception just so, and set your head at an angle) as distaff-distancing, or melanistically invidious, non-recevable par la pensée unique.

And what of our past?  This American sketch from the last century but one  provides an example, with an apparent Erstbeleg to boot:

As we swept from the shore, I cast back a wistful eye upon the moss-grow roofs and ancient elms of the village, and prayed that the inhabitants might long retain their happy ignorance, their absence of all enterprise and improvement, their respect for the fiddle, and their contempt for the almighty dollar.

-- Washington Irving, “A Sketch from a Steamboat” (1837)

The now-banal epithet “almighty dollar” has passed into cliché, and would in no quarter raise an objection or an eyebrow.  But the unsuspecting author (and wordsmith) was apparently reviled, by the speech-police of his day;  and when the piece was later collected, he defended himself in a footnote:

This phrase, used for the first time in this sketch, has since passed into current circulation, and by some has been questioned for savoring of irreverence.   The author, therefore, owes it to his orthodoxy  to declare that no irreverence was intended, even to the dollar iself, which he is aware is daily becoming more and more an object of worship. -- W.I.

The Inner Life of Turtles (and the sagacity of owls)

“By nature  a tortoise may be no stupider than a bird.  But you must admit that its way of living doesn’t exactly encourage intelligence.”

-- Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (1928), p.  102

That it does not; but, contemplation.

For a meditation upon the contemplative nature of our shelly friends, try this:

   https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2016/04/thirty-two-turtles.html

And, for those of us who just can’t get enough of these fellows, these:

 https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/turtles

 

~

The owl has met a variety of folkloristic fortunes around the world, being seen  here as a sage, there as a fool.  Being partial ourselves to the former image, we were delighted to stumble upon this passage

The prince was overjoyed to find the owl so deeply versed in topography, and now informed him, in confidence, of his tender passion  and his intended elopement, urging him to be his companion and counselor.

“Go to!”said the owl, with a look of displeasure.  “Am I a bird to engage in a love-affair? -- I, whose time is devoted to meditation and the moon?”

-- Washington Irving, “The Legend of Prince Ahmed Al Kamel”, in The Alhambra (1832)

But all turns out well, as the fowl allows himself to be persuaded.  After the adventure, the prince appoints the owl his privy-counselor -- “It is needless to say that never was a realm more sagely administered.”

Glimpses of Sick Light

Chicago on fire,  seen from afar:

the thickening haze

through which the sun shone

with a hellish red glare

-- Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917)

In the red darkness

glinted

innumerable rubies

-- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932), ch. 3 

(In context, the implication is likewise hellish,
 since the locale is the laboratory manufacturing babies.)

Dust Bowl:

In the spring of 1934, only sun, and no rain … A powder of humus and colloids, the topsoil of the country  blowing away.  And still the sullen sun shone.

On and on  the clouds whirled, some into the astonished East, spreading their baleful orange and amber aura.

-- Arthur Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal (1959), p. 69

Note: “baleful” is an apt adjective here, as it echos the word balefire.

Compare, during an eruption of Vesuvius:

A lurid, baleful light  hung in the heavens.

-- Washington Irving, “The Story of the Young Italian.

The sky, darkened by moving storm clouds

was one of those invented by Gustave Doré

to emphasize important Biblical calamities.

A colorless light   filled  the empty quay.

-- James Gould Cozzens,  Ask Me Tomorrow (1940), ch.5

Bits / about / Bats

The  bat     flit-

ted   a      bout

in the   uncert-
ain       light,

and the frog    croaked

from the fish-pond.

-- Washington Irving ,“The Legend of the Two Discreet Statues”, in The Alhambra (1832)

~

the twi-light-loving                         bats

began  to flit-about

-- Washington Irving ,“The Legend of the Enchanted Soldier”, in The Alhambra (1832)

PS:  Bats Are Our Friends:
https://laughingsquid.com/bat-makes-noises-when-head-scratched/

Ruined-Tower tableau

The spider spun her web

athwart the ruined vault

and bats and owls  nestled in those chambers

-- Washington Irving ,“The Legend of the Two Discreet Statues”, in The Alhambra (1832)

Sierra Nevada monostich

The shadows of the valley  grew

deeper  and   deeper

till all was dark…

-- Washington Irving, “The Legend of the Moor’s Legacy”

Sunrise Monostich

cocks passing the reveille  from farm to farm

-- Washington Irving

[For a matching monostich about the dusk, try this.]

