'Last night I saw Lester Maddox...'

Born on this day in 1915 was Lester Maddox, the segregationist Governor of Georgia. Little cause for celebration there, but I'm not one to turn down an opportunity to play a Randy Newman song. You'll recall that Rednecks begins with the lines

'Last night I saw Lester Maddox on a TV show
With some smart-ass New York Jew*
And the Jew laughed at Lester Maddox
And the audience laughed at Lester Maddox too.

Well, he may be a fool, but he's our fool
And if they think they're better than him, they're wrong
So I went to the park and I took some paper along
And that's where I made this song...'

* Dick Cavett, not a Jew.

It's also interesting to note that Maddox – along with George Wallace and most of the segregationist Southern political leaders – was a Democrat. How did the party get from there to the right-on moral high ground in so few decades?

A Pickle

I see it's National Poetry Day again (how soon it comes around...). This year's theme is, er, Freedom. For myself, I'm with Donovan inasmuch as freedom is a word I rarely use*. But, to mark the day, let's hand over to Kay Ryan for a few words on life - this life - what is it, Kay, in a word?

It's a pickle, this life.
Even shut down to a trickle
it carries every kind of particle
that causes strife on a grander scale:
to be miniature is to be swallowed
by a miniature whale. Zeno knew
the law that we know: no matter
how carefully diminished, a race
can only be half finished with success;
then comes the endless halving of the rest --
the ribbon's stalled approach, the helpless
red-faced urgings of the coach. 


* see, if you must, Colours (1965) 

Spark Again

Having taken a refreshing dip in masculine waters with Donald Westlake, I was soon back with my lady novelists - specifically Muriel Spark. I'd picked up a copy of The Driver's Seat in a local charity shop and, as I hadn't read it before...
 What can I say? It's very short, barely novella length, very strange and, even by Spark's standards, icy cold. It's also an astonishing piece of writing, the kind of thing that only a writer of dazzling talent could bring off (if she does bring it off - many of Spark's most ardent fans, it seems, found this one hard to swallow).
 What is it about? Well, it's impossible to say without giving the plot away - but, as Spark happily does just that by way of opening the third chapter of the book, it hardly matters. Lise, the clearly deranged main character, whom we first meet buying a bizarre selection of garish clothes in a London shop before flying off to some unidentified Mediterranean resort, is a 'murderee' (isn't there one of those in Martin Amis's London Fields? Did he get the idea here?). Lise is setting out to accomplish her own murder. She just needs to find someone to do it...
 We are told almost nothing about Lise, beyond the bare fact that she's worked in the same office for sixteen years - a few hints here and there, but nothing concrete - and must try to work out for ourselves why she is doing this, even as we hang on, pale and aghast, waiting to find out how she will bring it about. Happily there are supporting characters and incidental details - delineated with Spark's characteristic acuity - to diffuse our attention, but it is Lise's unexplained, inexplicable quest that drives the action to its climax.
 The author does not let us into the inner world of anyone in this novel - least of all Lise - but remains outside it all, omniscient but telling us almost nothing.  Perhaps that is the only way to handle these dark materials - and it works, to the extent that it keeps the reader reading, and adds up to something that looks like a satisfying whole, even if it's one you'd really rather not swallow. The New Yorker called The Driver's Seat 'spiny and treacherous', and those adjectives are dead right. It is also, like it or not, a rare piece of virtuoso storytelling.

A Face from the Past

This face, I feel sure, is going to haunt me for a long time. It is that of Sir Adrian Scrope (died 1623) as carved by - who else? - Epiphanius Evesham for Scrope's monument in the remote Lincolnshire church of St Leonard, South Cockerington.
 Sir Adrian (of whose life almost nothing is known) reclines on one elbow, the hand of his other arm on his breast, his head raised as if listening intently to something, or lost in thought. His sword lies beside him, his helm behind, his gauntlets under one armoured knee. He wears a fine collar and a sash that still retains a little colour. On two beautifully carved panels below him on the tomb chest his sons and daughters are artfully arranged. The tomb is of alabaster, but Sir Adrian's effigy is of grey limestone, and has been knocked about a bit, as is so often the case with these monuments, great works of art though they are.

