Books Do Furnish A Room

Hanging committee

I've been buying quite a few things for the house recently - all decorative, not utilitarian - and you may have seen my Chinese lacquer a few days ago.

This has included quite a few prints, which has necessitated a bit of rehang in the house.  Two of them are by Aimee Birnbaum, an American artist who exhibits at Greenwich and at Southbank Printmakers, where I found a lot of interesting work by her and others - part of the newly revitalised South Bank.

The first is Spirits of the Dance, pandering to one of my passions, and the second is called Lovers' Cavalcade - I have shown the whole print and a small detail of two delightful horses - is this land or sea over which they fly?

T T Waring

As the title of this site will tell you, I am an avid fan of the novels of Anthony Powell, especially the twelve volume series Dance to The Music of Time, written between 1951-1975.  I read them every year - normally once, but occasionally more often - and I estimate that I have notched up 35 readings overall.  When I next embark on this joyous marathon, I assure you that you will hear all about it, and if you want to share my pleasure, Hilary Spurling’s excellent guide to the novels, Invitation To The Dance, is invaluable.  These novels are one of the supreme literary achievements of the twentieth century, and are illuminating, funny and vividly immediate to each of our individual experiences.  He may not be in quite the same class as a novelist, but in tone and method, he is the Austen of the modern age.

But my reading of Powell was largely confined to these novels, and the wonderful Fisher King, his last novel, published in 1986.  But last year, I read his biography, Anthony Powell, A Life by Michael Barber. This is well worth reading as a picture of literary London from the 1920s to the 1980s, especially the earlier decades of that period. Barber’s book reinforces what you suspect from the novels, and what is clear from Powell’s memoirs (To Keep The Ball Rolling - four volumes, and a rather dense and unrewarding read, if the truth be told) and diaries (Diaries, in three volumes), that his work was unusually autobiographical.  Powell was open about this, asking how anyone could write about things they didn’t know about and hadn’t experienced - and, for example, explaining that one of the reasons that his account of Nick Jenkins’ childhood (Nick is the main protagonist in the Dance, and his alter ego) occurs so late in the sequence - its in The Kindly Ones, the sixth novel - is that his parents were by then dead, and were therefore ‘available’!  But the biography also makes it clear that the early novels, before Dance, are well worth reading, and I have put them on my list.

Afternoon Men (1931), Venusberg (1932 ), and From A View To A Death (1933) await in the book tray, but I have just read What’s Become of Waring? For some reason I don’t understand, this title has always put me off (anyone who tells you not to judge a book by its cover or its title preaches in vain) and made me think that the novel must be a piece of vapid juvenilia, only childishly amusing.  I confess to being completely wrong.

Published in 1939 - after the first two novels of the Dance sequence - What’s Become of Waring? is set in pre-war London, with a holiday in south of France.  Much of the story revolves round a publishing house (which is where Powell started his career, at Duckworth & Co), where T T Waring is an elusive but successful author of off the beaten track travel books.  His sudden death is the catalyst for a chain of events involving the publishers, his would be biographer and his alleged former fiancée, Roberta Payne.  (The photograph is of one of Marc’s illustrations to a modern edition, showing Hugh Judkins, the elderly publisher, and the fatale Roberta). It’s a fine portrait, lightly written and gently allusive, of a slightly rackety and uncertain period - the “twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres” as T S Eliot has it.

Precious china

After a year away - and two years before that not living in my London house - I have been catching up on buying things, and am giving my house a bit of a smarten up (well, I'm not, but I'm really thinking about it!) and adding to my modest collections of this and that.  Two recent additions are two pieces of Chinese lacquer, which I love for their deep reds and golds which are somehow multi-layered and ambiguous.  These two pieces are a late 19th/early 20th century dried fruit bowl about nine inches high, and a 19th century Jiaojiang food basket with delicate cane handles, about 12 inches in diameter - fancy taking your sandwiches to work in that gorgeous thing! They're lovely, but also very affordable - an equivalent English piece in wood or ceramics might cost many times what I paid for these. And they are cheap compared with my book bill!

