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Well, it is the little things, for instance
(Not all of the ideas below are contiguous, or necessarily memorable. I simply wanted them collected somewhere. At least three of them, however, I would like to expand.)
What I do not forget when I tell people that I think Leslie Howard would have made a better Peter Wimsey (pace Edward Petherbridge) than any other actor currently alive or dead, but which I do often forget to mention, is that Howard's flawless upper-class Englishness was itself—like Wimsey's silly-ass piffling or Percy Blakeney's foppish inanity: the characters are on a direct continuum—a kind of impersonation. His parents were Jewish, at least one a Hungarian immigrant. His birth name was Steiner. He was a clerk before he enlisted in World War I; was badly shell-shocked and took up acting as therapy; became, after the outbreak of World War II, the on- and off-screen embodiment of all that was quintessentially English, slightly fey with unexpected reserves of passion and steel; and was shot down in 1943 while on a lecture tour of Spain and Portugal with intelligence-gathering on the side, not unlike his most famous character. I would want to write him into a secret history, if film criticism hadn't already beaten me to it: "This final scene [of Pimpernel Smith (1941)] achieves a near-supernatural quality, with Smith vanishing almost impossibly into the night, his whispering voice somehow remaining behind him. Coming to this extraordinary sequence today we cannot help but bring to it echoes of Howard's own death at the hands of just these enemies, making it not only every bit as stirring as Howard intended, but also genuinely poignant." And so I know that actors differ from their roles, but I still wonder if he gravitated toward those interplays of face and mask, person and persona; he lived one. And he seems to have made it real.
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schreibergasse: I imagine it will not come as a surprise to most people if I mention that in high school I sang with the chorus (and later the Madrigal Singers), that I took Latin and Spanish until my junior year when I dropped Spanish (in order to have room for Madrigal Singers), or that my first afterschool job was in the now-defunct science fiction and fantasy bookstore Enchantments in Lexington Center (which had nothing to do with the Madrigal Singers at all, except that friends of mine were involved in both), but I have no idea how many of my current acquaintances know that for two years in high school, I ran cross-country. I was not good at it. Unlike archery and singing, which I found both physically exhilarating and good for my emotional and mental health, I did not enjoy the experience of running for half an hour or whatever at a stretch; I can walk a mile in easily under fifteen minutes, but I clocked under seven minutes running exactly twice. I am long-legged, I have good lungs, it didn't matter. I was not a cheetah. I felt more like a jackal: in races at home, I would run alongside girls from the other team, occasionally at a conversational pace, and then sprint flat-out once the finish line was in sight, which meant that I almost always came in ahead of them. (They were also sprinting flat-out, because that's how races end, but it still always felt like a cheat.) I don't remember that I formed friendships on the team, either. All I liked was knowing that I had the ability to run for five miles straight, even if I hated how each step felt. And then in the spring of my sophomore year, I caught whooping cough and that put the kibosh on running whether I liked it or not—that fall, I auditioned successfully into the school musical. Occasionally I think that I should pick up that stamina again, on the possibility that someday I might have to run for more than the honor of Lexington High School. I can't tell if that's prudent or paranoid.
Perhaps this is my first objection to the classification of speculative poetry: that some of my earliest exposures to formal poetry contained as many gods and myths as fit in a handful of hendecasyllables, and no one speaks of Catullus or Ovid (or Kallimachos or Sappho) as speculative. I do not buy the argument that mimetic fiction is a weird secondary spinoff of the fantastic—among other reasons, because the taxonomy assumed by that statement is anachronistic—but I might argue about poetry. Which has similar issues of historical applicability, not to mention where does it leave politics and personal feelings, the whole epic/lyric binary that annoys me almost as much as the mimetic/mythic, but it is not profitable to argue that non-realist elements are something sui generis.
"In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him . . . They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It it simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history . . . Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible in art."
—T.S. Eliot, "Ulysses, Order and Myth" (1923)
There is a paper to be written on George Mackay Brown's "John Barleycorn" as a literary hymn.
