Patrick: Lagniappe

He had assumed that he would fall asleep instantly, but just as he was dropping off he thought I'm falling asleep, as if it was something he was dreading as well as counting on; in any case the idea of sleep, solid and specific, for long moments blocked off the thing itself.

--Slim collected in Monopolies of Loss by Adam Mars-Jones

[N.B.  There's a lot of craft you could learn just by studying that one sentence.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

One thing I find I can visualize is a ration book.  That's how I make sure I don't get overtired.  Over-overtired.  I suppose my mother had a ration book before I was born.  I don't think I've ever seen one.  But I imagine a booklet with coupons in it for you to tear out, only instead of an allowance for the week of butter or cheese or sugar, my coupons say One Hour of Social Life, One Shopping Expedition, On Short Walk.  I hoard them, and I spend them wisely.  I tear them out slowly, separating the perforations one by one.

--Slim collected in Monopolies of Loss by Adam Mars-Jones

Patrick: Lagniappe

One of the things I'm supposed to be doing these days is creative visualization, you know, where you imagine your white corpuscles strapping on their armour to repel invaders.  Buddy doesn't nag, but I can tell he's disappointed.  I don't seem to be able to do it.  I get as far as imagining my white corpuscles as a sort of cloud of healthiness, like a milkshake in the dark flow of my blood, but if I try to visualize them any more concretely I think of Raquel Welch, in Fantastic Voyage.  That's the film where they shrink a submarine full of doctors and inject it into a dying man's bloodstream.  He's the president or something.  And at one point Raquel Welch gets attacked and almost killed by white corpuscles, they're like strips of plastic - when I think of it, they are strips of plastic - that stick to her wetsuit until she can't breathe.  The others have to snap them off one by one when they get her back to the submarine.  It's touch and go.  So I don't think creative visualization will work for me.  It's not a very promising therapeutic tool, if every time I try to imagine my body's defences I think of their trying to kill Raquel Welch.  I still can't persuade myself the corpuscles are the good guys.

--Slim collected in Monopolies of Loss by Adam Mars-Jones

Patrick: Lagniappe

I've learned that there is a yoga of tears.  There are the clever tears that release a lot in a little time, and the stupid tears that just shake you and don't let you go.  Once your shoulders get in on the act, you're sunk.  The trick is to keep them out of it.  Otherwise you end up wailing all day.  Those kind of tears are very more-ish.  Bet you can't cry just one, just ten, just twenty.  But if I keep my shoulders still I can reach a much deeper level of tears.  It's like a lumbar puncture.  I can draw out this fluid which is a fantastic concentrate of misery.  And then just stop and be calm.

--Slim collected in Monopolies of Loss by Adam Mars-Jones

Patrick: Lagniappe

Words are so friendly, so accommodating, so loosely adaptable, not like numbers, with their tiresome insistence on meaning only what they mean and nothing more.  But what they have that words have not is rigour, and rigour was what seduced me from the start, the promise of one firm thing in an infirm world.  It all seemed so simple, early on.  I loved the process, the slow accumulating of many tiny parts into a vast and gorgeous gewgaw the joy of which was its utter inutility.  What did it matter if some other, a mere technician, should extract from the middle of my mesh a bristling filament that fitted perfectly a slot in one of his infernal machines?  Apply, apply away!--that was my cry.  And apply they did, adapting my airy fancies to invent all sorts of surprising and useful gimcrackery, from the conversion of salt water into an endless source of energy to rocket ships that will fly the net of time.  I was resented, of course; my kind always are.  Benny used to warn me, but I never listened.  Benny pretends to be a man of the people, though he is just like me, in his deepest heart.  We are all alike, all we Olympians.  We are supposed to be the celebrants of all that is vital and gay and light, and so we are but, oh, we are cold, cold.

--The Infinities by John Banville

Patrick: Lagniappe

Petra seizes her chance and breaks the silence by asking of the table, in a loud voice, why is it that tumours are always compared to citrus fruits.  "As big as a lemon, they say," she says, "an orange, a grapefruit--why?"  She looks about the table, fierce in her demand, but no one has answer to offer her.

--The Infinities by John Banville

Patrick: Lagniappe

What casuistries they are capable of, even the simplest-minded among them, what fine distinctions and discriminations they devise!  This is what we never cease to marvel at, the mountains they make out of the molehills of their passions, while all the time their real, their savage, selves are crouched in hiding behind those outcrops, scanning the surrounds for danger or opportunity, for predators or prey.

--The Infinities by John Banville

Patrick: Lagniappe

 The secret of survival is a defective imagination.  The inability of mortals to imagine things as they truly are is what allows them to live, since one momentary, unresisted glimpse of the world's totality of suffering would annihilate them on the spot, like a whiff of the most lethal sewer gas.  We have stronger stomachs, stouter lungs, we see it all in all its awfulness at every moment and are not daunted; that is the difference; that is what makes us divine.

--The Infinities by John Banville

Patrick: Lagniappe

 By the way, tenses: he is stuck in the present, though his preference would be for the preterite.  As for the future, he avoids it as the plague.  He wishes he had the powers of that emperor of old Cathay who on his deathbed forbade the use of the future tense throughout his vast realm, saying that since he was going to die there would be no future to speak of.

--The Infinities by John Banville

Patrick: Lagniappe

 But what attention we lavished on the making of this poor place!  The lengths we went to, the pains we took, that it should be plausible in every detail--planting in the rocks the fossils of outlandish creatures that never existed, distributing fake dark matter throughout the universe, even setting up in the cosmos the faintest of faint hums to mimic the reverberations of the initiating shot that is supposed to have set the whole shooting-match going.  And to what end was all this craft, this labour, this scrupulous dissembling--to what end?  So that the mud men that Prometheus and Athene between them made might think themselves the lords of creation.  We have been good to you, giving you what you thought you wanted--yes, and look what you have done with it.

--The Infinities by John Banville

Patrick: Lagniappe

The coming war first impinged on his consciousness on July 30, when in addition to his daily diary he began in a black exercise book a special war-diary, intended to chronicle the whole course of the struggle.  He kept it up dutifully each day until August 15, added one more entry on the 21st, and thereafter only a page or two each year until 1920. 

--Hugh Walpole by Rupert Hart-Davis

[N.B.: Catty, catty Mr. Hart-Davis.  Feckless is as feckless doesn't.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

His seclusion was broken only by a visit to the Beresfords, at whose house he met the actress Athene Seyler.  She was to become one of his dearest women friends--perhaps the dearest of all--since she was possessed of all those qualities which Hugh demanded from women before he could get on with them at all.  Athene was intelligent, witty, forthright, and gaily affectionate without making any demands on him. 

--Hugh Walpole by Rupert Hart-Davis

[N.B.: To appreciate the deeper meaning of these remarks, one must keep in mind that Hugh was a big, strapping, handsome fellow who was also firmly homosexual--as a result, Hugh wound up in a number of Bertie Woosterish situations of being chased after by romantically-inclined women but he had no Jeeves to save him from the comic repercussions.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

On February 5 The Duchess of Wrexe was published by Secker.  The Morning Post treated it lengthily as a work of importance, and most of the other papers followed suit, though one or two critical voices were raised.  Allan Monkhouse wrote in the Manchester Guardian: "If Mr Walpole could mistrust himself and his portentous methods he might become much more interesting," and the anonymous critic of the Nation: "Up to a point Mr Walpole holds one by his clever planning of his situations, by his bold and energetic scene-painting, by the rapid flow of narrative, by the energy indeed of his creative imagination . . . and yet the whole effect of the story is of something half-real, pretentious, third-rate . . . in our opinion Mr Walpole has switched his talent on to a track that, whether it leads to popularity or not, is destructive of artistic quality."

--Hugh Walpole by Rupert Hart-Davis

[N.B.:  That "up to a point," is, well, quite delicious.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art, yours and mine, what we are talking about--and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered.--I think I don't regret a single "excess" of my responsive youth--I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.

--Hugh Walpole by Rupert Hart-Davis (excerpt from a letter by Henry James to Hugh Walpole)

[N.B.:  This sounds strikingly similar to the famous line from The Ambassadors.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

One of Hugh's later detractors was his American publisher George H. Doran, who after he had retired wrote a book of reminiscences¹ (which Hugh described as "vulgar and malicious") wherein he accused Hugh of meanness as well as jealousy.  The English edition of the book was suitably expurgated in this and other respects.

¹ Chronicles of Barabbas 1884-1934 (1935).

--Hugh Walpole by Rupert Hart-Davis

[N.B.:  I don't know which is worse: the apparent pride in the English tradition of censoring books or the hypocritical distaste in describing Hugh as mean and jealous given Mr. Hart-Davis's retailing of those exact same criticisms as described in the prior blog entry.  Oh well, in any event, it's a highly entertaining read.  And, but of course, I've ordered my own copy of Chronicles of Barabbas (what a great title!)]

Patrick: Lagniappe

It was often said of Hugh that while he was always generous and helpful to young, promising, and unsuccessful writers, he was apt to be jealous of those novelists, usually his contemporaries, who seemed likely to challenge his own specialty and popular esteem.

