History – Reconstructionary Tales

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.

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.

Lords and servants

(Nicholas Condy, Estate Staff in a Servants’ Hall: Mount Edgcumbe House)

As we get older – I’m warily assuming that I’m not alone in this – our reading habits tend to change. These days, I don’t even pretend to persevere with a work that bores me or that I find incomprehensible, while avoiding anything that smacks of the dutiful. I also have a small store of things that keep the reading wheels turning if I stall. Crime fiction, certainly, but also a few writers with a healthy backlist of novels and stories, always of, or above, a certain quality threshold, literary but not excruciatingly so, tending to the concise and accessible. My usual suspects include Graham Greene and Muriel Spark.

Reading recently Spark’s unsettling short novel Not to Disturb, I came across Lister, the Baron Klopstock’s butler, saying to the other household servants as they anticipate the incursion of the press: ‘“Bear in mind that when dealing with the rich, the journalists are mainly interested in backstairs chatter. The popular glossy magazines have replaced the servants’ hall in modern society. Our position of privilege is unparalleled in history. The career of domestic service is the thing of the future.”’[1]

Any close encounters with literature and history, up to and well into the twentieth century will bump up against the servants – or, very often, the silence and spaces where the servants would be. If domestic service of the old kind seemed until recently to have largely died out in this country, except in the homes of the immensely rich or ostentatious, in many other parts of the world, it seems never to have diminished much at all. Definitions of ‘servant’ and ‘service’ have shifted or dissolved, and the contemporary situation is complex and frequently alarming, riven with cancelled visas, failed safeguards and government inaction, while the exploitation and abuse reported from a great many countries seem indistinguishable from slavery.

(John Finnie, Maids of All Work: Museum of the Home)

Lucy Lethbridge observed that: ‘In 1900 domestic service was the single largest occupation in Edwardian Britain: of the four million women in the British workforce, a million and a half worked as servants, a majority of them as single-handed maids in small households. Hardly surprising then that the keeping of servants was not necessarily considered an indication of wealth: for many families it was so unthinkable to be without servants that their presence was almost overlooked.’[2]

In Dorothy Sayers’ childhood, her biographer wrote, ‘It was the period of wash-stands with jug and basin in the bedrooms, and chamber pots. The housemaid carried cans of hot water up to the bedrooms every morning. When baths were needed, hot water was again carried up and poured into a hip bath. ‘“Strangely enough, my mother used to say,” wrote Dorothy, “she never had a servant complain of this colossal labour in all the twenty years we were at Bluntisham.”’[3] Beside this might be placed Rudyard Kipling’s recalling, late in life, his dislike for those radicals who ‘derided my poor little Gods of the East, and asserted that the British in India spent violent lives “oppressing” the Native. (This in a land where white girls of sixteen, at twelve or fourteen pounds per annum, hauled thirty and forty pounds weight of bath-water at a time up four flights of stairs!)’[4] Twelve or fourteen pounds. . . At a private view, on 3 December 1898, Arthur Balfour, who would become Prime Minister in 1902, bought two of William Hyde’s pictures on the spot. Hyde’s collaboration with the poet Alice Meynell, London Impressions, her ten essays complementing his many ‘etchings and pictures in photogravure’ was published that month, priced at eight guineas, apparently ‘equal to a house servant’s wages for a year’.[5]

Some servants were more highly prized—and individualised—particularly butlers and manservants. E. S. Turner informed his readers that: ‘The butler wore no livery but was attired in formal clothes, distinguished by some deliberate solecism—the wrong tie for the wrong coat or the wrong trousers—to prevent his being mistaken for a gentleman.’[6] Always best to be on the safe side. In the household of Edward and Georgiana Burne-Jones, ‘William, like all good butlers, was a depressive.’[7] Some butlers and valets had interesting family connections. In 1840, Benjamin-François Courvoisier was hanged outside Newgate Prison, before a huge crowd (among which were Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray), for the murder of Lord William Russell (he was suspected of other murders but never charged with them). The defendant’s legal representation was provided by Sir George Beaumont, the amateur painter, friend of William Wordsworth and art patron whose pictures were a foundational gift to the National Gallery. Beaumont’s butler was Courvoisier’s uncle.[8]

