'Not the worship of ashes...'

 Recently I wrote about Richard Wilbur's precept: 'In poetry, all the revolutions are palace revolutions' – in other words, all true revolutions take place within the living tradition, the poetic heritage; nothing is overthrown, the tradition lives on (this applies only to true revolutions, not rebellion for its own sake, which leads nowhere). Yesterday I came across another quotation that I think expresses perfectly the value of tradition: 'Tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire.' This formulation was coined by a musicologist called Constantin Floros, and is taken from his study of Mahler's symphonies (which I haven't read, being no great fan of those works). 'The preservation of fire' is indeed what a living tradition is all about, and when it is based on the worship of ashes it is no longer alive – at which point the time is ripe for another palace revolution. Poetry could probably do with one now, though heaven knows where it would come from or what it would look like. At present the living tradition appears to be very much more alive in music than in poetry... 

Radical Harmony

  Yesterday I was in the wicked city, having lunch with an old friend and visiting the pointillism exhibition, Radical Harmony, at the National Gallery. This display of paintings from the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, seems to have had lukewarm reviews, for some reason – I guess it's a style of painting that can seem rather sterile and limited. For myself I love it, largely because it was favoured by Seurat, one of the greatest of all late-19th-century painters (IMHO). The National Gallery has one of his that has never before been seen in Britain – Le Chahut (the Can-Can), a late and intriguing work that seems to suggest that Seurat, towards the end of his too-short life, was going to move off in new, unexpected directions, perhaps towards something more geometric and abstract, less naturalistic. 

I was glad to see a small-scale version of Les Poseuses (for my money, one of the great paintings of its time) and several of the coastal views painted by Seurat and Paul Signac. There is also Seurat's extraordinary portrait drawing of Signac, a miracle of ultra-delicate draughtsmanship. 
For me the revelation of the exhibition was Theo Van Rysselberghe, a Belgian artist I had barely heard of. The stricter pointillists were sniffy about his work, as he strayed from the technique, mixing it with other, looser manners of applying paint to canvas – but the results, especially in his portraits, could be rather wonderful. Among the large portraits on display are a lovely one of his wife –

and an equally impressive portrait of Anna Boch, an artist and collector, who has the distinction of being the purchaser of the only painting Van Gogh sold in his lifetime (La Vigne Rouge) –

And here, for good measure, is Maria Sèthe at the Harmonium . Maria was the wife of the Belgian architect and designer Henry Van de Velde – 

Van de Velde also painted, and his restful, vaguely melancholy Twilight caught my eye – 

Needless to say, these are not paintings that reproduce very well, and you really do need to see them. The exhibition, which is on a manageable scale and is not attracting blockbuster crowds, is on until February. I'd recommend it to anyone at all interested in post-impressionist art. 

What Would Captain Mainwaring Say?

 Born on this day (in 1920) was the actor Buster Merryfield, who achieved fame as 'Uncle Albert' in the sitcom Only Fools and Horses, which I rate as the best long-running British sitcom ever (though, like most, it ran a little bit too long). His career path was quite extraordinary, indeed unique, as I wrote here back in 2013... 

'Born on this day in 1920 was Henry Merryfield. A big strapping 9lb baby, he was immediately nicknamed Buster by his granddad, and Buster he remained, to the point where scarcely anyone knew his real name. As Buster Merryfield, he achieved fame late in life, playing the seafaring Uncle Albert (catchphrase 'During the war...') in the massively successful sitcom Only Fools and Horses.
 Something of a fitness fiend, Buster had been a boxing champion in his day, and was a PT and jungle warfare instructor 'during the war' - at which time he also got his first taste of the biz we call show, serving as an entertainment officer. However, when hostilities ceased, he was already married and about to become a father, so he elected to take the safe option – returning to the then National Westminster Bank, where he had been employed before the war.
  The amazing thing is that he stayed there until his retirement. While spending much of his spare time in amateur theatricals, Buster Merryfield didn't turn professional until after he had retired from what was by then NatWest. He had clocked up 40 years of service, man and boy, and risen to be manager of the Thames Ditton branch in Surrey. Surely this was the most unlikely bank manager ever – and surely the only bank manager ever to make the switch to much-loved sitcom stalwart. He must also have been alone among bank managers in having his face framed by such a mighty beard – what would Captain Mainwaring say?

'Busy, curious, thirsty fly!'

