L. Frank Baum - "Tik Tok of Oz"

E. A. Wallis Budge - "Legends Of The Gods"

Horace - "The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos"

Anonymous - "The Frog Prince and Other Stories"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Alone

N >> Norman Douglas >> Alone




There recurs to me a sentence in a printed letter written by a
celebrated novelist of the artificial school, a sentence I wish I could
forget, describing Ouida as "a little terrible and finally pathetic
grotesque." Does not a phrase like this reveal, even better than his own
romances, the essentially non-human fibre of the writer's mind? Whether
this derivative intellectualist spiderishly spinning his own plots and
phrases and calling Ouida a "grotesque"--whether this echo ever tried to
grasp the bearing of her essays on Shelley or Blind Guides or Alma
Veniesia or The Quality of Mercy--tried to sense her burning words of
pity for those that suffer, her hatred of hypocrisy and oppression and
betrayal of friendship, her so righteous pleadings, coined out of the
heart's red blood, for all that makes life worthy to be lived? He may
have tried. He never could succeed. He lacked the sympathy, the sex. He
lacked the sex. Ah, well--Schwamm drueber, as the Norwegians say. Ouida,
for all her femininity, was more than this feline and gelatinous New
Englander.




Rome

The railway station at Rome has put on a new face. Blown to the winds is
that old dignity and sense of leisure. Bustle everywhere; soldiers in
line, officers strutting about; feverish scurryings for tickets. A young
baggage employe, who allowed me to effect a change of raiment in the
inner recesses of his department, alone seemed to keep up the traditions
of former days. He was unruffled and polite; he told me, incidentally,
that he came from ----. That was odd, I said; I had often met persons
born at ----, and never yet encountered one who was not civil beyond the
common measure. His native place must be worthy of a visit.

"It is," he replied. "There are also certain fountains...."

That restaurant, for example--one of those few for which a man in olden
days of peace would desert his own tavern in the town--how changed! The
fare has deteriorated beyond recognition. Where are those succulent
joints and ragouts, the aromatic wine, the snow-white macaroni, the
cafe-au-lait with genuine butter and genuine honey?

War-time!

Conversed awhile with an Englishman at my side, who was gleefully
devouring lumps of a particular something which I would not have liked
to touch with tongs.

"I don't care what I eat," he remarked.

So it seemed.

I don't care what I eat: what a confession to make! Is it not the same
as saying, I don't care whether I am dirty or clean? When others tell me
this, I regard it as a pose, or a poor joke. This person was manifestly
sincere in his profession of faith. He did not care what he ate. He
looked it. Were I afflicted with this peculiar ailment, this attenuated
form of coprophagia, I should try to keep the hideous secret to myself.
It is nothing to boast of. A man owes something to those traditions of
our race which has helped to raise us above the level of the brute. Good
taste in viands has been painfully acquired; it is a sacred trust.
Beware of gross feeders. They are a menace to their fellow-creatures.
Will they not act, on occasion, even as they feed? Assuredly they will.
Everybody acts as he feeds.

Then lingered on the departure platform, comparing its tone with that of
similar places in England. A mournful little crowd is collected here.
Conscripts, untidy-looking fellows, are leaving--perhaps for ever. They
climb into those tightly packed carriages, loaded down with parcels and
endless recommendations. Some of the groups are cheerful over their
farewells, though the English note of deliberate jocularity is absent.
The older people are resigned; in the features of the middle generation,
the parents, you may read a certain grimness and hostility to fate; they
are the potential mourners. The weeping note predominates among the
sisters and children, who give themselves away pretty freely. An
infectious thing, this shedding of tears. One little girl, loth to part
from that big brother, contrived by her wailing to break down the
reserve of the entire family....

It rains persistently in soft, warm showers. Rome is mirthless.

There arises, before my mind's eye, the vision of a sweet old lady
friend who said to me, in years gone by:

"When next you go to Rome, please let me know if it is still raining
there."

It was here that she celebrated her honeymoon--an event which must have
taken place in the 'sixties or thereabouts. She is dead now. So is her
husband, the prince of moralizers, the man who first taught me how
contemptible the human race may become. Doubtless he expired with some
edifying platitude on his lips and is deblatterating them at this very
moment in Heaven, where the folks may well be seasoned to that kind of
talk.

Let us be charitable, now that he is gone!

