A Very Fine Cat Indeed

 I recently posted a couple of Venetian-themed poems by Robin Saikia which had impressed me. Seeking to find out more about this little-known but clearly talented poet, I discovered that he had published, in 2020, a dramatic monologue titled A Very Fine Cat Indeed, devoted to Dr Johnson's beloved Hodge. Naturally I bought a copy, but I'm sorry to report that I found it disappointing. What I was hoping would be a dramatic monologue in the Browning line turned out to be a short piece for the stage, in which Johnson mourns the recently dead Hodge. The monologue blends real and imagined events, and includes some well-known moments from Boswell. Saikia catches Johnson's voice pretty well, but without achieving enough sonority or depth to give a full impression of the man. The piece seems like a thin watercolour sketch when something more like an oil painting is called for. To make matters worse, there is some seriously bad proof-reading. The opening paragraph of the Introduction begins thus:

'When I first had the idea of writing a dramatic monologue about Hodge, I began by trying to found [sic] out what, if anything, had been previously been [sic] attempted in this line.' What he found was Samuel Beckett's dramatic fragment Human Wishes, in which a sleeping Hodge (stage direction asleep, if possible) is present. Saikia describes the play as being 'largely about Johnson's relationship with Hester Thrale and her circle'. Really? That doesn't sound much like the play I read and wrote about five years ago...  

  The saving grace of A Very Fine Cat Indeed is that the slim volume is padded out with five Appendices. One is 'An Elegy on the Death of Dr Johnson's Favourite Cat' by Percival Stockdale (a rival of Johnson's), a mock-heroic work beginning 'Let not the honest Muse disdain/For Hodge to wake the plaintive strain' and ending 'Let Virtue in they [sic] bosom lodge;/Or wish thou hadst been born a Hodge.' Another is Leigh Hunt's account of Johnson stepping out to buy oysters for Hodge. Then there are some thoughts on animals by Jeremy Bentham, and Christopher Smart's 'Jeoffry' (from Jubilate Agno) – 'For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry...' New to me was this charming poem by Susan Coolidge (of What Katy Did fame). Slightly rose-tinted perhaps, but a fine tribute to Johnson the cat-lover – 

Burly and big, his books among,
Good Samuel Johnson sat,
With frowning brows and wig askew,
His snuff-strewn waistcoat far from new;
So stern and menacing his air,
That neither Black Sam,
nor the maid
To knock or interrupt him dare;
Yet close beside him, unafraid,
Sat Hodge, the cat.

"This participle," the Doctor wrote,
"The modern scholar cavils at,
But," – even as he penned the word,
A soft, protesting note was heard;
The Doctor fumbled with his pen,
The dawning thought took wings and flew,
The sound repeated, come again,
It was a faint, reminding "Mew!"
From Hodge, the cat...

The Dictionary was laid down,
The Doctor tied his vast cravat,
And down the buzzing street he strode,
Taking an often-trodden road,
And halted at a well-known stall:
"Fishmonger," spoke the Doctor gruff,
"Give me six oysters, that is all;
Hodge knows when he has had enough,
Hodge is my cat."

Then home; puss dined and while in sleep
he chased a visionary rat,
His master sat him down again,
Rewrote his page, renibbed his pen;
Each "i" was dotted, each "t" was crossed,
He labored on for all to read,
Nor deemed that time was waste or lost
Spent in supplying the small need
Of Hodge, the cat.

The dear old Doctor! Fierce of mien,
Untidy, arbitrary, fat,
What gentle thought his name enfold!
So generous of his scanty gold.
So quick to love, so hot to scorn,
Kind to all sufferers under heaven,
A tend'rer despot ne'er was born;
His big heart held a corner, even
For Hodge, the cat.

Reconnecting

 I spent much of the weekend in transit, travelling down to Guildford, in my old home county, and back again the next day. We were there for the post-wedding celebration of an old friend who has remarried – and a fine celebration and joyous occasion it was. What matters here is the back story, for this friend is the widower of the old friend whose funeral I wrote about on the blog five years ago – and, as if that wasn't enough tragedy for one life, he was also the father of the lovely young woman whose memorial I wrote about here the following year. She, her twin brother and the two younger daughters were like grandchildren to us (before we had any of our own), and it was wonderful, heart-lifting to reconnect with them all. I think at least some of the family will be visiting Lichfield soon...
  In Guildford we stayed overnight in an old hotel, a former posting house, with many stairs and creaking corridors. Our room was the James Boswell room, next to the Samuel Johnson room. A very fine room it was too, but, alas, there is no Johnsonian connection with Guildford. Or only an irrelevant one: the other 18th-century Samuel Johnson, an American theologian-philosopher, was born in Guildford, Connecticut. Ah well – unlike Dickens, Johnson didn't stay in practically every hotel in England.   

