Books Do Furnish A Room

Reading for La Serenissima

Off soon to Venice, for the first time, and what to pack for reading, apart from guide books?  Well initially, I thought I hardly knew any Venetian literary connections, but I quickly came up with these:

• Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
• Death in Venice, Thomas Mann
• Memoirs, Casanova
• The Stones of Venice, Ruskin (also available with modern illustrations)
• The Passion, Jeanette Winterson
• Don't Look Now, Daphne du Maurier
• The Exploding Battleship, Michael Innes (in The Appleby File)

I have resisted the temptation to include Temporary Kings, because you may have heard quite enough of Powell from me recently.  Any others you want to recommend? 

I have just re-read the Innes short story, and very lovely it is - he is a real master of the craft, lightly but tightly written stories with whimsy and character, as well as the invariably splendid plots.  Don't Look Now is perhaps more famous for the Christie / Sutherland film, during the production of which .. but this is a family site, I must desist.  But the story is very good too, and I enjoyed it - although I have never felt the slightest temptation to read any of her full length novels, still less to read them all backwards, which is the task Cornflower has set herself!  Perhaps my reluctance comes from my mother's too warm recommendation of them, combined with a fuzzy feeling that they were probably a bit soppy - a teenage judgement I am very happy to admit was certainly quite wide of the mark!

I actually have no desire whatever to read the Casanova, and I think I will hold the Ruskin back until after my visit, so I can read it with a little knowledge of the place.  I plan on reading Death in Venice and The Passion while actually there, so will post on them later.  And something on the Calvino will come up soon!

Kew Moore light

You may have seen, some time ago, a couple of posts about Henry Moore at Kew (and another visit), and then a third viewing in the mist.  Henry Moore in the wonderfully relaxed and spacious setting of Kew Gardens really breathes, and allows you to see them uncluttered and to get lots of different views.  On Friday, I was promised a different treat, Moore floodlit at night, with the added bonus of seeing parts of Kew Gardens under these unusual and stimulating conditions.  It was intermittently wet and always cold, but it was still pretty good - in a stoical, stiff upper lip sort of way!

The statues were wonderful - they seemed to jump out of their space at you, and to seem even more intensely physical, and the reflections and highlights created new shapes and new dimensions (alright, Dark Puss, there are only three dimensions in Kew Gardens, but you know what I mean!).  They were, sadly, extremely difficult to photograph without sophisticated equipment and a tripod, so I have only a few hamfisted efforts to show you.  But there were other joys as well - the architecture of the glasshouses, the eerie feeling of going through one of them with chiaroscuro effects in the cacti and the palms, with stats above, and the emphasis lights brought to the shapes and lines of trees and leaves.  Here are a few pictures which might give you some idea - the floodlights came in two colours, a whitish green and a sepia tone, which creates dramatic effects in some places.

Donkey

Continuing, just for this week, a vaguely religious theme, is this favourite poem of G K Chesterton's, The Donkey.  He was an odd man, full of enthusiasm for life and overflowing with geniality and words, and always able to grab the attention.  He overdoes his love of bounding rhythms and of paradoxes, but is still enormous fun to read, in prose or poetry.  The Donkey shows off his verbal skill, and makes its point clearly.  Other poems, such as Lepanto and The Rolling English Road, also deserve reading - the last is a real treat, and it is not always appreciated that there are three radically different treaments from three different viewpoints - I may return to this theme!

When fishes flew and forests walked

    And figs grew upon thorn,

Some moment when the moon was blood

    Then surely I was born.

With monstrous head and sickening cry

    And ears like errant wings,

The devil's walking parody

    On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,

    Of ancient crooked will;

Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,

    I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;

    One far fierce hour and sweet:

There was a shout about my ears,

    And palms before my feet.

Hellebore

Hellebore and borage were reputedly sovereign remedies for madness, melancholy, accidie.  In  Borage recently, I shared some of my excitement in reading Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, a book which is at once overwhelming and enticing.  And I finished that post with a sentence which I think will become a theme for all the rest of my saying and writing:

If through weakness, folly, passion, discontent,  ignorance, I have said amiss, let it be forgiven and forgotten.

But now I have got through the introductions, and the exploratory material on melancholy, and in this post I am exploring some his solutions for melancholy - leaving the the wilder channels of his thought, and the remoter backwaters, such as werewolves, witches, excessive study, and the decline in academic standards for your own exploration!  It is worth exploring, but be prepared for anything, and be undisciplined in your reading, just browse at random, not trying to make sense of the whole - or you'll surely fall prey to some form of madness, and Boots is fresh out of borage and hellebore!

Burton covers a lot of things which might ameliorate, control or cure melancholy, and I quote some of them now, partly for the sake of his views, but also for his wonderful prose.  Let's look at tobacco, hellebore, alcohol, and coffee.

