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Right on schedule, August arrives, the month in which ‘Choler and Melancholy much increase, from whence proceeds long lasting Fevers and Agues not easily cured. Avoid immoderate exercise this month’, dear me, ‘especially the recreations of Venus.’[1]
Literary folk are celebrating two hundred years of Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, or, The Whale, who wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne in November 1851, ‘A sense of unspeakable security is in me at this moment on account of your having understood the book. I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.’[2]
Against a couple of centuries, I look back fondly just a few weeks, to the period I might term BB—before backache—but for the confusion it might cause to those of a certain age and predilection, for whom the initials will always conjure Brigitte Bardot; or certain literary historians who will bring to mind only the poet Basil Bunting. And there was also the author of The Little Grey Men: A story for the young in heart, Carnegie winner in 1942, ‘the greatest book about gnomes in the English language’, as the website dedicated to him has it:
https://www.bbsociety.co.uk/bb-the-author.php
This was the author and illustrator Denys Watkins-Pitchford, his book published under the pseudonym ‘BB’, though he illustrated it under his real name. The Little Grey Men clearly owed a good deal to Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, though it ‘makes a better use of the god Pan’ than Grahame did, Victor Watson writes in The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English, while adding that the author’s ‘messages about the environment were mixed, rooted in a conservative hunting-and-fishing ethos that many contemporary young environmentally-aware readers would find unacceptable.’[3]
Still, definitely now in recovery mode, on a dry, slightly cooler and breezier day, I take time off from communing with the literary dead to walk and, perhaps, commune with the dead in another setting: Arnos Vale, the local Victorian Garden cemetery covering some 45 acres. I might even commune with the living – though careful not to overdo it.
En route to the cemetery, I cut through Perrett’s Park, generously populated by women with small children and a wide selection of dog walkers, one of whom exchanges greetings with me on the straight path above the slopes and terraces running down to the natural amphitheatre with the playground in the far corner. On the near slope, a man is lying on his back; his companion leans above him, her slow fingers stroking his face with extravagant tenderness.
At Arnos Vale, there are so many paths to choose from that, should another walker be glimpsed, fifty yards off, ducking under outspread branches, there are always reliable means of avoidance close at hand. In fact, the flickering instability of the sunlight breaking often through dense foliage, the briefly seen figures who duck and veer as you yourself do, the long avenues colliding with sudden turns and side-lines, conjure up sequences in a film version of Alice in Wonderland—probably Jonathan Miller’s.
Returning via the park, I find even more children, and even more dogs, the couple on the near slope now rearranged, she sitting in front with head leant back, he with his arms wrapped around her. The last of the cloud burned off, the view across the city stands up and out like a tourist brochure.
‘For there is no faith, and no stoicism, and no philosophy, that a mortal man can possibly evoke, which will stand the final test of a real impassioned onset of Life and Passion upon him’, Melville wrote. ‘Then all the fair philosophic or Faith-phantoms that he raised from the mist, slide away and disappear as ghosts at cock-crow. For Faith and philosophy are air, but events are brass. Amidst his gray philosophizing, Life breaks upon a man like a morning.’[4]
References
[1] Richard Saunders, Apollo Anglicanus, The English Apollo, quoted by Bonnie Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Strevens, The Oxford Companion to the Year (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 315.
[2] The Portable Melville, edited by Jay Leyda (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), 453.
[3] Victor Watson, editor, The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 432.
[4] Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852; New York: Signet 1964), 327.
Reconstructionary Tales 