Alice Munro RIP

 I was sorry to hear that the great Canadian short story writer Alice Munro has died, but glad to learn that she had reached the grand age of 92 – I had no idea she was that old. I came late to her work, by way of the collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, which I wrote about here. Later I was bowled over again by Friend of My Youth, writing about it here. I have read many of her other stories too, but don't seem to have written about them. Unlike many writers, particularly of short stories, and particularly those not by nature inclined to self-publicity, Munro was rewarded with all the honours she deserved, up to and including the Nobel Prize for Literature. 'A story,' she wrote, 'is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself, of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.'
 And now I intend to read or reread more of Alice Munro.
 RIP. 

'The timber is to carry'

 'It's my mission,' wrote Les Murray, 'to irritate the hell out of the eloquent who would oppress my people, by being a paradox that they can't assimilate: the Subhuman Redneck who writes poems.' Murray was happy to play the part of unrepentant ocker*, fat, shorts-wearing, plain-spoken, born into absolute poverty, educated largely by his own efforts – and he was determined to created a new Australian poetry not from the offcuts of British or European culture but from what was uniquely and distinctively Australian: the Bush, Murray's own country. He was of course a highly cultivated poet, with a vast vocabulary, well versed in the British and European traditions – indeed he was for some years a professional translator – but that was just another element in the Murray paradox. Another, perhaps, was that he was a devout and observant Catholic (he converted when he married his Budapest-born wife). Last night, browsing in the Selected Poems, I came across this moving little poem, written to mark the conversion to Catholicism of the poet Kenneth Hart. (It begins by recalling an incident at the brutal Moreton Bay penal colony, and the overseer 'who later died' was probably the notoriously harsh commandant, Captain Patrick Logan, who was killed in a skirmish with Aborigines in 1830.)

New Moreton Bay

A grog-primed overseer, who later died,
Snapped at twenty convicts gasping in a line
That pole ain't heavy! Two men stand aside!
And then two more, and you, pop-eyes! And you!
– until the dozen left, with a terrible cry,
broke and were broken
beneath the tons of logs they had stemmed aloft desperately.

Because there is no peace in this world's peace
the timber is to carry. Many hands heave customarily,
some step aside, detained by the Happiness Police
or despair's boutiques; it is a continual sway – 
but when grace and intent
recruit a fresh shoulder, then we're in the other testament
and the innocent wood lifts line-long, with its leaves and libraries.

* An ocker is defined as 'a rough, uncultivated Australian man' – though of course Murray was very far from uncultivated.

Eurovision 2008

 Sixteen years ago, in May 2008, I devoted the very first post on this blog to the Eurovision Song Contest. To read that post today is to revisit a more innocent age, when Eurovision still provided innocent entertainment (often unwittingly) while Terry Wogan and the rest of us looked on aghast. But by 2008 even Wogan was no longer really enjoying it, and was worrying about politicised voting. In fact, as he seems to have sensed, Eurovision was beginning its long descent into unwatchability. It's a good thing he's not around to see the contest venue besieged by demonstrators voicing their support for a genocidal kleptocracy, and the Israeli contestant under armed guard (and, inevitably, being booed). Not to mention a peculiarly depraved and misjudged UK entry. But hey ho, never mind – it's a beautiful sunny May day, and I intend to get out there and enjoy it...
Here's the 2008 piece, which was headed 'Everybody Loves Russia...'

Or so it would seem from Russia's runaway victory in last night's Eurovision Song Contest (as it is still whimsically called). The winning song was a tedious blast of bad power pop (and you'd have thought power was something the Russians would know about), enlivened by an ice skater circling pointlessly around the singer.
I recently heard a new explanation for why the eastern bloc countries get all the votes - it's the ethnic minorities who find themselves living in the 'wrong' nation states and assert their identity annually by voting en masse for their mother/fatherland. Eurovision as a protest against the nation state? Well, maybe.

It was a poor result anyway, after the two previous winners, who had both been completely insane choices (monster rockers Lordi, and Serbia's mystifying answer to k d lang). And it wasn't as if there weren't madness galore on offer. At Nige Towers, much hilarity was occasioned by Bosnia's entry, an impenetrable drama involving a doll-like woman pegging out washing while a man with a painted-on moustache pranced around and tricoteuses in wedding dresses knitted away. Croatia's act, involving an old man in a hat, was almost as mystifying, and Latvia's deranged pirate song was inspired, perfect Eurovision fare. France too managed a classic - an impassioned song which, according to the subtitles, was all about 'Chivers', with which the singer seemed to have an agonised relationship (English marmalade perhaps? You know what the French are like...). The subtitles throughout were fascinating, not only in yielding no meaning at all 90 per cent of the time, but in establishing that most of these acts were in fact singing in English, though so heavily accented that you'd never have known. English, the international language of bad pop music, oh dear...
The great Terry Wogan did his head-shaking stuff superbly, as ever, but rather let himself down at the end by seeming to take the outcome seriously (I think he couldn't get hold of a drink, so he was probably crotchety). We should, he suggests, either pull out, or cut eastern Europe adrift and let western Europe have its own, supposedly non-political, merit-based contest. But where would the fun be in that? The whole point of Eurovision is its madness, its total divorce from any notions of musical quality (even at this base level). It proves to us year after year, in the most diverting way, that, when it comes to pop/rock music, those unfortunates on the far side of the Channel simply haven't a clue. Here at least we of the English-speaking world have got those continentals licked. So let's keep it coming, and the madder the better.

