Books Do Furnish A Room

Ozymandias

Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ozymandias needs no introduction, and in this age of inter-continental travel, we have all had experiences like this.  But the first time it captured the moment for me was in the British Museum as a young man, probably not out of my teens, when the first staircase to the left had just such a pair of legs on the first landing.  Shelley is not a poet I love greatly, but this has a place in my affections always.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Island pilgrimage

In a post on Cees Nooteboom's travel writing, I mentioned his essay on the work of Tim Robinson, Stones of Aran. This comes in two volumes, Pilgrimage about the coast, and Labyrinth about the interior; these are sizeable volumes, and considering that their subject is an Irish island only 8 miles long and 2 miles wide with a population of just over a thousand people at the time he was writing (mid 1980s), you will see that they are very detailed.  I am reading Pilgrimage first, because I love coasts and the sea, and because, in any island, but particularly one so small, the coast is the point – an island is of the sea as much as it is of the land.

Aran (or Arainn) is a limestone island off the west coast of Ireland,  just off Galway Bay; you look north to Connemara and east to the Burren of County Clare; and though it is a only few miles offshore, it is and has always been pretty remote and isolated from the main political events and turmoil of Ireland, let alone Europe as a whole.  Its great traditional glory has been its religious foundations, which have exported an intellectual legacy all over Europe, and which have left a tangible one of ruins and stones.

He starts at the extreme eastern end of the island, and steadily goes clockwise (or sunwise, the “circuit that blesses”) along the southern coast to the western end – out to the rocky islets further west still – and then back along the northern coast.  He describes each bay and point in detail, not meticulously and tediously, but descriptively and imaginatively, recounting the human stories of the place, the myths and the legends, the names and the topography, building a series of powerful impressions through prose which is precise, even finicky, and yet which is more meditative that it is academic.

He has made a map of the island, and discovered something interesting, that boatmen, in giving bearings and directions to each other, give names to features on the land that the landsmen either know by a different name, or by no name at all.  In some cases, a feature  which is obvious from afar is nothing when you are actually there, walking across it.  He says,

Thus offshore usage recreates  the surrounding landscapes; ... the fisherman low among the waves raises his eyes and picks words off the land with which to write sentences on the sea.

His language is a constant joy, and the book so quietly insistent an invitation to slow, detailed reading, that I will post again, as I follow the coast round with him.  But for now, just one more example (Bar Aille is an Aran place name which simply means top of the cliff), with a fine ambiguity in the final word:

A common phrase here for a fruitless endeavour is ag dul go Barr Aille gan tada, "going to Barr Aille for nothing", for the islanders almost never visit these tall cliffs without good reason, and there are many whom no reason at all could bring to this mortal edge of their holding.

Thanks to Lorianne for the photographs; she has more which are well worth looking at.

Re-Reading

Having finished my annual re-read of the Dance To The Music of Time sequence recently, I was moved to think a little bit about the idea of re-reading things.  It seems to excite, in non- or occasional readers, much more surprise than going to see a film again, or watching a repeat of a favourite television programme or sporting event  And as for looking at a picture again, or listening to music more than once, everyone seems to accept this as completely normal.  Indeed, it would be a sad world if you couldn’t look twice at Las Meninas or listen more than once to the Mahler 3.

So why do people say – “how can you re-read a book, you already know what happens!”?  My first response (apart the fact that the same point can be made about films, music and the rest) is that I very seldom read to find out what happens, or at least not just to find out.  An exception might be a thriller bought in desperation at an airport or a railway station, or – in youth – a Thomas Hardy (novels I found at once unreadable and compulsive).  But even with the “lowest” forms of writing, I try only to read things that I might want to read again – whether it be poetry, high novels, crime thrillers, or travel writing.  This is not, course, to say that I do read them again – life is short, the book so long – but the idea is there.

If someone tells me that I waste my time to re-read a poem of Donne or an Austen novel, I might retort that they should not waste precious minutes tasting a fine cheese or wine a second time, since “they know what it tastes like already”.  And the absurdity is the same, my brain needs nourishment all the time, and it’s enjoyable (and extra rewarding) to give it food it has enjoyed before.

