Proms, Flags

 It's that time of year again. Summer has elided into autumn, and that sure calendrical marker, the Last Night of the Proms, has been and gone. Watching it on television, I found this year's event rather underwhelming – too many musical 'lollipops' with little of substance to balance them, efficient but uninspired conducting, and rather too much downright silliness  (the spectacle of the BBC's finest musicians performing a classicised version of 'Bohemian Rhapsody' with straight faces will not be easily forgotten). Still, Alison Balsom delivered a typically brilliant farewell performance, the soprano Louise Alder showed real star quality, and I fancy Rachel Portman's 'The Gathering Tree' will be a big choral hit. The traditional finale could hardly fail, but I felt it could have done with rather more oomph. And of course the flags were waving. There were plenty of union jacks, especially towards the front, this being one of the few occasions on which waving the national flag is considered safe, not a step on the slippery slope to racism, ultranationalism and fascism (in contrast to the intolerably vulgar shows of patriotism at the 'far right' rally in London earlier the same day, sniff sniff). There were also large numbers of EU flags, and even EU hats, designed to be seen from above; indeed, I got the impression that the EU flags were more numerous than last year, and actually outnumbered the union jacks – will the Remainers never give up? I suppose, to take a charitable view, they are making the fatal error of mistaking the EU for that wondrous thing, Europe – and hence European civilisation, European music, etc. English classical music, except at its folky fringes, certainly belongs in the European tradition, just as English popular music belongs in the American tradition. But all that, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with the EU. 

The Comforters

 Lately it occurred to me that, what with one thing and another, I hadn't read a novel for quite a while – I think the last one was probably James Hamilton Paterson's Rancid Pansies. So I reached for a recent charity shop find, Muriel Spark's The Comforters. This was her first novel (one of the dwindling few I haven't read) and it finds her sprinting from the starting blocks with absolute assurance, already fully formed, unique and unmistakable. It was published in 1957, but it could have come from any period of her career, though it does play with some elements of late 1950s fiction, notably the 'Reds under the bed' thriller, the supernatural tale, and the more modish experiments with 'metafiction'. Caroline Rose, who is trying to write a book about the modern novel, finds herself plagued by the sound of typewriter keys and a voice narrating her own thoughts and actions, as if – exactly as if – she is a character in a novel that someone else, the 'Typewriting Ghost', is writing. This element of the story was inspired by Spark's own uncanny experiences while she was having a paranoid breakdown, brought on by overwork, stress, a baked-bean diet and the consumption of large quantities of dexedrine. Meanwhile, Caroline's off-and-on lover Laurence, a sports commentator (of all things) with an excessively inquisitive mind, has become convinced that his grandmother, in her cottage down in Sussex, is running some kind of nefarious gang – and when he finds diamonds hidden in a loaf of bread, this seems to confirm his suspicions. Caroline's friend, the self-styled Baron Stock, a bookseller of sorts, has suspicions of his own, and is convinced that he is on the trail of Britain's leading diabolist. Spark weaves these threads (and more) together with her familiar lightness of touch and, as ever, without wasting a word. She leaves you fully satisfied, and yet in a state of uncertainty as to what exactly it is that you have been reading. If only we could say the same about more recent fiction, which tends to leave you both unsatisfied and quite sure what you've seen reading...
   Oddly, Evelyn Waugh happened upon The Comforters just as he was finishing his own account of a paranoid breakdown, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Like Spark, Waugh was tormented by voices – brought on in his case by a hair-raising combination of bromide, chloral and crème be menthe, imbibed in response to rheumatic pains and insomnia. Both he and Spark had their breakdowns in January 1954, but Waugh did not intrude on Spark's hallucinations – no, she believed she was being persecuted by T.S. Eliot, no less, who was sending her coded messages in the programme notes to The Confidential Clerk and in his Faber blurbs. Anyway, Spark recovered, Waugh recovered, and the front cover of my edition of The Comforters has the endorsement of Evelyn Waugh: 'Brilliantly original and fascinating,' he says. And so it is. 
   

'Poplar, absolute danseuse...'

 The poplars are fell'd... Ten poplar trees in Lichfield's delightful Beacon Park have been felled by the council, on the perfectly good grounds that they were shedding huge branches onto well frequented paths. But it is always sad to see them go. As Cowper put it, in a beautifully crafted poem lamenting the loss of a line of poplars by the river Ouse near his home in Olney –

The Poplar Field 

The Poplars are fell’d, farewell to the shade
And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade,
The winds play no longer and sing in the leaves,
Nor Ouse on his bosom their image receives.

Twelve years have elapsed since I last took a view
Of my favourite field and the bank where they grew,
And now in the grass behold they are laid,
And the tree is my seat that once lent me a shade.

The black-bird has fled to another retreat
Where the hazels afford him a screen from the heat,
And the scene where his melody charm’d me before,
Resounds with his sweet-flowing ditty no more.