And, believing as I do, that nothing furnishes a room like books, I wondered what Chinese literature I had on my shelves - not counting Kai Lung, of whom I think you have had enough recently. I found to my shame that the cupboard is not well stocked, but here are three little gems of utterly different styles and genres to ponder on.

First, Monkey by Wu Ch'Eng En, an almost structureless adventure story based on an ancient Chinese fable, but written in the sixteenth century, about a monkey (and his friends Pigsy and Sandy!)who becomes a great god and magician, and has a whole series of picaresque adventures, both human and divine.  Great fun, an amazing satire on all sorts of things (including bureacracy and heaven), and lots of great stories, but a book for dipping into and reading like a box of chocolates. If it sounds twee, it's not - but it isn't philosophy either.

Next, Qiu Xiaolong's Death of a Red Heroine, for afficionados  of murder mysteries. I didn't realise you could write a murder story in modern China, but Xiaolong has produced a story of the Communist Party, corruption and betrayal, in modern Shanghai.  He has also created a really engaging, humane and lovely detective, Chen, as will keep you engaged throughout without any of the conscious effort that you sometimes have to make reading books set in an utterly strange milieu.

And finally, a Nobel prize winner, Gao Xingjian, and his short stories, Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather.  The back cover reviewer notes Gao's "understated, expressive concision", and that sums up his writing beautifully. The collection includes six stories, spread over only 160 spacious pages, and they are gossamer gentle, poignant and illuminating.  Gao was born in 1940, and burned much work during the Cultural revolution, so his work is not extensive, but includes two novels (Soul Mountain and One Man's Bible) an a couple of plays. I haven't read any of them, but I'd love to hear from anyone who has.  In very different ways, both Death of a Red Heroine and Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather adddress the dramatic changes going on in China, but whereas one is a fierce grapple with an elusive truth, these stories are a meditation.  I'm sure the same changes are producing lots of interesting writing if we only knew.

Centaurea cyanus

A visual present from Syon Park for my friend and mentor Cornflower!

Midsummer's Day

The longest day was three days ago, so the nights are drawing in, but today is Midsummer's Day.  Sadly, my neighbours' combined birthday street party looks set to be rained off! It would be insulting you to talk about Midsummer Night's Dream, which anyway I've always thought a hugely over-rated play, so I thought I'd take a look at two other books with a Midsummer connection.

Kipling wrote Puck of Pook's Hill in 1906 and its sequel Rewards and Fairies in 1910.  Two children, Una and Dan, quite accidentally "break the hills" and summon Puck to the present day by performing (a shortened version of) Shakespeare's play on Midsummer's Eve, three times, in a fairy ring, under Pook's Hill.  Puck lets them see epsiodes from English history - especially with a local, Sussex, connection - by meeting people from all ages past: 

"She is not any common Earth,

Water or wood or air,

But Merlin's Isle of Gramarye,

Where you and I will fare."

The stories are beautifully written, intense and imaginative, and extremely knowledgeable; they are written as for children, and they certainly appeal to children of all ages, but they are fine short stories for any audience - I read the first two stories last night again, wonderful, magical bedtime reading.

Please don't be put off by Kipling's imperialist baggage; that isn't a major feature of these stories at all, and the glory of the language, the pleasure of the history, and the humour and the clarity of perception of human behaviour will win you over immediately.

They are in print, of course, but second hand editions are often available, and make much better presents, especially for children, than the modern ones - mainly because they sometimes have fine illustrations.  The originals were illustrated by H R Millar and Charles Brock, and have a simple and charming immediacy.  I can find no good images on the web, so here are the covers to my Penguin editions - on the left, Millar's illustration to "Knights of the Joyous Venture" and on the right Brock's to "Gloriana":

The stories are not in chronological order, so you can pick and choose - but you really must start with "Weland's Sword" or you won't know what's going on throughout the rest of the book!  But my favourites in Puck are that one, "Old Men at Pevensey", "Hal o' The Draft", and "Dymchurch Flit", a quite wonderful story of turn of the century Sussex and Tudor England all in one.  In Rewards and Fairies, the best are probably "Gloriana", "Marklake Witches" (about a beautiful girl dying of tuberculosis and the inability of medicine in the early nineteenth centruy to help - but lightly done, but tearful too), and "A Doctor of Medicine".  Wonderful stuff - I'm going to have to read them all again now I've been writing about them.

Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke

Samuel Johnson once remarked that "you could not stand five minutes beneath a shed while it rained with [Edmund Burke] without thinking him the greatest man that ever lived" - quoted variously by Boswell and Mrs Piozzi.  This occurred to me this afternoon when I sought shelter under a tree in a torrential downpour by the Thames.  Admittedly, I was sharing the exiguous shelter with an attractive young lady who lacked both umbrella and conversation, but the thought still came to me.  Johnson is often not read nowadays directly, but only through the medium of Boswell, either the Life of Johnson or Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. But some things of Johnson's are indeed well worth reading.

Rasselas, for example, is a striking aphoristic work, describing the philosophic travels of Rasselas, a prince of Abyssinia, and is full of common sense, striking writing and humour - and ends with a "Conclusion in Which Nothing is Concluded" - there is much to think about, but, surprisingly for those who only know Johnson from his retorts to the dim and the slow, no one view is pushed down your throat, unless it be the proposition that action is superior to reflection.  Just a few lines from the story may show you what I mean:

"Marriage has many pains, but celibacy no pleasures."

"Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful."

Rasselas was published in the same year, 1759, as Voltaire's Candide, which it resembles although it is less savage in tone - but neither author had read the other's book.  And he wrote stimulatingly on the Lives of the English Poets, and penned a notable introduction to the plays of Shakespeare, which set the tone for our modern view of him as the greatest and most humane and understanding of all playwrights.  And the Dictionary is full of instruction, prejudice and fun: fopdoodle is an insignisicant wretch, and salmagundi is a mixture of chopped meat and pickled herrings!

And to come full circle, we should not forget Burke, subject of Johnson's pluvial encomium!  The greatest orator of his age - an age blessed with wonderful speakers - he moved out of tune with modern times when he opposed the French revolution; at the end of his life, young MPs cruelly called him "the dinner bell" and crept away when he rose to speak. Admittedly, the Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful is heavy going and just for the specialist.  But On the Present Discontents is still worth reading:

"It is an undertaking of some degree of delicacy to examine into the cause of public disorders. If a man happens not to succeed in such an enquiry, he will be thought weak and visionary; if he touches the true grievance, there is a danger that he may come near to

persons of weight and consequence, who will rather be exasperated at the discovery of their errors, than thankful for the occasion of correcting them. If he should be obliged to blame the favourites of the people, he will be considered as the tool of power; if he censures those in power, he will be looked on as an instrument of faction. But in all exertions of duty something is to be hazarded."

And Reflections on the Revolution in France, a European bestseller at the time, ought to be required reading for every thinking person.  Yes, its a conservative view of the world, though Burke was a Whig, but it's also a wonderfully modern liberal, parliamentary view, and written with an angel on the quill:

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, glittering like the morning star full of life and splendour and joy. . . . Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded."

Johnson, incidentally, in spite of his own genius and his admiration of Burke, thought that "Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison".

A day in Barnes and a book by Barnes

This week, I spent two days at the Barnes wetland centre, the London outpost of Peter Scott's Wildfowl and Wetland Trust (WWT).  I was learning to be a volunteer, which I hope I will find time to do at weekends over the coming months.  So if you visit, you might be greeted by your Books Do Furnish A Room blogger!  One of the incidental pleasures of such work is the joy of being outside in the sunshine (the weather is unfailingly mild and sunny in West London, of course) and just happening across wonderful things while trundling a wheelbarrow or guiding a party of schoolchildren.

Some of those things are in my photographs - this lovely bee orchid is probably the most striking, but common things must not be overlooked - the young coot among the yellow lilies, and a marsh frog in a ditch (not our common frog, but greener, larger, and much, much noiser, with inflated bladders in its throat).

