Wet Wet Wet

 I don't like to boast, but yesterday Lichfield, according to the Met Office, was the wettest place in the country, with 52.8mm of rain – that's two inches in the old money – falling in a four-hour period in the morning. I can't say I'm surprised: the weather was spectacular, with fierce vertical rain, lurid sheet lightning, earth-shaking thunder, and the lower-lying parts of Beacon Park under water. And that morning onslaught wasn't the end of it – back it came in the evening, as dramatic as before, clocking up (according to a local weather station) another 41mm. So that's the best part of four inches in 24 hours, and the drought of the past two months is well and truly over, putting an end to reckless talk of 'another 1976', and greening up the wilting vegetation. The garden is looking wonderfully refreshed, and the birds will be glad to have worms and snails on the menu again. 

Also

I've just realised that today is the 450th anniversary of the death of the greatest of all Venetian painters, if not of all painters – Tiziano Vecello, aka Titian. 

Forester

 Born on this day in 1899 (in Cairo, under the name Cecil Smith) was C.S. Forester, a novelist of a kind that was common enough in his day but now much rarer – a fine storyteller, a prolific, versatile and more than competent writer, producing entertaining high-quality fiction with wide appeal. His Hornblower novels prefigured Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, and two of his works, The African Queen and The Good Shepherd, were successfully filmed. Like Raymond Chandler and P.G. Wodehouse, he was educated as Dulwich College, and, like them, spent much time in the United States (where Forester worked during the war for the British Ministry of Information). He achieved sufficient fame to appear on an episode of You Bet Your Life, hosted by Groucho Marx, in 1956, and during the war he met the young Roald Dahl and encouraged him to take up writing (we'll forgive him for that). 
  The Hornblower novels proved so popular that he ended up writing ten of them, between 1937 and 1962. I dipped into them (and others of Forester's works) as a boy. My father was a big fan, and my brother still is. Indeed, he was inspired by the Hornblower novel Flying Colours to make a rowing expedition on the river Loire – and to write a book about it: here's the link.

'A later artist, Tintoretto, also did his paintings here...'

Recently Johnson's ballad parody, 'I put my hat upon my head', turned up on this blog, apropos Marianne Moore's tin ear for meter. Browsing last night in a recent charity-shop purchase, The New Oxford Book of Light Verse – edited by Kingsley Amis – I came across it again, sandwiched between two other Johnson parodies. I particularly like the last one...

Epigram

If a man who turnips cries
Cry not when his father dies,
Is it not a proof he'd rather
Have a turnip than his father?

(from Burlesque of Lines by Lope de Vega)

Ballad

I put my hat upon my head
And walked into the Strand,
And there I met another man
Whose hat was in his hand.

(from Parodies of 'The Hermit of Warkworth')

Idyll

Hermit hoar, in solemn cell,
Wearing out life's evening grey,
Strike thy bosom, Sage, and tell
What is bliss, and which the way.

Thus I spoke, and speaking sighed,
Scarce repressed the starting tear,
When the hoary sage replied,
'Come, my lad, and drink some beer.'

(from Parody of Thomas Warton)
Thomas Warton, who became poet laureate in the year after Johnson's death, was best known for an early work, The Pleasures of Melancholy. 

From the same anthology, I also enjoyed this one, in which John Betjeman applies the plodding Hiawatha meter to La Serenissima...

Longfellow's Visit to Venice
(To be read in a quiet New England accent)

Near the celebrated Lido where the breeze is fresh and free
Stands the ancient port of Venice called the City of the Sea

All its streets are made of water, all its homes are brick and stone
Yet it has a picturesqueness which is justly all its own

Here for centuries have artists come to see the vistas quaint
Here Bellini set his easel, herе he taught his School to paint

Here thе youthful Giorgione gazed upon the domes and towers
And interpreted his era in a way which pleases ours

A later artist, Tintoretto, also did his paintings here
Massive works which generations have continued to revere

Still to-day come modern artists to portray the buildings fair
And their pictures may be purchased on San Marco's famous Square

When the bell notes from the belfries and the campaniles chime
Still to-day we find Venetians elegantly killing time

In their gilded old palazzos, while the music in our ears
Is the distant band at Florians mixed with songs of gondoliers

Thus the New World meets the Old World and the sentiments expressed
Are melodiously mingled in my warm New England breast.

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Inspector of Poultry and Rabbits

At least three literary birthdays today – Max Beerbohm (born 1872, a birthday I've marked more than once on this blog), Jean Rhys (born 1890, on the Caribbean island of Dominica) and Jorge Luis Borges, mentioned here the other day as a literary librarian. His library career took an interesting turn in 1946, when the dictator Perón got him dismissed from his post as a municipal librarian in Buenos Aires and 'reassigned' as an inspector of poultry and rabbits at public markets. This calculated insult was a punishment for his and his family's vocal opposition to Peronism, and Borges did not endure it for long. After Perón was ousted, Borges was appointed director of the National Library, a post he held until he resigned in disgust when Perón returned from exile in 1973.  

