Lichfield

I was strolling around Lichfield on Saturday - a fine city, with a handsome but homely old town of red brick, sandstone and black-and-white, a market square with a grand (ex-)church, a string of large ponds, and everywhere you look the famous three spires of the great cathedral. It was in Lichfield that Samuel Johnson was born and spent the first 27 years of his life, in the house of his bookseller father - which, happily, still stands, is open to the public and now houses England's second 'Dr Johnson's House' (the other being on Gough Square in London). It's a pleasant house to visit - all creaking boards and twisting stairs and small rooms with undulating floors - with a warmer and more welcoming feel than the London house, informative displays presented with a light touch, and even a rather wonderful second-hand bookshop downstairs.
 Lichfield also has the charming Erasmus Darwin house, larger and more imposing than the Johnson house - in fact very handsome - and with displays inside that must be doing a great job in bringing the Grandfather of the More Famous Charles some of the recognition he deserves, as natural philosopher, poet, inventor, physician, thinker and all-round good egg. His physic garden has also been recreated and must be quite something in the summer months.
 And then there's the heartrender, which caught me unawares. In the southeast corner of the cathedral stands a monument every bit as moving as the great memorial to Penelope Boothby in St Oswald's church in nearby Ashbourne. The Lichfield monument, by Sir Fancis Chantrey, is known as The Sleeping Children, and made a huge impact in its day (it was initially displayed at the Royal Academy) and into the Victorian period. The children asleep in one another's arms - the younger holding a little posy of snowdrops - are Ellen-Jane and Marianne Robinson, daughters of Mrs Ellen-Jane Robinson, whose husband, a prebendary of the cathedral, had died of tuberculosis in 1812, at the age of 35, leaving her widowed with two young daughters. The following year, Ellen-Jane (the elder daughter) died of burns after her nightdress caught fire while she was preparing for bed. Then, in 1814, the younger daughter, Marianne, fell ill and died during a visit to London. In three years, Mrs Robinson had been trebly bereaved, losing her entire family. It is hard to imagine how anyone could survive such an onslaught, hard to conceive the sheer strength of faith and hope required. The children's epitaph concludes thus:

              '...Their affectionate mother
In fond remembrance of their "heav'n-lov'd innocence",
        Consigns their resemblances to this sanctuary,
                    In humble gratitude
            For the glorious assurance that
          "Of such is the kingdom of God".'

Quartet In Autumn

After I'd read (and reviewed) Philip Larkin's A Girl In Winter, it was a natural step to read another Barbara Pym. Larkin was a big Pym fan and, along with Lord David Cecil, responsible for the revival in her fortunes after a fallow period in which she could not get published. Larkin and Lord D named her in a TLS round-up as a criminally underrated writer, the literary world - and a publisher (Macmillan) - took notice, and the first fruit was Quartet In Autumn, published in 1977 (and shortlisted for that year's Booker). Oddly, while most of the rest of Pym in easily available in chicklit-styled paperbacks from Virago, Quartet In Autumn can only be had in Macmillan's digital imprint Bello. Not that it matters - the main thing is that, thanks to Larkin and Lord D, it was published, and it remains available...
 Quartet is a difficult book to write about, being, even by Pym's standards, sparse, tight, nuanced and extremely finely drawn, with very little 'happening' in the sense of narrative events. It is a beautifully managed group and individual portrait of four people - two men, two women - who have been working together for some time in an office (a very Pymian office where nothing identifiable as useful work is done, time hangs heavy and the day revolves around cups of tea, an economy-size tin of instant coffee, and lunchtime activities). All four are nearing retirement age and, in the course of the narrative, the two women, Letty and Marcia, do retire, leaving the two men, Edwin and Norman, to respond, in their different (and equally ineffectual) ways, to their absence.
 These are not, on the face of it, terribly attractive characters - Norman mean and cunning with an eye to the main chance; Edwin passive and self-satisfied, his life revolving smoothly around the (Very High) Church; Letty as passive as Edwin, but less satisfied (and in the end finding, perhaps, a future and some hope of autonomy); and Marcia, a strange, prickly character, fending off the world and retreating ever deeper into her obsessions once she loses the daily routine of work. And yet, such is Pym's delicate art that she makes you care about them all (well, perhaps not Norman), writing about them with cool, clear-sighted sympathy - and, of course, with humour, that sharp but always forgiving wit of hers. This is, despite the ostensible sadness of the little world it portrays, an often very funny novel, most definitely a comedy rather than a tragedy. And it is, in its unique Pymian way, a minor (and minor key) masterpiece.
 Quartet In Autumn gets off to a bravura start in which, in the very first paragraph, Pym, before she's even introduced them, tells you all you need to know about her four characters simply by describing the different ways in which they wear their hair. After an opening like that, what can you do but read on?