 The recent cold snaps have put paid to the last of the summer's wasps and flies, though the latter have hung around rather longer. When it come to flies, I (unlike Mrs N) take the line favoured by Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy: 

'Go—says he, one day at dinner, to an over-grown one which had buzz’d about his nose, and tormented him cruelly all dinner-time,—and which, after infinite attempts, he had caught at last, as it flew by him;—I’ll not hurt thee, says my uncle Toby, rising from his chair, and going a-cross the room, with the fly in his hand,—I’ll not hurt a hair of thy head:—Go, says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he spoke, to let it escape;—go poor devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee?—This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.'

For all their deplorable habits, flies are marvellous little creatures, wonderfully made, even beautiful if looked at closely and without prejudice, and their habit of scrupulously 'washing their hands' is endearing. Their vision operates at such a speed that our attempts to catch them are usually doomed: they see our approaching hand moving in slow motion and escape at their leisure.
Uncle Toby was not the only one with a soft spot for the fly. Browsing in my recently purchased India-paper anthology, I came across this, by William Oldys: 

On a Fly Drinking Out of His Cup

Busy, curious, thirsty fly!
Drink with me and drink as I:
Freely welcome to my cup,
Couldst thou sip and sip it up:
Make the most of life you may,
Life is short and wears away.

Both alike are mine and thine
Hastening quick to their decline:
Thine's a summer, mine's no more,
Though repeated to threescore.
Threescore summers, when they're gone,
Will appear as short as one!

 Oldys was an important antiquarian and bibliographer, but a man of irregular habits, whose debts landed him in the Fleet prison for two years, before he was rescued by friends who paid off all he owed. The Duke of Norfolk appointed him Norfolk Herald Extraordinary and Norroy King of Arms. However, the College of Arms describes him as 'a noted antiquary and bibliographer but wholly ignorant of heraldry and known for being "rarely sober in the afternoon, never after supper" and "much addicted to low company".'

What the Camel-Sparrow Ate

 The excellent Public Domain Review recently posted a photograph, from around 1930, of the contents of an ostrich's stomach, extracted post mortem. It's a fascinating collection of objects, including two handkerchiefs and a buttoned glove (this was a zoo ostrich), a length of rope, and various metal objects – coins, tacks, staples, hooks and a four-inch nail (which, sadly, was the cause of death). Here's a link –  https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/contents-of-an-ostrich-s-stomach-ca-1930

It would seem, than, that there is some truth in the idea that the ostrich 'digesteth hard yron', as in the poem by Marianne Moore –

He 'Digesteth Hard Yron' 

Although the aepyornis
   or roc that lived in Madagascar, and
the moa are extinct,
the camel-sparrow, linked
   with them in size—the large sparrow
Xenophon saw walking by a stream—was and is
a symbol of justice.

   This bird watches his chicks with
   a maternal concentration—and he’s
been mothering the eggs
at night six weeks—his legs
   their only weapon of defense.
He is swifter than a horse; he has a foot hard
as a hoof; the leopard

   is not more suspicious. How
   could he, prized for plumes and eggs and young
used even as a riding-beast, respect men
   hiding actor-like in ostrich skins, with the right hand
making the neck move as if alive
and from a bag the left hand strewing grain, that ostriches

   might be decoyed and killed! Yes, this is he
whose plume was anciently
the plume of justice; he
   whose comic duckling head on its
great neck revolves with compass-needle nervousness
when he stands guard,

   in S-like foragings as he is
   preening the down on his leaden-skinned back.
The egg piously shown
as Leda’s very own
   from which Castor and Pollux hatched,
was an ostrich-egg. And what could have been more fit
for the Chinese lawn it

   grazed on as a gift to an
   emperor who admired strange birds, than this
one, who builds his mud-made
nest in dust yet will wade
   in lake or sea till only the head shows.

	.	.	.	.	.	.	.

   Six hundred ostrich-brains served
   at one banquet, the ostrich-plume-tipped tent
and desert spear, jewel-
gorgeous ugly egg-shell
   goblets, eight pairs of ostriches
in harness, dramatize a meaning
always missed by the externalist.

   The power of the visible
   is the invisible; as even where
no tree of freedom grows,
so-called brute courage knows.
   Heroism is exhausting, yet
it contradicts a greed that did not wisely spare
the harmless solitaire

   or great auk in its grandeur;
   unsolicitude having swallowed up
all giant birds but an alert gargantuan
   little-winged, magnificently speedy running-bird.
This one remaining rebel
is the sparrow-camel.

