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.

Missing Liddle already

 I see that my old university has given a professorship to a fantasist and plagiarist (both 'alleged', m'lud), for reasons that are all too painfully obvious. The story is still unfolding, in jaw-dropping detail, and will surely do real harm to Cambridge's reputation.
   One of Arday's outlandish Munchausenesque tales is that he once ran 600 miles in six days – and that reminded me of something I wrote about a while back: the six-day walk (and one George Hazel did indeed walk 600 miles in six days, back in 1882). 
   Among the many reasons to mourn the death of Rod Liddle, the nearest thing we had to a Swiftian journalist, is that we'll never read what he had to say on the Jason Arday story. It would surely have been choice. 

Dowson

 Born on this day in 1867 was Ernest Dowson, a minor poet, Decadent and doomed – but he left the English language three fine, musical phrases that have long survived him. I told the story in this post from fifteen(!) years ago...

Last?

 Every time I post about having seen my last swift of the year, I do so with an unspoken hope of tempting benign fate into granting me a further sighting, or maybe more. Sure enough, as I was sitting in the garden just now, I looked up and saw a pair of swifts flying over – a joyful sight. They've made it into August, hurrah! And already I'm wondering if those two really will be the last...

Note

 Blog posts might be a little sparser over the next few weeks, as my daughter and family are visiting from Canada (via Rome). 

Marianne Moore: No Feet

In the chapter devoted to Marianne Moore in Their Ancient Glittering Eyes, Donald Hall examines the structure of Moore's verse, which basically comes in two forms: syllabic verse and free verse. Her syllabic lines have no meter, no feet, only particular syllable counts. Indeed, it seems that she was effectively tone deaf when it came to meter, simply not hearing it – an extraordinary thing in a poet of her accomplishment. In her memoir of Moore, 'Efforts of Affection', which Hall quotes, Elizabeth Bishop 'recalls with astonishment that Moore was baffled by conventional English prosody.' 'Why not believe,' Bishop concludes,' that the old English meters that still seem natural to most of us ... were not natural to her at all?' 
  There is plenty of evidence, and Hall cites an essay by Moore, 'Feeling and Precision', in which 'she spoke of "Dr Johnson's objection to rigmarole, in his takeoff on the ballad:
       'I put my hat upon my head,
          And went into the Strand,
       And there I saw another man,
          With his hat in his hand.'"
Johnson was parodying bad poets' attempts at achieving the simplicity of a ballad, and the lines depend on a thumpingly regular meter – which Marianne Moore mucks up in the last line: it simply doesn't scan. It should read 'Whose hat was in his hand' – three iambs, di-dum, di-dum, di-dum, as in the second line. Johnson first recited these lines to his friend Garrick, who passed them on to Boswell – making exactly the same mistake as Moore in the last line.  When Boswell repeated Garrick's version to Johnson, the Doctor growled, 'Then he has no ear.' As for Marianne Moore's ear – Hall concludes that 'she had a remarkable and innovative ear, but not an ear for English meter. She had an ear that Johnson would have recognised as belonging to prose, not to poetry.' But, emphatically, she was a poet – a quite unique one, and a classic. 'Removed from the distractions of time,' Hall concludes his essay, 'her work grows firmer, the character more luminous, brave, exemplary, virtuous, and strange.'  For another take on Moore's extraordinary poetry, here is Kay Ryan, plain-speaking as ever. 

Review

 My review of Lea Korsgaard's The Butterfly Season is on Engelsberg Ideas, embellished with a rather lovely butterfly print by Rasmus Christiansen (a Dane). The link in the review should take you to a podcast reading of my earlier piece on the Aurelians – the reader is not me (I wish I sounded like that, but I don't). 
https://engelsbergideas.com/reviews/in-pursuit-of-denmarks-butterflies/

'The swift's black bow'

It looks very much as if the swifts have flown, from Lichfield at least – a notably early departure. It's been a strange, but ultimately successful, season, beginning with the newly arrived birds absenting themselves for long periods from the cool, wet weather of late spring and early summer (and who could blame them?). Then, once the weather had properly warmed up, back they came in force, as numerous as I have ever seen them in Lichfield. If they have truly gone now, it has been a short season indeed – down south I often saw my last swifts in mid-August. I must have seen my last of this year a couple of evenings ago – a pair in fact, lazily circling high up over the garden.
  Unlike Edward Thomas in this lovely short poem, I never know when I have seen the last of the season...

'How at once should I know,
When stretched in the harvest blue
I saw the swift's black bow,
That I would not have that view
Another day
Until next May
Again it is due?

The same year after year –
But with the swift alone.
With other things I but fear
That they will be over and done
Suddenly
And I only see
Them to know them gone.'