Holbrook Jackson

My favourite image
of Holbrook Jackson

In the section ‘Of Pedigree Copies’ in his The Anatomy of Bibliomania, (George) Holbrook Jackson writes of the attraction of books “which are discriminated by the marks of precedent possessors, signatures, dedications, notes, memoranda, etc., or by recorded pedigrees showing a descent of distinguished ownership” (p.500). And he continues “How much more to be cherished are those books which bear the personal inscriptions of their authors, ex dono auctorem, volumes which the author gave in the pride of his heart to the poet who was his ‘Master’, to the critic whom he feared, to the friend with whom he was on terms of mutual admiration; to experience the strange unforgettable thrill at the sight of the self-same page that was once looked upon, even by the master whose writing it bears.” It is perhaps not surprising that Jackson left marks and more on some of his books, including pasting photographs into the front pages.

I’ve often thought the usual posed photos of Holbrook Jackson that you see on the internet do not portray the gentleness, the warmth or the quick intelligent and playful eye of the man. The commonly available pictures are staged to make the author look altogether too serious to my mind. How could the author of the delightful Bookman’s Holiday be the man in these photos? Holbrook Jackson was, we must remember, the editor of The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear, and he writes in his essay ‘Masters of Nonsense’ (which appears in Southward Ho! & Other Essays) “I do not think it is good for any one to be always sensible. … We live in a practical and business-like age, and have little time to cut capers. Material success is our aim, and nonsense has nothing whatever to do with that aim.” I think there was something decidedly mischievous in Holbrook Jackson’s character, which is not at all conveyed in the readily available images of him.

The photograph used
in the Wikipedia article
on Holbrook Jackson

Holbrook Jackson’s book Romance and Reality starts with the simple sentence “I like to do nothing” and further down the page continues “Of course I work — but I make no virtue of that — I work because I must. I do not make this admission to invite your sympathy. Even were I rich I might do something, just to give a relish to my real aim in life … As it is, I work to provide a margin to my days, a margin in which I may “taste the vaguely sweet content of perfect sloth in limb and brain. I know there are people who like work, and I am bound to respect their taste; but I do not in the least understand them.” Maybe after all there is something a bit dandy-like and posing in this prose; Holbrook Jackson produced more than forty books, and The Anatomy of Bibliomania alone runs to 668 pages, so he was certainly no stranger to literary work, all of which was done on top of his “day job” of journalism, of editing and later owning a weekly, and running a small press.  

In the copies of his books which he gave to his lifelong friend the librarian Ernest Callard (‘Callie’) are lovely inscriptions in his somewhat jagged handwriting, together with various photographs. There are two good photos of his house — ‘The End House’, Winterstoke Gardens, Mill Hill — pasted into the front of Southward Ho! & Other Essays, together with a more youthful and pleasant looking photo of the author.

‘The End House’, Winterstoke Gardens, Mill Hill

Another view of ‘The End House’, Mill Hill

Holbrook Jackson 

An even more youthful photo pasted by Holbrook Jackson into the front of Ernest’s copy of his Romance and Reality, shows, according to HJ’s inscription, dated 25.vi.45, Holbrook Jackson and Ernest pausing on a walk somewhere in Surrey some time in the early nineteen hundreds.

The young Holbrook Jackson and Ernest in Surrey

On the facing page is another pasted photo, and by far the most moving inscription is in Ernest’s hand, and sits below the following photo:

Holbrook Jackson on the day of his death, with Ernest ‘Callie’ Callard.

“Fifty years later. Taken at Bournemouth on the day of his death, 17th June 1948. The close of a joyous friendship.”

