84 - Heaven
Causley on nostalgia, thoughts on Gene Wolfe's historical fantasies, a review of "Late Spring" by Ozu, and recent wine notes
Recent Article
I forgot to link this here before, but I recently put out an article in The Critic on AI and Classics: https://thecritic.co.uk/the-masses-against-the-classicists/
Heaven
They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock:
My father, twenty-five, in the same suit
Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack
Still two years old and trembling at his feet.
My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress
Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat,
Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass.
Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.
She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight
From an old H.P. sauce-bottle, a screw
Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out
The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue.
The sky whitens as if lit by three suns.
My mother shades her eyes and looks my way
Over the drifted stream. My father spins
A stone along the water. Leisurely,
They beckon to me from the other bank.
I hear them call, ‘See where the stream-path is!
Crossing is not as hard as you might think.’
I had not thought that it would be like this.
- “Eden Rock” by Charles Causley
I recently taught this poem. I’ve read it before, a decade and more ago – found it affecting then – but return to it now with all the accreted experience that a decade gives, and have to say that poetically, and perhaps imaginatively, it is a very good piece of work.
Causley turns to loose but traditional forms: five four-line stanzas, basically decasyllabic lines, a lot of assonances and half-rhymes on an ABAB structure. I do say loose and mean it – he starts with something which is (probably) thirteen syllables long, and metrically this isn’t really iambic pentameter though sometimes it feels like it, insomuch as Causley relies on English speech rhythms.
Causley is staying in these comfortable limits – and more power to him, they’re good limits – in a way that both suits his poetic style but also serves the purpose of the poem: there is an attempt to articulate the strange mystical side of nostalgia here. Anthony Esolen has defined nostalgia as a longing for heaven from the exile of earth (I paraphrase, but accurately), and I think there is probably something to that; Causley, at any rate, agrees. Nostalgia and Heaven are linked very explicitly here.
Let’s consider the poem a bit at a time. The title? The first line? Where is Eden Rock? Nowhere, I believe; there is one in Antarctica, but that hardly answers. There is a River in Pilgrim’s Progress that must be crossed, without use of a bridge, to gain the Celestial City, and the river is Death. That is perhaps our scene; Eden Rock is Bunyanesque, directly into-the-nose imagery, therefore, and all the better for it. His parents wait beyond Eden Rock; perhaps Causley is to their east.
His father, “in the same suit” – Causley’s father died of wounds suffered in World War One, though he was long dying, finally crossing the river in 1924 when Causley was aged seven. The same suit, a good suit, must be the suit that Causley remembers; “the same suit” as his memory. His mother lived much longer, dying in old age, but she is transmuted to the same time, age, period, as her long-deceased husband. Death has not aged her. I remember once hearing the suggestion that in Heaven, we shall all be thirty-three, the age of Our Lord at His Ascension and installation, made into his likeness in that way as well as others. “We do not yet know what we shall be”, indeed, but certainly every element of human age and decay cannot be imagined to persist there. The wisdom of age, perhaps, but not the senescence.
There is something hard to describe, but highly technically efficient in these verses describing his parents.
My father, twenty-five, in the same suit
Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack
Still two years old and trembling at his feet.
My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress
Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat,
Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass.
Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.
There is no sound, only vision. There is colour, cinematic colour, the lens catching the whole light – tweed (textured, earthen-toned), a terrier so excited it trembles, a ribbon (implicitly coloured) in a straw hat (yellow), stiff white cloth, wheaten hair gleaming in the light, surely turning gold. Transmutation. Again – no sound. He is looking beyond at a scene, a memory, something captured long ago. Yet it is not dead; it is trembling, full of colour, turning golden.
She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight
From an old H.P. sauce-bottle, a screw
Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out
The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue.
That is why this is not quotidian or banal. These are the precious memories of childhood, precisely recounted, which flow somehow naturally into this heavenly recollection, or vision. The tea comes from a Thermos, not a mere flask; the milk comes not from a bottle, but an “old H.P. sauce-bottle”. The screw of paper is brought to mind decades later. The setting of the picnic is slow, which – with the metre, with the stiff white cloth, creates the sense of slow motion. “The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue” – again the explicit recollection (“the same”), again the strong celestial colour.
The sky whitens as if lit by three suns.