Washington Irving quatrain

Her ladyship  rang for her page;

the captain   smiled  assent.

And thus did they  their pains assuage

in innocent merr-  i  -  ment…

[cobbled together from fragments of “Student of Salamanca”, et alicunde]

A Locked-Room Mystery -- Inside-Out!

Reading here and there, in America’s literary incunabula,  I happened upon an excellent tale by Mr Washington Irving:  “The Stout Gentleman:  a stage-coach romance” (1822).

The story, set at an inn, concerns a scant multiplicity (they are nothing so coherent as a group) of travellers, trapped by a day of rain.  It opens with abundant atmospherics: 

It was a rainy Sunday in the gloomy month of November. … The rain pattered against the casements …

That will put the modern cynic  immediately in mind of the “Bulwer-Lytton” awards for bad beginnings, after the classic “It was a dark and stormy night.”  That, however, for anyone who knows how to tell a tale, or to thrill to one, rather than to patronize, was an excellent beginning, worthy of imitation and expatiation.

A dark and dreary night; people nestling in their beds, or circling late about the fire….

-- Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), beginning of Ch. 15

It was a wild night.  The wind was howling outside, and the rain was beating and splashing against the windows.
-- Conan Doyle, "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" (part-way through)

At any event, “The Stout Gentleman” ultimately advances but little upon its promising opening.  It proves to be a writerly exercise, to show how many bricks  may be made, with how little straw.   It is an early, but inverted version, of a Locked Room mystery  -- yet in spirit, more like Paul Auster than like John Dickson Carr.

A locked room mystery  is narratively locked as well -- like a constructed chess-problem, walled off from the unpredictable rough-and-tumble of actual play.  At the center is a sort of black box, in which some untoward thing is thought to have happened;  but you cannot penetrate it directly (nothing so puerile as an auxiliary door hidden behind the cheval-glass), nor does it let its guarded secrets out.  The detective must use deduction.  He is like the scientist, deducing what may be inside the black-box, from its fitful and ambiguous meter-readings.

Yet, oddly for so early a work (prior to Poe), the tale seems almost post the locked-room subgenre. For although the stout gentleman of the title, whose likely or imagined or projected characteristics form the slender nub of the tale, does keep to his room in the inn, he is not locked off;  inn staff go in and out, the narrator is at liberty to look in on him if he so desired:  yet the narrator is as though paralyzed in will, keeping to the dreary common-room on this rainy day, and attempting to deduce from the distant sounds, or bits of overheard conversations of the servants, just what kind of gentleman  this unseen stout gentleman might be.  The story is more about the process of detection -- or rather, induction -- itself, than about the ‘mystery’ of the stout gentleman, which never rises above something wherewith to beguile the idle hours of a rained-in day.

This (let us call it) sub-subgenre of the whodunit, in which it is the (amateur) detective who is “locked in”, and -- denied sight -- must judge by muffled sounds, is brought to the pitch of perfection, and indeed to spiritual depth, in G.K. Chesterton’s short story, “The Queer Feet” (1910; collected in The Innocence of Father Brown).  Here Father Brown is temporarily sequestered in a closed chamber off a back passageway;  and from this vantage, deduces all, both factual and spiritual, based simply upon the footfalls of an unnatural gait.  Indeed, the story is a kind of rhythmic pendant to the visual-geometrical masterpiece, "The Wrong Shape".

~

Hawthorne’s American notebooks from the mid-1840s  contain many brief notes for possible future stories, most of which he never got around to writing.  The following struck us, in connection with Irving’s (already published!) tale:

A story, the principal personage of which  shall seem always on the point of entering the scene; but shall never appear.

Such, indeed, is the dénoument of Irving’s finger-exercise.  Only at the very end, as the stout gentleman is climbing into a coach to leave the inn (his secret safe for ever) does the feckless narrator get a glimpse, but only of his broad back.   The author leaves us le miel sur les lèvres  -- it has been a snack, and not a meal.