He starts by praising tobacco as a valuable remedy, but abruptly changes tack, reporting that:

... as it is commonly abused by most men, which take it as tinkers do ale, 'tis a plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods, land, health, hellish, devilish and damned tobacco, the ruin and overthrow of body and soul.

As for hellebore itself,

Black hellebore, that most renowned plant, and famous purger of melancholy, which all antiquity so much used and admired, was first found out by Melanpodius a shepherd ... who, seeing it to purge his goats when they raved, practised it upon Elige and Calene, King Praetus' daughters, that ruled in Arcadia, near the fountain Clitorius, and restored them to their former health ... and it was generally so much esteemed of the ancients for this disease amongst the rest, that they sent all such as were crazed, or that doted, to be purged, where this plant was in abundance to be had. ... Lilius Geraldus saith, that Hercules, after all his mad pranks upon his wife and children, was perfectly cured by a purge of hellebore, which an Anticyrian administered unto him. They that were sound commonly took it to quicken their wits, [and] Cameades the academic, when he was to write against Zeno the stoic, purged himself with hellebore first.  In such esteem it continued for many ages, till at length Mesue and some other Arabians began to reject and reprehend it, upon whose authority for many following lustres, it was much debased and quite out of request, held to be poison and no medicine; and is still oppugned to this day by Crato and some junior physicians. [Quotes various "modern" objections].. and Nicholas Leonicus hath a story of Solon, that besieging, I know not what city, steeped hellebore in a spring of water, which by pipes was conveyed into the middle of the town, and so either poisoned, or else made them so feeble and weak by purging, that they were not able to bear arms. Notwithstanding all these cavils and objections, most of our late writers do much approve of it.

As for alcohol, why not pop down to the Bull and Bush for a couple of pints to provoke your urine or expel wind and cold poisons?  No more ridiculous than some of the nonsense talked about nowadays by the snake oil fringe of alternative medicine!

Amongst this number of cordials and alteratives, I do not find a more present remedy, than a cup of wine or strong drink, if it be soberly and opportunely used. It makes a man bold, hardy, courageous, "whetteth the wit," if moderately taken, (and as Plutarch saith) "it makes those which are otherwise dull, to exhale and evaporate like frankincense, or quicken" (Xenophon adds) as oil doth fire. "A famous cordial" Matthiolus in Dioscoridum calls it, "an excellent nutriment to refresh the body, it makes a good colour, a flourishing age, helps concoction, fortifies the stomach, takes away obstructions, provokes urine, drives out excrements, procures sleep, clears the blood, expels wind and cold poisons, attenuates, concocts, dissipates all thick vapours, and fuliginous humours."  And that which is all in all to my purpose, it takes away fear and sorrow.

But if you don't drink, have a cup of coffee instead, described by Burton as a wondrous strange habit of the Turks (he is writing in 1621, remember):

The Turks have a drink called coffa (for they use no wine), so named of a berry as black as soot and as bitter... which they sip still of, and sup as warm as they can suffer; they spend much time in those coffa-houses, which are somewhat like our ale houses or taverns, and there they sit chatting and drinking to drive away the time, and to be merry together, because they find by experience, that kind of drink, so used, helpeth digestion and procureth alacrity.

All in all, I've enjoyed my excursions into Burton, and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys the language and has a taste for the quirky in language or opinion.  But I wouldn't invest in the whole thing, but buy some intelligently edited selection such as Kevin Jackson's.  Happy reading, in all senses.

Man of Arainn

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Tim Robinson’s Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage in a post called Island pilgrimage.  Pilgrimage is about his imaginary walk around the coast (not imaginary, because he undoubtedly walked all around the coast many times over several years, but imaginary because it is described as one walk, continuous and leisurely).  He wrote a much larger companion volume called Labyrinths, which describes the interior.  I loved his language so much, and his careful, joyously detailed approach to landscape and history, that I filled a whole post from reading a few chapters.  I can’t tell you everything that I really liked about this book, but I invite you to join me in following him along the south coast of Aran, uninhabited and rocky, perhaps as far as the north eastern end with its remote and rocky islets.

His detailed descriptions of the great forts of Duchathair and Dun Aonghasa, the latter with its concentric semi-circles surrounding a great enclosure backed by cliffs, are marvels all of their own.  Archaeology cannot tell us who built them or why, but Robinson conjures up a really impressive physical sense of place.  But the lack of firm knowledge, and the failure of all obvious hypothesis (if a fort, who was the enemy, and how did they manage without water?) frustrates him:

I have failed adequately to be in this strange place, this knot of stone from which the sky has broken out.  So I promise to come back and try again, to approach it from a different angle, take it by storm or by moonlight, bring a measuring tape or a bottle of wine.

