Books Do Furnish A Room

Contempt for critics

A poet who knew his own mind, and had nothing but contempt and scorn for his critics (and, indeed, apparently for the rest of the world, including his mortal self) was John Marston, who flourished at the tail end of the 16th century and the early part of the 17th.  He may not be known well now for a number of reasons - an unsympathetic style and subject matter among them - but I suppose there can hardly have been a worse period in which to try and find fame through poetry!  But he has a fine, charging contempt for his critics, which I enjoy - especially when he disdains their "dungy muddy scum"!  Here, then, is John Marston's To Detraction:

FOUL canker of fair virtuous action,

Vile blaster of the freshest blooms on earth,

Envy's abhorred child, Detraction,

I here expose, to thy all-tainting breath,

The issue of my brain: snarl, rail, bark, bite,

Know that my spirit scorns Detraction's spite.

 

Know that the Genius, which attendeth on

And guides my powers intellectual,

Holds in all vile repute Detraction.

My soul - an essence metaphysical,

That in the basest sort scorns critics’ rage

Because he knows his sacred parentage -

 

My spirit is not puffed up with fat fume

Of slimy ale, nor Bacchus' heating grape.

My mind disdains the dungy muddy scum

Of abject thoughts and Envy's raging hate.

True judgement slight regards opinion;

A sprightly wit disdains Detraction.

 

A partial praise shall never elevate

My settled censure of my own esteem;

A canker’d verdict of malignant hate

Shall ne’er provoke me, worse myself to deem.

Spite of despite, and rancour’s villainy,

I am myself, so is my poesy.

Walking the plank

In my Dorset cottage, a big step forward at the end of last year was the laying of a new floor in the sitting room.  A badly laid and horrible dirty pink carpet, and the painted (black, if you please) pine boards came up, and oak went down.  To see the clean pale oak go down was to see the room get bigger and lighter, and when it was lacquered, the beautiful grain came up magnificently. This was not a straightforward job, as the joists underneath proved to be in a terrible mess, some rotten, some badly repaired or extended, so I decided to replace all of them as well.  It delayed the project, and hurt my wallet, but it will be well worth it in the longer term.  Here are a few pictures to take you through the process!

And here and there a Grayling

The philosopher A C Grayling has many claims to fame; for me, he is known as a Trustee of the London Library and a columnist in New Scientist, although you can regulalry find him on the BBC or in the papers.  This is, of course, to leave out the main and primary cause of his fame - his distinguished academic career, with which I am not philosopher enough to engage.  But I was therefore delighted to come across The Form of Things, a collection of short, non-technical writings on a bewildering variety of subjects  - a miscellany, indeed, on the arts, life, civil liberties and much else.  It is a collection of the reactions and views  of a torch bearer for the intelligent defence of Enlightment values, civilised, cultured and liberal. 

The writing is pithy, witty, often engaging you with an out of the way fact or a an intellectual challenge, and while I did not agree with everything he said, by a long way, I was always entertained and stimulated.  There are over 50 varied pieces in just over 200 pages, so its a very varied, accessible read - highly browsable before "lights out".  Subjects vary - here's a small selection: Beauty, Funerals, Montreux, Voyaging, Long life, Perfect numbers, Fox-hunting, Science and faith before Darwin, Rochester and the libertines, Vermeer, Free speech, and Identity cards - so something for everyone.

Here he is on funerals, a piece written on his return from a funeral marked by the smells, bells and Latin of the Tridentine mass:

Most of the congregation were treated to what was assuredly the habitual experience of medieval peasants: not understanding a word of what was going on ...

Societies in which alcohol is seen as the proper fuel for transporting the dead into the new phases of their existence .. have great advantages over those that merely serve tea and monosyllables.

[After discussing funerals in Africa and China] ... whatever its form, a funeral is an absolute parting, and the more clearly that hard fact is seen, the sooner heals the wound it makes; and the prompt for mourning is universal, however individual cultures understand it: for although not all call it love or need, the grief feels just the same.

This is a book well worth reading; whatever you interests or your philosophic views, you will find food for thought and amusement.

And my post title - utterly frivolous, this is of course a quotation from Tennyson's The Brook.

