reconstructionarytales

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.

Lessoning, lessening, listening

(William H. Clarkson, Floods in the Arun Valley, Brighton & Hove Museums)

Two years after the end of the Second World War, Aldous Huxley wrote: ‘The most important lesson of history, it has been said, is that nobody ever learns history’s lessons.’[1] A decade on, in Iris Murdoch’s fourth novel, she wrote of one of her young characters, ‘Toby had received, though not yet digested, one of the earliest lessons of adult life: that one is never secure. At any moment, one can be removed from a state of guileless serenity and plunged into its opposite, without any intermediate condition, so high about us do the waters rise of our own and other people’s imperfection.’[2]

Those rising waters would not have struck quite the note they would today, when the human species seems uncertain of whether to burn the planet or to drown it. (Recently—18 November—was the anniversary of the day on which, in 1929, Jonathan Cape published 5000 copies of a book by Robert Graves, with the reassuring title of Good-bye to All That.)

Lessons, though. Trying to think of life lessons I’d learned over the years, I could only initially come up with two: first, if at all possible, do the washing up before going to bed; and second, take the time to empty your bladder completely (if you’ve had one urinary infection in your life, you sure as hell don’t want another one). There must be more, surely. But then, looking around at some of my fellow-creatures just now, I think even two is probably pretty good going. Thus prompted, I remember a third: actually knowing or taking the trouble to find out who is to blame. A great many people in this country and elsewhere are angry, many of them with good reason, but astonishingly often that anger is effortlessly exploited by grifters, charlatans, gangsters, snake oil salesmen and rabblerousers with their own agendas, and the anger diverted to scapegoats rather than focused on the actual culprits.

(Guercino, Saint Cecilia: ã Dulwich Picture Gallery)

I see that today is the feast day of St Cecilia, patron saint of musicians, of whom I’ve written before—https://reconstructionarytales.blog/2019/11/22/camelot-and-st-cecilia/—John Dryden’s ‘Song for St Cecilia’s Day 1687’ and its connections with Ford Madox Ford’s work—a day on which so many anniversaries jostle for position: the assassination of President Kennedy, and the deaths, on precisely the same day, of Aldous Huxley, C. S. Lewis and, three decades later, Anthony Burgess (who was born in the same year as Kennedy). More cheerfully, it’s the birthday of Benjamin Britten, George Eliot and André Gide.

I used to let such dates be prompts quite often when I was writing this blog frequently if not regularly, both birthdays and deathdays, letters or diary entries. I liked too the comforting examples of writers and artists breezing (or bruising or boozing or cruising) into their eighties. Today, of the seven named figures, only Gide comes up to snuff (so to speak) in that respect.

Infrequent, irregular—but still extant, looking and listening.

And yes, there are rumours—even recent claims—of ‘peace’. In The Agricola, Tacitus sets down, or even, as has been suggested, devises—a speech (‘the substance of what he is reported to have said’) by one of the Britons, a military leader named Calgacus, ‘a man of outstanding valour and nobility’, to the crowds of warriors ‘clamouring for battle’. Part of the way through come the phrases familiar to many people, some of whom are probably hazy about the context: ‘auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant’, ‘To robbery, butchery, and rapine, they give the lying name of “government”; they create a desolation and call it peace.’[3] There are probably as many suggestions about the translation of ‘solitudinem’ as there are about the first word (‘maman’) of Albert Camus’ L’Étranger—usually rendered as ‘desert’ but ‘desolation’ seems even more actively desolate than that. The poet and artist David Jones, wrote of ‘all the desolation peculiar to things that functioned in the immediate past but which are now no longer serviceable, either by neglect or by some movement of events.’[4]

(David Jones via Apollo)

It is, to be sure, immensely tiring to find that the constant contemporary echoes and resonances of past events or states of mind or actions seem always to be of a maleficent or destructive or stupid kind rather than constructive, benevolent or intelligent. But we can hardly pretend to be surprised. I try to find a positive in the Labour government’s relentless efforts to prevent my ever voting for them again in a general election. I think the latest vicious policy announcements with regard to the immigration ‘crisis’ may have ensured that.

Otherwise, when not engaged with the reliable humanitas of Ford Madox Ford, I seem to be edging further from the arena and back in time, currently with the young William Hogarth in Smithfield. . .

Notes

[1] Aldous Huxley, Science, Liberty and Peace (1947), 32.

[2] Iris Murdoch, The Bell (1958; London: Vintage, 2004), 163.

[3] Tacitus, The Agricola and The Germania, H. Mattingly’s translation revised by S. A. Handford (London: Penguin Books, 1970), 81.

[4] David Jones, In Parenthesis (1937; Faber 1963), 21.

‘The Weeping and the Laughter’

Almost August. Record–breaking temperatures in South Korea and Japan but a dull, grey morning here today. Even the saxophonist who practises in the small wood in the park may postpone his session for a while.

Emerging from Paul Willetts’ biography of Julian Maclaren-Ross, I was a little dizzy from the extraordinary sequences of work done, or proposed, or rewritten, of contracts honoured or let slip, of rooms and suites and flats rented and left in a series of moonlight flits or evictions, of creditors and lawsuits, landladies, hoteliers, retailers (a pram for his son Alex) and the post office (for telephone bills), of separations from, and reconciliations with, wives and girlfriends.[1] It’s difficult not to have a sense of being slightly bruised by contact with the innumerable knocks that the writer underwent. He was incurably extravagant and wasteful with money, nor did the alcoholism, heavy smoking, bad diet, amphetamine use and lack of exercise help much, and the fatal heart attack at the age of fifty-two is not wholly unexpected.

The two undeniable positives, though, are the biography itself, a prodigious feat of research and writing; and Maclaren-Ross’s own staggering fecundity. The novels, short stories, sketches, radio dramas, adaptations, autobiographies, screenplays, parodies, memoirs, reviews and essays emerge at an astonishing rate. Writing often through the night, he seems to turn out entire radio drama series in days, reviews and sketches in hours, year after year through the 1940s, 1950s and into the early 1960s, always in financial distress and increasingly aware that the impact made by some of his early work had not been maintained and had ebbed away. It’s remarkable, given the rate of production and the conditions in which most of it was written, that so much of it is so good. Some of the stories, the novel, Of Love and Hunger, the memoirs, many of the superb parodies and critical writings (on cinema as well as literature) in Bitten By the Tarantula, are assured, often very funny, and hugely impressive.

