The Faerie Queene

I was reading David Frum's Blog on NRO today about his attempt to listen to an audio book reading of James Joyce's Ulysses. Aha, famous writer, I have read Ulysses, the whole thing. Once. The trick is to read it really fast and resist the urge to nod off. When you do that you get the whole picture, which is this: it's just one big Irish joke. And the joke is on the solemn denizens of University English faculties and newspaper culture pages who don't want anybody to know they don't understand a word of it. James Joyce wasn't the only Irish writer to pull the literary world's collective leg.
His secretary, confidante and successor, took the cue and played the same game...only better. Who could be more hilarious than Samuel Beckett? "...There's this man who comes every week. ...He gives me money and takes away the pages.,' is how he begins his trilogy, apparently. "Yet I don't work for money. For what then? I don't know. The truth is I don't know much. For example my mother's death. Was she already dead when I came? Or did she only die later? I mean enough to bury." There's an Irish way of joking about things that can't be joked about, apparently. The Greeks saw paradoxes and made philosophies, or wrote plays about human fate and brutality. James Joyce saw bathroom humour: "When I makes tea I make tea and when I makes water I make water. But I don't use the same pot." Apparently.
Flann O'Brien aka Myles na Gopaleen wrote a send-up of Ulysses called "The Dalkey Archive," but I like "The Third Policeman" much better, maybe because I have always been concerned about stolen bicycles. Throw in the strangest haunted house ever imagined and that illogical Irish logic and you have a book unlike any other.
"What is your attitude to the high saddle?" inquired Gilhaney.
"Questions are like the knocks of beggermen, and should not be minded," replied the Sergeant, but I do not mind telling you that the high saddle is alright if you have a brass fork."
"A high saddle is a power for the hills," said Gilhaney."
I see that audio books have been made of both Molloy and The Third Policeman and I think either of them would be great to listen to on a long car trip.
I haven't heard these editions, but I do have Edmund Spenser's "Faerie Queene" on a Naxos audio book which I heartily recommend to David Frum. Couched in what was probably archaic English even when it was written this is a poem meant to be absorbed through the aural apparatus. Somehow a poem takes different pathways into consciousness when it is heard. I have it on my iPod and am always delighted when a verse wedges itself between Helen Humes and David Oistrakh. Spenser fits right in. Yes, I know he was anti Catholic and an oppressor of ireland but it's still one of the greatest poems ever composed. What amazes me about this work is that while Spenser was contemporary with Shakespeare he couldn't be more different. While Shakespeare looks ahead to the psychology of the inner man, Spenser is looking backward at the great literary tradition of Chaucer and Dante, of mythic lore and the problem of knowing good from evil. At first I wasn't especially impressed with the adenoidal voice of reader John Moffatt, but the more I hear this recording the more I like it. I have always loved this poem, the last of the great medieval allegories. It's Homeric in scale with lines as pungent as any found in the Iliad. I've memorized a few verses and I like to read it out loud so I had my own preconceptions of how it should sound. But reciting a few lines is a vastly different enterprise than telling the whole thing. The beauty of a poem of this stature is that you can focus on a verse or two from anywhere in the poem and then gradually build up an understanding of the whole. Poetry isn't linear. Hearing Moffatt's magesterial sonorities I realize why poetry doesn't really flourish in a print oriented culture. Without the sound of the language ringing down the depths of one's soul there is no poetry. Spenser was the last great master of the ancient Saxon device of alliteration.
I have some more recent poets loaded onto the iPod: eecummings, Robert Frost, W.H. Auden, T.S.Eliot read by the poets themselves. Actually, I quickly tired of cummings and dumped him, and I more often than not hit the skip arrow when Robert Frost comes on. The most interesting of them is T.S. Eliot and comparisons can be made between Spenser's poetry and his. Eliot knew about music and yearned for the epic scale, medieval allegory, but he had to struggle with the train wreck of 20th Century art. So he wrote "...in my beginning is my end..," "...like a patient etherized upon a table...oh, do not ask what is it, let us go and pay our visit." One can admire the sunset poetry of expiring western poetry but enjoyment isn't part of the equation. Perhaps Spenser was right to look to the myth of chivalry for poetic material. Maybe he knew already that Shakespeares's inner man was doomed.