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

Notebook: The Green Children

Thomas Keightley:

"Another wonderful thing," says Ralph of Coggeshall, "happened in Suffolk, at St. Mary's of the Wolf-pits. A boy and his sister were found by the inhabitants of that place near the mouth of a pit which is there, who had the form of all their limbs like to those of other men, but they differed in the colour of their skin from all the people of our habitable world; for the whole surface of their skin was tinged of a green colour. No one could understand their speech. When they were brought as curiosities to the house of a certain knight, Sir Richard de Calne, at Wikes, they wept bitterly. Bread and other victuals were set before them, but they would touch none of them, though they were tormented by great hunger, as the girl afterwards acknowledged. At length, when some beans just cut, with their stalks, were brought into the house, they made signs, with great avidity, that they should be given to them. When they were brought, they opened the stalks instead of the pods, thinking the beans were in the hollow of them; but not finding them there, they began to weep anew. When those who were present saw this, they opened the pods, and showed them the naked beans. They fed on these with great delight, and for a long time tasted no other food. The boy, however, was always languid and depressed, and he died within a short time. The girl enjoyed continual good health; and becoming accustomed to various kinds of food, lost completely that green colour, and gradually recovered the sanguine habit of her entire body. She was afterwards regenerated by the laver of holy baptism, and lived for many years in the service of that knight (as I have frequently heard from him and his family), and was rather loose and wanton in her conduct. Being frequently asked about the people of her country, she asserted that the inhabitants, and all they had in that country, were of a green colour; and that they saw no sun, but enjoyed a degree of light like what is after sunset. Being asked how she came into this country with the aforesaid boy, she replied, that as they were following their flocks, they came to a certain cavern, on entering which they heard a delightful sound of bells; ravished by whose sweetness, they went for a long time wandering on through the cavern, until they came to its mouth. When they came out of it, they were struck senseless by the excessive light of the sun, and the unusual temperature of the air; and they thus lay for a long time. Being terrified by the noise of those who came on them, they wished to fly, but they could not find the entrance of the cavern before they were caught."

The Fairy Mythology (1828)

The incident described, which reportedly took place in the 12th century, has prompted various explanations, all of which seem superfluous. The town where they were found is today known as Woolpit, a corruption, but what connection if any the story may have with wolves is unclear. A laver, according to Merriam-Webster, is "a large basin used for ceremonial ablutions in the ancient Jewish Tabernacle and Temple worship."

Wild Thing

I found this tiny red eft in the street in front of our house one rainy morning a few days ago. It was torpid and I didn't much like its chances against car tires, so I managed to flip it gently onto the only thing I had available — a plastic bag — and carried it off to a safer location next to a seasonal runoff stream. The delicacy of the animal was remarkable, considering that it was, after all, a fellow vertebrate and distant relative, though less than two inches long. There are brawnier insects, some of which might well have made a snack out of it, though efts do produce a formidable neurotoxin.

It's become a thing in the northeast to go out on rainy spring nights and help migrating amphibians across the road. As far as I know no one does this for earthworms, vast numbers of which wind up squashed or dessicated on the pavement. Chalk it up to "vertebratism."

I may have saved the salamander's life, but I don't expect that it felt gratitude or even consented to being moved. Its ability to conceptualize cause and effect or make rational decisions is presumably limited. As with most wild animals, its attitude towards us is grounded in simple fear.

There's a group of five or six deer living in the woods around us, and some days they come grazing within sight of our kitchen window. They may benefit from our presence, in that young vegetation prospers where we've created a clearing, but they beat a hasty retreat if we step outside. I've seen deer and owls, when I encounter them on a trail, hold their ground with something that might border on curiosity or at least indifference, but there's no reason to think that my presence is valued or welcome. Our domestic animals, of course, are capable of feeling most or even all of the emotions with which we regard each other, and this can also be true of some animals that haven't been "domesticated" but merely tamed, but these are exceptions. Timothy Treadwell, the subject of Werner Herzog's film Grizzly Man, captured some entrancing footage of a wild fox interacting with him with something like mutual joy, but Treadwell's misjudgment of his ability to cross the boundary between the human and animal worlds led to his being eaten by a bear.

Note and Queries (Borges)

I've probably read Jorge Luis Borges's short story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" at least a half-dozen times over the years, in English and in Spanish, but I've only now discovered an error — or at least a discrepancy — in the published Spanish text.

For those unfamiliar with it, the story concerns the accidental discovery of an account of a previously unknown and possibly fictional region of the Middle East called Uqbar, a discovery that leads in turn to the revelation of the supposed existence of a previously unknown planet that turns out to be, at least at first, an elaborate hoax perpetrated by a conspiracy of scholars over the course of several centuries. The story begins when the narrator — unnamed, but we are justified in calling him Borges — is having a conversation with his fellow writer and occasional collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares. Both men are unsettled by the presence of a mirror in the villa where they are staying, and Bioy observes "that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had stated that mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of man." Borges is intrigued by the citation and asks its source; Bioy says that he found it in the article on Uqbar in The Anglo-American Cyclopedia. By chance, there is a set of that work in the villa, but it proves to have no article on Uqbar. Borges half suspects that his friend has concocted a false source to cover his own witticsm, but the next day Bioy telephones to say that he has checked his own copy and found the article in question, which he subsequently shows to Borges. And it goes on from there.

