(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.
(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-BornExpatriate 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 TheNorth 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).
[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.
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.
(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, 15th – 18th 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.
(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.
‘Darknesse and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with memory a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest stroaks of affliction leave but short smart upon us.’[1]
The leaves are falling faster now, perhaps mostly fallen. Our clocks have gone back an hour and we are on Greenwich Mean Time. The polymath Edward Heron-Allen wrote in his journal on 22 May 1916, ‘The notable feature of the month is the establishment by law on the 20th of “summer time” which Willett, the originator of the idea, never lived to see introduced. At midnight on the 20th we all had to put our clocks on one hour, and in this way an hour of daylight is “added” to the day.’ And, five months later, he noted: ‘I do not think I have recorded that on 30 September we put our clocks back an hour and returned to Greenwich time.’[2]
William Willett, whose 1907 pamphlet, The Waste of Daylight, marked a crucial point in the advance towards ‘summer time’, had died from influenza on 4 March 1915, at the early age of 58, and is buried in St Nicholas churchyard in Chislehurst (as is his second wife.) The 1916 emergency law was passed to change the clocks twice a year as a measure to reduce energy and increase war production. It became a permanent feature when the Summertime Act was passed in 1925.
Leaves falling, darker days, the year in some ways closing down – but all these are in the natural order of things, as—or so we hope—the political convulsions, atrocities in Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine, Sudan and elsewhere, are not. At least, as Jake Barnes says, at the close of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’
(John Berryman via The Paris Review)
‘Now there is further a difficulty with the light’, John Berryman wrote:
I am obliged to perform in complete darkness operations of great delicacy on my self.[3]
Currently those operations feature slow and sometimes painful analyses of my bafflement and confusion, not always helped by the Librarian’s daily bulletins from the battlefield that is the American election, often delivered in tones of appalled astonishment, while the phrase ‘batshit crazy!’ tends to recur.
What, in some senses, seems self-evident (one candidate sane, the other rather less so) is dwarfed by complexities and nuances almost invisible to us – we’re here and they’re. . . over there. I grasp, more or less, the fact that America is so divided a country now that neither side can—perhaps has no wish to—hear the other. But there is that other complication. While I can see that the appalling and spineless response of the Biden government to the conflict in the Middle East must repel a good many voters, it baffles me that those voters should think that withholding their vote from Harris (and thereby potentially contributing to her defeat) could somehow help the Palestinian people. Surely the precise opposite?
(John Donne, unknown English artist, c.1595)
Well, we’ll know soon enough. People, eh? I think of Katherine Rundell writing that, ‘amid all Donne’s reinventions, there was a constant running though his life and work: he remained steadfast in his belief that we, humans, are at once a catastrophe and a miracle.’ And: ‘He thought often of sin, and miserable failure, and suicide. He believed us unique in our capacity to ruin ourselves. “Nothing but man, of all envenomed things,/Doth work upon itself with inborn sting”. He was a man who walked so often in darkness that it became for him a daily commute.’[4]
Notes
[1] Sir Thomas Browne. Hydriotaphia, or Urn-Buriall, in Selected Writings, edited by Geoffrey Keynes (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), 152.
[2]Edward Heron-Allen’sJournal of the Great War: From Sussex Shore to Flanders Fields, edited by Brian W. Harvey and Carol Fitzgerald (Lewes: Sussex Record Society, 2002), 65, 71.
[3] John Berryman, ‘Dream Song # 67’, The Dream Songs, collected edition (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 74.
[4] Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (London: Faber, 2023), 5-7.
(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.
Alfred Lord Tennyson died on 6 October 1892, having served as Queen Victoria’s Poet Laureate for over forty years, the longest ever tenure – though a later octogenarian, John Masefield, came very close. Tennyson’s funeral, which took place six days after his death, was a pretty grand affair. His remains were, the Times reported, ‘consigned to their last resting-place in Poets’ Corner, Westminster’ – the grave of Robert Browning, who had died three years previously, is immediately adjacent to Tennyson’s. All the leading members of the royal family sent representatives (Sir Henry Ponsonby, Sir Dighton Probyn, Lord Edward Cecil) and the place was thronged with bishops, lords and ladies, the pall-bearers including the Duke of Argyll and Lord Kelvin. Conan Doyle, Ellen Terry, John Burns, Frederic Harrison and Henry Irving were among the mourners. In the street outside, vendors were offering, for a penny, copies of the poet’s 1889 lyric, ‘Crossing the Bar’ (author portrait included):
Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me! And may there be no moaning of the bar, When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep, Too full for sound and foam, When that which drew from out the boundless deep Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell, And after that the dark! And may there be no sadness of farewell, When I embark;
For though from out our bourne of Time and Place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face When I have crost the bar.[1]
Tennyson was 80 when he wrote it, so unsurprisingly aware that the encounter with his ‘Pilot’ was not that far off.
