more of Jean Giono than Dylan Thomas to it) to which we can assent. At the end of the same poem (‘After Reading
The Country of the Pointed Firs
’), we get ‘As the wind threw itself about in the bushes and shouted / And another day fresh as a cedar started.’ This is aesthetically satisfying. The wind, which has been personalised,now has a life of its own. The characteristics, borrowed from a boy, are amplified and add a dimension which is valid, and the poem is refreshed and lifted out of the commonplace by them.
Still, it is unwise to base a whole method of composition on a talent for phrase-making – that is a stock-in-trade merely. Now this poet has written a number of ballads and songs, and the form of these, for the above reason, is not on her side. It rejects utterly verbal fantastification and imprecise meaning. The surface of a ballad must be as tight as a drum; it is virtually plotless, the plot is one emotion. Burns goes in deeply with ‘My love is like a red red rose’, and continues to refine the same emotion to the core, so that what began by touching us on a physical level ends by moving us spiritually. He makes the work easy; but it’s a matter of temperament to be able to do so.
Two points should especially be mentioned with regard to Miss Garrigue’s last work. In taking her step forward the poet has uncovered a gift for quick portraits:
That man going around the corner, his pants blown out by the Wind,
That pottering, grey-faced bakery dog,
(which comes from ‘Free-Floating Report’), and for genuine insight. Although she had this in early days, it was often so badly placed that it might as well not have been there at all. The use of certain words, which inexorably draw after them other words of the same sort, obliterated it. Even now she does her best to destroy it by insipid diction, which is not the equal of the content in the following lines (from ‘For Jenny and Roger’):
Nor is their thought known to them
Till the other give the truth away.
They are hidden from their thought
Till the other finds it out.
These are worth all the struggles with an overweight baggage of derivative elegies, nocturnes, laments, soliloquies, dialogues, notes, and incantations.
The Wisdom of Colette
Colette: The Difficulty of Loving
by Margaret Crosland
The Thousand and One Mornings
by Colette, translated by
Margaret Crosland, by David Le Vay
[
New York Review of Books
, 24 January 1974]
We call her great, for her gift to us is not limited to the art of writing: it is the gift of a culture. I do not mean simply French culture and taste, but that she made certain discoveries with regard to the art of
being
which are indispensable to our lives, and which are regularly lost in the Western part of the world.
These discoveries came about as she got round the difficulties of her life. She became gradually the journalist of her own life, and in that journalism are strokes of genius that befit her to receive Nietzsche’s blessing. We can think of her as the prime exemplar of experiencing, who obtains truths which can only be got through the agency of things. She always found life new enough not to have to invent it; or we might put it another way, and say that she invented it by understanding it.
Because she teaches with her life, she is, fortunately, difficult to categorise, and belongs to philosophy as much as to literature. Her novels, which are brilliantly written, are as novels weak. By this I mean that when we read them we do not undergo a moral enlargement by reason of a vision whose effects are permanent, as we do with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, George Eliot, or Henry James. She did not formulate in the abstract characters powerful enough to carry out schemes of redemption and enlightenment. That was not her way; it might very likely have seemed to her not truthful enough to what was all around her. And there is the danger, in finding one’s ultimate reach in literature, of losing the original
The Country of the Pointed Firs
’), we get ‘As the wind threw itself about in the bushes and shouted / And another day fresh as a cedar started.’ This is aesthetically satisfying. The wind, which has been personalised,now has a life of its own. The characteristics, borrowed from a boy, are amplified and add a dimension which is valid, and the poem is refreshed and lifted out of the commonplace by them.
Still, it is unwise to base a whole method of composition on a talent for phrase-making – that is a stock-in-trade merely. Now this poet has written a number of ballads and songs, and the form of these, for the above reason, is not on her side. It rejects utterly verbal fantastification and imprecise meaning. The surface of a ballad must be as tight as a drum; it is virtually plotless, the plot is one emotion. Burns goes in deeply with ‘My love is like a red red rose’, and continues to refine the same emotion to the core, so that what began by touching us on a physical level ends by moving us spiritually. He makes the work easy; but it’s a matter of temperament to be able to do so.
Two points should especially be mentioned with regard to Miss Garrigue’s last work. In taking her step forward the poet has uncovered a gift for quick portraits:
That man going around the corner, his pants blown out by the Wind,
That pottering, grey-faced bakery dog,
(which comes from ‘Free-Floating Report’), and for genuine insight. Although she had this in early days, it was often so badly placed that it might as well not have been there at all. The use of certain words, which inexorably draw after them other words of the same sort, obliterated it. Even now she does her best to destroy it by insipid diction, which is not the equal of the content in the following lines (from ‘For Jenny and Roger’):
Nor is their thought known to them
Till the other give the truth away.
They are hidden from their thought
Till the other finds it out.
These are worth all the struggles with an overweight baggage of derivative elegies, nocturnes, laments, soliloquies, dialogues, notes, and incantations.
The Wisdom of Colette
Colette: The Difficulty of Loving
by Margaret Crosland
The Thousand and One Mornings
by Colette, translated by
Margaret Crosland, by David Le Vay
[
New York Review of Books
, 24 January 1974]
We call her great, for her gift to us is not limited to the art of writing: it is the gift of a culture. I do not mean simply French culture and taste, but that she made certain discoveries with regard to the art of
being
which are indispensable to our lives, and which are regularly lost in the Western part of the world.
These discoveries came about as she got round the difficulties of her life. She became gradually the journalist of her own life, and in that journalism are strokes of genius that befit her to receive Nietzsche’s blessing. We can think of her as the prime exemplar of experiencing, who obtains truths which can only be got through the agency of things. She always found life new enough not to have to invent it; or we might put it another way, and say that she invented it by understanding it.
Because she teaches with her life, she is, fortunately, difficult to categorise, and belongs to philosophy as much as to literature. Her novels, which are brilliantly written, are as novels weak. By this I mean that when we read them we do not undergo a moral enlargement by reason of a vision whose effects are permanent, as we do with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, George Eliot, or Henry James. She did not formulate in the abstract characters powerful enough to carry out schemes of redemption and enlightenment. That was not her way; it might very likely have seemed to her not truthful enough to what was all around her. And there is the danger, in finding one’s ultimate reach in literature, of losing the original
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