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FYP Texts
by Dr. Thomas Curran
DO YOU KNOW MARK TWAIN’S definition of a classic? “A book which everyone wants to have read—but nobody wants to read.”
I am absolutely obsessed with a weekly (English) Guardian column entitled: “Books that made me” which has been running since September 2017—so, of course, all the past columns are online. I have become so obsessed (actually: addicted) with this regular Guardian feature that—even during the lock-downs—I had to try to limit myself to the one new column each week, and, only if I had dealt with the most pressing of my duties, could I allow myself to peek at a past exemplar—but, then strictly, only one additional column a week.
The questions that are put to contemporary and living authors in this Guardian feature is which book they are most “ashamed not to have read”—sometimes this also appears in the form of: “The book I couldn’t finish?” From my informal poll of over half the published columns, I have ascertained that James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is by far and away that work of literature that Guardian authors have either never managed to begin or then to finish. Moby-Dick is a distinct second (“leave that whale alone”), but Melville is not mentioned nearly as often by the penitent sinners. If there were ever a use for Mark Twain’s dictum, it must be here.
In the same vein, W.H. Auden apparently gave a lecture on Cervantes’ Don Quixote in which he informed his audience that he had never actually managed to finish this great (and massive) early novel, and he doubted if there might be anyone in the audience who had finished it either.
The Guardian authors tend to be a bit more respectful of Ulysses than of Moby-Dick (1851). The general tone for Herman Melville is this: the authors hope that Captain Ahab finally completes his encounter with the whale, because along the way the readers have become entirely wearied by the Captain’s tedious obsession.
This January (2021) there was a slight flurry of James Joyce celebration because the eminent author died in January 80 years ago (January 13, 1941). James Joyce festivities are bound to ramp up soonish, since in 2022, we shall be commemorating 100 years since the publication of two of the most famous/notorious/admired/over-hyped statements—take your pick—of “Modernism” in the English language, viz. James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s epic poem
A marvellous FYP initiative for this Zoom/COVID academic year has been the nightly performance of “Read Now!” in which the subject of the next morning’s lecture is introduced by a reading aloud from the assigned text. On Sunday evening, March 7th, two of the chief architects of “Read Now!” (FYP’s Susan Dodd and Neil Robertson) were engaged in a Zoom recitation of the entirety of Eliot’s epic The Waste Land—a very moving and special treat for all involved. The Waste Land—both first printed in 1922.
There is something quite instructive in the way these two poems were received by another colossus of English-language Modernism, Virginia Woolf—whom we are now reading in the Foundation Year Program, with the same regularity as Eliot’s (mostly admired) masterpiece. This academic year (2020-21) Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway (1925) is the required reading. There is critical opinion that features of Woolf’s 1925 novel (first mentioned in Woolf’s diary in August 1922) contain evidence of the putative influence of Eliot’s earlier completed monumental poem.
The Woolfs (Virginia and Leonard) were profoundly charmed by Eliot: they published Eliot’s poetry (1919), found an apartment for him, and they were engaged in setting up a patronage fund to support Eliot’s poetic ambitions. But most remarkably, Virginia Woolf took a direct hand in preparing the publication of The Waste Land—since the initial typesetting had been so incompetent. The early exposure to the then still unpublished The Waste Land was positive: Virginia Woolf recorded that Eliot read his poem to them: “He sang it & chanted it [&] rhythmed it. It has great beauty & force of phrase: symmetry; & tensity.”
Presumably Virginia Woolf has also summarized the reaction of many of us in our first encounters with the poem: “What connects it together, I’m not so sure…” That was in June of 1922; in that October, she defended Eliot in a letter: “I have only the sound of it in my ears, when he read it aloud; and have not yet tackled the sense. But I like the sound.”*
How many scores of FYP students might Virginia Woolf be addressing with these accounts of her initial responses to Eliot’s poetic collage?
And for many (secret) Guardian authors might Virginia Woolf be speaking concerning the novel Ulysses—when, in a letter she reported to the famous Lytton Strachey: “Never did I read such tosh.” Her diary (August 16th, 1922)—not really meant for “social media” consumption—documents Woolf’s being “puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples”—a tone not altogether divorced from aspects of Ulysses itself. So, at least in that way, novelist and critic can be firmly united.
This negative judgment by Woolf (of an “underbred book”) is rendered despite the fact that “Tom, great Tom, thinks this [Ulysses] on a par with War & Peace!” It is with unbearable sadness that one learns this truly stellar friendship was, in its turn, also to suffer a massive falling out in early 1928. In February, Woolf herself would be equally “puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned” by the formerly so highly esteemed companion. Apparently on February 6, after Thomas Stearns Eliot announced that he had become an Anglo-Catholic, the erstwhile “Tom, great Tom”—became now “poor dear Tom Eliot who may be called dead to us all from this day forward.” King’s Chapel goers, beware!
REMEMBERING KING’S
By John MacKay BA’71
MEMORIES COME IN TORRENTS now, often flooding in with a potency and richness I didn’t know were possible when I was young. It’s one of the curious states of being that aging brings.
After many years away, I’m once again in Halifax, where my daily walks take me across the King’s Quad, quiet now in these unusual times. Often, for a minute or two, I stop and take in the beauty of this college I have always loved.
In the wash of memory, it was just moments ago that I bolted out the doors of Radical Bay late for class, that I sat aimlessly with fellow students on the A&A building stairs and that I lived, here at King’s, that sense of vibrant expectation that belongs exclusively to those years of our lives.
Places, like people, have power and energy and in many ways, King’s formed me; it was here, directing plays in the King’s Theatre, that I discovered the talent that would become my first career. It was here that I made heartful friendships, some of which are with me still. I fell in love here, broke my heart here, experienced here the parts of myself that would become my cherished gifts and my life-long struggles.
Of course, there’s a point to what I’m writing and excuse me if I’ve been a touch slow getting to it. I want to evoke in you, today, a reminder of what King’s continues to evoke in all of us who have been here. I want King’s to survive, I want King’s to prosper. I want the King’s experience to be here, waiting for the many, many more of us yet to come.
To that end, I’m leaving King’s a gift in my will. It won’t build a building or bankroll a new academic program, believe me, but it’s something, and doing so has great meaning for me. What I leave in my will is part of my legacy, a mark of who and what have really mattered to me in my life.
Perhaps, like me, you’ve given to King’s occasionally over the years. Or maybe you’ve never been in a position to give, though King’s has always been in your heart. Well, here it is, your last chance, so to speak, to support this college you love. You can set it up now and you can personalize it; you can leave a gift that lets the college use the money where they most need it at the time, you can earmark it for scholarships or you can work out something that has personal meaning for you. The gift I’m leaving, for example, will go towards the academic program that, at the time, is cutting edge and full of promise for the university, the program that may help shape King’s future.
Whether you remember your years here as the flat-out happiest of your life, or, as I do, the years that brought you to life in unexpected ways, we all have ownership of the University of King’s College and, to one extent or another, we’re indebted. Remember King’s and all it means to you in your will.