Edward Burne-Jones was particularly excited that the city of Mantua ‘had sent bay from Virgil’s birthplace to lay in the tomb.’ In fact, ‘bay’ and ‘pilot’ occurred in another ‘literary’ interment context a few years later, though William Morris’s ‘country funeral’, Fiona MacCarthy observes, ‘was the absolute antithesis of Tennyson’s burial in Westminster Abbey in 1892.’[2]
(William Morris, Fruit (Wallpaper): William Morris Society: Kelmscott House)
Morris died on 3 October 1896. He was only 62 but such a tireless worker, such a tireless maker, of pictures, poems, translations, tapestries, stained-glass windows, fabrics, carpets, furniture, illuminated books, wallpapers, prose romances and more that, as is often remarked, the primary cause of his death was simply being William Morris. His funeral took place on 6 October, exactly four years after the death of Tennyson. The body had to be transported from Paddington to Lechlade by train (a form of transport that Morris disliked intensely), then taken by cart to Kelmscott Church.
It was a cold wet morning, and the day turned stormy later. In that week’s issue of the Saturday Review (10 October 1896), there were pieces on Morris by George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Symons – and R. B. Cunninghame Graham, whose account of the day on which ‘the most striking figure of our times’ was buried, began with that weather. ‘As we never associated William Morris with fine weather, rather taking him to be a pilot poet lent by the Vikings to steer us from the doldrums in which we now lie all becalmed in smoke to some Valhalla of his own creation beyond the world’s end, it seemed appropriate that on his burial day the rain descended and the wind blew half a gale from the north-west.’ He noted of the arrival at Lechlade: ‘There, unlike Oxford, the whole town was out’, and added that the open haycart on which the coffin was transported to Kelmscott Church was ‘driven by a man who looked coeval with the Saxon Chronicle.’[3]
‘Over the coffin were thrown two pieces of Oriental embroidered brocade, and a wreath of bays was laid at his head’, the Daily News reported. The mourners included, alongside painters, publishers and printers, workmen from Merton Abbey (where the tapestry, weaving and fabric printing workshops were sited), Kelmscott villagers and members of the Art Workers’ Guild, all in their daily working clothes. The architect William Lethaby wrote: ‘It was the only funeral I have ever seen that did not make me ashamed to have to be buried.’[4]
(William Morris, Kelmscott Press Edition of ‘Godefrey of Boloyne’ by William Caxton: William Morris Society: Kelmscott House)
Morris continues to attract enormous biographical and scholarly interest, and warrants it all. So many arts, so many crafts, so many connections, so widespread and generative an influence, cropping up in all manner of places, often the expected ones, sometimes less so. Ezra Pound read Morris to the young Hilda Doolittle, ‘in an orchard under blossoming—yes, they must have been blossoming—apple trees.’ And: ‘It was Ezra who really introduced me to William Morris. He literally shouted “The Gilliflower of Gold” in the orchard. How did it go? Hah! hah!La belle jaune giroflée. And there was “Two Red Roses across the Moon” and “The Defence of Guenevere.”’[5] Pound read Morris to Yeats too, in Stone Cottage at the edge of Ashdown Forest, his translations of the Icelandic sagas.[6] Yeats would later recall of Morris’s prose romances that they were ‘the only books I was ever to read slowly that I might not come too quickly to the end.’[7]
(William Morris, La Belle Iseult: Tate)
Fiona MacCarthy remarks that ‘There was a neurotic basis to his fluency. On a good day he could write 1,000 lines of verse’, and some readers will find some of the longer poems soporific.[8] Penelope Fitzgerald wrote that the lyrics, in her opinion were ‘far the most important part’ of his poetry and, ‘If I could keep them I would cheerfully sweep all the sagas and Earthly Paradises under the carpet.’[9] Other readers, in Morris’s own time, and since, have felt quite differently. Yeats continued to be one of them. In October 1933, he reported to his old friend (and ex-lover) Olivia Shakespear (Pound’s mother-in-law) his attempt to read Morris’s long poem The Story of Sigurd the Volsung to his daughter and then to his wife: ‘and last night when I came to the description of the birth of Sigurd and that wonderful first nursing of the child, I could hardly read for my tears. Then when Anne had gone to bed I tried to read it to George and it was just the same.’[10]
This is probably the passage he refers to, early in Book II:
Then she held him a little season on her weary and happy breast And she told him of Sigmund and Volsung and the best sprung forth from the best: She spake to the new-born baby as one who might understand, And told him of Sigmund’s battle, and the dead by the sea-flood’s strand, And of all the wars passed over, and the light with darkness blent.
