Remembering, or forgetting, 4 August


(Selwyn Image, ‘Stained Glass Design’, 1887: © Victoria & Albert Museum)

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 110th 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.

Taking liberties


(A. Webster, ‘An Oriental Harbour’, National Trust for Scotland, Castle Fraser, Garden & Estate)

Walking back from the long round of the Victorian cemetery, still early, the Librarian remarks that this would be ‘a good Harry day’. As it would: the sun already high, little or no cloud, barely a breath of wind, soon to be around 26 degrees or so – as high as 30 (that’s 86 degrees in American money). The back garden will be warm and calm, idyllically so for animals that worship sun and sleep.

Not much later, I am aboard the Al Raza, not a classic dhow, locally known as ‘a launch’, some sixty feet long, ‘decidedly stubby, and her single mast was more like a twig than a tree and carried no sails.’ The craft is ‘a working launch of 100 tons and looked it.’ A crew of eight, including the nakhoda, the ship’s master, all Baluchis except one Indian-born and one Iranian. When engine trouble forces them to drop anchor off the coast of Iran, Gavin Young, whose earlier reading on the trip has included Ford Madox Ford’s Memories and Impressions, and who repeatedly cites Joseph Conrad, turns to his copy of Helen MacInnes’s Decision at Delphi.[1]

Just then, a white rabbit passed me, plucking a pocket watch from his waistcoat and audibly murmuring that he mustn’t be late, before popping down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge. Naturally, having recently reread the Alice books for Fordian purposes, I followed.

Now, MacInnes. Surely Hammond? Scottish, 30-odd novels and other books. Had I not read one or two? The Wreck of the Mary Deare, perhaps? Levkas Man? The rabbit rolled its eyes. Of course – I was misremembering, actually thinking of Innes, Hammond Innes. Helen MacInnes (1907-1985), whom I then looked up, did an MA at Glasgow University in French and German and added a diploma in librarianship from University College, London. She married, translated from the German with her husband, travelled widely in 1930s Europe, taking copious notes along the way, and moved to the United States when her husband, a fellow of St John’s College, University of Oxford, was offered a chair at Columbia University, teaching Latin and Greek. She published more than 20 books, mainly espionage novels, and several were filmed. Decision at Delphi was her 11th published novel.


(Helen MacInnes in 1941)

Her husband was Gilbert Highet, classicist – and MI6 intelligence agent. That name rang a bell. Careful to avoid the white rabbit’s gaze, I leafed through various mental pages and turned up Ezra Pound and Sextus Propertius.

Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius appeared in part in Poetry (March 1919) and in volume form seven months later, though he’d written to his parents as early as 1910: ‘I’ve taken to Propertius’.[2] And, decades later, it was Highet who wrote, in Horizon (January 1961), that Pound’s Homage was ‘an insult both to poetry and to scholarship and to common sense.’[3]

It’s true that, beginning with Professor William Gardner Hale of Chicago, against whose emphatic protests Harriet Monroe reluctantly published four of twelve sections in Poetry, a good many classical scholars have clutched their pearls in outrage at this iconoclastic American taking such liberties with a canonical writer—one of theirs.

Annalists will continue to record Roman reputations,
Celebrities from the Trans-Caucasus will belaud Roman celebrities
And expound the distensions of Empire,
But for something to read in normal circumstances?
For a few pages brought down from the forked hill unsullied?
I ask a wreath which will not crush my head.
            And there is no hurry about it

The poet Charles Tomlinson headed his selection from the poem ‘A travesty of Propertius’ Latin’, but his grasp of what Pound was doing meant that there was no contradiction between that heading and his terming the poem a masterpiece.[4] In another Oxford anthology, Adrian Poole and Jeremy Maule quote Pound’s ‘rampant defence’ of his poem in a letter to A. R. Orage on the first page of their introduction: ‘My job was to bring a dead man to life, to present a living figure’ and begin their Part 7, ‘Propertius to Hadrian’, with Pound’s superb section VII.

Though you give all your kisses
                                    you give but few.

Nor can I shift my pains to other,
            Hers will I be dead,
If she confer such nights upon me,
                                    long is my life, long in years,
If she give me many,
                        God am I for the time.

