Sanders

 I'm off to London today, so here's a post from some years back, in which I marked the July 3rd birthday of the actor George Sanders...

Born on this day in 1906 – in St Petersburg, whence his family wisely returned to England in 1917 – was the actor George Sanders. With his good looks and crisp, sonorous upper-crust voice, he became the man for playing debonair, louche, more or less depraved English aristo types – most memorably Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Jack Favell in Rebecca and Addison deWitt in All About Eve. He was a commanding presence on screen, even if he was mostly doing little more than playing himself (though he can hardly be accused of that in his classic voicing of Shere Khan in The Jungle Book).
  The tenor of Sanders's personal life may be judged from the fact that he called his autobiography Memoirs of a Professional Cad, and suggested the title A Dreadful Man for his biography (written by his friend Brian Aherne). He managed to marry not only the ineffable Zsa Zsa Gabor but also, some years later, her sister Magda – a marriage that lasted just six weeks and drove Sanders even further into drink. His end was sad. Threatened by dementia and failing health, Sanders decided to give up the unequal struggle, finally killing himself with a massive overdose of Nembutal in a hotel room in a small coastal town near Barcelona. He left behind a message addressed to 'Dear World': 'I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good Luck.' He was 65 – the precise age at which, according to his pal David Niven, he predicted that he would kill himself.
  But what of the real George Sanders? As ever, we turn to the authoritative Me Cheeta, where the index entries are not promising, all listed under 'Sanders, George, caddishness of'. However, Cheeta's few encounters with Sanders seem to have left a reasonably favourable impression. The two were introduced at a notably starry private screening of Tarzan and His Mate (the one in which Maureen O'Sullivan takes a very saucy swim). 'Cheetah, my deah,' says George. 'If you're anything like me, you'll find it absolutely excruciating to watch yourself on screen. I should leave before those terrible monstahs turn against you and skin you alive. It's not going to shit on me, is it, Maureen?'
  Hmm. On a more exalted level, it's an intriguing thought that the boy Sanders would have been walking the streets of St Petersburg at the same time as the teenage Nabokov*. I wonder if their paths ever crossed – either then or later, when both lived in Switzerland. Sanders might have made rather a good job of Clare Quilty in the Lolita film...

* and the young Eric Knight, author of Lassie Come Home, whose mother was a governess to the Imperial family.
  

O Canada

 July already, and my late mother's birthday (she'd have been 105 today) – and it's Canada Day, marking the anniversary of the Canadian Confederation, formed on this day in 1867.
It was on Canada Day in 1980 that 'O Canada' became the country's official national anthem (and one of the best). Here is the one and only k d lang performing it –

And here she is again, referencing 'O Canada' in one of the most beautiful recordings she ever made – her cover of Joni Mitchell's 'A Case of You'...

The Say-But-the-Word Centurion

 It isn't often that a sermon turns up in my inbox, but today – the 4th Sunday after Pentecost – one did, and it's rather good. Here's a link...

https://www.rememberingsion.com/p/foundation-faith-sermon-4th-sunday-pentecost

And of course this led me straight back to Les Murray's great poem of faith, 'The Say-But-the-Word Centurion Attempts a Summary'...

That numinous healer who preached Saturnalia and paradox has died a slave’s death. We were manoeuvered into it by priests and by the man himself. To complete his poem.

He was certainly dead. The pilum guaranteed it. His message, unwritten except on his body, like anyone’s, was wrapped like a scroll and despatched to our liberated selves, the gods.

If he has now risen, as our infiltrators gibber, he has outdone Orpheus, who went alive to the Shades. Solitude may be stronger than embraces. Inventor of the mustard tree,

he mourned one death, perhaps all, before he reversed it. He forgave the sick to health, disregarded the sex of the Furies when expelling them from minds. And he never speculated.

If he is risen, all are children of a most real high God or something even stranger called by that name who knew to come and be punished for the world.

To have knowledge of right, after that, is to be in the wrong. Death came through the sight of law. His people’s oldest wisdom. If death is now the birth-gate into things unsayable

in the language of death’s era, there will be wars about religion as there never were about the death-ignoring Olympians. Love, too, his new universal, so far ahead of you it has died

for you before you ever met it, may seem colder than the favours of gods who are our poems, good and bad. But there never was a bad baby. Half his worship will be grinding his face in the dirt

then lifting it to beg, in private. The low will rule, and curse by him. Divine bastard, soul-usurer, eros-frightener, he is out to monopolise hatred. Whole philosophies will be devised for their brief snubbings of him.

But regained excels kept, he taught. Thus he has done the impossible to show us it is there. To ask it of us. It seems we are to be the poem and live the impossible. As each time we have, with mixed cries.