To have lived so long with a person of this incurable respectability
would have soured any ordinary woman's temper. Hers it refined; it made
her into something akin to an angel. He was her cross; she bore him
meekly and not, I like to think, without extracting a kind of sly, dry
fun out of the horrible creature. A past master in the art of gentle
domestic nagging, he made everybody miserable as long as he lived, and I
would give something for an official assurance that he is now miserable
himself. He was a worm; a good man in the worse sense of the word. It
was the contrast--the contrast between his gentle clothing and ungentle
heart, which moved my spleen. What a self-sufficient and inhuman brood
were the Victorians of that type, hag-ridden by their nightmare of duty;
a brood that has never yet been called by its proper name. Victorians?
Why, not altogether. The mischief has its roots further back. Addison,
for example, is a fair specimen.

Why say unkind things about a dead man? He cannot answer back.

Upon my word, I am rather glad to think he cannot. The last thing I ever
wish to hear again is that voice of his. And what a face: gorgonizing in
its assumption of virtue! Now the whole species is dying out, and none
too soon. Graft abstract principles of conduct upon natures devoid of
sympathy and you produce a monster; a sanctimonious fish; the coldest
beast that ever infested the earth. This man's affinities were with
Robespierre and Torquemada--both of them actuated by the purest
intentions and without a grain of self-interest: pillars of integrity.
What floods of tears would have been spared to mankind, had they only
been a little corrupt! How corrupt a person of principles? He lacks the
vulgar yet divine gift of imagination.

That is what these Victorians lacked. They would never have subscribed
to this palpable truth: that justice is too good for some men, and not
good enough for the rest. They cultivated the Cato or Brutus tone; they
strove to be stern old Romans--Romans of the sour and imperfect
Republic; for the Empire, that golden blossom, was to them a period of
luxury and debauch. Nero--most reprehensible! It was not Nero, however,
but our complacent British reptiles, who filled the prisons with the
wailing of young children, and hanged a boy of thirteen for stealing a
spoon. I wish I had it here, that book which everybody ought to read,
that book by George Ives on the History of Penal Methods--it would help
me to say a few more polite things. The villainies of the virtuous: who
shall recount them? I can picture this vastly offensive old man acting
as judge on that occasion and then, his "duties towards society"
accomplished, being driven home in his brougham to thank Providence for
one of those succulent luncheons, the enjoyment of which he invariably
managed to ruin for every one except himself.

God rest his soul, the unspeakable phenomenon! He ought to have
throttled himself at his mother's breast. Only a woman imbued with
ultra-terrestrial notions of humour could have tolerated such an
infliction. Anybody else would have poisoned him in the name of
Christian charity and common sense, and earned the gratitude of
generations yet unborn.

Well, well! R.I.P....

On returning to Rome after a considerable absence--a year or so--a few
things have to be done for the sake of auld lang syne ere one may again
feel at home. Rites must be performed. I am to take my fill of memories
and conjure up certain bitter-sweet phantoms of the past. Meals must be
taken in definite restaurants; a certain church must be entered; a sip
of water taken from a fountain--from one, and one only (no easy task,
this, for most of the fountains of Rome are so constructed that, however
abundant their flow, a man may die of thirst ere obtaining a mouthful);
I must linger awhile at the very end, the dirty end, of the horrible Via
Principe Amedeo and, again, at a corner near the Portico d'Ottavia;
perambulate the Protestant cemetery, Monte Mario, and a few quite
uninteresting modern sites; the Acqua Acetosa, a stupid place, may on no
account be forgotten, nor yet that bridge on the Via Nomentana--not the
celebrated bridge but another one, miles away in the Campagna, the
dreariest of little bridges, in the dreariest of landscapes. Why? It has
been hallowed by the tread of certain feet.

Thus, by a kind of sacred procedure, I immerge myself into those old
stones and recreate my peculiar Roman mood. It is rather ridiculous.
Tradition wills it.

To-day came the turn of the Protestant cemetery. I have a view of this
place, taken about the 'seventies--I wish I could reproduce it here, to
show how this spot has been ruined. A woman who looks after the
enclosure was in a fairly communicative mood; we had a few minutes'
talk, among the tombs. What a jumble of names and nationalities, by the
way! What a mixed assemblage lies here, in this foreign earth! One would
like to write down all their names, shake them in a bag, pick out fifty
at random and compose their biographies. It would be a curious
cosmopolitan document.