My fugitive years are all hasting away,
And I must e’er long lie as lowly as they,
With a turf on my breast and a stone at my head
E’er another such grove shall arise in its stead.

’Tis a sight to engage me if any thing can
To muse on the perishing pleasures of Man;
Though his life be a dream, his enjoyments, I see,
Have a Being less durable even than he.

Poplar trees are more liable than most to be cut down, simply because they are so brittle and so prone to shed branches, or indeed be blown over (they are shallow-rooted). But they are glorious things in their prime – trees with tremendous presence, beautiful alike to the eye and the ear (the rustling of their leaves is one of the loveliest sounds of summer). Here is Gerard Manley Hopkins lamenting his lost poplars – at Binsey, a village on the edge of Oxford – and deploring man's impact on nature, in language freed of all Cowperian restraint:
 
Binsey Poplars

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
   Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
   All felled, felled, are all felled;
     Of a fresh and following folded rank
                Not spared, not one
                That dandled a sandalled
         Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.
   O if we but knew what we do
          When we delve or hew—
     Hack and rack the growing green!
           Since country is so tender
     To touch, her being só slender,
     That, like this sleek and seeing ball
     But a prick will make no eye at all,
     Where we, even where we mean
                To mend her we end her,
           When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
   Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
      Strokes of havoc únselve
           The sweet especial scene,
      Rural scene, a rural scene,
      Sweet especial rural scene.

(The Binsey poplars, by the way, were replaced with a fine avenue that lasted until 2004.)
Hopkins's evocation of the poplar's restless presence in the opening lines is vivid, but I think Richard Wilbur catches it supremely well in this short poem, which pairs the poplar with the sycamore, another tree that grows abundantly in Lichfield, that city of trees –  

Poplar, Sycamore

Poplar, absolute danseuse,
Wind-wed and faithless to wind, trowelling air
Tinily everywhere faster than air can fill,
Here whitely rising, there
Winding, there
Falling to earth with a greener spill,
Never be still, whose pure mobility
Can hold up crowding heaven with a tree. 

Sycamore, trawled by the tilt sun,
Still scrawl your trunk with tattered light, and keep
The spotted toad upon your patchy bark,
Baffle the sight to sleep,
Be such a deep
Rapids of lacing light and dark,
My eye will never know the dry disease
Of thinking things no more than what he sees.

And here, for good measure, is one more poplar poem, by Siegfried Sassoon, recalling a moment of something like bliss – 

A Poplar and the Moon

There stood a Poplar, tall and straight; 
The fair, round Moon, uprisen late, 
Made the long shadow on the grass 
A ghostly bridge ’twixt heaven and me. 
But May, with slumbrous nights, must pass;
And blustering winds will strip the tree. 
And I’ve no magic to express 
The moment of that loveliness; 
So from these words you’ll never guess 
The stars and lilies I could see.

'Crickets – Crows – and Retrospects'

 Ever since the turn of the month I've been meaning to post a September poem – and now, thanks to an American friend who's an Emily Dickinson maven, I have one. Here it is...

September’s Baccalaureate
A combination is
Of Crickets—Crows—and Retrospects
And a dissembling Breeze

That hints without assuming—
An Innuendo sear
That makes the Heart put up its Fun
And turn Philosopher.

I think those few eloquent lines perfectly catch the elusive, melancholy feel of September, of summer quietly moving into autumn.  

Talking of which, the summer being over, we now have Butterfly Conservation's report on the findings of their Big Butterfly Survey, that annual exercise in citizen science, in which this year 125,000 people took part – and sure enough, as predicted here, they've managed to turn it into a bad news story. Everyone with eyes to see knows that 2025 was the best butterfly year we've had in a long time – but that goes against the approved narrative of relentless decline, so obviously a good deal of spin was called for. You can't blame Butterfly Conservation, whose fund-raising is always going to go better in a climate of urgency and crisis. Long-term decline in butterfly numbers is undeniably a fact, but things are far from simple. The Big Butterfly Count is never going to be anything more than a snapshot, and the most recent comprehensive survey, The State of the UK's Butterflies 2022, showed a mixed picture. Despite the background trend of overall decline, more than half of butterfly species showed increases in either abundance or distribution or both (and abundance was up by 35 per cent in Scotland). Also, it's worth bearing in mind that 1976, the year from which all these surveys start, was a hot dry summer of extraordinary butterfly abundance, followed by an immediate decline (the result of drought shrivelling so many food plants).  
Anyway, enough of butterflies – for now. 

