Ghetto

 Yesterday we visited the Venice ghetto (the first in the world, more than 500 years old, and in its day one of the best places in Europe for Jews to settle). We found it a thriving and cheerful place, with a warm, relaxed atmosphere, full of families enjoying the sun after so much recent rain – all very much more lively than I remember it from earlier visits. There were carabinieri and other security personnel dotted about, but no tension in the air. All felt good.
  Today is the anniversary of the horrific pogrom in which Hamas and their civilian foot-soldiers gave the clearest possible demonstration of their genocidal intent toward the Jews of Israel. And now, one year on, the Israelis stand accused of genocide, huge demonstrations in apparently civilised cities call for the destruction of Israel, and the walls of Venice are liberally adorned with 'Free Palestine' graffiti and worse. The world has truly gone mad. 

'At the top-top-top-of everything'

 Yesterday was a day of incessant heavy rain and blustery wind, but at least we made it to the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, a visit to which remains one of the greatest experiences even Venice has to offer. It was here that the discovery of the power of Tintoretto's art inspired Ruskin to write The Stones of Venice:
'Tintoret swept me in away into the mare maggiore of the schools of painting which crowned the power and perished in the fall of Venice; so forcing me into the study of Venice herself; and through that into what else I have traced or told of the laws of national strength and virtue.'
His encounter with the paintings in the Scuola exploded Ruskin's former neat classification of the great artists. As he reported at the time,  'I never was so utterly crushed to the earth before any human intellect as I was today – before Tintoret. Just be so good as to take my list of painters and put him in the school of Art at the top-top-top-of everything, with a big black line underneath.'
Unfortunately the Crucifixion, for Ruskin and many others the greatest painting in the world, is currently in restauro, concealed behind a high screen while the conservationists and restorers get to work. The results promise to be spectacular – another good reason to revisit Venice. 
And this morning it is still raining, though mercifully with less force than yesterday.

Rain, Poetry

 It's raining here in Venice – sometimes hard, sometimes gently, but raining most of the time – and I've discovered that it is still possible to get truly, hopelessly lost in at least one part of Venice, the part where our hotel is. We have spent an inordinate amount of time wandering in circles and failing to get any nearer where we want to be – a state of affairs made worse by my having mysteriously lost my one truly useful street map of the city, an unwieldy monster the size of a tablecloth. However, we did find our way to San Sebastiano, Veronese's parish church, and San  Nicolo dei Mendicoli, to Santa Maria dei Carmini (one fine Lotto), and to that great Gothic church full of preposterous monuments, the Frari, where I once again sat in wonder in front of Titian's great, astonishing, endlessly fascinating altarpiece of the Assumption of the Virgin...
Meanwhile, I note that it's National Poetry Day back in the homeland, where I'm sure the nation is once again given over to wild celebrations to mark the occasion. Here is my contribution, courtesy of an American poet – Marianne Moore, who else? 

Poetry

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
   Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
   it after all, a place for the genuine.
      Hands that can grasp, eyes
      that can dilate, hair that can rise
         if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
   useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the
   same thing may be said for all of us—that we
      do not admire what
      we cannot understand. The bat,
         holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
   a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base-
   ball fan, the statistician—case after case
      could be cited did
      one wish it; nor is it valid
         to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction
   however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,
   nor till the autocrats among us can be
     “literalists of
      the imagination”—above
         insolence and triviality, and can present

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have
   it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion—
   the raw material of poetry in
      all its rawness, and
      that which is on the other hand,
         genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

Asphodel

 The night before flying out to Venice I watched the first two episodes of Kaos, a rather brilliant black comedy reimagining of the lives of the Greek gods and goddesses, set in a kind of phantasmagoric version of modern Greece. Jeff Goldblum – who better? – plays Zeus, a touchy, truculent and insecure king of the gods, whose plans for mankind are imperilled by the activities of certain mortals, notably Orpheus (a rock star) and his girlfriend Eurydice. After her death (run over by a truck), Eurydice finds herself caught up in the vast hordes of the dead being herded around a grim grey processing facility, 'Asphodel' (as in the Fields of Asphodel) – where, having finally reached the Styx, she is unable to cross into the Underworld. The ghastly, dismal Asphodel, filmed in black and white (shades of A Matter of Life and Death), came back to mind the following morning, as my travelling companion and I found ourselves being herded around the modern Asphodel of airport Security for what seemed an eternity. The line I was in came to a total halt for lack of anyone to stare at the screen as the bags went past (the numerous staff all around devoting themselves to cheery badinage and gossip). My companion, meanwhile, had her bags theatrically emptied, one item at a time, and subjected to lengthy scrutiny, so that it took her even longer to emerge from this brilliantly conceived modern form of low-level torture and dehumanising humiliation.
Hell is an endless airport from which no planes ever take off. 

To Venice again

 Tomorrow I'm flying off to this place. It's my first visit in six years, and I'm hoping to find it in rather better shape than when I left it. It is, after all, the most beautiful city in the world. 

RIP

 At some point over the weekend, 'Me and Bobby McGhee' came into my head (and mercifully didn't find its way to my mouth) and I remember thinking, not for the first time, Damn but that's one very fine song. And this morning comes the sad news that Kris Kristofferson has died, aged 88, peacefully, surrounded by his family. He was one of the finest; may he rest in peace. 

It's That Man Again

 A fine bust of Lichfield's greatest son, Samuel Johnson, has been reinstated where it belongs, some way up on a wall in Bird Street, just along from the George hotel, and over what is now the Viking e-Cigs Shop, of all things. It was originally installed in 1884 and stayed in place until being removed in 1969. Now, restored, refreshed and lime-washed, it is back where it should be. I somehow missed the unveiling, which was on Johnson's birthday, September 18th, and was done by the mayor with the aid of a cherry-picker – believed to be a UK first. It's good to see yet more evidence that, in the city of his birth, Johnson is still very much alive. As he would have wished, he does indeed 'appear considerable in his native place'. 

