Singing, Dancing, Singing

 The other day I came across this charming little poem by Iain Crichton Smith –

Two Girls Singing

It neither was the words nor yet the tune
Any tune would have done and any words.
Any listener at all.

As nightingales in rocks or a child crooning
in its own world of strange awakening
or larks for no reason but themselves.

So on the bus through late November running
by yellow lights tormented, darkness falling,
the two girls sang for miles and miles together

and it wasn't the words or the tune. It was the singing.
It was the human sweetness in that yellow,
the unpredicted voices of our kind.

It reminded me of the Lawrence Binyon poem I put up recently, also about a joyful, spontaneous performance (again with no audience in mind) – this time of dancing, rather than singing... 

The Little Dancers

Lonely, save for a few faint stars, the sky
Dreams; and lonely, below, the little street
Into its gloom retires, secluded and shy.
Scarcely the dumb roar enters this soft retreat;
And all is dark, save where come flooding rays
From a tavern window; there, to the brisk measure
Of an organ that down in an alley merrily plays,
Two children, all alone and no one by,
Holding their tattered frocks, thro' an airy maze
Of motion lightly threaded with nimble feet
Dance sedately; face to face they gaze,
Their eyes shining, grave with a perfect pleasure.

There is something peculiarly moving and joyful in these moments, beautifully expressed by Siegfried Sassoon in his most famous poem, 'Everyone Sang' – 

 Everyone suddenly burst out singing;

And I was filled with such delight

As prisoned birds must find in freedom,

Winging wildly across the white

Orchards and dark-green fields; on – on – and out of sight.

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;

And beauty came like the setting sun:

My heart was shaken with tears; and horror

Drifted away ... O, but Everyone

Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

Sassoon's poem reads as if it was written in an exalted state, in the glorious afterglow of the experience he describes. However, its genesis was very different, as he recalls in his memoir Siegfried's Journey: 

'One evening in the middle of April I had an experience which seems worth describing for those who are interested in methods of poetic production. It was a sultry spring night. I was feeling dull-minded and depressed, for no assignable reason. After sitting lethargically in the ground-floor room [at Weirleigh, his mother's home] for about three hours after dinner, I came to the conclusion that there was nothing for it but to take my useless brain to bed. On my way from the arm-chair to the door I stood by the writing-table. A few words floated into my head as though from nowhere. In those days I was always on the look-out for a lyric – I wish I could say the same for my present self – so I picked up a pencil and wrote the words on a sheet of note-paper. Without sitting down, I added a second line. It was if I were remembering rather than thinking. In this mindless manner I wrote down my poem in a few minutes. When it was finished I read it through, with no sense of elation, merely wondering how I had come to be writing a poem when feeling so stupid.'

The birth of a poem is indeed a mysterious event... 

The Bedford Prophetess

 

Today, I learn, is Bedfordshire Day. Who knew there was such a thing? Radio 3 was making the most of it this morning, with various Bedfordshire-linked musicians and, of course, settings of Bedford's own John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. I've visited Bedford several times over the years, on one occasion to visit what is surely one of the strangest museums in England – or at least one telling the strangest story. I recently discovered, 'among my papers', something I wrote about that museum for a magazine, who in the end didn't want it. So here it is...

[The Panacea Museum is at 9 Newnham Road, Bedford – very near the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, with its Edward Bawden graphics and William Burges furniture.]

