Posts Tagged ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge’
The Road to Foundation
As I’ve recounted here before, on August 1, 1941, Isaac Asimov was riding the subway to John W. Campbell’s office in New York when the history of science fiction changed forever. In his memoir In Memory Yet Green, Asimov, who was twenty-one at the time, recalls the moment at which he first conceived of what became the Foundation series:
On the way down I racked my brain for a story idea. Failing, I tried a device I sometimes used. I opened a book at random and then tried free association, beginning with whatever I saw. The book I had with me was a collection of the Gilbert and Sullivan plays. I opened it to Iolanthe—to the picture of the Fairy Queen throwing herself at the feet of Private Willis, the sentry. Thinking of sentries, I thought of soldiers, of military empires, of the Roman Empire—of the Galactic Empire—aha!
For reasons that I’ll discuss below, I’m reasonably sure that the illustration that Asimov describes is the one reproduced above, which was drawn by the lyricist W.S. Gilbert himself. And what strikes me the most about this anecdote now is the fact that Asimov looked at this particular picture, ignored the Fairy Queen entirely, and turned it into a series in which no women of any consequence would appear for years. To make a slightly facetious comparison, if I were a therapist giving Asimov the Thematic Apperception Test, in which the subject is asked to look at a picture and make up a story about it, this is the point at which I would sit up slightly in my chair.
Recently, it occurred to me to try to figure out which book Asimov was carrying on the train that day, if only because it’s interesting to dig into what a writer might have been reading at a given moment. The great model here is John Livingston Lowes’s The Road to Xanadu, which obsessively connects the imagery of “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” to the travel narratives that Samuel Coleridge was studying at the time. Asimov, it’s worth noting, was skeptical of Lowes’s approach:
I tried reading the book in my youth, but gave up. It could only interest another Coleridge scholar. Besides, I saw no point to it. Granted that the phrases already existed scattered through a dozen books, they existed for everybody. It was only Coleridge who thought of putting them together, with the necessary modifications, to form one of the great poems of the English language. Coleridge might not have been a hundred percent original but he was original enough to make the poem a work of genius.
But this kind of search can be diverting in itself, and it didn’t take me long to conclude that Asimov’s book was likely to have been Plays and Poems of W.S. Gilbert, which was published by Random House in 1932. As far as I can tell, it’s one of only two books available at the time that included both the lyrics to Iolanthe and the illustrations by Gilbert, and it would have been easy to find. (The other is a book titled Authentic Libretti of the Gilbert and Sullivan Operas, which was published a few years later to coincide with a tour by the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, and it doesn’t look like something that Asimov would have brought on the subway.)
The edition, as it happens, is available online for free, and it can be amusing to left through it while keeping the young Asimov in mind. This isn’t literary criticism, exactly, but a kind of scholarly reverie, and it’s valuable primarily for the chain of associations that it evokes. The book opens with a lengthy introduction by Deems Taylor, a music critic and occasional member of the Algonquin Round Table, and I’d like to think that Asimov would have seen aspects of himself in it. For example, here’s Taylor on Gilbert’s early years as a writer:
For a time, his writings, although voluminous, attracted no attention whatsoever. He tried everything—reporting, dramatic criticism, editorials, weekly news letters to provincial papers, political polemics, essays—all the forms of quotidian literature that flow from the pen of any young person who vaguely “wants to write” (a sentence that, appropriately, has no object). The results were financially negligible. Nor did he have the meagre satisfaction of knowing that there were those who were watching him, believing in him. Nobody was watching a young journalistic hack who was no different from scores of his fellows except that he combined a gift for saying cutting things with a complete inability to refrain from saying them.
This sounds a lot like Asimov in the days when he was trying to break into Astounding, and as I thought more about Gilbert and Sullivan themselves, who brought out the best in each other, I saw them for the first time as shadows of Asimov and Campbell in the thirties, of whose partnership the former once wrote: “Campbell and I, in those first three years of my writing career—the crucial and formative ones—were a symbiotic organism.”
But the section that intrigues me the most comes near the end of the introduction. Speaking fondly of the characters of HMS Pinafore, The Mikado and all the rest, Taylor writes:
As this gay, silly, endearing crew skip upon the stage, the sum of all that they say is always the same thing; and it is a romantic thing: That the light of pure reason casts grotesque shadows; that a world in which there is nothing but the letter of the law, and the logical conclusion, and the inevitable deduction, and the axiomatic fact, and the rational course of conduct, is, in the last account, a ridiculous one. Looking at their world, in which there is everything but the truth that lies beyond logic, we perceive that it is, in more ways than one, an impossible world.
