Exclusive!

I was in transit to Canada on the day my latest plug for – sorry, piece on – the butterfly book came out, as the Notebook page in the new Literary Review. I'd post a link, but it's paywalled (or something). The printed version was rather different from my original, so I'll post what I wrote here, just for you, dear readers...

‘BUTTERFLY, n.s. A beautiful insect, so named because it first appears in the beginning of the season for butter.’ Johnson’s charming definition answers a question that will probably never get a definitive answer – why are butterflies called butterflies? His explanation is as good as any, and better than some, such as the folk belief that witches take the form of butterflies and steal milk and butter, or the notion that butterflies are named for their excrement, which resembles butter. As butterflies don’t excrete anything, because they don’t eat anything, at least that one can be ruled out. It’s more likely that they are named for the butter-yellow Brimstone butterflies that are often the first to be seen in the spring. I have been exploring this question, among much else, in the course of writing a book, The Butterfly: Flights of Enchantment, which, after a long pupation, has now been published by Saraband.
 Here is another question: Why are there no butterflies (apart from a handful of generic references) in Shakespeare, a poet very alive to nature, whose work teems with animal and bird life and includes the finest flower poetry in the language? The answer is that Shakespeare lived in an age when there had been no real attempt to distinguish between different species of butterflies: a butterfly was a butterfly, a frivolous creature, and that was that. It wasn’t until the eighteenth century that people woke up to the beauty and variety of butterflies, and began to study them systematically. The leading lights of the convivial Aurelian Society, who met in a tavern in Exchange Alley until it was destroyed in a catastrophic fire, were many of them painters, print-makers and textile designers, and it was the beauty of butterflies that excited them most. This enthusiasm resulted in some strikingly beautiful books (for example Moses Harris’s The Aurelian), illustrated with exquisite coloured engravings.
That aesthetic phase was followed was the ‘golden age’ of butterfly collecting, when the archetypal figure of the man in a Norfolk jacket waving a net was born. Though widely viewed as something between a harmless eccentric and a lunatic, this net-waving collector is often a surprisingly malign figure in fiction: the murderous Jack Stapleton in The Hound of the Baskervilles, the psychopathic loner Frederick Clegg in John Fowles’s The Collector, the pair of decidedly ‘queer’ butterfly collectors in Enid Blyton’s Five Go to Billycock Hill. Even Vladimir Nabokov, great butterfly-lover though he was, portrayed an obsessive collector driven to crime in his short story ‘The Aurelian’. Women collectors, though few and far between, come out of it much better, with Eleanor Glanville, whose brutal ex-husband cited her butterfly hunting as evidence of insanity, was the subject of a historical romance (Lady of the Butterflies by Fiona Mountain), and when Margaret Fountaine’s secret diaries were edited and published in the 1980s (as Love Among the Butterflies and Butterflies and Late Loves), they caused a sensation.
 In literature – with one glowing exception, which I’m coming to – butterflies have, for all their beauty and charm, been poorly served. Wordsworth’s early poem ‘To a Butterfly’ is, as ever, more about W. Wordsworth than about any butterfly. John Clare responded warmly to butterflies and wrote a couple of decent butterfly poems (‘To the Butterfly’ and ‘To an Early Butterfly’). The most interesting and distinctive of butterfly poets is Emily Dickinson – ‘The butterfly obtains’, ‘The Butterfly upon the Sky’, ‘Two Butterflies went out at Noon’ – but her butterflies can rarely be identified, and always seem to be up to something that bears little relation to the actual living organism we call a butterfly. In Specimen Days, Walt Whitman wrote excitably about a ‘butterfly good-time’, a gathering of ‘myriads of light-yellow butterflies’ in a hay field. (He also had himself photographed with what he claimed was a butterfly perched on his finger; it was in fact a cardboard cut-out attached to a ring.) In my opinion, the best butterfly poem, the closest to the living thing, was written by the American poet Janet Lewis. Called ‘The Insect’, it is too long to quote here, but well worth seeking out. Butterflies have fared better in music than in literature, the graceful movements of their flight lending themselves to musical representation, particularly by the piano, violin or cello. However, in painting, butterflies have, despite their visual beauty, been for the most part sloppily portrayed, a fact that Nabokov – yes, here he is, our glowing exception – lamented. ‘Only myopia,’ he declared in an interview, ‘condones the blurry generalisations of ignorance. In high art and pure science, detail is everything.’ And Nabokov was uniquely qualified to opine about high art and pure science, being both a great writer and a very distinguished scientific lepidopterist, who spent years researching butterfly taxonomy at Cornell. Butterflies appear frequently in his work, from his early poems to later works such as Pale Fire, where a perfectly described Red Admiral appears just as John Shade is about to die. Nabokov also wrote ecstatically about his butterfly life, as in this passage from his autobiography, Speak, Memory: ‘The highest enjoyment of timelessness … is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern – to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humouring a lucky mortal.’ It is chilling to realise that Nabokov, net in hand, stood ready to dispatch any hapless butterfly that he needed for his collections, pinching its thorax and placing it in a folded paper slip to keep it undamaged, ready to be pinned and set. Those were different times…
 The great butterfly books of the eighteenth century were published as large folios and were essentially what we would now call coffee-table books, but, as collecting became more popular, demand grew for something smaller and more portable, the pocket-sized field guide. I am happy to say that my book, though it is no kind of field guide (there are enough of those), is pocket-sized, a duodecimo volume. Too many books these days are too big, not only in terms of length – many could be profitably cut by anything up to a third – but also in format. Books, like films (ninety minutes is nearly always enough), seem to have developed a kind of cultural gigantism – and this in an age of multiple distractions and shrinking attention spans. Why? Maybe someone should write a book about it. A very small one.

