Quid Pro Crow

Never mind the Boris-Burqa row, here's a real news story – a team of trained rooks is being deployed to pick up litter, and generally spruce things up, at a French theme park. There's an uncharacteristically concise account of this heartening development on the BBC News website. While you're there, do follow the links to 'Crow with Yorkshire accent filmed' and 'Police rescue man from baby squirrel'.
Meanwhile, this is surely an occasion to rehearse Kay Ryan's great crow poem...

Felix Crow

Crow school

is basic and

short as a rule—

just the rudiments

of quid pro crow

for most students.

Then each lives out

his unenlightened

span, adding his

bit of blight

to the collected

history of pushing out

the sweeter species;

briefly swaggering the

swagger of his

aggravating ancestors

down my street.

And every time

I like him

when we meet.

Journey by Moonlight

Having limbered up with The Pendragon Legend, I last week read Antal Szerb's acknowledged masterpiece, Journey by Moonlight. This one is a very different kind of novel, but the tone of voice – playful, quicksilver, endlessly ironical – is very similar. Szerb has a gift for making his material at once deadly serious and not serious at all (is this a Hungarian thing?). Journey by Moonlight chronicles what is in effect a catastrophic mental breakdown, but it is closer to a fast-moving, unpredictable, often funny adventure or escape story than to a psychoanalytical study. Szerb's is, decidedly, a comic imagination – and a very distinctive one.
  Journey by Moonlight has the kind of opening paragraph that defies you not to keep on reading:

'On the train everything seemed fine. The trouble began in Venice, with the back alleys.'

Mihaly, we learn, is on his first visit to Italy, at the age of thirty-six, on his honeymoon. He has travelled a good deal, but always avoided Italy:

'Italy he associated with grown-up matters, such as the fathering of children, and he secretly feared it, with the same instinctive fear he had of strong sunlight, the scent of flowers, and extremely beautiful women.'

But now he was married, on his honeymoon, so 'now, he reasoned, there was nothing to fear from the danger Italy represented'. Until, that is, he felt the irresistible pull of those Venetian back alleys and, unplanned and unannounced, spent the night wandering in a daze among them. This is the beginning of Mihaly's 'journey by moonlight'.
  Trying to explain this nocturnal fugue to Erzsi, his long-suffering wife, he tells the story of a phase in his boyhood when he came under the spell of a group of free-spirited friends, dominated by the beautiful, death-obsessed Eva and Tamas Ulpius. It is in that luridly intense period of Mihaly's past that the key to all that follows resides, and it is to that phase of his life that Mihaly's flight from present reality repeatedly returns him. When one of those friends of his youth, the unreliable Janos, turns up in person, Mihaly is shaken and knows he cannot carry on with his life as it is. Soon he leaves Erzsi behind by half-consciously boarding the wrong train and taking off on his own, with no idea of where he's going. His journey takes him from one Italian city to another, and to various remoter locations, guided only by hints from Janos, who keeps turning up wherever Mihaly finds himself. But can the troubled Mihaly ever find a way of breaking free of the past that haunts him?
  That bald (and very incomplete) synopsis makes Journey by Moonlight sounds a lot more solemn than it is – indeed solemnity is a note that Szerb's writing never strikes. Reading him is always, for all sorts of reasons, fun; he's a great storyteller, and Journey by Moonlight is a real page-turner. It is also one of those books that is, I think, liable to haunt you for a long while after you've put it down.

  Szerb was a glittering star of the Hungarian literary firmament, the author of three major scholarly surveys of English, Hungarian and world literature, as well as the novels and numerous short stories. But he was Jewish (the son of assimilated Jews, and a baptised Catholic), and therefore vulnerable in the Hungary of the times. In 1944 he was removed from his professorship at the University of Szegad and sent to a forced labour camp. Friends and admirers offered to save him with falsified papers, but he turned them down, wishing to share in the common fate of his people. He was beaten to death in 1945, at the age of 43, and buried in a mass grave.

