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.

At Year's End

 Here is a new year/old year poem by the great Richard Wilbur.
The weather here is nothing like so wintry, just windy and damp, but we're promised some cold stuff and clear skies soon... 

Year's End

Now winter downs the dying of the year,   

And night is all a settlement of snow;

From the soft street the rooms of houses show   

A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,   

Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin   

And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake

The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell   

And held in ice as dancers in a spell   

Fluttered all winter long into a lake;   

Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,   

They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns   

Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone   

A million years. Great mammoths overthrown   

Composedly have made their long sojourns,   

Like palaces of patience, in the gray

And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise   

But slept the deeper as the ashes rose

And found the people incomplete, and froze   

The random hands, the loose unready eyes   

Of men expecting yet another sun

To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.   

We fray into the future, rarely wrought

Save in the tapestries of afterthought.

More time, more time. Barrages of applause   

Come muffled from a buried radio.

The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

Happy New Year, everybody!