A Great Walk and A Real Pain

Last weekend I was walking in Ladybird Land again – that land of abundant may blossom, tall cow parsley and gambolling lambs. This time it was in Derbyshire, where, because of the more northerly latitude, things were very much as they had been in Buckinghamshire on Mayday. Happily the weather was every bit as glorious, with warm sunshine and blue skies (populated by crazily energetic swifts and graceful swallows and martins). With my cousin, I enjoyed a long (by my present standards) walk, taking in Lathkill Dale, Youlgrave and Bradford Dale, ending at the pub/hotel at Over Haddon, with its magnificent views – one of the best walks in all of the Derbyshire Dales, though at present the river in some stretches of Lathkill Dale is dry. The chiffchaffs and other warblers were singing lustily, and Orange Tips, Brimstones and Peacocks were flying in good numbers – also, much to my delight, my first Common Blues of the year, three of them, looking fresh and lovely, in Bradford Dale (last year I only saw one in the whole year). The following day began with the grand surprise of a Wall Brown (once common, now scarce) settling to bask briefly in my cousin’s garden, and continued with my first Small Copper of the year (last year I didn’t see a single one) at a nearby nature reserve, along with my first definite Red Admirals of the year – and they were very definite, as is the way of Red Admirals. But it was not all butterflies and walking: we also watched a superb film, which I heartily recommend to all who haven’t seen it – A Real Pain, the directorial debut of actor Jesse Eisenberg.
  As all the world probably knows by now, this tells the story of two mismatched cousins, once close, now far apart, who use their recently deceased grandmother's legacy to go on a Jewish heritage tour of Poland. Eisenberg co-stars as the more sane and settled of the pair, while Kieran Culkin plays his maddening but strangely charismatic loose cannon of a cousin, who at every point seems about to throw the whole tour into jeopardy. Both performances are superb, but Culkin's is simply astonishing. 'Funny, heartfelt and moving in equal measure,' one critic said of A Real Pain, and it is all of those things. I'm already looking forward to watching it again.

'The spinner of fine cobwebs!'

Browsing in the (excellent) bookshop of the Samuel Johnson House yesterday, I found Beerbohm's Literary Caricatures: From Homer to Huxley, selected, introduced and annotated by J.G. Riewald (Allen Lane, 1977). It's a generous selection, with helpful notes by Riewald, a Dutch academic and Beerbohm specialist, setting each caricature in context. Naturally I bought it – for a mere £6 – and I'm sure it's going to provide me with much innocent entertainment. 
  The caricature above shows Mr Henry James Revisiting America, and was inspired by the author's final visit to the land of his birth, in 1905. A variety of stereotype Americans are responding to the great man: an Indian chief exclaims, 'Hail, great white novelist! Tunibaya – the spinner of fine cobwebs!' A negro mammy is in ecstasies: 'Why, it's Masser Henry! Come to your old nurse's arms, honey!' A plainsman remarks: 'Guess 'e ken shoot char'cter at sight!' An effete Harvardian wonders 'What's – the matter with – James?' A Beacon Hill hostess answers, 'He's – all – right!' And so on. As for James, Beerbohm transcribes his unspoken thoughts in a fine parody of his late style: 

'So that in fine, let, without further beating about the bush, me make to myself amazed acknowledgment that, but for the certificate of birth which I have – so very indubitably – on me, I might, in regarding, and, as it somewhat were, overseeing, à l'oeil de voyageur, these dear good people, find hard to swallow, or even to take by subconscious injection, the great idea that I am – oh, ever so indigenously! – one of them...'

Indeed.
The original of this caricature can be found at Lamb House, James's home in Rye.

Swifts and Mowing

 Time was when this blog could be relied on to hail the arrival of the first swift of the summer – a moment as thrilling and heart-lifting (for me) as the sighting of the first butterfly – but somehow I seem to have got out of the habit. For the record, though, I saw my first Lichfield swift this year on the 2nd of May, a little earlier than usual, no doubt because of the unusually welcoming spring weather. Just the one, passing over, but then, the next day, a pair putting on a fine aerial ballet as they circled and swooped, fluttered and raced, chasing down the airborne insects.  
   These have been busy days chez Nige, with much family activity, but this afternoon I had time for an activity I find quietly therapeutic and, in its way, pleasingly productive – mowing the lawn. The whole business has been so much more pleasurable since I ditched the electric mower and converted to manual – no cables, no fuss, no hideous noise, just a soft nostalgic clatter and rasp as the blades rotate and cut. Now I am on to my second hand mower, much superior to the first, and bearing the reassuringly English name of Webb (the first was a Bosch, of all things). Always, inevitably, when I'm mowing, Larkin's 'Cut Grass' comes into my head – one of the very few poems I still have by heart: 

Cut grass lies frail:
Short is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death

They die in the white hours
Of young-leafed June 
With chestnut flowers,
With hedgerows snow-like strewn,

White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne's lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer's pace. 