Analysis without tears: Sunday Salon

There is a really silly thing you can do if you're a blogger or know one well - you can get their Myers-Briggs personality profile just by putting the blog address in Typealyzer!  This is a very serious and helpful personality test, and this is a really trivial way of doing it - BUT, it did get me right, because I've done it properly several times, and it was spot on:

INTP - The Thinkers

"The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about."

Feel free to comment!!

 

Call of the heather

I came across this poem, which I did not know, while browsing through an anthology of Scottish poetry.  Kathleen Raine lived from 1908 - 2003, an interesting life, full of passion and sadness - the link goes to her Guardian obituary, which is rather touching. I love the big harsh landscapes of western Scotland, and the sudden softness of the light or the heather, so here is Kathleen Raine's To My Mountain. 

Since I must love your north

of darkness, cold, and pain,

the snow, the lovely glen,

let me love true worth,

the strength of the hard rock,

the deafening stream of wind

that carries sense away

swifter than flowing blood.

Heather is harsh to tears

and the rough moors

give the buried face no peace

but make me rise

and oh, the sweet scent, and purple skies!

 

It brings two other poems to mind, which I won't set out in full here, but just remind you of.  First is Eliot's Rannoch by Glencoe:

 

Here the crow starves, here the patient stag
Breeds for the rifle. Between the soft moor
And the soft sky, scarcely room
To leap or soar.

And the other is Kipling's The Roman Centurion's Song, in which the soldier laments being ordered back to Rome, preferring to stay in Britain, where he has served "from Vectis to the Wall" (from the Isle of Wight in the south, to Hadrian's Wall dividing England from Scotland):

 

For me this land, that sea, these airs, those folk and fields suffice.

What purple Southern pomp can match our changeful Northern skies,

Black with December snows unshed or pearled with August haze--

The clanging arch of steel-grey March, or June's long-lighted days?

Wolf Solent

I have been long familiar with the name of John Cowper Powys, but never actually read anything by him.  When I recently bought a property in Dorset, I became aware that he had a strong Dorset connection, having lived outside Dorchester for  couple of years and written a very odd personal diary, mainly concerned with his turbulent marriage and the health of his wife.  I didn’t find it particularly interesting – having picked it up with a view to learning more about Dorset life between the wars – but looking over his entries in the library catalogue, I couldn’t resist Wolf Solent.

This is both the title of the book, published in 1929, and the name of its hero.  It is a name that demands attention, and it’s only fair to say that the man behind the name deserves a lot of attention, and provides a lot himself, being decidedly a narcissistic type.  It’s a daunting book, running to a good 640 pages, and being full of dense prose and intense self-conscious moralising.  It all starts when Solent decides, at about the age of 30 or so, to break out of his dead end London life and make a new start in Dorset, unfortunately in an area full of the ghosts of his family’s colourful and controversial past. 

In a recent newspaper article, Philip Pullman praises Powys highly, but The Oxford Companion to English Literature, edited by Margaret Drabble says "Much controversy centres on Powys' stature as a novelist.  Some regard him as unjustly neglected, an arresting and major novelist, while others find his talent spurious and verbose."  I was therefore prepared for anything!

When Solent arrives in Dorset, he immediately runs into deep waters, complex family situations with a ghastly reek of incest, psychological disturbance, and shameful histories.  These link up with his own father's past, and are echoed by his own sexual cravings and disloyalties.  All this, of course, is covered in a rather prudish yet painfully explicit way, and a great deal of time is spent exploring - both in the third person and in Solent's head - the mythical, psychological and emotional  background.  At the same time, Solent is not without interest in the outside world, mainly the rural world, although he views this in a way which is both a semi-religious understanding of nature as a part of a universal expression of the All, and as a clear metaphor for sexual longing.  Indeed, his descriptions of the Dorset countryside are unique, compelling and full of historical and social power, far from the vapid musings of Hardy in the same country.  Pullman remarks that "Powys evoked the English landscape with an almost sexual intensity. Hardy comes to mind, but a Hardy drunk and feverish with mystical exuberance."

