New Selected Poems by Stevie Smith (Florence Margaret Smith)

Edition: New Selected Poems of Stevie Smith
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
The New Selected Poems (1988) of Stevie Smith were collected over a decade after her death in 1971. Interest in Smith's work was high in the 1980s; two different biographies of her were published, one in 1986 and the other in 1988.

SELECTED THEMES/COMMENTARY:
Death: Death figures in Smith's poetry as a frequently a kind of solace because of its certainty. Unlike God, Death when called will come, as the speaker asserts in "Come, Death." The speaker says, "I'd ask God to have pity on me, / But I turn to the one I know, and say: / Come, Death, and carry me away." In the short second stanza which forms the second half of this poem, the speaker finds Death to be sweet because of his sure subjection to the speaker's will: "Ah me, sweet Death, you are the only god / Who comes as a servant when he is called, you kno, / Listen then to this sound I make, it is sharp, / Come death. Do not be slow." The sense of Death as "sweet" rather than fearful makes it a companion charged with affect in other poems. "Tender Only to One" is a kind of love poem to death, in which the poet expresses her tenderness for only one, revealing at the end, "His name, his name is Death." "Company" is about how when other human company--friends, lovers, for instance--desert an old man, and he hears voices telling him, "Rely on yourself," Death comes as true company, who will surely not desert him at the end.   


Academia, Literature: Smith explicitly distances her poetry from the literary canon and academic institutions; when she makes allusions, they are often irreverent and speak back to canonical poets ("Thoughts Upon the Person of Porlock," for example, humorously welcomes Coleridge's "Person of Porlock" and neutralizes the poet's indignance, even suggesting that he had already been stuck in the writing of Kubla Khan before the person's entrance). Poems like "Souvenir de Monsieur Poop," written in the voice of a self-important academic, scathingly critique the institutionalization of the literary canon and academic hierarchies: "I am the self-appointed guardian of English literature," he proclaims, following with a litany of blind "beliefs" without justification. He is devoted, of course, to Shakespeare and Milton, and Housman in modern times. He degrades youth and dogmatically upholds old age and "established classics" as the measure of wisdom. "To School" critiques the kinds of poetry encouraged in institutions of learning, asserting that the "Muse" has flown away from these schools, knowing better.


God/Christianity: As mentioned above in the commentary on how death figures in Smith's poetry, God (and more specifically, Christianity) repeatedly fails to give comfort or satisfying answers. Much of Smith's poetry speaks back defiantly against this lack of comfort and satisfaction, even while aware of this defiance's egocentricity. In "Egocentric" the speaker asks, "What care I if good God be / If he be not good to me," lines which are repeated again at the end of the poem as if creating a kind of egocentric mirror. The egocentric speaker's question, however, is one Smith takes seriously; the speaker is trapped and forced into her egocentrism because of the lack of sufficient explanation from God. This yearning for satisfying answers is repeated in many of Smith's other poems, perhaps most poignantly in "Oh Christianity, Christianity" and How do you see?," a longer poem which contains lines from "Oh Christianity, Christianity" in it. "Oh Christianity, Christianity, / Why do you not answer our difficulties?" the speaker simply asks. She follows with a series of equally simply-stated and earnest questions about how Christ could take on our sins, if he felt guilty, how he is a "perfect man" if man is by definition sinful, and how the Trinity is supposed to be unchanging when clearly Christ altered things. These are big questions, and the speaker asks them here not at all defiantly, and just the same as in "Egocentrism," receives no answers. In "How do you see?" the speakers doubts and questions transform themselves from yearning and desire into a more radical statement that Christianity is a just a "fairy story" and can't be real. But, because it has been so often the reason for doing "good," the speaker realizes that there is a real urgency to make sure our children learn to be good without Christianity, since they might soon all realize that it is just a "fairy story": "I think if we do not learn quickly, and learn to teach children / To be good without enchantment, without the help / Of beautiful painted fairy stories pretending to be true...we shall kill everybody, / It will be too much for us, we shall kill everybody."

Perhaps because God is so absent to Smith, she takes the opportunity to envision what He might be like, given his intransigent absence. "God the Eater" posits a gluttonous God feeding on human feeling, an idea which finds repetition in "Childe Rolandine" where an artist forced to work as a secretary-typist, suddenly decides to speak out the truth on how "There is a Spirit feeds on our tears, I give him mine, / Mighty human feelings are his food / Passion and grief and joy his flesh and blood, / That he may live and grow fat we daily die / This cropping One is our immortality." "God and Man" presents another possibility of God as a kind of fickle, flakey lover to man. The poem is written in the voice of God, exaggeratedly drawling, "Man my darling, my love and my pain," while also stipulating harshly, "Do not come till I call, though thou weariest first."


Animals and people: Domesticated animals (as pets, or in captured in zoos) often serve as occasions for critiquing human treatment of animals. "Parrot" is about an "old sick green parrot / High in a dingy cage"; the speaker wishes that his death might come soon to put him out of its misery. "The Zoo" reveals, through irony, the lack of human awareness of what he does when putting away a lion in a cage. A voice of authority tells a little boy that the lion "does not like you, little boy, / It's no use making up to him," wisely asserting that "God gave him lovely teeth and claws so that he might eat little boys." The poet chimes in, commenting on the irony of how despite such professions of understanding the nature of lions, humans cause the condition wherein "[h]is claws are blunt, his teeth fall out, / No victim's flesh consoles his snout, / And that is why his eyes are red / Considering his talents are misused."

"Nature and Free Animals" provides an explanation (and interesting defense?) for why people warp the nature of their animals. The poem starts with a didactic voice criticizing human domestication of dogs: "You have taught them the sicknesses of your mind / And the sicknesses of your body / You have taught them to be servile / To hang servilely upon your countenance." Later, we find that this is the voice of God, and not of the poet. The human's response is a reproach to God, suggesting that this is kind of the same thing which He does to humans, and if we are in His image, it is natural for us to do the same to animals.


Gender Relations: Relations between men and women in Smith's poetry are hardly ever satisfactory; selfish cads seem preponderant in her poetry, and so are victimized women who often participate in the process bringing about their victimization. "In Felice" is a good example of Smith's portrayal of these two types in heterosexual relations. The speaker is a woman who no matter how much she is ignored or cheated on by "Sir Rat," imagines he loves her. She delusionally repeats, "my heart is singing," even in cases where it is clear that her heart should not be singing: "No Madam, he left no message, ah how his silence speaks / He loves me too much for words, my heart is singing." "Valuable" juxtaposes the situations of girls in society and panthers kept in cages. Unlike the panthers, however, whose eyes say, "I am too valuable to be kept in a cage," girls themselves say "yes" to often to their own debasement and subordination, and need to learn how to say no. The speaker laments that "Nobody teaches anybody they are valuable nowadays." The speaker imagines the common retort from girls, that "I shall be alone / If I say 'I am valuable' and other people do not say it of me / I shall be alone, there is no comfort there." The speaker points out the difference between comfortable versus valuable, and how the latter is more important. Furthermore, "if everybody says it in the end / It will be comforting." Smith seems to think Christianity responsible for some of the cruelty against women which she observes around her; this idea is directly suggested in "How Cruel is the Story of Eve" in which the poet ascribes to the story "reponsibility / in history / for misery. The poet contrasts the story's unreality, its "legend" status, with the very real, "historical" harm which it perpetuates, imagining how the story "colours / All human thought."  


"A House of Mercy" is one of Smith's autobiographical poems, on the house which she lived in with her mom and aunt and sister, in which she remained for much of her life. Smith has very positive associations of strength with their all female house, "For all its faults, / If they are faults, of sternness and reserve, / It is a Being of warmth I think; at heart / A house of mercy."


War: Romana Huk's recent study of Stevie Smith links her work to the two world wars which she lived through, reading against the grain of the assumption that because she spent most of her life in the suburbs, and styled herself as a bit of an eccentric, that her work doesn't really engage with the big questions of what poetry or literature more broadly had to bring to a post-war, traumatized western world. "The Poets are Silent" wrestles with the very question of the place of poetry after the trauma of war, providing the answer, in four short lines that silence is in fact a kind of poetic response in itself: "There's no new spirit abroad, / As I looked, I saw; / And I say that it is to the poets' merit / To be silent about the war." There is nothing to be said, but saying nothing is in fact saying something, and silence seems the most profound response to the experience of war. 


Smith's poetry expresses alienation before the wars which happened in her lifetime, often figured along gender lines. In "The Little Daughters of America" (subtitled, Pearl Harbor, 1941), the bellicose, virile "Admirals Curse-You and No-More" have nothing to do with "the little daughters of America"; the  poet points out the great gap between domestic images of patriotism and the combative spirit which carries on the operations of war. "I had a dream" similarly comments on the alienation of women from the battlefield, the speaker imagining herself as Helen of Troy, talking to the prophetic but cast-aside Cassandra. Helen becomes a kind of universal female figure, who views the men on the battlefield as possessing a spirit totally alien to her own: "Like the spirit of all armies, on all plains, in all wars, the men / No longer thinking why they were there / Or caring, but going on; like the song the English used to sing / In the first world war: We're here because, we're here because, / We're here because, we're here." Helen and Cassandra's positions in this poem are critical and intelligent before the drone-like mindlessness of the men on the battlefield. 


