Books Do Furnish A Room

Heartache and slow dancing

In 1985, I bought a small anthology of contemporary verse by young writers called Hard Lines 2 (I must have missed the first volume).  Not all the poetry is of the first order, but there are some compelling pieces.  Maybe this isn't poetry, maybe they are lyrics for pop songs:  I don't know, but I think they're worth reading, and that's all that matters.  Here is one of them, Sipping Heartache Through A Straw by Julie Milton.

I’m an alcoholic for your love
But then I suppose you’ve heard
You left me pretty shaken
Did I ever leave you stirred?
You said we’d drink each other dry
Seems you’re not thirsty anymore
And left me amidst your empties
Sipping heartache through a straw.

 

And here - not from Hard Lines - is another of Julie Milton's poems, Slow Dancing With Strangers:

Life can be like
Slow dancing with strangers
Never sure exactly where you stand
Worried if the next step
Will be out of line
Apprehensive because
You want to get closer
To the heart of it all
But scared to let your feelings show
And fall victim to emotions.
I never could
Slow dance with strangers
Couldn’t be close to
A heart I’ve never known
Rest my head on a
Shoulder I’ve never leant on
Let my lips wander over
A face I’ve never kissed
Perhaps I should step out of line
And discover what
I’ve missed.

 

Julie Milton is now a professional photographer based in Brighton, a town about which she is obsessive.  You can see more of her poetry and pictures on her website - worth a visit.

Criticism at its best and worst

I recently put up, as my Friday poem, Aunt Jennifer's Tigers, by Adrienne Rich.  I think it's an interesting poem, with subdued strength, and paints a clever picture of Aunt Jennifer's fear of life contrasted with the solidity and conventionality of her surroundings.  I didn't wholly agree with Glo's comments that she it was old-fashioned and "squashily sentimental", or with Cornflower's equating of Aunt Jennifer to Lady Slane in All Passion Spent, I see the force of both comments and they illuminate the poem for me.  You might want to be reminded of the poem:

Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

Aunt Jennifer's fingers fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

So, in the light of the current debate about blogs putting serious professional reviewers out of business, I was interested to come across a piece of professional criticism of this poem from the Department of English Literature and Language at Brock University.  You can read it all here, but here are some choice extracts:

It is clearly a 'feminist' poem which is critical of the male world for terrifying and oppressing 'Aunt Jennifer' -- causing her to create an alternate world of freedom, one which she could not inhabit other than imaginatively or aesthetically. The desolating effects of patriarchy are assumed and exposed, in three quatrains... Rich has herself created an ideological structure which silences or excludes much of human experience. Children, hunger, war, disease, the struggles of the spirit, racial and religious injustice and oppression, are dissolved into the tragedy -- which it is on one level -- of an apparently upper-middle-class woman who could express her desire for freedom only in her art.

The struggles basic to existence are mystified in this poem, as are the conditions of a genuine freedom. The first stanza gives an idealized, romanticized picture which shows that the Aunt was trapped in something more than gender oppression: she was protected from almost everything we know of the real world. Her tragedy may seem of diminished proportions for those people lining up at the food bank, for those who find that when they go to see an apartment for rent the landlord smiles apologetically into their coloured faces and says that, unfortunately, he has justrented it, for those dying of diseases, and the list can go on. The poem in its opening statement locates us in Aunt Jennifer's bourgeois, privileged world, and as we assent to that line we assent to the assumptions which keep us from challenging it. "Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen." In how many households in the world can 'screens' with tigers prancing across them be asumed to be normal? What would the function of this screen be, how would it advance the survival of the family or the society? Presumably it is not for privacy. Drafts?

The poem locates Aunt Jennifer as an oppressor as well as a victim and, as a victim, a victim of different powers than the poem obviously suggests... in the prison of that understanding of the world which says that it is all right for this person to spend her time knitting while people suffer the terrors of violence and poverty in her very city: she is imprisoned more in these than in the gender and domestic relations which these ideologies help create and support. ...the tigers which symbolize the freedom of spirit which she dreams of but never achieved except in her dreams as rendered in her art, are themselves figures of her location as an oppressor, because they locate her in relation to India, and hence to imperialism and to cultural and economic exploitation.

If this is what we're missing through reading blogs, I can't say I'm too worried!  There are plenty of splendid professional critics out there who illuminate and expound, rather than painfully scratch their own sores, but as far as this stuff is concerned, I'll read Cornflower any day!  By the way, his question about the screen is otiose: the screen is a firescreen, to fill the fireplace when it is not being used, and would be common in middle and working class houses until the advent of central heating: my own humble grandmother had one, and so did millions of others, often embroidered by themselves!