Exercising and Exercised

 I've been uncommonly busy lately, and am just back from a few days in Worthing – not on a lonely impulse of delight but, as ever, on family business. There was some horrendous weather down there, as elsewhere – sheeting rain, howling wind, hail, the works – but also what the weather people refer to as sunny intervals. Indeed, this morning in the little park where I was doing my daily exercises (an improvised combination of xi gong and pilates with a dash of yoga, if you really want to know), I saw a couple of Speckled Woods enjoying a patch of late sunshine. But what has been exercising me, to a deeply tiresome extent, is mobile phone technology, which seems to be getting ever more annoyingly unreliable. I have two phones – a 'smart' iPhone and a 'dumb' brick phone, which I recently upgraded. The latter kind of phone is, I gather, becoming increasingly popular as people abandon the over-sophisticated smart phones and go back to basics. I entirely sympathise, as it seems that the more sophisticated they get, the less reliable they become. I have certainly had plenty of problems, especially when trying to use my iPhone as what it claims to be – a phone. Partly this seems to be a result of living in what locals refer to as 'the Lichfield nexus', this being a town with notoriously patchy network coverage, despite a plethora of masts in the vicinity (half of them, I'm told, not working). By and large, my dumb phone is more reliable, but it also lets me down from time to time – and through most of my stay in Worthing it proved all but unusable, either for phone calls or simple text messages – not that the iPhone was any better. All of which makes me wonder – wasn't this mobile phone technology supposed to make communication easier, connecting us instantly and smoothly from wherever we are to whoever we want to talk to? It seems to work that way in many parts of the world, certainly most of Europe, but not in this country. Is it just me, or is it yet another sign that, as has been widely noted, Britain doesn't work any more?
Confirmation of the latter was provided on our return journey from Worthing, when we arrived at Euston to find that, owing to 'an incident' in Bushey, no trains were running on the Lichfield (and beyond) line – a situation that pertained for most of the day. On the train to Derby (which we were obliged to take, at considerable expense, if we wanted to get home at all), an elderly gentleman remarked that he had made his way by train East to West across the whole of Europe over the pervious few days with every train running on time to the minute, no delays, no cancellations, ample seating, etc, etc. Such stories are all too familiar. O Albion – what happened?

Going to the Barber

 Yesterday I went, with my cousin, to visit the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham, on the university campus (a symphony in red brick and stone). The Barber is a very handsome building in art deco style by Robert Atkinson – who, as it happens, was the architect of Wallington Town Hall, back in my old patch (the one building in Wallington that Pevsner commends – and rightly so). 
  The interiors of the Barber Institute are very fine – light, lofty, spacious, beautifully detailed, and a pleasure to walk around. And then there is the collection, which is full of gems, even if most of them could uncharitably be classed as second-rate work by first-rank artists or first-rate work by second-rank artists (as is usual in provincial galleries). The first thing to catch my eye was not a painting at all (the collection includes sculpture, coins and decorative arts) but this beautiful piece in Nottingham alabaster depicting the Coronation of the Virgin. Dating from the 15th century, it still has some of its original paint and gilding, and is unusually large, about 40 inches by 24. The effect is quite magnificent.

Among the paintings, which range from Bellini and Botticelli (studio of) through Gainsborough and Turner to the French impressionists, there was some lovely stuff and much of interest, but my top three, I think, are these. First, a stunning Veronese of the Visitation (of Mary to Elizabeth), typically sumptuous in effect and grand in conception, which of course has to be seen on the wall, particularly for those gorgeous Veronese textiles, but this image gives some idea of it...
 

Another Venetian gem that caught my eye was probably painted not in Venice but in England, around 1710, by Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, who worked for a while over here. An unusually pretty treatment of its subject, Judith (and her maidservant) with the head of Holofernes, its free brushwork and Venetian colour make it a feast for the eyes, though again, of course, you have to see it on the wall. 

And then there was the Manet, a large (over 6ft tall) unfinished portrait of the much-portrayed, much-portraying painter Carolus-Duran, standing in a woodland clearing in his riding boots, striking a pose of nonchalant swagger. The sheer presence and dashing execution of this one made it quite irresistible to me, but then I am a huge fan of Manet. 

There was more, of course, much more. This was a hugely enjoyable gallery visit, and I'm very glad to have discovered the Barber. I fancy I'll be back.

'Some friendly distribution'

 Despite spending three years ostensibly studying English Literature and even graduating with a decent degree, I somehow never came across the word 'ekphrastic' until quite recently. I was glad to find it, as it's a useful word, describing, as it does, poetry written about paintings or other works of art – a category that includes some very fine poems (Auden's 'Musée des Beaux Arts' to name but one). There is a whole slim volume of ekphrastic poems by R. S. Thomas, Between Here and Now, inspired by French impressionist paintings, and Kay Ryan has written a few. In this one, her subject is not just one Chagall painting but...


Every Painting by Chagall

Every twined groom and bride,
every air fish, smudged Russian,
red horse, yellow chicken, assumes
its position not actually beside
but in some friendly distribution
with a predictable companion.
Every canvas insists on a 
similar looseness, each neck
put to at least two uses. And wings
from some bottomless wing source.
They are pleasure wings of course
since any horse or violinist
may mount the blue
simply by wanting to.
(In freedom, dear things
repeat without tedium.)

Chagall was a painter much given to repeating himself, especially in his later years,  so, up to a point, every painting by Chagall is like every other painting by Chagall. Fair enough, then, to characterise the lot in sixteen short lines. In Ryan's collection Flamingo Watching (1994), 'Every Painting by Chagall' is immediately followed by another evocative Chagall-related poem, this one taking off from the artist's taste for overturning objects. Off go the tables...

The Tables Freed

'The presence of real objects is a nightmare for me. I have always overturned objects. A chair or a table turned upside down gives me peace and satisfaction.' 
– Marc Chagall

A companionable flood can
make things wobble. The
sober table at last enjoys
the bubbles locked in her
grain, straining together
good as Egyptians to shift
the predictable plane.
Dense plates and books
slide off and dive or bloat
but she floats, a legged
boat nosing the helpless
stationaries, the bolted
basin, the metal reliquaries –
in short, the nouns. All over
town tables are bumping
out of doors, negotiating
streets and beginning to
meet at water corners
like packs of mustangs,
blue, red, yellow, stencilled,
enlivened by swells as
wild horses are stretched
liquid and elegant by hills.