Walking Again

 Yesterday I was walking in the Oxfordshire countryside with my brother and walking friends. It was a gloriously sunny morning – the first in a long dreary while – and, for a wonder, it stayed that way for most of the day, only clouding over briefly in the early afternoon. Our walk began in the attractive little stone-built town of Eynsham and took in the villages of Church Hanborough and Freeland – all three of which had their churches open. St Leonard, Eynsham, has 'remarkably elegant' (Pevsner) nave arcades with concave mouldings – which find an echo, oddly, in the nave of St Peter and St Paul, Church Hanborough, a building blessed with some very fine 15th-century woodwork: screens, rood loft and pulpit. Freeland, by contrast, offers a small but sumptuously decorated high Victorian church by J.L. Pearson, with his trademark apse, and an attractive adjoining parsonage.
  So, a good day architecturally, but the walk was really the point – our first outing in five months, a sunny day, fine open countryside, and good company. I was delighted to see redwings in good numbers (having hitherto seen only a few this year), and parties of long-tailed tits, and skylarks testing their song, sensing spring in the air. The going was sometimes tough – mud and lying water, especially in the patches of woodland we had to traverse, or rather bash our way through, bent double, trying to keep our feet on something like dry land and not to fall over. But it was good. And the best of it all was that my brother, who has been recovering from radiotherapy and hadn't walked more than a mile or two in a long while, had no difficulty walking the full six miles of this memorable walk. 

Thomas + The Machine

Despite appearances, R.S. Thomas, the crag-faced curmudgeon of Sarn-y-Plas, had a tender side, which showed up quite often in his poetry, as in this love poem to his long-suffering wife of 51 years, the artist Mildred (Elsi) Eldridge –

Luminary

My luminary,
my morning and evening
star. My light at noon
when there is no sun
and the sky lowers. My balance
of joy in a world
that has gone off joy's
standard. Yours the face
that young I recognised
as though I had known you
of old. Come, my eyes
said, out into the morning
of a world whose dew
waits for your footprint.
Before a green altar
with the thrush for priest
I took those gossamer
vows that neither the Church
could stale nor the Machine
tarnish, that with the years
have grown hard as flint,
lighter than platinum
on our ringless fingers. 


For me, a word stands out, almost incongruously, from this poem – Machine, 'the Machine'. It crops up elsewhere in Thomas's poetry too; it was clearly a major preoccupation of his. Here it is again – 

  . . . The machine appeared
In the distance, singing to itself
Of money. Its song was the web
They were caught in, men and women
Together. The villages were as flies
To be sucked empty.

   God secreted
A tear. Enough, enough,
He commanded, but the machine
Looked at him and went on singing.

And how about this startling image? 

Is there a contraceptive
for the machine, that we may enjoy
intercourse with it without being overrun
by vocabulary?

'Overrun by vocabulary' – aren't we all, in this age of the internet, the mobile phone and social media? And Thomas wrote those lines in 1990, when that age had scarcely begun. For him, the Machine had always meant the relentless advance of technology, driven by money, gradually destroying the organic human world as it goes on its denaturing, deracinating, desacralising, ultimately dehumanising way. It's an image and a phrase that has taken off in recent years, as more and more people have become aware of the destructive processes that are going on in the high-tech world (though it's unlikely Rage Against The Machine had R.S. Thomas in mind when they chose their name). And now Paul Kingsnorth, a writer I admire for the way he has let his thinking develop and lead him on, has brought together his thoughts on the subject in a fat new book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. I'm going to be reading it, off and on, over the coming months, and might well report back. Meanwhile, there's always R.S. Thomas...

Larkin in Venice

Yesterday Patrick Kurp posted a poem, 'Larkin's Typewriter' – a 5-4-5 sonnet evoking Larkin's sad loss of his poetic afflatus – by a poet I had never heard of before, Robin Saikia. Taking a look online, I discovered that Saikia has written at least one other Larkin-themed poem, 'Philip Larkin's Death in Venice',  in which the old curmudgeon ruthlessly skewers every romantic cliché about La Serenissima...

If I should die, think only this of me:  
I'd not say labyrinth, save ironically.  
Nor shimmering lagoon, nor lapis sky,  
Nor call some damp old church a jewel (why?).  

I never let the moon caress the spires,  
Or let canals reflect my heart’s desires.  
No gondolier was stoic, wry, or kind,  
No shadows whispered secrets to my mind.  

