O Come, All Ye Readers,
Just a very brief note, before we return to our breakfast of roast goose, eggnog fritters and tawny port.
A small magazine is its readers, and we’ve been quite touched to hear that so many of you have enjoyed The Little Review this year. (Thoughts and suggestions are always much appreciated – you can always drop our editor a line at editor@thelittlereview.co.uk.)
Subscriptions are what keep this magazine going: if you’re looking for a very last-minute Christmas present for a bookish friend, a print subscription to The Little Review costs just £12 (plus p&p). That’s three elegant little 176-page yellow books a year, for less than the cost of two London pints.
And now, in this week’s festive newsletter:
Jane Austen finds a rhyme for ‘Saint Swithin’
‘Munching on walnuts and apples’ with Sylvia Plath
‘We gather / in stopped time. It is Christmas…’
A very merry Quviasukvik to you all,
TFS
Re-Reading:
Austen’s Life of Rhyme
I am not a Jane Austen scholar, nor a biographer, and until recently I was suffering from a rare condition in which the subject believes themselves to be Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, a side-effect of my last job, dramatising the novel for Radio 4’s celebration of her 250th birthday this December. So yes – don’t look here for limpid, dispassionate poetic criticism. I’m a fan – a big, big fan and if you are too then like me, you’ll want to know everything.
Of course in Austen’s case, we can’t. In the wake of her sister Cassandra’s destruction of many of Jane’s letters (intended to preserve Jane’s reputation, though inevitably only ramping up speculation as to what kind of badass cattiness we’ve all missed out on) there’s not all that much private material left.
Which is why the small clutch of poems Austen wrote is so intriguing – and it’s strange that they’re so seldom mentioned.
Dipping into them is like lifting the lid on the novelist’s beloved portable writing desk, sliding open a secret compartment and, in the scribbled sheets there stored, catching glimpses of off-the-record Jane; a Jane who’s kicked back, read the newspaper or a letter from a friend, found a silly name there and dashed off a zinger –‘I am in a dilemma, for want of an Emma / Escaped from the lips of Henry Gipps.’
Thatcouplet about an acquaintance was found in a letter to Cassandra; in another letter, she returns to the topic of ‘the useful Mr Gipps... rather a good-looking little man.’ Since none of the poems were intended for publication but were written for friends and relations to be sent with letters or gifts or to be performed at family gatherings, you feel a tiny bit surreptitious reading through them. They are intimate little verses, some complete, some inscrutably brief, leaving us to ponder if they were part of a larger whole, and/or where they sit alongside the thought-processes behind the novels.
Not that the voice here is the Jane-with-a-capital-J whom we sense in the masterful omniscient narrator of the books. This voice is mostly – to be honest – a lot sillier. You get the impression of a sharp, lively-to-the-point of feverish mind, racing around, taking inspiration from handkerchiefs, titbits in the news, headaches, births, marriages, deaths... anything. A mind, in short, surrounded by an awful lot of life, steadying itself through sheer delight in language. Absurdisms abound, such as in this lovely quatrain, Carrollian in its oddness:
That Damon was in love with me
I once thought and believed
But now that he is not I see,
I fear I was deceived.
Fun rhymes are also the order of the day. My favourite is that between ‘Anna’ and ‘savannah’ in a poem in praise of, amongst other things, her niece’s vast intellect. But a notable runner-up comes with the enjoyably dippy ‘I am going to have my dinner /After which I shan’t be thinner.’
Though they do include a couple of more serious verses, Austen’s poems are a mischievous bundle of writings. In a little poem to a female friend to accompany the gift of some handkerchiefs (hand-stitched by the author) Jane nimbly subverts the convention of apostrophising the female subject and apostrophises the hankie instead, wishing it a long, unsullied life, untroubled by too many tears or bad sneezes.
Or consider the saucy inflection of a tiny verse where we see Jane milk for all its worth a marriage notice (imagined or real, we don’t know) between one Camilla Gallop and a Reverend Wake, where Camilla, we’re told, has ‘in vain danced at many a ball’, so ‘Is now happy to jump at a Wake.’
And this vitality, this undimmable playfulness, most movingly, doesn’t peter out. Three days before her death in Winchester at 42, in a brief respite from an excruciating illness that may have been Addison’s disease, Jane dictated 24 lines of comic verse to Cassandra. In it, she ventriloquizes Saint Swithin, rhymes his name with ‘beginning’, rhymes ‘saint’ with ‘faint’, ‘showers’ with ‘powers’ and throws into one stanza, ‘When once we are buried you think we are dead, / But behold me immortal...’ setting a new bar for deathbed chutzpah. This is the magnificence of Austen; that she can look squarely at death, not as a far-off, woolly abstract, but her own, fast approaching, and decide, that, given the circumstances, the best thing to do is write a funny poem. CNT
Review of the week:
Sylvia Plath vs the Mummy
This past Christmas I spent alone. To cheer myself up, I went and bought The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath – a £35 splurge. I bought it at a fancy bookshop with bookshelf ladders and I almost fell off one while holding the book, orangey coloured with black stripes like a nicely cooked ham and thick as one too.
