Apocalypse Soon, Beckett Now

As you'd expect, I'm still reeling from the impact of the latest IPCC Report, published today and instantly hogging top spot in the BBC's news agenda. Having been oddly muted last time around, the IPCC is now firmly back on the front foot and in ass-kicking form (if such a thing can be achieved while firmly on the front foot). This year's report is truly apocalyptic, promising the imminent arrival of at least three of the Four Horsemen - indeed it's so apocalyptic that one of the panel withdrew his name from the published report in protest. I know better than to stray very far into this heavily mined territory, but it did strike me as interesting that the report's authors condemned 'sceptics' for their reliance on 'disputable' science. Isn't it the very definition of a valid scientific proposition, at least since Popper, that it should be disprovable, i.e. thoroughly disputable. And, come to that, isn't scepticism the only respectable attitude the scientific mind can adopt towards any area of knowledge? Any bar one, it seems, where 'denial of the science is malpractice'...
  But today's more interesting story was the publication, by Faber & Faber, of a 'lost' story by Samuel Beckett, Echo's Bones (a title he subsequently reused). It's an early effort that was forcibly rejected by his publisher at the time ('it gives me the jim-jams'), and Beckett was never keen on publishing much of what he wrote before he found his true voice. I shan't be fighting to get my hands on this story, but specialists and completists will no doubt be pleased - and it got Beckett's name onto that BBC news agenda. There was a little discussion about it on Today, tying it to the current resurgence of interest in Beckett's stage plays. Why is this 'high modernist' suddenly so popular again? No one had much of an answer, and no more have I. Perhaps it simply shows that Becket is a classic writer, one who has been (and will be) in and out of fashion, but whose best works will surely never go away.

Wilbur and Plath: 'How large is her refusal'

Browsing last night in Richard Wilbur's Collected Poems, I was startled to come across this one, which I hadn't noticed before, recalling an awkward meeting of two poets who could hardly be less alike: Wilbur himself and the tortured young poet-in-waiting Sylvia Plath. In a note, Wilbur explains that 'Edna Ward was Mrs. Herbert D. Ward, my wife's mother. The poet Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was the daughter of one of Mrs. Ward's Wellesley friends. The recollection is probably composite, but it is true in essentials.'

Cottage Street, 1953

Framed in her phoenix fire-screen, Edna Ward
Bends to the tray of Canton, pouring tea
For frightened Mrs. Plath; then, turning toward
The pale, slumped daughter, and my wife, and me,

Asks if we would prefer it weak or strong.
Will we have milk or lemon, she enquires?
The visit seems already strained and long.
Each in his turn, we tell her our desires.

It is my office to exemplify
The published poet in his happiness,
Thus cheering Sylvia, who has wished to die;
But half-ashamed, and impotent to bless,

I am a stupid life-guard who has found,
Swept to his shallows by the tide, a girl
Who, far from shore, has been immensely drowned,
And stares through water now with eyes of pearl.

How large is her refusal; and how slight
The genteel chat whereby we recommend
Life, of a summer afternoon, despite
The brewing dusk which hints that it may end.

And Edna Ward shall die in fifteen years,
After her eight-and-eighty summers of 
Such grace and courage as permit no tears,
The thin hand reaching out, the last word love.

Outliving Sylvia who, condemned to live,
Shall study for a decade, as she must,
To state at last her brilliant negative
In poems free and helpless and unjust.

When this was published, it was snittily received by Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (in their letters), Bishop describing it as 'very bad - really unfeeling' and 'smug', and Lowell (another poet very, very different from Wilbur) agreeing that  the poem 'annoyed me too. Which way is the irony meant?' etc. In hindsight, their reactions seems perverse, and the poem stands as a tender and touching memorial to a poet and a person Wilbur knew he could not understand, still less help. The irony is all, as Lowell could surely see, directed against himself, the 'published poet in his happiness' who finds himself reduced to helplessness, 'a stupid lifeguard'.
 For the record, Ted Hughes himself described Cottage Street, 1953 as 'the single truest best thing' written about his late wife.

Socialist Hair

I see our old friend Kim Jong-Un persists in his tireless efforts to make life in North Korea even more fun. His latest wheeze, it seems, is to decree that all male citizens of the Glorious People's Republic must sport the Supreme Leader's own style of haircut, that irresistible combination of buzzcut back and sides and centre-parted moptop.
 Actually, the chances are that no such decree has been issued; what is reported about North Korea's news media is scarcely more reliable than what is reported on them. For example, rumours earlier this year that North Korean news outlets were reporting the successful landing of one of their countrymen on the Sun were, probably, untrue. However, in the matter of hair, the North Korean leadership has form, having in 2005 issued an illustrated guide to the 28 officially sanctioned haircuts (18 for women, 10 for men), and it seems there was recently a TV campaign against long hair, under the slogan 'Let us trim our hair in accordance with the Socialist lifestyle'. Let us indeed. Me, I'm torn between the ideologically rigorous Kim Jong-Un cut and the more relaxed (but only slightly less weird) Ed Milliband.

Frost-Housman Day

On this blog, the 26th of March is Frost-Housman day - the day on which both Robert Frost (1874) and A.E. Housman (1859) were born. Last year I posted Frost's Spring Pools and Housman's Loveliest of Trees. This year's pair of poems both pay tribute to other poets.
 In Robert Frost's To E.T, he honours his brother in verse ('Edward Thomas was the only brother I had'), a man as vital to his own flowering as a poet as he was to Thomas's, and a friend with whom he had once been so close that Thomas seriously considered throwing in his lot with him and emigrating with his family to New Hampshire. But instead he went to war...

