Greenery Like Scenery

Narcissus Yellow Ocean and a Conradian yarn

A friend in California calls the New England spring ‘the green wall’. I hadn’t thought of it in such terms but she’s right. As the trees leaf out, copper and green, they shut down views, arch over roads, insist on being noticed as they point the way toward summer.

Updating my earlier gardening (as we’re agreeing to call it) news, my carpenter friend who’s done all the work on the house is building me three raised beds for vegetables. Raised so I don’t have to stoop, which may not be a problem now but, as my realist doctor likes to point out, by tomorrow who knows? So they will be raised, with a frame on one of the long sides from which I can drape deer netting. I can even plant some seeds in them, lettuce, herbs, and that kind of thing, though I’ll be too late to raise tomatoes—I already bought plants.

Meanwhile the garden is doing its best to keep me entertained, dressing itself like the set for a dramatic baroque opera in three acts:

There are no barn swallows, they haven’t returned, which makes me sad. They disappeared a day before the smoke from the Canadian wildfires descended on the region last year. This spring, their mud nests have been commandeered by small wren-like birds—nuthatches?—who have been active in renovating and improving with twigs the not-quite completed swallow nests. They don’t soar at me when I appear on the porch, being content to retreat to a bush to complain.

Are there less birds in general this spring? I don’t know. Has it been too hot, too cold, too wet? Probably all of the above. The Woodstock nursery is doing a good trade but with the inability to find anyone who wants to work there, let alone take over when the current owners retire, how long can that last? How long can they? But isn’t that the point of spring? To make clear that everything’s in flux, everything will come bursting out like it’s the first time ever, then after July fourth will coast to October when everyone will throw off what they’ve spent the season growing as if it wasn’t quite right after all, wasn’t quite what was needed or intended.

Still, the poison ivy is thriving, climbing up the house and various trees. I’ve spent a couple of days hacking at the vines, seeing the trees they’ve been strangling almost sigh with relief as they’re cut free. I have more to do, especially behind the house where vines are attacking a young Norway spruce. And the wisteria is everywhere as it always is. I swear, if you stand in one spot too long the damn stuff will twine itself up your leg. I’ve been cutting at that, too. But it’s cunning. If I use my cordless hedge clipper, it wraps itself around the blades, and if I snag it with the weed whacker it spins itself around the spindle and jams it.

The daffodils are over—they were beautiful and plentiful, almost plentiful enough. Nothing lasts as long as it should, everything’s gone before you have a chance to get to know it. Though I suppose that’s the point of flowers: almost as soon as they’re complete, they’re over. I’m wobbly about favorites; this year, indecisive about the white jonquil-like narcissus Thalia, I settled on Yellow Ocean that are coming into their own, delicate yet vigorous, pale yellow. See picture:

Like most daffodils they have a faint perfume that doesn’t last more than a day after cutting. The sunny, sturdy, Dutch Master has a delicate sugary, faintly lemony scent. Yellow Ocean, to my nose at least, has the faint aroma of dead mouse.

Though I planted a hundred and fifty, I only saw one tulip. One! It’s red, if that’s any consolation. If the deer ate them I didn’t see it happen. The poppies have been secretly moving themselves around, replanting themselves according to their own design—surely it’s too early for them to be blooming?—and someone’s eaten all the frogs. Snakes? Real ones, I mean, not hallucinations.

Back in winter, while on a necessary break from cruising online bulb sellers, I came across this beautiful quote from Joseph Conrad posted somewhere I don’t remember.

And it is only through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance; it is only through an unremitting, never-discouraged care for the shape and ring of sentences that an approach can be made to plasticity, to colour; and the light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface of words: of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage.

                    Joseph Conrad

Evanescent… yes. Then I noticed that it was from his introduction to what could arguably be his masterpiece. Certainly he loved the novel and was very proud of it, with good reason, it’s a story superbly told, complex, gripping, remarkable in its details. If you don’t know it I recommend it: you can download it online or get it at Apple Books: The Nigger of the Narcissus. To our eyes the title comes as a shock; as presumably it did to the first American publishers who changed it to Children of the Sea—I assume with the author’s consent.