Jealousy

I have only heard of Robbe-Grillet before, never read him; so I approached Jealousy with some trepidation; what would I make of a novelist who was notoriously ‘difficult’, who believed that most novels didn’t need readers (but that his own were an exception), and who probably had much more influence on the visual arts, especially film, than on the literary ones.  That trepidation was well merited:  I found Jealousy hard to read, and hard to follow – at least in the sense that the introduction told me I should follow it.  It is a mass of geometric detail, of repetition, of time muddled up again and again into an all powerful ‘now’, and the story is not told.

The action – though never was a word more ill chosen – covers a few days (though it is impossible to know how many) in the life of a house in the middle of a banana plantation.  Apart from very minor appearances by servants, and slightly distant sightings of some workmen in the garden, there are only two characters, A... (which is how she is always mentioned) and a neighbouring plantation owner, Franck. There is another person implicit, however, because there is always one more place laid for meals than A... and Franck need, and because the reader assumes that the point of view of the novel belongs to an actor in the drama, not a distant and dispassionate narrator; anyway, sometimes the servants speak to someone when everyone else is away: he is clearly the owner of the house, A...’s husband.

The book proceeds through minute observation of the irrelevant; there are few adjectives, no dramatic sentences, and no actions – except the repeated killing of a centipede on a wall – although there is a car crash at one stage, but it seems not to have happened – though it is impossible to be sure.  It is as if I described some high sexual drama to you by counting the threads in the sheets and telling you the exact angle of the bedclothes against the headrest, and where the shadows of the windows fell – and what you could see through the windows, and what you could have seen if you had been standing in a different place or if the house opposite were not there.  So what?  Was there anyone in bed?  Who was it? Did they have any fun or commit some sin?  I don’t know, but the crack in the plaster, about six inches above and slightly to the left of the right hand bedpost runs down the wall for three inches and then turns through 50 degrees towards the clock on the bedside table .. and on and on.  And in case you think I’m exaggerating, here is the opening paragraph, which although it is an immensely important one, is not untypical:

Now the shadow of the column—the column which supports the southwest corner of the roof—divides the corresponding corner of the veranda into two equal parts. This veranda is a wide, covered gallery surrounding the house on three sides. Since its width is the same for the central portion as for the sides, the line of shadow cast by the column extends precisely to the corner of the house; but it stops there, for only the veranda flagstones are reached by the sun, which is still too high in the sky. The wooden walls of the house—that is, its front and west gable-end—are still protected from the sun by the roof (common to the house proper and the terrace). So at this moment the shadow of the outer edge of the roof coincides exactly with the right angle formed by the terrace and the two vertical surfaces of the corner of the house.

In his introduction, Tom McCarthy says A... is "a fantastic creation, a femme fatale to rival Lady Macbeth or Clytemnestra in terms of her castrating potency".  Frankly, I don't get it.  To me the book seems sterile and uninteresting, and all I know about the characters and the drama is inferred or invented by me (or by others I have read, like critics, but not the author himself).  I’m sorry, but I don’t see the point.  I have no truck with the vapid and obvious wishywashiness of misery-lit that pretends so often to be a novel, but I don’t need this mass of scaffolding bereft of hangman or victim

Medley for a long flight: Sunday Salon

I have just been to Chile, and although it was a brief visit, I knew I would be spending something like 35 hours in planes or airports; what I did not know was that I would have an enforced 24 hours delay (in Madrid, than which there are many worse places to be stranded, although some luggage would have been nice).  With that in mind, I took a pile of books - very varied - as well as The Economist and New Scientist.

• Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson; she is an author I have always enjoyed, witness Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and The Passion, but I'm afraid this was the one book I didn't open all trip.  It came back with virgin pages.
• Travels With Charley, by John Steinbeck, which I was sent by Penguin for review as part of a promotion.  It wasn't the book they were meant to send me (that arrived while I was away), but it is entirely delightful.  As I read the opening chapter, which explains his desire to travel in America, I felt myself marking down suitable quotations on every page for later use, so this was a great joy, found entirely without effort on my part.  He is observant, whimsical and amusing, often all in one, and has some good stories to tell.  And of course, his prose is impeccable - very English prose, if I may say so without offending American readers - and his technical skill outstanding.  "We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us...In this a journey is like marriage.  The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it."
• Holy Disorders by Edmund Crispin, an amusing, very dated crime novel set at the beginning of the second war, starring the eccentric and infuriating Gervase Fen, a literature don (there's lots of literature in these books) and the slightly shy and ineffective Geoffrey Vintner as his foil.  The plot is very silly, but a lot of fun is had en route:  "Fundamentally, Geoffrey was afraid of women...Beyond the age of thirty, he had gradually shunned acquaintance with these puzzling beings.  Consequently, he approached this new example of the species with a trepidation accentuated by her obvious charm."
• Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet.  Physically, a tiny book of only just over 100 pages, but a monster of the nouveau roman of the 1950s, a real bully of a book which seeks to invoke intensity in one sphere - human sexual relations - by avoiding them and building up a detailed - very detailed - picture of the world around them.  Exactly where a shadow falls is crucial - the placing of a cup of coffee on the table is an exercise of Euclidean absorption - but the man and the woman are only just there, and their emotions are not mentioned at all, ever.  I loathed it, but felt I was in the presence of a master: I immediately understood the comment in the introduction that he was a great influence on film, a leading figure of the nouvelle vague, as this read almost like a description of a set and instructions to the camaraman.
• Brown on Resolution by C S Forester; a straightforward adventure story of a naval rating in the Galapagos, with a serious social twist in the lead up events.
• Birds of Southern South America and Antarctica:  I shall spare you any comment on this, except that it was completely useless, as I never had any time to walk round the city's parks and gardens.

And while I was there, I bought an English-Spanish parallel anthology of Essential Neruda;  in addition, I was halfway through Jasper Fforde's The Well of Lost Plots, which I left by my bedside.  As ever, I will be posting at more length on many of these books over coming days and weeks.

I hope you would have found something worth reading in my briefcase?

Love on an island

I have just made a brief visit to Chile, with little time to see the country or to read any of its literature, but I will nevertheless mark the event by giving you a Chilean poem - Night on the Island by Pablo Neruda.  It's very passionate, very earthy and slightly mystical - so much, that I wonder if the woman was there at all.   But there is a wonderful sense of physicality, although the sea that surrounds the island is more in your mind than in the poem itself.  But even in translation, one has the feeling that this is liquid, caressing poetry.

All night I have slept with you
next to the sea, on the island.
Wild and sweet you were between pleasure and sleep,
between fire and water.

Perhaps very late
our dreams joined
at the top or at the bottom,

Up above like branches moved by a common wind,
down below like red roots that touch.

Perhaps your dream
drifted from mine
and through the dark sea
was seeking me
as before,
when you did not yet exist,
when without sighting you
I sailed by your side,
and your eyes sought
what now--
bread, wine, love, and anger--
I heap upon you
because you are the cup
that was waiting for the gifts of my life.

I have slept with you
all night long while
the dark earth spins
with the living and the dead,
and on waking suddenly
in the midst of the shadow
my arm encircled your waist.

Neither night nor sleep
could separate us.

I have slept with you
and on waking, your mouth,
come from your dream,
gave me the taste of earth,
of sea water, of seaweed,
of the depths of your life,
and I received your kiss
moistened by the dawn
as if it came to me
from the sea that surrounds us.

Black beauty

Black flowers - purple really, but full of dangerous intensity, sinister and gorgeous in my shabby garden.

And a seasonally inappropriate quotation from T S Eliot, just to show that I could find "hollyhocks" in Four Quartets!

What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high
Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow?

Beechcombing

Richard Mabey's book on the beech - Beechcombings - is a well written meditation on the place of trees in our countryside and our hearts.  It focuses on the beech (Fagus sylvatica), and especially on beeches in southern England that he knows well.  He writes well and engagingly, but he has a slightly credulous and occasionally mystical approach, which I find slightly wearisome.  The antidote to this is to browse the book, picking it up and putting it down as the whimsy takes you, and feeling no obligation to read it all or to read it in order.

It's not the most useful wood - not hard enough or durable enough for building ships or houses, for example - but it can be burned and the leaves provide good animal fodder.  But its smooth bark give it an attractive, almost feminine aspect in mature trees.  Beech woods are more architectural, more orderly, more homogeneous than the woods of almost any other tree (not counting plantations, of course), and are particularly fine in the autumn, when their colour is golden and persistent, and when the fallen leaves make great drifts of beauty, rustling underfoot and swirling in the smallest breeze.  They have always attracted artists - of the most chocolate box sort, certainly, but others of great standing too.

For example, Paul Nash drew and painted Wittenham Clumps and the beech hangar at Ivinghoe, and these works capture the stately pride and grace of beech trees, and also their totemic appearance, especially on hilltop or ridge.  This picture is his Landscape of the Moon's last phase from about 1943/44, and is a night view of the Clumps, in the Thames valley.  Such appearances may be far from typical, but they are certainly archetypical.  Mabey covers these cultural aspects of the beech as well as the natural and historic aspects, and the book is well worth a few hours - but it is not, perhaps, as engrossing or as wide ranging, as Deakin's Wildwood, which I reviewed not so very long ago.

