An Unlikely Editor

 I've been  reading Siegfried Sassoon's memoir of his early years, The Old Century (and a very good read it is).
Being born a Sassoon, Siegfried was vaguely aware that he had a lot of rich relations, but he saw nothing of them – with one exception, Auntie Rachel, his father's sister, who was Mrs Frederick Beer, and who lived with her husband in an oppressively grand Mayfair mansion.  There were footmen and a butler, electric lighting, expensive furnishings and antiques galore. In the grand dining room, 'The food was a series of succulent surprises, and there were wonderful pictures on the walls. But every time we went there the floor became more densely occupied by piles of books. They were stacked all around the room and none of them had ever been opened, though they ought to have been because they were, to be precise, review copies sent to the Sunday Times, of which Auntie Rachel was the editor.' This nugget caught me up short – how could Auntie Rachel, 'well known for always being late for everything' and described by Sassoon as 'vague and desultory', be editing a national newspaper? 
 Sassoon explains: 'At that time both The Observer and the Sunday Times, which in those days were rather unobtrusive and retiring newspaper, belonged to Mr Beer, whose father had been a financier.' What is more (as he doesn't mention), Auntie Rachel was also the editor of The Observer – and was indeed the first woman to edit a national newspaper. The world of journalism was obviously very different in the 1890s, but even the young Sassoon found it hard to believe that his aunt could be editing a paper: 'I have often wondered how the Sunday Times managed to appear once a week under her editorship. I have also wondered how the printers succeeded in deciphering her handwriting, which was the most illegible hieroglyphic I have ever puzzled over.' Despite her husband becoming increasingly ill, she continued to edit both papers until 1901. On Frederick Beer's death in 1903, the papers changed hands again. Rachel herself was ill for many years, and when she died she left a large bequest to her nephew Siegfried, with which he was able to buy Heytesbury House in Wiltshire, where he lived for the rest of his life, forever grateful to Auntie Rachel. 

Degas's Apotheosis

This curious photograph – a silver print from a silver gelatine glass negative, dated 1885 – is titled 'The Apotheosis of Degas', and shows that artist sitting on the steps of a house in Dieppe surrounded by worshippers. Created with the help of a Dieppe portraitist and photographer, Walter Barnes, it is a parody of 'The Apotheosis of Homer', a heroic history painting by Ingres, one of Degas's artistic heroes.

Degas sent the photograph of his own apotheosis to his friends, partly as a joke but partly, one suspects, as an assertion of the artistic continuity between Ingres and himself – and indeed as a half-serious assertion of his own greatness; he was a man with a good conceit of himself. 
Ever the perfectionist, Degas later criticised his own composition: 'My three muses and my choir boys should have been grouped against a white or pale background, the costumes of the women in particular are lost. And the figures should also have been closer together.' Still, it works well enough.

A Centenarian

 It's not every day that you get to mark the centenary of someone still living – but today is the 100th birthday of the still very much alive broadcaster, actor and DJ Pete Murray (born Peter Murray James). His father was a Great War veteran who was injured in a gas attack at the Somme, and Murray claims to have been an unhappy and intensely shy boy. However, he got into RADA, despite a complete lack of experience, and even survived an attempt by the school's director to throw him out. According to Wikipedia, his early acting roles included a bit part in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, but by 1950 his career as a disc jockey had begun, with a five-year stint at Radio Luxemburg ('fabulous 208'), during which he discovered Bill Haley's 'Rock Around the Clock', played it four times in 15 minutes and thereby became (probably) the first man to introduce European audiences to rock'n'roll. Many successful years on BBC radio and television followed, until in 1983 the Corporation cancelled all his radio shows and Murray walked out, to start again with LBC. He is still broadcasting, and is reported to have presented a show today, on his 100th birthday. 
In a memorable appearance on the BBC's Breakfast Time back in 1983, reviewing the papers, he declared that 'a vote for Labour is a vote for communism. May God have mercy on your soul if you don't vote Conservative.' Wow. 

Practical Misfit

 

Last night I had a typically convoluted dream, of which, mercifully, I remember only one brief moment. A character rather like Sheldon Cooper (from that excellent sitcom The Big Bang Theory) is in a bit of a spin, frantically looking for something. 'Where is my Practical Misfit magazine?' he wails. 
Perhaps it's just me, but this struck me as very funny – which is presumably why I remember it. It made me wonder if a stable of magazines could be built around Practical Misfit, full of handy lifestyle tips. How about Practical Slacker? Practical Loner? Practical Nihilist? Practical Existentialist? Any more? Or maybe I've gone mad...