Notes on an Emergency

 I see that the charity Butterfly Conservation (which does an excellent job) has declared a national 'Butterfly Emergency'. This is in response to the Big Butterfly Count of 2024, in which 85,000 volunteers participated, and which came up with lowest-ever figures in its 14-year history, an average of seven butterflies per count, barely half of last year's figure. I doubt if this dire news will greatly surprise anyone: it has been a terrible year for butterflies, with a cool, wet and windy spring followed by a cool, wet  and windy summer, which only warmed up and dried off when it was already too late. My personal species count was pathetic, the lowest I've ever recorded, and in many cases the number I saw was well down – and this outcome was not entirely due to my no longer being based on the edge of the Surrey downs and hills; I saw many more butterflies last year.
  The Big Butterfly Count findings show declines in over 80 per cent of species (including lowest-ever figures for three that, oddly, I saw plenty of – Holly Blue, Green-Veined White and Small White), but even that means that one in five species showed no decline, which I suppose is something to cling on to. It's also worth looking at the long-term picture: according to the last definitive survey, The State of the UK's Butterflies, published in 2022, although 80 per cent of species had declined in either abundance or distribution since the 1970s, 56 per cent had increased in one or the other over the same period. Butterfly abundance at monitored sites was only down by six per cent, and in Scotland abundance was actually up by 35 per cent. So the overall picture is not quite as gloomy as is often claimed, and certainly more complex and nuanced. However, there is no denying that 2024 was a truly awful butterfly year. I am hoping very much that things are better next year – especially as, if all goes to plan, my little book on butterflies should be emerging from its long pupation in the spring. But I'll say no more on that until nearer the date...

A Welcome Cello, Minster Pool, the Swan of Lichfield

 Yesterday afternoon, as I drew near Minster Pool, I became aware of a beautiful sound – rich, deep and plangent – surely a cello? It was indeed: a young man was seated by the pool, playing a Bach cello suite, with his cello case out in front of him for donations. This was a wonderful surprise, as the buskers here rarely venture into the classics, and if they do the results are usually dire. I murmured something to the effect of 'beautiful' as I bent to drop a pound into his cello case, and he stopped playing to engage me in conversation – well, only a brief chat, in the course of which I learned that he'd been a music student in Manchester. I should have asked how he is earning his living now – surely not only by busking – but we got talking about Bach and the cello suites. He offered to go back to the beginning of the suite and play it through for me, but unfortunately I was in a hurry, so had to leave it at that. I continued on my way along the side of Minster Pool, which I learn (from a piece in the Johnson Society Transactions of 2008) owes its present pleasing form to none other than the poetess Anna Seward, the 'Swan of Lichfield'. It was she who in 1773 proposed to the Town Clerk (Thomas Levett, who was family friend) that the pool should be 'serpentined' into an elegantly curved shape, with parts of it dug out to a greater depth and the spoil piled on the far bank (the cathedral bank) to form a mound, which was duly planted with trees and shrubs. This not only stopped the pool silting up and flooding almost every year, but created, once the vegetation had bedded in, one of the finest cathedral views in England – so, even if her literary endeavours are now all but forgotten,  Anna Seward has one lasting legacy which continues to give delight.
  Less to her credit is Seward's hostility to and constant denigration of Lichfield's greatest son, Samuel Johnson. His habit of dominating conversation, 'talking to win' and verbally pummelling all opposition into the ground was anathema to her, probably because, with Johnson present, she was no longer able to hold the floor herself. The Swan of Lichfield described the Great Cham as 'an overrated ranter, who received uncritical adulation', regarded his religious beliefs as 'gloomy bigotry', 'malign and violent', and believed that his disparagement of some who had achieved more success than himself was due to simple jealousy. For his part, Johnson could not avoid encountering the Swan on his visits to Lichfield, where he often dined at the Bishop's Palace, the Sewards' family residence – but, understandably enough, he never sought her out, nor she him. Boswell, being Boswell, had a crack at Seward, a handsome woman with striking auburn hair, and came quite close to initiating an affair, but in the end she said 'no', later characterising the great biographer as 'nought but a Scottish coxcomb'. One of the more ridiculous stories put about, presumably, by Anna Seward's allies, was that Johnson was so intimidated by her that he would tremble in her presence. It is certainly hard to imagine Johnson trembling in anyone's presence, except perhaps that of his Maker. 

A Voracious Reader

 I must admit that when someone tells me they're a 'voracious reader', always with his or (more commonly) her nose in a book, my heart sinks a little. I know this self-description will nearly always mean that s/he is a compulsive reader of contemporary (or genre) fiction, and that we are unlikely to have more than a couple of titles in common. Here is a description of a 'voracious reader' from a slightly earlier time, one whose identity might come as a surprise: 
'Reading, for which he had a voracious appetite, was his chief relaxation and recreation. He read all the current English and American fiction as it became available from the Harrods Lending Library, most of which must have been by his lights pretty dismal stuff. The only writers he refused to read were Simenon and C.P. Snow. On average, he must have got through about eight books a week and sometimes my mother changed their two library books daily, to the despair of wide-eyed Miss Clutton who manned the exchange desk at the library. The standard of the novels never seemed to matter. I can only remember a few times when he put a book down with the words 'This is utterly bogus – I can't finish it!' ... He only liked novels – he would not read poetry or biography. He loved thrillers and magazines, particularly Time magazine.'
Well, at least he drew the line at C.P. Snow (but why Simenon?). The voracious reader described above, by his son Sebastian, is Henry Yorke, better known as the esteemed novelist Henry Green, author of Living, Loving, Party Going and more. Sadly he seems, from this account, to be a reader who has given up on really reading: as Sebastian notes, 'He never re-read a book or selected one from his small library of 'classics' collected in his Oxford days. Nor can I recall him reading anything by his professed idols: Gogol, Turgenev, Doughty, Céline or Faulkner.'
  The reminiscence is taken from a volume I picked up recently in (where else?) a charity bookshop – Surviving: Stories, Essays, Interviews, an NYRB volume complete with an introduction by John Updike. I thought I'd have a look at it to see if it would make me feel any more warmly towards Green, a novelist whose works have always defeated me, much though I, at some level, admire them for their originality and skill. They somehow leave me cold, perhaps because there is so little warmth in them, or so little humour. This is probably unfair.
  Surviving contains some good stuff in the way of short stories and fragments, with some interesting thoughts on writing. There's a vivid portrait of Edward Garnett, who helped launch Green's career, and a fine essay on C.M. Doughty (Travels in Arabia Deserta), whose prose he hugely admired.  Most of the journalism collected here is routine stuff. For me, the best things in the collection are Green's memories of serving in the Auxiliary Fire Service at the height of the London Blitz, with great swathes of the city on fire, and death and destruction all around: A Rescue is particularly memorable. Overall, I'm afraid this volume left me feeling no more warmly towards the author, who is probably in the end simply 'not for me'. I've tried. 