Quiet tigers

After the Blake a couple of weeks ago, I thought you might like this apparently more peaceful poem about an elderly lady and her embroidery of tigers.  But her tigers are only peaceful in the wool, while unknown terrors seize her heart and master her.  Timor mortis conturbat me!  Here is Adrienne Rich's Aunt Jennifer's Tigers.

Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

Aunt Jennifer's fingers fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

An Italian Sheridan?

Or is Sheridan an English Goldoni?   Following my visit to Venice a few weeks ago, I read - at the instigation of one of you (thank you, Glo) - some Carlo Goldoni.   I read La Locandiera, or Mine Hostess, written about 1752, and set in an inn outside Venice.  It is gentle, witty satire, which makes fun of many without hurting any too much, and passes a very pleasant couple of hours.  Reading it, I was struck by the similarity to Richard Brindsley Sheridan, although it seems more modern in language at least - probably because we always read Sheridan in eighteenth century English, whereas I read Goldoni in a twentieth century translation.

Carlo Goldoni lived from 1707 – 1793; the portrait at the top of this post is by Alessandro Longhi; Richard Sheridan - whose portrait (below right) is by Joshua Reynolds - lived from 1723 - 1792, so there is a very substantial sense in which they were contemporaries.  I am too ignorant to know if they read each other, but I would not be at all surprised - Sheridan's The Rivals was published in 1775, and The School for Scandal soon after, so Goldoni was first, if not master.

Goldoni has a delightful lightness of touch which makes him instantly accessible, so I was surprised (but not surprised) to read in the introduction of my edition by Gabriele Baldini, that "Now we are used to Goldoni's good-natured characters, and to his subdued, often light-hearted plots and situations so seemingly natural and effortless, it is difficult to realise that they were the result of a very hardfought revolution: this is mainly because we have no experience at all of the sort of plays against which the riforma was reacting: the shabby mechanical tricks of the last worn out phase of the Commedia dell'Arte."  Sheridan attracted similar comments from Goldsmith.

But the characters in Mine Hostess are essentially those of the Commedia, with a new vigour and attack; three suitors seek the hand of the inn landlady in marriage, but she ends up with her servant, the humble and puzzled figure who truly loves her.  The sixth major part is the servant of the misogynist knight, who is amazed when his master succumbs to the lady's charms.  All of them attract your sympathy and affection in different ways, and all of them seem archetypal figures - but new minted and joyous for the occasion.  Goldoni's great hero in the theatre was Moliere (but don't let that put you off), and after a fierce quarrel with his compatriot Gozzi, he left Italy for Paris, running the Theatre Italien and writing extensively in French thereafter. If you can read Italian, you will probably know if Goldoni: if you can't, I do recommend trying him.

Never marry but for love: Sunday Salon

The most important reading of the past week has been of the active variety - two friends asked me to read a piece of William Penn at their wedding in Rye yesterday.  I was of course happy to oblige, though the gravitas and simplicity of the message hides some complex stress shifts in the prose.  I love reading in public, but this was trickier than it looked.  But it has a fine, sonorous quality, and I thought you might enjoy it:

"Never marry but for love; but see that thou lovest what is lovely. He that minds a body and not a soul has not the better part of that relationship, and will consequently lack the noblest comfort of a married life.

Between a man and his wife nothing ought to rule but love. As love ought to bring them together, so it is the best way to keep them well together.

A husband and wife that love one another show their children that they should do so too. Others visibly lose their authority in their families by their contempt of one another, and teach their children to be unnatural by their own examples.

Let not enjoyment lessen, but augment, affection; it being the basest of passions to like when we have not, what we slight when we possess.

Here it is we ought to search out our pleasure, where the field is large and full of variety, and of an enduring nature; sickness, poverty or disgrace being not able to shake it because it is not under the moving influences of worldly contingencies.

Nothing can be more entire and without reserve; nothing more zealous, affectionate and sincere; nothing more contented than such a couple, nor greater temporal felicity than to be one of them."

And today, I am carry reading of a different quality to a god-daughter - Dr Seuss's The Cat in the Hat, which I am sure will be much appreciated too!

The Man Who Really Knew

The two accounts of the making of the English road we have had over past Fridays are essentially fanciful, but this one "suffers" from being absolutely accurate - in the poetic sense of Chesterton's fantasy, where accurate means completely made up!  This version is sung, again in The Flying Inn, by the innkeeper, Humphrey Pump.  This is G K Chesteron's The Road Turned First Toward The Left, and for this one I have given you just a few lines of context:

"Have you written one, Hump?" asked Dalroy.  Humphrey, who had been scribbling hard under the lamp, looked up with a dismal face.