After the irruption of Sam Weller into the serial version of Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers and the contribution of Passepartout to Phineas Fogg’s trip Around the World in 80 Days, the most famous—and visible and audible—manservant, in or out of literature, is presumably Jeeves, Bertie Wooster’s valet, surely followed, if at a modest distance, by Lord Peter Wimsey’s ‘immaculate man’, Mervyn Bunter.[9] It’s been suggested that Bunter drew partly on P. G. Wodehouse’s creation though he certainly incorporated elements of a man named Bates, the ‘gentleman’s gentleman’ to an ex-cavalry officer, Charles Crichton, whom Sayers met in France; and Sayers’ husband, ‘Mac’ Fleming, who developed his own photographs and was a good cook (also Bunter attributes).[10] Bunter, Wimsey’s mother explains to Harriet Vane, was previously a footman but ended up a sergeant in Peter’s unit. They were together in a tight spot and took a fancy to each other – ‘so Peter promised Bunter that, if they both came out of the War alive, Bunter should come to him. . . .’ Wimsey’s nightmares about German sappers linger on for a few postwar years: he’s afraid to go to sleep and unable to give orders of any kind. ‘There were eighteen months . . . not that I suppose he’ll ever tell you about that, at least, if he does, then you’ll know he’s cured. . .’ In January 1919, Bunter turns up, on one of Wimsey’s worst days, takes charge and sees to everything, not least finding the Piccadilly flat and installing himself and Wimsey in it.[11]

In that postwar period, apparently, ‘as many as forty ex-soldiers would answer a single advertisement for domestic help.’[12] Though the widespread employment of domestic servants hugely diminished by the time of the Second World War, the habit sometimes persisted in individual lives. Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1974 letter to her daughter Maria, describing the guests at the ‘surrealist tea-party’ that took place during her visit to a friend in Rye, includes mention of ‘Henry James’s manservant (still living in Rye, but with a deaf-aid which had to be plugged into the skirting) who couldn’t really bear to sit down and have tea, but kept springing up and trying to wait on people, with the result that he tripped over the cable and contributing in a loud, shrill voice remarks like “Mr Henry was a heavy man – nearly 16 stone – it was a job for him to push his bicycle uphill” – in the middle of all the other conversation wh: he couldn’t hear.’[13]

(Marie Leon, ‘Henry and William James’, (c) National Portrait Gallery)

It occurs to me at this late stage that the matter of servants is not purely an historical issue in my own case since, for three years in Singapore, my parents had the benefit of a cook-boy and an amah, Goh Heck Sin and his wife Leo: cooking, cleaning, laundry all taken care of (had there been young children in the family, the amah would have looked after them too). My primary—and certainly not undervalued—inheritance from those years is my ability to attract the attention of cats by making the call that Sin always made when he summoned our three (Thai Ming, Remo, Tiga) to their meals of rice and steamed fish.

Notes

[1] Muriel Spark, Not to Disturb (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), 83.

[2] Lucy Lethbridge, Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth-century Britain (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 9.

[3] Barbara Reynolds, Dorothy Sayers: Her Life and Soul, revised edition (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1998), 24. Sayers was born in 1893.

[4] Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself, edited by Robert Hampson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 87.

[5] Jerrold Northrop Moore, The Green Fuse: Pastoral Vision in English Art, 1820-2000 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2007), 90.

[6] E. S. Turner, What the Butler Saw: Two Hundred and Fifty Years of the Servant Problem (Michael Joseph 1962; reprinted with new afterword, London: Penguin Books, 2001), 158.

[7] Penelope Fitzgerald, Edward Burne-Jones (London: Michael Joseph, 1975), 223.

[8] Judith Flanders, The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime (London: Harper Press, 2011), 202fn.

[9] Dorothy L. Sayers, ‘The Entertaining Episode of the Article in Question’, in Lord Peter Views the Body (1928; London: New English Library, 1977), 27.

[10] Reynolds, Dorothy L. Sayers, 112, 180.

[11] Dorothy L. Sayers, Busman’s Honeymoon,(1937; London: Coronet, 1988), 379-380.

[12] Turner, What the Butler Saw, 279.

[13] Penelope Fitzgerald, So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald, edited by Terence Dooley (London: Fourth Estate, 2008), 150.

There not there

(Edmund Dulac, Frontispiece to Princess Badoura: A Tale from The Arabian Nights, by Laurence Housman)

‘The things you think of to link are not in your control. It’s just who you are, bumping into the world. But how you link them is what shows the nature of your mind. Individuality resides in the way links are made.’[1]

Bumping into the world, I noticed yesterday that I was reading A. S. Byatt on what would have been her 88th birthday. More, in the volume’s longest story, was the sentence: ‘And she waited for the sound of thunder, or worse, the silence of absence.’[2] I was struck (or bumped against) by that last phrase, having been thinking recently in similar terms. Sometimes the silence here is indeed the dictionary’s ‘absence of sound; complete quietness’ – but often something more. Silences have their own flavours, idiosyncrasies, tones, strengths and essences.

