'Not the worship of ashes...'

 Recently I wrote about Richard Wilbur's precept: 'In poetry, all the revolutions are palace revolutions' – in other words, all true revolutions take place within the living tradition, the poetic heritage; nothing is overthrown, the tradition lives on (this applies only to true revolutions, not rebellion for its own sake, which leads nowhere). Yesterday I came across another quotation that I think expresses perfectly the value of tradition: 'Tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire.' This formulation was coined by a musicologist called Constantin Floros, and is taken from his study of Mahler's symphonies (which I haven't read, being no great fan of those works). 'The preservation of fire' is indeed what a living tradition is all about, and when it is based on the worship of ashes it is no longer alive – at which point the time is ripe for another palace revolution. Poetry could probably do with one now, though heaven knows where it would come from or what it would look like. At present the living tradition appears to be very much more alive in music than in poetry... 

Radical Harmony

  Yesterday I was in the wicked city, having lunch with an old friend and visiting the pointillism exhibition, Radical Harmony, at the National Gallery. This display of paintings from the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, seems to have had lukewarm reviews, for some reason – I guess it's a style of painting that can seem rather sterile and limited. For myself I love it, largely because it was favoured by Seurat, one of the greatest of all late-19th-century painters (IMHO). The National Gallery has one of his that has never before been seen in Britain – Le Chahut (the Can-Can), a late and intriguing work that seems to suggest that Seurat, towards the end of his too-short life, was going to move off in new, unexpected directions, perhaps towards something more geometric and abstract, less naturalistic. 

I was glad to see a small-scale version of Les Poseuses (for my money, one of the great paintings of its time) and several of the coastal views painted by Seurat and Paul Signac. There is also Seurat's extraordinary portrait drawing of Signac, a miracle of ultra-delicate draughtsmanship. 
For me the revelation of the exhibition was Theo Van Rysselberghe, a Belgian artist I had barely heard of. The stricter pointillists were sniffy about his work, as he strayed from the technique, mixing it with other, looser manners of applying paint to canvas – but the results, especially in his portraits, could be rather wonderful. Among the large portraits on display are a lovely one of his wife –

and an equally impressive portrait of Anna Boch, an artist and collector, who has the distinction of being the purchaser of the only painting Van Gogh sold in his lifetime (La Vigne Rouge) –

And here, for good measure, is Maria Sèthe at the Harmonium . Maria was the wife of the Belgian architect and designer Henry Van de Velde – 

Van de Velde also painted, and his restful, vaguely melancholy Twilight caught my eye – 

Needless to say, these are not paintings that reproduce very well, and you really do need to see them. The exhibition, which is on a manageable scale and is not attracting blockbuster crowds, is on until February. I'd recommend it to anyone at all interested in post-impressionist art. 

What Would Captain Mainwaring Say?

 Born on this day (in 1920) was the actor Buster Merryfield, who achieved fame as 'Uncle Albert' in the sitcom Only Fools and Horses, which I rate as the best long-running British sitcom ever (though, like most, it ran a little bit too long). His career path was quite extraordinary, indeed unique, as I wrote here back in 2013... 

'Born on this day in 1920 was Henry Merryfield. A big strapping 9lb baby, he was immediately nicknamed Buster by his granddad, and Buster he remained, to the point where scarcely anyone knew his real name. As Buster Merryfield, he achieved fame late in life, playing the seafaring Uncle Albert (catchphrase 'During the war...') in the massively successful sitcom Only Fools and Horses.
 Something of a fitness fiend, Buster had been a boxing champion in his day, and was a PT and jungle warfare instructor 'during the war' - at which time he also got his first taste of the biz we call show, serving as an entertainment officer. However, when hostilities ceased, he was already married and about to become a father, so he elected to take the safe option – returning to the then National Westminster Bank, where he had been employed before the war.
  The amazing thing is that he stayed there until his retirement. While spending much of his spare time in amateur theatricals, Buster Merryfield didn't turn professional until after he had retired from what was by then NatWest. He had clocked up 40 years of service, man and boy, and risen to be manager of the Thames Ditton branch in Surrey. Surely this was the most unlikely bank manager ever – and surely the only bank manager ever to make the switch to much-loved sitcom stalwart. He must also have been alone among bank managers in having his face framed by such a mighty beard – what would Captain Mainwaring say?

'Busy, curious, thirsty fly!'

 The recent cold snaps have put paid to the last of the summer's wasps and flies, though the latter have hung around rather longer. When it come to flies, I (unlike Mrs N) take the line favoured by Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy: 

'Go—says he, one day at dinner, to an over-grown one which had buzz’d about his nose, and tormented him cruelly all dinner-time,—and which, after infinite attempts, he had caught at last, as it flew by him;—I’ll not hurt thee, says my uncle Toby, rising from his chair, and going a-cross the room, with the fly in his hand,—I’ll not hurt a hair of thy head:—Go, says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he spoke, to let it escape;—go poor devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee?—This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.'