To measure the loss of Sylvia Plath, as a prose writer, think of the poet Muriel Spark, who published her first novel, The Comforters, at 39. Spark’s best work – The Driver’s Seat, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, A Far Cry from Kensington – was still to come, however acerbic and brilliant The Comforters is. Think, too, of Angela Carter, not much younger than Plath, whose debut novel, Shadow Dance (1966), came out three years after The Bell Jar first appeared under Plath’s pseudonym Victoria Lucas, just weeks before her death in February 1963 at the age of 30. The Bell Jar is not included here; Plath’s second novel, Double Exposure, is unpublished and missing. In this 800-page volume, we have short stories, reviews, essays.
I prefer Plath the novelist to Plath the poet. There are more doughnuts, hard-boiled eggs, bits of plastic, turkey pies, bad drains, ‘liverish-stained veneer furniture’ and Ovaltine in the prose. I don’t think she was like Carson McCullers or Francois Sagan, who peaked young and petered out quickly as very young novelists often do, but someone just getting into her stride before she died aged 30.
Stylistically, Plath the prose writer at her best already has a lot in common with Muriel Spark, a kind of mysticism wrapped in orange oil-cloth and green formica. There is also something of Rachel Ingalls, author of Mrs Caliban (and a fellow American in Britain) and very much of Shirley Jackson, who like Plath is not merely eerie and razor-sharp on women’s lives, but also writes wonderfully of food: not fancy food but the pedestrian food of the era and its joys, ‘frozen and tinned foods’, scones, pie, ‘munching on walnuts and apples’ while reading Wuthering Heights.
Plath lets herself be herself – darkly funny – in her short stories: a woman asks a friend’s child ‘how she likes to punish her dolls’; jarred embryos are the colour of mushrooms; and in ‘Mothers’ a pregnant woman in small-town Devon buys ‘an immense swede’ which bulges ‘like a miraculous storybook vegetable’ but is ‘spongy and tough as cork’. She cooks it in a pressure cooker which shrinks it to ‘an orange mash that blackened the bottom and sides of the pot with a slick evil-smelling liquor’. Men get tattoos of roses on their butts (‘each bloom the size of a brussels sprout’). Dreams, as in ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’, are described so viscerally you forget the old adage that one shouldn’t put dreams in fiction.
Less successful stories, such as ‘Shadow Girl’, have the formula of a typical 20th-century medicore magazine story: a misunderstanding or twist, a drop of melodrama and romance, everything wrapped up neatly. But this was also the era when you could make serious money by publishing stories in magazines, and writers need money. Many such stories of Plath’s were submitted to mags like Women’s Realm. Shirley Jackson once wrote of her fridge breaking, writing a story, selling it, and buying a new fridge with the proceeds. And who hasn’t written some stinkers, especially in their 20s? Plath probably less so than everyone else.
It’s good, when reading this, to keep dates along with money in mind. I read the beginning of the fiction section, only to realise afterwards she was around seven and 14 years old when she wrote those pieces, a prodigious Daisy Ashford. If Plath had lived longer, they would perhaps not be included.
Still, I loved her story, written at 14, ‘The Mummy’s Tomb’. At 14, Sylvia has a roughly hewn prototype of her style (peppered with many exclamation marks). It’s incredibly dark. A girl seeing a museum exhibition of ancient Egyptian artefacts is bored until her ‘casual gaze was suddenly arrested by something shining amoung the pendants’:
It flashed through my thoughts that it was an eye. A human eye! […] as I was gathering up the tangled shreds of what I like to call my composure, I read the sign beneath the eye. It was only made of agate! However, under my frenzied gaze the eye was jelly-like, and the pupil seemed to dilate as it stared at me.
A creepy old man approaches her: ‘I was watching you from behind the pillar over there; I saw you admiring the eyeball in the case. Looks real, doesn’t it?’ The man draws her back to the case and makes her look at it again through a magnifying glass: ‘to my terror, the eye rolled about and looked pitifully at me as the man moved the glass around over the horrible organ.’
