Well, I'll Be Dashed...

My daughter in Canada, who works as an online editor,  tells me her writers are being urged not to use dashes, as that punctuation mark is too heavily associated with AI-generated content. It seems the likes of ChatGPT are strangely fond of scattering dashes through their 'writing' – with the result that it now looks more authentically human to eschew them. This is a sorry state of affairs – the beginning of the end for the dash? – especially as my daughter is as fond of dashes as I am. 'Now', says one of her writers, 'we're stuck with commas, semicolons, and existential dread.' What's worse, the semicolon could be next, according to some reports – and then what will we do? 
  The versatile and endlessly useful dash – introducing light and space into airless prose – is an invaluable weapon in the writer's armoury. It is impossible to imagine some writer's works – notably Laurence Sterne's – without the dash, of which he was the supreme virtuoso. How would Keats's letters read without their spattering of dashes? As it happens, we have an enlightening example of what happens when dashes (along with underlinings, abbreviations and exclamation marks) are edited out of manuscript text in favour of decorous semicolons, full stops and quotation marks. This was the treatment meted out to Jane Austen by her publishers, and it seems to me that it drained her writing of a good deal of its original vitality. Here is a passage from the manuscript of Persuasion, as written –

You should have distinguished – replied Anne – You should not have suspected me now; – The case so different, & my age so different! – If I was wrong, in yeilding to Persuasion once, remember that it was to Persuasion exerted on the side of safety, not of Risk. When I yeilded, I thought it was to Duty – But no Duty could be called in aid here. – In marrying a Man indifferent to me, all Risk would have been incurred, & all Duty violated.

And here is the tidied-up version – 

'You should have distinguished,' replied Anne. 'You should not have suspected me now; the case so different, and my age so different. If I was wrong in yielding to persuasion once, remember that it was to persuasion exerted on the side of safety, not of risk. When I yielded, I thought it was to duty; but no duty could be called in aid here. In marrying a man indifferent to me, all risk would have been incurred, and all duty violated.'

Compare and contrast, as they say. 
   At present it is only possible to read Jane Austen in the original in the prohibitively expensive five-volume set of Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts, edited by Kathryn Sutherland. Surely there is enough interest in Austen to publish some of them in an affordable form. 

'It's best for genuises to travel light'

 The other day I was startled to discover that I don't have a Yeats on my bedside bookshelves. I know I have at least one somewhere, but it/they must have been subsumed into the chaos that reigns on the other shelves in the house. So off I went to pick up a Yeats from one of the charity bookshops, two of which carry quite a lot of poetry, so surely.... Alas, I drew a blank at my favourite shop, so I tried a less favourite one. As I was scanning the poetry section, an amiable young volunteer who was shelving nearby asked me what I was looking for. The name Yeats clearly meant nothing to him, but he was interested enough to ask if he'd written anything he might know. I quoted a few old chestnuts – no country for old men, things fall apart, I will arise and go now, etc. – but no response. He's a student, he told me, studying speech and drama. Ah well. He asked me how Yeats was spelt, and obligingly went off and looked in the stockroom, but again no joy. However, continuing to scan the shelves, I spotted Gavin Ewart's Selected Poems, 1933-1993 (quite a run!), so I snapped that up. I've written about Ewart before (e.g. here). He was a poet who wrote mostly 'light verse', and whose range has been described as 'from rueful to raucous'. It could also be described as 'from serious to scabrous'. Here, from Selected Poems, is something fairly close to the 'serious' end, a typically shapely reflection on literary fame, contrasting the fate of Yeats and Shakespeare (and referencing Arnold's 'Others abide our question, thou are free').  

Yeats and Shakespeare

Somebody wrote somewhere (about Yeats) 
how even in those wasp-waisted days
before the First World War
(for twenty years reckoned among the Greats)
he was so spoiled by worship and by praise
he couldn't behave naturally any more,

as hostesses crept up behind his back
with every kind of social, sexual net
and pecking order snare; 
a lion with hyenas on his track
or hunters closing, they say, and yet
he never seemed to find this hard to bear.