Misanthropy/Post-Human Point of View: Perhaps related to Smith's suggestion in "The Poets are Silent" that words probably can't bear the burden of the world shaken to its core by the experiences of war, is Smith's frequent reference to a perspective beyond a human one to account for the universe. This often takes the form of a kind of misanthropy, rather disturbing in poems like "The Suburban Classes" in which the speaker suggests a pamphlet, "Free for every Registered Reader's table" which will tell the suburban classes, "Your King and your Country need you Dead." "The Face" describes a common face which the poet encounters in modern England, someone with a "monkey soul" (presumably signifying imitative and unthinking) "that bangs about, that beats a gong," embodying conventions and platitudes, "utter[ing] social lies."  The poet concludes, much in the spirit of "The Suburban Classes," "You well may say that better far / This face had not been born." "The English," again, plays on a similar theme of how so many so-called "intelligent English / Of the Arts, the professions and the Upper Middle Classes, / Are under-cover men," signaling a modern-day loss of something deeper to humanity than such vocational and class designations as "of the Arts, the professions, and the Upper Middle Classes." Pessimistically, the poet notes that what is under the covers is often gone, and hence these men are now mere "corpse carriers" and what's worse, "infective" through their ideologies.

Smith makes the transition from misanthropy towards something potentially more uplifting in imaginings of a post-human perspective in a number of other poems. "The New Age" is probably the most explicitly post-human, decrying "how these crying people spoil the beautiful / geological scene." "Unpopular, lonely, and loving" problematizes love as a human emotion, the absence of which would mean less misery. "In Protocreation," the poet expresses a strong desire for the world before man's existence ("Oh had it but stopped then / Oh had there not come men") because with man came knowledge of good and evil: "There was no good deed and no crime / No oppression by informed mind / No knowledge and no human kind." These all are in existence because the human mind has created them. Smith turns often to the current animal world for a solacing perspective beyond the human one: in "Away, Melancholy," the speaker notes that nothing else in nature is melancholy, "The ant is busy / He carrieth his meat, / All things hurry / To be eaten or eat," continuing on to think about how "Man, too, hurries, / Eats, couples, buries / He is an animal also." Thus, if animal also, man ought to be able to banish melancholy, a mental construct of his own and not a necessary condition of existence. "Frog Prince" is one of Smith's more playful poems, in which the speaker is the frog prince, telling his non-human perspective of the fairy tale. Basically, the frog prince is happy before his "disenchantment" by the royal princess. He has been doing just fine as a frog: "I have been a frog now / For a hundred years / And in all this time / I have not shed may tears, / I am happy I like the life." The princess promises that with "disenchantment," he can be "heavenly," but as the frog notes, not happy.

Selections from Seamus Heaney

Edition: Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996
SUMMARY/BACKGROUNDS and COMMENTARY:
Collection: Death of a Naturalist (1966) 
These early poems present local, rural images associated with Heaney's childhood--Heaney lived from his birth until his teenage years at Mossbawn, a family farmhouse. These poems, though pastoral, are not exactly peaceful ones. These poems were written before the so-called "troubles" beginning around 1968 in Northern Ireland so they don't wrestle specifically with recent political violence, but seem to nevertheless register a more abstract violence in the rhythms of natural life and farm-work which interacts with nature. The language and images of these poems are extremely physical and tactile, metrically, the poems possess a Hopkins-esque assertiveness and energy appropriate to images of rural disruption and violence. Sonically, these poems are filled with onomotapoeic effects. In his Nobel Prize speech later, Heaney would describe his early life at the farm as a kind of "creaturely existence," which I think is exactly what the tactility and physicality of these early poems convey.

Specific examples:
"Digging" links his father's digging for potatoes with his spade with his own "digging" with a pen. Tactile images like the "cool hardness in our hands" of the potatoes and the physicality of his father's work, "Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods / Over his shoulder, doing down and down" bring words close to the feeling of this kind of rural labor. This is, after all, the main subject of the poem: through the physicality of his language and the linked images of the pen and the spade, the poet is able to trace a kind of genealogy between the work of his father and his own work.
"Death of a Naturalist" describes the violence of "frogspawn" bursting; also the rot, the festering which surrounds this "frogspawn." The poet recalls filling "jampotfuls of jellied / Specks to range on window-sills at home...and wait and watch until / The fattening dots burst into nimble-/Swimming tadpoles." This "frogspawn" takes its revenge, however, on a hot day when he hears the frogs' "coarse croaking," the "slap" and "plop" of their "obscene threats." Similarly, in "Blackberry Picking," nature kind of fights back "where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots" and when the bath of blackberries inevitably rots. The poet writes, disappointingly, "I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair / That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. / Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not."
"The Diviner" describes the art of finding water with a "forked hazel stick." When it strikes water, the movement is sudden, live, and violent: "The pluck came sharp as a sting. / The rod jerked with precise convulsions / Spring water suddenly broadcasting / Through a green hazel its secret stations." Everywhere, nature seems to be bursting and rupturing, leaving in the wake of such violence a messy decay.


Collection: North (1975)
This collection was published following the breakout of intense political violence which had reached a peak in 1972 (the more violent Provisional IRA formed in this period, the infamous Bloody Sunday or Bogside Massacre also happened in 1972). In efforts to contain the violence, London issued a "direct rule" over the north of Ireland as a sort of temporary solution. North's attention to this violence is worked through images of bodies (ancient and recent) recovered from boglands; the ways in which these poems aestheticize corpses and the violence done to them has been fairly controversial. The second half of this collection moves away from these aestheticized images of violence, turning towards issues of the poet's place and responsibility towards the violence of the contemporary world.

Specific examples:
In "Funeral Rites" the poet is lifting coffins of dead relations and looking upon their corpses: "their eyelids glistening, / their dough-white hands / shackled in rosary beads." These are not merely aestheticized corpses but also Catholicized ones by the rosary beads, and later, melting candles, and "gleaming crosses" complete the picture. The lines are short (generally trimeter) and move quickly down the page grouped in an orderly fashion of four lines each to a stanza, reminding one of ritual and regular rhythms of religious ceremony. The poet seems to imagine that the religiously tinged aestheticization of the dead brings something redeeming to the violence, though it might be inadequate. This tension is expressed best in by following lines: "...Gunnar / who lay beautiful / inside his burial mound, / though dead by violence / and unavenged."

In poems like "Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces" and "Bone Dreams," words are associated with biological debris, as if words can do the work of ordering these bodily fragments, making them valuable and beautiful. The words are literally in "bits" in "Bone Dreams," fragmented but aestheticized: "White bone found / on the grazin: / the rough porous / language of touch" an "flit-find, nugget / of chalk, / I touch it again, / I wind it in / the sling of mind / to pitch it at England / and follow its drop / to strange fields." The "pitching" of these bone bits at England deliberately situates these bone bits in the history of and continual violence of English colonialism.


"Bog Queen" is a first-person imagining of the decaying matter having a sort of consciousness: she says that her body "was braille / for the creeping influences: / dawn suns groped over my head / and cooled at my feet." Later, the account talks about a memory of violence and (sexualized) trauma: "I was barbered and stripped / by a turf-cutter's spade."
Works like "Grauballe Man," "Strange Fruit," and "Punishment" seem to ask whether violence done in the past to a corpse is mitigated somehow by the absence of human physicality in the "matter" which makes up the corpse in the present. The "grain" of the Grauballe man's wrists "is like bog oak, / the ball of his heel / like a basalt egg. / His instep has shrunk / cold as a swan's foot / or a wet swamp root." The girl's head in the next poem is like an "exhumed gourd," a "strange fruit." These images suggest that neither of them are human anymore, so what does that mean for past violence? "Punishment" wrestles with this question, and even more specifically asks if calling attention to a body's state as non-human mitigates sexual trauma. In the beginning, the poet sexualizes the body, trying to imagine feeling "the tug / of the halter at the nape / of her neck, the wind / on her naked front." Yet she is "oak-bone, brain-firkin," so when the wind "blows her nipples / to amber beads," perhaps there isn't anything lurid about it at all. Still, the poet persists in imagining her history as a "Little adultress," but again, her current state resists these human characteristics that would make violence, sexual or otherwise, a problem. Now, she's just "darkened combs," "muscles' webbing," and "numbered bones."

The later poems in this collection move away from these more abstract wrestlings with violence, aestheticization, language, and "matter," drawing attention to the specific political contexts under which Heaney was writing. "Act of Union" are two sonnets in the first-person voice of England essentially raping Ireland: Ireland is eroticized as a female, England says, "Your back is a firm line of eastern coast / And arms and legs are thrown / Beyond your gradual hills." The moment of violence is in the second stanza, ending with England leaving Ireland ruined for all time: "No treaty / I foresee will salve completely your tracked / And stretchmarked body, the big pain / That leaves you raw, liked opened ground, again." Not particularly positive, to say the least, about the history of colonization and the continuing conflict into the late twentieth-century. "Summer 1969" describes the poet in Madrid, while hearing of violence happening on television. He retreats to the Prado, seeing paintings of violence (like Goya's "Third of May") and suggests that these images of art make violence seem more real than the journalistic accounts in newspapers and television. Both this poem and "Exposure" work through Heaney's own place, as a poet, in all of this violence and express anxiety over what poetry can do (or maybe can't do). "How did I end up like this," he asks in this latter poem, "As I sit weighing and weighing / My responsible tristia. / For what? For the ear? For the people? / For what is said behind-backs?" The tone here is self-mocking and severely ironic in using a rather "high" term like "tristia." In his Nobel lecture, Heaney explains that at the time he had moved with his family to Wicklow, south of Dublin, "Feeling puny in my predicaments as I read about the tragic logic of Osip Mandelstam's fate in the nineteen-thirties, feeling challenged yet steadfast in my non-combatant status..."
 