Death in Rome

 My latest serendipitous find on the bookshelves of my favourite charity shop was a novel called Death in Rome by a German novelist I had never heard of, Wolfgang Koeppen. It looked interesting, and when I read the blurb on the back, I knew I had to have it. Death in Rome is described by its translator, Michael Hofmann (the man who has Englished most of Joseph Roth's oeuvre), as 'the most devastating novel about the Germans that I have ever read, and one of the most arresting on any subject'. Who could resist? Not me.
  The principal characters in Death in Rome are four members of a German family who find themselves more or less unintentionally reunited in the Eternal City: 'Once upon a time,' the opening sentence reminds us, 'this city was a home to gods.' No longer. This quartet of German visitors consists of Judejahn, a wholly unrepentant SS general who managed to escape after being sentenced to death at Nuremeberg, and is now working with the military in an unnamed Arab country; his brother-in-law Pfaffrath (Koeppen likes grotesque names), the ultimate bureaucrat who is thriving under democracy just as well as he did under Nazism; and the two lost, damaged souls – Judejahn's son Adolf(!), who is trying to escape the past by training for the priesthood, and Pfaffrath's son Siegfried, a discontented composer of twelve-tone music. These four, Hofmann points out chillingly in his Introduction, represent 'the four principal areas of German achievement, or the four quarters of the riven German soul: murder, bureaucracy, theology and music'. Each of them, as he wanders around Rome, experiences a different city, a different world, none of them easy to take (except for the complacent Pfaffrath senior). Their different perceptions and voices are choreographed like a complex, macabre ballet. Tenses and persons shift (only Siegfried habitually uses the first person), viewpoints switch vertiginously, and the uneasiness present from the start builds into a terrible sense of foreboding as events head towards an inevitable bloody climax. The novel ends with a blunt version of the last sentence of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice ('And before nightfall a shocked and respectful world received the news of his decease'), the ghost of which hovers over Koeppen's novel. Unsurprisingly, when Death in Rome was first published in Germany in 1954, it had a hostile reception and was dismissed with remarks such as 'Is this really what we need at such a time in our history?' A time, that is, when the German nation had willed itself into a state of profound historical amnesia. Death in Rome was just the kind of wake-up call that was not wanted. 
  I hesitate to recommend this novel; it makes unsettling and sometimes painful reading, and this blog is supposed to be a hedonic resource. However, I have to say that it is, by any measure, an extraordinary piece of work. So, if you're feeling strong...

'Where Love directs, a Libertine it roves'

 Born on this day in 1698 was Henry Baker, naturalist and man of many parts. He began his working life apprenticed to a bookseller, but soon after that he acquired a reputation as a therapist, apparently having great success with deaf people, using a system that he kept secret. His medical work brought him to the attention of Daniel Defoe, with whom he launched the Universal Spectator and Weekly Journal in 1728, and whose youngest daughter he married in 1730. But his activities were largely focused on scientific inquiry, specialising in microscopy, and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, among other distinctions. He was also a member of the Society of Aurelians, the first entomological society in the world, whose members devoted themselves to the study of butterflies, moths and other insects (and also to having a good time whenever they got together). 
  Baker claimed most of the credit for a magnificent illustrated book written by his fellow Aurelian Benjamin Wilkes, English Moths and Butterflies. It was, he claimed, 'in some sort my own child, having myself compiled it and put it in the order it is now, from Mr. Wilkes memorandums, he being indefatigable in his observations and faithful in the minuting down every particular but for the want of learning quite incapable of writing a book.' Charming... However, Baker, who was also something of a poet, did furnish Wilkes's book with a rhapsodic, if excessively pious, introductory poem:

 See, to the Sun the Butterfly displays
His glistering Wings and wantons in his Rays:
In Life exulting o’er the Meadow flies,
Sips from each Flow’r and breathes the vernal Skies.
His splendid Plumes, in graceful order show
The various glories of the painted Bow.
Where Love directs, a Libertine it roves,
And courts the fair ones through the verdant Groves.
How glorious now! How chang’d since Yesterday
When on the ground a crawling Worm it lay,
Where ev’ry foot might tread its Soul away!
Who rais’d it thence and bid it range the Skies?
Gave its rich plumage and its brilliant Dyes?
’Twas God: its God and thine, O Man, and He
In this thy fellow Creature lets thee see
The wond’rous Change that is ordained for thee.
Thou too shalt leave thy reptile form behind,
And mount the Skies, a pure ethereal Mind,
There range among the Stars, all pure and unconfin’d.

Terry

 I only learnt of the existence of Terry, the Stowe Pool terrapin, the other day, and hadn't expected to see him the first time I went looking – but there he was yesterday morning, basking in the May sun on an outwork of a big, messy coot's nest. The coots seemed entirely relaxed about his presence, and were carrying on with business as usual. Terry, according to Lichfield lore, has lived in Stowe Pool for years. He certainly looks as if he's been around a while, being about the size of a mature garden tortoise. He manages to hibernate and survive the winter – as do some 4,000 other 'feral' terrapins in the UK, most of them originally pets who, as they grew larger, proved too high-maintenance for their owners, who released them into the nearest expanse of water. 
  I was delighted to make Terry's acquaintance, and hope to see him again next time I'm passing Stowe Pool (which, by the way, is a reservoir, dating back to the 18th century in its present form, and full of impressive fish, including 25lb carp). And then, later in the day, I saw my first swifts – three of them, over a supermarket car park. Summer is here!
[The photo above is not mine, but captures Terry very well, I think.]

One Road to Tolerance

 A blog friend recently sent me a passage from a book by the American anthropologist and science writer Loren Eiseley, The Night City. Eiseley describes a visit to the ruins of Leptis Magna in the Libyan desert, where he meditates on time and its passing. 'There should be a kind of pity that comes with time', he writes, 'when one grows truly conscious and looks behind as well as forward, for nothing is more brutal than the man who is not aware he is a shadow. Nothing is more real than the real; and that is why it is well for men to hurt themselves with the past—it is one road to tolerance.' The last two phrases in particular struck me: I think a knowledge of the past is indeed a road to tolerance, and ignorance of it is surely a road to intolerance. Isn't this what we are seeing in today's vicious displays of intolerance by the new breed of unforgiving 'woke' activists? A quarter of a century ago, in The Triumph of Love, Geoffrey Hill wrote of  'these strange children, pitiless in their ignorance and contempt' – and now they're everywhere, dominating every university campus and loudly asserting themselves on the streets of our cities. And they are, I'm sure, massively ignorant of the past – how could they not be if they are accusing the Israelis of genocide? What unfathomable depths of ignorance does that imply? These people's idea of history will no doubt have been formed by the minimal and partial (in both senses) teaching of the subject in schools, where the subject itself is becoming increasingly marginal and the teaching of it is likely to leave a clear impression that our forebears were ethically deplorable and their achievements based on oppression and exploitation, best forgotten and disowned. This can only encourage a rejection of the past and our connection with it, leaving people with no sense of continuity with what came before – and without that sense, that perspective, an entire dimension of our human reality is lost.
  Every culture has told stories about its past, either in the form of factual history or, more often, myths and legends. Some knowledge of these stories was considered essential to becoming a fully conscious, fully functioning human. Without that knowledge, what are we? Well, we are beginning to find out, and it is not good...
  Zbigniew Herbert was a poet, living in the dangerous present of 20th-century Poland, whose imagination was steeped in the past, in history and the classics. In this poem he shows exactly why the classics matter, why history matters – 

