A Great Walk and A Real Pain

Last weekend I was walking in Ladybird Land again – that land of abundant may blossom, tall cow parsley and gambolling lambs. This time it was in Derbyshire, where, because of the more northerly latitude, things were very much as they had been in Buckinghamshire on Mayday. Happily the weather was every bit as glorious, with warm sunshine and blue skies (populated by crazily energetic swifts and graceful swallows and martins). With my cousin, I enjoyed a long (by my present standards) walk, taking in Lathkill Dale, Youlgrave and Bradford Dale, ending at the pub/hotel at Over Haddon, with its magnificent views – one of the best walks in all of the Derbyshire Dales, though at present the river in some stretches of Lathkill Dale is dry. The chiffchaffs and other warblers were singing lustily, and Orange Tips, Brimstones and Peacocks were flying in good numbers – also, much to my delight, my first Common Blues of the year, three of them, looking fresh and lovely, in Bradford Dale (last year I only saw one in the whole year). The following day began with the grand surprise of a Wall Brown (once common, now scarce) settling to bask briefly in my cousin’s garden, and continued with my first Small Copper of the year (last year I didn’t see a single one) at a nearby nature reserve, along with my first definite Red Admirals of the year – and they were very definite, as is the way of Red Admirals. But it was not all butterflies and walking: we also watched a superb film, which I heartily recommend to all who haven’t seen it – A Real Pain, the directorial debut of actor Jesse Eisenberg.
  As all the world probably knows by now, this tells the story of two mismatched cousins, once close, now far apart, who use their recently deceased grandmother's legacy to go on a Jewish heritage tour of Poland. Eisenberg co-stars as the more sane and settled of the pair, while Kieran Culkin plays his maddening but strangely charismatic loose cannon of a cousin, who at every point seems about to throw the whole tour into jeopardy. Both performances are superb, but Culkin's is simply astonishing. 'Funny, heartfelt and moving in equal measure,' one critic said of A Real Pain, and it is all of those things. I'm already looking forward to watching it again.

'The spinner of fine cobwebs!'

Browsing in the (excellent) bookshop of the Samuel Johnson House yesterday, I found Beerbohm's Literary Caricatures: From Homer to Huxley, selected, introduced and annotated by J.G. Riewald (Allen Lane, 1977). It's a generous selection, with helpful notes by Riewald, a Dutch academic and Beerbohm specialist, setting each caricature in context. Naturally I bought it – for a mere £6 – and I'm sure it's going to provide me with much innocent entertainment. 
  The caricature above shows Mr Henry James Revisiting America, and was inspired by the author's final visit to the land of his birth, in 1905. A variety of stereotype Americans are responding to the great man: an Indian chief exclaims, 'Hail, great white novelist! Tunibaya – the spinner of fine cobwebs!' A negro mammy is in ecstasies: 'Why, it's Masser Henry! Come to your old nurse's arms, honey!' A plainsman remarks: 'Guess 'e ken shoot char'cter at sight!' An effete Harvardian wonders 'What's – the matter with – James?' A Beacon Hill hostess answers, 'He's – all – right!' And so on. As for James, Beerbohm transcribes his unspoken thoughts in a fine parody of his late style: 

'So that in fine, let, without further beating about the bush, me make to myself amazed acknowledgment that, but for the certificate of birth which I have – so very indubitably – on me, I might, in regarding, and, as it somewhat were, overseeing, à l'oeil de voyageur, these dear good people, find hard to swallow, or even to take by subconscious injection, the great idea that I am – oh, ever so indigenously! – one of them...'

Indeed.
The original of this caricature can be found at Lamb House, James's home in Rye.

Swifts and Mowing

 Time was when this blog could be relied on to hail the arrival of the first swift of the summer – a moment as thrilling and heart-lifting (for me) as the sighting of the first butterfly – but somehow I seem to have got out of the habit. For the record, though, I saw my first Lichfield swift this year on the 2nd of May, a little earlier than usual, no doubt because of the unusually welcoming spring weather. Just the one, passing over, but then, the next day, a pair putting on a fine aerial ballet as they circled and swooped, fluttered and raced, chasing down the airborne insects.  
   These have been busy days chez Nige, with much family activity, but this afternoon I had time for an activity I find quietly therapeutic and, in its way, pleasingly productive – mowing the lawn. The whole business has been so much more pleasurable since I ditched the electric mower and converted to manual – no cables, no fuss, no hideous noise, just a soft nostalgic clatter and rasp as the blades rotate and cut. Now I am on to my second hand mower, much superior to the first, and bearing the reassuringly English name of Webb (the first was a Bosch, of all things). Always, inevitably, when I'm mowing, Larkin's 'Cut Grass' comes into my head – one of the very few poems I still have by heart: 

Cut grass lies frail:
Short is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death

They die in the white hours
Of young-leafed June 
With chestnut flowers,
With hedgerows snow-like strewn,

White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne's lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer's pace. 