This is a poem that vividly evokes the ludicrous but admirable flightless bird (not the last large flightless bird, pace Miss Moore), but is also about much more: the persistence of the past, endurance and survival, heroism and greed. The notes are impressive in themselves, citing Lyly's Euphues – 'the estrich digesteth hard yron to preserve his health' – and a range of other sources, notably George Jennison's Animals for Show and Pleasure in Ancient Rome.  Maybe the 'poet friend' quoted by Kay Ryan in her essay on Moore* was right: 'They should have taken away her library card.' But she is magnificent, formidable. Ryan goes on: '... how can we not find Marianne Moore formidable since she's so hard to understand? I think we just have to read her until we can contain the complexity that we cannot resolve. That is a bigger kind of understanding. At that point, the poet is no longer "formidable". A word or two becomes sufficient to invoke the complex spirit. We feel, now, an affection, a human affection, and a receptiveness which we could not feel when we were fighting with particulars.' Very true, I think, and of other poets than the magnificent Miss Moore.

*Collected in the wonderful Synthesizing Gravity (2020).   

Everyone's writing about this, so feel free to ignore...

 I could scarcely believe my eyes when I saw the headline – 'Lockdown could have been avoided entirely'! Had the farcical Covid 'inquiry' at last, having expended just shy of £200 million of our money, managed to produce a glimmer of sense? No, of course not, as I soon discovered. The gist was that lockdown could have been avoided if we'd, er, locked down a week earlier: it was the predetermined narrative of 'too little, too late' yet again. Earlier and more drastic action, it was said, would have saved 23,000 lives, according to 'computer modelling' – the same deeply flawed computer modelling that came up with such preposterous projections throughout the epidemic. There's an interesting graph on the Spectator website, showing a mighty Himalaya of projected deaths – projected by computer modelling – looming over something more like an alluvial plain, the near-flatline of actual Covid deaths. This 'inquiry' was set up with its conclusions ready made – that Boris Johnson's government fouled up and must be blamed, and that the only thing wrong with the harsh and oppressive measures taken was that they weren't harsh and oppressive enough, or go on for long enough. In the teeth of all the evidence, lockdown is unquestioningly presented as a life-saver on a grand scale, with no acknowledgment that, overall, the countries with the lightest (or non-existent) lockdown regimes had the best outcomes in terms of mortality, and those with the tightest regimes had among the worst. So, nothing has been learnt, and the next time will be even worse – especially if it happens under Starmer, who, when the final lockdown was belatedly lifted, predicted that this 'reckless' act would lead to 50,000 extra deaths in what would forever after be known as the 'Johnson variant'. This, oddly, did not come to pass. 

'The high mimetic powers possessed by Mr Dickens...'

 Good news from Birmingham (for a change) – the city is to unveil a Blue Plaque at its fine neoclassical town hall to commemorate Dickens's first public reading of A Christmas Carol.
A contemporary report chronicled the event thus: 

'The first of the Readings generously given by Mr Charles Dickens on behalf of the Birmingham and Midland Institute, took place on Tuesday evening, December 27, 1853, at the Birmingham Town Hall, where, notwithstanding the inclemency of the weather, nearly two thousand persons had assembled. The work selected was the CHRISTMAS CAROL. The high mimetic powers possessed by Mr Dickens enabled him to personate with remarkable force the various characters of the story, and with admirable skill to pass rapidly from the hard, unbelieving Scrooge, to trusting and thankful Bob Cratchit, and from the genial fulness of Scrooge's nephew, to the hideous mirth of the party assembled in Old Joe the Ragshopkeeper's parlour. The reading occupied more than three hours, but so interested were the audience, that only one or two left the Hall previously to its termination, and the loud and frequent bursts of applause attested the successful discharge of the reader's arduous task. On Thursday evening Mr. Dickens read THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH. The Hall was again well ruled, and the tale, though deficient in the dramatic interest of the CAROL, was listened to with attention, and rewarded with repeated applause. On Friday evening, the CHRISTMAS CAROL was read a second time to a large assemblage of work-people, for whom, at Mr. Dickens`s special request, the major part of the vast edifice was reserved.
.........
At the close of the reading Mr Dickens received a vote of thanks, and "three cheers, with three times three". As soon as the enthusiasm of the audience would allow him to speak, Mr Dickens said:-"You have heard so much of my voice since we met tonight, that I will only say, in acknowledgment of this affecting mark of your regard, that I am truly and sincerely interested in you; that any little service I have rendered to you I have freely rendered from my heart; that I hope to become an honorary member of your great Institution, and will meet you often there when it becomes practically useful; that I thank you most affectionately for this new mark of your sympathy and approval; and that I wish you many happy returns of this great birthday-time, and many prosperous years."