'I cannot tread even a limited space of air'

 'I suffer from a strong suspicion that things in general cannot be accounted for through any formula or set of formulae, and that any one philosophy, howsoever new, is no better than another. That is in itself a sort of philosophy, and I suspect it accordingly; but it has for me the merit of being the only one I can make head or tail of. If you try to expound any other philosophic system to me, you will find not merely that I can detect no flaw in it (except the one great flaw just suggested), but also that I haven't, after a minute or two, the vaguest notion of what you are driving at.' This is Max Beerbohm, in 'Laughter', the last essay (and one of the best) in his collection, And Even Now. I'm with him on philosophy in general, much though I've enjoyed sampling the more entertaining philosophers – Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer – but have never read Bergson, whose essay on laughter inspired Beerbohm's own. Alas, Bergson's essay did not help Max: 'I have profited from his kindness no more than if he had been treating of the Cosmos. I cannot tread even a limited space of air. I have a gross satisfaction in the crude fact of being on hard ground again, and I utter a coarse peal of – Laughter.'
  In fact, as Beerbohm straight away admits, he did no such thing; he merely smiled. 'The joyous surrender' of hearty laughter, he suspects, is becoming a thing of the past. 'It may be that in the early ages of this world there was far more laughter than is to be heard now, and that aeons hence laughter will be obsolete, and smiles universal – everyone, always, mildly, slightly, smiling.' He adduces examples of wild, tumultuous laughter from the annals of literary history – Byron and Moore convulsed with helpless mirth over the line 'When Rogers o'er his labour bent' (with even Rogers himself joining in); and Johnson's mighty fit of laughter one night by Temple Bar, when Johnson 'to support himself, laid hold of one of the posts at the side of the foot pavement, and sent forth peals so loud that in the silence of the night his voice seemed to resound from Temple Bar to Fleet Ditch.' Such laughter would indeed be a rare thing nowadays, when loud, raucous laughter is common enough, but seldom betokens mirth or good cheer, more a form of self-assertion bordering on aggression. Mercifully, the real thing – helpless, joyous laughter – still comes naturally to children, as it always did: I remember well the fits of irresistible giggles that would convulse me in boyhood, often, agonisingly, on solemn occasions. The most uninhibited, joyful laugh-er I know today is my second youngest grandson, William, who abandons himself to mirth with absolute delight and can end up literally rolling on the floor. Laughter survives; it surely always will. 

The Sheriff's Ride

 

Today was the day of the Sheriff's Ride, a grand Lichfield tradition, in pursuit of which the Sheriff, riding on horseback and followed by a train of other riders – these days including many on bicycles – perambulates the city (in former times county) boundary, in a less hands-on version of 'beating the bounds'.  I was up too late, and with too much to do, to see this year's procession, but I am heartily glad the tradition survives: 'How but in custom and ceremony are innocence and beauty born?' (as Yeats put it). 
  Samuel Johnson's father, Michael, happened to be Sheriff in the year of his son's birth, and led the ceremonial ride – presumably on a sturdy mount, as Michael was built on much the same generous lines as Sam; indeed Mrs Piozzi described him as 'a man of still larger size and greater strength than his son'.  After the ride, Johnson recalled, his father 'feasted the citizens with uncommon magnificence'. Michael Johnson was at that point approaching the apogee of his career as bookseller, businessman and widely respected local worthy. Sadly, in the years to come, he declined into genteel poverty, largely as a result of his lax business habits, a falling-off in the book trade, and the expenses of a growing family. Johnson, who spoke little of his parents, recalled that 'My father had much vanity, which his adversity hindered from being fully exerted.' Both his father and his mother are buried in St Michael's church, Lichfield, where a memorial stone in the nave floor carries a long Latin epitaph composed by their son in 1784, the year of his death and of his last visit to Lichfield. 

A Wealden Walk

   I've been off gallivanting again, but am now back home. This gallivant was a two-day walk (rather little of which was spent actually walking) down in Sussex, with my brother and the doughty remnants of the walking group. We spent the first day and night in Chichester, that fine town, where my brother, an expert on the subject, gave us an exhaustive tour of the cathedral – the site of the Arundel monument that inspired Larkin's famous poem, and of a touching memorial to William Collins, not to mention a fine statue of Sir William Huskisson, the first person to be run over by a railway engine, and some superb modern artworks commissioned by the art-loving Dean Hussey (whose own collection is now housed in Chichester's excellent Pallant House gallery). 
  The next day – only yesterday, but it seems longer ago – we drove north to walk in the Rother valley, beginning and ending in heather-and-gorse-clad heathland, but mostly in the lush, well-wooded river valley (the picture above shows Stedham bridge) – beautiful Wealden countryside, with glorious views of the South Downs. There had been much rain overnight and we had to shelter from a couple of morning downpours, but most of the time we had sun, and walking in such surroundings at the turn of summer/autumn was a delight. Even better, the walk route took in four lovely little Sussex churches, tucked away amid trees, all but one quite unspoilt by Victorian restoration. The undoubted gem was St George's, Trotton, home to some spectacular medieval wall paintings – below are the Seven Works of  Mercy from the west wall – and two very impressive brasses to members of the Camoys family (one commemorating the commander of the left flank at Agincourt and his wife, the widow of Harry Hotspur). There were butterflies too – Whites and Speckled Woods in abundance, with a Humming-Bird Hawk Moth thrown in. All of this, and we'd barely walked five miles. The riches of the English countryside are truly  inexhaustible.

