Patrick Butterly asks where is the poet today who can extract harmony from the modern view of the universe, as opposed to the traditional and romantic view of stars in the early verse of the young Tennyson (Letters, November 28).
However, there was a poet at work during Tennyson’s childhood whose writing portrayed an advanced and very modern view of the cosmos. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem Queen Mab (1813) and his verse drama Prometheus Unbound (1820) were both significantly early departures from the conventional earthbound literary view of space as a two-dimensional dark canvas of the night sky dotted with stars.
In both cases, Shelley’s evocation of a cosmic sublime vividly portrays journeys through a three-dimensional void, leaving the Earth behind to travel into the vastness of deep space. Prometheus Unbound in particular seems to owe much of its imagery to his reading of the works of William Herschel, personal astronomer to George III at Windsor, the discoverer of Uranus and what would later be called infrared radiation – and the owner and constructor of what was then probably the largest telescope in the world.
Shelley’s description of a “multitudinous orb” (Prometheus Unbound IV.253) resembles a highly poetic rendition of Herschel’s description of nebulae in his scientific paper On Nebulous Stars (1791). Descriptions of stars “surrounded by a milky nebulosity, or chevelure”, radiating invisible infrared light, are rendered by Shelley as “heavens of liquid darkness”, pierced by rays of “fire that is not brightness”.
The astronomer’s description of the overall appearance of one particular nebula, which he thought consisted of swirling concentric layers, is rendered by Shelley as:
A sphere, which is as many thousand spheres,
Solid as crystal, yet through all its mass
Flow, as through empty space, music and light;
Ten thousand orbs involving and involved …
Sphere within sphere; and every space between …
Yet each inter-transpicuous, and they whirl
Over each other with a thousand motions,
Upon a thousand sightless axles spinning …
Christopher Goulding
Newcastle upon Tyne
The Waves
In “Breaking The Waves” (Commentary, July 25) I described the “one unsolvable textual mystery” in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, where one or more words seem to be missing from the speech where Neville says to Bernard, “then you will visit Paris in the Easter vacation and come back wearing a black tie some detestable Frenchman whom nobody has ever heard of”. This mystery has now, I think, been solved, and the solution has been hiding in plain sight since 1937.
In an undated diary entry, probably on February 23, 1937, Woolf recorded a visit from Marguerite Yourcenar, who was translating the novel into French: “we went through The Waves. What does ‘See here he comes?’ mean & so on”. Yourcenar’s translation was published in Paris later that year as Les Vagues. It renders the phrase with the missing words as “puis, aux vacances de Pâques, vous irez visiter Paris, et vous reviendrez portant une cravate noire, et transformé en un odieux Français que personne n’a rencontré jusqu’ici”.
No one but Woolf, answering Yourcenar’s questions, could have provided the words translated as “et transformé en”. The English text she provided seems likely to have been “wearing a black tie, and transformed into some detestable Frenchman”; the words “transformed into” also occur in her Roger Fry (1940). Of course, these may or may not have been the same words that she had omitted six years earlier when preparing her typescript for the printer.
The Waves was published in 1931. Ninety-four years later, its text is, I hope, at last complete.
Edward Mendelson
Columbia University
On Antisemitism
I don’t mind Abigail Green’s taking issue with my arguments about antisemitism, but I do mind her suggesting that I fail to credit fellow scholars (November 28). Green claims she looked in vain in the introduction for an acknowledgement on my part of an article from 2018 by the historian David Feldman that outlines the sort of approach I follow. Had she read to the end of the book, she would have found it at the top of my suggestions for further reading.
Mark Mazower
Columbia University
Asa Briggs
I’m puzzled as to why Michael Bentley, in his grudging review of Adam Sisman’s Life of Asa Briggs (November 28), talks about interdisciplinarity as “a good idea that went wrong”. In my thirty years of teaching at the University of Sussex, the early ones under Briggs, I blessed the Founding Father every day for making it central to the very idea of Sussex. And while we are on the subject of Briggs, I have been struck that in the many reviews of Sisman’s book I have read, no one has commented on the fact that, despite his huge productivity and apparently being on every committee going, he was both approachable and caring towards his colleagues, far beyond the bounds of duty. Certainly I found him so.