For all their deplorable habits, flies are marvellous little creatures, wonderfully made, even beautiful if looked at closely and without prejudice, and their habit of scrupulously 'washing their hands' is endearing. Their vision operates at such a speed that our attempts to catch them are usually doomed: they see our approaching hand moving in slow motion and escape at their leisure.
Uncle Toby was not the only one with a soft spot for the fly. Browsing in my recently purchased India-paper anthology, I came across this, by William Oldys: 

On a Fly Drinking Out of His Cup

Busy, curious, thirsty fly!
Drink with me and drink as I:
Freely welcome to my cup,
Couldst thou sip and sip it up:
Make the most of life you may,
Life is short and wears away.

Both alike are mine and thine
Hastening quick to their decline:
Thine's a summer, mine's no more,
Though repeated to threescore.
Threescore summers, when they're gone,
Will appear as short as one!

 Oldys was an important antiquarian and bibliographer, but a man of irregular habits, whose debts landed him in the Fleet prison for two years, before he was rescued by friends who paid off all he owed. The Duke of Norfolk appointed him Norfolk Herald Extraordinary and Norroy King of Arms. However, the College of Arms describes him as 'a noted antiquary and bibliographer but wholly ignorant of heraldry and known for being "rarely sober in the afternoon, never after supper" and "much addicted to low company".'

What the Camel-Sparrow Ate

 The excellent Public Domain Review recently posted a photograph, from around 1930, of the contents of an ostrich's stomach, extracted post mortem. It's a fascinating collection of objects, including two handkerchiefs and a buttoned glove (this was a zoo ostrich), a length of rope, and various metal objects – coins, tacks, staples, hooks and a four-inch nail (which, sadly, was the cause of death). Here's a link –  https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/contents-of-an-ostrich-s-stomach-ca-1930

It would seem, than, that there is some truth in the idea that the ostrich 'digesteth hard yron', as in the poem by Marianne Moore –

He 'Digesteth Hard Yron' 

Although the aepyornis
   or roc that lived in Madagascar, and
the moa are extinct,
the camel-sparrow, linked
   with them in size—the large sparrow
Xenophon saw walking by a stream—was and is
a symbol of justice.

   This bird watches his chicks with
   a maternal concentration—and he’s
been mothering the eggs
at night six weeks—his legs
   their only weapon of defense.
He is swifter than a horse; he has a foot hard
as a hoof; the leopard

   is not more suspicious. How
   could he, prized for plumes and eggs and young
used even as a riding-beast, respect men
   hiding actor-like in ostrich skins, with the right hand
making the neck move as if alive
and from a bag the left hand strewing grain, that ostriches

   might be decoyed and killed! Yes, this is he
whose plume was anciently
the plume of justice; he
   whose comic duckling head on its
great neck revolves with compass-needle nervousness
when he stands guard,

   in S-like foragings as he is
   preening the down on his leaden-skinned back.
The egg piously shown
as Leda’s very own
   from which Castor and Pollux hatched,
was an ostrich-egg. And what could have been more fit
for the Chinese lawn it

   grazed on as a gift to an
   emperor who admired strange birds, than this
one, who builds his mud-made
nest in dust yet will wade
   in lake or sea till only the head shows.

	.	.	.	.	.	.	.

   Six hundred ostrich-brains served
   at one banquet, the ostrich-plume-tipped tent
and desert spear, jewel-
gorgeous ugly egg-shell
   goblets, eight pairs of ostriches
in harness, dramatize a meaning
always missed by the externalist.

   The power of the visible
   is the invisible; as even where
no tree of freedom grows,
so-called brute courage knows.
   Heroism is exhausting, yet
it contradicts a greed that did not wisely spare
the harmless solitaire

   or great auk in its grandeur;
   unsolicitude having swallowed up
all giant birds but an alert gargantuan
   little-winged, magnificently speedy running-bird.
This one remaining rebel
is the sparrow-camel.

This is a poem that vividly evokes the ludicrous but admirable flightless bird (not the last large flightless bird, pace Miss Moore), but is also about much more: the persistence of the past, endurance and survival, heroism and greed. The notes are impressive in themselves, citing Lyly's Euphues – 'the estrich digesteth hard yron to preserve his health' – and a range of other sources, notably George Jennison's Animals for Show and Pleasure in Ancient Rome.  Maybe the 'poet friend' quoted by Kay Ryan in her essay on Moore* was right: 'They should have taken away her library card.' But she is magnificent, formidable. Ryan goes on: '... how can we not find Marianne Moore formidable since she's so hard to understand? I think we just have to read her until we can contain the complexity that we cannot resolve. That is a bigger kind of understanding. At that point, the poet is no longer "formidable". A word or two becomes sufficient to invoke the complex spirit. We feel, now, an affection, a human affection, and a receptiveness which we could not feel when we were fighting with particulars.' Very true, I think, and of other poets than the magnificent Miss Moore.