Larkin was a reluctant but diligent mower, who, when he moved to a house in Newland Park, Hull, had a lot of lawn to deal with ('for I have premises to keep, and miles to mow before I sleep' – not Larkin but a wag in a Peter de Vries novel). 'It has a huge garden –,' he wrote to Judy Edgerton, a regular correspondent, 'not a lovely wilderness (though it soon will be) – a long strip between wire fences – oh god oh god – I am 'taking over' the vendor's Qualcast (sounds like a character in Henry James).' It was an incident involving the Qualcast – a machine that is now preserved for posterity in the Larkin archive in Hull – that inspired Larkin's other great mowing poem, 'The Mower' – 

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found   

A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,   

Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.   

Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world   

Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.

The first day after a death, the new absence   

Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind   

While there is still time.

This would not have happened with a hand mower – just sayin'. 
(Incidentally, the ending of 'The Mower' was once quoted on The Archers – a moment almost as surreal as the time Nigel Pargetter, not the sharpest knife in the box, suddenly started spouting lines from the Georgics, in the original Latin. Even more incidentally, Larkin was a fan of The Archers, and used to fantasise about writing for them. That might have been interesting...) 

Mayday Walk

Yesterday – the warmest May Day on record – I was walking in the Buckinghamshire countryside. The hawthorn blossom was so richly abundant that it was like walking through an illustration of spring from a Ladybird book – and not just hawthorn: cow parsley in flower everywhere ('lost lanes of Queen Anne's Lace'), blue drifts of forget-me-nots, late bluebells still in flower, white comfrey, green alkanet, jack by the hedge, 'daisies pied and violets blue' in the fresh green grass. The horse chestnut candles were in full flower, the trees in young leaf, the sun shining gloriously – and there were butterflies galore: orange tips, brimstones, speckled woods, holly blues, peacocks, commas... All this and some peaceful towpath walking – no belligerent cyclists – and, from time to time, magnificent views across miles of rolling countryside. Although it was almost too hot for walking, it was a marvellous day, one to remember. 

  We covered no great distance, and our route was circular, beginning and ending in a village called Stoke Hammond (church locked, alas). This, as a plaque proudly announced, was one of the Thankful Villages of the First World War, one that lost none of its men. It's a subject I've written about before – here – so I won't repeat myself (but will correct my assertion that France has only one Thankful Village – it has 12). 

Endings 3

 To round off this mini-anthology of endings (and the month of April), here is a miscellaneous collection with no obvious linking features...

First, an ending I think one of the most beautiful in literature – the final paragraph of Ruskin's autobiographical Praeterita. In it he recalls his last visit to Siena, with his American friend and correspondent Charles Eliot Norton, and he remembers the fireflies...

'Fonte Branda I last saw with Charles Norton, under the same arches where Dante saw it. We drank of it together, and walked that evening on the hills above, where the fireflies among the scented thickets shone fitfully in the still undarkened air. How they shone! moving like fine-broken starlight through the purple leaves. How they shone! through the sunset that faded into thunderous night as I entered Siena three days before, the white edges of the mountainous clouds still lighted from the west, and the openly gold sky calm behind the gate of Siena's heart, with its still golden words, "Cor magis tibi Sena pandit," and the fireflies everywhere in sky and cloud rising and falling, mixed with the lightning, and more intense than the stars.'

A wonderfully haunting ending is that of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The narrator, and the party he is with (on the Thames in London), have just heard the last of Marlow's terrible tale...

'Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. "We have lost the first of the ebb," said the Director suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky – seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.' 

Here is the closest Samuel Beckett ever came to a happy ending – the beautiful, pared-to-the-bone closing passage of Ill Seen Ill Said:

'Farewell to farewell. Then in that perfect dark foreknell darling sound pip for end begun. First last moment. Grant only enough remain to devour all. Moment by glutton moment. Sky earth the whole kit and boodle. Not another crumb of carrion left. Lick chops and basta. No. One moment more. One last. Grace to breathe that void. Know happiness.'