According to my commemorative hardcover edition of Ficciones (El libro de bolsillo, Alianza Editorial, 2006), at the villa Borges and Bioy first look for the article on Uqbar at the end of Volume XLVI (46), which ends with "Upsala" and the first pages of Volume XLVII (47), which begin with "Ural-Altaic Languages." The missing article on Uqbar, however, is found in Volume XXVI of the set Bioy possessed, that is, in the twenty-sixth volume, not the forty-sixth. The narrator makes no comment on this curious fact.

My copy of Ficciones was bought to replace an essentially identical paperback copy that had fallen apart (and which I have since discarded). The copyright information has been updated, but the cover art, layout, and typography are presumably identical to the edition I used for years, except for the garish belly band and a small green square on the cover. In either form, the text originated as a Libro del Bolsillo in 1971 and was revised in 1974 under the author's supervision; it has presumably sold hundreds of thousands of copies. I have two translations of the story on my shelves, both from the early 1960s. One, in a volume that uses the Spanish title Ficciones, was translated by Anthony Kerrigan. The other, in a collection entitled Labyrinths, was translated by James E. Irby. (I don't have a copy of Andrew Hurley's newer translation.) In both editions, it is in Volume XLVI that Bioy finds the article on Uqbar; there is no discrepancy.

"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" was orginally published in the literary magazine Sur in 1940. (In the version that was published in book form there is a postscript dated 1947, but that date may be a fiction.) It's possible that both Kerrigan and Irby noticed the "error," if that's what it was, and silently corrected it, but it seems more likely that the misprint crept into a later Spanish-language edition. I haven't been able to access Sur online, but I have found online versions with both readings of the passage: "Me dijo que tenía a la vista el artículo sobre Uqbar en el volumen XXVI de la Enciclopedia" (Ciudad Seva) and "Me dijo que tenía a la vista el artículo sobre Uqbar, en el volumen XLVI de la Enciclopedia" (Borges todo el año). So a story that hangs, in part, on the instability of a printed text turns out to have fallen prey to the same circumstance.

The translated text in the second paragraph above is from Anthony Kerrigan's version.

Grand tour

Tobias Smollett's novels have been on my list of things to get around to reading, so when I found this edition of The Expedition of Humphry Clinker in a local used bookstore I took the plunge. An epistolary novel told "in different voices," it was Smollett's last novel, and the editor of this volume, Howard Mumford Jones, considers it his masterpiece. It concerns a middle-aged Welsh landowner, Matthew Bramble, who makes a slow circuit of England and Scotland leading in tow his disagreeable, husband-hunting sister Tabitha, their wide-eyed niece and nephew, and a few servants. Bramble is a hypochondriac bachelor who hates crowds and finds much to grumble about in English social life, architecture, and hygiene, but he's ultimately soft-hearted and unpretentious. As he and the other members of the party send their individual accounts back home, we're treated to contrasting views of the delights or inconveniences of Bath, London, and other parts, until they all cross the border into Scotland, where Bramble's health miraculously takes a turn for the better. There are mishaps and romantic entanglements along the way, and the whole thing is wrapped up in a serious of improbable revelations and three weddings. Oh, and a character named Humphry Clinker does in fact appear, eventually.

There's a good deal of genial low comedy throughout the book, including some fairly vicious pranks and at least four separate incidents of accidental indecent exposure. (This was, after all, the period that produced Rowlandson's Exhibition Stare Case.) Much verbal fun is had with the inability of Tabitha to spell English correctly ("Don't forget to have the gate shit every evening before dark") and with the lack of sophistication of her maid Winifred Jenkins (who twists "metamorphos'd" into "matthewmurphy'd" and says of the Highlanders, observantly, that "they speak Velch, but the vords are different"). It's not all drollery, however; Smollett has interesting things to say about husbandry and political economy, and his affection for his native Scotland is evident.

*

The original Everyman's Library was founded in 1906 by J. M. Dent with a declared goal (which it eventually surpassed) of publishing affordable editions of more than 1,000 titles in various fields, though English literature would predominate. The Arts & Crafts-influenced design of the earliest volumes, featuring ornate floral decorations on the spine and endpapers, is too busy for my taste (and the books have tended to fall apart over time); the modernist redesign in 1935, featuring the dust-jacket emblem by Eric Ravillious shown above, is more to my liking. By the 1970s additional redesigns had bled out the visual appeal of the books, and the advent of Penguin Classics and other paperback lines made them obsolete. The rights to the hardcover series were ultimately acquired by Random House, which relaunched it in a completely different format and with a narrower range of titles. The current Everyman's Library is a commendable undertaking, but one can't magine it publishing, as J. M. Dent did, eight separate volumes of Hakluyt. There is a comprehensive history of the Dent Everyman's Library (including a link to a list of titles) at Collecting Everyman's Library: 1906-1982.