Strictly, Last Night

 Last night on BBC television I watched the first of a new season of Strictly Come Dancing and the Last Night of the Proms (so shoot me). Oddly I found both experiences quite heartening, offering some grounds to believe that just possibly – could it be? really? – the woke tide is turning at last.
  The scandal-prone Strictly gave every appearance of having cleaned up its act, projecting wholesome good fun all round, with not a drag queen in sight, no same-sex couples, and the alleged bad boys among the professionals duly absent. There were the usual ghastly dance routines from the pros, as frenetic as they were incomprehensible, but less risqué, and the usual displays of ecstatic joy when the couples were paired up. There were even a few celebrities I'd heard of. The whole thing was still as camp as Christmas, but not as camp as Christmas at Ru Paul World. And the star of the show, so far, is Chris McCausland, the quick-witted blind comedian. When we were told that one of the contestants was combining Strictly with working as a GP, he remarked: 'None of us can believe we've managed to get in the same room as a GP.' Brilliant. 
   But what of the Last Night of the Proms? Here too things were looking encouragingly back-to-basics. Union Jacks were present in abundance, outnumbering the EU flags that some of the more addle-pated were still waving. The genial Finnish conductor, Sakari Oramo, was proudly sporting a Union Jack waistcoat, and the Last Night soloist, the American soprano Angel Blue, wore a splendid Union Jack jester's cap. I didn't seen any signs of LGBTQ+ or BLM symbolism, and the final run of patriotic and seafaring songs was conducted with due verve. Listening to songs like 'Land of Hope and Glory' (a great melody, whatever Elgar thought of it), 'Jerusalem' (an even greater melody) and 'Rule, Britannia' becomes a sadder experience with every passing year, as we drift ever further from the England they represent, or even from the aspirations they express. All that is over now, but, well, thank you for the music.  

'It is better than games'

 Peter Scott – ornithologist, conservationist, painter of waterfowl, naval officer, Olympic yachtsman, broadcaster, author, intrepid glider, que sais-j' encore – was born on this day in 1909. He was the son of the ill-fated Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his sculptress wife Kathleen (both vividly portrayed in Beryl Bainbridge's The Birthday Boys, which I recently reread). Peter was only two years old when his father met his end in the icy wastes of the Antarctic. In his last letter to his wife, Scott gave her some sound advice: 'Make the boy interested in natural history if you can; it is better than games.'  As it was, Peter inherited his mother's artistic talent, becoming an accomplished bird painter, and his father's derring-do and love of vigorous outdoor action, if not of games as such. He took up cruising while at Cambridge (where he graduated in history of art), along with wildfowling, ice skating and other such pursuits. I described him above as an 'intrepid glider', and that is no exaggeration. Here is a hair-raising account of a flight he took on the 1st of July 1957, as related on this very blog 16 years ago (yes, it's been going that long)...

'Peter Scott, the naturalist and (subsequently) gliding champion, was up in his glider when he spotted a promising cumulo-nimbus thundercloud, and decided to have a crack at getting his Gold height badge. This is the kind of cloud that pilots avoid at all costs – but not the more intrepid members of the gliding fraternity. Scott plunged into the side of the cloud and, amid hail and ice, found himself being bounced about violently at 20ft per second as the altimeter raced to 11,000ft. An ascent of 700ft in about 30 seconds was promptly followed by a violent hurtle downwards, then up again for another 700ft, with full air brakes out and 80mph on the clock. Another almighty jerk, down again, then finally out of the cloud. Trying to shut the air brakes, Scott discovered that they were frozen open. On landing, he was pleased to note that he had indeed climbed to Gold height.' 
Phew.
  Scott's first wife was the novelist-to-be Elizabeth Jane Howard, who was 19 (to Scott's 33) when they married in 1942. She left him four years later, and, after various literary dalliances and another short-lived marriage, got together with Kingsley Amis, who became her third husband, and whom she managed to put up with for 18 years. 

App Goes Mad

As some readers might recall, I recently took a step into the 21st century (more fool me) by buying an 'app' for my mobile that claims to identify birds from their songs. Initially it worked quite well, and helped me to distinguish the songs of various warblers. Since then, however, it appears to have developed a mind of its own, and that mind has become increasingly deranged. Among the latest birds it has kindly identified for me have been the (American) Great Horned Owl, the Australian Reed Warbler, the (American) Chimney Swift, and a wildly improbable Crossbill. I look forward to confident identifications of the Phoenix and the Roc, maybe the Dodo...

'We have to be honest...'

 Just when you thought royal statuary could get no worse – see, most recently, this –  along comes another abomination. In case you're wondering – and you might well be – the couple pictured above are intended to represent Elizabeth II and her consort, the Duke of Edinburgh. The double statue was commissioned as a memorial to the late Queen and erected in Antrim Castle Gardens in County Antrim. As an Antrim councillor confessed to BBC News, 'We have to be honest, it does not resemble the Queen in any shape or form.' And talking of shape and form, the bodies attached (in a decidedly unnatural manner) to these bizarre heads seem to be articulated in some manner quite unrelated to human anatomy as commonly understood. And the statue stands not on a plinth, or even on the ground, but on a meagre stone slab set in a flower bed. As a result, the Queen and Duke look like two people of restricted growth who have somehow got lost in the flower garden and strayed off the path. The expression of complete imbecility on the Queen's face only reinforces the impression; the Duke is perhaps right to look worried. Even the corgis don't look right... You can read the full story, told in typically exhaustive style, on the BBC News website – link here: 
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyl0xnrynzo

'Bootless home and weather-beaten back.'