Let me give you an example or two.  First, here is Solent on his way home in the dusk (note the self absorption, the sexual conjuring of fern-fronds, and the use of "furtive" to describe his inner life):

... as he watched the horizon in front
of him grow each moment more fluid, more wavering;
as he saw detached fragments of the earth's surface
hill-curves, copses, far-away fields and hedges blend
with fragments of cloud and fragments of cloudless
space, it came over him with a mounting confidence that
this wonderful country must surely deepen, intensify, en-
rich his furtive inner life, rather than threaten or de-
stroy it. ... Wolf felt the familiar mystic
sensation surging up even now from its hidden retreat.
Up, up it rose, like some great moonlight-coloured fish
from fathomless watery depths, like some wide-winged
marsh-bird from dark untraverscd pools ! The airs of this
new world that met its rising were full of the coolness of
mosses, full of the faint unsheathing of fern-fronds.
Whatever this mysterious emotion was, it leaped forward
now towards the new element as if conscious that it
carried with it a power as formidable, as incalculable, as
anything that it could encounter there.

Or here, his peculiar relationship with his mother, dependent and antagonistic, develops into a fierce quarrel, which - when she has got her way through emotional blackmail - she allows to lapse, and restores harmony:

It was his mother who broke the spell.  She raised her hands to his head and held it back by his stubbly straw-coloured hair, pressing, as she did so, her own tear-stained cheeks against his chin, and finally kissing him with a hot, intense, tyrannous kiss.

This is pretty overwhelming in even small doses, but sustained in this hyper-active, almost fugitive way at such length, I found myself in the "spurious and verbose" camp, and thought it almost literally unreadable.  Although I wanted to know what happened to the main characters, in particular, how Solent would resolve the problem of loving two very different women, and I enjoyed much of the social and rural description (there is no doubt that Powys has an acute eye), I found myself skimming over the page after page of this glutinous writing.  In the end, I passed on to more rewarding reading, and I cannot honestly recommend this to the modern reader.  That said, I see in Waterstone's great piles of a new paperback edition, so someone obviosly thinks very differently!

Private death

The Private Patient, P D James’ latest Adam Dalgleish mystery, is another elegant piece of writing and a fine crime thriller; it can hardly fail to satisfy Miss James’ hordes of fans.  It is largely set in Dorset, though that lovely county plays a very passing role. The Dalgleish team is still strong, and James uses it to explore a lot of well known themes now – compassion, guilt, the happiness of individuals against the value of doing a job society needs; and, in what is perhaps a farewell gesture, she has allowed Dalgleish happiness at last; even Sayers didn’t keep Wimsey from the altar this long!  But is it too critical, too cautiously judgemental to think that some of the easy magic has worn thin over the years?  The Private Patient is very fine, but she has set herself a very high standard over many novels, and it may be that this is not her best.  But how unfair criticism is – and one knows how hard it is to write a single good sentence, let alone a novel – comparison with the ineptitudes of Michael Underwood, for example, makes me realise what an achievement it is to write a crime novel which is well written, surprising but plausible, and full of human as well as forensic interest.  So my criticism is very cautious!

The plot starts simply, with an investigative journalist deciding to have cosmetic surgery to remove a scar she has had from childhood – from a drunken assault by her father, though there is a carefully rehearsed story of minor domestic accident for public consumption.  One obvious question – why has she waited almost forty years to deal with this – is posed, and is placed en prise at the start of the novel; you assume that answering this question will help Dalgleish work out why, when attending the converted Dorset manor house for her operation, she is murdered.  If you’re worried that I’ll spoil the plot, you can skip the next paragraph, although I promise not to reveal who or why done it!

Of course, as an investigative journalist, she has a nose for dirt – and there’s scope for a few significant detours from the main plot here; one of them is truly impressive and challenging, but the final product is somehow unsatisfying.  But equally, there is less of the confrontation than we are used to – some of the lies only we know, and Dalgleish spends less time forcing the truth out of his witnesses than usual.  On the other side of the coin, there are, perhaps unusually for James, several warm and positive lines in the story, although they are developed in the sketchiest fashion, and sometimes only near the end.  But the end of what – of the investigation and the novel?  Surely not just that – with Dalgleish having got engaged to Emma in a previous book, this one opens with him visiting his future father-in-law to inform him; and there are strong indications that the special unit Dagleish heads is to be disbanded.  Is this, in fact, the last Dalgleish novel?

