Books Do Furnish A Room

Come Dance with me

Cornflower mentioned our universal need for still points the other day, and I agree; but for me, still points are pauses for action, still only in the sense that movement is temporarily contained, perhaps momentarily halted, not in any sense permanently suspended or evaded.  And in the passage where Eliot uses the phrase, he uses the powerful image of dance to capture this:

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.

I am passionate about dance and I love this image.  The violence of a reel, the clodhopping rumbustiousness of country dancing, the grace of a waltz, the care and structure of a minuet, the heightened sensibility and tautness of the  ballet, they all seem wonderful images of life: pattern you cannot quite understand or achieve, intimacies and ephemeral contacts; grace and sweat blood and tears - how perfect do you want your images to be?

Eliot plays with this image and ones like it  - to do with stillness and movement - several times in Four Quartets.  He talks of

The stillness, as a Chinese jar still

Moves perpetually in its stillness.

Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,

Not that only ...

Or

... a limited value

In the knowledge derived from experience.

The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,

For the pattern is new in every moment

And every moment is a new and shocking

Valuation of all we have been. ...

The pattern here is the dance, and one particular Dance I love is Anthony Powells' Dance To The Music Of Time, the twelve volume sequence of novels which covers a slice - an ever changing slice - of English society from the First World War to the 1970s.  They are hilarious and tragic and they make me understand - for brief fleeting moments - how people work.  I read them all every New Year, and I shall start tomorrow of A Question of Upbringing;  I shall not post exhaustively on each of them, that were tedium for my readers, but I shall offer you a little vignette or paragraph from each as we go along.  So, come and Dance with me!

Pine trees

I threatened a few weeks ago to give you some Rupert Brooke, and here it is!  He was one of that golden crop of poets, like Owen and Sassoon, who were mown down by the Great War.  He was perhaps more country house than them, and he was certainly a talismanic youth to his generation, good looking, talented, doomed to die.  He is not a war poet in the same sense as them at all - no blood or mud.  He was very romantic, and many of his poems comforted me through the love agonies of adolescence, but they are young man's poetry.  But he has wonderful technique, and great gentleness, and a wider range than he is often given credit for.  He is often very despairing, in a romantic way, almost enjoying the pain and the suffering of a love affair, but there is a genuine bitterness which surfaces from time to time.  It is hard to find a short poem which ends on a positive note, but as it's almost New Year, I've made the effort, and here is Rupert Brooke's Pine Trees and the Sky: Evening.

I'd watched the sorrow of the evening sky,
And smelt the sea, and earth, and the warm clover,
And heard the waves, and the seagull's mocking cry.

And in them all was only the old cry,
That song they always sing - "The best is over!
You may remember now, and think, and sigh,
O silly lover!"
And I was tired and sick that all was over,
And because I,
For all my thinking, never could recover
One moment of the good hours that were over.
And I was sorry and sick, and wished to die.

Then from the sad west turning wearily,
I saw the pines against the white north sky,
Very beautiful, and still, and bending over
Their sharp black heads against a quiet sky.
And there was peace in them; and I
Was happy, and forgot to play the lover,
And laughed, and did no longer wish to die;
Being glad of you, O pine-trees and the sky!

Walking round London 10

Further progress walking around London just before Christmas, on a wintry but brighter day.  We started at Streatham Common and ended up at Wimbledon Park - a short leg of only five and a half miles, but we added a little detour for nostalgic reasons.  We started off at the station, and indeed stayed close to the railway (the Brighton line and suburban services) for a couple of hours.  The first point of interest was the Streatham Pumping Station, built in a Moorish style, and still working.  They knew how to build public buildings in those days!