I SLUMBERED with your poems on my breast
Spread open as I dropped them half read through
Like dove wings on a figure on a tomb
To see, if, in a dream they brought of you,
I might not have the chance I missed in life
Through some delay, and call you to your face
First soldier, and then poet, and then both,
Who died a soldier-poet of your race.
I meant, you meant, that nothing should remain
Unsaid between us, brother, and this remained—
And one thing more that was not then to say:
The Victory for what it lost and gained.
You went to meet the shell’s embrace of fire
On Vimy Ridge; and when you fell that day
The war seemed over more for you than me,
But now for me than you—the other way.
How over, though, for even me who knew
The foe thrust back unsafe beyond the Rhine,
If I was not to speak of it to you
And see you pleased once more with words of mine?

And here is A.E. Housman, taking his cue from Robert Louis Stevenson's famous Requiem, fashioning an austerely beautiful lyric...

R.L.S.

Home is the sailor, home from sea:
  Her far-borne canvas furled
The ship pours shining on the quay
  The plunder of the world.

Home is the hunter from the hill:
  Fast in the boundless snare
All flesh lies taken at his will
  And every fowl of air.

'Tis evening on the moorland free,
  The starlit wave is still:
Home is the sailor from the sea,
  The hunter from the hill.


This was not the only poem to spin off from Stevenson' Requiem; Philip Larkin took the line 'This be the verse' as the title of his most notorious work.  

Buon Compleanno, Venezia!

Any excuse for a Venetian picture on this blog - and today's excuse is the 1,593rd birthday of the city. For it was on this day, according to tradition, in the year 421, at the stroke of noon, that Venice was founded, by the consecration of the church of San Giacomo di Rialto (above).
 It's a funny little church, dark inside, awkwardly shaped and - by Venetian standards, which are of course very high - not particularly interesting. But it does, undeniably, feel very old. Unlike most of the lesser Venetian churches, it is seldom quiet, being placed as it is hard by the Rialto, with its markets and its thronged streets lined with tourist tat and tourist tratts. The Gothic portico outside - once a common feature of Venetian churches, now a rare survival - was originally used by bankers and money changers, heedless of the views of Jesus on the subject. From here were issued some of the world's first bills of exchange, laying the foundations for Venice's burgeoning wealth. And as its wealth increased, so did the beauty of the city. It doesn't seem to work like that these days, does it?

Weird

I guess David Cameron must be taking some comfort from the fact that, in the latest polling, a mere 27 percent of those asked classified him as 'very weird' or 'somewhat weird'. This certainly put him well clear of Ed Milliband - 41 percent - and, occupying the middle ground of political weirdness, Nick Clegg, on 34 percent. The worrying thing about all this is that the polls reflect a sad truth - today's politicians are, for the most part, more or less weird. Perhaps you have to be pretty weird even to want to get into serious politics these days but, more to the point, today's politicians are increasingly only politicians - a  caste apart, with little direct contact with or experience of what most of us would call the 'real world'. The voters feel increasingly alienated from the political elite - hence the rise of UKIP and the like...
 But when did all this start - this perception of politicians as 'weird'? I blame Tony Blair - a weird man himself, if ever there was one - whose idea of political debate was to point at the Tory front bench and cry 'Weird! Weird! Weird!' And of course he had a point... Before that, 'weird' was not a word you ever heard in this context - politicians, whatever their faults and quirks, seemed more or less like us, or at least recognisably human, didn't they? Apart from Ted Heath, of course...

Wyatt: They flee from me...

By a small miracle, there are now two good history series running on BBC2 - Monday's The Plantagenets and Friday's A Very British Renaissance, presented by the suave art historian James Fox. Last night's programme featured Sir Thomas Wyatt's great poem They Flee From Me - in itself a powerful demonstration of an English literary renaissance under way in the reign of Henry VIII (though Wyatt's poems were not intended for publication and were only published some years after his death). Wyatt died of a sudden illness at the age of 39, having more than once had a narrow escape from the executioner's axe. Imprisoned in the Tower of London after being accused of adultery with Anne Boleyn, he very probably watched from his cell window as she was beheaded, preceded by five men accused of being her lovers. Luckily for Wyatt, he had powerful protectors, and each fall from grace was followed by a return to favour. But there were other falls from favour from which there was no returning, as They Flee From Me makes clear..
  When, last year, I was posting a personal Anthology, I was going to include this poem, partly because I still remember the electrifying impact it had on me when I first read it - at school, under the tutelage of the inspirational English teacher of whom I've written elsewhere. For many years I had it by heart, and can still, with an effort, retrieve it all. The first great (short) poem in the (modern) English language? Certainly the first great poem of its kind, influenced by Italian models but unmistakably English, in its intensity and frankness of address looking forward to the Metaphysicals, and thence to us, to whom this poem, nearly five centuries old, still speaks with astonishing directness.

They flee from me that sometime did me seek

With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.

I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,

That now are wild and do not remember

That sometime they put themself in danger

To take bread at my hand; and now they range,

Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise

Twenty times better; but once in special,

In thin array after a pleasant guise,

When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,

And she me caught in her arms long and small;

Therewithall sweetly did me kiss

And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”

It was no dream: I lay broad waking.

But all is turned thorough my gentleness

Into a strange fashion of forsaking;

And I have leave to go of her goodness,

And she also, to use newfangleness.

But since that I so kindly am served

I would fain know what she hath deserved.