Frost Tries to Disappear

 I'm reading (for review) a couple of new books on wetlands – marsh, fen, bog, swamp, mire, etc. In one of them I came across a tale from Robert Frost's early life that I don't remember hearing before – his youthful journey into the poetically named Great Dismal Swamp (a still large area of wetland that straddles Virginia and North Carolina). The young poet was suffering from a bad case of thwarted love, and his intention was apparently to disappear into the swamp and never come out again. His sweetheart, Elinor White, was at college in New York, where, he feared, she was in danger of forgetting about him and dallying with other men. To make sure of winning her heart, he travelled overnight from Massachusetts and turned up unannounced at her college, clutching one of two specially made copies of his first collection of verse and bearing the good news that one of his poems (the rather dreadful 'My Butterfly') had been accepted for publication. Elinor sent him packing, citing the college rules about male visitors, and Frost, heartbroken, tore up his copy of his poems and resolved to disappear, never to be seen or heard of again. Hence the journey to the Great Dismal Swamp. 
   Arriving by ship at Norfolk, Virginia, Frost walked out to the village of Deep Creek, then took the road into the heart of the swamp, walking by moonlight and taking to plank boardwalks when the road ran out. This was dangerous stuff, but the young poet survived unscathed and, by the time he saw a light – the light of a lock-keeper's cottage – he was ready to abandon his suicidal venture. He got a lift on a canal boat to the nearest town, and embarked on a three-week journey back to Massachusetts, some of it on freight trains in the company of hobos. From Baltimore, he wired his mother for the money to buy a ticket home. And the following year he married Elinor. They were together for 43 years.

Abundance

 So, a heatwave comes, and suddenly sparseness gives way to abundance. At least for the swifts, which had been worryingly quiet and/or absent so often in May and June, and are back in numbers, screaming and chasing each other full pelt across the suburban skies. And for the butterflies, whose numbers had been so low in spring and early summer, and which are now abundant again – not the same butterflies, but the grassland species that have benefitted from the earlier wet weather making the grass grow lush. I sometimes wonder if, despite my generally sceptical views on 'climate change' etc, I have nevertheless absorbed a touch of catastrophic thinking, leading me to overreact to temporary sparseness, even though I know that abundance will likely follow – especially once we get some proper summer weather.
   Yesterday, visiting a favourite local patch of clay grassland, I found it alive with Ringlets, Gatekeepers, Meadow Browns, Marbled Whites and Skippers (Small and, for those who like nice distinctions, Essex). There were also, as I had hoped, Purple Hairstreaks to be spotted in the oak trees. Today I was briefly on chalk downland and found almost as much abundance, with the added bonus of beautiful Dark Green Fritillaries (they're having a very good year) and my first Chalkhill Blue of the season. There will be more. 

Bicentenary

 Today is the bicentenary of the death of Percy Bysshe Shelley. A suicidally reckless swimmer – as was Swinburne, who, despite his puny build, would happily throw himself into the roughest of seas – Shelley died by water, but not in a swimming accident. He 'drowned when the boat he was sailing was caught in a sudden storm, and his body was washed up ten days later at Viareggio, along with his two sailing companions. They were identifiable only by their clothes – and, in Shelley’s case, a volume of Keats [Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems, 1820] that he had crammed into his pocket. With the help of Italian soldiers who were on hand, guarding the bodies, Trelawny [writer, adventurer and friend of poets] built the funeral pyre and set it alight, while his friends Byron and Leigh Hunt looked on. The fierce heat of blazing resinous pine took Trelawny by surprise and drove the onlookers away to a safe distance. As the flames began to die down, Trelawny poured on frankincense and salt, then wine and oil, in the manner of the ancient Greeks, and that was that. The three men then took a long swim out from the shore, and, in one final romantic gesture, Trelawny seized Shelley’s heart from the embers of his pyre. (That heart now resides in the Shelley family vault at St Peter’s, Bournemouth, along with the body of Mary Shelley and the remains of her parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, dug up from the churchyard of Old St Pancras.)'
That account of the improvised funeral is from this, hem hem, highly recommended book. There is a fuller account of the much mythologised occasion in Philip Hoare's curiously titled RisingTideFallingStar. 
To mark the bicentenary, commemorative events are planned at the Keats-Shelley House in Rome (about which I wrote something a few years ago).  

'It's just not a word I like'

I just came across this quotation from my exact coeval Tom Waits: 
'I don’t have fun. Actually, I had fun once, in 1962. I drank a whole bottle of Robitussin cough medicine and went in the back of a 1961 powder-blue Lincoln Continental to a James Brown concert with some Mexican friends of mine. I haven’t had fun since. It’s just not a word I like. It’s like Volkswagens or bellbottoms, or patchouli oil or bean sprouts. It rubs me up the wrong way. I might go out and have an educational and entertaining evening, but I don’t have fun.' No doubt Waits was stringing an interviewer along when he came out with this, but I can see his point. There is something tiresome about the constant celebration and pursuit of 'fun', a thing that often turns out in practice to be anything but (and yet one feels obliged to pretend it is, as promised, fun). As Johnson observed: 'Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.'