The islanders had few resources, so were skilled in taking birds and eggs from precipitous cliffs, including guillemot, puffin and other auks, and cormorant, just as they do along the west coast of Scotland.  But the meat of these birds, though highly prized, is reputedly tough, fatty and gamey, and too much can be too much.  So in a marvellous phrase for the nausea or distaste brought on by surfeit, the islanders refer to:

blas an seachtu crosain – the taste of the seventh razorbill.

G K Chesterton remarks somewhere that “the Irish are the people God made mad, For all their wars are merry and all their songs are sad”;  and I have at last found out why their wars are merry.  A local account of “the first battle in Ireland”, between descendants of Noah’s son Japhet and more Irish heroes, tells us that it lasted a week, and “not a man was slain there, because it was a magic battle”!

At one point, Robinson explains some local names in terms of land divisions – what in England might be Longacre or Church Hundred – and the words, and the social context, are fascinating.  First, each townland – the land belonging to each town, and typically giving a fair proportion of good land and wild rocky cliff by being extended right across the island in a broad strip – is divided into carrows, each subdivided into catrons, which in turn are formed of croggeries.  These are anglicized versions of ceathru, cartur, and cnagaire respectively, but I will use the “english” versions.   Carrow means a quarter, although most of the townships have six of them, and there are four catrons to a carrow, and four croggeries to a catron – so a croggery is one ninety-sixth of a townland (in Aran that is; it would be one sixty-fourth elsewhere), and a townland is about 1800 acres, although it can be bigger if there is a lot of bare rock (as there often is on Aran).  And, at the bottom of the scale, there is a description of what a croggery meant in practice: it is as much land as could support a cow with her calf, a horse, some sheep for their wool, and sufficient potatoes for one family – although the reference to potatoes gives away the fact that this is essentially a modern description of a mediaeval measure.  But the words are magic enough for me, although I cannot help thinking that the 16 – 18 acres of a croggery was probably pretty mean allowance for a large family in an inhospitable and largely infertile place like Aran.

One of the great myths of Aran – though like all Irish myths, it is completely true – is the Land Leaguers’ desperate attack on one O’Flaherty, who they regarded as a land grabber and a threat to the smallholders.  So in 1881, they rounded up his cattle, blindfolded them, and herded them over the cliffs into the sea.  “One or two”, remarks Robinson, “said that it would have been fair enough to throw the landlords over the cliff, but it was a shame to treat the innocent beasts so.”  And he tells the delicious story of O’Flaherty leaving the island to go to court on the mainland, seeking compensation.  An unsympathetic priest said “And may you never come back”, to which a bystander said “Amen”.  The curate, facing up to the cruel intent of his words, but still solicitous of the spiritual health of his parishioner, rebuked the bystander, saying “That’s a terrible thing you’ve done, saying Amen to a curse”!  Even today, Robinson, says, the islanders feel the shame of the deed: Ba mhor an naire e.  Ba mhor an peaca e – a great shame it was. A great sin it was.  (I wonder if peaca, a Gaelic word, shares a root with peccare, the Latin verb to sin?).

But I am only half way round the island with Robinson, and I must stop.  If you want to go further, you must read the books, and how better to do that than to visit Aran or Arainn yourself?

Tutankhamun

When I was a little boy, I wanted to be, not a train driver, but an archaeologist.  In fact, I wanted to dig in the Middle East, and discover new civilisations in Egypt and Iraq, but I gave this up because of a total inability to learn languages.  In the end, my archaeological career was confined to a few summers worth of digging in Saxon and mediaeval Southampton, which was interesting enough, and a visit to the British Museum with my father in the 1970s to the Tutankhamun exhibition.

That exhibition was wonderful, though after four and a half hours queuing, we were hurried through a very crowded set of rather dark rooms stretching to see over other people for a clear view of the wonderful artefacts, including the famous gold mask.  Last weekend, at the O2 centre in Greenwich, I went to a very different Tutankamun exhibition.  Modern exhibition management meant we had timed tickets which led to a completely uncrowded experience, with a very spacious exhibition with lots of wonderful pieces, excellently lit and clearly displayed.  There was a dearth of the really big items from the tomb itself, but lots of preparatory material from slightly earlier periods, and then some fine smaller items from Tutankamun’s tomb itself.

Highlights for me included some very French looking furniture, a marvellous black panther I immediately christened Bagheera, and an ostrich feather fan.  If you get a chance to go, and it’s on until the end of August, I’d recommend it.  Useful but tacky website here!