So she spake, and the sun rose higher, and her speech at last was spent, And she gave him back to the women to bear forth to the people’s kings, That they too may rejoice in her glory and her day of happy things.[11]
For other admirers of Morris, it may be the campaigner, the Socialist, or perhaps the designer and producer of stained-glass, fabrics, stories, the late romances, the lectures and the essays:
‘To give people pleasure in the things they must perforce use, that is one great office of decoration; to give people pleasure in the things they must perforce make. That is the other use of it.’ ‘Does not our subject look important enough now? I say that without those arts, our rest would be vacant and uninteresting, our labour mere endurance, mere wearing away of body and mind.’[12]
Yes, the allusions to damaging and artificial divisions are often wonderfully suggestive of other divisions causing much wider harms – as, of course, they continue to do. And, though I may be prejudiced in this regard, I like his idea, in ‘The Beauty of Life’, of ‘the fittings necessary to the sitting-room of a healthy person’. The first of these is ‘a book-case with a great many books in it’. Oddly, he never seems to mention, let alone recommend, piles of books everywhere else. . .
Notes
[1]Tennyson: A Selected Edition, edited by Christopher Ricks (Harlow: Longman Group, 1989), 665-666.
[2] Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life for Our Time (London: Faber & Faber, 1994), 631, 673-675.
[3] R. B. Cunninghame Graham, ‘With the North-West Wind’, Saturday Review (10 October 1896), Vol. 82, Issue 2137, 389-390.
[4] Quoted by Philip Henderson, William Morris: His Life, Work and Friends (Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1973), 429.
[5] H. D., End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound, edited by Norman Holmes Pearson and Michael King (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1980), 22-23.
[6] James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 142-143.
[7] W. B. Yeats, ‘The Trembling of the Veil [1922]: Four Years’, in Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955), 141.
[9] Penelope Fitzgerald to Dorothy Coles, 5 June [1992], So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald, edited by Terence Dooley (London: Fourth Estate, 2008), 460.
[10]The Letters of W. B. Yeats, edited by Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), 816.
[11] William Morris, The story of Sigurd the Volsung and the fall of the Niblungs (London: Ellis & White, 1877), 80-81.
[12] ‘The Lesser Arts’, in William Morris: The Selected Writings, edited by G. D. H. Cole (London: The Nonesuch Press, 1934), 496.
(Francisco Goya, Las Parcas: Atropos, or The Fates: Prado, Madrid)
‘Words of grief become almost meaningless in these days, they have to be used so frequently. But one does not feel any the less. Sorrows do not grow lighter because they are many.’[1]
Sitting in the kitchen, turning away from the seemingly endless and indiscriminate slaughter of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank, now extended to Lebanon, watching the rain or the gaps between the rain, I hear the Librarian coming into the kitchen, to announce another day of being baffled by the news that the American election is still ‘on a knife-edge’, the candidates ‘neck and neck’, when one of those candidates is evidently unhinged. ‘At his rallies, he just comes on and talks complete nonsense for fifty minutes.’ Similarly bewildered by this, I find it oddly reassuring that it’s not just non-Americans, looking in or on from outside, that share such feelings. Eliot Weinberger, whose devastating What I Heard About Iraq I still recall from nearly twenty years ago, summarises the matter with characteristic skill, in a piece dated 13 September:
‘It seems incredible that almost half the country still supports Trump, despite the felony convictions, the porn stars, the blatant graft, the endless lies, the allegations of assault and rape, the 6 January insurrection, the continuing refusal to accept his defeat in 2020, the classified documents in his bathroom at Mar-a-Lago, the vows to prosecute all his many enemies, including journalists, and to fire everyone in the government bureaucracy who is not loyal to him, the claims to dictatorial power. Even more incredible is that there is a slice of the voting population that is still “undecided”. Republican legislatures in various states have already set in motion procedures to keep people from voting and to deny the results if Trump loses’.[2]
There is, indeed, a report, more than one report, about highly suspect practices and preparations, changes of rules and the like, with reassuring headlines such as ‘Network of Georgia election officials strategizing to undermine 2024 result’: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/18/trump-election-georgia
I know there are Americans who believe wholeheartedly that the moon landings were faked and patched together in a Hollywood back lot, while others know for a certainty that giant lizards are the true masters of the world but seeing, back in the summer, footage of men and women at political rallies with wads of fabric or nappy liners stuck to the sides of their heads was somehow in another dimension: irrefutable, painfully visible, undeniably and palpably there. A full-throttle alternative reality in operation, for sure, and believable enough that it might be swallowed by a few hundred, even a few thousand. But millions? And all in tune with what used to be a major and mainstream political party?