Endless monologues on a barstool in Fitzrovia. The teddy-bear coat, the sharp suit, the cigarette-holder, the silver-topped malacca cane, the snuff box, the eternal dark glasses: ‘From an early age’, Paul Willetts writes, ‘Julian put as much effort into propagating his personal myth as perfecting his prose style’ (306), going on to mention the many characters in poems and novels that are based on him, as well as the memoirs in which he features. Pubs and clubs, magazines and anthologies, are threaded through the story as much as boxers and bullfighters are in Hemingway’s, and Maclaren-Ross encountered an extraordinary range of writers, editors, publishers, painters and BBC producers. One of these, who became increasingly important in his desperate pursuit of commissions and payments, was Reginald Donald ‘Reggie’ Smith (born on this day, 31 July, 1914), whose name rang a bell because he’d cropped up in a couple of other stories. Married to the novelist Olivia Manning, he’s familiar to readers of her Balkan Trilogy as the model for her central character Guy Pringle (to viewers of the superb adaptation, it is, of course, Kenneth Branagh). Smith crops up on more than thirty pages of Willetts’ biography because he was hugely supportive of Maclaren-Ross for some years. He was a friend of the novelist and critic Walter Allen and of Louis MacNeice, and had been to King Edward Grammar School in Aston, Birmingham, with poet Henry Reed and George D. Painter, future biographer of Marcel Proust. When he married Olivia Manning in August 1939 at Marylebone Registrar’s Office, their witnesses included Stevie Smith and Walter Allen. Their best man had been written into the certificate as ‘Louise MacNeice’—both bride and groom noticed but said nothing—and Olivia seems to have taken the opportunity to shave a few years off her age, her birthdate recorded there as 1911 (in fact it was 1908).[2]

I may briefly take refuge now in something calmer, less harassed—perhaps a Simenon. Not that the world of Inspector Jules Maigret is entirely detached from that of Julian Maclaren-Ross, one of whose many publications was a translation, published by Penguin Books in association with Hamish Hamilton in 1959: Maigret and the Burglar’s Wife. . .

Notes

[1] Paul Willetts, Fear & Loathing in Fitzrovia: The Bizarre Life of Writer, Actor, Soho Raconteur Julian Maclaren-Ross, revised edition (London: Dewi Lewis, 2013). Willetts also introduces Collected Memoirs (London: Black Spring Press, 2004) and Bitten By the Tarantula and other writing (London: Black Spring Press, 2005). Penguin Books published Of Love and Hunger, with an introduction by D. J. Taylor, in 2002. ‘The Weeping and the Laughter’ is subtitled ‘A Chapter of Autobiography’ in Collected Memoirs (1-110).

[2] Neville & June Braybrooke, Olivia Manning: A Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 2004), 54, 58, 59.

Blackberries, cats and a tilly

And every tree is a tree of branches
And every wood is a wood of trees growing
     And what has been contributes to what is.
So I am glad to have known them,
     The people or events apparently withdrawn;
The world is round and there is always dawn
     Undeniably somewhere.[1]

Some days, if you’re early enough, you can walk all the way round a huge Victorian cemetery and not see even a single dogwalker—though you might catch sight of a fox, if you’re lucky. The blackberries have got ahead of themselves to such an extent that they’ll barely last the month: but once in the freezer drawer, they’ll see us well into winter. Cow parsley, Anthriscus sylvestris, or Queen Anne’s lace (or, I gather, keck) still hangs on in places. A mistle thrush and a song thrush seem to answer one another and there’s a goldcrest somewhere near.

We are well past midsummer now. Glastonbury Festival is over (I shall probably get The Cure’s ‘Friday I’m in Love’ out of my head soon), the Wimbledon tennis tournament finished, the Bristol Harbour Festival has happened and the Balloon Fiesta is just a couple of weeks away. The wider canvas still largely features arterial blood and heavy boots on infant faces though even some Western politicians have now begun to wonder if deliberately starving thousands of innocent civilians and then shooting them down in cold blood day after day when they try to secure food might be just a bit over the top. Even so, to demonstrate that they know what’s terrorism and what isn’t, our government is prosecuting people who object to their country’s complicity in war crimes.

But pass on, pass on. Books, music, food, wine, love, cats.

When I surface from Ford’s letters, I have waiting for me Paul Willetts’ remarkable reconstruction of the life of Julian Maclaren-Ross, Ronald Blythe, Sarah Moss, early Ernest Hemingway. Otherwise, I just revel in Anne Carson:

‘My mother forbad us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them.’[2]

Yes. Meanwhile, the weather, or much of it, prompts me to recognise my increasing intolerance to higher temperatures (and to much else: I know I’m widely assumed to become more conservative politically as I age but something’s clearly gone wrong). Earlier walks, more water, more cursing – I know all the tricks.

As to cats – yes, I like to remember that ‘Balthus painted himself once as a cat dining on fish, and once as the King of the Cats.’[3] Sylvia Townsend Warner mentioned, in a letter to William Maxwell (9 April 1952) , the northern Scottish traveller’s tale of seeing the cat funeral. ‘And the cat of the house, lying on the hearth, started up at these words, and exclaimed, “Then I am the King of the Cats”, and vanished up the chimney.’[4] When Swinburne died in 1909, William Butler Yeats said to his sister Lily, ‘Now I am king of the cats.’[5]

(John Butler Yeats, portrait of embroiderer, and co-founder (with her sister Lolly) of Cuala Industries, Susan Mary (Lily) Yeats (1901): National Gallery of Ireland)

The novelist, suffragist and partner—for several fraught years—of Ford Madox Ford had a good many of them: ‘Violet’s parrots—part of a menagerie that included an owl (named Anne Veronica after Wells’s novel), a bulldog and nine Persian cats—shrieked “Ezra! Ezra!” whenever they saw him bouncing up the walk.’[6]

I can, alas, only half-agree with Lord Peter Wimsey when he says to Parker at the end of that bell-ringing mystery, The Nine Tailors, ‘“Bells are like cats and mirrors – they’re always queer, and it doesn’t do to think too much about them.”’[7] Queer they may be but I think about them a good deal and seem none the worse for it.