‘Throughout the house’, Patrick White wrote in his story ‘The Night the Prowler’, ‘there were the sounds of furniture, and clocks, and silence.’[3] It has to be said that furniture was often on his mind, not least in populating Theodora Goodman’s world: ‘There is perhaps no more complete a reality than a chair and a table’ – though he adds there: ‘Still, there will always also be people, Theodora Goodman said, and she continued to wait with something of the superior acceptance of mahogany for fresh acts.’[4] When the painter Hurtle Duffield meets a man named Mothersole on the ferry, the printer asks what sort of things Duffield paints. ‘“Well! For some time now, tables and chairs.”’ Mothersole finds it a ’funny sort of subject’ and Duffield responds: ‘“Why? What could be more honest?”’[5]

There must be vastly fewer ticking clocks in the world now, timepieces having been widely and inescapably recruited to the cause of at least electronic silence. Ticking is a disturbing anomaly in this grave, enslaved new world. My maternal grandfather once owned several fish and chip shops in Portsmouth but, by the time I was of an age to notice such things, he had become a jeweller and watchmaker. The clocks that had audibly populated so much fiction through several centuries still kept the faith in his shop. He even had, at one point and appropriately enough, a grandfather clock. Ticks, tocks and chimes galore.

(The Clockmakers’ Museum. Musical table clock by Thwaites for Barraud. L2015-3473 Science Museum Group Collection Online.)

Thinking of silence, then, we often think of absence too, perhaps of the old saying that ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ (or, as I once heard someone—probably of a poetic turn of mind—say, a few drinks in: ‘Absinthe takes the art au fond-er’). Old sayings, though. People sometimes ask: are they true? To which the answer is, can only be, it depends. For some yes, for others no.

Absence can be a source of amusement, an occasion for pleasure. Rudyard Kipling’s parents (John Lockwood Kipling and Alice Macdonald) were unable to attend a party given by Dante Gabriel Rossetti because the date of their sailing on the S. S. Ripon to Bombay had been brought forward by a day, to Wednesday 12 April, 1865. ‘In their absence, however, Ford Madox Brown proposed their health, in a speech throughout which, with his usual inability to remember names, he referred to the bridegroom as “John Gilpin”—to the delight of all present.’[6]

Annie Erneaux, though, recalled literally writing out her passion in Florence, being temporarily removed from an intense and wounding affair: ‘Those eight days on my own, without speaking, except to waiters in restaurants, haunted by the image of A. (to the extent that I was astonished to be accosted by men, could they not see him silhouetted inside my own body?) seemed to me an ordeal for the betterment of love. A sort of further investment, this time to imagination and craving through absence.’ And elsewhere she stated that: ‘It is the absence of meaning in what one lives, at the moment one lives it, which multiplies the possibilities of writing.’[7]

(Franz Ferdinand & Sophie. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis via The Guardian)

When Stanley Weintraub wrote about the guns falling silent at the end of the First Word War, his book’s title, A Stillness Heard Round the World, looked back both to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Concord Hymn’, which included the phrase ‘the shot heard round the world’ and the fact that Emerson’s phrase has often been applied to the shot that began the war, fired at the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip, who killed both the Archduke and his wife Sophie on 28 June 1914. The significance of that incident was not widely grasped and reports of it were often to be found on the inner pages of the following day’s newspapers – a squabble in the Balkans! – but since then a great deal of writing about it has certainly been found possible.

Marcel Proust observed that ‘the absence of a thing is not merely that, it is not simply a partial lack, it is a disruption of everything else, it is a new state which one cannot foresee in the old.’[8] We can, in fact, often foresee that absence, we grasp its inevitability, not least the inescapable end of every living thing but of course that single fact is not, cannot be, all there is. We distinguish between ‘surprise’ and ‘shock’ for a reason. Our awareness that something is coming, will inevitably happen, does not provide a thorough preparation for the event and its aftermath. Some effects are unscripted.

‘There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things’, Helen Macdonald wrote. ‘And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.’[9]

Yes. As Sarah Moss wrote, ‘One does not need to see ghosts, to know that people are haunted.’ And, a little further on: ‘It is not ghosts but absence that is harder to bear.’[10]

Notes

[1] Anne Carson, Paris Review interview (2004), quoted by Jennifer Krasinski in her review of Carson’s Wrong Norma in Bookforum, 30, 3 (Winter 2024), 13.

[2] A. S. Byatt, ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’, in Medusa’s Ankles: Selected Stories (London: Vintage, 2023), 256.

[3] Patrick White, ‘The Night the Prowler’, in The Cockatoos: Shorter Novels and Stories (London: Jonathan Cape, 1974), 149.

[4] White, The Aunt’s Story, (1948; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963), 141.

[5] White, The Vivisector (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 420.

[6] Roger Lancelyn Green, Kipling and the Children (London: Elek, 1965), 20, citing Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones (1904), I, 290.