It’s hard for me to read this now without reflecting that Asimov was just moments away, as he rode the train to Campbell’s office, from conceiving nothing less than “a world in which there is nothing but the letter of the law, and the logical conclusion, and the inevitable deduction, and the axiomatic fact, and the rational course of conduct,” which would end up dominating much of the rest of his life. And while I’m no expert on Gilbert and Sullivan, viewing the Foundation series through that lens seems like a promising approach. Asimov, as I’ve noted elsewhere, never seems to have been particularly interested in psychohistory, which was mostly Campbell’s invention, and he was more conscious of its limitations than many of its fans are. (In The End of Eternity, Asimov describes a similar group of scientists as a collection of “psychopaths.”) And what Taylor writes of these operettas applies just as well to many of the stories that they inspired: “The sky has cleared, the problems solve themselves, and everything has suddenly turned out all right. Every fundamental axiom of human motive and conduct has been outraged, and we are delighted.”
Quote of the Day
This power [of the poet], first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, control…reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgement ever awake and steady self-possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry.
Quote of the Day
Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense, at all events; just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house.
Quote of the Day
Genius cannot be lawless: for it is even this that constitutes genius—the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.
The real thing
I don’t think there’s anything better in this world than an icy bottle of Mexican Coke, made with real sugar, with a slice of lemon. My wife and I have recently taken to picking up a six-pack of it whenever we visit our local grocery store, and for the past few weeks, it’s been my afternoon treat—although you have to do it right. The lemon is essential, and the bottle needs to be as cold as possible, which means ten minutes or so in the freezer before I pop the cap. The other day, though, I put one in the freezer and promptly forgot about it for hours. When I finally retrieved it, anxious at the thought of losing something so precious, I found, to my surprise, that the Coke was still liquid, at least at first glance. As soon as I added the lemon, however, the entire bottle nucleated at once, transforming its contents before my eyes into something brown, slushy, and delicious. (I’m not the first person to observe this phenomenon, of course: apparently there are vending machines in Hong Kong that sell bottles of supercooled Coke, and you can read more about the science behind it here.)
And because this is how my mind works, and also because I wanted an excuse to talk about it on this blog, I was struck by how much this resembled the process in which an idea takes root in the brain. If you’re a writer, you’ve felt it before: the moment when the seed crystal of a single image or concept rockets through your imagination, altering everything it touches, and transforms a pool of unrelated thoughts into something crystalline and structured. I’ve spoken about this before in relation to my own work. When I was researching The Icon Thief, I started with the vague desire to write a novel about the art world, but it wasn’t until I saw a picture of Duchamp’s Étant Donnés that the rest locked into place: at once, the story had its central image, the engine that would drive the narrative all the way to its ending. The same was true of the Dyatlov Pass incident in City of Exiles and the Shambhala story in Eternal Empire. In each case, I immediately knew what I’d found, and within seconds, a shapeless and unformed web of impressions became a structure on which I could build something substantial.
But you need to be ready for it. Coke needs to be supercooled first before it can freeze in an instant, and a long period of preparation is equally necessary for an idea to take hold. I don’t think I would have been nearly as struck by Étant Donnés, at least not as the basis for a novel, if I hadn’t already saturated myself for weeks with books and articles on art. The ideas for the next two books had the ground prepared for them by their predecessor: a world of characters and potential relationships was there already, waiting to be catalyzed. Habit, as I’ve said before, is just a way of staying in practice—and of physically being at the keyboard—while you wait for inspiration to strike, and that’s as true of the search for ideas as for the writing process itself. Even if you don’t have a particular project in mind, it’s necessary to think as much as possible like a novelist as you go about your daily business: looking for connections, images, moments of behavior that might be incorporated into something more. This requires taking good notes, and also supercooling your mind into that state of receptivity without which even the best idea can settle briefly into place without triggering a larger reaction.
