Name That Writer

 Here's a question that I think would flummox everyone in any literary quiz: 
Whose first novel begins with this sentence? 

'In this dream where he was weightless and unalive, where he was a pervading mist of consciousness that seethed and trembled in a vast stretch of dark, there was at first no feeling, only a dim sort of apperception, eyeless, brainless and remote, whose singular ability was to differentiate between himself and the darkness.'

Give up? Well, here's a clue, or rather more than a clue. This same writer's third novel begins like this: 

'William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen. Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree and accepted an instructorship at the same university, where he taught until his death in 1956. He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his course... Stoner's colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.'

Yes, it's John Williams, whose masterpiece Stoner, after being barely noticed for years, broke through and became a massive hit somewhere around 2010 (45 years after it was published). I've read Stoner at least twice, and written about it (e.g. here), but had never come across a book about Stoner until a blog friend warmly recommended one to me – William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life by Steve Almond. This recommendation was then equally warmly withdrawn, but by then I'd picked up a copy of the book, so, intrigued, I started in to read it. 
I soon discovered both why my friend had recommended it, and why he had so dramatically changed his mind. Almond's book begins as an interesting, often incisive, if sometimes overheated study of Williams's book, written in the light of Almond's amazed discovery of it when he was fresh from a 'creative writing' course and so steeped in 'show, don't tell' dogma that he could scarcely believe his eyes when he read that opening paragraph of Stoner. So far, so good, but as the book goes on, Almond himself, who is clearly a rather tiresome, self-advertising type, elbows his way to centre stage. He, his life story, his marital history, his political views (anti-Trump, you'll be astounded to learn  – clearly this is a man who doesn't mind going out on a limb) become the subject, rather than Stoner. This is a shame, because embedded in this book is the germ of a much better, and shorter, one – perhaps a long essay. It's a pity Almond was so fascinated by himself that he couldn't keep his gaze (which is often acute) focused on Stoner. I gave up well before the end. 

James and the Great Masticator

 There is a lot of talk these days, in the kind of places where these things are discussed, of the health benefits of thorough and lengthy chewing of food. Haven't we been here before, I thought, as I came across something on this theme... We have indeed, and after a little brain-racking the word came back to me – 'Fletcherism'. This was one of the great health fads of the golden age of health fads around the turn of the twentieth century, and one of the most successful. The brainchild of Horace Fletcher – artist, writer, businessman, opera house manager (in New Orleans), art dealer (in San Francisco) – Fletcherism taught that the key to health and strength, weight loss, happiness and long life was to chew every mouthful of food so thoroughly that it was reduced to a tasteless pulp, more liquid than solid; only then was it safe to swallow the stuff. It seemed to do the trick for Horace himself, restoring him to vigorous health after he went into a decline in his middle age. The Great Masticator was a brilliant self-publicist and a forceful personality, and he made a fortune from his theory, buying various homes around the world, one of them a Venetian palazzo, where he lived some of the time with his artist wife and entertained his celebrity disciples. Alas, in the end he took his theory too far, in effect starving himself to death, and dying of bronchitis at the age of 69. 
  Among his followers were various literary men, including Mark Twain, Upton Sinclair – and Henry James (along with his brother William). In January 1904 Henry wrote to William: 'I continue to found my life on Fletcher. He is immense – thanks to which I am getting much less so.' With Henry, the infatuation didn't last, and by 1909, he seemed to be abandoning the Great Masticator (at least, that appears to be the sense of this tangled passage from a letter of that date): 
'There are other things, or mainly one other — which I might sum up as being at last, again, definitely & unmistakably, the finally proved cul-de-sac or defeat of literal Fletcherism — might so sum up if I could go at all into the difficult & obscure subject by letter. I can’t do so — though I will return to it on some future writing, & after more results from my of late — that is these last 3 months’ very trying experience — which has abated since queer lights (on too prolonged Fletcherism) have more & more distinctly & relievingly come to me. But meanwhile communicate nothing distressful to poor dear H.F. if he is in America — his malady of motion, a perfect St. Vitus’s Dance of the déplacement-mania, make me never know where he is. I am worrying out my salvation — very interesting work & prospects, I think, much aiding — & “going into” the whole fearsome history intelligibly this way is an effort from which I recoil.'
   Others remained faithful to Fletcherism – including, of all people, Franz Kafka. He was so thorough a masticator that, according to food historian Margaret Barnett, his father hid behind his newspaper at mealtimes 'to avoid watching the writer Fletcherise'. 

