Notebook: Albatross

John Livingston Lowes:

The size of the albatross ... has long been a stone of stumbling to matter-of-fact souls, who protest that Coleridge has strained verisimilitude to the breaking point through his patent misconception of the albatross's size. For he has suspended about a sailor's neck a bird the sweep of whose regal wings was twice a tall man's height, and, in the poem as it originally stood, has fed the Brobdingnagian creature "biscuit worms," as if it had the tastes and the dimensions of a wren... One may admit at once the piquant incongruity of the biscuit worms, which were promptly banished from the poem. As for the rest, Coleridge was intent upon poetic truth, not ornithological fact. But even a poet may be presumed to know that size is a matter of species and age, and the sooty albatross, which is much the smaller bird, might readily enough, as I know from experiment, have been carried suspended from a sailor's neck.

The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (emphasis added)

I often return to this 1927 study of the making of "Kubla Khan" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," though I'm not sure that I've ever read it cover-to-cover. My Vintage Books paperback copy is now in pieces crudely taped together, but I haven't gotten around to replacing it. Lowes is such an engaging and enthusiastic writer (not to mention such an erudite scholar), that one can just open the book anywhere and start reading, as in the passage above, which inescapably creates a mental image of Professor Lowes in some dusty back room in a natural history museum trying on a taxidermied albatross for size.

Notebook: Coleridge's Glosses

Most editions of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" published today include Coleridge's marginal glosses, which have come to be seen as an intrinsic part of the poem, though they weren't part of the first printed version (in Lyrical Ballads, 1798). Coleridge tinkered with the text of the poem repeatedly over the years, and by the time of its inclusion in his 1817 collection Sibylline Leaves it had acquired a set of notes by the author, presumably intended as exegesis, the form of which, according to John Livingston Lowes, Coleridge may have borrowed from glosses in some of the narratives of exploration that he was fond of reading. Arguably these glosses aren't "necessary" to the appreciation of the Rime, but — reason not the need — they certainly make it richer.

My favorite of these sidenotes is a sentence so lovely it can stand on its own:

In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and every where the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected, and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.

You can feel the wild onrush of Coleridge's mind here, as he adds clause after clause until the Moon and stars are all but absorbed by the metaphor and the syntax finally comes a bit unmoored at the very end. There is little to prompt any of this in the stanzas it was meant to accompany, which come after the mariner has shot the albatross and the rest of the crew have died:

The moving Moon went up the sky,
And no where did abide:
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside --

Her beams bemocked the sultry main,
Like April hoar-frost spread;
But where the ship's huge shadow lay,
The charmed water burnt alway
A still and awful red.

There's no "yearning" in those stanzas, and the simple lines about the Moon and the stars provide little foundation for the elaborate imagery of the gloss, but the Rime is fuller for the addition. The same mind that could conceive — but not "finish" — "Kubla Khan" is here seen moving ever outward, finding more and more connections as it weaves of the universe a fabric that can never be completed.

The Prehistory of the Bear

I've been re-reading Rafi Zabor's great jazz novel The Bear Comes Home again, so out of curiosity I decided to see what I could find out about the original serialization of parts of the book. Zabor was a contributor of reviews and articles to the (now defunct) magazine called Musician, which in its November 1979 issue ran the first installment of his work-in-progress about a talking and jazz-playing ursine. The last installment appeared one year later, at which point a note was appended indicating that "a full novel is intended... and we'll keep you posted." As it turns out, that "full novel" wouldn't appear for another seventeen years.

As it happens, PDFs of most of the serialization are available on the World Radio History website (a few pages of one chapter seem to be missing) and I've made JPEGs of four of the opening pages. It's amusing that the editors used as an illustration a mock-up of a (fictional) article from the Village Voice that is referred to in the text.

Although the novel seems to cover a time period of only a few months or maybe a year or two, the musicologist Tim Storhoff has noted that technologies are described in the final version, published by W. W. Norton in 1997, that either didn't exist in 1979-1980 or hadn't yet become commonplace: compact discs, for example, and laptop computers. (The bear, in the book's first sentence, dances on the sidewalk to "a disco cassette.") In addition, living figures who appear as characters in the opening chapters died during the writing process, notably the drummer Steve McCall, whose death (in 1989) was incorporated into the Norton edition.

Much of the Musician text made it into the final version substantially unchanged, but there is at least one section, involving a talking lion, that was cut (perhaps wisely). I'm electing not to read it, but it's there for the curious.

Girls on the Bridge (Derek Mahon)

I found a copy of this chapbook on the giveaway shelf in our local library and brought it home, knowing only that the author, Derek Mahon, was a modern Irish poet of good reputation. It was published by Gallery Books in Dublin in 1981.