Busy

 Busy times, with much family activity, but I did manage to get away for a day's walking in the Cotswolds with my brother and friends, in the course of which I revisited the monument to the Bray children in Great Barrington church  – 'one of the finest in England,' in Mrs Esdaile's estimation (it features in this book, pp175-7). Unfortunately the long, difficult journey back from deepest Gloucestershire left me too exhausted yesterday to post my usual after-walk report. 
  Also contributing to the busyness is a small pile of books on death, ageing and longevity that I'm reading for review. Talking of ageing, here's Kay Ryan – 

As some people age they kinden.
The apertures of their eyes widen.
I do not think they weaken;
I think something weak strengthens
until they are more and more it,
like letting in heaven.
But other people are mussels or clams, frightened.
Steam or knife blades mean open.
They hear heaven, they think boiled or broken. 

Librarians

 As a former librarian, I am always keen to learn of writers, artists and musicians vastly more illustrious than me who also worked as librarians at some point in their lives. So far, my list includes Proust (who took a job as a volunteer librarian, to please his father, but hardly ever turned up for work), Marcel Duchamp (who worked briefly as a librarian, to free his mind for other things), Borges of course (director of the National Library of Argentina for 18 years), Marianne Moore (library assistant at the New York Public Library's Hudson Park branch during the 1920s), Hector Berlioz (librarian at the Paris Conservatoire), Philip Larkin of course (university librarian at Hull), Anne Tyler (assistant librarian at McGill University Law School) and Angus Wilson (British Museum Library, as it then was, before and after the war). Has anybody got any more names to add to the list?
   And then, of course, there is Keith Richards, bibliophile extraordinaire, who spent many happy boyhood hours in Dartford public library, was fascinated by the Dewey decimal system, and might well have been a librarian if his career hadn't taken a somewhat different path. In 1998 he suffered the least rock'n'roll accident that ever befell a rock god, when he fell off his library steps while reaching for a book, breaking three ribs and puncturing a lung. You can read about it here (and follow the link, if you can, to one of the most curious books in my own library).  

'Well, sir...'

 The weather has cooled off at last, and there was even a little rain last night, creating the first puddles I've seen in weeks – a welcome sight. With memories of the July-August heatwaves still fresh, here is an apposite Wodehouse quote that I came across today: 

'Do you know what Jeeves said when I asked him why, during a spell hotter than Bobbie Wickham's hosiery, I had never seen the man sweat? He replied, "Well, sir. From a personal standpoint I've never seen the need for it."'

[Bobbie Wickham is the fun-loving hottie, described by Aunt Dahlia as a 'one-woman beauty chorus', who recurs in various Jeeves and Mulliner stories,]

An Eliot Centenary

 Born 100 years ago today was Valerie Eliot (née Fletcher), the second wife of the poet, and apparently the one who made him happy. The couple lived in Kensington, just around the corner from Ivy Compton-Burnett, and their paths crossed from time to time. On one occasion, the three of them shared a taxi back from a party in Knightsbridge, and in the course of the journey Ivy talked of nothing but the forthcoming Rent Act, cake shops, fishmongers, greengrocers on the Gloucester Road, where to get the best fillet steak, and the iniquity of having to pay her porter five shillings to bring up her coals. Quite the feast of reason and flow of soul...
  Ivy found the phenomenon of 'Mr Eliot's bride' quite fascinating. 'Apparently she's always adored him,' she told Elizabeth Taylor (the novelist), 'although she was his secretary for years. I am sure if I had been his secretary for a fortnight I should have wanted to poison him, not marry him... Yes, I should have run round to the chemist's for three pennyworth of poison after a very short time.'

Tennyson's Painted Tongue

 Last night's Gardeners' World included a report from Farringford, Tennyson's estate on the Isle of Wight, where the garden, which had been entirely lost, has been restored to something very like its original appearance – much like an English cottage garden in style, but quite grand in scale. It looks delightful, and the gardeners responsible have done a great job. From them I learned that Tennyson's favourite flower was no native, but the somewhat exotic Salpiglossis or Painted Tongue (that's one of its many varieties pictured above). Perhaps unsurprisingly, he never celebrated the Salpiglossis in verse, but the little flower poem below can be found on a plaque under Watts's imposing statue of the poet that stands outside Lincoln cathedral. The statue shows him with his dog – a Siberian wolfhound called Karenina – at his side and a flower (presumably from the crannied wall) in his hand. 

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

('Crannies', 'man is' – quite the rhyme.)