Of course, some ideas are like ice-nine; if you touch them even lightly, the reaction occurs instantaneously. It happened to Peter Benchley, walking along the beach, when an idea occurred to him that would change the course of popular entertainment forever: “What if a shark got territorial?” But Benchley had been thinking about sharks for a long time, and he was a professional writer—not to mention the son and grandson of writers who were famous in their own right. Similarly, Samuel Coleridge dreamed of Kubla Khan’s palace only after reading about it in Purchas his Pilgrimage, and there’s a good reason that the melody for “Yesterday” happened to drift into the dreaming mind of Paul McCartney and not some other young Liverpudian. The more we look at any case of “sudden” inspiration, the more it seems like the result of a long incubation, arising in a mind that has been prepared to receive it. The process can be a quiet, private one, unperceived even by the artist himself, as superficially dormant as that bottle of Coke in the freezer. But once you feel it, when you’re ready, you’ll know it’s the real thing.
How long does it take to write an epic poem?
I should not think of devoting less than twenty years to an epic poem. Ten to collect materials and warm my mind with universal science. I would be a tolerable Mathematician, I would thoroughly know Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Optics, and Astronomy, Botany, Metallurgy, Fossilism, Chemistry, Geology, Anatomy, Medicine—then the mind of man—then the minds of men—in all Travels, Voyages and Histories. So I would spend ten years—the next five to the composition of the poem—and the five last to the correction of it. So I would write haply not unhearing of that divine and nightly whispering Voice, which speaks to mighty minds of predestinated garlands, starry and unwithering.
John Keats on negative capability
At once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
—John Keats, in a letter to George and Thomas Keats
The best words in the best order
I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order;—poetry = the best words in the best order.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk
Quote of the Day
Never pursue literature as a trade.
On listening to dreams
About a decade ago, MTV and Rolling Stone published a list of the hundred greatest pop songs of all time, topped by “Yesterday” and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” What strikes me now about this list, aside from some dubious choices (such as “I Want It That Way,” which made the top ten), is the fact that while the list covers four decades of music history, the top two songs were recorded just over a month apart, in the late spring of 1965. Even more startlingly, both songs came to their composers in a dream: Paul McCartney dreamed the melody to “Yesterday” while staying with his girlfriend on Wimpole Street, while Keith Richards dreamed the guitar riff to “Satisfaction” in St. John’s Wood, getting up to play it into a tape recorder and immediately passing out again. The distance between St. John’s Wood and Wimpole Street, incidentally, is something like three miles. Which implies that something very interesting was happening in London that year.
Dreams naturally lend themselves to mystical interpretations. On Sunday, I posted two examples of the creative power of dreams: Friedrich August Kekulé’s discovery of the ring structure of benzene, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s composition of “Kubla Khan.” Both stories have inspired much speculation, serious or otherwise, about the larger meanings of such messages from the dreaming world. Thomas Pynchon, in Gravity’s Rainbow, speculates that Kekulé’s dream might have been sent to him by a bureaucracy on the Other Side (“So that the right material may find its way to the right dreamer, everything involved must be exactly in place in the pattern”), while Jorge Luis Borges, noting that Kublai Khan’s palace was also inspired by a vision in a dream, something that Coleridge couldn’t possibly have known, has an even more striking hypothesis:
The first dream added a palace to reality; the second, which occurred five centuries later, a poem (or the beginning of a poem) suggested by the palace; the similarities of the dreams hints of a plan; the enormous length of time involved reveals a superhuman executor. To speculate on the intentions of that immortal or long-lived being would be as foolish as it is fruitless, but it is legitimate to suspect that he has not yet achieved his goal. In 1691, Father Gerbillon of the Society of Jesus confirmed that ruins were all that was left of Kublai Khan’s palace; of the poem, we know that barely fifty lines were salvaged. Such facts raise the possibility that this series of dreams and works has not yet ended.
Turning to other major works of art, two of the three great canonical works of horror, Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, appear to have had their origins in dreams. (The third is Dracula, which stands apart as the most left-brained of horror novels, built on a substantial foundation of diligent work and research.) According to interviews, Francis Ford Coppola’s upcoming movie Twixt Now and Sunrise was also inspired by a nightmare. Finally, to compare small things with great, some of the elements in my novelette “Kawataro” were rooted in dream imagery. Which shouldn’t blind us to the fact, of course, that there’s nothing more boring than hearing someone else’s dream—at least until the rational brain has done the hard work of editing and refining the material.