Barnes -and the other centres around the country - are wonderful havens for British wetland birds of all types, and for valuable collections of endangered foreign birds, many of which owe their continued survival to the WWT.  All of them stem from the remarkable vision of Sir Peter Scott, the son of Scott of the Antarctic, and just as remarkable a man.  If you'd like to read about his extraordinary, passionate and clearly happy life, his autobiography, Happy the Man is a very good read - though sadly apparently out of print at present, but readily available on the secondhand market.  And if you'd like to read about birds without taking it too seriously, Simon Barnes, sports and environmental correspondent of The Times, has published an idiosyncratic and very pleasurable book called, in great modesty, How to be a Bad Birdwatcher, and a companion book about 50 common birds.

Music for a Tea ceremony

And if you want music appropriate for a tea ceremony, you can hardly do better than Takemitsu's ghostly harp and flute music, or Schnittke's intense, dark, exciting Ritual, fine accompaniment for Nooteboom's book of (almost) the same name.

Lindsay Bagshaw

A reader e-mailed me yesterday, and wondered why my e-mail address was "lindsaybagshaw ...".  Because this blog is called Books Do Furnish A Room, and in Anthony Powell's novel of that name (volume 10 of Dance to The Music of Time), the phrase is Lindsay Bagshaw's nickname, or cognomen as Powell calls it. To find out why, you know what you have to do!  The Marc cartoon on the cover of the current paperback edition, by the way, is not Bagshaw but another wonderful character called X Trapnel.  The Poussin painting which inspired and haunted Powell, also called Dance to The Music of Time, in which Time is a greybearded, winged old man playing the lyre at the right of the picture, is below.  It's in the National Gallery in London.

Bramah, Kakuzo, Nooteboom

My post on Ernest Bramah a few days ago brought some interesting responses - apart from those expressing a desire to read some Kai Lung or some Max Carrados stories, there were several questions as to the name.

Was it anything to do with the high quality locksmith of the same name?  Not as far as I know!  But one person said his father remembered 'Bramah' being an adjective of approval - "Bramah", he tells me, "was a byword for quality: a piece of work being praised as really top class would elicit the comment "Bramah that is, Bramah"", which I take to be a reference to the locks, although the Oxford English Dictionary knows it not.  Another Bramah invented and patented an early flushing toilet.  It must actually have been quite a common name, it seems.  And someone asked if there was any connection with the Bramah Tea & Coffee Museum near London Bridge - I don't think so, but what a lovely thought!  And a nice little lunchtime excursion is already being planned.

Mention of the Tea Museum reminded me of The Book of Tea, by Okakura Kakuzo, which I last read in 1989.  This is a very unusual book, published in 1906 in English by a learned Japanese academic, expert in the fine arts at a major Tokyo institution.  It's a delightful meditation - it's normally classed as a sacred book, or at least as philosphy - on tea, its history, and its cultural significance.  Its a super read if you're at all interested in tea, or in Japanese Buddhism, especially Tao and Zen, but a little mannered.  For him, preparing and drinking tea is an art absolutely on a par with painting or poetry, and the tea ceremony certainly treated it with that level of intensity. The great master Rikyu used it as the setting for his calm and accepting suicide - a long, long way from afternoon tea in the English tradition and The Tiger Who Came to Tea!

And the tea ceremony takes me to Cees Nooteboom.  He is being talked about at the moment because of his Nomad's Hotel, an anthology of travel writing - and I want to review this soon.  But his novels have been neglected in this country.  The finest of them is Rituals, a fine, spare novel about a Dutch collector who treasures a wonderful raku tea bowl, and holds a tea ceremony of terrible intensity.  Its a short, beautiful, painful book - read it. 

Doing a Giambologna

I have been reading James Fenton's essays, The Strength of Poetry, this week.  He was Oxford Professor of Poetry 1994-99, and the essays are based on his lectures during that period. They are full of interest, and I wish I had read them earlier - they've been on my shelf for over three years! Apart from the two I shall concentrate on, there are essays on Larkin, Marianne Moore, Auden and Shakespeare, among others.

