Closing in

‘A clever lesson Alfred taught
that should remain within our thoughts:
“A threat seen in its infancy
will lose much of its potency.”
So heavy jolts have far less force
if spotted early in their course;
& you can dodge an arrow’s blow
by watching as it leaves the bow,
then keeping its approach in sight,
then ducking from its fatal flight.’[1]

July. A bad month for the Romanovs, among others, as I recall. Sedgemoor, the last major battle on British soil. Anaïs Nin begins her journal. Louis-Ferdinand Céline died on 1st July; Franz Kafka was born on the 3rd. I was not actually aware of those last two facts when the month began. More widely, it began with a pause in the heat, in the United Kingdom anyhow, though extreme weather still had a grip elsewhere, a death grip often enough. More locally, as in our breakfast table, it started with Céline’s Death on the Instalment Plan (Mort à crédit) and Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’. Yes, as in the case of Dr Johnson’s old friend, Oliver Edwards, who had tried in his time to be a philosopher, ‘cheerfulness’ is ‘always breaking in.’[2]

Since then, wildfires raging in France, Spain, Italy, Crete, Greece. . . a fire blazing in the Cairngorms national park in Scotland for a fortnight now, and a huge area in Suffolk devastated, including the Minsmere nature reserve. The climate emergency is taking itself seriously, even if some of those affected by it still, astonishingly, do not. Our ‘temperate’ country is currently enduring, in parts of the country, its fourth heat wave of the year, half of England now officially in drought, already having recorded the hottest June ever. The excessive humidity made it much worse then, of course, oppressive and exhausting, with large areas of western Europe reportedly sitting under a ‘heat dome’, so both physically and psychologically stifling, something of a theme for the times. Closing in.

It’s an old literary theme too, unsurprisingly. In Edgar Allen Poe’s tale, ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, after the narrator has saved himself from the pit only by tripping on the hem of his robe, and freed himself by luring rats to chew through his bonds, the walls of the cell begin closing in. They are also red-hot and force him towards the pit in the centre of the cell. ‘I shrank back – but the closing walls pressed me resistlessly onward.’[3]

Fifty years later, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb’, Hatherley lets slip to Colonel Lysander Stark that he has realised the deception practised upon him. The Colonel is not amused, slams the door and turns the key in the lock. ‘The lamp still stood upon the floor where I had placed it when examining the trough. By its light I saw that the black ceiling was coming down upon me, slowly, jerkily, but, as none knew better than myself, with a force which must within a minute grind me to a shapeless pulp.’[4]

Encroaching walls, descending ceilings, such closings-in are at the more grotesque end of the spectrum. Others are more general, more personal, more subjective.

George Orwell (in 1940) writes of Henry Miller at the end of Tropic of Cancer, watching the Seine, ‘in a sort of mystical acceptance of the thing-as-it-is. Only, what is he accepting? In the first place, not America, but the ancient boneheap of Europe, where every grain of soil has passed through innumerable human bodies.’ Secondly, the modern age of concentration camps, bombs, purges, political murder and the rest. And, regarding Walt Whitman, to whose outlook Miller’s own is ‘deeply akin’, Orwell adds: ‘Unlike Whitman, we live in a shrinking world.’[5]

I live in a city, large parts of which—and in a country, large parts of which—were essentially designed for an earlier century: the twentieth and, very often, the nineteenth. Many roads are narrow, their pavements not designed to be blocked by huge plastic recycling bins and boxes, and by oversized vehicles parked half on pavements with their wing mirrors not even folded in on the pedestrian side. Shrubs and hedges, which used to be tidied and trimmed, now trail and jut over walls and fences. Innumerable plants, not all of them weeds by any means, sprout from the base of front boundary walls, shaving a few more inches off the pedestrian space: you might say ‘rewilding’ or, in some moods, ‘neglect’ or ‘arrant laziness’. Private premises encroach, if only—again—by inches, on designated public spaces. Urban walking now is too often done with arms by your sides, drawn tightly in, or turned sideways, or simply stepping into roads.

On a broader stage, there are a number of figures, in and out of parliament, the rousers and the easily roused, who clearly wish to shrink this country (among others) further, make it smaller, poorer, tighter—and whiter.

But then – ‘We find hope where we can, and where we cannot, invent it.’[6]

Still, the war, the wars, go on. The most stupid one in recent memory persists in stuttering on, and nobody knows how long it will do so, least of all those who started it or naively believed they controlled the narrative. And as Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote to her friend Paul Nordoff in 1946: ‘No one in wartime can quite escape the illusion that when the war ends things will snap back to where they were and that one will be the same age one was when it began, and able to go on from where one left off. But the temple of Janus has two doors, and the door for war and door for peace are equally marked in plain lettering, No Way Back. And the dead are not more irrevocably dead than the living are irrevocably alive.’[7]

Notes

[1] Simon Armitage, The Owl and the Nightingale (London: Faber & Faber, 2021), 58-59. ‘Alfred’ is Alfred the Great.

[2] James Boswell, Life of Johnson, edited by R. W. Chapman, revised by J. D. Fleeman, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 957.

[3] Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Stories (London: Everyman’s Library, 1992), 603.

[4] Arthur Conan Doyle, The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: Volume I, edited with notes by Leslie S. Klinger (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company 2006), 281.

[5] George Orwell, ‘Inside the Whale’, in A Patriot After All: 1940-1941, edited by Peter Davison, revised and updated edition (London: Secker and Warburg, 2000): The Complete Works of George Orwell, Volume XII, 91.

[6] Claire Messud, The Last Life (London: Pan Macmillan, 2000), 160.

[7] Sylvia Townsend Warner, Letters, edited by William Maxwell (London: Chatto & Windus, 1982), 91.

June runes

(Évrard d’Espinques, Arthur’s Knights at the Round Table)

June 1909. The seventh issue of the English Review, edited by Ford Madox Hueffer, begins with ‘Modern Poetry’, begins in fact with a notice (signed ‘E. R.’) of the death of the novelist and poet George Meredith on 18 May. Ford begins: ‘Mr Meredith follows Mr Swinburne into the shadows; and now, indeed, the whole Round Table is dissolved.’ And he comments on the suitability of that phrase given the Arthurian cycle’s domination of the age, among such writers and artists as Alfred Tennyson, Lewis Carroll, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Dyce, John Collier and J. W. Waterhouse. As well as the poetry, this issue offered work by Hilaire Belloc, Wyndham Lewis, Olive Garnett, H. M. Tomlinson, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Reynolds and Edward Thomas.[1]

But those ‘Modern Poets’? They were represented, in a downward sliding scale, by four poems, three, two and one. The four were by John Galsworthy, prolific novelist and playwright (but whose 1934 Collected Poems ran to just under 140 pages); there were three poems by Gerald Gould, poet, journalist and essayist, and two by Eden Phillpotts, astonishingly prolific novelist, poet and playwright (some 250 books).

