King's Lynn and the Emblematic City

 “When an individual has been swept up into the world of symbolic mysteries, nothing comes of it; nothing can come of it, unless it has been associated with the earth, unless it has occurred when that individual was in the body…. Only if you first return to your body, to your earth, can individuation take place; only then does the thing become true.”

  Yesterday I re-read the poet Kathleen Raine's paper 'William Blake's Fourfold London' which she gave at The Temenos Academy way back in 1993. In it Raine (1908-2003) discusses the last of Blake's Prophetic Books 'Jerusalem' and its relationship to the London of Blake's day and our own.  To help her she uses two significant ideas of the French philosopher and theologian Henri Corbin (1903-1978): 'emblematic city' and 'imaginal'.

   The first term, and the one that really concerns this post, describes how certain cities are 'a great mediating symbol, at once an embodiment of imaginative vision, and empowered to to awaken that vision, that perception of invisible values and meanings, in the minds of its inhabitants'.  (I think we ignore this attribute of the city at our peril.) For Corbin the city has the potential to act as a bridge between the world of the senses and what he termed the Mundus Imaginalis - the Alam Al-Mithal, the Imaginal World - not, as you might think, the world of the imagination, or the Unconscious; but the world of the spirit (ie the Unseen) and of the soul; the dwelling of images and archetypes. One might see it a fusion of Jungian and Sufi thought.

   

   For me King's Lynn, in its small mundane way, is freighted with the possibilities of being an 'emblematic city'. It is the town where Vaughan Williams came looking for folk songs, an ancient port with a half-Celtic name and a member of the Hanseatic League, where pilgrims from Northern Europe arrived on their way to Walsingham. The birthplace of Vancouver and Fanny Burney, as well as the late Medieval mystic Margery Kempe.  And I suppose that's why I'm always disappointed with it.  I have, probably, too high an expectation of it. Don't get me wrong there is some really good architecture there: medieval churches, guildhalls and warehouses and any amount of Georgian houses, but too much has been lost, destroyed to be replaced with the utilitarian and the common place for the town to be truly satisfying or to bear the weight of my imaginings.
   In addition, in gathering my thoughts together to write this post I was reminded of C. P. Snow's 'Two Cultures'.  He was talking about science and art, but there is the same sort of binary conflict happening in King's Lynn; on the one hand is the commercial heart of the town which is busy and hard and ugly and generic.  There is nothing local and peculiar to modern King's Lynn. Its back is turned to the river - the Ouse, which here so close to the sea is wide and muddy-coloured and tidal.  The town feels disconnected, too, from that great agricultural area that surrounds it.  And, on the other hand, there is the old heart of the town which is so beautiful but feels too enclosed, as though it was under siege, indeed too self-regarding to allow the visitor to enter into any profound dialogue with it. I found that particularly true of the Arts Centre on King St., which seemed to be an altogether aloof organisation.  (I feel the same about Snape Maltings which, I've decided, is not meant for the casual visitor. Both are like entering into a temple of a faith to which you don't belong.  Both are really only meant for those initiated into the mysteries.)  

   It could be argued that the streets of the old town have ceased to be the centre of civic life and become a rather posh dormitory suburb. It has lost the power to evoke in us 'that perception of invisible values and meanings'. What perhaps exists is merely the shell. Sometimes - at, say, the steps down to the ferry over the Ouse to West Lynn, or at the Pilot's Office on Common Staithe Quay, with a Georgian pub, 'The Crown and Mitre' across Ferry Lane for company - does one gets some sort of sense of the past, echoing Yeats 'I wished for a world where I could discover this tradition perpetually, and not in pictures and poems only, but in tiles around the chimney-piece, and in the hangings that kept out the draught.'  Museums are not enough.  And in any case they are ways in which objects can be denuded of their emblematic and imaginal powers. Perhaps it is too late for King's Lynn and a myriad of other places, in any case, for the warp and the thrum have been severed.

The present decadence of the arts and all the more or less ineffectual attempts to find other foundations upon which to rebuild them than those of tradition, arises quite simply from the disappearance of the idea of an intelligible world (to use Plato’s phrase), a spiritual order, a world of the soul, whose existence is not that of the fleeting images of nature.

'According to Queeney' - Beryl Bainbridge

   I've always been attracted to the character of Beryl Bainbridge, (1932-2010), but up to now had read nothing by her.  Browsing in the new Foyles in London the other week for a book to read I decided to make amends and made my way to the 'B's and there was 'According to Queeney' (2001) as a token example of her large literary output.  I'm not usually one for 'Historical fiction' (not quite sure why) so I was a little trepidatious.  Perhaps one of the reasons for this hesitation was the fear that it would be weighted down with historical detail. What else to do with all that research?  This does not happen in this novel.  Bainbridge's fluid, easy style soon put me at ease.  A style that seems to owe something to Waugh, and reminds me, also, of both Colette and Mauriac - perhaps Flaubert too.
   This book, make no mistake, was a brave undertaking for 'According to Queeney' is the story of Dr Johnson, one the great men of English letters, and the curious relationship between him and Hester Thrale, wife of the Southwark brewer Henry Thrale.  In passing we meet any number of the great and the good of eighteenth century London society: Boswell, Reynolds, Dr Burney and his daughter Fanny, and also, at the other end of the social spectrum, the residents of the somewhat chaotic, dysfunctional home of Johnson. All these are people who have long been the subject of scholarly research and some popular imagination.  (A new biography of Johnson servant/secretary Francis Barber has only just come out.) And here I have to confess to myself knowing something about Johnson and the Thrales.  It is unlikely therefore that anybody could come to this novel with out some pre-formed idea of what the characters ought to be like. And this makes a minefield for a novelist.  Bainbridge navigates her way, however, with immense skill.  It is totally convincing, and quite captivating.
   The image on the cover of this particular edition is a reproduction of the Reynolds double portrait of Mrs Thrale and her daughter Queeney.  Hester is in some sort of reverie, aware but not interested in her daughter who looks inquisitively at her mother.  The portrait presents a sort of summary of the complex, at times contradictory, relationship between mother and daughter that forms the other narrative strand in this novel: a sort of benign indifference, perhaps a wearisome tolerance, from the mother and need, that turns to cynicism, from the daughter, who is a intelligent, sharp girl.  Mrs Thrale is depicted as more interested in the formation of a cultural salon at her residences in Southwark and at the then rural Streatham, and interested too in a succession of men, including Dr Johnson, who could be her lovers, and all seemed destined to become tutors to her daughter.  Johnson, the 'Great Cham', taught Queeney Latin.  Perhaps this was a contrivance of Mrs Thrale to make the presence of so many unattached men in the Thrale household acceptable to her husband, but there is a sense too that Queeney is a special project of her mother. Certainly Queeney is the only one of her children who Mrs Thrale involves herself with. The child is taken on trips and social visits, but is often made to think her presence irksome to her mother, although Mrs Thrale is quite happy to use her daughter as a spy when it suits her.  This close interweaving of their lives means that Queeny is often a witness to adult dramas and transactions. (Contrary to expectations the narrative is not in the first person but in the third person, which gives us more access to those occurrences than had if Queeney was relating these events directly to us.)
   Towards the end the novelist Fanny Burney flits across the pages almost ghost-like, hardly speaking but - one feels - doing a lot of listening.  (Here Bainbridge appears to have been influenced in Burney's description of her own self, but apparently that is as much a self-construct of Burney's as it is an accurate self-portrait.)  Bainbridge is perhaps like Burney; her tread is very light. And yet her ability to suggest, and to manipulate the reader is is deeply assured.