‘It is very extraordinary’, John Dowell reflects as he looks at the mad Nancy, ‘to see the perfect flush of health on her cheeks, to see the lustre of her coiled black hair, the poise of the head upon the neck, the grace of the white hands—and to think that it all means nothing—that it is a picture without a meaning.’[3] We are frequently confronted either by pictures that may really have no meaning—in the sense of a rational, graspable, ideally paraphrasable, meaning—or have a meaning that cannot be understood, either because we lack the necessary contextual information or because removal from the immediate experience is required, granting us distance, perspective, the means by which to find the edges, the boundaries, and thus the true extent of what we have witnessed.
(Richard Westall, Theseus and Ariadne at the Entrance of the Labyrinth: North Lincolnshire Museums)
Edmund Blunden recalled the sight of flares on the Ypres battlefield on New Year’s Eve, 1917: ‘Their writing on the night was as the earliest scribbling of children, meaningless; they answered none of the questions with which a watcher’s eyes were painfully wide.’[4] A considerable number of people stared uncomprehendingly at the clay tablets Arthur Evans had unearthed at Knossos before the researches of Alice Kober and Michael Ventris eventually led to an understanding and decipherment of Linear B.
‘The contemporary is without meaning while it is happening’, Guy Davenport remarked, ‘it is a vortex, a whirlpool of action. It is a labyrinth.’[5] And Hugh Kenner remembered Wyndham Lewis observing that ‘The present cannot be revealed to people until it has become yesterday.’[6]
Some parts of the present, surely; and to some people. Historians will, we accept quite conventionally, see more—though in some cases, or in some senses, less. There is, after all, an increasingly clear and present danger now not only of misinformation being manufactured and widely (and rapidly) disseminated but also of witnesses being silenced (often permanently), of evidence being systematically destroyed, of commentary and analysis being censored or concealed. And yet, while it’s true that we are all in the labyrinth and that the Minotaur is real – some people, I persist in believing, still have hold of that crucial thread.
Notes
[1] Vera Brittain, Chronicle of Youth: Vera Brittain’s Diary 1913-1917 (London: Gollancz 1981), 206.
[2] Eliot Weinberger, ‘The Debate’, London Review of Books, 46, 18 (26 September 2024), 8.
[3] Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (1915; edited by Max Saunders, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 192.
[4] Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War (1928; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 234.
[5] Guy Davenport, ‘The House That Jack Built’, in The Geography of the Imagination (Boston: David R. Godine, 1997), 56.
[6] Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 436.
(Rembrandt van Rijn, Saskia van Uylenburgh in Arcadian Costume: National Gallery, London)
In the other park, which we traverse quite often, there are rosemary bushes to be discreetly ransacked – for potatoes, fish, meat, as well as for remembrance. ‘“There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance”’, Ophelia says. And Laura Cumming notes that when Rembrandt’s wife Saskia van Uylenburgh died in 1642, at the age of 29 and after less than eight years of their marriage, Rembrandt ‘put a sprig of rosemary in her hand: rosemary for remembrance.’[1]
The weather forecast offers a 70% chance of rain. I add an umbrella to my tote bag and am soon walking uphill – in warm sunshine. Yes, the forecasts are more sophisticated these days, with many technical advances – on the other hand, I seem to remember that, in the days before we broke the weather, things were a bit more definite. Or did conditions appear to change every ten minutes then as well?