I was going to post the closing passage of The Trial, but really it's just too grim. Instead, here are a couple of endings from left field. First, the resonantly abrupt original ending of Mark's Gospel – 

'And entering into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were affrighted.

And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him.

But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he said unto you.

And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid.'

And finally, a diversion into poetry, though it is could be classified as prose poetry – Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns, in which the past and the present, the lives of King Offa and of the young Geoffrey Hill, intermingle to extraordinary effect. For some reason, I find the ending quite wonderful: 

'[XXIX]

'Not strangeness, but strange likeness. Obstinate, 
  outclassed forefathers, I too concede. I am your
  staggeringly-gifted child.'

So, murmurous, he withdrew from them. Gran lit the
         gas, his dice whirred in the ludo-cup, he entered
         into the last dream of Offa the King.

[XXX]

And it seemed, while we waited, he began to walk to-
       wards us            he vanished

he left behind coins, for his lodging, and traces of
       red mud.'


It's probably just me...

Endings 2

 Eudora Welty said of the last sentence of Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, 'If I had written that sentence, I'd be happy all my life!' High praise from a writer of her calibre, and well merited: the sentence is indeed beautiful and eloquent, when read in context.
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant ends with Ezra finally managing to bring the whole of his dysfunctional family together, after his mother's funeral, for a dinner at his restaurant – even including Beck, the errant father who deserted them all long ago. But then Beck absents himself, and the rest of the family go in search of him to bring him back. Cody, Ezra's troubled and troublemaking brother, is the one who finds him. In the closing paragraph, Cody recalls  a boyhood incident when he accidentally shot his mother with his new bow and arrow, with dire consequences...

'Cody held on to his elbow and led him toward the others. Overhead, gulls drifted  through a sky so clear and blue that it brought back all the outings of his boyhood – the drives, the picnics, the autumn hikes, the wildflower walks in the spring. He remembered the archery trip, and it seemed to him now that he even remembered that arrow sailing in its graceful, fluttering path. He remembered his mother's upright form along the grasses, her hair lit gold, her small hands smoothing her bouquet while the arrow journeyed on. And high above, he seemed to recall, there had been a little brown airplane, almost motionless, droning through the sunshine like a bumblebee.' 

Another American novel from much the same time (forty years ago!) as Dinner at the Homesick is Jayne Anne Phillips's Machine Dreams, which also follows the members of a broken family, but in less straightforward manner, drawing in particular on their dreams (and quoting letters). The emotional heart of the book is the close loving relationship between Danner and her younger brother Billy, who is fascinated by machines, especially aeroplanes, becomes a pilot in the Vietnam war, and is shot down and killed. Here is the closing dream of the book, Danner's. It gets me every time...

'Danner and Billy are walking in the deep dark forest. Billy makes airplane sounds. Danner, oblivious to her brother's play, is stalking the magic horse. There are no cloven tracks, but the dust on the path is disturbed and the horse seems to be circling. Occasionally Danner looks over her shoulder and sees the animal watching them through thick leaves. The mare's eyes are large and certain. Certain of what? Billy pays no attention and seems to have followed his sister here almost accidentally. They walk on, and finally it is so dark that Danner can't see Billy at all. She can only hear him, farther and farther behind her, imitating with a careful and private energy the engine sounds of a plane that is going down. War-movie sounds. Eeee-yoww, ach-ack-ack. So gentle it sounds like a song, and the song goes on softly as the plane falls, year after year, to earth.'

I guess the most famous ending of an American novel is that of The Great Gatsby, which I quoted recently, on the centenary of its publication – 

'Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And then one fine morning – And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.'

And then, in a very different register, there is the equally famous (?) ending of Huckleberry Finn: 

'Tom's most well now, and got his bullet around his neck on a watch-guard for a watch, and is always seeing what time it is, and so there ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it and I ain't agoing to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before.'

Follow that.  

Endings

 Recently I've been thinking about, and discussing with an online friend, great endings in literature – those passages that close a book with something that resonates long after, that can stir the heart and, in some cases, start the tears. A prime example is the ending of Lolita – or rather its two endings. There is the shattering paragraph that closes Humbert's narrative, the point at which he finally becomes fully aware of what he has done to Lolita, as he stands on a hillside above a playground and hears the childish sounds rising from it (as Nabokov himself did on one of his American butterfly-hunting trips) – 

'What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapour of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic—one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.'