But the real point is that it never is the same.  Sure, the murder is always solved and the same person dunnit, Elizabeth Bennet always marries Darcy, and July is never the cruellest month.  But the experience is always different – my mood, what I have read and learned since my last reading (including the book itself), my attention, my sensitivity to certain factors.  Even with the books I re-read most, I find sentences I swear I have never noticed before, and my taste changes surely over the years and with the gradual influence of wider cultural stimuli.  As a boy, I preferred the Odyssey over the Iliad, now the reverse is true; I grew to love Eliot gradually in my late teens and early twenties, but my passion – still undimmed – has a different quality to it.  And there is the wonderful pleasure of meeting old friends, sometimes knowingly, sometimes sprung upon you by the imperfect memory of the reader.

I read Dance all through every year, and all of Jane Austen, and the short stories of Kipling and Borges; less frequently,  a whole host of books, fiction and non-fiction, and lots of crime novels.  As for poetry, it exists to be re-read and savoured, and Donne and Eliot are often off the shelf.  I shall continue to re-read without shame, as long as I can find savour and depth in the reading, and as long as I have time to read lots and lots of new stuff as well!!

Wide Sargasso Sea

Months ago, I bought Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea in Liverpool railway station, but didn’t read it until last week.  It’s a short book, but one heavily loaded with meaning and burdened with images; sometimes, I felt it was too frail a craft to be so heavily loaded.  But it is based on – more accurately motivated by - Jane Eyre, and maybe this inspires readers to see more in it, and may have inspired Rhys to attempt too much.  The title, too, is laden with mystery – a open sea full of weed, where mariners belieced their ships could become trapped, and now known as the spawning ground of the common eel.

It is an imagining of the Jane Eyre story from a different perspective in time, space and person.  It concentrates on the first Mrs Rochester, her childhood and the early weeks of her marriage, and is set largely in Jamaica and Dominica in the mid 1830s (a couple of decades after the original events of Jane Eyre would have taken place).  It is a brief novel, no more than 120 pages, and this is possible because Rhys paints in strong colours with a wide brush, but also because your knowledge of Jane Eyre creates a scaffold of understanding for much which is unexplained.  It would be hard reading if you didn’t know the earlier novel!  The cover of my Penguin Modern Classics edition has a John Minton painting, bold colourful, dark, and this captures the book very well.

There are a number of mixed themes in the novel: slavery and the treatment of blacks by whites; marriage and property ownership in marriage; and voodoo and hatred.  This are mixed boldly, almost recklessly, in a cocktail of despair and fatigue, of horror at the ownership of one human being by another, whether through a commercial contract or a religious sacrament.  For me, it was a box of fireworks which never quite caught fire – instead of a riot of colour and display, there was only the occasional bright squib, although I remained in my lady’s danger all the time.

Because this is based on another, much more famous novel, there is no need for me to avoid talking about the ending, which is the finest part of the book - and the most familiar – Mrs Rochester’s account of her imprisonment in England, looked after by Grace Poole, and the subsequent fire (and her death) through the medium of  musings and a dream, as well as a direct account by Grace herself.  It’s a nice conceit, well executed, and worth reading in its own right.

I read another book based on Jane Eyre not long ago, the comedic fantasy, The Eyre Affair.  That was a lot of fun, this is a serious novel.  But to be honest, I enjoyed the lighter, frivolous treatment more – perhaps a reflection of the fact that I’m not really a lover of the original masterpiece, with its Gothic halftones and violent intensity.

The Widow's Party

A change of mood this week for the Friday poem, a strong piece of verse from Kipling - one of the Barrack Room Ballads.  The Widow's Party by Rudyard Kipling is a tough, vulgar bit of writing, but Kipling's real concern for the ordinary soldier (and the ordinary man in general) comes shining through.  The Widow, of course, is Queen Victoria, and the "party" takes place at the end of the nineteenth century - perhaps one of the innumerable conflicts on the north-west frontier of the Indian Empire, in what is now Pakistan.  There are several serious points to this kind of poetry - one is that it's a lot harder to write than it looks, so don't despise it.  Another is that although the food is awful and the chances of death and injury very high, not to mention long absences from home, "they couldn't do more and they wouldn't do less";  This captures the attitude of today's soldiers too, heroically toiling in places like Afghanistan to bring about the changes mentioned in the final stanza.  This kind of stuff is strong, raw spirit, and it's not everyone's taste - but you should certainly give it a try.