Overall, this is a fine read, with a good mixture of murder and detection, psychological drama, human interest, and a peppering of landscape, history and ritual.  If you don’t know P D James and Adam Dalgleish, this would be a perfectly good book to start with, although an odd one in terms of his development.  If you know them well, you will not think this their greatest hour, but you will not be disappointed either.

Following - and forgiving - the plough

Reading J S Collis’ two books on working on a farm during the war (the second one, 1939-45 – though with the Falklands, Iraq twice, and Afghanistan, and a host of smaller conflicts, the language will surely lose phrases like “the first war” and “the last war” before too long), I was struck by how recent the distant past is.  Collis is writing during a war in which my father fought, I was born hardly ten years after the book was published, and yet the picture of the land is utterly alien to me.  I have seen nothing like it in England, although I have come across something analogous in the poorer parts of southern Europe and further afield.

While Following the Plough is Collis’ account of working for six years on two farms, one in Sussex, and the other at Tarrant Gunville in Dorset.  He had no agricultural experience at all, and did this as a more productive and, as he hoped, a more stimulating, job than serving some military staff job (he was an officer cadet in the Irish Guards in the first (1914-18) war, but hadn’t finished his training when the war ended – so he was at once getting too old for active military service as a subaltern, and entirely without practical military experience.  Later, he wrote Down to Earth, about being a forester; this was later published jointly with While Following The Plough as The Worm Forgives The Plough - a quotation from William Blake, but it always makes me think of Kipling:

The toad beneath the harrow knows
Exactly where each tooth-point goes.
The butterfly upon the road
Preaches contentment to that toad.

The subject matter is very interesting, but his prose style can be very flat, even dead.  And he gets amusement out of the most trivial things!  So, for example, he is suggesting that the threshing machine being fed by a team of nine human beings, would give a traveller from another planet the wrong impression about who was in charge; then he says that even for us, “if we turned a corner and suddenly came upon such a scene, it would be sufficiently surprising” (well, blow me down, the excitement is mounting fast!).  But he can be very penetrating, as when he finds one of the land girls he is working with is “mad about poetry”, and he says:

This was very cheering; for as we progress it becomes more common to meet a person who writes bad books than who reads good ones.

 

And he has a melancholic, semi-spiritual streak which comes out, normally in comparisons of the urban and the rural, or of the agricultural and manufacturing worker.  But on one occasion, having a solitary lunch under a tree, he gets quite carried away:

I do not think anything in Nature is more mysterious or more effective than a big tree.  It is not only that so much proceeds from so little .. but there is something about a great tree.  Standing under this one and looking up, with knitted concentration, quite baffled, I got the impression that it emanated – Goodness.  It stood firmly like a noble Thought, which, if understood, would save the world.

Richard Ingrams, whose article in Slightly Foxed (Autumn 2008, No 19) inspired me to read While Following The Plough, says of that "it succeeds on two levels: first as a description of farm labour in the days before the combine harvester, and also as an account of one man's discovery of nature and the beauty of the countryside."  I agree, and he's certainly worth reading, but he takes a little digesting!  He is at his best when plainly observing work on the farm, and the rhythm of daily life.  The most notable things are the hours, and the lack of mechanisation.

Almost everything is done by hand or by horse, although there are a few tractors in Dorset, primitive and unreliable - and during the war, short of fuel.  So gangs of men and women worked the fields, manhandling ploughs, potatoes and potash, and a thousand other things, working long hard hours, and often not appreciating their surroundings through the harshness of their toil.  It is a mistake, he points out, to assume that those who work on the land either want to be there, or that they are intrinisically any happier than factory workers or coal miners.  He has an endearingly realistic streak amongst the pictures of the farm and the land around him:

I have no objection whatever to standing on a dunghill.  There is no place where I am more content to stand.  But for how long?  That's the question.  The dunghill is ... celebrated by poet, by prophet and by priest.  It is numbered amongst the highest riches of the land.  I never feel better employed than when dealing with one. ... True.  But consider the reality.  It is 2 pm.  There are three and a half hours to go.  There is an icy wind.  Also a drizzle.  There is no one to talk to, and ... there will be nothing to talk about. ... the dunghill soon ceases to be anything but an object, heavy and clogging.