Stirring Stuff

 The new issue of 'the real reader's quarterly', Slightly Foxed, is out, and, as ever, it's full of good stuff, including pieces on Jane Welsh Carlyle's letters, Updike's Couples, Lucky Jim, Edward Gorey and Georges Simenon. There's also this, by me, in which I look back to a time when people would read, memorise and happily recite the kind of 'good bad' verse that stirred the blood...

Bernie Taupin and I have one thing (and only one, I suspect) in common. Catching an interview with him on the radio recently, I discovered that the man who wrote the words for all those Elton John hits was, like me, reared on recitations of stirring narrative verse, mostly from the Victorian age.
In his case, it was his mother and maternal grandfather who had quantities of the stuff by heart and would recite it at the drop of a hat; in my case, it was my father, and his preferred time of day for poetry was the morning, often while he was shaving. To this day, I cannot hear or read Newbolt’s ‘Vitai Lampada’ (‘There’s a breathless hush in the Close tonight – Ten to make and the match to win…’) or Macaulay’s ‘Horatius’ (‘Lars Porsena of Clusium by the nine gods he swore…’) or Tennyson’s ‘A Ballad of the Fleet’ (‘At Flores in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay, And a pinnace, like a fluttered bird, came flying from far away…’) without being transported back to the chilly bathroom of an Edwardian house in Ealing, where my father is lathering his face with shaving soap and reciting from memory his favourite poetry.
 Part of his delight in such verse was no doubt that it reconnected him with his post-Edwardian boyhood and his charmed schooldays. He surely enjoyed ¬– who wouldn’t? – the strong rhythms and rhymes that are a feature of so much narrative verse, and he relished expressions of patriotic sentiment, courage under fire, morally upright behaviour, the excitement of action, a fight in a good cause – all themes that were already unfashionable when he was a young man, not that he would have cared.
There was one anthology that was so important to him that he bought a copy to keep him company when he was serving in Palestine during the war. I still have that copy, inscribed with his name, regiment and number, and carrying the label of the Modern Library & Stationery Store, Jaffa & Haifa. The anthology is Lyra Heroica: A Book of Verse for Boys, edited by William Ernest Henley, the peg-legged poet whose wooden leg and overpowering presence partly inspired his friend Robert Louis Stevenson’s creation of Long John Silver. The epigraph, from Scott, on the title page gives some idea of the tone: ‘Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife, To all the sensual world proclaim, One crowded hour of glorious life Is worth an age without a name.’ Stirring stuff indeed.
In his short preface, Henley reaffirms that his selection is aimed at boys, and that it represents only ‘the simpler sentiments, and the more elemental emotions’. And yet, reading it now, it seems to me that, for all its emphasis on stirring narrative, it actually makes a useful introduction to a far wider field of English poetry, from Shakespeare and Drayton (both on Agincourt) to Henley himself, represented by three works, including his most enduring, ‘Invictus’ (‘Out of the night that covers me, Black at the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul…’). Along the way there is much that is quieter and more inward-looking than might be expected: George Herbert’s beautiful ‘Memento Mori’ (‘Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright – The bridal of the earth and sky – The dew shall weep thy fall tonight, For thou must die…’), Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, Samuel Johnson’s lines on the death of Dr Robert Levet (‘Condemn’d to Hope’s delusive mine, As on we toil from day to day…’). Henley even includes Marvell’s Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland, a poem that cleverly subverts the very triumph it appears to celebrate. Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ appears under the heading ‘The Beauty of Terror’ – Henley likes to add his own titles, to point a moral: Keats’s great sonnet ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ is headed, bizarrely, ‘To the Adventurous’.
