Monday 18 March 2024

'So that when I stretch'd out my hand.....'

 It was on this day in 1768 that Laurence Sterne died, at the age of fifty-four, less than three weeks after the publication of his Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. What happened after his death is a strange saga of interment, 'resurrection', reinterment, disinterment and eventual burial of at least part of the remains in their rightful grave. I've written about it before here – and there's a fine account of Sterne's long duel with death in the excellent Public Domain Review: here's the link – 

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/alas-poor-yorick-the-death-and-life-of-laurence-sterne/?fbclid=IwAR1GY3vik7LM4FiqFA0NXuqZnCNEfq_ZrDCQFKnvTpRcxkVU4NJzFPrNTns

Sterne's creative life closed more elegantly, with the gloriously inconclusive ending of A Sentimental Journey,  at once deathly and bawdy. Yorick, Sterne's alter ego, has been obliged to share a bedchamber with an attractive young Piedmontese lady, who has an equally attractive maid. Having negotiated a 'treaty' designed to get them through the night with no impropriety (rather in the manner of Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night), Yorick, restless and unable to sleep, exclaims 'O my God!'...

'– You have broke the treaty, Monsieur, said the lady, who had no more slept than myself – I begg'd a thousand pardons – but insisted it was no more than an ejaculation – she maintained it was an entire infraction of the treaty – I maintain'd it was provided for in the clause of the third article. 
   The lady would by no means give up her point, though she weakened her barrier by it; for in the warmth of the dispute, I could hear two or three corking-pins fall out of the curtain to the ground.
   Upon my word of honour, Madame, said I – stretching my arm out of bed by way of asseveration – 
   (– I was going to have added, that I would not have trespass'd against the remotest idea of decorum for the world) – 
   But the fille de chambre hearing there were words between us, and fearing that hostilities would ensue in course, had crept silently out of her closet, and it being totally dark, had stolen so close to our beds, that she had got herself into the narrow passage which separated them, and had advanc'd so far up as to be in a line betwixt her mistress and me – 
   So that when I stretch'd out my hand, I caught hold of the fille de chambre's

                                   END OF THE SECOND VOLUME


  

Sunday 17 March 2024

Graceful Monuments to the Obvious

 For reasons of research (mostly), I've been looking at a 1978 volume, edited by Kingsley Amis – The Faber Popular Reciter, an anthology of 'all the poems you've really enjoyed and which you can never remember properly' (to quote the back jacket). Amis's introduction is, as you'd expect, a fine, punchy little essay, one that strikes something of an elegiac note: he knows he is writing in the last days of a once vigorous tradition. 'When I was a schoolboy before the Second World War,' he begins, '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; they were sung in church or chapel or on other public occasions [Amis's anthology is unusual in containing a scattering of hymns and songs]... Most of that, together with much else, has gone.' Nowadays 'any adult who commits a poem to memory does so for personal satisfaction; if he utters it in company he does so to share it with like-minded friends (or as a harmless means of showing off), and as one who quotes, not one who recites.' Despite its title, Amis's anthology is not intended for recitation as such, but rather for reading aloud – not as a performance but as a way of 'finding out more about a piece of writing and so enjoying it more'. This is perhaps the best reason to read poetry aloud, and to at least attempt to learn it by heart. Reading aloud broadens out our experience of a poem from something on the page to something more intimately, more physically known, on the pulses, as you might say. 
  What Amis offers is an anthology of popular (or once popular) poetry that lends itself particularly well to reading aloud, by virtue of strong rhythm and rhyme, clarity of expression and some stirring or inspiriting quality. He recognises that Orwell was perhaps right to judge most such verse as 'good bad poetry', but Orwell added that '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.' As Johnson said of Gray's Elegy, ' The Church-yard abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.' And what can be wrong with that?  
  Thomas Gray's great elegy features, quite rightly, in the Popular Reciter. And so too does a much later poem of the same (almost) name, G.K. Chesterton's 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard', a short, angry poem, written in the aftermath of the First World War, and ending on a bitter note to which, in these times, many a bosom might still return an echo – 

The men that worked for England
They have their graves at home:
And birds and bees of England
About the cross can roam.
 
