Continuing on this work by Christopher Caudwell:
Scenes and Actions: Unpublished Manuscripts, selected, edited, and introduced by Jean Duparc and David Margolies. London: New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986.
Preface
Introduction
Selected Bibliography
from The Wisdom of Gautama
from Heaviside
Short stories
from The Rock
Friends
The Mother Superior
Lodgings for the Night
The Bully
Thomson
from The Island
The Play
A Bit in the Papers
The Piston
Homage to Calderon
The Bank
The Device
from ‘Verse and Mathematics’
Heredity and Development
Letters
While I have owned this book for a couple decades or more, I never actually read it through. Verse and Mathematics was the draft of what was honed to his published landmark book Illusion and Reality. The extract published here is interesting and I may make it the subject of another blog post. "Heredity and Development: A Study of Bourgeois Biology" was not included in Caudwell's Studies in a Dying Culture, though it belongs there. The letters outline Caudwell's aesthetic principles and his evaluation of his own fiction, as well as details leading up to his fatal participation fighting fascism in Spain.
The introduction places all this in context, also presenting the following poems in whole or part:
The balance of the book contains selections from Caudwell's hitherto unpublished fiction. Having read none of his published fiction either, though I knew of it, I experienced this facet of Caudwell for the first time. I turned to the fiction after perusing the rest of the book, not in order of the items presented. After reading the letters, I began with Caudwell's non-naturalistic fiction--the excerpt from the speculative fiction story "Heaviside" and the stories from "The Island," which Caudwell termed Kafkaesque, which are in any case extrapolations of ideas, situations, and institutions. This is an unfamiliar dimension of Caudwell for me and adds to understanding his originality and sensibility. The stories from The Rock are character studies. At various times in reading these pieces my attention flagged, but that may just have been an effect of my state of mind at the moment and not the prose itself. While Caudwell criticized his own fiction, as does the book's introduction, Caudwell's style as well as his probing of human character are noteworthy.
It was fortunate that the Stalinists had no idea of what Caudwell was up to or they would have squashed him like they tried to squash Jack Lindsay, an original polymath from Australia who was also a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Caudwell indulged in formulaic political judgments in his analyses, but retained a freshness and originality in his approach.
Scenes and Actions: Unpublished Manuscripts, selected, edited, and introduced by Jean Duparc and David Margolies. London: New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986.
Preface
Introduction
Selected Bibliography
from The Wisdom of Gautama
from Heaviside
Short stories
from The Rock
Friends
The Mother Superior
Lodgings for the Night
The Bully
Thomson
from The Island
The Play
A Bit in the Papers
The Piston
Homage to Calderon
The Bank
The Device
from ‘Verse and Mathematics’
Heredity and Development
Letters
While I have owned this book for a couple decades or more, I never actually read it through. Verse and Mathematics was the draft of what was honed to his published landmark book Illusion and Reality. The extract published here is interesting and I may make it the subject of another blog post. "Heredity and Development: A Study of Bourgeois Biology" was not included in Caudwell's Studies in a Dying Culture, though it belongs there. The letters outline Caudwell's aesthetic principles and his evaluation of his own fiction, as well as details leading up to his fatal participation fighting fascism in Spain.
The introduction places all this in context, also presenting the following poems in whole or part:
The SurvivalThe UnspeakablesIn Memoriam [of T.E. Lawrence]Artic ExpeditionSoul's Progress [excerpt]Smoke and DiamondThe Art of Dying[untitled fragment]The ObjectHeil Baldwin!
Caudwell’s
Collected Poems were published by Carnacet Press in 1986.
The balance of the book contains selections from Caudwell's hitherto unpublished fiction. Having read none of his published fiction either, though I knew of it, I experienced this facet of Caudwell for the first time. I turned to the fiction after perusing the rest of the book, not in order of the items presented. After reading the letters, I began with Caudwell's non-naturalistic fiction--the excerpt from the speculative fiction story "Heaviside" and the stories from "The Island," which Caudwell termed Kafkaesque, which are in any case extrapolations of ideas, situations, and institutions. This is an unfamiliar dimension of Caudwell for me and adds to understanding his originality and sensibility. The stories from The Rock are character studies. At various times in reading these pieces my attention flagged, but that may just have been an effect of my state of mind at the moment and not the prose itself. While Caudwell criticized his own fiction, as does the book's introduction, Caudwell's style as well as his probing of human character are noteworthy.
It was fortunate that the Stalinists had no idea of what Caudwell was up to or they would have squashed him like they tried to squash Jack Lindsay, an original polymath from Australia who was also a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Caudwell indulged in formulaic political judgments in his analyses, but retained a freshness and originality in his approach.
No comments:
Post a Comment