Later, this motif of a title character being ever awaited, but never quite seen, became familiar:  En attendant Godot; l’Arlesienne.   The prophetic underpinning, to which those are a sort of fey parody:  the Mahdi; the Second Coming.

~

A brief but interesting essay offers some ruminative reflections, going so far as bringing in God to Moses in Exodus 33: “thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen.”

http://www.aestheticrealism.net/essays/Known&Unknown_WashingtonIrvings_StoutGentleman.html

To recur to our Chestertonian approximations, we may mention that mere rear-view of Sunday, in GKC’s The Man Who Was Thursday.

Like a duck in thunder (II)

Recently I had occasion to seek the origin and meaning of the phrase (in full) “like a dying duck in a thunderstorm”.   If you google that phrase, you’ll find plenty -- mostly pages and pages of ill-informed and inconclusive forum-discussion;  even if an authoritative answer lies buried there somewhere, it is not worth one’s while to sift through the debris.

So here is the entry from a standard reference-work, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, by Eric Partridge (first edition 1937; many subsequent updates), in its entirety:

To have a ludicrously forlorn, hopeless, and helpless appearance :  coll., orig. rural:  from ca. 1850 (Ware).

Now, as it happens, we can antedate that date;  and this, in a lexicographically most interesting way:  not with a simple antecedent Erstbeleg, but something more powerful though more roundabout.

~

Back when I was an editor at Merriam-Webster dictionaries, I had full responsibility for the two technical disciplines of Etymology and of Pronunciation, but none at all for the company’s meat and drink, which was defining;  let alone for deciding which new words were to be entered in the flagship Collegiate ™ dictionary, which was lightly revised each year, and wholly reedited each decade.  That privilege fell to the Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Mish -- an intelligent and well-educated man, and not without a certain wry humor;  but as regards the humors, he rather took after his atrabilious and phlegmatic predecessor, Doctor Johnson, whose sour frowning portrait hung over his desk, exactly matching the successor’s habitual mood.  I used to despair at the chef-rédacteur’s obstinate sluggishness against admitting culturally key new words -- they’d make it in eventually, but only after the kairos had long passed -- and occasionally would champion some one particular word for inclusion, loading the files with attestations for the definer to refer to next time around.

One such, at the height of Gorbachev, was glasnost.   Many were the citations I supplied, to no avail.  However (one might argue) you can always pile up stats for some particular term, no matter how specialized, by drawing from specialized sources:  which would prove nothing.  The Collegiate is not for the specialist, but for the general educated public;  and glasnost is, after all, in origin  Russian:  the Collegiate is quite rightly chary of letting in too many foreign terms (like Erstbeleg -- common in the lexicographic literature, but unknown outside it).  So, how to show that the word had passed into English common currency?

In support of the suggestion that glasnost be included, I submitted slips attesting such derivata as glasnostic, with fully English morphology (and phonology:  the stress shifts to another vowel, which additionally is detensed).  Now, that was a nonce form, unworthy of inclusion on its own;  but it did witness the fact that, by then, glasnost had already passed into the everyday Wortschatz of American English, for a confection like “glasnostic” presupposes the antecedent currency of the base.

~

And so, back to our duck.

Consider the following passage from Dickens’ novel Martin Chuzzlewit:

‘What,’ he asked of Mr Pecksniff, happening to catch his eye in its descent;  for until now  it had been piously upraised, with something of that expression which the poetry of ages has attributed to a domestic bird, when breathing its last amid the ravages of an electric storm …

Now,  this circumlocuitous, scarcely lapidary, obscure expression, is (as the annotator notes, in the Penguin edition) nothing more nor less than a winking allusion to the set expression (alliterative, assonant, and striking in its imagery) a dying duck in a thunderstorm.  Moreover, the allusion could not possibly work unless that expression were antecedently quite familiar to the reader, since -- much more than the morphological presupposition of glasnost by glasnostic-- there is a significant gap (lexical, though not semantic) between the original and the pastiche.   The case is often to be met with in literature -- more usually in a droll setting, as here, though we do find  “like the cat in the adage” in MacBeth, an allusion  (one requiring rather a lot of the groundlings, one should have thought) to the Latin catus amat piscis, sed non vult tingere plantas (a cat likes fish, but doesn’t like to get its paws wet).