A blowy day today, very autumnal, threatening rain – but it could be worse...
On this date in 1402, on a wild and windswept night, Henry IV, on campaign in Wales 'to chastise the presumptuous attempts of the Welshmen', was nearly killed when his tent collapsed about him. This was just the latest in a succession of assaults on the English by the relentless Welsh weather: 'Never did a gentle air breathe on them, but throughout the whole, rain mixed with snow and hail afflicted them with cold beyond endurance.' Yes, that sounds like Welsh weather – no wonder R.S. Thomas was such a cheery chap. This expedition was Henry's third attempt to crush the rebellion led by Owain Glyndwr (anglicised in Shakespeare to Owen Glendower). As Glendower boasts in Henry IV, Part I:
'Three times hath Henry Bolingbroke made head
Against my power; thrice from the banks of Wye
And sandy-bottom'd Severn have I sent him
Bootless home and weather-beaten back.'
Indeed – but was Glendower making use of magical powers? Holinshed reports that, to escape Henry, 'Owen conveyed himself out of the way, into his known lurking places, and (as was thought) through art of magic, he caused such foul weather of winds, tempest, rain, snow and hail to be raised, for the annoyance of the king's army, that the like had not been heard of.' After this third attempt to subdue the Welsh, Henry gave up and turned for home, but not before 'having caused his people yet to spoil and burn first a great part of the country'. Owain Glyndwr, a fugitive guerrilla heading a band of 'bare-footed rascals of small reputation', was well on his way to becoming a Welsh national hero, and indeed Prince of Wales. 
Let R.S. Thomas have the last word – 

The Rising of Glyndwr

Thunder-browed and shaggy-throated
All the men were there,
And the women with the hair
That is the raven's and the rook's despair.

Winds awoke, and vixen-footed
Firelight prowled the glade;
The stars were hooded and the moon afraid
To vex the darkness with her yellow braid.

Then he spoke, and anger kindled
In each brooding eye;
Swords and spears accused the sky,
The woods resounded with a bitter cry.

Beasts gave tongue and barn-owls hooted,
Every branch grew loud
With the menace of that crowd,
That thronged the dark, huge as a thundercloud.

Zbigniew Herbert, Feeder of Lice

 Talking of Zbigniew Herbert, I was startled to learn that, during the Nazi occupation of Poland, he worked as a 'feeder of lice' at the Rudolf Weigl Institute in Lvov. This was not a line of work I had ever heard of, so I decided to find out a bit more...
It seems that, at this time, the only way to develop a typhus vaccine was to feed typhus-infected lice with human blood, and the sated lice would then be used in the manufacture of vaccines. As the Nazis were desperate to have a mass vaccine to protect their army from typhus, they practised louse-feeding on a grand scale. The grisly procedure involved strapping small cages containing infected lice to the feeder's thigh or calf, and leaving them to drink their fill. Each cage contained 400 to 800 lice, feeding sessions were around 30 to 45 minutes, and they were repeated over the course of 12 days. A feeder would typically accommodate between seven and 11 boxes at a time. I'm feeling itchy already...  For the feeders there was of course a risk of infection, though they would have been given some kind of vaccine (and lice transmit typhus by way of their excrement rather than their bite). For those living under Nazi occupation, there were distinct and important advantages to being feeders of lice: they were given extra food rations, were permitted to move freely around the occupied city, and were exempt from being shipped to slave labour camps and Nazi concentration camps. For those reasons, many Polish intellectuals took up louse-feeding – including our man, Zbigniew Herbert. As far as I know, this experience did not find a way into his poems, but I may well be wrong – anyone?  

Two Poets Remember Their Fathers

 Browsing last night in my bedside poetry books, I found these two poems – very different in style but linked by a common theme – one after the other, just like that. 
First, Geoffrey Hill, in a poem (the first of his Soliloquies) dedicated to Charles Causley, a poet of a very different stamp...

The Stone Man

Recall, now, the omens of childhood:
The nettle-clump and rank elder-tree;
The stones waiting in the mason's yard:

Half-recognised kingdom of the dead:
A deeper landscape lit by distant
Flashings from their journey. At nightfall

My father scuffed clay into the house.
He set his boots on the bleak iron
Of the hearth; ate, drank, unbuckled, slept.

I leaned to the lamp; the pallid moths 
Clipped its glass, made an autumnal sound.
Words clawed my mind as though they had smelt

Revelation's flesh... So, with an ease
That is dreadful, I summon all back.
The sun bellows over its parched swarms.

Hill's father was the policeman in his Worcestershire village (Fairfield. By the way, I wonder if anyone is working on a biography of Hill?).
The second poem is by the great Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, whose father was a lawyer who worked as a bank manager, and had fought in the Polish Legions in the First World War. 