"Where have you been this while away,
    Johnnie, Johnnie?"
'Long with the rest on a picnic lay,
    Johnnie, my Johnnie, aha!
They called us out of the barrack-yard
To Gawd knows where from Gosport Hard,
And you can't refuse when you get the card,
    And the Widow gives the party.
       (Bugle:  Ta--rara--ra-ra-rara!)

"What did you get to eat and drink,
    Johnnie, Johnnie?"
Standing water as thick as ink,
    Johnnie, my Johnnie, aha!
A bit o' beef that were three year stored,
A bit o' mutton as tough as a board,
And a fowl we killed with a sergeant's sword,
    When the Widow give the party.

"What did you do for knives and forks,
    Johnnie, Johnnie?"
We carries 'em with us wherever we walks,
    Johnnie, my Johnnie, aha!
And some was sliced and some was halved,
And some was crimped and some was carved,
And some was gutted and some was starved,
    When the Widow give the party.

"What ha' you done with half your mess,
    Johnnie, Johnnie?"
They couldn't do more and they wouldn't do less,
    Johnnie, my Johnnie, aha!
They ate their whack and they drank their fill,
And I think the rations has made them ill,
For half my comp'ny's lying still
    Where the Widow give the party.

"How did you get away -- away,
    Johnnie, Johnnie?"
On the broad o' my back at the end o' the day,
    Johnnie, my Johnnie, aha!
I comed away like a bleedin' toff,
For I got four niggers to carry me off,
As I lay in the bight of a canvas trough,
    When the Widow give the party.

"What was the end of all the show,
    Johnnie, Johnnie?"
Ask my Colonel, for I don't know,
    Johnnie, my Johnnie, aha!
We broke a King and we built a road --
A court-house stands where the reg'ment goed.
And the river's clean where the raw blood flowed
    When the Widow give the party.
       (Bugle:  Ta--rara--ra-ra-rara!)

View from a stage coach

Reading Deakin recently, about laying his hedges in Suffolk, suddenly reminded me of that sublime "Author's Introduction" to George Eliot's Felix Holt.  I have always thought this novel oddly under-rated; it's more accessible and captivating than Middlemarch (as well as being shorter!), and is my favourite amongst all her works.  In her introduction, George Eliot hearkens back to the days of 1831 (she is writing in about 1865), and paints a compelling if romantic picture of England before political reform and industrialisation.  She does this by imagining the view from the roof of a stage coach travelling through England, and in a few magical pages captures a wonderful image of the land and its people.  And in there is this magnificent description of English hedges, riotous, untamed, glorious:

… everywhere the bushy hedgerows wasted the land with their straggling beauty, shrouded the grassy borders of the pastures with catkined hazels, and tossed their long blackberry branches on the cornfields. Perhaps they were white with May, or starred with pale pink dog roses; perhaps the urchins were already nutting amongst them, or gathering the plenteous crabs. It was worth the journey only to see those hedgerows, the liberal homes of unmarketable beauty - of the purple blossomed ruby-berried nightshade, of the wild convolvulus climbing and spreading in tendrilled strength till it  made a great curtain of pale-green hearts and white trumpets, of the many-tubed honeysuckle which, in its most delicate fragrance, hid a charm more subtle and penetrating than beauty. Even if it were winter the hedgerows showed their coral, the scarlet haws, the deep-crimson hips, with lingering brown leaves to make a resting-place for the jewels of the hoar-frost.

I remember when ...

An interesting article in this week's New Scientist (only the opening paragraph available for free), which argues that forgetting is healthy.  This may not seem so to those of use who can't recall the name of someone we know well, or anybody's telephone number, but the burden of a complete memory can be intense.  It can apparently be obsessive, block creativity, or merely not allow you to forget something embarrassing, traumatic or distressing - therefore forbidding you from "moving on" in the current idiom.  Fancy being able to remember where you put your keys when you entered the house 13 years ago, what dress you were wearing, and whether the cat had drunk its milk!  Neither of the people mentioned in the article had been able to turn their memories to academic or professional advantage, there were just burdened by them.

