Closing a Good Book

George Gissing to Edith Sichel, July 20th, 1889:

Up to a year ago I used to give a great deal of time to the Greeks and Romans; for whatever reason, I am now seldom disposed for them. Yet I know very well that, if I put modern thoughts aside and sat down to some of the old men for a fortnight, I should be (for the time) the most contented of pedants. Do you not sometimes experience this trouble in giving each taste and faculty its reasonable opportunities? It is so hard to renounce pleasures of the intellect. Sometimes I say, in closing a good book, "That I shall never again read," and the thought is saddening.

The Collected Letters of George Gissing: 1889 - 1891, Vol. 4
(Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1990), p. 89.

Everyone Does This Sort of Thing

Louis Thomas, Curiosités sur Baudelaire (Paris: Albert Messein, 1912), pp. 26-7.
My own translation:

One day, Baudelaire’s landlord complained that he was making an unbearable racket. 

"I do not know what you are talking about," he replied graciously.  "When I am at home I behave like all respectable people." 

"I'm sorry, but we hear you moving furniture and banging the floor at all hours of the day and night," answered the landlord. 

Baudelaire took a serious tone. "Once again, I give you my word that nothing out of the ordinary takes place. I chop wood in the living room and drag my mistress around the floor by her hair. Everyone does this sort of thing, and you have absolutely no right to concern yourself."

Weimar Wednesday: No. 3

I am in the midst of translating Hans Ostwald's Sittengeschichte der Inflation (Berlin: Neufeld & Henius, 1931). The book is frequently cited in works dealing with the Weimar hyperinflation (where it is usually referred to as A Moral History of the Inflation, or Tales of the Inflation), but up until now it has not been published in English. In these times of quantitative ease, I thought it might be amusing to post something from it each week.

The following excerpt describes the theft of valuable metals. This sort of thing has already returned to my part of the world -- not long ago Toronto police reported that brass nameplates and flower urns were being removed from cemeteries and sold as scrap. I haven't seen any VIA Rail trousers yet, though...

During the inflation every little item, especially raw materials, took on an incredibly high value. In the regulated economy, the most basic foodstuffs were available for fractions of a cent. Currency depreciation had made rent nearly meaningless. Eventually it cost about as much to rent a two room apartment for a year as it used to for a week. But copper and bronze had great value. They had to be purchased from abroad at a high price. 

And now the doorhandles and brass rods that held down carpets were being stolen, and soon even the carpets themselves. In the end, thieves risked going after public monuments. Prudent municipalities had some statues locked away in warehouses. Thieves stooped so low as to rob graves. In Stahnsdorf they stole metal funerary urns, and a woman praying in the St Pauli cemetery on Berlin's Seestrasse saw them carry off a bronze monument weighing three hundred pounds. They stole grave fences and borders everywhere. Yes, even the manhole covers over the sewer system appealed to the metal thieves. The couplings and leather straps were stolen from railway cars, and the plush covers were cut away from the seats. Some people even went around wearing trousers that had the same pattern as railway upholstery.

W. R. Paton

While reading Michael Gilleland's blog I became curious about William Roger Paton (1857-1921), who translated Greek texts for the Loeb Classical Library. At first I could find very little information online apart from a brief obituary in the American Journal of Archaeology (Vol. XXVI, 1922, p. 90) saying that he had studied at Oxford, married a woman from the Greek island of Samos, and died there on April 21st in the town of Vathy. A more vigorous search turned up two more substantial references:

Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Erinnerungen 1848-1914 (Leipzig: K. F. Koehler, 1929), pp. 227-8. My own translation from the German:

The most important [of my English correspondents] was W. Paton, who had approached me with questions while he was collecting inscriptions on Kos. I didn't have enough free time for them then, but we maintained an active correspondence from that day on, even into the early years of the Great War. He was stuck working as a junior teacher at the British school in the south because he had fallen in love with a beautiful Greek woman from Kalymnos. He owned a plot of land in Myndos and was later compelled to move to Chios and Lesbos for his sons' sake, since this is where the Greek high schools were. 

Unenthusiastic about archaeological research he drifted from one author to another until he finally settled on Plutarch's Moralia, working without the hostility of the clever but undisciplined and unreliable Bernardakis, who gave me a hard time because I dared to describe his messy edition as a chore. We both laboured on Plutarch for many years; in the end Paton died while the first volume was at the printer, but the edition is secure, even if I do not live to see its completion. As far as I can tell, criticism here is most difficult; one must get used to the apathy of the philological audience when one is working on texts that will be heavily consulted by the public. 