Larkin was a reluctant but diligent mower, who, when he moved to a house in Newland Park, Hull, had a lot of lawn to deal with ('for I have premises to keep, and miles to mow before I sleep' – not Larkin but a wag in a Peter de Vries novel). 'It has a huge garden –,' he wrote to Judy Edgerton, a regular correspondent, 'not a lovely wilderness (though it soon will be) – a long strip between wire fences – oh god oh god – I am 'taking over' the vendor's Qualcast (sounds like a character in Henry James).' It was an incident involving the Qualcast – a machine that is now preserved for posterity in the Larkin archive in Hull – that inspired Larkin's other great mowing poem, 'The Mower' – 

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found   

A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,   

Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.   

Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world   

Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.

The first day after a death, the new absence   

Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind   

While there is still time.

This would not have happened with a hand mower – just sayin'. 
(Incidentally, the ending of 'The Mower' was once quoted on The Archers – a moment almost as surreal as the time Nigel Pargetter, not the sharpest knife in the box, suddenly started spouting lines from the Georgics, in the original Latin. Even more incidentally, Larkin was a fan of The Archers, and used to fantasise about writing for them. That might have been interesting...) 

Mayday Walk

Yesterday – the warmest May Day on record – I was walking in the Buckinghamshire countryside. The hawthorn blossom was so richly abundant that it was like walking through an illustration of spring from a Ladybird book – and not just hawthorn: cow parsley in flower everywhere ('lost lanes of Queen Anne's Lace'), blue drifts of forget-me-nots, late bluebells still in flower, white comfrey, green alkanet, jack by the hedge, 'daisies pied and violets blue' in the fresh green grass. The horse chestnut candles were in full flower, the trees in young leaf, the sun shining gloriously – and there were butterflies galore: orange tips, brimstones, speckled woods, holly blues, peacocks, commas... All this and some peaceful towpath walking – no belligerent cyclists – and, from time to time, magnificent views across miles of rolling countryside. Although it was almost too hot for walking, it was a marvellous day, one to remember. 

  We covered no great distance, and our route was circular, beginning and ending in a village called Stoke Hammond (church locked, alas). This, as a plaque proudly announced, was one of the Thankful Villages of the First World War, one that lost none of its men. It's a subject I've written about before – here – so I won't repeat myself (but will correct my assertion that France has only one Thankful Village – it has 12). 

Endings 3

 To round off this mini-anthology of endings (and the month of April), here is a miscellaneous collection with no obvious linking features...

First, an ending I think one of the most beautiful in literature – the final paragraph of Ruskin's autobiographical Praeterita. In it he recalls his last visit to Siena, with his American friend and correspondent Charles Eliot Norton, and he remembers the fireflies...

'Fonte Branda I last saw with Charles Norton, under the same arches where Dante saw it. We drank of it together, and walked that evening on the hills above, where the fireflies among the scented thickets shone fitfully in the still undarkened air. How they shone! moving like fine-broken starlight through the purple leaves. How they shone! through the sunset that faded into thunderous night as I entered Siena three days before, the white edges of the mountainous clouds still lighted from the west, and the openly gold sky calm behind the gate of Siena's heart, with its still golden words, "Cor magis tibi Sena pandit," and the fireflies everywhere in sky and cloud rising and falling, mixed with the lightning, and more intense than the stars.'

A wonderfully haunting ending is that of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The narrator, and the party he is with (on the Thames in London), have just heard the last of Marlow's terrible tale...

'Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. "We have lost the first of the ebb," said the Director suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky – seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.' 

Here is the closest Samuel Beckett ever came to a happy ending – the beautiful, pared-to-the-bone closing passage of Ill Seen Ill Said:

'Farewell to farewell. Then in that perfect dark foreknell darling sound pip for end begun. First last moment. Grant only enough remain to devour all. Moment by glutton moment. Sky earth the whole kit and boodle. Not another crumb of carrion left. Lick chops and basta. No. One moment more. One last. Grace to breathe that void. Know happiness.'

I was going to post the closing passage of The Trial, but really it's just too grim. Instead, here are a couple of endings from left field. First, the resonantly abrupt original ending of Mark's Gospel – 

'And entering into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were affrighted.

And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him.

But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he said unto you.

And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid.'

And finally, a diversion into poetry, though it is could be classified as prose poetry – Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns, in which the past and the present, the lives of King Offa and of the young Geoffrey Hill, intermingle to extraordinary effect. For some reason, I find the ending quite wonderful: 

'[XXIX]

'Not strangeness, but strange likeness. Obstinate, 
  outclassed forefathers, I too concede. I am your
  staggeringly-gifted child.'

So, murmurous, he withdrew from them. Gran lit the
         gas, his dice whirred in the ludo-cup, he entered
         into the last dream of Offa the King.

