Reply to Stu

This morning I received in the post a copy of A.E.Housman's A Shropshire Lad from my best friend Stu. The train of associations it triggered were involuntary; attempting to write them down however is not.

"The laws of remembering affected the very scale of the work. The reason was that, while an event experienced is finally closed, at least in the one sphere of experience, an event remembered is limitless, being simply a key to all that came before & all that came after it."

- Walter Benjamin, talking about A la recherche du temps perdu in Picturing Proust, 1 - which quote I found in a book of Benjamin that Stu gave me.


"Horatio: 'Twere to consider too curiously to consider so."

- Horatio trying to rein in Hamlet's more baroque flights of reasoning in the Gravedigger's scene - Hamlet 5.1.199


Stu ! Thanks so much for A Shropshire Lad, which arrived safely this morning. Seeing the title made me think of a funny moment in the film of A Room With A View; I don't know whether it is in the novel or not. The vicar Mr. Beebe & Freddy - who is the younger brother of Lucy Honeychurch, the central character - have gone to visit the Emersons who have just moved into the village where they live. As the Emersons are in the process of moving in to their cottage, there are open boxes of their possessions lying around, including boxes of books. Evidently curious, Mr. Beebe picks up a book on top of one of the boxes to see what it is; he makes a face & says to himself:

"A Shropshire Lad ? Never heard of it !"

That memory is going to occur to me I would say whenever the title A Shropshire Lad comes up. Since I've never read it, it's probably one of my strongest associations with that title, along with the fact that Orwell wrote about it in his essays somewhere.

But why do I know A Room With A View so well, so that I can quote or refer in my mind to this scene & many others ? Because it was one of my Mum's favourite films. She had a tape of the soundtrack (which is Puccini) & played it endlessly. I think she strongly identified with Lucy Honeychurch. Both were given to playing Beethoven on the piano in an impassioned manner; both loved Italy, & Italian Renaissance Art, & Italian culture generally; though whether my Father figured in my Mum's mind as Cecil Vyse (the wrong bloke) or George Emerson (the right bloke) is more than I can say. Mum went to Florence once, both pursuing her own interests, & to some extent I think to follow in the footsteps of Lucy Honeychurch, & revel in the location of the 1st part of the film. She loved E.M.Forster generally (as I do), books & film adaptations.* One thing she brought back from Florence, specifically from the Uffizi, which I remember vividly was a beautiful print of an Annunciation by Fra Angelico. It hung on the wall at Heworth Road; this one: 

As I continue tracing the links, Simon Callow plays Mr. Beebe, & a very young Rupert Graves plays Freddy. Later, Rupert Graves would be in Louis Malles' Damage, so there is a connection to Louis Malle, & at the moment he is playing Lestrade in the new tv lateral adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Sherlock. I need hardly dilate on the significance of Sherlock Holmes for me.

I could trace many other links & ramifications which are real but would be forced & artificial. Described above are the vital networks in my mind set a-glowing by the receipt of this book. It is a synecdochical example of what odd connections there are in one's mind; & perhaps also of how almost anything could & an extraordinarily diverse range of things do lead back by association to whatever is preoccupying me at a given moment. From A Shropshire Lad to my Mum is a mere 2 jumps via A Room With A View, the work of a second.

It is impossible to explain all of these links one might have fully, because the mind in its real action works too fast for words, which are clumsy & halting by comparison. (But we can only work with the tools we have: & in their defence words can, when well deployed, be incisive & definite.) While I was describing one set of links, as I have here, my mind was not idle & others have occurred to me, sparked by other initial stimuli, on other topics. One thing I can do though to try & get at how the mind works is use synecdoche: this examined fragment of my mind's action standing for its more complex & elusive reality.


* & when I look up E.M.Forster on wikipedia, what do I find ? The article is illustrated by a portrait of him by Dora Carrington ! It goes on & on & on ........