Frank pays tribute to one of the great, and quite bonkers, prose stylists…
If Charles Montagu Doughty (1843-1926) is remembered at all today, it is as the author of Travels In Arabia Deserta, a classic account of his wanderings in northern Arabia, published in 1888. One hesitates to call it influential, for it is written in a highly-wrought, archaic, often quite bonkers style that is probably inimitable. The Observer extolled it thus: “Charles Montagu Doughty was one of the great men of our day, the author of a unique prose masterpiece. For many readers it is a book so majestic, so vital, of such incomparable beauty of thought, of observation, and of diction as to occupy a place apart among their most cherished literary possessions”.
Travels In Arabia Deserta has been more or less constantly in print since T E Lawrence enthused about it in the 1920s – unlike Doughty’s later works, mad epics written in verse so chunky and chewy and Anglo Saxon they make virtually anything else read like pointyhead management-guff.
The titles include The Dawn In Britain (Volume One of which has been recently reissued, I discover with glee), Adam Cast Forth, The Titans, and Mansoul, Or The Riddle Of The World. For your edification and enlightenment, I have chosen some of my favourite lines and phrases from Book One of the last-named. All quotations are [sic] throughout, by the way, checked and re-checked.
Sun-stricken inhuman wasteful ground
I heard, hoarse murmuring tumult as of sea
Deeps long-maned wave-rows, beating boisterous;
And rushing billows, like to raging scour
Of ravening wolves; wide whelming on sea-cliffs.
And creaking-winged mews’ clamour, cleping loud,
O’er long fore-shoreOf human souls such multitude He comprised;
As clustered blebs, some greater and some less;
We see oft in wind-driven floc of foam,
In day of storm, on some tempestuous strand.I slumbered till a turtles’ gentle flock,
… folding from flight,
Their rattling wings; lighted on vermeil feet;
Jetting, with mincing pace, their iris necks;
With crooling throat-bole; voice of peace and restGurgles from hid grot
Broods o’er these thymy eyots drowsy hum
They sound their shrill small clarions
And hurl by booming dors, gross bee-fly kinDawns shrill medleyed babble of early birds ;
And Summers breath, in the bleak poplar leaves.Whence fuming incense doth embalm his brain
Hewed as we sea-shells see within appear.
Whereon were laced, with curious device
Of antique art, in purple leathern work ;
Buskins, whose shining knops were Albans gold.These unhewn sunless labyrinthine crypts
The temple-maiden had aforetime scruzed,
Nepenthe and clary and molyA croc of nard, set on an aumbry shelf
Neath crumpled boughs, aye dripping baleful mist!
On sleep-compelling canker-worts beneath,
Black hellebore and rank-smelling deadly dwale
And bryony, and other more, I know not well ;
The Furies’ garden-knots ; whose snaky entrailed
Locks, wrapped about my feeble knees and feet.
‘A croc of nard’! Great title for a novel…
Doughty is extraordinary. Is The Dawn in Britain the great English epic (Milton having messed up his attempt at writing same)? – Maybe not, but it has its moments. Here, to reassure readers that Frank is not making all of this up, are the ancient Britons, preparing for war from The Dawn in Britain, Book XI:
The glades reek, in fair Kent, of Andred Forest;
Whose broad shaws sound, with travaillous multitude,
Hewers of oaks. Many, in dripping delves,
Burrow, and see no sun. Are burners, some,
Of coal; some couch crude ores, of iron, with lime.
And there, on hundred stithies, loudly beat,
By soughing bellows, many famous smiths.
They weld red-hot iron bars, they turn with tongs;
And smite, again! with valiant cunning hands.
Blades of blue steel they labour, long broad-swords,
And cast, in water-troughs, out, heads of spears.
And oft those call on Brigit! whilst they sweat.
Dover does or did keep Arabia Deserta in print; I once had both volumes of that edition. I remember that it was the chief reading matter of the narrator in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. The American critic Guy Davenport thought well of Doughty, also, or perhaps just found his principles interesting.
Philip’s contribution makes me think that there should be an anthology of smithy, or anyway metallurgical, writing, starting with the Iliad and proceeding through Chaucer, Smollett, Dickens, and Longfellow on. I fear that a good deal of the 20th Century work would come from the Russian school of socialist realism.
David Jones attempted a great British epic with The Anathemata I believe, but as far as I got in it, I did not think it promsing.