The key point here is that the first half of Martin Chuzzlewit  (where our passage appears) was initially serialized  in 1843,  thus antedating the Ware/Partridge date.  And if the proverb had occurred literatim, it would antedate matters no further.  But as it stands, we can deduce that the adage was already in wide circulation among Dickens’ anticipated readership, well before 1843:  else he could not have counted on them to get the reference:  and without that, the passage falls flat.

[Psychostylistic footnote]  It is the very paradoxical absurdity of the original adage, that tempts Dickens to toy with it.  For after all, ducks do just fine in thunderstorms, much better than do squirrels (or the proverbial “drowned rat”) -- rain being, as the expression has it, “nice weather for ducks”.   In just such a fashion does Wodehouse (through his character Bertie Wooster) play, in novel after novel, with the speech in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, that ends “like quills upon the fretful porpentine”.  Or, at a humbler level, such dimestore wit as hasta la pasta (for hasta la vista).

(For our own discourse upon said porpentine, click here.)

For final proof, if proof be needed, this witness from Washington Irving’s fine finger-exercise of a story of 1824, “The Stout Gentleman”:

Rain pattered against the casements.  … There were several half-drowned fowls crowded together under a cart, among which was a miserable cristfallen cock … Everything was comfortless and forlorn, excepting a crew of hardened ducks, assembled like boon companions round a puddle, and making a riotous noise over their liquor.

-- Washington Irving, from Tales of a Traveller

.

P.G. Wodehouse in memoriam (expanded)

I have just finished reading the prolific master’s comparatively little-known but quite wonderful comic novel, Money for Nothing (1928).

Someday  I may have something intelligent to say about this wordsmith magician who pulls rabbit after rabbit out of his fathomless hat,

but for now, the following observation must suffice:

He is both unfailingly wholesome, and (to a degree you do not fully appreciate  till you have lived a while, and beheld the alternative, and seen how, decade after decade, he soldiered on  through it all)  deep-seatedly humane.

Usually he is jolly and joshing, by choice;  but when he wishes, he can conjure up effects out of Wind in the Willows.   As here, describing a pair of young lovers drifting the river:

The Skirme rippled about the boat, chuckling softly to itself.  It was a kindly, thoughtful river, given to chuckling to itself like an old gentleman who likes seeing young people happy.

Many of his characters are -- designedly -- stock figures, recycled from story to story with slight variations.   (Cf. the Commedia dell'arte -- there is no blame in this.)  But Wodehouse can capture the mind’s movements exactly, when so inclined.   A disappointed lover:

‘I hear you’re engaged to Hugo,’ he said, speaking carefully  and spacing the syllables so that they did not run into each other as they showed an inclination to do.

 (A simple-seeming sentence, yet with much art.  A while after reading it, I tried to recall it from memory, but could not fetch up such perfect wording.  All I could think of was “as they seemed inclined to do”, which is not nearly as good.)

Yet later, as she accepts his proposal and offer her hand, the pan-psychism of a benevolent world  springs up anew, now with a touch, not of Willows, but of Mary Poppins:

The garden had learned that dance now.  It was simple once you got the hang of it.  All you had to do, if you were a tree, was to jump up and down, while, if you were a lawn, you just went round and round.   So the trees jumped up and down  and the lawn went round and round, and John stood still in the middle of it all, admiring it.

If a Heaven there be, which I am bound to believe, then I likewise confide, that old P.G. is up there, chuckling with contentment, and playing golf atop the clouds.

Pleased as Plum

[Update]

When considering writers like Petrarch, a primary consideration is his influence on later authors:  he lives on abundantly, in the works of those unblushing borrowers the Petrarchians.   For Wodehouse, the case is otherwise.  He wrote in a century when, unlike in olden times, great premium was set upon originality.  Furthermore, once he found his voice, he kept doing the same thing over and over -- but so devilishly well, that he formed a sui-generis genre, which none dare ape upon pain of being dismissed as derivative.   So, there is no-one, certainly no prominent writer, who can be called a “Wodehousian”, in anything like the sense that whole passels of poets are Petrarchians.