As Poole and Maule rightly say, ‘Translators must take liberties. They are in any case bound to be accused of having done so.’[5] Indeed, the history of translation and its reception is littered with the husks of those who knew the classical texts but had no sense of living English. George Steiner writes in his introduction: ‘A first look at nearly any translation in this anthology is enough to show whether it comes before or after’ the Homage, adding: ‘But the “making new” of translation had already occurred in Personae (1909) and Provença (1910). After “The River Merchant’s Wife” (1915) the art of translation had entered its modern phase.’[6]


The critic F. R. Leavis, highly influential in his time, wrote appreciatively of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley but Hugh Kenner, in ‘The Making of the Modernist Canon’ (1984), remarks on how Henry James’s ‘habits of diction were refracted throughout a poem Leavis nowhere mentions, Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius. That was a central modernist discovery, that distinctions between “prose” and “verse” vanish before distinctions between firm writing and loose’.[7] Kenner also touches there on  Imaginary Letters (1917-18), a series in the Little Review, begun by Wyndham Lewis and continued by Pound when Lewis was transferred to France. One striking feature of Pound’s ‘Imaginary Letters’ is the extent to which their texts would not look out of place in the Homage. Much of this is to do with the varied registers of language, mixing contemporary diction, poeticisms, large-mouthed polysyllables and the careful use of plain often monosyllabic words for some of Propertius’ reflections on love, death or fate. To that extent, his poem’s real subject is language, the intimate relation between a country’s language and its cultural health, the differences between public and private pronouncements, the strategies of a ruling class entrenched behind fortifications of rhetoric and generality. The disorientation that a reading of the poem can produce results in part from the multiplicity of voices Pound employs: Propertius as conventionally heard and as Pound hears and presents him; Victorian or earlier translators; contemporary English poets (in that last year of the war). Perhaps unsurprisingly, not a few readers these days rate the Homage even above Mauberley. It was, and remains, an astonishing achievement, by turns provocative, moving and funny.

I have, of course, ordered a copy of MacInnes’s Decision at Delphi – and also a copy of Assignment in Brittany, her second book, which became, apparently, required reading for British agents joining forces with the French resistance.

Notes

[1] Gavin Young, Slow Boats to China (1981; London: Picador, 1995), 269, 278. His In Search of Conrad, published in 1991, won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.

[2] Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929, edited by Mary de Rachewiltz, David Moody and Joanna Moody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 239. His letter of 3 November 1918 has: ‘Also done a new oeuvre on Propertius’ (423).

[3] Quoted by J. P. Sullivan, Ezra Pound and Sextus Propertius: A Study in Creative Translation (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), ix.

[4] The Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation, Chosen and Edited by Charles Tomlinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 443; Tomlinson, Poetry and Metamorphosis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 59. The book contains the four 1982 Clark Lectures, delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge.

[5] The Oxford Book of Classical Verse, edited by Adrian Poole and Jeremy Maule (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), xxxv, 423.

[6] George Steiner, editor, The Penguin Book of Modern Verse Translation (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), 33. In his introduction to The Translations of Ezra Pound (enlarged edition, London: Faber and Faber, 1970), Hugh Kenner remarks: ‘Pound calls the Propertius sequence a Homage, largely in a futile attempt to keep it from being mistaken for an attempt at translation’ (12-13). He does not include the poem in that volume.

[7] Reprinted in Hugh Kenner, Mazes (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 31. ‘Major snow job in western education is concealment of the hit & miss state of Graeco-Roman texts, all but a few’, Kenner wrote to Guy Davenport (8 June 1962).  ‘Ez rearranged Propertius fragments in the spirit of the scholarship that gave us the standard texts by—arranging fragments’: Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner, edited by Edward M. Burns, two volumes (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2018), I, 137.

Changes for the worse


Strange days. Even to say so is to provoke suspicions of glimpses into the bleeding obvious. But strangeness there is, the compass broken and the maps all wrong.