Body and Soul

 The last day of June, and it's a hot one – not ideal for travelling to London, but that's what I'll be doing, heading for Heathrow, there to board a flight for Canada very early tomorrow morning. This will be the first visit to our daughter and family since they moved from New Zealand to Prince Edward Island. I'm looking forward to everything except the journey.
  By way of a parting gift, here is a poem by Donald Justice which I came across the other day. I think it is rather beautiful, especially the last section...

Body and Soul

1  Hotel

If there was something one of them held back, 
It was too inadvertent or too small
To matter to the other, after all.

Afterwards, they were quiet, and lay apart,
And heard the beating of the city's heart,
Meaning the sirens and the street cries, meaning
At dawn the whispery great street-sweeper cleaning
The things of night up, almost silently.

And all was as it had been and would be.


2  Rain

The new umbrella, suddenly blowing free,
Escaped across the car hoods dangerously,
And we ran after – 
                               only to be lost
Somewhere along the avenues, long avenues
Toward evening pierced with rain; or down some mews
Whose very cobbles once the young Hart Crane
Had washed with a golden urine mixed with rain.


3  Street Musician

A cold evening. The saxophonist shivers
Inside his doorway and ignores the givers
Dropping their change into his upturned hat.
High now or proud, he leans back out of that,
Lifting his horn in some old bluesy riff
His fingers just do manage, being stiff –
Yet so sincere, so naked that it hurts.
Punk teens, in pink hair-spikes and torn T-shirts,
Drift past; a horse-cop towers above the cars;
And office lights wink on in place of stars.

Silence of cities suddenly and the snow
Turning to rain and back again to snow...

In the New Cotswolds

 Yesterday I was walking in a corner of rural Bedfordshire that is being spoken of (at least on the Property pages) as 'the new Cotswolds', or 'the affordable Cotswolds'. It's an area of rolling countryside, pasture and arable, gentle hills and patches of woodland, punctuated by attractive stone-built villages replete with thatched cottages – and, of course, churches. There were four churches on our (pretty short) route, so it looked set to be a good church crawl – but no, we had reckoned without the dear old Church of England and its 'if in doubt, lock them out' policy of keeping churches closed. Three of the four churches were firmly closed and locked, and the only one open was no longer serving as a church but as a kind of outdoor centre with visitors' accommodation – bunk beds cleverly tucked away in the aisles, and even bean bags in the chancel. The conversion had been nicely done, leaving the essential structure of the church still readable – but even so...Not to have seen the inside of one actual church was seriously disappointing, especially as all were fine medieval buildings. 
  I've inveighed before against the C of E's habit of keeping so many (most?) of its churches closed to the world, even though the ecclesiastical insurers generally advise that it's better to leave them open, at least during the day. I believe I wrote about it with some vehemence in my book, The Mother of Beauty – and that was before the Covid madness swept the land and all churches were, deplorably, closed and locked and all public worship banned, demonstrating to the world that Health and Safety was more important than anything a church could offer. Even when churches were allowed to reopen, ludicrous restrictions and practices remained in force, making the experience of church visiting, let alone attending a service – where such a thing was on offer – awkward and restrained at best. Happily those days are gone – at least until the next health panic – but far too many churches remain closed and locked.
  Other than that, the walk in the new Cotswolds was delightful – and the butterflies were out in numbers in the meadows and hedgerows: plenty of Ringlets flying with the Meadow Browns, a few Skippers, Commas aplenty, Peacocks, Tortoiseshells, Red Admirals and a Painted Lady – and, best of all, Marbled Whites galore, my first of the year. 