I saw no lovers lost in time’s embrace,  
No masks concealing sorrow’s tragic face.  
And never, even once, in life or dream,  
Did Byron’s ghost drift past upon the stream.  

Instead, I stood here, damp, confused, and cold,  
Inspecting water damage, growing mould,  
As cruise ships spewed out flocks of squawking Brits,  
And pigeons shat their Jackson Pollock shits.  

So if you must romanticise my end,  
At least don’t make me out some fool who penned  
The stuff that turns this sinking pile of stone  
Into a fleeting sigh, or softened moan.

This is one of a collection of Venetian poems by Saikia (who also wrote Drink and Think Venice: The Story of Venice in 26 Bars and Cafés). Here is another, in which he addresses John Ruskin himself – 'Venetian Light'...

I take the views to task for looking wrong,
Too bright, too sharp, too easily admired.
They stir me into long complaints
Of how Venetian light seems tired
Of telling the same old truth.

And all this balanced marble leaves me cold:
Palladian fronts, too pleased with being grand,
Look like the sort of buildings that uphold
Whatever graft found readily to hand,
Their symmetry a smirk at common need,
Their columns as performative as kings.
I see in them the tidiness of greed,
The waterline where beauty stops and power begins.
Look, for example, at that awful dome
Which claims the clouds as mere reflective drift;
Not so much a hallowed shelter
As vaulted evidence of civic grift.

Still worse, the precious murmur of canals,
Or chalk-dust overbrush of Guardi skies,
Washes back something truly grim,
A lesson in grief I happily once forgot,
That only the over-thoughtful truly learn:
Beauty is no luxury, but a brief reprieve
From something dark,
And only God knows what.

Despite all this, my water-scriptured bride 
Takes me in hand
In ways I never planned.

That slow unbuttoning of light and shade,
Those trembling walls, the peeling off of gold,
All these unfreeze me, tease out a reminder
Of how time illuminates a gentler truth:
That nothing built by man is ever free,
Nor should be, from a sense of loss,
Or a leaning back to youth.

I listen, then, as if her stone could speak
In arching syllables,
All Gothic tracery a whispered thought
That all our half-articulate desires
And private longings can and should be wrought,
Made public fact, by love or art;
That in these crooked lanes and lines
A Gothic spirit lives,
Not as a theory, but a daily act
Of breathing memory,
Giving a sense that all we seek
Is findable, if slightly out of sight,
Smudged, uncertain, blurred,
But there, in the Venetian light. 

There are more of Saikia's Venetian poems to be found here, and they are well worth exploring. 

194 Today

 Manet Day again – the great Edouard's 194th birthday – and I realise that I've never posted on the subject of one of his best-known and most mysterious paintings, Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe. There might be a reason for this, as I'm not sure there's much that can usefully be said about it. It's certainly not helpful to apply reductionist Marxist/feminist/sociological critiques to the Déjeuner (as has been often done), but I guess it's worth tracing the painting's affinity with works by Giorgione and Titian (The Pastoral Concert, The Tempest), Raimondi/Raphael (The Judgment of Paris), even Watteau (La Partie Carrée) – as ever, in art and literature alike, the way to the future is by way of the past. However, the Déjeuner remains, and I imagine will for ever remain, a strange and deeply mysterious painting, one in which nothing looks quite 'right'. I lived for some months with a print of it over the fireplace in my university rooms and must have spent many hours staring at it and wondering. It's a painting of strange beauty and tremendous power – hence its long afterlife and 'iconic' status – and I could happily spend more hours staring at it, but I don't think I'd emerge with anything much more to say. Bon anniversaire, Monsieur Manet. 

'It would be only polite to thank him'

 The dismal weather of this interminable January – grey days, relentless rain, damp cold (the worst sort) – is only to be expected, I suppose, but it does depress the spirits and eat into the soul. It's time for a cheering poem, preferably set in summer – and here's one, taken from Wendy Cope's great little anthology Heaven on Earth: 101 Happy Poems. It's by the ever sprightly* Gavin Ewart – 

June 1966

Lying flat in the bracken of Richmond Park
while the legs and voices of my children pass
seeking, seeking: I remember how on the
13th of June of that simmering 1940
I was conscripted into the East Surreys,
and, more than a quarter of a century
ago, when France had fallen,
we practised concealment in this very bracken.
The burnt stalks pricked through my denims.
Hitler is now one of the antiques of History,
I lurk like a monster in my hiding place.
He didn't get me. If there were a God
it would be only polite to thank him.


* 'So good for you, Gavin, for having stayed sprightly
   While keeping your eye on the ball;
Your riotous road-show's like Glenlivet nightly,
   A warming to us all.'
                                    Philip Larkin Good for You, Gavin