Collection: Station Island (1984)
This collection, highly autobiographical, works out on a very personal level Heaney's own sense of his vocation as a poet. Loosely recalling Dante's Purgatorio, the poet encounters deceased friends and literary precursors. Helen Vendler describes the eponymous long central sequence (divided into twelve parts) of this collection as a series of potential "alter-egos" of Heaney's, which he imagines he might have been instead. As a whole, the collection doesn't seem to resolve the central question of what a poet is to do amidst the reality of violence, what to do with his guilt or his responsibility.

Specific examples:
"Station Island" takes its name from a medieval place of pilgrimage which remains up to the contemporary age as such. The sections vary widely as far as form goes; many are dialogic, with the poet in conversation with different "alter egos" as Vendler argues. The sections detail available vocations, like farm, priest, or schoolmaster. The poet speaks with a missionary who has been disillusioned, failing and returning from the rain forest. The poet at first feels a "strange reversal," having come for confession, but then he is rebuked for his poetry might be the same kind of failed mission: "what are you doing here / but the same thing?" the father asks. "I at least was young and unaware." Many of these dialogues are difficult for the poet; another particularly damning one is his conversation with Colum, his cousin who died as a result of sectarian violence: Colum says, "You saw that, and you wrote that--not the fact. / You confused evation and artistic tact. / The Protestant who shot me through the head / I accuse directly, but indirectly, you / who now atone perhaps upon this bed / for the way you whitewashed ugliness and drew / the lovely blinds of the Purgatorio / and saccharined my death with morning dew." The voice of Colum charges Heaney with the crime of aestheticizing death and violence, belittling its horror. Joyce is perhaps the kindest to him, telling him, essentially, to stop worrying about these issues and to just write: "Let go, let fly, forget." Joyce is belittling though, about the "pilgrimage," calling it "infantile," and a "peasant pilgrimage."


Collection: Spirit Level (1996)
Written a year after receiving the Nobel Prize, and two years after Ulster paramilitaries and the IRA signed a truce, this collection represents for many critics a break from Heaney's earlier work. Certainly the impasse which seems to characterize "Station Island" seems broken, and many of these poems lay claim to adequacy and value. In his prize speech, Heaney refers to the story of a minibus stopped on the side of a road by IRA terrorists. The passengers were directed to stand in a line, and Catholics were encouraged to step aside to acknowledge their beliefs. Assuming those who had stopped them to be Protestant militants, a Protestant squeezes the hand of the one Catholic old man in their company to signal he needn't step out. The old Catholic steps out to acknowledge his faith, and the rest of the Protestants are slaughtered. Heaney describes the work of poetry as "credit[ing] as a reality the squeeze of the hand, the actuality of sympathy and protectiveness between living creatures." In another section of the speech, Heaney expresses his faith that there is an "adequacy" in lyric poetry for doing such work.

Specific examples:
Vendler characterizes the "value" of many poems in this collection as a kind of middle-age stoicism not particularly common to lyric (if only because so many lyric poets happened to die young). Characters in this collection, perhaps most obviously Hugh Heaney in "Keeping Going" move on with the business of everyday, seemingly mundane, everyday living in the face of the violence of man's brains being shot out against the whitewashed building: "My dear brother, you have good stamina. / You stay on where it happens. Your big tractor / Pulls up at the Diamond, you wave at people, / You shout and laugh above the revs, you keep / Old roads open by driving on the new ones." As if paralleling the saving grace in the performance of the ordinary after the trauma of violence, the language in this collection seems much simpler, concrete, and less abstract than in "Station Island." Poems like "Rain Stick" celebrate the simply joys of hearing the sounds of the rain stick; "Mint" calls upon the reader to look for "newness in the back yard of our life," the sprigs of mint that grow wild "beyond where we dumped our refuse and old bottles." These are both calls to regard the power of what might be overlooked and disregarded after so much of the horrific had happened. These sentiments are related to the poet's re-valuation of his vocation in this section: like St. Kevin in "St. Kevin and the Blackbird," the poet must strive "To labour and not seek reward," or like the "journeyman tailor" in "At Banagher," never "question[s] what it all amounts to." This steady, stoic work which the poet strives for isn't exactly the same as what Joyce suggests to him in "Station Island" which seems more revolutionary and "high," the middle-age poet doesn't seek to fly but to return to earth and work, as Caedmon sings during the time that he isn't doing yardwork ("Caedmon"). In these figurations of stoicism there is an obvious echo through allusion to the ancient world (e.g., the poet figuring himself as a lookout in "Mycenae Lookout" who is simply there to watch, with a "frozen stare" the destruction of Troy) and also to an Eastern, Buddhist sort of denial of self (again, as in St. Kevin's forgetting his own pain or self in the labor of holding his arms out for the blackbird's eggs to hatch). The poet no longer wrestles with writing to exorcise guilt or take responsibility, but chooses to write as a kind of witness to the other ordinary things of value that remain even after scenes of destruction and violence.

Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot

Edition: Four Quartets
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Eliot's Four Quartets grew out of a what was initially a single poem, "Burnt Norton," which ended up being the first of four poems. "Burnt Norton" was made up of discarded passages from his dramatic work from the 1930s, specifically, Murder in the Cathedral. After the outbreak of World War II in 1939, interest in the theater declined, and Eliot turned back to poetry, writing a second poem which takes the same five-part structure of "Burnt Norton" called "East Coker." During the writing of this second poem, Eliot decided on the overall sequence of the Four Quartets. The third poem, "The Dry Salvages," was completed in 1940, and the last poem, "Little Gidding," was completed in 1942. Their first publication as a set was in 1943 in New York, and 1944 in London.

SUMMARY/OVERVIEW/:
Burnt Norton
I. The poet expresses abstractions of time which privileges the notion that "time is eternally present" in reflective yet simple lines. A bird calls "us" into a rose-garden, "our first world" (alluding to Eden), where an unnamed "they" are, "dignified, invisible / Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves..." We look into an empty pool which fills "with water out of sunlight" and "they" stand behind us, reflected. The moment "they" are identified as children (our own past?) the bird tells us to leave.
II. The beginning of this second section is metrically nursery-rhyme like: "Garlic and sapphires in the mud / Clot the bedded axle tree." The lines expand with the introduction of a recurring image in this poem, "the still point of the turning world," which the poet insists, is stillness and not "fixity." This still point is this eternal present, a Buddhist-like state free from "practical desire" "release[d] from action and suffering."
III. The poet indicates "a place of disaffection," which is being stuck in "Time before and time after." To escape this temporality, one could descend, "Into a world of perpetual solitude / World not world, but that which is not world, / Internal darkness, depirvation / And destitution of all property / Dessication of the world of sense, / Evacuation of the world of fancy, / Inoperancy of the world of spirit." This begins to sound like Hell rather than Heaven, though both are empty of desire and notions of "time past and time future."
IV. This is a short stanza; it plays with the images of a bell, nature, and again, the still point of the turning world.
V. This final section admits and explores the limitations of words and music. Even though words and music don't die like people do, they aren't "still" and are subject to the burden of movement. "Form" and "pattern" perpetuate stillness, though, and might help words and music to get closer to the divine stillness  of an eternal present which the poem has been holding up throughout.

East Coker
I. The poem begins, "In my beginning is my end." Images of destruction, decay, restoration, and renewal, collapses beginnings and endings. In an "open field," archaic, rustic rituals celebrating "matrimonie" and coupling go on, alongside the time of seasons, milking, harvest. "Eating and drinking" are juxtaposed with "Dung and death."
II. Again, the first part of this section begins with clipped, nursery-rhyme like lines which mix together imagines from different seasons, again collapsing linear time. The words which he has just used to try to collapse linear time, the poet says in the next section, are inadequate to the task. The section ends bleakly with the adage that "[t]he only wisdom we can hope to acquire / Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless."
III. "O dark dark dark" reminds us of Milton's blindness, but also his faith: the dark is not a place of despair, but it "shall be the darkness of God." Didactic negations turn out to be the way of reaching (the inexpressible state of spiritual fulfillment--but it can't really be "fulfillment" since that signals progression). This is how Eliot expresses it: "To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, / You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. / In order to arrive at what you do not know / You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance...And what you do not know is the only thing you know / And what you own is what you do not own / And where you are is where you are not."
IV. Sin is figured as a disease and sickness, and earth is "our hospital." In battling fevers here on earth, the poet says he "must freeze / And quake in frigid purgatorial fires."
V. This section contains a direct reference to the World Wars, and the poets own "twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres / Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt / Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure..." Again, words aren't up to the task of expressing the still point of the world, the time eternal, the spiritual state which we need to realize. Yet, the fight to get there, to "recover what has been lost" is what we do. In fact, "for us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business," in other words, that's the business of Christ.