And then, as if that is not enough, there is the closing passage of Humbert's confession and of the novel: 

'I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my spectre shall come out of him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C. Q. [Clare Quilty]. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations.  I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.'

Perhaps the most beautiful of all endings is that of James Joyce's 'The Dead', in which Gabriel Conroy, at the end of an awkward and dispiriting social evening, has discovered his wife convulsed with tears as she remembers an earlier love in her life, a young man long dead...

'Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hordes of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling. 
   A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey [his wife's dead love] lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.'

Still with Joyce, the ending of Ulysses, concluding Molly Bloom's great inner monologue, is an astonishing passage (and, like the story of lost love in 'The Dead', owes a great deal to the much maligned Nora Barnacle, without whom Molly Bloom would never have come into being) – 

'the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leap year like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a woman's body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldn't answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didn't know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governor's house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the fig trees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rose gardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.'

Phew. After which, let's descend to something completely different – the ending of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. Here Yorick has been obliged to share a room with an attractive Piedmontese lady, who has an equally pretty maid. Having negotiated a 'treaty' designed to get them through the night with no impropriety, Yorick find himself restless and unable to sleep, and exclaims 'O my God!' –  

' – You have broke the treaty, Monsieur, said the lady, who had no more slept than myself – I begg'd a thousand pardons – but insisted it was no more than an ejaculation – she maintained it was an entire infraction of the treaty – I maintain'd it was provided for in the clause of the third article. 
   The lady would by no means give up her point, though she weakened her barrier by it; for in the warmth of the dispute, I could hear two or three corking-pins fall out of the curtain to the ground.
   Upon my word of honour, Madame, said I – stretching my arm out of bed by way of asseveration – 
   (– I was going to have added, that I would not have trespass'd against the remotest idea of decorum for the world) – 
   But the fille de chambre hearing there were words between us, and fearing that hostilities would ensue in course, had crept silently out of her closet, and it being totally dark, had stolen so close to our beds, that she had got herself into the narrow passage which separated them, and had advanc'd so far up as to be in a line betwixt her mistress and me – 
   So that when I stretch'd out my hand, I caught hold of the fille de chambre's

                                   END OF THE SECOND VOLUME

  I think I might return to this subject, as I have quite a few more notable endings up my sleeve...

'None of them has a yellow blob at the end'

 Exciting news today from the somewhat rarefied scholarly world of penis-counting – specifically counting penises on the Bayeux Tapestry. For some while it has been generally accepted, thanks to the tireless work of Professor George Garnett, that the total number of penises depicted on the tapestry (yes, I know – it's not a tapestry, it's a narrative embroidery) is 93, five of them human and the other 88 depending from horses. Now another scholar and 'Anglo-Saxon nudity expert', Dr Christopher Monk, claims to have identified a 94th penis – and it's a human one, hanging beneath a running man's tunic. Professor Garnett confidently identified this appendage as the dangling scabbard of a sword or dagger, but Dr Monk is equally certain it is a penis: 'The detail,' he declares, 'is surprisingly anatomically fulsome' [fulsome? Really?]. For Dr Monk, the relevant stitches clearly 'depict all the necessary parts  – a penis, with distinct glans and two testicles.' For Professor Garnett, however, that is no glans but a yellow blob intended to depict brass: 'If you look at what are incontrovertibly penises in the tapestry, none of them has a yellow blob at the end.' You can read the whole sordid story here, and see the contested image, which I must say looks like no penis I ever saw in art or nature.  

