New Town, Old Roots

 What's this then? It's All Saints, the parish church of Milton Keynes – the original Milton Keynes, that is, the charming little village that gave the new town its name and is now surrounded by its sprawling namesake. I was there yesterday, in winter sunshine, and had a good look at the church, inside and out; it's very fine, in my favourite style, the one we call Decorated (and the French call 'Flamboyant' – flaming), characterised by flowing lines and curves, especially in the window tracery. The nearby old rectory is also rather wonderful, and, as with many areas of the MK footprint, you would hardly know you were anywhere near a modern new town (though the sound of traffic is hard to escape). In the churchyard of All Saints are buried the remains of a hundred or so late Saxons whose bones were excavated in a field nearby. Farther on in the walk we passed through – on a metalled path, incongruously – a fine deserted medieval village. This 'new town' has old and deep roots. It was a sunny, blue sky day, for a wonder, and I saw, as well as drifts of Snowdrops, my first Winter Aconites of the year.
   Of Worthing I have little to report except that it was extremely windy, and at one point I had the humbling experience of being very nearly blown off my feet by a gust that must have been at least gale force. I think I have probably exhausted the subject of Oscar Wilde in Worthing (see here and here), and, looking for further literary connections, I discovered that two of our greatest nature writers – W.H. Hudson and Richard Jefferies – are both buried in the same Worthing cemetery. I must look into this...

Memorial Day

 Just to say that Radio 3's breakfast programme today, live from Auschwitz, was a simply wonderful broadcast, one of the finest, most beautiful and moving I have ever heard. Presenter Petroc Trelawny is shaping up to be a truly great radio broadcaster – and the music, and the stories told... Sometimes it was almost unbearable, but it was a magnificent, memorable piece of radio. If you missed it, it should be possible to find it on BBC Sounds. 

The Throwout Bearing

 A dreary, sodden day of wind and rain, with more of the same threatened, so here is something to bring a little cheer. It's an anecdote from Joseph Epstein's Never Say You've Had a Lucky Life. Especially If You've Had a Lucky Life, which is still my bedtime reading, slow reader that I am. This made me laugh out loud...
[At this point Epstein, a man who has had many jobs in his life, is in Arkansas working for the North Little Rock Urban Renewal Agency, where all his colleagues are Southerners.]
'One among them, a genial man named Harold Russell, was currently building his own house on weekends. When I happened to mention to him that I needed to replace something called a "throwout bearing" in my used Corvair – the car, by the way, featured for its flaws in Ralph Nader's book Unsafe at Any Speed – Harold told me that replacing it presented no real problem. "All you have to do is lift the engine and screw in the bearing underneath." Lift the engine? He told me that here all I needed was to get a #197 pulley, park the car between two strong trees, and with the aid of a the pulley lift up the engine and screw in the bearing. Simple enough, no? Had I attempted it, I could imagine the next day's headline in the Arkansas Gazette: "Jewish man found dead under Corvair Engine, Car Parked Between Two Trees in North Little Rock."
  For a few years afterward, whenever I brought one of my cars in for repair, I would casually mention that I had just installed a throwout bearing in it, suggesting that I had done it myself and thus was not a man for any mechanic to attempt to cheat. Much later I learned that only cars with manual transmissions, or clutches, had throwout bearings. Gotcha, Schmuckowitz! those various mechanics must have thought.'

  Which led me to read up about throwout bearings on the internet. Such is life. 
  And from tomorrow I'll most likely be out of action on the blog front for a few days, on family business in rain-lashed Worthing, then walking in rain-lashed Milton Keynes, or rather touring the historic villages that make up that much maligned New Town. 