Not only was this Dickens's first public reading of the Carol; it was his first public reading of any of his own works. It clearly gave him a taste for such performances, to which he devoted much of his later career, exhausting himself in the process with readings of terrific emotional intensity – notably his famously terrifying reading of the murder of Nancy from Oliver Twist. Dickens judged the success of that one by how many ladies had fainted with horror in the course of it. 

In our own day, a public reading of all three hours of A Christmas Carol would be unlikely to attract many takers (even if it was given by Andrew Scott, whose one-man Chekhov, Vanya, was such a hit). But we do have the inimitable Count Arthur Strong currently touring the country with his, er, somewhat tangential take on A Christmas Carol. Here's a preview...

'And then they clearly flew...'

A slight thing this, but it caught my eye, and I think it does say something, or enact something, true about the line between prose and poetry... 

Because You Asked About the Line Between Prose and Poetry
by Howard Nemerov 

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned to pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

The House of Peace

 Yesterday I visited, with my Derbyshire cousin, the National Holocaust Centre and Museum. You can be forgiven if you've never heard of it – neither had I – as it is not widely publicised, and it is located in what could with some justice be called the middle of nowhere. To be precise, it is deep in rural Nottinghamshire, near the village of Laxton, where England's last working example of the medieval open field system of cultivation is to be found. The National Holocaust Centre, or Beth Shalom (house of peace), was established by a Christian family, the Smiths,  who were inspired by visiting Yad Vashem, Israel's national holocaust memorial. Their aim was to educate visitors – children in particular – in the realities of the Shoah, as part of the great effort to ensure that it is never forgotten and never repeated. The museum building, which used to be the Smith family home, stands amid gardens which were naturally not looking their best on a drear November day. The museum tells the story of the Holocaust in two permanent exhibitions: one is an excellent historical display with good use of oral testimony, audio, visuals and artefacts, and an emphasis on survivors' stories; and the other, aimed at children, in the form of The Journey, a more immersive and interactive telling of the story of a Jewish boy who manages to escape the Nazi persecution on a Kindertransport. 
  The main display makes a good job of setting the Holocaust in its historical context, as one manifestation – the worst and most deadly – of a deep-rooted, ongoing hatred of Jews. Though it gives the facts and figures, it is reticent about the details of what actually went on in the camps, but that is perhaps just as well – the display packs enough of a punch to make its point. The only real weakness, I thought, was that it did not carry the story up to the present, taking in the great surge in antisemitism that followed the 7th October pogrom (perhaps there are plans to do so?). As it happens, though, that job is being done at present (until next spring) by Fabricated?, a rather wonderful exhibition of works and artefacts by Caren Garfen, who specialises in embroidery, often of texts reproduced in tiny stitches, forcing the viewer to come in close and absorb the message. Some of the work illuminates the past, but much of it chronicles the terrible things that have been happening since October 7th.  One of the exhibits, for example, is an old-fashioned typewriter from which spills a roll of paper bearing a list of recent antisemitic incidents, all of it, incredibly, embroidered in tiny stitches (and the 'paper' is of course cloth). It's hard to describe Fabricated?, but you can read more about it here. It is an intensely moving exhibition, and makes a visit to this extraordinary museum even more worthwhile. It's the only museum of its kind in England, and it deserves to be better known. 

A Find

 Feeling a sudden urge to have a classic poetry anthology by my bedside, I took a look in one of my local charity shops, and straight away found this beauty. I believe I already have it somewhere, in its familiar large format and in a later edition – but this version is duodecimo, printed on India paper, all 1,000-plus pages of it contained in a volume of no great thickness, the pages of which are edged with still-fresh gilt. The typeface looks pleasingly old-fashioned, probably a version of Fell, and this handsome volume – an edition of 1930, inscribed 'To Mary, with love from Maude, Sep.1934' – was mine for just £3. The original Oxford Book of English Verse, it covers the period from 1250 to 1900, and is edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch, aso known as 'Q' (though he was not, as far as is known, a spymaster). He states his aims clearly and rather charmingly in the opening paragraph of the Preface: 
'For this Anthology I have tried to range over the whole field of English Verse from the beginning, or from the Thirteenth Century to this closing year of the Nineteenth, and to choose the best. Nor have I sought in these Islands only, but wheresoever the Muse has followed the tongue which among living tongues she most delights to honour. To bring home and render so great a spoil compendiously has been my capital difficulty. It is for the reader to judge if I have so managed it as to serve those who already love poetry and to implant that love in some young minds not yet initiated.'
According to Wikipedia, this India-paper edition was carried around the Empire by poetry-loving Brits, and was a popular 'knapsack book' among the military. 'Q' later revised the 1900 edition considerably, thinning out the late 19th century and adding more poems from earlier periods and from 1900 to 1918. Anyway, it will be good to have it at my bedside, where it will join another India-paper classic, my single-volume edition of Carlyle's French Revolution, which I am now nearly halfway through. 

