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.'

Jane Austen's Pizza Parlour

 I've been in Worthing (a place in Sussex, a seaside resort) again, for family reasons. It's a place with literary associations – mostly with Oscar Wilde, about whose eventful stay in Worthing I have written before (here and here). There is also a Jane Austen association, which only came to light in recent times, as a result of research into the dairies of Fanny Austen, Jane's eldest niece. Jane spent a few months in Worthing in 1805, staying in Stanford's Cottage, a house on Warwick Street which then had uninterrupted views south to the sea and north to the downs. It no longer does, being hemmed in by later buildings, and is now, of all the unlikely things, a branch of Pizza Express – that's the exterior above, and inside there are many reminders of the Austen connection, in the form of portraits, quotations and graphics. 
  In Worthing, Jane and her party – sister Cassandra, brother Edward and his wife Elizabeth, and their oldest child, Fanny, with her governess – did the usual seaside things of the time: bathing in the sea and the warm baths, walking on the beach, buying fish, attending a raffle. Probably Jane wrote a fair copy of her early work Lady Susan, and added the 'Conclusion', but the main contribution of Worthing to the Austen oeuvre was that it very probably gave her the idea for Sanditon, the fast-developing seaside resort in the unfinished novel of that name. Jane and Cassandra were certainly on friendly terms with Edward Ogle, the speculator-developer who at the time of their visit was turning the once sleepy fishing village of Worthing into a fashionable resort with all the amenities – just as the energetic Mr Parker is doing to the fictional Sanditon.
  Even Edward Ogle might be astounded to see Worthing as it is today, and if he could find Stanford's Cottage again, he would surely be bemused. 'What' he might ask, 'is pizza? And what does it express?'
  
  
  

A Geonaut Supreme

The moles of Lichfield are numerous and industrious, and evidence of their activities, in the form of lines of molehills, is easily found. These doughty tunnellers are of course Mercian moles, descendants of the mole that shoulders the clogged wheel in Hymn IV of Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns –  

I was invested in mother-earth, the crypt of roots
and endings. Child’s-play. I abode there, bided my
time: where the mole

shouldered the clogged wheel, his gold solidus; where
dry-dust badgers thronged the Roman flues, the
long-unlooked-for mansions of our tribe.

By chance – actually not by chance, as I'd been impressed by a poem of hers that Patrick Kurp quoted recently – I found this very fine mole poem by the American poet Deborah Warren, a  cleverly rhymed sonnet that breaks, unusually, at line seven, when it moves from below the ground into  the air – 

 Mole

Earth is his occupation, and the moleworks the turf in his native breaststroke, swimminghallways into the sod—a geonautsupreme, and connoisseur of worms; I’ve heard himbreaking roots an inch beneath my soleand seen how the subterranean specialistcarves out for himself a single, simple role.I envy the expertise he brings to bearon dirt, the narrow office he was given;as for me, my habitat is thought,where I grope and sweat and scrabble out a living,forced to prove—up here in a windy lairas invisible as the mole’s—that there existsan animal who can dig a hole in air.
I still remember the first time I found a dead mole, how perfect its velvet coat was, and how out of place the poor creature, with its excavator claws and tiny eyes, looked above ground. Here is another very fine mole poem, Andrew Young's  'A Dead Mole' – 
        Strong-shouldered mole,
That so much lived below the ground,
Dug, fought and loved, hunted and fed,
For you to raise a mound
Was as for us to make a hole;
What wonder now that being dead
Your body lies here stout and square
Buried within the blue vault of the air?


 

Hopwas

 Yesterday I visited the village of Hopwas, just outside Tamworth, to take a look at the church of St Chad (who else?), an unusual and rather charming Arts & Crafts building of around 1880. It was designed by John Douglas of Chester, the man who built practically everything Victorian in that city and give it its distinctive half-timbered look. He certainly brought his love of half-timbering with him to Hopwas, creating a picturesque building that he envisaged as having something of a Swiss or Bavarian look, nestling among tall trees (some of them have gone now) and set against a wooded hillside. 

   The interior is as plain as the exterior is fancy, with a fine exposed collar and tie-beam roof and a wide chancel arch of (surprisingly) yellow brick. 