[7] Annie Erneaux, Simple Passion, translated by Tanya Leslie (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021), 33; A Girl’s Story, translated by Alison L. Strayer (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020), 143.

[8] Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time. 1: The Way By Swann’s, translated by Lydia Davis (London: Allen Lane, 2002), 308.

[9] Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk (London: Jonathan Cape, 2014), 171.

[10] Sarah Moss, Signs for Lost Children (London: Granta Books, 2016), 64, 86.

Dusting the monument

Let not a monument give you or me hopes,
Since not a pinch of dust remains of Cheops.
(Byron, Don Juan, I, 219)

Walking to and from the Watershed, meeting my elder daughter, prior to her birthday, and her travels to Germany and France, we cross Queen Square. It’s a famous Bristol feature, dating in its present form from 1700 and named after the queen two years later. The statue of William III, ‘Dutch William’, by John Michael Rysbrack (originally Jan Michiel Rijsbrack), stands in the centre. The Bristol riots of October 1831, following the House of Lords blocking a Reform Bill, left nearly a hundred buildings in the square burned to the ground, their cellars looted, including the Mansion House. Four rioters were hanged and scores sent to prison. Estimates of those who actually died in the riots ranged up to 250. The rebuilding went on for decades.

Approaching the monument, I felt a flicker of uncertainty as to whether I would pass it on the left or the right. It really doesn’t matter to me but it certainly did to William Faulkner’s Benjy Compson, 33 years old but with the mind of a child and no sense of time. The closing pages portray, you might say, Benjy’s sound and his brother Jason’s fury. Luster, 14 year old son of the Compson family’s black servant Dilsey, in the driving seat, swings the horse, Queenie, to the left at the Confederate monument. ‘For an instant Ben sat in an utter hiatus. Then he bellowed. Bellow on bellow, his voice mounted, with scarce interval for breath. There was more than astonishment in it, it was horror; shock; agony eyeless, tongueless; just sound’ – provoking Jason to rush furiously across the square and on to the step. ‘With a backhanded blow he hurled Luster aside and caught the reins and sawed Queenie about and doubled the reins back and slashed her across the hips. He cut her again and again, into a plunging gallop, while Ben’s hoarse agony roared about them, and swung her about to the right of the monument. Then he struck Luster over the head with his fist.
‘“Don’t you know any better than to take him to the left?” he said.’
When the horse moves again Ben hushes at once. ‘The broken flower drooped over Ben’s feet and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and façade flowed smoothly once more from left to right; post and tree, window and doorway, and signboard, each in its ordered place.’[1]

(The Colston statue taking a dip, Bristol, June 2020)

Monuments (not just Confederate ones) are a tricky business, of course. Rysbrack also produced a sculpture of Edward Colston, the Bristol slave trader and philanthropist, another statue of whom, created in 1895 by John Cassidy, was toppled into Bristol Harbour by protesters in June 2020. There have been many other contested monuments, Cecil Rhodes, Columbus and James Cook among them.

But other figures, perhaps in other ages, provoke quite different, and often more positive, emotions and reactions. Of the stone monument of Tsubo-no-ishibumi on the ancient site of the Taga castle in the village of Ichikawa (about six feet tall and three feet wide), Bashō wrote:

‘In this ever-changing world where mountains crumble, rivers change their courses, roads are deserted, rocks are buried, and old trees yield to young shoots, it was nothing short of a miracle that this monument alone had survived the battering of a thousand years to be the living memory of the ancients. I felt as if I were in the presence of the ancients themselves, and forgetting all the troubles I had suffered on the road, rejoiced in the utter happiness of this joyful moment, not without tears in my eyes.’[2]

Also in Japan is the monument to Ernest Fenollosa, in Uyeno Park, Tokyo. He had suffered his final, fatal heart attack in September 1908, at his home in London, while his step-daughter Erwin Scott (‘Noshi’, aged sixteen), was reading Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’ to him. His ashes remained for a short while in Highgate cemetery but were then transported to Japan, to the hills overlooking Lake Biwa and the gardens of Miidera Temple, where they were reburied on the first anniversary of his death. The inscription, chosen by his students, read: ‘To the merit of our Sensei [teacher], high like the mountains and eternal like the water.’[3]

(Ernest and Mary Fenollosa)

It is not always a case of a specified and designated monument, but may be something that becomes so, such as the Esnoga synagogue that Steven Nadler wrote of: ‘Almost alone among the synagogues of Holland, this unmistakeable monument to Jewish achievement was left standing, undamaged, by the Nazis. Inside the hechal [ark of the Torah] is a Torah said to be the one brought to Amsterdam from Emden in 1602 by Moses Uri Halevi.’[4]

A monument might also serve as a complex representation of parallels and comparisons, whether discerned or imposed, as in Ezra Pound’s focus upon—or obsession with—the condottiere Sigismondo Malatesta’s monument to his wife Isotta. Pound was writing the Malatesta Cantos in the early 1920s and, Lawrence Rainey writes, ‘On the simplest level Pound seeks to suggest that the Tempio’s construction heralds a new cultural era, the dawn of the Renaissance and the spring of a neopagan revival.’ Of more urgent personal interest, though, he wished ‘to discern a parallel between himself and Sigismondo Malatesta’, and ‘between the magnum opus he wished to write and the unfinished monument of Rimini.’[5] That the Cantos (like the Tempio) ultimately remained unfinished was not then envisaged, and remains a curious historical irony.