They have now a dog, the woman tells me, a ferocious dog who roams among
the tombs, since several brass plates have been wrenched off by
marauders. At night? I inquire. At night. At night.... Slowly, warily, I
introduce the subject of fiammelle. It is not a popular theme. No! She
has heard of such things, but never seen them; she never comes here at
night, God forbid!

What are fiammelle? Little flames, will-o'-the-wisps which hover about
the graves at such hours, chiefly in the hot months or after autumn
rains. It is a well-authenticated apparition; the scientist Bessel saw
one; so did Casanova, here at Rome. He describes it as a pyramidal flame
raised about four feet from the ground which seemed to accompany him as
he walked along. He saw the same thing later, at Cesena near Bologna.
There was some correspondence on the subject (started by Dr. Herbert
Snow) in the Observer of December 1915 and January 1916. Many are the
graveyards I visited in this country and in others with a view to
"satisfying my curiosity," as old Ramage would say, on this point, and
all in vain. My usual luck! The fiammelle, on that particular evening,
were coy--they were never working. They are said to be frequently
observed at Scanno in the Abruzzi province, and the young secretary of
the municipality there, Mr. L. O., will tell you of our periodical
midnight visits to the local cemetery. Or go to Licenza and ask for my
intelligent friend the schoolmaster. What he does not know about
fiammelle is not worth knowing. Did he not, one night, have a veritable
fight with a legion of them which the wind blew from the graveyard into
his face? Did he not return home trembling all over and pale as
death?...

Here reposes, among many old friends, the idealist Malwida von
Meysenbug; that sculptured medallion is sufficient to proclaim her
whereabouts to those who still remember her. It is good to pause awhile
and etheralize oneself in the neighbourhood of her dust. She lived a
quiet life in an old brown house, since rebuilt, that overlooks the
Coliseum, on whose comely ellipse and blood-stained history she loved to
pasture eyes and imagination. Often I walked thence with her, in those
sparkling mornings, up the Palatine hill, to stroll about the ilexes and
roses in view of the Forum, to listen to the blackbirds, or the siskins
in that pine tree. She was of the same type, the same ethical parentage,
as the late Mathilde Blind, a woman of benignant and refined enthusiasm,
full of charity to the poor and, in those later days, almost
shadowy--remote from earth. She had saturated herself with Rome, for
whose name she professed a tremulous affection untainted by worldly
considerations such as mine; she loved its "persistent spiritual life";
it was her haven of rest. So, while her arm rested lightly on mine, we
wandered about those gardens, the saintly lady and myself; her mind
dwelling, maybe, on memories of that one classic love-adventure and the
part she came nigh to playing in the history of Europe, while mine was
lost in a maze of vulgar love-adventures, several of which came nigh to
making me play a part in the police-courts of Rome.

What may have helped to cement our strange friendship was my
acquaintance, at that time, with the German metaphysicians. She must
have thought me a queer kind of Englishman to discuss with such
familiarity the tenets of these cloudy dreamers. Malwida loved them in a
bland and childlike fashion. She would take one of their dicta as a
starting-point--establish herself, so to speak, within this or that
nebular hypothesis--and argue thence in academic fashion for the sake of
intellectual exercise and the joy of seeing where, after a thousand
twists and turnings, you were finally deposited. A friend of ours--some
American--had lately published a Socratic dialogue entitled "The
Prison"; it formed a fruitful theme of conversation. [9] Nietzsche was
also then to the fore, and it pleases me to recollect that even in those
days I detected his blind spot; his horror of those English materialists
and biologists. I did not pause to consider why he hated them so
ardently; I merely noted, more in sorrow than in anger, this fact which
seemed to vitiate his whole outlook--as indeed it does. Now I know the
reason. Like all preacher-poets, he is anthropocentric. To his way of
thinking the human mind is so highly organized, so different from that
of beasts, that not all the proofs of ethnology and physiology would
ever induce him to accept the ape-ancestry of man. This monkey-business
is too irksome and humiliating to be true; he waives it aside, with a
sneer at the disgusting arguments of those Englishmen.