 The glass is the handsome East window is rather good, but I can't find out who it's by. Fortunately I'm a member of a church stained glass group on Facebook, so I'm hoping to find out from them. 
  The church, which I believe is technically a chapel-of-ease in the parish of Tamworth, seems to be very much alive, and is always open to the public. When I arrived, a wedding party was being photographed at length in the churchyard. As usual in these parts, the bride was generously proportioned, as were most of the wedding party, with the men looking uncomfortable in bright blue suits. Everyone seemed very happy, and it's always a pleasure, or at least a reassurance, to see these wedding parties, with which Lichfield and its environs abound. It is surely a sign of health in a society – and the triumph of hope, indeed of love – that people are still getting married. And in these parts, property prices being so much lower, they can even afford to get married quite young.

The Other Twilight

There are two twilights in every 24 hours, but in English we have only the one word, 'twilight', and that is invariably used for the ending of the daylight hours; for their beginning we have to say, if we want to be precise, 'morning twilight'. However, the Greeks – as is only fitting – had a word for it: amphiluke, which occurs just once in Homer, denoting the quality of light before dawn's rosy fingers get to work, when retreating night and advancing day are in equilibrium. In Latin, too, there is a word with the same meaning – diluculum. These fine words define the period when steals the morn upon the night and melts the shades away – and give me the perfect excuse to play Handel's sublimely beautiful duet from L'Allegro, Il Penseroso ed Il Moderato, sung here by Lucy Crowe and Mark Padmore – 'As steals the morn'...

'Omnibus, Omnibus!'

 I don't suppose George Moore (that's him above, drawn by Manet) is much read these days, though his Esther Waters is still in print, and it was televised as recently as 1977 (recently? That's getting on for half a century ago.) It's a fine realist novel that is still, I think, worth reading – I've read it twice, and also tackled Moore's Confessions of a Young Man, his lively memoir of life among the Impressionists in the Paris of the 1870s and 80s, but I don't think I finished that one; I seem to remember something vaguely off-putting in the tone.
   It seems that putting people off was rather his métier, especially as he grew older and more irascible, falling out with many friends, including Yeats. Oliver St John Gogarty said of him: 'It was impossible to be a friend of his, as he was incapable of gratitude.' Much of his work (including Esther Waters) was controversial in its time, and he was happy to court controversy. One of his later novels, The Brook Kerith, sounds interesting (and controversial), relating how a purely human Jesus did not die on the cross, but survived, was nursed back to health, and lived to repent his pride in declaring himself the Son of God. Moore travelled to Jerusalem to research this one, and it was presumably what was on his mind when Edith Sitwell had the misfortune to cross his path, at the Regent's Park home of Sir Edmund and Lady Gosse (as she recalls in Taken Care Of):
'Mr Moore had not, I think, arrived in a very happy frame of mind; and this state was aggravated by the conversational habits of another guest. At first Mr Moore remained steeped in an impenetrable gloom, but after a while he turned to me, and in a voice shaking with indignation, hissed: "Yes, yes, yes, forty million thousand yes's. How can I talk when someone says yes, yes, yes?"
   To this question, no answer could be returned, so I remained silent. Afterwards Mr Moore relented so far as to speak of a most interesting book called the Bible, which contained the intimate history of a most interesting people, the Jews, and, as well, to inform me that he had discovered there was a vehicle called an omnibus which would take one to any destination, should one be fortunate enough to attract its attention. As we left the house Mr Moore perceived one of these vehicles, and rushed towards it crying "Omnibus, Omnibus!" But alas, he was not fortunate on this occasion, and did not attract he attention of the omnibus, which went on its way without him.'

'A rather solemn and high-toned mediocrity'