There was a collection of essays published ‘on the Occasion of the 25th Anniversary of Finnegans Wake’, which included pieces by Padraic Colum, Frank Budgen, Vivian Mercier, Fritz Senn, A. Walton Litz and other distinguished Joyceans. It was called Twelve and a Tilly.[8]

For ‘tilly’, my Shorter Oxford has: ‘In Ireland and places of Irish settlement, an additional article or amount unpaid for by the purchaser as a gift from the vendor.’ Joyce’s nocturnal masterpiece offers four occurrences and the splendid online glossary – http://finwake.com – adds to ‘the thirteenth of a baker’s dozen’ the derivation from Irish tuilleadh, added measure.

Opening my eyes to uncertain light, I can hear the table-tennis ball moving in the kitchen and the hall, knocking against skirting-boards and doorframes. I get up for a pee and a small grey tabby runs in to check on my progress and brush against my legs. Getting back into bed, I see that it’s 03:50. Moments later, the table-tennis ball is on the move again.

Yes, we have our own Tilly now, not an added measure but one-half of a pair. Her brother is named Max, which I like in part because it was the name of the very first pet I remember, in Gillingham, Kent, a black cocker spaniel—but also because of the occasional fleeting uncertainty which attends such phrases as ‘I said to Max’ or, more plausibly, ‘I asked Max’, which might conceivably be a reference to either a handsome tabby or our leading Ford Madox Ford scholar.

Scholars, though, at least as a general rule, do not sit in the kitchen sink, talk to toy mice or suck their tails. . .

Notes

[1] Louis MacNeice, ‘Autumn Journal: XXI’, Collected Poems, edited by Peter McDonald (London: Faber, 2007), 153.

[2] Anne Carson, ‘On Walking Backwards’, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (New York: Vintage, 2000), 36.

[3] Guy Davenport, A Balthus Notebook (New York: Norton, 1989), 7. Le Roi des Chats (1935). Balthus identified strongly with cats: in the year of this self-portrait, he began signing his letters to his future wife Antoinette as ‘King of Cats’. ‘Jeune fille’ occurs many times in the titles of his paintings—but so does ‘chat’ (sometimes together).

[4] Sylvia Townsend Warner, Letters, edited by William Maxwell (London: Chatto & Windus, 1982), 133.

[5] Yeats to Susan Mary (‘Lily’) Yeats, 12 Apr. 1909: R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life. I: The Apprentice Mage: 1865–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 616n.69.

[6] Pound, of course. Barbara Belford, Violet: The Story of the Irrepressible Violet Hunt and her Circle of Lovers and Friends—Ford Madox Ford, H. G. Wells, Somerset Maugham, and Henry James (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 166-7.

[7] Dorothy L. Sayers, The Nine Tailors (1934; with an introduction by Elizabeth George, London: New English Library, 2003), 305.

[8] Twelve and a Tilly: Essays on the Occasion of the 25th Anniversary of Finnegans Wake, edited by Jack P. Dalton and Clive Hart (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965).

Grackles, clouds, popes

(Ambrosius Bosschaert the Younger, A Blackbird, Butterfly and Cherries: National Trust, Ham House)

04:30 and the blackbird already in full song. Not conducive to much further sleep but fine music. The same bird or a different one has several times come down to pick up grubs from pots ranged against the walls. Writing of the disappearances from the natural world over the past decades, Richard Mabey mentions smaller gnat swarms and choruses of blackbirds, and the barn owls gone.[1] And it’s true that we never hear such choruses now: it is almost always a solitary blackbird.

Guy Davenport remarks on ‘Gracchus’, meaning ‘grackle’ or ‘blackbird’; in Czech, kavka. And that Franz Kafka’s father had a blackbird on his business letterhead.[2] I recall that Davenport used ‘Grackle’ in ‘The Messengers’, his fourth story about Kafka (after ‘The Aeroplanes at Brescia’, ‘The Chair’ and ‘Belinda’s World Tour’). The writer is asked his name by the household god:
‘My name? Why, it’s Amschel. I mean, Franz. By the world, I am Franz Kafka.’
‘A kavka is a jackdaw.’
‘A grackle. Graculus, in Latin a blackbird.’
‘Yes.’[3]

I see that yesterday was Allen Ginsberg’s birthday, just one short of a centenary. Dear Ginsberg. I saw him read a couple of times, too many years ago, and the phrase ‘what thoughts I have of you’ came into my mind quite recently, remembering then: ‘What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.’

That poem ends: ‘Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?’[4]

Whitman’s America, opening out; Ginsberg opening, broadening, welcoming. A decade or so later and he calls on Whitman again, this time with a long quotation from Democratic Vistas as epigraph to the collection called, ah, The Fall of America.

Here we are. And here we are.

Back then too, in my early bookselling days, was Dick McBride, poet, playwright, actor, bookseller, publisher, former manager of City Lights Bookshop, having been introduced to Lawrence Ferlinghetti by poet, painter and novelist Kenneth Patchen. Dick was living in England then, distributing American small press books (and not so small: New Directions for a while)—a cottage in Great Horwood, Buckinghamshire, and an abandoned Victorian Methodist chapel for a warehouse. On my shelves is a copy of Cometh with Clouds (Memory: Allen Ginsberg), inscribed to me by Dick and dated July 14, 1983. It was published the previous year by Cherry Valley editions. I think I have a few of his other books, Lonely the Autumn Bird: Two Novels and Memoirs of a Natural-Born Expatriate were issued by Alan Swallow, and also The Astonished I, published by, ah, McBride’s Books.