 John Greenleaf Whittier’s ‘Barbara Frietchie’, a favourite of my father’s, is here (‘“Shoot, if you must, this old grey head, But spare your country’s flag,” she said …’), as is another favourite, Francis Hastings Doyle’s ‘The Private of the Buffs’ (‘Last night, among his fellow roughs, He jested, quaffed and swore; A drunken private of the Buffs, Who never looked before…’). Others that made a big impression on the boyhood me include Byron’s thrilling ‘Sennacherib’ (‘The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold…’) and ‘The Isles of Greece’ (‘where burning Sappho loved and sung’). Surprisingly absent are Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ and Kipling’s ‘If’, but they were in my father’s repertoire anyway, as was (on a good day) the whole of Chesterton’s ‘Lepanto’, which he probably took from another anthology we had on our shelves, the more straightforwardly literary A Book of Narrative Verse, an Oxford World’s Classic dating from 1930. ‘Lepanto’, a gorgeously coloured account of the great naval confrontation between the Holy League and the Ottoman Empire, stirred me more than almost anything I heard in my boyhood. Who could resist the opening lines? ‘White founts falling in the Courts of the sun, And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run; There is laughter like fountains in that face of all men feared, It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard, It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips, For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships…’).
I never managed to learn the whole thing myself, but back in those days, when I still had a retentive memory, I did commit some quite long poems to memory – inspired, of course, by my father’s impromptu recitations. Though sadly I can no longer retain any great quantity of verse, I still believe that learning ‘by heart’ is an excellent way of really getting to know a poem, to know it, as it were, from the inside – and the same goes for reading aloud. The musicality of a poem, how it sounds when read out loud as well as in the head, is essential to its nature, and both learning by heart and reading aloud can open up a poem to us more effectively than just reading it on the page. And yet it seems that both are now largely things of the past.
 In the Introduction to The Faber Popular Reciter (1978), Kingsley Amis, its editor, strikes an elegiac note: ‘When I was a schoolboy before the Second World War,’ he writes, ‘the majority of the poems in this book were too well known to be worth reprinting. If they were not in one anthology they were in a couple of others; they were learned by heart and recited in class, or performed as turns at grown-up gatherings … Most of that, together with much else, has gone.’ Despite its name, his anthology is, Amis insists, for reading aloud – sharing a poem with like-minded friends (or harmlessly showing off), and quoting rather than reciting. He recognises that much popular verse is ‘good bad verse’, but, as Orwell wrote, ‘a good bad poem is a graceful monument to the obvious. It records in memorable form … some emotion which nearly every human being can share.’
 Amis’s anthology, which includes some hymns and songs, is, in its less overtly sinew-stiffening way, every bit as stirring as Lyra Heroica (and it does include ‘If’ and ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’). It represents the poetry that lingered in the mind of a man raised at a certain time, a time when learning by heart and recitation were standard ways of engaging with poetry, and when poetry – the ‘good bad poetry’ of popular verse, hymns and songs – was everywhere, in a way it no longer is. If all that was already gone in 1978, how much more so is it now.
However, there are occasional signs that something survives. Kipling’s ‘If’ clearly lives on, coming top in a nationwide poll of favourite poems in 1995 (with Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shallot’ and Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Listeners’ a rather surprising second and third). I suspect it would come top again if the poll was repeated. In 2009 the film Invictus told how the imprisoned Nelson Mandela read Henley’s poem of that name on a scrap of paper and drew strength from it. This inspired various politicians, including our own Gordon Brown, to claim that they too had been inspired by the poem, and when Prince Harry founded his games for disabled veterans in 2014, he christened them the Invictus Games.
Perhaps, paraphrasing Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’, we could say that, though much is taken, much abides… However, there is no denying that the poetry-infused world recalled by Kingsley Amis has, sadly, long gone. Those of us who caught the tail end of it, like me and Bernie Taupin, are surely the better for having been exposed at an early age to all that stirring verse, recited with gusto. In my case, it laid the foundations for a lifelong love of poetry – even if, alas, it didn’t make a millionaire songwriter of me.

