Myrtle

 The night before last, on Gardeners' World, the estimable Monty Don was talking about the beautiful and fragrant shrub Myrtle, which reminded me that I really must get a bush for the garden – and also reminded me of one of those Browning poems with an instantly memorable first line, 'The Patriot'. The first line I remembered was 'It was roses, roses, all the way', but wasn't there something about myrtle too? There was indeed, as I discovered when I reread the poem (after many years, I think). I also discovered what a vivid, hard-hitting piece it is. It's short and simple, but is surely one of the most powerful depictions of the brevity and uncertainty of fame and the awful vicissitudes of fate – not to mention the fickleness of the crowd (no doubt Browning had the French Revolution in mind)...

The Patriot

An Old Story

I

It was roses, roses, all the way,
With myrtle mixed in my path like mad:
The house-roofs seemed to heave and sway,
The church-spires flamed, such flags they had,
A year ago on this very day.

II

The air broke into a mist with bells,
The old walls rocked with the crowd and cries.
Had I said, ‘Good folk, mere noise repels –
But give me your sun from yonder skies!’
They had answered, ‘And afterward, what else?’

III

Alack, it was I who leaped at the sun
To give it my loving friends to keep!
Naught man could do, have I left undone:
And you see my harvest, what I reap
This very day, now a year is run.

IV

There’s nobody on the house-tops now –
Just a palsied few at the windows set;
For the best of the sight is, all allow,
At the Shambles’ Gate – or, better yet,
By the very scaffold’s foot, I trow.

V

I go in the rain, and, more than needs,
A rope cuts both my wrists behind;
And I think, by the feel, my forehead bleeds,
For they fling, whoever has a mind,
Stones at me for my year’s misdeeds.

VI

Thus I entered, and thus I go!
In triumphs, people have dropped down dead.
‘Paid by the world, what dost thou owe
Me?’ – God might question; now instead,

‘Tis God shall repay: I am safer so. 



Myrtle crops up again in the opening lines of Milton's 'Lycidas' –
'Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more
Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere...'
Which begs the question 'Myrtles brown?' Myrtle is an evergreen with white flowers and blue berries, never brown at any stage of its life cycle. I sometimes wonder about Milton's colour sense, as in 'russet lawns and fallows grey' in 'L'Allegro'. In my experience grass stays basically green through autumn and winter, and the only time my lawn could be described as 'russet' is during summer droughts. It was certainly pretty russet last summer. 

Goodbye Sam, Hello Samantha

 The Telegraph has introduced a new online newsletter called Characters, which reprints choice obituaries from recent years. As the obits have long been the best thing in the paper, I naturally signed up for this one – and today they came up with a gem from 2007. It's the obituary of one Sammy Duddy, who has the surely unique job description 'Loyalist Paramilitary for the Ulster Defence Association and notorious drag queen who went by the stage name of Samantha'. 
   Sammy, or rather Samantha, was known in the 1970s as the Dolly Parton of Belfast. She was a star of the cabaret circuit, her risqué jokes and extravagant drag outfit – fishnet tights, wig, falsies and heavy make-up – going down particularly well in Loyalist pubs and clubs (was Ian Paisley a fan, I wonder?). Duddy was a founder member of the UDA, but doesn't seem to have been regarded as a major figure in the organisation, and in 1981, in the wake of the Kincorra boys' home scandal, he was ordered to drop the drag act, grow a moustache and drop his voice. He accordingly said goodbye to Samantha: 'It was a pity,' he reflected, 'but I guess it had to end some time.'
  Intriguingly, Duddy published in 1983 a volume of poetry with the not terribly promising title Concrete Whirlpools of the Mind. I have been unable to trace this volume (not that I tried very hard), but it has been described as 'a notable artifact of 20th-century Northern Irish poetry'.  Well, well.  

'We have forgotten Paris...'

 I reckon it's time for a poem. Here is one by Janet Lewis (wife of the eminent poet and critic Yvor Winters), who is perhaps best remembered for her classic novel The Wife of Martin Guerre, but was also an accomplished poet, active across six decades.
In 'Helen Grown Old', she wonders what became of Helen of Troy, reunited (in Homer's account) with Menelaus, after the Trojan war and the death of Paris...