Remembering My Father

His face severe in clouds above the waters of childhood

so rarely did he hold my warm head in his hands

given to belief not forgiving faults

because he cleared our woods and straightened paths

he carried the lantern high when we entered the night

I thought I would sit at his right hand

and we would separate light from darkness

and judge those of us who live

—it happened otherwise

A junk dealer carried his throne on a hand-cart

and the deed of ownership the map of our kingdom

he was born a second time slight very fragile

with transparent skin hardly perceptible cartilage

he diminished his body so I might receive it

in an unimportant place there is shadow under a stone 

he himself grows in me we eat our defeats

we burst out laughing

when they say how little is needed

to be reconciled

Miss Pym's Day Out

 Last night BBC4 showed an old edition of Bookmark, Miss Pym's Day Out, a 1992 film by James Runcie which dramatised Barbara Pym's visit to London to attend the Booker Prize dinner in 1977. Her late masterpiece Quartet in Autumn had been shortlisted – a sign of how thoroughly her literary reputation had been restored following her 14 years in the unpublished wilderness and her 1977 'rediscovery' triggered by Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil (who both named her as the most underrated writer of the century). The film follows her as she makes her way from her home in the Oxfordshire village of Finstock to London, where she gamely endures an interview, meets various dignitaries and fans, sits through the dinner, and discovers that, of course, she hasn't won. Miss Pym's Day Out is so rich in quotations from, allusions to and glimpsed scenes from the novels that the Barbara Pym Society helpfully detailed them all in a scene by scene synopsis. The film is made in something close to documentary or cinema verité style, and various people appear as themselves – Jilly Cooper, publisher Tom Maschler, A.N. Wilson, Penelope Lively, and indeed Barbara's sister Hilary. Also present, but played by an actor, is Philip Larkin, who was chairman of the Booker judges that year – but was he rooting for Barbara to win? No, he was not: indeed, he declared he would jump out of a window if Paul Scott's Staying On didn't win. And the winner was... Staying On. 
  Introduced by its star, Patricia Routledge, Miss Pym's Day Out should be available on the BBC iPlayer.

Not So Fab

 There are many memorials on the quayside at Liverpool's Albert Docks, mostly, as is only fitting, memorial plaques to the dead of both world wars who perished at sea serving the Allied cause. There are also statues, some of them commemorating notable Liverpudlians, and the worst of them is surely that depicting the four Beatles. From a distance you'd be hard put to recognise them, and close up it doesn't get much better. Lifeless, lumpish and ugly, this piece of public sculpture, like so many others, illustrates the sad decline of the art (see, for example, the Diana statue in Kensington Gardens, the giant Lovers at St Pancras station, or this horror). Nor does it express anything at all about the Beatles: this sad and vacant looking foursome could be anyone. 
  On the other hand, one dockside statue that did impress me was 'Waiting', a monument to the Liverpool working horse, by the equine sculptor Judy Boyt. Liverpool once had more working horses on its streets than any city but London, and their role in carrying goods from the docks to warehouses and railway depots helped to keep supply lines open during both world wars. 'Waiting' is wonderfully lifelike and has real presence and character. The humble working horse has ended up with a far more impressive monument than the Fab Four. And why not? 

Only a pipe rack!

 I've been away for a few days, visiting Chester – a city I know quite well – and Liverpool, a city I had never visited before, and against which I had long nursed a quite groundless prejudice (probably caused by over-exposure to certain Scouse celebrities). In the event, I found it a fascinating, in places beautiful, city, full of fine buildings, and with a splendid waterfront, albeit one disfigured with some hideous recent crimes against architecture. And the people, such as we came across, were all pleasant and helpful. But the highlight, for me, was undoubtedly the cathedral – not the Roman Catholic one, 'Paddy's wigwam' (a wonderful interior, let down by a messy exterior that is not ageing at all well), but the Anglican cathedral on St James's Mount.
  I knew this building only from pictures and the mixed reports of visitors, and my expectations were not particularly high. Pictures certainly don't do it justice, and I feared it might turn out to be an overblown, essentially arid exercise in an outmoded style (i.e. Gothic). Nothing had prepared me for the breath-taking impact of this vast and astonishing building, the largest cathedral in Britain, and one of the largest in the world: no wonder it took so long to build – all in all from 1904 to 1978. One of the many astonishing things about it is that the architect, Giles Gilbert Scott, was just 22 years old, with no buildings to his name (only a pipe rack!), when he won the commission in open competition – and he was a Catholic, which was hardly a help. Scott's original design inevitably went through many changes over the years, but its essence remained – and that essence is true, living Gothic. Nothing about this cathedral feels like a pastiche; it all breathes the genuine spirit of Gothic (or so it seemed to me). The craftsmanship is of stunning quality, every detail works, there is beauty wherever you look, and the disposition of the vast spaces is brilliantly managed. It's not only the scale that is staggering – it's, well, it's everything. Despite its late date, and despite the competition, I would rate Liverpool Cathedral one of the great Gothic buildings of England. 

Butterflies, Oasis

 It's been a pretty terrible year for butterflies, one of the worst I can remember – and for the usual reason: the English weather.  A cool, wet spring was followed by a cool, wet early summer, with far too few sunny intervals. When proper summer weather finally arrived, it was too late for many species; the damage had been done. What made my butterfly year more painful was the weather divide that developed in high summer, with the Southeast often basking in warm sunshine while up here in Mercia we were having no such luck – and unfortunately I wasn't able to get down to my old butterfly haunts in the hills and downs of Surrey. I don't miss much about 'down South', but I certainly miss those landscapes and those butterflies... However, one species has been keeping my spirits up all through this disappointing season – the Speckled Wood, which has been as abundant as ever (that's one in my picture above, feeding on Astrantia in my garden). Speckled Woods have been flying, feeding and basking in the garden every vaguely sunny day since April, from early in the morning to the last evening sun, and I never cease to wonder at the beauty of this common, but uncommonly lovely, butterfly. When I was a boy it was still a woodland specialist, flying in the dappled sunlight of woodland rides and margins, but over the years it has hugely extended its range, and is now adding its little touch of beauty to virtually every environment, even urban and suburban. A reason to be cheerful, if ever there was one. 

                                                                                  *
Not that I care, but I can't help noticing that the proposed comeback of Oasis (a popular beat combo, m'lud) is causing a mighty stir among the commentariat, with many pitching in to tell us how much they've always loathed the band and all their works. I noticed yesterday, on the Spectator website, that Marcus Berkmann has decided that Wonderwall is 'the worst song ever written'. A large claim. Then, that same evening, in a repeat episode of the rather wonderful This Country on BBC2, Kerry Mucklowe came up with the perfect origin story for that very song: her dad, she declared, wrote it on a beermat one evening at The Keeper's Arms, then threw it away because it was rubbish. As it happened, two brothers were in the pub that night – Matt and Luke Goss, aka Bros. They picked up the beermat, took one look and threw it away – but then in walked the Gallagher brothers, and the rest in history. Sounds quite plausible to me. 