Thomas Day, Victim of Theory

 One of the Lichfield luminaries featured in Anna Seward's wildly eccentric biography of Erasmus Darwin (which I wrote about here) is Thomas Day, whose History of Sandford and Merton, one of the first novels written specifically for children, was a big bestseller at the time, and later blighted many a Victorian childhood. Day had strong views on the raising of children – views which were, alas, coloured by his worship of Rousseau, who had cheerfully abandoned all five of his own children to a foundling hospital, leaving him free to tell the rest of the world how to bring up their offspring. Thomas Day, for one, was hugely impressed by Rousseau's writings, and joined another worshipper, Richard Lovell Edgeworth (father of Maria), in bringing up Edgeworth's son Dick in the manner prescribed in Rousseau's Emile.
  Judging this project a success, Day then went on to make his own Rousseauvian experiment: to train up a girl to be his wife. At this point the story gets decidedly creepy. Day applied to the Foundling Hospital in London to take two suitable girls to be, he said, servants in the Edgeworth household – a fact unknown to Edgeworth until several months later. The girls were aged 12 and 11, and Day immediately changed their names to Sabrina and Lucretia. After a short stay in London, Day took both girls to France – a move that put him out of the reach of English law and enabled him to isolate the girls, refusing to hire English-speaking staff or to teach them French. He soon decided that Lucretia, then aged 12, lacked wifely potential, so returned to England and placed her with a milliner's family in London – a lucky escape for her. Sabrina he took with him to Lichfield, where he leased Stowe House (a fine Georgian building which still stands overlooking Stowe Pool). Keeping Sabrina in ignorance of his plans for her, he set about giving her a thorough Rousseauvian training, which among other things involved conditioning her not to fear pain or physical privations. To this end, he would drip hot candle wax onto her arms, make her wade into cold water up to her neck, and shoot at her skirts with a pistol (which might or might not have been loaded; accounts differ). All of which sounds more like a case study in psychopathy than an experiment in philosophy. Fortunately, a year after bringing her to Lichfield, Day abandoned this Rousseauvian project and packed Sabrina off to a boarding school. 
  Day went on to write a heartfelt and influential anti-slavery poem, 'The Dying Negro', as well as his History of Sandford and Merton and the less successful History of Little Jack. He met his end putting another theory of his to the test – that the breaking-in of horses was a harsh and unnecessary practice. Thrown by an unbroken colt at Barehill, Berkshire, in September, 1789, he died almost instantly, perhaps having just enough time to wonder if he might have got that one wrong. 

'Malt does more...'

 If – which heaven forbid – there were to be only one (alcoholic) drink available to you for the rest of your life, which would you choose? Which would be the one that would get you through, even in the absence of all alternative bevvies? For myself, it would have to be Scotch whisky. Not only is it a drink that exists in a wide range of incarnations, of various ages, characteristics and qualities, it is also, I find, the most reliable pick-me-up or calm-me-down, or whatever is required to reconcile a person to existence (as Housman put it, 'Malt does more than Milton can To justify God's ways to man'). To put it simply, as I often do as I raise a glass to my lips, I just love whisky (and, happily, it gives every appearance of loving me).
Recently I was pleased to discover that Igor Stravinsky, no less, felt just the same about whisky. 'My God,' he once declared, 'so much I like to drink Scotch that sometimes I think my name is Igor Stra-whisky.' And he had medical backing for his predilection: a doctor in Los Angeles once advised him, 'Drink plenty Scotch, it's the best thing. ' (Those were the days, when doctors took a sane and relaxed line on such matters.) Stravinsky's favoured tipple was Ballantine's 30-year-old, a blend that would now set you back around £300 a bottle. He was seldom without a flask of the stuff, and it surely fed his creative flame, as well as his general health and well-being (he lived to 88). Here's to you, Stra-whisky!

Happy Easter

A happy Easter to all who browse here!
And above is my favourite Resurrection painting again – Rembrandt's Christ and Mary Magdalen at the Tomb, which can be seen in the Queen's Gallery at Buckingham Palace. It's surely the homeliest treatment of the subject, with the risen Christ wearing a broad-brimmed gardener's hat. 
'Thinking he was the gardener, she said, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him."
Jesus said to her, "Mary."
She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, "Rabboni!" ( which means "Teacher").'

I often find myself thinking, 'What would Jesus make of it all?' All the 'vast musical moth-eaten brocade' as Larkin called it: the whole establishment of the Church in its various forms, the huge problematic mass of dogma, creed, canon and liturgy, the grand buildings, the accumulated wealth, the terrible history of religious conflict – all of it in His name. Jesus surely would be astounded and bemused by the very existence of Christianity, which was after all not his creation but largely that of the convert Paul.  
And what of Easter? What of Easter eggs? Well, to that one, Kay Ryan (who I suspect might now be our best living poet) has an answer in her wonderful poem, 'The Palm at the End of the Mind' –

After fulfilling everything
one two three he came back again
free, no more prophecy requiring
that he enter the city just this way,
no more set-up treacheries.
It was the day after Easter. He adored
the eggshell litter and the cellophane
caught in the grass. Each door he passed
swung with its own business, all the
witnesses along his route of pain
again distracted by fear of loss
or hope of gain. It was wonderful
to be a man, bewildered by
so many flowers, the rush
and ebb of hours, his own
ambiguous gestures – his
whole heart exposed, then
taking cover.

Ryan's poem takes its title from the first line of Wallace Stevens's great, late poem – one of his last – 'Of Mere Being' – 

The palm at the end of the mind,

Beyond the last thought, rises

In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird

Sings in the palm, without human meaning,

Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason

That makes us happy or unhappy.