Gabriel Josipovici
Lewes, East Sussex
English studies in the UK
Trevor Pateman makes a valid point about the “great big black hole” in our knowledge of what students in the past actually knew or how they expressed themselves (Letters, November 28). But sometimes scraps of evidence do survive. I recently unearthed a thick bundle of my essays and notes from when I studied English at Oxford in the 1960s. My callow, shallow thoughts on Beowulf, Milton, Shakespeare and the rest were so embarrassing to revisit that I threw the lot in the bin. It was remarkable that I gained a degree on the basis of them. In fact, the essential reading I did at that time, which informed me then, and has stayed with me, was all extracurricular: Gide, Camus, Rimbaud, Blaise Cendrars, Dostoevsky, Pyotr Ouspensky, Nietzsche, Borges.
In addition, some people have an aptitude for exams, which others lack. On the eve of my finals paper in Middle English, finding myself a bit short of topics, I visited the Bodleian and took down at random a book about John Gower, the fourteenth-century poet. I read it through, memorizing dates, key quotations and critical insights, and next day wrote an essay on him, getting quite a good mark. I have never, from that day to this, read John Gower.
Graham Chainey
Brighton
Heidegger
Ben Hutchinson writes of “Heideggerian waffle” (October 17) as if it were an established fact. A hundred years ago, the philosopher Gilbert Ryle had a better stab at it when he spoke of Heidegger’s “nursery language”. It was no small undertaking to try to rebuild the German philosophical idiom from scratch to capture the immediate experience of our being in the world, and get away from an account that, post-Aristotle, had been shaped by reason alone. The affinity of German with ancient Greek allowed for new coinages that, though cumbersome and at first difficult to understand exactly, illustrated the point that the old lexicon stood in philosophy’s way if it wanted to grasp what our being here felt like. It seems to me that it is Anglo-Saxon piffle to call this attempt by one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century to set our thinking on a new path “waffle”.
Lesley Chamberlain
London N6
What the public wants
In his review of People’s Choice Literature (November 14), Gordon Fraser refers to, among other models, Robinson Crusoe as “the story of a non-aristocratic property owner who gets trapped on a desert island, survives and makes a fortune”.
I recently re-read Crusoe, probably more than sixty years after my first reading (and several readings of the Marvel Classics Comics version). I was surprised that the key motivation of Crusoe throughout was enslavement. He leaves his prosperous home and gets enslaved by pirates. His escape is aided by an unwilling young man of colour and, when Crusoe gets to safety, he considers selling the young man. After a trip to Brazil, he finds himself with a prospering plantation without sufficient cheap labour and re-embarks to purchase slaves. After a shipwreck, he manages to build a solitary, secure and pious life (the best-known and most interesting part of the book) on a desert island with the rum, seeds and tools he rescued from the wreck. He also finds some coins, which are of no value on the island, but help later. His idyll ends when he finds his island is frequented by cannibals from the mainland. He rescues a young man of colour from the cannibals and trains him as his “man Friday”, teaching him to do the manual and menial labour needed to maintain his herd of goats, as well as Christianity.
Crusoe finally escapes by engineering a retaking of a ship from mutineers and sets sail, considering once again whether to sell his young companion. He has more adventures, including recovering and selling his plantation, and escaping ravening wolves in the Pyrenees. The unaffected naturalness of his desire to plant invasive crops in Brazil using forced labour is endearing, but hardly acceptable today. On the other hand, I admired his industry and organization, which enabled his colonial adventures. Without presentist judgementalism, his treatment of weaker (that is, less organized) humans was no more instrumental than his treatment of goats. Perhaps, as the success of Fifty Shades of Grey illustrates, what people want in novels is vicarious participation in feats of strength, regardless of the weakness of the subjugees.
