Double-Distilled Melancholia

James Cousins may be a poet and playwright rather than a fiction writer, but he's a fantastic letter writer and letters are most certainly prose. Maybe we could do something with letter-writing as a genre? That might be a good way to include cool manuscript material and show what terrible penmanship most of these crazy people had. I'm sure we have other letters like this one that uses such vivid and fantastic imagery to describe the process of inspiration and creation.

Letter from James Henry Cousins to ? 4.27.1899:

• “Did not I tell you I’d go raving mad after the (2) ecstasy of that ramble. I promptly developed a fit of thoroughbred double-distilled melancholia! This is dear mother nature’s usual plan of making me pay up for excess of enjoyment; but, like laughing, it’s nothing when one’s accustomed to it. And it is usually in such periods of gloom that some idea gets into my cranium, like the pain of sand in the oyster, around which the succulent bivalve casts a garb of pulp that only becomes a pearl to shine on my lady’s brow." (1-2)

• "Ah! how happy this poor old world would be if only people followed a star; a real, substantial, honest star, instead of the wills-o’-the-wisp that are so plentiful! That star has got into my imagination: I am still following it: I hope I (and the person who glorified its shining by (4) an apt thought) may find like the shepherd’s of old, if not the young child, at least the spirit of purity, truth, and wisdom which he came to show forth." (3-4)

• "I want to scale Killiney on Saturday, if weather permits. You know the way: will you act as my 'guide, philosopher, and friend'—chum, purely platinum!" (4)

Bowen's Christmas card

This passage from Bowen's short essay "The Light in the Dark" describes her ideal Christmas card, which to me is striking in its strange combination of nostalgia and forboding. Although its image of a woodman's cottage is wholly at odds with the Big House with which we associate her, Bowen's description nonetheless captures the same haunting loneliness that I associate with The Last September--despite its idealism and nostalgia, her picture nonetheless seems to see the cottage as a symbol of the isolation towards which that other, bigger world always moves.

I'm not entirely sure where this could be included--it's from a lovely gift edition of the essay--but if we do something about Christmas, or Anglo-Irish views of the "simple life," or simply something about the imagination, it could be useful.

• "Each of us, probably, has in mind one ideal and absolute of the Christmas card, as received in childhood. My own taste (date around 1910) is this—I behold a cottage gable in deep, dusky silhouette against an inspiring gleam of sunset, one window lit; smoke goes up from the chimney. To this, a woodman returning, footprint by footprint, across the foreground snow; all around stretch white wastes, the bare trees are dark. How it glows and glows through that one small window—core of the world, magnet to man, the home! Towards it, the coach lurches among the drifts, the cravatted rider whips up his horse, the red-mittened children drag their laden sledge, the spotted dog lollops, the cat leads her train of kittens, the crinolined lady picks her delicate way. All Christmas-card-land creatures have the same destination. My woodman’s cottage, crouched in smouldering evening, remains for me forever the symbol-scene—no better picture, before or since, has so fixed for me that light in the falling dark; or, by contrast, the elemental and daunting loneliness of Elsewhere. That sense of the Elsewhere, and of those straying in it, can but encircle Christmas, if one has any heart."