Speaking up for the Gutter

We are all in the gutter, quipped Oscar Wilde, but some of us are looking at the stars. As if there were some virtue in looking at the stars. Personally, when I raise my eyes to the starry heavens, I feel much as Pascal did about the eternal silence of those infinite spaces. I would rather not know that what I'm seeing is the faint emanation of meaningless events occurring at unimaginably remote distances in space and time. There are better, more heartening things to be seen by looking down, even in the gutter. This morning, as I strolled along my road, I spotted - in the gutter - a small clump of rather beautiful yellow, trumpet-shaped flowers happily growing there (despite the best efforts of the municipal weed exterminators). I think they are some kind of Monkey Flower (pictured). How they got there heaven knows - presumably as a garden escape - but if I hadn't had my eyes on the gutter, I'd never have seen them, and my morning would have been the poorer. 

Leveson

With the Leveson inquiry still grinding on and on, hats off to the talented young fellow behind this video for livening things up. As he happens to be the son of an old friend of mine, I suggest you all find ways to send him large sums of money and make him rich.

Cut Grass

'Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death

It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers,
With hedges snowlike strewn,

White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne's lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer's pace.' 

At the weekend, I performed, after long delay, the gardener's grand transmogrifying task - mowing the lawn. Inevitably my mind turned to Philip Larkin's beautiful little poem - it always does - but this time, as I tried to say it in my head, I realised how shockingly little of it I actually knew. My once retentive memory is woefully unreliable these days. When I had finished mowing, I read it again, all 12 lines of it. Surely, I thought, even I can get this one by heart. I read it through a few more times and I had it. What's more surprising is that I still have it by heart today (I checked) - will I, this time, hold on to it for good?
Cut Grass is set in 'young-leafed' June - it was written in fact on the 3rd of June, in 1971 - but the Lilac is still in bloom and the May in the hedgerows at its snow-like peak. Clearly this is the North of England - presumably somewhere near Larkin's Hull home - as the Lilac and May would be as good as over in the South country. What of those chestnut flowers? Too early, even in the South, for Sweet Chestnut, so these must be the candles of the Horse Chestnut, still in flower in the North, at least in Larkin's time. Since then, the Little British Warming (aka  'climate change') has brought everything a little forward - and nothing more so than the Horse Chestnut, but that is largely in response to attack from the Horse Chestnut Leaf Miner and a fungal pathogen. The Horse Chestnuts come into leaf, flower and fruit earlier each year as they race to get the whole process over with before the attackers gain the upper hand.
At the end of the week, I shall check and see if I still have Cut Grass by heart. I do hope so - it beats This Be The Verse, which stays stubbornly embedded in my memory banks.

A new National Treasure

Over on The Dabbler, there's a new post by me on a mighty painting in the National Gallery...

Edward Bulwer-Lytton: Peerless Unreadability

Today would have been my father's 103rd birthday (long generations on that side of the family - his grandfather was born before Waterloo and the last of said grandfather's many grandchildren in the 1930s). But today was also the birth date, in 1803 - before even my great-grandfather - of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a hugely successful novelist in his day, now all but forgotten and unread, remembered only for incidentals. He coined the phrases 'the Great Unwashed' and 'the almighty dollar' as well as the proverbial 'the pen is mightier than the sword'. He is also the man who persuaded Dickens (a friend) to revise the original ending of Great Expectations, bringing Pip and Estella together in a reader-friendly happy ending - and the originator of the 'vril' in Bovril (taken from his science-fcition novel, Vril, The Power Of The Coming Race). And he came up with the famously 'bad' opening line (to a novel called Paul Clifford), 'It was a dark and stormy night'. Actually there's nothing wrong with that - it's only as it painfully unfolds that the sentence reveals Bulwer-Lytton's limitations as a prose stylist:
'It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.'
That is bad writing at its baddest.
One of the strangest book finds of my life was of a Bulwer-Lytton. For reasons of research, I needed (or fancied I needed) one of his more obscure titles, Lucretia. This was back in the days before the internet, let alone AbeBooks or Gutenberg, and it proved impossible to track Lucretia down. Then, on a summer walk in rural Suffolk, I was passing a cottage when I noticed that a few tatty old books had been scattered on a small trestle outside, like so many unwanted vegetables, for anyone who cared to take them away. One of these volumes was a sturdily bound, if mouldering, copy of Lucretia. You could have knocked me down with the proverbial.
Naturally I took it away, then made the mistake of trying to read it. Twice I took a run at the opening chapter, but twice I was obliged to pull up halfway through. Bulwer-Lytton's prose is of such peerless unreadability that the reader feels like one lost in a steamy jungle, hacking away with a machete in the fading hope of stumbling upon a clearing. And yet this man was one of the top-selling authors of his day. It goes to show how, for the most part, the bestsellers of every age become unreadable to later generations (a heartening thought as one scans the bestseller shelves in W.H. Smith). Truly, the past is another country; they read differently there.

Bob and Christine, Sitting in a Tree...

Christine LaGarde, the permatanned head of the International Monetary Fund, has, I am told, a powerful erotic effect on certain susceptible men. One such would appear to be Robert Peston, who yesterday was in such a lather after meeting her that he had even more difficulty than usual in getting his words out  (and that's saying something). I'm afraid it was all over for Christine and me when I spotted this in Private Eye a while back. It's an image I'm quite unable to shake - it might even cool Peston's ardour...

In the Garden with T.E. Brown

At last the weather has relented, the sun is out, the air is warm, and last night I was able to enjoy that supreme expression of the suburban idyll - sitting out in the garden in the cool of the evening as dusk comes on, watching the wheeling swifts and enjoying the song of the blackbirds. The swifts have finally taken possession of the skies again, after a long hesitant period when they must have been wondering if they'd overshot and ended up somewhere near the Arctic Circle - and the blackbirds were in fine full-throated voice. How we'd treasure the blackbird's song - and indeed the beauty of the bird - if it was more of a rarity, like the nightingale, instead of a familiar of every garden... At some point in these garden evenings, one of us - I or Mrs N - is always liable to come out with the line, 'O blackbird, what a boy you are! How you do go it!' A regular presence in older editions of the ODQ, it comes from a poem called Vespers by T.E. Brown, the 'Manx national poet':

'O blackbird, what a boy you are!
How you do go it!
Blowing your bugle to that one sweet star -
How you do blow it!
And does she hear you, blackbird boy, so far?
or is it wasted breath?
'Good Lord! she is so bright
To-night!'
The blackbird saith.'

More of an exclamation than a poem perhaps, Vespers has a certain robust charm - at least it avoids the vapid lyricism of many Victorian apostrophes to our feathered friends. Despite his status as Manx national poet, Brown, a considerable scholar, spent most of his working life as a much-loved master at Clifton College, before retiring back to his island home. He died on a return visit to Clifton, having just mounted the podium to address the boys. T.E. is also responsible for this effusion, titled My Garden:

'A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!
Rose plot,
Fringed pool,
Ferned grot--
The veriest school
Of peace; and yet the fool
Contends that God is not--
Not God! in gardens! when the eve is cool?
Nay, but I have a sign;
'Tis very sure God walks in mine.'

Hmm. The first line of this can also be rendered as 'A garden is a lovesome thing? God! What?!'