"Yes," he said. "But I write under a great disadvantage. You see, I know why the road curves about." And he read very rapidly, all on one note:

"The road turned first toward the left
    Where Pinker's quarry made the cleft;
    The path turned next toward the right
    Because the mastiff used to bite;
    Then left, because of Slippery Height,
    And then again toward the right.
    We could not take the left because
    It would have been against the laws;
    Squire closed it in King William's day
    Because it was a Right of Way.
    Still right; to dodge the ridge of chalk
    Where Parson's Ghost it used to walk,
    Till someone Parson used to know
    Met him blind drunk in Callao.
    Then left, a long way round, to skirt
    The good land where old Doggy Burt
    Was owner of the Crown and Cup,
    And would not give his freehold up;
    Right, missing the old river-bed,
    They tried to make him take instead
    Right, since they say Sir Gregory
    Went mad and let the Gypsies be,
    And so they have their camp secure.
    And, though not honest, they are poor,
    And that is something; then along
    And first to right--no, I am wrong!
    Second to right, of course; the first
    Is what the holy sisters cursed,
    And none defy their awful oaths
    Since the policeman lost his clothes
    Because of fairies; right again,
    What used to be High Toby Lane,
    Left by the double larch and right
    Until the milestone is in sight,
    Because the road is firm and good
    From past the milestone to the wood;
    And I was told by Dr. Lowe
    Whom Mr. Wimpole's aunt would know,
    Who lives at Oxford writing books,
    And ain't so silly as he looks;
    The Romans did that little bit
    And we've done all the rest of it;
    By which we hardly seem to score;
    Left, and then forward as before
    To where they nearly hanged Miss Browne,
    Who told them not to cut her down,
    But loose the rope or let her swing,
    Because it was a waste of string;
    Left once again by Hunker's Cleft,
    And right beyond the elm, and left,
    By Pill's right by Nineteen Nicks
    And left--"

"No! No! No'! Hump! Hump! Hump!" cried Dalroy in a sort of terror. "Don't be exhaustive! Don't be a scientist, Hump, and lay waste fairyland! How long does it go on? Is there a lot more of it?"

"Yes," said Pump, in a stony manner. "There is a lot more of it."

"And it's all true?" inquired Dorian Wimpole, with interest.

"Yes," replied Pump with a smile, "it's all true."

"My complaint, exactly," said the Captain. "What you want is legends. What you want is lies, especially at this time of night, and on rum like this, and on our first and our last holiday."

Difficult decisions for good books: Sunday Salon

I have recently been fortunate enough to find a country retreat which I hope to visit regularly.  One of the puzzles, of course, is what books to choose to take to this new paradise.  Or, to be more honest, which of my books would choose to make the move to rural bliss? (You never own a book or a dog - you are its servant).  I've just taken down sixty or so on a first trip, and these are not easy decisions - which books would I prefer to read where?  Can I live without a copy of that in my London home?  So, I walked the shelves and took what took my fancy - and the pictures show you some of the results.

 

 

Some things, of course, don't need choosing, because I will have copies of certain authors and certain works at both houses: there will be a complete Jane Austen, lots of Kipling, all of T S Eliot, the complete Borges (a contradiction in terms?), and Powell's Dance in both places, with no doubt some others.  But there will also be anthologies (Oxford Book of Verse and Modern too are on the shelf above), Trollope and much else.  You might be able to make out some Levi, Robertson Davies  and Neil Gunn (recently recommended to Cornflower for her bookgroup) in the shelf below.

 

 

And there are lots of murder mysteries, and things I've never read or not read for an age - Doris Lessing, Marlowe, and several worthy tomes I shall relish the country quiet to attack, including A History of Histories, Richard Fortey's book on the Natural History Museum, and many others.  Books on Dorset, on woodlands, and wildlife - not to mention a great pile of maps, also tend to gravitate countrywards.

 

 

No doubt the book I really need right now will always be in the other place, but I think I can be assured of two things: there will always be something interesting to read wherever I am an - and the collection will grow, in spite of my best efforts at restraint!

Tyger!

Yes, I know this is a cliche, but it's irresistible!  This is William Blake's The Tyger!  Blake may not have been one of the very greatest poets, but he is a colossal, embracing figure who forged poetry on the anvil: the words are hot when they come to you, and have been beaten and quenched and fired.  His genius sometimes reminds me of Dylan Thomas; in both poets, the words are heady, intoxicating, and meaning becomes secondary to the strong drink that bursts our brains.