And the one poem? That was by a certain Ezra Pound. Entitled ‘Sestina: Altaforte’, it began thus:

I
Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace.
You whoreson dog, Papiols, come! Let’s to music!
I have no life save when the swords clash.
But ah! when I see the standards gold, vair, purple, opposing
And the broad fields beneath them turn crimson,
Then howl I my heart nigh mad with rejoicing.[2]

Two anecdotes attaching to this, ‘the Bloody Sestina’ as Pound’s friends and acquaintances dubbed it, are, firstly, the poet declaiming it at full volume at a table in the Tour Eiffel restaurant, the occasion on which the waiter felt the need to place a screen around the offending party; and, secondly, Pound delivering it in a similar fashion to the sculptor Henri Gaudier. Deeply impressed, Gaudier reported to the writer and translator John Cournos his excitement at the fact that Pound had dared to use the word ‘piss’ in the opening line of his poem.[3] Perhaps one more note: in ‘How I Began’, relating the circumstances of its composition, Pound commented: ‘Technically it is one of my best, though a poem on such a theme could never be very important.’[4] That ‘theme’ being bloodlust, war, slaughter and other exultations (the title of the volume in which the poem was collected). A little more than a year after that comment, of course, that theme would become very prominent indeed.

And yet . . . rather like the case of Melville’s Moby Dick, everyone knowing that it begins ‘Call me Ishmael’—except that it doesn’t, a page or so of ‘Etymology’, supplied by ‘a late consumptive usher to a grammar school’, being followed by more than a dozen pages of ‘Extracts’, supplied by ‘a sub-sub-librarian’, before those magic and memorable words appear—the case of Pound’s ‘Sestina: Altaforte’ also has some preliminary matter.

It actually begins thus:
LOQUITUR: En Bertrans de Born.
            Dante Alighieri put this man in hell for that he was a stirrer-up of strife.
            Eccovi!
            Judge ye!
            Have I dug him up again?
The scene is at his castle, Altaforte. “Papiols” is his jongleur.
“The Leopard,” [later in the poem] the device of Richard (Coeur de Lion).’

(Gustave Doré ill., Dante, The Vision of Hell, 1866)

And yes, Dante put Bertrans down in the Ninth Bolgia, among the makers of discord, carrying his own severed head by the hair.

E perchè tu di me novela porti,
sappi ch’ I’ son Bertram dal Bornio, quelli
che diedi al Re giovane I ma’ conforti.

‘And that thou mayst bear news of me, know that I am Bertran de Born, he that gave evil backing to the Young King. I made rebellion between the father and the son; Ahitophel did no worse for Absalom and David with his wicked goadings. Because I parted those so joined I carry my brain, alas, parted from its root in this trunk; thus it is observed in me the retribution.’[5]

More than 700 years further on, we may not feel so sure about a literal hell, though metaphorically, symbolically, huge numbers of people must feel themselves there on a daily and nightly basis. And we surely have a great many stirrers up of strife, for political or personal advantage, makers of discord, rabble rousers. Where might we put them now?

The novelist Sarah Moss once wrote (in what may still be my favourite of her books, or very close to it), ‘No one who knows what happens in the world, what humans do to humans, has any claim to contentment.’[6]

And a general sense of unease, of restlessness, is hardly surprising, as we see what this country (among others) is in worsening danger of becoming. The British—or the English—used to be widely admired for their qualities of tolerance and common sense—or so we believed, were led to believe. Could we believe it now? And if so, for how much longer?

Notes

[1] English Review, II, 7 (June 1909).

[2] Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations, edited by Richard Sieburth (New York: Library of America, 2003), 105.

[3] Helen Carr, The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H.D. and the Imagists (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009), 612.

[4] ‘How I Began’, T.P.’s Weekly (6 June 1913), 707. A note on De Born’s war songs added later to The Spirit of Romance read: ‘This kind of thing was much more impressive before 1914 than it has been since 1920.’

[5] Dante, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. I: Inferno, Italian text with translation and comment by John D. Sinclair (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 353, Canto XXVIII.

[6] Sarah Moss, Signs for Lost Children (London: Granta Books, 2016), 97.

Human Voices

(Harold Charles Harvey, The Tea Table: Cornwall Museum and Art Gallery)

Writing at the kitchen table was the title of the fine biography of Elizabeth David by Artemis Cooper.[1] It is also my current location, though updates arrive promptly and audibly from the front room where the Librarian is keeping a wary eye on the latest idiocy or outrage via news bulletins from the BBC, whose coverage of this latest disaster has been exemplary. I award myself no prizes for guessing to whom such of her phrases as ‘That’s insane’ or ‘He’s just nuts’ apply.

Voices whose variations, intonations and emphases we can read are often those learned over extended periods of time. But with literary voices or, rather, the closeness with which the voice fits the materials, the words on the page, the sense of fitness, of a join as fine as those of a master carpenter, the reader’s grasp can be almost immediate. A recent example for me was Rebecca Perry’s novel, May We Feed the King, the curator’s voice so exactly right that my confidence was assured from the outset.


Voices. On Ezra Pound’s 1939 visit to the United States, when he asked Louis Zukofsky if ‘it was possible to educate certain politicians’, Zukofsky retorted, ‘Whatever you don’t know, Ezra, you ought to know voices.’[2] As indeed he ought: of the Cantos, Guy Davenport wrote that voices ‘predominate in the poem’, that in fact its ‘basic metric’ is ‘simply the rhythm of talk.’[3]

Such concerns are not confined to the major modernists, though of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Hugh Kenner remarked that it is, ‘so to speak, a telephone poem, its multiple voices referrable to a massive short-circuit at the central exchange.’[4]

Eliot’s earlier masterpiece, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ ends with the reflection that:

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Did that phrase furnish Penelope Fitzgerald with the title of her 1980 novel? As Hermione Lee notes, London was bombed from late August 1940 and Fitzgerald’s Human Voices is set precisely in that period, March to September, though Fitzgerald only started work at the BBC in December 1940.[5] The wartime BBC, Fitzgerald wrote, was ‘dedicated to the strangest project of the war, or of any war, that is, telling the truth. Without prompting, the BBC had decided that truth was more important than consolation, and, in the long run, would be more effective. And yet there was no guarantee of this. Truth ensures trust, but not victory, or even happiness.’[6]

(Penelope Fitzgerald via The Telegraph)

It would be encouraging if it were still the case that truth ensures trust but the truth has numerous enemies these days, some of them very powerful and very well-funded. We are all familiar with what has long been recognised as the first casualty of war. By way of context, the Reporters Without Borders annual World Press Freedom Index for 2025 mentions the major factor of economic pressure, much of it due to ‘ownership concentration, pressure from advertisers and financial backers, and public aid that is restricted, absent or allocated in an opaque manner.’

https://rsf.org/en/rsf-world-press-freedom-index-2025-economic-fragility-leading-threat-press-freedom

That index, by the way, has the United Kingdom at number 20, the United States at number 57, and Israel at number 112.

Denton Welch heard a voice through a cloud; and, writing to John Flaxman (‘Dear Sculptor of Eternity’) in September 1800, William Blake reported of the arrival at the cottage in Felpham, in West Sussex (where he wrote Milton: A Poem): ‘I have begun to work. Felpham is a sweet place for Study. because it is more Spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on all sides her golden Gates   her windows are not obstructed by vapours. .  voices of Celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard & their forms more distinctly seen & my Cottage is also a Shadow of their houses.’

(Detail from an illustration to Blake’s Milton)
Work to restore Blake’s cottage is still going on and needs support:
https://www.blakecottage.org/

Voices from clouds, from angels, from spectres are all very well in their place. And it’s true that of the earthbound kind, there are no guarantees of truthfulness or rationality or consistency. Readers of William Faulkner may well recall Quentin Compson’s observation: ‘They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.’[7]

Nevertheless, with all its attendant hazards, frustrations and uncertainties, my current plan remains to hold fast to human voices.