From there we walked through typical late C19 century south London streets, some in good condition, others a bit more neglected, until we were almost at Tooting Bec common.  Here, we left the route - I hope the Fat Controller who wrote the official guide book will forgive us, 'cos he's very prissy and paternalistic - and went to see Prentis Road where the two of us lived, with a variety of others at different times, some time in 1979-1981.  It was a big middle class house, still there, and looking reasonably much the same - as far as my imperfect memory can recall; it had a dental surgery on the ground floor, grand stairs to a big flat on the first floor (the dentist's mother, I believe), and much meaner stairs to a three bedroom flat at the top in the attics.  It wasn't heaven, but it was the first place in London that I ever called home, so it was quite fun to go and see it.

Then back to Tooting Bec common - named after a French abbey - with a huge outdoor lido, a hundred yards of freezing water where you can, if you should be so minded, see (and participate in) the 2008 World Winter Swimming Championships, in February!  See you there.  Brass monkey swimming aside, it's a large open common with lots of sport pitches and a reasonable amount of woodland and rougher areas for birds etc.  And in the winter sunshine, one could only be grateful to those Victorian pioneers who prevented it being built all over.

Back into suburbia then, and past some striking brick decoration on some of the smarter houses, before arriving at Wandsworth Common, where we stopped for a very welcome cup of tea and cake.  Wandsworth is also a fine area of common, but it's badly chopped into pieces by roads and railway lines.  Leaving the common, we passed the less attractive brickwork of Wandsworth Prison, formerly the Surrey House of Correction, where Oscar Wilde was briefly an inmate (before he more famously was moved to Reading):

"I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every drifting cloud that went
With sails of silver by."

Then down to Wimbledon Park, through the long Earlsfield (or Wandsworth) cemetery, well kept and still in use.  Curiously, there is a war cemetery here, exceedingly well maintained and very moving, about 22 very young men dying a long way from home - mainly Australians, but a handful of Canadians too.  I was puzzled as to what this was doing here, but the web provided the answer - the majority of the WW1 casualties buried in the military plots at this cemetery died at the nearby No 3 London General Hospital.  I was touched to find that there are still people, 90 years later, looking after the graves and asking, from Canada or Australia, for information and photographs.

"They shall grow not old,
As we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them,
Nor the years condemn,
At the going down of the sun
And in the morning
We will remember them."

Finally, across the fast flowing River Wandle, once a famous trout stream, then a sewer for the soap and chemical industries, now clean again and a bit of a nature reserve.  That was pretty much the end of the day's walk - only one leg to go to see Richmond Bridge again!

Moore mist opportunities

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas Day, and are enjoying the feast of St Stephen. These pictures seemed an appropriate offering.

Just before Christmas, to Kew Gardens in a thick mist.  I will let these images speak for themselves, except to say that Kew, for all the winter weather, is always beautiful - and that however well you know it, you would have got lost as I did in these conditions!  Fantastic views of trees and the Moore sculptures, which have a primal, absolute quality in these conditions, utterly dissociated from the world yet hugely of it.  I hope to capture them under snow as well.  The leaf at the end is a sculpture, too, I think.

A Child's Christmas

This Friday poem is prose!  And I make no apology for this seasonal offering, extracts from Dylan Thomas' A Child's Christmas in Wales.  Thomas's prose is so poetic that I feel justified in using this favourite of mine; he is a man on whose words you can really get drunk - and to hear him read his own poetry is a revelation - there are recordings still available, notably a BBC compilation.  This lovely story, which you can get illustrated by Ardizzone, tells of a composite childhood Christmas in his native South Wales, and is full of gorgeous language, wonderfully funny incidents, and a childlike mystery which captures even my hard heart.  Don't just read this, wrap yourself in it, shout it aloud, and have a very happy Christmas!

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out comes...

...Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the colour of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed. But here a small boy says: "It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea."

"But that was not the same snow," I say. "Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely-ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards."