Fog

Recently, in Dorset, I spent a whole day unable to see from my back door to the garden fence, so I looked out two short poems about fog.  First, the short and delightful Fog by Carl Sandberg:

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

And now a slightly longer piece, Sarah Teasdale's White Fog.  It's a gentle approach to fog - but actually, of course, fog can be macabre, threatening, alienating - moods caught by last week's poet, T S Eliot, in various places.  But tonight, the demons can sleep, and all is damp, quiet beauty.

Heaven-invading hills are drowned
In wide moving waves of mist,
Phlox before my door are wound
In dripping wreaths of amethyst.

Ten feet away the solid earth
Changes into melting cloud,
There is a hush of pain and mirth,
No bird has heart to speak aloud.

Here in a world without a sky,
Without the ground, without the sea,
The one unchanging thing is I,
Myself remains to comfort me.

Strangers and Brothers: Time of Hope

The first novel in C P Snow’s Strangers and Brothers sequence is Time of Hope, although it was not the first to be written; it describes the early life of Lewis Eliot, the central figure of the sequence, although he is often observer and reporter as well as main protagonist; he is not the anonymous, almost reclusive observer and analyst that Anthony Powell makes Nick Jenkins, for example.  Eliot is a highly autobiographical figure, though his life diverges significantly from Snow’s on occasion - so they were both born in lower middle class families in Leicester, but Snow became a scientist, but makes his leading figure a barrister.  Published in 1949, it covers an extended period in Eliot’s life, from about 1914, just before the war started, when Eliot is about nine, until he is 28, in 1933 – though we will visit parts of this period again in the sequence.  (The cover design shown here is by David Gentleman).

This is an interesting novel, though I personally find the first half, when the pace is slower and more considered, more interesting than the later passages.  Snow is very good on the small family issues – the pride of the family in being a step or two better off than others, and the consequent shame of bankruptcy; the portrait of a too domineering aunt and a too complaisant father; the exaggerated emotions of childhood – grief at his mother’s death, humiliation in front of other boys; and the sexual and professional frustrations of adolescence.  Snow shared much of this himself – and although he came to make his mark as fellow of a Cambridge college, novelist, member of the House of Lords, and junior member of the Government in the 1960s, he remembers it well.

His approach to a long sequence of novels is quite different to Powell’s.  He is a lesser novelist, of course, but not an inconsiderable one, and certainly a more traditional teller of stories.  But the sequence did not start here, and it is probably easier to read the Snow novels completely independently of each other than it is the Powell.  Indeed, it is not always easy to decide what is the best order to read them in.  I personally, just by chance, started with The Light and the Dark, which is the first of the sequence written, but normally placed fourth in the order.  So this novel has some odd features; the first is that there are at least two themes in it which are surprisingly sketchily developed – George Passant’s career and legal difficulties, and Charles March’s struggle with his family – and you are bound to think, why are these mentioned at all, if we are not to hear more?  The answer is, of course, they are expounded at full length in “later” novels, and not to include them here would have been incomprehensible in the light of what was to follow.

But this is a novel about a young man making good, though with real difficulties – financial, professional, and especially sexual and matrimonial.  And his cup does not run over – he becomes aware that  his career, though perfectly respectable, is slowing, and his private life becomes a cross which he feels unable to bear or to discard:

I had longed for a better world, for fame, for love.  I had longed for a better world; and this was the summer of 1933.  I had longed for fame: and I was a second rate lawyer.  I had longed for love: and I was bound for life to a woman who never had love for me and who had exhausted mine.

It is at times very moving, and it is, I think, a fine portrait of the period.  I would encourage you to read Snow, and I think you’ll enjoy this, but I might suggest that newcomers – if they can bear the thought of not reading the books in sequence – might start elsewhere (recommendations in later posts!).

Old fashioned crime

Over the Christmas holiday, I read two old fashioned murder mysteries or thrillers.  I use the phrase advisedly - these were not classic or vintage crime from the great age of private sleuths, between the wars, but nor were they modern police thrillers aiming to be accurate in terms of procedure and gritty with social or psychological comment.  These were in a sense transitional between the two modes, and are almost as dated as a result than any Christie or Sayers.