The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.

The wind moves slowly in the branches.

The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

Good Friday

 One of Giovanni Bellini's last (and greatest) paintings – Lamentation over the Dead Christ (1515-6), now in the Gallerie dell' Accademia in Venice. 
  And here, to go with it, is a short, enigmatic poem by R.S. Thomas – 

Pieta

Always the same hills
Crowd the horizon,
Remote witness
Of the still scene.

And in the foreground
The tall Cross,
Sombre, untenanted,
Aches for the Body
That is back in the cradle
Of a maid's arms.

Maundy Thursday

Today is Maundy Thursday, the day when, in commemoration of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples before the Last Supper, our monarchs used to wash the feet of the poor – a practice that was sadly discontinued early in the eighteenth century, replaced by the doling out of specially minted coinage to a selection of deserving recipients. The image above is Tintoretto's Christ Washing the Feet of His Disciples, which hangs, somewhat ravaged by time and restorations, in the National Gallery, and used to live in the church of San Trovaso in Venice, where it hung opposite a Last Supper by Titian (which is still there). 
  Talking of Last Suppers, the most famous image of that event is the most problematic – the mural painted by Leonardo for the refectory of the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. Because of the materials Leonardo used, various environmental factors and intentional damage over the years, very little of the original painting survives, and what we see today is the product of numerous restorations. Even in the artist's lifetime, his Last Supper was beginning to disintegrate, as Dick Davis recalls in his short, eloquent poem, 'Leonardo' (collected in Seeing the World, 1980) –

My years were given
To permanence –
The arrested dance,
Emblem of heaven. 

Decay invades
The icon of
Eternal love:
My emblem fades

Like human skin:
The wrinkles grow
As if paint too
Partook of sin.

Late, late I see
The meaning of
Incarnate love,
Eternity.

Beckett In Utero

 Today is the supposed birthday (in 1906) of Samuel Beckett. He liked to claim that it was not only Friday the 13th but also Good Friday, though in fact Good Friday did not fall on that date in 1906 – and, to add further confusion to the picture, Beckett's birth certificate gives his date of birth as May 13th (a Sunday). Never mind – Beckett tended to regard his birth as an altogether regrettable event anyway. As for what came before it, he claimed to vividly remember life in the womb – a dark, frightening and constrained space, from which his eventual expulsion was painful, even more frightening, and lastingly traumatic. He had one particular in utero memory, of being at the dinner table shortly before his birth and being obliged to overhear the banal conversation of his parents and their guests. That supposed memory surely plays into this passage from the first chapter of Watt, in which a respectable couple, 'Tetty' and 'Goff' (Johnsonian names: Tetty being Mrs Johnson's pet name – not 'Titty', a Macaulay has it in his unsympathetic essay on Johnson – and Gough Square the site of Johnson's house), converse with the hunchbacked Mr Hackett, another one who apparently remembers his own birth. Tetty and Goff regale Mr Hackett with the story of their son Larry's birth...

