'The curiosity of future ages'

'When the Funerall pyre was out, and the last valediction over, men took a lasting adieu of their interred Friends, little expecting the curiosity of future ages should comment upon their ashes, and, having no old experience of the duration of their Reliques, held no opinion of such after-considerations. 
  But who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried? Who hath the Oracle of his ashes, or whither they are to be scattered?'
  So begins the Epistle Dedicatory of Sir Thomas Browne's masterpiece, Urn Burial (Hydriotaphia). This passage came to mind the other night when I was half-watching Digging for Britain, an archaeological programme on BBC2. Much of it was dedicated to the excavation of a medieval burial ground containing large numbers of remarkably well preserved skeletons from the 14th to the 16th centuries. Genetic scientists were getting to work on these, extracting DNA (of which the best sources, surprisingly, are the tiny ossicles of the inner ear) to find out what they can about these long dead people and what killed them. Particularly affecting were a pair of young male skeletons, brothers who had died together, of the Black Death, and been buried together. As the scientists probed and tested, I found it uncomfortable viewing. These people certainly did not die expecting 'the curiosity of future ages' to be picking over their bones a few centuries later, and they surely had some sense – as most people still do even now – that their remains amounted to more than just a pile of old bones, and deserved a degree of reverence, of recognition of their individual worth and identity, the soul that once animated those bones. How old do human remains have to be before they forfeit any such claim on posterity? A hundred years? Probably too little. Two hundred? Maybe. Certainly by the time we get back to the medieval period, it seems that human remains, skeletons and bones anyway, have pretty much lost their humanity and become mere objects of forensic curiosity. But is it just a matter of age? Things are different, it seems, with remains that are more recognisably individual, having been mummified or preserved in peat bogs or mountain ice. I recall that on my last visit to Derby Museum and Art Gallery, their two Egyptian mummies, of individuals called Pypyu and Pa-sheri, are displayed with a good deal of interpretive signage and reminders that these were human beings and visitors might find it disturbing to see them on display. Pypyu and Pa-sheri have been better served by posterity than all those much more recent medieval dead.   

Epstein's Luck

 Top of my bedside reading pile just now is a gift from my daughter – the great essayist Joseph Epstein's new memoir, Never Say You've Had a Lucky Life. Especially If You've Had a Lucky Life. As I am another who feels he's had a lucky life, in all manner of ways (and is hesitant about saying so, for fear of tempting fate), I am naturally drawn to a book with such a title, and so far  I'm enjoying it hugely, as I always enjoy Epstein's writings. He is a brilliant but unshowy writer, a master of his craft, with a wonderfully light touch and a terrific sense of humour – and of proportion, which is much the same thing. 
  Epstein counts himself lucky on many counts – 'in the time in which I was born, in the parents to whom I was born, in my education, and much more' – and I could say much the same, though there were times when I wouldn't have entirely assented to the second of those. In terms of time, I'd count myself perhaps luckier than Epstein in having been born in 1949 rather than his 1937. This meant I was the right age to enjoy the golden age of popular music that unfolded, or rather exploded, from the mid-Sixties to the mid-Seventies. However, it also meant that I was perfectly placed to succumb resistlessly to the various excesses and self-destructive idiocies of what we think of as the Sixties (which mostly happened in the Seventies).
  I certainly see, as Epstein does, the years I have lived through as marked by radical change: 'from a traditionally moral culture to a therapeutic one, from an era when the extended family was strong to its current diminished status ... from print to digital life featuring the war of pixel versus print, and much more'. One of the small, but significant, changes Epstein notes is that 'our parents also had a certain decorum missing from parents of later generations. I do not recall seeing my mother not wearing a dress (or at home what was called a 'housecoat') or without makeup. Until his retirement at 75, my father had no leisure clothes. Today, on the streets of my own middle-class neighbourhood, I see older men and women go about in flip-flops, cargo shorts and tank tops, getups my parents wouldn't have worn to take out the garbage.' I'm sure Epstein would not be seen dead in such apparel. Nor, come to that, would I. Some of us, even children of the Sixties, still have a residual belief in the bella figura. 