Mahon, who died in 2020, presents some initial difficulties for the American reader, for anyone, that is, to whom the names Rathlin Island or Roscoff mean as little as they did to me. If Mahon drops the name of Somhairle Buidh (as he spells it) into a poem (as he does), he's not going to gloss it for the uninitiated. But the poems repay the trouble. Several of the best (and most accessible) of them are responses to paintings by Pieter de Hooch (in the title poem), Paolo Uccello, and Edvard Munch. The last is represented by a scene of several girls standing on a bridge, which could be any of a number of canvases the artist created on the same theme, perhaps the one below.

Here are the first three stanzas:

Audible trout,
Bound to be midges. Beds,
Lamplight and crisp linen, wait
In the house there for the sedate
Limbs and averted heads
Of the girls out

Late on the bridge.
The dusty road that slopes
Past is perhaps the high road south,
A symbol of world-wondering youth,
Of adolescent hopes
And privileges;

But stops to find
The girls content to gaze
At the unplumbed, reflective lake,
Their plangent conversational quack
Expressive of calm days
And peace of mind.

Transcendental

A quick hopscotch from Sonny Rollins to Lope de Vega and back again.

When I think of Sonny Rollins the first thing that comes to mind isn't Saxophone Colossus or The Bridge, as fine as those records are, but his early work with the trumpeter Clifford Brown, first as a sideman in the Clifford Brown and Max Roach Quintet (Clifford Brown and Max Roach at Basin Street), along with the pianist Richie Powell and bassist George Morrow, and then as a leader (with the same line-up) on Sonny Rollins Plus 4. Rollins and Brown were close contemporaries, born just a few months apart, but Brown (and Powell, and Powell's wife Nancy) were killed one terrible night on the Pennsylvania Turnpike not long after those records were made. Rollins outlived him by almost seventy years.

I can't remember that Julio Cortázar ever mentioned Sonny Rollins, but he certainly must have known who he was, since he was a great admirer of Clifford Brown, about whom he wrote the following (in Thomas Christensen's translation):

When I want to know what the shaman feels in the highest tree on the path, face to face with a night apart from time, I listen once more to the testament of Clifford Brown, a wing-beat that rends the continuum, that invents an island of the absolute within disorder. And afterwards, once again the custom wherein he and so many others are dead.

Cortázar took up the theme of the "others" who have gone before late in his life, in Un tal Lucas, in a brief piece that in Gregory Rabassa's translation is entitled "Steady, Steady, Six Already":

After the age of fifty we begin to die little by little in the deaths of others. The great magi, the shamans of our youth, successively go off... Everyone has his beloved ghosts, his major interceders — the day arrives when the first of them horribly bursts out in the newspaper and radio scene. Maybe we'll take some time to realize that our death has begun on that day too; I knew it the night when in the middle of dinner someone indifferently alluded to a television news item that said Jean Cocteau had just died in Milly-la-Forêt and a piece of me fell dead too onto the tablecloth in the midst of the conversational phrases.

The rest have followed along, always in the same way, radio or newspaper, Louis Armstrong, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, Duke Ellington, and last night, while I was coughing in a hospital in Havana, last night a friend's voice that brought the rumor from the outside world to my bed, Charles Chaplin. I shall leave the hospital, I shall leave cured, that's for certain, but, for a sixth time, a little less alive.

The perplexing title that Rabassa provides is barely more inscrutable than the original "Burla burlando ya van seis delante," but this turns out to be an allusion to a famous sonnet by Lope de Vega, the "Soneto de repente" or "Instant sonnet," an amusing bit of metapoetry in which the poet says that someone named Violante has asked him to write a sonnet, and he responds by writing a sonnet about writing the sonnet.

Un soneto me manda hacer Violante,
que en mi vida me he visto en tanto aprieto;
catorce versos dicen que es soneto,
burla burlando van los tres delante.

Yo pensé que no hallara consonante
y estoy a la mitad de otro cuarteto,
mas si me veo en el primer terceto,
no hay cosa en los cuartetos que me espante.

Por el primer terceto voy entrando,
y parece que entré con pie derecho
pues fin con este verso le voy dando.

Ya estoy en el segundo y aun sospecho
que voy los trece versos acabando:
contad si son catorce y está hecho.

There are translations available online and I won't attempt another. The relevant part for us is the first stanza, in which, roughly paraphrasing, he says that Violante has asked him to make a sonnet, that he's never been in such a quandary, that a sonnet, they say, is made up of fourteen lines, and that just playing around three have already gone ahead. Cortázar changes "three" to "six," since he's counting six "major interceders" who have gone before him. Although he may not have realized it at the time, Cortázar, already beset with health issues, would soon catch up with them, in 1984.

In a statement released upon his death, Rollins said “I think when the creative person ends, he continues in the next existence. I’m a person who believes this life isn’t the be-all and end-all of everything. A spiritual person doesn’t feel like that.” I'm not "a spiritual person," but I'm content to give him the last word.