"Were there postmen then, too?"
"With sprinkling eyes and wind-cherried noses, on spread, frozen feet they crunched up to the doors and mittened on them manfully. But all that the children could hear was a ringing of bells."
"You mean that the postman went rat-a-tat-tat and the doors rang?"
"I mean that the bells the children could hear were inside them."
"I only hear thunder sometimes, never bells."
"There were church bells, too."
"Inside them?"
"No, no, no, in the bat-black, snow-white belfries, tugged by bishops and storks. And they rang their tidings over the bandaged town, over the frozen foam of the powder and ice-cream hills, over the crackling sea. It seemed that all the churches boomed for joy under my window; and the weathercocks crew for Christmas, on our fence."

If you can't wait until you can get to a bookshop, you can read the whole thing here.

Radetsky March

Books are like hills: those that look most daunting can be easy of ascent, and vice versa; and the hardest work does not always produce the finest views.  With Joseph Roth's family novel, Radetsky March, I was cautious.  It looked formidable - not too big, to be sure, but dense and very, very serious, perhaps gloomy and pessimistic.  But I gathered my courage, stepped out boldly and soon found myself surging up the slopes to a mighty summit.  This is not a fine novel, it is a great one, and the inevitable comparison is with Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks.

It deals with four generations of the Trotta family, although the most recent two are the main theme of the novel.  The eldest Trotta is a humble man, but his son manages to become a junior officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, and is fortunate enough to save the life of the Kaiser Franz-Joseph at the battle of Solferino (1859, when the Austrians were defeated).  This leads to promotion, nobility and - quixotically - his resignation from the army.  This second Trotta (the first Baron) is not in the book for very long, but he and his portrait  pervade every page, and he is one of the two standards by which his son and grandson judge themselves, and are found wanting.  The other is the Kaiser, who reigned from 1848, year of revolutions, to 1916.  His portrait, too, is omnipresent - and around these two men and their two portraits, and the march of the title, Roth weaves a magical carpet of aspiration and failure, grandeur and decay.  But don't let these fine words mislead you, there is nothing of the heroic or the epic about this book: it truly is a study in the failure of a class and an Empire to notice and adapt to the changing world of the turbulent nineteenth century.

The writing is superb.  There is an extended passage, late in the book, inside the mind of the Kaiser, which is amongst the finest chapters of any nineteenth century novel I have ever read:  he is wise but timid; he knows that his Empire and the whole social order is in irreversible decay - he has lost Italy, he has seen the rise of Prussia and of democratic and nationalist movements in his own territories.  But his staff think they are protecting him from rude reality: and all he wants is to see the military manoevers, with the uniforms and the music, a childlike glee in pageant and an old man's wisdom. 

The portrayals of the third Trotta, a civilian offical utterly dedicated to maintaining the family and Imperial dignity, and of the last member of the family, are exceptionally fine.  The last Trotta is in the army but without vocation - and, too, unaware that it is an army utterly unfit for the storm which is brewing fiercely, but which he has no idea is brewing.  He fails to match his father and grandfather, and eventually, after a serious of scandals, leaves the army.  The two scandals lead to desperate, poignant passages of wonderful imagination - a pointless duel, and an audience with the Kaiser.  But the real heartbreak is still to come: the youngest Trotta has to rejoin in 1914, and is killed in trivial, even ignominious circumstances.  His father and the Kaiser both die a little later, each unable to outlive the other.  Sic transit gloria mundi.

This is an astonishing and very beautiful, though very sad, book:  I revelled in it, and was carried up a huge mountain in splendour and tragedy.

Walking round London 9

After a long interval, caused by a (mild) leg injury and a long holiday, I got around to continuing my Capital Ring walk round London ten days or so ago.  It was the 8 mile stretch from New Beckenham to Streatham Common - and it was a marked contrast to earlier walks, with a much shorter, darker day, cold and wet.  But it nevertheless was of real interest, though a quick glance at the map seemed to offer a lot of street walking.

