Seduce her for me: Ana’s fate sealed in ‘La Regenta’

Posted on July 30, 2016 by Simon Lavery

Alas, La Regenta – final post

Ana’s plight has often been likened to Mme Bovary’s. It’s not hard to find striking similarities; here she remembers feeling angrily frustrated by her incarceration as a child by her carers:

‘What a stupid life!’ thought Ana…she believed that she had sacrificed herself to self-imposed duties…’The monotony and dullness of this existence…this sacrifice, this struggle, is greater than any adventure in the world.’…It was as if there were thistles in her soul. [p. 71, ch. 3]

The part inside quotation marks exemplifies Alas’ technique of ‘estilo latente’ or free indirect style; not exactly Ana’s thoughts, but very close.

Immediately after these rebellious, troubled thoughts she visualises her tempter, Alvaro Mesía, ‘the President of the Gentlemen’s Club, wrapped in a high-collared scarlet cape, singing under Rosina’s balcony’. Clothes and accessories play a major symbolic role in the novel; here it’s the romantic garb of the hero as player in Rossini’s Barber of Seville, then ‘in a close-fitting white top-coat, greeting her as King Amadeus used to greet people’. Fermín, Mesía’s rival for Ana’s affections, is always described as clothed in his clerical ‘mozetta’ and ‘rochet’ or long soutane – but he longs to stride out in secular trousers like…a real man, not an asexual priest.

Such erotic fantasies vie in Ana’s mind with conflicting mystical-religious images and thoughts. She’s also dreaming here of having a baby – which will not be provided by Víctor, her husband, the ex-judge, as they have no sexual relations. She’ll need someone virile like Mesía (or Fermín, the canon theologian, secretly in love with her – and whom she sees – mostly – as a spiritual father, not potential lover) to provide her with a child. But she also longs for sex in its own right: this scene is erotically charged with descriptions of her semi-naked state in bed:

…her form, of a modern Venus, provocative and voluptuous, was both revealed and exaggerated by the coloured blanket of fine-spun wool, drawn close about her. [p. 70]

As her spirits flag, Ana feels ‘the aridity and tension which were tormenting her’ turn into ‘disconsolate grief’. She stops feeling ‘wicked’ and returns to thoughts of sacrifice and sublimity. Mesía’s alluring, romantic image fades and is replaced by that of her elderly, foolish husband, pictured in her imagination as the antithesis of the dashing, handsome Mesía, signified again by apparel and appearance:

a tartan dressing-gown, a green smoking-cap of velvet with gold braid and a tassel, a white moustache and a white goatee, two bushy grizzled eyebrows…[pp. 71-72]

This ‘respectable and familiar figure’ was ‘the burthen of her sacrifice’; he clearly doesn’t stand a chance against Mesía’s campaign to storm Ana’s sexual defences – especially as he goes on to make Mesía his bosom buddy, encourages him to entertain his wife.

Víctor’s ill-judged patronage of his rival reaches a climax in ch. 26 when Ana, recalling a woman she’d seen in Saragossa ‘dressed as a penitent, walking barefoot’ behind the image of ‘the dead Christ’ in a Holy Week procession, emulates this act of ‘spiritual fidelity’, dressed ‘in purple’, a ‘spectacle’ which she knows will scandalise the narrow-minded Vetustans. Would it be ‘brazen’, she wonders, or the act of a ‘bluestocking George Sand’ – yet another dramatic metafictional image.

Obdulia, whose overt sensuality truly is brazen, looks on ‘pale with emotion and dying of envy.’ This was, she thinks, characteristically, ‘the perfect ideal of coquetry.’ Her appearance once again reveals her character:

Her own naked shoulders, her ivory arms acting as a background for clinging embroidered lace, her back with its vertiginous curves, her bosom, high and strong, exuberant and tempting, had never attracted in this way or in anything like this way the attention and admiration of an entire town, however much she displayed them in ballrooms, theatres, promenades – and processions. [p. 590]

Ana’s ‘two bare feet’ cause more of an erotic sensation in the town than all of Obdulia’s flaunted flesh. She knows she can’t match this ‘cachet’, possessed by ‘admiring envy’ and a kind of ‘crazy, brutal lust’ – in a charge of eroticism she felt ‘a vague desire – to – to – to be a man’. Ana’s sexual appeal transcends gender. And her naked feet ‘were the nakedness of her whole body and soul’ – a kind of sexual synecdoche.

This scene fills several astonishing pages. Mesía, when the statue of the Virgin passes him, is afraid: that image of ‘infinite pain’ contrasts tellingly with his own thoughts, ‘all profanation and lust’: even he is frightened. He realises Ana is performing a great ‘act of madness’ for Fermín, his currently triumphant spiritual rival, dressed in his habitual ‘rochet, a mote and a cope’, but ‘was going to perform other greater ones for her lover, for Mesía.’

Fermín experiences a similar epiphany to Mesía’s: ‘what little of the clergyman he had left in his soul was disappearing…He was the shell of a priest.’

Here’s the climax of the scene:

‘She’s looking most extraordinarily beautiful!’ the ladies in the balconies of the court-house were saying.

‘Extraordinarily beautiful!’

‘It takes some courage, though.’

‘But then she’s a regular saint.’

‘I think she’s dying the death,’ said Obdulia…She looks like plaster.’

‘I think she’s dying of shame,’ said Visita…

‘Going barefoot was an atrocious thing to do. She’ll be a week in bed with her feet torn to tatters’ [said Doña Rufina].

We see the whole spectrum of town also voicing or showing their cynical, lascivious responses to Ana’s egregious display, until:

The religious masses admired the lady’s humility, without any objections or reservations. ‘That really was what you’d call imitating Christ. Walking along, just like any ordinary person…going barefoot all around the town! She was a saint!’