''Twould tempt the dying anchorite to eat'

 My native good cheer has been somewhat dented this past couple of days by a dreary saga involving the non-delivery of some bathroom flooring. However, it's summer, the days are long, the nights short and, in contrast with last year, the weather has been properly summery and the butterflies are out in decent numbers (especially Commas just now). With temperatures reliably in the 20s most of the time, these are salad days. So here is the Rev. Sydney Smith's ' Recipe for a Salad' – 

To make this condiment your poet begs
The pounded yellow of two hard boiled eggs;
Two boiled potatoes, passed through kitchen sieve,
Smoothness and softness to the salad give;
Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl,
And, half suspected, animate the whole;
Of mordant mustard add a single spoon,
Distrust the condiment that bites so soon;
But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault
To add a double quantity of salt;
Four times the spoon with oil from Lucca crown,
And twice with vinegar, procured from town;
And lastly, o’er the flavoured compound toss
A magic soupçon of anchovy sauce.
O green and glorious! O herbaceous treat!
’T would tempt the dying anchorite to eat;
Back to the world he ’d turn his fleeting soul,
And plunge his fingers in the salad-bowl;
Serenely full, the epicure would say,
“Fate cannot harm me,—I have dined to-day.”

Famous for his wit and wisdom, Smith was prone to what he called 'low moods', and his advice to those similarly afflicted was to steer clear of 'poetry, dramatic representation (except comedy), serious novels, melancholy sentimental people, and everything likely to excite feeling or emotion not ending in active benevolence'. Fair enough, and still better was his advice to a friend to 'take short views of human life – not further than dinner or tea'. Wise words. 
   'Recipe for a Salad' sparked a faint memory of another jeu d'esprit – an elaborate recipe for something or other which ends along the lines of 'mix all the ingredients together and throw out of the window'. Is it Dorothy Parker or someone? I can't trace it. Anyone? 

'And now this stride into our solitude...'

 On this day in 1981, the Humber Bridge – at the time the longest single-span suspension bridge in the world – opened. Andrew Marvell not being available, Hull's other great poet, Philip Larkin, was commissioned to write a celebratory poem, which would be set to music and performed by the Hull Choral Society. The result was a rare, and very accomplished, public poem – one that suggests that, had the occasion arisen, Larkin could have made a perfectly good Poet Laureate... 

Bridge for the Living

Isolate city spread alongside water,

Posted with white towers, she keeps her face

Half turned to Europe, lonely northern daughter,

Holding through centuries her separate place.

 

Behind her domes and cranes enormous skies

Of gold and shadows build; a filigree

Of wharves and wires, ricks and refineries,

Her working skyline wanders to the sea.

 

In her remote three cornered hinterland

Long white flowered lanes follow the riverside.

The hills bend slowly seaward, plain gulls stand,

Sharp fox and brilliant pheasant walk, and wide

 

Wind-muscled wheatfields wash round villages,

Their churches half submerged in leaf. They lie

Drowned in high summer, cartways and cottages,

The soft huge haze of ash-blue sea close by.

 

Snow-thickened winter days are yet more still:

Farms fold in fields, their single lamps come on,

Tall church towers parley, airily audible,

Howden and Beverley, Hedon and Patrington,

 

While scattered on steep seas, ice-crusted ships

Like errant birds carry her loneliness,

A lighted memory no miles eclipse,

A harbour for the heart against distress.

 

And now this stride into our solitude,

A swallow-fall and rise of one plain line,

A giant step for ever to include

All our dear landscape in a new design.

 

The winds play on it like a harp; the song,

Sharp from the east, sun-throated from the west,

Will never to one separate shire belong,

But north and south make union manifest.