In the first essay, "A Lesson from Michaelangelo", he talks about a young artist, the young Giambologna, getting a brutal lesson from Michaelangelo, who completely destroyed and remodelled a wax model - and then told him to go and learn the basics, when the young man was convinced that he had achieved something wonderful.  But the point is not that the master gave the yougster a lesson - but that the 'lesson' came out of envy not compassion, and that Giambologna rejected it angrily, finding his mature, independent self in the process - eventually becoming sculptor to the Medici.  What has this to do with poetry - well, nothing directly except that I suspect Fenton just likes this and other stories from Vasari's Lives of the Artists.  He goes on, though, to give examples of the same thing in literature - the most striking being Wordsworth stopping Coleridge from publishing Kubla Khan ("throw it into the fire, and never speak of it again"!) -  a reluctance overcome by Byron's praise.  (I'm sure you know Kubla Khan, but just in case, it's sublime - it was not written in an opium trance - and it starts like this:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

... and you can find it here.

Another fine essay in this book is "Wilfred Owen's Juvenilia", which opened my mind to something I had never considered -that the war poems, marvellous as they are, are not the real Owen.  Before the war, he wrote in a very Wardour Street style:

Nay, light me no fire tonight,

Page Eglantine;

I have no desire tonight

To drink or dine.

It's horrible, and there can't be many people who would identify these lines as by the author of Anthem for Doomed Youth.   In May 1918 - Owen was killed later that year, a week before the armistice - his literary plans included blank verse plays on old Welsh themes, finishing a poem called "Perseus" (from the draft of which the quotation above is taken), and something called "Idylls in Prose".  Of course, it might not have turned out like that, but it hardly bears thinking about!

Tiny invasion

Over the past weekend or so, the tadpoles have been turning into frogs in my garden pond, seen here complete with guardian owl, carved from beech, and fountain.  They're getting everywhere - there are literally hundreds of them, many sadly destined to fall prey to accidents of one sort or another - being eaten by birds and cats will account for many.  When I cleaned my pond this morning, there were no less than eight frogs on a single submerged plant.  But the real joy was to see all the varieties of froglet jumping around, making their bids for freedom.  Some seem to stay close to water, some move away immediately to seek new adventures.  Some have lost their tails before they emerge, some have quite a tadpole tail on them even at the point of coming out.  The pictures below might give you some idea of the size and delicacy of these tiny animals (excellent, by the way, for pest control in the garden - especially when they grow up, no slug or snail is safe!)

This one was quite happy walking around out of the water, but has a long tail still; I rescued him from my weed bucket and put him back in the water, where he was quite relaxed while I took this portrait.

This chap is fully formed, with a hint of a stumpy tail, but tiny - that's part of my thumb in the background!

Just in case you didn't believe me!

And another one, with a 5 pence piece.

Back to books later, but for now, Jeremy Fisher is off to lunch - but not slugs and snails.

Ernest Bramah

I want to talk today about an author called Ernest Bramah; he's not well known, but he's hugely loved by those who know him.  Bernard Levin forgave friends who didn't return borrowed Bramah books, because "they are among the blessed", and his early supporters included Jerome K Jerome, Arthur Quiller-Couch ("Q", the  critic, essayist and famously idiosyncratic editor of the Oxford Book of English Verse), and Hilaire Belloc.  He's a very funny writer, utterly sui generis, and I hope to persuade you of his charms!

A few basic facts - Ernest Brammah Smith lived from 1868 to 1942, a very private and secluded life which has proved almost impenetrable to biographers.  But Aubrey Wilson has just written The Search for Ernest Bramah which collects together a great deal of information.  It's of interest because information on Bramah is so scarce, but it's a bit clunky, with an infelicitous style and an over-reliance on quotations from the books.  I wouldn't recommend it except to confirmed Bramah lovers - but it does put his writing into context.  Bramah wrote several types of books - "Chinese" stories, most notably the Kai Lung series; stories about the detective Max Carrados; a very popular but now unread politcal satire called The Secret of the League, which George Orwell acknowledged as a major influence on Nineteen Eighty-Four; a book about his failed attempt to make a living from farming; and English Regal Copper Coins, Charles II - Victoria, 1671-1860 - which I certainly won't be commenting on!