The most useful advice on the relationship between dreams and art is still that given by Kekulé: “But let us beware of publishing our dreams till they have been tested by waking understanding.” McCartney dreamed the melody to “Yesterday,” but obsessively tinkered with it for weeks afterward, much to the annoyance of his bandmates. Coleridge, contrary to his own account of the poem’s creation, seems to have carefully revised “Kubla Khan.” Stevenson burned the original draft of Jekyll and Hyde, rewriting it entirely, and the result is one of the most ingeniously structured novels in any genre. In the end, as Paul Valéry points out, the creative process requires both halves of the artist’s personality: “The one makes up combinations; the other chooses, recognizes what he wishes and what is important to him in the mass of the things which the former has imparted to him.” Which only reminds us that if our dreams are sometimes messages, art is the province of the waking mind.
“A person on business from Porlock”
In the summer of the year 1797, the author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas’s Pilgrimage: “Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.” The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan; Or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment”
Books for Christmas?
First off, I don’t see how anybody can fail to love this kid, although apparently this video has generated more than a few negative comments on YouTube:
Personally, I love getting books for Christmas. And while yesterday’s post was about potential gifts for the writer in your life, today I’m going to be talking about a few personal favorites—a handful of rare or out of print books that might make a more unusual present for a discerning writer (or reader). Some are a bit hard to find these days, but I can’t imagine my own library without them:
1. The Annotated Sherlock Holmes by William S. Baring-Gould. Leslie Klinger’s more recent edition is a fine piece of work, but for sheer reading bliss, it doesn’t hold a candle to Baring-Gould’s original version, which, as far as I’m concerned, is the best book in the world. While Klinger tries to be objective, Baring-Gould cheerfully favors his own theories about the identity of Watson’s wives, the location of Watson’s mysterious wound, and what, exactly, Holmes was doing during the Great Hiatus. The result is a monumental work that has probably given me more pleasure, over the years, than any other single book.
2. Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics by R.H. Blyth. If I could own only five books, this strange but wonderful little volume would be among them. It’s ridiculously hard to find—there’s one used paperback copy available on Amazon for $25, which is the lowest price that I’ve seen in a while, and hardcover copies tend to run much more than that—but if you can track it down, it’s more than worth it. As well as a highly opinionated introduction to Zen, it’s one of the most idiosyncratic multicultural anthologies around, with much valuable poetry, both Eastern and Western, that I’ve never seen anywhere else. I don’t agree with everything that Blyth says—notably his low opinion of Coleridge—but this is still the closest thing that I’ve ever found, between book covers, to my own personal philosophy.
3. The Road to Xanadu by John Livingston Lowes. Speaking of Coleridge, this obsessive look at the composition of “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is an unparalleled look at a writer’s creative process, as well as a compellingly odd book in its own right. Lowes begins by studying the scribbled quotations in Coleridge’s notebooks, and by tracing the quotes back to their original sources, he attempts to reconstruct the process by which the two great poems took shape, idea by idea, with one image leading to another. It’s speculative, eccentric, and probably unacceptable by current scholarly standards, but also riveting, with a lot of fascinating incidental material along the way. The footnotes alone are worth the price of a good used copy. (The novelist Toby Litt is particularly eloquent in his praise of this book, which you can read in an article here.)
4. World Tales by Idries Shah. Arguably the best book of folklore and fairy tales ever published, with a consistently entertaining and surprising selection of stories from throughout the world, complemented by Shah’s insightful thoughts on their origins and variants. You can buy a no-frills paperback on Amazon, but for the full experience, you’re better off tracking down a used hardcover copy of the illustrated edition, which features fantastic artwork by Brian Froud, Alan Lee, and other legendary artists. (Some of the illustrations might be a little scary, or smutty, for kids, but that’s part of the fun.)
5. The Limits of Art by Huntington Cairns. The fact that this remarkable anthology is out of print is a crime: it should be in every school and home library in the world. The concept is a simple one: it’s a collection consisting solely of works of prose and poetry that have been deemed, by one major critic or another, the best of their kind. Cairns reproduces the critic’s evaluation along with each passage—in translation and in its original language—and the result is like browsing through a compendium of the best that the human race can offer: the most famous passages of Shakespeare, Dante, and the rest, of course, but also a lot of welcome surprises. It’s hard to read even a few pages without being immediately humbled, and inspired.
One last thing: if Google would make copies of these books, especially 3 and 4, readily available online, it would single-handedly justify its digital bookstore’s existence. Google eBooks has already made it possible for me to read the books of George Saintsbury, most of which are out of print, and it needs to do the same for Blyth and Lowe. Is anyone in Mountain View listening?
Quote of the Day
Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense…just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Alec Nevala-Lee 