Looking for online traces of Dick all these years later, I find more than I’d expected, on the Allen Ginsberg Project site and, particularly, a fine website created (and ongoing) by Rob McDowall: https://dickmcbride.co.uk/

I am currently with James Boswell in Italy, Dorothy Parker in New York, and Ford Madox Ford more or less anywhere, generally in either Paris or New York, though occasionally in Corsica or Carqueiranne. Also, just now, with Stella Bowen in Italy, where she is travelling with Dorothy Pound, looking at pictures, while Ezra ransacks the archives to find material for the Malatesta Cantos. Quite unable to rely on so much of the world to refrain from barbarism and conduct its affairs with decency, intelligence or basic humanity, I’m happy enough to be elsewhere in quite other temporal locations.

Poor Boswell lectures himself on his conduct almost daily but then argues with his companions, pursues a married countess or takes himself off to the nearest working girl. A ‘fille charmante’, about seven shillings. Also, ‘“Des filles” in the next three days ran to thirteen shillings.’ He seems strikingly subject to venereal disease too. After his triumphant forays into the lives of Jean Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire, Boswell is travelling with a party that includes Lord Mountstuart, son of Lord Bute, and has secured the friendship of John Wilkes, who (perhaps not an ideal model for young Boswell) takes the view that ‘dissipation and profligacy renew the mind’, he having written his best issues of his newspaper The North Briton (founded to attack Prime Minister Lord Bute) while ‘in bed with Betsy Green’.[5]

(Alexander Pope by William Hoare: National Portrait Gallery)

From time to time, I also try to get back more into the eighteenth-century frame of mind with some Pope – Alexander, to avoid any possible confusion, recalling an occasion not so long ago when I asked the Librarian what she was watching. ‘A bit of Pope’, she said. I looked into the front room and saw a blaze of red, cardinal red, you might say. Boswell, in an earlier journal, had recounted an evening including the poet’s work, which was not, however, quite enough to save the occasion: ‘The night before I drank tea and sat all the evening writing in the room with my landlord and landlady. They insisted that I should eat a bit of supper. I complied. I also drank a glass of punch. I read some of Pope. I sung a song. I let myself down too much. Also, being unaccustomed to taste supper, my small alteration put me out of order. I went up to my room much disgusted. I thought myself a low being.’[6]

Having actually taught Pope to unfortunate students many years back, I’m surprised to find I have to make a stern and conscious effort to stick with him, uneasily recalling W. H. Auden’s remark (8 January 1947) to Alan Ansen: ‘The real test of liking English poetry is Pope. His ideas aren’t much, but the language is wonderful—“Chicane in furs.” The Rape of the Lock is the most perfect poem in English.’[7] Or, indeed, Hugh Kenner, reviewing Maynard Mack’s life of the poet: ‘The great danger of absorbing writers’ biographies is that you can begin to think you understand writing you’ve not troubled to come to terms with.’[8]

I like to think of Gilbert White being presented with a copy of Pope’s six-volume translation of the Iliad by the poet himself, when graduating with distinction from Oriel College, Oxford, in 1743.

In Pope’s ‘Epistle to Burlington’, I see a neat encapsulation of pre-Romantic sensibility:

‘In all, let Nature never be forgot.
But treat the Goddess like a modest fair,
Not over-dress, nor leave her wholly bare;
Let not each beauty ev’ry where be spy’d
Where half the skill is decently to hide.
He gains all points, who pleasingly confounds
Surprizes, varies, and conceals the Bounds.’

And elsewhere a remark that never goes out of date, alas:

‘But when to Mischief Mortals bend their Will,
How soon they find fit Instruments of Ill!’ (‘Rape of the Lock’, Canto III).

Notes

[1] Richard Mabey, Nature Cure (London: Chatto & Windus 2005), 134.

[2] Guy Davenport, The Hunter Gracchus and Other Papers on Literature and Art (Washington: Counterpoint, 1996), 2.

[3] Guy Davenport, The Cardiff Team: Ten Stories (New York: New Directions, 1996), 2.

[4] ‘A Supermarket in California’, in Allen Ginsberg, Selected Poems 1947-1995 (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 89.

[5] Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica and France, 1765-1766, edited by Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle (London: William Heinemann, 1955), 54n., 58n.

[6] Sunday 19 December 1762: Boswell’s London Journal, 1762-1763, edited by Frederick A. Pottle (London: William Heinemann, 1950), 95.

[7] Alan Ansen, The Table Talk of W. H Auden, edited by Nicholas Jenkins (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), 15-16.

[8] Hugh Kenner, ‘Maynard Mack’s Pope’, Historical Fictions (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 250.

In the Scales

On 25 August 1773, in an indifferent inn at Banff, James Boswell watched Samuel Johnson pen a long letter to Mrs Thrale. ‘I wondered to see him write so much so easily. He verified his own doctrine that “a man may always write when he will set himself doggedly to it.”’[1]

Dogged, yes: ‘sullen’ I don’t quite see but ‘pertinacious’, holding obstinately to an opinion or a purpose, unyielding, we can certainly settle for. So that

Writing of April in the Scotland uplands, of mainly grey days, cold and snow, the 20-year-old John Buchan remarked: ‘Nor have we any of the common associations of spring, like the singing of birds. A mavis or a blackbird may on occasion break into a few notes, and there is, for certain, an increasing twitter among the trees. But the clear note of the lark as yet is not; the linnet does not pipe; the many named finches are still silent.’[2]

We have also been in the hills this April, though further south, with not a hint of snow. A few days in the Black Mountains, the border country, with its panoramic vistas and the River Wye looking sleek and animated and glossy, and where, on some roads, you move from England to Wales and back again with dizzying ease and frequency. That was in a foreign country. . .

As for birds. . . . In a few days and in a limited area, we saw or heard (frequently both), skylark, chaffinch, blackbird, robin, blackcap, sparrow, wood pigeon, linnet, chiffchaff, wren, dunnock, crow, goldfinch and song thrush (Buchan’s ‘mavis’).[3] Many of these in the trees and the grass outside the living-room or kitchen windows of the farmhouse we were renting, others on walks through fields and woods.

