Eclectic Letters #8 — Rachel Edwards

A Victorian painting of Pompeii, Calvino's Invisible Cities, the works of Stefan Zweig, À Rebours, a Zbigniew Herbert poem, and a charming short film about the disorienting experience of first love.

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Faithful Unto Death 

Several years ago, I visited Liverpool for the funeral of a much-loved family friend. Killing time before my train home, I wandered into an art gallery, where I saw Faithful Unto Death, painted by Edward John Poynter in 1865. It depicts a frightened Roman sentry in Pompeii, during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Fire rains down around him, the streets are littered with bodies, but he does not leave his post.

Perhaps if I’d seen this painting on any other day, I’d have thought: this is kitsch, ridiculous, borderline suicidal stupidity. This is sentimental Victorian nonsense, the same as the poem about the boy stood on the burning deck. But, because I had come straight from the church, I stood in front of the painting for a long time. I couldn’t look away from the soldier’s nervous expression, how tightly he grips his spear, the way his helmet reflects that awful orange light. I thought how he must feel its warmth on his face. 

And it reminded me of C.S. Lewis’s description of the unnamed servant in King Lear: 

In King Lear (III:vii) there is a man who is such a minor character that Shakespeare has not given him even a name: he is merely “First Servant.” All the characters around him—Regan, Cornwall, and Edmund—have fine long-term plans. They think they know how the story is going to end, and they are quite wrong. The servant has no such delusions. He has no notion how the play is going to go. But he understands the present scene. He sees an abomination (the blinding of old Gloucester) taking place. He will not stand it. His sword is out and pointed at his master’s breast in a moment: then Regan stabs him dead from behind. That is his whole part: eight lines all told. But if it were real life and not a play, that is the part it would be best to have acted.

C.S. Lewis, of course, believes in the Day of Judgement, and a Christian heaven, and he’s writing in that context. His writing about Christianity — I particularly like the Screwtape Letters — is so straightforward and elegant that it makes me wish I believed in God. 

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Invisible Cities

Like much of Italo Calvino’s writing — Invisible Cities is a bizarre, ambitious book. The Venetian explorer Marco Polo is living at the court of Kublai Khan, who quizzes him about the cities he has visited on his journey. Their conversations are interspersed with prose poems representing Polo’s description of 55 fictional cities, a lush kaleidoscope of familiarity and strangeness. 

I used to take the same copy of this book to read and reread on trips abroad, making notes in the margins wherever I felt I had encountered some shadow of these fantastical cities. This is the book I recommend most often — and most people can’t get into it. But I will keep stubbornly recommending it anyway. 

Here’s Valdrada, one of my favourite cities: 

The ancients built Valdrada on the shores of a lake, with houses all verandas one above the other, and high streets whose railed parapets look out over the water. Thus the traveler, arriving, sees two cities: one erect above the lake, and the other reflected, upside down. Nothing exists or happens in the one Valdrada that the other Valdrada does not repeat, because the city was so constructed that its every point would be reflected in its mirror, and the Valdrada down in the water contains not only all the flutings and juttings of the facades that rise above the lake, but also the rooms' interiors with ceilings and floors, the perspective of the halls, the mirrors of the wardrobes.

Valdrada's inhabitants know that each of their actions is, at once, that action and its mirror-image, which possesses the special dignity of images, and this awareness prevents them from succumbing for a single moment to chance and forgetfulness. Even when lovers twist their naked bodies, skin against skin, seeking the position that will give one the most pleasure in the other, even when murderers plunge the knife into the black veins of the neck and more clotted blood pours out the more they press the blade that slips between the tendons, it is not so much their copulating or murdering that matters as the copulating or murdering of the images, limpid and cold in the mirror.

At times the mirror increases a things's value, at times denies it. Not everything that seems valuable above the mirror maintains its force when mirrored. The twin cities are not equal, because nothing that exists or happens in Valdrada is symmetrical: every face and gesture is answered, from the mirror, by a face and gesture inverted, point by point. The two Valdradas live for each other, their eyes interlocked; but there is no love between them.

Peruvian architect and illustrator Karina Puente has created some lovely illustrations of the various cities. Here is her Valdrada:

Karina Puente

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The works of Stefan Zweig

Last year, a friend recommended Stefan Zweig’s longest book, Beware of Pity, which I devoured. Weeks later I discovered a beautiful edition of short historical stories by Zweig, languishing unread on my bookshelf. Since then, Zweig has quickly become one of my favourite writers. 

The best thing I’ve read so far is The First Word Across the Ocean, which captures the risks taken, sacrifices made, and frustrations endured as part of laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable. Zweig’s admiration for ambitious endeavours — and the personalities which make them possible — is irresistible. This was published in the collection Shooting Stars, where Zweig narrates “fateful hours” in the history of mankind in mesmerising detail.

Zweig’s own history is a more sobering read. Being Jewish, he fled Austria for England in 1934. In 1940, he took his second wife to New York and then Brazil. They committed double suicide by a barbiturate overdose in February 1942. He was sixty; she was thirty-three. Translator Anthea Bell notes that by then, the war was turning against Hitler, and theorises that Zweig’s reason for suicide may have been “a sense that, whether the war was won or lost, the world of civilised culture in which he had lived and worked was gone forever.” 