Writing to Eudora Welty in July 1969, the novelist and editor William Maxwell told her of offering to let his elder daughter Kate, then fifteen, read a lot of the letters he’d received. He added: ‘And maybe I will, as a result, not be the mystery to her that my parents are to me, but more than likely it won’t change anything. It takes a great deal to change things. In a better way, I mean. To change things for the worse, all you need is somebody like Nixon, and there are plenty like him.’[1]

Watching a news programme earlier this month, I saw a clip of Nixon explaining to a bemused David Frost—unsurprisingly bemused since Nixon had no justification at all then for claiming this—that, whatever a president did, it couldn’t be illegal, by definition.

Rather more recently, of course, a stacked Supreme Court has thrust yet another blade into the guts of the republic.

 I began writing a post around the time of the British general election but was overtaken, as they say, by events. When the last results were coming in early on the Friday morning, it was clear that, after so many years of other countries viewing us with sympathy or disbelief or disdain, we had a distinct possibility of edging at least in the direction of honesty or sanity or some other unfashionable trait. The irony adhered in the fact that while we had pulled ourselves out of a ditch after a decade and half, some of those same countries seemed hellbent on hurling themselves into it. Thankfully, France has since pulled back to slightly firmer ground, though remaining unsettlingly close to the edge.

Watching the election, I flagged a little around 3 a.m. but rallied at the prospect of seeing some of the more appalling figures in the Tory ranks ditched. Some clung on but there were certainly highlights, particularly the member for North East Somerset being sent home to Nanny and seeing the shortest-serving British Prime Minister do to a 26,000 majority (2019) roughly what she’d done to the country. So, however brief or prolonged the respite it promises, that interesting Fourth of July turned out to be our Independence Day. It must have appeared a great deal less so in the United States,

Since then, a European football competition that grabbed wide attention, a botched assassination attempt on a former president of the United States, the usual murders, atrocities, coups, crises and catastrophes.


But for us, here, drowning out all that, the critical illness of an irreplaceable member of our household. Then the trips to the vet, the phone calls, the fraught conversations, the broken sleep, the agonised weighing of options. And now the weeks of ghost steps on the stairs, of puzzling shadows at the corners of your eyes, of strident silences and oddly empty spaces, because a light has gone out of our world.

Harry the Cat has left the building.

Notes

[1] Suzanne Marrs, editor, What There Is to Say, We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 259.

Fit to stroke a cat

‘If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again’, Henry Thoreau wrote, ‘– if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled your affairs, and are a free man – then you are ready for a walk.’[1]

Without jettisoning all the relevant relations but also without a burdensome array of debt, I think I’m ready for a walk. A couple of mornings back, when someone all too few gardens away was learning to play ‘Johnny B. Goode’, I was a good deal readier but today, certainly at an early hour, there’s nothing louder than a blue tit close by and, further off, the occasional roar of propane burners firing as the two hot air balloons make sure that they’re well clear of the treetops in the park,

Hotter weather tends to make for weariness, certainly in those unaccustomed to it, like us in our northern temperate zone. It was hard to keep my eyes open on a recent trip down to Somerset by train, though driving probably wouldn’t have been much better (and a damned sight more hazardous). Judith Stinton once quoted Theodore Powys on motors and motoring: ‘A Journey in a motor car is the most tiring experience in the world . . . When I am tired all I feel fit to do is to stroke a cat’.[2] That I can do.

On that theme of tiredness: we have a General Election looming, its imminence evident from the increasingly desperate headlines in the right-wing press, as Jonn Elledge has noted:
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2024/06/the-tory-media-has-gone-into-meltdown


(William Hogarth, ‘An Election: 1. The Entertainment’: Sir John Soane’s Museums)