Giles Cooper

Today is the centenary of the birth of Giles Cooper – a name that might still mean something to lovers of radio drama (if they're of a certain age). Cooper was a prolific dramatist who wrote for both radio and TV – among much else, he adapted Simenon's Maigret novels for the hugely successful TV series starring pipe-smoking Rupert Davies. Perhaps his best known radio play was Unman, Wittering and Zigo, which also became a TV drama and a feature film (screenplay by Simon Raven).
  Cooper, who was born into a landed Anglo-Irish family, confounded family expectations by enrolling in drama school, but before much longer he was conscripted into the Army and sent to Burma, where he fought for three years in the jungle in that most gruelling of campaigns (see George MacDonald Fraser's Quartered Safe Out Here). After the war Cooper worked as an actor (encountering Kenneth Williams and Harold Pinter in rep), then moved into script editing and playwriting. He died at the age of 48 after, bizarrely, falling from a train as it passed through Surbiton. He had been attending the Guild of Dramatists' Christmas dinner at the Garrick and was perhaps excessively refreshed. The coroner's verdict was misadventure.
  Happily his name lived on for some years after his death, in the shape of the Giles Cooper Awards for radio drama, jointly sponsored by the BBC and the publishers Methuen. These awards ran from 1978 to 1992, and winners included Tom Stoppard, William Trevor, Fay Weldon, Anthony Minghella, Rose Tremain and bloody Harold Pinter. I remember being at several of the (pretty minimal) awards ceremonies back in the days when I was writing about radio for the late lamented Listener. A pity there isn't a prestigious award for radio drama these days – it might raise the standard.

Flown

And I got back to find that the swifts have flown – already (but then it always feels like 'already'). I thought they looked as if they were getting ready to go when we left for Dieppe, but was hoping they might hang on a little longer. After all, they got off to a belated start, not settling down until mid-May – but, like the butterflies, they recovered to enjoy a prodigious season, thanks to weeks of warm sunshine. I hadn't seen so many over our house in years.
  Susan Hill, writing in the Spectator, reports a complete absence of swifts in her neck of the woods (North Norfolk?) until, one July evening, they suddenly arrived – 'a few, then dozens, soaring, diving, swooping, crossbows in the blue sky'. Since then, she claims, she has done nothing but watch them, and she urges the rest of us to 'gaze while you can. Neglect everything. These are not birds, they are angels.' I hope they are still with her.

Back from La Canicule

Blue skies and unbroken sunshine meant that this Dieppe jaunt was – unusually in a part of France not famous for brilliant weather – something of a beach holiday, and all the more enjoyable for that. However, I did find time to visit the two great churches and check on progress. The restoration of St Jacques continues at an arthritic snail's pace – but at St Remy things are really moving, with impressive progress on the decayed Northern facade, most of which is now convincingly restored.
  This visit also added a word to my French vocabulary – 'canicule', meaning heatwave. This word was everywhere, all over the papers and television, where, in addition to alarming 'scorchio' weather reports, there were endless, very French discussions of the implications of 'La Canicule' for the future of the planet, etc.
  And then it was back to England, and to endless, very English discussion of a subject encapsulated in another single word – Burqa. The brouhaha over Boris Johnson's 'letterbox' remark – in the course of a piece arguing for the 'right' to wear the burqa – seems peculiarly fatuous and confected, even by the standards of such brouhahas. And nobody seems to have pointed out that it's based on an erroneous use of words: it is not the burqa but the niqab that lends the wearer the fetching letterbox look Boris remarks on. The burqa offers its wearer complete insulation from the lustful gazes of men by covering the entire body, eyes included. You don't come across it too often over here, but I've seen women shopping in the full burqa on Kensington High Street. They order this matter better in France, where the burqa is banned.

To D***** Again

No prizes for guessing which French port-resort I'm heading for tomorrow. Mais oui – it's Dieppe again. In what seems set to become an annual tradition, Mrs N and I are spending a few days there with son, daughter-in-law and ever adorable granddaughter. There might be the occasional dispatch; if not, normal service will be resumed some time next week.

The Welsh Claude

Born on this day in 1714 was the Welsh painter Richard Wilson, who turned out lots of fine restful landscapes, suffused with the spirit of Claude Lorrain and the Dutch landscapists, and reflecting his early experience of painting in Italy. Wilson was a rarity in his time for concentrating so heavily on landscape painting – and he seems to have been the first to notice that his native Wales had a few landscapes that were worth painting (that's Llyn-y-Cau, Cader Idris, above).
  Wilson, Ruskin opined, 'paints in a manly way, and occasionally reaches exquisite tones of colour'. Ruskin also acknowledged that 'the Welsh Claude' had a significant influence on his hero Turner. Good to know he painted in a manly way.