The working classes of Vetusta bewilder and appal the bourgeoisie and aristocracy of the city, and serve, as here, with their vulgar but honest vitality and comparative integrity, to show up the hypocrisy of their social betters.

Víctor, Ana’s husband, is horrified by her gesture, and says to Mesía, not knowing about his supposed friend’s intended treachery:

‘Sooner than this, I would prefer to see her in the arms of a lover! Yes, a thousand times yes,’ he continued, ‘find me a lover for her, seduce her for me, anything rather than seeing her in the arms of fanaticism!’…’You can count upon my firm friendship, Don Víctor – a friend in need…[says Mesía, p. 597]

This is one of the most remarkable set pieces in the novel. From this point Ana’s fate is sealed, Víctor’s cuckolding unwittingly given his own blessing, and Mesía can’t believe his luck. By prostrating herself symbolically before the town in an act of fanatical religiosity, Ana has inadvertently confirmed the gossip and opinion, as far as the upper classes are cynically concerned, that she is just as sexually available as the rest of their scheming womenfolk.

Her attempt to find religion and resist venality, as Tom has shown in his posts at Wuthering Expectations blog, is doomed in this toxic city.

A cold and calculating egotism: La Regenta, by Leopoldo Alas

Posted on July 29, 2016 by Simon Lavery

Leopoldo Alas, La Regenta

The cover painting on my Penguin edition is an early Picasso: rather striking

In his first posts on this huge novel, first published in Spain in 1885, and which I read in the John Rutherford translation in Penguin Classics, Tom at Wuthering Heights summarised the plot and began some thoughts about its structure, theme and merits (it was his ‘readalong’ for July). In the second of his posts he linked to a highly perceptive piece by Scott Bailey, which suggests that the adultery theme, influenced by Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, is not, as most commentators suggest, the primary one. It’s Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, he argues, that’s the important plot template, as seen in Ana’s struggle with her conflicting impulses towards mystical saintliness and spirituality, on the one hand, and venality and sexuality on the other.

I find this a compelling argument, and will not try to add to it here – except to make a case for parallels with another great 19C novel of spiritually stifling and hypocritically amoral provincial life: George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I haven’t thought this through yet, but Scott’s discussion of the significance of St Teresa in La Regenta stirred up memories of the portrayal of Dorothea Brooke as a Midland St Teresa. There are congruent themes, too, of the hypocrisy and corruption of business and of scabrous bourgeois society (and, to a lesser extent, the Church – more critically exposed in the character of the spiritually arid but outrageously vain, pedantic clergyman, Casaubon. Ana’s elderly husband Víctor is less obnoxious, but equally asexual, foolish in his own way, but less forbiddingly unpleasant than Casaubon). I wouldn’t want to push the analogies too far, but my memory of this novel raises several other similarities with the Alas: struggles of faith with Mammon in particular, of the (usually doomed) quest for personal fulfilment in a ‘toxic’, vulgar, secular world that’s ostensibly religious (though Dorothea’s fate is less gruesome than Ana’s).

I don’t know if Alas had read Eliot…

So I’ll leave that thought for now. Instead I’ll look at some representative passages from the text to explore Alas’ style and manner of conveying character, themes and subject matter.

Let’s start with character. Here’s one of the first of many (MANY!) set-piece portraits of one of the huge cast, in this case one of the three major players: Don Fermín De Pas, vicar-general and canon theologian of the cathedral church of Vetusta (an archaic Spanish word for ‘antiquated’ – an unsubtle sign for the conservative, backward-looking provinciality of the city), which is clearly based on the Oviedo in Asturias in which Alas spent much of his adult life (as an academic lawyer and journalist-critic; La Regenta was his first novel, written at the age of 37).

A pair of bell-ringer street urchins had observed him in the street below from their church tower vantage-point. As the man passes by, they admire his legs:

This was real class! Not one stain! The feet were like a lady’s; the hose was purple, like a bishop’s; and each shoe was a work of painstaking craftsmanship in the finest leather, displaying a simple yet elegant silver buckle which looked very splendid against the colour of the stocking. (ch. 1, p. 26)

Here, in this first character portrait of the novel, the narrative technique is apparent. The opening words, without quotation marks, are clearly the thoughts of the working-class boy – it’s what Rutherford in his introduction calls estilo latente, better known now as free indirect style, and usually associated with Flaubert. Elsewhere in the novel Alas has longer, more nuanced ‘sympathetic projection’ passages in which he does flag up the device with quotation marks. This makes for a disconcerting layer of complexity as the viewpoints shift back and forth frequently between characters and the ironical narrator, often many times within a short space (Rutherford gives examples and explores them). It serves to dramatise the layers of motive in these flawed, hypocritical characters.

There’s humour in this extract, too. The urchin is most impressed by the cleanness of the canon’s appearance; he would of course be mud-spattered or dusty and unwashed himself, and his naivety enables Alas to switch to a more knowing voice in the rest of the paragraph.

Although the comparison with a lady’s feet focalises largely on the boy’s viewpoint, the detail now starts to veer away from his to a voice more akin to that of the worldly, satirical-ironic narrator (more deeply cynical, I suspect, than Alas himself). That long third sentence has a more sophisticated vocabulary than the boy’s, and it introduces us to the more darkly critical, overtly critical portrait of de Pas that follows:

The post-boy was right, De Pas did not use cosmetics.

The denial is a comically transparent indication of the canon’s excessive attention to his appearance, his barely-concealed sensuality that we later learn culminates in his falling passionately in love with the eponymous judge’s wife, Ana. His hypocrisy is drawn, perhaps not always very subtly, but with great gusto, to our attention from the outset. It’s a fundamental factor in the two parallel plots mentioned above. De Pas fails Ana as a spiritual father and mentor, and precipitates her fall into the arms of the handsome Mesía – to whom I hope to turn in a later post.

