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.

More Samper

 Having had to do some rather heavy-duty intensive reading lately – those bird books and The Maias, among other things – I found myself in need of some light relief, preferably comic. Happily I had just spotted another novel by James Hamilton-Paterson, whose Cooking with Fernet-Branca had me laughing immoderately last year. The one I'm reading now is called Amazing Disgrace and turns out to be a sequel to Cooking with Fernet Branca, featuring the further exploits of that great comic character, the appalling Gerald Samper. This time he has been commissioned to ghost-write the autobiography of one Millie Cleat, one-armed sailor (she lost it to a shark) and national treasure, whose solo round-the-world voyage has made her the toast of Britain. The project is, of course, giving Samper much grief, and he is desperate to get out of writing the sequel, which will be devoted to Millie's 'spiritual side'. What he really wants is to write the memoirs of the celebrated conductor Max Christ (short 'i', mercifully), but he seems to have blown his chances of that, in truly spectacular (and laugh-aloud funny) style. Meanwhile, Samper is rashly trying out some tablets of Chinese origin called Pow-r-TabsTM which promise great things in the trouser department – and Nandy, the addle-pated boy-band leader last seen in Cooking with Fernet-Branca is back, wanting Gerald to write his memoirs...
  This is a sequel that is every bit as funny as the original – and I've just spotted yet a third entry in the Samper saga, with the promising title Rancid Pansies. I've bought it to keep in reserve for when I next have need of a cheering dose of top-quality comic fiction.

Olympic Park, Garden, Petroc

 Yesterday I was on an uncharacteristically urban walk, down in 'that Lunnun', as we provincial hicks call it. The walk began at Stratford (definitely not Upon Avon) station, and started amid the retail hell that spreads for some way beyond it. With that behind us, things became more architectural, with many new or newish 'statement' buildings, some of them left over from the 2012 Olympics – the velodrome by far the best, the actual stadium oddly anticlimactic, the exploded helter-skelter known as the Orbit Tower as hideous as ever. The post-Olympic buildings somehow gave the effect of being architects' models or 3-D simulations – or architectural drawings, making us feel like the shadowy generic figures that saunter about in those, lightly touched-in in gouache. However, the best of this part of the walk was not the buildings but the created landscapes of the Olympic Park, most of which have been superbly well done, particularly those around the cleaned-up and beautified River Lea, and will probably look even better in a decade or two, when the whole thing has matured and settled in, and even those buildings might feel more real. 
  Things did get more real later – not always in a good way – as we passed through the achingly hip, graffiti-covered streets of Hackney Wick, now a haunt of 'artists', among other poseurs. However, all ended well – indeed triumphantly – when, to our surprise, we found Hawksmoor's great church of St Anne, Limehouse, open. The interior is a typical masterclass in the management of space and volume (with nothing numinous about it), while the exterior is a grand demonstration of  Hawksmoor's uniquely fantastic imagination. This was ending on a high note...

Back home, I found that, in my mere two days' absence, things in the garden had accelerated, with new flowers blooming everywhere, buds bursting open and tender leaflets emerging, intensifying the vernal green. There is nothing like this time of year in England, when the sun is out and the weather mild (see Browning 'Home Thoughts from Abroad'). 

Sadly, this morning the great Petroc Trelawny presented his last Radio 3 breakfast show. Ever since I gave up on Radio 4's dismal Today programme and turned to 3, thereby vastly improving my life, I've found Petroc's show the perfect thing to wake to, easing me beautifully into the day. And his roving reports from various parts of the country (and beyond) were superbly presented. As for his altogether extraordinary Auschwitz programme... well, I wrote about that briefly at the time. Petroc is moving to the early evening programme, In Tune, but my mornings – and those of many others – will never be the same again. He will be sorely missed. 

Birds

Here's a round-up of recent bird books, my latest contribution to Literary Review (where it appears on slightly different form). As ever, I urge you to buy the magazine – it's simply the best...

Birds, Sex and Beauty: The Extraordinary Implications of Charles Darwin’s Strangest Idea By Matt Ridley (4th Estate 340pp £25)
Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood By Adam Nicolson (Collins 448pp £22)
The Great Auk: Its Extraordinary Life, Hideous Death and Mysterious Afterlife By Tim Birkhead (Bloomsbury Sigma 288pp £20)