Paton must have had a deep need to speak about very intimate things, since he discussed them more and more in his letters to me. In this way I came to know the character of an extraordinary man from Scotland. Despite a long life in completely different circumstances he was a gentleman in the fullest sense, and he was still an Englishman despite his freedom from certain ties. However, he did he not have the haughty demeanor that is found in a particular kind of Englishman -- the same demeanor that could also be found in a corresponding type of travelling German before the war.

He was appropriately proud of his great nation and the British Empire. As a true patriot he was willing to admit the validity of another's patriotism and pride. United in this spirit, we good friends sent our sons off to fight each other in the trenches.

J. H. Fowler, The Life and Letters of Edward Lee Hicks (London: Christophers, 1922), pp. 91-2:

At this time [Hicks] became associated with another Greek scholar, Mr. W. R. Paton, who took up his abode in the Island of Cos and made a careful collection of the inscriptions to be found there. Hicks collaborated in the deciphering and interpretation of the inscriptions, and wrote the introduction for the Inscriptions of Cos (Clarendon Press, 1891). A friendship grew up between the two men, unlike as they were, the one equally at home in the practical and in the theoretical life, the other a dilettante scholar who became at last so completely "orientalized" (to use his own expression) that he was reluctant to revisit England, and who never earned anything in his life till he was paid for his translations from the Greek Anthology in the Loeb Library. Nevertheless, he did visit England and Hulme Hall; and he most kindly set down for this biography his impression of the visit some time before his own lamented death in May [sic], 1921:

Vathy, Samos, Greece.  

I was deeply grieved to hear of the death of my dear master and friend, the late Bishop of Lincoln. When I first came to know him, I was more or less a novice in Greek epigraphy, a science of which he had complete command. I happened to discover some very interesting inscriptions in the island of Cos, which I communicated to him before publishing ; and as I was at the time residing there, he advised me to collect all the inscriptions of that island, and offered to join me in publishing them, as we did. Of course, that led to most cordial relations, and I fully learnt to estimate aright his skill and judgment. I also had the privilege of meeting him personally, both at my own house in Scotland, where the late Mr. Theodore Bent and Professor W. M. Ramsay were present, and I had the full advantage of the conversation of these three distinguished people, and also at his own house at Manchester, where he was then Principal of Hulme Hall , and obviously very popular with the young men there.  

He was then an honorary Canon of Worcester (I think) and had a fair amount of leisure, although devoted to the cause of temperance and social reform. When he was appointed to a regular Canonry at Manchester itself, entailing the care of a large and poor parish, I confess I was sorry. He possessed unique qualifications for the study of Greek inscriptions, and such qualified epigraphists are few, whereas many others might have worked with equal zeal and devotion among the poor at Manchester. But, of course, whatever he did, he always threw his heart into it, which is the great secret of success, when the heart is supported by an intellect like his. He had not abandoned his interest in Greek epigraphy. A few years ago a Coan stone, my copy of which I had lost, but which I mentioned in our book, saying that some one in a yacht had bought it and carried it off, and it might turn up, did turn up in a garden somewhere in the country in England, and luckily was acquired by the British Museum. It is a very important and interesting ritual document, and the Bishop helped them to read and edit it, and wrote to me about it.  

W. R. Paton

There also appears to be a note on Paton in Text and Tradition: Studies in Greek History and Historiography in Honor of Mortimer Chambers (Claremont: Regina Books, 1999), but I do not have access to it.


Update: Mike Gilleland was kind enough to consult David Gill's entry on Paton in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and sent me these two quotes:

It seems that at this time Paton was offered a chair at Oxford, presumably the newly created Wykeham chair of ancient history filled by Myres in 1910, but he declined. His daughter Sevasti Augusta, in her unpublished memoirs, linked her father's decision to Paton's feelings about how Oscar Wilde had been treated; she recalled Paton 'could never work with a People who were capable of confusing the great Artist with the man'.

A glimpse into Paton's character is provided by Oscar Wilde. Paton had written to his old friend Wilde on his release from Pentonville in 1897, and Wilde responded, "I have often heard from others of your sympathy and unabated friendship … I hope you are happy, and finding Greek things every day".

