Stormy

  

Photograph: The Rossetti family at home in Chelsea, London, taken by Lewis Carroll on the 7^th October, 1863. Left to right: Dante Gabriel, Christina, Frances Polidori (their mother), and William Michael. Photograph held at the V&A.

 It was a dark and stormy night, a month’s rain in 24 hours, not quite a once-in-one-hundred-year event, but relief for the garden and the overwarmed brains of heatwave survivors. “It was a dark and stormy night,” wrote 12-year-old Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1840), “in the month of December when a figure closely wrapped in the sable folds of his cloak, and mounted on a jaded steed, was seen hurrying across a bleak common towards a stately castle in the distance, whose lofty towers and time-worn battlements frowned over the wide expanse beneath.” It was a dark and stormy night is a perfectly marvellous and effective opening to a story, in truth. It was a dark and stormy night is not a sinning but a winning formula. It was a dark and Stormy night for the former president when the penny dropped that accumulating hush money and legal fees made his transaction with the adult film star the costliest transaction that day. It was a dark and stormy night, the ideal night to open a bright fresh document and begin your entry on that square of light for the worst opening sentence to a novel. It was a dark and stormy night, as meteoric meteorologist Jane Bunn would say, more eloquently than you or I. “It was a dark and stormy night,” wrote Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1830), not anticipating that within a decade Dante Gabriel Rossetti would be lifting the line to open his own romantic, some say melodramatic, story. It was a dark and stormy night inside Vincent Van Gogh’s head, sorting thunder from lightning trees, swirling black from too brief jagged cerulean. It was a dark and stormy night across the Bellarine Peninsula, the Geelong road awash, power failures in Werribee and other parts, awesome as a Sir David Attenborough docuseries only with no comforting voiceovers and very wet. It was a dark and stormy night or, as Alexandre Dumas would say “C’était une nuit orageuse et sombre, de gros nuages couraient au ciel, voilant la clarté des étoiles; la lune ne devait se lever qu’à minuit” (1844), doubtless setting the scene for the next entrance of dashing D’Artagnan. It was a dark and story night for fiction writers in every language, seated beneath the lamplight wondering which way the plot was going to go next, does it work or is it a dark and stormy mess. It was a dark and stormy night, a phrase used by Washington Irving in 1809, the origin of which is it seems obscure, lost in some dark and stormy night of literature. It was a dark and stormy night when Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton found himself more sinned against than sinning, sitting in his sitting room a sitting duck, out of luck, with zero stars out of five. It was a dark and stormy night, pouring, when Snoopy’s typewriter keys jammed from a day’s solid pawing (1971), ending his flow just as he was nearing The End.

Painfulness

 

A factor almost universally ignored nowadays by critics and readers is the extent of the pains a writer, or any artist at times, went to in assembling the created work. Critics behave as though the work is there primarily as a test of their superior reading skills, their special criteria for praise or dismissal. The intellectual, experiential, and emotional realities that made the work possible count for nothing much, or so it appears. The common reader, similarly, too often seems to talk about works in the same way they treat other phenomena, as consumables whose existence arrived on the shelf purely by chance, there for an hour’s passing distraction. This factor came to mind today re-reading a favourite Victorian author, Richard Chenevix Trench. He writes: ‘[Thomas] Fuller, our Church historian, having occasion to speak of some famous divine that was lately dead, exclaims, “Oh the painfulness of his preaching!” We might assume at first hearing, and if we did not know the former uses of ‘painfulness,’ that this was an exclamation wrung out at the recollection of the tediousness which he inflicted on his hearers. Far from it; the words are a record not of the pain which he caused to others, but of the pains which he bestowed himself: and I am persuaded, if we had more ‘painful’ preachers in the old sense of the word, that is, who took pains themselves, we should have fewer ‘painful’ ones in the modern sense, who cause pain to their hearers. So too Bishop Grosthead is recorded as “the painful writer of two hundred books” – not meaning hereby that these books were painful in the reading, but that he was laborious and painful in their composing.’ (‘English, Past and Present: Five Lectures.’ 3^rd Edition, Revised. London, 1856, page 180.) The Revd Trench of Itchen Stoke calls this “a very easy misapprehension,” adding it to the many in his lectures he went to pains in tracing, in order to illustrate how meanings change over the centuries. Linguistics, or philology, was a second string to Trench’s bow, whose several painful books of theology and biblical interpretation assisted his eventual advance to the position of Archbishop of Dublin. In fact, his mind- and time-expanding skills of etymology are one of the original inspirations for the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the supreme results of that Age of dedicated painfulness. He hadn’t time to help compile the OED, but he is regarded as one of its three founders. His different word studies books enunciated a complete and erudite rationale for collecting instances of word change in the literature, formulated before the genesis of the Dictionary itself in 1857. An entire literature has since evolved around OED editors and contributors past and present, lucid and less so, readers of this biographical literature avid to admire the extreme painfulness of their scholarship. Some of it on a par with Bishop Grosthead, better known by Trench’s time as Robert Grosseteste of Lincoln, one of England’s foremost medieval statesmen, theologians and philosophers, as well as being thought the real founder of the scientific method at Oxford.

Excellence

 

Each day for some weeks now I have been puzzling over the meaning of redefining excellence. ‘redefining excellence’ is the lowercase slogan of the building company constructing a new dwelling in our neighbourhood. There is time each morning, walking past their sign to the railway station, to unpack the wisdom, if it is wisdom, of this bold claim. Here are some of my breakfast thoughts on this subject, though be warned that from our place to the station is nearly all downhill. To begin with, can we redefine excellence? If something is already excellent, isn’t that enough? Surely excellence is what we strive for, that once achieved does not require further enhancement. If excellence is the aim, the crown, the hilltop of our work then that ought to be it; anything extra may even jeopardise excellence. There are reasons we do not have excellenter or excellentest. Then, do we want to redefine excellence? Yes or no? And how do we go about that? Some would see this as the argument from imitation. Haydn is excellent. Therefore, theoretically, redefining Haydn is how we get Mozart and Beethoven. Is this what the sign means? Maybe. Can the simple and excellent fifties brick dwelling recently demolished on the site be redefined into a two-storey twenties home with granny flat and swimming pool? At a stretch, maybe. Depends on our definition of the word redefine. Because implied in this verb is some notion that something more excellent than excellent is about to be achieved, something no one else could possibly manage. Simply to say that an excellent home is under construction is neither here nor there in a world brimming with superlatives. It is assumed from the ground up that the forthcoming construction will be excellent, of a certainty, because all constructions the length and breadth of the metropolis are excellent. We know that already. The implication is that this is more excellent, as distinct from excellenter, than all other excellent dwellings. To which is added an element of mystery: obviously the building company is across excellence from the start, but redefining excellence is another level again, an expression of excellence hitherto unseen, only what? -- with infinite views across the valley even further than the railway station. This is the kind of excellence we only read about in books. I am offering these thoughts to save you the trouble, because one tentative conclusion of mine is that redefining excellence does your head in. On the one hand it seems hubristic to make claims for excellence that defy the norms of the building industry, or even the history of architecture. While on the other, it could be an objective that is impossible accurately to assess, if excellence is only ever in the eye of the beholder. Much as I am certain that the company will deliver an excellent home, based on its own declared self-belief, I find the criteria lack definition. By now I am ordering coffee from the station barista, my thoughts heading towards the second front carriage of the stopping all stations.