Shakespeare was not so honoured in his life
though (for a player) he ended rich,
great ladies didn't swoon
to hear or see him; and a bitter wife,
it is presumed, told him the what and which
of all his faults, and told him pretty soon.

Arnold was John the Baptist, coming late
to smooth the way for universal awe,
but one thing he got right: 
Shakespeare was lucky not to be thought great
outside the Mermaid, or above the law.
It's best for geniuses to travel light. 

No Bezos

 As a blatant hypocrite, one who deplores Jeff Bezos and all his works while making frequent use of Amazon, I was cheered to see that the people of Venice are not taking the forthcoming  nuptials of Mr Amazon and his somewhat Amazonian bride lying down – and who can blame them? While no one could seriously claim that Venetians are great enemies of vulgar display, this occasion, which apparently involves hiring the whole island of San Giorgio Maggiore for three days (what will the resident monks make of it?), booking out all the most expensive hotels and boats and closing off parts of the city, is too much even for them. Surely the Venetian Resort at Las Vegas would have sufficed for Mr B, wouldn't it?  Or perhaps he's a keen student of Palladio's architecture, who knows?
I wonder if any goodie bags from the festivities will turn up on Amazon...

'The unpurged images of day recede...'

 On this day 160 years ago, William Butler Yeats was born. When I marked the sesquicentenary ten years ago, I wrote a little about his work and reputation. Today I shall simply post one of the greatest of his late great poems, a meditation of art and life, mortality and immortality, flesh and spirit, in all its blazing glory...

Byzantium

The unpurged images of day recede;

The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;

Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song

After great cathedral gong;

A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains

All that man is,

All mere complexities,

The fury and the mire of human veins.

Before me floats an image, man or shade,

Shade more than man, more image than a shade;

For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth

May unwind the winding path;

A mouth that has no moisture and no breath

Breathless mouths may summon;

I hail the superhuman;

I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.

Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,

More miracle than bird or handiwork,

Planted on the starlit golden bough,

Can like the cocks of Hades crow,

Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud

In glory of changeless metal

Common bird or petal

And all complexities of mire or blood.

At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit

Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,

Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,

Where blood-begotten spirits come

And all complexities of fury leave,

Dying into a dance,

An agony of trance,

An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood,

Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood,

The golden smithies of the Emperor!

Marbles of the dancing floor

Break bitter furies of complexity,

Those images that yet

Fresh images beget,

That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

RIP

 This blog can't let the death of the great Brian Wilson go wholly unmarked, so here are a couple of favourite tracks.
First, this one, from the greatest pop album ever made. I Just Wasn't Made for These Times is an astonishing production, featuring the electro-theremin (its first ever use), harpsichord, tack piano, bass harmonica, guitars, clarinets, piccolo, plus all six Beach Boys, layer after layer of sound... 

And here, by way of contrast, is my favourite feelgood Beach Boys song (also from the annus mirabilis of 1968, but harking back to surfing days) – 

The great celestial jam session will be richer than ever with Mr Wilson in the mix.