There’s a fairly general consensus that the present administration has failed utterly to honour the contract assumed to exist between government and governed, having trashed the public realm, lavished huge sums on the few at the expense of the many, and repeatedly attacked, dismantled or disparaged precisely those elements that distinguish a civilised society. Given the damage done and the importance of the contest, it seems a little strange that so much of the campaigning is so muffled – this is because neither of the two main parties can afford to be honest about the true state of the nation and what is needed even to begin to repair it. A while back, the – Tory – politician Rory Stewart, trying to define a picture of the country, came up with: ‘An economy 80 per cent based on elusive intangible services; buoyed by an improbable housing bubble, and entirely dependent for its health and care on immigrants, whom citizens seemed to wish to exclude.’[3] Not much has changed, unless for the worse. Yet with all that said, we are still in comparatively privileged conditions. It’s painfully obvious from the international news that a good many people, in several countries, some of them particularly surprising cases, have decided that fascism—which we thought a world war was largely fought to defeat—did not, after all, have a fair crack of the whip and deserves another go. Those people are doing their best, under various names and flags and guises, to give it that go now. And again, despite some disturbing recent domestic moves against democratic freedoms and the right to protest, we are still extremely unlikely in this country to be beaten, tortured or shot on account of being—or despite being—a medical professional, a journalist, a hospital patient, a poet, a photographer, a peace activist,  a woman, a child, or simply someone of the wrong racial character.

(‘After such knowledge, what forgiveness?’ T. S. Eliot asked in another context.[4] To which the most probable answer is: ‘none’.)

To avoid the danger of overdosing on the pleasures of current affairs, I’m taking refuge in the extremely relaxing early eighteenth century when ‘[s]tealing anything worth more than a shilling carried the death penalty’ but, on the other hand, ‘It took only four days to go from London to York or to Exeter by stagecoach.’[5] 

Those were the days. . .

Notes

[1] Henry Thoreau, ‘Walking’ (1862), in The Portable Thoreau, edited by Carl Bode (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), 593. Emerson’s 1862 eulogy, ‘Thoreau’, included the observation that: ‘The length of his walks uniformly made the length of his writing. If shut up in the house he did not write at all.’ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Essays, edited by Larzer Ziff (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982), 400.

[2] Judith Stinton, Chaldon Herring: Writers in a Dorset Landscape (Norwich: Black Dog Books, 2004), 41.

[3] Rory Stewart, Politics on the Edge: A Memoir from Within (London: Jonathan Cape, 2023), 360.

[4] T. S. Eliot, ‘Gerontion’.

[5] A ‘torrent of legislation’ after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 ‘raised the number of capital crimes from about fifty to over 200 by the turn of the nineteenth century.’ Lucy Moore, The Thieves’ Opera: The Remarkable Lives and Deaths of Jonathan Wild, Thief-Taker, and Jack Sheppard, House-Breaker (London: Penguin Books), 1998), ix, 188, 137.

Wording, birding


(Robert Wilson, Hadrian’s Villa, c.1765: Tate)

‘At night I trailed from one window recess to another’, the Emperor Hadrian recalls in Marguerite Yourcenar’s novel, ‘from balcony to balcony through the rooms of that palace where the walls were still cracked from the earthquake, here and there tracing my astrological calculations upon the stones, and questioning the trembling stars. But it is on earth that the signs of the future have to be sought.’[1]

So it is. ‘Ghosts await you in the future if they do not follow you from the past’, Sarah Moss wrote, and: ‘No one who knows what happens in the world, what humans do to humans, has any claim to contentment.’[2] Yes. I write pages and delete them, since they serve no real purpose except to relieve my feelings for a short while. The past is not always a foreign country and they do not always do things differently there. As Pankaj Mishra said in his recent ‘Winter Lecture’: ‘It hardly seems believable, but the evidence has become overwhelming: we are witnessing some kind of collapse in the free world.’[3]

Early summer creeps on, though fitfully. Watching rose petals fall from the bush in a light wind, I remembered Pound’s Canto XIII, the first in which Confucius appears, and which ends:

The blossoms of the apricot
            blow from the east to the west
And I have tried to keep them from falling.[4]


(Shen Zhou, ‘Apricot Blossom’, leaf from the album, Dreaming of Travelling While in Bed: Palace Museum, Beijing)

Ronald Bush observed that: ‘To keep the blossoms of the apricot from falling is to keep nature in a permanent vernal bounty.’[5] It also seems to me to signify cultural contact, the free exchange of ideas, without the limits of borders or nationalism. At that stage, Pound was using Guillaume Pauthier’s translation of Confucian texts in Confucius et Mencius: les quatre livres de philosophie morale et politique de la Chine and had written in ‘Exile’s Letter’:

Intelligent men came drifting in from the sea and from the west border,
And with them, and with you especially
There was nothing at cross purpose,
And they made nothing of sea-crossing or of mountain crossing,
If only they could be of that fellowship,
And we all spoke out our hearts and minds, and without regret.[6]

On the daily walks we speak our minds but, just lately, exchanges are punctuated by information from our newly downloaded Merlin app, available from Cornell University, which draws on a huge database of bird sounds, sightings and photographs to identify what you’re probably hearing in that nearby tree or passing overhead.