Notes

[1] Artemis Cooper, Writing at the Kitchen Table: Elizabeth David (London: Penguin Books 2000).

[2] Louis Zukofsky, ‘Work/Sundown’, in Preposition The Collected Critical Essays of Louis Zukofsky (London: Rapp and Carroll, 1967), 157.

[3] Guy Davenport, Cities on Hills: A Study of I–XXX of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1983), 70.

[4] Hugh Kenner, The Mechanic Muse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 36.

[5] Hermione Lee, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life (London: Chatto and Windus, 2013), 69.

[6] Penelope Fitzgerald, Human Voices (1980; London: Everyman, 2003), 145.

[7] The Sound and the Fury (1929), in Novels 1926-1929, edited by Joseph Blotner and Noel Polk (New York: Library of America, 2006), 967.

Rules of the Game

(David Wilkie, Blind Man’s Bluff: Sheffield Museums)

Sunshine, breeze. People walking or taking their dog for a walk or taking their phone for a walk, so intent upon that small screen that they will likely miss the apocalypse which, given the current derangements, may be sooner than expected and certainly sooner than hoped.

Oddly—or perhaps not—several features of recent and current news bring to mind Gilbert Murray’s The Stoic Philosophy. This was the Conway Memorial Lecture, delivered at South Place Institute, 16 March 1915, and published in volume form later that year.

Murray (1866-1957) is less well-known these days but was for many years an extremely familiar name in some circles: from 1908-1936 he was the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, and a very prolific translator and interpreter of ancient Greek literature and philosophy, particularly drama. He published almost a hundred books in all, including at least thirty volumes of translation and another twenty of classical studies. Born in Sydney, Australia, he came of an Irish Catholic family and was a consistent supporter of Irish Home Rule. His ashes are interred in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey

(Gilbert Murray)

He crops up several times in Ford Madox Ford’s letters in the period of the First World War, once as a signatory (one of 52) of a public letter, which appeared in The Guardian on 18 Sept. 1914, ‘British Authors and the War’, subheaded ‘Allies’ Righteous Cause’, setting out why the signatories supported Britain’s engagement in the war. His name was one of six which appeared both there and among the fifty signatories of another letter more than six years later, also published in The Guardian (1 Jan. 1921) but in several other newspapers also: ‘The State of Ireland. An Urgent Appeal for Mediation. Manifesto by the Arts and Professions’, a protest against the current policy being pursued in Ireland by the British government,[1] or, as Margaret Cole remembered it: ‘a propaganda campaign against the Black-and-Tans and the English occupation of Ireland’.[2]

The Stoic Philosophy is not a long book—a little more than 50 pages of Murray’s text, plus appendices and the Chairman’s introduction—and appeared at a serious historical juncture, just six months into the war which did not end war. It deals with major issues: philosophy, religion, history, the nature of matter, of reality: nevertheless, it seems to have been Murray’s comment on the 4th century BCE philosopher Zeno’s response to questioners that stuck in my head. Zeno of Citium is a major player here, being the founder of the Stoic philosophy, and Murray likens his strategy to that of the Duke of Wellington, when dealing with a subaltern who appears sceptical of the ageing Duke’s story, concerning an occasion during the Peninsula War when his servant opened a bottle of port and found that it contained a rat. The subaltern suggests that it must have been a very large bottle and the Duke retorts that it was ‘a damned small bottle’. The subaltern then comments that it must then have been a very small rat. The Duke replies that it was ‘a damned large rat’. ‘And there’, Murray concludes, ‘the matter has rested ever since.’[3]

Still, rats aside, there is plenty of interest in a relatively small space. Murray remarks of Zeno that ‘[t]he time of his coming is certainly significant. It was a time when landmarks had collapsed, and human life was left, as it seemed, without a guide’.

And: ‘Two questions lay before him—how to live and what to believe. His real interest was in the first, but it could not be answered without first facing the second. For if we do not in the least know what is true or untrue, real or unreal, we cannot form any reliable rules about conduct or anything else’ (22-23). And, towards the end: ‘Life becomes, as the Stoics more than once tell us, like a play which is acted or a game played with counters. Viewed from outside, the counters are valueless; but to those engaged in the game their importance is paramount. What really and ultimately matters is that the game shall be played as it should be played’ (50).

The game – or The Game. This does not mean—or need not mean—life viewed as trivial or to be taken lightly. It points towards a recognition of rules, of recognized forms and formations, though the outcome, the result—at, so to speak, the final whistle—is, of course, always the same.

I remind myself that the first volume of the novelist Nicholas Mosley’s Memoirs of Sir Oswald Mosley and Family was Rules of the Game (the second was Beyond the Pale).


In the year of Murray’s lecture, Sigmund Freud was thinking about literature, particularly fiction: ‘It is an inevitable result of all this that we should seek in the world of fiction, in literature and in the theatre compensation for what has been lost in life. There we still find people who know how to die – who, indeed, even manage to kill someone else. There alone too the condition can be fulfilled which makes it possible for us to reconcile ourselves with death: namely, that behind all the vicissitudes of life we should still be able to preserve a life intact. For it is really too sad that in life it should be as it is in chess, where one false move may force us to resign the game, but with the difference that we can start no second game, no return-match. In the realm of fiction we find the plurality of lives which we need. We die with the hero with whom we have identified ourselves; yet we survive him, and are ready to die again just as safely with another hero.’[4]

In literature, and the arts generally, of course, you may break the rules of the game (once you have established to your own satisfaction what they actually are) without inflicting serious harm on others: while the same cannot confidently be said of politics, psychiatry, medicine or physics. Nor need its implications end with, or be restricted to, the human. In No More Parades, Ford Madox Ford has Christopher Tietjens thinking ‘good-humouredly’ about his official religion: God the great English landowner; Christ, an almost too benevolent land steward, son of the owner; the Third Person of the Trinity the spirit of the estate, ‘the Game, as it were, as distinct from the players of the Game.’[5]


An element of the game occurred also to John Fowles when, with the figures of Heraclitus and Pascal hovering about his shoulders, he wrote of what he sometimes termed the Godgame (working title of his novel The Magus): ‘Put dice on the table and leave the room; but make it clear to the players that you were never there before you left the room.’[6]

The first task is to identify the rules of the game, the second to understand them or, perhaps, to understand what understanding in this context might amount to. Or is it, before all else, to confirm that it is in fact a game? Or is the attempt to confirm that itself the game?

Perhaps a little early in the day for such philosophical demands – or stoicism in the face of such questions. Barely one coffee in – and many hours away from an aperitif. . .

But a supplementary question must be: what of those who ignore the rules of the game or fail to understand them or whose ego obscures too much of the world, the people in it, their motives for what they do or say or fail to do or say?


Sybille Bedford related the story of Aldous Huxley aboard a ship when, off North Borneo, a sailor was threatening to run amok with a dagger. While the ship’s officers conferred and the passengers stood huddled together, Huxley reflected on ‘the precarious artificiality of all that seemed most solid and fundamental in our civilization, of all that we take for granted. An individual has only to refuse to play the game of existence according to the current rules to throw the rule-observing players into bewildered consternation . . .
‘They are appalled, they are at a loss, they are helpless.’[7]

We have moved on from that, of course – and from more than the dagger, we fondly hope.

Notes

[1] The other five signatories to both letters were Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, Jane Harrison, Arthur Quiller-Couch and May Sinclair

[2] Margaret Cole, Growing Up into Revolution (Longmans, Green & Co, 1949), 83.