--Hugh Walpole by Rupert Hart-Davis

[N.B.:  So, you want to be the next Dan Brown (i.e., earn your rewards in this earthly life and not in the one to come)?  Then look no farther than Rupert Hart-Davis's catty biography of Hugh Walpole, the historical-novelist Dan Brown of his day, whom Hart-Davis served as his long-time publisher.  This stylish book explains in gruesome detail how to plan out one's writing campaign and to advance one's reputation with no regard to style, grammar, or even historical accuracy.  A charming--if disheartening--read.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

Everything you can imagine flows through a senator's local office, from immigration appeals to reports about unidentified flying objects.  One lady left rambling messages about her sexual fantasies--all of them involved Senator Edwards--on the office answering machine every night.  Agents of the Office of the U.S. Marshal eventually paid a visit to her trailer and asked her to stop making these calls.  She didn't.  We heard almost as often from a federal inmate who wrote the senator on ten-foot stretches of toilet paper.  Every sheet was filled with his carefully penciled grievances about the government.  Each time one of these communiqués arrived, I got a kick out of watching an intern try to use an official stamp to record receipt of the letter without tearing it.

--The Politician by Andrew Young

[N.B.:  Note how classy Mr. Young let's you know about the class status of the unidentified lady by referencing her "trailer."]

Patrick: Lagniappe

I wanted to set a new standard for body men.  Whenever the senator was flying in, I would call the airline and arrange for an agent to meet him at the gate.  (Since airlines have a lot of dealings with the federal government, they were eager to help.) The agent would escort the senator through the crowds to baggage claim and out the door, where I would be standing at the curb beside my white Chevy Suburban, which was running with either the heat or air-conditioning on.  Inside, I'd have a cooler with cold Diet Cokes (he preferred cans) and snacks.  National and local newspapers would be displayed for him to read, along with briefing pages.  If it was dinnertime and he wasn't going to be able to eat, I'd have a take-out meal and a chilled glass of Chardonnay.  The menu would depend on whether he had made a request or was on the Atkins diet at the time.  Diet meals generally involved salmon and a salad with ranch dressing and no croutons from the Glenwood Grille or 518 West.  At other times it was ribs, or country fare from Cracker Barrel.  He loved Cracker Barrel--once, he was so excited to see a new Cracker Barrel near his house that he almost made me crash.

--The Politician by Andrew Young

[N.B.:  On the front page of yesterday's New York Times is a fascinating story about this most destructive man-crush.  As the trial of John Edwards continues to grind on, the only thing absolutely clear is that hell hath no fury like a body man scorned.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

It is a fact that in the brutal periods of history, what changes is not the cutting edge of every new market, or the ambition that drives a new factory owner or a new hostess, or a new conquest from the performing stage, or a new triumph in a political drawing room.  All that is constant.  It is the level of coasting that goes on behind the bright and harsh facade that is different.  In a gentle era - and my youth was passed in a fairly gentle era - people of little ability could drift by in every class, at every level of society.  Jobs were found for them.  Homes were arranged.  Someone's uncle sorted it out.  Someone's mother put in a word.  But when things get tough, the weaklings are elbowed aside until they fall back and slip over the cliff.  Unskilled workers or stupid landowners alike, they are crushed by a system they cannot master and find themselves ejected on to the roadside.

--Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes

[N.B.:  Hmmm, what generation might this observation apply to?  Let me ask some young people; they've been to college and what not.  Oh, excuse me, Millenials, if you could spare a moment from Occupying Wall Street, I'd be very interested on your thoughts regarding whether you consider this a brutal period of history?  What's that?  You must take a call from your friendly government student-loan debt collector?  That's fine, I can wait--unlike some.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

It always amuses me that this particular era, redolent as it is of Versailles and Queen Marie-Antoinette, is such a favourite costume theme with toffs.  They seem to have forgotten that it did not as a whole turn out well for the privileged classes, so many of whom would leave their heads, and no doubt wigs, in the basket below the guillotine.

--Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes

Patrick: Lagniappe

There was an inertia in the room and we all three felt it.  This often happens when old friends get together after an interval of many years.  Prior to the meeting they imagine that something explosive and fun will come out of it, but then they are usually faced by a lacklustre group, in late middle age, who have nothing much in common any more.  For better of worse, the Rawnsley-Prices had negotiated their journey, I had travelled mine and now we were just three people in a very dirty kitchen who didn't know each other.

--Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes

Patrick: Lagniappe

'Our parents used to talk about the problem child in any family,' I said.  'Now, it seems to be more the norm to have one child who isn't a problem.  If you're lucky.'

--Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes

Patrick: Lagniappe

Not for the first time I was struck by the phenomenon, another by-product of the social revolution of the last four decades, whereby parents these days frequently belong to an entirely different social class from their children.  Obviously, this was Lucy's daughter, but she spoke with a south London accent, harsh and unlovely in its delivery, and her plaited hair and rough clothes would have told a stranger of long, hard struggles on an under-supported housing estate, not weekends with her grandfather, the baronet.  Having known Lucy at roughly the same age, I can testify that they could have come from different galaxies for all they shared.  Why don't parents mind this?  Or don't they notice it?  Isn't the desire to bring up your young with the habits and customs of your own tribe one of the most fundamental imperatives in the animal kingdom?  Nor is this restricted to any one part of our society.  Everywhere in modern Britain parents are raising cuckoos, aliens from a foreign place.

--Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes

Patrick: Lagniappe

This phenomenon, where the losers in a revolution try to demonstrate their support for, and approval of, the changes that have destroyed them, always fascinates me.  I suppose it is an offshoot of the Stockholm Syndrome, where kidnap victims start to defend their captors.  Certainly, we've seen and heard a lot of it over the past few decades, especially among those toffs who are determined to show they are not being left behind.  'We mustn't cling on to the past,' they say cheerily, 'we have to move with the times.'  When the only movement possible for them, once all their values have been denigrated and destroyed, is down and out.

--Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes

Patrick: Lagniappe

The history of costume is, as we know, a fascinating subject in itself and I find it interesting that I will almost certainly live to see the death of one outfit, at least, that was significant enough in its heyday, namely White Tie.  From early in the nineteenth century, thanks to Mr Brummell, until the middle of the twentieth, it was the male costume of choice for any Society evening, the club colours of the British aristocracy.  When, in the late 1920s, the Duke of Rutland was asked by his brother-in-law if he ever wore a dinner jacket he thought for a moment.  'When I dine alone with the Duchess in her bedroom,' he replied.

--Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes

Patrick: Lagniappe

In all the time I knew him, he never made the classic parvenu mistake of lapsing into over-familiarity.  Not long ago I was talking to a man before a shoot.  We had got on well at dinner the night before and he, supposing, I imagine, that we were now friends, began to poke me jocularly in the stomach as he joshed me about my weight.  He smiled as he said it and looked into my eyes, but what he saw there cannot have encourage him as I had decided, on that instant, I would never seek his company again.  Damian made no such error.  His approach was relaxed and easy but never egregious or impertinent. 

--Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes

[N.B.:  So you like Downton Abbey, ehhh?  Well, who doesn't--but that is sugary, sentimental candy a surfeit of which will make you sick.  Come on over to Past Imperfect and enjoy some of Fellowes's filet mignon.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

We often used to spend whole evenings there, eating, talking, dancing, although it is hard to imagine what the modern equivalent of this sort of place might be, since to manage all three in a single location seems impossible now, given the ferocious, really savage, volume that music is played at today anywhere one might be expected to dance.  I suppose it must have begun to get louder in the discotheques after I had ceased to go to them, but I was not aware of the new fashion until perfectly normal people in their forties and fifties adopted it and started to give parties that must rank among the worst in history.  Often I hear the notion of the nightclub, where you sat and chatted while the music played, spoken of as belonging to the generation before mine, men and women in evening clothes sitting around the Mirabelle in the 1930s and '40s, dancing to Snake Hips Johnson and his orchestra while they sipped White Ladies, but like so many truisms this is not true.  The opportunity to eat, talk and dance was available to us and I enjoyed it.

--Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes

Patrick: Lagniappe

The major-domo--imported with the band from Egypt--tried to put a good face on it by remarking that this was originally Pilate's Praetorium.  It might have been.  No one was quite sure.  On the whole most people thought that it was, though certainly much altered.  Helena was plainly impressed.  The major-domo went further.  These marble steps, he explained, were the identical stairway which Our Lord had descended on his way to death.  The effect was beyond his expectation.  The aged Empress knelt down, there and then in her travelling cloak, and painfully and prayerfully climbed the twenty-eight steps on her knees.  More than this, she made the whole of her suite follow her example.  Next day she ordered her private cohort of sappers to take the whole staircase to pieces, number them, crate them and pack them on wagons.  "I am sending it to Pope Sylvester," she said.  "A thing like this ought to be in the Lateran.  You clearly do not attach proper importance to it here."

--Helena by Evelyn Waugh

Patrick: Lagniappe

When Macarius examined his conscience it was with the method and trained observation of a field-naturalist in a later age studying the life of a pond.  Less scientific penitents noted merely the few big fish; the squeamish recoiled from the weed and scum and with closed eyes blurted out an emotional, inaccurate tale of self-reproach.  But through all his long life the Bishop had refined his knowledge of the soul until each opacity, each microscopic gem had a peculiar significance for him.  He knew what was noxious, what was harmless, what was of value.

--Helena by Evelyn Waugh

Patrick: Lagniappe

Never do harm except for positive, immediate advantage.  Beyond that simple rule, Fausta held, lay disaster and perhaps damnation.