Country Scenes

 Walking in Monsal Dale (one of the glorious dales of Derbyshire) on a sunny day a couple of weeks ago, I was pleasantly surprised to see large numbers of undoubtedly brown-skinned people walking the trails, frolicking in the water, and clearly having a high old time. At Monsal Head there was a group of decidedly Salafist appearance – heavily bearded man in grey jellabiya with a bevy of covered women – and even they were giving every appearance of enjoying the view, like everyone else. This is surely a good thing, people from other cultures and backgrounds tasting the traditional pleasures of English life. Ah yes, but do these people not know that the countryside is 'overwhelmingly white' and that hostility, cold shoulders and covert racism await any brown-skinned person who braves a country outing? Have they not read the latest report from the University of Leicester's Centre for Hate Studies (yes, there is such a thing)? It would seem not – but then these reports are not intended to be read by such 'minoritised communities' but to wring the withers of bien-pensant liberals. A funny old world. 

Diana

A melancholy anniversary today – that of the death, in 1997, of Diana, Princess of Wales. I remember lying in bed that night, dozing and following the barely believable story as it unfolded on the BBC World Service. It was clear from the start that the BBC had got their response wrong and had hugely underestimated the impact of this death on so many 'ordinary people'. Travelling in to work that morning, hours after the death had been confirmed, I could tell that something very big and strange was already under way – spontaneous, unrestrained public mourning on a scale we hadn't seen in our lifetimes. People were already making their way to Kensington Palace with sheaves of flowers, at the beginning of what was to become an ever more febrile, ever more extravagant round-the-clock display of grief, one result of which was a mountain of festering flowers, many of them rotting away in their cellophane sheaths. But that was all to come. When I arrived at work that morning – yes, at the Daily Mail – the shock and grief were palpable, and there were ashen faces (something you rarely see in real life) all around. Diana had been 'one of theirs' and they (unlike the BBC) knew just how big this death was, how hard it was going to hit, and what an extraordinary outpouring of grief it was going to provoke. 
   Diana, alas, has no fitting memorial – and her posthumous fate reflects a general decline to somewhere near rock bottom in the art of memorialising the dead. When the popular Queen Mary II, who shared the throne with William III, died, her death was marked by Purcell's sublimely beautiful funeral music. Diana's musical memorial was Elton John's mawkish update of 'Candle in the Wind' – 'Goodbye England's Rose'. When, in 1817, the much loved Princess Charlotte died, shortly after giving birth to a stillborn son, the nation was plunged into Diana-scale grief, and that feeling found artistic form in a grand, heaven-aspiring monument by M.C Wyatt – 

Diana's best memorial is probably the much derided water feature in Kensington Gardens – at least it has some life, unlike her sculptural memorial. When this was eventually unveiled, 24 years after her death, it turned out to be an absolute horror. Who is this creepy transvestite social worker rounding up waifs and strays? Diana? What? Really?!

Perhaps we shouldn't have been surprised. An age that routinely denies death, sweeps it away out of sight, and increasingly rejects even the very idea of a funeral is not going to be much good at producing memorials, especially as the art of figurative sculpture is also in decline. Just another sign of a culture that has lost its bearings and is withering on the vine.   
   
  

An Arty Jaunt

 I'm back from a two-day, two-gallery London jaunt, taking in two lunches, visits to Tate Britain and the National Gallery and, between them, an overnight stay with an old friend. At Tate Britain (still 'the Tate' to me) there are two concurrent exhibitions: one devoted to Edward Burra, which I was keen to see, and one to Ithell Colquhoun, which my friend wanted to see. I dutifully trailed around the latter, finding little to enjoy in the works of an artist who pursued every modish dead end available – notably surrealism and occultism – with results that are rarely very interesting or attractive. She seem to have had some talent for composition and a good colour sense, but that is hardly enough to carry a full-scale retrospective. Burra, on the other hand, had more than enough going on to sustain a big retrospective – the first in forty-odd years. There was plenty to enjoy here,  especially in his lively jazzy scenes of Paris and Harlem low life, and the pleasure only flagged when his darker, more monumental work from the war years (Spanish and World) took over. For me, the best of this exhibition, by far, came towards the end, with Burra's wonderful watercolour landscapes from the 1970s, towards the end of his life. I've written before about Burra and these extraordinary late watercolours, which I only learned about from Christopher Neve's classic Unquiet Landscape.  Among those on display at the Tate are Valley and River, Northumberland –

Near Whitby – 

And Landscape, Dartmoor – 

As Neve says, these paintings really have to be seen in the original, and I was delighted to have the opportunity.
   The next day's visit to the National Gallery, with an even older friend, was a joy. Seeing more of the great rehang only confirmed my initial impression that this has been extraordinarily effective in bringing a great collection alive, and making a great gallery even greater. I'll be back. 