Under an abruptly darkening sky, I enter the park and the uncertain terrain of rosemary-picking. Plants in a public park: it would never occur to me to pick flowers in one and take them home since they’re for everybody to look at and enjoy. But a bush, herbs, green, largely unnoticed, simply wasted if not used. . . the case is altered, surely. Nevertheless, I aim for discretion and scan the park. Two women with dogs on the grassy slope; a woman with a child in a pushchair walking towards me on the path. Progress is arrested by the sight of a jay, landing on a nearby wooden post. It lingers for ten, fifteen seconds. I stand and stare. Eventually, it moves, I move. The woman says, in passing: ‘Pretty birds, aren’t they?’ Always the loquacious Englishman, I say ‘Yes, very’, moving on to stock up on rosemary and continue my walk into a sunshine resuming its humorous campaign.
In another campaign, the fallout from the presidential debate in Philadelphia on Tuesday night was still dominating the media, and I could still amuse the Librarian by abruptly announcing: ‘They’re eating the dogs!’ but the joke, if that’s what it is, is a dark one. Like a great many other people – at least I hope so, I’m baffled by this stuff much of the time, by those ‘undecided voters’, let alone those determined to make America hate again.
I realised later that it was the birthday of Louis MacNeice, a fine poet who also kept a wary eye on the political weather and who died at the absurdly young age of 55. Thinking of how the wrong things keep happening and the wrong people ending up on top almost invariably, and how far, how much, if at all, the rest of us can be said to bear responsibility, I noted the lines in his Autumn Journal:
And at this hour of the day it is no good saying “Take away this cup”; Having helped to fill it ourselves it is only logic That now we should drink it up. Nor can we hide our heads in the sand, the sands have Filtered away; Nothing remains but rock at this hour, this zero Hour of the day.[2]
‘Responsibility’ is a handy word. Delmore Schwartz’s famous short story, ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’, which gave his first volume its title, has the narrator watching, on a movie screen, the time just before the beginning of his own life, his parents moving towards their disastrous marriage, which will have a lasting and damaging effect on the poet. He’s ejected from the cinema after shouting at the screen—’“What are they doing?”’—and wakes up ‘into the bleak winter morning of my twenty-first birthday, the windowsill shining with its lip of snow, and the morning already begun.’[3]
But I was thinking too of the close of Robert Penn Warren’s fine novel, All The King’s Men : ‘soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.’[4] The connection is with MacNeice, because of that poet’s relationship with Eleanor Clark in 1939-40. When MacNeice was invited by F. R. Higgins to join the Irish Academy of Letters, it was to Eleanor that he wrote about it, saying that ‘The Irish Academy of Letters meets once a year in Dublin’s only decent restaurant and gets so drunk they have to send the waiters away.’[5] Clark grew up in Connecticut, went to Vassar in the 1930s, and worked on their literary magazine with Elizabeth Bishop and Mary McCarthy, among others. She wrote for left-leaning magazines and journals such as The Partisan Review, thought of herself for a while as a ‘Trotskyite sympathizer’ and went to Mexico in the late 1930s. Apparently, she did some translating for Trotsky and was married for a while to his Czech secretary, Jan Frankl. She wrote novels, essays and reviews, children’s books and a memoir, but was probably best-known for her travel books, Rome and a Villa and The Oysters of Locmariaquer. She married Robert Penn Warren in 1952 and died in 1996, aged 82, seven years after Warren himself.
(Eleanor Clark and Robert Penn Warren at their summer home in West Wardsboro, Vermont, 1986: Kentucky Library and Museum)
The novelist Nicholas Mosley once wrote that ‘Humans can either learn – or refuse to believe that humans are responsible for themselves.’[6] My favourite use of ‘responsibility’, though, is probably that of the hugely influential Trinidadian radical historian, journalist and political theorist, C. L. R. James, who adopted, in his early years, William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair as the book: ‘By the time I was fourteen I must have read the book over twenty times’. And he adds, a little later: ‘Thackeray, not Marx, bears the heaviest responsibility for me.’[7]
That radical, Thackeray!
Notes
[1] William Shakespeare, Hamlet, IV. v.; Laura Cumming, Thunderclap: A memoir of art and life & sudden death (London: Chatto & Windus, 2023), 61.
[2] Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems, edited by Peter McDonald (London: Faber, 2007), 111.
[3] Ilan Stavans, editor, The Oxford Book of Jewish Short Stories (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 165.
[4] Robert Penn Warren, All The King’s Men (1946; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2007), 661.
[5] Louis MacNeice, Letters of Louis MacNeice, edited by Jonathan Allison (London: Faber, 2010), 351.
[6] Nicholas Mosley, Efforts at Truth: An Autobiography (London: Minerva , 1996), 299.
[7] C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary (1963; London: Vintage, 2019), 24, 52.
Reconstructionary Tales 