Birthdays

Today is the birthday, the 204th, of the fitfully great painter and etcher Samuel Palmer - let him provide the picture. It is of ancient oaks at Lullingstone, near Shoreham in the Darenth valley - the Valley of Vision, where Palmer did his most extraordinary work. Poor Palmer suffered much - the loss of his daughter in childhood, and later of the son in whom he had reposed all his hopes, endless professional frustrations and thwarted projects, the tyranny of his father-in-law, the hugely successful painting machine John Linnell, the neuroses of his wife - and he ended his life in a depressing respectable mock-Gothic 'cottage' outside Redhill. I began a novel about him once, long ago - appropriately enough, in view of its subject, it came to nothing...
It's also the birthday of Mozart (1756) and Jerome Kern (1885) and that strange man known to posterity as Lewis Carroll (1832) - and of Hester Lynch Salusbury Thrale Piozzi (1741), known to posterity chiefly through her intimate friendship with Johnson - a friendship vehemently broken off by him when she married her Italian. Their relationship has been the subject of much speculation - was it masochistic? Did it have something to do with his fear of madness? Does it matter (even if we could know)? Beryl Bainbridge deals with it with due delicacy in her novel According To Queeney, which gives, I think, as true and living a picture of Hester Thrale as could reasonably be hoped for. How wonderful that Bainbridge and Penelope Fitzgerald (very different writers in so many ways) should both have switched, late in their careers, from writing out of their own lives to writing out of the material of history - and thereby found their real genius. Something which, sadly, Palmer by and large lost as his career went on - but for a blaze of sunset glory in his late etchings.