The Incorrigible BBC

As the BBC's lawyers try to find a form of words that will appease the Orange Man Across the Water – to the BBC an embodiment of all that is wrong with the world – and thereby avoid having to pay him extremely hefty damages, I find myself experiencing a strong sense of deja vu. 

This blog was but a few months old when, back in 2008, Radio 2 saw fit to broadcast obscene prank messages left by Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross on the answering machine of the elderly actor Andrew Sachs. The Corporation's reaction to the inevitable row managed, as ever, to make a bad situation worse. Here's what I wrote at the time...

'Well, it seems that edgy old BBC has mishandled this one so spectacularly that the story's still making headlines and they've even lost one of these two precious specimens of 'talent' (and, for the time being, have as good as lost the other). This time the old tactic of issuing anodyne statements, setting the bureaucratic mills grinding and waiting for it all to blow over haven't worked. The BBC assumption that the real problem is not with them but with the Public's silly benighted attitudes never fitted the case this time, and they should have dealt with it swiftly and decisively. Yes, I know – 'swiftly and decisively' are words that don't belong in the same sentence, the same world, as BBC management. Now that they've allowed it to blow up into a colossal row, they have predictably drawn their wagons into a circle. Astonishingly (well, it would be if this wasn't the BBC) no senior executive (with one minor exception) has given an interview anywhere in the media. The gaze of the sclerotic, hypertrophied, barely mobile BBC is, as ever, turned inward on itself. The controller of Radio 2 has let it be known that she'll resign if any of her production people are sacked. This can only mean that she thinks the Ross/Brand broadcast was acceptable – in which case it would be better if she did go. We should remind ourselves that what those two did was probably illegal, and the broadcasting of it was certainly a massive editorial misjudgment – and symptomatic, as the scale and duration of this row have demonstrated, of something very wrong with the BBC.'

In 2012, the Corporation made a massive mistake in promoting one George Entwistle to be Director General. He lasted 54 days, creating yet another crisis at the top of the BBC. The night before he departed I happened to catch a documentary about Lord Reith, the effective creator of the BBC...

'... the giant Reith was also a full-blown megalomaniac, who created the BBC in his own  megalomaniac image – and the megalomania survives in the institutional DNA of the Corporation. Having worked for a (mercifully) few years inside the BBC, I  must say that I have never encountered  an organisation with such delusions of grandeur, so unshakably convinced of its manifest destiny and its innate, self-evident superiority, despite all the human evidence to the contrary seated around its meeting tables (which is where most BBC staff seem to spend most of their time). Megalomaniac organisations are fine so long as they are dominated by personalities and talent, however maverick (some newspapers still fit this image), but the BBC has become over the years an organisation so dominated by structures, by faceless management, navel-gazing  and endless bureaucratic procedures that it rewards mediocrity – hence the rise of Entwistle to the top – while stifling originality and creativity. And of course it continues to pat itself on the back – insisting that it is still has the public's 'trust', whatever that means – even as it falls apart. Clearly the BBC is in need of a radical shake-up; incredibly, those who appointed him thought Entwistle, the 'insider's insider', was just the man to do the job. Only the BBC could delude itself on quite such an epic scale.'

That was 13 years ago, but it was only a couple of years back, in December 2023, that the BBC was told a few home truths in a research report it had itself commissioned. Both the charges against the BBC and the Corporation's response almost exactly parallel the recent furore. This is an organisation that is apparently incapable of learning, let alone adjusting its world view to something a little closer to that of the majority of those who pay its licence fee. The trouble is... well, I come to that here –

'Back in May 2021 the BBC board commissioned a survey to monitor its output and ensure that impartiality reigned and a wide range of viewpoints was represented. The results are now in, and show clearly that – and I know you're going to find this hard to believe – the BBC feeds its viewers (and listeners) 'a steady diet of woke bias', with slavery (i.e. Britain's historical role in the triangular trade tout court, nothing else) and issues of gender and race (only one attitude permitted) relentlessly overemphasised and shoehorned into all kinds of programmes. Who knew? And here is the BBC's response: 'Cherry-picking a handful of examples or highlighting genuine mistakes in thousands of hours of output does not constitute analysis and is not a true representation of BBC content. We are proud that our output seeks to represent all audiences and a range of stories and perspectives. Across the entirety of our services there will, of course, be occasions when people disagree with or want to challenge what they have watched or heard and we have well-publicised routes for them to do that.' So that's all right then, nothing to see here. The trouble is, I fear, that the BBC is now so completely imbued with woke bias that it sees its own worldview as simple, middle-of-the-road, non-controversial common sense, therefore those who dissent from it can only be crackpots, fanatics or ignorant deplorables. The result is that it simply cannot see its own bias, and, while it continues to exist in its present form, I don't suppose it ever will.' 