That is what happens to men who think that "the spirit alone lives; the
life of the spirit alone is true life." A philosopher weighs the value
of evidence; he makes it his business, before discoursing of the origin
of human intellect, to learn a little something of its focus, the brain;
a little comparative anatomy. These men are not philosophers.
Metaphysicians are poets gone wrong. Schopenhauer invents a "genius of
the race"--there you have his cloven hoof, the pathetic fallacy, the
poet's heritage. There are things in Schopenhauer which make one blush
for philosophy. The day may dawn when this man will be read not for what
he says, but for how he says it; he being one of the few of his race who
can write in their own language. Impossible, of course, not to hit upon
a good thing now and then, if you brood as much as he did. So I remember
one passage wherein he adumbrates the theory of "Recognition Marks"
propounded later by A. R. Wallace, who, when I drew his attention to it,
wrote that he thought it a most interesting anticipation. [10]

He must have stumbled upon it by accident, during one of his excursions
into the inane.

And what of that jovial red-bearded personage who scorned honest work
and yet contrived to dress so well? Everyone liked him, despite his
borrowing propensities. He was so infernally pleasant, and always on the
spot. He had a lovely varnish of culture; it was more than varnish; it
was a veneer, a patina, an enamel: weather-proof stuff. He could talk
most plausibly--art, music, society gossip--everything you please;
everything except scandal. No bitter word was known to pass his lips. He
sympathized with all our little weaknesses; he was too blissfully
contented to think ill of others; he took it for granted that everybody,
like himself, found the world a good place to inhabit. That, I believe,
was the secret of his success. He had a divine intuition for discovering
the soft spots of his neighbours and utilizing the knowledge, in a frank
and gentlemanly fashion, for his own advantage. It was he who invented a
saying which I have since encountered more than once: "Never run after
an omnibus or a woman. There will be another one round in a minute." And
also this: "Never borrow from a man who really expects to be paid back.
You may lose a friend."

What lady is he now living on?

"A good-looking fellow like me--why should I work? Tell me that.
Especially with so many rich ladies in the world aching for somebody to
relieve them of their spare cash?"

"The wealthy woman," he once told me, after I had begun to know him more
intimately, "is a great danger to society. She is so corruptible! People
make her spend money on all kinds of empty and even harmful projects.
Think of the mischief that is done, in politics alone, by the money of
these women. Think of all the religious fads that spring up and are kept
going in a state of prosperity because some woman or other has not been
instructed as to the proper use of her cheque-book. I foresee a positive
decline ahead of us, if this state of affairs is allowed to go on. We
must club together, we reasonable men, and put an end to the scandal.
These women need trimmers; an army of trimmers. I have done a good deal
of trimming in my day. Of course it involves some trouble and a close
degree of intimacy, now and then. But a sensible man will always know
where to draw the line."

"Where do you draw it?"

"At marriage."

Whether he ever dared to tap the venerable Malwida for a loan? Likely
enough. He often played with her feelings in a delicate style, and his
astuteness in such matters was only surpassed by his shamelessness. He
was capable of borrowing a fiver from the Pope--or at least of
attempting the feat; of pocketing some hungry widow's last mite and
therewith purchasing a cigarette before her eyes. All these sums he took
as his due, by right of conquest. Whether he ever "stung" Malwida? I
should have liked to see the idealist's face when confronted in that
cheery off-hand manner with the question whether she happened to have
five hundred francs to spare.

"No? Whatever does it matter, my dear Madame de Meysenbug? Perhaps I
shall be more fortunate another day. But pray don't put yourself out for
an extravagant rascal like myself. I am always spending money--can't
live without it, can one?--and sometimes, though you might not believe
it, on quite worthy objects. There is a poor family I would like to take
you to see one day; the father was cut to pieces in some wretched
agricultural machine, the mother is dying in a hospital for consumption,
and the six little children, all shivering under one blanket--well,
never mind! One does what one can, in a small way. That was an
interesting lecture, wasn't it, on Friday? He made a fine point in what
he said about the relation of the Ego to the Cosmos. All the same, I
thought he was a little hard on Fichte. But then, you know, I always
felt a sort of tenderness for Fichte. And did you notice that the room
was absolutely packed? I doubt whether that would have been the case in
any other European capital. This must be the secret charm of Rome, don't
you think so? This is what draws one to the Eternal City and keeps one
here and makes one love the place in spite of a few trivial
annoyances--this sense of persistent spiritual life."

The various sums derived from ladies were regarded merely as
adventitious income. I found out towards the end of our acquaintance,
when I really began to understand his "method," that he had a second
source of revenue, far smaller but luckily "fixed." It was drawn from
the other sex, from that endless procession of men passing through Rome
and intent upon its antiquities. Rome, he explained, was the very place
for him.