R.S. Thomas was never Poet Laureate – would he have accepted the post if offered?  Probably not, but he did accept, among other honours, the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1964, and had  no objection to being nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996 (Seamus Heaney won). Betjeman, of course, was Poet Laureate, from 1972 to 1984, and made a fine job of it; he was probably the last laureate who really fitted the role. 
   In his essay 'Thank You, No' Joseph Epstein – with one published poem to his name – admits that 'I would like to be asked to be poet laureate of the United States so that I could refuse it, for this seems to me a job that would bring much greater glory to turn down than to take up'. He takes a dim view of the American laureateship, and an equally dim one of the British original, at least in its more recent manifestations: 'Andrew Motion, the current poet laureate [Epstein is writing in 2005], whose biography of Philip Larkin fingered the best poet of his time for being politically incorrect, is the perfect man for the job. What is wanted in a poet laureate is a rather solemn and high-toned mediocrity, someone whose work, though perfectly acceptable in its time, is unlikely to divert the attention of posterity.' (True enough generally, but not of Betjeman, who was certainly neither solemn nor high-toned.) 
  'As one runs down the list of American poets laureate,' writes Epstein, 'the only explanation for certain names appearing there is that they are either women or black or otherwise "with the show", as they say on the carnival grounds. Make the ostensibly sweet bow in the direction of political correctness, and art, like reality in the face of a social science concept, leaves the room.' Those words were true when Epstein wrote them, and even truer now, in a world in which 'political correctness' has been replaced by 'wokeness', a much more potent and pernicious force, which has been carrying all before it, driving out art and reality alike. 

'Readers in a baize library'

 I must have half a dozen slim volumes of R.S. Thomas's poetry, mostly dating from his later years and published by Bloodaxe Books. Today, browsing in my favourite charity bookshop, I found yet one more – a posthumous collection called Residues (2002), the title Thomas himself had given to a file of typescript poems he left behind at his death, from which his literary executor M. Wynne Thomas compiled the slim volume. 
One of the poems in Residues is 'Remembering Betjeman' – an unlikely subject perhaps, as these were, on the face of it, two poets of very different kidney, and Thomas, the 'Welsh Ogre', was not the most clubbable of writers, nor the most anglophile. However, Betjeman had a very high regard for Thomas, and in his introduction to the collection Song at the Year's Turning: Poems 1942-54, wrote that 'the "name" who has the honour to introduce this fine poet to a wider public [this was Thomas's first mainstream publication] will be forgotten long before that of R.S. Thomas'.  In 'Remembering Betjeman' Thomas recalls a visit to his fellow poet's London house, overlooking the graveyard of St Bartholomew the Great. 

The only greenness
from your city
window was that of the grass
in the cemetery
outside. The stones
bent over it likes readers
in a baize library
out of the way
of the traffic. I caught
your gaze homing
there and changed the talk
from poetry to prose, 
enquiring from the living
what only the dead
knew, who had all time
on their side.
                      Into that room,
now that you have left
it, the view enters
unchanged; the grass
is absorbing, the readers
have not looked up
from their breathless
pondering of the manuscript
of the deaf and dumb.
It is a slow view, but one
never to be overtaken
by the hurrying images
of that other window
your successor has turned to,
tipplers at an existence
that has everything
this one has not 
except its repose. 

'White with fury and contempt'

'When I was about twelve years old,' Edith Sitwell recalls in Taken Care Of, 'my father determined that He (I must really use a capital letter in this connection) must be portrayed for posterity ...  After a good deal of fussing, he decided that Sargent was to be the artist whom he would take under his wing, and he set about teaching the gentleman in question his business.
  My father was portrayed in riding-dress (he never rode), my mother in a white-spangled low evening gown and a hat with feathers, arranging, with one prettily shaped, flaccid, entirely useless hand, red anemones in a silver bowl (she never arranged flowers, and in any case, it would have been a curious occupation for one wearing a ball-dress, even if, at the same time, she wore a hat). 
  The colour of the anemones was repeated in my scarlet dress. I was white with fury and contempt, and indignant that my father held me in what he thought was a tender paternal embrace. (I was freed from my Bastille* during the period of the sittings.) Osbert and Sacheverell, sitting on the floor, playing with my mother's black pug, were the only beings that seemed to have any trace of life. Mr Sargent, a kind and charming man, kept them more or less quiet by reciting to them the following verse, repeated at intervals: 
        There was a young lady of Spain
        Who always was sick on the train – 
        Not once and again,
        Or again and again –
        But again and again and again.
  The portrait was painted against the background of one of the great Renishaw** tapestries – depicting Justice, as it happened.'