'The brighter visions brought music...'

 On Armistice Day, the mind inevitably turns to the 'war poets' – a mixed bunch, some of whom overtly took war and 'the pity of war' as their subject, approaching it head-on, while others, notably Edward Thomas, were more tangential in their approach. Although he was at his creative peak during his years of war service and was killed in action, Thomas wrote little that can be readily classified as 'war poetry'.  Similarly, Ivor Gurney, a poet of the Great War who often gets overlooked, tended to write obliquely of his experiences at the front, but one of his best-known poems is a direct recollection – and an unusually heartening one, finding 'human hopeful things' and 'a strangely beautiful entry to war's rout': 

'After the dread tales and red yarns of the Line
Anything might have come to us; but the divine
Afterglow brought us up to a Welsh colony
Hiding in sandbag ditches, whispering consolatory
Soft foreign things. Then we were taken in
To low huts candle-lit, shaded close by slitten 
Oilsheets, and there but boys gave us kind welcome,
So that we looked out as from the edge of home,
Sang us Welsh things, and changed all former notions
To human hopeful things. And the next day's guns
Nor any Line-pangs ever quite could blot out
That strangely beautiful entry to war's rout;
Candles they gave us, precious and shared over-rations—
Ulysses found little more in his wanderings without doubt.
'David of the White Rock', the 'Slumber Song' so soft, and that
Beautiful tune to which roguish words by Welsh pit boys
Are sung—but never more beautiful than here under the guns' noise.'

'That beautiful tune' was probably 'Ar Hyd Y Nos' – 'All Through the Night'. Music was at least as important as poetry to Gurney, who was a gifted composer whose song settings – 'Sleep', In Flanders', 'Severn Meadows' and many more – are some of the most beautiful of their time. Gurney said of his dual vocation, 'The brighter visions brought music; the fainter verse.' Often music finds its way into his verse, as in this poem recalling sentry duty on the front: 

Bach and the Sentry

Watching the dark my spirit rose in flood

   On that most dearest Prelude of my delight.

The low-lying mist lifted its hood,

   The October stars showed nobly in clear night.

When I return, and to real music-making,

   And play that Prelude, how will it happen then?

Shall I feel as I felt, a sentry hardly waking,

   With a dull sense of No Man's Land again?

Gurney, who studied music under Herbert Brewer (and alongside Herbert Howells) at Gloucester, then under Charles Villiers Stanford at the Royal College, was devoted to Bach. What was that 'most dearest Prelude'? Gurney wrote that the Prelude in G Minor 'sticks to me in solemn moments', but added that, in 'Bach and the Sentry', he had no particular prelude in mind (and which G minor prelude did he mean? There seem to be at least two to choose from.)
As it happens, Radio 3 this morning ushered in the Two Minutes' Silence with a Bach prelude and fugue – in C major, played by Angela Hewitt. Here she is, in lockdown, playing the Prelude...

Ivor Gurney survived the war, but ended his days in an asylum. His wartime experiences, and a failed love affair, might have tipped him over the edge, but it is generally thought now that Gurney's mental disorder – probably what we now call 'bipolar' – was already in evidence in his prewar life, and might well have led to the same sad outcome. 

An Incident in the Life of Richard Burton

I see that it was 100 years ago today that Richard Burton (né Richard Walter Jenkins Jr) was born – that would explain why I happened upon Under Milk Wood on the radio the other day (and felt no kindlier towards it for having heard it again). Blessed with preposterously good looks and a superb baritone voice and cursed with an insatiable thirst for hard liquor, Burton had what might best be called a tumultuous life, dominated for some years by the Great Hollywood Romance: Burton and Taylor. His relationship with the The Most Beautiful Woman in the World was the stuff of legend, and was of course doomed to implode. 
  It was while Burton and Taylor were still together that R.S. Thomas's son Gwydion, an aspiring actor, worked with the Great Man on his film of Doctor Faustus. Byron Rogers – who wrote a wonderful biography of R.S. Thomas, The Man Who Went into the West – takes up the story: 
'On set, when served tea, Burton, he [Gwydion] recalled with awe, had to have the cup glued to the saucer, because his hands shook so much the rattle was picked up on sound.
Then there was an extraordinary lunch after the actor had asked to meet Gwydion's father. In the course of this, R.S. Thomas tried to interest Elizabeth Taylor in small talk. The poet did this by broaching the subject of flatfish. "And have you tried plaice?" he asked the Most Beautiful Woman in the World.'
Her answer is not recorded. 