Birds we had, then, in abundance. Space and grass and sheep and silence also. Wi-Fi, broadband, not so much. ‘I’ve rebooted it and logged on several times, it seems fine now’, the housekeeper said before leaving. The blue light lasted for at least a minute. The Librarian tried resetting it a few times, quite a few times, over the next few days with the same result. But we had food, wine, books and packs of cards. There were mobile phones too, in the event of an emergency. We survived. And what lengths would we go to, should we go to, for the latest news? After all, given the current state of things, should you not warm to neo-fascist extremism or the aggressive erasure of history or the continuing mass murder of civilians or the vicious suppression of non-violent protest, there’s little in daily bulletins to lift the spirits. Some people, though—and I have it on the best authority—can find it oddly cheering to see, as they cross a field from stile to stile, a pheasant strolling to and fro in that field, apparently without a care in the world.

So Inspector Jules Maigret sweltered in August heat or remained on edge when ‘no one had ever known such a damp, cold gloomy March.’[4] Virginia Woolf did not go to the party at Gordon Square where the d’Aranyi sisters, Adila, Hortense and Jelly (‘great-nieces of the renowned Hungarian violinist Joachim’) would be playing, because Leonard arrived home too late, ‘& it rained, & really, we didn’t want to go.’[5] And I was glad to learn about the Society of Dilettanti, concerned with practical patronage of the arts, whose members included Sir Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick and Charles James Fox, and to be told of Horace Walpole’s writing that, while the nominal qualification for membership of the Society was having been to Italy, the real one was being drunk.[6]

After the diversions of fictional Paris and historical Brighton, I am now with James Boswell, young Boswell on his Grand Tour, after Holland, currently in Germany, soon to be in Switzerland. He is still often preposterous, still wholly irresistible—and still battling with the Black Dog (‘The fiend laid hold of me’). But he finds diversions enough: ‘I must not forget to mark that I fell in love with the beauteous Princess Elizabeth. I talked of carrying her off from the Prince of Prussia, and so occasioning a second Trojan War.’[7]

We are back, then, via taxi and train among Good Friday crowds, walking again in the park amidst hurtling spaniels rather than quietly to and fro along a secluded lane with teeming hedgerows, remarkable trees and glimpses of an unfamiliar breed of sheep, which gave rise to a good deal of highly technical agricultural vocabulary: ‘God, they’re chunky!’ Too far away for a convincing photograph but, scanning various sheep breeders’ websites, we agree that they were probably Zwartbles.

As confirmed by such remarks, we are now returned to what E. M. Forster termed the world of ‘telegrams and anger’—minus the telegrams, of course, and seemingly with many times the anger. We are also back, that is to say, in the firm grip of the internet. Does that warrant one cheer or two?

Notes

[1] James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D., edited by Ian McGowan (1785; Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 1996), 234-235.

[2] John Buchan, ‘April in the Hills’, in Scholar-Gipsies (1896; London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1927), 28.

[3] Apparently derived from the French mauvis (though, confusingly, this seems to mean ‘redwing’, turdus iliacus rather than turdus philomelos). ‘It is still used for the bird in Orkney and survives elsewhere in Scotland’: Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey, Birds Britannica (London: Chatto & Windus, 2005), 358-359.

[4] Georges Simenon, Maigret’s Failure, translated by William Hobson (Penguin Books, 2025), 1; August heat in Maigret Sets a Trap, translated by Siân Reynolds (London: Penguin Books, 2017).

[5] The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 1: 1915-19, edited by Anne Olivier Bell (with the Asheham Diary, London: Granta, 2023), 11-12.

[6] Venetia Murray, High Society in the Regency Period: 1780-1830 (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 165.

[7] Boswell on the Grand Tour: Germany and Switzerland 1764, edited by Frederick A. Pottle (London: William Heinemann, 1953), 12, 67.

Good Wood

(The Boppard Altarpiece, Panel: limewood, pine, paint & gilt: Victoria & Albert Museum)

Back in the day—not that day, another one—a woman had been on the throne of England for around sixty years.

Walk wide o’ the Widow at Windsor,
For ’alf o’ Creation she owns:
We ’ave bought ’er the same with the sword an’ the flame,
An’ we’ve salted it down with our bones.[1]

Yes, back then, a while and a world ago, when Queen Victoria was not quite gone, Rudyard Kipling had dropped in on the west coast of the United States. ‘There was wealth—unlimited wealth—in the streets’, he wrote of San Francisco, ‘but not an accent that would not have been dear at fifty cents.’ He was disappointed by the disparity between the fine and expensive clothes worn by the women he saw and their voices, ‘the staccato “Sez he”,“Sez I,” that is the mark of the white servant-girl all the world over.’

He felt, that is to say, that ‘fine feathers ought to make fine birds.’ But, ‘Wherefore, revolving in my mind that these folk were barbarians, I was presently enlightened and made aware that they also were the heirs of all the ages, and civilised after all.’ Luckily for this much-travelled traveller, he’s been accosted by ‘an affable stranger of prepossessing experience, with a blue and an innocent eye.’

It’s true that the man has peered into the hotel register and read ‘Indiana’ for the ‘India’ that Kipling has actually come from but, for the moment, the drinks and cigars that he presses upon the famous writer are welcome.[2]

Ford Madox Ford referred numerous times to Kipling, often admiringly, but almost always—and, to me, unaccountably—focusing on the early work. Some of that is wonderful but the later stories, becoming often more complex, more oblique, more modernist, somehow get lost sight of, not only by Ford but by several other major writers of the time, as if Kipling were a known quantity and need not be kept any longer in sight.

