`Suffered to Survive in Print'

First, a digression:

“If you do not care for either novels or newspapers, you can try biography, poetry, drama, essays, or those books mysteriously classed as belles-lettres. Most of these also are bad, but they are not quite so numerous as newspapers and novels. You should be careful about poetry, as this is often poor….There are only quite a few living poets who write good poetry. It is safer to read dead ones, as only a few of these have been suffered to survive in print. As to most modern plays, these should not be read, but only seen, if that. Memoirs, essays, and travels may be amusing or (more probably) may not. Those who write of their travels are sadly apt to be discursive, and to give their private opinions, whereas all we want of them is an account of the places they saw, the inns that put them up, and the best ways to get from place to place.”

The work of Rose Macaulay is one of those clandestine pleasures too complicated to explain to most readers. She was born six months before James Joyce but her name packs no frisson of hipness or even recognition. If you tell people you admire Proust, they nod approvingly even if they’ve never advanced beyond “For a long….” Yet Macaulay (1881-1958), after her apprenticeship, never wrote a dull book and she is often very funny. Like many comic writers, she revels in her characters’ contradictions, which is one of the reasons she is a great religious writer. Her best and best-known novel is The Towers of Trebizond, published in 1956 when she was 75. Its first sentence is vintage Macaulay: “`Take my camel, dear,’ said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.” New York Review Books returned it to print several years ago, and I wish they would do the same for The Pleasure of Ruins (1953).

I excerpted the lengthy passage above from A Casual Commentary, a collection of essays Macaulay published in 1925. The literary situation in England 80 years ago, described in “Problems of a Reader’s Life,” resembles our own except less good poetry is being written today. Earlier in the same essay she writes:

“A novel on any theme may be witty, graceful, charming, or interesting. A novel on any theme may be the reverse of all these things. It quite often is; that is the trouble. Whether it be about crime, love, psychology, international crooks, desert islands, family life, great white trails, politics, finance, young women or young men, the same heavy, witless touch is usually brought to bear on it, kneading it into the dull mass of dough that lies in piles on the library table, repelling our investigations.”

This is a sensibility you want to investigate. I had not previously read A Casual Commentary. Serendipity, both online and the old-fashioned library-traipsing sort, led me to Macaulay’s amusing little collection of essays. I mentioned this was a digression because I started by writing about my 7-year-old and his casual but persistent interest in music. He attended his first music class last weekend and, in addition to learning about Mozart and sixteenth-notes, he listened as his teacher played something on the oboe. The sound enchanted him, so I’ve been playing a seven-CD set of recordings by the late oboist Robert Bloom – Bach, Telemann, Haydn, Schumann, you name it.

Anyway, I got interested in the oboe in literature and history, and remembered Wallace Stevens’ “Asides on the Oboe,” with its mention of “If you say on the hautboy man is not enough….” That led me to etymology and the Oxford English Dictionary, where I found the linguistic precursor to the English “oboe” was the French hautboy, meaning “high wood,” used by Falstaff in King Henry IV, Part II:

“I saw it, and told John a Gaunt he beat his own name; for you might have thrust him and all his apparel into an eel-skin; the case of a treble hautboy was a mansion for him, a court, and now has he land and beefs.”

Finally, after another circuitous ramble, I found my way to Macaulay’s essay, in which, after dismissing most of contemporary literature, she writes:

“Always excepting the Oxford [English] Dictionary. If you can manage to lift one of the volumes of this from its shelf, you will find it the best reading of all, infinitely varied in it contents, and full of elegant and brief extracts from the English literature of all times.”

As I said, a sensibility worth investigating.