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On offer and on reflection

The Tove Jansson story is The Golden Calf, and is the first story in her 1968 short story collection, Bildhuggarens Dotter, translated into English in 1969 as Sculptor’s Daughter. I hope Casanova did actually say this thing about women and pleasure; the only source I can find for it (apart from a 1984 book called Taking It Like a Woman by Ann Oakley, where it also appears to have been quoted) is the novel I first read it in, Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights; because of this, I can’t credit a translator, but I can send readers to this Hardwick novel and that’s another pleasure in the handshake between sources. Jan Verwoert’s comments on Giorgio Agamben, art, and profanity come from Frieze, Issue 129, March 2010. An aside: if I think of a contemporary inheritor of this fused literary force of coincidence/generosity found in the work of Dickens and Shakespeare, it’s Kate Atkinson. The two song lines here about the cup o’ tea for all are from Lionel Bart’s Consider Yourself; the writer whose work first suggested to me this confluence of notions of kindness and family in the word kind is Sebastian Barry; the combination is one of the driving forces of his fiction, drama, and poetry. The Marlowe translation of the Ovid Elegy is from Elegy 8: He curses the bawd who has been instructing his mistress in the arts of a whore. The story goes that Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s Elegies of Love, done in the early 1580s when he was still an undergraduate at Cambridge, was thought so ‘unsemely’ by the Archbishop of Canterbury when published that it was banned and burned. All my dictionary definitions throughout these talks come from The Chambers 20th and 21st Century Dictionaries; the Michael Ondaatje quote comes from The Cat’s Table (2011); I found the Oscar Wilde story (which Wilde called The Disciple) in Richard Ellmann’s 1987 biography; the Atwood quote about Alice and the mirror is from Negotiating with the Dead; George Mackay Brown talked about the leafing of the imagination in an aside in an article about short story writing in the Orcadian, December 1983; David Constantine allowed me to quote from a piece he was writing, at the time of these lectures, about the crucial purpose and workings of the humanities (in an era where the fact that studying the humanities has to be rhetorically and economically justified tells us a great deal about contemporary state, mind-set, and philosophy); last of all, the piece about the thread of these adventures nearing its end is from a page or two before the close of Dickens’s Oliver Twist.

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Picture Credits

Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts: A Digital Edition www.janeausten.ac.uk. Used by permission. With thanks to the Bodleian Library Image Services Department.

‘Studies for a Virgin and Child,’ by Michelangelo © The Trustees of the British Museum.

‘Jupiter und Io,’ by Antonio Allegri, called Correggio © Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

‘Four Women Asleep,’ Lee Miller, Leonora Carrington, Ady Fidelin, Nusch Eluard, Lambe Creek, Cornwall, England, 1937, by Roland Penrose © Roland Penrose Estate, England 2012. The Roland Penrose Collection. All rights reserved.

‘Pastoral’, by Leonora Carrington © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2012. With thanks to Susan Aberth for her help in sourcing the image.

Actress Aliki Vougiouklaki from the movie ‘Punishment Came from Heaven’ by Finos Film, 1959, Greece. With kind permission from Yiannis Papamichail, the son of Aliki Vougiouklaki.

Mercury, from Pompeii, c.50–79 AD (fresco), Roman, (1st century AD) / Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples, Italy / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library.

‘Autumn Tree,’ ‘Winter Tree,’ ‘Spring Tree,’ and ‘Summer Tree,’ by Sarah Pickstone. With warm thanks to Sarah for her permission to use the paintings in this book.

Text Permissions

‘Not Waving but Drowning,’ by Stevie Smith, copyright (c) Estate of James MacGibbon, by permission.

‘Not Marble: A Reconstruction,’ by Edwin Morgan from Collected Poems. 1990. Used by permission of Carcanet Press Limited.

‘Rider,’ by Edwin Morgan from New Selected Poems. 2000. Used by permission of Carcanet Press Limited.

‘The Wedding Party,’ by Boris Pasternak. Translated by Edwin Morgan, from Collected Translations. 1996. Used by permission of Carcanet Press Limited.

‘Spring and All,’ by William Carlos Williams from Collected Poems Volume 1. 2000. Used by permission of Carcanet Press Limited. ‘Spring and All,’ by William Carlos Williams from The Collected Poems: Volume I, 1909–1939, copyright ©1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

‘I thank You God for most this amazing,’ by E.E. Cummings. Copyright © 1950, 1978, 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1979 by George James Firmage, from Complete Poems: 1904–1962 by E.E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

‘No More’ and ‘Ars Poetica,’ by Czeslaw Milosz from New and Collected Poems 1931–2001. Copyright © Czeslaw Milosz Royalties Inc., 1988, 1991, 1995, 2001. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers and Penguin Books Ltd.

‘In My Craft or Sullen Art,’ by Dylan Thomas from The Poems (Orion) and quoted with the permission of David Higham Associates. ‘In My Craft or Sullen Art,’ by Dylan Thomas from The Poems of Dylan Thomas, copyright ©1946 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,’ by Dylan Thomas from The Poems (Orion) and quoted with the permission of David Higham Associates. ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,’ by Dylan Thomas, from The Poems of Dylan Thomas, copyright ©1952 by Dylan Thomas. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.