'A liturgy demands a language that is different from everyday speech...'

 In the church of St Thomas a Becket in Lewes, I happened upon this notice, which seems to me to offer a very good account of the special potency of the Book of Common Prayer, and why it should continue in use. 

The Subtitled Sublime

 The Ode to Joy that ends Beethoven's Ninth Symphony has been with me all my musically aware life, ever since I first heard it in primary school music class (those were the days – sound musical education in every state school). The Classics for Pleasure double album of the Ninth was the first LP I ever owned, back in the olden days when affordable albums (still expensive by today's standards) were quite a novelty. It was Carl Schuricht conducting the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra – not that I cared who it was: the music simply overwhelmed me, swept me away, especially the choral finale, that Ode to Joy. I never bothered about the words, which I couldn't make out and were clearly in a language I didn't understand – fine by me. What mattered was that glorious music, the sheer genius of the vast musical world that Beethoven builds from what is on the face of it a pretty banal melody (hence its adoption as the EU's anthem). Last night's televised Prom ended with Beethoven's Ninth, and the BBC had decided to subtitle the choral finale with an English translation of the Ode to Joy (written, as all the world knows, by Schiller). I do wish they hadn't: the words, at least in this translation, were of the most flatulent banality – all about universal love and brotherhood, and God somewhere above the starry canopy – and only detracted from the glory of the music. But if subtitles are going to be used for choral music, why not do so more generally? It might be genuinely useful, as the words are often impossible to make out and brief subtitles might help. However, if they're going to do it, they might at least take care to make them accurate: the subtitles to the Ode to Joy last night referred more than once to a God who 'swells' above the starry canopy. A disturbing image. 

In Which Ivy's Sisters Teach Jonathan Miller Nothing

 Yesterday, for some reason, I was reading about Jonathan Miller – 'theatre and opera director, actor, author, television presenter, humorist and physician', as Wikipedia describes this man of many parts. He was also that rare thing in this country, a 'public intellectual', and, with his massive self-satisfaction and total conviction of his own superior wisdom, a living illustration of why we like to keep them very thin on the ground. 
  Anyway, I was interested to read that, at one point in his boyhood, Miller was taught by two sisters of Ivy Compton-Burnett (a persistent presence in this blog). Young Jonathan, a somewhat difficult lad (or precocious brat, according to viewpoint), spent much of his early life cannoning from school to school, when not enjoying sessions with the  psychiatrist Leopold Stein, in which, by Miller's account, the two 'simply conversed about philosophy and Hughlings Jackson's early neurological theories'. As you do. He encountered the two Compton-Burnett sisters at a Rudolf Steiner school at King's Langley in Hertfordshire (since closed). The sisters were Juliet and Vera, who had survived the high death toll and psychic carnage of Compton-Burnett family life and found refuge in theosophy and the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, turning the house they shared with the pianist Myra Hess in St John's Wood into an 'art house' filled (as Ivy's biographer Hilary Spurling puts it) 'with music, painting, modelling, eurhythmics, all activities that Ivy flatly deplored'. Later they took up residence in Berkhamstead and, while living there, became involved with the school at King's Langley. Miller claimed that during his time with them he 'never learnt anything at all'. For achieving that all but impossible outcome, the Compton-Burnett sisters surely deserve a small accolade. 

A Poetical Scrap and 34 Stanzas of Filth

 When the elderly John Masefield died in 1967, the post of Poet Laureate became vacant – who would succeed? Finding a successor should have been a fairly straightforward matter, but such things are rarely straightforward in the overheated, viciously rivalrous world of poetry (see Sam Riviere's Dead Souls).    Newly released documents from the National Archive reveal what went on behind the scenes as the poetry establishment scrapped ferociously over the succession, briefing against every candidate but the one they favoured. Betjeman was imperiously dismissed by Lord ('Two Dinners') Goodman: 'The songster of tennis lawns and cathedral cloisters does not, it seems to me, make a very suitable incumbent for the poet laureateship of a new and vital world in which we hope we are living.' Ah yes, that new and vital world, I remember it well... Philip Larkin was 'a reserved man who will never give a public reading' (though he was happy to appear in front of millions on TV). Stevie Smith was described as 'unstable'. Hugh MacDiarmid was reported to be 'heavily on the bottle, and has rejoined the Communist party'. Edmund Blunden 'suffered from severe mental lapses and was almost incoherent at times'. 
  As for the favourite, W.H. Auden, he, it seems, was ruled out largely because of a pornographic poem that appeared under his name in various underground publications. It had several titles – 'The Platonic Blow, by Miss Oral', 'The Gobble Poem', 'A Day for a Lay' – and was a narrative poem consisting of 34 ABAB stanzas of unremitting filth. I remember seeing it in, I think, the magazine Suck, and thinking something along the lines of WTF! Can this really be by Auden? Well, it seems it was, though the poet never intended it for publication. It was privately circulated among like-minded friends, and would have remained unknown (at least until after Auden's death) had it not been for Ed Sanders – yes, Ed Sanders of the notorious Fugs – who got hold of a copy through an employee of the Morgan Library and published it in the magazine he founded, the delightfully named Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. Auden initially admitted, at least to friends, that he wrote the poem, but later he denied it. Fair enough for a man who was forever revising his corpus. 
  As for the laureateship, in the end it went to the 'safe' Cecil Day Lewis, who died five years later. He was duly succeeded by John Betjeman, who all along had been the man best fitted for the job, and was certainly the best laureate we have had in recent times. 

