Those That Failed to Make the First Team - Carl Halling (first ebook reader TXT) 📗

after all, does the Word of God not say
That there is nothing new
Under the sun?
But it was possibly unprecedented
In terms of pervasiveness and intensity
At the height of Romanticism
And I’d have no hesitation
In labelling it tragic as a result.

In terms of my own pre-Christian self,
It was almost overwhelmingly powerful,
And so believer that I am, I feel compelled
To expose it as potentially ruinous,
For after all, is it not still with us
In one way or another,
Having been passed on by the Romantics
To kindred movements coming in their wake,
From the Spirit of Decadence
To the Rock Revolution?

And could it not also be said
That the peculiar notion
Fostered by Romanticism
Of the artist as a spirit
Set apart for some special purpose,
Of which pain is so often an essential part
Is also still among us?
Of course it could,
And I'd have no hesitation
In labelling it tragic as a result.

This Mal du Siecle of which I speak
Is surely especially melancholy
In the case of tragic lovers,
Adolphe and Ellénore,
For it results in Adolphe effectively
Drifting into a romance
With another man’s mistress,
A young mother, Ellénore,
Who sacrifices everything for him
Only to discover he no longer loves her.

For “Adolphe” is in some respects
A work within the tradition
Of the libertine novel
Of the Age of Enlightenment,
And yet at the same time,
By no means an endorsement of libertinage.
Is rather perhaps, in many respects,
A powerful indictment of this tendency,
And thence as much a reproach
To the tradition; as a late addition to it.

And the forlorn figure of Adolphe
Was ultimately to prove influential,
Notably in Mother Russia,
Where he allegedly served in part
As model to Pushkin’s fatal dandy,
The Byronic Eugene Onegin,
And if Tolstoy’s Count Vrosnky
Was also partially based on Adolphe,
Then there is of course a marked kinship
Between Ellénore and Anna Karenina.

In the end, though, one can only weep,
At the tragedy these eminently romantic
And sympathetic figures
Made of their lives. And I speak as one
Who was once in thrall to the tragic worldview,
But who came to view life
As something infinitely valuable,
To be lived fully under the guidance of God,
And not sacrificed like some beautiful bauble
For the bitter-sweet pleasures of the world.

Verses for Tragic Lovers Adolphe and Ellénore

Ellénore initially resists Adolphe’s advances
But after a great deal of persuasion,
Agrees to see him on a regular basis,
And soon falls in love.

We know little of the physical appearance
Of Adolphe, but in all probability
He possesses the youthfully seductive charm
Of Romantic heroes,
Werther, René and Julien Sorel.

Ellénore initially resists Adolphe’s advances
But after a great deal of persuasion,
Agrees to see him on a regular basis,
And soon falls in love.

Adolphe is preoccupied with himself
In the classic manner
Of the contemplative, melancholy,
Faintly yearning, hypersensitive,
Isolated, perceptive Romantic hero.

Ellénore initially resists Adolphe’s advances
But after a great deal of persuasion,
Agrees to see him on a regular basis,
And soon falls in love.

Perhaps he is somebody who believes
That self-interest is the foundation
Of all morality, but then, he announces:
“While I was only interested in myself,
I was but feebly interested for all that.”

Ellénore initially resists Adolphe’s advances
But after a great deal of persuasion,
Agrees to see him on a regular basis,
And soon falls in love.

There is much genuine goodness
In Adolphe,
But much of it is subconscious,
Surfacing only
At the sight of obvious grief.

Ellénore initially resists Adolphe’s advances
But after a great deal of persuasion,
Agrees to see him on a regular basis,
And soon falls in love.

The cause of this inability to feel
Spontaneously, is very probably the result
Of the complex interaction
Between a hypersensitive nature
And a brilliant if indecisive mind.

Ellénore initially resists Adolphe’s advances
But after a great deal of persuasion,
Agrees to see him on a regular basis,
And soon falls in love.

By reflecting on his surroundings
To an exaggerated degree,
Adolphe feels a sort of numbness,
A premature world-weariness…
Lucid thoughts and intense emotions confused.

Ellénore initially resists Adolphe’s advances
But after a great deal of persuasion,
Agrees to see him on a regular basis,
And soon falls in love.