'When summer's end is nighing'

 Another warm and sunny day today – on a Bank Holiday, for a wonder – but there is no mistaking the end of summer feeling in the air. It's been a (mostly) glorious season, and, for a butterfly lover, one that has gone on giving and giving. I thought that Clouded Yellow in Worthing was going to be the last surprise of my butterfly year – but no, this morning, wandering in one of my Lichfield haunts, I was delighted to spot a late (second brood) Brown Argus, a lovely little butterfly that I thought I'd missed, not having seen one in the spring. What a summer it has been... There is a certain melancholy about its ending, but at least it has been a proper summer with proper summer weather – and the beauties of autumn are still to come. 
    The element of melancholy was inevitably very much to the fore when A.E. Housman turned his mind to the end of summer in this beautiful poem. Its five-line stanzas lend it a different energy from the more usual quatrains – and (spoiler alert) the last line is a killer. 

XXXIX (from Last Poems)

When summer's end is nighing
  And skies at evening cloud,
I muse on change and fortune
  And all the feats I vowed
  When I was young and proud.

The weathercock at sunset
  Would lose the slanted ray,
And I would climb the beacon
  That looked to Wales away
  And saw the last of day.

From hill and cloud and heaven
  The hues of evening died;
Night welled through lane and hollow
  And hushed the countryside,
  But I had youth and pride.

And I with earth and nightfall
  In converse high would stand,
Late, till the west was ashen
  And darkness hard at hand,
  And the eye lost the land.

The year might age, and cloudy
  The lessening day might close,
But air of other summers
  Breathed from beyond the snows,
  And I had hope of those.

They came and were and are not
  And come no more anew;
And all the years and seasons
  That ever can ensue
  Must now be worse and few.

So here's an end of roaming
  On eves when autumn nighs:
The ear too fondly listens
  For summer's parting sighs,
  And then the heart replies.

'A perfect association of splendour and intimacy'

 I've been staying the weekend with my Derbyshire cousin, and on Friday we crossed the border back into Staffordshire to check out a building I'd been meaning to visit for some while – the Church of the Holy Angels at Hoar Cross. I knew of its reputation as one of the great Victorian churches of England, the masterpiece of its architect G.F. Bodley – but the impact of the building, especially the interior, was still stunning (my photograph does it no justice). Built on an almost cathedral-like scale and in Bodley's favourite medieval style, Decorated, this tall cruciform church with an almost too massive central tower, has a powerful presence, and it is obvious even from the exterior that no expense has been spared. Inside, that impression is only strengthened, especially towards the liturgical East end (actually South, ensuring a blaze of noonday light through the great East window). The nave is relatively plain, and the whole building is quite dark, having virtually no clear glass – but a coin in the slot (shades of Venice!) bathes it all in light. Everything in this richly detailed church is of the highest quality, and as you wander round you notice more and more, and marvel more and more at the skill and verve of those who made it. It is a deeply satisfying aesthetic experience, and Hoar Cross is certainly one of the finest, most memorable Victorian churches I have ever seen. 
   The Church of the Holy Angels is set in a small village, amid gentle rolling countryside, and a little way from the church is Hoar Cross Hall (now a hotel, with a health spa attached), which was the home of the lady who commissioned Bodley and his partner Garner to build the church – the Hon. Emily Charlotte Meynell Ingram, who intended it to be a memorial to her late husband (whose fine medieval-style monument stands in the chantry). No budget was set for the work, and no effort or expense was spared in achieving exactly what Mrs Meynell Ingram and her architects intended. The church was commissioned in 1871, and building continued until 1876, with further additions being made at the West End after Bodley's work was done. It is no wonder that Bodley wrote afterwards (somewhat ungrammatically) 'Oh that one had more opportunities as was granted at Hoar Cross'. I'll leave the last word to John Betjeman, who wrote of Hoar Cross: 'The stalwart pink sandstone tower dominates the leafy hilltop. The tall nave, choir and transepts, so chaste and regular outside, make the stately interior all the more imposing because of its rich contrast with the exterior. It is ... a perfect association of splendour and intimacy architecturally expressed. This is because the green, blue and gold stained glass, the carved oak benches and screens, paved floors and sandstone walls blend into a perfect church interior of late Victorian vigour and hope.' 

Aimez-Vous Brahms?