Why the Classics
                         

                                 1
                         in the fourth book of the Peloponnesian War
                         Thucydides tells among other things
                         the story of his unsuccessful expedition

                         among long speeches of chiefs
                         battles sieges plague
                         dense net of intrigues of diplomatic endeavours
                         the episode is like a pin
                         in a forest

                         the Greek colony Amphipolis
                         fell into the hands of Brasidos
                         because Thucydides was late with relief

                         for this he paid his native city
                         with lifelong exile

                         exiles of all times
                         know what price that is

                                 2
                         generals of the most recent wars
                         if a similar affair happens to them
                         whine on their knees before posterity
                         praise their heroism and innocence

                         they accuse their subordinates
                         envious colleagues
                         unfavourable winds

                         Thucydides says only
                         that he had seven ships
                         it was winter
                         and he sailed quickly

                                 3
                         if art for its subject
                         will have a broken jar
                         a small broken soul
                         with a great self-pity

                         what will remain after us
                         will it be lovers' weeping
                         in a small dirty hotel
                         when wall-paper dawns

And here he is writing as a Roman in dangerous times, pondering his return to a court not unlike that ruled over by Stalin:

 The Return of the Proconsul

I’ve decided to return to the emperor’s court
once more I shall see if it’s possible to live there
I could stay here in this remote province
under the full sweet leaves of sycamores
under the rule of sickly nepotists

when I return I don’t intend to commend myself
I shall applaud in measured portions
smile in ounces frown discreetly
for that they will not give me a golden chain
this iron one will suffice

I’ve decided to return tomorrow or the next day
I cannot live among vineyards nothing here is mine
trees have no roots houses no foundations the rain is glassy flowers smell of wax
a dry cloud rattles against the empty sky
so I shall return tomorrow the next day in any case I shall return

I must come to terms with my face again
with my lower lip so it knows how to check scorn
with my eyes so they remain ideally empty
and with that miserable chin the hare of my face
which trembles when the chief of guards walks in

of one thing I am sure I will not drink wine with him
when he brings his goblet nearer I will lower my eyes
and pretend I’m picking bits of food from between my teeth
besides the emperor likes courage of convictions
to a certain extent to a certain reasonable extent
he is after all a man like everyone
and already tired by all those tricks with poison
he cannot drink his fill incessant chess
this left cup is for Drusus from the right one pretend to sip
then drink only water never lose sight of Tacitus

take a walk in the garden and return when the corpse has been removed
I’ve decided to return to the emperor’s court
I really hope that things will work out somehow

'To go home and wear shorts forever...'

 Warmth in the air today – at last – and no rain, even the sun shining off and on. With the sun, inevitably, come the first sightings of men in shorts. For myself, I have never knowingly worn shorts since boyhood, but live and let live, I say (when not denouncing shorts as an offence against man, God and nature, not to mention taste). At least the wearers of shorts have one great poet – Les Murray, Australia's finest – on their side. Here is his tour de force, 'The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever'...

To go home and wear shorts forever
in the enormous paddocks, in that warm climate,
adding a sweater when winter soaks the grass,

to camp out along the river bends
for good, wearing shorts, with a pocketknife,
a fishing line and matches,

or there where the hills are all down, below the plain,
to sit around in shorts at evening
on the plank verandah;

If the cardinal points of costume
are Robes, Tat, Rig and Scunge,
where are shorts in this compass?

They are never Robes
as other bareleg outfits have been:
the toga, the kilt, the lava-lava
the Mahatma's cotton dhoti;

archbishops and field marshals
at their ceremonies never wear shorts.
The very word
means underpants in North America.

Shorts can be Tat,
Land-Rovering bush-environmental tat,
socio-political ripped-and-metal-stapled tat,
solidarity-with-the-Third World tat tvam asi*,

likewise track-and-field shorts worn to parties
and the further humid, modelling negligee
of the Kingdom of Flaunt,
that unchallenged aristocracy.

More plainly climatic, shorts
are farmers' rig, leathery with salt and bonemeal;
are sailors' and branch bankers' rig,
the crisp golfing style
of our youngest male National Costume.

Most loosely, they are Scunge,
ancient Bengal bloomers or moth-eaten hot pants
worn with a former shirt,
feet, beach sand, hair
and a paucity of signals.

Scunge, which is real negligee
housework in a swimsuit, pyjamas worn all day,
is holiday, is freedom from ambition.
Scunge makes you invisible
to the world and yourself.

The entropy of costume,
scunge can get you conquered by more vigorous cultures
and help you notice it less.

To be or to become
is a serious question posed by a work-shorts counter
with its pressed stack, bulk khaki and blue,
reading Yakka or King Gee, crisp with steely warehouse odour.

 Satisfied ambition, defeat, true unconcern,

the wish and the knack of self-forgetfulness
all fall within the scunge ambit
wearing board shorts of similar;
it is a kind of weightlessness.

Unlike public nakedness, which in Westerners
is deeply circumstantial, relaxed as exam time,
artless and equal as the corsetry of a hussar regiment,

shorts and their plain like
are an angelic nudity,
spirituality with pockets!
A double updraft as you drop from branch to pool!

Ideal for getting served last
in shops of the temperate zone
they are also ideal for going home, into space,
into time, to farm the mind's Sabine acres
for product and subsistence.

Now that everyone who yearned to wear long pants
has essentially achieved them,
long pants, which have themselves been underwear
repeatedly, and underground more than once,
it is time perhaps to cherish the culture of shorts,

to moderate grim vigour
with the knobble of bare knees,
to cool bareknuckle feet in inland water,
slapping flies with a book on solar wind
or a patient bare hand, beneath the cadjiput trees,

to be walking meditatively
among green timber, through the grassy forest
towards a calm sea
and looking across to more of that great island
and the further tropics.

* 'Tat tvam asi' is one of the 'Great Sayings' of the Upanishads, and means 'That thou art', expressing the relationship of the individual to the Absolute – as do shorts, in their own small way...

Half an Hour to Justify the Licence Fee?