What I do not forget when I tell people that I think Leslie Howard would have made a better Peter Wimsey (pace Edward Petherbridge) than any other actor currently alive or dead, but which I do often forget to mention, is that Howard's flawless upper-class Englishness was itself—like Wimsey's silly-ass piffling or Percy Blakeney's foppish inanity: the characters are on a direct continuum—a kind of impersonation. His parents were Jewish, at least one a Hungarian immigrant. His birth name was Steiner. He was a clerk before he enlisted in World War I; was badly shell-shocked and took up acting as therapy; became, after the outbreak of World War II, the on- and off-screen embodiment of all that was quintessentially English, slightly fey with unexpected reserves of passion and steel; and was shot down in 1943 while on a lecture tour of Spain and Portugal with intelligence-gathering on the side, not unlike his most famous character. I would want to write him into a secret history, if film criticism hadn't already beaten me to it: "This final scene [of Pimpernel Smith (1941)] achieves a near-supernatural quality, with Smith vanishing almost impossibly into the night, his whispering voice somehow remaining behind him. Coming to this extraordinary sequence today we cannot help but bring to it echoes of Howard's own death at the hands of just these enemies, making it not only every bit as stirring as Howard intended, but also genuinely poignant." And so I know that actors differ from their roles, but I still wonder if he gravitated toward those interplays of face and mask, person and persona; he lived one. And he seems to have made it real.
This is for
schreibergasse: I imagine it will not come as a surprise to most people if I mention that in high school I sang with the chorus (and later the Madrigal Singers), that I took Latin and Spanish until my junior year when I dropped Spanish (in order to have room for Madrigal Singers), or that my first afterschool job was in the now-defunct science fiction and fantasy bookstore Enchantments in Lexington Center (which had nothing to do with the Madrigal Singers at all, except that friends of mine were involved in both), but I have no idea how many of my current acquaintances know that for two years in high school, I ran cross-country. I was not good at it. Unlike archery and singing, which I found both physically exhilarating and good for my emotional and mental health, I did not enjoy the experience of running for half an hour or whatever at a stretch; I can walk a mile in easily under fifteen minutes, but I clocked under seven minutes running exactly twice. I am long-legged, I have good lungs, it didn't matter. I was not a cheetah. I felt more like a jackal: in races at home, I would run alongside girls from the other team, occasionally at a conversational pace, and then sprint flat-out once the finish line was in sight, which meant that I almost always came in ahead of them. (They were also sprinting flat-out, because that's how races end, but it still always felt like a cheat.) I don't remember that I formed friendships on the team, either. All I liked was knowing that I had the ability to run for five miles straight, even if I hated how each step felt. And then in the spring of my sophomore year, I caught whooping cough and that put the kibosh on running whether I liked it or not—that fall, I auditioned successfully into the school musical. Occasionally I think that I should pick up that stamina again, on the possibility that someday I might have to run for more than the honor of Lexington High School. I can't tell if that's prudent or paranoid.Perhaps this is my first objection to the classification of speculative poetry: that some of my earliest exposures to formal poetry contained as many gods and myths as fit in a handful of hendecasyllables, and no one speaks of Catullus or Ovid (or Kallimachos or Sappho) as speculative. I do not buy the argument that mimetic fiction is a weird secondary spinoff of the fantastic—among other reasons, because the taxonomy assumed by that statement is anachronistic—but I might argue about poetry. Which has similar issues of historical applicability, not to mention where does it leave politics and personal feelings, the whole epic/lyric binary that annoys me almost as much as the mimetic/mythic, but it is not profitable to argue that non-realist elements are something sui generis.
"In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him . . . They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It it simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history . . . Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible in art."
—T.S. Eliot, "Ulysses, Order and Myth" (1923)
There is a paper to be written on George Mackay Brown's "John Barleycorn" as a literary hymn.
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Nine
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What would other literary hymns be? Things like the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins?
