But—will you e'er forget the scent of hawthorn in the sun, or bracken in the wet?
D. K. Broster's The Flight of the Heron (1925) is indeed a more complex novel than The Wounded Name (1922) and almost as damn-the-subtext slashy—it's not difficult to see one as a dry run for the other, although they differ substantially in the ending and I am not getting over the incredibly gay string of classical allusions in the earlier novel any time soon. This one piles on not just the loyalty and the hurt/comfort but the conflicted pursuit of honor between heart and duty in ways that occasionally and unexpectedly gave me flashbacks to some elements of Turn (2014–2017). The latter were not unwelcome, but I don't consider them statistically significant; they may be a side effect of emotionally twisty narratives set between rebellion and empire. Conversely, I am indebted to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
nineweaving for confirming the lineage between Broster and Rosemary Sutcliff with the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, since after one novel of Broster's I was suspicious, but after two I was willing to buy a hat to eat if Sutcliff hadn't read her. I have found myself saying recently that Broster feels like a bright body in a constellation of writers I was raised on, but it took me until now to see her. I feel like I could end up with a research project on my hands if I'm not careful.
It was strange, it was alarming, to feel, as by this time he did, how strongly their intimacy had progressed in two months of absence and, on his side, of deliberate abstention from communication—like the roots of two trees growing secretly towards each other in darkness.
(Slash goggles continue to be superfluous.)
nineweaving for confirming the lineage between Broster and Rosemary Sutcliff with the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, since after one novel of Broster's I was suspicious, but after two I was willing to buy a hat to eat if Sutcliff hadn't read her. I have found myself saying recently that Broster feels like a bright body in a constellation of writers I was raised on, but it took me until now to see her. I feel like I could end up with a research project on my hands if I'm not careful.It was strange, it was alarming, to feel, as by this time he did, how strongly their intimacy had progressed in two months of absence and, on his side, of deliberate abstention from communication—like the roots of two trees growing secretly towards each other in darkness.
(Slash goggles continue to be superfluous.)
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"My father's was Sir Christopher Cradoc, who went down at Coronel in 1916. My father was his pilot, and would have gone down with him but for a last-minute transfer. Sir Christopher Cradoc wore steel-boned corsets and used scent. He used regularly to arrive on the bridge when my father was bringing the ship into harbour, and say 'Thirty seconds late, Pilot,' to which my father would reply, 'Sir, kindly get off my bridge, you are upsetting my compass.' Years later, when I came to know about such things, I said to my father, 'Was he a homosexual?' My father looked at me with clear surprised eyes, and said, 'No, just Elizabethan, like Drake and Raleigh.'"
"Upsetting my compass"! Indeed.
Nine
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I had no idea she had named Cradoc of The Eagle of the Ninth after a person more recent than the first century CE.
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I love how she slips that homage in, invisibly.
Nine
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The ever-useful ODNB:
"The term 'knightly' was easily applied to this very model of a late Victorian naval officer who never married. Tall, alert, and always immaculately dressed with a neatly trimmed beard, the well-spoken Cradock had a reputation as a fine sportsman and seaman. As commander in the Royal Naval College Britannia in 1895 he reminded the future Admiral Andrew Cunningham of Sir Francis Drake. Cradock also published, notably Sporting Notes in the Far East (1889) followed by Wrinkles in Seamanship (1894). His best-known work was Whispers from the Fleet (1907), a series of anecdotes and maxims providing common-sense advice for young officers that would also be carefully examined by historians after his death for possible explanations of his motives."
Nine
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Indeed! Nice eyes. And nicknamed "Kit," I see, as an Elizabethan Christopher should be.
Per Philip Burton's "Rosemary Sutcliff's The Eagle of the Ninth: A Festival of Britain?" which I will fetch off JSTOR for you if necessary:
"In Blue Remembered Hills, Sutcliff recounts how her first novel, Wild Sunrise, was 'a saga of the Roman invasion of Britain, told from the British viewpoint. Its hero, Cradoc, was a young British chieftain, as Victorian-English as anything out of Whyte Melville's Gladiators.' This Cradoc himself seems to have had complex roots. Welsh mythology knows several Caradocs, and the name is often taken to be the same as that of Caratacus, son of Cunobelinus, the hero of the Catuvellauni's resistance to Claudius' invasion of Britain. This would certainly make sense in the context of Sutcliff's Wild Sunrise, though of course the action of The Eagle is set some ninety years later. The sixth-century King Cerdic of Wessex seems to have borne a Anglicized version of the name. The Welsh connection also takes us into Arthurian cycle, and the First Continuation to Chrétien of Troyes' Perceval contains a Livre de Caradoc, describing the adventures of two Sir Caradocs. Finally, at least one Cradoc was important in Sutcliff's own family circle: her naval-officer father had, before she was born, been pilot to Rear-Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock (Cradoc in her spelling), who, as she presents it, had 'inspire[d] hero-worship in one young navigating officer that lasted him the rest of his life' . . . These dislocations in time and place are, I suggest, important for our reading of The Eagle as a whole. Guenevere the wife of Arthur is, in some sense, the regal, mysterious wife of Cradoc. Cradoc the resistance leader is the Caratacus who fought against Rome nearly a century before – and also the Sir Christopher Cradock with whom Sutcliff's father served."
The article is an painstakingly detailed look at the acknowledged and identifiable influences and allusions in the novel—of which I get to feel smug about catching most of the Kipling shout-outs, though I missed the neon sign of "The Lost Legion" (1892)—which then goes on to consider how they work together to form a broader resonance in the traditions of both imperial and post-war literature. Her red-haired pilot of whom you told me, battle-fatigued out of the RAF, is considered part of the pattern, too, although the author does not link him to wounded Marcus and that's the first thing that would have occurred to me.
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I don't actually see how it follows.