So we stroll along narrow paths thus:

Politics, dinner, politics. . .
‘Blue tit. Carrion crow. Wren.’
Politics, domestic details, politics, cat, literary chuntering. . .
‘Dunnock. Blackcap. Chiffchaff.’
Ash dieback, politics, university gossip, politics. . .
‘Blackbird. Herring gull. Great tit. Jay!’

Excuse me, sir, let me just ask about the birdsong: in a world both literally and metaphorically on fire, democracies hanging by a thread, war crimes, liars and knaves in public places – does it help?

Why, yes, a little – rather more than a little, in fact. . .

Notes

[1] Marguerite Yourcenar, The Memoirs of Hadrian, translated by Grace Frick, with Yourcenar (1951; Penguin Books, 2000), 82.

[2] Sarah Moss, Signs for Lost Children (London: Granta Books, 2016), 88-89, 97.

[3] Pankaj Mishra, ‘The Shoah after Gaza’ [Winter Lecture], London Review of Books 46, 5 (7 March 2024).

[4] The Cantos of Ezra Pound, fourth collected edition (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 60.

[5] Ronald Bush, The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 251.

[6] ‘Exile’s Letter’, Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations, edited by Richard Sieburth (New York: Library of America, 2003), 255.

Passing the critical stage, or not


RSPB: https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/jay

The highlight of yesterday morning was the jay, garrulus glandarius, briefly perched on the high roof of the shed beyond our back fence, a bird we’ve seen high up in the trees of the Victorian cemetery but never so close to home. The lowlight, in the wake of the announcement of a forthcoming General Election, now a little over five weeks away, was probably the reported Tory proposals to cut taxes for the rich again and to bring back National Service. This last appears to be an attempt to outflank satirists with a first strike of absurdity and anachronism. We await with bated breath the reintroduction to the statute books of the death penalty for stealing a pocket handkerchief, damaging Westminster Bridge or impersonating a Chelsea Pensioner.

Reading the stories of  Somerville and Ross lately, I alighted on Major Sinclair Yeates, together with Flurry Knox and the visiting Englishman Leigh Kelway, taking refuge from the rain in a public-house, having failed to get to the country races: ‘The bread tasted of mice, the butter of turf-smoke, the tea of brown paper, but we had got past the critical stage.’[1]

On occasion, we – or certainly I – don’t get to the critical stage, much less past it. Some things, moments, sights, sounds, are merely to be experienced and enjoyed (or, occasionally, suffered), without evaluation or ranking or even attempted analysis. And sometimes, writing so good or so distinctive that it delays or disarms criticism.

After a recent lunch, the librarian lingered at the table, extending her familiarity with the work of Olivia Laing, occasionally pausing to tell me how good it—The Garden Against Time—was. On my side of the table, I was extending my familiarity with the work of Anne Carson (Wrong Norma), frowning occasionally, laughing often and muttering, not at all rarely, ‘Wonderful!’ None of which, I suppose, passes muster as incisive literary analysis or exegesis. Not all the world’s a critical stage, you might say. (I’ve since read the Olivia Laing myself, muttering ‘Wonderful’ from time to time.)


The authors: from Irish Memories (1919)

‘It has been said of Ireland that the inevitable never happens, and that the impossible invariably occurs.’[2]

The volume that contains the Somerville and Ross story was published 125 years ago and is dense with hunting and hunting lore: horses, hounds, whips, drags and the rest. I could hardly be further from the imagined target audience if an interest in, or sympathy with, hunting were assumed. But that, of course, is not the point. The point is the writing, the humour, the sharply drawn characters, the thorough, detailed knowledge of Irish people and culture with which it deals, the politics of the time not made central but subtly pointed up from time to time.