Beattie's Infirmities

 

Sir Joshua Reynold's portait of James Beattie

I have previously quoted an exchange with his wife that Dovlatov recounted:

Я говорил:

— Пушкин волочился за женщинами… Достоевский предавался азартным играм… Есенин кутил и дрался в ресторанах… Пороки были свойственны гениальным людям в такой же мере, как и добродетели…

— Значит, ты наполовину гений, – соглашалась моя жена, – ибо пороков у тебя достаточно…

I said: “Pushkin chased after women ... Dostoevsky indulged in gambling ... Yesenin boozed and picked fights in restaurants ... Vices was just as common to men of genius as virtue …”

“Then you must be at least half a genius,” my wife would agree, “you’ve more than enough vices …”

This inadvertently largely echoes remarks made by the Scottish poet and moralist James Beattie in a letter dated 16 November 1766 to the Hon. Charles Boyd: “I flatter myself … thay I shall ere long be in the way of becoming a great man. For have I not headaches, like Pope? vertigo, like Swift? grey hairs, like Homer? Do I not wear large shoes (for fear of corns), like Virgil? and sometimes complain of sore eyes (though not of lippitude), like Horace? Am I not at this present writing invested with a garment not less ragged that that of Socrates? Like Joseph the patriarch, I am a mighty dreamer or dreams; like Nimrod the hunter, I am an  eminent builder of castles (in the air). I procrastinate, like Julius Caesar; and very lately, in imitation of Don Quixote, I rode a horse, lean, old, and lazy, like Rozinante. Sometimes, like Cicero, I write bad verses; and sometimes bad prose, like Virgil. This last instaqnce I have on the authority of Seneca. I am of small stature, like Alexander the Great; I am somewhat inclined to fatness, like Dr. Arbuthnot and Aristotle.”

Civilisation and Politics

Kenneth Clark

Kenneth Clark in 1969 in Civilisation observed: “It could be argued that western civilisation was basically the creation of the Church,” and this theme is taken up in detail in Tom Holland’s 2019 book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. Clark makes the point that when things are truly important — as science has been us in the last century — that internationalism is accepted without hesitation, and that was most definitely the case with the Church.

But there are barriers to internationalism as we are only too aware. Politics — especially recent aggrieved and parochial (or ‘patriotic’) politics that has gained popularity and momentum in so many countries — gets in the way of internationalism, and this of course poses grave problems both in terms of dealing with the current pandemic but also the long term issue of the climate. 

That politicians are happy to abandon internationalism is perhaps to be expected. That they seem unable to address important issues is reluctantly but widely accepted; but that they may not even want to deal with the big issues comes as more of a surprise. Yet Tolstoy in his novel Resurrection already described the situation with great clarity: regarding Minister of State Count Ivan Mikhailovich he wrote:

в том, что у него не было  никаких  общих принципов или правил, ни лично нравственных, ни государственных,  и  что  он поэтому со всеми мог быть согласен, когда это нужно было, и, когда это нужно было, мог быть со всеми не согласен. Поступая так, он старался только о том, чтобы был выдержан тон и не было явного противоречия самому себе, к тому же, нравственны  или  безнравственны  его  поступки  сами  по  себе,  и  о  тем, произойдет ли от них величайшее благо или  величайший  вред  для  Российской империи или для всего мира, он был совершенно равнодушен.

“having no general principles or rules of morality, either public or private, made it possible for him to agree or disagree with anybody as best suited the moment. In thus ordering his life and his work, his one endeavour was always to behave with good form and avoid being too obviously inconsistent. Whether his actions were in themselves moral or immoral, whether great good or great harm would result from them for the Russian Empire or the world as a whole, was a matter of supreme indifference to him.” (pp.328 – 329)

This is a singularly depressing observation, given as we are to seeing ourselves still very much in terms of being at the end of a long progression of societal and political development — I am reminded of those old illustrations of a series of apes standing ever more upright which now feature primarily in parody cartoons. We have, after all, progressed through various reformations and the Enlightenment. Holland sees all this as a mere extension of the fundamental pivot in thinking that the Christian church brought to the west.

“Already, by the time that Anselm died in 1109, Latin Christendom had been set upon a course so distinctive that what today we term ‘the West’ is less its heir than its continuation. Certainly, to dream of a world transformed by a reformation, or an enlightenment, or a revolution is nothing exclusively modern.”