 

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat.
What dread hand and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile His work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

 

Roundabout

Another version of the English road, this time by the dominant character in The Flying Inn, Patrick  Dalroy, the enthusiatic, passionate Irishman who is an English patriot of romantic and adventurous tendencies .  Here is G K Chesterton's Road to Roundabout, not as good as the famous version of a couple of Fridays ago, but with some fine sardonic lines:

Some say that Guy of Warwick,
      The man that killed the Cow,
    And brake the mighty Boar alive,
      Beyond the Bridge at Slough,
    Went up against a Loathly Worm
      That wasted all the Downs,
    And so the roads they twist and squirm
      (If I may be allowed the term)
    From the writhing of the stricken Worm
      That died in seven towns.
        I see no scientific proof
        That this idea is sound,
        And I should say they wound about
        To find the town of Roundabout,
        The merry town of Roundabout
        That makes the world go round.

Some say that Robin Goodfellow,
      Whose lantern lights the meads,
    (To steal a phrase Sir Walter Scott
      In heaven no longer needs)
    Such dance around the trysting-place
      The moonstruck lover leads;
    Which superstition I should scout;
      There is more faith in honest doubt,
    (As Tennyson has pointed out)
      Than in those nasty creeds.
        But peace and righteousness (St. John)
        In Roundabout can kiss,
        And since that's all that's found about
        The pleasant town of Roundabout,
        The roads they simply bound about
        To find out where it is.

Some say that when Sir Lancelot
      Went forth to find the Grail,
    Grey Merlin wrinkled up the roads
      For hope that he should fail;
    All roads led back to Lyonesse
      And Camelot in the Vale;
    I cannot yield assent to this
      Extravagant hypothesis,
    The plain, shrewd Briton will dismiss
      Such rumours (Daily Mail).
        But in the streets of Roundabout
        Are no such factions found,
        Or theories to expound about
        Or roll upon the ground about,
        In the happy town of Roundabout
        That makes the world go round.

Morality Play

Yesterday, I read again a novel by Barry Unsworth, Morality Play, which I had not looked at since I first read it in 1997 - it had been shortlisted for the Booker the previous year (I think) and that's probably how I came across it.  I enjoyed it greatly at the time, and recommended it to lots of people, so I'm not clear why I have not thought about it for so long - perhaps because I read his later novel, Losing Nelson, with great disappointment.  But returning to Morality Play was an excellent decision, and I enjoyed it all, on at least three levels - to which I shall return in a moment.

It's a short book  - less than 200 pages - and covers the lives of a small group of travelling players, just before Christmas, in the north of England in the late fourteenth century.  They are poor, gifted, but limited to traditional religious plays acted in inn-yards and on village greens, and they have a number of pressing problems: the death of one of their key members, getting enough to eat while they travelled north to serve their patron over the holiday season, and falling gates as the populace gets bored with their offering and excited by grand pageants and tourneys funded by the great and the good.

Into this group comes a priest, who becomes a player.  He is young, and has sinned:  he left his cathedral because he was bored with the library and seduced by the spring, so he is out of his diocese without permission; he lays with a woman; and worst of all, he allows a man (the player) to die without coming forward to shrive him: mea maxima culpa.  They go to a local town to bury their colleague and friend, and do their play.  They make very little, but they become aware of a local cause celebre, the murder of a young boy, allegedly by a local deaf and dumb woman, and they daringly revise their plans and make a play of this boy's murder - Our Play of Thomas Welles.

I won't share the plot from there on, but you have here a beautifully crafted and beautifully written novel, which is at once - here are my three levels - a fine murder mystery, a good novel about what it is to be an actor and to find yourself and your true identity, and a meditation on reality and causes - because in the end, justice is done (whatever that may be, I give away no endings), but you may feel justice is a by product of less noble - or at least very different - imperatives.

As a newcomer, the priest is puzzled to find a mixture of freedom and abandon in acting - where the subjects are tightly prescribed, but each player can improvise and invent:

It came to me ... that the player is always trapped in his own play but he must never allow the spectators to suspect this, they must always think that his is free.

And then, he worries that a new play, not set out in Holy Writ, will have no meaning; but they are starving, and one of his fellow players says:

Death does not wait for meanings ... Sword or rope or plague, it is all one to him.

And in the midst of all this, action moves on crisply in an English medieval winter, with fear, power and death; truth is discovered and the curtain falls, but in ways which will surprise you and which illuminates and entertains.