Let’s complete this exploration of De Pas in this extract.

The most striking thing about the canon theologian’s eyes, which were green with speckles that looked like grains of snuff, was that they seemed as soft, smooth and clammy as lichen; but sometimes a piercing gleam would shoot out from them – an unpleasant surprise, like finding a needle in a feather pillow. Few people could bear that look.

This is fine character sketching, and the comparisons to snuff and lichen are suitably repellent. That De Pas has such a formidable gaze is intended to show how secular and unexpectedly masculine he is for a senior cleric: qualities that conflict with his desire to appear a loving spiritual pastor to his (largely female, adoring) flock.

My problem with Alas is that he doesn’t stop there; the narrative camera pans down his head to his nose, lips then chin, in a mammoth paragraph that almost fills the page of (tiny) print. In case we’ve missed the point – obvious enough, surely – the narrator concludes:

[he had] an expression of prudence verging on cowardly hypocrisy and revealing a cold and calculating egotism. It could be avowed with confidence that those lips guarded like a treasure the supreme word, that word which is never spoken. [We then get more description! His jowl, head, powerful neck…]

Rutherford’s introduction quite aptly compares the indirect style favoured by Alas with Jane Austen’s. But she would rarely ‘tell’ us (rather than show) a character’s nature with such prolix descriptive detail and narrative comment.

That mysterious bit about the ‘supreme word’, though, is terrific and sinister, summing up brilliantly the duplicitous, manipulative ambition of this muscular priest, oozing barely repressed sexuality and male energy.

The paragraph ends by saying that he is physically (and unclerically) ‘robust’ (he’s only 35, and later demonstrates his strength is superior to his rival for Ana’s affection in a way that humiliates Mesía and confirms him as a bitter enemy), comparable with ‘the sprucest gadabout in town’.

He has been set up for us, then, perhaps at too great length, but with flashes of fine writing, as a hypocritical representative of a corrupt church, who’s had sexual dalliances with married ladies in the past, and lusts after Ana in a most unspiritual way (which he disguises with decreasing efficacy as the novel progresses). De Pas is thus a fitting rival to the equally egotistical sexual predator, Mesía, who represents the secular world in his role as serially cynical ‘middle class seducer’ of the ladies of Vetusta.

They’re as odious as each other in their pursuit of sexual and social dominance.

More extracts for discussion next time, with perhaps a glance at another influential text (possibly): Dangerous Liaisons. Meanwhile I’d recommend you take a look at Tom’s three posts so far on La Regenta, and Scott Bailey’s. Links at the start of this post.

Plymouth Pilgrim

Posted on July 14, 2016 by Simon Lavery

Plymouth pilgrimage

If you’ve read this blog recently you’ll know that one of my oldest friends died in May. Michael Flay’s works (reviewed by me) and contributions have featured many times over the years here. He and I used to meet several times a year to talk. Usually it was somewhere between Cheltenham, where he lived, and Truro – most often Plymouth (Bristol and Exeter also, sometimes).

We always travelled by train to these meetings; Mike loved railways. Yesterday I went on a poignant, solitary trip to Plymouth to meet with him in his absence.

Having arrived at Plymouth station concourse at noon, I paused to scan the Arrivals noticeboard. There was the train Mike would have caught: the 13.01 from Cardiff. I would usually wait in the garish buffet over a coffee. I looked towards the barriers, half expecting to see Mike’s customary approach and greeting. Of course, it wasn’t to be.

Armada Way, looking north (wikipedia photo)

Through the arid shopping precincts of the city (Mike would have called them ‘zones’), rebuilt by modernist zealots after the destruction of the blitz – aimed inaccurately at the naval shipyards – during WWII.

I walked to the Waterfront, a striking art-deco bistro-pub on a terrace right beside Plymouth Sound. To get there I pass over the

The repaired Waterfront bistro terrace with the Hoe behind

The repaired Waterfront bistro terrace with the Hoe and Smeaton’s Tower behind

Hoe, with its stiff statue (see above) of an implausibly theatrical Drake (born in nearby Tavistock), bowling-ball in hand, gazing out implacably towards the expected, despised, ‘invincible’ Armada.

From below the Pilgrim Fathers set out on their puritanical way in 1620 to New Plymouth in New England – the second settlement there. Hence the accent: the West country English burr.

Our favourite table inside the Waterfront when too cold to sit outside

To the West, the estuary of the Tamar, border with my county, Cornwall. To the east, the Plym. Across the broad entrance to the Sound stretches the Breakwater, which has protected the haven since 1814.

Like a whale’s back in the middle of the Sound looms the granite bulk of Drake’s Island.

By Drake’s statue the red-and-white striped lighthouse, Smeaton’s Tower, named after its designer, and built by Cornish miners in 1759. Originally located 14 miles offshore, the second of the famous Eddystone lighthouses, it was dismantled and reassembled on the Hoe in 1877, two thirds of its original height. Tourists can now climb to the top to admire the panorama. The tower even has its own Twitter account (@SmeatonsTower).

We used to catch a cab to the Waterfront and have a couple of beers. Mike invariably ordered a burger, but he only ever ate half of it.

The curving facade of the Waterfront and its terrace, with Plymouth Sound behind

It was warm and sunny enough to sit outside and admire the view across the bay. The terrace was almost destroyed in the winter storms a couple of years ago, so we’d taken to spending our lunchtimes at what Mike called ‘the colonial hotel’, about which more later. Sadly, the Waterfront didn’t reopen in time for us to have one more rendezvous there.

A young man with a handsome whippet called Carlos joined his father at the table next to mine. We chatted. The father was from Belfast, and was delighted to hear that my ancestors came from that city. Carlos watched us with canine dignity.