The two were John Creasey’s The Enemy Within (1950) and Michael Underwood’s Crooked Wood (c 1978).  These two books were quite different, utterly distinct in quality and also, though to a lesser degree, in social assumptions.  One was seemed a dead end to me, whereas the other, although further removed from modern crime writing, set us on the road in an unexpected way.

Let me deal with the Underwood first.  This is set in London in the 1970s, and starts when a senior partner in a firm of solicitors, known for their uncomfortably close association with serious criminals, is shot in a housing estate in east London.  It’s basically a courtroom drama, in the sense that the trial provides the temporal span of the book, but there are several excursions out to follow up unexpected evidence and so on.  The main police protagonist is Detective Sergeant Attwell, who manages the case with his wife’s assistance (she was a policewoman before they married and had children).  The only untruth I have told so far is in the word “drama” – the story is dead on the plate, the prose is flat, there is no excitement, and no sudden understanding (or misunderstanding).  Murder, betrayal, judgement, they are all one with a railway timetable and a bar of soap.  It is impossible to believe in any of the characters, and they are so flatly drawn, it’s quite often difficult to tell them apart.  At the very end, I wasn’t absolutely sure who’d hired the killer – and I didn’t care a dam.  And I sympathised with the child who had written at the bottom of the last page, “this must be the most boring book in history”!.  If you like this mixture of thriller and courtroom drama, let me recommend the incomparable Michael Gilbert’s 1951 story, Death Has Deep Roots, which is fast moving, exciting, and much more realistic, too.

The other book, The Enemy Within, is much earlier, much more old-fashioned  - people drive large cars round central London and park with ease outside theatres and restaurants, for example.  It’s full of secret headquarters, spies, passwords and concealed buttons, and it’s completely unbelievable.  But it’s well written and an enjoyable lark for a couple of hours as “the Z men” (a secret force within Special Branch) outwit the forces of Soviet communism trying to infiltrate society in London.  You know from the beginning that Charles Corliss is a Soviet spy planted inside the Z men’s organisation, but the fun comes from watching him and them trying to outwit each other; the denouement is unlikely to be a big surprise, but there’s enough action and pace for that not to matter.  The writing is not fantastic, but it’s OK, a bit dated and occasionally clunky.  But the extraordinary thing is the author – John Creasey is one of 28 aliases under which the same man wrote 562 books – or well over one a month if he wrote for 40 years!  He wrote spy stories, thrillers, westerns, romances, and probably most famously the Gideon series of modern police procedurals, starting with Gideon’s Day, under the name of J J Marric.  I read these avidly when I was a boy, and I’d like to go back to them soon, but they’re not in print although I have read that this will soon be rectified.

New poetry blog: Sunday Salon

Natalie is starting a poetry blog over at http://www.writonwater.blogspot.com/, an enterprise in which she deserves every encouragement.  You can just read the blog (and comment), or you can join and actually contribute directly by posting.

It's only in its infancy, but it deserves a fair wind, so get over there and have a look.

And to encourage you, here's a little poem (in addition to my normal Friday poem, which people really seem to like) - Sergeant Brown's Parrot, by Kit Wright:

Many policemen wear upon their shoulders
Cunning little radios. To pass away the time
They talk about the traffic to them, listen to the news,
And it helps them to Keep Down Crime.

But Sergeant Brown, he wears upon his shoulder
A tall green parrot as he's walking up and down
And all the parrot says is "Who's-a-pretty-boy-then?"
"I am," says Sergeant Brown.

A cold coming

For the Friday after Epiphany, traditionally associated with the arrival of the wise men, whoever they were and however numerous (who says there were three?), at Bethlehem, a mighty poem about the practical and emotional realities of the journey.  As I explained in a post a few days ago, T S Eliot's masterpiece was inspired by a sermon of Launcelot Andrews' - and for me, it also has a particular, personal resonance.  At school, three of us were asked to read three Christmas poems at the annual carol concert - Hardy's The Oxen, Betjeman's Christmas ("that most tremendous tale of all"), and Journey of the Magi.  At the time, I was very anti modern poetry of any sort, and would happily have read the Betjeman, and been OK with the Hardy - but of course, I was allocated the Eliot!  I read it with great passion and violence, hamming it up dreadfully no doubt.  And when the evening came, one of my colleagues was ill, and I did the Hardy as well (Mr Cornflower may even remember it?).  Since then, of course, my views have changed, and while I can enjoy Hardy's or Betjeman's poetry on occasion, I am long a convert to the view that Eliot is the most significant poet in English  ... well, since when?  Certainly of the last hundred years, and perhaps since the beginning of the eighteenth century?