*Collected in the wonderful Synthesizing Gravity (2020).   

Everyone's writing about this, so feel free to ignore...

 I could scarcely believe my eyes when I saw the headline – 'Lockdown could have been avoided entirely'! Had the farcical Covid 'inquiry' at last, having expended just shy of £200 million of our money, managed to produce a glimmer of sense? No, of course not, as I soon discovered. The gist was that lockdown could have been avoided if we'd, er, locked down a week earlier: it was the predetermined narrative of 'too little, too late' yet again. Earlier and more drastic action, it was said, would have saved 23,000 lives, according to 'computer modelling' – the same deeply flawed computer modelling that came up with such preposterous projections throughout the epidemic. There's an interesting graph on the Spectator website, showing a mighty Himalaya of projected deaths – projected by computer modelling – looming over something more like an alluvial plain, the near-flatline of actual Covid deaths. This 'inquiry' was set up with its conclusions ready made – that Boris Johnson's government fouled up and must be blamed, and that the only thing wrong with the harsh and oppressive measures taken was that they weren't harsh and oppressive enough, or go on for long enough. In the teeth of all the evidence, lockdown is unquestioningly presented as a life-saver on a grand scale, with no acknowledgment that, overall, the countries with the lightest (or non-existent) lockdown regimes had the best outcomes in terms of mortality, and those with the tightest regimes had among the worst. So, nothing has been learnt, and the next time will be even worse – especially if it happens under Starmer, who, when the final lockdown was belatedly lifted, predicted that this 'reckless' act would lead to 50,000 extra deaths in what would forever after be known as the 'Johnson variant'. This, oddly, did not come to pass. 

'The high mimetic powers possessed by Mr Dickens...'

 Good news from Birmingham (for a change) – the city is to unveil a Blue Plaque at its fine neoclassical town hall to commemorate Dickens's first public reading of A Christmas Carol.
A contemporary report chronicled the event thus: 

'The first of the Readings generously given by Mr Charles Dickens on behalf of the Birmingham and Midland Institute, took place on Tuesday evening, December 27, 1853, at the Birmingham Town Hall, where, notwithstanding the inclemency of the weather, nearly two thousand persons had assembled. The work selected was the CHRISTMAS CAROL. The high mimetic powers possessed by Mr Dickens enabled him to personate with remarkable force the various characters of the story, and with admirable skill to pass rapidly from the hard, unbelieving Scrooge, to trusting and thankful Bob Cratchit, and from the genial fulness of Scrooge's nephew, to the hideous mirth of the party assembled in Old Joe the Ragshopkeeper's parlour. The reading occupied more than three hours, but so interested were the audience, that only one or two left the Hall previously to its termination, and the loud and frequent bursts of applause attested the successful discharge of the reader's arduous task. On Thursday evening Mr. Dickens read THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH. The Hall was again well ruled, and the tale, though deficient in the dramatic interest of the CAROL, was listened to with attention, and rewarded with repeated applause. On Friday evening, the CHRISTMAS CAROL was read a second time to a large assemblage of work-people, for whom, at Mr. Dickens`s special request, the major part of the vast edifice was reserved.
.........
At the close of the reading Mr Dickens received a vote of thanks, and "three cheers, with three times three". As soon as the enthusiasm of the audience would allow him to speak, Mr Dickens said:-"You have heard so much of my voice since we met tonight, that I will only say, in acknowledgment of this affecting mark of your regard, that I am truly and sincerely interested in you; that any little service I have rendered to you I have freely rendered from my heart; that I hope to become an honorary member of your great Institution, and will meet you often there when it becomes practically useful; that I thank you most affectionately for this new mark of your sympathy and approval; and that I wish you many happy returns of this great birthday-time, and many prosperous years."

Not only was this Dickens's first public reading of the Carol; it was his first public reading of any of his own works. It clearly gave him a taste for such performances, to which he devoted much of his later career, exhausting himself in the process with readings of terrific emotional intensity – notably his famously terrifying reading of the murder of Nancy from Oliver Twist. Dickens judged the success of that one by how many ladies had fainted with horror in the course of it. 

In our own day, a public reading of all three hours of A Christmas Carol would be unlikely to attract many takers (even if it was given by Andrew Scott, whose one-man Chekhov, Vanya, was such a hit). But we do have the inimitable Count Arthur Strong currently touring the country with his, er, somewhat tangential take on A Christmas Carol. Here's a preview...