Jackson's Nineties

 I spent much of the train journey to and fro Worthing reading Holbrook Jackson's The 1890s (a book I mentioned briefly here). Jackson – writer, journalist, publisher and bibliophile – is all but forgotten today, but, to judge by The 1890s, he is well worth a look. It's a notably well written and insightful survey of a fascinating decade, tracing the many, often contradictory forces at work, from the Aesthetic movement (more of an 1880s phenomenon) and the Decadence (owing so much to France) to movements for social reform, and – both potent forces – patriotism and imperialism. And it's a decade that, with remarkable symmetry, breaks into two halves in its middle year, with the calamitous trial and downfall of Oscar Wilde.
  The early chapters on the leading artistic magazines of the period, notably The Yellow Book and The Savoy, are interesting, but contain rather too many lists of contributors, many of whom are quite forgotten now, even if their names were still alive in 1913 when The 1890s was published. Jackson gets into his stride with the chapters devoted to individual writers, beginning with Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley: each of those chapters is a brilliant evocation and a judicious study of its subject. Slow reader that I am, I've only just got to the chapter on Max Beerbohm, which I expect to be every bit as good. 
  Talking of Oscar Wilde, I learn from The 1890s that his last published work was the second of two letters he wrote to The Daily Chronicle about the terrible conditions in English prisons. It begins
'SIR – I understand that the Home Secretary's Prison Reform Bill is to be read this week for the first or second time, and as your journal has been the one paper in England that has taken a real and vital interest in this important question, I hope that you will allow me, as one who has had long personal experience of life in an English gaol, to point out what reforms in our present stupid and barbarous system are urgently necessary.' 
Wilde sent this letter from the Villa Bourget in the sleepy coastal village of Berneval-sur-Mer, outside Dieppe, where he also wrote 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' and thought about writing a new play, to be called Ahab and Jezebel – but he never got round to it, so that second letter to The Daily Chronicle was the last thing he published. According to Jackson, it was printed under the heading 'Don't Read This if you Want to be Happy Today' – a headline that could be reused on a grand scale in today's papers, and indeed could serve as the masthead motto of at least one.

Worthing again

 I'm going to be in Worthing for the next few days.
(It looks a bit different now...)

A Momentary Vision

 John Everett Millais, one of the giants of Victorian art, was born on this day in 1829. A child prodigy and a formidably gifted painter, he was a founder and star of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but, as his career progressed and he achieved great wealth and social eminence, his work became less interesting, and he was liable to lapse into sentimentality and crowd-pleasing showpieces, reaching a nadir with works like 'Bubbles', used to advertise Pear's soap. It's unlikely that any amount of critical revisionism will rescue much of his later work, even the bleak, unpopulated landscapes he painted in Perthshire on his annual hunting-and-fishing holidays (one of the best known of these, 'Chill October', is owned by Lord Lloyd Webber).  In 1885 he became the first artist to be honoured with a hereditary title, becoming Baronet Millais of Palace Gate (where his Kensington mansion still stands), and in 1896 he inevitably succeeded Lord Leighton as President of the Royal Academy. 
  Max Beerbohm's caricature, 'A Momentary Vision that Once Befell Young Millais', tells the story perfectly. The youthful Millais, in Pre-Raphaelite mode, is startled by a glimpse of what he is to become – a plump, contented member of the squirearchy, devoted to hunting, fishing and high society. Beerbohm places a little girl in a mob cap on his knee as a reminder of the sentimental prettiness that won him such popularity and wealth. As ever with Beerbohm, there is no malice in the portrayal, which is less a caricature of Millais himself than of the common perception of the unfortunate course of his career. The painting on the easel – 'Ferdinand Lured by Ariel' – stands as a reminder of what a daring and brilliant painter Millais could be. 

'Discovered need and loss'

In 'Portrait Painter' (collected in The Covenant), Dick Davis writes a formal poem (a single sentence of three six-line stanzas rhymed abcbac) that is a kind of defence of formalism, telling how the artist, detaching himself emotionally and concentrating on form and technique, can bring forth the essence, 'unbidden, true', of a subject – and its emotional power, unsought but blazing through...  

Portrait Painter

If, in the middle-aged
Worn face now given to
His stranger's scrutiny
He sees – unbidden, true – 
Regret stare unassuaged
From posed formality – 

Her need and loss, a life
Of compromise made plain,
His thoughts are not the rush
Of sympathy for pain
But tone and palette-knife,
The texture of this brush:

And, glancing up, his gaze
Meets nothing of the heart 
But colour, shade, and gloss –
The problems of his art;
While from the canvas blaze
Discovered need and loss.