How Fortunate Sometimes is our Ignorance

Why is it, I ask myself, that I adore Rimbaud above all other writers? I am no worshipper of adolescence, neither do I pretend to myself that he is as great as other writers I might mention. But there is something in him that touches me as the work of no other man does. And I come to him through a language that I have never mastered! Indeed, it was not until I foolishly tried to translate him that I began to properly estimate the strength and the beauty of his utterances. In Rimbaud I see myself as in a mirror. Nothing he says is alien to me, however wild, absurd or difficult to understand. To understand one has to surrender, and I remember distinctly making that surrender the first day I glanced at his work. I read only a few lines that day, a little over ten years ago, and trembling like a leaf I put the book away. I had the feeling then, and I have it still, that he had said all for our time. It was as though he had put a tent over the void. He is the only writer whom I have read and reread with undiminished joy and excitement, always discovering something new in him, always profoundly touched by his purity. Whatever I say of him will always be tentative, nothing more than an approach -- at best an aperçu. He is the one writer whose genius I envy; all the others, no matter how great, never arouse my jealousy. And he was finished at nineteen! Had I read Rimbaud in my youth I doubt that I would ever have written a line. How fortunate sometimes is our ignorance.

Henry Miller, The Time of the Assassins; A Study of Rimbaud
(New York: New Directions, 1962), pp. 107-8.

Tremendous Caveman Instincts

When the poet and translator Roy Campbell married Mary Garman without his father's consent, he was cut off from the family purse. In the early 1920s the couple moved to North Wales:

The stable they rented cost 1£ 16s a year. Five pounds a month paid for everything else, though books accounted for half of this budget. That left about 12s 6d a week for all their bodily needs -- in other words, next to nothing. [...] The couple settled down in their mud-floored stable to read Dante, Rabelais, Milton and the Elizabethans -- 'living on the continual intoxication of poetry for two years'. Roy, who had tremendous caveman instincts, went trapping for rabbits and game for the pot, and they collected gulls' eggs from the cliff face. He poached and scavenged, and sometimes the locals would bring them gifts of potatoes or fuel. It was a heady life, and cheap.

Virginia Nicholson, Among the Bohemians (New York: Harper Collins, 2002), pp. 22-3.

Gibberish

Here I should like to amplify a point I touched on earlier, the matter of communication between poet and audience. In applauding Rimbaud's use of the symbol I mean to emphasize that in this direction lies the true trend of the poet. There is a vast difference, in my mind, between the use of a more symbolic script and the use of a more highly personal jargon which I referred to as "gibberish". The modern poet seems to turn his back on his audience, as if he held it in contempt. In self-defense he will sometimes liken himself to the mathematician or the physicist who has now come to employ a sign language wholly beyond the comprehension of most educated people, and esoteric language understandable only to the members of his own cult. He seems to forget that he has a totally different function than these men who deal with the physical or the abstract world. His medium is the spirit and his relation to the world of men and women is a vital one. His language is not for the laboratory, but for the recesses of the heart. If he renounces the power to move us his medium becomes worthless.

Henry Miller, The Time of the Assassins; A Study of Rimbaud
(New York: New Directions, 1962), p. 59.

Life Without a Permanent Income

Henry Miller on Arthur Rimbaud's decision to move to Northeast Africa:

How did a man of genius, a man of great energies, great resources, manage to coop himself up, to roast and squirm, in such a miserable hole? Here was a man for whom a thousand lives were not sufficient to explore the wonders of the earth, a man who broke with friends and relatives at an early age in order to experience life in its fullness, yet year after year we find him marooned in this hell-hole. How do you explain it? We know, of course, that he was straining at the leash all the time, that he was revolving countless schemes and projects to liberate himself, and liberate himself not only from Aden but from the whole world of sweat and struggle. Adventurer that he was, Rimbaud was nevertheless obsessed with the idea of attaining freedom, which he translated into terms of financial security. At the age of twenty-eight he writes home that the most important, the most urgent, thing for him is to become independent, no matter where. What he omitted to add was, and no matter how. He is a curious mixture of audacity and timidity. He has the courage to venture where no other white man has ever set foot, but he has not the courage to face life without a permanent income.

Henry Miller, The Time of the Assassins; A Study of Rimbaud
(New York: New Directions, 1962), pp. 7-8.