But they that fought for England,
Following a falling star,
Alas, alas for England
They have their graves afar.
 
And they that rule in England,

In stately conclave met,

Alas, alas for England

They have no graves as yet.



Friday 15 March 2024

Radio, Television, and That Man Again

 Ever since I broke with Radio 4 and made Radio 3 my default network, with all my radios tuned to it, I have of course been a happier, healthier, wiser and saner man. Although Radio 3 has its faults – it is, after all, a branch of the BBC – it offers a musical menu that is rarely unlistenable and in its totality includes the greatest, most beautiful and soul-enriching music ever written. However, speaking as a semi-insomniac – one who has no trouble falling asleep but often finds it hard to stay that way in the small hours, and resorts to low-volume radio as a soporific – I find the musical menu on offer during those difficult hours thoroughly unsatisfactory. Whenever I turn to Radio 3 for something quiet and calming, I find that there is nothing on offer but thumping, bombastic orchestral music, symphony after symphony, concerto after concerto, with little or nothing in the way of chamber music – and, what's worse, it's mostly live, so if I have managed to nod off despite everything, I'm liable to be jolted awake by a burst of applause. This goes on right through to 6.30, when Petroc Trelawny comes on with a  more varied and altogether less jolting musical menu. I've no idea why 3 fills the small hours with all those orchestral fireworks, just when 'relaxing classics' (as Classic FM likes to call its own output) are what is called for. What's worse, when in small-hours desperation I turn to Classic FM, I usually find that even they are playing the same sort of stuff as 3. Why do both networks do this? Are they going for the Antipodean audience? I wish there was a night-time radio station playing only chamber music, with maybe a bit of soothing choral stuff – I'd be tuning in to that. 
  From radio to television (I don't suppose I'l be writing again about either any time soon) – I was astonished to discover recently that the massively 'transgressive' comedy Little Britain is available for all to see on one of the outlying digital channels. David Walliams and Matt Lucas's show got into a fair bit of trouble when it first went out (2003-6), but in these woke times there is not the slightest chance it would ever get made. With sketches revolving around a revolting, supposedly disabled man who is actually faking it, two unmistakably male men who insist on behaving like and being treated as 'ladies', and the extravagantly caricatured young homosexualist, Daffyd, who insists, in the teeth of all the evidence, that he's 'the only gay in the village', I think it's safe to say that Little Britain would be shot down in flames and Walliams and Lucas barred from polite society, at the very least. Anyway – to my point: the village in which Daffyd believes himself to be 'the only gay' is called Llanddewi-Brefi, and at first I assumed this was an invented name. Later I discovered that it is a real village in west Wales (Cardiganshire), and one of some historical importance, as the site of the sixth-century Synod of Brefi, a gathering of Welsh saints and bishops (in those days practically every bishop was a saint), and the scene of various miracles performed by, among others, St David (Dewi), the patron saint of Wales. On one occasion during the synod, the ground mysteriously rose up under David while he was preaching, allowing him to be seen and heard by the whole of the large crowd that had gathered around him. This miracle is recalled in a poem by R.S. Thomas – yes, it's that man again...

Llanddewi-Brefi

One day this summer I will go to Llanddewi,
And buy a cottage and stand at the door
In the long evenings, watching the moor
Where the sheep pasture and the shadows fall
Thick as swathes under the sun's blade.
And there I will see somewhere beyond the wall
Of the old church the moles lifting the ground,
And think of the saint's cunning and how he stood
Preaching to the people from his secret mound,
A head's breadth above them, and they silent around.


Thursday 14 March 2024

A Word Is Born

 It seems it was on this day in 1839 that the word 'photography' entered the language. The polymath – inventor, mathematician, astronomer, chemist, botanist, etc. – Sir John Herschel described, in a lecture at the Royal Society in London, a series of processes that he called 'photography', i.e. drawing with light. No one had uttered the word in public before.
This gives me a ready-made excuse for posting Julia Margaret Cameron's wonderful 1867 photograph of Sir John in old age – a perfect example of 'drawing with light', and surely one of the greatest portrait photographs ever taken (if 'taken' is the word – perhaps 'made' would be better). 