This question was the title of a 1959 novel by Françoise Sagan – but don't worry, I haven't become a late-life Sagan fan.
There was a time, in the latter part of the 19th century, when, in an early outbreak of identitarianism, the musical world divided into lovers of Brahms, and therefore of the established Romantic tradition, or  lovers of Wagner, and therefore of 'new music' and new musical directions. So how you answered the question mattered. For myself, I've had problems with both men, but recently I have definitely been coming round to Brahms, mostly by way of his chamber music, but also with a new appreciation of his symphonies – a CD of the great Carlos Kleiber conducting the Fourth opened my eyes. And then I discovered, to my surprise, that Glenn Gould was fascinated by Brahms's late intermezzos, and rated his own recording of them among his best: 'It's the sexiest interpretation of Brahms's intermezzi you've ever heard – and I really think it's perhaps the best piano playing I have done.'
   In his (best) collection, The Cost of Seriousness, Peter Porter has a short, enigmatic poem titled 'A Brahms Intermezzo' –

                         The heart is a minor artist
                         hiding behind a beard.
                         In middle age
                         the bloodstream becomes a hammock
                         slowing down for silence – 
                         till then, this lullaby,
                         arpeggiated thunder
                         and the streams running
                         through Arcadia. I, too,
                         says the black-browed creature,
                         am in this vale of sweetness,
                         my notes are added to eternity. 

I wonder if this beautiful, melancholy piece was the intermezzo Porter had in mind?

A Joyful Rehang

 Yesterday I was in London, having a long lunch with an old friend. Before lunch, having a little time to kill, I retreated from the London hubbub into St Martin's In The Fields – surely the least numinous church in England, more like a Georgian assembly room, but at least it's quiet and peaceful. After lunch, having a little more time to kill before my train back, I went to have a look at the rehung National Gallery and, well... suffice to say, I staggered out half an hour or so later dazed with aesthetic bliss – this rehang is wonderful! It's a radical rehang too, affecting virtually every room, and bringing large numbers of paintings out of storage and into the galleries. Although the gallery as a whole can still be clearly read as a chronological history of western art, paintings from different periods have been placed together to brilliant effect, and, best of all, the great masterpieces have been given the space to work their unique magic, rather than being embedded in the 'context' of a time-bound narrative. My brief visit wasn't nearly long enough, but I spent the whole of it reeling from space to space in a kind of ecstasy – the great gallery has never looked better, or delivered more sheer delight. This rehang has been given the title The Wonder Of Art, but it might better be called (but for some unfortunate associations) The Joy Of Art. 'It must give pleasure,' Wallace Stevens wrote of his 'Supreme Fiction'. The rehung National Gallery does, and it gives it abundantly.

Bromide, Quinine and Croquet

 So there I was, strolling through the garden in front of Heene Terrace in Worthing – a fine sea-facing terrace of 1865 – when I spotted a smallish yellow-orange butterfly dashing about in a tearing hurry to be somewhere else. There was only one thing it could be – and, sure enough, it was: a male Clouded Yellow! This was a glorious late-season surprise, the first Clouded Yellow I've seen in several years. Of course it didn't settle so that I could have a proper look – they never do. 
   Other than that... Well, the rail journey gave me ample time to progress with my reading of Rosamund Bartlett's Chekhov: Scenes from a Life, a biography that tells the story of his life and art through the places he lived in and the places and landscapes (natural and man-made) that most inspired and moved him.  Thus we follow him from his boyhood in provincial Taganrog, on the edge of the southern steppe, to Moscow and St Petersburg, Siberia and Sakhalin Island, the French Riviera and Yalta – and his beloved country estate, Melikhovo. There, I was interested to learn, he had two 'assistants' in the form of his pet black-and-tan dachshunds, Bromide and Quinine (named by his sister Masha). These arrived as puppies, a gift from his friend Nikolai Leikin, and on arrival at Melikhovo they 'were fantastically happy to get here. They raced around all the rooms jumping up affectionately on everyone and barking at the servants ... In the morning, when I was walking them in the garden, they caused panic in the breasts of the yard dogs, who had never in all their lives seen such monstrous creatures...' Quinine was especially affectionate, and in the evenings would put her front paws on Chekhov's lap and gaze at him adoringly. The feeling was mutual, and Chekhov was equally fond of Bromide (known as Brom). 
   The dachshunds, like the yard dogs, led a free and easy life, fathering and giving birth to litters of puppies, one of them the result of an incestuous union. Chekhov wrote of Quinine giving birth three times a year to 'puppies who were a strange mixture of crocodile and mongrel'. Sadly, both dogs were to die, probably from rabies, six years later, during the last summer Chekhov spent at Melikhovo.

  I was also interested to learn that, at Melihkovo, Chekhov was a keen player of croquet, a game I'd always thought of as quintessentially English. It was, in fact, hugely popular in Russia towards the end of the 19th century, and remained so, even into Soviet times. Chekhov became such an enthusiastic player that he would insist on continuing games even as night fell and matches had to be lit to see where the balls were. Scenes from a Life is full of such fascinating and unexpected details, and particularly illuminating about Chekhov's relationship with the landscapes he loved, especially the steppe (his first 'literary' story was 'In the Steppe'). 'Chekhov was a landscape painter,' Bartlett writes, '– in prose.' 

'It is a seaside resort...'

 I shall be down in Worthing (again, on family business) for the next few days...