‘Exegi monumentum aere perennius’, Horace wrote (Odes, Book III), and Pound translated it:

This monument will outlast metal and I made it
More durable than the king’s seat, higher than pyramids.
Gnaw of the wind and rain?
Impotent
The flow of the years to break it, however many.[6]

One might argue of some of these names that it’s a bit soon to tell – but Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) has lasted over 2030 years so far, and seems to be holding on quite well. . .

Notes

[1] William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929), in Novels 1926-1929, edited by Joseph Blotner and Noel Polk (New York: Library of America, 2006), 1123-1124. In ‘Appendix. Compson: 1699-1945’ (1141), Faulkner wrote of Luster that he was ‘a man, aged 14’, who was ‘not only capable of the complete care and security’ of Benjy, a man ‘twice his age and three times his size, but could keep him entertained.’

[2] Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and other travel sketches, translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa (London: Penguin Books, 1966), 113.

[3] Lawrence W. Chisolm, Fenollosa: The Far East and American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 211, 35.

[4] Steven Nadler, Rembrandt’s Jews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 162.

[5] Lawrence S. Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History, and the Malatesta Cantos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 38, 43.

[6] Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations, edited by Richard Sieburth (New York: Library of America, 2003), 1146.

Remembering, or forgetting, 4 August

Looking at the news this 4 August, it’s sobering to reflect that one of the candidates for the Tory leadership recently vowed to ‘turn the tide of Liberalism’, when it is painfully obvious that what is actually – and urgently – needed is to turn the tide of fascism and racist violence.

Today is the 110^th anniversary of Britain’s declaration of war, which will be old news to anyone who reads or writes around the First World War, or simply has an average grasp of history, and it has tended rather to dwarf other, personal, events and anniversaries – though not, perhaps, for the individuals concerned.

Walter de la Mare (‘Jack’) and Elfrida Ingpen (‘Elfie’) were married privately in the parish church at Battersea on 4 August 1899. D. H. Lawrence’s sister Ada married William Edward Clarke on 4 August 1913.[1] Julian Barnes noted that his grandparents were married on 4 August 1914, the day itself,[2] which also marked the birth of Anthony, Rebecca West’s son by H. G. Wells. It was the birthday of Florence, Stanley Spencer’s sister: she married J. M. Image, Cambridge don and brother to Selwyn Image.[3] Ezra Pound, quite recently arrived in London, went in February 1909 to see Selwyn, ‘who does stained glass. & has writ a book of poems. & was one of the gang with Dowson – Jonson – Symons – Yeats etc. – talks of “when ‘old Verlaine’ came over etc.’[4]

(Plaque, Royal College Street, Camden, via The Guardian: photograph by Frank Baron)

‘Old Verlaine’ came over more than once, firstly in 1872, in the company of Arthur Rimbaud (whom he later shot and wounded, in Brussels, another story), settling for a while in rooms in Howland Street off the Tottenham Court Road and, on a second visit shortly afterwards, in Camden Town. They seem to have dropped in on one of the soirées at the Fitzroy Square home of Ford’s maternal grandfather, the painter Ford Madox Brown and his second wife Emma.[5] In October 1893, at the suggestion of William Rothenstein, Verlaine arrived to lecture and read his poetry, in London and in Oxford. Ernest Dowson recorded that, arriving in the small hours of the morning, Verlaine was greeted by the poet and critic Arthur Symons, ‘bearing a packet of biscuits and a bottle of gin’. He gave his first lecture at Barnard’s Inn on 21 November and two days later arrived in Oxford, to be met by Rothenstein and a man named York Powell, of Christ Church (Icelandic scholar, authority on Roman Law, boxing and Middle High Dutch. He also knew Hebrew and Old Irish). Verlaine lectured on contemporary French poetry ‘in the room behind Mr Blackwell’s shop’ and was so enamoured of the city—‘Ô toi, cité charmante et mémorable, Oxford!’— that prising him out of it necessitated both escorting him to the train and withholding his lecture fee until he was safely on the train for London.[6]