More Easter poetry

Not everyone will have enjoyed the almost brutal poetry  - an extract from T S Eliot's East Coker - that I posted on Friday, though this mood has plenty of parallels in seventeenth century religiosity - notably Donne's sermons.  So here is something quite different: although I refuse to indulge in doggerel about chocolate eggs and easter bunnies, I think this has enough real point to it while still being pretty well written, by a poet who is almost completely forgotten nowadays in that role.  Here is a sonnet, Oscar Wilde's On Easter Day:

The silver trumpets rang across the Dome:
The people knelt upon the ground with awe:
And borne upon the necks of men I saw,
Like some great God, the Holy Lord of Rome.
Priest-like, he wore a robe more white than foam,
And, king-like, swathed himself in royal red,
Three crowns of gold rose high upon his head:
In splendor and in light the Pope passed home.
My heart stole back across wide wastes of years
To One who wandered by a lonely sea,
And sought in vain for any place of rest:
"Foxes have holes, and every bird its nest,
I, only I, must wander wearily,
And bruise My feet, and drink wine salt with tears."

Pavlova

This, I think, is the picture Glo is referring to, John Lavery's romantic conception of Anna Pavlova (1910), from the Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow.  Having lived in Australia, "pavlova" means a particularly sickly cake without much substance to it .. quite appropriate really!

Easter poem

For a confirmed non-believer like me, I sometimes find it surprising that I respond so strongly to religious poetry, especially Donne and Eliot.  So, for Good Friday, there can only be one offering - this passage from East Coker, the second of T S Eliot's Four Quartets.  This is tough love, facing facts with a vengeance and then some.

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

    Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

    The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

    The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

    The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

Into cleanness leaping

A wonderful evening last week at the ballet  - but not just any ballet, the New York City Ballet doing Balanchine, whose flame they tend with devotion and brilliance.  This is a rare privilege for Londoners, as they last visited 25 years ago, and I was keen to make the most of it – the first of four ballet evenings over coming weeks.

We saw three ballets, all choreographed by Balanchine – Serenade (Tchaikovsky), Agon (Stravinsky), Symphony in C (Bizet) – all in archetypal style, with plain costumes, and no props and no scenery.  This is almost pure dance, at least in Serenade, with almost no emotion or drama.  It’s something I find very sympathetic – technique without any sentimental gloop – but it may have left some of the audience a little cold or at least cautious, though their applause was warm enough.  Agon, of course, is the great masterpiece, and was bold, exciting and impressive – though as in the first ballet, the supporting dancers were not always flawless (but that is to say that one leaf on the tree is curled, no more).  But in Symphony in C, which I find a little too ornate and repetitive, the dancing was absolutely unbelievable, precise, clean, fast and perfect, just showing what peaks of technique this company can rise to.

Really good writing about ballet is rare in my experience – though I’d be delighted to be proved wrong – and even pictures all too often fail to capture the passion, the drama, and the sheer hard work and sweat of the ballet.  Degas and a modern painter like Donald Hamilton Fraser are both tremendous in their different ways, but they don’t really capture all sides of the dance for me.  The title of this post comes the octet from Peace by Rupert Brooke, and is not even about ballet, these words just seemed appropriate:

Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping...

Writer with the X factor

Julian Maclaren-Ross is hardly a name to conjure with nowadays, apart from a sympathetic review in a few issues ago in Slightly Foxed, but he was once spoken of with Powell, Betjeman, Waugh, Greene and Connolly.  He is a bohemian figure who typifies the image, if not the reality, of raffish literary life before, during and just after the war, and although his output was not large – he died at 52, after a life which included failed marriages, imprisonment and insanity – he is certainly not negligible.  His biography has been written by Paul Willetts, and although I have not read it, the title promises much: Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia. 

His output is largely short stories, with the novel Of Love and Hunger published in 1947.  I have been reading a selection of the short stories, edited  by Paul Willetts, drawn from a number of sources, including several written for Punch or Horizon, which Cyril Connolly was editing throughout the 1940s.  The prose is compelling, a fierce and immediate language which seizes your attention but feels very natural, very unpolished, but which he can adapt for the common soldier or the middle class expatriate.  Memories of Hemingway are stirred, but there are also other, more demotic echoes – Dalshiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler: this is prose which looks simple, free of ornament, plain, but which is in fact taut and sophisticated, and which leads you to conclusions as a punched fait accompli rather than inviting discussion or, even less, coming to conclusions of its own.