Rebecca Clarke

 A musical anniversary today: Rebecca Clarke, one of a number of women composers who are now getting their due in terms of recognition and airplay, was born on this day in 1886. She had a tough start in life and in music, thanks to her abusive father, who often beat her, and who withdrew her from the Royal Academy of Music after her harmony teacher, Percy Hilder Miles, proposed to her. She later studied at the Royal College of Music under Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, who arranged for her to study the viola under Lionel Tertis. However, while still at the college, she angered her father by criticising his extramarital activities, and in response he turned her out of the house and cut off her funds. Fortunately by then Clarke was able to support herself as a professional violist, becoming one of the first female professional orchestral musicians, and performing with all the greats of the day – Schnabel, Heifetz, Casals, Rubinstein, etc. In 1916 she moved to the United States to continue her performing career, and began to perform her own works. She later returned to London, then found herself stranded in the States when war broke out in 1939. It was while living in America that she wrote this piece, her Passacaglia on an Old English Tune, which seems to me impressive and rather beautiful – 

Altitudes

 The more I read of Richard Wilbur, the more I admire him. Here is a poem I happened upon while browsing last night – a brilliant evocation of two strongly contrasted 'altitudes': the painted dome populated by complacent, pleasure-loving gods, sustained by the prayer of mortals; and the little square 'cupola' to which  Emily Dickinson could climb and find 'a wild shining of the pure unknown'.  

Altitudes

                       1
    Look up into the dome:
It is a great salon, a brilliant place,
   Yet not too splendid for the race
Whom we imagine there, wholly at home

    With the gold-rosetted white
Wainscot, the oval windows, and the fault-
    less figures of the painted vault.
Strolling, conversing in that precious light,  

    They chat no doubt of love.
The pleasant burden of their courtesy
    Borne down at times to you and me
Where, in this dark, we stand and gaze above.

     For all they cannot share,
All that the world cannot in fact afford,
    Their lofty premises are floored
With the massed voices of continual prayer.

 
                         2

     How far it is from here
To Emily Dickinson’s father’s house in America;
     Think of her climbing a spiral stair
Up to the little cupola with its clear

     Small panes, its room for one.
Like the dark house below, so full of eyes
     In mirrors and of shut-in flies,
This chamber furnished only with the sun

      Is she and she alone,
A mood to which she rises, in which she sees
     Bird-choristers in all the trees
And a wild shining of the pure unknown

     On Amherst. This is caught
In the dormers of a neighbour, who, no doubt,
     Will before long be coming out
To pace about his garden, lost in thought.

Henley

 Born  on this day in 1849 was the poet William Ernest (W.E.) Henley. I've written before about his most famous poem, the indestructible 'Invictus', and about his classic anthology Lyra Heroica. 
From the age of 12, Henley was dogged by tuberculosis in his bones, which resulted in the amputation of his left leg below the knee. The disease persisted, causing him long periods of intense pain, but he had tremendous vitality and resilience, and a huge presence. His friend Robert Louis Stevenson told him, after the publication of Treasure Island, that he had been the inspiration for Long John Silver, 'the maimed man ruling and dreaded by the sound'. He died at the age of 53 after a fall from a railway carriage caused a fatal flare-up of the tuberculosis. His ashes were buried with his beloved daughter Margaret, who had died at the age of five. (It was Margaret who had inspired J.M. Barrie to name his heroine in Peter Pan 'Wendy', the infant Margaret having habitually greeted Barrie as 'fwendy-wendy'.)
  With so much to contend with in his life, it is no wonder that Henley's poems tend to be muscular exercises in sinew-stiffening, but he had a considerable range, writing sometimes in a stark social-realist style, at other times favouring a quieter, melancholic manner, as in this piece, set, like Gray's 'Elegy', in the English twilight – 

A lark twitters from
the quiet skies:
And from the west,
Where the sun, his day's work ended,
Lingers as in content,
There falls on the old, grey city
An influence luminous and serene,
A shining peace.

The smoke ascends
In a rosy-and-golden haze. The spires
Shine and are changed. In the valley
Shadows rise. The lark sings on. The sun,
Closing his benediction,
Sinks, and the darkening air
Thrills with a sense of the triumphing night—
Night with her train of stars
And her great gift of sleep.

So be my passing!
My task accomplish'd and the long day done,
My wages taken, and in my heart
Some late lark singing,
Let me be gather'd to the quiet west,
The sundown splendid and serene,
Death.

And sometimes Henley could be playful, as in this jolly villanelle, written at a time when everyone was writing them –

A dainty thing's the Villanelle.
Sly, musical, a jewel in rhyme,
It serves its purpose passing well.

A doublc-clappered silver bell
That must be made to clink in chime,
A dainty thing's the Villanelle;

And if you wish to flute a spell,
Or ask a meeting 'neath the lime,
It serves its purpose passing well.

You must not ask of it the swell
Of organs grandiose and sublime –
A dainty thing's the Villanelle;

And, filled with sweetness, as a shell
Is filled with sound, and launched in time,
It serves its purpose passing well.

Still fair to see and good to smell
As in the quaintness of its prime,
A dainty thing's the Villanelle,
It serves its purpose passing well.

Henley's chief cultural legacy is of course 'Invictus', but a more surprising borrowing was the title and theme of Joe Orton's breakthrough play, The Ruffian on the Stair, taken from Henley's bleak 'Madam Life's a piece in bloom' – 

Madam Life's a piece in bloom
    Death goes dogging everywhere:
  She's the tenant of the room,
    He's the ruffian on the stair.
    You shall see her as a friend,
  You shall bilk him once or twice;
    But he'll trap you in the end,
  And he'll stick you for her price.
  With his kneebones at your chest,
  And his knuckles in your throat,
You would reason — plead — protest!
  Clutching at her petticoat;
  But she's heard it all before,
Well she knows you've had your fun,
  Gingerly she gains the door,
And your little job is done.

But let's end with something jollier. Here is 'In Rotten Row' –

In Rotten Row a cigarette
I sat and smoked, with no regret
For all the tumult that had been.
The distances were still and green,
And streaked with shadows cool and wet.

Two sweethearts on a bench were set,
Two birds among the boughs were met;
So love and song were heard and seen
In Rotten Row.