The Rest Is Noyes

 Born on this day in 1880 was Alfred Noyes, a poet now largely forgotten, but for the gloriously melodramatic ballad 'The Highwayman', which regularly features in anthologies and in polls of the nation's favourite poems – and why not? It's pretty irresistible...

PART ONE

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees.   

The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.   

The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,   

And the highwayman came riding—

         Riding—riding—

The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

He’d a French cocked-hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin,   

A coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of brown doe-skin.

They fitted with never a wrinkle. His boots were up to the thigh.   

And he rode with a jewelled twinkle,

         His pistol butts a-twinkle,

His rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jewelled sky.

Over the cobbles he clattered and clashed in the dark inn-yard.

He tapped with his whip on the shutters, but all was locked and barred.   

He whistled a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there   

But the landlord’s black-eyed daughter,

         Bess, the landlord’s daughter,

Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.

And dark in the dark old inn-yard a stable-wicket creaked

Where Tim the ostler listened. His face was white and peaked.   

His eyes were hollows of madness, his hair like mouldy hay,   

But he loved the landlord’s daughter,

         The landlord’s red-lipped daughter.

Dumb as a dog he listened, and he heard the robber say—

“One kiss, my bonny sweetheart, I’m after a prize to-night,

But I shall be back with the yellow gold before the morning light;

Yet, if they press me sharply, and harry me through the day,   

Then look for me by moonlight,

         Watch for me by moonlight,

I’ll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way.”

He rose upright in the stirrups. He scarce could reach her hand,

But she loosened her hair in the casement. His face burnt like a brand

As the black cascade of perfume came tumbling over his breast;   

And he kissed its waves in the moonlight,

         (O, sweet black waves in the moonlight!)

Then he tugged at his rein in the moonlight, and galloped away to the west.

PART TWO

He did not come in the dawning. He did not come at noon;   

And out of the tawny sunset, before the rise of the moon,   

When the road was a gypsy’s ribbon, looping the purple moor,   

A red-coat troop came marching—

         Marching—marching—

King George’s men came marching, up to the old inn-door.

They said no word to the landlord. They drank his ale instead.   

But they gagged his daughter, and bound her, to the foot of her narrow bed.

Two of them knelt at her casement, with muskets at their side!   

There was death at every window;

         And hell at one dark window;

For Bess could see, through her casement, the road that he would ride.

They had tied her up to attention, with many a sniggering jest.

They had bound a musket beside her, with the muzzle beneath her breast!

“Now, keep good watch!” and they kissed her. She heard the doomed man say—

Look for me by moonlight;

         Watch for me by moonlight;

I’ll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way!

She twisted her hands behind her; but all the knots held good!

She writhed her hands till her fingers were wet with sweat or blood!   

They stretched and strained in the darkness, and the hours crawled by like years

Till, now, on the stroke of midnight,

         Cold, on the stroke of midnight,

The tip of one finger touched it! The trigger at least was hers!

The tip of one finger touched it. She strove no more for the rest.   

Up, she stood up to attention, with the muzzle beneath her breast.   

She would not risk their hearing; she would not strive again;   

For the road lay bare in the moonlight;

         Blank and bare in the moonlight;

And the blood of her veins, in the moonlight, throbbed to her love’s refrain.

Tlot-tlot; tlot-tlot! Had they heard it? The horsehoofs ringing clear;   

Tlot-tlot; tlot-tlot, in the distance? Were they deaf that they did not hear?

Down the ribbon of moonlight, over the brow of the hill,

The highwayman came riding—

         Riding—riding—

The red coats looked to their priming! She stood up, straight and still.

Tlot-tlot, in the frosty silence! Tlot-tlot, in the echoing night!   

Nearer he came and nearer. Her face was like a light.

Her eyes grew wide for a moment; she drew one last deep breath,   

Then her finger moved in the moonlight,

         Her musket shattered the moonlight,

Shattered her breast in the moonlight and warned him—with her death.

He turned. He spurred to the west; he did not know who stood   

Bowed, with her head o’er the musket, drenched with her own blood!   

Not till the dawn he heard it, and his face grew grey to hear   

How Bess, the landlord’s daughter,

         The landlord’s black-eyed daughter,

Had watched for her love in the moonlight, and died in the darkness there.

Back, he spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky,

With the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high.

Blood red were his spurs in the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat;

When they shot him down on the highway,

         Down like a dog on the highway,

And he lay in his blood on the highway, with a bunch of lace at his throat.