 Waking (for the third time, dammit) just after 6.30 this morning and tuning to Radio 3, I found Petroc Trelawny marking a musical anniversary – the first performance, in 1692, of The Fairy-Queen, Purcell's take on A Midsummer Night's Dream (which actually has rather little to do with the play itself). Petroc played a strikingly beautiful plaint, 'O Let Me Weep', which I don't remember hearing before. This was followed by the great Maurizio Pollini playing a Chopin nocturne (No 2 in E flat), and by then it was time for Bach Before 7: this morning a fragment of a multi-instrumental concerto (three trumpets for starters) that was probably intended as the introductory Sinfonia of a lost cantata. (And talking of lost music, the score of The Fairy-Queen was lost after Purcell's death, and only recovered in the early 20th century)...
 Some time after 7, I drifted off to sleep again, with the comfortable feeling that half hours like that one almost justify the licence fee. Almost. Actually I'd happily pay a licence fee just for Radio 3 – especially as it would only be a few quid.
   Here is 'O Let Me Weep', wonderfully simple and wonderfully profound, like so much of Purcell..

 

Another Magazine Gone

 I was sorry to learn that the UK edition of that old warhorse Reader's Digest is to close down, unable to stay afloat in today's magazine market. When I was a boy my parents, like almost everyone else, had Reader's Digest (and even a few of the books they published) in the house, and from an early age I would leaf through it, often mystified – especially by the 'humour' ('Laughter the Best Medicine', 'Humour in Uniform') – but finding plenty to interest me, sometimes in 'Towards More Picturesque Speech' or 'It Pays to Increase Your Word Power', often  in the articles on science and medicine: in those days I wanted to be a doctor, a desire that left me as soon as I found out how much dreary science I'd have to do at school. Readers' Digest was a product of its time – aspirational, self-improving, decently conservative, unchallenging (though it campaigned hard to establish the link between smoking and lung cancer) – and was still in its heyday in the Fifties and Sixties when I first knew it. Not only was it in every home (or so it seemed) but in every doctor's or dentist's waiting room, along with the long since departed Punch.
   In my youth, of course, I had no time for it, but much later I did once have the curious experience of writing for it. The excellent Russell Twisk, the Listener editor who had bravely taken me on as radio critic in the course of a successful shake-up of the magazine, went on to be the UK editor-in-chief of Reader's Digest, so naturally I tried to get some work off him. I needed the money – and, by golly, the money turned out to be good. However, I had never had to work so hard to write a piece that amounted to little more than extended picture captions (it was to celebrate the tercentenary of the Glorious Revolution that brought William and Mary to the throne). Then, when I thought I'd finally crossed the finishing line, I came up for the first time against American-style fact checking. For one who tended to rely on winging it, bluffing and improvising, this was a major shock to the system. I was quite relieved when a couple of further ideas I put to Reader's Digest were turned down.
  And now Reader's Digest is following Punch and indeed The Listener into the ever growing graveyard of defunct magazines. Many more will follow it, I fear.

Rudyard: Kiplings, Funambulists and Swallows

 Talking of public monuments, here, viewed from behind, is a tree sculpture that overlooks Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire, which I visited at the weekend. I took the picture from behind because, frankly, it looks better: seen from the front, that tightrope walker has an unnerving look of the Monopoly Man about him. The sculpture, carved from a beech tree, overlooks the lake, and is intended to commemorate the feat of Carlos Trower, the 'African Blondin', who in 1864 (and again in 1878) walked across the lake on a tightrope 100ft above the water. He was not actually African but African-American, and I'm surprised he isn't better known in these days when 'black history' is so popular.  His feat was replicated in 2016 by funambulist Chris Bull, aka Bullzini, as the climax of a day of activities replicating Rudyard's heyday as a Victorian inland resort to which hundreds of thousands of day trippers and holidaymakers flocked, arriving on the North Staffordshire Railway. Among these visitors were John Lockwood Kipling and Alice Macdonald, who met there on a visit from Burslem, and were so taken with Rudyard Lake that they named their first son after it. 
  The lake was not intended as a tourist resort when it was created in 1799 as a canal reservoir, but such was its size – nearly two and a half miles long – and the beauty of its setting in a wooded valley that it was bound to become one, once the railways had reached it. It is still beautiful today, and visitors still come, though probably in smaller numbers than in its Victorian heyday – and they no longer arrive by train: there is now only a miniature railway, running in the summer months along the shore of the lake. When I was last at Rudyard, in 2016, I saw my first swallows of the year there, skimming the surface of the lake – and again this year my first swallows were waiting for me at Rudyard. They were two and a half weeks later than in 2016 – a testament to this year's cold wet April. I wonder if the swifts will be late too...

'The age of the statue is dead'

 The unveiling of the latest appalling public statue – of the late Queen and her (rather more lifelike) corgis, in Rutland, a delightful little county that doesn't deserve such an outrage – prompts an excellent piece by Ben Lawrence in the Telegraph. He's right that 'the biggest problem with modern statues is that they're awful' – think, if you can bear to, of the Diana statue in Kensington Gardens, or the giant Lovers looming over St Pancras station. However, there are exceptions – one, indeed, being the statue of John Betjeman that also stands at St Pancras, another the Larkin statue (also by Martin Jennings) in Hull. Only recently a pretty good statue of Coleridge (by Nicholas Dimbleby) was unveiled at Ottery St Mary. I should also mention that Lichfield has two good public statues – of Erasmus Darwin and St Chad, by Peter Walker. However, these are outliers, and Ben Lawrence is surely right that 'the age of the statue is dead' – the age, that is, of the naturalistic public monument, a statue that served a purpose, was skilfully made, and invoked a kind of grandeur that has become quite alien to our levelling, denigrating culture. Alas. 

A Cather Anniversary

 On this day in 1947, Willa Cather died in her Park Avenue home, at the age of 73, not of the cancer that she had been living with for some while, but of a cerebral haemorrhage. Her life partner Edith Lewis, in accordance with Cather's instructions, subsequently destroyed most of the manuscript of an unfinished final novel, Hard Punishments, set in medieval Avignon. Fragments of it have subsequently surfaced, and it sounds like yet another departure for an author who, as A. S Byatt put it, reinvented the novel form with each new work she wrote: this would have been her only novel set entirely in the Old World. Cather was interred in the Old Burying Ground of Jaffrey, New Hampshire, where Edith joined her 25 years later. 
  For years Willa Cather was little more than a name to me, as to most readers on this side of the Atlantic, so I came to her very late – in 2012, I think – initially by way of My Antonia, the last of the 'Prairie Trilogy', soon followed by another little masterpiece, A Lost Lady. As I read on through her novels (search 'Willa Cather' on this blog for my reactions), finally devouring all of them – and much of the shorter fiction – my admiration and wonder grew and grew, and I realised that I was dealing with a truly classic writer, one of the greats. Indeed, if someone has to be the Greatest Novelist of the 20th Century, I would be happy to nominate her – and, as the reputations of many of the male contenders for that title continue to fall away, that might come to seem a pretty sound choice.