My mother shades her eyes and looks my way
Over the drifted stream. My father spins
A stone along the water. Leisurely,
A sky whitening with three suns. Colour, but also the obvious supernatural – “as if” is as good as “is” when we come to a heavenly vision. Are three suns the mother, father, and son? The Trinity? I don’t know. But it is an intrusion upon a comforting but uncanny scene by something which surpasses any measure of normalcy. The stream is “drifted” – his father, not in pain, effortlessly spins a stone upon. Time is slow here. So slow that Causley does not finish the full clause, breaking the stanza on an adverbial comma. The comma is a dramatic caesura; I find it draws me in, because whatever is said leisurely here must be of the greatest importance anywhere else. In our dreams, the figure from the past turns to speak – but so often we wake up.
They beckon to me from the other bank.
I hear them call, ‘See where the stream-path is!
Crossing is not as hard as you might think.’
I had not thought that it would be like this.
The dream does not end. The silence is broken, at last, and it is welcome, welcome, welcome. The river must be crossed without a bridge, but there is a path, and there are guides waiting. Death is not cessation, but a stepping from one room to the next, from the anteroom to the dining room.
I had not thought that it would be like this.
I wonder if a sceptic or cynic might read that into this; but this is awe, a pure emotion which we all perhaps feel too rarely.
Historical Fiction and Fantasy – A Preliminary Observation, Touching on Gene Wolfe
Made possible thanks to the support of Matthew on Patreon.
There was a longish boom period for historical fiction, which seems just about to have stopped. From the ‘90s, say, through to the ‘10s, you had a succession of important historical fiction series and some very well-known authors in the genre. I think of, for instance and most importantly, Bernard Cornwell, the Shaaras, Ken Follett, Hilary Mantel, Patrick O’Brian, Lindsey Davis, and Philippa Gregory.
This was also a period of several significant blends of fantasy and historical fiction. Diana Gabaldon blended angsty Highlanders with time travel in Outlander, Guy Gavriel Kay wrote a long run of fantasies in other worlds, but closely modelled on historical events (I have read The Lions of al-Rassan). Harry Turtledove wrote alternate timeline history (The Killer Angels) and William Forstchen wrote historical people going into a portal fantasy (The Lost Regiment). You could reasonably include His Dark Materials in this category, too. Earlier works apply in both categories, too, of course (Hornblower, the series starting with Prince of Annwn, etc). David Drake sometimes wrote excellent sci-fi stories closely based on history and “real” legend.
There are a couple of approaches to these sorts of book, and they are surprisingly similar across the divide between “historical fiction” and “historical fantasy”.
One approach is this: the past is really like our time, but they wear different trousers. This is me being reductive, of course, but it’s a real thing: Sharpe is written by a man born in 1944 to an airman and his lover, put up for adoption, raised into an eccentric Christian sect which he rejected, and who ended up in BBC journalism, and – you won’t believe this – Sharpe reads like it! I don’t even mean at the level of psychoanalysis (Sharpe, Starbuck, and Uhtred all have complex paternal relationships). I mean that his variety of tetchily liberal view of class, the romantic view of the action hero, the scepticism over religion and orthodox morality, all the rest of it – it’s what you’d expect from a man raised in that era under those circumstances. I also mean that they are written to be digested in the first instance – any historical oddity is either bypassed or immediately exposited so as not to trip up the reader. They are ripping yarns, sometimes even arriving at “really good books”, and the history in them is not at all badly researched, but the atmosphere is either timeless or trapped in time, depending on the particular book.
O’Brian writes using almost the opposite method. Aubrey and Maturin are political opposites, and their politics don’t really map on to ours; we end up on a ship with the equally clueless Maturin, and we are all together overwhelmed by a flood of rarely-explicated nautical technology (which slowly beds in over the course of the books); we experience historical arcana such as the tipstaffs out to catch Jack via a game of tag without any open exposition, but with enough context to get us by; sometimes we wander around southern France with one of our heroes disguised as a dancing bear (!). O’Brian does offer us some accommodation, but the joy of the past as a foreign country is precisely the point. Its alien mores do not obliterate its humanity, but put it into relief.
This is not to say that, say, Cornwell does not take history seriously and O’Brian does. I think they both do. But the point of the historical setting is different in each: for Cornwell, it is an exciting backdrop for relatively universal heroes to engage in 20th (and 21st) century stories; for O’Brian, the past is a place to escape to and to find yourself lost in.