James Kardon
Scarsdale NY
Railway reading
In her enjoyable review of Moonlight Express and To the Sea by Train (November 28) Alev Adil combined two of my favourite things, books and railways. However, I am not sure she is right to say that the publisher Allen Lane “came up with the concept” of the paperback book for train travel. The first paperbacks were produced in the 1840s and WH Smith’s first railway bookstall opened at London Euston on November 1, 1848. Routledge’s Railway Library series of paperbacks, which ran to more than 1,000 titles, was out of print by 1898, four years before Lane was born. Constable’s 6d series took up the slack and was widely available at stations.
I have a Constable paperback edition from 1908 of George Gissing’s The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. This would have been sold, quite possibly to a rail traveller, when Lane was six or seven.
David Harris
London WC1A
Personal pronouns
As in French and Italian (Letters, November 28), so in their parent Latin, where the word suus, indicating possession, changes ending according to the thing owned, not the owner. Generations of young students have consequently been left unsure whether, say, the table (mensa, feminine, so sua) is owned by Cicero or Clodia. Words such as “his” and “her” in English are an underappreciated boon.
N. J. Sewell-Rutter
Oxford
As observed by Benjamin Friedman (Letters, October 31), while not generally allowing the omission of subject pronouns (cf Stephen Bottomore, Letters, October 3), English allows the omission of subjects in informal speech (“Can’t see the point of that discussion”), or in abbreviated styles of writing such as diaries (“Got up too late to catch the news”), though there exist some grammatical restrictions on this phenomenon not discussed here.
Typically, authors of detective stories, ranging from Agatha Christie to Richard Osman, use subject pronoun omission to represent casual speech. Like other authors, Christie uses the device to style her characters: members of the military and working-class speakers are prolific adopters; those in middle or higher classes retain subjects in formal contexts, but may drop them in informal settings. Among Christie’s detectives, Hercule Poirot is the exception in never dropping subject pronouns. His exceptional status is clearly in keeping with her general characterization of Poirot as always highly formal, as reflected in his soigné dressing. It may also be a reflex of her characterization of Poirot’s use of English as heavily influenced by French, in which spoken subject pronoun omission is not as common as in English.
In Murder Is Easy, Christie also uses subject pronoun omission to develop her plot, revealing her literary craftsmanship. When discussing the killing of Honoria Waynflete’s pet canary, Lord Whitfield says: “Wrung its neck”. The lack of a subject makes this line ambiguous: it could either mean “I wrung its neck” – the most obvious reading – or “She wrung its neck” – ultimately the correct reading. The line is significant: whoever is capable of the cruel killing of an innocent little bird has the capacity for murder and becomes a suspect. Thus, the first interpretation singles out Lord Whitfield as a potential suspect, the second points elsewhere. “Wrung its neck” serves both as a clue to the identification of the killer and as a red herring.
Liliane Haegeman
Ghent University, Belgium
Academic obfuscation
After reading about “homodiegetic second-person narrative”, I was relieved when Patricia Craig later decried the book’s “mass of academic obfuscation” (in her review of Irish Shame, November 14). Such obfuscation may be worse in English departments than in the humanities in general. I once asked a friend in a classics department about this problem. He mused that classicists establish their specialized knowledge by mastering Latin and Greek. The students of English professors come to university already knowing English. So English professors may unconsciously feel compelled to use a recondite vocabulary to impress their students with their superior knowledge. In the US, their students are fleeing.
Richard M. Waugaman
Georgetown University
Supplementary
Ian Sansom was led to feel that he was “out of the supplement loop” when questioned by co-workers (Afterthoughts, November 14). The appropriate learned response to his interlocutor should have been “I usually find the Times Literary Supplement to be sufficiently fortifying”.
Robert Jaggs-Fowler
Barton-upon-Humber, Lincolnshire
Correction
In the review by Margaret Drabble of Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson by Leo Damrosch (October 17), it was suggested that J. M. Barrie visited Stevenson on Samoa. (“He has arrived. I have put him in a bedroom. I advised him to rest for a bit – for as long as he could.”) In fact, the two never met, and the description of the visit was one imagined by Barrie in correspondence with Stevenson.
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