Nothing Like It

 November began in Thomas Hood mode – 'No sun – no moon! No morn – no noon', etc. However, the morning fog gradually thinned, and suddenly the sun came through – glorious mellow sunlight, illuminating the beautiful autumn colours. There is something special about sunshine in November, as Edward Thomas knew – 

THERE'S nothing like the sun as the year dies,
Kind as it can be, this world being made so,
To stones and men and beasts and birds and flies,
To all things that it touches except snow,
Whether on mountain side or street of town.
The south wall warms me: November has begun,
Yet never shone the sun as fair as now
While the sweet last-left damsons from the bough
With spangles of the morning's storm drop down
Because the starling shakes it, whistling what
Once swallows sang. But I have not forgot
That there is nothing, too, like March's sun,
Like April's, or July's, or June's, or May's,
Or January's, or February's, great days:
And August, September, October, and December
Have equal days, all different from November.
No day of any month but I have said–
Or, if I could live long enough, should say–
"There's nothing like the sun that shines to-day"
There's nothing like the sun till we are dead.

Thomas wrote this celebration of November sun, a meditation on the dying year and on mortality, in November 1915, when he was contemplating enlistment in the army.  Less than a year and a half later he was killed in action at Arras. 
  The phrase 'nothing like the sun' has resonance. Originating in Shakespeare's sonnet 130 – 'My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun' – it also furnished the title for Anthony Burgess's Shakespeare-themed novel, and indeed the second album of Gordon Sumner, aka Sting. 

Little Books and Huge Noses

 The excellent Public Domain Review, a rich source of curious stories and images, has branched out into publishing books – small books, my favourite kind. I now have the first three of these PDR Press Minis, and lovely little volumes they are, each with a usefully informative Note on the Text (more like an Introduction really). Number one in the series is a safe bet: Overture, from Swann's Way – the opening section of the first novel of the sequence, in Scott Moncrieff's translation (justly praised in the Note on the Text for 'finding an English music for the capacious and serpentine lines of the French original').
  The second title is A Dictionary of Victorian Slang and Phrase, which is extracted from Passing English of the Victorian Era by J. Redding Ware, first published in 1909. As well as the Note on the Text, this one includes the author's Preface, which begins 'Here is a numerically weak collection of instances of "Passing English". It may be hoped that there are errors on every page, and also that no entry is "quite too dull"...' Browsing in its pages, I discovered, among other things, that 'Made in Germany' meant, in the 1890s and after, 'Bad, valueless. Outcome of the vast quantity of inferior goods imported from Germany' – how times change... I also came across the word 'Dook', meaning 'a huge nose', in reference to the Duke of Wellington's magnificent hooter. A note appended to this entry, 'See Boko', leads to a word that I remember was still in use in the comics of my boyhood. It means the same thing as 'dook', and is, I learned, a corruption of 'beaucoup'. Ware elucidates: 'Said to be descended from the time of Grimaldi, who would observe while "joey-ing", C'Est Beaucoup and tap his nose. The phrase still remains, Anglicised, for a rough observing to another rough of a third gentleman's nose will make the statement, "I say – boko!" When one Espinosa, a French dancer, came to London (1858), the size of his wonderful nose drew so much gallery observation of "boko" that Mr J. Oxenford, in The Times, especially referred to the organ and assumed it was art. Thereupon, Espinosa wrote explaining that the nose in question was un don de la nature.' I fancy there's a lot more good browsing in store...
  As for the third title, this is Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched & The Finding of the Absolute by May Sinclair, an author, literary patron and modernist critic, of whom I knew nothing, though she was the first to use the phrase 'stream of consciousness' in a literary context. The two stories are the first and last in Sinclair's collection of Uncanny Stories, and I have yet to read them. I'm looking forward to it.

Satire Day

 Believe it or not, there is a World Satire Day (or rather World Day of Satire), inaugurated in Nigeria in 2019 and, I think it's fair to say, not very widely observed. Its date, November 9th, seems to have been chosen for no particular reason. Today, October 28th, would be a much better candidate, as it is both the anniversary of the publication of Gulliver's Travels and the birthday of Evelyn Waugh (born 1903), who in my opinion was at his very best in his early satires – Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, A Handful of Dust and (my own favourite) Scoop.
   Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts, by Lemuel Gulliver was published on this day 200 years ago. I remember the thrill of reading it in full for the first time, and realising that this was something very different from the sanitised tale I'd known in my childhood, and that Lilliput and Brobdingnag were the least of it. Johnson famously said of the Travels that 'When once you have thought of little men and big men, it is very easy to do the rest' – one of his more flippant judgments, and one that is surely wrong: 'the rest' is actually the hard part. The voyages to the flying island of philosophers, Laputa, to the magician's dwelling on Glubbdubdrib, to the unhappily immortal Struldbrugs of Luggnagg, and finally to the land of the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos – these surely were the hard parts to write, the boldest in imagination and the fiercest in their satire. They are also a great deal harder to read, more difficult and disturbing, than the relatively knockabout adventures in Lilliput and Brobdingnag. They are, of course, a million miles from the dreary consensual pap that passes for 'satire' on radio and television these days.   

A Herbert Spencer of a Day

 Well, today was a day almost entirely lost to the infuriating, time-consuming, soul-sapping business of dealing with a banking fraud. It was an ingenious and thoroughly plausible one, and fortunately, in the end, the damage was undone, but Lord it was a long, exhausting haul. Inevitably, after much online to and fro and hanging on the telephone, I ended up making my way to the actual physical bank (and counting myself lucky to have one a short walk away). Before I was bamboozled into taking up online banking, I used to visit quite often, and it was a quiet and peaceful place – but now all is changed and the place was heaving. This was partly because a nearby branch of its sister bank recently closed down, and partly because, it seems, the cashiers are no longer authorised to do more than handle incoming and outgoing cash. As a result most customers end up sitting in one of several liminal spaces – okay, waiting rooms – waiting to talk to a human and sort things out. I'd estimate that at least eight out of ten of those waiting were bewildered oldsters (myself included), and most of those were, in theory, doing their banking online. As banking has become ever more complex and ever more virtual, it has also become ever more difficult and, as was painfully brought home to me today, vulnerable. I can't help but wonder what would happen if someone less (okay, even less) tech savvy than me, and less mobile, fell victim to this or some similar scam. This is increasingly becoming a world that older people, and the most vulnerable, cannot understand, let alone navigate – more and more people are being effectively barred from full participation in everyday life, and I fear it will only get worse. As for me, I finally got to see a helpful human being, who eventually got things sorted out. And that was my day. I hope I don't have such another any time soon. 

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.