Some historical fantasy writers explicate clearly as they go along; they fit the alternate world, or the fantasy elements in this world, into our frame of reference; there is a desire to take us gently by the hand, to ensure we are not too alienated from the strange cocktail of real and fantastic (plenty of urban fantasy authors take the same approach). This sensitivity to the reader is doubly natural, because both the historical and the fantastic are prone to alienate. Seemingly in contradiction to this, often the fantasy elements are strongly emphasized as fantasy (this applies to “normal” fantasy, too, often) – but this is part and parcel of the same technique, clearly defining what is strange, what is normal, and what the reader should expect and feel. This is the Cornwell school, applied to historical fantasy.
Gene Wolfe, as a historical fantasy writer, falls into the equivalent of the O’Brian school. His chief historical fantasy is the Latro trilogy (a trilogy in the sense of being three books, not in the sense of being a single completed story), about a soldier whose story starts, for us, in Ancient Greece after the Battle of Plataea in 479 BC. It might as well start there for Latro too, because he is an amnesiac, suffering from a head injury in the battle. Latro, is naturally, baffled by the world around him quite a lot of the time, experiencing it as a wholly ignorant outsider. People sometimes explain things to him, and sometimes don’t. In this sense, as well as because he is a first-person narrator, he functions as an audience surrogate. However, he often experiences the ancient world for us as Maturin does the natural one – full of confusing events and terminology. At other times, he understands things but does not think to explain them to us – he writes for himself, not us.
Making this “worse” is that Latro’s head injury has made him (legitimately and actually) see the gods and other supernatural personages, and he has become in some sense an agent of certain gods. Often we do not immediately realize he is seeing a god. At one point he helps a man with some rocks and the man disappears afterwards. It’s probably Sisyphus, but Latro shows no sign he even understands something strange is happening,
This “immersed” approach to both the history and the fantasy – the mixture of legitimate confusion over the unknown, failure to explain the known, and inability to parse things the audience at least half-suspects – is a striking success, and for a particular reason. The distant past might as well be a fantasy world for most of us – we are often trapped by presentism, and historical imagination is a difficult skill to develop. By pitching the historical confusions (What are the rules in Sparta? Are the helots likely to be friendly?) and the fantastic strangenesses (Who is this man who wants help with rocks? Why has this male oracle seemingly been replaced by a female one?) in exactly the same way, the line between history and fantasy is blurred and both become stranger. This, in turn, creates a possibility of immediacy that I think is harder for books where the history or fantasy is present as author creativity or colour; once we choose to engage with the world Latro experiences, we experience it without friendly authorial mediation, but as a strange but real world, tactile nd fascinating and strange.
(I will probably record a video drawing out this comparison, but looking at Latro compared to Guy Gavriel Kay’s work – comparing fantasy history to historical fantasy, and digging into specific texts, which will allow some of the above points to be better developed.)
Recent Wines
Francois d’Allaines Auxey-Duresses 2020 (Appellation Auxey-Duresses Controlée) – 6.5/10
Chateau de Beuaregard Pouilly-Fuissé 2020 (Appellation Pouilly-Fuissé Controlée) – 6.5/10
Chateau de Beauregard Pouilly-Fuissé 1er Cru Les Reisses 2020 (Appellation Pouilly-Fuissé 1er Cru Controlée) – 7/10
These were from an en primeur order which was reaching its prime, even back years of drinking. All of these are dry, unoaked Chardonnays from Burgundy. The Pouilly-Fuissés are from the Maconnais – the unglamorous region on the southern edge of Burgundy – whilst Auxey-Duresses is on the Cotes de Beaune. These were, all, basically, the same. There are ways in which certain styles of good, “luxury” wines can, if not fail, at least hit a ceiling: you can reach a certain intensity and depth of ripe apple and bready flavour, balanced with quite sharp citric-toned acid – but if it stops there, you are looking at decent wine for an aperitif or perhaps with some very light white meat, but no further. You will not be excited; you have paid your money to ensure you are not let down, and these do not let you down. The Premier Cru is a little more refined, a little more textured – what I mean is that you sometimes move quietly between flavours and tones on the palate, rather than smashing around, and also that everything lasts a little longer. Nonetheless, it falls into the same bracket. All good, none quite remarkable.
