'It's best for genuises to travel light'

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

Yeats and Shakespeare

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

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

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

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

No Bezos

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

'The unpurged images of day recede...'

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

Byzantium

The unpurged images of day recede;

The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;

Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song

After great cathedral gong;

A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains

All that man is,

All mere complexities,

The fury and the mire of human veins.

Before me floats an image, man or shade,

Shade more than man, more image than a shade;

For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth

May unwind the winding path;

A mouth that has no moisture and no breath

Breathless mouths may summon;

I hail the superhuman;

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

Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,

More miracle than bird or handiwork,

Planted on the starlit golden bough,

Can like the cocks of Hades crow,

Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud

In glory of changeless metal

Common bird or petal

And all complexities of mire or blood.

At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit

Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,

Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,

Where blood-begotten spirits come

And all complexities of fury leave,

Dying into a dance,

An agony of trance,

An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood,

Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood,

The golden smithies of the Emperor!

Marbles of the dancing floor

Break bitter furies of complexity,

Those images that yet

Fresh images beget,

That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

RIP

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

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

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

Jackson's Nineties

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

Worthing again

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

A Momentary Vision

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

'Discovered need and loss'

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

Portrait Painter

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

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

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

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

Ten Years On

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

Rex Whistler

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

When Buzzards Attack

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

Prefaces

 I do like a good preface, whether it be Johnson's sonorous Preface to his dictionary, beginning 'It is the fate of those who toil at the lower employments of life, to be rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by the prospect of good; to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise; to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward.  Among these unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries...' – or, in a very different register, this one, from the reissue of John Betjeman's youthful treatise Ghastly Good Taste: 

'I wrote this book 38 years ago. I was 26, in love, and about to be married. When Anthony Blond said he would like to reprint it, I thought I had better read it, and he kindly sent me a copy. I am appalled by its sententiousness, arrogance and the sweeping generalisations in which it abounds...' 

Or here's Sylvia Townsend Warner's preface to Mr Fortune's Maggot, a story the first third of which came to her readymade in a dream – 

'I was really in a very advanced stage of hallucination when I finished the book - writing in manuscript and taking wads of it to be typed at the Westbourne Secretarial College in Queens Road.
 I remember writing the last paragraph - and reading over the conclusion, and then impulsively writing the Envoy, and beginning to weep bitterly...'

Scarcely less dramatic is Edith Sitwell's preface to her extraordinary autobiography, Taken Care Of – 

'This book was written under considerable difficulty. I had not recovered from a very severe and lengthy illness, which began with pneumonia. The infection from this permeated my body, and the bad poisoning of one finger lasted for fifteen months. This was agonisingly painful, and I could only use either hand with great difficulty, as the poison spread gradually. The reminiscences in this book are of the past. I do not refer to any of my dearly loved living friends. I trust that I have hurt nobody. It is true that, provoked beyond endurance by their insults, I have given Mr Percy Wyndham Lewis and Mr D.H. Lawrence some sharp slaps. I have pointed out, also, the depths to which the criticism of poetry has fallen, and the non-nutritive quality of the bun-tough whinings of certain little poetasters – but I have been careful, for instance, not to refer to the late Mr Edwin Muir (Dr Leavis's spiritual twin-sister). I have attacked nobody, unless they first attacked me. During the writing of certain chapters of this book, I realised that the public will believe anything – so long as it is not founded on truth.'

And here's one, short and to the point, that I read only yesterday – 

'The title of this book is meant to be "arresting" only in the literal sense, like the signs put up for motorists: "ROAD UNDER REPAIR", etc. It means that the book will have little interest for people under forty years of age. The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts, and the persons and prejudices recalled in these sketches slid back into yesterday's seven thousand years.Thomas Mann, to be sure, belongs immensely to the forward-goers, and they are concerned only with his forwardness. But he also goes back a long way, and his backwardness is more gratifying to the backward. It is for the backward, and by one of their number, that these sketches were written.'