Hélène de Montgeroult

 This morning on Radio 3 I heard a hauntingly beautiful piece for violin and piano which stopped me in my tracks. It turned out to be the slow movement of a violin sonata by Hélène de Montgeroult, a composer I'd heard of, but knew nothing about. Consulting Professor Wiki, I discovered that this was a woman who had a most remarkable life, being captured and imprisoned by Austrians in Piedmont in 1793, narrowly escaping the guillotine during the Reign of Terror in Paris, and going on to become the first woman professor of music at the Paris Conservatoire. She was a prodigious pianist, improviser and pedagogue, and a composer (at a time when women composers were something of a rarity) who, when she died in 1836, left behind a large body of work, mostly for piano, which is only now being rediscovered and recorded. Read more about her here...
And here is the piece I heard this morning. 

'We come like croupiers with rakes...'

 The other day I was in the garden raking up leaves – not from the lawn, where the worms take care of them, but from the paths and various corners where they accumulate and turn to slippery mush. It's a job I always rather enjoy, especially in crisp sunny weather, a reminder of the profligate beauty and bounty of nature, and the poignant transience of all things. Each leaf is a marvel, and there they are, in countless profusion, lying all around... 
  My raking of the leaves didn't culminate in a burning. Nobody seems to have bonfires these days – are they illegal or something?  In this meditative poem by the American poet Howard Nemerov – some of whose poems I have previously posted (here, here and here) – he burns the gathered leaves, and the burning brings the poem to a quietly beautiful end. 

Burning the Leaves

This was the first day that the leaves
Came down in hordes, in hosts, a great wealth
Gambled away over the green lawn
Belonging to the house, old fry and spawn
Of the rich year converted into filth
In the beds by the walls, the gutters under the eaves.
We thought of all the generations gone
Like that, flyers, migrants, fugitives.

We come like croupiers with rakes,
To a bamboo clatter drag these winnings in.
Our windfall, firstfruits, tithes, and early dead
Fallen on our holdings from overhead,
And taxable to trees against our sin.
Money to burn! We play for higher stakes
Than the mere leaves, and, burdened with treasure, tread
The orbit of the tree that heaven shakes.

The wrath of God we gather up today, 
But not for long. In the beginning night
We light our hoarded leaves, the flames arise,
The smell of smoke takes memory by surprise,
And we become as children in our sight.
That is, I think, the object of this play,
Though the children dance about our sacrifice
Unthinking, their shadows lengthened and cast away.

(Note the clever rhyme scheme  – abccbaca.)

The picture above is Millais's Autumn Leaves, a marvellously expressive work which Ruskin acclaimed as 'the first instance of a perfectly painted twilight'. It was inspired in part by Millais's memory of raking leaves with Tennyson – a scenario that sounds about as improbable as Wendy Cope's making cocoa for Kingsley Amis. 

 

Derangement

 It has come to my attention that it is now considered perfectly acceptable, indeed laudable, in polite society to call for the assassination of Donald Trump – you know, that chap who recently secured a landslide victory in the U.S. elections, thanks largely to rising support among Latinos, African-Americans and even Arabs. Apparently he should be killed because (a) He is well fascist, innit? (These people wouldn't use such a vulgar turn of phrase, but it perfectly expresses the depth of their political analysis), and (b) If we don't kill him, he'll kill us (You know, like he did last time he was in power – remember when he killed us all?). Like so much these days, this takes me back to the seventeenth century, when various forms of religious mania swept the land, many of them driven by the maniacs' absolute conviction that they were of the Elect, therefore self-evidently Right, and therefore Justified in whatever they did or said, up to and including murder. 
We live in different times now, but it would be nice if the American Psychiatric Association urgently updated its manual to include Trump Derangement Syndrome (with a retrospective mention, perhaps, of Covid Derangement Syndrome and Brexit Derangement Syndrome). A mad world, my masters.