Rosalba

 Born on this day in 1673 was the great Venetian pastel portraitist Rosalba Carriera, one of the most talented and successful women artists of her time. Her best works demonstrate a mastery of subtle tonalities and exquisitely rendered textures, drawn in free, spontaneous strokes, using pastels made to her own innovative formulations. Her informal, very direct self-portraits are among her best work. The one above, showing her holding a portrait of her beloved sister and companion Giovanna, hangs in the portrait gallery of the Uffizi. Giovanna's death in 1738 sent Rosalba into a deep depression, but she continued working until her eyesight failed in the mid-1740s. One of her last self-portraits [below], which she gave to the British consul in Venice, Joseph Smith, is in the Royal Collection, where I remember seeing it a few years back in an exhibition at the Queen's Gallery. Sadly, Carriera, after her glittering career, died blind and alone in Venice in 1757, having outlived all her family. 

'I sought a theme...'

 This wretched flu, like an ageing artiste reluctant to leave the stage, keeps coming back for yet one more encore. This is very wearing, and as a result my spirits are low and mental activity sluggish. Not a good time to be reading late Yeats, you might think, but this morning, as I sought a theme and sought for it in vain, 'The Circus Animals' Desertion' inevitably swam into what's left of my mind.
Most poets either peter out in the natural course of things, or carry on doing their thing for as long as they can get away with it, or descend into prolixity (Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, even Geoffrey Hill) – but a few find new poetical life in old age: Hardy, Wallace Stevens, and supremely Yeats, in whom the decrepitude, absurdity and indignity of old age sparked a great resurgence of his poetical powers, blowing away any last traces of the Celtic twilight. Here is 'The Circus Animals' Desertion' in all its raging glory – 

I

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,

I sought it daily for six weeks or so.

Maybe at last being but a broken man

I must be satisfied with my heart, although

Winter and summer till old age began

My circus animals were all on show,

Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,

Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

II

What can I but enumerate old themes,

First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose

Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,

Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,

Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,

That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;

But what cared I that set him on to ride,

I, starved for the bosom of his fairy bride.

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,

`The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it,

She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away

But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.

I thought my dear must her own soul destroy

So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,

And this brought forth a dream and soon enough

This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread

Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;

Heart mysteries there, and yet when all is said

It was the dream itself enchanted me:

Character isolated by a deed

To engross the present and dominate memory.

Players and painted stage took all my love

And not those things that they were emblems of.

III

Those masterful images because complete

Grew in pure mind but out of what began?

A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,

Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,

Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut

Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone

I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Centenary

 Born exactly 100 years ago today was the naturalist, writer and (an endangered species, this) zookeeper, Gerald Durrell – a child of the Raj, born in Jamshedpur in British India. I owe his shade some gratitude, as his books were among the first to engage me in reading for pleasure. Some time around the end of the 1950s a relation I knew as 'Auntie Molly', who had somehow sensed that I might be a boy in need of the right books, gave me a hardback copy of Durrell's Encounters with Animals, illustrated with fine line drawings by Ralph Thompson. Being a budding young naturalist myself, I was immediately interested, plunged in, read it straight through more than once, and thereafter leapt on every Durrell title I could find. It was several years before, my literary taste having become a little more exacting, I tired of Durrell's style, though I was always interested to read about the remarkable animals he continued to encounter on his collecting trips.
  The book of his that kept me enthralled the longest was My Family and Other Animals, his not entirely reliable but utterly charming account of his boyhood years with his family on Corfu, described by his brother Lawrence as 'the best argument I know for keeping thirteen-year-olds at boarding schools and not letting them hang about the house listening in to conversations of their elders and betters'. My Family has had a long afterlife, having been filmed, televised and adapted repeatedly. It might still be around when Lawrence's novels (does anyone read them any more?) are all but forgotten, but its survival would not be down to superior literary merit, only (only!) to a superior ability to deliver pleasure. Durrell's works certainly delivered plenty of that to the young me, so I salute him now on his centenary. 