But I was thinking mostly of that phrase tucked into the Kipling lines, which recurs several times elsewhere. ‘We are the heirs of all the ages,’ Ford wrote in early September 1913, in an essay which provided the ‘Preface’ to his Collected Poems a few weeks later and in which the same line sits.[3] He had written nearly a decade earlier of ‘all the dead Londons that have gone to the producing of this child of all the ages’, and in his 1910 novel, A Call, Grimshaw remarks to Pauline: ‘We’re the children of the age and of all the ages. . .’[4]

(Kipling/ Tennyson)

Those words look back to ‘Locksley Hall’—‘I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time’—by Alfred Tennyson, a poet that Ford was generally unenthusiastic about, seeing him as one of the stifling ‘Victorian Great’ figures. Yet Tennyson’s work so saturated the second half of the nineteenth century that familiarity with it was unavoidable for any serious reader.[5]

It’s a point so obvious, so banal, so unremarkable, that huge numbers of people must fail utterly to remark it. We are the heirs, the inheritors, of all that has gone before. Not just the books, the music, the paintings—which people like me are only too ready to bang on about—but the housing, the streets, the scars on the landscape, what were the mining villages, what were the dockyards and shipyards, what were the council estates, the public libraries, the youth clubs, the community centres, the rivers, the fields and hedgerows, the birds and the butterflies, the very flavour of the air. And we are also the ones who will, in our turn, bequeath or pass on or let fall the things which others will inherit and be the heirs to. As far as we have influence and agency, what will our legacy to them look like?

After January—the first rule of that month being: survive January!—I venture a little further afield to gauge the State of Things. The news, astonishingly, is Not Good. For weeks, my main focus has been the life and letters of Ford Madox Ford in the 1920s, though, on occasion, I dipped my toes into world news, not wishing to have my leg taken off just above the knee by sharks should I venture too far in.

In the United States, things are evidently shaping up to be as bad as any sane person would expect, far worse, in fact. But there’s enough derangement here to satisfy any eager watchers at the gates of Bedlam, not least a government apparently possessed of a talent to choose every time precisely the wrong policy, facing in the the wrong direction and benefiting the wrong people.

On the bright side, though—O optimist!—the Chinese New Year celebrations have welcomed in the Year of the Snake, are still welcoming it, I suppose, since this involves not only animal but also zodiac elements. This is then the Year of the Wood Snake – also known as the Year of the Green Snake, wood being associated with the colour green. The Spring Festival, I gather, takes place over fifteen days, ending with the Lantern Festival on 12 February, and is estimated to be celebrated by some two billion people in numerous countries, not only China but Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and their diasporas.

The snake may have had a bad press—certainly a bad Judaeo-Christian press—but I read that, in Chinese astrology, as a wood animal, it’s understood to represent good luck, renewal, flexibility, tolerance. Wood is good!

(‘Hippocamp’, a wooden carving in the form of a winged horse, originally part of the panelling inside Stafford Castle: Staffordshire County Museum Service)

This in turn brings to mind the recent piece following the death of David Lynch, which touched on Twin Peaks: The Return, and had a nice quote from Michael Horse, who played the series’ Deputy Sheriff Hawk: ‘When they did the premiere of The Return, the executives had not seen it, and they said: “Mr Lynch, would you say a few words?” And he comes out; he goes: “This project has a lot of wood in it. I like wood.”’
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jan/23/an-oral-history-of-twin-peaks-david-lynch-madchen-amick-joan-chen

We all like wood, no? Wood nymphs, woodwind, woodbine, woodpeckers, woodlands – as a child, I had a pet woodlouse for a short time, though it didn’t end well. Woodcuts, wood engravings. Albrecht Dürer, Hiroshige, Käthe Kollwitz, Robert Gibbings, Thomas Bewick, Clare Leighton, David Jones, Gwen Raverat. Harriet Baker wrote of woodcuts made by Carrington and Vanessa Bell: ‘Carving directly into soft wood, the markings of tools and the tremors of hands were as much a part of the final pieces as form and composition.’[6]

The French historian Fernand Braudel gave wood a significant role in the lessening of the effects of the Black Death which, he argued, ‘did not, as used to be thought, arrive in Central Europe in the thirteenth century, but in the eleventh at the latest.’ His analysis of the retreat of the disease in the 18th century mentioned stone’s replacing wood in domestic architecture after major urban fires; the general increase in personal and domestic cleanliness, and the removal of small domestic mammals from dwellings, all factors that resulted in the lessening impact of fleas. He also discussed the enormous significance of wood being used everywhere: ‘One of the reasons for Europe’s power lay in its being so plentifully endowed with forests. Against it, Islam was in the long run undermined by the poverty of its wood resources and their gradual exhaustion.’[7]

(Thomas Gainsborough, A Forest Road: Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)

The gradual exhaustion of resources. Here we are again. Not so gradual now, I suspect, but in any case a phrase to tingle the tongues of those who, as previously noted, are custodians of the past and guardians of the future. Which is us, of course, even those currently making war on their own children and grandchildren.

In September 1911, Ezra Pound spent a Sunday afternoon with G. R. S. Mead, a scholar of hermetic philosophy, early Christianity and Gnosticism, the occult and theosophy: he had served as private secretary to Madame Blavatsky during her last years. He had founded the Quest Society in 1909 and invited Pound to give a lecture, which would be published subsequently in the quarterly review, The Quest. Pound delivered his lecture early in 1912 and it appeared in the October issue of the review with the title ‘Psychology and Troubadours’. Twenty years later, it was incorporated into Pound’s The Spirit of Romance.[8] It’s years since I read it but one sentence, particularly, lodged in my memory and remains intact: ‘We have about us the universe of fluid force, and below us the germinal universe of wood alive, of stone alive.’[9]

Pound, like Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Guy Davenport wrote, ‘had conceived the notion that cultures awake with a brilliant springtime and move through seasonal developments to a decadence. This is an ideas from Frobenius, who had it from Spengler, who had it from Nietzsche, who had it from Goethe.’[10]

Yes. Never mind third runways, never mind nuclear power stations on every corner, never mind mimicking anti-immigrant messages from other political parties that run on that sort of fuel. If a body is bleeding to death in front of you—how can I put this?—it may be best, before all else, to try to stop the bleeding.

Touch wood. Good wood. Touch good wood.

Notes

[1] ‘The Widow at Windsor’, Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Inclusive Edition, 1885-1918 (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1925), 471.

