More Music

 For some reason – I hope simply the sublime beauty of the music – my post of Wilhelm Kempff playing the slow movement of the Hammerklavier – attracted more views than anything I've put up in recent times. So I'll try another piece of sublime music, which I just caught on Radio 3. It's Benjamin Appl singing Schubert's 'Im Abendrot' in an orchestral arrangement by Max Reger. Does it top Fischer-Dieskau or Hans Hotter with Gerald Moore at the piano? Does it matter? It is one of Schubert's most beautiful songs, and that is surely enough.
Unfortunately I cannot lift this version from YouTube, but this link should take you there...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ7MpUNb92s

Under the Lights

 Johnson is sitting, brooding and unimpressed, under his Christmas lights again, and this year I was there to see them being turned on, as our granddaughter was singing carols with her school before the big switch-on. As usual, the sight and sound of children singing the Christmas favourites (especially Little Town of Bethlehem, Silent Night and, yes, Away in a Manger) filled my eyes with tears and my heart with a familiar potent cocktail of love and memories and thankfulness. I managed to maintain my composure, but there will be more to draw the tears and challenge my composure, with Advent a week away... Christmas is for me the most emotionally affecting, and perhaps the most profoundly meaningful, time of the liturgical year. (Just to be clear, I mean Christmas, not Xmas, the consumerist horror show that unfortunately coincides with it.)

Meanwhile, I have seen my first snowdrop of the year – of next year, rather (or my last of this year?). This was on Friday, so it would have been the 24th of November, which is ridiculous – especially as I'd seen a Red Admiral, full of vigour, only the day before. This week's cold snap will send the last butterflies into hiding, but won't trouble that precocious snowdrop – and should bring the redwings flying in with it. This late November/ early December cold snap seems to be the one sure thing about the British weather: it happens just about every year, regardless of climate change, global warming or whatever, even if the ensuing winter is mild – but no one seems to have noticed.

 

'The most magnificent monologue'

 Born on this day in 1895 was the German pianist Wilhelm Kempff, one of the great performers of Beethoven and Schubert. Here he is playing the slow movement, Adagio Sostenuto, from Beethoven's monumental Hammerklavier sonata, which Kempff described as 'the most magnificent monologue Beethoven ever wrote'. When he was in Finland, Sibelius asked him to play this movement, and when he had finished Sibelius said, 'You did not play that as a pianist, but rather as a human being.' It is a movement of profound, ethereal beauty. Enjoy...

'Only the next room of the dream'

 In 1961 there was a bit of a scandal at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York when three of their most prized Etruscan antiquities turned out to be modern fakes. Among them was a fearsome eight-foot-high figure of a warrior (whose armour did not extend to his genitals) that was one of the Met's most popular and striking exhibits. Its exposure as a forgery inspired Howard Nemerov to write this lament: 

To Clio, Muse of History

One more casualty,
One more screen memory penetrated at last
To be destroyed in the endless anamnesis
Always progressing, never arriving at a cure.
My childhood in the glare of that giant form
Corrupts with history, for I too fought in the War.

He, great male beauty
That stood for the sexual thrust of power,
His target eyes inviting the universal victim
To fatal seduction, the crested and greaved 
Survivor long after shield and sword are dust,
Has now become another lie about our life.

Smash the idol, of course.
Bury the pieces deep as the interest of truth
Requires. And you may in time compose the future
Smoothly without him, though it is too late
To disinfect the past of his huge effigy
By any further imposition of your hands.

But tell us no more
Enchantments, Clio. History has given
And taken away; murders become memories,
And memories become the beautiful obligations: 
As with a dream interpreted by one still sleeping,
The interpretation is only the next room of the dream.

For I remember how
We children stared, learning from him
Unspeakable things about war that weren't in the books;
And how the Museum store offered for sale
His photographic reproductions in full colour
With the ancient genitals blacked out. 

[I found this in The Winter Lightning: Selected Poems, published in the UK by Rapp & Whiting. A volume in the Poetry USA Series, it looks exactly like a Grove Press Evergreen Original. I don't think I've come across any of this series before.]