All this reminded me of Borges' story, Funes the Memorious.  Funes remembers everything, and it is an intolerable burden, and the death of thought:

We, in a glance, perceive three wine glasses on the table; Funes saw all the shoots, clusters, and grapes of the vine. He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of the Quebracho. These recollections were not simple; each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his fancies. Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day ... Funes not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it.

This has dramatic consequences for him, and his life  - physically limited by being a bed-bound cripple - is mentally limited too:

He was, let us not forget, almost incapable of general, platonic ideas. It was not only difficult for him to understand that the generic term dog embraced so many unlike specimens of differing sizes and different forms; he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at three-fifteen (seen from the front). His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him on every occasion. Swift writes that the emperor of Lilliput could discern the movement of the minute hand; Funes could continuously make out the tranquil advances of corruption, of caries, of fatigue. He noted the progress of death, of moisture. He was the solitary and lucid spectator of a multiform world which was instantaneously and almost intolerably exact.

There is much more to the story than this, and its eight pages is a world of tragedy and mockery, philosophical speculation and daily toil.  Funes the Memorious is in Labyrinths, and is a wonderful fictional counterpart to the idiot savants and their companions in Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, a series of compelling, beautifully written factual accounts of disabilities which amaze and teach us something profound about the working of the brain and the human condition, too.

Into the Wild Wood

I have been reading, in a leisurely way, Roger Deakin's Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees - it's a book which lends itself to this approach, being made up of shortish chapters which are entirely self contained. It's about woods and wood all round the world, which justifies me putting it in the travel category, for these chapters have the joy of journeying in them as well as the main matter of trees and landscape.  And this is true even of his British chapters, where a visit to Hampshire or Wales is as magical as one to Greece or the Ferghana valley.

It's delightful and wide ranging, and my early fears that I would enjoy it at first but that it would then grow monotonous were quickly assuaged. The tone is meditative in parts, then intensely practical and knowledgeable.  He starts with some description of his home turf - where he lives, how he manages his own arboreal environment, then harks back to schoolboy trips to the New Forest, botanising with an unusually expert and enlightened schoolmaster, whom he visits again as an adult.  These are fascinating visits to a time that is largely lost, but the real pleasures of the book are yet to come.

There are chapters on oak-apple day, the myth of the green man, and henges of trees as well as of stone and cut wood.  There are essays on artists and sculptors - and if you haven't heard of them, it doesn't matter at all, I hadn't.  And there are continuous incursions into natural history and human history entwined, as in the essays on the Forest of Dean and the historic use of walnut burr in furniture (replaced by mahogany in England when the French banned exports after a series of cold winters killed many trees and threatened their own supplies), and in luxury cars today.

And then he travels, to poplars and chestnuts in an abandoned district of rural France, to woodland walking in Poland and Ukraine, deserted villages still reeling after a century's pogroms, to Australia to understand gum forests, mulga, and the beneficial effect of fire - an open forest without scrub resulted from the Aboriginals' traditional fire grazing to encourage new herbs to attract prey.  Then to Central Asia, to the great walnut forests of Kyrgyzstan, the rampant fruit trees, and the original domestic apples from which all the world's apples have spread.  To read these chapters is to read politics, wildlife and engaging social and personal histories in the most engaging of ways.

And finally, he comes home, and writes of Suffolk trees and hedge laying.  It's a magnificent journey, and full of interest.  Wildwood is a mighty tome, at almost 400 pages, but the essays are seldom much longer and a dozen pages, and it makes wonderful browsing and meditation for all with an interest in trees and the relationship of man to the land.  Mature, contingently lovely, and very thoughtful.

For Anne Gregory

The day after Valentine, another love poem, the wistful, desperate lyric For Anne Gregory by W B Yeats.  I can't think of anything clever to say about this poem, except that if you don't get it, you've never been a young man yearning after a beautiful girl.  I imagine the experience of young women is exactly parallel, but whom am I to say?  It were otiose to remark that gentlemen prefer blondes (and it isn't true, anyway).

'Never shall a young man,

Thrown into despair

By those great honey-coloured

Ramparts at your ear,

Love you for yourself alone

And not your yellow hair.'

'But I can get a hair-dye

And set such colour there,

Brown, or black, or carrot,

That young men in despair

May love me for myself alone

And not my yellow hair.'