The Dry Salvages
I. The first section figures (the Mississippi?) river as a "strong brown god," who is forgotten in the building up of cities and the living in them. Yet, the divine presence of the sea remains everywhere though it may be "unhonoured, unpropitiated, / By worshippers of the machine."
II. This section revises the notion of an "end" and suggests that in time, there is only "addition" or accumulation. As one gets older, the poet says, time seems less and less like development or sequence (linear), but more like a pattern, which is another way of thinking of it as accumulation. The only true happiness is not in the things that we usually think of as "well-being," like "fruition, fulfilment, security or affection, / Or even a very good dinner" but a "sudden illumination" which can't be expressed as any kind of "meaning." This happiness is only available through Christ.
III. "I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant" links Eliot's poem to Eastern concepts of transmigration of the soul. The poet enjoins life travellers to "fare forward" and not to fare well; there is a sense of inevitability in change and to "fare forward" is to let these changes happen and to face them bravely.
IV. The poet prays to the Virgin on behalf of people living by the seaside, those who have embarked voyages, and the women who have been left behind.
V. This section condemns all sorts of life occupations to tell the future ("To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits, / To report the behaviour of the sea monster, / Describe the horoscope,  haruspicate or scry, / Observe disease in signatures, evoke / Biography from the wrinkles of the palm...") as unreal--they are merely "pastimes and drugs." Instead, one ought to try to "apprehend / The point of intersection of the timeless / with time." This is the "occupation for the saint," although Eliot stops here and admits it isn't an "occupation." Ultimately, the closest we may get here on earth are to gain "only hints and guesses," "the rest / Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action."


Little Gidding
I. The poem begins with "midwinter spring" is a divine, eternal sort of season which feels "suspended in time, between pole and tropic." The second part of this section breaks into second-person address conditionals which essentially say that regardless what route you take, the notion of "purpose" will break apart. "You are not here to verify, / Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity / Or carry report. You are here to kneel / Where prayer has been valid."
II. After images of water and fire destroying the earth, a dead master speaks with the poet in terza rima, preaching purification and refinement of the soul by fire. Specifically, the master refers to the disciplined movement of "dancing" in the fire, again suggesting the importance of pattern (as in poems, music) in aiding a soul towards realizing the divine state of stillness.
III. This section explores problems of attachment (such as to country, "faces and places") and levels these kinds of loyalties in death: "We cannot revive old factions / We cannot restore old policies / Or follow an antique drum. / These men, and those who opposed them / And those whom they opposed / Accept the constitution of silence / And are folded in a single party."
IV. This is a short section on redemption by fire.
V. The poet asserts that "What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning," destroying once again the linear conception of time. A similar sentiment is expressed in "history is a pattern / Of timeless moments." He suggests a continuing exploration throughout ones life, however, but that the "end" of such exploration will be to get back to where we started "And know the place for the first time," strongly signaling a return to a state before original sin.

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
The five-part structures of the poems in Four Quartets are reminiscent of The Waste Land, but late Eliot is significantly different from earlier Eliot. For one, Eliot's subject is more obviously Christian; Four Quartets primarily and explicitly works out the subject of time and mankind in relation to the divine. Stylistically, the poems feel like they are spoken by a "single consciousness" (according to critic Margaret Thormahlen, SOURCE: LitEncyc) rather than the fragmented consciousness of The Waste Land. Relatedly, Four Quartets feels much more personal in nature--indeed, autobiographical snippets further this overall sense (each poem is named after a place which was personally significant to Eliot). The invocation of a musical form of "quartets" alongside Leavis's reading of The Waste Land, however, forges an important connection between these works: both reject narrative as an archaic organizational principle and favor the abstraction of musical relationships as a substitute in modern times.  In The Waste Land this new form is less explicitly aligned with a new conception of Christianity for the modern world, and the art itself seems to hold its own kind of power, but in Four Quartets, this new conception of Christianity is the whole point which art strives towards (but inevitably fails to completely reach).

Letters from Iceland by W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice

Edition: Letters from Iceland
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
In 1936, Auden and MacNeice went to travel in Iceland, having been commissioned to write a book beforehand. The result was a hodge-podge collage of their own poetry and prose, and textual fragments compiled from other sources, published in 1937. This collage is put together as "chapters." Immediate historical contexts in 1936 included high unemployment rates in Europe, the Spanish Civil War, and Hitler's continuing rise.

SUMMARY:
The "Letters to Lord Byron," interspersed throughout in four parts form a kind of "central thread," according to Auden. In the second Letter to E.M.A., Auden says that he formulated his idea on the Byron letters while on a bus: "He's the right person, I think, because he was a townee, a European, and disliked Wordsworth and that kind of approach to nature, and I find that very sympathetic. This letter in itself will have very little to do with Iceland, but will be rather a description of an effect of travelling in distance places which is to make one reflect on one's past and one's culture from the outside. But it will form a central thread on which I shall hang other letters to different people more directly about Iceland." The first letter explicitly talks about its form (rhyme royal), and tells Byron why he has been chosen for correspondence. As is the case in the rest of the letters to Byron, the rhyme is intentionally bad as a tribute to Don Juan. The second letter tells Byron of England today; Auden articulates the modern malaise under lives controlled and made comfortable by such things as "antiseptic objects" or "central heating."  Don Juan, he says, would find the century good nonetheless, for the variety enabled by technology: "Indeed our ways to waste time are so many, / Thanks to technology, a list of these / Would make a longer book than Ulysses." Continuing on, Auden tells Byron that they are more socialist, in that "Fortune's ladder is for all to climb," but that the spirit of the people has lost the appreciation for the individual hero. He even muses on whether Hitler is the heir to the Byronic hero--a scary thought, and Auden clearly expresses nostalgia for more colorful and spirited individuals who take the trouble to speak back to authority and establishments. The third letter continues the subject of modern Europe, specifically articulating for Byron the place of the modern artist. Unlike in the past, when an artist had a specific audience or a patron, today's artist didn't really have a place at all. Most occupations have a professional niche and utility, but artists don't belong as such. The fourth and final letter muses on a child from the future, asking "What's / An intellectual of the middle classes?" This becomes Auden's excuse to offer an account of his own life, beginning with information found on his passport, the ancestral lineage of his parents, his early fascination with Icelandic sagas, his dream to become a mining engineer, and finally his career a poet and his literary influences: Layard, Lane, Lawrence, and Gidet are mentioned. He tells Byron of the profession of teaching English at a boarding school, and how those who want to be authors today take this on because it generates enough income for a life independent compared to the "alternative" of occupying "an office stool" all day.

Auden's to Letter to Christopher Isherwood consists of a poem followed by a letter, where the letter answer's Isherwood's queries about Iceland. Some of Auden's thoughts are that the Icelanders are not a particularly ambitious people, that they are fond of satirical lampoons, and are uninhibited sexually. In a word, they seem a people that take life with a certain levity and without the kinds of "neuroses" common to the English: Auden concludes, "Scandinavian sanity would be too much for you, as it is for me."

In a Letter to Graham and Anne Shepard, MacNeice writes in verse couplets to answer the question as to why they are in Iceland.  Iceland is simpler, for one, than England: "This complex world exacts / Hard work of simplifying; to get its focus / You have to stand outside the crowd and caucus." At another point, MacNeice offers his own "simple" answer: "Wystan said that he was planning to go / To Iceland to write a book and would I come too; / And I said yes, having nothing better to do." In Iceland there is a sense of rest from the rush and movement of England: "Here is a different rhythm, the juggld balls / Hang in the air--the pause before the souffle falls."

The For Tourists chapter is written as a typical travel guide, offering advice on currency, lodging, food, transportation, language etc. A bibliography includes travel guides, language books, and histories - mostly pertaining to romances and sagas.

Sheaves from Sagaland is probably the most fragmented and heteroglossic "chapter." It begins with categories followed by quotations drawn from a number of authorities (the first is, category "Iceland is Real," followed by "'Iceland is not a myth; it is a solid portion of the earth's surface.'"). The authorities are mostly British but with some French and German ones mixed in as well. The many categories are organized under larger headings- The Country, The Natives, The Tourist, and Home Again. After this section, there is a prose account "The 1809 Revolution" drawn mainly from "Hooker and MacKenzie." In 1809, Jorgen Jorgensen, a Danish traveler/adventurer tried to proclaim himself the new ruler of Iceland after its independence from Denmark. The revolutionary failed, and was taken to prison in London after the Danish government was reinstated. Following this historical account is another one, this time of a volcanic eruption in 1727. This account is in given by a preacher (who is quoted by Mackenzie). At the end of the chapter, there is a quick textual extracts from the Suarbar Parish Register from 1805, listing the names, occupations, ages, status of confirmation, literacy levels, conduct and general abilities of a number of inhabitants. After this, the chapter closes with a "bibliography."

Auden's Letter to R.H.S. Crossman, Esq. is in verse, and also includes some old, textual enclosures: a "Formula of Peace-Making, a Law of Wager of Battle, and The Viking Law

Auden writes two letters to E.M.A., the first describing various sights, scenes, and people. There is also a discussion of Iceland's poetry, particularly the odd circumstance that "any average educated person one meets can turn out competent verse." There seems to be no "modern" influence. Included in this letter is Auden's poem, "A Detective Story," explaining why people read detective stories. The second letter I have mentioned above--in it he describes his idea for the Byron letters. The second letter shares a chapter with a set of strange proverbs that seem translated (e.g., "Ale is another man," "If mending will do, why cut off") and also an old story/legend about a woman troll.

Eclogue from Iceland was written by MacNeice, and in couplets, gives the dialogue between two tourists in Iceland and a ghost they meet. One of the tourists is Irish, and the other is escaping from the Spanish Civil War, suggesting they are representations of MacNeice and Auden. The tourists see Iceland as a kind of escape from Europe. The ghost, however, advises them to struggle on with modern Europe: "Minute your gesture but it must be made--/ Your hazard, your act of defiance and hymn of / hate, / Hatred of hatred, assertion of human values, / Which is now your only duty." Escape isn't a permanent answer.