Out of the station, past a house almost completely obscured by Christmas decorations, including snow and a sleigh on the roof!  Past, too, the site of Kent House, a 13th century farm which was the first building in Kent on this road leaving London - and which, tragically and unbelievably, was only demolished in 1957.  Then into Crystal Palace Park for a welcome cup of soup and a walk round the bizarre 19th century dinosaur models, a piece of earnest education in something akin to a theme park.  Also, among the dinosaurs are a couple of massive elk - deer only made extinct 11,000 years ago, whose antlers - re-grown each year - sometimes reached 12 feet across.  Wouldn't care to meet one of these in a bad mood in the New Forest.

Then up through the park to the gigantic terraces which housed the Crystal Palace itself, moved here from Hyde Park in 1854 but burned down in 1936.  Little remains except the imposing terraces, and a few token items, including a number of curious statues and sphinxes - impressive at a distance, but close up, it's clear that they're just hollow concrete over iron frames in bad repair.

From Crystal Palace, a zig-zag route across to Streatham, through Biggin Wood, a thin but pleasant green strip, and past Dickens Wood Close, the site of a house where Charles Dickens stayed, and where he set David Copperfield's meeting with Dora Spenlow.  Then across Norwood Park.  This is a lovely, unsung park, with a house built in the 1840s for Arthur Andersen, founder of the P&O shipping company and MP for the Orkneys.  It's in public ownership now, but still with pleasant gardens and well maintained on the outside at least.  My walking companion, a south Londoner for thirty years, had no idea of its existence - and that's been one of the charms of this walk, finding these unknown beauties.

Finally, into Streatham Common and another unknown, the formal Rookery gardens tumbling down the gentle slope with fine views over London to the North Downs.

Horace

I keep running across Horace lately, and I am no classicist.  But I was reading Kipling – his collection of short stories, Diversity of Creatures. This is far from his best, but still has some fine stories, which anyone else would be proud of – including the moving In The Presence, about Indian soldiers performing their duty at the lying in state of the coffin of Edward VI, and Regulus.  This is a late Stalky story about adolescence and growing pains, set around a lesson from the Classics master, Mr King; he is taking the class through Horace, Ode 5 in Book 3.

The ode describes Regulus, taken prisoner by the Carthaginians and returned by them to persuade Rome to end the war and come to terms, but in fact he is passionately advising Rome to do no such thing.  By doing this, and insisting on returning to Carthage according to his word, he leaves his wife, children and friends, and goes to certain and painful death.  You get an idea of the poem by reading the story, but I went to my shelves to read the whole.  I am ashamed to say that I had only a Victorian edition, translated by Lytton, and it's fusty and ornate – not my taste at all.  But you can see why Horace appealed to Victorian values.  A stanza from Lytton, when Regulus has annouced his decision to return to face a punishment he could have avoided by breaking his oath:

Albeit he knew what the barbarian skill

Of the tormentor for himself prepared,

He motioned from his path

The opposing kindred, the retarding crowd.

Curiously enough, my next encounter with Horace was also concerned with teaching and with Victorian values, in Tom Stoppard’s Invention of Love, where the classicist and poet A E Housman is explored with wit and sympathy.  At the centre of the play – in which there are dozens of classical references, all clearly set out in the text, you need be no classicist to enjoy this play – Housman is teaching Diffugere nives, (Ode 7, Book 4) of which he says (in Stoppard’s words):

“Diffugere nives goes through me like a spear.  Nobody makes it stick like Horace that you’re a long time dead – dust and shadow, and no good deeds, no eloquence, will bring you back.  I think it’s the most beautiful poem in Latin or Greek there ever was.”

It is wonderful, describing the renewal of life in the spring, and lamenting that we cannot share in it, that our decay is for ever (where "Tullus and Ancus are" in the extract below, that is, dead and in Hades).  Finally, it describes Theseus’ failed attempts to free his lover Pirithous from the chains of hell.  A couple of stanzas in Housman's incomparable version:

The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws

And grasses in the mead renew their birth,

The river to his river bed withdraws,

And altered is the fashion of the earth.