The 'arresting' title is Not Under Forty, and the author is Willa Cather. So far I have only read the first of the collection, 'A Chance Meeting', and it's a gem. It begins like a short story, with Cather, staying at the Grand Hotel in Aix-les-Bains, becoming increasingly fascinated by a very striking old lady who is a fellow guest. They begin to talk, but it is some while before they converse properly and Cather realises, to her astonishment and delight, who the mysterious lady is – Flaubert's beloved niece Caroline, who was taken in by the author and his mother after her mother died, and was raised in the Flaubert household. What follows is a fascinating discussion of Flaubert's works, illuminated by his niece's insights and experience, and by Cather's own profound appreciation of his works. I shall read on... 
I have a feeling that even readers under forty might get a lot from this collection. 

'He clasps the crag with crooked hands...'

 I heard on the news today (even Radio 3 has some news bulletins, mercifully brief) that Golden Eagles are being seen in the far North of England, a hopeful sign that they might return to breed south of the border for the first time in many years. 
I still find Tennyson's short poem 'The Eagle' a thrilling piece of work, as I did in my boyhood – 

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.

Who could resist? The poem, described as 'A Fragment' but surely complete, has been subject to some fanciful interpretation over the years, with the eagle being seen as a metaphor for a corrupt ('crooked') man of power holding on to his position but doomed to fall, or even for the position of the Catholic church following the passing of the Ecclesiastical Titles Act (in the same year the poem was written). I'm quite happy to read it as an extraordinarily vivid and forceful poem about, er, an eagle – though not, as it happens, an English eagle, or even a Scottish one. It seems that Tennyson was inspired by memories of the eagles he saw circling overhead on his visits to the Pyrenees (where, as a young man, he had helped Arthur Hallam and others to deliver money and messages to the Spanish revolutionaries). The 'wrinkled sea' he invented, perhaps with the spectacular White-Tailed Sea Eagle in mind.
This was one of the poems that cemented my boyhood love of Tennyson, a love that has never quite left me. 

'Sweet Reason rules the morning...'

 Today is the actual centenary of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's birth – I jumped the gun on Sunday – so, to stay with the musical theme, here is a poem by Dick Davis, a kind of history of music in a day, with some very clever rhyming:

Listening

Sweet Reason rules the morning – what's as sweet as
Rosalyn Tureck playing Bach partitas?

Midday's for Haydn, who loved everyone
(Except the pompous pig Napoleon) – 
Music's Hippocrates ('First do no harm'), 
An Aufklärung of common sense and charm.

Mozart and Schubert own the afternoon –
High spirits and a Fiordiligi swoon;
A sudden key change: you will die alone.
The shadow that you stare at is your own.

Then comes the night. Pandora's lid is lifted,
Each scene implodes before it can be shifted –
Longing's a tenor's accurate bravura,
Sex and Despair are Fach and Tessitura;

And heaven's where the mind's sopranos sing
In harmonies undreamt of in The Ring.


Rosalyn Tureck was a pianist and harpsichordist who was described by William F. Buckley Jr as 'Bach's representative on Earth', and acknowledged by Glenn Gould as his 'only' influence. (Incidentally, fact fans, she was a classmate and friend of Saul Bellow at Tuley High School in Chicago.) 
Here she is playing Bach – the Prelude and Fugue in A minor, BWV895. The sound quality isn't great, but the playing is...