A Grand Short Crawl

 It has been a long time – or it certainly feels like one – since I did any church crawling, but today I had a short, hugely enjoyable church crawl, admittedly by car, but there's a lot to be said for that. Among the highlights were some remarkable monuments in St Peter, Elford (near Lichfield), including one known as 'the Stanley boy', commemorating the last male heir of the Elford Stanleys, killed by a tennis ball in 1460. He holds the ball in one hand and points to his ear with the other, illustrating the motto on the monument: 'Ubi dolor ibi digitus' (where the pain is, there is the finger, i.e. at the point of impact of the ball). This is a nice story, but there is every reason to believe it is a fabrication – see this demolition job by the ever scrupulous Church Monuments Society. However, I'm happy to print the legend. As for the other monuments, these are in astonishingly good condition – a fact that may owe something to the dubious Edward Richardson's repairs (the whole church was thoroughly Victorianised by Salvin and Street), but they look wonderful and are of very high quality. One of them, to Sir Thomas Arderne (an ancestor of Jacinda's?) and his wife, shows that display of 'stone fidelity' familiar from the famous Arundel tomb in Chichester Cathedral, the one that inspired Larkin's great poem: Sir Richard and his lady are 'holding hands'... 

After that, it was St Andrew's, Clifton Campville [below], one of the finest medieval churches in Staffordshire (albeit almost in Leicestershire), and on to St Editha's, Tamworth, one of the finest town churches in the county. Aah, it felt so good to be back in church crawling mode, if only for half a day.

'One can, I think, safely say...'

 Although I am not by any means as ardent a Dylan worshipper as, say, Bryan Appleyard, I have for some while been getting almost daily Dylan-related items in my Facebook feed (also, for much less reason, Rolling Stones stuff). Usually the Dylan material is mildly interesting, if overlong, but yesterday came a splendidly pithy quotation from Mary Travers, of Peter, Paul and Mary fame: 
'One can, I think, safely say that the world fell in love with Bob Dylan's words before they fell in love with his voice.' 
Nicely put. One rarely comes across such delicately phrased, nuanced utterances in the music world – and what she says is very true. I remember the first time I heard the Dylan voice – on the radio, singing 'Blowin' in the Wind' – and even I, a broad-minded lad, was shocked by the sound. Nothing like it had been heard anywhere near the pop charts or mainstream radio, and even though I loved what I was hearing, it took me a while to get used to that raw, whiney, unmusical voice. I soon realised, however, that it was essential to the Dylan magic, as was apparent from the cover versions that were springing up everywhere: the more mellifluous the voice, the less effective the song. That voice, that guitar style and that wonderfully expressive harmonica playing – all belonged together and worked together magically to bring those songs fully to life. That is why Dylan's lyrics in isolation, on the page, are thin stuff compared to the fully realised song – and why it is ridiculous to call Dylan a poet, and supremely ridiculous to have given him the Nobel Prize for literature. He has been the supreme singer-songwriter of his generation, by a country mile – isn't that enough? 

Find

 My favourite Lichfield charity bookshop has gifted me many great finds – but today's was the best, and most unexpected, yet: Nabokov's Blues by Kurt Johnson and Steve Coates. I'm not sure this was even published in England, and heaven knows how it found its way to Lichfield and to a charity bookshop, but I know from the flyleaf that it was once owned by one Anne D. Wilson, whom I thank for disposing of it so judiciously. 
  Nabokov's Blues tells the story of 'The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius', focusing on Nabokov's ground-breaking work on those fascinating and beautiful butterflies known as the Blues. As well as being a butterfly lover (as is evident from his fiction and memoirs), Nabokov was a serious lepidopterist – or rather lepidopterologist, which is even more serious and scientific. His work on the Blues included a radical new classification which at the time was highly controversial, but was found many years later to be soundly based and led to new insights into the global movement of species and the threats to their survival. Dmitri Nabokov,  no less, describes Nabokov's Blues as a book 'both eerily evocative and stunningly new, that makes delectable reading without patronising the reader'. I'm looking forward to reading this one, perhaps in the winter when the butterflies are no longer flying.