Famously (if not quite famously enough), 4 August is the date threaded through Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier—seventeen occurrences in all—and also the birthdate (4 August 1841) of W. H. Hudson, one of Ford’s most consistently admired writers, to whose work he recurred over more than thirty years, sometimes singling out Nature in Downland but more generally stressing that Hudson’s writing had ‘a tranquillity, a clearness of epithet, and an utter absence of affectation or strain that renders his pages like balm for tired souls’, adding that, as with Turgenev, ‘it is all one whether these writers treat of birds or of South American revolutions, of peasants singing, or of Nihilists at their debates. It is simply that the pages of their books reveal a personality, restful soothing, and itself quite at ease.’[7]

(Edward Heron-Allen in 1927, via The Edward Heron-Allen Society)

On 4 August 1918, the polymath (writer, scientist, linguist, historian) Edward Heron-Allen—very much not a friend of Ford’s—wrote in his journal that: ‘One thing stands out and is certain, and that is, that mentally and physically we are changed, changed as we never dreamed a whole nation could be changed.’ He noted that he had ‘escaped the “Spanish Influenza” of which we hear so much, but it seems to be a real menace. We are told that the German Army is “decimated” by it, and that this accounts for the delay and failure’ of the recent offensive.[8]

A decade and a bit further on, the poet and artist David Jones was making his third visit to his friend Helen Sutherland at Rock Hall, Northumberland, 4 August 1931. At the start and end of each visit, Jones would be driven past the Duke of Northumberland’s castle. Helen told him that this was on the site of Lancelot’s castle, Joyous Guard – and the supposed place of his burial. ‘With this association in mind, Jones referred to the church at Rock as “the Chapel Perilous”, the place of terrifying enchantment that Lancelot enters – an episode in Malory that reminded him of his experience at night in Mametz Wood.’[9]

The Battle of Mametz Wood, during the First Battle of the Somme, involved British attacks on 7 and 10-12 July, centrally involving the 38th (Welsh) Division and resulting in huge losses: their casualties were one-fifth of their total strength. David Jones was wounded in the early hours of 11 July, and his great poem In Parenthesis, stops at that point.[10]

(David Jones via The Poetry Foundation)

Lie still under the oak
next to the Jerry
and Sergeant Jerry Coke.
The feet of the reserves going up tread level with your fore-
head; and no word for you; they whisper one with another;
pass on, inward;
these latest succours:
green Kimmerii to bear up the war.[11]

Ford Madox Ford left Cardiff with the 3rd Battalion on 13 July; and departed for France from Waterloo on 17 July. When 4 August came around this time, he was in a Casualty Clearing Station at Corbie, having been blown into the air and severely concussed by a high explosive shell, ‘so that, as I have said, three weeks of my life are completely dead to me though I seem to have gone about my duties as usual. But, by the first of September I had managed to remember at least my own name…’[12]

Quite a few public figures (not least newspaper columnists) seem to have lost their memories lately – quite selectively and with markedly less excuse.

Notes

[1] Letters of D. H. Lawrence II, June 1913–October 1916, edited by George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 38n.

[2] Julian Barnes, Nothing to be Frightened of (Cape 2008), 28.

[3] Kenneth Pople, Stanley Spencer: A Biography (London: Harper Collins, 1991), 55, 49.

[4] Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929, edited by Mary de Rachewiltz, David Moody and Joanna Moody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 160.

[5] Angela Thirlwell, Into the Frame: The Four Loves of Ford Madox Brown (London: Chatto & Windus, 2010), 100. On a later visit, Verlaine lodged at 10, London Street, Fitzroy Square, very close to Howland Street.

[6] Joanna Richardson, ‘’The English Connection: French Writers and England, 1800-1900’, in Richard Faber, editor, Essays by Divers Hands: being the transactions of the Royal Society of Literature. New Series: Volume XLV (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1988), 33-35; Joanna Richardson, Verlaine (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1971), 317-320.

[7] Ford Madox Ford, ‘Literary Portraits: XXV. The Face of the Country’, Tribune (11 January 1908), 2.

[8] Edward Heron-Allen’s Journal of the Great War: From Sussex Shore to Flanders Fields, edited by Brian W. Harvey and Carol Fitzgerald (Lewes: Sussex Record Society, 2002), 203. A footnote adds that there were approximately 70 million deaths worldwide in 1918-19, compared to the estimated total of 7.8 million killed in action in the war.

[9] Thomas Dilworth, David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet (London: Jonathan Cape, 2017), 140-142.

[10] Anthony Hyne, David Jones: A Fusilier at the Front (Bridgend: Seren Books 1995), 37.

[11] David Jones, In Parenthesis (1937; London: Faber, 1963), 187.

[12] Ford Madox Ford, It Was the Nightingale (London: Heinemann, 1934), 175.

