Paranoid perspectives

Sketch of Arkham’s street plan, by H P Lovecraft

‘Lovecraft and Landscape‘ (1978)
by Angela Carter,
in The Necronomicon,
edited by George Hay and introduced by Colin Wilson.
Corgi Books, 1980 (1978).

In 1980, at the age of forty, Angela Carter took a year-long teaching post as visiting professor at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. While there she attempted, together with her friend – Christopher Frayling, an expert on popular culture – to locate the grave of the horror writer H P Lovecraft, though without success.

Her biographer, Edmund Gordon, tells us she was keen on Lovecraft’s fiction, “finding in it ‘an odd stylistic resemblance’ to [Jorge Luís] Borges,” his work doubtless resonating with her own taste for the macabre.¹ Despite the fruitless grave search – unsurprising given that there are some forty thousand interments in the 60-acre cemetery – the pilgrimage was a logical extension to her interest in weird fiction.

Two years earlier that interest had already manifested itself in a collection of fictive studies of Lovecraft’s own concept of an occult volume ascribed to the ‘mad Arab’ Abdul Alhazred, to which she contributed – as had Frayling – a piece about the Providence author. Published by Neville Spearman Ltd, The Necronomicon reflected the publisher’s customary eclectic taste for a range of off-beat topics, and Carter’s piece on Lovecraft’s visionary landscapes obviously suited the brief.²

Appreciating the preposterous

Frontispiece by Philippe Jullian

Nursery Rhymes. An essay
by V Sackville-West.
Illustrated by Philippe Jullian.
Michael Joseph, 1950 (1947).

“Coleridge had a proper appreciation of the preposterous, astounding, yet entirely acceptable propositions which go to make up the thaumaturgy of the nursery. No one lacking that appreciation is advised to read any further in this essay.”

p 7

Well, I’m one of those who, like Coleridge, appreciate the preposterous thaumaturgy of nursery rhymes, so Vita Sackville-West’s enthusiastic paddling in the shoreless pool of childhood lore naturally appealed to me. That she does it with humour yet without condescension was a bonus, and that there were unexpected delights hiding under various rocks she turns over satisfied my abiding curiosity.

Surprisingly, for what now counts as a period piece, she’s prepared to be critical of antiquarian ‘explanations’ concerning the origins of these rhymes and what they supposedly signified, but her mockery is gentle and she’s even prepared to admit to her own mistakes, as first appeared in an earlier limited edition.

The whole is embellished by Philippe Jullian’s whimsical drawings all printed in plum-coloured ink, their style very much conforming to contemporary adult attitudes regarding nursery lore – genteel and aloof but maybe not absolutely reflecting their historical origins.

“Africa is not fiction.”

WordPress Free Photo Library

Africa’s Tarnished Name
by Chinua Achebe.
Penguin Modern Classics 28. 2018 (2009)

Africa is not fiction. Africa is people, real people. Have you thought of that?

‘Africa Is People’ (1998)

Chinua Achebe is regarded as a giant not just of African but of world literature, yet it has taken me a while to read anything by him. Being an academic as well as a man of letters his is a legacy of factual writings as well as of fiction and so for me provides a legitimate way into his body of work.

This volume in Penguin’s Modern Classics is a selection of essays and speeches taken from a collection entitled The Education of a British-Protected Child, published in 2011, two years before his death. The four pieces range in date from 1989 to 2008, and I propose discussing them in chronological order rather than the order published here. This way I hope to get a sense of any common themes spread over a score of years as well as any changes of emphasis.

The apotheosis of artifice

Giambattista Piranesi, Carcere XIV (‘The Gothic Arch’)

The Narrative of Trajan’s Column
by Italo Calvino,
translated by Martin McLaughlin.
Penguin Great Ideas 115,
Penguin Classics 2020

Just the titles of so many of these pieces are mouthwateringly attractive — ‘The Museum of Wax Monsters’, ‘The Adventures of Three Clockmakers and Three Automata’, ‘The Sculptures and the Nomads’ — and their contents don’t disappoint either. Martin McLaughlin has done a great job on the translation as far as I can tell because the sentences feel newly minted, as though directly from the hand of the author to the reader.

Except there are clues that these are not recent writings: references are made to a time before the Iranian Revolution and to a few other events that locate them firmly to a time before the author’s premature death in 1985 — he was only in his 63rd year.

But it is Calvino’s gimlet observations, marshalling of details, and philosophical reflections that render his comments eternal and paradoxically contemporary, meaning that these dozen pieces will be for me a joy to revisit at some future date.

Living by ideas

A C Grayling: The Mystery of Things
Phoenix/Orion 2004

… so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies.
— King Lear

This thoroughly enjoyable as well as informative collection of over fifty essays and reviews by the philosopher A C Grayling (its title inspired by Shakespeare) perfectly illustrates both the wide range of his interests and his ability to write engagingly, in a style that neither talks down to his audience nor spares them his sometimes forthright views.

At the time of writing he is extremely active on social media decrying the disaster that is Brexit, taking British politicians to task over their wilful decisions and canvassing for a People’s Vote; but — even though you could argue this overshadows his day job — differing philosophies are actually at the heart of this make-or-break point in the UK’s history; and it’s important to distinguish between rational arguments and emotional responses, which of course is the job of the philosopher.