Helen Grown Old

We have forgotten Paris, and his fate.
We have not much inquired
If Menelaus from the Trojan gate
Returning found the long desired
Immortal beauty by his hearth. Then late,

Late, long past the morning hour,
Could even she recapture from the dawn
The young delightful love? When the dread power
That forced her will was gone,
When fell the last charred tower,

When the last flame had faded from the cloud,
And by the darkening sea
The plain lay empty of the armèd crowd, 
Then was she free
Who had been ruled by passion blind and proud?

Then did she find with him whom first she chose
Before the desperate flight,
At last, repose
In love still radiant at the edge of night, 
As fair as in the morning? No one knows.

No one has cared to say. The story clings
To the tempestuous years, by passion bound,
Like Helen. No one brings
A tale of quiet love. The fading sound
Is blent with falling embers, weeping kings.

There Are No Trees on Earth

 An old friend, knowing my interest in such oddities, has alerted me to a wonderfully outlandish theory that seems to have attracted thousands of believers, many of them already adherents of Flat EarthTheory. It all began ten years ago, when someone in Crimea, whose account has since been deleted, posted a video on YouTube in which he argued that there are no trees on Earth: what we take for trees are mere bushes, shrubs and saplings, remnants of an age when supergigantic trees, with trunks two miles across,  soared up to 40 miles into the sky. These trees were, alas, destroyed in a cataclysmic event, thousands of years ago, that destroyed 99 percent of Earth's biosphere – but happily their remains are there for all to see, in the shape of flat-topped geological features such as Ayers Rock, the Giant's Causeway and the Devil's Tower butte in Wyoming. These are clearly the stumps of gigantic trees, as the Crimean theorist demonstrates by comparing them to blown-up pictures of trees; they are different only (only!) in material and size – two rather fundamental categories, you might think. Rocks, you might point out not unreasonably, are made of rock. Well yes, but, according to the theory, rock is just the rubble left behind by the cataclysmic event that destroyed all those giant trees. Q.E.D. 
  Why this theory should appeal to Flat Earthers is hard to say. Forty-mile-high trees rising vertically from a flat disc would surely make for serious instability – and if fruits fell to Earth from these arborial giants the effects would be catastrophic, probably setting the Earth disc spinning out of control, generating devastating winds, felling the trees... Ah, of course – that would be the cataclysmic event central to the No Trees theory. So No Trees and Flat Earth are perfectly compatible. It all makes perfect sense... 

A Walk and The Undead

The other day I was walking in Gloucestershire again, with my brother and walking friends – this time a stroll beside the Severn from Deerhurst to Tewkesbury and back. Deerhurst (a name that sounds more Kent than Gloucestershire) boasts a very remarkable Anglo-Saxon church – a large, complex building which is still not fully understood, but is unmistakably an impressive survival from those times, with later changes and additions. I'm no fan of Anglo-Saxon architecture, which seems to me aesthetically impoverished and frankly rather crude (so kill me), and Deerhurst church is – as even my brother, usually a great one for the Anglo-Saxon, remarked – hard to love. Apart from its antiquarian interest, its major attraction is the Deerhurst Angel, a sculpture that survives high up on what is now an external wall, and which, it has to be said, doesn't look like much compared to that other marvellous survival, the Lichfield Angel. The village also has Odda's Chapel, a chantry built shortly before the Norman Conquest, which was rediscovered in Victorian times, incorporated into a timber-framed farmhouse. So, a feast of Anglo-Saxon, somewhat wasted on me...
   And then there was Tewkesbury, and the great abbey there, with its imposing crossing tower – the largest and finest of its period in England, in Pevsner's opinion – looked even better than I remembered it from an earlier visit a good many years ago. The nave is breathtakingly beautiful, its Norman weight offset by wonderful airy vaulting, complete with painted roof bosses and corbels, and a fine chevet of chapels radiate from the apse; there are some excellent stained-glass windows, medieval and modern, and a collection of medieval monuments second only to Westminster Abbey. The town, or at least the part of it nearest the cathedral, is pleasingly unspoilt and full of historical interest – and of course a river runs through it, which is always a good thing.
  The Tewkesbury pub where we had lunch was already elaborately gussied up for Halloween, even though All Hallows Eve is a fortnight away. As with Christmas, the run-up seems to get earlier every year – and Halloween, barely celebrated in this country in my youth, gets bigger and more over the top every year.
  Talking of Halloween, here is an uncharacteristically macabre (but characteristically brilliant) poem by Richard Wilbur –

The Undead

Even as children they were late sleepers,
Preferring their dreams, even when quick with monsters,
    To the world with all its breakable toys,
        Its compacts with the dying;
 
    From the stretched arms of withered trees
They turned, fearing contagion of the mortal,
    And even under the plums of summer
        Drifted like winter moons.
 