 What is remarkable - indeed unnerving - about this effigy is how extraordinarily real it seems, how completely natural and unforced the pose is. When you enter the church, it really does look as if some visitor has decided to rest awhile on a tomb chest. And then, when you look at that face,  when you look into those eyes - or rather try to; the eyes are always elsewhere - it is absolutely like looking at the face of a living person, of a person who has lived. What is that face saying? Is it telling us anything, or is that gaze purely inward?
 This is certainly a man facing the end of his life, not one newly awakened at the general resurrection of the dead, though a similar pose was often used in resurrection monuments. Indeed that semi-recumbent pose was, sadly, to become standard for a host of intensely relaxed aristos on a host of overblown Baroque tombs. But there is nothing relaxed about Sir Adrian, and nothing overblown about his monument. Indeed there's nothing really Baroque about it - that face, in particular, could have been carved at any time. There is something universal about it. Perhaps, when we look at it, we are ultimately looking at ourselves.

In His Country

The landscapes of the Lincolnshire Wolds - rolling wooded hills and farmland dotted with sleepy little villages - are among the most beautiful in the land. They are also among the least appreciated and visited: the roads are almost eerily quiet, and people of any description are few and far between - which is great news for those of us who do appreciate the beauty of these wolds. Even better, all the churches that can be opened are indeed open - a rare pleasure for the church-crawler in these times.
 I was there at the weekend, with my cousin, on a little tour of 'Tennyson country', the cluster of villages centred on Somersby, where the poet grew up, a child of the rectory (and of the deeply troubled rector, who descended into insanity in his later life). There is no plaque on the rectory, nor any indication that this was the house where one of England's greatest and most popular poets spent his formative years. Outside the church, an information board gives a pretty good summary of Tennyson's Somersby life, but you would not otherwise know that this tiny village was the heart of 'Tennyson country'; this is not exactly an over-promoted attraction. As a happy result, it can still be enjoyed in blessed peace and quiet.
 Somersby church is typical of the Wolds churches - stone-built, compact, unpretentious, with a sturdy West tower and a degree of Victorian restoration. The airy whitewashed interior is peaceful and numinous. Against one wall there's a display case containing a couple of the poet's churchwarden pipes and one of his quill pens - and, under the tower, the great man's brooding bust, by Thomas Woolner, stares at nothing.
 If there is to be a 'Tennyson country', this is just as it should be - a half-forgotten land lost in a very special, very local kind of enchantment.

The Japanese have a word for it...

And the word is Tsundoku. It describes a phenomenon that will be familiar to any book buyer - buying books that are destined to spend the rest of their lives standing neglected and unread on the groaning shelves. We are all guilty - though I like to think I'm a lot less so than I once was. Good to know there's a word for it anyway.

Meanwhile, I must report that I'm off again, to Derbyshire and Lincolnshire, where the hunt for Epiphanius Evesham monuments continues...

A Nigel Writes

It seems the once proud name of Nigel is dying out - see, for example, this wittily titled piece from the Guardian. The writer - a Nigel himself - gets most of the notable Niges in there (including Nigel Blackwell of Half Man Half Biscuit), but unaccountably omits Spinal Tap's Nigel Tufnel and my own hero and role model Nigel Molesworth [above].
 For myself, I owe my moniker - which, like most Nigels, I've never liked - to a combination of my mother's transparent snobbishness and my father's enthusiasm for the historical novels of Arthur Conan Doyle, a couple of which feature the adventures of Sir Nigel and the White Company. He might also have been thinking of the great locomotive engineer Sir Nigel Gresley - I'd like to think so.