[2] Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea (2 volumes: Macmillan, 1900), I: 479-480

[3] Ford Madox Ford, ‘The Poet’s Eye’, New Freewoman, I, 6 (1 September 1913), 109; ‘Preface’ to Collected Poems (London: Max Goschen, 1914 [1913]), 20.

[4] Ford Madox Ford, England and the English, edited by Sara Haslam (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2003), 4; Ford Madox Ford, A Call: The Tale of Two Passions (1910; with an afterword by C. H. Sisson, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1984), 23.

[5] Alfred Tennyson, Poems: A Selected Edition, edited by Christopher Ricks (London: Longman, 1989), 192.

[6] Harriet Baker, Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner & Rosamond Lehmann (London: Allen Lane, 2024), 73.

[7] Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15^th – 18^th Century. Volume I: The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible (London: Fontana Books, 1985). Translated from the French; revised by Sîan Reynolds, 83, 84, 363.

[8] 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), 260; A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: A Portrait of the Man and His Work: Volume I: The Young Genius 1885–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 159.

[9] Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance (1910; New York: New Directions, 1968), 92.

[10] Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination (Boston: David R. Godine, 1997), 22.

‘So they came to the end of that year’

(Jan Josef Horemans the Younger, A Merry Party: Hackney Museum)

‘For Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragons teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.’—John Milton, Areopagitica

How was it for you?
Bad. How could it not be? Our cat died.
And—more broadly?
Some good connections, some good work done, some good books read.
More broadly still?
Pretty bad. The end of all rules-based international order. Genocidal violence, unchecked. Countries losing their minds, wars waged on children in the modern fashion. The usual stupidity, greed, aggression, corruption. Electorates incapable of paying attention. Cyclists on footpaths; cars on the pavement. Dante knew where to put those people. . .
And next year?
Ah well.
Better or—?
Ah well.
Give me a word.
Attention.
Give me a number.
Two. Three with a cat.
Give me a blessing.
May you always be threefold, even if alone.

I read a lot of books this year and see that just over half of them were by women (which I find significant primarily by virtue of its non-significance now), despite Fords, Simenons, Herrons and the like. Hmm. A recent one was Charlotte Wood’s novel, Stone Yard Devotional, which I’d say is about acceptance and forgiveness, of oneself and of others—and of those who die or disappear before forgiving or being forgiven. That in itself reminds me of another novel recently read, the reissue of Elspeth Barker’s O Caledonia: ‘It was Janet’s view that forgetting was the only possible way of forgiving. She did not believe in forgiveness; the word had no meaning.’[1]

Leaning towards Janet – but here’s Willie:

MY SELF:
I am content to follow to its source,
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.[2]

Ali Smith was also a little more, ah, yielding than Elspeth’s Janet: ‘many things get forgiven in the course of a life : nothing is finished or unchangeable except death and even death will bend a little if what you tell of it is told right’.[3]

Would I be that forgiving were I a victim of the numberless war crimes, sexual assaults, racist attacks, domestic outrages? Frankly, no. But we are at year’s end and, by the sound of it—bears of little brain letting off fireworks as though it were that day in November—it’s an evening of celebration.

Here’s the laureate of cheerfulness, J. G. Ballard: ‘It is a misreading to assume that because my work is populated by abandoned hotels, drained swimming pools, empty nightclubs, deserted airfields and the like, I am celebrating the run-down of a previous psychological and social order. I am not. What I am interested in doing is using these materials as the building blocks of a new order.’[4]

The eminent literary critic Frank Kermode did get to the celebratory stage but seemed to find the steps to it a little surprising. At Liverpool University, he was taught Latin by F. W. Wallbank, J. F. Mountford ‘and, rather surprisingly, George Painter’ (the celebrated biographer of Marcel Proust). ‘I took up Italian, under the instruction, also surprisingly, of the future father of Marianne Faithfull. Indeed, I drank wine in celebration of his wedding and continue to take comfort from this connection with true fame.’[5]

(Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (The Courtauld: Samuel Courtauld Trust)

We are rather more low-key here. A bottle of champagne, some rye bread with smoked salmon, and sitting in front of University Challenge, lamenting (that is, me lamenting) the fact that, while the contestants can answer obscure questions about astronomical phenomena, Third World flags or physiological irregularities, they are all at sea with literary questions that I vaguely assumed to be common knowledge even among household pets.

‘New Year’s Day, for us, is All Souls’ Day’, the Goncourt brothers wrote, 1 January 1862. ‘Our hearts grow chill and count those who are gone’.[6] Ah, well and ah, well. Best wishes to all, wherever you may be, and may 2025 lean more towards Life than the other thing. . .

Notes

[1] Elsbeth Barker, O Caledonia (1991; Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2021), 116.

[2] W. B. Yeats, ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’, Collected Poems, second edition (London: Macmillan, 1950), 142.

[3] Ali Smith, How to be both (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2014), 95.

[4] J. G. Ballard, interview with Peter Rǿnnov-Jessen (1984), cited by John Gray, ‘Crash and Burn’, New Statesman (5-11 October 2012), 52.

[5] Frank Kermode, Not Entitled: A Memoir (London: Harper Collins, 1996), 78.

[6] Edmund and Jules de Goncourt, Pages From the Goncourt Journal, edited and translated by Robert Baldick (New York: New York Review Books, 2006), 66.

Cookery: war, cavalry: rice

Browsing the tirelessly interesting The Literary Life: A Scrapbook Almanac of the Anglo-American Literary Scene from 1900 to 1950, I come across (‘In the Wings’ section of 1913): ‘“Eager for any sort of adventure,” Joyce Cary serves as a cook in the Montenegrin Army in the First Balkan War, receiving a gold medal for his participation in the final campaign.’[1] Montenegro! It reminded me that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Major Jay Gatsby had been decorated by every Allied government, ‘even Montenegro, little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea!’[2]

And a cook! Intriguing, especially when poking about in various sources to confirm it but coming up against Red Cross nurse, stretcher bearer, Red Cross orderly, and finally: stretcher bearer and cook, which I promptly accept as definitive.