Elagabalus Gets Her Pronouns

 I see that the North Hertfordshire Museum has decided, on advice from the historical experts of (ahem) Stonewall and the LGBT wing of Unison, that the emperor Elagabalus was 'transgender' and will be referred to by his 'preferred pronouns' – she, her, etc. – in the museum's extensive display of Elagabalus-related material, i.e. one silver denarius. 
  Elagabalus has come down to posterity as one of the most thoroughly depraved and useless of all the Roman emperors, but as he only ruled for four years, did little of much note, and was assassinated at the age of 18, there really isn't much to go on. The historians, notably Cassius Dio and Herodian, piled in on Elagabalus in grand style, accusing him of all the effeminate depravity to be expected of a product of 'the soft luxury of Asia' (Elagabalus was of Syrian origin), but, like most Roman historians, they were seriously biased and unreliable. This, however, did not stop Gibbon from taking their word for it – and he also drew on the even more unreliable Historia Augusta in forming his damning assessment of Elagabalus. ‘It may seem probable,' he writes, 'that the vices and follies of Elagabalus have been adorned by fancy and blackened by prejudice. Yet, confining ourselves to the public scenes displayed before the Roman people, and attested by grave and contemporary historians, their inexpressible infamy surpasses that of any other age or country.' Well, there you go.
  What is interesting (in a depressing mind of way) about this is that it illustrates how a historical villain can be transformed into a hero/victim (the terms are all but interchangeable) in today's all-embracing binary system of Oppressor/Oppressed. Elagabalus, by being assigned to a gender category unknown to the Romans, becomes one of the Oppressed, is given a protected status, and rewarded with his – sorry, her – preferred pronouns. I'm sure he/she would be very grateful. 

'The rest was poetry'

 The latest issue of the literary quarterly Slightly Foxed marks its twentieth anniversary – surely a cause for celebration – and I was happy to find a piece I'd written on A Girl inWinter in it, along with many other goodies, including a lovely appreciation of J.L. Carr by Ursula Buchan, William Palmer on The Best of Myles, and Jonathan Law on Christopher Neve's Unquiet Landscape – a piece that actually inspired me to buy the book (this often happens with Slightly Foxed). Here is me on A Girl in Winter – but do buy the magazine; it's well worth it...

I had been reading Philip Larkin’s poetry for years before, quite recently, I decided to have a look at his novels. I knew he had published a couple in his early years: Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947). I knew too that, in their Oxford days and for some while after, Larkin saw himself as primarily a novelist, while his friend Kingsley Amis regarded himself as primarily a poet (how wrong they were). What I did not know was that, of Larkin’s novels, the second, A Girl in Winter, far from being an early misfire, is, well, a bit of a masterpiece.
 It was a good thing I read the second first, because if I had started with Jill I might not have bothered to pursue Larkin the novelist any further. He himself all but disowned Jill, regarding it as a piece of juvenilia, best forgotten, though he acknowledged that it offers an evocative portrait of wartime life in Oxford and is a kind of prototype for many a later tale of a working-class lad’s misadventures at university. It is also worth reading for its vivid descriptions of a bombed industrial town (clearly drawing on Larkin’s hometown of Coventry). However, as a novel, Jill is unconvincing, and certainly gives no hint of what was to come with A Girl in Winter, a work that is not only quite unlike its predecessor but unlike anything else in English fiction. 

 A Girl in Winter doesn’t read as if it was written by a man, and certainly not by a man as plain-spoken, curmudgeonly, misanthropic, sexist, and all the rest of it, as the Philip Larkin of popular imagination. Reading A Girl in Winter ‘blind’, with no knowledge of its authorship, I doubt if more than one in ten would identify its writer as male, and I doubt if one in a hundred would guess the name of Larkin. It’s a work of great emotional sensitivity and powerful empathy, written entirely from the perspective of the young woman at its heart. That young woman is Katherine Lind, whom we first meet as a wartime refugee working as a library assistant in a provincial northern, or midland, town: the town is not specified (it could well be Coventry), nor is Katherine’s country of origin. Small internal clues suggest that it is Germany, and that she is probably Jewish, though that too is never stated. 

 A Girl In Winter is simply constructed, in three parts. The outer two, set in the town where Katherine is living and working, form a stretch of 12 hours or so on a cold, foggy Saturday in wartime, while the middle section takes us back six years to an English summer in rural Oxfordshire. The wartime Saturday is, for Katherine, a working day, and she is clearly unhappy in her work under a peculiarly unpleasant and officious librarian, Mr Anstey, portrayed with real venom by Larkin, who had no doubt come across an Anstey or two in his library career (I was a librarian once, and I recognise the type). 