So you got whooping cough in high school, eh? My sister got it when she was in college. Not so very fun :-(
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I mean a piece—I think by definition all hymns are chanted or sung—that may be indistinguishable from an actual hymn in structure, subject, or language, but which is not designed for ritual use. To quote from William Furley and J.M. Bremer's Greek Hymns: Selected Cult Songs from the Archaic to the Hellenistic Period, Volume I: The Texts in Translation (Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen: 2001): "[T]here is a pragmatic difference of emphasis and purpose between the cult hymn and the literary piece, however religious in theme. The cult hymn is a form of worship directed towards winning a god's goodwill and securing his or her assistance or favour. Literature is concerned with the entertainment and enlightenment of the audience addressed: it may treat of the gods but it does not address them directly . . . it does not devote its resources to securing something from that divinity through its performance." So while I am sure it is still hotly debated whether the original folksong "John Barleycorn" is indeed a holdover from pre-Christian harvest practices of sacrificial year-kings, or some kind of early Christianization of the aforementioned, or nothing of the sort at all, if nothing else it is a centuries-old tradition that evolved demotically.* George Mackay Brown's version is a specifically literary artifact: it seems to have been written for his play A Spell for Green Corn (1970), where it is a précis of the old religion of the Orkneys as envisioned by Mackay Brown.** Later the ballad will be hawked by tinkers at a fair-day, but it is still holiness. This seems to me to fit the definition of a literary hymn, especially in the ways it reworks an extant folksong and resets it in a context where it is unambiguously an expression of the sacred, but it is not a hymn to a deity that may ever have (apply quotation marks as needed to this next word) existed, and thus I think it deserves further exploration.
*With a little help from Robert Burns; he did not originate the song, but I believe his version is the most copied and influential.
**The plot itself is like a mystery play, for a world where corn-kings are substantial and effective: the fiddler Storm Kolson lay with Sigrid Thomson at midsummer, his fiddle condemned as an incitement to drunkenness and randiness (as testified by the number of Kolson's bastard children and the frequency with which he reels home from weddings), confiscated and thrown on the fire, but Sigrid took it from the flames, unburnt, and disappeared into the fields with him. Now he is missing, the corn is growing tall—where previously she had been heard to repeat that the corn was dying—and she's carrying his child. For this conjunction, she will be convicted of witchcraft and given herself to another fire. The last act snaps forward to the present day, but if anything it is stranger there and more mythic: its characters are a fiddler who has wandered and played the corn to life for the last three hundred years, his fiddle-strings made of his love's fair hair; a girl whose lover drowned in the time of the saints, she walked after him into the sea and has only now walked out of it again; and a pair of tinkers who are not particularly surprised by the mythologies colliding in front of them. I want to write someday a paper on George Mackay Brown and Greer Gilman. They evolved in isolation, but their cosmoi are cousins-germane.
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Nine
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Things like the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins?
Let me think about this. I am much less familiar with literary hymns in English than in Latin or Greek, which is one of the reasons Mackay Brown's "John Barleycorn" requires research before I can speak confidently on it; I do not know, for example, if John Donne's "Holy Sonnets" are considered genuine hymns, written out of the relationship between their author and his God, or if they fall into the literary category, since there is no evidence they were ever performed in a ritual context, and if either of these definitions is affected by Benjamin Britten's setting them to music—must they be performed in a church, as part of a service, to qualify, or is it enough to hear them in a secular concert at a university? What is the status of a concert Mass, à la Mozart's Requiem? Etc., etc., and so forth.
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Any sort of paper at all on "John Barleycorn" would be very cool--I like the notion of tracing that silver thread down through history from ancient corn-king days into the present. I like that the Mackay Brown version keeps the sacrificial thing and gives it a Christian twist (but only in passing; the pagan feel remains pretty strong!)
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I don't know (were Catullus 34 or 62 ever sung, or only written as though they should be?) that performance is a necessary component—I need to find out!
I like that the Mackay Brown version keeps the sacrificial thing and gives it a Christian twist
"They struck him at his golden prayer / And they killed my priest John Barleycorn . . ."
(but only in passing; the pagan feel remains pretty strong!)
Oh, yeah.
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But I also really really love the description of him at the beginning "...does he up and dance when the wind is high..."
I love the baker's verse too--"that was a madman, I'll be sworn"
The whole song is just great.
I want to read your paper, in any incarnation it should happen to take--please?