A Centenary

 Today is the centenary of the birth (in Miami, Florida) of Donald Justice, a very fine poet who is still undervalued – indeed, he's barely known on this side of the Pond – but whose works will surely last. Patrick Kurp pays fitting tribute on Anecdotal Evidence. I shall simply post a Justice poem, one of my favourites...

Thinking about the Past

Certain moments will never change, nor stop being—
My mother's face all smiles, all wrinkles soon;
The rock wall building, built, collapsed then, fallen;
Our upright loosening downward slowly out of tune—
All fixed into place now, all rhyming with each other.
That red-haired girl with wide mouth—Eleanor—
Forgotten thirty years—her freckled shoulders, hands.
The breast of Mary Something, freed from a white swimsuit,
Damp, sandy, warm; or Margery's, a small, caught bird—
Darkness they rise from, darkness they sink back toward.
O marvellous early cigarettes! O bitter smoke, Benton...
And Kenny in wartime whites, crisp, cocky,
Time a bow bent with his certain failure.
Dusks, dawns; waves; the ends of songs...

'He turned round to me again... and he just went under the water.'

On this day in 1979,  J.G. Farrell, author of Troubles, The Siege of Krishnapur and The Singapore Grip, died in bizarre circumstances, apparently falling into the sea from a rock he was fishing from at the remote Sheep's Head peninsula in West Cork. He had been living there for a while, enjoying a quiet life, working on his next novel, and relaxing by fishing for his dinner. Nobody knows exactly what happened on that day, but the weather was rough, with a storm brewing, and the likeliest explanation is that either a freak wave or a sudden strong gust of wind swept him into the water.
   By chance, an acquaintance who was out walking with her children and a friend came on the scene just after Farrell had fallen, and saw him in the water: 'We could see that he'd got boots on,' she recalled, 'and I was always telling them you mustn't go near the sea with boots – it's dangerous. I turned round to Sarah [her daughter] and she said, "Quick, Mummy, he's fallen in the water." And so I said I would go down, and that put them into hysterics. We could see him in the water – just his head. I said, "I'm going to go down to reach to him", but the children said, "No, you'll fall in." We called to him to take off the boots. But he didn't even attempt to take the boots off. He was quite close to me, only within about eight feet. He looked up at the boys and then round at me. I called to him to try and come towards me – because he was staying dead still. He wasn't moving his arms, but his head was completely above the water ... He looked at me, and then he turned round and looked at the children. He turned round to me again… and he just went under the water.'

  I imagine that scene, and the terrible feeling of helplessness, must have given the poor woman – and her children – many bad dreams. The probability is that Farrell was already on the brink of death by the time they saw him. He was physically weakened by the polio he contracted as a student at Oxford in the 1950s, and had probably succumbed quickly to hypothermia. His body was found later on the far side of Bantry Bay, and there was speculation in some quarters that his death was the work of the IRA or British Intelligence, while others spoke of suicide, but the coroner's verdict was clear and surely right – accidental drowning. A terrible accident, and a sad loss.

One from the Right

 A while back, I wrote about 'early disclosers', people who insist on telling you their (invariably dreary) political views as soon as they meet you. At the time of writing, I had never come across anyone whose views might be labelled 'right-wing' who has similarly made a point of declaring them at the first opportunity. Today, however, in the supermarket check-out queue, I was buttonholed by a chap who lost no time in telling me that he had stood as the UKIP candidate in some nearby rock-solid Labour seat and attracted an impressive (I think) 960 votes. He intends to stand for Reform in the next general election, as he thinks Nigel Farage is one hell of a fellow, and after that his plan is to become Minister of Transport in the Reform government – this because he is very exercised about the number of traffic roundabouts in Walsall, and the fact that the lights on pedestrian crossings stay on red even after all pedestrians have crossed the road. I fear his plans are a little unrealistic, not least because, as he told me, he is 81 years old, rising 82 – although, to be fair, he looked little more than 60, and is clearly fizzing with energy. By the time I was paying for my shopping, he had turned away and engaged two women in conversation, but I don't know if he was regaling them with the same routine. Anyway, it made a nice change to meet someone from the 'other side' who was keen to share their political views – though I would have preferred almost any other subject. 