Birthday, Rain

 Vladimir Nabokov was born on this day in 1899, though by the old calendar it would have been the 10th of April, and the following year it became the 23rd, so he celebrated his first birthday on our St George's Day. Anyway, here in England it's been a day (and night) of incessant rain, so here is a fitting poem by Nabokov, written in 1956...

Rain

How mobile is the bed on these nights of gesticulating trees when the rain clatters fast, the tin-toy rain with dapper hoof trotting upon an endless roof, travelling into the past. Upon old roads the steeds of rain slip and slow down and speed again through many a tangled year; but they can never reach the last dip at the bottom of the past because the sun is there.

'A Man Was Drawing Near to Me'

 This morning, I thought I'd try another Blindfold Poetry Selection. The slim volume I blindly took from the shelf turned out to be A Choice of Thomas Hardy's Poems – an attractive little book edited by Geoffrey Grigson, illustrated by Glynn Thomas, and published by Macmillan – and the poem it fell open at was 'A Man Was Drawing Near to Me'. I hadn't remembered reading it before, though I must have done: once, years ago, I even embarked on a doomed venture to read the Collected Poems, a volume of some 900 pages. Hardy, like many another poet, wrote too much, but the best of it is, for all its sometimes tortuous diction, very fine indeed. 'A Man Was Drawing Near to Me' is a haunting, mysterious affair – who is this man drawing near, and what does his 'gaze that bore My destiny' reveal? It could almost have been written by Walter de la Mare, though the result would have been smoother and more musical. The place names, by the way, are all from north Cornwall...

    On that gray night of mournful drone,
    Apart from aught to hear, to see,
    I dreamt not that from shires unknown
    In gloom, alone,
    By Halworthy,
    A man was drawing near to me.

    I'd no concern at anything,
    No sense of coming pull-heart play;
    Yet, under the silent outspreading
    Of even's wing
    Where Otterham lay,
    A man was riding up my way.

    I thought of nobody – not of one,
    But only of trifles – legends, ghosts –
    Though, on the moorland dim and dun
    That travellers shun
    About these coasts,
    The man had passed Tresparret Posts.

    There was no light at all inland,
    Only the seaward pharos-fire,
    Nothing to let me understand
    That hard at hand
    By Hennett Byre
    The man was getting nigh and nigher.

    There was a rumble at the door,
    A draught disturbed the drapery,
    And but a minute passed before,
    With gaze that bore
    My destiny,
    The man revealed himself to me.

London, Glass

 

Yesterday I was in London – always something of a shock to the system these days ('I had not thought death had undone so many', etc.) – to have lunch with an old friend. Afterwards we crossed the river to have a look at the Glass Heart exhibition at Two Temple Place – or rather, to visit Two Temple Place, which is always a pleasure: the extraordinary neo-Gothic house built for William Waldorf Astor in 1895 is like nothing else in London (or at least nothing open to the public – and indeed Temple Place wasn't until quite recently). The Glass Heart exhibition was interesting, mostly for some informative stuff about glass making and the glass industry, rather than what was on show. This included rather too much lumpish and unattractive recent work, and too little in the way of traditional stained or painted glass, though the Wahls, father and daughter, get a look-in, and there are bits of Morris & Co. material, mostly designs and sketches (and, in a different line, some nice engraved glass). Of course the best stained glass is, by its nature, in situ, and best seen in situ. Indeed, I found the two great windows that are in situ in the great hall of Temple Place the most enjoyable things I saw. They are by Clayton and Bell, and represent Sunrise (the East window) and Sunset (the West). And now I am back in Lichfield, with the cathedral and its wonderful Flemish glass ten minutes' walk away...

Chasing the Devil Out of Texas

 Today is the centenary of the birth, in Vinton, Louisiana, of Clarence 'Gatemouth' Brown (who got his nickname from a teacher who said he had 'a voice like a gate'). Brown was a popular performer but also something of a musician's musician, a versatile multi-instrumentalist – guitar, fiddle, drums, piano – who worked in a variety of genres, though he was at heart a blues man: he won a Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album in 1983 (for Alright Again!). Here he is showing he could also play a mean country fiddle – and still find time to enjoy a few puffs on his pipe during the keyboard solo...

Rowland Suddaby

 This image from the golden age of motoring – an age when oil companies commissioned quality artwork (and quality books, in the form of the wonderful Shell Guides, edited by Johns Betjeman and Piper) – caught my eye today. It shows Folly House in Darley Abbey, a place I've visited a few times: it's a village in the Derwent valley that is now part of the city of Derby and has some fine buildings dating from its 18th-century industrial heyday. Of the medieval abbey little remains, and Folly House I don't recognise at all –maybe I missed it? Adjoining Darley Abbey is the magnificent Darley Park, one of the country's finest public parks (IMHO). 
  Anyway, I like the picture, which looks rather like a cross between Eric Ravilious and recent David Hockney. The artist's name was new to me – Rowland Suddaby. He is, it seems, a pretty minor figure, with a decidedly meagre Wikipedia entry and not a lot more information online, though his pictures are dotted about the country here and there. His dates are 1912 to 1972, he studied at Sheffield Art College, moved to London, where he had some small success, then settled in Suffolk. He was a founder of the Colchester Art Society, whose exhibitors included Edward Bawden, John Nash and Cedric Morris. Suddaby worked largely in landscape, painting in a distinctive brushy style and favouring bare trees (rather crudely drawn) and grey skies. Along the way, though, he developed another speciality – arrangements of flowers placed in a window against a view. These, I think, work very well. Here are two I particularly like: first, a Window at 5 Portland Place (overlooking the BBC, All Souls and the then Langham Hotel) – 

And this one, with a more rural (and vernal) view, is titled Flowers in a Window –

And here, for good measure is a bright Still Life with Flowers –

Daffodils, and the Walter Scott Publishing Company

 The daffodils are largely faded or gone, but there's still time for Robert Herrick's beautiful lyric, 'To Daffodils' – 

Fair Daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon;
As yet the early-rising sun
Has not attain'd his noon.
Stay, stay,
Until the hasting day
Has run
But to the even-song;
And, having pray'd together, we
Will go with you along.
We have short time to stay, as you,
We have as short a spring;
As quick a growth to meet decay,
As you, or anything.
We die
As your hours do, and dry
Away,
Like to the summer's rain;
Or as the pearls of morning's dew,
Ne'er to be found again.