'And that will be England gone'

 In 1972 the UK government participated in the UN Stockholm Conference on the Environment, submitting a number of papers, one of them titled How Do You Want to Live? Deciding that they wanted to commission a preface to set the tone of the report, they commissioned that notorious cock-eyed optimist Philip Larkin, and – surprise, surprise – they were not entirely satisfied with the result, publishing a bowdlerised version, under the plain title 'Prologue'. Larkin happily pocketed the fee, then reworked the poem, restored the cuts, changed the title to 'Going, Going' (completed on this day in 1972) and published it in High Windows. It's not one of his best poems, but, like so many of Larkin's, it ends beautifully, and contains some resonant phrases: 'I thought it would last my time', 'Things are tougher than we are', 'It seems, just now, to be happening so very fast', 'And that will be England gone', 'Most things are never meant', 'I just think it will happen, soon'...

Going, Going

I thought it would last my time –

The sense that, beyond the town,

There would always be fields and farms,

Where the village louts could climb

Such trees as were not cut down;

I knew there’d be false alarms

 

In the papers about old streets

And split level shopping, but some

Have always been left so far;

And when the old part retreats

As the bleak high-risers come

We can always escape in the car.

 

Things are tougher than we are, just

As earth will always respond

However we mess it about;

Chuck filth in the sea, if you must:

The tides will be clean beyond.

– But what do I feel now? Doubt?

 

Or age, simply? The crowd

Is young in the M1 cafe;

Their kids are screaming for more –

More houses, more parking allowed,

More caravan sites, more pay.

On the Business Page, a score

 

Of spectacled grins approve

Some takeover bid that entails

Five per cent profit (and ten

Per cent more in the estuaries): move

Your works to the unspoilt dales

(Grey area grants)! And when

 

You try to get near the sea

In summer ...

It seems, just now,

To be happening so very fast;

Despite all the land left free

For the first time I feel somehow

That it isn’t going to last,

 

That before I snuff it, the whole

Boiling will be bricked in

Except for the tourist parts –

First slum of Europe: a role

It won’t be hard to win,

With a cast of crooks and tarts.

 

And that will be England gone,

The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,

The guildhalls, the carved choirs.

There’ll be books; it will linger on

In galleries; but all that remains

For us will be concrete and tyres.

 

Most things are never meant.

This won’t be, most likely; but greeds

And garbage are too thick-strewn

To be swept up now, or invent

Excuses that make them all needs.

I just think it will happen, soon.

Reading the poem today, it seems prophetic only in the sense that Larkin's England was indeed, as he sensed, going, going – but in all manner of ways, with changes that went far beyond the urban spread that is Larkin's preoccupation. If he had cast his net more widely, the results might well have been even more pessimistic, so perhaps it's just as well he didn't. His reflex pessimism was often, I think, quite shallow, half jocular, and frequently wrong. I recall that when he had his mother's ashes interred in St Michael's churchyard in Lichfield in 1977, the Rector told him that it was the last burial in the old churchyard, which also contained several earlier Larkin family graves. The churchyard would now, Larkin averred in a letter to Barbara Pym, be 'handed over to the Council to be landscaped into a vandals' playground or some such nonsense. I expect I shan't see all the old Larkin graves again ... as they will all be levelled and the stones taken away.' He was quite wrong, of course: the old churchyard of St Michael's is now a combination of well maintained historic burial ground and well managed nature reserve, and the old Larkin graves are still there, quite easily found. The one that eludes me, oddly, is that of Larkin's parents, which, having found it once (and photographed it), I have never been able to find again. 

Spot the Author

 This, believe it or not, is the great Southern writer Eudora Welty in her younger days, hamming it up for the camera (she was an excellent photographer herself). The picture is used on the cover of a volume of early writings, cartoons and odds and ends called Early Escapades, edited by her long-time friend Patti Carr Black. 'An evening with her,' Black recalls, 'was like being at vaudeville. She was great at one-liners and quick responses. She had such clarity and wit, you were always taken aback.' 