All About Eve

 Last night BBC4 showed the classic 1950 movie All About Eve. It's a film I've seen before – at least twice, I think – and each time I was duly impressed, but it was only last night that I realised just what an amazing all-round masterpiece it is. The performances of all three principals – Bette Davis as ageing Broadway star Margo Channing, George Sanders as kingpin theatre critic Addison deWitt, and Anne Baxter as Margo Channing's scheming nemesis – are each perfect in every detail. Much of the acting is done by Bette Davis's and Anne Baxter's wonderfully expressive eyes, registering every tiny nuance of emotion. George Sanders's method doesn't make much use of the eyes, of course, but his is a powerhouse performance, a perfect blend of suave urbanity and veiled menace. And the script – well, the script (by the director Joseph Mankiewicz) is so good, so tightly written and so pitch-perfect, it would have made a fine film even without acting of this calibre. 
  As is often the case with films that seem so perfectly cast that they could never have been otherwise, All About Eve could have looked very different. The role of Margo Channing, so perfect for Bette Davis, was originally intended for Susan Hayward, and among others considered for the role were Marlene Dietrich, Gertrude Lawrence, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford and Ingrid Bergman. The part was actually given to Claudette Colbert, but she had to pull out because of an injury – and only then did the finger of fate finally swing round to Bette Davis. Similarly, Anne Baxter was only given the role of Eve after the first choice, Jeanne Crain, fell inopportunely pregnant. Making a film, even a masterpiece, is a tortuous process, and no one really knows what the end result will be until it's up there on the screen. 
  All About Eve was released in 1950 (and won a clutch of well deserved awards, including six Oscars). That same year also saw the release of another classic film about an ageing actress, Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard – and at least one other masterpiece, Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon. It was quite a year... 

Digging

 My two youngest grandsons, like all boys of a certain age, enjoy digging holes. My brother and I certainly did, and were quite prepared to entertain the possibility that, if we dug deep enough, we would get all the way to Australia. After all, we had been told, against all the evidence, that the Earth was round (just as we had been told, also against all the evidence, that it was spinning around at some incredible speed, and – every bit as implausibly – circling the Sun). So maybe one day, if we dug hard enough, we might emerge, blinking, in the land of the kangaroo and the kookaburra. Anyway, it was fun just digging as deep as we could get, and we occasionally turned up odd shards of terracotta and bits of cheap blue and white china (no clay pipes, alas, and rarely a coin). Once we dug an unusually large hole in the garden and covered it up with sticks and leaves to disguise it. Unfortunately our father happened to be passing that way a little later, and suddenly disappeared up to his thighs in the ground. To our relief, he was more amused than annoyed. He was always a boy at heart... 
Here is Richard Wilbur, in a fine poem, recalling his digging days: 

Digging for China

“Far enough down is China,” somebody said.
“Dig deep enough and you might see the sky
As clear as at the bottom of a well.
Except it would be real–a different sky.
Then you could burrow down until you came
To China! Oh, it’s nothing like New Jersey.
There’s people, trees, and houses, and all that,
But much, much different. Nothing looks the same.”

I went and got the trowel out of the shed
And sweated like a coolie all that morning,
Digging a hole beside the lilac-bush,
Down on my hands and knees. It was a sort
Of praying, I suspect. I watched my hand
Dig deep and darker, and I tried and tried
To dream a place where nothing was the same.
The trowel never did break through to blue.

Before the dream could weary of itself
My eyes were tired of looking into darkness,
My sunbaked head of hanging down a hole.
I stood up in a place I had forgotten,
Blinking and staggering while the earth went round
And showed me silver barns, the fields dozing
In palls of brightness, patens growing and gone
In the tides of leaves, and the whole sky china blue.
Until I got my balance back again
All that I saw was China, China, China.

Owls

I'm sure my readers need no reminding that today is International Owl Awareness Day. This is good news for me, because (a) I'm very fond of owls, and used to be able to make a pretty convincing Tawny Owl hoot, though the power seems to have deserted me now, and (b) it gives me an excuse to share one of my favourite Edward Thomas poems, 'The Owl' – 

Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved;

Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof

Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest

Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof.

Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest,

Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I.

All of the night was quite barred out except

An owl’s cry, a most melancholy cry

Shaken out long and clear upon the hill,

No merry note, nor cause of merriment,

But one telling me plain what I escaped

And others could not, that night, as in I went.

And salted was my food, and my repose,

Salted and sobered, too, by the bird’s voice

Speaking for all who lay under the stars,

Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.

And here is another, very different poem titled 'The Owl', by Walter de la Mare, its tortured syntax evoking a tortured state of mind – a long way from the poet's more familiar quiet lyricism:

What if to edge of dream,
When the spirit is come,
Shriek the hunting owl,
And summon it home —
To the fear-stirred heart
And the ancient dread
Of man, when cold root or stone
Pillowed roofless head?

Clangs not at last the hour
When roof shelters not;
And the ears are deaf,
And all fears forgot:
Since the spirit too far has fared
For summoning scream
Of any strange fowl on earth
To shatter its dream?

And here is yet one more poem titled 'The Owl', a charming and musical lyric by Tennyson –

When cats run home and light is come,
    And dew is cold upon the ground,
And the far-off stream is dumb,
    And the whirring sail goes round,
    And the whirring sail goes round;
         Alone and warming his five wits,
         The white owl in the belfry sits.

When merry milkmaids click the latch,
    And rarely smells the new-mown hay,
And the cock hath sung beneath the thatch
    Twice or thrice his roundelay,
    Twice or thrice his roundelay;
         Alone and warming his five wits,
         The white owl in the belfry sits.