My Herrick is an attractive little volume – date unknown, probably around 1900 – in the Canterbury Poets series, published by the Walter Scott Publishing Company at one shilling (5p in today's money) each. The company had nothing to do with the famous Walter Scott, but was founded by a Newcastle man of the same name, whose mission was to bring cheap but high-quality books – covering literature, ideas, history and much else – to the common man. The company was such a success that Scott, having started with nothing, died a millionaire.
The back pages of my Herrick volume give some idea of the range of the company's publications, and in doing so provide a fascinating snapshot of the mass-market end of the publishing industry at the turn of the last century. As well as the Canterbury Poets – over 100 volumes, each with an authoritative introduction (by Ernest Rhys in the case of Herrick) – the Scott Library (another hundred-plus volumes, slightly more expensively produced at one shilling and six pence) is also listed. This includes essays, letters, philosophy, and classics in translation. Anyone reading through both these libraries would end up well read indeed. And if they wanted to find out more about the lives of the authors, they could move on to the Great Writers series, each with a bibliography by J.P. Anderson of the British Museum. The life of Johnson, I notice, is by one Colonel F. Grant (who he?), but others are by more familiar names, including W.M. Rossetti, Edmund Gosse and Richard Garnett. Also advertised are 'Booklets by Count Tolstoy' (his sententious essays, attractively packaged) and, on a very different plane, The Useful Red Series, factual works on such topics as bridge, indigestion, consumption and choosing a piano. Finally, one volume gets a full-page announcement to itself: billed as 'A Book for Every Dinner Table', it is titled Musicians' Wit, Humour and Anecdote: Being On Dits of Composers, Singers and Instrumentalists of All Times, by Frederick J. Crowest, profusely illustrated with quaint drawings by J.P. Donne. 'Among the hundreds of stories abounding in wit and pointed repartee which the volume contains, will be found anecdotes of famous musicians of all countries and periods.' I think my own dinner table will get by perfectly well without this particular volume. 

Birthday

 It's Samuel Beckett's birthday today (born 1906). I would have thought I'd have marked the date quite often on the blog, but it seems I've only done so once. Since that was in 2009 – fifteen years ago, long enough for everyone (myself included) to have forgotten – I take the liberty of reprinting that piece. It has some choice quotations in it –

'Well, today is Samuel Beckett's birthday - he liked to claim that it was Good Friday the 13th, but that happy coincidence didn't occur in 1906, his natal year. It is also - despite all evidence to the contrary here in grey cold drizzly London - Spring, a season which always brings to mind the 'brief statement' (26 unparagraphed pages) made by the gentleman in the green baize apron in Watt, before he leaves Mr Knott's house, the gentleman who of course regrets 'everything' and who takes a dim view of the natural world and the turning seasons -
"The crocuses and the larch turning green every year a week before the others and the pastures red with uneaten sheep's placentas and the long summer days and the new-mown hay and the wood-pigeon in the morning and the cuckoo in the afternoon and the corncrake in the evening and the wasps in the jam and the smell of the gorse and the look of the gorse and the apples falling and the children walking in the dead leaves and the larch turning brown a week before the others and the chestnuts falling and the howling winds and the sea breaking over the pier and the first fires and the hooves on the road and the consumptive postman whistling 'The Roses Are Blooming in Picardy' and the standard oil-lamp and of course the snow and to be sure the sleet and bless your heart the slush and every fourth year the February debacle and the endless April showers and the crocuses and then the whole bloody business starting over again."
  The gentleman may regard the whole business as 'an excrement', 'a turd' - but isn't this an extraordinarily vivid and evocative piece of nature writing? In fact, Beckett often demonstrates a remarkably sharp eye (and ear) for landscape and close-up detail, for the sights and sounds of nature - the bleak landscapes of Molloy, for example (clearly rooted, as is the passage above, in the author's memories of Ireland), are brilliantly realised and linger long in the mind. Perhaps Beckett's attention to nature is all the sharper for his sense of man's inescapable alienation from it - it is a scene across which a man passes but of which he can never fully be (or feel himself) a part. There's another lovely passage earlier in the gentleman's monologue -
"The long blue days for his head, for his side, and the little paths for his feet, and all the brightness to touch and gather. Through the grass the little mosspaths, bony with old roots, and the trees sticking up, and the flowers sticking up, and the fruit hanging down, and the white exahusted butterflies, and the birds never the same darting all day into hiding..."

It seems to me that among Beckett's less celebrated talents is that of a brilliant, if eccentric, reluctant and against-the-grain, nature writer.'

In the Slave Market

 In the course of the book I'm reading for review, Sir Samuel Baker, the English explorer who named Lake Albert, makes an appearance – and so does his travelling companion and presumed wife, Florence. Samuel, we are told, 'had found nineteen-year-old Florence in 1859 at an auction of white slaves in a Turkish-administered town in Bulgaria. Her parents had been killed in the 1848 uprising in Hungary, and Baker bought her, and subsequently fell in love with her...' An eyebrow-raising passage – and there was more to the story than this: Baker had been on a hunting trip in the Balkans with the Maharajah Duleep Singh when, to amuse the Maharajah, they visited the slave market in Vidin. There Baker spotted Florence, who was destined for the harem of the Ottoman Pasha of Vidin, and was instantly smitten. In the auction the Pasha outbid him, but the resourceful Baker bribed the girl's guards to release her, and they made off together in a carriage. They were inseparable ever after, and Florence accompanied her husband (they were properly married on their return to England) on even his most arduous travels, in Africa and elsewhere. 
  White slaves, eh, and in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century? Surely slavery was invented by the racist imperialist British to service their sugar plantations in the West Indies and enrich Britannia? Surely there was no slavery in the world but the wicked triangular trade? This is certainly the impression one would get from the BBC and from the kind of history teaching that goes on in schools. Of course it is entirely fallacious and ahistorical, but such is its traction that it has thoroughly permeated our 'woke' establishment culture, to the point where cringing apologies and even reparations are seriously entertained. I may be wrong, but I rather doubt that the Turkish government is intending to offer either apologies or reparations to anyone any time soon.