 This particular morning, Katherine is detailed to escort home a dislikeable girl, Miss Green (those were formal times), who has a raging toothache. Part one of the novel simply follows their journey across town, in the course of which Miss Green's condition worsens, while Katherine comes into focus as someone whose emotions are, like the townscape, frozen. Why this is so remains, throughout the novel, a story that is never quite told, though the war has obviously forced her to leave her home country and the life she had there. Whatever the source of the winter in Katherine's soul, the turning point of the first part of the novel is a memorable scene in a municipal park when, suddenly, she sees the tiresome Miss Green as a human being rather than a burden, and compassion becomes a possibility: 

‘Till then she had seen only her ugliness, her petulance, her young pretensions. Now this faded to unimportance and she grasped for the first time that she really needed care, that she was frail and in a remote way beautiful. It was so long since she had felt this about anyone that it came with unexpected force: its urgency made her own affairs, concerned with what might or might not happen, bloodless and fanciful. This was what she had not had for ages, a person dependent on her.’ 

 We also learn in part one that Katherine has been in touch with an English family with whom she stayed six years earlier, before the war. There is a note at her dismal 'digs' from the son, Robin, who says he is visiting that day, an encounter that Katherine is now keen to avoid. Why? The back story to that makes up part two of the novel, set in the sunshine and rain of an English summer, in the course of which Katherine falls in love with the reserved and very 'English' Robin, then out of love with him. Katherine finds the experience of meeting and living with his family – and working out what his strange, unhappy elder sister is up to – confusing and unsettling. Larkin traces the movements of Katherine’s emotions with great sensitivity, until finally, standing by the river on her last evening in England, she finds some resolution:

 ‘The water was the colour of pewter, for the afterglow had faded rapidly and left a quality of light that resembled early dawn. It had drawn off the brightness from the meadows and stubble-fields, that were now tarnished silver and pale yellow, and the shadows were slowly mixing with the mist. In this way the edges of her emotions had blurred, and they now overlaid each other like planes of water running over wet sand, the last expenditure of succeeding waves. There was no discord in them: she felt at peace.’ 

As that passage suggests, there is much fine descriptive writing in A Girl in Winter, a novel in which weather, landscape and townscape are always to the fore, from its beginning – describing a day of lying snow with more expected – to its end, when the snow is finally falling (as at the end of James Joyce’s The Dead – did Larkin have that in mind?). 

 From prewar summer it's back to wartime winter for the final third of the book. Here the threads of plot from the first part – Robin’s impending visit, an inadvertent handbag swap – are resolved (the latter, slight and unpromising as it might seem, leading Katherine to a quite unexpected and deeply sad discovery). There’s not a lot of plot in A Girl in Winter: its essence lies in the creation of atmosphere and the tracing of nuances of emotion, especially in exploring Katherine's alienation, the way her feelings, and the world around her, move in and out of focus. For all its fine descriptive passages, this is not a typical 'poet's novel', introspective, showily written and dripping with ‘sensibility’; it’s too firmly grounded in the kind of grim provincial reality that was the seedbed of Larkin’s genius, and the author keeps himself firmly out of it. 

 Where did A Girl in Winter come from? What could have inspired such an atypical work? Possibly its origins lie in an unhappy visit Larkin made to prewar Germany with his father, an admirer of Hitler. They stayed in the resort of Königswinter, and Larkin’s original title for the novel was The Kingdom of Winter. Could Katherine’s numb desolation in wartime England be a version of the young Larkin’s misery in that German resort? Even if that is the case, we still don’t know who, if anyone, was the model for Katherine Lind. Larkin, typically, left no clues. 

 A Girl in Winter has been described as ‘the most underrated work in the Larkin canon’ and ‘a harbinger of greatness’. Andrew Motion, Larkin’s biographer, characterised it as ‘a beautifully constructed, funny and profoundly sad book’. It’s hard to see where he found the ‘funny’, but profoundly sad it certainly is. However, the shimmer and music of Larkin’s descriptive prose tell another story, of life and possibility and hard-won hope. It’s a shame this novel is not better known; if it has been buried under the great edifice of Larkin’s poetry, it should be brought up from the basement and read again as one of his most interesting pieces of work. 

 Why did he write no more novels? It seems he did have at least one other in mind, the third part of a very loosely conceived trilogy, in which Jill represented innocence, A Girl in Winter the loss of innocence, and the one that remained unwritten marking a return to life. However, he gave up on ever writing that third work, or any other fiction. Perhaps he simply lacked material for sustained fiction, or, more likely, he was by then realising where his true vocation lay. Either way, there were to be no more novels: after A Girl in Winter, the rest was poetry.

RIP

 I was sorry to discover, belatedly, that the poetry anthologist Anne Harvey, whom I knew slightly, has died. Of her many anthologies, one I have found particularly rewarding is Elected Friends: Poems For and About Edward Thomas, which I recommend to anyone with an interest in that great poet, and about which I wrote here and here.
And here is an affectionate obituary of Anne Harvey by Susan Bailes.