The Southern Garden Poetry Society: Literary Culture and Social Memory in Guangdong

2. Chinese Poetry Societies and the Southern Garden

Chapter Two Chinese Poetry Societies and the Southern Garden I have been thinking how in the olden days even men whose lives were spent amidst the hurly-burly of public affairs would keep some quiet retreat for themselves with its tiny corner of mountain and trickle of running water; and how they would seek, by whatever arts and blandishments they knew of, to assemble there a little group of kindred spirits to share in their enjoyment of it; and how on the basis of such leisure-time associations, rhymers’ guilds and poetry clubs were then founded, so that the fleeting inspirations of an ideal hour might often be perpetuated in imperishable masterpieces of verse. —The Story of the Stone1 Literary Clubs in the West Literary clubs have a long tradition in the West. The Greek symposium, literally “drinking together,” seems to be the earliest antecedent. According to Timothy Raylor, it was characterized by “the competitive composition of verses on set themes or the parodying of serious activities.”2 One view has it that the symposium was not much more than ritual wine drinking, even above poetizing or philosophizing.3 Close relatives, the Greek hetaireia, were formed by young aristocrats to strengthen social and political ties.4 The Roman convivium often extended common drinking and poetizing to actual communal living; when held by upwardly mobile groups, convivia reinforced their sense of status and expanded social contacts.5 Literary clubs in London began to appear in the early seventeenth century; they were also known as societies, fraternities, and orders. An example of such a club is the Mermaid group of Ben Jonson, which first met in 1604 and persisted until 1616. Often these groups were associated with particular taverns, which signified the fact that they were formalized clubs. The Order of Fancy, formed to better the social lot of budding wits, was distinguished by a “taste for puns, anecdotes, bawdy jokes, and selfmockery …(an) aptitude for mimicry and the competitive composition of humorous verses.”6 The parlors of such famous salonnières as Ninon de Lenclos and Madame de Pompadour in eighteenth-century France were dominated by witty and occasionally politically-oriented conversation.7 Literary associations along the lines of the clubs founded or co-founded by Dr. Johnson, also in the eighteenth century—the Ivy Lane Club, the Literary Club, or the Essex-Head Club—perhaps come closest to the spirit of the Chinese poetry society in fostering what J. Nelson calls the spirit of “learned amiability” in combining all of the best characteristics of the drinking Greeks, the sociable Romans, the refined French, and the literaryminded English.8 Eighteenth-century Scottish poetry clubs further refine our understanding of the nature and purpose of such literary gatherings of the time. Three literary figures represent three disparate functions of Scottish poetry clubs. Allan Ramsey and the Easy Club (founded in 1712) wrote poetry to present its members as part of an imagined Scottish national community; Robert Fergusson and the Cape Club (which lasted from 1764 to 1841) focused on poetic composition for pleasure and conviviality as a source of unity; both clubs helped to assimilate its members to English tastes and manners. But Robert Burns and the Crochallan Fencibles (1780 to 1794) defined a new nationalism through revealing universal Scottish character traits. All in all, in seventeenth-century Scotland, concludes Corey Andrews, club poetry served not only to commemorate the occasion of the club’s meetings but also to represent the “contemporaneous community” of the club to its members. It is during such imagined moments of national communion like these that particular solidarities are built, which in turn generate imagined national communities. Such moments of national bonding are a key means for the strangers in club, city, town, Lowland, and Highland alike to see each other as fellow Scots.9 Substitute the word “Cantonese” for the word “Scots” and “regional” for “national” (and transform “Lowland” into “urban” and “Highland” into “delta”) and we have a fair depiction of the cultural and social function of poetry societies in Guangdong over the ages. 44 The Southern Garden Poetry Society Early Chinese Poetry Societies The earliest specific group which has been singled out as the ancestor of all formal poetry associations in China was the one which gathered around Bai Juyi 白居易 (772–846) in his declining years, the “Assemblage of the Nine Elders” 九老會. Bai once partied with Hu Gao 胡杲, Ji Wen 吉呅, Zheng Ju...