Malle and Wat were burning garden rubbish; the heap was crackling merrily; below the busy flames were sliding their quick fingers about the dry wizened stalks, feeling along, licking up; above, smoke, reeking of rottenness, poured out, leaned sideways, swirled wide and swept over half the garden. Malle and Wat, casting down fork and rake, fled out of it to the clear air to breathe, and leaned together upon the wall.
”˜Wat,’ said Malle, ”˜have you thought that He has stained Himself, soiled Himself, being not only with men, but Himself a man. What’s that, to be man? Look at me. Look at you.’
They looked at each other, and one saw a dusty wretched dumb lad, and the other saw a heavy slatternly woman.
Malle said: ”˜It’s to be that which shoots down the birds out of the free air, and slaughters dumb beasts, and kills his own kind in wars.’
She looked away up the Dale towards Calva, rust-red with dead bracken, smouldering under the cold sky.
”˜And it wasn’t that He put on man like a jacket to take off at night, or to bathe or to play. But man He was, as man is man, the maker made Himself the made; God was un-Godded by His own hand.’
She put her hands to her face, and was silent, till Wat pulled them away.
”˜He was God,’ she said, ”˜from before the beginning, and now never to be clean God again. Never again. Alas!’ she said, and then, ”˜Osanna!’
–H. F. M. Prescott, The man on a donkey (New York: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 455-456
Prof. Amos Lee Laine had us read The Man on a Donkey in our freshman Western Civ class. Re-read it last year.
What terrible writing, posturing, precious,pretentious. Is has, in short, “phony” written all over it. Why is this posted here? This wouldn’t get past freshman English in any reputable college. LM
If no one told you the “whole story,” this is how desolate you might feel.
Funny. I picked up and read the book (and also contributed the excerpt) because it was recommended by Peter Green as “one of the most powerful and moving historical novels ever written”. This was in his contribution to the Times Literary Supplement’s annual “Books of the Year” feature, Times Literary Supplement no. 5409, 1 December 2006, p. 9, where his contribution stands with recommendations by John Ashbery, Julian Barnes, John Bayley, A. S. Byatt, Margaret Drabble, Terry Eagleton, Nadine Gordimer, Gabriel Josipovici, Doris Lessing, Paul Muldoon, Joyce Carol Oates, Elaine Showalter, George Steiner, Brian Vickers, and A. N. Wilson, and many others.
No desolation, reine4. Read it again.
Oops. It was probably obvious, but #4 was directed at #2.
Peter Green (1924- ) is Dougherty Centennial Professor Emeritus of Classics in the University of Texas at Austin, and teaches now, in retirement, at the University of Iowa, where his wife has an appointment (http://www.uiowa.edu/~classics/people/peopleindex.html). In addition to reams of scholarship and translation, he is also the author of historical novels, including one published by Doubleday, and one by the University of California Press. He is also a literary figure and critic prominent enough to be courted by the Times Literary Supplement of London. “one of the most powerful and moving historical novels ever written”: hardly the words of someone who can’t tell what “wouldn’t get past freshman English in any reputable college”. Even Homer nods, but I stand by the novel on the whole, and find this passage in particular quite profound. Care to comment, Mr. Morse?
Ah yes, I am supposed to double up in despair by the weight of authority. Get a life. The writing is as bad as I said.
Look at it. Here we have two local yokels, who by the appearance and names and occupations are serf-like. Jus t their names give them away. The likelihood is that they can neither read nor write.Now, what is the liklihood that such a one would say, “God was un-Godded by His own hand.”
First of all, this literary structure far exceeds anything an ignorant man or woman would say, because the phrase is so artificial. Indeed, even in the mouth of Schori, the phrase would be precious, glib and facile. And see Malle’s first speech: A left-wing piece of soap-box oratory.
It isn’t worthwhile running a critique on the rest of the language in the sample. It is all alike in this: It is utterly improbable, given the speakers, and it is mannered, baroque, and pseudo-intellectual.
Yes, I read the NTimes Book Review section and have taught English for years in both college and high school. Are you unable to read for yourself, that you have to cite Authority in his learned soc in the hopes that I will be steamrollered? No, YOU defend the writing on some sound literary grounds. LM
I am not so conversant with the period and its sources as to claim to know with your degree of certainty how an untutored sixteenth-century seer with “showings†would most definitely not speak. And that’s a perfectly legitimate ground for giving those of the caliber and literary judgment of an H. F. M. Prescott (who seems to have lived and breathed the period) or a Peter Green (both Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature) the benefit of the doubt. But you’re certainly right to this extent, that anything Mr. Green may have said about the book as a whole does not commit him to a defense of this passage in particular (since, as I’ve said, even Homer nods). So if you can claim the very conversance of which I speak, then I’m more than willing to defer on this passage, with sincere apologies for the initial defensiveness.
So much for literary considerations.
I’m not sure what you find so objectionable theologically in what you call her “first speechâ€. Do you refer to the reference to shooting, slaughtering, and killing, or what?