--Helena by Evelyn Waugh

Patrick: Lagniappe

"Sylvester?" she said with a wave of her plump white hand.  "Oh yes, of course you'll have to meet him.  It's only polite.  And of course we all respect his office.  But he's not a man of any personal distinction, I assure you.  If he's ever declared a saint they ought to commemorate him on the last day of the year.  A thoroughly holy, simple old man.  No one has a word against him except that, frankly, between ourselves, he is something of a bore.  I'm all for holiness, of course.  Everyone is now.  But after all, one is human.  I'm sure in Heaven, when we're all holy, I shall be very pleased to spend hours on end with Sylvester.  Here on earth one does want a little something besides, don't you think?

--Helena by Evelyn Waugh

Patrick: Lagniappe

The oblivious Caesars fought on.  They marched across frontiers, made treaties and broke them, decreed marriages and divorces and legitimizations, murdered their prisoners, betrayed their allies, deserted their dead and dying armies, boasted and despaired, fell on their swords or sued for mercy.  All the tiny mechanism of Power regularly revolved, like a watch still ticking on the wrist of a dead man.

--Helena by Evelyn Waugh

Patrick: Lagniappe

"It needs a special quality to be a martyr - just as it needs a special quality to be a writer.  Mine is the humbler role, but one must not think it quite valueless.  One might combine two proverbs and say: 'Art is long and will prevail.'  You see it is equally possible to give the right form to the wrong thing, and the wrong form to the right thing.  Suppose that in years to come, when the Church's troubles seem to be over, there should come an apostate of my own trade, a false historian, with the mind of Cicero or Tacitus and the soul of an animal," and he nodded towards the gibbon who fretted his golden chain and chattered for fruit.  "A man like that might make it his business to write down the martyrs and excuse the persecutors.  He might be refuted again and again but what he wrote would remain in people's minds when the refutations were quite forgotten.  That is what style does - it has the Egyptian secret of the embalmers.  It is not to be despised."

--Helena by Evelyn Waugh

Patrick: Lagniappe

"They have no faith, the English.  They believe in what men make, but what men make crumbles.  Look at their empire.  This is all they have.  Charles II Street and South Africa House and a lot of stupid-looking stone men on stone horses.  The sun rises and sets on it in twelve hours, no trouble.  This is what is left."

--White Teeth by Zadie Smith

Patrick: Lagniappe

Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love.  No.  Everybody deserves clean water.  Not everybody deserves love all the time.

--White Teeth by Zadie Smith

Patrick: Lagniappe

Girls either wanted him or wanted to improve him, but most often a combination of the two.  They wanted to improve him until he justified the amount they wanted him.

--White Teeth by Zadie Smith

Patrick: Lagniappe

Irie, looking strangely like the crowd on top of the wall in her everyday garb of CND badges, graffiti-covered trousers, and beaded hair, shook her head in saddened disbelief.  She was that age.  Whatever she said burst like genius into centuries of silence.  Whatever she touched was the first stroke of its kind.  Whatever she believed was not formed by faith but carved from certainty.  Whatever she thought was the first time such thought had ever been thunk.

--White Teeth by Zadie Smith

Patrick: Lagniappe

The first few doors she received the usual pained faces: nice women shooing her away as politely as possible, making sure they didn't get too close, scared they might catch religion like an infection.  As she got into the poorer end of the street, the reaction became more aggressive; shouts came from windows or behind closed doors.

"If that's the bloody Jehovah's Witnesses, tell 'em to piss off!"

Or, more imaginatively, "Sorry, love, don't you know what day it is?  It's Sunday, innit?  I'm knackered.  I've spent all week creating the land and oceans.  It's me day of rest."

--White Teeth by Zadie Smith

Patrick: Lagniappe

She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease and not (as with most of the girls Archie had run with in the past) like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.

--White Teeth by Zadie Smith

Patrick: Lagniappe

BARBED WIRE

The silence, with its ragged edge of lost communication,

silence at the latter end,

is now a spiked north wind.

Last words

toss about me in the streets, waste paper

or a cigarette butt in some gutter stream

that overflows

from crumpled darkness.

"Look, I am plunged in the midst of them, a dagger

in their midst."

and over the edge

the nightmares peer, with their tall stories

and the day's unheard-of cry.

--Eithne Wilkins (collected in New British Poets: An Anthology (ed. Kenneth Rexroth))

Patrick: Lagniappe

INFANT NOAH

Calm the boy sleeps, though death is in the clouds.

Smiling he sleeps, and dreams of that tall ship

Moored near the dead stars and the moon in shrouds,

Built out of light, whose faith his hands equip.

It was imagined when remorse of making

Winged the bent, brooding brows of God in doubt.

All distances were narrowed to his waking:

"I built his city, then I cast him out."

Time's great tide falls; under that tide the sands

Turn, and the world is shown there thousand-hilled

To the opening, ageless eyes.  On eyelids, hands,

Falls a dove's shade, God's cloud, a velvet leaf.

And his shut eyes hold heaven in their dark sheaf,

In whom the rainbow's covenant is fulfilled.

--Vernon Watkins (collected in New British Poets: An Anthology (ed. Kenneth Rexroth))

Patrick: Lagniappe

THE MOTHER AND CHILD

Let hands be about him white, O his mother's first,

Who caught him, fallen from light through nine months' haste

Of darkness, hid in the worshipping womb, the chaste

Thought of the creature with its certain thirst.

Looking up to her eyes declined that make her fair

He kicks and strikes for joy, reaching for those dumb springs.

He climbs her, sinks, and his mouth under darkness clings

To the night-surrounded milk in the fire of her hair.

She drops her arm, and, feeling the fruit of his lips,

Tends him cunningly.  O, what secrets are set

In the tomb of each breath, where a world of light in eclipse

Of a darkly worshipping world exults in the joy she gave

Knowing that miracle, miracle to beget,

Springs like a star to her milk, is not for the grave.

--Vernon Watkins (collected in New British Poets: An Anthology (ed. Kenneth Rexroth))

Patrick: Lagniappe

VARIOUS ENDS

Sidney, according to report, was kindly hearted

When stretched upon the field of death;

And in his gentleness, ignored the blood that spurted,

Expending the last gutter of his flickering breath.

Marlowe, whose raw temper used to rise

Like boiling milk, went on the booze;

a quick word and his half-startled eyes

Mirrored his guts flapping on his buckled shoes.

Swift went crazy in his lonely tower,

where blasphemous obscenity paid the warders,

Who brought a string of visitors every hour

To see the wild beast, the Dean in holy orders.

And there were those who coughed out their sweet soft lungs

Upon the mountains, or the clear green sea.

Owen found half-an-ounce of lead with wings;

And Tennyson died quietly, after tea.

Sam Johnson scissored at the surgeon's stitches

To drain more poison from his bloated body.

And Byron may have recalled the pretty bitches,

Nursing his fevered head in hands unsteady.

De Nerval finished swinging from a grid

And round his neck the Queen of Sheba's garter.

Swinburne died of boredom, doing as he was bid,

And Shelley bobbed lightly on the Mediterranean water.

Rimbaud, his leg grown blue and gross and round,

Lay sweating for those last weeks on his truckle-bed;

He could not die--the future was unbroken ground--

Only Paris, Verlaine and poetry were dead.

Blake had no doubts, his old fingers curled

Around dear Kate's frail and transparent hand;

Death merely meant a changing of his world,

A widening of experience, for him it marked no end.

--Ruthven Todd (collected in New British Poets: An Anthology (ed. Kenneth Rexroth))

Patrick: Lagniappe

CATS

Those who love cats which do not even purr

Or which are thin and tired and very old,

Bend down to them in the street and stroke their fur

And rub their ears, and smooth their breast, and hold

Them carefully, and gaze into their eyes of gold.

For how can they pass what does not ask for love

But draws it out of those who have too much,

Frustrated souls who cannot use it all, who have

Somewhere too tight and sad within them, such

A tenderness it flows through all they touch.

They are the ones who love without reward,

Those on whom eyes are closed, form whom heads turn,

Who know only too well they can afford

To squander love, since in the breast it burns

With the cold anguish every lover learns.

So they pass on, victims of silent things,

And what they love remains indifferent

And stretches in the sun and yawns, or licks the rings

That sheathe its claws, or sleeps and is content,

Not knowing who she was, or what she meant.

--Francis Scarfe (collected in New British Poets: An Anthology (ed. Kenneth Rexroth))

Patrick: Lagniappe

LIVING

The smoky blue of evening wreathes from fields

            Of tumbled clay,

And lanes where summer's trampled body sprawls

             In damp decay.

Through the thin mist, a heavy tread encroaching,

            I greet my neighbor

Clumsily slouching homeward to his cottage,

            Tired after labour.

Alone with dusk, I light a cigarette,

            But let it smoulder.

Another year burns down to stub and ash,

            And I am older. 

--D. S. Savage (collected in New British Poets: An Anthology (ed. Kenneth Rexroth))

Patrick: Lagniappe

NIGHT IN MARTINDALE

Not in the rustle of water, the air's noise,

the roar of storm, the ominous birds, the cries--

the angel here speaks with a human note.

Stone into man must grow, the human word

carved by our whispers in the passing air

is the authentic utterance of cloud,

the speech of flowing water, blowing wind,

of silver moon and stunted juniper.

Words say, waters flow,

rocks weather, ferns wither, winds blow, times go,

I write the sun's Love, and the stars' No.

--Kathleen Raine (collected in New British Poets: An Anthology (ed. Kenneth Rexroth))

Patrick: Lagniappe

"I think any hardship is better than pretending to do what one is paid for, and never really doing it."

--Middlemarch by George Eliot

Patrick: Lagniappe

Fred fancied that he saw to the bottom of his uncle Featherstone's soul, though in reality half what he was there was no more than the reflex of his own inclinations.  The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.