JR, B-P, MB

 In Eminent Edwardians (which I'm still reading, with great enjoyment), Piers Brendon tells of a curious connection between John Ruskin and the young Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, known to his family as 'Stephe'. B-P's formidably well connected mother consulted Ruskin about 'Stephe's vexatious habit of painting with both hands (on occasion with both feet)'. Happily the great man approved of the boy's ambidexterity and encouraged it, and B-P was to put it to good use in his military career, taking notes with either hand and making sketches with both simultaneously, drawing with one hand while shading with the other. Brendon also tells of an occasion when Thackeray came to dinner with the Baden-Powells and, 'when young Stephe attempted to join the party, paid him a shilling to go away – the earliest recorded instance of bob-a-jobbery.' 
   There is also one thing – and surely only one – that B-P had in common with Max Beerbohm: they were both educated at Charterhouse under Dr William Haig Brown, the headmaster who had moved the school out of the city and re-established it on a Surrey hilltop. This was just the school for young Stephe, offering 'few impediments to Stalkyish independence, to the practice of Spartan chivalry and Machiavellian chicanery. As for intellectual impedimenta of the kind provided by modern culture and ideas, the school was disinclined to clutter fledgling minds with such stuff.' All his life, B-P, the eternal schoolboy, was a keen and loyal Old Carthusian, and 'one of his sharpest disappointments during the siege of Mafeking was that he could find no other Carthusian with whom to celebrate Founder's Day'. He was, in Max Beerbohm's phrase, 'of the straitest sect'. In Old Carthusian Memories (1920), Max writes that 'the straitest sect is never happy. It simply can't bear the thought of having left Charterhouse. After-life for it is one long anticlimax' – which was certainly not the case for Beerbohm, though he writes quite affectionately about the old place, and is glad he spent five years there. 'The main thing that I had learnt there, and have not yet forgotten,' he writes, 'was a knack of understanding my fellow-creatures, of living in amity with them and not being rubbed the wrong way by their faults, and not rubbing them the wrong way with mine.' A very useful thing to learn; we could do with more of it in the world.
   Max continues: 'It is often complained that public schools tend to repress individuality in a child. Charterhouse in the eighteen-eighties did not at all tend that way ... Its traditions left plenty of latitude. I was a queer child. I didn't care a brass farthing for games. What I liked was Latin prose, Lain verse, and drawing caricatures. Nobody bothered me to play games. Boys and masters alike ... encouraged me to draw as many and as impudent caricatures as possible. I ought to have been very happy. But––oh, how I always longed to be grown-up! Boys are mostly not cursed with a strong instinct towards independence; nor men mostly, for the matter of that. I, alas, was.' Max went his own way – and so, along a very different path, did Baden-Powell. 

Hot

 These are not the dog days – they come in August when the dog star, Sirius, is rising – but, by heaven, they feel like it. It's proper hot, as we say around here, and more to come tomorrow. At least the butterflies are loving it – to the extent that a Silver-Washed Fritillary paid a fleeting visit to the garden the other day: they sometimes do this, flying far from their usual haunts, when the weather gets really hot. But talk of dog days inevitably leads me to this, one of Auden's best – so good it even impressed Randall Jarrell...

Under Sirius

Yes, these are the dog days, Fortunatus:

The heather lies limp and dead

On the mountain, the baltering torrent

Shrunk to a soodling thread;

Rusty the spears of the legion, unshaven its captain,

Vacant the scholar’s brain

Under his great hat,

Drug though She may, the Sybil utters

A gush of table-chat.

And you yourself with a head-cold and upset stomach,

Lying in bed till noon,

Your bills unpaid, your much advertised

Epic not yet begun,

Are a sufferer too. All day, you tell us, you wish

Some earthquake would astonish,

Or the wind of the Comforter’s wing

Unlock the prisons and translate

The slipshod gathering.

And last night, you say, you dreamed of that bright blue morning,

The hawthorn hedges in bloom,

When, serene in their ivory vessels,

The three wise Maries come,

Sossing through seamless waters, piloted in

By sea-horse and fluent dolphin:

Ah! how the cannons roar,

How jocular the bells as They

Indulge the peccant shore.

It is natural to hope and pious, of course, to believe

That all in the end shall be well,

But first of all, remember,

So the Sacred Books foretell,

The rotten fruit shall be shaken. Would your hope make sense

If today were that moment of silence,

Before it break and drown,

When the insurrected eagre hangs

Over the sleeping town?

How will you look and what will you do when the basalt

Tombs of the sorcerers shatter

And their guardian megalopods

Come after you pitter-patter?

How will you answer when from their qualming spring

The immortal nymphs fly shrieking,

And out of the open sky

The pantocratic riddle breaks –

"Who are you and why?"

For when in a carol under the apple-trees

The reborn featly dance,

There will also, Fortunatus,

Be those who refused their chance,

Now pottering shades, querulous beside the salt-pits,

And mawkish in their wits,

To whom these dull dog-days

Between event seemed crowned with olive

And golden with self-praise. 

Fortunatus was a sixth-century poet of the Merovingian court, who wrote in Latin and became a Christian bishop (and was venerated after his death).
'Soodling' means dawdling, 'baltering' tumbling along.
The 'three wise Maries' are three variously identified Maries from the Gospels who, according to medieval legend, made landfall in Provence after travelling from the Holy Land. 'Sossing' is simply onomatopoeic.
An 'eagre' is a kind of tidal wave, commonly known as a 'bore' – which would not have sounded quite as good: 'the insurrected bore'!

 

Ten Years Ago

 On this day ten years ago – the day the result of the Brexit referendum was announced – I was walking in Surrey, where I took this picture. This is what politicians used to look like (take note, Andy Burnham)...

https://nigeness.blogspot.com/2016/06/picture-of-day.html

Cometh the Hour...

 McGonagall, thou shouldst be living at this hour...

'Twas in the year twenty twenty-six, on the twenty-second day of June
– Which many political commentators and others said was not a day too soon –
That the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, stood outside 10 Downing Street and announced his resignation 
To the reporters and cameramen assembled there, and also to the nation.
His successor is expected to be the popular King of the North, Andy Burnham,
But, when it comes to the fortunes of the Labour party and indeed of the nation, the question many are asking is 'Can he turn 'em?'