La Sagesse des Normands

I cannot let this day pass without marking the centenary of the birth of Norman Wisdom, who in his day was one of Britain's biggest film stars (as was George Formby - we have a funny idea of film stars here). Wisdom was one among many deeply unfunny comics who peaked in the Fifties and Sixties (something of a sub-speciality of this blog: see Charlie Drake, Bernie Winters, Dickie Henderson, etc). As with Charlie Drake, in my innocent boyhood I found Wisdom hilarious and would queue up with my brother to catch his latest film, which would invariably feature his Gump character, most often in the form of Norman Pitkin, a tiresome imbecile who was constantly falling over and creating mayhem, yet who always ended up getting the better of Mr Grimsdale or some other representative authority figure (usually played by Jerry Desmonde) and even getting the girl or, if not, treating us to some excruciating pathos, yet more painful to watch than his comedy - even as a boy I found that part of the package hard to take.
 There was not so much as a Google doodle to mark the centenary today, but they'll no doubt be marking the occasion with due ceremony in Albania, where Wisdom was a cult figure, largely because his films were among the few to reach Communist Albania from the capitalist West, being considered as fine embodiments of the triumph of  the proletarian little man (Norman Pitkin) over the capitalist ogre (Mr Grimsdale). Wisdom was treated as a national hero in Albania and on one occasion was in Tirana when the England football team were playing Albania's finest. The little chap duly ran out onto the pitch, wearing a half-English, half-Albanian shirt and executing one of his trademark trips, to universal hilarity. He also treated the Queen to one of his comedy trips while stepping up to collect his OBE at Buckingham Palace. Irrepressible he was.
 Norman Wisdom's theme song was Don't Laugh At Me. Not a great choice for a comedian really...

Satan unavailable for comment (again)

A fine (non) story has popped up on the BBC News website, to the effect that Bolsover in Derbyshire is not, in fact, the Satanic capital of the UK. Having been there a couple of times (to see the castle, which is well worth a visit), I can't say I was surprised to learn this. I suspect the famous Derbyshire sense of humour was at work when those census forms were filled in... The article is, however, an exemplary piece of work, and if I hadn't read it I would never have known that the so-called Church of Satan does not worship or even believe in the existence of Satan. Follow the handy link in the piece and you will discover that these Satanists are merely atheists, with a tendency to self-worship (or 'I-theism') and no interest or belief in any supernatural beings. Which rather begs the question, why call yourselves the Church of Satan then? Church of Me would be more honest.
 The only disappointing feature of the BBC News piece is that the assiduous author didn't get a quote from Satan. However, the contribution of the Bolsover council chief is priceless. He had not, he said, heard of any Satanic activities in Bolsover, adding 'There's the usual traditional harvest festivals or flower festival, but that's more or less a fundraising job for the churches.' Yes, not quite the same thing...