The stories are varied in locale and protagonists, but they are often bleak:  I Had To Go Sick and Through The Usual Channels are about getting 'arsed about' by the army, and there are other compelling army stories, about the accidental death of a comrade, about the domestic and local trivia of army life away from the war.  A Bit of A Smash in Madras recalls Orwell’s stories about Burma, as an expatriate manages to get off any punishment despite almost killing a local while driving well and truly drunk; Maclaren-Ross passes no judgement, but conveys the smug hypocrisy of a little big man, insidious corruption, and his own despairing distaste without pulling any punches.  In the oddly titled Welsh Rabbit of Soap, he tells the story, miserable but funny, of a rapid bar room engagement which ends when the girl  - a fantasist and a centreless character - just disappears.  The main character, going home, late and probably drunk, after realising that he has lost her, says (in a paragraph which is not typical, yet conveys well his cosmic despair and emptiness, with a distinctly unusual literary reference):

So that was that; just another neurotic; neurosis followed me out of the ‘phone-box into the violent noisy night – drunks singing, shouts of Taxi, the rumble of a rocket exploding in the suburbs; neurosis, not happiness, lay in wait around the corner: my own neurosis, augmented by a succession of psychopathic girls, transmitted through the mind and through the blood, playing hide-and-seek, now dodging ahead, now pacing a step behind, waiting its chance to catch up: the hooded stranger, the shadowy third, of T S Eliot and the arctic wastes.

His other great strength is his dialogue.  Here’s a passage from Death of a Comrade:

“Lennox...Fair haired kiddy from Cambridge.  He got drowned today.”

“Drowned?”

“They ain’t found his body yet.”

“Good Lord.  How’d it happen?”

“...Current got him, I reckon.  He didn’t ought to’ve done no bathing in there: it’s too bleeding deep.”

“Well”, I said, “It’s too late to stop him now.”

“Too bleeding true it is”, the orderly sergeant said.

“Lennox.  What was he like?”

“Blowed if I remember”.

“Neither do I.”

And it worried me, not being able to remember.  Working in the army office I must have seen him scores of times ... Lennox, Lennox - I knew the name from typing out nominal rolls, but I couldn’t fit it to any face.

And why do I say he has the X factor? Because he is often regarded as the primary model for X Trapnel in Powell’s Books Do Furnish A Room, a writer of prodigious talent, much wasted, of strong and not always comfortable views, and of personal tragedy.

Small but perfectly formed

I have been browsing on recent train journeys through the Oxford Book of Short Stories, edited by V S Pritchett.  I am a great admirer of the genre, which can range much more widely than the novel – some things can be sustained over a handful or a score of pages which would impossible over 300 – the bitter morality tales of Saki, for example, and the gymnastics of the imagination that Borges uses to light our darkness.  But a good short story is a hard thing to write: it must be complete in itself, taut and well constructed, and must satisfy without leaving us feel short changed.  How hard that is, is demonstrated by the vast number of poor short stories.

This collection is wide ranging in space and time – five continents and two centuries (the short story is even younger than the novel) – and is engagingly mixed of old favourites and less well known work.  I am far from bowled over by everything in it, but have enjoyed much.  The anthology has 40 stories from Walter Scott to John Updike, but perhaps these few examples will stand for the whole;  and no, none of them are are perfectly formed - but some are very good indeed.

At the familiar end is Saki’s Sredni Vashtar, chilling story of an unloved boy whose ferret kills his guardian, while he – essentially innocent, one feels – enjoys more lavishly buttered toast.  Saki is a wonderful writer, but his stories can have a sense of sameness about them – this is a little different, perfectly observed as always, but with a savagery and bitterness in the soul which is rarely this explicit.   New to me was Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat, a tale of four men in a boat after a shipwreck, stupefied by fatigue and perhaps by fear, making their way nearer and nearer to a coast which seems alternately unattainable and imminently close.  They play different roles in the boat, always cooperating and calm, but  - in spite of the best efforts of the leader and of the strongest man – they don’t all make it alive to shore.  A bleak, sad tale, which achieves its effects without bathos or any extravagance of description – but one which would have lost impact over a wider spread of pages.

There is a sad, angry tale of Henry James’, Paste, about jewels which might or might not be real, and about honesty and pride.  And there is Thrawn Janet, a tremendous moody Scottish story of a young cleric and the Devil by Robert Louis Stevenson, full of glorious language.  And I came across a new writer for me, A E Coppard (1878-1957), whose The Field of Mustard was a strangely moving story of three old women collecting firewood, and stopping to gossip – finding out about infidelity and lost love from each other, and yearning desperately for what they do not have.  The final sentence is “Clouds were borne frantically across the heavens, as if in a rout of battle, and the lovely earth seemed to sigh in grief at some calamity all unknown to men”.

O’Henry is an author I must have tried too young and found indigestible – but Telemachus, Friend was smartly written and very amusing.  Finally, I should mention a Kipling story I didn’t know (and that such a thing existed surprised me), The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot, a vigorous honest tale of a slum woman who was a saint in the dark, and of the rough loves and deaths of the London slums. 