....

But oh, whate'er the sky-led seasons mar,

Moon upon moon rebuilds it with her beams:

Come we where Tullus and where Ancus are,

And good Aeneas, we are dust and dreams.

All this prompted me to go and buy a decent modern edition, and I recommend browsing in this poet, whose monument, in his own phrase, is more lasting than bronze.  And the Radio 3 essays on classical authors are about him this coming week, at 11 pm - if they're as good as the Homer essays last week, they'll be worth listening to.

Listeners

This week's poem is a real school classic, Walter de la Mare's The Listeners.  I read this first a hundred years ago, and liked it then.  Then I grew out of it, and would have scorned to read this with my clever friends in the sixth form or at University - but it has something, don't you think?  We all know that no house is truly empty, that pilgrimage is worth the journey even if you alone know you have been there, and I would read this for that atmosphere alone.  But the words are beautiful too, if a little close to cliche on occasion:  "the silence surged softly backward" is worth the entrance money by itself.  But I mustn't get carried away, or I'll be giving you Rupert Brooke next (and why not?). "Is there anybody there?" said the Traveller, Knocking on the moonlit door; And his horse in the silence champed the grass Of the forest's ferny floor; And a bird flew up out of the turret, Above the Traveller's head: And he smote upon the door again a second time; "Is there anybody there?" he said. But no one descended to the Traveller; No head from the leaf-fringed sill Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes, Where he stood perplexed and still. But only a host of phantom listeners That dwelt in the lone house then Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight To that voice from the world of men: Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair, That goes down to the empty hall, Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken By the lonely Traveller's call. And he felt in his heart their strangeness, Their stillness answering his cry, While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf, 'Neath the starred and leafy sky; For he suddenly smote on the door, even Louder, and lifted his head:-- "Tell them I came, and no one answered, That I kept my word," he said. Never the least stir made the listeners, Though every word he spake Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house From the one man left awake: Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup, And the sound of iron on stone, And how the silence surged softly backward, When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Manguel: a "biography" of Homer

Been reading with great interest Alberto Manguel’s Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey: a biography.  We know too little about Homer the man to write his biography, but about the two master works, we have almost too much information, they have been commented on and translated so often over the past three millennia or so.  I have my own views on translating Homer (here), but this book makes me realise that I have only dipped a toe into the available Ocean of Homer.  A particular stimulus of this book is to read Matthew Arnold’s Lectures on Translating Homer, of which A E Housman, most exacting of critics, remarked that it would alone outweigh the whole of corpus of criticism of the nation of critics!  If I can find a copy – the London Library is sure to have it! – I will let you know.  (It does, but it will have to wait a little now!)

It isn’t important that we don’t know who – or whether – Homer was, but it is extraordinary how richly he has influenced every literary nation since, being revered by Romans, Christians, Muslims and freethinkers.  He sees so truly, and his characters have such complexity – Manguel gives the example of the many toned and occasionally selfish anger of Achilles -  as can only amaze us.  Many readers apparently find the Odyssey easier at first, being almost a picaresque novel, full of different adventures; but many readers on maturer reflection, rate the Iliad yet higher, with its fierce driving dynamic of Achilles’ wrath and the internal politics of the Greeks and their gods.

What I enjoyed most about the Manguel are some of the minor insights – the argument among the Fathers about Homer’s value or danger as a teacher of young Christians; the fact that Pope translated all of Homer and made a fortune (£9,000) from it, but spoke no Greek; the way Homer became central to early Islamic learning, and then into the European renaissance; how Homer studies gravitated northwards as the Vatican frowned, being neglected in the Mediterranean countries and elevated in Germany, Britain and the Netherlands; and the way this spread to the Americas, with the North learning Greek in its schools and building Greek architectures, whilst in the south, they followed the Baroque.  All human history is here.