In the Laing book, in fact, there are hundreds of plant names that meant nothing to me, functioning rather as sound poetry, mantra or music. But then, as more than one critic has pointed out, you don’t need detailed knowledge of baccarat or poker to take pleasure in Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale and, more broadly, the narrator or central character of a novel with whom we don’t sympathise, empathise, agree or even like at all is pretty standard. So too the frequent apparent gap between the maker and the made, and the recurrent agonising over how one can possibly read X’s writings or look at Y’s pictures or listen to Z’s music because they were such awful people doesn’t really connect with me. . .

On hunting, Walter de la Mare had a neat little poem:

Hi! Handsome hunting man,
Fire your little gun,
Bang! Now that animal
Is dead and dumb and done.
Never more to peep again, creep again, leap again,
Eat or sleep or drink again, oh, what fun![3]

In a New York Times Book Review piece, W. H. Auden quotes it and concludes: ‘A child brought up on such verses may break his mother’s heart or die on the gallows but he will never suffer from a tin ear.’[4]

Tin ears are very widely rampant just now (if ears can in fact ramp). But then, in the cemetery this morning: two jays in the same tree, quite close together. I doubt if the Tories, in their distorting lowlight mirror, can rival that.

Notes

[1] E. Œ. Somerville & Martin Ross, ‘Lisheen Races, Second-Hand’, in The Irish R. M. (London: Abacus, 1989), 102-103.

[2] ‘Major Apollo Riggs: Part III’, The Irish R. M., 518.

[3] Walter de la Mare, Rhymes and Verses: Collected Poems for Children (New York: Holt, 1988), 86.

[4] W. H. Auden, ‘An Appreciation of the Lyric Verse of Walter de la Mare’ (NYTBR, 26 February 1956), reprinted in Prose, Volume IV: 1956-1962, edited by Edward Mendelson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 8. He noted that Randall Jarrell’s was ‘the only good American article about de la Mare’s recent work that I have come across’. This must be the piece published in The Nation (1946) and included in Poetry and the Age (1955; London: Faber and Faber, 1973), 137-141.

First lines, later thoughts


(Carson McCullers: Columbus State University via Library of America)

Rereading a Carson McCullers novel recently, I was thinking again about the curious affair of the opening line. Though I’m quite capable these days of forgetting someone’s name even while they’re still being introduced to me, I recall or recognise the openings of books read twenty, thirty, even forty years ago. Ford, unsurprisingly; Joyce, Faulkner, Patrick White, Virginia Woolf, Henry Miller, one or two, the famous ones by Beckett and by Camus (with translators and their reviewers jousting over the ‘correct’ Anglo-American equivalent to that one word, ‘maman’). Not always the ones I expect, sometimes books of which I remember practically nothing else. Here, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter’s opening, ‘In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together’, was, I realised, already imprinted on one of the walls of my brain, perhaps a little faded after more than a quarter of a century, but still clearly legible.

First lines are frequently very far from first thoughts; and sometimes freighted, by writer or critic, with all manner of significance. Of the famous opening of John Keats’s Endymion:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing

Robert Gittings remarked that ‘Keats had not only found a first line and a beginning; he had found a principle that was to maintain him all through his life.’[1] That is, loving the principle of beauty in all things.

Also attentive to large implications, Hugh Kenner wrote of the eventual opening of Pound’s Cantos:

And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea

that here the poet was pondering ‘a chord that should comprise four of history’s beginnings: the earliest English (“Seafarer” rhythms and diction), the earliest Greek (the Nekuia), the beginnings of the 20th-century Vortex, and the origins of the Vortex we call the Renaissance, when once before it had seemed pertinent to reaffirm Homer’s perpetual freshness.’[2] What actually precedes that first word, ‘And’, has also proved a fertile subject for discussion. One thing that precedes it, of course, is the section of Canto III in the 1917 Poetry publication, ‘Three Cantos of a Poem of Some Length’, that alludes to Andreas Divus, the Renaissance translator of Homer’s Odyssey into Latin and continues:

‘Here’s but rough meaning:
“And then went down to the ship, set keel to breakers,
Forth on the godly sea”’[3]