'I heard an old religious man

But yesternight declare

That he had found a text to prove

That only God, my dear,

Could love you for yourself alone

And not your yellow hair.'

Shadowlands

At the weekend, to the theatre to see Shadowlands, a fine play by William Nicholson about C S Lewis' tragic - but still rewarding? - love for the American lady, Joy Gresham.  Joy becomes very ill and dies soon after they know each other, and Lewis' first passion, in his late 50s, was snatched away soon after a marriage in a hospital ward.  Lewis was Charles Dance, very fine indeed, and the whole thing was funny and then desperately moving - with fine roles for the two main protagonists, but also for her young son and Lewis' brother.  I saw the film many years ago, and enjoyed it, but I think this was more immediate.  There's not more than a couple of weeks to catch it, if you're interested, but it would be well worth it.

But the main reason I raise this is to give a plug to The Screwtape Letters, C S Lewis' wonderful letters from a senior to a junior devil.  He is so well known for the Narnia books and for Surprised By Joy, but this is not as widely read as it should be.  The point of the book, on the surface, is the education of a junior devil by a senior one, as to how best to tempt Christians into sin; of course, its real purpose is the exact opposite - it's moral guidance for the young, but who would have read it then?  The letters are very funny, and deserve an audience among the Christian, the agnostic, and the atheist, and I'm sure among the followers of other faiths.  The older devil's increasing frustration at the ineptitude of the younger is wonderful - and its fun to think of devils as occasionally inept and unthreatening!

The Fashion in Shrouds

Needing a break from "serious reading", I have just (re)read Margery Allingham's The Fashion in Shrouds, which is from the golden age of English crime writing, set in the fragile, glitzy society of the 1930s.  This isn't her masterwork, by any means, but its a rattling a good yarn with some very good writing and some serious observation of the decay and danger beneath the glamour.  Her characters are never wholly real, but they are complex, impulsive and believable beings, not at all cardboard (as, say, Ngaio Marsh's can sometimes be).

The milieu is very much that of Marsh, and while I enjoy Roderick Alleyn's elegant detective work, Allingham and Campion have the upper hand in terms of writing and drama.  The blood is redder, the action quicker, the psychology surer.  One fine example of her language and her grasp of motivation is an elderly woman's comment on a self absorbed and dandyish man working in a fashion house: "Rex is not quite a lady", a perfectly filthy remark from a grande dame of the old order.

The Fashion in Shrouds is the story of a silly but beautiful actress who has two lovers disappear or die on her in the space of a few years, and stars Albert Campion - looking stupid but very clever (why does that appeal to me, I wonder?) and his melancholic and vulgar butler Lugg, late of  H M P Parkhurst, as well as his sister Val and his early love, Amanda (who he met in Sweet Danger).  There is a rich cast of wonderful characters from theatre and fashion, and the action moves along smartish.  The end is not at all telegraphed, and while the tale is fantastic, it's internally pretty consistent and satisfying.

This is not Tiger in the Smoke or Sweet Danger, but its very good.  If you like Marsh, you'll love this.

Trains

Two additions to Cornflower's trains.  First, the wonderful story of Brabazon, the Victorian dandy who had trouble with his 'r's, and was known as a result as Bwab.  He rushed onto the platform of his local station, to be told that his train had gone, to which he replied "Gone?  Gone!  Bwing another!"

And how can you think of trains without thinking of Night Mail?  If you don't know it, the link gives you the original wonderful black and white steam footage and the poem all in one.  Three minutes of nostalgic, poetic bliss - do watch it.

Doodling uphill with a Bang and a Bing and a Pong

This extraordinary post title will probably tell you nothing, unless you already know W E Bowman's mountaineering parody, The Ascent of Rum Doodle, published in 1956 in fond mockery of the heroic age of mountain writing - notably H W Tilman's The Ascent of Nanda Devi (1939).  The mood is intensely topographical, and dwells on the decency of the chaps one is climbing with, the splendid contribution of the native porters, a certain amount of strictly controlled spiritual uplift in the big hills - and glosses over difficulties amid much self deprecatory laughter.  Nanda Devi is a classic, but it does demand parody.