The Great Joy

 Ten years ago today, I became a grandfather. Sam, the first of what was to become a fine tally of five delightful grandchildren, was born to our daughter in Wellington, where he was to be joined two and a half years later by a brother, Ethan. Meanwhile, in England, our daughter-in-law brought the sole granddaughter, Summer, into the world, to be followed after a long interval by William, now three, and Jack, just two years younger. Being a grandfather has been the great joy, and the great adventure, of my later years. It's true what they all say: it brings all the pleasures and rewards of parenthood (including falling in love with each baby as it comes along, though 'they' don't usually say that), but with the added bonus of being able to give the children back to their parents at the end of the day. And it's true what they also say – that grandchildren keep you young, though it's in spirit rather than body; being an active grandparent to young children is nothing if not tiring. But it is all energy well spent. Indeed it could hardly be better spent. Happy birthday, Sam!

The Strange Fate of Mr Hardy's Heart

 Browsing in one of my late uncle's very well organised scrapbooks (mostly newspaper cuttings about politics and theatre, alas), I came across a splendidly macabre tale of what happened – or might have happened – to Thomas Hardy's heart after he died. Hardy, bleak atheist (or God-hater) though he was, wanted to be buried in the churchyard of Stinsford, Dorset (the Mellstock of his Wessex), 'unless the Nation strongly desires otherwise' – which inevitably it did, demanding a Westminster Abbey burial. So it was decided that Hardy's heart would be taken for burial in Stinsford churchyard and the rest of his body cremated for an urn burial at the Abbey.
When Hardy died at his home in Dorchester (the hideous Max Gate), his heart was duly removed and the undertaker Charles Hannah, who had buried both Hardy's parents, wrapped it in a tea towel and placed it for safe keeping in a biscuit tin. Alas, the tin proved less than secure, and a household cat managed to get the lid off and eat the greater part of the heart (cats, for the record, are averse to human flesh – unlike dogs – but will eat human offal). Charlie Hannah, discovering this, took an executive decision. 'Mr 'Ardy wanted 'is 'eart buried at Stinsford,' he declared, 'and buried at Stinsford Mr 'Ardys 'eart shall be.' With which he wrung the poor cat's neck and crammed it back into the biscuit tin, which now contained Mr 'Ardy's 'eart nestled in the stomach of a dead cat. If this it true, then that curious combination is what was interred, with due ceremony, in Stinsford churchyard (in the grave of Emma, Hardy's much-wronged first wife). It would explain why, instead of being presented for burial in the modestly sized urn prepared for the occasion, Hardy's heart was buried in a polished wooden box large enough to contain biscuit tin, cat, heart and all. So the story may well be true. Either way, Hardy would surely have relished the tale. 

'It made me extremely happy...'

 Acting on a hot tip from a trusted source, I did something I rarely do these days: I read a new work of fiction. Well, almost new – Sam Riviere's Dead Souls was published last year – but since then, after a slow start, it has, I gather 'taken New York by storm'. If so, that's a surprise because it is, among other things, a very English work set in a very English scene – specifically the English poetry scene. Not, however, the English poetry scene as we know it, but strangely transformed into an exaggerated, hypertrophied version of itself by developments in what we must take to be the near future, as it is much like the present, only that bit worse. In particular, a piece of software, the QACS (quantitative analysis and comparison system), capable of detecting plagiarism, or rather duplication, in any writer's works and thereby triggering a career-ending pile-on, has had devastating effects on prose fiction, leaving only the poets standing – or, in many cases, falling victim. Solomon Wiese, a poet who thought he had found a way around the software – and was not in any normal sense plagiarising – is a recent casualty, and it is his story, told in the course of one night in the bar of the Travelodge by Waterloo Bridge (which, we are told, has an all-night licence and is therefore a magnet for poets), that forms the bulk of Dead Souls. Listening to Solomon Wiese's tale is an unnamed narrator who is a poetry editor and translator and has just delivered a reading of works by an absent Ukrainian poet to an audience none of whom, the narrator realises, actually wants to be there, but all of whom feel obliged to show their faces and maintain their positions in the fiercely competitive and fissiparous world of the English poetry scene. Solomon Wiese's tale – indeed the whole novel – is told in one unbroken paragraph, conventionally punctuated but tending towards very long sentences, often packed with subordinate clauses, qualifications and clarifications, and anchored periodically by the reminder 'Solomon Wiese said' (in the manner of the 'Austerlitz said' at the end of the torrential sentences in Sebald's Austerlitz).  This way of writing reminded me strongly of another novel I read recently – Javier Marias's The Infatuations – and, as with the Marias, I enjoyed being carried along on these great surging rollers of prose. As a satire, Dead Souls is gloriously bitter and very funny, increasingly funny as it (and the night in the Travelodge bar) goes on. It's a thoroughly unusual novel, English in its subject matter but in style and spirit very far from what we might expect of a contemporary English novel. It is rather wonderful that such a big mainstream  house as Weidenfeld & Nicolson should have published it – hats off to them, and to Sam Riviere for having produced something so bracingly original and so hugely enjoyable. 
The back jacket is covered with blurbs so peppered with reviewers' adjectives that I suspected they might all be part of the satire (alas, they are not) – 'Mordant, torrential, incantatory, Bolano-esque, Perec-ian' ... 'Beautiful, intricately humane and gut-wrenchingly funny' ... 'Sublime, legendary, delightfully unhinged'... 'Whip-smart, razor-sharp, wise-funny'... I'd agree with one blurber's conclusion, though: 'It made me extremely happy, and I dreaded it ending.' Me too.