Hetty to Nancy: These are a set of letter written by Macneice, adopting a loquacious female voice to tell of his and Auden's camping adventures with four schoolboys and their schoolmaster. "Hetty" relates the adventures of herself, her friend Maisie, and four schoolgirls and their schoolmistress. Hetty mostly launches complaints about her travel companions, about not having brought enough of her own camping supplies, and about the spartan living conditions of small tents in severe, cold weather. Hetty views the landscape to be inhospitable, and speaks fondly of "civilization" back in England. She writes, "Iceland is a barren land for souvenirs. Of course one can always bring home little bits of lava for one's friends...but I am afraid I have the wrong sort of friends." She doesn't see evidence of anything particularly foreign or romantic about Iceland: "You can't imagine any of them behaving like the people in the sagas." "Hetty" and "Nancy" are apparently codes, respectively, of "straight" and "gay," the letters revealing that Nancy is a lesbian who likes rock-climbing, and Hetty is stereotypically "feminine," holding up things like lipstick and marriage.

Auden's Letter to Kristjan Andresson, Esq. is an account of Iceland which Kristjan had requested from Auden after his travels, wishing to know what Auden's impressions of his own country were. Auden begins with apologies and qualifications on a touristic view of Iceland. He says he won't talk about geography, since impressions on people are really what matters most. This introduction aside, Auden launches unabashedly into his impressions, dividing them into the following categories: Physique and Clothes, Character, Manners, Wealth and Class Distinctions, Education and Culture, and General. Some of the more memorable observations that Auden makes about Icelanders is that they are "very direct, normal, and free from complexes, but whether that is a good or bad thing, I cannot decide." He appreciates Icelanders' wide appreciation of literature, but laments their lack of taste in architecture, drama, painting or music. In thinking through Iceland's future, Auden does not think that Iceland can become a successful capitalist society, because though peasant proprietors are becoming more and more "urbanised," there are not enough of them to "build up a capitalist culture of their own." Socialism might be an alternative. Finally, Auden is ambivalent about cosmopolitanism and Europe's influence on Iceland: "I know the day of self-contained national culture is over, that Iceland is far from Europe, that the first influences of Europe are always the worst ones, and that the development of a truly European culture is slow and expensive. But I am convinced that the cultural future of Iceland depends on the extent to which she can absorb the best of the European traditions, and make them her own."

Letter to William Coldstream, Esq begins as a "little donnish experiment in objective narrative," where Auden narrates what happens to them in third person. This is followed by a free-verse poem talking about the writing and publication of this work. This chapter ends with a poem, "Iceland" by MacNeice.

Auden and MacNeice's Joint "Last Will and Testament" end the work. The two of them bequeath many abstract concepts to people, communicated often via humorously enjambed lines like MacNeice's "And to my stepmother I leave her rich / Placid delight in detailed living who adds / Hour to hour as if it were stitch to stitch." Auden appoints Edward Upward and Christopher Isherwood "my join executors / To judge my work if it be bad or good." Together they also "leave" things that are not theirs to leave, like "the false front of Lincoln Cathedral" to the P.M. Baldwin, or "National character and strength of will" to Winston Churchill Ballinrobe's dry harbour." The tone is irreverent; the bequeathals often make fun of contemporaries. One of the more cutting moments is what they "leave" I.A. Richards:  "Item, to I.A. Richards who like a mouse / Nibbles linguistics with the cerebral tooth / We leave a quiet evening in a boarding-house." Towards the ending, however, their bequeathals become more serious: they leave, "[t]o all the dictators...the soft wind from the sweeping wing / Of madness, and the intolerable tightening of the mesh / Of history." And finally, near the very end, they end on a hopeful note: "We leave the unconceived and unborn lives / A closer approximation to real happiness / Than has been reached by us, our neighbours, or their wives."

MacNeice's Epilogue dedicated to Auden in a way summarizes what they have (not) seen in Iceland: "In that island never found / Visions blossom from the ground, / No conversions like St. Paul / No great happenings at all." Iceland's attraction, however, owes to its barrenness, in comparison to modern Europe: "Better were the northern skies / Than this desert in disguise--/ Rugs and cushions and the long / Mirror which repeats the song."

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Auden returned to Iceland in 1965, and wrote a foreword to the 1966 edition of Letters from Iceland (by then MacNeice had passed away). In this foreword, Auden traces his lifetime relationship with Iceland: "In my childhood dreams Iceland was holy ground; when, at the age of twenty-nine, I saw it for the first time, the reality verified my dream; at fifty-seven it was holy ground still, with the most magical light of anywhere on earth." He returns to the themes of Iceland as a place somehow untouched by "modernity," and the "only really classless society I have ever encountered." Though Iceland could never really be an "escape" for Auden facing the challenges of two world wars and massive historical and cultural shifts, it manages to retain a kind of magical hold on him in its perceived exemption from the complications of the modern world.

James Wilson's reading of Letters from Iceland's hodge-podge form argues that the work follows the high modernist treatment of art and fragment with some important departures from modernist canonical texts like Eliot's The Wasteland. Like The Wasteland, Letters is "polyglot" and hence fragmented: various in genre, in allusions, textual extracts, and finally, dual authorship. At the same time, the literary work itself as a whole is a "hermetically sealed" whole: in Wilson's summary of this high modernist tenet: "Art is always art, rather than something else, but everything else can always be absorbed within its integral form." For Letters, the integral form which brings together fragments is the travel account, whereas in The Wasteland it's the poem. Where Letters departs from The Wasteland is in its rejection of Eliot's seriousness. Letters takes up Byron as a father-figure, and particularly, such a humorous, irreverent work as Don Juan. Wilson suggests that while Eliot and Auden/MacNeice all seek to form something integral and communal in the fragmented modern era via the power of literary form, the latter achieves this through a comedic spirit which is an alternative to Eliot's serious religiosity.

Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Edition: The Remains of the Day
PUBLICATION HISTORY:
The Remains of the Day was published in 1989 and won the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction. The novel is Ishiguro's third novel.

SUMMARY:
The story is told from the first-person point of view of Stevens, the butler at Darlington Hall, as he embarks upon a four-day excursion into the English countryside in July of 1956. His new employer, an American by the name of Farraday, has suggested that Stevens take a vacation; Stevens, whose "professionalism" defines nearly his entire personality. Stevens tells the reader that he decides to take the trip only after an old housekeeper during the great days at Darlington Hall before the war, formerly Miss Kenton and now Mrs. Benn, had written to him with a tinge of nostalgia and news that her marriage wasn't so great. Stevens goes into great detail about how a faulty "staff plan" after Farraday's paring down of the staff was the culprit for some minor errors which he had committed lately. Stevens has in mind that Miss Kenton might return to Darlington and solve these minor problems.

The time during which Stevens writes his story is confined to immediately before, during, and immediately after his trip, but the story itself follows no particular chronology and seems to spontaneously pour out of Stevens's head as a set of flashbacks and philosophical musings. One of his first anecdotes he offers is an account of Farraday gently teasing him about visiting a lady friend; this anecdote launches him into a longer musing on the requirements of "banter" which his new employer requires, and which he can't seem to get a hang of. On the road to Salisbury in Farraday's Ford, Stevens is told by an old man to take a view of England atop a hill, and he does so, thinking on how "great" the landscape of "Great Britain" really was. This catapults him into reflecting on what makes a "great" butler, and he answers that a great butler must have "dignity." To describe dignity, which he defines as an "ability to inhabit [a] profeesional role and inhabit it to the utmost," Stevens gives a few examples from his own father's career: one time, when his father was a butler in India, shot a tiger under a dining room table without disturbing the occupants of the drawing room; another time, his father compelled a couple of drunk men he was driving to settle down just by force of his own silence; and yet another time, his father maintained his composure while serving the haughty general who had given bad orders resulting in the death of Stevens's older brother.

On the morning of the second day (Stevens is still in Salisbury), Stevens re-reads Miss Kenton's letter and has a long flashback to their mutual arrival at Darlington Hall in 1922. Miss Kenton had been pointing out that Stevens's father had been making more and more errors. Stevens has rude responses to Miss Kenton and basically won't believe her. Soon however, his father's decline simply can't be ignored; following a fall, Stevens tells his father curtly (and "professionally," Stevens thinks) that his duties will be abridged. He ignores the old man's protests. Here, the reflection ends and Stevens doubles back to talking about his approach to Salisbury, and how he had nearly run over a chicken. Abruptly, he returns again to talk about his father, thinking it important to justify his treatment of his father as the reader might think him harsh. To give further examples that his behavior was simply professional (and, ostensibly, "dignified"), Stevens narrates the events of the conference of 1923 at Darlington Hall. Stevens regards this moment as a proud one of his career because he thought that it illustrated his own coming-of-age as a butler. It was an "unofficial" conference at Lord Darlington's which would essentially bring about the relaxing of terms against Germany in the Versailles Treaty (the "official" conference, Stevens tells us, is merely a front for what has already happened in private settings such as Darlington's home). As the reader knows, this relaxation of terms was the appeasement policy that would largely enable Hitler's ascendancy. Stevens, though, seems negligently unconcerned about this, simply using the occasion to talk about his own equanimity even though his father dies during this event. Stevens callously ignores his father's deathbed question as to whether he's been a good father to him or not and delusionally imagines that his father would want him to continue his duties. During the conference, the foreign diplomats that Darlington has assembled seek to convince M. Dupont, a French gentleman of interest, of the need for relaxed terms because it is the "gentlemanly" thing to do after war. M. Dupont comes around, and the only dissident is Mr. Lewis, the American. After Stevens's father died, Darlington remarks that it seems as if Stevens has been crying, but Stevens, of course, shrugs this off.

