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...

As the Actress Said...

Here's something to lower the tone.
  The phrase 'As the actress said to the bishop' is still just about extant (on this side of the pond), employed to draw attention to a double entendre. A slightly naff expression, it was a favourite of Ricky Gervais's David Brent in The Office. But where did it originate? I hear you ask wearily. Well, it has an origin story, which may or may not be true, but it certainly made me laugh, so I pass it on...
  It seems the actress, socialite and alleged royal mistress Lillie Langtry was a guest at a country house party, where one of her fellow guests was a bishop. While they were strolling together in the rose garden, the bishop had the misfortune to prick his thumb. Later that day, at dinner Miss Langtry inquired of the bishop, 'How is you prick?' 'Throbbing,' he replied, causing the butler to drop a tureen of potatoes. 

[This reminded me of Arthur Marshall's account of Clemence Dane's unfortunate turns of phrase.]

Rembrandt in Birmingham

Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery is currently hosting an exhibition of prints on loan from the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam  – 58 of them in total, nearly all etchings. I was there yesterday, and would urge anyone with an interest in Rembrandt and in etching to visit if you can. There are portraits and self-portraits, landscapes, biblical subjects, genre scenes, studies and sketches, and there are even a few of the original copper plates – also, helpfully, a video explanation of the technique of etching and a display of etching tools and materials. Each of the prints, from the tiniest sketches to the larger, more finished works, is worth a close look, and the museum helpfully provides magnifying glasses so that even the most delicate lines and marks can be examined. The skill with which they are made, and the punch the best of them pack, seem almost miraculous. Looking intently at these works was both richly satisfying and  borderline exhausting, but it left me more convinced than ever that Rembrandt is either the greatest artist there ever was, or the equal of any other contender for that title. This touring exhibition is on until June 1st, and is going nowhere else in the the UK, so catch it if you can.   

As well as the Rembrandts – supplemented by a few of his etchings from the museum's own collection – there is a small display of prints by two West Midlands artists: Raymond Cowern (1913-86), a fine etcher, painter and illustrator, and Harry Eccleston (1923-2010), whose engraving skills were such that he became the Bank of England's first in-house artist-designer, creating the first pictorial British bank-notes (Newton, Wellington, Shakespeare, Wren and Florence Nightingale). Both men were products of Birmingham School of Art. 

From the French

 There are reports of a poetry revival in France, with book sales even of new poetry surging. This is being interpreted as a response to troubled and uncertain times, poetry offering a kind of solace or escape – which sounds plausible enough, though it's hard to see a poetry revival happening in this country any time soon. If it does, those in quest of solace will more likely be looking for it in the poetry of the past than of the present. 
  Anyway, I reckon it's time for a poem, so let's go for a French one – in translation, of course.
Richard Wilbur was a great translator from the French. His Molière translations are regarded as the gold standard – but here is something on a smaller scale, a sonnet translated from Stephane Mallarmé (who, like many French littérateurs, took Edgar Allan Poe very seriously)... 

The Tomb of Edgar Poe

Changed by eternity to Himself at last,
The Poet, with the bare blade of his mind,
Thrusts at a century which had not divined
Death's victory in his voice, and is aghast.

Aroused like some vile hydra of the past
When an angel proffered pure words to mankind,
Men swore that drunken squalor lay behind
His magic potions and the spells he cast.

The wars of earth and heaven — O endless grief!
If we cannot sculpt from them a bas-relief
To ornament the dazzling tomb of Poe,

Calm block here fallen from some far disaster,
Then let this boundary stone at least say no
To the dark flights of Blasphemy hereafter.

Funeral Notes

 As we grow older, we inevitably find ourselves attending more and more funerals (I was at one only yesterday, down in Kent), and noticing, perhaps, how much they have changed over the years. I think the first funeral I attended must have been back in the Sixties, for one of my grandmothers, and it was the first and last time I went to pay my respects to the body, duly laid out in its coffin in the undertakers' parlour; that no longer seems to happen, at least in C of E circles. Back in those days, funerals, for those not avowedly atheist, were invariably some version of the Book of Common Prayer's Order for the Burial of the Dead, without eulogies. It must have been a couple of decades later, maybe more, that I first experienced a humanist, or secular, funeral service. Since then it seems to have become the norm, and any kind of Christian service something of a minority taste. The standard funeral now is an individually tailored affair, consisting of  eulogies and (usually secular) music, with pauses for personal reflection, and little else. Such occasions are invariably described as 'a celebration of the life' – which is fine, but isn't there also something to be said for the universal, one-size-fits-all approach of the traditional religious service? It recognises the levelling effect of death,  which makes all people of all social ranks, the righteous and the flawed alike, one in death, each equally a scrap of humanity – a scrap, and a universe! (I seem to be developing Carlylean habits) – a spark of the eternal fire. A secular 'celebration' tends inevitably to recognise only the better elements of the dear departed's character and behaviour, whereas the religious service recognises the whole person, and sends that whole person to join the Great Majority, praying that eternal rest and light perpetual will be their fate. And mercy, by God's grace. No prizes for guessing what kind of funeral service I want, when the time comes (and no, I'm not expecting that to be any time soon). 