The thing, then, for those who relish parallels, is to keep an eye out for antedatings of the Wodehousian manner.  After all, he must have derived his distinctive manner from somewhere, unless it were dictated to him directly by Comus (in lieu of the Spiritus Sanctus).   Thus, herewith  some attestations from our own random readings -- foreshadowings of the droll style on which Wodehouse later took out a patent.

~

Travellers gathered in an inn:

“And was there anything remarkable in her history?”

Never was question more unlucky.  The little Marquis immediately threw himself into the attitude of a man about to tell a long story.  In fact, my uncle had pulled upon himself the whole history of the civil war of the Fronde, in which the beautiful Duchess had played so distinguished a part.  …

[some time later]

“… I’ll tell you how it was.  Her father, Henry de Bourbon …”

“But did the Duchess pass the night in the chateau?” said my uncle rather abruptly, terrified at the idea of getting involved in one of the Marquis’s genealogical discussions.

-- Washington Irving ,“The Adventure of my Uncle”, in Tales of a Traveller (1824)

Compare Wodehouse’s recurring character, “The Oldest Member”.

~

And, from the pen of an American:

A cook she certainly was, in the very bone and centre of her soul.  Not a chicken, or turkey, or duck  in the barnyard, but looked grave when they saw her approaching, and seemed to be reflecting on their latter end.

-- Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a serious book;  it is said that Lincoln, upon meeting Mrs Stowe, said, “So you’re the little lady that started a war!”  But here we have a passage that might have wafted over from Castle Blandings.

~

The first place you’d look, for PGW-parallels, might be Dickens -- the early Dickens of The Pickwick Papers.   Therefore, we shall not fish in so shallow a pond.  But the masterpiece Our Mutual Friend is another mostly rather somber novel; yet even there, one finds snippets that, did they follow the Wodehousian oeuvre, rather than precede it, one might have deemed echos:

When R. Wilfer returned, candlestick in hand, to the bosom of his family, he found the bosom agitated.

-- Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1864-5), ch. 4

Pure Wodehouse:  deniching a word from an idiom wherein it figures in a special sense,  to comic effect.  Even the name, “R. Wilfer”, sounds somehow Wodehousian.

“Inasmuch as every man … appears to be under a fatal spell  which obliges him, sooner or later, to mention the Rocky Mountains  in a tone of extreme familiarity  to some other man, I hope you’ll excuse my pressing you into the service of that gigantic range of geographical bores.”

-- Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1864-5), ch. 6

That passage is not so close to PGW as the other; moreover, is at least as close to any number of other English humorists, some of them from the Dickens era or earlier, others quite modern (Kingsley Amis, Aldous Huxley).   I cite it merely to show how difficult it is   truly to unearth such correspondences.

We ourselves noted a possible (though problematic) Dickens/Wodehouse parallel, in our notes to the previously unpublished fragment:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-lost-fragment-of-our-mutual-friend.html

There we remarked, in a footnote to the recovered text:

(²) boil his head:  Connoisseurs of both authors will here instantly recognize a favorite phrase of Mr P.G. Wodehouse, so strongly influenced by Dickens in point of style.  Yet he cannot actually have read this particular passus, since, as mentioned previously, it was never published before this very day.  Consequently a direct le-style-c’est-l’homme influence of the earlier upon that later novelist, cannot in this instance  be established.

Whether the contavenient influence, of Wodehouse upon Dickens, might be surmised in this case, mediated perhaps by signal-bearing tachyons traveling backwards in time, we must leave to the physicists.

Scholars are divided as to the proper interpretation of this suggested influence -- indeed, as to the status of the resurrected fragment  as a whole.

~

Earlier than Dickens, indeed:

“The good wine  did its good office.” The frost of etiquette … began to give way … and the formal appellatives with which the dignitaries had hitherto addressed each other, were now familiarly abbreviated in Tully, Bally, and Killie.

-- Sir Walter Scott, Waverley (1814)

Washington Irving monostich

 ~  her gayety fled  with the roses of her cheek, 

and she sank into silence  and debility  ~

[from: “The Belated Travellers”, in:  Tales of a Traveller (1824)]

[And, in different words, compare this.]