In the afternoon of this same day, Stevens reaches Mortimer's Pond in Dorset. He continues reflecting on the question of what makes a "great" butler, and launches into a nostalgic consideration of his own generation of butlers, whom he imagines as being part of the hub of a wheel: the metaphor is that important decisions which change the course of history are made from the hubs (great houses like Darlington) and the fanning out of the spokes represents the widespread effects of such decisions. Thus, the butlers at these great houses were at the center of historical change. Stevens returns to an incident on his journey, in which he notices a strange noise coming from his car. He manages to find someone to help at a garage. Strangely, Stevens finds himself lying to the man at the garage about his association with Lord Darlington, and we find out that this is something that he has lied about before. The reader becomes increasingly aware of Stevens's hidden desires to distance himself from the name. On reaching Taunton, Somerset, Stevens recalls an episode which substantiates Darlington's loss of his good name after the war. It seems that Darlington had received hospitality from the Nazis during his pre-war trips to Germany, and had also received to his own home members of the "blackshirts." Stevens is quick to defend Darlington, however, saying that he cut off associations with the Nazis and the blackshirts as soon as he realized what they represented.

On the evening of the third day, Stevens has reached Moscombe, a small village near Tavistock, and he doubles back to answer charges of anti-semitism leveled against Darlington. Apparently, Darlington had dismissed two of their Jewish housemaids at one point--this became a point of contention between Stevens and Miss Kenton. Miss Kenton felt it to be wrong and nearly resigned on principle while Stevens maintained that such decisions by "great men" did not concern them. The hiring of a new pretty housemaid named Lisa becomes an occasion for Miss Kenton making fun of Stevens for having a "curious aversion to pretty girls being on the staff," suggesting his repressed sexuality. Stevens, of course, denies this. It seems increasingly clear, however, that Miss Kenton and Stevens has a much more intimate relationship than Stevens would admit. Stevens then reveals that he had been so deep in thought that he has gotten lost, resulting in his running out of Petrol. He had found lodging with a nice couple, the Taylors, at Moscombe. After this bit of information, Stevens offers another recollection which has preoccupied him of late: the time that Miss Kenton discovered him reading a sentimental romance novel. His excuse at the time had been that such novels were helpful in perfecting his gentlemanly English, though he does admit getting some "incidental enjoyment" out of reading them. He thought that this incident may have led to a change in his relationship with Miss Kenton; things seem increasingly strained between the two of them when he refrains from comforting her when her aunt died. Going back to his stay at the Taylor's, Stevens tells of how the various members of the small village came to know about his arrival and many of them imagine him to be a "gentleman," voicing to him their opinions on political involvement and wishing to gain his attention. Stevens doesn't let on that he is just a butler, but says that he has encountered the likes of Mr. Eden and Lord Halifax. The question as to whether those who are not "great men" should have strong opinions and a say in politics comes up, and Stevens is uncomfortable. He ends this section with an extended excuse about how butlers can only be good butlers if they don't question the decisions of their employers. Thus, Stevens concludes, "it is quite illogical that I should feel any regret or shame on my own account."

On the afternoon of the fourth day, Stevens has reached Little Compton, where he will meet with Miss Kenton. While sitting at his hotel before their meeting, Stevens reflects on an episode in which Mr. Cardinal, a journalist and the godson of Lord Darlington, berated Stevens for refusing to see that Darlington was a pawn for Hitler. During this visit, Miss Kenton also revealed to Stevens that she was getting married and leaving Darlington Hall. In these fraught moments, Stevens chooses to maintain his "sense of duty," showing little to no evidence of a moral struggle or of emotion. The account closes with Stevens's retrospective account of his meeting with Miss Kenton, in which she had revealed to him that she and her husband were in fact fine and that she had reconciled with him. She hints at the life that Stevens and she could have had together, and Stevens even admits that his heart was breaking as he heard this. He bids her to be happy, however, and takes his leave. In the final scene, Stevens is before the pier in the evening. There, he meets another butler and in his reflections to this other butler, begins to realize some of his own errors. Sadly, he reflects on how Lord Darlington at lest "chose a certain path in life," though "it proved to be a misguided one," but that he himself "cannot even claim that." As Stevens begins to think that there is no dignity in that, his companion tells him to stop, and to enjoy the evening, the remains of the day. In the end, it seems that Stevens reaches a more humanistic understanding as he looks out on the groups of people "bantering" in the evening, thinking how perhaps "in bantering likes the key to human warmth."

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Like Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, Ishiguro's first person narrator's story emerges out of a disjointed account which temporally jumps around in such a way that the account is as much a story as a psychological portrait of a disturbed individual. The account primarily oscillates between the past and the present; the overall structure is that something in the present catapults the narrator into either some recollection from his time as a butler under Darlington or some extended philosophical reflection on his career or the changing times more broadly.

At the heart of this story is the psychological portrait of a person who does progress, who gradually comes to realize his own inhumanity: in the reflective oscillation between past and present which his time off from work enables, he does get closer and closer to admitting the mistakes of his past. The scenes that he revisits from his past are ones that clearly bother him, even as he re-justifies them with the same rationales that he had used at the time. In doing so, he gradually realizes their emptiness, culminating in his admitting to himself his love for Miss Kenton (in describing his heart-break) and affirming the importance of "human warmth" at the end of the day.

What makes Ishiguro's novel greater than just a psychological portrait of a man who learns that he has sacrificed his own humanity to the abstraction of "professional duty" is its contextualization within the social changes from the pre-war to the post-war period. Stevens's being unaware of human suffering through his idealization of Darlington's English gentlemanliness and his own professional dignity is shot through by the unawareness of the whole world as it stood by while Hitler came to power. Since Stevens's realization of his own mistake sneaks up on him and isn't anything climactic, Ishiguro seems to remind us that the attitudes that comprise appeasement have a much deeper root than "political policy," it seems to be an attitude which pervasively extended its influence from high to low society. That someone like Stevens, a butler, could accept as part of inhabiting his "profession" that he was incapable of making moral distinctions and that such decisions should be left to the more capable elites indicates that appeasement was written into the entire structure of English society. Stevens's attitude and revisions of his own past at the end of the novel also doesn't seem to owe much to his own moral merit, but changes in English society after the war. As he looks out on the pier, he meets a butler enjoying his retirement and groups of people enjoying the evening after work. This "new" kind of professional, unlike the old professional who "inhabits" his role all the time, takes of the "role" that s/he inhabits at the end of the day, and has time for "human warmth," even if it is only at the end of the day. In acknowledging this change from new to old professionalism, Stevens again sort of goes with the flow.

Finally, what could Ishiguro's revisitation of such pre-war to post-war changes have to do with the moment of The Remains of the Day's publication? The fall of the Berlin Wall comes to mind, naturally, as the most salient association with 1989. The fall of the wall was a symbolic end to post-war Germany, and the hailing of a new era of democracy and freedom, and so Ishiguro's meditations might be a kind of elegy and reminder of what has come before. Certainly, obvious lessons might be drawn--don't be a drone and accept blind ideologies, maintain your individual moral compass so that this new democracy might last--but I don't think it's quite so simple that, since Stevens's coming to realize his own humanity isn't really his triumph as an individual but simply his being carried on by the "times." Still, though perhaps we're all slaves to the "times," Ishiguro's novel does engage readers in a meta-critical exercise  which reflects on what it might look like to be one particular slave to the times, in hopes, perhaps, to lessen the extend of our own blindness to our times.

Poetry Selections from Thomas Hardy

Edition: Selected Poems (Penguin Classics)

BACKGROUND/CONTEXTS:
Hardy's poems, since the author was famous primarily for his novels, have faced a rather unforgiving critical history. Both Hardy's contemporaries and more recent critics have disparaged Hardy's craft as well as his subjects. A recurring claim was that Hardy's poetry was gloomy and pessimistic: Lytton Strachey said, "the gloom is not even relieved by a little elegance of diction." Still, as poet Robert Mezey in his introduction to the Penguin edition of selected poems has pointed out, Hardy remains a favorite amongst a number of important poets including Ezra Pound, W.H. Auden, and Philip Larkin. Hardy's biography bears out poetry's personal importance to him--though he eventually became successful as a result of his fiction, he had tried first to market his poetry.