A Man Who Liked to Strike a Pose

Yesterday I was in London (my dear, the noise – and the people!) to have a leisurely lunch with an old friend. Afterwards, with time to kill before my homeward train left, I thought I'd pop in to the National Gallery to have a quick look around. Oh dear. The days of popping in – the days when Ronald Firbank's Mrs Shamefoot could drop in to tidy her hair in front of the Madonna of the Rocks – are long gone. Now airport-style security means long, slow-moving queues stretching into the middle distance, and zero chance of a flying visit. No wonder the gallery's visitor numbers are down by nearly half. Happily the National Portrait Gallery, around the corner, is far more penetrable, so I popped in there for a quick mooch. That was when I saw the self-portrait above, which made me audibly laugh. It's by a St Ives painter, Arthur Hayward (1889-1962), who clearly liked a joke. Here he portrays himself grandly as The Artist, striking a pose every bit as flamboyant and histrionic as any struck by Rubens or Rembrandt or Van Dyck. In the background is the harbour of St Ives, a subject Hayward painted many times, usually in an easy-on-the-eye Impressionist style – or is it actually a painting of the harbour? The same background appears again in the self-portrait below, in which Hayward, for some reason, paints himself in the guise of a Breton onion-seller (an 'Onion Johnny', as they were known). He has the beret, but not the traditional striped jersey, and he appears to be wearing a college scarf. The onions look good enough to eat.

Hayward also painted himself as a (presumably French) skier, in a self-portrait called Le Skieur. He was certainly a man who liked to strike a pose...

'of all seasons most gratuitous'

It's the first day of Astronomical Spring, the weather has warmed up, and the sun is shining from a blue sky as if at the beginning of a primary-school essay titled 'A Spring Day'. Who better to spoil the mood than dear old Philip Larkin? Here is his poem 'Spring', a Petrarchan sonnet that is not exactly full of the joys thereof –

Green-shadowed people sit, or walk in rings,
Their children finger the awakened grass,
Calmly a cloud stands, calmly a bird sings,
And, flashing like a dangled-looking glass,
Sun lights the balls that bounce, the dogs that bark,
The branch-arrested mist of leaf, and me,
Threading my pursed-up way across the park,
An indigestible sterility.

Spring, of all seasons most gratuitous,
Is fold of untaught flower, is race of water
Is earth’s most multiple, excited daughter;

And those she has least use for see her best,
Their paths grown craven and circuitous,

Their visions mountain-clear, their needs immodest. 

That poem is dated 19 May 1950. On this date (20 March) in the same year, Larkin wrote (or signed off on) this curious take on the writer's life. I like the second section particularly...

The Literary World

I
‘Finally, after five months of my life during which I could write nothing that would have satisfied me, and for which no power will compensate me…’

My dear Kafka,
When you’ve had five years of it, not five months,
Five years of an irresistible force meeting an
immoveable object right in your belly,
Then you’ll know about depression.

II
Mrs. Alfred Tennyson

Answered
begging letters
admiring letters
insulting letters
enquiring letters
business letters
and publishers’ letters.
She also
looked after his clothes
saw to his food and drink
entertained visitors
protected him from gossip and criticism
And finally

(apart from running the household)
Brought up and educated the children.

While all this was going on
Mister Alfred Tennyson sat like a baby
Doing his poetic business.

