Derangement

 It has come to my attention that it is now considered perfectly acceptable, indeed laudable, in polite society to call for the assassination of Donald Trump – you know, that chap who recently secured a landslide victory in the U.S. elections, thanks largely to rising support among Latinos, African-Americans and even Arabs. Apparently he should be killed because (a) He is well fascist, innit? (These people wouldn't use such a vulgar turn of phrase, but it perfectly expresses the depth of their political analysis), and (b) If we don't kill him, he'll kill us (You know, like he did last time he was in power – remember when he killed us all?). Like so much these days, this takes me back to the seventeenth century, when various forms of religious mania swept the land, many of them driven by the maniacs' absolute conviction that they were of the Elect, therefore self-evidently Right, and therefore Justified in whatever they did or said, up to and including murder. 
We live in different times now, but it would be nice if the American Psychiatric Association urgently updated its manual to include Trump Derangement Syndrome (with a retrospective mention, perhaps, of Covid Derangement Syndrome and Brexit Derangement Syndrome). A mad world, my masters.

Remembrance Sunday

 This morning I attended the Remembrance ceremony that takes place every year in the Garden of Remembrance. The sun had just shown itself for the first time in a fortnight, the trees were in their autumn glory, and it seemed le tout Lichfield was out and about. Not being able to get any nearer, I followed the proceedings as best I could from the far side of Minster Pool. The Canada geese did their best to drown it out with their clamour, but I heard Laurence Binyon's 'For the Fallen' being read, as it always is, and as it was no doubt being read at other ceremonies the length and breadth of the land. Doubtless other suitable poems were being given an airing too – Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum', Rupert Brooke's 'The Soldier', John McCrae's 'In Flanders Fields', Dylan Thomas's 'And Death Shall Have No Dominion', maybe even Philip Larkin's 'MCMXIV'. The lost poets of the Second World War – Sidney Keyes, Alun Lewis, Keith Douglas – rarely get a look in on these occasions. So this year, to redress the balance, I'll mark the day with one of theirs, 'The Unknown Soldier' by Alun Lewis. A complicated, unhappy man, who died 'in mysterious circumstances' – almost certainly by his own hand – I have written about Lewis here before, and posted one of his poems. He is most famous for 'All Day It Has Rained', which, as well as being a fine poem in itself, is a heartfelt tribute to the poet dearest to Lewis's heart – Edward Thomas...

      All day it has rained, and we on the edge of the moors
      Have sprawled in our bell-tents, moody and dull as boors,
      Groundsheets and blankets spread on the muddy ground
      And from the first grey wakening we have found
      No refuge from the skirmishing fine rain
      And the wind that made the canvas heave and flap
      And the taut wet guy-ropes ravel out and snap.
      All day the rain has glided, wave and mist and dream,
      Drenching the gorse and heather, a gossamer stream
      Too light to stir the acorns that suddenly
      Snatched from their cups by the wild south-westerly
      Pattered against the tent and our upturned dreaming faces.
      And we stretched out, unbuttoning our braces,
      Smoking a Woodbine, darning dirty socks,
      Reading the Sunday papers - I saw a fox
      And mentioned it in the note I scribbled home; -
      And we talked of girls and dropping bombs on Rome,

      And thought of the quiet dead and the loud celebrities
      Exhorting us to slaughter, and the herded refugees;

      As of ourselves or those whom we
      For years have loved, and will again
      Tomorrow maybe love; but now it is the rain
      Possesses us entirely, the twilight and the rain.

      And I can remember nothing dearer or more to my heart
      Than the children I watched in the woods on Saturday
      Shaking down burning chestnuts for the schoolyard's merry play,
      Or the shaggy patient dog who followed me
      By Sheet and Steep and up the wooded scree
      To the Shoulder o' Mutton where Edward Thomas brooded long
      On death and beauty - till a bullet stopped his song.

(Of all the lost wartime poets, was Edward Thomas the most grievous loss – a poet who had just come into the fullness of his great gift, only to have his life cut short? Who knows what he might have gone on to write?)
  Anyway, to today's Alun Lewis poem, a powerful piece which I think deserves to be better known. Here it is...