Tuesday 12 March 2024

'I never took up the lancet again'

 Talking of Keats... I've just read an essay, 'The Medical Keats', by Joseph Epstein, published in his gloriously named collection In a Cardboard Belt! (a reference to a line spoken by Zero Mostel's Max Bialystock in Mel Brooks's The Producers – 'Look at me now! Look at me now! I'm wearing a cardboard belt!'). Of course I'd always known that Keats had some medical training and could be numbered with Chekhov and Rabelais, Sir Thomas Browne and Tobias Smollett, Oliver Goldsmith and Somerset Maugham in the company of writers with medical training (in which company the self-taught apothecary-physician Samuel Johnson could almost be counted). What I had not realised until I read Epstein's essay, was how big a part his medical training played in Keats's life, and how much of that short life it consumed: as Epstein points out, 'Six of his twenty-five years, after all, were spent in medical surroundings and training, and these represented more than half his intellectually conscious life.' He was good at medicine, too, taking a real interest in the subject and passing all his examinations – no mean feat at a time when the great majority of medical students failed and dropped out. 
   Epstein rightly emphasises how tough Keats was, for all his extreme sensitivity. Anyone would have to be tough to endure surgical training at Guy's at that time, especially if you were assigned, as Keats was, to the worst surgeon in the hospital, William Lucas, Jr. William Hale-White (physician son of the author known as Mark Rutherford) wrote in Keats as Doctor and Patient (which Epstein quotes) that 'His surgical acquirements were very small, his operations generally very badly performed and accompanied by much bungling if not worse.' Lucas's colleague Astley Cooper described Lucas as 'neat-handed, but rash in the extreme, cutting amongst most important parts as though they were only skin, and making us all shudder from the apprehension of his opening arteries or committing some other error'. As for conditions in the dissecting room, a contemporary of Keats's wrote that 'On entering the room, the stink was most abominable. About 20 chaps were at work, carving limbs and bodies, in all stages of putrefaction, & of all colours ... while the pupils carved them, apparently, with as much pleasure as they would carve their dinners. One ... amused himself with striking his scalpel at the maggots, as they issued from their retreats.' Such scenes seem not to have unduly disturbed the young Keats, but watching Lucas's butchery surely had an effect, and enhanced his main inhibition – the fear of doing harm. Tough though he was, Keats did not have the steely temperament and massive self-confidence needed to perform surgery, especially in those days before effective anaesthesia and antisepsis. 'My last operation,' he told his friend Charles Brown, 'was the opening of a man's temporal artery. I did it with the utmost nicety; but reflecting on what passed through my mind at the time, my dexterity seemed a miracle, and I never took up the lancet again.'
  Who knows? If the young Keats had not been introduced into literary circles and decided that he must be a poet, he might well have spent the rest of his short life as a physician. Certainly, had he done so, the world would have been immeasurably poorer. 