'War, disease, crime and banditry, distress of nations and perplexity will increase until the Bishops open Joanna Southcott's box.' Some of us – most of us, I guess – are old enough to remember when announcements to this effect appeared regularly in the national press. (Actually, you don’t need to be that old; the campaign to ‘open Joanna Southcott’s box’ lasted into the 1990s.) But what was it all about? Who was Joanna Southcott, what was in that box of hers, and who wanted it opened?
 The story begins in the years of war and revolution around the turn of the 19th century, and leads all the way to… well, to Bedford, of all places, at the time of the First World War. England in the 1790s was experiencing a spate of self-proclaimed prophets claiming to have urgent news from God about an imminent millennium and what must be done to save mankind. Joanna Southcott was one of these, but she began as a follower of another, Richard Brothers, a retired seaman who liked to be known as ‘God Almighty’s Nephew’ (or, by way of variety, ‘Revealed Prince of the Hebrews’ or ‘Slain Lamb of Revelations’). Brothers’ prophecies caused a sensation in the early 1790s, but he set the date for the millennium too early. It came and went, and so did Brothers (ultimately into a lunatic asylum) – but Joanna Southcott, who was receiving her own messages from God, continued what he had started.
 One of Brothers’ claims was that he was the ‘Shiloh’ mentioned in Genesis, the new messiah who would gather the people of Israel – who, for Brothers, included the lost tribe known as the English – at the millennium, lead them to Jerusalem and set up a new world order. Joanna Southcott didn’t go quite that far; her ultimate mission, she believed, was to give birth to this messiah, Shiloh. Southcott was a Devon woman, a former domestic servant, who in her portrait looks more like a jolly farmer’s wife than a prophetess, but her barely comprehensible prophetic writings won her a devoted following of thousands, high and low, in London and beyond.
The Southcott cult reached a pitch of frenzy when Joanna declared that she was the ‘Bride of Revelations’, the ‘woman clothed with the sun’, and that she – although a virgin in her sixties – was now pregnant with Shiloh. While the satirical cartoonists of the time had a field day, six eminent doctors who examined her declared that she was indeed pregnant (so much for medical expertise), and her followers set her up in a grand London house and prepared for the great day. But alas, Joanna Southcott, far from giving birth, died of some kind of dropsy, and was discovered – surprise – never to have been pregnant at all.
  However, she left what was to prove a strangely enduring legacy – a trunk-sized, sealed box of prophecies, which, if opened in the presence of 24 bishops of the Church of England, would, she declared, initiate an era of eternal peace, love and harmony under the new messiah. Southcott also left behind a core of believers, but Joanna and her box faded into the background as other prophets emerged, in England and America, with their own ideas about the always imminent millennium.
  Then, a century after Southcott’s death, something extraordinary happened. In Bedford. Mabel Barltrop, a clergyman’s widow, began receiving visions and messages from (as she believed) God, who communicated with her through automatic writing. She became fascinated by Joanna Southcott’s prophecies, and found a sympathetic audience among Southcott’s rump of followers, who were happy to accept the ‘revelation’ that Mrs Barltrop was in fact the expected messiah, Shiloh, in person. They also believed her to be the eighth and last prophet of ‘the Visitation’, the prophetic tradition that had begun with Richard Brothers. Mrs B therefore styled herself ‘Octavia’.
  The community of followers, mostly women, that ‘Octavia’ formed around her in Bedford took the name of the Panacea Society, and it soon proved remarkably successful. As well as 70 members living in and around a ‘campus’ of large Victorian houses centred on Albany Road, there were up to two thousand in other parts of the English-speaking world as the Society grew and its influence spread through the 1920s and 1930s. The Bedford community lived quietly and drew little attention to themselves, but they pursued their two aims vigorously and in a thoroughly businesslike manner. These were to sell their cure-all ‘panaceas’ – little squares of linen dipped in water on which the prophetess Octavia had breathed (130,000 sold worldwide, many cures claimed) – and, yes, to campaign relentlessly, though leaflets, advertisements and petitions, to get those 24 bishops to open Joanna Southcott’s box. Adverts appeared everywhere – not only in the press but on billboards, hoardings and the sides of buses – and many thousands signed petitions calling for the opening of the box.
  The society continued to thrive even after Octavia’s death in 1934, but it gradually faded away over the post-war decades, finally being dissolved in 2012. However, that was not the end of the story: the society’s considerable assets were used to found a charitable trust – and to turn the Society’s ‘campus’ into a most fascinating museum, which tells the story of the Visitation tradition and the Panacea Society lucidly and objectively. There are informative displays on such unlikely phenomena as the House of David baseball team, formed of extravagantly bearded members of the Michigan-based Israelite House of David (which also had a successful basketball team, an orchestra and even a big band). The museum is a quite extraordinary place, with many rooms preserved as they were, everything in readiness for the visit of the 24 bishops and the opening of the box. There are some extraordinary artefacts, including the very fancy cradle made for Joanna Southcott’s divine child, and even the baby clothes that he was to wear. The buildings are ranged around a pleasant, peaceful garden (the Panaceans believed Bedford was the site of the Garden of Eden – a wonderful flight of fancy). In the garden are the chapel where the Panaceans worshipped, the Wireless Room where they relaxed and listened to the radio, a weeping ash tree that they believed to be ‘Yggdrasil’, the tree at the centre of the world – and, stuffed and mounted in a cage, Octavia’s pet jackdaw, Sir Jack Daw.
  As for Joanna Southcott’s box, that stands in the panelled room prepared for its ceremonial opening – but it’s not the real box, only a facsimile. There seem always to have been a number of replica boxes in circulation, just to confuse the sceptics (the psychic researcher Harry Price X-rayed one of them in the 1920s and found it contained only a horse pistol, a dice box, a purse and various odds and ends). Where is the real box? No one knows – or at least that’s the official answer. Wherever it is, there is no clamour now for it to be opened. The handful of remaining Southcottians in England are mostly in their nineties. It seems the curious prophetic tradition that led to the Bedford prophetess and the Panacea Society is finally at an end. However, it has a fine memorial in the Panacea Society Museum. And of course it’s never too late to open that box.  