Well, said the lady, that morning at breakfast Goff turns to me and he says, Tetty, he says, Tetty, my pet, I should very much like to invite Thompson, Cream and Colquhoun to help us eat the duck, if I felt sure you felt up to it. Why, my dear, says I, I never felt fitter in my life. Those were my words, were they not?
  I believe they were, said Goff.
  Well, said Tetty, when Thompson comes into the dining room, followed by Cream and Berry (Colquhoun I remember had a previous engagement), I was already seated at the table. There was nothing strange in that, seeing I was the only lady present. You did not find that strange, did you, my love?
  Certainly not, said Goff, most natural.
  The first mouthful of duck had barely passed my lips, said Tetty, when Larry leaped in my wom.
  Your what? said Mr Hackett.
  You know, said Goff, her woom.
  How embarrassing for you, said Mr Hackett.
  I continued to eat, drink and make light conversation, said Tetty, and Larry to leap, like a salmon.
  What an experience for you, said Mr Hackett.
  There were moments, I assure you, when I thought he would tumble out on the floor, at my feet.
  Merciful heavens, you felt him slipping, said Mr Hackett.
  No trace of this dollar appeared on my face, said Tetty. Did it, my dear?
  Not a trace, said Goff.
  Nor did my sense of humour desert me. What roly-poly, said Mr Berry, I remember, turning to me with a smile, what delicious roly-poly, it melts in the mouth. Not only in the mouth, sir, I replied, without an instant's hesitation, not only in the mouth, my dear sir. Not too osy with the sweet, I thought.
  Not too what? said Mr Hackett.
  Osy, said Goff. You know, not too osy.
  With the coffee and liqueurs, labour was in full swing, Mr Hackett, I give you my solemn word, under he groaning board.
  Swing is the word, said Goff.
  You knew she was pregnant, said Mr Hackett.
  Why er, said Goff, you see er, I er, we er ––
  Tetty's hand fell heartily on Mr Hackett's thigh.
  He thought I was coy, she cried. Hahahaha. Haha. Ha.
  Haha, said Mr Hackett. 
  I was greatly worried I admit, said Goff.
  Finally they retired, did you not? said Tetty.
  We did indeed, said Goff, we retired to the billiard-room, for a game of slosh.  
  I went up those stairs, Mr Hackett, said Tetty, on my hands and knees, wringing the carpet-rods as though they were made of raffia.
  You were in such anguish, said Mr Hackett.
  Three minutes later, I was a mother. 
  Unassisted, said Goff. 
  I did everything with my own hands, said Tetty, everything.
  She severed the cord with her teeth, said Goff, not having a scissors to her hand. What do you think of that?
  I would have snapped it across my knee, if necessary, said Tetty. 
  That is a thing I have often wondered, said Mr Hackett, what it feels like to have the string cut.
  For the mother or the child? said Goff.
  For the mother, said Mr Hackett. I was not found under a cabbage, I believe. 

Another Centenary, etc.

 The boy in the portrait is Oliver Postgate, who later in his life would create, with Peter Firmin and other gifted collaborators, some of the greatest, most enduring children's television programmes ever made. Indeed one of the lesser, but very real, pleasures of grandparenthood has been rediscovering the wonders of Bagpuss, Ivor the Engine and Noggin the Nog (The Clangers never really did it for me – nor for any of the grandchildren, oddly enough). Postgate was born 100 years ago today, and this morning Radio 3 had a delightful tribute to him, focusing mostly on the music which contributed so much to the charm of Postgate's creations. 
  The portrait above was drawn by the Australian-born artist Stella Bowen in 1934. Bowen was one of the women in the life of the ever amorous Ford Madox Ford. She met him in 1918, when she was 24 and he 44, and they were together for nine years, in the course of which Stella gave birth to a daughter – none of which rates a mention in Ford's memoir, It Was The Nightingale, where Stella isn't even named. Bowen's life was never easy for long, and she struggled to make a living from her art. However, her career revived somewhat with the coming of World War II. She published a well received memoir, Drawn from Life (1941), and was appointed as a war artist.  Her brief was to chronicle the activities of the Royal Australian Air Force stationed in England. The remarkable painting below, Bomber Crew (1944), shows the members of a Lancaster bombing crew from 460 Squadron RAAF. Bowen sketched them on the day they set out on a raid over Germany, in which their plane, like so many Allied bombers, was shot down, and only one of the crew survived.  (In the course of the war, 460 Squadron dropped more tonnage of bombs than any in Bomber Command, and suffered the heaviest losses of any Australian squadron.) Bowen's picture shows men who knew that they were likely facing death. 

Nature Notes

 A day of summer heat in early April – this spring has been wonderfully warm and sunny, in marked contrast to last year's relentless rain and cold. The Orange Tips are flying in numbers, along with newly emerged Holly Blues and Speckled Woods. Peacocks also seem to be off to a good start this year. The birds are singing lustily too, and this morning my generally useless birdsong app correctly identified a Blackcap singing away near the cathedral, its song 'full, sweet, deep, loud and wild', as Gilbert White described it. 
Meanwhile, the RSPB reports that its annual Big Garden Birdwatch recorded the lowest number of Starlings visiting gardens since the survey began in 1979, and the species, which you might have taken for one of our commoner birds, remains 'endangered' and on the Red List. This is on the basis of a steep decline in numbers since the 1960s, but you could argue that there were too many of them then (I remember when Starling roosts were so numerous and so productive of guano that they could bring tree branches down) rather than that there are too few of them now. They are certainly still abundant around here, and plenty of them have been visiting the garden, feeding voraciously and extremely messily on the bird feeder. 
Also in the news today was a story about salmon being affected by anti-anxiety drugs that are finding their way into our water, in minimal concentration, of course, but sufficient to have remarkable effects of salmon behaviour.  Tests in Sweden with drugged and undrugged fish found that the former, freed from their fishy cares, laughed at all obstacles in their way, and outpaced their more anxious brethren. As a result of their carefree attitude, a higher proportion of the blissed-out fish made it out to sea and on with their migratory journey. So I guess that's one thing you don't have to worry about as you take your anti-anxiety drugs – somewhere downstream you might be helping a salmon make it to the sea. 