It's a Wonderful Film

 This wretched flu continues to toy with me mercilessly, one day giving every indication that it's coming to an end, the next surging back with renewed vigour, draining me of all energy. It's been quite a ride. And somewhere along the way, in keeping with Christmas tradition (one not observed for several years), the decision was taken to watch It's a Wonderful Life. This was not wise: I had overlooked the state of emotional frailty the flu had plunged me into. The result was that the titles were barely over before liquefaction set in, and by the end I was a wrung-out emotional wreck of a man, beyond help. The film is notoriously one that can wring tears from the stoniest heart, so a man in my condition was asking for trouble...
  What is it about It's a Wonderful Life? Like A Christmas Carol – with which it has clear parallels, not least in the Scrooge-like character of Mr Potter and in its time-shifting vision of what might have been – it has the power of fable, and it has a Dickensian simplicity. Essentially both A Christmas Carol and It's A Wonderful Life dramatise the same conflict, between a view of the world (Potter/Scrooge's) in which the 'bottom line' is everything and human beings merely interchangeable economic units, and one in which bonds of social and familial affection, custom and ceremony count for more than profit-and-loss and create something of infinitely greater value. George Bailey is a man at the point of breaking under the relentless pressure to surrender to the grinding logic of Potter's ruthless accounting and betray the community that he has done so much to build. Of course we know how it will end, but Frank Capra's storytelling and (in particular ) Jimmy Stewart's performance are so compelling that the film gains power as it goes along, building such a head of emotional steam that by the end... well, there won't be a dry eye or an unwrung heart. Okay, it's sentimental, it's hokey and all the rest, but It's a Wonderful Life is also a cinematic masterpiece of rare potency. 
  By the way, when George Bailey is granted a vision of how 'Potterville' (the former Bedford Falls) would have ended up but for him, the pleasure-crazed asocial dystopia – all cocktail bars and gambling dens and low dives – seemed, mutatis mutandis, sadly reminiscent of the centres of some of our depressed English towns today. This represents, I suppose, the triumph of 'limbic capitalism' – capitalism relentlessly titillating the pleasure centres to keep us coming back for more of what does us no good at all.  

Bug and Bland

 I have been laid low by a pretty vicious dose of flu, which struck, with exquisite timing, on New Year's Eve and shows no intention of releasing its grip just yet. Physical lethargy and mental hebetude reign. However, I note that today is the birthday of the appalling Hubert Bland, first husband of E. Nesbit – and that I wrote about him exactly ten years ago today. So, back to the archive...

'Woman's metier in the world – I mean, of course, civilised woman, the woman in the world as it is – is to inspire romantic passion... Romantic passion is inspired by women who wear corsets. In other words, by women who pretend to be what they not quite are.'
So opined Hubert Bland, born on this day in 1855. A founder member of the Fabian Society, Bland would be an even smaller footnote than he is, had he not also been the husband of the great children's writer E. Nesbit. Clearly no feminist, he was also a rum kind of socialist, holding strongly pro-imperialist views and characterising democracy as 'anti-national and vulgar'. A large, pugnacious and fearsome man, with a voice 'like the scream of an eagle' (according to Shaw), Bland completed a full house of contradictions by joining the Roman Catholic Church in his middle age, though he was barely observant. Nobody seems to have had a good word to say for him, and yet many otherwise intelligent people fell under his spell – including, alas, Edith Nesbit.
 Edith was just 18 when she met Bland, and they married in haste, with Edith seven months pregnant. At first Bland lived partly with Edith and partly at home with his mother and her companion – whom Edith later discovered to have had a son by him. And there turned out to be another woman who believed herself to be Bland's fiancée. But worse was to come later, when Edith discovered that her good friend Alice Hoatson was also pregnant by Hubert, who bullied Edith into taking in Alice and the child. Thirteen years later, Alice bore another child by Hubert, who was also taken in to the household and adopted.
 Bland also found time to father three children by Edith, of whom her favourite son Fabian tragically died at the age of 15 in a botched tonsilectomy. By now Nesbit was launched on the successful career as a children's writer that would support Hubert and the family and enable them to entertain on a grand scale – though Edith was often upstairs writing, sustained by gin and cigarettes. Around 1911, Hubert began to go blind, and Edith, of course, cared for him until his death in 1914. Happily, she went on to remarry – this time to the genial and much less problematic Thomas 'the Captain' Tucker, at the time an engineer on the Woolwich ferry. They ended up living companionably and very happily in New Romney, where Edith died. She is buried in the churchyard of St Mary in the Marsh, her grave marker made by her grieving second husband.