Locksley Hall

Something a little bit more demanding today for today's poetic tastes, two extracts from Tennyson's Locksley Hall.  The second passage is the one everyone knows about the future of air travel and air warfare, but I like the whole thing, of which that passage is not notably typical.  So here, first, is an earlier passage, when the young man sees another vision of "the wonder that would be", expressed in the springtime of birds (rather than the technology of war) - and promptly realises that he is in love.

Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,

Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.

Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro' the mellow shade,

Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.

Here about the beach I wander'd, nourishing a youth sublime

With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time;

When the centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed;

When I clung to all the present for the promise that it closed:

When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see;

Saw the Vision of the world and all the wonder that would be.--

In the Spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin's breast;

In the Spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest;

In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish'd dove;

In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.

Then her cheek was pale and thinner than should be for one so young,

And her eyes on all my motions with a mute observance hung.

Then, later, is the famous vision, the hope of world peace, and the disillusionment.  Not always a favourite poet nowadays, but such a technical master, and psychologically more astute than he is often given credit for.  The metre is compelling, and reading the bit about the "whisper of the south wind rushing warm", I nailed a memory: this is the metre of G K Chesterton's Lepanto (which is lots of fun, but not quite up to this standard!), I think?

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,

Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,

Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew

From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,

With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm;

Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd

In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,

And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapped in universal law.

So I triumph'd ere my passion sweeping thro' me left me dry,

Left me with the palsied heart, and left me with the jaundiced eye.

Borage

I have been browsing through Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy recently.  It’s a very odd book, utterly overwhelming to a modern taste, and extremely long – three substantial volumes in most editions – and full of undisciplined torrents of prose, example building on example until the mind reels.  It’s as if Burton, who knows a lot, cannot bear to leave out anything he has ever noted down or remembered, and piles up prose beyond any measure of pleasure or utility.

But what prose it is!  What a fine writer, and a dramatic writer Burton is; and what an excellent psychologist and philosopher.  I read this in two ways: looking through the first complete volume, to get a feel for the full scale of the work, complete with innumerable quotations from the classics, sometimes even writing in Latin because his subject matter is temporarily delicate – seeking what Gibbon calls the “decent obscurity of a learned language”.  And also in an anthology edited by Kevin Jackson, helpfully sub-sectioned and shortened dramatically, and translated fully.  In either event, it’s an interesting experience and enormous fun, as well as being full of insight and empathy.

Burton’s masterwork was published in 1621, when melancholy was a modish upper class preoccupation, perhaps as angst was in certain parts of the twentieth century, though Burton -a lifelong bachelor, academic and cleric – clearly suffered greatly from Black Dog as Churchill called it, or accidie in medieval terminology (a very good read on this is Churchill: Four Faces and the Man, with its excellent essay on Churchill's depression by Anthony Storr).  But the Anatomy is not just about melancholy – indeed, it is hard to think of anything which is foreign to its all-encompassing grasp.  I feel two posts coming on, since quotation needs to be at some length to convey his inimitable style, and I want to discuss some of his views as well as quote them.

Some of the material I most enjoyed came in his lengthy introduction, including the famous description of the style he intends to use:

I neglect phrases, and labour wholly to inform my reader’s understanding, not to please his ear; ‘tis not my intent or study to compose neatly ... but to express myself readily and plainly as it happens. So that as a river runs sometimes precipitate and swift, then dull and slow; now direct, then per ambages; now deep, then shallow; now muddy, then clear; now broad, then narrow; doth my style flow: now serious, then light; now comical, then satirical; now more elaborate, then remiss, as the present subject required, or as at that time I was affected. ... I shall lead thee ... through variety of objects, that which thou shalt like and surely dislike.

Like Nick Jenkins, I particularly appreciate the licence to be “remiss” if I am so affected, and I admire his willingness to (as he affects) not consult the readers’ tastes, though this did not impede the commercial success of the book.  But there are occasions where you can be wearied by his sheer voluminousness, when drinking from a fire hydrant is pulverising not refreshing;  but there are lots of occasions where he builds up torrential images which sweep you up and make you laugh, cry or exult as the paragraphs carry you unresisting along.  And here he is on the main subject of his writing:

... being a kind of dotage, it cannot be otherwise but that the brain must be affected ... and from thence it is communicated to the heart and other inferior parts, which sympathise and are much troubled ... Such as live in over-cold or over-hot climes; such as are born of melancholy parents; as offend in those six non-natural things, are black, or of a high sanguine complexion, that have little heads, that have a hot heart, moist brain, hot liver and cold stomach, have been long sick; such as are solitary by nature, great students, given to much contemplation, lead a life out of action, are most subject to melancholy.  Of sexes both, but men more often; yet women misaffected are far more violent, and grievously troubled.  Of seasons of the year, the autumn is the most melancholy.