Brittany Ferry in the distance, entering the Sound

As we talked I noticed the Britanny Ferries ship approaching. It passed close enough to see its name: ‘L’Armorique’. Plymouth has long been an important trading and naval port, with a busy ferry service to Britanny and Santander, across the choppy Bay of Biscay. Armorica was the ancient Gaulish name for that French peninsula which features so often in Arthurian legends. An apt reminder of the cultural and ethnic links between Old and New Britain (as Geoffrey of Monmouth called Britanny).

L’Armorique ferry passes by

Mike enjoyed coming to this place: as a child he’d spent many family holidays at the beach resorts nearby, and often visited Plymouth with his parents. I drove us to Cawsand, Kingsand and Whitsand Bay on one occasion when I came by car to meet him. We’d also visited Dartmoor – we liked the grim prison at Princetown, and once had a coffee in the dour café in the village.

Back through the shopper-thronged precincts to the hotel bar, our more recent haunt while the Waterfront was rebuilt. It’s an unprepossessing concrete structure, but has a comfortable bar, and does adequate food. This is where my last obituary piece arose: the Sky News with sound off, subtitles scrolling, relating Cameron’s last PMQ session, and the forced jollity of the debating chamber’s farewell to the outgoing Prime Minister.

On the train home I considered whether this had been an uplifting pilgrimage, or morbid wallowing in sadness. On balance I think it was the former: cathartic. I felt his presence, like Eliot’s shadowy figure, the ‘third who walks always beside you’ from the Waste Land, and was able, in some way, to feel we’d communed.

Asides: manutergium, Isidore of Seville, words and etymologies

Posted on July 11, 2016 by Simon Lavery

While I slowly work my way through the 19C Spanish novel La Regenta, by Leopoldo Alas – an immense work running to just over 700 pp in my Penguin Classics translation (but in tiny print, so would be well over a thousand if published in a normal size font) – here’s another rare word I collected a while back.

It can be seen as another example of the ecclesiastical/liturgical terminology that I featured in a recent post. Here’s the (edited) OED Online entry on the word of today:

manutergium, n.

‘ A towel on which a priest dries his hands after washing them before celebrating Mass.’

Etymology: < post-classical Latin manutergium hand-towel, especially for liturgical purposes (early 5th cent.; from 7th cent. in British sources) < classical Latin manus hand + terg-, stem of tergēre to wipe. Compare manuterge n. [a towel used in various liturgical contexts by the priest, such as after washing of hands before mass, before administering baptism, etc.]

1774 T. West Antiq. Furness Explan. Ground Plan sig. a2, The piscina, or cistern, at which the priest washed his hands before service..over it hung the manutergium.

It’s sometimes spelt ‘maniturgium’.

Google the word and there pop up a number of similar blog entries seemingly by Catholic priests. It’s traditional for a newly ordained priest to give his parents a gift after celebrating his first Mass. To his mother he gives the manutergium, which he’d used to wipe his hands. It’s a reminder of the shroud in which Jesus was entombed. It is presented to the priest’s mother because she was his first protector on earth, while it serves as an emblem of God’s protection of Christians and their priests.

When the priest’s mother dies, she is buried with the manutergium in her hands, as a sign in the anticipated afterlife that she has given birth to a priest. Mgr Charles Pope, in his blog Lost Liturgy File, posted a poignant piece attesting to this custom back in 2010. His definition is slightly different from the one above; he says it is

a long cloth that was wrapped around the hands of the newly ordained priest after the Bishop anointed his hands with the sacred Chrism (oil). The purpose was to prevent excess oil from dripping onto vestments or the floor during the remainder of the ordination rites.’ (That term ‘chrism’ was noted in my previous post).

His post continues

The use of the manutergium was discontinued in the current Rite of Ordination. Currently, the newly ordained steps aside to a table after his hands are anointed and uses a purificator to wipe away any excess oil. While it is not technically called the manutergium nor is it exactly the same in design or usage, (for the hands are not wrapped by it), nevertheless this is still a cloth used to wipe away the excess Chrism.

The priest traditionally gives to his father the stole he wore when hearing his first confession. When his father dies, he is buried with the stole in his hands.

Footnotes: 1. Reference works such as Lewis and Short’s Latin Dictionary cite Isidore’s Origines (translated as ‘Etymologies’ in English) for an early definition.

'T and O' mappa mundi from Bk 14 of the Etymologies in its first printed edition, by Guntherus Zainer, Augsburg, 1472. Now in BL

‘T and O’ (or O-T) mappa mundi (orbis terrarum) from Bk 14 in its first printed edition, by Guntherus Zainer, Augsburg, 1472. Now in BL, G.7633 = IB5440 . Jerusalem is depicted at the centre of the globe’s northern hemisphere – the southern one was considered uninhabited or unreachable. The T divides the 3 continents: Asia at the top, twice the size of Europe and Asia. The O is the encircling ocean.

Isidore of Seville, c. 560-636, compiled this encyclopedia of terms from the Seven Liberal Arts to legal jargon, agriculture and hundreds of other topics towards the end of his life. It was his attempt to preserve all the learning that could be gleaned from classical antiquity that he considered worthwhile. It was hugely influential until the Renaissance.

In Book 19 (of 20), ‘De Navibus, aedificiis et vestibus’ – Ships, buildings and clothing – among other items of clothing, subheaded ‘Bedspreads and other cloths that we use’, he writes:

Facietergium et manitergium a tergendo faciem vel manus vocatum. [online Latin text at thelatinlibrary.com]

The face towel (facietergium) and hand towel (manitergium) are named from wiping (tergere) the face (facies) or hands (manus). [online version of a translation by Stephen A. Barney et al., published by Cambridge UP]

According to Wikipedia the Vatican considered naming Isidore the patron saint of the internet – an apt choice, given his massively eclectic and ‘complacently derivative’ textual enterprise (according to his translator Barney, quoted above).