Cary (1888-1957) was born in Derry but, when he settled in England, this was where he largely stayed. He attended Clifton College in Bristol (as did L. P. Hartley, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Henry Newbolt, Geoffrey Household, Montague Summers, actors, musicians and an astonishing array of military, scientific and political notables). He joined the colonial service in Africa and fought in the First World War – with a Nigerian regiment in the Cameroon campaign. He seems to have largely dropped from view but was pretty well-known for a while, particularly for his novel The Horse’s Mouth, published in 1944 and reprinted as a Penguin book four years later.

(Alec Guinness and Kay Walsh in the 1958 film, The Horse’s Mouth)

I did read several of his other novels but that’s the one I remember best. It’s about a painter, Gulley Jimson, who has some diverting comments about the art that he practises. One day, he remembers, ‘I happened to see a Manet. Because some chaps were laughing at it. And it gave me the shock of my life. Like a flash of lightning. It skinned my eyes for me and when I came out I was a different man. And I saw the world again, the world of colour. By Gee and Jay, I said, I was dead, and I didn’t know it.’ A little later, ‘And then I began to make a few little pencil sketches, studies, and I took Blake’s Job drawings out of somebody’s bookshelf and peeped into them and shut them up again. Like a chap who’s fallen down the cellar steps and knocked his skull in and opens a window too quick, on something too big.’ But to a boy who keeps turning up, saying he wants to be a painter himself, Jimson tells him ‘“something for your good. All art is bad, but modern art is the worst. Just like the influenza. The newer it is, the more dangerous. And modern art is not only a public danger – it’s insidious. You never know what may happen when it’s got loose.”’[3]

(William Blake, engraving for The Book of Job)

Cookery and war, though. Conflict in the kitchen is familiar fare in several strenuous television series of recent years but there are other offscreen instances enough.

Joan Didion recalled being taught to cook by someone from Louisiana. ‘We lived together for some years, and I think we most fully understood each other when once I tried to kill him with a kitchen knife.’[4] And M. F. K. Fisher remembered a Mrs Cheever at Miss Huntingdon’s School for Girls: ‘She ran her kitchens with such skill that in spite of ordinary domestic troubles like flooded basements and soured cream, and even an occasional extraordinary thing like the double murder and hara-kiri committed by the head boy one Good Friday, our meals were never late and never bad.’[5]

In the First World War, as in so many other wars, cookhouses and dining halls were central to the military effort, both at home and abroad. If your medical category was C1, then cookhouse fatigues were likely to feature on your work rota, along with clerking, cleaning and gardening. The poet F. S. Flint did precisely that although towards the end of his war service in England and Scotland—brief enough since he was only called up in August 1918—he taught French to officers who were awaiting demobilisation. The novelist Edgar Jepson wrote of attempting ‘to diminish the gluttony of the British people.’ His masterpiece drew, he said, on the experiments of Mrs Peel in the basement kitchen: ‘I dwell at this length on the Cookery Book [The Win the War Cookery Book of May 1917] because I wish to make it wholly clear that it shares equally with the United States the glory of having won the war.’ He added: ‘Not that I would have it supposed that I reckon the months I spent at the Ministry of Food wasted: I acquired there a faith in human stupidity, which nothing will ever shake.’[6]

(Eugène Louis Bourdin, Étaples)

Closer to the scenes of combat, the young Wilfred Owen would discover in December 1916 that meals in the officers’ mess at Étaples in northern France—where a series of mutinies the following year resulted in executions and prison sentences—‘were cooked by a former chef to the Duke of Connaught and presided over by a baronet.’[7]

Midway through that war, in the same year as Owen’s sumptuous dinners, poet and novelist Robert Graves bought a small cottage from his mother. He wrote, a decade later: ‘I bought it in defiance of the war, as something to look forward to when the guns stopped (“when the guns stop” was how we always thought of the end of the war). I whitewashed the cottage and put in a table, a chair, a bed and a few dishes and cooking utensils. I had decided to live there by myself on bread and butter, bacon and eggs, lettuce in season, cabbage and coffee; and to write poetry.’[8]

War and the kitchen. Really not in my case; perhaps the nearest would be peeling a butternut squash, the culinary equivalent, I suppose, of fell walking or hill climbing, requiring as it does both stamina and occasional brute strength. And war has changed out of all recognition in the last hundred-odd years, sometimes seeming to be called ‘war’ only to spare the feelings of those on one side who are slaughtering, almost without resistance or effective means of defence, the other. And there was a time, after all, when ‘war’ meant men on horseback. . .

‘It was from the cavalry that the nation’s military leaders were drawn. They believed in the cavalry charge as they believed in the Church of England.’ Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, when the future General Sir Ian Hamilton, as an English observer in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, reported that ‘the only thing the cavalry could do in the face of entrenched machine guns was to cook rice for the infantry’, his statement had the effect of ‘causing the War Office to wonder if his months in the Orient had not affected his mind.’[9]

Never underestimate the value to the world of getting the cooking time of your rice just right.

Notes

[1] Robert Phelps and Peter Deane, The Literary Life: A Scrapbook Almanac of the Anglo-American Literary Scene from 1900 to 1950 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), 54.

[2] F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1926; edited by Tony Tanner, London: Penguin Books, 2000), 65.

[3] Joyce Cary, The Horse’s Mouth (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1948), 70-71, 72, 24-25.

[4] Joan Didion, South and West: From a Notebook, foreword by Nathaniel Rich (London: Fourth Estate, 2017), 8.

[5] M. F. K. Fisher, ‘The First Oyster’ (1924), in Gastronomical Me (1943; London: Daunt Books, 2017), 26.

[6] Edgar Jepson, Memories of an Edwardian and Neo-Georgian (London: Richards, 1937), 193, 196. Mrs C. S. Peel was a prolific author of books about thrifty cookery, including The Eat-Less-Meat Book: War Ration Housekeeping (1917).

[7] Dominic Hibberd, Wilfred Owen: A New Biography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002), 203.

[8] Robert Graves, Good-bye to All That: An Autobiography (1929; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2014), 252.

[9] Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August and The Proud Tower, edited by Margaret MacMillan (New York: Library of America, 2012), 593, 214.