You may not agree with that particular judgement, but here is a mighty poem in anybody's language.  It starts with a quotation from Lancelot Andrews' 1620 Christmas sermon, and its language, too, is much influenced by Andrewes. It is harsh and bitter in places, but it is also very moving - and the language is superb.  This was published in Ariel Poems, in 1927, as Eliot moved steadily towards the religious belief, specifically the strongly ritualistic Anglo-Catholicism, of the rest of his life.  I hope you find something powerful and determined in T S Eliot's Journey of the Magi, and I wish you all well on your individual journeys in 2009.

‘A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a journey:

The ways deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter.’

And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,

Lying down in the melting snow.

There were times we regretted

The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,

And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

Then the camel men cursing and grumbling

And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,

And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,

And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly

And the villages dirty and charging high prices:

A hard time we had of it.

At the end we preferred to travel all night,

Sleeping in snatches,

With the voices singing in our ears, saying

That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,

Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;

With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,

And three trees on the low sky,

And an old white horse galloped in away in the meadow.

Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,

Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,

And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.

But there was no imformation, and so we continued

And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon

Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This:  were we led all that way for

Birth or Death?  There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt.  I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

Preparing for "such a journey"

In 1620, Lancelot Andrewes (1555 - 1625), some time chaplain to Queen Elizabeth, prebendary of St Paul's, and Bishop of Winchester, gave one of a series of Christmas Day sermons in front of the king, James I.  His text was from the Gospel according to St. Matthew (ii, 1-2):

Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea, in the days of Herod the King, behold there came wise men from the East to Jerusalem, Saying, Where is He That is born King of  the Jews? For we have seen His star in the East, and are come to worship Him.

Cum ergo natus esset Jesus in Bethlehem Judae, in diebus Herodis Regis, ecce magi ab Oriente venerunt Jerosolymam, dicentes, Ubi est Qui natus est Rex Judaeorum? Vidimus enim stellam Ejus in Orientes, et venimus  adorare Eum.

I have given the Latin, too, because Andrewes refers to it in his text a lot.  Andrewes' prose, and his preaching, were highly esteemed in his own time and afterwards, although the prose is not the gorgeous, living thing that Donne makes it, but a more workaday tool full of care and precision, and very plain and easy to understand.  When you get into it a little, it becomes very attractive, and can be almost conversational with the occasional very short, simple sentences, and the emphatic inversions - though "Behold, come they did" does sound a little bit like Yoda in Star Wars!

T S Eliot read widely in the seventeeth century authors - Andrewes, Donne, and Hobbes among them - and in this sermon found inspiration for Journey of the Magi; he was particularly taken by Andrewes' "ordonnance", and his biographer Peter Ackroyd, has this to say about the poem: "The directness of statement and lucidity of structure derive at least in part from his recognition of the "ordonnance" of Andrewes' own writing - an internal agreement of words which encourages precision, relevance and intensity."  Andrewes was, rightly, as a scholar and a writer, one of the authors of the King James bible, described fascinatingly in Adam Nicolson's Power and Glory.

Here is a bit of Andrewes' great sermon.  Ecce venerunt simply means "Behold they came", with ecce carrying a load of emphasis and wonder and even amazement.  I wouldn't necessarily suggest everyone should go and read Andrews nowadays, though he is essential for the history of Anglican practice and doctrine, but he is one of the early masters who created English as such a formidable tool; he wrought well, and many after built on his foundations, though they knew it not! 

We shall go in the company of wise men ... And if the shepherds were too homely to sort with, these are company for the best; they were company for Cyrus and Darius, and all the great Monarchs of Persia.