Now back to La Regenta and scandalous provincial goings-on in Vetusta (Oviedo).

Asides: cockpits and cabins

Posted on July 6, 2016 by Simon Lavery

In her entertainingly eclectic blog ‘Finding Time to Write’,Marina Sofia recently wrote a salutary post about blogging: she eschews the advice of ‘social media experts’ and ‘cookie-cutter’ advice from ‘experts’, and advocates her own approach, which is pretty much to write what she damn well likes, when she likes. I like this philosophy, and abide by it myself.

Jerry the dog in his Languedoc garden, urging me to throw his frisbee

My regular reader will know that I’ve posted almost every day recently, since returning from my Euro travels (no pictures of elegantly crested parrots this summer, sadly, but I did meet a lovely dog called Jerry). This reflects the fact that I’m currently on leave from the paid job, and have more time to write for the blog.

Like most of those who commented on Marina’s piece, I know I risk alienating my readers by overwhelming them with material. I hope I don’t; readers are sensible people, and will skip items that don’t appeal. I just enjoy writing them, and hope you enjoy reading them.

So here I go. Yesterday I posted about some rather arcane ecclesiastical-liturgical words. Now for something more mundane…

A couple of words entered my mind on the flight home from Brussels. The First Officer, when giving his usual welcome announcement before take-off, referred to the cockpit of the plane. The flight attendant, during the flight, made an announcement about walking through the plane’s cabin. These words intrigued me.

Cockpit: why name that part of the plane after an arena for fighting game birds? I decided to explore…

OED online: (I’ve omitted much of the detail, and given a few of the more interesting [to me] historical references.)

1. A pit or enclosed area in which game-cocks are set to fight for sport; a place constructed for cock-fighting.

1587 T. Churchyard Worthines of Wales sig. N3v, The Mountaynes stands..In roundnesse such, as it a Cockpit were.

†b. Applied to a theatre; and to the pit of a theatre. Obs.

a1616 Shakespeare Henry V (1623) Prol. 11:

Can this Cock-Pit hold The vastie fields of France? Or may we cramme Within this Woodden O, the very Caskes That did affright the Ayre at Agincourt?

a1635 L. Digges in Shaks. Suppl. I. 71 Let but Beatrice And Benedict be seen; lo! in a trice, The cockpit, galleries, boxes, all are full.

Naut. The after part of the orlop deck of a man-of-war; forming ordinarily the quarters for the junior officers, and in action devoted to the reception and care of the wounded.

[‘Orlop‘??]

1706 Phillips’s New World of Words (ed. 6) Cockpit, in a man of war, is a Place on the lower Floor, or Deck.

1769 W. Falconer Universal Dict. Marine Cock-pit of a ship of war, the apartments of the surgeon and his mates, being the place where the wounded men are dressed.

1813 R. Southey Life Nelson II. 258 The cockpit was crowded with wounded and dying men; over whose bodies he was with some difficulty conveyed.

1834 F. Marryat Peter Simple I. x. 124 Send him down to the surgeon in the cockpit.

Now here’s the bit I was looking for:

Aeronaut. In the fuselage of any kind of aircraft, or in the capsule of a space vehicle: the space occupied by a pilot, observer, astronaut, or (formerly) a passenger.

I suppose it’s obvious, then, that it’s used as a sort of spatial metaphor, signifying the rather cramped conditions and enclosed nature of the space where the pilot(s) sit…This would explain the next entry, for similar reasons:

Motor Racing. The space in a racing car occupied by the driver.

Next I turned to:

Online etymological dictionary

1580s, “a pit for fighting cocks,” from cock (n.1) + pit (n.1). Used in nautical sense (1706) for midshipmen’s compartment below decks; transferred to airplanes (1914) and to cars (1930s).

nacelle, n

late 15c., “small boat,” from Old French nacele “little boat, bark, skiff” (12c., Modern French nacelle), from Vulgar Latin *naucella, from Late Latin navicella “a little ship,” diminutive of navis “ship” (see naval). Meaning “gondola of an airship” is from 1901; extended to “cockpit of an aircraft” by 1914; later transferred to other similar housings and structures.

[I like that use of ‘gondola’ for the basket part of an airship. Poetic.]

Now for:

cabin, n. [OED online again]

Etymology: Middle English cabane , < French cabane (= Provençal cabana , [etc.])< late Latin capanna

A permanent habitation of rough or rudimentary construction; a poor dwelling.

Applied esp. to the mud or turf-built dwellings of slaves or impoverished peasantry, as distinguished from the more comfortable ‘cottage’ of working men, or from the ‘hut’ of traditional African homesteads, or the temporary ‘hut’ of travellers, explorers, etc.

c1440 Promptorium Parvulorum 57 Caban, lytylle howse, pretoriolum, capana.

†3. A cell: e.g. of an anchorite or hermit, in a convent or prison; a cell of a honeycomb.

1362 Langland Piers Plowman A. xii. 35 Clergy in to a caban crepte.

[Here we go: the aircraft usage]

A room or compartment in a vessel for sleeping or eating in. An apartment or small room in a ship for officers or passengers. Also in an aircraft or spacecraft.

1382 Bible (Wycliffite, E.V.) Ezek. xxvii. 6 Thi seetis of rowers..and thi litil cabans.

Ok, so it’s another spatial metaphor: the plane’s ‘cabin’ is of necessity confined, cribbed…of course! That’s why these words were niggling in my mind. I was thinking of Macbeth, and the line that’s become a cliché: back to OED online:

cabin, v.