Oxford Days (a few)

(Tom Quad, Christ Church College)

‘Even when we protested the invasion of Iraq’, I said to the Librarian, recalling that day some twenty years earlier when we shuffled along London streets in company with over a million others, ‘I think we moved more quickly than this.’

‘This’ was our glacial progress up St Aldates in Oxford on a sunny afternoon, together with residents, tourists, American and other participants in the Oxford Experience, or those embarked upon the countless other summer courses and programmes, and many hundreds of—mainly Japanese—children dressed in the Gryffindor house colours of scarlet and gold, concerned to take in the Harry Potter vibrations from New College, the Bodleian Library and Christ Church College. Tour guides in their dozens hoisted small flags or halted in gateways with uplifted arms. Lanyards in their hundreds bobbed or swung. Some individuals, either on home turf or away, looked vague, a little stunned, reminding me of the passage in Rory Stewart’s memoir, where he described Steve Hilton, David Cameron’s director of strategy, moving into the corridor and another room. ‘He seemed to be searching for something – although I couldn’t tell whether it was a cat, an idea, or his shoes.’[1]

On High Street or Broad Street, Broad Walk, Christ Church Meadow, by rivers and canals, on bridges and benches, crowds ebbed and flowed – but mainly flowed. We are soon to be visible in a thousand physical or virtual photograph albums. I said, at one point, ‘Okay, if it’s a child of ten or younger having a photograph taken, we’ll pause. Otherwise, we plough straight on.’ The Librarian agreed but soon lowered the qualifying age to eight, then six. Minutes later, it was down to zero. Thereafter, we ploughed straight on.

(Alice Liddell’s dad, Henry George Liddell, dean of Christ Church from 1855)

Oxford! The literary references the word throws up are astonishing, even excluding the people that only studied there. Lewis Carroll, or rather, Charles Dodgson, haunts the place, but other names rampage through a distracted memory: Philip Pullman, Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night, John Wain, P. D. James, Iris Murdoch, Hardy’s Jude and Colin Dexter’s Morse, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. A random footnote fact I gathered since that visit was that Edward De Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, was educated not at Oxford, as one might reasonably expect, but at Queen’s College, Cambridge. Attempts were later made to claim him as the ‘real’ author of Shakespeare’s plays, an idea launched by the splendidly named John Thomas Looney. De Vere was the nephew of Arthur Golding, translator of Ovid, his Metamorphoses ‘the most beautiful book in the language’, in Ezra Pound’s words.[2] A man skilled in ‘fourteeners’ (that many syllables in a line):

Then sprang up first the golden age, which of it selfe maintainde,
The truth and right of every thing unforst and unconstrainde.
There was no feare of punishment, there was no threatning lawe
In brazen tables nayled up, to keep the folke in awe.
There was no man would crouch or creepe to Judge with cap in hand,
They lived safe without a Judge, in everie Realme and lande.

Here Daphne flees from Apollo:

And as shee ran the meeting windes hir garments backewarde blue,
So that hir naked skinne apearde behinde hir as she flue,
Hir goodly yellowe golden haire that hanged loose and slacke,
With every puffe of ayre did wave and tosse behind hir backe.[3]

One name occurs on the ground as well as in the mind, the memorial plaque in Christ Church Cathedral (astonishing vaulted ceiling, stained glass by Burne-Jones and others, the St Frideswide Shrine). W. H. Auden came to the College to study biology, switched to English Literature in his second year and graduated (with a third class degree) in 1928. Nearly 30 years later, he became Oxford Professor of Poetry, and returned to Christ Church to live (part of the time) in 1972, the year before his death.

Wot, no Ford Madox Ford notes? Perhaps a sly one. In Some Do Not. . ., Christopher Tietjens, in a mood verging on ‘high good humour’, walks through a Kentish field with Valentine Wannop, a scene, a day, a walk which will recur in both their memories. Among those things that the best people must know are the local names (and the stories behind them) of the plants and flowers they pass. Tietjens—younger son, mathematician, member of the English public official class, who will also, in time, be lover, soldier and antique dealer—tells over to himself the words, the names, the language:

In the hedge: Our lady’s bedstraw: dead-nettle: bachelor’s button (but in Sussex they call it ragged robin, my dear: So interesting!) cowslip (paigle, you know, from the old French pasque, meaning Easter): burr, burdock (farmer that thy wife may thrive, let not burr and burdock wive!); violet leaves, the flowers of course over; black briony; wild clematis: later it’s old man’s beard; purple loose-strife. (That our young maids long purples call and liberal shepherds give a grosser name. So racy of the soil!) …[4]

In the wonderful Botanic Garden, the country’s oldest, one section is the Literary Garden, featuring plants that occur in literature, Alice in Wonderland, Agatha Christie (a great user of poisons) and others, including William Shakespeare:

Yes, those liberal shepherds grossly naming again. Modernists though Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, Wyndham Lewis and Ford were, they were not Futurists rejecting the past—a little more selective than that: ‘BLAST years 1837 to 1900’ and, indeed, ‘BLESS SHAKESPEARE for his bitter Northern Rhetoric of humour’—and they all had frequent recourse to that Elizabethan. . .