The Unknown Soldier

Everything has lasted till today.
He stares upon it like a velvet king.
Velasquez might have made this flaccid mask,
The silence round the languid mouth,
The weak and glassy eyes, the crumpled brow.
All things are out-distanced now.

All days are heaped in wrath upon today.
The senses sleep except one crazy spark
That leaps the lesion slashed between his eyes
And cries – not for a fertile century,
Nor for the secular ransom of the soul –
But for a sip of water from my flask.
What is the soul to him?
He has outlasted everything.

Joy's deceitful liturgy has ceased.
Tomorrow and tomorrow have no place
Among the seas of rain, the seas of peace
That are the elements of this poor face.
The mean humiliating self no more
Has access to him, nor the friends
Whose sensual persuasions first began
The brittle scattering that this days ends.
On pander, lord and jester slams the door.
And impotent in his kingdom the grey king
No longer clings to that which dies.

He has abandoned everything.
Velasquez, close those doglike dolorous eyes. 

  

Binyon's Dancers

 Having spent the greater part of the day in transit (returning from yet another visit to Worthing), I've missed most of Radio 3's Day of Dance. There have been guest artists, interviews, special performances, dance music galore – and a scattering of poems, one of which was this, by Laurence Binyon, of which I particularly like the closing image:

The Little Dancers

Lonely, save for a few faint stars, the sky
Dreams; and lonely, below, the little street
Into its gloom retires, secluded and shy.
Scarcely the dumb roar enters this soft retreat;
And all is dark, save where come flooding rays
From a tavern window; there, to the brisk measure
Of an organ that down in an alley merrily plays,
Two children, all alone and no one by,
Holding their tattered frocks, thro' an airy maze
Of motion lightly threaded with nimble feet
Dance sedately; face to face they gaze,
Their eyes shining, grave with a perfect pleasure.

Laurence Binyon is best known for his famous poem of Remembrance, 'For the Fallen', but he also, among other good things, made a very successful translation of Dante, and wrote the eloquent introduction to The Bible Designed to Be Read as Literature.  

  When it comes to dance poems, I think this one by Richard Wilbur, inspired by a Degas painting, takes some beating: 

L'Etoile

A rushing music, seizing on her dance,
Now lifts it from her, blind into the light;
And blind the dancer, tiptoe on the boards
Reaches a moment toward her dance's flight.

Even as she aspires in loudening shine

The music pales and sweetens, sinks away;

And past her arabesque in shadow show

The fixt feet of the maitre de ballet.

So she will turn and walk through metal halls

To where some ancient woman will unmesh

Her small strict shape, and yawns will turn her face
Into a little wilderness of flesh. 

When Kingsley Met Roald

 One last dip into Kingsley Amis's Memoirs...
He is at a party at Tom Stoppard's house in Buckinghamshire when one of the guests arrives, long after everybody else – and, unlike everybody else, by helicopter. It is none other than Roald Dahl, the monstrously successful children's author, and a little later Amis finds himself reluctantly closeted with him. Dahl immediately steers the conversation onto the subject of money. 'What you want to do,' he advises, 'is write a children's book. That's where the money is these days.' To prove his point, he tells Amis the jaw-dropping size of the advance he was paid for his latest one. However, Amis protests, reasonably enough, that he couldn't do it: 'I don't think I enjoyed children's books much when I was a child myself. I've got no feeling for that kind of thing.'
'Never mind,' replies Dahl, 'the little bastards'd swallow it.'
That, Amis swears, is exactly what Dahl said, verbatim. 
  Later, however, Mr Dahl changes tack and tells Amis that, 'unless you put everything you've got into it, unless you write it from the heart, the kids'll have no use for it', and more along similar lines, before, 'with a stiff nod and an air of having asserted his integrity by rejecting some outrageous and repulsive suggestion, the man who put everything into the books he wrote for the kids left me to my thoughts.' 
Amis concludes:
'I felt rather as if I had been looking at one of those pictures by Escher in which the eye is led up a flight of stairs  only to find itself at the same level as it started at.
  I watched the television news that night , but there was no report of a famous children's author being killed in a helicopter crash.'
Somehow one gets the feeling Amis didn't take to Mr Dahl. 
  For myself, as long-time readers of this blog might know, I loathe Dahl and his works, and count myself lucky that my own children proved largely immune to their charm. However, I recently watched, with the grandchildren, the 2009 film of Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox, and I enjoyed it. My pleasure, I'm sure, was due less to Dahl's story than to director Wes Anderson's imaginative re-creation of it (in fact much of the film is Anderson's own invention). In particular, it was a joy to see proper crunchy hand-made animation (mostly stop-motion) instead of the usual slick and soulless computer-generated capers – and there were some great songs on the soundtrack. Heaven knows what Mr Dahl would have made of it...