.       .       .

And still of a winter’s night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,

When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,   

When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,   

A highwayman comes riding—

         Riding—riding—

A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door.

Over the cobbles he clatters and clangs in the dark inn-yard.

He taps with his whip on the shutters, but all is locked and barred.   

He whistles a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there   

But the landlord’s black-eyed daughter,

         Bess, the landlord’s daughter,

Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.

But there was more to Noyes than 'The Highwayman'. His first volume, The Loom of Years, was praised by Yeats and Meredith, and was published just after he left Oxford – without a degree, as he had had to miss a crucial exam in order to attend a meeting with his publisher. Nice work. 
   Noyes successfully published five more collections of his verse between 1903 and 1913. A long poem called 'The Barrel Organ' was especially popular (and includes the lyric 'Come down to Kew in lilac time'). Then there was a 200-page epic, Drake, and Noyes's only drama, Sherwood, which contains another of his popular lyrics, 'A Song of Sherwood'. His first wife was American, and with her he began to pay frequent visits to the States, becoming a visiting professor at Princeton, where his students included F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson. His views on literature were robustly traditional: he rated Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Johnson and Tennyson the greatest writers in the language – a perfectly reasonable position – and disliked most modernist work, expressing a strong distaste even for Arnold Bennett, H.L. Mencken and Proust, let alone Joyce, whose Ulysses he described as 'the foulest book that has ever found its way into print'. 
   Rather surprisingly for one of his conservative views, Noyes was a pacifist who deplored war and lectured against it and in favour of world peace and disarmament, though he supported Britain in both world wars. In the wake of the Great War, he was particularly disgusted by the Victory Balls held by members of the aristocracy, and his disgust found expression in an extraordinary poem, 'The Victory Ball' – 

The cymbals crash,
And the dancers walk,
With long white stockings
And arms of chalk,
Butterfly skirts,
And white breasts bare,
And shadows of dead men
Watching ’em there.
Shadows of dead men
Stand by the wall,
Watching the fun
Of the Victory Ball.
They do not reproach,
Because they know,
If they’re forgotten
It’s better so.
Under the dancing
Feet are the graves.
Dazzle and motley,
In long white waves,
Brushed by the palm-fronds
Grapple and whirl
Ox-eyed matron,
And slim white girl.
Fat wet bodies
Go waddling by,
Girdled with satin,
Though God knows why:
Gripped by satyrs
In white and black,
With a fat wet hand
On the fat wet back.

See, there’s one child
Fresh from school,
Learning the ropes
As the old hands rule.
God! how the dead men
Chuckle again,
As she begs for a dose
Of the best cocaine.

"What do you think
We should find”, said the shade,
“When the last shot echoed
And peace was made?”

“Christ” laughed the
Fleshless jaws of his friend,
“I thought they’d be
Praying for worlds to mend,
And making earth better
Or something damn silly
Like whitewashing hell
Or Picca-damn-dilly.
They’ve a sense of humour
These women of ours,
These exquisite lilies,
These fresh young flowers”.

“Pish”, said a statesman
Standing near,
"I’m glad they keep busy
Their thoughts elsewhere!
We mustn’t reproach 'em,
They’re young, you see”

“Ah”, said the dead men,
“So were we”.

Victory! Victory!
On with the dance!
Back to the jungle
The new beasts prance!
God, how the dead men
Grin by the wall
Watching the fun
Of the Victory Ball.

This is a poem that reads more like a poetic analogue of a George Grosz painting than the work of a popular traditionalist English poet of his time. 
  Noyes carried on writing voluminously, in prose and verse, tackling ever larger themes, to the end of his long life (he died in 1958). In his later years, he took to writing for children – and produced one more popular anthology piece, the poem 'Daddy Fell into the Pond'. The contrast with 'The Victory Ball' hardly needs pointing up...

Everyone grumbled. The sky was grey.
We had nothing to do and nothing to say.
We were nearing the end of a dismal day,
And there seemed to be nothing beyond.
THEN
Daddy fell into the pond!

And everyone's face grew merry and bright,
And Timothy danced for sheer delight.
"Give me the camera, quick, oh quick!
He's crawling out of the duckweed."
Click!

Then the gardener suddenly slapped his knee,
And doubled up, shaking silently,
And the ducks all quacked as if they were daft
And is sounded as if the old drake laughed.
O, there wasn't a thing that didn't respond
WHEN
Daddy fell into the pond!