The Curious Case of God's Nephew

I've been reading about a character called Richard Brothers, who styled himself as, among other things, the Revealed Prince of the Hebrews, the Slain Lamb of the Revelation, and God Almighty's Nephew – this last title, in particular, attracting mockery in some quarters (its justification was that the British are in fact Israelites, descended from Jesus's brother: hence the uncle-nephew relationship). A former naval officer, Brothers came to prominence not in the seething religious ferment of the mid-17th century, but in the 1790s – and, for a while, he attracted a large and devoted audience with his books of vehement prophecies, in particular A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times, Wrote under the direction of the Lord God and published by His sacred command... This was a huge hit, running into edition after edition and bringing admirers flocking to his Paddington Street door to meet him, consult him or just bask in the presence of one who claimed to have been told by God that he was the Prince of the Hebrews who was going to lead the Jews of England back to Jerusalem, which he would rebuild as the New Jerusalem. God had also revealed much to him about world events, including the impending destruction of London, and potentially that of England and the rest of the world – from which Brothers was uniquely placed to bring deliverance, having already, by his account, averted such universal destruction three times. His forecasts for Europe included the Austrian Emperor conquering half the continent, the Czar of Russia invading Turkey and proclaiming himself Emperor of Greece, the Spanish monarchy ceasing, and the Papacy being destroyed for ever. His theories included a firm belief that the sun revolves around the Earth – if it was the other way round, the wind and heat generated would make life impossible – and that the moon and stars are made of ice and hung in the heavens for man's amusement. The fans who queued at the door of this unlikely prophet included French émigrés, fashionable ladies, peers and curious MPs, and devotees determined to play their part in the building the New Jerusalem when the time came. 
   So far, so harmless, you might think – but Brothers was sailing dangerously close to the wind, particularly when he claimed to have it direct from God that the Almighty did not approve of the ongoing war against France, and that if it continued the British monarchy would be overthrown, and both the prime minister William Pitt and his brother John would die terrible deaths. These were febrile times, with the British establishment terrified of revolution, and well aware that the class of people who formed the bulk of Brothers's following – merchants, small tradesmen and superior artisans – had also been a driving force of the French Revolution. And then Brothers went even further, informing the King (George III) that God has decreed that, when the time came, he would be obliged to give up his crown to the Prince of the Hebrews. This was too much, and Brothers was duly arrested for treason. Two King's Messengers came to take him from his house – and were nearly lynched by a mob of Brothers's supporters as they took him away.
  What followed was a bizarre Privy Council interrogation, in the course of which Brothers, author of an endless stream of fiery denunciations and lurid prophecies, remained effortlessly calm and lucid at all times, giving straight answers to all questions, and so charming the assembled councillors with his benign air, attractive appearance and mild demeanour that the Lord Chancellor concluded: 'I see nothing in the words of Mr Brothers but what is sensible and proper. He may withdraw.' 'Yes, yes, certainly,' chorused his fellow councillors. The only hope of getting Brothers out of circulation now was to have him declared insane – and this, after three weeks of examination by two doctors, was eventually achieved, with Brothers being removed to a private asylum. But even then the tumult did not die down, as Brothers continued to issue new prophecies, testimonies to his powers still streamed from the press, and Brothers's most prominent supporter, Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, MP and orientalist, spoke in his favour in Parliament, laying a copy of the Revealed Knowledge on the table of the House.
  However, Brothers had been a little too precise in his prophecies, and had set the crucial dates dangerously close: by July 1, 1795, the Revealed Prince of the Hebrews, with the Jews of England in train, was due to be in Constantinople, preparatory to establishing God's kingdom in Jerusalem on November 19. Both dates passed uneventfully, with Brothers still in the asylum, still feverishly writing, still making detailed plans for the New Jerusalem, and still with a few faithful followers. But his moment of glory had passed, and he would die all but forgotten in 1823. His last and most devoted disciple, a Scottish lawyer called John Finlayson, was still publishing detailed plans of the New Jerusalem and lavishly illustrated accounts of its governance into the 1840s, driving himself into poverty in the service of his late master. He never doubted that in his lifetime the New Jerusalem would be built. 