Sunday 10 March 2024

The Sweet Dove Died: A Strong, Sad Book

 So – The Sweet Dove Died, the Barbara Pym novel to which I turned after the harrowing experience of reading The Blood of the Lamb. The Sweet Dove Died was written in the Sixties, when Pym's star had sunk far below the horizon of fashionable taste, was rejected by 21 publishers in all (even when she sent it in under a male name), and finally published in 1978, after the great Pym revival occasioned by Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil both naming her, in a TLS feature, as the most underrated novelist of the century. 
  The version of the novel published in 1978 differed from its original form, partly in response to Larkin's helpful suggestions: 'With fewer characters and slower movement,' he advised, 'it could be a strong, sad book.' And a strong, sad book it is, also one with rather few characters (and not many pages: it comes in at a bit over 180). The central character is Leonora Eyre, an elegant and attractive middle-aged woman who is taken up by Humphrey Boyce, a pompous upmarket antique dealer, and his ineffectual but personable nephew James, a young man of ambiguous sexuality who has lost both his parents and been, in effect, adopted by Humphrey: 'There was something about the idea of an orphan that brought out the best in Humphrey, that desire to do good without too much personal inconvenience that lurks in most of us.'       Leonora is only too happy to be taken up by Humphrey and James, the former offering a convenient and conventional relationship (though the fastidious Leonora flinches from the prospect of sex with him), the latter something more emotionally satisfying and flattering to her self-image. Between Humphrey's assiduous wooing and James's undemanding adoration, Leonora is in just the kind of situation she likes, with a little world spinning devotedly around her. She is, as we gradually discover, self-centred and self-serving to a quite alarming degree, happy to behave ruthlessly in her own interests, while all the time convinced she is doing absolutely the right thing: whatever serves to keep her little world spinning to her satisfaction can only be the right thing, surely. 
  However, the cosy Humphrey-Leonora-James triangle comes under threat from outside, in the shape of the dangerously amoral Ned, an American whom James meets on his travels. On Leonora's first meeting with him, she feels an instant, cool antagonism, which turns to something more troubling when Ned pointedly quotes to her the seemingly innocuous little poem by Keats from which Pym's novel takes its title: 'I had a dove and the sweet dove died; And I have thought it died of grieving...' Ned goes on, 'his voice lingering over the words and giving them a curious emphasis. "O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied/With a single thread of my own hand's weaving."' Leonora is right to sense danger...
  The Sweet Dove Died darkens towards the end, and has little of the high comedy of her earlier works, but it has real depth, is full of acute observation, and, with its strongly drawn characters and tight, well managed plot, it makes for a richly satisfying read. I'd rate it very high among Pym's novels. And to think – if it hadn't been for Larkin and Cecil, we'd never have heard of it.

Friday 8 March 2024

Heroic Futility, and R.S.T.

 My Facebook activity is sporadic (life's too short, etc.) and pretty random, but I do have spurts of activity from time to time. One of these recently resulted in me joining something called the Dull Men's Club. The stimulus – hardly the appropriate word – was a piece describing one man's heroically futile journey, by plane, train and automobile, all the way from the West coast of Scotland to Stourbridge in the West Midlands with the sole purpose of taking a ride on the Stourbridge Shuttle, Britain's shortest – and probably dullest – branch line, four-fifths of a mile between Stourbridge Junction and Stourbridge Town, a three-minute journey each way. An account of this adventure appeared under the aegis of the Dull Men's Club, and turned up out of nowhere on my Facebook feed. When I wanted to find it again, it had of course disappeared, so I threw caution to the wind and joined the Dull Men's Club. Or rather, as I later discovered, I joined one of at least three Facebook groups that go by that name (and between them have a worryingly large following) – and of course it was not the one that had carried the post I was looking for. Since then I have found this report, which gives the gist of the story, but is doesn't have the particular flavour of Neil Hughes's original first-person account. 
  Meanwhile, I've found that the Dull Men's Club (UK Chapter) does come up with some good, magnificently dull stuff, which I do find strangely amusing. I should say in my defence that I also recently joined an R.S. Thomas group (guaranteed to crack a smile), Dutch Golden Century Painters, UK Butterflies, Pursuing the Pre-Raphaelites, Painters from the North (i.e. Scandinavia) and other reputable groups. Not to mention my long-standing membership of the estimable Edinburgh Salon. But who could resist the saga of the Stourbridge Shuttle? Not me.
 And talking of R.S. Thomas, here is the poem for today, a sonnet – 'Young and Old'

Cold sea, cold sky:
This is how age looks
At a thing. The people natter,
The wind blows. Nothing they do
Is of worth. The Great problems
Remain, stubborn, unsolved.
Man leaves his footprints
Momentarily on a vast shore.

And the tide comes,
That the children play with.
Ours are the first questions
They shelve. The wind is the blood
In their veins. Above them the aircraft
Domesticate the huge sky.