3. To shut up or confine within narrow and hampering bounds. (Mostly after Shakespeare [see, I was right].)

a1616 Shakespeare Macbeth (1623) iii. iv. 23 Now I am cabin’d, crib’d, confin’d, bound in.

1818 Byron Childe Harold: Canto IV cxxvi. 66 The faculty divine Is chain’d and tortured—cabin’d, cribb’d, confined.

1846 E. Bulwer-Lytton Lucretia III. ii. xviii. 116 [One who] had the authority to cabin his mind in the walls of form.

1871 E. A. Freeman Hist. Norman Conquest (1876) IV. xvii. 58 The newer foundation was cabined, cribbed, and confined in a very narrow space between the Cathedral Church and the buildings of the City. [There’s the evidence of the cliché: it’s almost impossible to use ‘cabin’ as a verb without adding the other two synonyms used by Shakespeare]

So there we are: the two words are a consequence of our language’s fondness for metaphorical neologisms and coinages – especially when Shakespeare can be tapped into.

Let’s finish with another picture of my much-missed canine friend, Jerry:

Asides: aumbry, chrism, laver, accolade

Posted on July 5, 2016 by Simon Lavery

Frank Bottomley’s The Explorer’s Guide to the Abbeys, Monasteries and Churches of Great Britain (Avenel Books, New York, 1984) was bought by me, according to an inscription on the flyleaf, in Windsor in 1987. It’s an alphabetical glossary of terms related to eccclesiastical and monastic terminology, especially architectural and liturgical. It’s fascinating, full of arcane stuff that appeals to the ex-medievalist in me, and has delightful, rather crude, line drawings. Weirdly the front cover has the author’s name spelt wrongly, as my picture shows.

I pulled it off the shelves this morning and found at random this entry, a term I’d forgotten (definition, etc., abridged from online OED):

aumbry, n.

Mid-13C aumbry, St Matthew’s church, Langford, Oxon

Etymology (abridged): < (i) Anglo-Norman almarie … (also OF, MF armaire, MF, French armoire) niche, cabinet, cupboard, closet, bookcase, library, chest (12th cent.), and its etymon (ii) classical Latin armārium cabinet, cupboard, bookcase, in post-classical Latin also recess in a wall (12th cent. in a British source), shelf (1440 in a British glossarial source) < arma gear, tools, arms + -ārium

Perhaps sometimes associated by folk etymology with ALMONRY n., as if a place for alms…

1. A container for storing books, a bookcase; (occas.) a room where books or other documents are stored, a library, an archive. Formerly also: †a repository or compendium of knowledge, such as a chronicle or commentary (obs.). Now hist. (chiefly in the form almery) and rare.
2. More generally.
a. A place for storing things, as a cupboard, locker, safe, press, etc.; a repository; (in later use) esp. a niche or recess in a wall used for storage. Formerly also (occas.): †a storeroom or storehouse (obs.).
Earliest recorded in attrib. use.

1886 R. L. STEVENSON Kidnapped iv. 37 ‘The blue phial,’ said he—‘in the aumry—the blue phial.’..I ran to the cupboard.
1972 B. MOORE Catholics ii. 77 The Abbot crossed the cloister to a bay where there was an ambry used for storing wood.

b. Christian Church. A cupboard, locker, or recess in the wall of a church or church building, to hold books, communion vessels, vestments, etc. This is the sense in which Bottomley uses it; he gives several examples of churches where they survive. They might have also been used for storage of ‘towels for laver’ (source of my surname? French ‘laverie’):

LAVER: monastic place for washing hands before meals ‘and for performing the morning toilet’. It would also be used in the ‘maundy’ – ritual footwashing (a symbol of fraternity and humility).

A chrismatory, German,1636, now in the V & A Museum, London

1555 W. WATERMAN tr. J. Boemus Fardle of Facions II. xii. 301 Upon the right hande of the highe aulter, that ther should be an almorie, either cutte into the walle, or framed vpon it: in the whiche thei would haue the Sacrament of the Lordes bodye, the holy oyle for the sicke, and the Chrismatorie, alwaie to be locked.

******** **********

Glass ambry for oil (chrism) of catechumens (candidates for baptism) and the sick

Wikipedia points out (s.v. ‘ambry’) that it stored elements used in the Eucharistic ceremony; the pyx would also serve this purpose. In Catholic usage it is where the various holy oils are stored, including the splendidly named chrism (from the Greek for ‘anointing’ or ‘unction’). It us used in the ceremonies of Confirmation or chrismation, and the sacraments of baptism and Holy Orders; also for consecration of altars and churches. It’s made from olive oil infused with sweet perfume such as balsam.

These holy oils are stored in receptacles called chrismaria and they’re kept in…yes, an aumbry.

In the Confirmation ceremony, associated with the renewal of baptismal vows when a person has reached an age of sufficient maturity to choose to make the renewal, the bishop would accompany the final ‘pax tecum’ blessing with a touch on the cheek. The Roman Pontifical interpreted this as a ‘slap’ – a physical reminder to the recipient to be brave in the defence of the faith.

This is a concept related to the medieval chivalric accolade (from ‘col’, French for neck, Latin ‘collum’), originally a rite of passage ceremony to signify a young man’s achieving the formal status of mature knight, later coming to signify ‘embrace’ or ‘honour’. Today we’re most familiar with the gesture of ‘adoubement’ or dubbing the recipient with a tap on each shoulder with the flat blade of a sword (the English queen does this still when knighting people). There is some dispute about the earlier forms of this ritual; it seems a kiss or light blow (‘colée’) on the cheek or ear might have been originally used, and the dubbing with the sword replaced the gesture.

