'It was a very droll time that we had at the White House...'

 Born on this day in 1811 was Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the prohibitionist bestseller Uncle Tom's Cabin. She was born, I was interested to see, in Litchfield, Connecticut, a small town that wisely changed its name from Bantam township, adopting the name of the great Mercian cathedral city, but inserting, for reasons unknown, an extraneous 't'. 
  Following the sensational success of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and in the second year of the Civil War, Mrs Stowe and family visited President Lincoln at the White House. Alas, it seems he did not greet her with the famous words, 'So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.' However, her daughter recalled, intriguingly, that 'It was a very droll time that we had at the White House, I assure you ... it was all very funny – and we were ready to explode with laughter all the while.' Mrs Stowe herself told her husband in a letter: 'I had a real funny interview with the President.' It seems Presidents were cut from a different cloth in those days. 
  As a boy, I made a rash attempt to read Uncle Tom's Cabin. I don't think I even reached the end of chapter one, and all I remember is a single image, of a man holding a glass of some kind of wine up to the light and admiring a bee's wing floating in it. This struck me as very odd, and the image stayed with me for years – until I realised that what was being described was not the wing of a bee but a flake of the translucent 'crust' of port or old red wine, a sign of long ageing in the bottle. Composed of potassium bitartrate (cream of tartar), it's called 'beeswing' because of its resemblance to the delicate veined wing of a small flying insect. This adds a new, appropriately alcoholic, level of meaning to Betjeman's description of Wilde's 'bees-winged eyes' in his poem, 'The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel', one of the best he ever wrote – 

He sipped at a weak hock and seltzer
As he gazed at the London skies
Through the Nottingham lace of the curtains
Or was it his bees-winged eyes?

To the right and before him Pont Street
Did tower in her new-built red,
As hard as the morning gaslight
That shone on his unmade bed.

“I want some more hock in my seltzer,
And Robbie, please give me your hand —
Is this the end or beginning?
How can I understand?

“So you’ve brought me the latest Yellow Book:
And Buchan has got in it now:
Approval of what is approved of
Is as false as a well-kept vow.

“More hock, Robbie — where is the seltzer?
Dear boy, pull again at the bell!
They are all little better than cretins,
Though this is the Cadogan Hotel.

“One astrakhan coat is at Willis’s —
Another one’s at the Savoy:
Do fetch my morocco portmanteau,
And bring them on later, dear boy.”

A thump, and a murmur of voices —
(”Oh why must they make such a din?”)
As the door of the bedroom swung open
And TWO PLAIN CLOTHES POLICEMEN came in:

“Mr. Woilde, we 'ave come for tew take yew
Where felons and criminals dwell:
We must ask yew tew leave with us quoietly
For this is the Cadogan Hotel.”

He rose, and he put down The Yellow Book.
He staggered — and, terrible-eyed,
He brushed past the plants on the staircase
And was helped to a hansom outside.

 

'If his face looks like this...'

Yesterday's announcement of David Hockney's death was greeted by a wonderful outpouring of affectionate and admiring tributes – and quite right too. He was that rare thing, a genuine artist who was also widely popular and well-liked – the equivalent in painting, perhaps, of John Betjeman in poetry. Not easy to think of another, in either field, with such a combination of attributes...
  I've always loved Hockney's drawings, perhaps rather more than his paintings – certainly more than his late paintings, cheering though they are. The above pen drawing of Auden is a favourite – so economical in means, yet so perfectly capturing the man. Hockney has wisely simplified the prodigious reticulation of wrinkles that covered the ageing Auden's face, giving it the appearance, as he put it himself, of 'a wedding cake left out in the rain'. I wonder – well, I don't really, but you never know – if the lyricist Jimmy Webb had that phrase in mind when he wrote that totally bonkers song 'MacArthur Park': 

'MacArthur Park is melting in the dark,
All the sweet green icing flowing down.
Someone left the cake out in the rain,
And I don't think that I can take it
'Cause it took so long to bake it,
And I'll never have that recipe again.
Oh no!
Oh no!'
(Check out the full lyrics here to savour just how bonkers this song is. I particularly like the line 'Like a striped pair of pants' in the first stanza.)

   To return to Auden's face, Hockney recalled that, when drawing it, he kept thinking, 'If his face looks like this, what must his balls look like?' 
  Scientific Postscript: Some medical experts believe that the state of Auden's face was due to a rare genetic condition known as Touraine-Solente-Golé syndrome. But many years of heavy smoking, supplemented by alcohol and benzedrine, can't have helped. 

Aethelflaed

 Happy Aethelflaed Day, everyone! 
Aethelflaed (870-918), daughter of Alfred the Great, is remembered as the Lady of the Mercians, and is something of a feminist icon. With her brother, who later became King Edward the Elder, she ruled over much of Mercia from 911, successfully fighting off the Vikings. She died on this day 1,108 years ago (have I got that right?).
Above is a strange and, er, somewhat unsatisfactory statue of Aethelflaed, which stands on a traffic island in Tamworth, the Mercian capital. 