And while I have been reading this, Radio 3 has had some excellent evening lectures on Homer, which you can listen to here.  They're really each a very good 15 minutes worth, and I especially recommend the first by Christopher Pelling  (If the link is being tempermental, its Radio 3, The Essay, Mon-Thu this week - but they're only available for a few days).  This is the start of a whole radio series, and Horace is next week, who by chance, I am also reading at the moment.  Listen out for them.

Lady on the Train

I met, the other day, a lady on the train and we talked about books, what else?    So this post is not about a lost Hitchcock thriller, but about reading lists.  Personally, I'm always a little sceptical about the type of list you see in the papers from time to time, exhorting you (or your children) to read such and such a miniature library, but I believe in the canon - so it should be possible.  So this charming lady told me that she was reading her way through lots of lists, but particularly she recommended one printed by the Toronto Globe and Mail a few years ago.  She subsequently sent it to me, and I append it for your interest - slightly oddly sorted by initial initial of author (my fault, not the lady's!).

The Strangers (The Outsider)	Albert Camus
The Color Purple	Alice Walker
Howl	Allen Ginsberg
A Clockwork Orange	Anthony Burgess
Bleak House	Charles Dickens
Inferno	Dante Alighieri
The Sun Also Rises	Ernest Hemingway
The Great Gatsby	F. Scott Fitzgerald
Metamorphosis	Franz Kafka
The Brothers Karamazov	Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Love in the Time of Cholera	Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Heartbreak House	George Bernard Shaw
1984	George Orwell
The Tin Drum	Gunter Grass
To Kill a Mockingbird	Harper Lee
Tropic of Cancer	Henry Miller
Moby Dick	Herman Melville
The Glass Bead Game	Hermann Hesse
Catcher in the Rye	J. D. Salinger
On the Road	Jack Kerouac
Dubliners	James Joyce
Sense and Sensibility	Jane Austen
The Grapes of Wrath	John Steinbeck
Heart of Darkness	Joseph Conrad
Catch 22	Joseph Heller
The Awakening	Kate Chopin
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest	Ken Kesey
Slaughterhouse Five	Kurt Vonnegut
Anna Karenina	Leo Tolstoy
The Handmaid's Tale	Margaret Atwood
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn	Mark Twain
Don Quixote	Miguel de Cervantes
Barney's Version	Mordechai Richler
The Time and the Place	Naguib Mahfouz
Picture of Dorian Gray	Oscar Wilde
Collected Poems	Robert Frost
Midnight's Children	Salman Rushdie
Krapp's Last Tape	Samuel Beckett
The Red and the Black	Stendhal
The Bell Jar	Sylvia Plath
The Waste Land	T. S. Eliot
Gravity's Rainbow	Thomas Pynchon
Beloved	Toni Morrison
To the Lighthouse	Virginia Woolf
Lolita	Vladimir Nabokov
Leaves of Grass	Walt Whitman
The Sound and the Fury	William Faulkner
Lord of the Flies	William Golding
Naked Lunch	William S. Burroughs
King Lear	William Shakespeare

Anyone read them all?  I've heard of either book or author or both in all but two cases (Mordecai Richler's Barney's Version, and Kate Chopin's Awakening), but would only claim to have read 23.  There are a couple of my very greatest favourites - Eliot and Austen - but not much poetry.  Of all the world's poetry, they pick Frost?  And Plath?  Give me a break! There's a clear North American bias, which is fair enough, but not much European literature - no Homer, no Virgil?  As the list was published under the heading of How to be well read, I think they might have some explaining to do there!  But the real purpose of these lists is not that people read the books, but that they talk about them and maybe find one or two new authors.  So, a challenge - pick one of the books on here you haven't read, and tell Booksdofurnisharoom about it!