SUMMARY/THEMES:
I have chosen to divide Hardy's poems thematically and not by collections to indicate some of the larger patterns/occupations that I noticed across all of his work.
Human materiality and natural landscape: Hardy's poems frequently explore the continuity between human bodies and nature, especially through imagining what happens after death. "Drummer Hodge" will forever be part of an "unknown plain" and will "Grow to some Southern tree." In a sonnet written to Leslie Stephen, "The Schreckhorn," Hardy links Stephens's personality to the mountain he climbed - they're kind of  fused, both physically in Hardy's imagination and in their both being "aloof" in their personalities: "Upon my nearing vision, less it seems / A looming Alp-height than a guise of him / Who scaled its horn with ventured life and limb, / Drawn on by vague imaginings, maybe, / Of semblance to his personality / In its quaint glooms, keen lights, and rugged trim." In "Rain on a Grave" Hardy imagines that daisies will be showing on Emma's grave soon, and that she will "form part of them--/Ay--the sweet heart of them." Finally, one of the most explicit examples of people growing into natural landscapes is "Transformations": "Portions of this yew / Is a man my grandsire knew, / Bosomed here at its foot: / This branch may be his wife." Despite Hardy's doubts about consciousness after death, the dead rarely stay completely underground in his poetry.
Ghosts, afterlives, and traces: Many of Hardy's poems imagine ghosts, obsess over afterlives--especially in imagining events that have taken place in some now changed or deserted place, and look for traces after people have departed the scenes of life. "Friends Beyond" imagines friends who have died speaking their freedom in death, expressing that they were now free from the desires and concerns which detained them in life. Each goes over some possession or circumstance in life which no longer matters to them, and all end by saying together, "We've no wish to hear the tidings, how the people's / fortunes shift..." "After the Last Breath" is a moving memorial to his mother, Jemima Hardy, which expresses a similar sentiment (though rather unexpectedly because of the enjambment): "Our well-beloved is prisoner in the cell / Of Time no more." The "cell" turns out not to be her coffin, but Time. In "His Immortality" the poet sees "a dead man's finer part, / Shining within each faithful heart / Of those bereft." At first he thinks these memories that remain on earth are immortality, but then as time passes, he notices that this "immortality" shrinks, and eventually, it may merely be "a feeble spark / Dying amid the dark." This poem's view of memory tends to be more pessimistic than others; usually, memory in Hardy's poems is charged with a kind of mystical and magical power akin to Wordsworthian "spots of time." "The House of Hospitalities," for example, describes the house where they spent many Christmases, and the memory remaining: "I see forms of old time talking, / Who smile on me." "Old Furniture" operates similarly, in which the poet describes how relics seem to bear the traces of "the hands of the generations" through his imaginings: "On the clock's dull dial a foggy finger, / Moving to set the minutes right / With tentative touches that lift and linger / In the wont of a moth on a summer night, / Creeps to my sight." At the end of this poem, however, is a rejection of this kind of reminiscing in modern-day life, though coming after the lyrical excess given to memory, this seems unconvincing. "Logs on the Hearth" sweetly imagines the tree which the log comes from and how he and his sister used to climb it. "The Shadow on the Stone" offers an interesting solution to the problem of belief: the poet imagines on a Druid stone a shadow of a "well-known head and shoulders" and instead of doubting or believing, he charts a middle course in deliberately deciding not to turn around (because if he does so, he knows it won't be there): "Nay I'll not unvision / A shape which, somehow, there may be." **Hardy's 1912-1913 Elegies to Emma deserve special mention. "The Going" and "Without Ceremony" focus on how quickly she has gone from him, something that Hardy finds very difficult to come to terms with. "The Haunter" imagines her ghostly consciousness, she would speak to him with love if she could, but is "Always lacking the power to call to him / Near as I reach thereto!" In "After a Journey" the poet follows her ghost to their old haunts, "I see what you are doing: you are leading me on / To the spots we knew when we haunted here together." "The Walk" signals his guilt of how he used to go on a particular walk alone, "and I did not mind / Not thinking of you as left behind" but that now he very much minded. 
Consciousness: Related to Hardy's obsession with ghosts, afterlives, and traces is his fascination with what happens to consciousness after death. Does consciousness of their still-living loved ones matter if the dead are no longer conscious? Hardy's poem seem to go back and forth on this. "Lament" imagines all of the parties, dinners, that Emma would have loved, "But / She is shut, she is shut / From the cheer of them, dead / To all done and said / In her yew-arched bed." "The Photograph" gives a more open answer, when pondering whether the subject of a burning photograph, either dead or alive, would feel the burning: "Well; she knew nothing thereof did she survive, / And suffered nothing if numbered among the dead; Yet--yet--if on earth alive, / Did she feel a smart, and with vague strange anguish strive? / If in heaven, did she smile at me sadly and shake her head?" In "Choirmaster's Burial," a Choirmaster asked that "Mount Ephraim" be sung at his memorial. The vicar says that they need a quicker service because of the weather, "But 'twas said that, when / At the dead of next night / The vicar looked out, / There struck on his ken / Thronged roundabout" saints singing the psalm by the choirmaster's grave. This last poem exemplifies Hardy's frequent harking back to folkloric, village settings as locales for spiritual connection and the possibility of consciousnesses beyond earthly, human consciousness.
Secret lives of things (objects, animals): Again, relatedly, Hardy seems obsessed with the otherness (and more specifically, the potential other-consciousness) of things--objects, particularly in nature, and animals, frequently. "Nature's Questioning" imagines "field, flock, and lonely tree" thinking human thoughts, wondering at their place in an industrializing landscape; in a reversal of what usually happens, where nature doesn't answer the poet, the poet says, "No answerer I." This is, however, a fantastic projection from the mind of the poet, and poems like "An August Midnight," which imagines a longlegs, a moth, a dumbledore, and a fly in the room where he writes, concludes with wonder at the inaccessible lives of these seemingly humble creatures: "They know Earth-secrets that know not I." "The Last Chrysanthemum" dramatizes the poet's curiosity as to why this flower continues budding soon after the rest have folded, ascribing to it person-like traits like reason, taking no heed, and loneliness. At the end he realizes this as folly: "I talk as if the thing were born / With sense to work its mind; / Yet it is but one mask of many worn / By the Great Face behind." The same notion is expressed in "The Darkling Thrush" who had sung out against frosty gloom "Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware." Despite the gap between human knowing and other-knowing, the fascination remains, and itself becomes the subject of many of Hardy's poems. In "The Convergence of the Twain," the poet imagines the iceberg as a "sinister mate" for Titanic, linking them in some mystical realm that isn't accessible to human knowledge: "And as the smart ship grew / In stature, grace, and hue, / In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too." Often, the poet imagines nature in an outright rejection of the human world. In "Ah Are You Digging on My Grave" the dog isn't thinking of being faithful to his mistress when he digs on her grave but has merely happened to bury a bone there. "To the Moon" is a poet's imagined interview with the moon, asking questions like: "What have you looked at, Moon, / In your time, / Now long past your prime?" The final reply of moon is kind of rude, in regards to human life: "O, I think of it, often think of it / As a show / God ought surely to shut up soon, / As I go." Indeed, "things" are sometimes downright sinister-seeming (though still fascinating), as in "Near Lanivet, 1872," in which the poet and Emma share a haunting vision of her being crucified as she leaned against a handpole. Though the "secret lives of things" remains inaccessible to the poet, very rarely does Hardy express that the secret lives simply do not exist. A possible exception is "My Father's Violin" in which the poet tells of how the violin's glory days are over and that it is nothing without its human player: "here alone I sadly con / Your present dumbness, shape your olden story."
Time and aging: The ravages of time are a subject of repeated anxiety for Hardy. In "I Look into My Glass," the poet's expresses his inability to reconcile this physical aging with the continuing fullness of his heart. Aging is particularly problematic in marriages for Hardy. In "In the Night She Came," the male speaker tells of his fault in breaking his vow to his older wife when he recoiled at her aging face as she came to him in the night. He tries to make amends but fails: "And when next day I paid / My due caress, we seemed to be / Divided by some shade." Memory might help against the ravages of time, as suggested in "Former Beauties" which talks about "market dames, mid-aged, with lips thin-drawn / And tissues sere," whom the poets conclude would still be beautiful if they themselves had not forgotten that they had been former beauties: "They cannot know / What once they were, / Or memory would transfigure them, and show / Them always fair." Memory helps Hardy's mother in "Church Romance," in which he describes how in "long years thence, when Age had scared Romance" she would recall "[a]t some old attitude of his or glance / That gallery-scene would break upon her mind."
The futility of war: Hardy's engagement with the subject of war is almost always to critique its warping of human values. "Souls of the Slain" imagines those dead from war returning to ask if their loved ones dwell on their heroic deeds; instead, they learn the lesson that "it seems that our glory / Weighs less in their thought / Than our old homely acts, / And the long-ago commonplace facts / Of our lives." In "The Man He Killed," the speaker describes how if he had met his enemy "[b]y some old ancient inn" they would have stopped to drink together. But the theater of war warps things in such a way that he must kill the man. "Channel Firing" is an eery description of ghosts rising out of the thinking that World War I was judgment day.
Social conduct, women, and marriage: Writing at the end of the Victorian era, Hardy's views on social conduct, women, and marriage often express discontent with conventions. His many poems on the subject (and Tess, of course) testify to his antagonism to conventions. In "The Ruined Maid," the speaker meets a formerly poor maid and berates her for her ascent to wealth and not attending to her former peers. In response, she keeps replying that she is "ruined" by her wealth but the speaker doesn't listen, he associates "ruin" only with poverty-stricken women. In "After the Club-Dance," a young woman leaving the dance asks herself, "Why do I sink with shame/ When the birds a-perch there eye me? / They, too, have done the same," a logic (conventions are unnatural) which Tess herself frequently returns to. Hardy ventriloquizes oppressive male voices as well, but in doing so revealing their oppressiveness and wrong: "The Homecoming" is a chilling account of man in dialogue with new young wife, who would like to go back to her "daddee" because he could have provided better for her. In this dialogue, nature (violent and windy) interrupts intermittently in italicized text while the woman is spoken to patronizingly and pretty much forced into the marriage: "So don't ye tap your shoe so pettish-like; but smile at me, / And ye'll soon forget to sock and sigh for dear daddee!" "One Ralph Blossom Soliloquizes" is a dramatic monologue which reveals a caddish man who gives an account of most of his women basically saying they wanted him (that they want him even in heaven while he's in hell).
Folkloric, lighter poems: The poems I have thus discussed above are fairly serious in tone and tenor. There are, however, in Hardy's repertoire a number of lighter poems. "The Respectable Burgher" playfully satirizes Higher Criticism's erudite rejections and also the bourgeois speaker who reads "that moderate man Voltaire" (the reader knows, Voltaire was no moderate). Many of Hardy's lighter poems are in folkloric modes. In "The Trampwoman's Tragedy," in a ballad-like song, the "trampwoman" tells of how she teases her lover, of how he kills his competition, and her remorse: "From Wynard's Gap the livelong day, / The livelong day, / We beat afoot the northward way / We had travelled times before." Other poems in this category rival Chaucerian bawdiness: for example, note these lines from "Timing Her," apparently referring to a fifteen-year-old daughter of a curator in Dorset: "Lalage's coming: / Where is she now, O? / Turning to bow, O, / And smile, is she, / Just at parting, / Parting, parting, / As she is starting / To come to me?"