[XXX]

And it seemed, while we waited, he began to walk to-
       wards us            he vanished

he left behind coins, for his lodging, and traces of
       red mud.'


It's probably just me...

Endings 2

 Eudora Welty said of the last sentence of Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, 'If I had written that sentence, I'd be happy all my life!' High praise from a writer of her calibre, and well merited: the sentence is indeed beautiful and eloquent, when read in context.
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant ends with Ezra finally managing to bring the whole of his dysfunctional family together, after his mother's funeral, for a dinner at his restaurant – even including Beck, the errant father who deserted them all long ago. But then Beck absents himself, and the rest of the family go in search of him to bring him back. Cody, Ezra's troubled and troublemaking brother, is the one who finds him. In the closing paragraph, Cody recalls  a boyhood incident when he accidentally shot his mother with his new bow and arrow, with dire consequences...

'Cody held on to his elbow and led him toward the others. Overhead, gulls drifted  through a sky so clear and blue that it brought back all the outings of his boyhood – the drives, the picnics, the autumn hikes, the wildflower walks in the spring. He remembered the archery trip, and it seemed to him now that he even remembered that arrow sailing in its graceful, fluttering path. He remembered his mother's upright form along the grasses, her hair lit gold, her small hands smoothing her bouquet while the arrow journeyed on. And high above, he seemed to recall, there had been a little brown airplane, almost motionless, droning through the sunshine like a bumblebee.' 

Another American novel from much the same time (forty years ago!) as Dinner at the Homesick is Jayne Anne Phillips's Machine Dreams, which also follows the members of a broken family, but in less straightforward manner, drawing in particular on their dreams (and quoting letters). The emotional heart of the book is the close loving relationship between Danner and her younger brother Billy, who is fascinated by machines, especially aeroplanes, becomes a pilot in the Vietnam war, and is shot down and killed. Here is the closing dream of the book, Danner's. It gets me every time...

'Danner and Billy are walking in the deep dark forest. Billy makes airplane sounds. Danner, oblivious to her brother's play, is stalking the magic horse. There are no cloven tracks, but the dust on the path is disturbed and the horse seems to be circling. Occasionally Danner looks over her shoulder and sees the animal watching them through thick leaves. The mare's eyes are large and certain. Certain of what? Billy pays no attention and seems to have followed his sister here almost accidentally. They walk on, and finally it is so dark that Danner can't see Billy at all. She can only hear him, farther and farther behind her, imitating with a careful and private energy the engine sounds of a plane that is going down. War-movie sounds. Eeee-yoww, ach-ack-ack. So gentle it sounds like a song, and the song goes on softly as the plane falls, year after year, to earth.'

I guess the most famous ending of an American novel is that of The Great Gatsby, which I quoted recently, on the centenary of its publication – 

'Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And then one fine morning – And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.'

And then, in a very different register, there is the equally famous (?) ending of Huckleberry Finn: 

'Tom's most well now, and got his bullet around his neck on a watch-guard for a watch, and is always seeing what time it is, and so there ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it and I ain't agoing to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before.'

Follow that.  

Endings

 Recently I've been thinking about, and discussing with an online friend, great endings in literature – those passages that close a book with something that resonates long after, that can stir the heart and, in some cases, start the tears. A prime example is the ending of Lolita – or rather its two endings. There is the shattering paragraph that closes Humbert's narrative, the point at which he finally becomes fully aware of what he has done to Lolita, as he stands on a hillside above a playground and hears the childish sounds rising from it (as Nabokov himself did on one of his American butterfly-hunting trips) – 

'What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapour of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic—one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.'

And then, as if that is not enough, there is the closing passage of Humbert's confession and of the novel: 

'I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my spectre shall come out of him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C. Q. [Clare Quilty]. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations.  I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.'

Perhaps the most beautiful of all endings is that of James Joyce's 'The Dead', in which Gabriel Conroy, at the end of an awkward and dispiriting social evening, has discovered his wife convulsed with tears as she remembers an earlier love in her life, a young man long dead...

'Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hordes of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling. 
   A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey [his wife's dead love] lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.'

Still with Joyce, the ending of Ulysses, concluding Molly Bloom's great inner monologue, is an astonishing passage (and, like the story of lost love in 'The Dead', owes a great deal to the much maligned Nora Barnacle, without whom Molly Bloom would never have come into being) – 

'the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leap year like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a woman's body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldn't answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didn't know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governor's house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the fig trees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rose gardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.'

Phew. After which, let's descend to something completely different – the ending of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. Here Yorick has been obliged to share a room with an attractive Piedmontese lady, who has an equally pretty maid. Having negotiated a 'treaty' designed to get them through the night with no impropriety, Yorick find himself restless and unable to sleep, and 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

  I think I might return to this subject, as I have quite a few more notable endings up my sleeve...