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TWO NEW PUBLICATIONS

The Comedy of Forgiveness

readings in Shakespeare and Dickens
by

John Haddon

Has anybody noticed how important forgiveness is in Shakespeare’s plays?—in a number of forms and different degrees of seriousness and profundity.
     It is some support of the view of Dickens as a Shakespearean artist that he too can show forgiveness in particularly clear and beautiful ways.
      But Shakespeare and Dickens remain poets not preachers. Their pictures of forgiveness depend all the time on imaginative realisation, and so Mr Haddon’s discussion of their different creations—from the perfect forgiveness of Lear by Cordelia, or of his lady by Sir Leicester Dedlock, to the variously problematic forgivenesses in The Tempest, Measure for Measure, Little Dorrit and Othello—is all the time necessarily a sensitive close reading, asking how this moment is to be acted or how we take that line or paragraph.
     What new can be said about either Shakespeare or Dickens or forgiveness? Here is new thinking about all three.

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The Liza Doolittle Syndrome

a brickbat aimed at the high achievers of our society
by

Michael Wallerstein

In Dear Mr Howard Michael Wallerstein first noticed this modern mutation of a condition first described by Shaw in Pygmalion. Mr Wallerstein now treats this set of characteristic contemporary illiteracies and solecisms in a more systematic manner, by grammatical category.
If this slim volume causes resentment in some quarters, it will have achieved its object; but Mr Wallerstein will not be answered, because his patients will not understand him. Ordinarily educated readers will, and will find this little book as funny as it is alarming. The subject is the decay of a whole language.

For some serious responses to this book, by no means sugary-sweet, click on comments.

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And . . . the poetry we publish is unlike Mr Lee’s targets in the next column. Our poets vary greatly but they are all genuine and all craftsmen of verse: most recently Frances Blodwell and Christopher Morgan. There are not many copies left of D. S. Savage’s Winter Offering.

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and
EDGEWAYS BOOKS

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Directors Brian Lee (chairman)
Ian Robinson (secretary)
Michael DiSanto Duke Maskell

Since 1970 we have been publishing criticism of life, in many forms including essays, republication of classic works, new poetry and fiction, but all in the common pursuit of true judgement. We publish the only modern edition of The Homilies appointed to be Read in Churches, and Brynmill is the leading contemporary publisher of works by the third great English fabulist, T. F. Powys.

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CORRESPONDENCE

I read your column [no. 81] on gay-o-matic-marriage (TM). It is too late, I think. Almost everyone I know (in England) seems to think homosexuality is a jolly nice idea and minoritarily legitimate, fudge, fudge, muddle, muddle etc: but don’t mention what gays actually get up to. I confess that I rather enjoy talking to liberal friends about what exactly gays do get up to, and they beg me to stop, while holding on to their ideas all the same. But I had a thought, which might interest you.
     It was about PRIME MINISTERIAL MARRIAGE. We are clearly in an age in which Prime Ministers not only have to be enwived but enchildrened: and, even better, getting on with the betrothal and begetting on 24-hour-continuous-televisual-feed. It is fairly common for people to say “Now, Heath is impossible.” But I thought that a good question for modern soft-shoed English liberals would be “What would you say to a Homosexual Prime Minister?” A poll would not reveal anything decisive; but the question would have a striking effect. I think people would divide on whether they would cling to their liberal principles (“Why not?”) and suppress their sense that it does not seem quite right (as illiberal), or find themselves making an apologetic admission that it would not be a good idea. I think that’ll be the revolution: when our Leader is not only a Public Fornicator but Public Sodomite. My particular point is that our recent enthusiasm for procreative Prime Ministers (the last three) is in fact a sign that the homosexual lobby has quite a lot of work to do.
     Perhaps the Prime Minister of the future and his Hairdressing “Friend” or “Partner” could adopt a child on television.
     You are right about muddle. Everyone is torn between:

(i) tribal morality (i.e. don’t be a “love-rat”, look after the kids, life’s a trial but you have to see it through)
(ii) hedonistic morality (i.e. everything is all right as long as it doesn’t cause suffering)

and in the trade-off between the two they frolic in (ii) until experience beats them down a bit and they become tired and perhaps unattractive and settle into (i). But it is hard to state this morality, because it is ad hoc, and shifts from era to era of one’s life.
     I wonder if English puritanism is of the sort that the closet, hypocrisy, shame etc. are all destroyed once the cat gets out of the bag. It must be different in the hotter countries. It is here [Turkey], for instance, where I do not cause offence when I speak about these matters.
                                                  James Alexander

That’s Enough Poetry, (Ed.)

. . . ’phone-ins about ME, you’ve posted-in by fax,
jokes and anecdotes (forty-two lines at max.),
brazen confessionals, sit.-coms of your angst,
quips, puns, pranks, whims, skits and twitches,
conceits, “ideas”, issues, brainwaves, itches
in “scintillating” diction, comical-hysterical,
in-yer-face street-knowledge, docu-soapological
chat-show narratology, linguistic artifice,
funnies for the kiddies, everything goes whizz!
Audenish journalisms, autobiographs that ain’t,
lots of laddishness, with feminist complaynte,
addictions, obsessions, you did it, you were done,
kiss-and-tell nostalgia, I-was-wicked-it-was-fun
weepy confessions of the hard-nosed as a phallus,
“brilliant” and “knowing”, and shallow and callous,
from academic clever-ones turned Wapping yuppy,
full of explicitness, as limp as Mr Guppy,
lacrimae rerum, tapped and bottled at the source,
into sort-of, like, stanzas, to make it look
like verse . . .
if it’s catchy and “punchy” and delivered with a grin,
a “gas” and nihilistic, someone may stick it in,
among the continuous tinnitus of shame
the spacetime filling writing talking game
the craft so long to learn, attached to it, your name.

Brian Lee

Edgeways Books is a division of
The Brynmill Press Ltd.

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NOW READY

The Selected Criticism of D. H. Lawrence and the reset edition of Wittgenstein on Frazer can both be had as downloadable pdfs [portable document files]. The texts and pages are exactly the same as the printed books and are sent to the purchaser’s email address usually within one day of ordering, usually in a zip folder. They are fully protected by copyright and only available from this website. For details and prices click on

Web Texts

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F. R. Leavis
the Cambridge Don
by
Ian Robinson
An extensively revised talk previously published in an abridged form in
The Use of Engish

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Every Literature Helps
Presidential Address
to the Leicester Theological Society
by
Duncan Campbell OP

How literature does good is one of the great questions raised by all serious readers and unlikely to receive a definitive answer. Also, the world’s literature is very extensive. So to survey it in an hour’s lecture, organised around the question (asked from the point of view of a Christian priest) how literature helps, is to undertake at least two daunting tasks at once. Fr Campbell does so jauntily and as a critic with fresh responses to some wonderful works. Because this is genuine criticism it invites replies of the form “yes, but”. The memorable remark on the damnation of the leading characters in Wuthering Heights would be even better if extended to include the self-righteous Nelly Dean. The deepest insight in Bleak House is surely not about renunciation of the beloved but about forgiveness. (On which theme we shall bring out a book, by John Haddon, if ever we can overcome technical problems.) And so on. Here, that is, is a treatment of real questions that deserves attention and discussion—as a new demonstration that literary criticism is a non-scientific non-methodical form of thought.

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Poetry in the New Matrix
The Poet Laureate
and the Bane
by
Brian Lee

This thirty-two page pamphlet continues the series that includes Poetry and the System with some reflections on recent events and their bearing on the state of poetry and our common life.
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Translation
vs
Paraphrase
by
A. C. Capey

Mr Capey’s long-promised criticism of twentieth-century Bible translations

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Memories
of
F. R. Leavis
by
David Matthews

Mr Matthews’s memories of more than sixty years, going back to the great days of Downing, are a fresh testimony to the greatest English critic of modern times.
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Web Texts

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