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh

Edition: Scoop


PUBLICATION HISTORY:
Scoop was published in 1938 and drew from Evelyn Waugh's own experience as a war correspondent for the Daily Mail in Ethiopia in 1935 (then Abyssinia, at war with Italy). For a time, Waugh, a Roman Catholic, politically supported the Italian cause, but later sought to dissociate himself from Fascism.


SUMMARY: 
Scoop is divided into three "books," each of which are further subdivided into short, numbered sections (within each book, these sections vary as far as how high they count up before starting over) which suggests the fragmentation of newspaper accounts. 


In the first section of Scoop, "The Stitch Service," John Courtney Boot, a successful novelist who had "achieved an assured and enviable position in contemporary letters," needs to back out of love affair which has gone wrong and asks the influential Julia Stitch (wife of politician Algernon) to help him out. Julia talks him up at a dinner party and gets Lord Copper of The Beast to hire him as a war correspondent in Ishmaelia. Copper asks his foreign editor, Salter, to secure Boot for the job. Salter talks to the managing editor, who leads Salter astray thinking Copper meant William Boot, a country cousin of John's (the two Boots don't even know each other), who writes a minor column on natural scenes called "Lush Places." William is summoned to London to speak with Salter, at first thinking he is to be let go for a practical joke that his sister Priscilla played (replacing "badger" with "great crested grebe" in one of William's drafts which eventually got published). Eventually, he understands what is happening but declines the job, despite its high pay because he doesn't want to go abroad. Salter says in effect that he must take the job or get let go. William meets with Copper, who instructs William that the policy of The Beast was far as the war in Ishmaelia went was that they were on the side of the "Patriots," and the British public would only want a quick resolution, so this is what William should discover. William, reveling in power of an expense account, buys way too many things for his trip. He is all ready to go (even with a private plane to accommodate all of his stuff) but realizes that he needs visas for his passport. He visits two rival legations in London and after some confusion, ends up with two visas. William flies to Paris, allowing a stranger (who proclaims he is an Englishman, though he didn't seem it to William at first) on board. When they arrive, he meets this stranger again on the train to Marseilles. Next, William gets on a ship to Aden; on board, he meets Corker, an English journalist for the news agency called Universal News, which also sends stories to The Beast. Corker initiates William into the dishonest practices of journalism, telling him such stories as of the famous American journalist Jake who actually started a revolution when he mistakenly reported on one and the story was taken up. Corker also teaches William how to read journalistic cables from The Beast. After disembarking in Aden, William once again discovers that the stranger from before has been on the ship with him. Meanwhile, in London, John Boot meets up with Julia at a party and tells her that Copper has not contacted him and that he is in a bind because his lover thinks that he has already left for Ishmaelia.


The second section, entitled "Stones...£20," begins with an account of Ishmaelia's history. Europeans came, found that the inhabitants were fierce cannibals, and soon deemed the territory worthless to them. A committee of university-educated jurists drew up a constitution and Ishmaelia was called a republic, though it really was just corruptly passed down through generations of the Jackson family, originally from Alabama. Jacksonburg became of interest to the European world when a member of the Jackson family, Smiles, had a quarrel with the ruler; the European press took up the line that Smiles "represented international finance, the subjugation of the worker" and threw its support behind the leader. Soon, people in Ishmaelia did think there would be a war, so journalists flocked to the country. Most of them stay at the Hotel Liberty, including the famous Jakes, Shumble, Whelper, Pigge, Jocelyn Hitchcock and finally William and Corker. Not much is actually happening in Ishmaelia, until Shumble fabricates a story about a bearded ticket-collector as a Soviet operative. Calmly, Jakes tells the director of the Press Bureau, Mr. Benito, to declare the story false and all the rest of the journalists fall in line to kill the Shumble's scoop. Soon afterwards, William finds out that an old childhood friend of his is the Vice Consul. This friend of his tells him that there is in fact a Russian spy but William can't release the story because, as he learns, stories can't be revived even after being killed even if they are the truth. Jacksonburg soon becomes even more crowded with new journalists. William decides to move to a new location, the Pension Dressler, run by a German woman, Frau Dressler. William meets Katchen there, a young German woman whose husband has been away. William falls in love with Katchen, remaining in Jacksonburg while the rest of the journalists go off to Laku (which means "I don't know" in Ishmaelite, the Vice Consul has told him) where they have been granted permission to explore by Benito--William and Corker both find Benito's gesture to seem oddly a bit smug. Nevertheless, all the journalists including Corker go. Katchen has William buy a bag of stones (later revealed to be gold ore) which belong to her husband; this transaction gives the section its title which William expenses. As William is busy spending time with Katchen, he doesn't send any news stories so The Beast lets him go. At the same moment, however, William has been receiving "news" from Katchen, and he cables that the president has been locked up in his own palace. William is immediately reinstated. Katchen is soon taken off to prison because she doesn't have the proper papers. In Jacksonburg, William witnesses a Soviet coup--apparently, the Russians had bought Mr. Benito and organized the communist Young Ishmaelite party. He also finds out that the Germans have been backing Smiles. Meanwhile, Katchen's husband returns and Katchen does as well: William helps them escape in the canoe which he has brought. The Soviet coup-d'etat is then overthrown by counter-revolutionaries when William's mysterious fellow traveler parachutes in--apparently he is a financier with independent business interests in Ishmaelia. This man, going by Mr. Baldwin, writes William's scoop for him and effectively catapults him to fame. 


The third and (shorter) final section, "Banquet," Lord Copper decides to make Boot a knight and offer him a banquet. Mistakenly, John Boot, the novelist, is invited to be knighted and to the banquet--conveniently though, John is still being pursued by his lover so he skips town to Antarctica. Salter tries to correct the mess, going to William Boot's country home, where William has retired after his travels. Salter tries to convince William to go to the banquet, but William has had enough of the fame with which he has been met on his return to London. When Salter plays the card of mentioning Copper's importance, William defiantly says, "No...Not down here," referring to his countryside home. As Salter nods off at Boot Magna, the country estate, Uncle Theodore Boot talks to him about wanting to be engaged at the Beast for stories he has written. The next day, Theodore shows up at the offices of the Beast and because the show must go on, Lord Copper pretends that Theodore is William. The novel ends with William writing again for "Lush Places," specifically about "maternal rodents pilot[ing] their furry brood through the stubble." The final line of the novel, however, menacingly counters this happy, pastoral image: "Outside the owls hunted maternal rodents and their furry broods." 


CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS: 
Waugh's novel is a satire of the journalistic profession, but its indictments nevertheless provide a lively portrait of the extent to which professional journalism had consolidated itself as something quite secure and established by this time. The pack-like behavior of the (entirely male) profession, its lack of regard for the truth, its unabashed competitiveness, and extravagance are certainly all negatively represented in Waugh's account. Nevertheless though, the generally light and farcical tone of the novel undeniably renders the profession to be extremely lively, energetic, and above all, playful. Overall, I think that although the main thrust of the work critiques what the profession of journalism has become, there are many aspects of the novel that simultaneously resist this critique. 


First, the journalists are highly unapologetic, self-aware, and really not hypocritical as far as embracing ethically suspect professional codes. The rules are to do anything for the scoop, to squeeze money out of the expense accounts, to spin something that will maintain the interest of the public. They all play by these rules, and are not ashamed to acknowledge it--Corker, for example, unapologetically lets William know that he was competing with him while in Aden, because that's just what journalists understand each other as all doing. There is a deep faith in the fact that if they are all playing the game, the game is fair--democratic even, and the game also undeniably fosters a kind of camaraderie amongst the men. 


Second, the novelist who begins the novel, is just as much of a "sell-out" in his "achiev[ing] an assured and enviable position in contemporary letters." Waugh gives no details of what John Boot's novels are like, only of how many were sold and that they were read by people that John Boot respected. That John's novels only reach a small population of people that he respects signals a kind of sterile circularity. That no one actually knows or cares about what he has written drives the plot of the novel: it is because of this that William can be engaged without anyone knowing the difference. In contrast, the newspapers matter to large audiences; another important point in the novel is that newspapers create reality: the illustrious Jake made a revolution, and the press made William into a famous correspondent. Indeed, it seems that anything can be brought about and made possible by the press--even transforming a country hick into a famous war correspondent. In short, the novelist's world is sterile and circular, and the newspaperman's world is created by him and reaches wide audiences. 


Finally, the last line of novel resists allowing William Boot triumph in his "return to nature." Nature (in the of form of the owls) is also predatory, just like the journalists.