'His books were read but ridiculed'

 I watched another episode of The Sea of Faith last night – number four (not yet on the BBC iPlayer but available, with blurry visuals, on YouTube). This one focused on two very different thinkers – Marx and Kierkegaard: 'compare and contrast' indeed. As with Freud, I wondered if Marx would be quite so prominent if the series were made today: back in 1984 I guess it was still possible to think that societies built on Marxist foundations might thrive – no longer, obviously. The half of the programme devoted to Kierkegaard was very much more rewarding, and Cupitt expounded the great Dane's ideas on Christianity quite lucidly, helped by an actor (Colin Jeavons) doing a good job of impersonating Kierkegaard. 
  Cupitt, I noticed, chose to pronounce 'Kierkegaard' with a silent 'd'. This triggered memories of Malcolm Muggeridge (last glimpsed here suggesting an 'orgy' to Kingsley Amis) screwing up his features hideously as he wrestled with the name, finally bringing out, in a long agonised drawl, something like 'Kierke-yaaaaaaaawd'. Whatever the challenges posed by his name, Kierkegaard was something of a hero to the late period, spiritual Muggeridge, who wrote this about him:  
'Against the new leviathan, whether in the guise of universal suffrage, democracy, or of an equally fraudulent triumphant proletariat, he pitted the individual human soul made in the image of a God who was concerned about the fate of every living creature. In contrast with the notion of salvation through power, he held out the hope of salvation through suffering. The Cross against the ballot box or clenched fist; the solitary pilgrim against the slogan-shouting mob; the crucified Christ against the demagogue-dictators promising a kingdom of heaven on earth, whether achieved through endlessly expanding wealth and material well-being, or through the ever greater concentration of power and its ever more ruthless exercise.'
  For a useful summing-up, elegantly expressed, we could turn to the American poet Dana Gioia. Here is his 'Homage to Soren Kierkegaard '–

Work out your own salvation
with fear and trembling.
                            —St Paul

I was already an old man when I was born.

Small with a curved back, he dragged his leg when walking

the streets of Copenhagen. 'Little Kierkegaard,'

they called him. Some meant it kindly. The more one suffers

the more one acquires a sense of the comic.

His hair rose in waves six inches above his head.

Save me, O God, from ever becoming sure.

What good is faith if it is not irrational?

 

Christianity requires a conviction of sin.

As a boy tending sheep on the frozen heath,

his starving father cursed God for his cruelty.

His fortunes changed. He grew rich and married well.

His father knew these blessings were God's punishment.

All would be stripped away. His beautiful wife died,

then five of his children. Crippled Soren survived.

The self-consuming sickness unto death is despair.

 

What the age needs is not a genius but a martyr.

Soren fell in love, proposed, then broke the engagement.

No one, he thought, could bear his presence daily.

My sorrow is my castle. His books were read

but ridiculed. Cartoons mocked his deformities,

His private journals fill seven thousand pages.

You could read them all, he claimed, and still not know him.

He who explains this riddle explains my life.

 

When everyone is Christian, Christianity

does not exist. The crowd is untruth. Remember

we stand alone before God in fear and trembling.

At forty-two he collapsed on his daily walk.

Dying he seemed radiant. His skin had become

almost transparent. He refused communion

from the established church. His grave has no headstone.

Now with God's help I shall at last become myself.

