(Who did I think I was talking to?
You.)
~ ~ ~
Some sources used in the writing of these talks
The epigraph is from the Song of the Flow of Things in Bertolt Brecht’s Man Equals Man (1926).
On time
Angela Carter resees Blake’s Tyger as a pajama case in her 1978 essay, Little Lamb Get Lost; George Mackay Brown imagined the land of Tir-Nan-Og in midsummer of 1981 in one of his newspaper columns for the Orcadian, collected in the 1992 volume, Rockpools and Daffodils; Walter Benjamin writes about the storyteller’s authority in his 1936 essay, The Storyteller; the quote from Margaret Atwood about time comes from her 2002 book of lecture-essays, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing; all the Shakespeare references here to Time with a capital T come from the sonnets, and the two lines quoted in full are from Sonnet 64. The letter by Katherine Mansfield is dated 1909, to an unidentified recipient; in it she is worrying about the strange and changeable nature of her heart. Michelangelo’s urgent instructions to his assistant, Antonio Mini, can be found on a Virgin and Child sketch held in the British Museum; the Montale/Morgan translation comes from the poem called Brief Testament; Three Wheels on My Wagon was written by Bob Hilliard to music by Burt Bacharach in 1961 and was a hit for the New Christy Minstrels in 1962; the quote from Victor Klemperer comes from the volume of his diaries entitled The Lesser Evil; and Jackie Kay kindly wrote http://www.google.co.uk especially for these talks.
On form
begins with a poem made of lines from famous poems by, consecutively, Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Stevie Smith, John Keats, Dylan Thomas, WB Yeats, Sylvia Plath, WH Auden, Edward Thomas, and Philip Larkin. Ted Hughes meets Ovid in Hughes’s 1997 collection, Tales from Ovid; the Graham Greene comment on Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida comes from Shirley Hazzard’s book Greene on Capri (2000); its original source is an essay on British dramatists which Greene wrote in the 1940s. Later in this chapter I quote again from this memoir (whose slimness belies its richness), from a conversation Hazzard had with Greene about the impression reading War and Peace made on him. Thom Gunn’s definition of poetry comes from My Life up to Now, the autobiographical introduction to his bibliography in 1979; this can also be found in his collection of essays, The Occasions of Poetry (1982). It’s Kasia Boddy, decades ago, who drew my attention with her usual unique, generous, and fruitful eclecticism to the confluence of Shakespeare and Stevens in Morgan’s Not Marble; the Horace reference comes from the Odes, III.30; Woolf’s quote about the born writer and the husks of words comes from her essay on Oliver Goldsmith; the heart as metaphor, or not, comes from Elizabeth Hardwick’s 1979 novel Sleepless Nights. I’ve purposefully misquoted the line from the song Smile, for which Charlie Chaplin wrote the tune (it was music that featured in his 1936 film, Modern Times); the true first line is slightly different, though I’d bet it’s more often remembered as this misquote. The lyrics for Chaplin’s piece of music were written by John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons nearly twenty years after Chaplin composed it. The lines about the singing bird and the apple-tree are from Christina Rossetti’s poem A Birthday; the Ovid references a paragraph later come from the stories of Apollo and Daphne and Philemon and Baucis, in Metamorphoses; the quotations from Pound come from his poem The Tree, and from New Age, January 7, 1915; the lines about the star-eaten blanket of the sky come from the poem The Embankment, by TE Hulme. This is Katherine Mansfield on the hotel’s-worth of selves: ‘True to oneself! Which self? Which of my many — well, really, that’s what it looks like coming to — hundreds of selves. For what with complexes and suppressions, and reactions and vibrations and reflections — there are moments when I feel I am nothing but the small clerk of some hotel without a proprietor who has all his work cut out to enter the names and hand the keys to the willful guests’ (The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, Vol. II, ed. Margaret Scott, University of Minnesota Press, 2002). The quote from Woolf is from the last pages of A Room of One’s Own; the one from Yayoi Kusama, translated here by Ralph McCarthy, comes from her 2002 autobiography, Infinity Net. The quotations from Italo Calvino are from Six Memos for the Next Millennium, translated here by Patrick Creagh; these stories about Cézanne — and many more — can be found in Paul Cézanne: His Life and Art by Ambroise Vollard, which I read in the translation by Harold L. Van Doren published in 1924; and it’s the character of the Beadle, Mr. Bumble, who lays claim to naming Oliver Twist alphabetically.
On edge
The quote from Leonora Carrington comes from a story called The Stone Door, written in the 1940s. Doris Day’s Let the Little Girl Limbo, written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, was recorded in 1963 but didn’t reach the public’s ears till 1997; I first heard it on an album from the series of rescued pop music from the Columbia vaults, Where the Girls Are (Vol. 5). Ady Fidelin, Man Ray’s lover at the time of the photograph taken by Roland Penrose of Miller, Carrington, Eluard and her, was a dancer; she went on to become the first black model to feature not just in Harper’s Bazaar (1937) but (according to a 2007 New York Times article) in any major fashion magazine. Nusch Eluard, an artist and performer in her own right, was the poet Paul Eluard’s wife; she and her husband, members of the Resistance during the Second World War, were hounded by the Gestapo, and Nusch (whose fragility and malnutrition after the pressure of the war can clearly be seen in Lee Miller’s late photos of her) died in 1946 at the age of forty. The famous Kafka quote comes from his letter to Oskar Pollak, January 27, 1904; Hitchcock talks about his plate-glass floor/ceiling and his thoughts on the whodunnit in a 1966 Granada tv program called Cinema, introduced by Mike Scott; the story of Dalí diving comes from Antony Penrose’s 2001 book about his father, Roland Penrose: The Friendly Surrealist; the Hopkins lines come from the sonnet whose first line is ‘No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief.’ Edwin Morgan’s Orphean poem is part iii of a poem called Rider, from his 1973 collection, From Glasgow to Saturn; Katherine Mansfield wrote about writing and acid in a letter to John Middleton Murry on May 19, 1913 and jotted down Robert Louis Stevenson’s phrase ‘literary vagrancy’ in her notebooks; Stevenson suggested arriving was a lesser experience than traveling hopefully in 1881, in Virginibus Pueresque; and the Elizabeth Hardwick quote comes from her novel Sleepless Nights. The Greek myth about the musician in hopeless competition with Apollo is the story of Marsyas; the description of the Michelangelo drawing is of his Il Sogno (c. 1533); the Werner Herzog documentary about Chauvet is called Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010). I owe a big thank-you to Artemis Loi, who kindly helped with all things Greek.