Ecce venerunt it is in the text; and indeed, not only the persons, ecce magi, but their very coming deserved an ecce.  It is an ecce venerunt, theirs indeed, if we weigh it well, whence they came and whither.  Whence? from the East, their own country.  Whither? to Jerusalem, that was to them a strange land: that was somewhat.  They came a long journey, no less than twelve days together.  They came an uneasy journey, for their way lay through Arabia Petraea, and the craggy rock of it.  And they came a dangerous journey, through Arabia Deserta too, and the black tents of Kedar there, then famous for their robberies, and even to this day.  And they came now, at the worst season of the year.  And all but to do worship at Christ's birth.  So great account they made; so highly did they esteem their being at it, as they took all this great travel, and came all this long journey, and came it at this time.  Stayed not their coming till the opening of the year, till they might have better weather and way, and longer days, and so more seasonable and fit to travel in.  So desirous were they to come with the first, and to be there as soon as possibly they might; broke through all these difficulties, Et ecce venerunt, And behold, come they did.

Reading for 09 - just a start! Sunday Salon

I have really, very little idea what I'll read in 2009 (though it will include a lot of Powell, Austen, Homer, Kipling, Borges and Eliot, as well as heaps of classic mystery fiction), but there are two "starters for ten" as they say.  First, I made an assault on the bookshop, and another on the London Library, just before Christmas, and this was my booty:

 

Second, I have decided not to read Anthony Powell's Dance To The Music Of Time this New Year holiday, as I normally do (though I will doubtless read it later in the year).  Instead, I am going to read C P Snow's Strangers and Brothers series, an altogether more substantial undertaking - eleven novels of 400 pages or so each.  He isn't a great novelist, but I do think he's underrated, and he offers a fascinating insight into the twentieth century from the viewpoint of a northern lower middle class boy who makes good, a viewpoint with which I have, for family reasons, a great deal of sympathy.  I will start with A Time of Hope - the first in order of the completed sequence, but not the first written. Thereafter, it isn't always easy to keep them in order, as some overlap the others slightly or completely, and they weren't, especially early in the sequence, written in order.   I shall take a long while over this, reading other stuff en route, but I shall keep you informed at every step.

Runcible spoons

After solemn Milton last week, and a pretty intense and serious poem lined up for next week, I am celebrating the New Year with utter frivolity, with a poem that everybody will know.  It's by Queen Victoria's quondam drawing master, and is of course Edward Lear's The Owl and the Pussy-cat.  And if you need to ask about runcible, look here - it's worth it for those in the know, too!

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea

   In a beautiful pea-green boat,

They took some honey, and plenty of money,

   Wrapped up in a five-pound note.

The Owl looked up to the stars above,

   And sang to a small guitar,

"O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,

    What a beautiful Pussy you are,

         You are,

         You are!

What a beautiful Pussy you are!"

Pussy said to the Owl, "You elegant fowl!

   How charmingly sweet you sing!

O let us be married! too long we have tarried:

   But what shall we do for a ring?"

They sailed away, for a year and a day,

   To the land where the Bong-Tree grows

And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood

   With a ring at the end of his nose,

             His nose,

             His nose,

   With a ring at the end of his nose.

"Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling

   Your ring?" Said the Piggy, "I will."

So they took it away, and were married next day

   By the Turkey who lives on the hill.

They dined on mince, and slices of quince,

   Which they ate with a runcible spoon;

And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,

   They danced by the light of the moon,

             The moon,

             The moon,

They danced by the light of the moon.

Women reading: January

A very happy New Year to you all!

My calendar for January shows me Georges Croegaert's La Liseuse; he was a Belgian painter (1848-1923) who painted a lot of rather cosy and warm boudoir scenes.  This therefore presumably comes from the late nineteenth century (or possibly very early twentieth, though it doesn't have that feel for me.  The young lady is in a rich, fashionable apartment, decorated with many curios of travel and the East especially; she is obviously quite a reader, as her TBR pile is on the bottom shelf of the cabinet to the right.  The skin rug, the masks, the open cabinet, the dagger, as well as her good looks and languid appearance, make me speculate that she is mistress or lover, rather than wife, though I know not why.  There is certainly more than a hint of danger, of sexuality, in the picture.

   

This is not a particularly good quality image - you might want to look here instead to see more of the detail!

So what is she reading?  A novel, to be sure, and a French one - probably one which is ever so slightly racy or improper, certainly one which her father or priest would disapprove of.  What about Gustave Flaubert's Salammbô (1862), which Wikipedia tells me, "is largely an exercise in sensuous and violent exoticism".  Sounds perfect for the picture!