Finally (in this first Burton post at least), let me finish with a wonderful sentence which could be at the head of all my writing and saying:

If through weakness, folly, passion, discontent,  ignorance, I have said amiss, let it be forgiven and forgotten.

Borage, by the way, is one of the two sovereign remedies which Burton recommends for melancholy.  But you may want also to read Matthew Johnstone's wonderful Living With A Black Dog and I had a Black Dog, cartoons by a serious sufferer which can really lift your spirits.

...So They Do!

This is by Ignat Bednarik, a Romanian watercolourist, 1882-1963.

Detective Story

I haven’t come across the Hungarian Kertesz before, and I picked this up on a whim from the new books section of the London Library.  More shame on me, as he is a Nobel laureate in literature (2002), and his writing is much influenced by his Jewish background, including being an inmate of Auschwitz.  Detective Story was published this year for the first time in English, translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson.  Kertesz’ most famous other books are Liquidation, Fateless, and Kaddish for a Child Not Born, the latter two based on his time in concentration camp.  After reading Detective Story, I will be interested to read more, and especially to compare him with Primo Levi, for whom I have a high regard.

This short book is not a detective story, but the story of a detective.  It’s really a novel – with a strong element of the crime or thriller genre – and is rather hard to describe.  Much happens, but much is only implied, leaving you guessing or uneasy, a feeling which is a major part of the book’s unsettling impact.   Somehow I always expect overseas authors to write about their own countries (an absurd and narrow minded assumption) so it was rather a shock to find out that this dark and brooding story of revolution, police corruption and very rough justice was not set among the dirty concrete and faded palaces of Budapest, but in an unidentified Latin American country.

The narrator is a new recruit to a corps of special police, whose duties are unspecified but clearly include internal security and whose license is wide.  There is no violence in the book at all, but it pervades the story continually, menacingly and is more frightening because it is taken quite for granted by oppressor, policeman, and victim alike.  At the heart of the book is a continuous effort by  the narrator to distance himself from what is going forward, though he cannot conceal his pride in being a member of this elite corps, nor his satisfaction at their power and prowess.  His complicity is the lesson.

And his victim is a vain young man, rich and unfulfilled, who wants to reject his father’s smug commercial success and political associations with the regime, but cannot be accepted by real revolutionaries – he believes because of his family name, but in fact because he is a dilettante, without motivation or dedication.  How he gets involved in covert activity, and his relationship with his father, are the gossamer threads of of steel spun through the story.  Reading this book is like visiting an empty building (that's the Noriega police HQ in Panama in the picture) – sun pours in through the windows but this only emphasises the dark deeds which took place there; the rooms are empty, so you populate  them yourself with nameless terrors and machines of which even you hardly understand the purpose.

I didn’t exactly enjoy this novel, but it was very compelling, and on this scale, was an impressive achievement in a technique which I suspect is a lot harder to pull off than it looks.  In spite of my earlier comments, it does have an indefinably middle European feel, a kind of brooding harshness and pessimism, which is mysteriously attractive.

Uncommon readers

On a recent visit to Mr and Mrs Cornflower, I found Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader on my bedside table.  I took the allusion, and devoured the book before bed and before breakfast the next morning.  It is a whimsical essay about reading, the pleasures (and the pains and perils) of reading, lightly cloaked as a conte about our own dear Queen.

She is uncommon, of course, in the sense that she is not one of the common people – she is utterly unique in our society (and long may she remain so) – but we are all uncommon readers.  Perhaps because, as a reader of this site, you are likely to be “an uncommon reader” in the old sense of the phrase, that you read much more than most.  But even more, we are all unique and have a perspective on the world and on books which is quite different from anyone else’s, perhaps subtly but unmistakably so.   Confucius is said to have remarked that you never step into the same river twice: I am sure I never read the same book twice, in spite of much re-reading, and equally sure that you and I never read exactly the same book.

Apart from the gentle pleasure of the story – of a Queen much sharper and on the ball than her advisers, though they do not realise it – gradually finding her feet in a different world of sensibility and perception, there are Bennett’s wonderful insights into reading itself, a pleasure which binds us all.  A few examples will give you a flavour:

Reading was, among other things, a muscle and one that could be developed.

Though not, apparently, strongly enough to enjoy Jane Austen, whose minute social distinctions were not distinguishable from her exalted position!  Or to give her patience with certain authors:

Am I alone ... in wanting to give Henry James a good talking to? ... I can see why Dr Johnson is well thought of, but surely much of it is opinionated rubbish?

And a comment about the Queen’s distance from life – and perhaps from literature?