How Libraries Saved a Life

 When I saw the front page headline 'Libraries Saved My Life', I had to buy a copy of the Birmingham Mail. It's a great story – here's the link...

https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/libraries-saved-life-after-dads-28820089

... and the subject of the piece, Tracy King, has written a book about it: about how her father lost his life in a brawl with teenagers in a local shopping centre, how Tracy, at the age of 12, was left traumatised and adrift, unable to attend school, and how she spent her time in public libraries educating herself, in effect saving her life, or at least laying the groundwork for a successful one. There's a twist in the tale too: Tracy discovered, years later, that her father wasn't the heroic victim she thought he was...
The inspiring story of Tracy's self-education – a wonderful example of the life-changing possibilities of public libraries, even in a supposed age of affluence – must now be seen in the context of Birmingham City Council's proposal to close 25 of its 35 libraries as it tries to climb out of a deep financial hole (of its own making, no doubt). Naturally Tracy King, now a writer, producer and science communicator, is vehemently opposed to this, and determined that these vital community resources must, one way or another, be kept open and remain available to all. Let's hope they do, for all our sakes.
Her book, Learning to Think, is published by Doubleday and has already been widely praised. 

Review

 By public demand (hem hem), here is my latest contribution to that fine magazine Literary Review – a review of a book I greatly enjoyed reading. As ever, I urge you to take out a subscription – LR is far and away the most readable magazine of its kind...

The Book Forger: The True Story of a Literary Crime that Fooled the World
By Joseph Hone (Chatto & Windus 336pp £18.99) 

    This book has a great story to tell – the author calls it, without exaggeration, ‘perhaps the most sensational literary scandal of the last hundred years’ – and Joseph Hone tells it brilliantly. Strictly speaking, it was not quite a ‘literary scandal’ but rather a bibliographical one, as it involved the faking of physical books, not of their contents. It was a scandal affecting the most exalted levels of book collecting and the book market, and the man responsible for the faking was one the most revered authorities and collectors of his time, Thomas James Wise.
   The story of Wise’s crimes was first told by the two men who uncovered them (though there were more to be discovered later, by Hone himself among others). Booksellers John Carter and Graham Pollard published their findings in 1934 in a book with the deceptively bland title An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets – and it caused an instant sensation, not only shaking the antiquarian book trade and dethroning Wise, but becoming a news story in itself. It was the result of a long process of painstaking detective work, making use of the latest forensic techniques, notably the chemical analysis of paper, to provide clinching evidence. Carter and Pollard’s exposé stuck scrupulously to the facts, and the authors took care to stay out of the courts by never actually stating Wise’s guilt. The evidence they presented was so overwhelming that they didn’t need to.
  Hone expertly spins two narrative strands, at first in parallel, then increasingly intertwining, until they finally come together in Pollard’s climactic face-to-face confrontation with the cornered Wise. One narrative strand follows Wise from his early days in the various literary societies that thrived in late Victorian times to his first forays into illicit book-making, and his rise to fame and honours as a giant of the book world – and, ironically, scourge of the forgers. ‘He is the terror of all fraudulent booksellers,’ declared one admirer, ‘and fakes are to him what rats are to a terrier.’ In fact, fakes were to him a lucrative, absorbing and perversely enjoyable sideline.
 Wise got the idea for his particular line in forgery from his work with the literary societies, who liked to bring out scholarly limited-edition facsimiles of early and obscure works by their revered authors – Shelley, Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne and the like. These often became sought-after items, but it was always made clear that they were facsimiles. Wise’s bright idea was to bring out editions of works by these authors bearing earlier dates than the known first editions, and to pass them off as genuine, with carefully concocted stories of provenance to explain why they had never before seen the light of day. Wise already had a formidable reputation as a book hunter and an expert knowledge of book production, so he was sure to be believed. Soon he was doing very well out of the rising commercial value of what were then ‘modern firsts’. But his nefarious activities went beyond this: as Carter and Pollard did not know, Wise was also a thief, tearing out pages from books in the British Museum library to make up ‘perfect’ copies of rare volumes.
  But what of Pollard and Carter? They were an odd couple – Carter a suave, debonair product of Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, and Pollard a scruffy, rather louche one-time communist, leading a double life as bookseller and MI5 agent, spying on his former ‘comrades’. An Oxonian, Pollard was a member of the hard-drinking Hypocrites Club and credited as ‘the Jesus man who introduced corduroy trousers to polite society’. It was the book trade, and their passion for book collecting, that brought these two together, and gave them their great project – to expose Wise, who was widely disliked, and regarded by the younger generation of bibliophiles as something of a dinosaur. Hone makes a page-turning narrative of their detective work, technical though it often is, and the reader will be cheering them on, especially as Wise was such an unpleasant character, for all his ability to ingratiate himself with those who could be useful to him – including the very authors whose works he was set on faking.
  Why did he do what he did? Hone suggests that he was driven by a burning desire to take his seat at the top table of the book world, despite his obscure background and limited education (he was no Oxbridge man). The obverse of this insecurity was an overweening arrogance that in the end seems to have convinced him he could run rings round everybody and get away with anything. ‘Wise never served his books,’ Hone concludes; ‘they served him’, just as the many people he duped and exploited served him. Wise died a few years after the publication of An Enquiry, his reputation severely damaged. His huge library of beautifully bound books, the so-called Ashley Library, was bequeathed to the British Museum. They still reside in what is now the British Library, where, curiously, access to any and all of them is severely restricted. Having managed to examine some of them, Hone finds that the books ‘look odd’ and somehow wrong, products of a time when paper in suspiciously ‘virginal’ condition and elaborate ‘buttery’ leather bindings were desired. Tastes change. The book trade, though, remains as mad as ever: when Wise’s forgeries turn up today, they can sell for more than they did when they were made. 