Manet Day: Two Artists Paint Each Other

It has become a tradition on this blog to mark the birthday (in 1832) of one of my favourite painters, the great Edouard Manet. This year's picture is one I have actually seen, on the canvas, since the last birthday. It hangs on the walls of the Barber Institute in Birmingham, which I visited last autumn. A portrait of Manet's friend and fellow artist Carolus-Duran, it is clearly unfinished (especially the landscape background), but it has a huge presence, in part because of its size: it is over 6ft tall and almost as wide. The nonchalant swagger of Carolus-Duran's pose is caught perfectly, and his dress suggests he has just ridden over from his nearby country home. Manet at the time was staying on the estate of a wealthy patron near Paris, where, he wrote, 'there is too much entertainment here to work seriously', but he and Carolus-Duran agreed to paint each other's portraits (Carolus-Duran was famous for his portraits of members of Parisian high society). In return for Manet's grand, if sketchy, swagger portrait, Carolus-Duran painted this affectionate, informal portrait of his friend, adopting a loose, easy style perfectly in keeping with its subject. It is perhaps the most attractive portrait we have of the often rather forbidding-looking Manet.

Sam and Dave

 Just realised that I missed a Johnsonian anniversary yesterday – blame it on Blue Monday. 
  It was on January 20th in 1779 that David Garrick, the most famous actor of his generation, died, predeceasing his friend, fellow Lichfieldian and one-time teacher, Samuel Johnson. 'I am disappointed,' wrote Johnson, 'by that stroke of death which has eclipsed the gaiety of nations, and impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure.' Johnson, the older man, had known Garrick since the latter's Lichfield boyhood (both were alumni of Lichfield grammar school), and the young David Garrick had been one of the handful of pupils who attended the school that Johnson and his wife established at Edial, a few miles outside the city. When this doomed venture collapsed, Johnson and Garrick, sharing a horse, set out for London in search of fame and fortune – which both of them eventually found. They remained firm friends, though Garrick was not above giving wickedly accurate impersonations of the Great Cham, and Johnson took a somewhat condescending attitude to his young friend's theatrical career, stellar though it was. He would, however, never allow anyone else to say anything at all disobliging about Garrick. 
  David Garrick's funeral procession was one of the longest seen in London, stretching all the way from the Strand to Westminster Abbey, where he was interred in Poets' Corner. Fittingly, he also has a memorial in Lichfield Cathedral, in the form of a bust, with Johnson's epitaph ('I am disappointed...') inscribed below. 
  In one of my favourite Johnson quotations, the great man tells Garrick that he shan't be joining him behind the scenes at the theatre any more: 'I'll come no more behind your scenes, David; for the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses excite my amorous propensities.' 

Blue on Blue

 Today, being the third Monday of January, is Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year, according to a press release – sorry, 'scientific formula' worked out by 'experts'. Today the weather in England is certainly doing its best to live up to the billing – cold, grey and wet, yet another sunless day. What to do but pile blue on blue? Here is the song 'Blue Melody' from the album Blue Afternoon by the late great Tim Buckley. What a voice...

'The old notes still are new'

 Born on this day in 1840 was (Henry) Austin Dobson, a poet and essayist who is barely remembered today, but left some interesting work behind. Strongly influenced by French literature, Dobson delighted, like many writers of the late nineteenth century, in mastering a wide range of poetical forms – this was the period when the British Museum was, in Edmund Gosse's phrase, 'a hive of rondeliers'. Triolets, villanelles, sestinas, even the pantoum  – all were within Dobson's range. But he could write in a plainer, more discursive style too – as here, where he ponders the future of poetry in 'our prose-bound community' and sets out his poetic credo, a credo that seems to me pretty sound: that 'song must sing', that form matters, and that, in the right hands, 'the old notes still are new' and 'the Truth that pleased will please again'. The closing line refers to the scene in the Iliad when Hector comes to take his farewell of his wife Andromache and his son Astyanax, and leaves for what Andromache is convinced will be his certain death...