I was giving the CH (Companion of Honour) once, I think it was to Anthony Powell, and we were discussing bad behaviour.  Notably well behaved himself, even conventional, he remarked that being a writer didn’t excuse one from being a human being.  Whereas (one didn’t say this) being Queen does.  I have to seem like a human being all of the time, but I seldom have to be one.  I have people to do that for me.

But  a very human encounter with a young equerry results in mutual reappraisals of the changes that reading is bringing about in the Queen’s attitudes:

[This] truly human side [to the Queen was] not altogether welcome.  And whereas the Queen herself thought that such feelings probably arose out of her reading books, the young man felt it might be that she was beginning to show her age.  Thus it was that the dawn of sensibility was mistaken for the onset of senility.

And a comment which I devoutly hope is true:

You don’t put your life into your books.  You find it there.

Where my heart is

Robert Burns is another poet for whom I feel little, if any, affection, but when (at no notice at all!) my hostess at a Burn's Night dinner recently asked me to read a poem to the assembled masses, I chose this.  I am but a poor Sassenach, and this at least is in an English I could read without mangling - and as a great lover of the great high hills of the west, the main message even has the merit of being true.  No intellectual exercise for you this week, then, but some stirring if slightly vulgar music:

My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here,

My heart's in the Highlands a' chasing the deer -

A-chasing the wild deer, and following the roe;

My heart's in the Highlands , wherever I go.

Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North
The birth place of Valour, the country of Worth;
Wherever I wander, wherever I rove,
The hills of the Highlands forever I love.

Farewell to the mountains high cover'd with snow;
Farewell to the straths and green valleys below;
Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods;
Farwell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods.

My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here,
My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer
Chasing the wild deer, and following the roe;
My heart's in the Highlands, wherever I go.

Brorches and liggers

Reading Roger Deakin's Wildwood recently, I noted with particular glee a description of the complex process of thatching, with its wonderful vocabulary.  And only a week later, I was staying in a Dorset pub, the excellent Anvil Inn, which was mid-way through being re-thatched, though sadly with imported Ukrainian reed, not the superior Norfolk variety.  I took the opportunity to go up on the roof and have a closer look!

The old thatch is not completely always removed, so you see old grey thatch being gradually overlaid by the new, yellower reed.

Bundles of reed are laid in place, but tightly, and are secured by various pieces of hazel (willow in the Midlands, more flexible but not so long lasting).  The hazel is cut in the winter, as the sweet sap in the summer wood attracts woodworm, clearly a bad idea in a roof you want to last for thirty years or more.

Hazel rods are split lengthways - try doing that with a billhook on your knee without doing yourself an injury - and cut to different lengths and some twisted to provide scissor sprung clips over the thatch and the horizontal poles.  You can see this all quite clearly in my pictures, though it looks much less secure than it actually is - neither man nor gale will easily shift this roof when it's complete.

The horizontal pieces are, apparently, liggers, and the sprung twisted hazel clips are called brorches, at least in Suffolk.  The great OED knows not brorches, but they are also known as sprays in the Chilterns, buckles in Worcestershire, spars in the south-west, and spekes in Wiltshire.  What words, I could be drunk on them!  Whatever they are called, you can see them below, holding the ligger down on the thatch.

The OED does know ligger however, and offers no less than seven definitions, all quite different; Call My Bluff will never be the same again.  A ligger is:  a coverlet, a scaffolding timber, a horizontal branch in a laid hedge, an hazel thatching strip, the nether millstone, a plank bridge across a drain, a line and bait for pike fishing, one who puts the wool on the carding machine, or a gatecrasher of parties.  What a cornucopia of words and meaning we have here.

But the important thing is the thatch roof, warm, dry and cosy.  It looks soft and snug from a distance, but the cut ends are harsh and unwelcoming; reed thatch is much less plagued, therefore, by birds nesting and mice than cereal straw like wheat or barley.

Harriet's questions

I don't normally answer this  kind of circular quiz, but this one caught my fancy on Harriet Devine's blog, perhaps because several of her answers were the same as mine might have been.  So here goes:

What is your favourite word?   There are thousands, but plangent is very fine.

What is your least favourite word?   Posh is pretty dreadful; any word misused.

What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?  Mountains and green spaces, moving water.

What turns you off?   1960s architecture, pretension, sentimentality.

What is your favorite curse word?   It's a family site, so I couldn't possibly say.  But I used it for years at school not realising that it meant a sexual act that then I didn't even know existed!

What sound or noise do you love?   I'm with Harriet on this one - rushing water, also dry leaves around my feet, and the susurration of pebbles caught by a receding wave.

What sound or noise do you hate?   Fingernails on a blackboard.

What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?   Gardening, the law (as a barrister).

What profession would you not like to do?   Nursing (thank God for that, say all potential patients).

If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?   Jane Austen reads from her books every Thursday; today, it's the completed version of The Watsons!