Listening to trees

A gorgeous walk in the evening sunshine at Kew on Saturday;  I decided to walk - while staying on the paths - as close to the edge of the gardens as possible.  It took almost an hour and a half, and had the advantage of offering great variety and a glimpse of areas I seldom see.  Kew has a summer festival on at the moment, a celebration of trees, and there are exhibits everywhere.  The highlights are the new "Rhizotron", where you can see and understand roots underground, and the "Xstrata Treetop Walkway", a treetop walkway built on the basis of the Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 ... et cetera: if you don't know about this, Dark Puss is even now drafting an iluminating comment, I hope) so that you can see the life of the canopy, including lesser spotted woodpeckers and the purple hairstreak butterfly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Most magically for me, was the chance to ‘tune into trees' and experience designer Alex Metcalf's ‘Tree Listening Installation' (until 28 September 2008).  A mighty tree hangs with an odd shaped fruit - headphones, connected to a series of super-sensitive microphones embracing the tree.  You put them on, press a button, and can then listen to the gurglings, bubblings, and poppings of the tree as it transports water up to its leaves, while coping with the physical stresses of its own movement.  Trees can have strokes, and listening to this made the tree leap into life for all the children around me, and for this grown-up.  The installation aims to encourage people to appreciate that trees are not static and that there is more to them than meets the eye - it worked for me. 

If you're anywhere near Kew this year, do go and hear it - though I imagine a new age CD will be out soon!

Contre Contre Venise: Sunday Salon

I mentioned in my Sunday Salon post a couple of weeks ago that I had been reading Regis Debray’s Against Venice.  Finally, I have finished it, and  I wanted to return to it, partly because I did find it very spirited and provocative, and partly to touch on two other books with strong Venetian connections which I've enjoyed - a play by Goldoni, and a photographic update of Ruskin's Stones of Venice.  I will also say just a few words about the biggest book I have bought this year - Sylvie Guillem's Invitation!

Debray's book was published in 1995, and was recommended to me as a counter to the over adulation of Venice that can sometimes greet the new visitor to La Serenissima.  He sets out his stall at once, in the very first sentence of this slight volume:  Until you have laid the ghost of Venice within you – repressed every posture, leaning, pretension, temptation or daydream capable of being descibed as “Venetian” – you will never be on level terms with the internal enemy...

I don’t know what that means, and I instinctively react against it:    What, exactly, is Debray’s point?  I think it is that so many people are in thrall, that they can no longer question anything in Venice, and that Venice is no longer real, but a theatre - beautiful, ancient, but not alive, purely a show.  So for example, he says that: Venice cuts the figure of a carcass, an empty shell: not physically depopulated but spiritually dried out, dead to all magic ...[it is] a mirage from which the sacred has fled.

For him, Naples is much more alive, vulgar and exciting, and beautiful too - but as an afterthought; beauty is not the city's reason for existence.  I do not feel much sympathy for this view - I think I can love two cities, and will try to do so!  I enjoyed Venice, and will go back; I savoured its beauty and its decay; and I found pleasure in the quiet and carefree streets and canals away from the tourists honeypots.  But I was not seduced, I am not in thrall, I owe no fealty to the Bride of the Sea; as befits Voss himself, I remain my own man, critical and slightly distant from the myth that is Venice.

Briefly, to some other books, at least one of which I will post on separately:

• Carlo Goldoni's La Locandiera (My Hostess), a comedy set in an inn outside Venice, and performed there in 1725.  A delightful, lighthearted satire on morals and mores, and one of his plays would be well worth reading for anybody visiting Venice - and I would also recommend Jeanette Winterson's The Passion.  I will post again on Goldoni soon.
• Sarah Quill's Ruskin's Venice: The Stones Revisited, a book of fine modern architectural photographs of venice, with extracts from Ruskin's matchless prose alongside, and some of his brilliant drawings as well.  Evocative, beautiful, informative: does it get any better than this? (Or any worse, Debray would say!).

• Finally, Sylvie Guillem's massive Invitation.  This isn't a coffee table book, it's a coffee table!  Lots of great, beautiful photographs pf this exquisite dancer, many of them in performance or rehearsal - but many at home or on holiday.  It's exuberant, self-indulgent, and over the top , but a joy for any of her admirers.  She's an extraordinary dancer, and an extraordinary woman - not at all beautiful, she can radiate beauty and grace, as well as burning emotion and sexuality, through her dance and her photographs.  Is this what the French mean by the phrase jolie laide?

Hot loveless nights

With the frivolity of Chesterton last week, I thought something more solemn, more thoughtful, more intense, was called for this week.  So here is Roy Campbell's The Sisters.  I don't know what this poem means - that may not matter - but it captures me with its language and its images;  initially erotic, these sexual motifs, though they never pass from the poem, give way to a more mystical communion between the girls and their environment.  What a description of the dawn - "in smouldering gyres expand"!  I must find and read more of this poet.