[3] Gilbert Murray, The Stoic Philosophy (New York: The Knickerbocker Press, G. B. Putnam’s Sons, 1915), 24-25.

[4] Sigmund Freud, ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’ (1915), in Civilization, Society and Religion, edited by Albert Dickson (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 79.

[5] Ford Madox Ford, No More Parades (1925), edited by Joseph Wiesenfarth (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2011), 96.

[6] John Fowles, The Aristos (London: Pan Books, 1968), 21-22.

[7] Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley: A Biography (Two volumes, 1973; one volume edition, with a new preface, London: Pan Macmillan, 1993), 173.

Barbarous kings

Who has brought this to pass?
Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?
Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle drums?
Barbarous kings.[1]

Reading again Charles Dickens’ first—and astonishingly successful—novel, I was glad, being myself a man of Kent, to be reminded of it by Mr Alfred Jingle:  ‘“Splendid—capital—Kent, Sir—Everybody knows Kent—apples, cherries, hops, and women.”’

Further on, nothing worse that morning having happened chez nous than a smear of marmalade on a page, I came across the newspaper editor’s interesting take on research methods:

‘Mr. Pott looked dubiously at Bob Sawyer for some seconds, and, turning to Mr. Pickwick, said—
   “You have seen the literary articles which have appeared at intervals in the Eatanswill Gazette in the course of the last three months, and which have excited such general—I may say such universal attention and admiration?”
   “Why,” replied Mr. Pickwick, slightly embarrassed by the question, “the fact is, I have been so much engaged in other ways, that I really have not had an opportunity of perusing them.”
     “You should do so, Sir,” said Pott, with a severe countenance.
     “I will,” said Mr. Pickwick.
     “They appeared in the form of a copious review of a work on Chinese metaphysics, Sir,” said Pott.
     “Oh,” observed Mr. Pickwick—”from your pen I hope?”
     “From the pen of my critic, Sir,” rejoined Pott with dignity.
     “An abstruse subject I should conceive,” said Mr. Pickwick.
     “Very, Sir,” responded Pott, looking intensely sage. “He crammed for it, to use a technical but expressive term; he read up for the subject, at my desire, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.”
     “Indeed,” said Mr. Pickwick, “I was not aware that that valuable work contained any information respecting Chinese metaphysics.”
     “He read, Sir,” rejoined Pott, laying his hand on Mr. Pickwick’s knee, and looking round with a smile of intellectual superiority, “he read for metaphysics under the letter M, and for China under the letter C; and combined his information, Sir!”’[2]

Whether or not its practitioners would admit to it, I suspect that such an approach has not entirely died out in the journalistic—and, perhaps, academic—worlds. It certainly hasn’t died out in preparations, such as they are, for various contemporary military adventures.

Two weeks into March now, so two weeks of the current leaders of Israel and the United States making the world a safer place by gleefully setting large parts of it on fire. They have also encouraged the population of Iran to rise up against their oppressors but done so by the peculiar expedient of slaughtering their families and destroying their homes. An old song but not a good one. Lebanon too has been attacked yet again and civilian deaths are rapidly rising there also.

Here, a former British Prime Minister who dragged the country into an illegal and unsanctioned war—and who will be remembered, despite some positive domestic achievements, for nothing else, in history’s long view—has criticised the current Prime Minister for declining to drag the country immediately into an illegal and unsanctioned war. As things continue to deteriorate, though, he is being dragged rather further than we’d hoped.

‘And what does the word “city” mean?’ the Professor asks Marianne in Angela Carter’s post-apocalyptic novel:
   ‘She thought for a while.
   “Ruins?” she hazarded.’[3]

Well, yes. Apart from destroyed apartment blocks and a girls’ school, the bombs have not spared Tehran’s Golestan Palace, which dates back to the 14th century and is a world heritage site under the protection of UNESCO, which sent to all parties the coordinates of the palace at least ten days ago. The 17th century Chehel Sotoon Palace in Isfahan and other Iranian heritage sites have also been damaged. 

‘The tragic statement of the poem’, Guy Davenport wrote of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, ‘is that whereas centuries go into the perfection of a culture, an age of carelessness or ruinous war can destroy a culture in the batting of an eye.’[4]

Carelessness, ruinous war, yes – or barbarous kings.

Notes

[1] Rihaku (Li Po), ‘Lament of the Frontier Guard’, in Cathay, translated by Ezra Pound, ‘from the Notes of the Late Ernest Fenollosa, and the Decipherings of the Professors Mori and Ariga’: Collected Shorter Poems, Second Edition (London: Faber & Faber, 1968), 143.

[2] Charles Dickens, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836-37; edited by Mark Wormald, London: Penguin Books, 1999), 31, 679-680.

[3] Angela Carter, Heroes and Villains (London: Picador, 1972), 7.

[4] Guy Davenport, ‘Foreword’, Cities on Hills: A Study of I–XXX of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1983), vii.

Springing and Falling

The year turns to meteorological spring. Blue sky, crisp air, early blossom, some trees apparently having had advance warning of this.

‘A glimmer of light’, the Librarian observed of the news that the Green party’s Hannah Spencer had won the Gorton and Denton by-election convincingly, followed by predictable slurs from the bad losers and incontinent frothings from the right-wing tabloids. Certainly a glimmer, though seemingly not reaching the relevant offices of the Labour administration, where it would surely have made even more legible the message that the government has been heading in precisely the wrong direction.

Snuffing that candle, though, was news that the President of the United States had been played again, and that the inevitable chaos, destruction and slaughter of civilians was already well underway – again.

Earlier, the most recent stories were all of fallen or ruined princes, royal, self-styled and otherwise. We no longer execute royal personages who have fallen from favour, not since 30 January 1649 anyway. In this country, the last official execution of anyone was in 1964, when, at 08:00 on 13 August, two convicted murderers were hanged simultaneously, one at Liverpool’s Walton prison and the other at Strangeways prison in Manchester. Nearer in time to the demise of Charles I outside the Banqueting House, Whitehall, though, public hangings were both frequent and popular, Samuel Pepys and James Boswell among those attending. ‘There were often as many as 30,000 people; one hanging in Moorfields in 1767 attracted 80,000 spectators.’[1]

Princes in a bad way might prompt in some bookish people a memory of the only line they can confidently ascribe to the poet and travel writer Gérard de Nerval. His ‘El Desdichado’, one of the ‘Chimeras’, begins:

Je suis le ténébreux, – le veuf, – l’inconsolé,
Le prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie

Richard Sieburth’s translation has:

I am the man of gloom – the widower – the unconsoled,
the prince of Aquitaine, his tower in ruins[2]

That second line in French is the one made famous by T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. One of that poem’s celebrated notes offers for line 429 only the name of the poet and the title of the poem. But an earlier note (to line 46) states that Eliot is ‘not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from which I have obviously departed to suit my own convenience.’ He mentions The Hanged Man (one of the major arcana), The Phoenician Sailor (not a card in the traditional pack), The Merchant (a suit in the minor arcana), The Man with Three Staves (I’ll take a stab at the three of Wands). Oddly, he doesn’t mention The Tower (XVI: also one of the major arcana): the Prince’s is certainly in pretty bad shape and I gather (not being familiar myself with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack, as must be glaringly apparent) that the Tower (upright) is really not a card you want to come up against, connoting as it does chaos and destruction – even reversed, it’s not the ideal companion for an evening.

