The Secret Library – Page 42 – Interesting Literature

Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: Notes Towards an Analysis

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses Rainer Maria Rilke’s innovative novel

Published in 1910, Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is a rather experimental novel: a more or less plotless, meandering account of one man’s everyday experiences in Paris in the early twentieth century, interspersed with personal memories and reveries, which are often highly mysterious or only partly explained. The title The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge says it all: this is no novel in the conventional sense but rather fictionalised ‘notebooks’, diary entries, or journal fragments from one of the most innovative poets of the early twentieth century.

T. E. Hulme’s War Poem: ‘Trenches: St Eloi’

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle celebrates the poet and thinker who died 100 years ago this week

On 28 September 1917, T. E. Hulme was killed in action in Oostduinkerke in Flanders. Hulme’s death, as Robert Ferguson records in his biography, The Short Sharp Life of T. E. Hulme, was particularly brutal: he suffered a direct hit from a large shell which literally blew him to pieces. What was left of him was buried in West-Vlaanderen, Belgium where he is described in the war graves records as simply ‘one of the war poets’.

In some ways, this is a decidedly inapt description of Hulme. His entire poetic output was slim – including verse fragments it stretches to no more than 20 pages – and he wrote all of his poetry in the years preceding the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. But the poems he did write helped to forge a new form and style for English poetry.

T. E. Hulme was a larger-than-life figure in virtually every way. Standing at over six feet tall, with a ruddy complexion, a willingness to argue with anyone (or, indeed,

Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes: An Analysis of Nostalgia

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses Alain-Fournier’s curious novel about lost innocence

Published in 1913, The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes) (Penguin Classics) is the one novel by Henri Alban-Fournier, otherwise known as Alain-Fournier (the hyphen was supposedly left in to differentiate him from a racing driver of the same name). The English novelist John Fowles called this novel ‘the greatest novel of adolescence in European literature’; it is the one book carried around America by the protagonist of Jack Kerouac’s cult classic On the Road (1957), and it possibly even inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s eventual title for The Great Gatsby (1925). Alain-Fournier spent some time in England in 1905, working for a wallpaper factory in west London (which may go a little way towards explaining his interest in houses and habitation in this novel). He died in action in the first few weeks of the First World War, in 1914. Le Grand Meaulnes has been popular with French and English readers for a century, but has received relatively little critical analysis. In some ways a coming of age novel, it combines fairy-tale elements with the realities of France in the early twentieth century.

The double title of the novel as it comes to us points up the difficulty of translating its original title, which refers to the larger-than-life, charismatic youth, Augustin Meaulnes, who arrives at the school where the book’s narrator, the fifteen-year-old François Seurel, lives with his parents (who are both teachers).

Reverend Spooner, Father of the Spoonerism

In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle delves into the life of the man immortalised by the spoonerism

Archibald Spooner (1844-1930) was a physically striking man. An albino with pink skin and white hair, he became affectionately known as the Child by students at New College, the Oxford college of which Spooner became warden in 1903. (His wife Frances became known as the Madonna, hence their inevitable collective nickname of Madonna and Child.)

George du Maurier’s Trilby: A Victorian Phenomenon

In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle doffs his hat to a half-forgotten Victorian sensation

Here’s a question for you: what was the biggest-selling novel of the Victorian era? And who wrote it – Dickens perhaps? George Eliot? Robert Louis Stevenson? It was none of these, though they all enjoyed huge sales. Instead, the accolade arguably goes to a man who was principally known, not as a novelist at all, but as a cartoonist. (I say ‘arguably’ because reliable sales figures for nineteenth-century books are not always easy to find.)

The cartoonist’s name was George du Maurier and the novel is Trilby (1894). Du Maurier had made his name as an illustrator: in 1895 he was responsible for the famous ‘curate’s egg’ cartoon (with its complaisant curate assuring the vicar, concerning the bad egg he’d been served up, that ‘parts of it are excellent’), and he’d even been responsible for coining the phrase ‘bedside manner’ in a medical cartoon of 1884. But owing to failing eyesight, du Maurier had begun to complement his illustrating work with novel-writing as a way of continuing to make a living from his pen. He certainly succeeded: Trilby would become the sensation of the age, not just in Britain but in the United States. In time, even when the novel was largely forgotten, its title would be immortalised in the name of a hat.