Guncle Horton

 Born on this day in 1886 was Edward Everett Horton, one the great character actors of the Hollywood Golden Age. He appeared, invariably playing a fussy, pompous, rather dim character, in all the classic Astaire-Rogers comedies, in which he made full use of his trademark double take (or sometimes triple take), the best in the business.  I've seen Horton described as 'Hollywood's first guncle', which brought me up short – what on earth is a 'guncle'? Apparently it's a contraction of 'gay uncle' – not a gay uncle in the mould of the egregious Uncle Monty in Withnail and I, but a benign and generous figure who is like one of the family, though not related, and is also what used to be called a confirmed bachelor. 
How confirmed a bachelor Horton was is not known, but he never married. He lived on a four-acre estate, Belleigh Acres (pronounced 'belly achers') which included houses for his brother and sister and their families, and a guest house – in which, in 1938, Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Last Tycoon. Much of the estate was compulsorily purchased to make space for the Ventura Freeway, but Horton was still left with a couple of acres and two houses. He carried on working to the end of his long life, dying at the age of 84 in 1970. 
Here is a little taste of Horton in action, with another great character actor and Astaire-Rogers regular, Eric Blore...

What Do Teeth Say?

 This morning I was obliged to visit my dentist (the best dentist I've ever had, as it happens) to have a troublesome and half-wrecked wisdom tooth removed. This was my third wisdom extraction, so I knew what to expect, but my dentist was impressively quick and thorough, and I felt almost no pain this time. I'm still getting over the anaesthetic, but all seems well.
  While I was sitting in the waiting room, I was entertained by various videos about dental health and the wonders that can be worked on your teeth by cosmetic dentistry. 'Your teeth,' one video declared, 'say a lot about you.' Indeed, the video continued, they say more about you than your car, your clothes or your hairstyle. Naturally, I wondered what my teeth might be saying about me (apart from expressing the wish that they'd been better looked after in my early years). I think they would clearly say just two things: that I am English – they are very English teeth, i.e. overcrowded and uneven; and that I grew up in a time before straightening and whitening became the norm. My car would have nothing to say, for the very good reason that I don't drive one. My clothes would confirm that I am English, that I grew up when men dressed properly, and in my mature years I reverted to type. And my hairstyle (if such a word applies)? That would say simply that I am blessed with luxuriant hair, and in my old age am making the most of it. 
  I wish this anaesthetic would wear off...

'Even the small violet...'

 This post comes with a big tip of the hat to Anonymous, a frequent commenter (along with Unknown), who in a comment under 'Daffodil Time' directs me to a poem by John Clare that I did not know. I find it quite beautiful and, for all its questioning tone, cheering. So here it is for all readers, however anonymous and unknown, to enjoy...

The Instinct of Hope

Is there another world for this frail dust
To warm with life and be itself again?
Something about me daily speaks there must,
And why should instinct nourish hopes in vain?
'Tis nature's prophesy that such will be,
And everything seems struggling to explain
The close sealed volume of its mystery.
Time wandering onward keeps its usual pace
As seeming anxious of eternity,
To meet that calm and find a resting place.
E'en the small violet feels a future power
And waits each year renewing blooms to bring,
And surely man is no inferior flower
To die unworthy of a second spring?

Daffodil Time

 It's daffodil time, and this morning Radio 3's Poem of the Day was the inevitable 'I wandered lonely as a cloud' (a meaningless opening line unless you follow it past the enjambment into the next: there's nothing intrinsically lonely about a cloud. And Wordsworth wasn't 'lonely' either: he was walking with his sister Dorothy, whose journal entry inspired the poem.) It's a piece that is perfect in its way – as a (mercifully) succinct expression of Wordsworth's poetical philosophy, and as an effective, easily learned recitation piece.
For myself, when it comes to daffodil poetry, I would plump for Robert Herrick's equally perfect 'To Daffodils', a poem from which the word 'I' is refreshingly absent. Herrick does not present himself as a lone sensitive soul vibrating in sympathy with divine Nature – in fact he doesn't present himself at all: his poem is about what 'we' might feel, an inclusive and inviting 'we', not the exclusive, attention-seeking 'I'. It is simple (effortlessly concealing its art) and direct, and beautifully expresses the transience of all things, daffodils and 'we' humans alike...

Fair Daffodils, we weep to see

You haste away so soon;

As yet the early-rising sun

Has not attain'd his noon.

Stay, stay,

Until the hasting day

Has run

But to the even-song;

And, having pray'd together, we

Will go with you along.

We have short time to stay, as you,

We have as short a spring;

As quick a growth to meet decay,

As you, or anything.

We die

As your hours do, and dry

Away,

Like to the summer's rain;

Or as the pearls of morning's dew,

Ne'er to be found again.