The trick with parody is how you sustain it.  Bowman pulls it off, with a number of running gags and a fine feel for the language and ethos of the original.  Bill Bryson has written an introduction to the most recent edition, and describes it as "one of the funniest books you will ever read", a large claim, and one which is almost justified.  Although Rum Doodle is just over 40,000 feet (!), Bowman himself never got further than fell walking in the Lake District - but for years, climbers believed that it must have been written by one of them under a pseudonym, so "realistic" is it.

I shan't spoil the story by telling you what happens, but you do need a taste of the language and the mood.  One of the running jokes is the leader's efforts to get to know his men by talking to them about whether they have a fiancée waiting for their triumphant return. He is talking to one of them, who confides that he had an early interest in sexual matters (for which 'fiancées' is made to stand in this book), and his anxious parents tried to interest him in more normal things by buying him a catapult:

Except for the additional expense of broken windows they were quite satisfied with the result.  The boy's natural delight in owning a weapon of destruction drew his attention away from the subject of fiancées, thus relieving an inner tension which might well have resulted in a political career.

On another occasion, one of the climbers expresses his overpowering scepticism, developed as a young child when he found out that Father Christmas didn't exist (news to me, incidentally).  As an example, offered in sympathy by a colleague, we hear that

... I began to suspect that Scotland did not exist: it had been invented just to make a fool of me.  I became so apprehensive that I was unable to continue my journey by cycle.  I thought that if I went by train I should avoid exposure; for if Scotland really did not exist the Railway Company would know about it and would not issue a ticket.  [Eventually I came to the conclusion] that if it was a conspiracy it was a remarkably thorough business.  I decided that Scotland was a calculated risk worth taking.

So famous has this book become, that Rum Doodle is now real!  Twenty or thirty years after the book's publication, a mountain in Antarctica was really named Mount Rumdoodle - below. (Thanks for breaking the story early, Dark Puss!!)  It has a (mythical) elevation of 153 feet, a number of massive significance in the book, a precursor of the famous 42 which is the answer to life, the universe and everything in a later classic.  There are now several other Rumdoodle mountains around the world, and a restaurant in Kathmandu, patronised by hundreds of Everest summiteers, among others.

I don't want to give the story away, which is why my examples are not about the mountain climbing itself - but to give you a clue, the route finder is called Jungle, and is always lost, even when travelling by Underground across London! ... and the Bang and the Bing and the Pong?  Ah well, another reason for you to read the book.  You'll enjoy it if you have ever climbed, even from your armchair, or if you have ever laughed at a PG Wodehouse.

The River Merchant's Wife

This Friday, a week before Valentine's Day, a touching and delicate poem, a translation of The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter by Ezra Pound, from the eighth century Chinese of Li Po.  One way of appreciating Pound's genius is to look at three different versions by three different poets; they all tell you what the poem says, buy only Pound makes you feel you have read the Chinese.  Read, tremble, and wonder.

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married my Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
For ever and for ever and for ever.
Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noises overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!

The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the west garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
    As far as Cho-fu-sa.

A fine haul

A Viking raid on the London Library earlier this week, and some rich loot:

There are the Poems of J H Prynne, unknown to me but earnestly recommended not long ago by a columnist in, I think, The Times (an article which I cannot now trace);  Stones of Aran, which I came across in reading Cees Nooteboom, and which is quite unaffordable even when you can find it;  there is Built By Animals, a piece of serendipity, about how and why animals build complex structures like birds' nests and termite mounds; Bowman's classic mountaineering parody, The Ascent of Rum Doodle; and the first volume of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.  I will let you know how I progress with this lot.

And by the way, Dark Puss, I have borrowed a copy of They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell, if you still want to read it!

Dance: HSH

Hearing Secret Harmonies is not only the final novel in Powell's Dance To The Music of Time sequence, it is a fitting conclusion and crown, in which much is resolved, though much continues on, complex and entrancing, into the years beyond Powell's ken.  Some strong links are made to very early novels, and the brooding and uncomfortable presence of Widmerpool remains central - but he is the subject of dramatic and fantastic developments which represent just one form of growing older, the rejection of all that he has stood for and failure even in his new character.  Powell lives in HSH, as he does elsewhere, by the mantra that exaggeration mars the accuracy which is always more interesting than fantasy.  Events continue to be described calmly and from many points of view, whether they are simple and commonplace, or frightening and extraordinary.