The Butterfly, the Book

 Regular readers of this blog might have noticed that from time to time I have referred to 'my forthcoming butterfly book'. Well, I'm happy to say that is has at last forthcome.
  It's had a long pupation (like the Orange Tip butterfly – ten months as a chrysalis!): I wrote an early version of it during the first lockdown, then some while later I was astonished when a university press expressed keen interest in it. Thus began a very long process in the course of which the book was much edited, expanded and rewritten, taking on a very different, more shapely shape – but in the end both sides accepted what we had really known all along: that it was never going to be a book that any respectable academic press would put its name to. I took it back, worked on it some more and made various changes, finally ending up with a version that adapted the reshaped work to something rather closer to my original idea. I sent it out, more in hope than expectation, to a couple of those rare publishers who will look at works that don't come via an agent. One of them – Saraband – took it, and the end result was the attractively designed and pleasingly small (duodecimo) volume that you see illustrated above. I love that colour...
After a light and painless edit – Saraband have been a joy to work with – it was duly published, though I think the official publication date is in June in the UK and July in the US. It seems to be available online already (certainly from Alibris, and of course it can be preordered on Amazon). I am delighted that it has finally emerged, in a form very much in line with my original vision, but greatly improved by all that rewriting. And I was delighted to see what Patrick Kurp had to say about it yesterday.

Fischer-Dieskau centenary

 A big musical centenary today – 100 years ago Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who became one of the greatest singers of the 20th century, was born, in Berlin. He had barely begun his musical studies when he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and obliged to tend horses on the Russian front, after which he was sent to Italy, where he was captured and spent two years as a prisoner of war, entertaining his compatriots by singing Lieder. His family home was destroyed during the war, and his physically and intellectually handicapped brother was sent by the Nazis to an institution to be starved to death, as was standard practice at the time. 
Anyway, Radio 3 will be celebrating the centenary this evening with a tribute feature presented by Fischer-Dieskau's last pupil, Benjamin Appl. It's on at 7.15, and will be available on BBC Sounds.
Meanwhile, here is the great man, with the great accompanist Gerald Moore, singing a couple of seasonal Lieder. Enjoy...

An Epic Sonnet?

 Browsing in the Sonnets section of the Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, I was amused to find a sonnet bearing the surprising title 'Epic'. It was written by the Irish poet and novelist Patrick Kavanagh, recalling the time of the Munich Crisis of 1938, and I think it's rather good, so I pass it on – 

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting "Damn your soul!"
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel –
"Here is the march along these iron stones."
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

It's an unusual sonnet, both in what it describes and in its loose, barely half-rhymed form – though there is a definite division between the first octave and the closing sestet. 
The world of Duffys and McCabes and pitchfork-armed clans was the one in which Kavanagh grew up in rural County Monaghan. The son of a cobbler and farmer, Patrick left school at 13 to work on the land and as a shoemaker's apprentice. He started to write poems in his twenties, and was noticed by George William Russell (known as 'AE', a leader of the Irish literary revival), who took him under his wing. Kavanagh soon began building a successful writing career, though it was not without setbacks, including being sued for libel by Oliver St John Gogarty. He settled in Dublin when war broke out in 1939, where (according to his biographer), 'he realised that the stimulating environment he had imagined was little different from the petty and ignorant world he had left'. However, he caught the eye of John Betjeman, who was in Dublin, officially as a press attaché, less officially as an agent for British intelligence (in which capacity he was briefly an IRA assassination target – until their head of civilian intelligence read Betjeman's collection Continual Dew and decided to spare him). Despite their very different backgrounds and styles, the two men seem to have got on well and admired each other's works. Kavanagh even wrote a poem, 'Candida', to celebrate the first birthday of Betjeman's daughter –

Candida is one to-day,
What is there that one can say?
One is where the race begins
Or the sum that counts our sins;
But the mark time makes to-morrow
Shapes the cross of joy or sorrow.

Candida is one to-day,
What is there for me to say?
On the day that she was one
There were apples in the sun
And the fields long wet with rain
Crumply in dry winds again.

Candida is one and I
Wish her lots and lots of joy.
She the nursling of September
Like a war she won't remember.
Candida is one to-day 
And there's nothing more to say.

Another Cather!