* The 'Bastille' was a hideous torture device intended to correct Edith's slight stoop and weak ankles. Under the direction of a Mr Stout (who looked like 'a statuette constructed of margarine'), she was, she recalls, 'incarcerated in a sort of Bastille of steel. This imprisonment began under my arms, preventing me from resting them on my sides. My legs were also imprisoned down to my ankles, and at night-time these, and the soles of my feet, were locked up in an excruciating contraption. Even my nose did not escape this gentleman's efficiency, and a band of elastic surrounded my forehead, from which two pieces of steel (regulated by a lock and key system) descended on each side of the organ in question, with thick upholstered pads at the nostrils, turning my nose very firmly to the opposite way which Nature had intended, and blocking one nostril, so that breathing was difficult.'
 Edith's dreadful father made much of her crooked nose when setting up the portrait with Sargent, who, exasperated by Sir George's constant fussing, revenged himself by painting Edith's nose straight and giving a slight kink to her father's. 

** The Sitwell family seat in Derbyshire.

Rescued

After a worryingly long midsummer absence, the Peacocks are back in good numbers, but some of them seem to have a death wish. This one I rescued from the middle of the road, where she had already survived the passage of one SUV (the wheels passed either side). I coaxed her onto my hand, took her home, and introduced her to the Buddleia bush. She seemed quite happy, and gratefully posed for the above photograph.

Hail

 A pleasantly warm summer day today, after overnight rain. Things were very different on this day in 1879, when a massive hailstorm, accompanied by incessant lightning, destroyed just about every glasshouse in the Thames valley. At Kew Gardens, some three thousand panes of glass were destroyed in the Temperate House, and seven hundred in Paxton's great Palm House. In total, the great hailstorm broke 38,649 panes along the length of the Thames valley, and the total weight of broken glass was computed as 18 tonnes. However, the 1879 storm was itself nothing like as serious as the hailstorm of August 2nd, 1846, when, in temperatures of 32 degrees C, hailstones smashed more than seven thousand panes of glass at the Houses of Parliament, three hundred at Old Scotland Yard and ten thousand in Leicester Square, as well as almost every pane of the Regent Street arcades, Somerset House, the Burlington Arcade and the picture gallery of Buckingham Palace, which was also flooded as the rain poured in. 
 Imagine the hysterical reaction if any of that happened today. The air would be thick with warnings of  impending apocalypse; there would be wailing and gnashing of teeth, rending of garments, and calls to repent our climate sins before the planet disappears under a mountain of hailstones. Back in the olden days, by contrast, they seem to have taken 'extreme weather events' (of which these hailstorms were by no means the worst) in their stride, putting it all down to that old unreliable, the English weather.  

Taken Care Of

 How's this for a Preface?

'This book was written under considerable difficulty. I had not recovered from a very severe and lengthy illness, which began with pneumonia. The infection from this permeated my body, and the bad poisoning of one finger lasted for fifteen months. This was agonisingly painful, and I could only use either hand with great difficulty, as the poison spread gradually. The reminiscences in this book are of the past. I do not refer to any of my dearly loved living friends. I trust that I have hurt nobody. It is true that, provoked beyond endurance by their insults, I have given Mr Percy Wyndham Lewis and Mr D.H. Lawrence some sharp slaps. I have pointed out, also, the depths to which the criticism of poetry has fallen, and the non-nutritive quality of the bun-tough whinings of certain little poetasters – but I have been careful, for instance, not to refer to the late Mr Edwin Muir (Dr Leavis's spiritual twin-sister). I have attacked nobody, unless they first attacked me. During the writing of certain chapters of this book, I realised that the public will believe anything – so long as it is not founded on truth.'

The writer is Edith Sitwell, and the illness she describes was all too real: she died shortly after writing this arresting Preface, on December 9th, 1964. It prefaces her autobiography, Taken Care Of, which I happened upon at a bookshop in the outwardly unprepossessing (new) market hall in Shrewsbury. This bookshop, with its well chosen, well curated and keenly priced stock, is presided over by, of all the unlikely things, an attractive young woman – a great rarity in a world traditionally peopled by festering male misanthropes. She clearly knows her stuff too... Anyway, I snapped up Taken Care Of, and I fancy it's going to give me a lot of pleasure, as did my earlier foray into Sitwell country, English Eccentrics –
 see here and here and here.
The opening chapter is titled 'An Exceedingly Violent Child', and begins with a quotation from Kierkegaard ('I am Janus bifrons: I laugh with one face, I weep with the other'), and later chapter headings include 'In Disgrace for Being a Female', 'The Primulas Had Meant No Harm', 'The Turkish Army Put to Flight' and 'Vulgarity As It Has Been, Will Be, Ever Shall Be, Amen'. I think it's going to be quite a ride.