I wonder if Davis had Rembrandt in mind when he wrote this – the Rembrandt who painted portraits such as the one above, of Aechje Claesdr. I've written about two Rembrandt poems by Davis before – here and here. Perhaps this is a third?

Ten Years On

 This is John Singer Sargent's Madame Gautreau Drinking a Toast – to what, we don't know. Me, I'm drinking a toast to ten years of freedom – yes, it was on this day ten years ago that I achieved the great goal of my working life: retirement. And a great ten years it's been, encompassing, among other highlights, the birth of the two youngest grandsons, the publication of my two books, and the great move to Lichfield. More reading, more writing, more walks, butterflies, churches... Here's to the next ten years!
  [Sargent's painting hangs in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. It was painted a year before he portrayed Madame Gautreau as Madame X in a high-impact portrait that caused a sensation and ensured Sargent's fame.]

Rex Whistler

 Yesterday I caught an episode of Michael Portillo's Great British Railway Journeys in which he visited Plas Newydd on Anglesey, where he duly admired Rex Whistler's magnificent mural in the dining room. The amiable lady showing him around filled him in on the background, and mentioned the fact that Whistler was intending to return and finish a few details after the war, but was killed in action in Normandy. Although I knew Whistler had died in the war, I didn't know the details, so I checked out the story – and desperately sad it is. 
   At the start of the war, Whistler was too old for immediate conscription (he was 35), but he was determined to join up, believing it was the duty of men of his age to fight, rather than 'young boys'. The extraordinary self-portrait above shows him in May 1940, in his new Welsh Guards uniform, sitting on the verandah of a friend's house overlooking Regent's Park. It's a virtuoso work, and quite unlike any other self-portrait I can think of. When I saw it for the first time (it hangs in the National Army Museum), I was quite astonished at its impact. Inevitably, in view of what came after, it has, for all the gaiety of its detail, something decidedly melancholy about it, as if the shadow falling on the artist is that of his impending death. As it was, Whistler spent the next four years in military training in various parts of England, while at the same time drawing and painting whenever he could. He could have had a headquarters job, but when offered one by his divisional commander, he replied, 'Well, I'm bloody well not going – Sir! I'm going to stay with my troop!' The commander did not press him. Then, in June 1944, Whistler, now a troop commander in charge of three tanks, crossed with his regiment to Normandy. There, on his first day of action, near Caen, he was killed. He had left the safety of his own tank to help some of his men trapped in another tank, and was blown up by the blast from a German mortar. He is buried in the small military cemetery at Banneville-la-Campagne. 

When Buzzards Attack

 When I was a boy, the only place you ever saw buzzards was in wild, remote country. I think the first I ever saw were a pair circling over an abandoned quarry in wild west Wales – one of the very few pleasures of a miserable, wet week camping with the Boy Scouts (never again). Nowadays things are very different, and buzzards can be seen overhead almost anywhere, in city, town and suburb – and their presence is not without problems. In the gloriously named North London village of Havering-atte-Bower (remember Chaucer's Prioress who spoke French 'after the school of Stratford-atte-Bowe' rather than that of Paris?), a primary school has had to stop its pupils playing outside because of a dive-bombing buzzard, most likely one that is nesting nearby. According to the newspaper story, a buzzard or buzzards have been attacking villagers for months, and one victim of the buzzard terror describes the bird giving her the 'evil eye' as it closed in. Happily the school has turned the whole thing into a 'learning experience', with the children creating posters promoting the protection of birds – and they've nicknamed their buzzard 'Brenda', which seems a little tame. When a Harris hawk (which must have been an escape – it's a South American bird) recently started diving on villagers in Flamstead, Hertfordshire – showing a marked preference for tall middle-aged men – they nicknamed it Bomber Harris. It was finally humanely captured and handed over to a falconer – and its captor was a Mr Harris. What are the chances?