 

Lost centuries of local lives that rose

And flowered to fall short where they began

Seem now to reassemble and unclose,

All resurrected in this single span,

 

Reaching for the world, as our lives do,

As all lives do, reaching that we may give

The best of what we are and hold as true:

Always it is by bridges that we live.

'The higher processes of art are all processes of simplification'

 'The novel, for a long while, has been over-furnished. The property man has been so busy on its pages, the importance of material objects and their vivid presentation have been so stressed, that we take it for granted whoever can observe, and can write the English language, can write a novel. Often the latter qualification is considered unnecessary.'
That's Willa Cather, kicking off a short but pungent essay, 'The Novel Démeublé' (collected in Not Under Forty). The essay takes aim at the form of 'realism' that 'asserts itself in the cataloguing of a great number of material objects, in explaining mechanical processes, the methods of operating manufactories and trades, and in minutely and unsparingly describing physical sensations.' Cather acknowledges that the novels of Balzac and Tolstoy (and Flaubert, whom she doesn't mention) are decidedly over-furnished, but she excuses both on the grounds that the furniture, however luxuriant, is essential to their artistic purpose, to the creation of a particular world and a particular emotional atmosphere. 
  'If the novel is a form of imaginative art, it cannot be at the same time a vivid and brilliant form of journalism,' she writes, and 'the higher processes of art are all processes of simplification.' She takes a swipe at D.H. Lawrence: 'A novel crowded with physical sensations is no less a catalogue than one crowded with furniture. A book like The Rainbow sharply reminds us how vast a distance lies between emotion and mere sensory reactions ... Can one imagine anything more terrible than the story of Romeo and Juliet rewritten in prose by D.H. Lawrence?' Indeed.
  'How wonderful it would be,' she concludes, 'if we could throw all the furniture out of the window; and along with it, all the meaningless reiterations concerning physical sensations, all the tiresome old patterns, and leave the room as bare as the stage of a Greek theatre...'
  This is bracing stuff, from a writer whose own short, wonderful novels typically contain only the barest minimum of furniture. 

Well, I'll Be Dashed...

My daughter in Canada, who works as an online editor,  tells me her writers are being urged not to use dashes, as that punctuation mark is too heavily associated with AI-generated content. It seems the likes of ChatGPT are strangely fond of scattering dashes through their 'writing' – with the result that it now looks more authentically human to eschew them. This is a sorry state of affairs – the beginning of the end for the dash? – especially as my daughter is as fond of dashes as I am. 'Now', says one of her writers, 'we're stuck with commas, semicolons, and existential dread.' What's worse, the semicolon could be next, according to some reports – and then what will we do? 
  The versatile and endlessly useful dash – introducing light and space into airless prose – is an invaluable weapon in the writer's armoury. It is impossible to imagine some writer's works – notably Laurence Sterne's – without the dash, of which he was the supreme virtuoso. How would Keats's letters read without their spattering of dashes? Or Emily Dickinson's poems? As it happens, we have an enlightening example of what results when dashes (along with underlinings, abbreviations and exclamation marks) are edited out of manuscript text in favour of decorous semicolons, full stops and quotation marks. This was the treatment meted out to Jane Austen by her publishers, and it seems to me that it drained her writing of a good deal of its original vitality. Here is a passage from the manuscript of Persuasion, as written –

You should have distinguished – replied Anne – You should not have suspected me now; – The case so different, & my age so different! – If I was wrong, in yeilding to Persuasion once, remember that it was to Persuasion exerted on the side of safety, not of Risk. When I yeilded, I thought it was to Duty – But no Duty could be called in aid here. – In marrying a Man indifferent to me, all Risk would have been incurred, & all Duty violated.

And here is the tidied-up version – 

'You should have distinguished,' replied Anne. 'You should not have suspected me now; the case so different, and my age so different. If I was wrong in yielding to persuasion once, remember that it was to persuasion exerted on the side of safety, not of risk. When I yielded, I thought it was to duty; but no duty could be called in aid here. In marrying a man indifferent to me, all risk would have been incurred, and all duty violated.'

Compare and contrast, as they say. 
   At present it is only possible to read Jane Austen in the original in the prohibitively expensive five-volume set of Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts, edited by Kathryn Sutherland. Surely there is enough interest in Austen to publish some of them in an affordable form.