Princes and towers come unpleasantly together in a familiar, yet still unresolved, episode in English history, Richard of Shrewsbury and his brother, the young Edward V, who went in to the Tower of London but never emerged again. Two likely skeletons turned up during renovations in 1674. Richard III is often named as their murderer though it’s sometimes suggested that Henry VII has a case to answer.

A. E. Waite’s Pictorial Guide to the Tarot was published in 1910 (following the issue of the Rider-Waite Tarot deck, illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith) and reprinted in 1922, the year that The Waste Land also appeared. The illustration of the Tower shows it struck by lightning, a crown knocked off its top and two falling figures.

If not explicitly in the form of the Tarot card, Eliot’s poem has its towers too.

 The brisk swell
 Rippled both shores
 Southwest wind
 Carried down stream
 The peal of bells
 White towers

Also:

Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

A few lines on:

And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

The Waste Land sometimes appears unsettlingly prophetic, when we read back into it later follies, failures and fiascos. Not too prophetic this time around, let’s hope.

Notes

[1] Lucy Moore, The Thieves’ Opera: The Remarkable Lives and Deaths of Jonathan Wild, Thief-Taker, and Jack Sheppard, House-Breaker (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 220. A figure outstripped by a good many recent football crowds in both England and Scotland but the current population is nearly ten times what it was then.

[2] Gérard de Nerval, Selected Writings, translated with an introduction by Richard Sieburth (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 363.

Crocuses promising well and not waiting for rain


Sitting at the kitchen table, a cat within the circle of my arms, flanked by James Baldwin and Walter de la Mare, I was thinking about crocuses.

The poet Edmund Blunden, then serving in the 11th Royal Sussex, ‘heard an evening robin in a hawthorn, and in trampled gardens among the luggage of war, as Milton calls it, there was the fairy, affectionate immortality of the yellow rose and blue-grey crocus.’[1] And: ‘The garden is gay with crocuses’, Ford Madox Ford wrote to John Rodker in March 1920, ‘or shd it be crocoi?’ De la Mare himself was not wholly adverse to a crocus: ‘the crocus soon/ Will open grey and distracted/ On earth’s austerity’; ‘as near, that is, as any name can be to a thing—viz, crocus, or comfit, or shuttlecock, or mistletoe, or pantry’; ‘Miss Curtis would no more have dreamed of sharing this old ghost with, say, Miss Mavor, than a crocus would dream of blossoming at the foot of the North Pole.’[2]

Literary, literary. It was, in fact, while walking in the park, that the Librarian drew my attention to a small group of crocuses, harbingers of spring, a welcome light in the encroaching gloom of the year so far, not least because of seemingly inexhaustible rain. We had rain on twenty-six days out of thirty-one in January. Several places outstripped that, there were floods on the Somerset Levels and elsewhere. But in any case—literary again!—the mention of crocuses always brings to mind Sherlock Holmes, specifically the alarming appearance of the gigantic and ferocious Dr Roylott, who has ‘dashed open’ the door of the sitting-room at 221b Baker Street:

(Illustration by Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, February 1892)

‘“Which of you is Holmes?” asked this apparition.
“My name, sir; but you have the advantage of me,” said my companion quietly.
“I am Dr. Grimesby Roylott, of Stoke Moran.”
“Indeed, Doctor,” said Holmes blandly. “Pray take a seat.”
“I will do nothing of the kind. My stepdaughter has been here. I have traced her. What has she been saying to you?”
“It is a little cold for the time of the year,” said Holmes.
“What has she been saying to you?” screamed the old man furiously.
“But I have heard that the crocuses promise well,” continued my companion imperturbably.’[3]

The promise of crocuses—or should it be crocoi? Promises, promises. Spring, yes, and all that it connotes. Or, perhaps, all that it used to connote.

‘The past has consequences in the present regardless of whether we know what happened in it; learning the history makes those consequences intelligible.’[4]

The month recently ended will soon be a finite, measurable chunk of that past, a blood smear on some historian’s page. Harold Wilson may or may not have said that a week is a long time in politics; Joseph Chamberlain, some eighty years earlier, is fairly reliably recorded as asserting that there’s no use in looking beyond the next fortnight.

Glancing around at a volatile and feverish world I was about to remark in an email to a friend that—hardly surprisingly—I seemed to be suffering from ‘the English disease’. I meant melancholia but remembered just in time that understanding of the term has varied over time, taking in rickets, a sluggish economy caused by industrial unrest, bronchitis, football hooliganism and more: ‘The English disease, a love of Nature, was inborn in her’, Virginia Woolf wrote of her heroine/ hero Orlando.[5]

(Orlando, Hogarth Press, 1928)

Among the many pleasures of reading published diaries are the references to—or, sometimes, the lack of them, or delayed enlargement on them—what are later viewed as hugely significant events. I was recently reading Helen Garner’s impressive and enjoyable How To End a Story: Collected Diaries, 1978-1998 and seeing ‘The army has entered Tiananmen Square and machine-gunned students’ or ‘People are sitting on top of the Berlin Wall. They’re chipping chunks out of it with chisels, for souvenirs’. I wonder if some of what’s occurring now will be reducible in time to one or three or five lines. In what form will the United States survive? Will liberal or left of centre politicians learn how to do politics in this online, social media age so resistant to accurate information and inconvenient facts? Will Europe get its act—economics, security—together? I note various leaders’ recent responses as they finally accept that the current version of the United States is neither friend nor ally, and recall that appeasement didn’t work too well in the 1930s and is unlikely to do so now.

‘I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain’, James Baldwin wrote in ‘Notes of a Native Son’, first published as ‘Me and My House’ in November 1955.[6] Adam Shatz’s recent essay about the current situation in the United States, first delivered as a lecture, begins with Baldwin, who is also referenced in the piece’s title, ‘Another Country’ (Baldwin’s third novel). Shatz remarks that, though both parties have been ‘complicit in the creation of the imperial presidency and a neoliberal economic order’, ‘anyone who cares about the stability of the republic might have reason to regret the disintegration of moderate Republicanism, one of the defining structural features of American political life.’[7] We have suffered a version of that in this country too, with the collapse and near-disappearance of moderate Conservatism, those figures to whom we were totally opposed twenty or more years ago appearing now almost as beacons of light, intelligence and sweet reason, compared to the current crew. If I’d seriously believed then that the political landscape would be what it is, that certain individuals would be regarded as acceptable public servants, even as plausible contenders for government office, I would have sought medical help as a matter of urgency. Mais passons. There is always the rain. . .