"This is what keeps me here and makes me love the place in spite of a
few trivial annoyances--this persistent coming and going of tourists.
Everybody on the move, all the time! A man must be daft if he cannot
talk a little archaeology or something and make twenty new friends a
year among such a jolly crowd of people. They are so grateful for having
things explained to them. Another lot next year! And there are really
good fellows among them; fellows, mind you, with brains; fellows with
money. From each of those twenty he can borrow, say, ten pounds; what is
that to a rich stranger who comes here for a month or so with the
express purpose of getting rid of his money? Of course I am only talking
about the medium rich; one need never apply to the very rich--they are
always too poor. Well, that makes about two hundred a year. It's not
much, but, thank God, it's safe as a house and it supplements the
ladies. Women are so distressingly precarious, you know. You cannot
count on a woman unless you have her actually under your thumb. Under
your thumb, my boy; under your thumb. Don't ever forget it."

I have never forgotten it.

Where is he now? Is he dead? A gulf intervenes between that period and
this. What has become of him? You might as well ask me about his
contemporary, the Piccadilly goat. I have no idea what became of the
Piccadilly goat, though I know pretty well what would become of him,
were he alive at this moment.

Mutton-chops. [11]

Yet I can make a guess at what is happening to my red-haired friend. He
is not dead, but sleepeth. He is being lovingly tended, in a crapulous
old age, by one of the hundred ladies he victimized. He takes it as a
matter of course. I can hear him chuckling dreamily, as she smooths his
pillow for him. He will die in her arms unrepentant, and leave her to
pay for the funeral.

"Work!" he once said. "To Hell with work. The man who talks to me about
work is my enemy."

One sunny morning during this period there occurred a thunderous
explosion which shattered my windows and many others in Rome. A
gunpowder magazine had blown up, somewhere in the Campagna; the
concussion of air was so mighty that it broke glass, they said, even at
Frascati.

We drove out later to view the site. It resembled a miniature volcano.

There I left the party and wandered alone into one of those tortuous
stream-beds that intersect the plain, searching for a certain kind of
crystal which may be found in such places, washed out of the soil by
wintry torrents. I specialized in minerals in those days--minerals and
girls. Dangerous and unprofitable studies! Even at that tender age I
seem to have dimly discerned what I now know for certain: that dangerous
and unprofitable objects are alone worth pursuing. The taste for
minerals died out later, though I clung to it half-heartedly for a long
while, Dr. Johnston-Lavis, Professor Knop and others fanning the dying
embers. One day, all of a sudden, it was gone. I found myself riding
somewhere in Asiatic Turkey past a precipice streaked in alternate veins
of purest red and yellow jasper, with chalcedony in between: a discovery
which in former days would have made me half delirious with joy. It left
me cold. I did not even dismount to examine the site. "Farewell to
stones" I thought....

Often we lingered by the Fontana Trevi to watch the children disporting
themselves in the water and diving for pennies--a pretty scene which has
now been banished from the politer regions of Rome (the town has grown
painfully proper). There, at the foot of that weedy and vacuous and yet
charming old Neptune--how perfectly he suits his age!--there, if you
look, you will see certain gigantic leaves sculptured into the rock. I
once overheard a German she-tourist saying to her companion, as she
pointed to these things: "Ist doch sonderbar, wie das Wasser so die
Pflanzen versteinert." She thought they were natural plants petrified by
the water's action.

What happened yesterday was equally surprising. We were sitting at the
Arch of Constantine and I was telling my friend about the Coliseum hard
by and how, not long ago, it was a thicket of trees and flowers, looking
less like a ruin than some wooded mountain. Now the Coliseum is surely
one of the most famous structures in the world. Even they who have never
been to the spot would recognize it from those myriad reproductions
--especially, one would think, an Italian. Nevertheless, while thus
discoursing, a man came up to us, a well-dressed man, who politely
inquired:

"Could you tell me the name of this castello?"

I am glad to think that some account of the rich and singular flora of
the Coliseum has been preserved by Deakin and Sebastiani, and possibly
by others. I could round their efforts by describing the fauna of the
Coliseum. The fauna of the Coliseum--especially after 11 p.m.--would
make a readable book; readable but hardly printable.

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