An Autobiographical Narrative: 1980s

“The Bitter-Sweet Fruits of Andre Gide” was based on an essay, probably written in my final year at Westfield College, University of London, where I studied the works of Andre Gide with the aforementioned Dr Mein. It was photocopied so badly I was barely able to decipher what I’d originally typed, its original having vanished; yet, as is my wont, I’ve made minor grammatical adjustments and heavily edited it, a necessary process given the darkness of the work involved, the ecstatic prose poem, “Les Nourritures Terrestres”, or “The Fruits of the Earth”.
While dating from 1896, at the height of the Franco-British literary decadence, it was evidently rediscovered in the 1920s, an era very similar to the Yellow Nineties in so many respects, and to some extent also, the Swinging Sixties.
It’s clear from the tone of the essay, although not so much from the sanitised version it has to be said, that I at least partly approved of the work’s subversion of traditional Judaeo-Christian morality, while the same could by no means be said of Gide, the product of a deeply pious Huguenot Protestant upbringing.
And the “Fruits” stood in marked contrast to his first published work, “The Notebooks of André Walter”, for both the latter and the later “Straight is the Gate” are anatomisations of Christian self-abnegation, specifically with respect to his troubled love for his devout Christian cousin Madeleine, who went on to become his wife, and perhaps the one and only true love of his life.
The character of Ménalque, who acts as a mentor to the protagonist Nathanael in “The Fruits” was allegedly based on Oscar Wilde, whom Gide first met, in the company of his companion the poet Lord Alfred Douglas, in Paris in 1891. And while he is relatively sympathetic in the earlier work, when he reappears in “The Immoralist” in 1902, he is infinitely less so. This is significant given that the latter was written by Gide as a warning against the excesses extolled in “The Fruits”.
“The World of Subjectivity” consists of a series of unconnected fragment salvaged from a teeming nightmare of “diary entries” I made in a school notebook throughout 1986. While more or less verbatim, some very minor corrections may have been made.

The Bitter-Sweet Fruits of Andre Gide

The keynote to Andre Gide’s “The Fruits of the Earth” is the unfettered cultivation of the ego, related to the Nietzschian doctrine of the Will to Power, in contradistinction to the self-abnegation of his Protestant upbringing.
This gospel of pagan energy has always contained within it a distinctly sadistic element, conscious in Ménalque, unconscious in the Gidean protagonist who carried it to its disastrous extreme, Michel in “The Immoralist”, specifically written in order to warn against the dangers of excessive “disponibilité”.
However, there is no direct evidence of such criticism in “The Fruits”, which makes it all the more intriguing to the reader, who can interpret the work according to his own nature.
With the inspired ecstasy of a fasting prophet, he embarked upon a work of such sensuous intensity that the very pages suggest the North African villages, parched by the blinding sun. Evil lurks in every corner of every page, where no noble, lasting values are left intact and one after the other, selfishness, infidelity, duplicity and fornication are extolled. By the end of the volume, the narrator’s senses have been worn to the bone. For his final message, he stresses the importance of other people. The reason for this is ambiguous, and it is up to the reader to interpret this altruism as he chooses.

An Autobiographical Narrative: 1980s

Thanks to the large quantity
Of notes I committed
To paper while at Leftfield,
My beloved college can live again
Through writings
Painstakingly forged out of them,
Such as the poetic piece below,
Based on several conversations
I had with my good friend Jez,
A tough but tender Scouser
With slicked back rockabilly hair,
Who’d played guitar in a band
At Liverpool’s legendary Eric’s
Back in the early eighties,
When Liverpool post-Punk
Was enjoying a golden age.
These took place at Scorpio’s,
A Greek restaurant situated in
North West London
Following a performance at college
Of Lorca’s “Blood Wedding”
In which I’d played the bridegroom.

One of the Greats Who Never Was

‘I think you should be
One of the greats,
But you've given up
And that's sad.

You drink too much,
You think, ____ it
And you go out and get _____,
When I'm 27 I'd be happy
To be like you.

In your writing,
Make sure you've got
Something really
Unbeatable...
Then say...'Here, you _______!'

You've got the spark of genius
At sixteen, you knew
You were a genius,
At nineteen, you thought
What’s a genius anyway?’

An Autobiographical Narrative: 1980s

‘A Cambridge Lamentation’
Centres on my brief stay at Homerton,
A teaching training college
Contained within the University of Cambridge,
With its campus at Hills Road
Just outside the city centre.
A fusion of previously published pieces,
It was primarily adapted
From an unfinished and unsent letter
Penned just before Christmas 1986,
And conveys some of the fatal restlessness
Which ultimately resulted
In my quitting Homerton early in 1987.
In its initial form, it had been forged
By extracting selected sentences
From the original script,
And then melding them together
In a newly edited and versified state,
Before publishing them at the Blogster weblog
On the 10th of June 2006.

A Cambridge Lamentation

This place is always a little lonely
At the weekends…No noise and life,
I like solitude,
But not in places
Where's there's recently been
A lot of people.

Reclusiveness protects you
From nostalgia,
And you can be as nostalgic
In relation to what happened
Half an hour ago
As half a century ago, in fact more so.

I went to the Xmas party.
I danced,
And generally lived it up.
I went to bed sad though.
Discos exacerbate
my sense of solitude.

My capacity for social warmth,
Excessive social dependance
And romantic zeal
Can be practically deranging;
It's no wonder I feel the need
To escape…

Escape from my own
Drastic social emotivity…
A devastating capacity
For loneliness.
I feel trapped here,
There's no
Outlet for my talents.

In such a state as this…
I could fall in love with anyone.
The night before last
I went to the ball
Couples filing out
I wanted to be half of