Much is made of Heart of Darkness—too much in my opinion—much is made of its depiction of colonialism and Conrad’s attitude toward it. I don’t think the story is about a colonial society, it’s about the extractive system of empire, in this case of ivory. No one plans to stay in the Congo a day longer than they can help, least of all Kurtz, the McGuffin that causes the hero to make that extraordinary journey up river into the past that is the core of the tale. When we get to him, Kurtz is something of a disappointment. What had till then seemed concrete and solid in its details seems to evaporate into vaguely symbolic jiggery-pokery, with Kurtz’ implied paramour (there really is no other word for it) making an appearance that’s meant to shock, and might have in its day, but now mostly makes the modern reader go ‘Huh’? That effect, if you like, could be termed ‘racist’ because the author, putting the emphasis on her beauty, clearly intended the fact that she’s black to jolt the reader.

Leaving Twitter aside, don’t we reckon ourselves to be people of good faith? Don’t we try to do the right thing? To live decent and, if we’re fortunate, productive lives? Lives we hope one day might stand up to the scrutiny of the future? It seems only fair that we make the same provision for him: certainly if anyone could slice and dice motives and morals it was Conrad. I don’t think he was snobbish or reactionary—he’d done too much real stuff with too many people in too many places—but he was certainly a traditionalist. The kind of man who puts on a suit to sit at his desk. It shows in his prose, in sentences that coil and unspool themselves, or gather into almost solid edifices glinting darkly.

But it was reading that title, seeing it again, that made me re-read the book to try to answer a few questions for myself, chief among them being WTF? Turns out, apart from the colossal storm at its heart that almost sinks the sailing ship Narcissus, I’d retained very little. The title character I’d remembered as being somehow heroic, of having saved the ship, when in fact that’s not his function at all. He is there to provide a fulcrum, an anchor, to be an cipher on which the other characters can project their own fantasies, bringing good or bad luck depending on how they view the fact that he’d lied his way onto the ship to have a protected place to die. He isn’t likable, but Conrad leaves it to his reader to work out that James Wait was born into slavery and perhaps escaped from his island home of Nevis. So what does that tell us about the title and the author’s intentions? Having re-read it, I re-read more of the novels I’d known, then read a couple more that I hadn’t been able to find back in the day, and began to explore the links I’d seen when I was working on Songbook, links between his  story The Secret Sharer and his novel Lord Jim; two of my characters find each other at a showing of the movie version in 1962.

All of which got me working on a Conradian yarn, which is now done. I’ll be posting it here soon. I’ve recorded it, meaning it to be heard as much as read: the small once-upon-a-time voice telling stories in the dark. All I need to do now is comp and EQ the tracks; and no, I have no idea what that means, perhaps we’ll find out together. 

The Happiness To Come, is about the impossibility of taking anything back, the vanity of idealism, and the kindness of lies. It’s also been a way for me to look at myself as I was in my twenties, which is when I read these stories for the first time. In those pre-internet days when you could only buy books on paper, once I’d finished everything published by Penguin Modern Classics it gave me a rush of excitement to come across one of his lesser known works put out by, say, Bantam. Now, since he’s in public domain, you can go online and download pretty much everything he ever wrote.

To correct his past gets us nowhere with our present. Is it disappointing that Pound was an avid fascist and collaborator? Yes, but that’s not Conrad. He was essentially a romantic, a teller of tales, some of them pretty tall. To take him on his own terms seems to me the least we can do. If wed on’t like those terms we can put the book aside. I haven’t softened his attitudes, because they reflect the characters and not the artist who created them, providing context to the world of ‘white men’ and ‘natives’ in which they live. And that’s the essential point: the title in question is the summation of all the characters who live in that story on that particular ship crashing its perilous way through an ocean gone mad. 

‘Greenery like scenery’ is from a poem by Robert Hillyer, American, and self-avowed conservative poet. A traditionalist as was Conrad. I knew it as the lyric to a lovely, lilting song by Ned Rorem, also a traditionalist in his way, for all his modernism. Though it’s about summer, it has the sadness of remembered happiness, the hope for happiness to come. He’d volunteered as an ambulance driver in WWI, enlisting when the US entered the war. 1919 found him lingering in Paris:

Early in the morning

Of a lovely summer day,

As they lowered the bright awning

At the outdoor café,

I was breakfasting on croissants

And café au lait,

Under greenery like scenery

Rue François Premier.

They were hosing the hot pavement

With a dash of flashing spray,

And a smell of summer showers

When the dust is drenched away,

Under greenery like scenery

Rue François Premier.

I was twenty, and a lover,

And in Paradise to stay—

Very early in the morning

Of a lovely summer day.

Summer will be here before we know it. And it will be either too hot or too cold. Or too wet. Or not wet enough. Meanwhile the tress will bide their time, uncomplaining, gathering themselves for their momentary splendor come fall.