Egyptian Geese

Only a few patches of snow in the shadier parts of Kensington Gardens at lunchtime, where the early spring flowers (including a couple of precocious anemones) were looking rather sorry for themselves. A pair of Egyptian Geese were grazing under a tree, far from the Round Pond. These spectacular, prettily marked birds are becoming an increasingly common sight - a beneficiary, perhaps, of the Modern Warm Period (such as it is). I often see one from the train, perched in a poplar tree between Streatham and Balham - an incongruous sight, but these waterfowl nest (like Shelduck) in holes in trees. They have a look of Ancient Egypt about them; indeed they're very similar to the geese in Egyptian wall paintings (as below, the right hand pair).

The Snow that never drifts -

I woke to snow this morning. This is always exciting, especially if it's the first of  the year (and might  well be the last). It was only a couple of inches but it had worked that white transforming magic on the garden, the streets, and the park as I walked through it on the way to the station. It was soft snow, never going to last, and has probably already melted away -  'transient, fragrant snow' as in Emily Dickinson's poem:

The Snow that never drifts —
The transient, fragrant snow
That comes a single time a Year
Is softly driving now —

So thorough in the Tree
At night beneath the star
That it was February's Foot
Experience would swear —

Like Winter as a Face
We stern and former knew
Repaired of all but Loneliness
By Nature's Alibi —

Were every storm so spice
The Value could not be —
We buy with contrast — Pang is good
As near as memory —

Peder Balke: A Revelation

Yesterday I was back at the National Gallery to see the exhibition of paintings by an artist I admit I'd never heard of before I read about this display - Peder Balke, a Norwegian painter (1804-87) whose mature style was so heavily criticised in his day that he gave up painting for public display and got on with being a distinguished citizen of Christiania (Oslo), active in the Norwegian labourers' movement and in the fight for universal suffrage. But he carried on painting, and his work gradually began to be rediscovered in the 20th century. Now Balke is regarded as one of Norway's 19th-century greats and - where he is heard of at all - as a fascinating figure in the development of landscape painting into increasingly free, increasingly abstract styles.
 He has been well served by the National Gallery exhibition, which is on a small scale and thoughtfully hung in the airy and always pleasant Sunley Room. It's the very antithesis of the Rembrandt-style subterranean blockbuster: even on a Sunday afternoon, there was nothing resembling a crowd and it was possible to wander freely and spend as long as you liked with each picture - and that was quite a long time, for these are extraordinary works. The display begins, cleverly, with four paintings of what is essentially the same view - the North Cape, at the northermost tip of Norway, viewed from the sea. Three are relatively early, from the 1840s, and display Balke's fluid brushwork, deft use of impasto and easy mastery of light - especially moonlight - and sea and sky. They are fine paintings by any standards - but the fourth, a large canvas dating from the 1870s, is something else altogether. In this one, which seems filled with light, the scene has been reduced to delicate washes of blacks, greys, whites and blues from which emerge forms of rocks, ghost-like boats, the distant Cape itself, a pale cloud. In its delicate brushwork and reduction of the scene to a few eloquent essentials, the effect is strangely reminiscent of Chinese landscape painting.
 That group of four paintings offers a striking epitome of what we see unfolding through the rest of the exhibition, as Balke develops his extraordinary style. At one point he makes his seas creamy and clotted with impasto, against mountain backgrounds more thinly painted with broad but perfectly controlled sweeps of the brush. Later, he turns to black and white , working often on a very small scale and becoming ever more brushy and abstract in his depiction of stormy seas, jagged rocks and soaring mountains. In a pair of wonderfully deft miniatures he depicts the Northern Lights - in black and white, in a composition that is all horizontals and verticals. (Oddly, when he turns his attention to inland views, the results are rather generic Romantic landscapes - he was a painter who needed the sea to unleash his genius.)
 After all the storm-swept darkness and towering, wave-lashed cliffs, the exhibition ends beautifully with another picture full of light, in which a boat is rowed across a calm sea of blue and gold, under a wide luminous sky, to a safe haven. It's a glorious painting, and the perfect end to an exhibition that really must be seen - it is truly a revelation. And there's still plenty of time to see it - it's running till April 12th.