‘If there’s much more of this’, I say to the Librarian as we trudge wetly home, ‘we might be living in a J. G. Ballard novel.’ We pass the City Farm, where their prize hens are sheltering, huddled together, beneath their chicken coop. It occurs to me that a number of Ballard novels might qualify though I was referring specifically to The Drowned World, which is, of course, concerned with rather more than water: ‘Sometimes he wondered what zone of transit he himself was entering, sure that his own withdrawal was symptomatic not of a dormant schizophrenia, but of a careful preparation for a radically new environment, with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would merely be an encumbrance.’[8]

There has been very little brightness. Too often the sliver of sunlight glimpsed earlier in a day is—fittingly, in the current political climate—neither sincere, truthful, friendly or sustained. I’ve had the odd drenching myself but—full-length waterproof coat! umbrella! Englishman!—with no apparent ill-effects. Others have not always been so lucky. Perhaps ‘the most dramatic incident’ of Lewis Carroll’s life, Penelope Fitzgerald remarked, was the river expedition to Nuneham when the whole party, ‘including his aunt, two of his sisters, and Alice herself, got wet through and had to be taken to a friend’s house to dry off. In 1898, almost as an afterthought, Dodgson died of a cold and cough.’[9]

(Edith, Lorina and Alice Liddell)

Needless to say, awash as the country is, the disastrous privatisation of this vital resource, with its attendant greed and incompetence, has resulted in towns and villages running out of water, waiting days for their supplies to be reconnected or warned that they may have to be abandoned in the fairly near future. There is, apparently, a great deal more trouble to come: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/22/what-happens-england-water-run-out-drought-tunbridge-wells

The drought last summer was not as bad as it might have been because preceded by a wet autumn and winter, reservoirs well-filled and groundwater in a healthy state – certainly not as bad as that recalled by the novelist Violet Hunt. ‘We were in for a hot July—it was the year 1911 when heat and drought drove men mad, caused the cattle that supported them to be lean and perish, filled the Courts with murder and rapine, inflamed Strike committees, and incensed three nations to the verge of war for want of a little rain that might have staunched their hissing hatreds.’[10]

‘For want of a little rain.’ Just so.

Notes

[1] Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War (1928; revised edition, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982), 117.

[2] Respectively, ‘The Children of Stare’, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 21; ‘Pigtails Ltd’, Walter de la Mare, Collected Stories for Children, edited by Giles de la Mare (London: Giles de la Mare Publishers Limited, 2006), 7; ‘The Picnic’, Short Stories, 1927-1956, edited by Giles de la Mare (London: Giles de la Mare Publishers Limited, 2001), 180.

[3] Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’, in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, 2 volumes, edited with notes by Leslie S. Klinger (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company 2005), I, 241-242..

[4] Sarah Churchwell, The Wrath to Come: Gone With the Wind and the Lies America Tells (London: Head of Zeus, 2022), 11.

[5] Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 137.

[6] James Baldwin, ‘Notes of a Native Son’, in Collected Essays, edited by Toni Morrison (New York: Library of America, 1998), 7.

[7] Adam Shatz, ‘Another Country’, London Review of Books 48, 2 (5 February 2026), 3-10.

[8] J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World (London: Fourth Estate, 2012), 14.

[9] Penelope Fitzgerald, ‘In the Golden Afternoon’: A House of Air: Selected Writings, edited by Terence Dooley with Mandy Kirkby and Chris Carduff (London: Harper Perennial, 2005), 81.

[10] Violet Hunt, The Flurried Years (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1926), 177-178.

Borders and bounders

(Frederick William Newton Whitehead, A Frosty Morning: Dudley Museums Service)

‘But it must be remembered, that life consists not of a series of illustrious actions, or elegant enjoyments; the greater part of our time passes in compliance with necessities, in the performance of daily duties, in the removal of small inconveniences, in the procurement of petty pleasures; and we are well or ill at ease, as the main stream of life glides on smoothly, or is ruffled by small obstacles and frequent interruption. The true state of every nation is the state of common life.’[1]


I have a new hat, woollen, of the kind so frequently worn by sensible people in cold weather. My hat history is not an inspiring one but in this I look no more ridiculous than other wearers. Perhaps just a little more. Were it a magic hat, it might explore the current rumours of an illegal American invasion of a sovereign, oil-rich country while also analysing the strange sensation of having been here before. But of course there were differences and I’m reminded of the observation by C. L. R. James, ‘To the extent that a historical parallel is suggestive, to that very degree it is dangerous.’

James was writing of interconnections, not only with reference to cricket and colonialism but also cricket and art: ‘We may some day be able to answer Tolstoy’s exasperated and exasperating question: What is art? – but only when we learn to integrate our vision of Walcott on the back foot through the covers with the outstretched arm of the Olympic Apollo.’[2]

(Biography of Sir Clyde Walcott via New Beacon Books)

More broadly still, that two-way flow of influence and attraction that many nationalists and imperialists are unwilling or unable to comprehend. Beyond all manner of boundaries. Ian Baucom, writing of James, referred to his exploration of the false dichotomy of ‘here’ and ‘there’: the assertions of taking ‘Englishness’ abroad tending to forget or elide the ‘un-Englishness’ constantly flowing back into England. England’s history, after all, was and is, inextricably, the history of those others outside England too, the beyond also the within.[3]

I was glad to learn that ‘bounder’, a cad, an ill-bred person, though now long ‘archaic’, once also meant a limit, landmark or boundary. Even amidst the current icy weather, all along the lower half of our road, dead leaves are heaped against the kerbs, the recycling bins and front doorsteps, the park being just a stone’s throw away and a line of London plane trees just beyond its boundary wall.

This border at least is easily crossed, if not always elegantly, and is clearly visible to the naked eye. On Friday 18 November 1870, the Reverend Francis Kilvert wrote in his diary of sitting in Mrs Powell’s cottage in Killey, ‘feeling for the boundary notch in the chimney’, this being somewhere along the wavy line separating England from Wales on the map. A child had been born there that they had been careful to have born in England, ‘in the English corner of the cottage’, the midwife having Betsey deliver the child standing.[4]

The Finnish word ‘susiraja’ – literally wolf border, the boundary between the capital region and the rest of the country, implying perhaps that everything outside is wilderness – gave Sarah Hall the title of her fine 2015 novel.[5] The poet and translator Anne Carson also touches on boundaries – and wolves: ‘The wolf is a conventional symbol of marginality in Greek poetry. The wolf is an outlaw. He lives beyond the boundary of usefully cultivated and inhabited space marked off as the polis, in that blank no man’s land called to apeiron (“the unbounded”). Women, in the ancient view, share this territory spiritually and metaphorically in virtue of a “natural” female affinity for all that is raw, formless and in need of the civilizing hand of man.’[6]


That civilizing hand seems to have been sawing off its own limbs of late but we should focus on the positives. Hardly a promising start to the new year but there’s plenty of it left. Remembering Thomas Carlyle’s 1829 essay ‘Signs of the Times’, it occurs to me that its most familiar line (for those to whom any line of it is familiar) is probably ‘Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand.’ But my eye was caught by a couple of other sentences: ‘There is no end to machinery. Even the horse is stripped of his harness, and finds a fleet fire-horse invoked in his stead.’

17 February (in the lunar calendar) marks the beginning of the Chinese New Year; and 2026 is, I gather, the year of the Horse, specifically the Fire Horse. All the commentaries—astrological and others—on this configuration (yang and yang) that occurs every sixty years seem to hint at both opportunity and danger, energy, heat, a greater willingness to take risks, one of them the risk of burn-out. The word ‘expansion’ cropped up once or twice, hardly reassuring in the present global context. Still, best wishes to all for this year, and, as more than one person said in my hearing over Christmas, ‘May the gods be kind.’

Notes

[1] Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland, edited by Ian McGowan (1775; Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 1996), 18-19.

[2] C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary (1963; London: Vintage, 2019), 205, 279.

[3] Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), ‘Introduction : Locating English Identity’, 38-39.

[4] Francis Kilvert, Kilvert’s Diary, edited by William Plomer, Three volumes (London: Jonathan Cape, 1938, reissued 1969), Volume 1, 262.

[5] Sarah Hall, The Wolf Border (London: Faber 2015).