Eclipse

 Well, here in Lichfield, we had a typically English eclipse – which is to say that a magnificent bank of cloud (something scarcely seen in the past three weeks) rolled into place bang on time, right in front of the eclipsing sun, and in an otherwise largely blue sky. 'The world is disgracefully managed,' as Ronald Firbank's Mrs Shamefoot puts it. 'One hardly knows to whom to complain.' We had a couple of glimpses of the sun, so knew roughly what was going on, but the eclipse-viewing pinhole cameras lovingly constructed for the occasion were barely needed. And actually it didn't seem to get notably darker at any point – nothing like the total eclipse I remember from 1999, when darkness fell in the middle of the day and the birds ceased to sing. Could it be that the whole thing had been somewhat overhyped, what with this being the Silly Season and everyone liking these dramas in the skies, such as they are? There seems to be a very marked difference between 90 percent and 100 percent when it comes to eclipses. But never mind: it was, with all that illuminated cloud and, radiating from behind it, wide rays of light, a spectacular, dramatic sky – and, when I looked up into the blue overhead, there, unbelievably, was a single swift flying over. So the evening's sky-watching paid off in a quite unexpected way. And later there were many bats flitting around in the garden.

Johnson and The Vicar

 Last night I strayed from my usual listening home on Radio 3 to my former home, Radio 4, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the current Book at Bedtime is Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, one of those classics that these days hardly anybody actually reads – including, in this case, me, despite having taken a passing interest in the 18th-century sentimental novel. (Radio 4 has done this before, I seem to remember, with The Ingoldsby Legends and Annals of the Parish among others, and it's surely good that such titles are being kept alive. They're certainly an improvement on most of the contemporary fiction that gets broadcast on Radio 4.) 
  Samuel Johnson played an important, even dramatic part in getting The Vicar of Wakefield published. Here is his own account:

'I received one morning a message from poor Goldsmith that he was in great distress, and, as it was not in his power to come to me, begging that I would come to him as soon as possible. I sent him a guinea, and promised to come to him directly. I accordingly went as soon as I was dressed, and found that his landlady had arrested him for his rent, at which he was in a violent passion: I perceived that he had already changed my guinea, and had a bottle of Madeira and a glass before him. I put the cork into the bottle, desired he would be calm, and began to talk to him of the means by which he might be extricated. He then told me he had a novel ready for the press, which he produced to me. I looked into it and saw its merit; told the landlady I should soon return; and, having gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds [to Francis Newbery, nephew of the published John Newbery, who sat on it for nearly two years before publishing it]. I brought Goldsmith the money, and he discharged his rent, not without rating his landlady in a high tone for having used him so ill.'

[The painting above, depicting the scene, is attributed to Edward Matthew Ward, and hangs in Dr Johnson's House on Gough Square.] 

'Surely rather a striking tribute'

 I've been reading Wodehouse at bedtime – actually dipping into this volume – and this morning, browsing on Facebook, I came across a Wodehouse anecdote.  
  It seems that someone signing themselves 'Indignant' wrote a letter to the press attacking Wodehouse for being a vastly overrated writer. In his 1957 collection Over Seventy, Wodehouse responded to 'Indignant' by drawing his attention to a letter in the Times from a Mr Verrier Elwin of Patangarth, India, telling how a cow wandered into his home and, after due consideration, ate a copy of Carry On, Jeeves, selected from a shelf containing works by John Galsworthy, Jane Austen and T.S. Eliot. 'Surely rather a striking tribute,' Wodehouse remarks.

Hardy's Nocturnal Visitors

 Here is a little August nocturne by Thomas Hardy, a man who has been strangely present to me since my recent reading of Max Gate (in which he is, for the most part, strangely absent). Hardy's nocturnal visitors are a daddy-longlegs or crane fly (of which, fact fans, there are more species than there are of birds), an unspecified moth, and a dor beetle, an earth-boring dung beetle that takes to the air, clumsily and noisily, on warm summer evenings. 

An August Midnight

I

A shaded lamp and a waving blind,
And the beat of a clock from a distant floor:
On this scene enter—winged, horned, and spined—
A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore;
While ’mid my page there idly stands
A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands ...

II

Thus meet we five, in this still place,
At this point of time, at this point in space.
—My guests besmear my new-penned line,
Or bang at the lamp and fall supine.
“God’s humblest, they!” I muse. Yet why?
They know Earth-secrets that know not I.

Birthday Boy

 Well, I can't really let Tennyson's birthday go unmarked (he was born on this day in 1809, at the rectory of Somersby in the beautiful Lincolnshire Wolds). With all the talk of this Odyssey film (which I have no intention of seeing), surely it's got to be this:

Ulysses

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd

Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those

That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when

Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades

Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known; cities of men

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'

Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades

For ever and forever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!

As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains: but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this gray spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

         This is my son, mine own Telemachus,

To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—

Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil

This labour, by slow prudence to make mild

A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees

Subdue them to the useful and the good.

Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere

Of common duties, decent not to fail

In offices of tenderness, and pay

Meet adoration to my household gods,

When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

         There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:

There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me—

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

'T is not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.