Colour in Birmingham

 Yesterday I was in Birmingham, to see the (partly) reopened city art gallery and, en route, drop in on the cathedral church of St Philip. This is a baroque God-box designed by Thomas Archer very early in the 18th century and extended eastwards in the following century – essentially a grand town church rather than a slow-growing, centuries-old cathedral. I knew Burne-Jones had designed some windows for it, but my expectations weren't especially high. And then I saw them – four large windows, one (a Last Judgment) at the West end, three (Nativity, Resurrection, Crucifixion) at the East – and I was simply stunned. The colours are extraordinarily intense – I believe they were restored recently – and the designs and drawing strong and impactful. Nothing wishy-washy about these windows: indeed I've seldom felt such power in any Victorian glass. Seeing them was an astonishing, and unexpectedly powerful, experience.
   And then came the art gallery, a grand Victorian building of which enough has reopened to house an exhibition titled Victorian Radicals, showcasing the gallery's extensive holdings of Pre-Raphaelite and related art (and craft) works. Some of what is on show is of peripheral interest, but the exhibition is worth seeing for the sake of the big, in-your-face masterpieces, which have to be seen to be believed – Ford Madox Brown's massive Work and An English Autumn Afternoon, The Last of England and The Pretty Baa-Lambs, Millais's The Blind Girl, Henry Wallis's The Death of Chatterton, Arthur Hughes's The Long Engagement. As with Burne-Jones's windows, the colours are startlingly intense and the impact stunning. No reproduction can do these works justice; they have to be seen in their physical reality, and examined closely: there is always more to see in paintings as packed with significant detail as these. They are pictures that I felt I had known all my life, but seeing them in situ in this exhibition somehow felt like seeing them for the first time. Now I feel I really know them – and I'll be back to see more of Birmingham's art gallery when the rest of it has reopened. 

American Fiction

 Last night, in a rare moment of intersection with the Zeitgeist, I watched American Fiction, a film of shockingly recent vintage (2023, for heaven's sake). I'm happy to say the I enjoyed it greatly, it gave me many a laugh, and impressed me with its cleverness and with the sharpness and boldness of its satire. As all the world probably knows, American Fiction tells the story of Thelonious 'Monk' Ellison, a black academic and frustrated writer, who loses his job (after a student objects to his writing the name of a certain Flannery O'Connor short story* on the whiteboard) and who finds himself facing big problems in his life – notably his mother's Alzheimer's – and with no money. Out of despair and cynicism, and as a kind of dark joke, he decides to pose as a stereotypical blaaack badass and write a grisly, foul-mouthed, clichéd blaaack memoir of the kind that is likely to attract the interest of an increasingly deranged publishing industry, making big money off condescending stereotypes of black life. To his amazement it works, and our hero is soon passing himself off as fugitive criminal 'Stagg R. Leigh' and trousering a huge advance, as well as attracting the interest of a hot-shot Hollywood producer. His memoir is initially called My Pafology, but in one of the funniest scenes in the film 'Stagg' forces the publishers to give it the even 'blacker', even more 'authentic' title Fuck.
   It might seem improbable that an obscure academic could convincingly pretend to be 'Stagg R. Leigh', but happily he is played by the excellent Jeffrey Wright, who makes it all seem perfectly believable (the rest of the cast are spot-on too). Events move to a climax, with an awards ceremony at which Monk, one of the judges, finds Stagg R. Leigh's book winning. How will it play out? In several different ways, as it turns out: what begins as a straight satire ends as metafiction, with alternative endings tried out by the hot-shot Hollywood producer, who finally, inevitably opts for the bloodiest and most stereotyped, the most 'black'. American Fiction (which is based on a novel, Erasure by Percival Everett) is the debut movie of director Cord Jefferson. He is clearly going to be one to watch.

* 'The Artificial Nigger', one of her best.

'He is a brittle crazy glass'

 Born on this day in 1593 was the great devotional poet George Herbert. 
Here he is in full flow –

The Windows

Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?
    He is a brittle crazy glass;
Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford
    This glorious and transcendent place,
    To be a window, through thy grace.
 
But when thou dost anneal in glass thy story,
    Making thy life to shine within
The holy preachers, then the light and glory
    More reverend grows, and more doth win;
    Which else shows waterish, bleak, and thin.
 
Doctrine and life, colors and light, in one
    When they combine and mingle, bring
A strong regard and awe; but speech alone
    Doth vanish like a flaring thing,
    And in the ear, not conscience, ring.

Quite so. The window above, by Christopher Webb, was installed in 1953 in Salisbury cathedral, just down the road from the parish where Herbert was Rector. It illustrates Herbert's poem 'Love-Joy' –

AS on a window late I cast mine eye, I saw a vine drop grapes with J and C Anneal’d on every bunch. One standing by Ask’d what it meant. I, who am never loth To spend my judgement, said, It seem’d to me To be the bodie and the letters both Of Joy and Charitie. Sir, you have not miss’d, The man reply’d; It figures JESUS CHRIST.

April

Here's a painting for the new month – April, Epping by Lucien Pissarro, painted in 1894, a few years after the artist and his wife had settled in England. It shows a landscape somewhere near the small semi-suburban house where the Pissarros lived in Epping. There is nothing very distinguished about either the painting or its subject, but what struck me about it was Pissarro's use of cleverly modulated dabs of different colours, in a manner similar to the 'divisionism' of Seurat and Signac, with whom Pissarro had associated before leaving France. This took me back to art classes at my grammar school, when I was around 11 and 12. The teacher, a youngish, dark-haired woman whose name I have forgotten, was apparently on a mission to teach her young charges to paint in something very like a divisionist manner, applying little dabs of different colours placed together so as to give the impression of another colour altogether (like the oranges, mauves and blues that create the shadow of a tree in the left foreground of April, Epping). As you may imagine, her mission was doomed to failure, and even I, who loved to paint and draw, found myself struggling with this strange way of doing things. As I recall it, the teacher began to take a more relaxed approach in time, and I was able to paint more freely. As for my next art teacher, he was certainly encouraging, but inclined to, what shall we say, excessively affectionate behaviour towards his favourite pupils – but that is another story...

Addendum

 The Easter Day Solemn Evensong in the cathedral was a beautiful and richly satisfying service, with the choir on top form – Stanford's wonderful setting of the Magnificat and Handel's glorious Worthy Is the Lamb the high points.
I've found lately that it's impossible to attend a religious service without the mind turning to the recent terrible events in Israel. The Old Testament readings have a new, and potent, resonance – and this was certainly the case with today's reading from Ezekiel 37, in which God takes the prophet and sets him down 'in the midst of the valley which was full of bones ... And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live, and I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest.' Through the 'prophesying' of his prophet, God brings the bones back to life, 'and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army. Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts. Therefore prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel. And ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I have opened your graves, O my people, and brought you up out of your graves, And shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land.'