I was given my first Kai Lung book by an elderly great-aunt around 1980, when her husband died and left an eccentric collections of books.  It was in the classic Penguin edition of the 1930s - the dress all my volumes are proud to wear - and I chose it from the library my uncle had left because I recognised the name from Dorothy Sayers' Strong Poison, in which Harriet says to Lord Peter Wimsey, "However entrancing it is to wander through a garden of bright images, are we not enticing your mind from a subject of almost equal importance?"  She is, very gently, cutting him short in a marriage proposal, in order that he can concentrate on clearing her from the risk of being hanged for murder!  I read and was immediately hooked.  Kai Lung is a Chinese story teller, and he satirises British and European instituions and attitudes under the guise of traditional Chinese settings, complete with elaborate circumlocution, irony, and aphorisms.  Bramah never went to China, but read Chinese literature, and British and American books about China, voraciously, and created a glorious make believe of romance and wit.  He writes like an angel. The stories are full of aphorisms, of satisfactory endings in which villains get their come-uppance and the virtuous are rewarded, and they are unlike anything you have ever read before!  The Kai Lung stories are hard to quote to give a real indication of the overall effect, but here are a couple of examples:

It is a mark of insincerity of purpose to spend one's time in looking for the sacred Emperor in low class teashops.

Say on, if you must ... but a virtuous life speaks louder than a brazen trumpet.

The Max Carrados books, on the other hand, are set in late Victorian and Edwardian England - often London.  The first, simply called Max Carrados, was published in 1914 - I have borrowed a first edition from the London Library.  The eponymous hero is a gentleman of leisure, a keen numismatist, an amateur detective, and completely blind.  The stories are a delight, although not always absolutely credible; The Game Played in the Dark is a classic, often anthologised, notably in Penguin's Rivals of Sherlock Holmes in the early 1970s.

I hope you will want to read some Bramah, and I've put relevant links in the left hand column, though there are many cheap second hand editions available from sites like http://www.abebooks.co.uk/ or http://www.usedbooksearch.co.uk/UK.htm.  I'd suggest you started with Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat, or Max Carrados  - and do let me know if you try him, and what you think.  May your yin and yang be perfectly balanced.

Toumani Diabate

One recent comment, noticing the Ali Farka Toure CD, recommended his In the Heart of the Moon with Toumani Diabate.  I don't know this, but I know Diabate very well - he's a brilliant lame kora player from Mali, and I went to the normally staid Carnegie Hall in New York recently to hear him with his Symmetric Orchestra - fantastic drumming, dancing in the aisles, very lively, with every Malian in New York there, I should think.   The cora is a large stringed instrument - often 22 strings - built round a huge gourd, played seated on the ground with the instrument perched upright, strings towards the player for plucking with both hands.

Poems and trees

I can't decide whether to talk about trees or Ernest Bramah today, so I'm putting off both discussions - which may be quite intense and deserve more thought than 11 pm affords, and offering three pieces of poetry and three of my own pictures of trees.  First, a view of trees along the Coln river in Gloucestershire, and the wonderful The Trees by Philip Larkin:

The trees are coming into leaf

Like something almost being said;

The recent buds relax and spread,

Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again

And we grow old? No, they die too.

Their yearly trick of looking new

Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh

In fullgrown thickness every May.

Last year is dead, they seem to say,

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

And then a chant about a tree which gets ideas above its station from one of Ernest Bramah's lovely books about a Chinese itinerant storyteller, The Wallet of Kai Lung.  Buddha is amused, but punishes the tree for its presumption - and then a picture of a baobab from Mali :

How strong is the mountain sycamore!
Its branches reach the Middle Air, and the eye of none can
pierce its foliage;
It draws power and nourishment from all around, so that weeds
alone may flourish under its shadow.
Robbers find safety within the hollow of its trunk; its
branches hide vampires and all manner of evil things which
prey upon the innocent;
The wild boar of the forest sharpen their tusks against the
bark, for it is harder than flint, and the axe of the
woodsman turns back upon the striker.