That first line, in a prose work, can suggest tone, style, diction, even imply the extent or nature of the whole. It can also, of course, strike the wrong note with some readers. ‘By the way’, Penelope Fitzgerald wrote to the novelist Francis King, ‘wouldn’t you agree that the worst thing about the opening of Howards End isn’t so much the letter itself (as a method) as the “One may as well begin with”. It makes me feel resentful. Why begin at all, if that’s how he feels about it.’[4]

And, it hardly needs saying, there is often another issue about that first line to consider, specifically, is it in fact the first line at all? Is the first line of Byron’s Don Juan, the ‘Preface to Cantos I and II’—‘In a note or preface (I forget which) by Mr W. Wordsworth to a poem’—or the ‘Dedication’—‘Bob Southey! You’re a poet, poet laureate’—or ‘Canto I’: ‘I want a hero, an uncommon want’?  We all know that Melville’s Moby Dick commences dramatically: ‘Call me Ishmael.’ Except that it really begins: ‘Etymology (Supplied by a late consumptive usher to a grammar school.)’ This list is followed by a dozen pages of ‘Extracts (supplied by a sub-sub-librarian.)’ And then there are accretions: readers beginning Ford’s The Good Soldier will now, more often than not, reach its famous opening line (‘This is the saddest story I ever heard’) via the ‘Dedicatory Letter’, addressed to Stella Bowen, added to the 1927 edition (a dozen years after the first) and generally included in subsequent editions – the opening line itself having been altered from the serial version in Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex, while the story of that alteration is contained in the letter (one version of the story, anyway, just to be clear).


(Frances Flora Bond Palmer, lithograph published by Currier and Ives, ‘Rounding a Bend on the Mississippi – The Parting Salute’, Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Huckleberry Finn also has its prefatory matter and its own slight challenge to determine exactly how and where it begins. ‘You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” but that ain’t no matter.’ This sentence is preceded by the ‘Notice’ warning against attempts to find motive, moral or plot in the narrative that follows and a note about the variety of dialects used in it, Twain adding (still funny, I think, 140 years on): ‘I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.’

D. H. Lawrence was sometimes prone to writing complete new versions of a text, rather than tinkering. Still, as Frances Wilson notes, in the case of the superb ‘Introduction’ to the Memoirs of the Foreign Legion by ‘M. M.’ (Maurice Magnus), ‘apart from revising his opening line and rethinking some later sentences, his sixty handwritten pages are as neat and unblotted as the work of a medieval scribe.’[5] Lawrence himself thought it ‘the best single piece of writing, as writing, that he had ever done’.[6]

Last words are, of course, a different matter entirely. . .

Notes

[1] Robert Gittings, John Keats (London: Pelican Books, 1971), 188.

[2] Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 349.

[3] So one earlier thing is those quotation marks. The 1917 texts are included in Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations, edited by Richard Sieburth (New York: Library of America, 2003), 318-330, and discussed at length by Ronald Bush, The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

[4] Letter of 12 April [c.1978], So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald, edited by Terence Dooley (London: Fourth Estate, 2008), 269.

[5] Frances Wilson, Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence (London: Bloomsbury,  2021), 153. Lawrence’s essay is reprinted in Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished and Other Prose Works by D. H. Lawrence, Collected and Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore (London: William Heinemann, 1968), 303-361.

[6] David Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 6. Lawrence said this to Catherine Carswell: see her The Savage Pilgrimage: A Narrative of D. H. Lawrence (1932; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 117.

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.

Local elections and watching for dragons


(Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Spring: J. Paul Getty Museum)

Mayday, m’aider. I think, without counting pages to an absurd degree, that 1 May, along with 1 January, is only exceeded by 25 December in the extent of its coverage in The Oxford Companion to the Year, which mentions at the outset the sacrifice of a pregnant sow by the priest of Vulcan to Maia (a goddess of growth).[1] My ageing dictionary offers for Mayday ‘given to sports and to socialist and labour demonstrations’. There was such a time, I think, and the change has not been for the better. This particular Mayday, we have continuing wars and war crimes, failing states, thuggish cops violently assaulting and arresting students and faculty on several American campuses.

