This week's mystery quote comes from a 1953 article by Ronald Bottrall, "The Teaching of English Poetry to Students whose Native Language is not English" (
ELT Journal 8, no. 2 [Winter 1953-1954]: 39-44):
What, in fact, this kind of thing leads to is a Variorum edition of the poets; we have one of Hopkins already. The foreign student is particularly liable to be misled by this piling of Pelion on Ossaat the worst he reads Gardner (W. H.) on Hopkins or Gardner (H.) on Eliot, and never gets near the poetry at all. To adopt a phrase of Henry Reed's, he is always reading the top layers of a palimpsest (emphasis mine).
Unfortunately, I don't have easy access to the full text of the journal, but by doing some backwards-and-forwards searching I was able to withdraw this sizable chunk of the surrounding text. Not that the context makes it any easier to deduce the source of this particular paraphrase of Reed. I had to look up a whole bunch of stuff:
- Variorium: A variorium edition contains criticism and notes by various scholars (or is a collection of the various versions of a text).
- Piling Pelion on Ossa: To "pile Pelion on Ossa" is an attempt to perform a tremendous but ultimately fruitless task, based on the Greek legend of the giants Otus and Ephialtes.
- Gardner (W. H.) on Hopkins, and Gardner (H.) on Eliot (or possibly, on Eliot).
- Palimpsest: a palimpsest is a manuscript which has been re-used to inscribe new text over the old.
To my credit, I at least already knew what a palimpsest was, probably from the
re-discovery of Archimedes treatises in a medieval manuscript.
The 'palimpsest' line's provenance currently escapes me. Reed may have compared reading a particular author to only seeing 'the top lines of a palimpsest' in
The Novel Since 1939 (British Council, 1946), or it may be a line he used in one his "Italian" radio plays,
Return to Naples (1950), or
The Great Desire I Had (1952). I guess the article is late enough for
A Very Great Man Indeed (1953) to be fresh in the author's memory, but I don't recall the line being from there, either.
An unconfirmed sighting appears in the archives of a Midwestern university: a letter from a 'Henry Reed' to Father Peter Milward,
S.J., in the
Small Manuscript Collection of the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota: 'Reed, Henry, one
ALS to Fr. Peter Milward, 1975.'
I was quick to dismiss this as coincidence, until discovering that
Father Milward is a renowned Shakespeare scholar. From "Fifty Years of Milward," in the Spring, 2002
Shakespeare Newsletter:
Milward, originally from England, has spent a half century teaching at Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan. He is the founder or co-founder of numerous societies and organizations in Japan, most notably the Renaissance Institute, founded in 1971 to promote the scholarly vision of continuity between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, in the spirit of C. S. Lewis. He is the author of over 300 books, which range from scholarship to poetry to educational guides for Japanese students.
Milward's ["Fifty Years of Shakespeare, 1952-2002"] lecture at Boston College marked the establishment of the
Peter Milward Special Collection (links mine) at Burns Library, which now has a more or less complete collection of
Milward's Shakespeareana, and a generous selection of his other works. Boston College's scholarly journal,
Religion and the Arts, is planning a sizable volume of essays on Shakespeare and the Reformation. Milward was therefore invited as a major figure in establishing Shakespeare's Reformation contexts, especially through his landmark book,
Shakespeare's Religious Background, which argued for both Catholic and Anglican contexts.
Milward, it turns out, was one of the first to argue that Shakespeare was a practicing Catholic. He has also written extensively on Gerard Manly Hopkins (he is the honorary president of the
Tokyo branch of the Hopkins Society of Japan), and T.S. Eliot.
While still unlikely, it seems entirely plausible that Reed may have written Father Milward to congratulate him on some publication on Shakespeare, or to argue some minuscule point of Eliot scholarship.