Captains of Industry

Supposing the captain of a frigate saw it right, or were by any chance obliged, to place his own son in the position of a common sailor; as he would then treat his son, he is bound always to treat every one of the men under him. So, also, supposing the master of a manufactory saw it right, or were by any chance obliged, to place his own son in the position of an ordinary workman; as he would then treat his son, he is bound always to treat every one of his men. This is the only effective, true, or practical rule which can be given on this point of political economy. 

And as the captain of a ship is bound to be the last man to leave his ship in case of wreck, and to share his last crust with the sailors in case of famine, so the manufacturer, in any commercial crisis or distress, is bound to take the suffering of it with his men, and even to take more of it for himself than he allows his men to feel; as a father would in a famine, shipwreck, or battle, sacrifice himself for his son. 

John Ruskin, The Roots of Honour (New York: John B. Alden, 1885), p. 28-9.

Do You Like This Idea?

Eternal recurrence as a thought experiment, taken from the 2007 film When Nietzsche Wept and posted at a friend's request:

Weimar Wednesday: No. 2

I am in the midst of translating Hans Ostwald's Sittengeschichte der Inflation (Berlin: Neufeld & Henius, 1931). The book is frequently cited in works dealing with the Weimar hyperinflation (where it is usually referred to as A Moral History of the Inflation, or Tales of the Inflation), but up until now it has not been published in English.

In these times of quantitative ease, I thought it might be amusing to post something from it each week. This passage comes to mind whenever I hear James Kunstler talk about the United States degenerating into a garage sale nation:

Berlin's Scheunenviertel district had become a real fairgrounds. The roads between Alexanderplatz, Schönhauser and Rosentaler Tor were packed with crowds so dense that the trams could only progress by constantly ringing their bells. People selling ladies' underwear, suspenders, army boots, blankets, newspapers, gingerbread, and sausages filled the neighbourhood with their junk and their loud cries. A group formed around each merchant as he proclaimed the merits of his wares. But really people were just curious. 

Troops surrounded or marched through the neighbourhood almost every week, and sometimes every day, arresting or expelling the unruly peddlers. But most of the traders and gamblers returned once the troops had disappeared. 

Occasionally there were other clashes. A soldier had taken part in a game and, because he had lost, wanted to arrested its organizer. The crowd grew rebellious and began shouting: "Kill the bastard!" The soldier was going to defend himself with a hand grenade, but he was knocked to the ground before he could use it. The grenade exploded, and the flying shrapnel injured a woman and her daughter as well as a young boy on his feet and arms.

A Masterful Display

Hugh Garner describes his first Canadian Authors Association meeting:

It wasn't as bad as I'd expected it to be, it was worse. I found myself perched on a collapsible chair on the outer perimeter of a group of chitty-chatty elderly ladies whose broadened A's, mink stoles and social pretensions matched perfectly their complete ignorance of contemporary writing. They looked to me like the offspring of Crimean War field officers and Dickensian almshouse gruel-servers, which they probably were. Their twitterings were composed largely of Can Lit name-droppings (first names, if you please) of writers deceased, defunct and deplored. God, how I wished I'd stashed a pint of rye in my inside pocket! 

Things got underway with a welcoming speech by a sour-pussed broad who probably spent her daylight hours chasing kids of her lawn, between composing prose that would turn they gut of a pterodactyl. She then introduced the "distinguished speaker of the evening," who turned out to be some old guy in a brown tweed suit from Kingston, Ontario, who would give us "an entertaining and informative talk on Service," spoken with a capital S. 

I found myself becoming interested, for while I've never been a Robert W. Service fan, and can only recite a couple lines of his poetry, at least a talk about him promised to get the meeting much closer to earth than I'd imagined it could ever get. 

The speaker, to polite applause like the fluttering of fans, jumped right into his subject, and riding the thermal updrafts of his verbosity like a bespectacled hawk, soared off into an incoherence that would put shame to poetry critics of a college quarterly. It was a masterful display of socio-literary bullshit. As a matter of fact it took me almost a quarter of an hour to realize that the Service he was talking about was not the author of the Songs of a Sourdough but the service of such laudable petit-bourgeouis organizations as the Rotary, Kiwanis and Lion's Clubs.

One Damn Thing After Another (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1973), p. 201.