On the Future of Poetry    

Bards of the Future! you that come
  With striding march, and roll of drum,
  What will your newest challenge be
  To our prose-bound community?
  What magic will you find to stir
  The limp and languid listener?
  Will it be daring and dramatic?
  Will it be frankly democratic?
  Will Pegasus return again
In guise of modern aeroplane,
Descending from a cloudless blue
To drop on us a bomb or two?
I know not. Far be it from me
To darken dark futurity;
Still less to render more perplexed
The last vagary, or the next.
Leave Pindus Hill to those who list,
Iconoclast or anarchist —
So be it. "They that break shall pay."
I stand upon the ancient way.
I hold it for a certain thing,
That, blank or rhyming, song must sing;
And more, that what is good for verse,
Need not, by dint of rhyme, grow worse.
I hold that they who deal in rhyme
Must take the standpoint of the time —
But not to catch the public ear,
As mountebank or pulpiteer;
That the old notes are still the new,
If the musician's touch be true —
Nor can the hand that knows its trade
Achieve the trite and ready-made;
That your first theme is Human Life,
Its hopes and fears, its love and strife —
A theme no custom can efface,
Common, but never commonplace;
For this, beyond all doubt, is plain:
The Truth that pleased will please again,
And move men as in bygone years
When Hector's wife smiled through her tears.

'The curiosity of future ages'

'When the Funerall pyre was out, and the last valediction over, men took a lasting adieu of their interred Friends, little expecting the curiosity of future ages should comment upon their ashes, and, having no old experience of the duration of their Reliques, held no opinion of such after-considerations. 
  But who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried? Who hath the Oracle of his ashes, or whither they are to be scattered?'
  So begins the Epistle Dedicatory of Sir Thomas Browne's masterpiece, Urn Burial (Hydriotaphia). This passage came to mind the other night when I was half-watching Digging for Britain, an archaeological programme on BBC2. Much of it was dedicated to the excavation of a medieval burial ground containing large numbers of remarkably well preserved skeletons from the 14th to the 16th centuries. Genetic scientists were getting to work on these, extracting DNA (of which the best sources, surprisingly, are the tiny ossicles of the inner ear) to find out what they can about these long dead people and what killed them. Particularly affecting were a pair of young male skeletons, brothers who had died together, of the Black Death, and been buried together. As the scientists probed and tested, I found it uncomfortable viewing. These people certainly did not die expecting 'the curiosity of future ages' to be picking over their bones a few centuries later, and they surely had some sense – as most people still do even now – that their remains amounted to more than just a pile of old bones, and deserved a degree of reverence, of recognition of their individual worth and identity, the soul that once animated those bones. How old do human remains have to be before they forfeit any such claim on posterity? A hundred years? Probably too little. Two hundred? Maybe. Certainly by the time we get back to the medieval period, it seems that human remains, skeletons and bones anyway, have pretty much lost their humanity and become mere objects of forensic curiosity. But is it just a matter of age? Things are different, it seems, with remains that are more recognisably individual, having been mummified or preserved in peat bogs or mountain ice. I recall that on my last visit to Derby Museum and Art Gallery, their two Egyptian mummies, of individuals called Pypyu and Pa-sheri, are displayed with a good deal of interpretive signage and reminders that these were human beings and visitors might find it disturbing to see them on display. Pypyu and Pa-sheri have been better served by posterity than all those much more recent medieval dead.   