--Middlemarch by George Eliot

Patrick: Lagniappe

"But now, tell us exactly what sort of man he is."

"Oh, tallish, dark, clever--talks well--rather a prig, I think."

"I can never make out what you mean by a prig," said Rosamond.

"A fellow who wants to show that he has opinions."

"Why, my dear, doctors must have opinions," said Mrs. Vincy.  "What are they there for else?"

"Yes, mother, the opinions they are paid for.  but a prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions."

--Middlemarch by George Eliot

Patrick: Lagniappe

"I should be glad of any treatment that would cure me without reducing me to a skeleton, like poor Grainger," said Mr. Vincy, the mayor, a florid man, who would have served for a study of flesh in striking contrast with the Franciscan tints of Mr. Bulstrode.  "It's an uncommonly dangerous thing to be left without any padding against the shafts of disease, as somebody said--and I think it a very good expression myself."

--Middlemarch by George Eliot

Patrick: Lagniappe

The feminine part of the company included none whom Lady Chettam or Mrs. Cadwallader could object to, for Mrs. Renfrew, the colonel's widow, was not only unexceptionable in point of breeding, but also interesting on the ground of her complaint, which puzzled the doctors, and seemed clearly a case wherein the fulness of professional knowledge might need the supplement of quackery.

--Middlemarch by George Eliot

Patrick: Lagniappe

We know what a masquerade all development is, and what effective shapes may be disguised in helpless embryos.  In fact, the world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities.  Will saw clearly enough the pitiable instances of long incubation producing no chick, and but for gratitude would have laughed at Casaubon, whose plodding application, rows of note-books, and small taper of learned theory exploring the tossed ruins of the world, seemed to enforce a moral entirely encouraging to Will's generous reliance on the intentions of the universe with regard to himself.  He held that reliance to be a mark of genius; and certainly it is no mark to the contrary; genius consisting neither in self-conceit nor in humility, but in a power to make or do, not anything in general, but something in particular.

--Middlemarch by George Eliot

Patrick: Lagniappe

[P]ride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.

--Middlemarch by George Eliot

Patrick: Lagniappe

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!"  Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts--not to hurt others.

--Middlemarch by George Eliot

Patrick: Lagniappe

But her feeling toward the vulgar rich was a sort of religious hatred; they had probably made all their money out of high retail prices, and Mrs. Cadwallader detested high prices for everything that was not paid in kind at the rectory : such people were no part of God's design in making the world; and their accent was an affliction to the ears.

--Middlemarch by George Eliot

Patrick: Lagniappe

"She says he is a great soul.--A great bladder for dried peas to rattle in!" said Mrs. Cadwallader.

"What business has an old bachelor like that to marry?" said Sir James.  "He has one foot in the grave."

"He means to draw it out again, I suppose."

--Middlemarch by George Eliot

[N.B.: Who says Miss Eliot does not have a wicked sense of humor?  Indeed, all of the great Victorian authors--Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, James--are remarkably filthy in their humorous allusions.  We're just so coarse that we are unable to notice it under their thick Victorian opaque veneer.  And we're the lesser for it.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

Miss Brooke argued from words and dispositions not less unhesitatingly than other young ladies of her age.  Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a sky, and colored by a diffused thimbleful of matter in the shape of knowledge.  They are not always too grossly deceived; for Sinbad himself may have fallen by good luck on a true description, and wrong reasoning sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions: starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zigzags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be.  Because Miss Brooke was hasty in her trust, it is not therefore clear that Mr. Causabon was unworthy of it.

--Middlemarch by George Eliot

[N.B.:  Note the comma splice in the penultimate sentence followed by starting the last sentence with "because."  Is Miss Eliot grammatically challenged or are we the equivalent of the Grammatical Mrs. Grundy?]

Patrick: Lagniappe

The fact is, human reason may carry you a little too far--over the hedge, in fact.  It carried me a good way at one time, but I saw it would not do.  I pulled up; I pulled up in time.  But not too hard.  I have always been in favor of a little theory: we must have Thought, else we shall be landed back in the dark ages.

--Middlemarch by George Eliot

[N.B.:  Have a little Thought for thy dark ages' sake.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

Flattered by the attention she had excited, the philosophic Berenza viewed her involuntarily with a feeling of encreased approbation; for true it is man is too apt to be guided in his estimate of things by the degree of estimation they may obtain from others, and to be influenced in his opinion by the standard (often depraved) of the public taste.

 --Zofloya, or the Moor by Charlotte Dacre

Patrick: Lagniappe

If improper tendencies are engendered by early neglect, education may still work a reform; for we are in a great measure the creatures of education, rather than of organisation: the former can almost always surmount the defects of the latter.  Thus, though Victoria in childhood gave proofs of what is termed, somewhat injudiciously, a corrupt nature, yet a firm and decided course of education would so far have changed her bent, that those propensities, which be neglect became vices, might have been ameliorated into virtues.  For example, haughtiness might have been softened into noble pride, cruelty into courage, implacability into firmness; but by being suffered to grow entirely wild, they overrun the fair garden of the mind, and prevented proper principles from taking root.

 --Zofloya, or the Moor by Charlotte Dacre

Patrick: Lagniappe

It's a general rule that however badly a first night goes in the first act, the second is always a bit better - the actors have got used to the house, the house has got used to not liking the play, everyone is halfway towards going home, or somewhere else where the evening will pick up - a bad evening at the theatre guarantees a good evening in the restaurant, so much to laugh at and be apoplectic about - 'I couldn't believe it, couldn't actually believe it when he began -' 'And that ghastly bit when she -' 'And that line, did you hear that line? and so forth.  I've had many happy dinners of that sort, pausing only sometimes to wonder about all the dinners I haven't been at, when my own play has provided the merriment and apoplexy.

--The Year of the Jouncer by Simon Gray

Patrick: Lagniappe

Anyway, now I'm alone again, the bar is empty again - I'd just written that - the bar is empty again - when lo! an elderly man, by which I mean older than myself, with a nose so bulbous and knotted and veined that if he's not an alcoholic he should sue it - there he is at the table next to mine, he has chosen it out of all the empty tables, there are ten of them, I've counted, just to sit beside me, attracted by the long shapelessness of my own nose, perhaps, or just by a muddled desire to be a nuisance - he's carrying an object the size and shape of a large book that I didn't at first notice which he fiddled with for a few moments and then, just as I turned away, he pressed a knob and a man's voice, plus music, both cackly, burst forth, yeas, a radio, the old bugger's got a radio, and he's sitting there, holding the radio to his mouth, like a sandwich, he's got very bushy eyebrows, by the way, thickets, actually, and a beard, also thickety, but just sticking out from the base of the chin - it's the head of a Pan, and he's holding the radio to his mouth no longer like a sandwich, like a flute, with hideous, unflutish noises emanating from it - he's conversing with Sam, the very neat and handsome young waiter, the one with the Eddie Murphy face, which he is bending to Pan's lips, so that he can hear him behind the music, no need - Pan's voice is loud, boisterous, slurred, he's requesting tea - 'Lots of good, strong tea, to wash the alcohol out,' he says, following his words with a coarse chuckle.

--The Year of the Jouncer by Simon Gray

[N.B.:  When you can write a sentence like that, I might read your book.  And keep in mind that over on this end of the Pond no one--and I do mean no one--knows who Simon Gray, the great, recently deceased, playwright is (or, more accurately, though also more sadly, was).]

Patrick: Lagniappe

The Great War was the psychological turning point, for Germany and for modernism as a whole.  The urge to destroy was intensified; the urge to create became increasingly abstract.  In the end the abstractions turned to insanity and all that remained was destruction, Götterdämmerung.

"Under the debris of our shattered cities," wrote Joseph Goebbels in 1945 with a breathless intoxication reminiscent of expressionist plays of the twenties, and indeed of his own diaries of that decade,

the last so-called achievements of the middle-class nineteenth century have been buried . . . Together with the monuments of culture there crumble also the last obstacles to the fulfillment of our revolutionary task.  Now that everything is in ruins, we are forced to rebuild Europe.  In the past, private possessions us to bourgeois restraint.  Now the bombs, instead of killing all Europeans, have only smashed the prison walls which held them captive . . . In trying to destroy Europe's future, the enemy has succeeded in smashing its past; and with that, everything old and outworn has gone.

These statements were meant for public consumption on radio and in the press.

--Rites of Spring by Modris Eksteins

Patrick: Lagniappe

In personal as well as social terms Hitler was a failure.  There was nothing natural or straightforward about him.  He was humorless, always awkward, always performing.  Even his eroticism, said Putzi Hanfstaengl, was "purely operatic, never operative."  Everything was artificial and surreptitious.  He was incapable of friendship or love or even a genuine smile.  Authenticity, which he advertised to the nation, was completely foreign and frightening to him.  If he was provoked to laugh, he always put his hand in front of his face.  He took pills for gas, terrified as he was of farting.  He changed his underwear as often as three time a day.  All was symbol, substitution, abstraction.  At the center there was nothing, an utter vacuum.  Only an audience could give Hitler meaning; he had none himself.

--Rites of Spring by Modris Eksteins

Patrick: Lagniappe

Early on, to arouse a sense of belonging, of "community," the party began to emphasize the importance, above everything else, of ritual and propaganda -- the flags, the insignia, the uniforms, the pageantry, the standard greetings, the declarations of loyalty, and the endless repetition of slogans.  Nazism was a cult.  The appear was strictly to emotion.  The assault was on the senses, primarily visual and aural.  The spoken word took precedence over the written.  Drama, music, dance, and later radio and film were accorded more importance than literature.  Nazism was grand spectacle, from beginning to end.