Chateau de Beauregard Saint-Véran La Roche 2020 (Appellation Saint-Véran Controlée) – 7.5/10
This is just a little more interesting, from a slightly more exclusive appellation neighbouring Pouilly-Fuissé. Really, much of what I have already said applies here – dry, ripe apple and dense bread, slight mineral notes if we’re lucky. But there is both a little of the extra texture of the Premier Cru and an almost volatile freshness. Volatility here represents not strange flavour profiles, but bursts of really quite refreshing forepalate notes, almost like drinking water after a walk on a hot day. You sometimes experience something similar with less dry wines, where residual sugar pops up in (hopefully pleasing) ways, but this isn’t sweet at all; it’s not a common thing at all, either, in this format. Slightly strange yet enjoyable.
Dr Loosen “L” Riesling 2024 (Qualitatswein Mosel) – 6/10
8.5%. I believe this is the successor to the old “Dr L” marque. This is a cheap Kabinett, really – off-dry to nearing medium, sweetish and spritzy, fresh. You get fresh apples, a touch of green grape, light mineral notes. This example isn’t really balanced – probably not as good as the best “Dr L”s – with a very slightly thin, watery element on the palate. Still eminently drinkable.
Domaine Desvignes Givry 2021 (Appellation Givry Protégée) – 8.5/10
13.5%. A high floral nose with violets and a bright touch of spring water. A silky palate, opening bright and fruity – fresh raspberries – then darkening into black fruits and a finishing acidic twist. This has length and breadth, but is not especially challenging or demanding. Elegant Burgundy. Good food wine. Very good wine.
Late Spring, d. Yasujiro Ozu (1949)
My second Ozu film, and certainly a maturer work than the Edo-period jidai geki reviewed a few months back. This is the origin of his “Noriko” character, played by Setsuko Hara, arguably the great muse of the latter half of his career. It is also a fully rounded exemplar of his famous cinematography – I have heard that “Ozu’s vase”, an important shot here, is almost the entry-point moment film critics talk about when they want to talk about Ozu.
The plot is simple and domestic: a widowed Professor (Chishu Ryu, Ozu’s key male actor) lives with his only child (Hara). The Professor, essentially, wants his adult daughter, Noriko, to get married so she will be looked after once he is gone; his daughter wants to stay with him. Noriko’s aunt and a divorced friend push Noriko to marry; her aunt even begins to arrange a remarriage for her father; seemingly backed into a corner, she marries the eligible bachelor suggested by her aunt. We are left ambivalent as to whether this is a good choice or not. Professor Somiya gives an impassioned, articulate argument for Noriko’s marriage at the end of their last holiday together – without any scoring or backing whatsoever, just Ryu delivering to camera, his character much more serious than in any other scene. On the other hand, the Professor is not in fact planning to remarry – that is a mere ruse to get Noriko to marry – and Noriko’s own unhappiness does give us pause, even bearing in mind the quite sensible concerns her father has for her future.
Plotwise, theme-wise, that is the most effective element here. We must puzzle out our own response. However, that is not really the strength of the film; everything is paced in a leisurely and even disjointed fashion, and the events are not themselves very “exciting”. Rather, we must look to Hara’s performance and the way the film is shot to see why this is considered such an all-time film. Hara’s ability to project an upbeat fragility, to don a mask of social control, only to – in a key set of scenes – break down, is truly something. She is also a marvellously appealing screen presence – in, shall we say, the Katharine Hepburn rather than Grace Kelly style.
The film is shot beautifully, and this is generally what kept me engaged. Ozu either offers or hints meaning in more or less every shot, and he uses an intelligent and clear variety of scenes to create contrast. We may be in Somiya’s traditional house, or Noriko’s friend Aya’s European-furnished apartment, or at a Noh play (where chiefly we watch a Noh play without subtitles for the singing – this is remarkably effective at forcing us to imagine the thoughts of Noriko and Somiya). In each case, long, static shots are the order of the day, taken from a low (but not Dutch) angle. We dwell on faces, or on silhouettes of bamboo, or on boys playing baseball. Not everything seems immediately relevant, but there is – even with the less connected inclusions, such as the baseball – a pregnancy of meaning on the boundary of understanding. This reminds me of Malick more than anyone.
I confess that this did not, as a whole film, wholly land with me. The domestic drama is probably not made for me anyway, but the leisurely pace did cause just a few checkings of the watch. Nonetheless, a beautifully shot and performed film.
3.5/5