In the last book (Temporary Kings) Powell notes the perspective a man's fifties bring.  Here, he notes that there are:

... compensations for growing old .. worth putting on record as the condition asserts itself.  The first is a vantage point gained for acquiring embellishments to narratives that have been unfolding for year's besides one's own, trimmings that can even appear to supply the conclusion of a given story, though finality is never certain, a dimension always possible to add.

On the same page - though more trivially - he delightfully remarks that:

I was turning the pages that evening with the sense - essential to the mature enjoyment of any classic - of being entirely free from responsibility to pause for a second over anything that threatened the least sign of tedium.

And he reverts to Trapnel, the long dead novelist who features so centrally in Books Do Furnish A Room, for comments on what is realism and what is invented:

People think because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case.  Because a novel's invented, it is true.  Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can't include every conceivable circumstance of what happened.  The novel can do that.  The novelist himself lays it down.  His decision is binding.

And so the caravan rolls on, and Powell ends where he began, twelve novels earlier, with drama, failure and understanding, and an image of winter and fires, just as in the first paragraph of A Question of Upbringing.  It is a fire he had lit twenty years and a million words before, which still burns for me and thousands of others.

Dance: TK

The Dance goes on, richer yet, but slower and more measured as Temporary Kings (wonderful title) takes us into the 1960s, with an extended visit to Venice - the bulk of the book - and literary and domestic life in London.  New characters continue to appear - Glober, the American tycoon, and Gwinnett, the academic researching the life of Trapnel.  There are some horrifying moments in this book, and some wonderful laughter too.  As always, threads from earlier novels are deftly picked up and either woven into the new fabric or sometimes given some sort of resolution - though you never feel any story will ever quite come to an end.

While in Venice, Nick and two colleagues are reading about a sexual and spying scandal which may implicate two people at the conference they are attending; the report is in a French scandal sheet, in which "promise was well short of performance", allegations of misbehaviour of the most appalling kind in a London hotel being hardly at all substantiated.  Dame Emily Brightman comments:

How unchanged remains the French view of English life - phlegmatic, sadistic aristocrats, moving coldly and silently from one atrocity to another through the fogs of le Hyde Park and les Jardins de Kensington. ... [later continues] ... One of my maiden aunts -a social category no longer extant - used to live permanently in that hotel.  I'm sure she had no idea things like that were going on ... She would have been surprised.  Rather thrilled, too, I think."

The other passage I always quote from TK - having achieved my own half century a year or so ago - is this:

Each recriminative decade poses new riddles, how best to live, how best to write. One’s fifties, in principle less acceptable than one’s forties, at least confirm most worst suspicions about life, thereby disposing of an appreciable tract of vain expectation, standardised fantasy, obstructive to writing, as to living.  The quinquagenarian may not be master of himself, he is, notwithstanding, master of a passable miscellany of experience.

That's not a bad summary, it seems to me, of a rich life which has nevertheless achieved nothing very concrete, and which, at fifty, has not delivered the unattainable finished adult of early dreamings.  This seems to me largely what the whole series of novels is about - for Nick, the unobtrusive narrator, this is exactly how we see him - becoming more knowledgeable and wiser, yet still following multiple stories of key parts of which he is still unaware, or which are not actually subject to knowing.  For Widmerpool, on the other hand, the trajectories have been more violent, more apparently happening and being done, but with the same underlying complexity of thought, apprehension, and motivation.  Temporary Kings tells of serious damage to Widmerpool's private and public personas - the so called kindly ones of the earlier novel come to mind - but you have to wait for the final novel to discover whether he once again rises above vicissitudes or is utterly cast down by them.

Cargoes

After last week's heavy fare, something lighter, almost trivial, and yet very pleasing.  This is an old school favourite, John Masefield's Cargoes, and I particularly like the mix of exoticism and the mundane, the glorious luxuries of two empires and the household goods of the third.

Quinquereme of Nineveh from distant Ophir

Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,

With a cargo of ivory

And apes and peacocks,

Sandalwood, cedar wood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,

Dipping through the tropics by the palm-grove shores,

With a cargo of diamonds,

Emeralds, amethysts,

Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,

Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,

With a cargo of Tyne coal,

Road-rails, pig-lead,

Firewood, ironware, and cheap tin trays.