[6] Anne Carson, ‘The Gender of Sound’, in Glass, Irony & God, introduction by Guy Davenport (New York: New Directions, 1995), 124.

Birth days (and other kinds)

‘Birth, and copulation, and death.
That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks:
Birth, and copulation, and death.’
            (Fragment of an Agon)[1]

Is T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney a little too concise here? You may be thinking, in some moods yes, in some moods no. You may even be thinking it a little too expansive. But most people, I suspect, might want to add a bit.

Take today, for instance, 17 December. The celebrated translator of Russian literature, Constance Garnett, died at 03:00 on this day in 1946. Over 70 English versions, of Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Goncharov, Tolstoy. Dorothy Sayers, author of superb detective stories and translator of Dante, died in 1957, also on this day.

The middle term: throw in a wedding (and assume a positive). On 17 December 1914, the painter Paul Nash and Margaret Odeh—‘Bunty’—were married in St Martin-in-the-Fields by ‘the young pacifist vicar the Reverend Dick Sheppard.’[2] Cue the opening stanza of W. H. Auden’s Letter to Lord Byron:

Excuse, my lord, the liberty I take
   In thus addressing you. I know that you
Will pay the price of authorship and make
   The allowances an author has to do.
   A poet’s fan-mail will be nothing new.
And then a lord—Good Lord, you must be peppered,
Like Gary Cooper, Coughlin, or Dick Sheppard.[3]

Gary Cooper, at least, will still be a familiar name; the other two, these days, rather less so, though not to historians of the 1920s and 1930s: Sheppard, the priest whose sermons, broadcast by the BBC, made him a national figure, and who later founded the Peace Pledge Union; Charles Coughlin, the Catholic priest who was also a widely-known broadcaster, though his anti-Semitic and pro-Fascist sympathies made his output rather different.

(Dick Sheppard broadcasting from St Martin-in-the-Fields: BBC)

On 17 December 1941, Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote to her friend Paul Nordoff: ‘Luckily, I have a tough memory for what I like, and I have most of it tucked away somewhere behind my ears.’[4] Just ten days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, then, a reminder if one were needed that on another 17 December—1903—Wilbur Wright’s fourth and last flight carried him  852 feet in 59 seconds.

The implications of that pioneering effort emerged with gradually increasing force and clarity a decade or so later. In 1915, Ezra Pound wrote to his parents (17 December): ‘Lewis has enlisted. That about takes the lot.’ He added: ‘I suppose we will go to France after the war. if it ever ends.’[5] Bombardier Wyndham Lewis would later recall that: ‘The war was a sleep, deep and animal, in which I was visited by images of an order very new to me. Upon waking I found an altered world: and I had changed, too, very much.’[6]

A few years on (17 December 1958) and the great Australian novelist Patrick White was writing to his friend and publisher Ben Huebsch—the rock on which White’s career was built, David Marr remarks—about his novel, Riders in the Chariot. ‘I shall want somebody here to check the Jewish parts after a second writing. I feel I may have given myself away a good deal, although passages I have been able to check for myself, seem to have come through either by instinct or good luck, so perhaps I shall survive. After all, I did survive the deserts of Voss.’ And in another letter to Huebsch, five months later, he returned to this: ‘What I want to emphasise through my four “Riders” – an orthodox refugee intellectual Jew, a mad Erdgeist [Earth spirit] of an Australian spinster, an evangelical laundress, and a half-caste aboriginal painter – is that all faiths, whether religious, humanistic, instinctive, or the creative artist’s act of praise, are in fact one.’[7] (I reread all Patrick White’s books seven years ago and I’m damned if I don’t feel almost ready to do it again. . .)

(Ford via New York Review of Books)

But then – why not celebrate? 17 December birthdays, yes: Humphry Davy, John Greenleaf Whittier, Erskine Caldwell, Paul Cadmus, Penelope Fitzgerald, Jacqueline Wilson, John Kennedy Toole – and the primary focus, or beginning spark, of all this anniversary rambling, Ford Madox Ford, 152 today.

His birthdays weren’t always joyous: at a party in 1901, he nearly choked on a chicken bone ‘and was prostrate for some days’.[8] In 1916, he was in a Red Cross Hospital in Rouen, writing to Joseph Conrad a couple of days later: ‘As for me—c’est fini de moi, I believe, at least as far as fighting is concerned—my lungs are all charred up & gone—they appeared to be quite healed, but exposure day after day has ended in the usual stretchers and ambulance trains’. In 1920, he spent at least a small portion of his birthday writing to Thomas Hardy, asking him to sign a manifesto protesting against British government policy in Ireland. It was published on 1 January 1921 in the Manchester Guardian and other papers. Fifty writers, artists and academics signed it but Thomas Hardy was not among them.

Past lives, past struggles, victories, defeats. Surely there is comfort to be found there, that they were faced with things we recognise only too well—not only the individual battles but the more general ones, against Fascism, vicious racism, authoritarianism, the hijacking of news, of the sources of information, the assaults on free speech, on civil liberties, on democratic rights—and came through. And we?

Optimism, pessimism. One up, one down; Monday, Tuesday; left hand; right hand. I liked Guy Davenport on the judicious estimate of his own make-up, reporting to Hugh Kenner that his friend Steve Diamant’s photographs included one that served as the author photograph on the dust jacket of Tatlin!, Davenport’s first collection of stories, or assemblages: ‘Guy beaming in the Dionysian priest’s chair, the Theatre, Athens. I had no notion such a radiant smile was in me. It cured a third of my paranoia and an eighth of my Calvinist pessimism to see it.’[9]

A whole eighth. Some photograph, some smile.

Notes

[1] T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), 122.

[2] Ronald Blythe, First Friends: Paul and Bunty, John and Christine – and Carrington (London: Viking, 1999), 77; David Boyd Haycock, A Crisis of Brilliance (London: Old Street Publishing, 2009), 238-9.

[3] W. H. Auden, The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939, edited by Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1977), 169.

[4] Sylvia Townsend Warner, Letters, edited by William Maxwell (London: Chatto & Windus, 1982), 76.

[5] Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929, edited by Mary de Rachewiltz, David Moody and Joanna Moody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 358.

[6] Wyndham Lewis, Rude Assignment: A narrative of my career up-to-date (London: Hutchinson, 1950), 129.

[7] Patrick White, Letters, edited by David Marr (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994), 151, 153. Marr’s remark about Huebsch’s importance is in ‘The Cast of Correspondents’, 638.

[8] Arthur Mizener, The Saddest Story: A Biography of Ford Madox Ford (London: The Bodley Head, 1972), 73.

[9] Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner, edited by Edward M. Burns, two volumes (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2018), I, 630.

Pikes, balloons and a touch of mastiff

(Henry Martin, ‘A December Morning in Mount’s Bay’: Penlee House Gallery and Museum)

December. Originally, as the name hints, the tenth month of the year. Blackburn and Holford-Strevens quote Richard Saunders’ 1697 Apollo Anglicanus, The English Apollo: ‘In December Melancholy and Phlegm much increase, which are heavy, dull, and cold, and therefore it behoves all that will consider their healths, to keep their heads and bodies very well from cold, and to eat such things as be of a hot quality.’[1] Not a lot to argue with there. Today at least is cold, clear and dry, so proper winter weather.

