'The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward'
Who’d have thought it?
When I did a post on compass directions in books I knew my
clever readers would have plenty to say, and I saw myself - having concentrated on North in that post –
perhaps doing some posts on the other cardinal points, collecting up the
suggestions from readers.
But I’m not going to do that, because – and this is
unprecedented – the level of participation in the comments below the line is so
high, that the only sensible thing is to suggest that people go and look at
them in situ. They range all over the place, both (reasonably enough)
geographically and also metaphorically, and make for fascinating, hilarious and thought-provoking reading. I’m not able to sort them out or file them by N S E & W, but the
randomness and serendipity of the entries bring their own joy. Please scroll through to the comments from this link:
Compass
directions, a children’s classic, and is North best?
And thank you all for giving me such joy. As I've said before, when there is so much depressing unkindness online, it is amazing that we can all participate in good-natured discussion and sometimes disagreement, and demonstate nothing but friendliness, community feeling, and a longing to share our great literary favourites with each other.
There are now pushing 200 comments (a blog record), and I
am going to quote blogfriend and major contributor Sovay:
“ I haven’t been quite nerdy enough to do an actual count, but my impression based on all the comments is that North and West are the most popular directions in book titles; South not too far behind, but East not getting much play at all except in conjunction with West. I think ‘East of Eden’ may be the only title in which East stands alone.”
I think she is spot on.
So do please go and browse through the comments and enjoy.
And I will just fill in a few more items from me.
I was saving this sublime quatrain for a theoretical post on West, but
of course readers (looking at you Dame Eleanor) got in first, and it is much
discussed btl - which gender is speaking?
Western wind, when will thou
blow?
The small rain down can rain.
Christ, if my love were in my
arms,
And I in my bed again!
One of my favourite blogpost titles of all the 2600 I have done is this – a line from a book rather than a title:
and which led to a later entry:
Still One Block West of the Light...
I thought I would surely find the East featured in one of
my favourite passages from Dorothy L Sayers’ The Nine Tailors, set as it
is in East Anglia, the Fens, and having very
much the feel of the remote parts of the East of England. But to my surprise the
key bell-ringing scene mentions other directions:
Out over the flat, white wastes of fen, over
the spear-straight, steel-dark dykes and the wind-bent, groaning poplar trees,
bursting from the snow-choked louvres of the belfry, whirled away southward and
westward in gusty blasts of clamour to the sleeping counties went the music of
the bells.
But there is this to put in the balance something for the
East – this is a para from my entry on Agatha Christie’s (famously bad) book Postern
of Fate:
The phrase Postern of Fate comes from a
poem by James Elroy Flecker, The Gates of Damascus. Flecker had a
huge facility for language, but his spirituality always seems bogus, and
nowadays he would surely be accused of Orientalism. However, Postern of Fate is
a great phrase, and a great title – what a shame it was wasted on this book.
There is something called the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem, a very well-known
spot, but this is not what Flecker was referencing. Ancient historical Damascus
had seven gates: Flecker writes about four of them, and the Eastern gate,
below, is the Postern of Fate, the road to the desert and to Baghdad.
I don’t think I have written about any book with East in the title,
astonishingly – given that I have featured more than 2500 books on the blog. Proving
Sovay’s point.
Some 'direction' books I have covered - many of these featured in
the comments:
Byron Rogers The Man Who Went into the West [This sounds as though it will be a Buchan/Kipling-style thriller but is actually a riveting account of the life of a priest-poet largely set in Wales]
Matthew Sweet West End Front
Nury Vittachi Mr Wong Goes West
Mrs Gaskell North and South
Jim Harrison True North
Fair Flower of Northumberland -
traditional ballad, linked to Mary Stewart's The Ivy Tree
Then some cheat ones, where a direction is mentioned in the
title as part of a name…
Agatha Christie’s Poirot Investigates includes a story called The Western
Star
Stella Gibbons Westwood
[double whammy] Vita Sackville-West Devil at Westease
Jane Austen Northanger
Abbey
Angela Thirkell Northbridge Rectory
And one more move to the west – I cannot resist an opportunity to quote yet again one of my favourite passages in all of literature: the closing words of the James Joyce short story The Dead:
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
"In
the full glory of some passion": James Joyce
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