A Centenary

It was on this day 100 years ago that The Great Gatsby was published. Fitzgerald was aiming to create something altogether superior to his earlier works – 'not trashy imaginings as in my stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere yet radiant world'. With Zelda and their young daughter he left New York for Europe to work intensively on the new novel while staying somewhere quieter and less expensive (though his idea of quietness was somewhat flexible: on a 1926 visit to the Riviera he wrote that there was 'no one' at Antibes, except 'me, Zelda, the Valentinos, the Murphys, Mistinguet, Rex Ingram, Dos Passos, Alice Terry, the MacLeishes...' etc, etc. – the list continues.) Fitzgerald wrote most of The Great Gatsby on the French Riviera, and finished it off in Rome. 
When it was published, it had mostly good reviews, but didn't sell well. The initial print run of 20,000 sold out, but a second printing of 3,000 didn't sell, and copies were still in the warehouse when Fitzgerald died 15 years later. He blamed the title, which he'd never liked – and, interestingly, the lack of strong female characters, as women were the ones buying fiction. Then as now? Surely more so now, though...
After publication Fitzgerald wrote to Edmund Wilson that 'of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about'. I'm not entirely sure I do, either, despite having read it several times over the years. It has a strongly distinctive feel – it seems to be the feel of a masterpiece – but is it one? Does it have the substance? I'm not at all sure. It certainly has a great, if enigmatic ending, though: 'Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And then one fine morning – And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.'

'The land of spices; something understood'

 George Herbert's resounding sonnet 'Prayer' is surely the greatest 'list poem' in the language, a sequence of glorious images, all evoking that mysterious, essential thing, prayer. 

Prayer the church's banquet, angel's age,

God's breath in man returning to his birth,

The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,

The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth

Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tow'r,

Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,

The six-days world transposing in an hour,

A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;

Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,

Exalted manna, gladness of the best,

Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,

The milky way, the bird of Paradise,

Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,

The land of spices; something understood.

When the American poet Dana Gioia wrote his own poem of the same name, he must have had Herbert's in mind. It begins as if it's going to be a list poem, but then develops into something else – a heartfelt but enigmatic elegy or lament. It is itself a prayer, rather than a poem about prayer...

Echo of the clocktower, footstep
in the alleyway, sweep
of the wind sifting the leaves.

Jeweller of the spiderweb, connoisseur

of autumn's opulence, blade of lightning

harvesting the sky.

Keeper of the small gate, choreographer

of entrances and exits, midnight

whisper travelling the wires.

Seducer, healer, deity or thief,

I will see you soon enough—

in the shadow of the rainfall,

in the brief violet darkening a sunset—

but until then I pray watch over him

as a mountain guards its covert ore

and the harsh falcon its flightless young.

'Watch over him...' – who? The tragic background to this poem is the death of Gioia's infant son, who is commemorated also in this moving poem, 'Planting a Sequoia' –

All afternoon my brothers and I have worked in the orchard,
Digging this hole, laying you into it, carefully packing the soil.
Rain blackened the horizon, but cold winds kept it over the Pacific,
And the sky above us stayed the dull gray
Of an old year coming to an end.

In Sicily a father plants a tree to celebrate his first son’s birth –
An olive or a fig tree – a sign that the earth has one more life to bear.
I would have done the same, proudly laying new stock into my father’s orchard,
A green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs,
A promise of new fruit in other autumns.

But today we kneel in the cold planting you, our native giant,
Defying the practical custom of our fathers,
Wrapping in your roots a lock of hair, a piece of an infant’s birth cord,
All that remains above earth of a first-born son,
A few stray atoms brought back to the elements.

We will give you what we can – our labor and our soil,
Water drawn from the earth when the skies fail,
Nights scented with the ocean fog, days softened by the circuit of bees.
We plant you in the corner of the grove, bathed in western light,
A slender shoot against the sunset.

And when our family is no more, all of his unborn brothers dead,
Every niece and nephew scattered, the house torn down,
His mother’s beauty ashes in the air,
I want you to stand among strangers, all young and ephemeral to you,
Silently keeping the secret of your birth.