Remembrance Sunday

 This morning I attended the Remembrance ceremony that takes place every year in the Garden of Remembrance. The sun had just shown itself for the first time in a fortnight, the trees were in their autumn glory, and it seemed le tout Lichfield was out and about. Not being able to get any nearer, I followed the proceedings as best I could from the far side of Minster Pool. The Canada geese did their best to drown it out with their clamour, but I heard Laurence Binyon's 'For the Fallen' being read, as it always is, and as it was no doubt being read at other ceremonies the length and breadth of the land. Doubtless other suitable poems were being given an airing too – Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum', Rupert Brooke's 'The Soldier', John McCrae's 'In Flanders Fields', Dylan Thomas's 'And Death Shall Have No Dominion', maybe even Philip Larkin's 'MCMXIV'. The lost poets of the Second World War – Sidney Keyes, Alun Lewis, Keith Douglas – rarely get a look in on these occasions. So this year, to redress the balance, I'll mark the day with one of theirs, 'The Unknown Soldier' by Alun Lewis. A complicated, unhappy man, who died 'in mysterious circumstances' – almost certainly by his own hand – I have written about Lewis here before, and posted one of his poems. He is most famous for 'All Day It Has Rained', which, as well as being a fine poem in itself, is a heartfelt tribute to the poet dearest to Lewis's heart – Edward Thomas...

      All day it has rained, and we on the edge of the moors
      Have sprawled in our bell-tents, moody and dull as boors,
      Groundsheets and blankets spread on the muddy ground
      And from the first grey wakening we have found
      No refuge from the skirmishing fine rain
      And the wind that made the canvas heave and flap
      And the taut wet guy-ropes ravel out and snap.
      All day the rain has glided, wave and mist and dream,
      Drenching the gorse and heather, a gossamer stream
      Too light to stir the acorns that suddenly
      Snatched from their cups by the wild south-westerly
      Pattered against the tent and our upturned dreaming faces.
      And we stretched out, unbuttoning our braces,
      Smoking a Woodbine, darning dirty socks,
      Reading the Sunday papers - I saw a fox
      And mentioned it in the note I scribbled home; -
      And we talked of girls and dropping bombs on Rome,

      And thought of the quiet dead and the loud celebrities
      Exhorting us to slaughter, and the herded refugees;

      As of ourselves or those whom we
      For years have loved, and will again
      Tomorrow maybe love; but now it is the rain
      Possesses us entirely, the twilight and the rain.

      And I can remember nothing dearer or more to my heart
      Than the children I watched in the woods on Saturday
      Shaking down burning chestnuts for the schoolyard's merry play,
      Or the shaggy patient dog who followed me
      By Sheet and Steep and up the wooded scree
      To the Shoulder o' Mutton where Edward Thomas brooded long
      On death and beauty - till a bullet stopped his song.

(Of all the lost wartime poets, was Edward Thomas the most grievous loss – a poet who had just come into the fullness of his great gift, only to have his life cut short? Who knows what he might have gone on to write?)
  Anyway, to today's Alun Lewis poem, a powerful piece which I think deserves to be better known. Here it is...

The Unknown Soldier

Everything has lasted till today.
He stares upon it like a velvet king.
Velasquez might have made this flaccid mask,
The silence round the languid mouth,
The weak and glassy eyes, the crumpled brow.
All things are out-distanced now.

All days are heaped in wrath upon today.
The senses sleep except one crazy spark
That leaps the lesion slashed between his eyes
And cries – not for a fertile century,
Nor for the secular ransom of the soul –
But for a sip of water from my flask.
What is the soul to him?
He has outlasted everything.

Joy's deceitful liturgy has ceased.
Tomorrow and tomorrow have no place
Among the seas of rain, the seas of peace
That are the elements of this poor face.
The mean humiliating self no more
Has access to him, nor the friends
Whose sensual persuasions first began
The brittle scattering that this days ends.
On pander, lord and jester slams the door.
And impotent in his kingdom the grey king
No longer clings to that which dies.

He has abandoned everything.
Velasquez, close those doglike dolorous eyes.