But here – we have local elections! Yes, one-sixth of England’s district, borough and unitary councils will hold elections tomorrow, Thursday, 2 May: 2,636 council seats to be contested in the 107 (out of 317) scheduled council elections and 48 by-elections, plus elections for 10 metro mayors, as well as police commissioners and members of the London Assembly. Our ward is in one of the 107: two councillors to be elected and the only candidates standing who contested it that last time around are the incumbents, both Green Party councillors.

We’ve been constantly reminded, of course, that this is the Year of Elections. More than 60 countries and directly affecting almost half of the world’s population. From India and the United States to Indonesia, Mexico, Iceland and Sri Lanka. It would be pleasant to view the prospect positively or even with equanimity, but it’s just too much of a stretch. Many of the countries going to the polls are not even democracies in any meaningful sense. Not that democracy is a perfect political system—if it were, there would be fewer psychopathic thugs, undisguised crooks and congenital liars in positions of power—it’s just that all the other systems are worse.

In the UK, we expect a General Election too and, around the country, people—especially those who follow politics closely—are able to indulge in the parlour game that consists of trying to identify a single sector or section of British social, cultural and economic life that the present government, in its fourteen-year tenure, has not destroyed, diminished, degraded or damaged beyond repair or recovery. Among the candidates are the health service, universities, schools, rivers and coastal waters, housing, freedom of speech, crime, social care, railways, roads, parks, the tax system, the legal profession, pedestrian thoroughfares, prisons, immigration, foreign policy, poverty, doctors, dentists, childcare, homelessness, domestic violence, the rental sector, defence, the climate emergency, the right to protest, sexual harassment in and out of the House of Commons. Answers on a polling card, please. . . 


(Altarpiece of St George, Attributed to Andrés Marçal de Sas, active 1393–c.1410: Victoria and Albert Museum)

Still, as Sarah Churchwell, observed, a few years back: ‘Because most people spend little time analysing political events or studying history, democracy will always risk being shaped by voters’ feelings rather than analysis.’[2] A risk, yes, but there are points in any country’s history when the two converge, in some species of agreement: informed analysis of the last decade and a half in the United Kingdom will identify decline, dissension, worsening social and economic conditions for the majority of its citizens, while a wide-ranging survey of voters’ feelings will find an immense tiredness, if not exhaustion, in a nation where everything now is broken and nothing works – unless, as ever, you are filthy rich.


(Albrecht Dürer, St Michael Fighting the Dragon)

Churchwell wrote in another book that: ‘Mythical histories lay the groundwork for fascist politics.’[3] Also true, increasingly evident in many countries around the world, including some of the most vaunted ‘democracies’, a few of them uncomfortably close. It was briefly illuminated (through a glass, darkly) by some of the clamorous noise around 23 April, St George’s Day, the patron saint of England, though ‘very little is known of him and his very existence is often doubted’.[4] If he did exist, he may have been born in Cappadocia, may have died in Palestine and never came near England. Still, he’s the patron saint of at least fifteen countries, states and major cities around the world. And, of course, there’s the matter of that dragon, a story added centuries later. Something may have happened somewhere in Libya, it seems.

‘Before Dürer’, Philip Hoare wrote, ‘dragons existed; after him, they did not. We were left with only the dragons of our unconscious, as Carl Jung would say.’[5] Even more on topic, one might say, is Nicolas Mosley’s comment about his father, Oswald Mosley: ‘But heroes continue not to see the dragons that are in themselves.’[6]

While the local elections may not accurately predict the winners in the various constituencies in the coming General Election, they will, I think, correctly identify the losers.

Notes

[1] Bonnie Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Strevens, The Oxford Companion to the Year (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 183.

[2] Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018), 215.

[3] The Wrath to Come: Gone With the Wind and the Lies America Tells (London: Head of Zeus, 2022), 352.

[4] The Oxford Companion to the Year, 166.

[5] Philip Hoare, Albert & the Whale (London: 4th Estate, 2021), 11.

[6] Nicholas Mosley, Rules of the Game; Beyond the Pale: Memoirs of Sir Oswald Mosley and Family (London: Pimlico, 1994), 116.