Kempff Again

 The first time I put up a Wilhelm Kempff post – this one – it attracted more readers than anything in years. So, as it's Kempff's birthday today (born 1895), I'm putting up an other beautiful specimen of his playing – his own transcription of the Siciliano from Bach's Flute Sonata, BWV1031:

Kempff wrote a number of Bach transcriptions, one of which features on Vikingur Olafsson'sgreat Bach album. It's a transcription of the Chorale Prelude 'Nun freut euch, lieben Christen g'mein', and it's a pretty astonishing performance. Indeed, Olafsson was even accused of overdubbing the chorale theme – which he somehow manages to play with his thumb, all his fingers being, er, otherwise engaged...

The Sea of Faith

 BBC4 – which, for much of the time, is the only BBC channel worth watching – no longer has a budget for making new programmes. This apparent deprivation has also been something of a blessing, leaving the channel free to delve in the vast BBC archive of classic (or at least worth another look) programmes from happier times. Lately we've had the brilliant prison sitcom Porridge (razor-sharp scripts, perfect lead performance from Ronnie Barker); that most amiable of panel games, Call My Bluff; the unbelievably erudite (by contemporary standards) music quiz Face the Music; Simon Schama's finest work, Landscape and Memory; and now – The Sea of Faith, Don Cupitt's epic series, now 40 years old, on the history of Christian belief, which popularised the idea of 'non-realist' faith, and even led to the launch of a 'Sea of Faith' network of like-minded Christians. Such thinking was at the time highly controversial, and Cupitt found himself under attack from believers and atheists alike. He also found himself famous – to the point where he had to wear dark glasses in the street to avoid being buttonholed by passersby every few yards. Cupitt, now 90 but clearly in full possession of his marbles, recalls this strange notoriety in a short introduction to the series. He says he greatly enjoyed making The Sea of Faith, which was genuinely what so many series today claim to be – a journey of exploration – but gave the impression that he has since journeyed far beyond its theology, into realms of ever greater uncertainty, though he remains, like Wittgenstein, 'incurably religious by temperament' (like many of us). 
Watching The Sea of Faith today – I've so far seen the first two parts – I was struck, of course, by how much more serious, incisive and spacious it is than anything that would get made today, and I found, to my surprise, that I had remembered quite a lot of it. One feature stands out, and marks it as a product of its time – the amount of attention Cupitt pays to Freud, a figure who was held in much higher esteem 40 years ago than he is today. But it's a wonderful series, well worth watching again, and I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of it. 

Name That Writer

 Here's a question that I think would flummox everyone in any literary quiz: 
Whose first novel begins with this sentence? 

'In this dream where he was weightless and unalive, where he was a pervading mist of consciousness that seethed and trembled in a vast stretch of dark, there was at first no feeling, only a dim sort of apperception, eyeless, brainless and remote, whose singular ability was to differentiate between himself and the darkness.'

Give up? Well, here's a clue, or rather more than a clue. This same writer's third novel begins like this: 

'William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen. Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree and accepted an instructorship at the same university, where he taught until his death in 1956. He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his course... Stoner's colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.'

Yes, it's John Williams, whose masterpiece Stoner, after being barely noticed for years, broke through and became a massive hit somewhere around 2010 (45 years after it was published). I've read Stoner at least twice, and written about it (e.g. here), but had never come across a book about Stoner until a blog friend warmly recommended one to me – William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life by Steve Almond. This recommendation was then equally warmly withdrawn, but by then I'd picked up a copy of the book, so, intrigued, I started in to read it. 
I soon discovered both why my friend had recommended it, and why he had so dramatically changed his mind. Almond's book begins as an interesting, often incisive, if sometimes overheated study of Williams's book, written in the light of Almond's amazed discovery of it when he was fresh from a 'creative writing' course and so steeped in 'show, don't tell' dogma that he could scarcely believe his eyes when he read that opening paragraph of Stoner. So far, so good, but as the book goes on, Almond himself, who is clearly a rather tiresome, self-advertising type, elbows his way to centre stage. He, his life story, his marital history, his political views (anti-Trump, you'll be astounded to learn  – clearly this is a man who doesn't mind going out on a limb) become the subject, rather than Stoner. This is a shame, because embedded in this book is the germ of a much better, and shorter, one – perhaps a long essay. It's a pity Almond was so fascinated by himself that he couldn't keep his gaze (which is often acute) focused on Stoner. I gave up well before the end.