After hot loveless nights, when cold winds stream
Sprinkling the frost and dew, before the light,
Bored with the foolish things that girls must dream
Because their beds are empty of delight,

Two sisters rise and strip. Out from the night
Their horses run to their low-whistled pleas
Vast phantom shapes with eyeballs rolling white,
That sneeze a fiery stream about their knees:

Through the crisp manes their stealthy prowling hands,
Stronger than curbs, in slow caresses rove,
They gallop down across the milk-white sands
And wade far out into the sleeping cove:

The frost stings sweetly with a burning kiss
As intimate as love, as cold as death:
Their lips, whereon delicious tremours hiss
Fume with the ghostly pollen of their breath.

Far out on the grey silence of the flood
They watch the dawn in smouldering gyres expand
Beyond them: and the day burns through their blood
Like a white candle through a shuttered hand.

Bruce and the wasps: Sunday Salon

It's been such a busy week that I have done very little reading, except for glancing through the Boys' Own Paper from 1909, which I posted about recently, and reading Debray's Against Venice, which is stimulating and provocative.  But there a couple of things on the reading table which might be of interest - but let me, first, if I am allowed in my Sunday Salon post, tell you briefly what I did yesterday.

First, I listened on the radio as my beloved Wasps won the rugby premiership.  Then I got on a train with, completely by chance, lots of triumphant Wasps supporters and downcast Leicester ones - no trouble at all, all very good natured - and crossed London to the Emirates stadium to watch The Boss, aka Bruce Springsteen, do one of his famous two and a half hour sets of old favourites and new hits with the E Street Band.  That's a pretty good day. Springsteen is a bit of a wordsmith in his way, as well as a hell of a showman, and there were some politically barbed comments about the state of the US - the suspension of habeus corpus, as he put it, and the increasing intolerance to immigrants and minorities - "we're keeping out the people who built America", and some great lines in the songs.  Springsteens's fan base has, of course, aged with him to some extent, and is slightly surprising to see a corpulent lady d'une certain age wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan: "Tramps like us, Baby, We were born to run".  It would seem fitter on a younger frame!

But back to the books.  First, I have been reading Hornblower recently, and enjoying him all over again.  It's a shame that C S Forester is not so well known for his other novels, which are well crafted and worth reading.  In the Oxfam shop on Friday, I found one - Brown on Resolution - of which I'd never heard. It's about a naval rating, Albert Brown, who is one of the few survivors of a first world war action, who is captured by the the Germans and taken to the island of Resolution in the Galapagos.  I look forward to it, and will tell you more anon.

Then, I have T S Eliot's Four Quartets. because I recently drove through East Coker, title village of the second quartet.  This always bears re-reading and re-imagining; this is the music of the essential heart of man in the twentieth century, at least in England.  I have quoted East Coker recently, and here is another wonderful passage, about the imperfection of the words you choose:

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Finally, a kind visitor brought me Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night; on an early glance, it looks fascinating, though I have not yet found reference to my own favourites - the delightful London Library, mighty Bodley, and the British Library.  I hope to find them on further reading.  Manguel is only known to me through his novel on Stevenson, and his biography of Homer's Odyssey and Iliad, both of which impressed.  But now, off to the library in the evening sunshine!

Paradise by Way of Kensal Green

I mentioned a few Fridays ago that I might share with you Chesterton's famous poem on the making of the English road - the windy, careless and carefree road of countryside and imagination.  But in fact, there are three of these poems, all offering different views, and you will have them all over the next month or so; they are the Poems of the Car Club from The Flying Inn.  Here is the first of them, G K Chesterton's The Rolling English Road, sung emotionally by Dorian Wimpole, the poet who has been almost hijacked by the good guys in the book, and has gone over to them with a vengeance.  Do read The Flying Inn, it's hilarious and thoughtful, and there's lots of poetry like this (by the way, if you don't know the geography, worry not - just assume that the directions are ludicrously wrong headed):

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,

The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.

A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,

And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;

A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread

The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.

I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,

And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire;

But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed

To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,

Where you and I went down the lane with ale-mugs in our hands,

The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands.

His sins they were forgiven him; or why do flowers run

Behind him; and the hedges all strengthening in the sun?

The wild thing went from left to right and knew not which was which,

But the wild rose was above him when they found him in the ditch.

God pardon us, nor harden us; we did not see so clear

The night we went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier.

My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage,

Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,

But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth,

And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death;

For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,

Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.