--Rites of Spring by Modris Eksteins

Patrick: Lagniappe

Many of Remarque's generation shared his apocalyptic post-Christian vision of life, peace, and happiness in death.  George Antheil would, when appearing in concert to play his own music, carry a pistol in his evening jacket.  As he sat down to play, he would take out the pistol and place it on the piano.  The .25 caliber Belgian revolver that Harry Crosby used in December 1929 to kill himself and his mistress had a sun symbol engraved on its side.  A year earlier, while saluting Dido, Cleopatra, Socrates, Modigliani, and Van Gogh among others, he had promised soon "to enjoy an orgasm with the sombre Slave-Girl of Death, in order to be reborn."  He yearned to "explode . . . into the frenzied fury of the Sun, into the madness of the Sun into the hot gold arms and hot gold eyes of the Goddess of the Sun!"

--Rites of Spring by Modris Eksteins

Patrick: Lagniappe

"Kill Germans!  Kill Them!" bellowed the Right Reverend A. F. Winnington-Ingram, bishop of London:

. . . not for the sake of killing, but to save the world . . . kill the good as well as the bad . . . kill the young men as well as the old . . . kill those who have shown kindness to our wounded as well as those fiends who crucified the Canadian sergeant . . . As I have said a thousand times, I look upon it as a war for purity, I look upon everybody who dies in it as a martyr.

Clergymen dressed Jesus in khaki and had him firing machine guns.  The war became one not of justice but of righteousness.  To kill Germans was to purge the world of the Antichrist, the great beast from the abyss, and to herald the New Jerusalem.  At the Madison Avenue Baptist Church in New York the Reverend Charles Aubrey Eaton attacked Woodrow Wilson for not avenging the Lusitania.  It had to be done "if it took ten million men, if our cities were laid in the dust and we were set back a hundred years."  Not since the wars of religion of the seventeenth century, and perhaps even the crusades, had men of the cloth encouraged killing for the greater glory of God with such enthusiasm.

--Rites of Spring by Modris Eksteins

Patrick: Lagniappe

Near Béthune, at the end of November 1914, Brigadier P. Mortimer recorded in his diary:

Our chief anxiety seems to be to clear German corpses from in front of our trenches -- as the latter are becoming untenable through stench.  Men are being offered rewards and promotion for going out and burning them and many gallant deeds are being performed.  One man in the 2/39th after disposing of 3 corpses out in the open and 50 yards from the German trenches -- was shot dead in the fourth attempt -- cold blooded pluck.

Mortimer made the entry, without further comment, obviously in all seriousness.  How long would it be before men sensed the horrible ironies of a world in which gallantry was called upon to fight corpses, in which the living died trying to destroy the already dead?

--Rites of Spring by Modris Eksteins

Patrick: Lagniappe

In a war in which men buried themselves so as to live, in which soldiers went fishing with bombs, in which Senegalese troops at first ate the grease sent to lubricate trucks, in which a dead carrier pigeon was decorated with the Légion d'honneur, in which the British commander in chief declared, on June 30, 1916, the day before the "big push" at the Somme, that "the wire has never before been so well cut," in which, on March 20, 1918, the eve of the last mighty German offensive, a French general remarked, "More and more confirmation is coming in for the opinion that the Boche will not attack"; in such a war and such a world the jackal of Kilimanjaro and the sniggering footman of Prufrock appeared to be the only suitable inhabitants. 

--Rites of Spring by Modris Eksteins

[N.B.:  What a sentence!  By the bye, if you like Modris Eksteins, he has a new book out:  Solar Dance: Van Gogh, Forgery, and the Eclipse of Certainty.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

Early in the nineteenth century Schopenhauer had defined history as "the long, difficult and confused dream of mankind," and derided all pretensions to objectivity and universality.  He did not receive much attention during his lifetime, but in the second half of the century his star began to rise.  In 1870 an admirer of Schopenhauer's, the historian Jacob Burckhardt, who, though Swiss, was trained in Berlin and exerted his greatest influence on German colleagues, wrote, "If anything lasting is to be created it can only be through an overwhelming powerful effort of real poetry."  Poetry, he said in agreement with Aristotle, is more profound than history.  In Burckhardt, history and art moved together.  Theodor Mommsen, the historian of Rome, who earlier in his career had had positivistic inclinations, was following a similar path by 1874 when he suggested in his rector's address to the University of Berlin that "the writer of history is perhaps closer to the artist than to the scholar."

--Rites of Spring by Modris Eksteins

Patrick: Lagniappe

In the Paris of Henri IV, duelling had become all the rage among galants, often taking place in the Place Royale.  Each year several hundred members of the gentry perished in duels.  Now Richelieu showed himself ruthlessly determined to stamp out what, to him, was a particularly heinous sin.  Pour encourager les autres, in June 1627 a well-known noble, the Comte de Montmorency-Bouteville, arrested for duelling, was refused a pardon and beheaded.  This causes a major sensation.

--Seven Ages of Paris by Alistair Horne

[N.B.:  The story of Comte de Montmorency-Bouteville would make a great movie today (he was quite the shot--and villain).]

Patrick: Lagniappe

On 27 May, still protesting that he had acted as a free agent on a divinely inspired mission, Ravaillac was put to death.  Before being drawn and quartered, the fate of a regicide, on the scaffold erected at the Place de Grève, he was scalded with burning sulphur, molten lead and boiling oil and resin, his flesh then being torn by pincers.  After this hors d'oeuvre of inhumanity, his arms and legs were attached to horses which then pulled in opposite directions.  One of the horses "foundered," so a zealous chevalier offered his mount; "the animal was full of vigour and pulled away a thigh."  After an hour and a half of this cruelty, Ravaillac died, as the mob tried to prevent him from receiving the last rites and urged the horses to pull harder.  When what remained of the regicide finally expired, "the entire populace, no matter what their rank, hurled themselves on the body with their swords, knives, sticks or anything else to hand and began beating, hacking and tearing at it.  They snatched the limbs from the executioner, savagely chopping them up and dragging the pieces through the streets."  Children made a bonfire and flung remnants of Ravaillac's body on to it.  According to a witness, one woman actually ate some of the flesh.

--Seven Ages of Paris by Alistair Horne

Patrick: Lagniappe

It was the time of the early scramble for colonies in the New World, but Sully saw France's map of the world lying entirely in Europe.  "Things which remain separated from our body by foreign lands or seas will only be ours at great expense and to little purpose" was his view.

--Seven Ages of Paris by Alistair Horne

Patrick: Lagniappe

To be considered truly great, a leader of men needs to be able to attract the best of talents to his side.  If it was true of Napoleon, it was certainly true of Henri IV in his choice of Maximilien de Béthune, Baron de Rosny and--later--Duc de Sully to run his affairs.

--Seven Ages of Paris by Alistair Horne

Patrick: Lagniappe

In 1340, Edward III of tiny England assumed the title of King of France, and effectively destroyed the French fleet at Sluys, off the coast of Flanders.  His troops landed virtually unopposed on the Cotentin Peninsula of Normandy, just where Eisenhower's Americans would land almost exactly 600 years later.  In 1346, the English longbowmen--employing the most advanced weapon in all Europe--won one of history's decisive battles against the ponderous French cavalry at Crécy on the Somme.  All that Philippe Auguste had won for France at Bouvines now seemed lost.  In a historic scene, recorded not least by Rodin, the burghers of Calais surrendered to Edward with halters round their necks.  England was to hold this vital foothold, this arrow pointed at Paris, until the days of Elizabeth I more than two centuries later.

--Seven Ages of Paris by Alistair Horne

Patrick: Lagniappe

To palliate the hardship of medieval life, entertainment was of the highest priority.  Parisians of all ranks loved a party, especially a good wedding feast, where minstrels would perform.  The principal instrument of the visiting jongleur would be a viele, a flat-bottomed fiddle, vaguely triangular, with three strings worked by a concave bow that was a little awkward to handle.  The music of the times was, it seems, seldom in unison.  The jongleur would first of all strike a note on his viele, and then chant; the much loved, heroic Chanson de Roland could take as long as five hours to perform.  With his knowledge of Jerusalem, the Siege of Antioch, of Arabs and Babylonians, drawn from the Crusades, and his tales of heroes who would give up all in the case of the Faith, the well-travelled jongleur was a much sought-after figure.  Though the chansons de geste such as Roland, with their attachment to a chivalry that was heroic to the point of suicide and absurdity, were arguably to help France lose the Battle of Crécy in the next century, they now kindled in Parisians for the first time a patriotic feeling of intense love for la douce France--principally identified with the immediately surrounding Ile de France.

--Seven Ages of Paris by Alistair Horne

Patrick: Lagniappe

By the end of the first century A.D., Christianity had arrived in Paris, followed shortly thereafter by the first martyrs.  Dionysius, of Denis, came from Rome and was probably Greek.  Aged ninety, he was arrested for denying the divinity of the Emperor, imprisoned on what is now the Quai aux Fleurs, close to the modern Préfecture de Police, and then dragged up the Roman highway that still bears his name northwards from the Seine.  On top of a hill overlooking the city where stood a temple to Mercury, he and two supporters were decapitated.  According to legend, he picked up his head with its long white beard, washed it in a nearby stream, and continued walking for "six thousand paces."  The spot where he finally dropped and was buried became a holy place.  Eventually the cathedral of Saint-Denis was built on its site, subsequently to become the burial place of French kings from Dagobert onwards.  His place of execution became the "Mons Martyrum"--or Montmartre; and the city annals chalked up their first revolutionary martyr as well as their first bishop.