Then cries the sycamore, 'Hail and rain have no power against
me, nor can the fiercest sun penetrate beyond my outside
fringe;
'The man who impiously raises his hand against me falls by
his own stroke and weapon.
'Can there be a greater or a more powerful than this one?
Assuredly, I am Buddha; let all things obey me.'

Whereupon the weeds bow their heads, whispering among
themselves, 'The voice of the Tall One we hear, but not
that of Buddha. Indeed, it is doubtless as he says.'

In his musk-scented Heaven Buddha laughs, and not deigning to
raise his head from the lap of the Phoenix Goddess, he
thrusts forth a stone which lies by his foot.
Saying, 'A god's present for a god. Take it carefully, O
presumptuous Little One, for it is hot to the touch.'
The thunderbolt falls and the mighty tree is rent in twain.
They asked for my messenger,' said the Pure One, turning
again to repose.
"Lo, he comes!"

And, finally, nothing to do with trees at all, but another, quite different view of the supreme being by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Brahma.  I really don't think its a very good poem, but I like it, and it fathered one of the most loved of all parodies, which I will offer up another time if anyone's interested. And to end, some peeling trunks in a wood in Panama.

If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near,
Shadow and sunlight are the same,
The vanished gods to me appear,
And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

Dance

One of the less bookish themes that might crop up here occasionally is dance.  Not only do I love ballet, but dance has always seemed a marvellous analogy for life itself.  Think of T S Eliot in Burnt Norton:

At the still point of the turning world.  Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

Or Anthony Powell, whose Dance to the Music of Time is a series of novels I return to again and again - and I even go and look at the Poussin in the National Gallery, though he is not one of my most admired Old Masters.  But the reason dance is on my mind at the moment is that I watched Darcey Bussell's farewell from the Royal Ballet a few days ago - the performance she chose was MacMillan's Song of the Earth to Mahler's song cycle of the same name.  These German translations of Chinese poems cannot be called cheerful, but both in the Mahler and in MacMillan's ballet realisation, there is such beauty.  I had the pleasure of seeing the ballet a week or so earlier as well, when I took my god-daughter to Covent Garden, a very pleasant afternoon indeed, quite without the tears which attended Darcey Bussell's farewell.

The Zantedeschia which have been trumpeting their purity all around my pond for weeks now, seem to capture the same mood of elegiac beauty, so here is a particularly fine example from my garden, after rain.

And here are a handful of other books in that tray I showed yesterday (complete with skull - no Webster references intended):

And its just occurred to me that The Fisher King, which I re-read last week, centres on a great ballerina, whose dancing is a sacrifice for the man she loves; but when she dances again, he knows he has lost her.

A toe in the water

As this is my first effort at a blog, I'd better start by telling you what I'm going to talk about. Well, of course, Books Do Furnish A Room will talk about books of all sorts- often neglected, out of print books, as well as bestsellers and thrillers; non-fiction as well as novels and poetry; my own books, library books, and borrowed and stolen books; classics and embarrassing favourites of no great merit.  But I will also talk about the garden, about trees and birds, about dance and pictures - in fact, I'll talk about anything that captures my fancy, but there will be books or a bookish theme everytime.

I'll start by showing you my book tray, a marvellous piece of brassbound oak which originally, I imagine, formed part of a bookseller's display, but which now holds the books I'm reading, thinking of reading, or which are just off the shelf because I've checked a reference or want to revel in a favourite phrase or paragraph.  There are lots of books I read which never make it here, because they're read and returned to the shelf too quickly.

I'll talk about the contents of the tray as I get to them - some are in books on the go - but here's a couple of visitors who've been acompanying my breakfast reading in the garden recently, a buff tailed bumble bee and a large red damselfly.

Two things I want to talk about very soon are Ernest Bramah and trees that live forever.  Right now, I'm going to bed with a Michael Innes!