I was thankful for some of the best essays I have read on being a North American living in Britain (how the ocean is different, a longing for real snow vs the British incapacity to handle a small bit, mean rental agents, tiny dark kitchens, Brontë tourism), particularly ‘Snow Blitz’ and ‘Landscape of Childhood’.
In ‘Landscape of Childhood’, written in the last months of her life, she writes:
For a time I believed not in God or Santa Claus, but in mermaids. They seemed as logical and as possible to me as the brittle twig of a seahorse in the zoo aquarium… I adored the beautifully morbid story of the little mermaid who fell in love with a land prince and traded her tongue to the sea witch for a pair of feet on which she could dance for him, utterly dumb, and pained and faint with the feel of needles. CG
The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath (Faber, 2024; £35)
Poem of the week:
Moving House
A Victorian house has been spirited
From its source on South Mariposa,
Lifted high over California and dropped
Almost intact onto Avenue 64.
Now, it lies slumped on its new site,
With the filigree work in wood
And iron under the gables,
And the gothic dormer windows
Proving how old it is, how firm
It stands against right angles
And the use of reason in the making
Of houses. But some of the slates
Are missing and some of the planks
Have fallen off or been poorly
Replaced. With work, it will look new,
Or a fine example of what is old.
It made me think of Ireland,
Where houses in general stay put.
For example, it’s hard to imagine
9 Parnell Avenue, where we lived,
Being transplanted to, say, Cush Gap.
Imagine, though, if we had, in fact,
Decided to unmoor our house,
Removing all our valuables,
Such as they are, waiting for a man
And his helpers to dig in
Under the house, lift it up and gently
Edge it on to the back of a lorry.
How sad our neighbours would be
At our departure, alarmed too
Since our house is, or was, semi-detached
And people will surely peer into the rooms
Through the new opening at the side.
Our house, by this time, is fully detached;
It lacks, to say the least, a context.
As the lorry spiriting it away approaches
Arnold’s Cross, a crowd gathers.
It veers left, almost gets stuck, as more people
From St John’s Villas come out to watch.
Then it is transported along Mill Park Road
By which time the Gardaí are waiting
At the roundabout, blocking Castle Hill,
As it is too steep for this house on a truck
That sails by unconcerned, skillfully
Managing to cross the old bridge, blithely
Scraping walls in Templeshannon
Before heading straight for Cush
Where, out of breath, it is set down in a field
Overlooking the sea, with a view to die for.
Soon, we put everything back in place
And get used to the new perspective.
As we wait for a telephone connection,
And the man from An Post, and the truck
From Campus Oil, and a visit from some
Of the more friendly neighbours
Glad to see us home, or here, at last.
It is a surprise that the front steps
Are no longer needed, they are sinking
Into the marly soil. And there are
No trees blocking the light at the back,
Like there were behind the house
When it was rooted in Parnell Avenue,
Nesting among neighbours with whom
We were on first-name terms.
Coming in on the wind, as though from France,
The sound of Vera next door, in number 10,
On the piano. A man moaning near the grotto
In the gardens of the County Home.
And Mrs Hennessy walking with a shopping
Basket, tea for her lady lodgers; Paddy Grace
On his bicycle; and the Kellys soon
To be replaced by the Franklins.
On the days we wait for old noises,
They don’t happen; instead, we hear the cawing
Of the local crows and, on windy days,
The hush of waves on the strand.
Where the old house used to be, birds
Come to survey who is still alive,
Who might be ready, ripe .
Like swallows they swoop and swirl
In panic and disbelief; a sacred
Nest has been befouled. Where are the aunts,
The mother, the brothers, the uncle, the father?
Indeed, where am I
Who lived in this house not long ago?
Forlorn, the birds bemoan the thinness in the air
Left by people who went off,
As though on a kind of spree.
At Cush, in the new, or newish, house, we gather
In stopped time. It is Christmas,
Or a birthday, or someone is home
From Dublin. We speak softly; some stories
Have not yet been told, others are half-way there.
We sit it out; my brother stares into the fire.
Auntie Harriet says that the sales women in Clery’s
Are less friendly that they used to be.
Auntie Kathleen smiles. ‘Is that right, Harriet?’
‘That’s what I think anyway,’ Harriet says.
As I look, each face comes into shape,
Unghostly, animated. The talk goes on:
Old neighbours; the freezing winter of 1947;
Mr Broe, Mr Brown, old Mr Kickham;
The thirst my mother suffered
In the south of France; the time Harriet
Went to see Elizabeth Taylor in ‘Who’s Afraid
Of Virginia Woolf.’ Father Ranson, Brother Cripps.
The almost unmentioned Troubled times;
And pilgrimages to Lourdes or Rome. CT
I do love Sylvia Plath's "Wintering," even though it is a poem.