--Seven Ages of Paris by Alistair Horne

Patrick: Lagniappe

'But we shall muddle through.  It is an English characteristic, to give the old country its due.  Not because we are muddle-headed, but because no other race is clear-headed enough to perceive how muddled they are.'

--Doom by William Gerhardie

Patrick: Lagniappe

'Patriotism,' said Frank, 'is like wine--a good thing when you haven't had too much of it.'

'You don't understand,' said the Frau Pastor.  'Only a German can understand what we feel about these things, only a German who has gone through what we have gone through and who knows what we know.'

There is a limit to an intelligent person's enjoyment of the irony of being regarded as an imbecile by fools.

--Doom by William Gerhardie

Patrick: Lagniappe

When he listened to one German after another who told him that if Germany had been arming it was because the Entente Cordiale was stifling them by a tightening ring of alliances (to whom he had said that if the Entente Cordiale was stifling them by a tightening ring of alliances it was because Germany had been arming), who were convinced that we had started the war as we were convinced that they had done so, the thought struck him :  'Of course they must be convinced.  When A is roused to a pitch where he will do B in, and take the risk of being done in by B in the doing, he is sincere in believing B to be in the wrong.  This is the shady side of faith.'

--Doom by William Gerhardie

Patrick: Lagniappe

Frank waved away the flies.  'If I were God I would consign all flies to the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone.  For don't tell me that they know what they do!'

Eva looked at him reproachfully.  'You are so stupid, darling.  You wave and shout at the flies.'

'But they do go away.'

'It's not because you shout, but because you wave that they go away.'

'H'm, that's possible.  I never thought of that.  I admit I am impractical.'

The secret of a successful picnic, in view of its invariable discomfort, is that it should be as short as possible.  They--all of them towny people--discovered this very soon and rose as if by mutual consent.

--Doom by William Gerhardie

Patrick: Lagniappe

Frank returned to Half-Moon Street, which Cynthia, by the way, it occurred to him had deserted some days ago, in more buoyant spirits.  He did not resent her disappearance.  A man who had failed to provide his horse with a stable, the stable with a manger, the manger with fodder, would, indeed, be unreasonable to object to his horse's grazing outside in the field.  and in this harsh and difficult world Frank was not unreasonable.  He watched, contentedly, her grazing on the greenest and most flourishing fields of London, Paris, and New York.  He walked about in the flat, inspecting the shelves in the kitchen containing things in tins bought with her money; and in applying them to their uses drew on his common sense and such powers of divination as he possessed; and reflected that man's needs were few, and woman's less.

--Doom by William Gerhardie

Patrick: Lagniappe

She recalled having read somewhere that in ancient Rome the slaves were not allowed to wear a distinctive dress lest they should recognize each other and learn their numbers and their power.  So, in herself, she discerned for the first time instincts and desires, which, mute and unmarked, had gone to and fro in the dim passages of her mind, and now hailed each other with a cry of mutiny.

--The Reef by Edith Wharton

Patrick: Lagniappe

Madame de Chantelle looked plaintively at her sturdy monitress.  "You don't expect me not to ask if she's got a family?"

"No; nor to think the worse of her if she hasn't.  The fact that she's an orphan ought, with your ideas, to be a merit.  You won't have to invite her father and mother to Givré!"

--The Reef by Edith Wharton

Patrick: Lagniappe

Darrow, as he continued to observe the new-comer, who was perched on her arm-chair like a granite image on the edge of a cliff, was aware that, in a more detached frame of mind, he would have found an extreme interest in studying and classifying Miss Painter.  It was not that she said anything remarkable, or betrayed any of those unspoken perceptions which give significance to the most commonplace utterances.  She talked of the lateness of the train, of an impending crisis in international politics, of the difficulty of buying English tea in Paris and of the enormities of which French servants were capable; and her views on these subjects were enunciated with a uniformity of emphasis implying complete unconsciousness of any difference in their interest and importance.  She always applied to the French race the distant epithet of "those people", but she betrayed an intimate acquaintance with many of its members, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the domestic habits, financial difficulties and private complications of various persons of social importance.  Yet, as she evidently felt no incongruity in her attitude, so she revealed no desire to parade her familiarity with the fashionable, or indeed any sense of it as a fact to be paraded.  It was evident that the titled ladies whom she spoke of as Mimi or Simone or Odette were as much "those people" to her as the bonne who tampered with her tea and steamed the stamps off her letters ("when, by a miracle, I don't put them in the box myself.")  Her whole attitude was of a vast grim tolerance of things-as-they-came, as though she had been some wonderful automatic machine which recorded facts but had not yet been perfected to the point of sorting or labelling them.

--The Reef by Edith Wharton

[N.B.:  Just like Henry James, Edith Wharton is such a great writer that she obeys the rules of the Masters to "tell not show" as opposed to the rules of the creative-writing scribblers to "show not tell."  The ways of God are not the ways of men and are unknown to them.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

Darrow had already guessed her to be a person who would instinctively oppose any suggested changes, and then, after one had exhausted one's main arguments, unexpectedly yield to some small incidental reason, and adhere doggedly to her new position.

--The Reef by Edith Wharton

Patrick: Lagniappe

He knew that most wrongdoing works, on the whole, less mischief than its useless confession; and this was clearly a case where a passing folly might be turned, by avowal, into a serious offense.

--The Reef by Edith Wharton

Patrick: Lagniappe

Darrow, lighting a cigarette while she sucked her straw, knew the primitive complacency of the man at whose companion other men stare.

--The Reef by Edith Wharton

Patrick: Lagniappe

Even in his first moment of exasperation it struck him as characteristic that she should not have padded her postponement with a fib.  Certainly her moral angles were not draped!

--The Reef by Edith Wharton

[N.B.:  This is Wharton's "naughty book" and has been mostly forgotten--but it shouldn't be!  If you're looking for a literary, yet tawdry, diversion, this is it.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

"There is no such thing as natural law.  Such terms are nothing more than ancient twaddle, worthy of the public prosecutor who was hunting me, the other day: his grandfather's wealth came from a forfeiture in the days of Louis XIV.  There are no rights, unless there's a law forbidding you to do this or that, or else you'll be punished.  Before there's a law, there's nothing natural except a lion's strength, or the needs of someone who is hungry, who's cold--who, in short, needs. . . . No, those we honor are simply rascals who've been lucky enough not to get caught with their hands in the cookie jar."

--The Red and the Black by Stendhal (tr. Burton Raffel)

Patrick: Lagniappe

In fifty years all there will be, in Europe, is the presidents of republics--not a king left.  And when those four letters--K-I-N-G--disappear, so too will all the priests and all the gentlemen.  All I can see is candidates paying court to dirt-covered majorities.

--The Red and the Black by Stendhal (tr. Burton Raffel)

Patrick: Lagniappe

(The author would have preferred, at this point, to insert a page consisting of nothing but ellipses.  "That would look awful," said that publisher, "and, for such a lightweight book, looking bad is, quite simply, death." -- "Politics," the author replied, "is a stone tied around literature's neck, and in less than six months, it sinks under the weight.  Politics set among the imagination's concerns is like a pistol shot fired at a concert.  The noise mangles without energizing.  It does not harmonize with the sound of any instrument in the orchestra.  Politics will mortally offend half your readers, and bore the other half, who would have found the discussion fascinating, and wonderfully lively, in the morning newspaper. . . ." --  "If your characters don't talk politics," responded the publisher, "they'll cease to be the Frenchmen of 1830, and your book will no longer be a mirror, as you claim it is. . . .")

--The Red and the Black by Stendhal (tr. Burton Raffel)

Patrick: Lagniappe

Ah, my dear sir: a novel is a mirror, taking a walk down a big road.  Sometimes you'll see nothing but blue skies; sometimes you'll see the muck in the mud piles along the road.  And you'll accuse the man carrying the mirror in his basket of being immoral!  His mirror reflects muck, so you'll accuse the mirror, too!  Why not also accuse the highway where the mud is piled, or, more strongly still, the street inspector who leaves water wallowing int he roads, so the mud piles can come into being.

--The Red and the Black by Stendhal (tr. Burton Raffel)

Patrick: Lagniappe

"We no longer have genuine passions, in the nineteenth century.  That's why there's so much boredom, here in France.  We do the most incredibly cruel things, but without cruelty."

"So much the worse!" said Julien.  "At the very least, crimes ought to be committed with pleasure.  That's the only good about them: How can we even begin to justify them for any other reason?"

--The Red and the Black by Stendhal (tr. Burton Raffel)

Patrick: Lagniappe

"Nothing can so distinguish a man as a death sentence," thought Mathilde.  "It's the only thing one can't buy."

--The Red and the Black by Stendhal (tr. Burton Raffel)

Patrick: Lagniappe

At the Père Lachaise Cemetery, a most obliging man, and even more assertively a liberal, offered to show Julien the tomb of Marshall Ney, Napoleon's general, to whom wise politicians have denied an epitaph.  But after leaving this liberal gentleman, who embraced him tightly, tears in his eyes, Julien no longer had his watch.

--The Red and the Black by Stendhal (tr. Burton Raffel)

Patrick: Lagniappe

Remember, even financially speaking, it's better to earn four hundred francs in the solid timber business, where you're your own boss, than to get four thousand francs from a government even were it that of King Solomon.