    Secret, unfriendly, pale, possessed
Of the one wish, the thirst for mere survival,
    They came, as all extremists do
        In time, to a sort of grandeur:
 
    Now, to their Balkan battlements
Above the vulgar town of their first lives,
    They rise at the moon's rising. Strange
        That their utter self-concern
 
    Should, in the end, have left them selfless:
Mirrors fail to perceive them as they float
    Through the great hall and up the staircase;
        Nor are the cobwebs broken.
 
    Into the pallid night emerging,
Wrapped in their flapping capes, routinely maddened
    By a wolf's cry, they stand for a moment
        Stoking the mind's eye
 
    With lewd thoughts of the pressed flowers
And bric-a-brac of rooms with something to lose,—
    Of love-dismembered dolls, and children
        Buried in quilted sleep.
 
    Then they are off in a negative frenzy,
Their black shapes cropped into sudden bats
    That swarm, burst, and are gone. Thinking
        Of a thrush cold in the leaves
 
    Who has sung his few summers truly,
Or an old scholar resting his eyes at last,
    We cannot be much impressed with vampires,
        Colorful though they are;
 
    Nevertheless, their pain is real,
And requires our pity. Think how sad it must be
    To thirst always for a scorned elixir,
        The salt quotidian blood
 
    Which, if mistrusted, has no savor;
To prey on life forever and not possess it,
    As rock-hollows, tide after tide,
        Glassily strand the sea.
 
 
   

'Today his star is set...'

 I see that today is Oscar Wilde's birthday (born 1854). 
Here is something I wrote some years ago about him – or rather about an altogether extraordinary Max Beerbohm essay, 'A Peep into the Past'...

'Browsing my overcrowded bookshelves with a view to some thinning out, I came across a collection of previously uncollected pieces by Max Beerbohm, A Peep into the Past (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1972) – definitely a keeper.
 The title essay is a quite extraordinary piece, written in 1893/4, when Max was a 21-year-old undergraduate, and apparently intended for the first issue of The Yellow Book (where, in the event, Beerbohm was represented by 'A Defence of Cosmetics'). 'A Peep into the Past' projects an alternative reality in which Oscar Wilde is an elderly, all but forgotten belle-lettrist, living 'a life of quiet retirement in his little house on Tite Street with his wife and two sons, his prop and mainstay, solacing himself with many a reminiscence of the friends of his youth'.

 'Oscar Wilde!' begins Max. 'I wonder to how many of my readers the jingle of this name suggests anything at all? Yet, at one time, it was familiar to many, and if we search back among the old volumes of Mr Punch, we shall find many a quip and crank cut at its owner's expense. But time is a quick mover and many of us are fated to outlive our reputations and thus, though at one time Mr Wilde, the old gentleman of whom we are going to give our readers a brief account, was in his way quite a celebrity; today his star is set, his fame obscured in this busy changeful city.'
 Bear in mind that this was written when Wilde, then 39, was at the peak of his fame - just a year before it all ended in scandal and ignominy.
 Mr Wilde, we are told, is an early riser and an indefatigable worker, with 'an infinite capacity for taking pains'  and plenty of '"grit", as they call it in the North'. 'Himself most regular in his habits, he is something of a martinet about punctuality in his household, and perhaps this accounts for the constant succession of page-boys which so startles the neighbourhood.' This is not the only hint at Oscar's predilections: when the author ventures to pay a visit to the house on Tite Street, 'I found everything there neat and clean and, though of course very simple and unpretentious, bearing witness to womanly care and taste. As I was ushered into the little study, I fancied that I heard the quickly receding frou-frou of tweed trousers, but my host I found reclining, hale and hearty, though a little dishevelled, upon the sofa. With one hand readjusting the nut-brown Georgian wig that he is accustomed to wear, he motioned me with a courteous gesture of the other to an arm-chair...'
 Beerbohm constructs an alternative literary career for Wilde, in which he has published little under his own name, produces quantities of journalism, and finally writes a play when already in his old age. 'After all,' Max sums up indulgently, 'it is not so much as a literary man that Posterity will forget Mr Wilde, as in his old capacity of journalist.' (Note 'forget'.)
 The visit to Tite Street goes well enough: 'The old gentleman was unaffectedly pleased to receive a visit from the outer world, for, though he is in most things "a praiser of past times", yet he is always interested to hear oral news of the present, and many young poets can testify to the friendly interest in their future taken by a man who is himself contented to figure in their past...'
 Wilde's celebrated wit is represented by a mangled version of a famous exchange with Whistler, in which 'Wilde, beaming kindly across the table, said, to encourage him, "How I wish I had said that!" Young impudence cried, "You will, Sir, you will." "No, I won't," returned the elder man, quick as thought...' Then, at the end, comes an equally painful example of Wildean paradox:
'Just as I was leaving the room I observed that the weather had become very sultry and I feared we should have a storm. "Ah yes," was the reply, "I expect we shall soon see the thunder and hear the lightning!" How delightful a perversion of words! I left the old gentleman chuckling immoderately at his little joke.'
 'A Peep into the Past' reads now like a strange kind of reverse prophecy, the projection of a future that could scarcely be more different from the one that actually unfolded for Wilde. Did Max sense something frail about Oscar's fame, the possibility of terminal disaster? The least surprising thing, perhaps, is Beerbohm's ability, while still an undergraduate, to project himself as a staid, middle-aged, genteel literary essayist: as Wilde remarked, Max was blessed with the gift of perpetual middle age.