Notes

[1] Rory Stewart, Politics on the Edge: A Memoir from Within (London: Jonathan Cape, 2023), 100.

[2] Ezra Pound, The ABC of Reading (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 127

[3] Extracts in The Oxford Book of Classical Verse, edited by Adrian Poole and Jeremy Maule (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 394; The Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation, Chosen and Edited by Charles Tomlinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 38.

[4] Ford Madox Ford, Some Do Not. . . (1924; edited by Max Saunders, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2010), 132.

Blackbird, macaroni

(Edward Atkinson Hornel, The Blackbird Song: Dundee Art Galleries and Museum Collection)

I thought for a moment that the blackbird in the tree that reaches over the back neighbour’s fence into our garden had sung itself hoarse. It’s certainly dwindled, unsurprisingly, since it was already in full flow when I came downstairs, cheered on by the cat, at 05:30 this morning. There is even a tentative sunlight, flickering a little, as if unsure of itself, a faltering connection – and who can wonder, at the end of an 18-month period (since October 2022) which is the wettest in Met Office recorded history? Of course, they only started collecting the data in 1836 (Guardian, 10 April 2024), so it’s not even 200 years yet.

The weekly journals arrive, still a little light on the good news. ‘Easy stories drive out hard ones. Simple paradigms prevail over complicated ones.’[1] Well, yes, though sometimes it really is that simple and, hearing some of the voices currently uplifted in the world, brings the sentiment expressed in the Goncourt Journal vividly to mind: ‘If there is a God, atheism must strike Him as less of an insult than religion.’[2]

The ice-cream van drifts into hearing, still a few streets off, playing ‘Yankee Doodle went to town’. I used to be rather baffled by the line, ‘Stuck a feather in his cap / and called it macaroni.’ Now, along with anyone that has access to the internet, and, presumably, millions of Americans, I’m no longer baffled, at least by that. As the incomparable Opie team has it: ‘Young dandies, who had been on the Tour, wore fantastical clothes, and affected Continental habits, were dubbed “Macaronis”; there was, indeed, a Macaroni Club flourishing in 1764.’[3] By 1772, a year before the Boston Tea Party and three years before the American War of Independence began, the Macaronis ‘were distinguished especially by an immense knot of artificial hair worn at the back but with the peruke flat on top’.[4] The story goes that the British forces sang it to mock those unsophisticated colonials but the Yankees took it up anyway. And, come to think of it, they won that war.

Philip Dawe, ‘The Macaroni. A Real Character at the Late Masquerade’ (1773)

Later, the rain still holding off – and now I can hear the bees. The tulips are open and not yet fallen; the cherry tree in its strong pot some seven feet high; branches above the high fence nodding; faint tones of the Italian near-neighbour and the laughter of a few guests, their windows must be ajar, the season’s premier opening; less faint tones of scaffolders a few houses along; Harry the Cat nodding on an outside blanket; all this is the first real scent of summer. I remember Sarah Bakewell noting that Plutarch’s Moralia, translated into French in the same year in which Montaigne began writing Essays, touched on the question of how to achieve peace of mind: ‘Plutarch’s advice was the same as Seneca’s: focus on what is present in front of you, and pay full attention to it.’[5] No doubt both Plutarch and Seneca had their difficulties to contend with – but one of those was not the internet, with its clamorous, competing and often lethal versions of the world. Reading of Elizabeth I’s ‘innate disposition to hedge’ in ‘the face of peril or hostility’, I noted Strachey’s later remarks about Robert Cecil: ‘But passivity, too, may be a kind of action – may, in fact, prove more full of consequence than action itself.’[6] Indeed. Or, too often, alas.

Notes

[1] Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (London: Chatto & Windus, 1984), 9.

[2] Edmund and Jules de Goncourt, entry for 24 January 1868, Pages From the Goncourt Journal, edited and translated by Robert Baldick (New York: New York Review Books, 2006), 135.

[3] The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, edited by Iona and Peter Opie, second edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 532.

[4] James Stevens Cox, An Illustrated Dictionary of Hairdressing and Wigmaking (London: Batsford, 1984), 99.

[5] Sarah Bakewell, How To Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer (London: Vintage 2011), 32.

[6] Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth and Essex: a Tragic History (1928; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 114, 140.