A horse or two there was to fret
The soundless sand; but work and debt,
Fair flowers and falling leaves between,
While clocks are chiming clear and keen,
A man may very well forget
In Rotten Row.

Footnote: I have been informed that the photo above is not of Henley but of another extravagantly bearded poet, Joaquin Miller. Whoops. Here is Henley –

'Here lies my dog...'

 The excellent local history website Lichfield Discovered yesterday carried a piece about a dog's gravestone found behind a former solicitors' offices on one of the older streets. It commemorates a dog called Purchaser, born 1897, died 1907 – a dog whose 'gentle manners and reasonable disposition endeared him to all who knew him'. He was a bulldog owned by one of the solicitors, and had won first prize at the Birmingham and Midland Counties bulldog show in 1900. The gravestone carries, at its foot, an epitaph in verse which the Lichfield Discovered reporter hadn't managed to decipher in full. So, unable to resist the lure of a good epitaph, I went in search of the stone and, with the help of a man who is looking after the now vacant property, found it and got to work uncovering the verse epitaph at the foot of the stone, the last lines of which were obscured by earth and vegetation. After a little scrabbling and squinting, I had them. Here is Purchaser's verse epitaph: sweet, effective and touching...

           Here lies my dog
           Who now without my aid
           Hunts through the shadow land
           Himself a shade
           Or couched intent
           Before some ghostly gate
           Waits for my step
           As here he used to wait.

I think, in its simple way, it's as good as Byron's famous epitaph for his dog Boatswain, inscribed on his monument at Newstead Abbey – 

Near this Spot
are deposited the Remains of one
who possessed Beauty without Vanity,
Strength without Insolence,
Courage without Ferocity,
and all the virtues of Man without his Vices.
This praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery
if inscribed over human Ashes,
is but a just tribute to the Memory of
Boatswain, a Dog
who was born in Newfoundland May 1803
and died at Newstead November 18th 1808.

Boatswain died of rabies, which Byron reportedly nursed him through, without fear of injury or infection. I hope Purchaser's end was more peaceful. 

Dryden and Purcell

 Born on this day in 1631 was the poet and critic John Dryden, the dominant literary figure of Restoration England. Among many other activities, he collaborated with the greatest composer of his time, Henry Purcell, notably on the semi-opera King Arthur, which included one of the most beautiful songs in all of English music – 'Fairest Isle':

Dryden recognised Purcell's musical genius, and on his death wrote this ode:

Mark how the Lark and Linnet sing,
With rival Notes
They strain their warbling Throats,
To welcome in the Spring.
But in the close of Night,
When Philomel begins her Heav'nly lay,
They cease their mutual spite,
Drink in her Music with delight,
And list'ning and silent, and silent and list'ning,
And list'ning and silent obey.

II

So ceas'd the rival Crew when Purcell came,
They Sung no more, or only Sung his Fame.
Struck dumb they all admir'd the God-like Man,
The God-like Man,
Alas, too soon retir'd,
As He too late began.
We beg not Hell, our Orpheus to restore,
Had He been there,
Their Sovereign's fear
Had sent Him back before.
The pow'r of Harmony too well they know,
He long e'er this had Tun'd their jarring Sphere,
And left no Hell below.

III

The Heav'nly Choir, who heard his Notes from high,
Let down the Scale of Music from the Sky:
They handed him along,
And all the way He taught, and all the way they Sung.
Ye Brethren of the Lyre, and tuneful Voice,
Lament his Lot: but at your own rejoice.
Now live secure and linger out your days,
The Gods are pleas'd alone with Purcell's Lays,
Nor know to mend their Choice.

It's a notably musical ode, one that seems to be crying out to be set to music. And so it was, by John Blow. It begins thus – 

 

The Head of the Jaeger School of Literature

 As you might expect of a book 'written under considerable difficulty', Edith Sitwell's autobiography, Taken Care Of, is something of a mess – but, most of the time, it's a richly enjoyable mess. As is invariably the case with autobiographies, the early chapters are the best, the most vivid and interesting, and things tail off later (for a classic example of this, see Charles Chaplin's My Autobiography). As Taken Care Of goes on, it becomes a collection of more or less random memories, vignettes, critiques savage and laudatory, and short miscellaneous essays, hung on the flimsiest of autobiographical frameworks, but it does manage to come in to land in the near present, with Edith's memories of America, including accounts of a hair-raising visit to Los Angeles's Skid Row (which sounds even worse than LA today) and of a conversation with Marilyn Monroe, with whom she had an instant and genuine rapport. 
  Along the way Miss Sitwell airs her views on poetry, and quotes far too much of her own verse, which had always struck me as strident, self-conscious and hollow, but of which she herself clearly thought very highly. She also regarded both Dylan Thomas and Roy Campbell as great poets – wrong on both counts, I'd say. As promised in the Preface, she lambasts Wyndham Lewis and D.H. Lawrence (who 'looked like a plaster gnome on a stone toadstool in some suburban garden. At the same time he bore some resemblance to a bad self-portrait by Van Gogh.') Though she praises some of Lawrence's poetry, she delivers a well deserved kicking to that terrible novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover, observing that Lawrence's 'loathing for Sir Clifford Chatterley amounted practically to a mania. Sir Clifford was so criminally offensive as to be a Baronet, and he, with most men, fought like a tiger in the First World War, instead of remaining safely at home, fornicating and squealing, shrilly, about the oppression from which he had suffered.' As for the notorious sex scenes, Edith describes some of these with due distaste, and concludes: 'I do not think the four-letter words in this book are as harmful as the descriptions of sexual intercourse, which in my opinion would freeze any impulse to love between boy and girl.' In a lecture at Liverpool, Miss Sitwell dubbed Lawrence 'the head of the Jaeger school of Literature since he was soft, hot and woolly.
  Messrs Jaeger protested mildly. "We are soft," they wrote to me, "and we are woolly, but we are never hot, owing to our system of slow conductivity."
  I replied, begging them to invent a system of slow conductivity for Lawrence, adding that I regretted having made the comparison, since their works are unshrinkable by Time, whereas the works of Mr Lawrence, in my opinion, are not.'