Achitophel

Today, a bleeding chunk of the unfashionable but quite wonderful John Dryden, from Absalom and Achitophel.  One of the difficulties in reading Dryden today is his politics - you do need to know a bit about the world he lived in to follow his arguments; Absalom and Achitophel is no exception, but this excerpt is wondrous music, and you need nothing except to know that Achitophel, a false adviser to King David stood in the C17th for all that was wicked and vile - and that every reader would have recognised him as the Earl of Shaftesbury, power seeking politician in the Commonwealth and under Charles II - and opponent of the accession of James II.  One of his direct descendants led the movement for factory reform in the C19th.  What language this is, what a picture of a man whose skill (and others' admiration of his skill) was worth more to him than what he used it to achieve!

Of these the false Achitophel was first;
A name to all succeeding ages curst:
For close designs, and crooked counsels fit;
Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit;
Restless, unfixed in principles and place;
In power unpleased, impatient of disgrace;
A fiery soul, which, working out its way,
Fretted the pigmy-body to decay,
And o'er-informed the tenement of clay.
A daring pilot in extremity,
Pleased with the danger, when the waves went high,
He sought the storms; but, for a calm unfit,
Would steer too nigh the sands, to boast his wit.
Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide;
Else, why should he, with wealth and honour blest,
Refuse his age the needful hours of rest?
Punish a body which he could not please;
Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease?
And all to leave what with his toil he won,
To that unfeathered two-legged thing, a son;
Got, while his soul did huddled notions try;
And born a shapeless lump, like anarchy.
In friendship false, implacable in hate;
Resolved to ruin, or to rule the state.

Zebra crossing

I know there are some readers who are practical and creative people, and I thought you might like a look at my new rug, a proud acquisition from Namibia.  These rugs are woven by native people to a very high standard, from the wool of the karakul sheep - bizarrely, I believe this is an Afghan breed - incorporating motifs from traditional life and the natural world around them.  It feels quite physical and nubbly, and I particualrly like the asymmetry, the way the zebra motif is not quite central in the rug.  I bought it without having a home for it, as it's three foot by about eight, but it found its own place on a blue-green carpet in one of the upstairs rooms (displacing another rug, which started a musical chairs not yet resolved!).

When I got back to the UK, I took this through the red channel and paid duty - much to the apparent surprise of the officer on duty.  The last picture is perversely setting the long lines of the rug at an angle, just for fun: it wouldn't work on the floor, but I think this quite effective.  I expect Cornflower to start knitting her own version shortly!  By the way, I saw lots of real zebras, too.

Afternoon men

The title comes from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, but this is one of Anthony Powell's early novels, from 1931.  Loving the Dance to the Music of Time sequence, and his late great novel, The Fisher King, I have been catching up on his early work.  Afternoon Men is about the lost generation of the 1920s, and it has all the hallmarks of Powell's later work: understatement, calm comedy, slightly difficult relationships, small actions carrying a great burden of meaning and understanding.  So much is this true, that the most dramatic event in this book doesn't actually happen.

Let me give you an example of his quiet, minimalist approach to language, and his vision of the bored rituals of society:

""Don't", she said. "You're not allowed to do that."

"Why not?"

"Because you're not."

"I shall."

She said "I'm glad we met. But you must behave."

Slowly, but very deliberately, the brooding edifice of seduction, came into being, a vast Heath Robinson mechanism, dually controlled by them and lumbering gloomily down vistas of triteness. With a sort of heavy-fisted dexterity the mutually adapted emotions of each of them became synchronized, until the unavoidable anti-climax was at hand.

Later, they dined at a restaurant quite near the flat."

The novel takes a few episodes in the lives of poor artists, young and emotionally impressionable, and a party or two, and a weekend in the country.  It explores their failings and inadequacies without rancour, but with precision and humour.  It's a joy to read, and for the dedicated Dance reader, it's fascinating to see Powell working up themes and flexing his character skills.  The book ends exactly as it begins, with a casual invitation to a party, and one feels a real lack of significance in the characters' lives, something which was radically to change as the 1930s unfolded.