  

Early Disclosers

 Twice recently – and many, many times in the less recent past – people I have only just met have, within minutes, informed me, in no uncertain terms, of their political affiliations. The first of the more recent declarations came when the man who was guiding me through the intricacies of keeping a listening diary for RAJAR (the radio audience research outfit – I had rashly agreed to record my listening for them) suddenly informed me, quite out of the blue, that he was one of the few who had voted Green in the last general election. He then, unprompted, told me why. As if I cared, let alone agreed... On the second occasion, it was a near neighbour, who, almost in the same breath as introducing himself to me, informed me that 'we' (himself and missus) 'are very left wing'. As he expanded on this, it became clear that he is some kind of Christian Socialist, one who takes seriously the absurd notion that 'Jesus was the first Communist'. Perfectly nice chap, but why did he feel compelled to tell me his political opinions with such alacrity. Why does anyone? The least interesting thing about most people is their opinions, and the least interesting of those are usually the political ones. But those who are so keen to declare their affiliations have, I notice, one thing on common: they are invariably of the 'Left'. I think this is in part because, unlike anyone of a conservative bent, they act on the assumption that all decent, civilised-seeming people must agree with them – how could they not? I don't recall anyone who could be categorised as conservative ever treating me to their political opinions on first meeting – partly as a matter of good manners, and partly, no doubt, because they know they are unlikely to find a kindred spirit in any gathering of 'thinking' or 'creative' people.
  Personally, I work on the assumption that nobody present is likely to agree with me, and this doesn't bother me in the slightest; I'm quite happy to be in a minority of one, to stay quiet and avoid the unpleasantness and sheer tedium of political debate. And I'm never going to fall out with anyone over their political opinions (unless they are blatantly antisemitic). But maybe I'm taking the wrong tack: maybe I should join the early disclosers and loudly declare on first meeting, 'My name is Nige and I am, like my father before me, a violent Tory of the old school.'  Not that I am, but it's what that socialist hero John Ruskin declared himself to be, in the opening sentence of his autobiography, Praeterita. But no, I'll keep quiet.
  Meanwhile, I was pleased to read that the new leader of the Conservative party, Kemi Badenoch, numbers among her inspirations Thomas Sowell and Roger Scruton. It looks like a promising sign, but who knows?

Another Country

 It was on this day in 1959 – 65 years ago, when I was rising ten years old – that Britain's first stretch of interurban motorway was opened, inevitably by publicity-hungry Transport Minister Ernest Marples (that's him in the picture, looking on the latest of his works, and no doubt feeling the hand of history on his shoulder). The section that was opened on this momentous day ran from Junction 5 (Watford) to Junction 18 (Crick/Rugby). It was a nice little motorway, with soft shoulders, no crash barriers, no speed limits, no lighting – and, by modern standards, virtually no cars. It was a popular entertainment in those days to watch what traffic there was going by on these startlingly wide (three-lane) roads. Yet again I find myself reaching for that well-worn phrase 'another world' – but it was another world, or at least another country, before the motor car finally took over, ruining many of our town and city centres, and clogging those once half-deserted highways with nose-to-tail traffic at all hours of the day and night. When I was at school, many, probably most, of the teachers didn't have cars, and came and went by bicycle or bus; nowadays not only the teachers but many of the older pupils drive to and from school – and many of the younger ones are picked up by parents in cars, an almost unheard-of thing in my day. 
   I remember 1959 for two other notable innovations – the unveiling of the first Minis (the Morris Mini-Minor and the Austin Seven – and mini they were, tiny by today's standards) and the first hovercraft. Both British inventions and both manufactured in Britain. As I say, another world...