 Here are three very different books about birds by three of our finest writers on nature and science. Matt Ridley’s is the most ambitious and wide-ranging, exploring the implications of ‘Charles Darwin’s strangest idea’ – that evolution is driven not only by natural selection but also by sexual selection. It’s an idea that has faced opposition from Darwin’s time down to our own, perhaps because it involves female choice, perhaps because it seems to dilute the purity of the all-embracing theory of natural selection. Alfred Russel Wallace dismissed it entirely, and it was attacked by generations of naturalists ever after, but for Darwin himself, after The Origin of Species, it was a subject of much more interest than natural selection, which, as Ridley points out, takes a back seat in The Descent of Man.
   Birds, Sex and Beauty begins before dawn somewhere on the Pennines, where the author is watching the extraordinary spectacle of a black grouse lek, a loud and lively gathering of male birds who, for eight months of the year, gather daily to strut their stuff, displaying their spectacular black, white and red plumage and scrapping with each other. Most of the time, this goes on in the total absence of females, but when the hens do arrive one cock will eventually get nearly all the sex, enjoying his two seconds of ecstasy with a succession of eager hens. Why, asks Ridley, do the male birds go to such bizarre, exhausting lengths? And why do their displays, like those of many other birds, notably peacocks and birds of paradise, seem beautiful to us (and, presumably, to susceptible hen birds)? What is going on in a black grouse lek is not an Arthurian tournament where the victor in combat wins the favour of the fair damsel, though that mistaken idea dies hard: Ridley calls out David Attenborough himself for promulgating it. Fights on the lek are not serious, and winners gain no status. No, something else is going on – something to do with beauty, something that has implications far beyond the world of birds.
  Female choice has triggered ‘runaway’ effects in male plumage and display, a circular process whereby ‘taste for beauty creates beauty which creates taste for beauty’. And female choice has done much more than that, as the heading of one of Ridley’s chapters suggests: ‘How Mate Choice Shaped the Human Mind’. The phenomenal growth of the human brain and human abilities might well have served the aim of seduction, and art could be seen as a ‘sexual display signalling system’. The line between instinct and culture, nature and nurture is blurred when culture can drive genetic change. Ridley’s book – written with a pleasingly light touch, larded with literary quotations (more beauty) and illustrated with excellent colour photographs – is illuminating, incisive and a pleasure to read.
 Every bit as enjoyable is Bird School, in which Adam Nicolson embarks on ‘an attempt to encounter birds, to engage with a whole and marvellous layer of life that I had lived with in a kind of blindness and deafness for decades’. He claims that ‘I had never paid much attention to birds’ – except, of course, seabirds, about which he wrote the classic The Seabird’s Cry. On land – on his own land, the Sussex farm on which he lives – he sets about immersing himself in its bird life by building a rather wonderful hide, a hexagonal shed on stilts, built to be accommodating to birds as well as humans, and placed in the midst of the birds’ world, on the margin of a wood and a field. Here he observes what is going on and writes about it, with typical elegance and rich descriptive power, focusing in each chapter on one bird and the theme it embodies – ‘Wrens: Surviving’, ‘Songbirds: Proclaiming’, ‘Robins: Occupying’, etc.
  This is a fruitful approach, enabling Nicolson to move easily between the particular and the general. In the chapter on songbirds, for example, he listens to a blackbird heralding the start of the dawn chorus, tells how a songbird identification app has transformed his relationship with birds, discovers that the order in which birds start singing is dictated by eye size (the bigger the eye, the earlier the start), describes the effects of light and sound pollution on birdsong, and ponders the various reasons why birds greet the day with song. And sex rears its Darwinian head again: Nicolson cites research that found that ‘starting early was sexy for blue tits’, as it demonstrates experience and virility.

 Bird School is a pleasing blend of lyrical description, exploratory thought, first-hand experience, research findings, and references to literature and music. Nicolson writes beautifully, with infectious joy in his subject, and the book flows effortlessly along. It ends with a chapter in which he ponders the subject of rewilding, and describes his own plans for his farm – not rewilding but what he calls ‘reculturing’, a kind of mending of the landscape, allowing ‘the ancient connection between human use and animal and plant life to re-establish themselves’ in patterns what were lost in the century of intensive agriculture. After the final chapter comes a ‘roll-call’ of the birds on Nicolson’s patch, vivid verbal sketches of each bird, with the basic facts of its life.

  The Great Auk by Tim Birkhead, author of that wonderful book on birds’ eggs, The Most Perfect Thing, tells the story of a truly iconic bird, the large, flightless northern seabird that became extinct before the 19th century was half over. As the subtitle says, the great auk’s life was indeed extraordinary, its death hideous, and its afterlife mysterious. A bird that was revered and totemic in the deep past, it became the first species to be driven to extinction by human activity – wholesale slaughter, which began as soon as Europeans first happened upon the bird in its huge, wholly defenceless island colonies. Now all that remains of it is in the form of ornithological relics – eggs, skins, stuffed specimens and bones, all of which command sky-high prices if they come on the market. Birkhead’s book begins with a chapter titled Funk Heaven, imagining the life of a great auk colony on Funk Island, off Newfoundland. Then, sadly, comes Funk Hell, beginning with the appearance of the first European explorers and developing into a terrible tale of carnage.
  Later, long after the poor bird’s extinction, the story is largely one of obsessive collectors fighting over great auk relics, especially the eggs, several of which have gone mysteriously missing. Birkhead introduces the extraordinary figure of Vivian Hewitt, one-time playboy and aviator, who ended up living in seclusion in Cornwall with the ‘housekeeper’ whose four children he may well have fathered himself. He also became an obsessive egg collector, at one time owning 13 of the surviving great auk eggs. Hewitt is the dominant personality in a rogues’ gallery of strange, driven collectors who feature in this fascinating page-turner of a book. And, interestingly, Birkhead suggests that Darwin could have used extreme collecting ‘as a metaphor for sexual selection’. So there we are – back to sex again.

'As sure as there is a Space infinite...'

And here's something to raise the tone...
  I heard this piece on Radio 3 the other morning and it brought me up short, the more so when I learned it was written by Gavin Bryars, a composer perhaps best known for the chanson trouvé 'Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet', and for co-founding the gloriously inept Portsmouth Sinfonietta. It's from The Fifth Century, Bryars' setting of words from the fifth of Thomas Traherne's Centuries of Meditations. The text set here is 'As sure as there is a Space infinite, there is a Power, a Bounty, a Goodness, a Wisdom infinite, a Treasure, a Blessedness, a Glory...' Here is the link – 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3210dgdT-_0

  Staying with music, today is the anniversary of the birth (in 1866) of the great Italian pianist, composer, teacher and transcriber Feruccio Busoni. I first discovered him through his Bach transcriptions, and the greatest, most monumental of these is surely the magnificent Chaconne in D minor. Today I came across a recording of Michelangeli playing this masterpiece live. It's a lush, virtuosic performance, very much in the 'romantic' manner, but I'm sure Busoni would have approved – and I think Bach would have too...