It is easier to face death than to face life: Ivy Compton-Burnett, ‘The Present and the Past’

Posted on July 4, 2016 by Simon Lavery

Ivy Compton-Burnett, The Present and the Past (1953)

My previous posts on this novel have centred on ICB’s extraordinary dialogue, even from children’s mouths – epigrammatic, witty and caustic, usually serving to outsmart the self-absorbed or distracted adults around them. Here’s another example.

The children are discussing their father, Cassius, whose moods and selfishness have cast a pall over the family for some time. He is jealous that his two wives have become friends, and exclude him from their intimacy, and that his children do the same.

‘Is Father happy?’ said Guy.

‘He is often satisfied,’ said Megan. ‘You can see him having the satisfaction’

That use of ‘the’ is pure Henry James. The apparently irrelevant but deeply meaningful reply by Megan and her subtle progression from ‘satisfied’ to ‘the satisfaction’ suggests a shrewd, cynical but profoundly perceptive understanding of her father’s volatile, introspective character. Megan is seven years old!

The conversation continues:

‘There is a great deal about grown-up people that children cannot understand,’ said Miss Ridley [the governess].

‘And a great deal that they can,’ said Fabian. ‘That is where the danger lies.’

‘I don’t think there is much to understand about Father,’ said Megan. ‘When he is unhappy himself, he wants other people to be.’

‘You cannot judge human beings as simply as that,’ said Miss Ridley. ‘They are complex creatures with many conflicting qualities.’

‘Ah, your father never wants you to be unhappy, my little one,’ said Cassius, quickening his pace. ‘It is true that he is sometimes unhappy and uncertain, but he never wants to hurt his children.’

Given that the crisis of the novel comes when this father of five children, two by his first wife, Catherine, three by the second, attempts suicide because he feels ignored by his family, this is a revealing demonstration of his fragile, egotistical nature. Even more interesting is the insight into it that his children show here; Fabian, the oldest, is only 13, yet he talks like an Oscar Wilde wit, with his paradoxes and aphoristic tendency. The children are the ones who sound mature, reflective and sensible in this flawed but fascinating novel.

And all is done through dialogue. No narrative comment is necessary. This is a highly unusual technique, difficult to accomplish, but done with panache by ICB. All that’s lacking is a little variation in the tone: it tends to be all at this pitch, and can become wearing.

In this extract, as we have seen in my earlier posts, Miss Ridley, the starchy governess, is too limited and conventional in her view of how children should comport themselves – dull and obedient like dutiful, ignorant Victorian children – to be their ally against their father and his self-indulgent, self-pitying heedlessness. By patronising them she shows herself unequal to the task of teaching them how to deal with their inadequate parents.

That final, insincere speech by Cassius is chilling in its childishness, hypocrisy and duplicity. Almost every line of dialogue in this novel is resonant with such (often dark) significance and ambiguity.

To round off this short sequence of discussions of extracts from the novel, here’s one of the most memorable aphorisms:

‘It is easier to face death than to face life.’

This isn’t just clever word-play; it compresses into ten words the tragicomedy that is life as portrayed unflinchingly by ICB. It also shows up the breathtaking selfishness of Cassius.

Cover of my elderly PMC edition, with an illustration from Stanley Spencer, ‘Villas at Cookham’

Other bloggers on ICB

If you’d like to learn more about her, I’d recommend a visit to the numerous posts in Simon Thomas’s excellent blog (full of plenty of other interesting pieces on lesser-known or neglected writers) – Stuck in a Book.

It has links to biographies, memoirs, etc., and examines most of the major novels, with recommendations where to start. Much more comprehensive than my first tentative explorations of this inimitable writer’s work.

Darwinian aphorisms from the mouths of babes: Ivy Compton-Burnett again

Posted on July 3, 2016 by Simon Lavery

Yesterday I wrote about the biting wit in the dialogue of all the characters in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s 1953 novel The Present and the Past. Even the children talk with a maturity and poise that belies their years.

Cover of my elderly PMC edition, with an illustration from Stanley Spencer, ‘Villas at Cookham’

Here’s another example, from pp. 32-33 of my battered PMC edition. Here the destructive behaviour of the smallest Clare child, Tobias, who is three, is being discussed. Henry is eight, Guy eleven; Cassius is the father, and Flavia his second wife (the mother of Fabian, who is 13, and Guy, was Cassius’ first wife, Catherine, who has suddenly reappeared after nine years, demanding access to her sons. Cassius and Flavia have had three children of their own).

Cassius has expressed his shock that Tobias doesn’t always speak the truth. When told by Fabian that the child is confused by having stories told to him, Cassius retorts that in future he should be told nothing but facts. Maybe, he muses, tales should not be told to children.

‘It would not be natural,’ said his son. [Fabian] ‘And it would not make any difference. The infant mind invents stories. All infancy is the same. In the infancy of the race tales were invented.’

‘Have we been wrong in deciding on a home education?’ said Flavia, smiling at her husband.

Such epigrammatic dialogue from young children is characteristic of ICB’s approach to fiction. It often involves this kind of witty generalisation arising from individual examples of human behaviour. Flavia’s admiringly bemused reaction is understandable.

The conversation moves on to the topic of the development of all five children:

‘I think the elder ones are of the higher type,’ said Cassius, in an even tone. ‘Especially if Guy’s backwardness is a passing phase.’

‘Well, their mother is a gifted woman. I have heard many people say so. It is natural that her children should take after her.’ [says Flavia]

‘Has she more gifts than you have?’ said Henry.

‘Yes, I think she probably has.’

‘Do children inherit only from mothers?’

‘No, from both their parents.’

‘Then Father might have some gifts for us to inherit.’

‘He hardly seems to think that you have inherited any.’

Eight-year-old Henry uses impeccable logic here to outwit the adults, managing to disparage his aloof, dismissive father (who is beginning to turn against Flavia, as he had against Catherine), while simultaneously defending his slighted mother. Cassius is exposed as the one behaving with childish egotism here.

