'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.