Less Is Moore

 One of the pleasures of my boyhood was going round to my grandmother's flat to watch TV (we didn't have a set at home at the time). On Saturday afternoons my brother and I would join her to watch the wrestling (Kent Walton ringside), and on weekend evenings there would be such delights as Danger Man, starring the very cool Patrick McGoohan, and The Saint, based on Leslie Charteris's stories, and starring Roger Moore. As it happens, today is Roger Moore's 99th birthday, though he isn't around to celebrate it (he died just short of 90). 
   Back in the early days of this long-lived blog, I included Roger Moore in a series called Cravat Heroes, part of my doomed campaign to encourage the wearing of the deeply unfashionable cravat. Here's some of what I wrote then...

'Roger Moore began by modelling knitwear, and continued to model a variety of formal and leisure wear for many decades, under the guise of an acting career (a career that connoisseurs agree peaked with his Lord Brett Sinclair in The Persuaders, opposite Tony Curtis). In matters of the dramatic art, Moore was a rigorous minimalist and restricted his efforts to the raising and lowering of one eyebrow, clearly believing that 'less is more'. Alas, in his case, less was indeed less – or rather, less was (hem hem) Moore. Strangely, Moore – a natural cravat man if ever there was one – has not pulled his weight in this crucial field of neckwear, usually preferring the naked neck look with an open shirt (long past the point at which this ceased to be advisable on aesthetic grounds). However, it has always seemed as if a kind of Platonic cravat was somehow there, even in its physical absence, rather as an ectoplasmic moustache has always hovered over John Major's upper lip. I think, despite everything (including the questionable pairing of a cravat with a frilly shirt), Roger Moore is worthy of inclusion in the Cravat Heroes pantheon...'

   Moore is sometimes credited with the invention of the Magnum – not the gun but the choc ice on a stick, a confection which has brought much pleasure to many, myself included. Alas, the facts don't quite support the legend...

'After Sir Roger's death, a journalist friend recalled that he had told her how, in an interview in the Sixties, he once said that, if he could have one wish and meet one person, he would like to meet 'Mr Wall's' and ask him why they didn't make a choc ice on a stick. 'I didn't know at the time,' recalled Moore ruefully, 'but other people like Claire Bloom were being asked the same question and they wanted to meet Gandhi or Jesus.' But apparently 'Mr Wall's' was delighted with Moore's answer and sent him some kind of prototype Magnum, but as it was in the form of a cake it was clearly a very long way from the finished product, which indeed didn't appear until the Nineties.
  Happily Sir Roger lived long enough to enjoy many a Magnum (despite being diabetic). His favourite was the Black Espresso, of which he permitted himself two a week. He claimed to be able to make one last a full half hour, which is impressive. The Black Espresso is my favourite too, but I rarely come across it these days, amid all the fancy new flavours.
If I had one request to make of 'Mr Wall's', it would be to find a way to stop the chocolate falling off the ice cream as you bite into your Magnum.'

Things have not improved: the Magnum still sheds chocolate – and the Black Espresso seems to have disappeared altogether. Perhaps 'Mr Wall's' could bring out a limited edition to celebrate the Roger Moore centenary next year.