 Four years ago, I lamented that I had reached the end of one of the great (and late) reading journeys of my life: I had read every one of Willa Cather's novels. Or had I? It seems not...
   Yesterday morning I was walking past the Oxfam bookshop (one of my regular haunts, though it's a charity about which I have serious reservations – of course not serious enough to stop me buying books from their shelves) when I felt my bibliophile antennae twitch, so in I went. And straight away I spotted a little cluster of Cathers – My Antonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and, in a World's Classics paperback edition... Alexander's Bridge? That was a title I'd never heard of – and, picking it off the shelf, I discovered that it was in fact Willa Cather's first novel, serialised in McClure's magazine in 1912, then published in the same year. By the time Cather wrote the preface to the reissued Alexander's Bridge ten years later, she was regarding it as an artistic failure, and neatly diagnosing what was essentially wrong with it – the same thing that is wrong with many first novels – 'the fact that it is not always easy for the inexperienced writer to distinguish between his own material and that which he would like to make his own. Everything is new to the young writer, and everything seems equally personal. That which is outside his deepest experience, which he observes and studies, often seems more vital than that which he knows well...' But is is from his (or her!) 'life line', his deepest experience and sense of life, that true art will emerge, 'when his "life line" and the line of his personal endeavour meet'. As they did, to wonderful effect, in Cather's next novel, O Pioneers!
 Is Alexander's Bridge as deficient as its author thought it? Well, I'll soon find out. This novel is more like a novella in length – ninety-odd pages – so even I should have it read before long. 

Beerbohm's Kipling

 On this day in 1956, Max Beerbohm died, at the age of 83, at the Villa Chiara, a private hospital in Rapallo, the Italian seaside town where he had lived since 1910. He had recently married his former secretary and companion Elisabeth Jungmann, his second wife. Beerbohm was cremated and his ashes interred in the crypt of St Paul's, where his memorial plaque describes him as 'Caricaturist and writer', in that order – which gives me my cue to post another example of his skill as a literary caricaturist (drawing on J.G. Riewald's Beerbohm's Literary Caricatures). This one – one of his best and most amusing – is captioned 'Mr Rudyard Kipling takes a bloomin' day aht, on the blasted 'eath, along with Britannia, 'is gurl.'

  Kipling's work, unsurprisingly, was not at all to Max's taste – but, as he wrote to Holbrook Jackson (author of The Eighteen Nineties), 'I carefully guard myself by granting you that Kipling is a genius. Indeed, even I can't help knowing him to be that. The schoolboy, the bounder, and the brute – these three types have surely never found a more brilliant expression of themselves than in R.K. (Nor, will I further grant, has the nursery-maid.) But as a poet and a seer R.K. seems to me not to exist, except for the purpose of contempt. All the ye-ing and Lord-God-ing and the Law-ing side of him seems to me a very thin and trumpery assumption; and I have always thought it was a sound impulse by which he was driven to put his 'Recessional' into the waste-paper basket, and a great pity that Mrs Kipling fished it out and made him send it to The Times.' A harsh judgment – particularly of 'Recessional' – but true enough of Kipling at his worst. At least Max recognises that there was real genius in him too. 

Ghostly Trees

This is not a winter scene, nor has anyone been spraying these trees with silver paint or Halloween cobweb spray. I took the photograph at the National Memorial Arboretum yesterday, where quite a number of trees were similarly affected. The ghostly webbing is all the work of the Small Ermine moth, an insect with a wingspan of less than an inch, which likes to build extensive webs in which to raise its caterpillars – and extensive is the word. I've never seen such a thing, at least not in this country or on such a scale. The official line on it is that the web-coated trees will not suffer any ill effects, even if, like several I saw, they are completely covered. I hope they're right about that; it would be sad if there were arboreal casualties at the National Memorial Arboretum – though I guess they could have their own memorial...
This was my second visit to the arboretum, and it was noticeable how much the trees had grown in the seven years since I was last there. It's maturing nicely, though it would benefit from rather less mowing. My thoughts on the place were much as they were last time, when I wrote this piece.