Views of Iceland (Updated)

Fourteen years ago, during a week in Iceland, I visited the Listasafn Íslands (National Gallery of Iceland), which was then housing an exhibition entitled Inspired by Iceland. The exhibition covered various styles and periods, but one of the highlights for me was a group or fifteen or so dramatic landscape scenes executed by an unknown painter or painters, probably in the eighteenth century. Though somewhat crudely done, the paintings were fascinating, especially when one realized that they were essentially works of fantasy. Though they bear inscriptions connecting them to real places in Iceland, their topographic infidelity makes it likely that the artist had never visited the country. (Earlier post here.)

It's been difficult to find reproductions of the paintings — there are said to be twenty-four in all — or more information about them, but the Listasafn has now put them back before the public eye, with the collaboration of the Icelandic Folk and Outsider Art Museum, in an exhibition entitled Iceland from Afar, which will run until October 2026. The reproduction above is from the Listasafn's Facebook page; the version on the museum's website is drabber and murkier, and I suspect that the former is more faithful to the original.

Notebook: Chloe Dalton

It's become a bit of a commonplace in contemporary natural history memoirs that the subject can't only be the natural world; there has to be some kind of personal dysfunction that can be healed or at least moderated at the same time. This is true even in the very good ones, like H is for Hawk, where Helen Macdonald describes her depression and grief as well as her goshawk, and Amy Liptrot's The Outrun, which is about out-of-control alcoholism as much as it is about the wildlife of Orkney. By comparison, the author of Raising Hare seems fairly stable. Chloe Dalton has been a longtime foreign policy advisor to British politicians (mostly to Tories, apparently) and has spent much of her life abroad, but she doesn't tell us much about herself, her romantic life, or her choice of substances.

If I had an addiction, it was to the adrenaline rush of responding to events and crises, and to travel, which I often had to do at a few hours' notice. I avoided fixed plans that would remove the flexibility to take a bag and go, and what I missed of holidays and family occasions I believed I gained in novel, unrepeatable experiences and exposure to parts of the world I might otherwise never have seen: glimpses of Bamako, Baghdad, Kabul, Algiers, Damascus, Ulaanbaatar, Tallinn, Sarajevo and Siem Reap.

The precipitating factor in her book is the COVID pandemic, which grounds her, exiles her from her urban rounds, and confines her to a converted barn somewhere in the countryside that she has been slowly restoring. She finds a leveret — a baby hare — that has apparently been abandoned or orphaned, and decides to take it in, although no one seems to have much information about how to foster a leveret or even about whether it can be done at all. Though she feeds it with a pipette, she refuses to regard it as a pet and never names it. Surprisingly, the animal survives and soon makes itself at home. Eventually allowed to come and go at will, it wanders the nearby garden and fields, bears several litters of young (we — and Dalton — only then learn that it's a female), but still likes to come in and lie by the fireside. Apparently hares are notably clean and instinctively house-trained, and the greatest damage it does is to chew through some computer cables.

I see lots of rabbits in my perambulations, but my only experience of hares — except, perhaps, in a zoo — was during a bus ride one spring through the Berkshire Downs, where I witnessed from a distance the sparring and dancing of their mating season that gave rise to the expression "mad as a March hare." Anyone writing about hares is quick to point out that they aren't rabbits, and are very distinct in form and behavior. Oddly, the staff at the Library of Congress doesn't seem to have gotten the message. Here is the CIP (Cataloging in Publication) subject data from the copyright page of the Vintage Books edition:

Subjects: LCSH: European rabbit—Great Britain—Popular works. | European rabbit—Great Britain—Anecdotes. | European rabbit—Behavior—Great Britain—Anecdotes. | European rabbit—Infancy—Great Britain—Anecdotes. | Human-animal relationships—Popular works. | Dalton, Chloe.

I've been somewhat skeptical about attempts to cross the human-wildlife divide (see earlier post), but Dalton's book effectively makes the case that the divide isn't necessarily absolute, if one respects the fundamental nature of the animal in question. She doesn't domesticate the hare (it can't be done), and only partially "tames" it, but it accepts and values her presence and, perhaps of equal importance, re-centers her perspective on the relationship between human beings and the other inhabitants of the planet.

Notebook: The Use of Learning

Henry Fielding:

Booth, as the reader may be pleased to remember, was a pretty good master of the classics; for his father, though he designed his son for the army, did not think it necessary to breed him up a blockhead. He did not, perhaps, imagine that a competent share of Latin and Greek would make his son either a pedant or a coward. He considered likewise, probably, that the life of a soldier is in general a life of idleness; and might think that the spare hours of an officer in country quarters would be as well employed with a book as in sauntering about the streets, loitering in a coffee-house, sotting in a tavern, or in laying schemes to debauch and ruin a set of harmless ignorant country girls.

Amelia