ICB was much concerned with Darwinian evolution and related concepts of inheritance, as well as with the toxic relations that often flourished in the Edwardian upper-middle-class families that formed the basis of her cast of characters. She never lets such thematic matters interfere too much with the drama conveyed exclusively through dialogue. It somehow doesn’t seem to matter that real children don’t talk like this; nobody really talks like characters in novels. ICB’s characters talk exactly as she wants them to, and the fulminations, manoeuvrings and put-downs are highly entertaining.

Here the scene is being set for the comedy of manners to shade into domestic tragedy. It takes rare skill to pull off such transitions, and such dialogue.

Children wise beyond their years: dialogue in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s ‘The Present and the Past’

Posted on July 2, 2016 by Simon Lavery

Ivy Compton-Burnett, The Present and the Past, 1953

Last week I wrote from sweltering Berlin about Ivy Compton- Burnett’s 1953 novel The Present and the Past, showing how a description of a character’s clothes and appearance functioned to point up the mordant humour and enrich the narrative. Today, back in divided, rain-squally England, I shall turn to other aspects of this writer’s distinctive technique.

As noted previously, ICB writes novels consisting almost entirely of dialogue. This makes her prose fiction resemble playscripts; she’s on record as saying that this approach came naturally to her. She didn’t go in for descriptions of setting, furniture and so on; it was dialogue that she felt was the most natural way for her to develop plot and reveal relationships, motives and themes.

In The Present and the Past all the characters speak in a highly cultivated, witty way. Even the children – to whom I turn in this post.

Some context first: after five years of marriage, Cassius Clare divorced his wife Catherine, part of the settlement involving his retaining custody of their two boys – Fabian and Guy. Nine years later, and after three more children with his second wife, Flavia – Henry, Megan and Tobias (8, 7 and 3 respectively) – Catherine suddenly demands access to her sons, now aged 13 and 11. Flavia had selflessly brought up all of the children without distinction between her own offspring and her stepsons. When Catherine drops her bombshell, announcing her imminent visit – the first of many, she insists – the shockwaves profoundly disturb the Clare family.

Critics described ICB’s dialogue as ‘stylised’ or artificial – a charge she rejected, preferring to see it as ‘condensed’. She was likened to Congreve, Austen, Henry James and the Elizabethan ‘horror’ tragedians. I can see some of all of these in her writing, but also of the epigrammatic wit of Wilde in his plays, and Edith Wharton’s novel about a post-divorce dysfunctional family of step-siblings, The Children (about which I wrote recently).

Let’s begin with the first exchange between the children and their head nurse, Bennet, and Miss Ridley, their governess. The children had heard about the ‘trouble’ caused by the first Mrs Clare’s desire to see her sons again, and their blasé discussion of the effects on the family of Catherine’s return causes consternation in the adult servants, who expect the children to seem less worldly and knowing:

‘It is nothing for you to think about,’ said Bennet, in an easy tone that was belied by her eyes.
‘It is the only thing. What would anyone think about in our place?’ [this is Fabian]
‘You have your mother here.’
‘We have our stepmother.’
‘What is a real mother like?’ said Guy.
‘Like Mater to her own children,’ said his brother [they call Flavia ‘mater’, and Catherine ‘mother’]
‘You know that no difference is made,’ said Miss Ridley.
‘The difference is there. There is no need to make it.’ [Fabian again; ICB regularly omits the names of her speakers in stretches of multiple-participant dialogue, so it requires some effort to figure out who says what – this is part of the textured effect she is after]
‘Are all fathers like our father?’ said Guy.
‘No father is like him,’ said Fabian. ‘We have no normal parent.’
‘He is devoted to you in his way,’ said Miss Ridley.
‘I daresay a cat does the right thing to a mouse in its way.’
‘Doing things in your own way is not really doing them,’ said Megan.
‘Why, Fabian, what a conscious way of talking!’ said Miss Ridley. ‘And it leads others to copy you.’
‘Why should I talk like a child, when my life prevents me from being one?’

So much is going on in this short extract. We have the first intimation that Cassius is not the most successful or loving of fathers. Fabian, the oldest child, is revealed to be caustically witty and mature beyond his years, with a satiric insight into the weaknesses and shortcomings of the adults in his world. In this respect I find ICB’s a more satisfying ‘divorce novel’ than Edith Wharton’s.

Miss Bennet’s limitations, which I examined in my previous post, are pointedly revealed here, as she’s effortlessly outwitted by Fabian. She represents for him the adult world which has let him down, and is therefore a legitimate target for his excoriating wit. Her efforts to control and placate him and the other children are comically futile, and she’s shown to be both dim-witted and hopelessly, condescendingly conventional.

Guy is more sensitive and naive, and hero-worships his older brother – a relationship that has powerful repercussions later in the novel. Megan is clearly destined to become another Fabian in terms of shrewdness and verbal acuity.

But all of these family and servant-child dynamics play a crucial role in the plot; this sample of sharp exchanges and verbal jousting is typical of ICB’s method throughout her work. That barbed aphorism of Fabian’s at the end is disarmingly funny, but also tinged with disingenuous cynicism and…what I can only call sadness. Fabian’s sadness makes me sad, too. His childhood has been tainted by the selfishness of his natural parents.

This discussion has already taken longer than I anticipated, and there are so many more such crackling exchanges I’d like to explore, so I’ll stop there with the hope that I’ll be able to return soon to ICB’s unique, subtle anatomising of this fractured, suffering family, with her inimitable blend of witty comedy of manners and sombre family tragedy.

Tredynas Days

A Literary Blog by Simon Lavery

Monthly Archives: July 2016