Epstein's Luck

 Top of my bedside reading pile just now is a gift from my daughter – the great essayist Joseph Epstein's new memoir, Never Say You've Had a Lucky Life. Especially If You've Had a Lucky Life. As I am another who feels he's had a lucky life, in all manner of ways (and is hesitant about saying so, for fear of tempting fate), I am naturally drawn to a book with such a title, and so far  I'm enjoying it hugely, as I always enjoy Epstein's writings. He is a brilliant but unshowy writer, a master of his craft, with a wonderfully light touch and a terrific sense of humour – and of proportion, which is much the same thing. 
  Epstein counts himself lucky on many counts – 'in the time in which I was born, in the parents to whom I was born, in my education, and much more' – and I could say much the same, though there were times when I wouldn't have entirely assented to the second of those. In terms of time, I'd count myself perhaps luckier than Epstein in having been born in 1949 rather than his 1937. This meant I was the right age to enjoy the golden age of popular music that unfolded, or rather exploded, from the mid-Sixties to the mid-Seventies. However, it also meant that I was perfectly placed to succumb resistlessly to the various excesses and self-destructive idiocies of what we think of as the Sixties (which mostly happened in the Seventies).
  I certainly see, as Epstein does, the years I have lived through as marked by radical change: 'from a traditionally moral culture to a therapeutic one, from an era when the extended family was strong to its current diminished status ... from print to digital life featuring the war of pixel versus print, and much more'. One of the small, but significant, changes Epstein notes is that 'our parents also had a certain decorum missing from parents of later generations. I do not recall seeing my mother not wearing a dress (or at home what was called a 'housecoat') or without makeup. Until his retirement at 75, my father had no leisure clothes. Today, on the streets of my own middle-class neighbourhood, I see older men and women go about in flip-flops, cargo shorts and tank tops, getups my parents wouldn't have worn to take out the garbage.' I'm sure Epstein would not be seen dead in such apparel. Nor, come to that, would I. Some of us, even children of the Sixties, still have a residual belief in the bella figura. 

Rosalba

 Born on this day in 1673 was the great Venetian pastel portraitist Rosalba Carriera, one of the most talented and successful women artists of her time. Her best works demonstrate a mastery of subtle tonalities and exquisitely rendered textures, drawn in free, spontaneous strokes, using pastels made to her own innovative formulations. Her informal, very direct self-portraits are among her best work. The one above, showing her holding a portrait of her beloved sister and companion Giovanna, hangs in the portrait gallery of the Uffizi. Giovanna's death in 1738 sent Rosalba into a deep depression, but she continued working until her eyesight failed in the mid-1740s. One of her last self-portraits [below], which she gave to the British consul in Venice, Joseph Smith, is in the Royal Collection, where I remember seeing it a few years back in an exhibition at the Queen's Gallery. Sadly, Carriera, after her glittering career, died blind and alone in Venice in 1757, having outlived all her family. 

'I sought a theme...'

 This wretched flu, like an ageing artiste reluctant to leave the stage, keeps coming back for yet one more encore. This is very wearing, and as a result my spirits are low and mental activity sluggish. Not a good time to be reading late Yeats, you might think, but this morning, as I sought a theme and sought for it in vain, 'The Circus Animals' Desertion' inevitably swam into what's left of my mind.
Most poets either peter out in the natural course of things, or carry on doing their thing for as long as they can get away with it, or descend into prolixity (Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, even Geoffrey Hill) – but a few find new poetical life in old age: Hardy, Wallace Stevens, and supremely Yeats, in whom the decrepitude, absurdity and indignity of old age sparked a great resurgence of his poetical powers, blowing away any last traces of the Celtic twilight. Here is 'The Circus Animals' Desertion' in all its raging glory – 

I

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,

I sought it daily for six weeks or so.

Maybe at last being but a broken man

I must be satisfied with my heart, although

Winter and summer till old age began

My circus animals were all on show,

Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,

Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

II

What can I but enumerate old themes,

First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose

Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,

Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,

Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,

That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;

But what cared I that set him on to ride,

I, starved for the bosom of his fairy bride.

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,

`The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it,

She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away

But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.

I thought my dear must her own soul destroy

So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,

And this brought forth a dream and soon enough

This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread

Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;

Heart mysteries there, and yet when all is said

It was the dream itself enchanted me:

Character isolated by a deed

To engross the present and dominate memory.

Players and painted stage took all my love

And not those things that they were emblems of.

III

Those masterful images because complete

Grew in pure mind but out of what began?

A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,

Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,

Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut

Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone

I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.