I’m partway through Zweig’s memoir, The World of Yesterday, which he sent to his publisher shortly before his death — it’s a beautifully written elegy for pre-WWI Vienna and the seemingly stable world Zweig calls the “Golden Age of Security” which was lost forever. Zweig is a master of melancholy nostalgia, without ever becoming overwrought or kitsch.

In the first chapter, Zweig confesses that in his youth, although antisemitism was a mainstream political view, he “never felt the slightest coldness or scorn […] as a Jew either in school, at the university, or in literature”. In the preface, he writes:

I was born in 1881 in the great and mighty empire of the Habsburg Monarchy, but you would look for it in vain on the map today; it has vanished without trace. I grew up in Vienna, an international metropolis for two thousand years, and had to steal away from it like a thief in the night before it was demoted to the status of a provincial German town. My literary work, in the language in which I wrote it, has been burnt to ashes in the country where my books made millions of readers their friends. So I belong nowhere now, I am a stranger or at the most a guest everywhere. Even the true home of my heart’s desire, Europe, is lost to me after twice tearing itself suicidally to pieces in fratricidal wars. 

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À Rebours 

À Rebours (or, Against Nature) is the “poisonous French novel” referenced in The Picture of Dorian Gray (another favourite of mine) and the iconic example of decadent literature. I remember being disappointed at first, finding it surprisingly tame for a novel that scandalised critics and which Wilde’s prosecutor called “sodomitical”. The protagonist Des Esseintes is a limp, neurotic shut-in who spends his time categorising paintings, rereading novels, and giving himself crippling headaches by spraying too much perfume indoors. 

Despite my initial dismay at the relative lack of opium, sodomy, and prostitutes, there is something strangely compelling about Des Esseintes’ commitment to luxuriating in misery and inactivity. À Rebours is full of oddly haunting and amusing images: an unfortunate tortoise, gold-plated and jewel-encrusted, inching across the patterned carpet; the servants wearing elaborate masks to protect Des Esseintes from the horror of accidentally seeing their ugly faces, a beleaguered country doctor begging Des Esseintes to make at least one friend, for the sake of his health. It’s a ridiculous, self-indulgent book about a ridiculous, self-indulgent man, and it’s absolutely magnificent.

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Elegy of Fortinbras

I have long adored Elegy of Fortinbras by Zbigniew Herbert, one of Poland’s most celebrated post-war poets. Fortinbras, the Norwegian prince who takes the Danish throne at the end of Hamlet, addresses the dead Hamlet. 

I must have been sixteen or so when I first read this poem, and my instinct was to intensely admire Fortinbras, the practical man of action. I was uneasy when I read about Herbert’s biography, and found an essay that identified Fortinbras with the fascists and communists Herbert spent his life resisting. I thought: is that really the choice, between totalitarianism and useless, suicidal indecision? Must Fortinbras be the villain? 

But the poem is richer and more complicated than that. Fortinbras gives an elegant impression of what is noble about Hamlet. Hamlet has all the best images: a star, elegant, heroic, crystal notions, wolfish, fallen nests; he invites fascination and metaphor, and has a certain integrity which Fortinbras cannot help but admire. But Fortinbras has the ability to make decisions, to stay alive, and to rule Denmark. Both men have their separate virtues.

Elegy of Fortinbras

Now that we’re alone we can talk prince man to man
though you lie on the stairs and see no more than a dead ant
nothing but black sun with broken rays
I could never think of your hands without smiling
and now that they lie on the stone like fallen nests
they are as defenceless as before The end is exactly this
The hands lie apart The sword lies apart The head apart
and the knight’s feet in soft slippers

You will have a soldier’s funeral without having been a soldier
the only ritual I am acquainted with a little
There will be no candles no singing only cannon-fuses and bursts
crepe dragged on the pavement helmets boots artillery horses drums
drums I know nothing exquisite
those will be my manoeuvres before I start to rule
one has to take the city by the neck and shake it a bit

Anyhow you had to perish Hamlet you were not for life
you believed in crystal notions not in human clay
always twitching as if asleep you hunted chimeras
wolfishly you crunched the air only to vomit
you knew no human thing you did not know even how to breathe

Now you have peace Hamlet you accomplished what you had to
and you have peace The rest is not silence but belongs to me
you chose the easier part an elegant thrust
but what is heroic death compared with eternal watching
with a cold apple in one’s hand on a narrow chair
with a view of the ant-hill and clock’s dial

Adieu prince I have tasks a sewer project
and a decree on prostitutes and beggars
I must also elaborate a better system of prisons
since as you justly said Denmark is a prison
I go to my affairs This night is born
a star named Hamlet We shall never meet
what I shall leave will not be worth a tragedy

It is not for us to greet each other or bid farewell we live on archipelagos
and that water these words what can they do what can they do prince

Translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott.

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Bat Eyes 

Bat Eyes is a charming short film about the disorienting experience of first love, told through a poem by W.B. Yeats. It’s based on a monologue by Australian playwright Jessica Bellamy.

When You Are Old is one of many poems Yeats wrote about his unrequited passion for Maud Gonne: actress, suffragette, and Irish nationalist. When he complained that he was not happy without her love, she retorted, “Oh yes, you are, because you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness and are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry. The world should thank me for not marrying you.”

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Rachel Edwards works for Works in Progress magazine and Stripe Press, a book publisher. You can follow her on Twitter or Substack, where she also writes theatre reviews and runs occasional sonnet competitions.