'His Granite Hat'

 My friend the Emily Dickinson maven sends me many a Dickinson gem that I've never come across before (I came late to her poetry). One of the latest was this November poem, with its startling final image – who but Emily Dickinson could have come up with that?

The Day grew small, surrounded tight

By early, stooping Night—

The Afternoon in Evening deep

Its Yellow shortness dropt—

The Winds went out their martial ways

The Leaves obtained excuse—

November hung his Granite Hat

Upon a nail of Plush

Duck Hunting on the Lagoon with Two Ladies

 The great Venetian genre painter Pietro Longhi, born on this day in 1701, painted mostly indoor scenes – including his famous Exhibition of a Rhinoceros in Venice – but he sometimes ventured outdoors, as in this typically cheery scene of duck hunters on the lagoon.

Is the smartly dressed hunter firing arrows at the birds? No, apparently the technique was to fire hard clay pellets from a bow (surely they'd have been better off using catapults?). Hunting birds on the lagoon was a popular pastime, as well as a useful source of food, and it is recorded also in a painting from 250 years earlier, by Vittore Carpaccio. 

The Carpaccio disappeared from public view until 1944, and now lives at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. In 1961 an art scholar made the bold suggestion that it might originally have formed the upper half of a work of which the lower half was the famous Two Women, which hangs in the Museo Correr in Venice.  This would explain the otherwise anomalous appearance of a bunch of lily flowers at the bottom left of the duck hunting scene. It seemed a pretty wild theory, and even its originator withdrew it. However, subsequent restoration and forensic work confirmed that the two paintings were indeed originally one. This is what it would have looked like – 

Surprisingly, it seems to work, doesn't it? It would be good if the two paintings could be reunited and put on display, if only temporarily. Preferably in Venice...

'So first the faithful dog will go...'

 

On this day in 1957 a mongrel from the streets of Moscow was launched into orbit around the Earth, strapped into the Soviet spacecraft Sputnik 2 – the first dog in space. Laika, as she was named, was never going to survive the journey, as the technology to allow safe re-entry into the atmosphere had not yet been developed. Laika's job was to show that living creatures from Earth could survive in space, thereby paving the way for human space flight. The Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert paid tribute to the poor dog in this sad and beautiful poem –

First the Dog

for Laika

So first the faithful dog will go
and after it a pig or ass
through the black grass will beat a track
along it will the first man steal
who with iron hand will smother
on his glass brow a drop of fear


so first the dog honest mongrel
which has never abandoned us
dreaming of earthly lamps and bones
will fall asleep in its whirling kennel
its warm blood boiling drying away


but we behind the dog and second
dog which guides us on a leash
we with the astronauts’ white cane
awkwardly we bump into stars
we see nothing we hear nothing
we beat with our fists on the dark ether
on all the wavelengths is a whining


everything we can carry on board
through the cinders of dark worlds
name of man scent of apple
acorn of sound quarter of colour
should all be saved for our return
so we can find the route in an instant
when the blind dog leading us
barks at the earth as at the moon

The Soviet authorities, lying with every breath, gave conflicting accounts of how Laika died (it was actually overheating). She was duly memorialised as a Soviet hero, with a statue and plaque at Star City, and a place at the Monument to the Conquerors of Space in Moscow, as well as on postage stamps and matchbox labels. But the best, most fitting memorial to this unhappy victim of human hubris is surely Herbert's poem.

Lichfield Brings Down a Prince (Maybe)

 I noticed this morning that the front page of one of the nationals claimed that the Lichfield heckle was the 'last straw' for the King, and stung him into decisive action, banishing his brother, the erstwhile Duke of York and Prince Andrew, into the outer darkness (i.e. a more than comfortable house on the agreeable Sandringham estate). In case you missed the story, what happened was that the King, who visited Lichfield last Monday, was shaking hands with wellwishers outside the west door of the cathedral when an ill-mannered republican started shouting Andrew-related questions at him, not expecting answers and not getting any from Charles, who completely ignored the heckler. 

I, along with le tout Lichfield, had regarded the incident as something of a stain on the fair name of our city, and, had I been present, I might even have joined those telling the loud-mouthed sansculotte to 'shut up'. However, if the unfortunate incident left Charles finally resolved to banish the appalling Andrew, then that, I suppose, was a good outcome. 

In other news, this morning – a sunny one, but windy and not exactly warm – I saw a very energetic Red Admiral flying past a nearby house, and then another one, equally full of beans, flying away from me in the park. November butterflies! I wonder if they will be the last of the year...