‘North Point has just accepted The Jules Verne Steam Balloon, for next fall’, Guy Davenport wrote to the poet and New Directions publisher James Laughlin on 1 December 1986. ‘Nine stories, dedicated to Humph’s memory, nine being a cat number.’[2] And the book does indeed carry a dedication to Davenport’s recently deceased cat, ‘For my friend Humphry 1971-1986’.

Curiously, on the same date as Davenport’s letter, the first ever ascent in a hydrogen balloon was recorded. This was ten days after the first manned Montgolfier balloon flight, launched from the hill of La Muette on 21 November 1783. It was 70 feet high, and powered by a six-foot open brazier, burning straw. The intrepid voyagers were Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes, a major in the Garde Royale. The later ascent was made by Dr Alexander Charles, who had, in effect, invented ‘nearly all the features of the modern gas balloon in a single brilliant design.’ Launched from Tuileries Gardens on 1 December 1783, with Charles’ scientific assistant M. Robert, it attracted ‘what has been estimated as the biggest crown in pre-Revolutionary Paris, upwards of 400,000 people, about half the total population of the city.’[3]

Two hours later, the balloonists landed some 27 miles away and Charles asked Robert to step out of the basket. Then he reached 10,000 feet in ten minutes, observing his instruments and making notes until his hand became too cold to grasp the pen. ‘I was the first man ever to see the sun set twice in the same day. The cold was intense and dry, but supportable. I had acute pain in my right ear and jaw. But I examined all my sensations calmly. I could hear myself living, so to speak.’ Then he gently released the gas-valve and, within 35 minutes, was back on the ground, three miles from the first landing-point: an almost vertical ascent. It was the first solo flight in history. He wrote that: ‘Never has a man felt so solitary, so sublime,—and so utterly terrified.’ Charles never flew again.[4]

From that to. . . this. I was reminded of a passage in Thomas Medwin’s record of talking with Lord Byron at Pisa in 1822: ‘I suppose we shall soon travel by air-vessels; make air instead of sea voyages; and at length find our way to the moon . . . Where shall we set bounds to the power of steam? Who shall say “Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther?” We are at present in the infancy of science.’[5]

In fact, his daughter Ada was then an infant scientist, just six years old: later  Countess Lovelace, she was a mathematician and pioneer computer scientist, associated particularly with Charles Babbage and his Analytical Engine. Ada would, like her father, die in her 37th year—and was buried beside him.

(Hogarth, ‘A Rake’s Progress: 1–The Rake Taking Possession of the Estate’: Sir John Soane’s Museum)

I’ve lately been reading Jenny Uglow’s wonderful Hogarth biography and in his 37th year, Hogarth began 1734 with prints of The Fair (later called Southwark Fair) ready for sale though those of The Rake’s Progress had been delayed. One detail that—inevitably—caught my eye was the reference to the story told by John Nichols, in his Biographical Anecdotes of William Hogarth.[6] He wrote there that Hogarth ‘boasted that he could draw a Serjeant with his pike, going into an alehouse, and his Dog following him, with only three strokes;—which he executed thus:

A. The perspective line of the door.
B. The end of the Serjeant’s pike, who is gone in.
C. The end of the Dog’s tail, who is following him.
There are similar whims of the Caracci.’[7]

In 1914, Ford Madox Ford published ‘On Impressionism’, an essay in two parts, in Harold Monro’s Poetry and Drama (June and December issues). ‘Let us approach this matter historically’, Ford begins the second section of his first article, ‘—as far as I know anything about the history of Impressionism, though I must warn you that I am a shockingly ill-read man. Here, then, are some examples: do you know, for instance, Hogarth’s drawing of the watchman with the pike over his shoulder and the dog at his heels going in at a door, the whole being executed in four lines? Here it is:

Now, that is the high-watermark of Impressionism; since, if you look at those lines for long enough, you will begin to see the watchman with his slouch hat, the handle of the pike coming well down into the cobble-stones, the knee-breeches, the leathern garters strapped round his stocking, and the surly expression of the dog, which is bull-hound with a touch of mastiff in it.’

Apart from the reversing of the image, the three strokes have become four. ‘The Impressionist must always exaggerate.’[8] Though a good many of the pikes I’ve seen pictured have one or more short curved blades at the top. . .

(Godfrey Kneller, Anthony Payne (c.1612-1691), the Cornish Giant: Cornish Museum and Art Gallery)

Hogarth has always had his admirers, and often been viewed chiefly as a satirist, like Swift or Pope, an acerbic commentator on the age’s hypocrisy, excesses and corruption. One of those admirers is the extraordinary painter, writer and central figure of Vorticism—‘Vorticism, in fact, was what I, personally, did, and said, at a certain period’—Wyndham Lewis and, interestingly, the single work of Hogarth’s he refers to several times is The Shrimp Girl, a superbly captured street-seller, ‘a moment caught on the wing’, Hogarth succeeding in conveying ‘all the movement in the girl’s body as he loaded his brush with pinks, vermilions and green—the bright colours of the rococo palette—and made fast curving strokes to outline the fall of her shoulders and breasts’.

(William Hogarth, Shrimp Girl: National Gallery)

After his death, Hogarth’s widow Jane ‘would tell visitors who saw The Market Wench, as it was known, “They say he could not paint flesh. There’s flesh and blood for you; – them!”’[9] In a characteristically combative statement late in life, Lewis cited that picture again: ‘Hogarth’s Shrimp Girl shows what splendid painting can be done in England. But since that eighteenth-century explosion there have been only the Pre-Raphaelites, and so it must be admitted that painting is not our forte.’

Lewis’s blindness had ended his five years as art critic of The Listener—see his remarkable final piece there, ‘The Sea-Mists of the Winter’—and there is a poignant closing paragraph to this essay too:

‘The question is not how a thing is done, but the thing that is done. However, unless the thing is beautifully painted, it never comes to life. I have never seen the original of the Shrimp-Girl, but several colour plates of it. I am blind, but, if I could see, I would do a large design of something like a Jabberwock outraging an eagle.’[10]

Notes

[1] Bonnie Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Strevens, The Oxford Companion to the Year (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 481.

[2] W. C. Bamberger, editor, Guy Davenport and James Laughlin: Selected Letters (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2007), 36.

[3] Julian Barnes, Levels of Life (London: Cape, 2013), 12; Richard Holmes. The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science  (London: Harper Collins, 2008), 129-131; L. T. C. Rolt, The Aeronauts (London: Longman, 1966), 50.

[4] Holmes, The Age of Wonder, 132.

[5] Thomas Medwin, Conversations with Byron, (1824), quoted by Fiona MacCarthy, Byron: Life and Legend (London: John Murray, 2002), 70.

[6] Hogarth: A Life and a World (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 55.

[7] See Biographical Anecdotes of William Hogarth, Third edition (London: Printed by and Ford John Nichols in Red-Lion-Passage, Fleet-Street, 1785), 63.

[8] Ford Madox Ford, ‘On Impressionism I’, Poetry and Drama (June 1914), 169-170.

[9] Uglow, Hogarth, 408, 409.

[10] Wyndham Lewis, ‘The Vorticists’, Vogue (September 1956), in Wyndham Lewis On Art: Collected Writings 1913-1956, edited by Walter Michel and C. J. Fox (London: Thames & Hudson, 1969), 457, 458; the earlier quotation is from the introduction to the catalogue of the 1956 retrospective exhibition, Tate Gallery, July-August 1956 in this same volume, 451. For other references to this picture, see 327, 329, 404.