--The Red and the Black by Stendhal (tr. Burton Raffel)

Patrick: Lagniappe

Beyond six rivers and three mountain ranges rises Zora, a city that no one, having seen it, can forget.  But not because, like other memorable cities, it leaves an unusual image in your recollections.  Zora has the quality of remaining in your memory point by point, in its succession of streets, of houses along the streets, and of doors and windows in the houses, though nothing in them possesses a special beauty or rarity.  Zora's secret lies in the way your gaze runs over patterns following one another as in a musical score where not a note can be altered or displaced.  The man who knows by heart how Zora is made, if he is unable to sleep at night, can imagine he is walking along the streets and he remembers the order by which the copper clock follows the barber's striped awning, then the fountain with the nine jets, the astronomer's glass tower, the melon vendor's kiosk, the statue of the hermit and the lion, the Turkish bath, the café at the corner, the alley that leads to the harbor.

--Cities & Memory 4 from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Patrick: Lagniappe

In vain, great-hearted Kublai, shall I attempt to describe Zaira, city of high bastions.  I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades' curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing.  The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper's swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of  queen's nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn; the tilt of a guttering and a cat's progress along it as he slips into the same window; the firing range of a gunboat which has suddenly appeared beyond the cape and the bomb that destroys the guttering; the rips in the fish net and the three old men seated on the dock mending nets and telling each other for the hundredth time the story of the gunboat of the usurper, who some say was the queen's illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the dock.

--Cities & Memory 3 from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Patrick: Lagniappe

When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city.  finally he comes to Isidora, a city where the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third, where cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls among the bettors.  He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city.  Isadora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference.  The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age.  In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them.  Desires are already memories.

--Cities & Memory 2 from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Patrick: Lagniappe

Treason!  Faithfully that terrible word reappears on French lips the moment there is a major disaster, revealing one of the less admirable national traits.  Gallic pride can never admit that the nation has been collectively at fault; inevitably, she has been betrayed by an individual or a faction.  Repeatedly during the Franco-Prussian War, and again in the most adverse moments of 1914-18, the expression Nous sommes trahis rings out across the ramparts.  But the soil had never been more fertile for such an interpretation of France's woes than in May 1940.

--To Lose A Battle: France 1940 by Alistair Horne

Patrick: Lagniappe

Later Giraud was forced to seek refuge in an isolated farmhouse.  At 6 A.M. on the 19th it was surrounded by German troops, and Giraud was forced to surrender - according to the French, to a group of tanks; according to the War Diary of the 6th Panzer, to the men of one of its field kitchen units.  That same day the division also captured General Bruneau, the commander of the annihilated French 1st Armoured Division.  Giraud's command had lasted exactly three and one-half days.  He had done the best he could in an already hopeless situation.

--To Lose A Battle: France 1940 by Alistair Horne

Patrick: Lagniappe

One of Rommel's panzer commanders recalled simply shouting, loudly and impudently, at the French troop columns to throw away their weapons.  "Many willingly follow this command, others are surprised, but nowhere is there any sign of resistance."  Several times his tank men were questioned, hopefully: "Anglais?"  There was evidently one rare, recalcitrant exception, who brought out the ruthless streak in Rommel: a French lieutenant colonel overtaken by Rommel as his staff car was trapped in the road jam.  On being asked by him for this rank and appointment "his eyes glowed hate and impotent fury and he gave the impression of being a thoroughly fanatical type."  Rothenburg signalled to him to get in his tank.  "But he curtly refused to come with us, so, after summoning him three times to get in, there was nothing for it but to shoot him."

--To Lose A Battle: France 1940 by Alistair Horne

Patrick: Lagniappe

But the important physical feature of Reynaud was his modest stature.  He had most of the attributes of the small man: agility, combativeness, vulnerability to flatterers, the self-confidence that masks a sense of inferiority - and courage.  His enemies (and they were many) called him "Mickey Mouse."  But to others he was a little fighting cock who, when a subject fired his imagination, would "get to his feet, put his hands in his pockets, throw back his head to raise his short figure to its full height, and hold forth in picturesque and biting phrases like quick hammer blows."  In debate he showed a brilliant, quick intellect and a devastating logic; but he sought to master rather than charm, and this with his natural assertiveness and love of battle did not endear him to other politicians of the Third Republic - especially to Daladier, who loathed him.

--To Lose A Battle: France 1940 by Alistair Horne

Patrick: Lagniappe

Daladier was a stockily built, energetic man with a dull-brown complexion and a greasy lock of hair that imparted a slight (and deceptive) look of Bonaparte.  Under the strain of the Front Populaire, he had come to depend increasingly on the more fiery French liquors.  Writing in all the bitterness of 1940, Vincent Sheean describes him as "a dirty man with a cigarette stuck to his lower lip, stinking of absinthe, talking with a rough Marseillaise accent. . . . He had a certain southern eloquence, particularly over the air when he could not be seen."  While Daladier was still in power, Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary that he looked "like a drunken peasant.  His face must once have had sharp outlines but now it is blurred by the puffiness of drink.  He looks extremely exhausted and has the eyes of a man who has had a bad night.  He had a weak, sly smile."  In the south, his supporters nicknamed Daladier "the bull of Vaucluse," but as Spears remarked acidly, "his horns bore more resemblance to the soft feelers of the snail than to the harder bovine variety."  Others said that his was a case of a "velvet hand in a glove of iron."

--To Lose A Battle: France 1940 by Alistair Horne

Patrick: Lagniappe

How difficult it is at this range to recapture, let alone explain, the instant magic that, in the 1930s, Hitler wielded over German youth - sublimely unaware as it was of the dark tunnel of unprecedented horror into which he would eventually lead them and all Europe!  Onto the fertile stock of German childhoods cast over by the miseries of hunger, crazy inflation, followed by depression and mass unemployment, the humiliations of defeat and occupation, the apparent injustices of Versailles and the seeming pointlessness of life under Weimar, Hitler was able to graft the bud of intoxication.  As Nietzsche said of the Germans, "Intoxication means more to them than nourishment.  That is the hook they will always bite on.  A popular leader must hold up before them the prospect of conquests and splendour; then he will be believed."  Hitler was believed and his early bloodless conquests confirmed and reconfirmed that belief.  Satisfying some elemental need for mysticism in the German soul, the gigantic Nuremberg Rallies with their pageantry and colour, their hysterical, chanting masses of assenting humanity, filled young Germans with a revolutionary fervour which they carried with them into the Wehrmacht.

--To Lose A Battle: France 1940 by Alistair Horne

Patrick: Lagniappe

The early stages of opium abuse are characterized by vivid and exciting dreams, and Harry put a high price indeed on his dreams.  Opium seemed as cheap a ticket as any both to Nirvana, beyond banal physical functions, and to Dionysian ecstasies--especially since it is one of the peculiar properties of opium that it can still or excite, is either a stimulant or depressant, depending upon the psychology and physiology of the user at the time of use, upon the dose consumed and upon a full spectrum of environmental and spiritual variables.

--Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby by Geoffrey Wolff

Patrick: Lagniappe

Opium (pace Coleridge and De Quincey) may be eaten, or, broken down into its alkaloid (morphine) or derivative (heroin), it may be injected.  But for Harry the smoking was crucial because it was part of an exotic and Oriental tradition.  To smoke opium required elegant paraphernalia and practiced skill: a bamboo dipper was used to remove a bit of the treacly opium, which was then twisted around the sharp end of the stick while the stuff was roasted, just so, over a lamp, till it resembled burnt wool.  Too much flame and the opium was dried out, ruined; too little and it could not be smoked.  A the exactly right moment the stuff was transferred from the dipper to the tiny bowl of a heated pipe, and inhaled three or four times.  The preparation might occupy minutes, the smoking thirty seconds.

--Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby by Geoffrey Wolff

Patrick: Lagniappe

Harry consistently overdrew his account not only at Boston's State Street Trust Co., but also at Morgan, Harjes.  Both places indulged him, and the latter institution accustomed itself to honoring such of his checks as were delivered for collection written on napkins from the restaurant where he had dined, or on plates, or whatever came easily at hand.  Harry did not like to carry a billfold.

--Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby by Geoffrey Wolff

Patrick: Lagniappe

When he discovered D. H. Lawrence, who later became his friend, Harry was awed, but not by everything he wrote.  (He found Lady Chatterley's Lover silly and salacious.)  He noted that it had been said of Lawrence that "like a Roman voluptuary he would sacrifice a nation for a night of perfect love."  Beside that extravagant claim, Harry penciled:  "Who wouldn't who had any sense?"

--Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby by Geoffrey Wolff

Patrick: Lagniappe

It should be recorded in Harry's favor that apart from a light supping upon one lady's neck, he was never, till his bloody end, a man for cruelty or violence, physically or social.  He instructed himself constantly to learn the arts of gentle love, and he pleased himself by pleasing those whom he loved.  And when he tumbled into love with a new girl, he would not repudiate his previous mistresses.

--Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby by Geoffrey Wolff

[N.B.:  Maybe Newt Gingrich is the reincarnation of Harry Crosby.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

His seductive habits became legendary among his friends.  If he noticed a girl who attracted him, he approached her, whatever his circumstances at the moment, or hers.  He might be dining in a restaurant with Caresse and another couple, and suddenly his attention would deflect from them to someone else--a pretty girl, perhaps, at table with her husband.  Witnessed testify that he was entirely capable of leaving his own table, going to a strange girl's and departing with her, without explanation or apology.

--Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby by Geoffrey Wolff

Patrick: Lagniappe

Excess was the only measure he knew.  when he ate, he ate oysters, and when he drank, he drank champagne, and too much of both, yet paid no price, laid on no fat and managed not to appear foolish.  If he saw something he wished to have, he had it:  "Went out this morning to buy silk pyjamas but came back with a 1st edition of Les Illuminations very rare as there were only 200 copies edited by Verlaine."  Another day, going to look for zebra skins, he returned home with the skeleton of a girl wrapped in a yellow raincoat, her feet hitting the stairs of 19 rue de Lille as he carried her to his library, where he hung her from a bookcase:  "And who was this woman, princess or harlot, actress or nun young or old pretty and passionate or ugly and dumb?"

--Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby by Geoffrey Wolff

Patrick: Lagniappe

You can't relive your life and it's a mistake to go looking for the job you lost, or an imitation of it.  The trick is not to sell what you have, but to have what will sell.  You take me, for example.  I'm not sure I'd go back to the newspaper business if I could.  My newspaper business is dying and I belong to its past.  In some other line, who knows?  I could be the man of the future.  I might make a good copywriter for an ad agency.  I spent most of my life writing short, punchy heads, you know.  Maybe I could bring some new ideas to the ad business.

--The Job Hunter by Allen R. Dodd

[N.B.:  It seems that the newspaper business has been dying for a long time now--this book was written in 1965.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

A man should have carved out his niche by the time he's forty, that's what they said.  Well, I had carved my niche and now I couldn't find it.

--The Job Hunter by Allen R. Dodd

Patrick: Lagniappe

"I think it's like very thin ice on a very deep lake.  The lucky ones never break through.  But if you do, you don't drop just a couple of inches--you go down and down and down.  Somebody's got to pay for the affluent society--it stands to reason--and from now on I guess that includes us.  It's like--well, it's a sort of hidden depression.  It's a great big pit outside everyone's office door.  Maybe you don't put your foot into it, maybe you do."

--The Job Hunter by Allen R. Dodd

Patrick: Lagniappe

There are fears beyond the things you fear and fears beyond them, too, one circle below another, and on that cold, clear day in the heart of midtown Manhattan I was close to panic. . . . I had hoped for a good job; I had been prepared for a fair one; I had feared being forced into a poor one.  It had never occurred to me that I might not be able to find a job--any job--at all. 

--The Job Hunter by Allen R. Dodd

Patrick: Lagniappe

Any smart businessman pays his rent before he starts spending his profits.  The old man took care of the customers who paid his overhead before the customers who represented his profit.

--The Job Hunter by Allen R. Dodd

Patrick: Lagniappe

I had made the job hunter's classic mistake; I had tried to juggle two spots and I had lost both.  Well, what do you do?  You can't take Job A and then quit it a week later if Job B comes through.

I was to learn later that you certainly can.  This came from a salesman I met who had joined one firm and paid his first "sales calls" each day on two others which were still thinking about him.  "You can't be squeamish about this," he told me.  "For them it's just an inconvenience; for you and your wife and kids it's survival.  Besides, those other spots won't come through.  I know some of those boys like a book.  Half the time they haven't even got a genuine opening.  They're just window-shopping for personnel.  They like to keep a stream of guys flowing through on the off-chance some genius will wander in."

--The Job Hunter by Allen R. Dodd

Patrick: Lagniappe

On the morning of Christmas Eve a man in B Company on our right was hit in the head by a sniper's bullet, and died a few minutes later.  The new Second-in-Command of the Battalion was in the line on a visit of inspection.  He was an energetic and efficient officer but he was also a fire-eater.  He made both platoons file past the dead man, saying to each, 'You must avenge this.  You must kill two Germans for every one of our dead.'  I said nothing, but felt outraged.  The men evidently thought he was mad.  The object of war, the aim of a battle, is not primarily to kill numbers of the enemy, but to defeat his forces in battle.  The men resented the Major's tactless tactics.  It was the mistaken psychology of fire-eating blimps and it made the bloodshed of the war evilly bloodier.

--Recollection of 2nd Lt. W. Cushing, collected in 1915: The Death of Innocence by Lyn Macdonald

Patrick: Lagniappe

I went further along and looked into the next dug-out and there was a Guardsman in there.  They talk about the psychology of fear.  He was a perfect example.  I can see that Guardsman now!  His face was yellow, he was shaking all over, and I said to him, 'What the hell are you doing back here?  Your battalion is out in front.  What are you doing back here?'  He said, 'I can't go.  I can't do it.  I daren't go!'  Now, I was pretty ruthless in those days and I said to him, 'Look, I'm going up the line and when I come back if you're still here I'll bloody well shoot you!'  Of course I had plenty to do because you had to reconnoitre the line and reverse the defences, so it took quite a while to get that going, and when I came back, thank God, he'd gone.  He was a Coldstream.  A big chap six foot tall.  He'd got genuine shell-shock.  We didn't realise that at the time.  We used to think it was cowardice but we learned later on that there was such a thing as shell-shock.  Poor chap, he couldn't help it.  It could happen to anybody.  But at that time you either did your job or you didn't.  There was no halfway house.  I've seen chaps go, but I've never seen anybody go like that.  It was horrible.  A day or two later we heard that a Guardsman had been shot for cowardice.  I often wondered if it was that chap.

--Recollection of CQMS G. Fisher, 1st Bn (TF), Hertfordshire Regt., 6 Brig., 2 Div., collected in 1915: The Death of Innocence by Lyn Macdonald

Patrick: Lagniappe

One of our Generals came up to inspect us in our trenches in front of Lone Pine, and he was a fatherly sort, always used to ask the blokes about their family and stuff like that.  He spoke to all the troops and he said to soldier on the firing step, 'Don't forget to write home.  How is your father?'  The bloke answered, 'He's dead.'  A bit later the General coming back along the trench asked the same question to the same soldier, 'And how is your father?'  And the bloke said, 'He's still the dead, the lucky bugger.'  We all laughed.  I don't know what the General thought!  But the tale went the rounds.

--Recollection of Cpl. G. Gilbert, A Sqn., 13th Light Horse, collected in 1915: The Death of Innocence by Lyn Macdonald

Patrick: Lagniappe

I never saw any attack with so many men who had bullet wounds as at Aubers Ridge.  The Germans just mowed them down and most of the bullet wounds were through the legs.  We had a lot of splinting to do, splinting, splinting, splinting.  But one man was brought in with his face covered with a bandage and when the Major came in to look at him and see what was the matter he went out and was violently sick.  When he took the bandages off we saw the man had no eyes, no nose, no chin, no mouth - and he was alive!  The Sergeant called me and said, 'The doctor says I've got to give him four times the usual dose of morphia.'  And I said,  'You know what that will do, don't you?'  And he said, 'Yes.  And I can't do it.  I'm ordering you to do it.'  So I had to go in and give him four times the dose of morphia.  I laid a clean bandage on his face and stayed with him until he died.  That stayed in my memory for a very long time.  It stays in it now.

--Recollection of Pte. L. Mitchell, 24th Field Ambulance, 8 Div., collected in 1915: The Death of Innocence by Lyn Macdonald

Patrick: Lagniappe

Of course we were standing to all day, ready to go, but about three o'clock in the afternoon we were stood down and told we could rest a bit in the trench, and it was fairly clear that nothing much else was going to happen.  Well of course we were exhausted, and I got down in the trench next to Walter and I dropped off right away.  All of a sudden there was an almighty explosion, right in the trench, a direct hit just a little bit further along from where we were.  I was right next to Walter - touching him even.  I was stunned of course, but when I got my wits together I could hardly believe it.  I was covered in blood - saturated - and I really thought I'd bought it.  But it was Walter's blood.  I didn't have a scratch myself.  Walter had taken the full blast and somehow of other it hadn't touched me.  He was blown to bits.  A terrible sight.  I don't think there was a bit of his body bigger than a leg of lamb.  I gathered up what I could, put him into a sandbag and later on when it got dusk, a few of us got out  of the trench and buried him a little way behind, about twenty-five yards back, because we couldn't go far.

--Recollection of Cpl. A. Wilson collected in 1915: The Death of Innocence by Lyn Macdonald

Patrick: Lagniappe

I had a glimpse of what the Great War did to Cousin Audrey's life when last week she told me that every day of her girlhood at Lochinver Lodge began with the raw sound at 5 a.m. of her father vomiting his guts up.  It was the trenches he was remembering.  His body sicked them up every single dawn until his dying day.

--What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness by Candia McWilliam

Patrick: Lagniappe

The drugs that tell you most sharply that you must have them the minute you've got out of the place that is protecting you from them appear to be methamphetamine sulphate and crack.  Speedballs, once had, are never forgotten.  speedball bores are like orgasm bores.  You can't convey it unless you can.

--What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness by Candia McWilliam

Patrick: Lagniappe

You will recall St Elizabeth who, when asked what she had in her basket by a superior who was growing weary of her good deeds, replied, 'Only roses', though in fact she was bearing bread rolls to distribute among the poor.  So once, caught terribly short on Lexington Avenue, very late at night and unable to find the keys of my sweet old-fashioned hosts, I peed into my Accessorize evening bag.  No trace at all in the morning; a miracle.

--What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness by Candia McWilliam

Patrick: Lagniappe

'Hello, big girl, who are you married to at the moment?'  Peculiarly enough, I have been asked this question twice in my life and I take it ill. 

--What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness by Candia McWilliam