An Unplanned Church

 Yesterday I had an appointment at a hospital some little way from Lichfield. For reasons I won't bore you with, I ended up arriving a full hour early. What to do? I'd noticed, on the way in, a red sandstone church standing apparently alone in the fields – Victorian by the look of it, and probably locked – but I thought I'd go and have a look. The hospital is in what might be called a semi-rural location, with the Big House (much Victorianised) close to it, and the village stretching along the main road, inhabited largely by the kind of people who like to build big showy houses behind tall wrought-iron gates and Virginia Water shrubbery. Not very inspiring then, and reeking of money. But the church – that was the thing. And I was lucky: as I drew near I spotted some human activity, which turned out to be the churchwarden and her husband finishing off the flowers with which the church was abundantly decked. This was in honour of the new vicar, who is being installed today. So, by pure luck, I had found the church open. It's wonderful how often this happens – sometimes it seems almost miraculous, as with the Lady with the Key. 
   Anyway, I had a nice chat with the churchwarden, and was able to have a look around the church before she locked up and left. The church is Victorian indeed, small and simple but of high quality, the gift of the then owner of the Big House, with lavish fittings, a spectacular polychrome sanctuary floor, and a couple of good stained-glass windows. Pevsner describes the interior as 'wholly satisfying', and it is indeed. I'm so glad I chanced to find it open. It was one of those happy unplanned moments that have peppered my church-crawling life – and indeed the rest of my life. Reasons to be thankful. 

'There is nothing to do with a day except to live it'

 Another day begins. Here is a starting-the-day poem by the great Richard Wilbur. It's just the kind of celebration of the domestic and the quotidian that got him such a bad reputation among the more 'advanced' taste-makers – more fools them: this is no simple celebration. 

C Minor

Beethoven during breakfast? The human soul,
Though stalked by hollow pluckings, winning out
(While bran-flakes crackle in the cereal bowl)
   Over despair and doubt?

You are right to switch it off and let the day
Begin at hazard, perhaps with pecker-knocks
In the sugar bush, the rancour of a jay,
   Or in the letter box

Something that makes you pause and with fixed shadow
Stand on the driveway-gravel, your bent head
Scanning the snatched pages until the sad
   Or fortunate news is read.

The day's work will be disappointing or not,
Giving at least some pleasure in taking pains.
One of us, hoeing in the garden plot
   (Unless, of course, it rains)

May rejoice at the knitting of light in fennel-plumes
And dew like mercury on cabbage-hide,
Or rise and pace through too-familiar rooms, 
   Balked and dissatisfied.

Shall a plate be broken? A new thing understood? 
Shall we be lonely, and by love consoled?
What shall I whistle, splitting the kindling-wood?
   Shall the night-wind be cold?

How should I know? And even if we were fated
Hugely to suffer, grandly to endure,
It would not help to hear it all fore-stated
   As in an overture.

There is nothing to do with a day except to live it.
Let us have music again when the light dies
(Sullenly, or in glory) and we can give it
   Something to organise.

Ever since I switched my allegiance from Radio 4 to Radio 3, classical music has been a background to my life for rather too much of the day (including even Classic FM pianissimo while I sleep, or not). If I'm awake early, I like to hear the snatch of birdsong that starts the Radio 3 day – but, by the time I'm eating my breakfast, I'm happy to turn the music off for a while. Wilbur is right – Beethoven at breakfast is not a good idea. But what was the C minor piece that was switched off? The expressive key of C minor was a favourite of Beethoven's – it's the key of the Pathétique sonata (and the last, number 32) and the Fifth Symphony. Wilbur talks of 'pluckings', perhaps suggesting a string quartet – maybe it was this one, a fine piece, but certainly not breakfast music...

'The best example of what living constantly with humans leads to'

 I see that the supermarket chain Sainsbury's is doing its bit to cut 'emissions' by removing brown eggs from its shelves in favour of white ones, which, according to its research, have a 12.7 percent lower 'carbon footprint' than their brown cousins. This major contribution to achieving 'net zero' has, of course, nothing to do with the fact that white eggs are cheaper and easier to produce... 
  Anyway, this got me thinking about chickens. The domestic fowl (Gallus gallus domesticus) is the most numerous bird, and the most numerous domestic animal, on the planet, with a population estimated at upward of 26.5 billion (four chickens for every human?). Our debt to them, as producers both of meat and of those natural wonders, eggs, is immense – but are we grateful to them, do we appreciate them? Of course not. Here is the great Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert's tribute to the doughty fowl –

Hen

The hen is the best example of what living constantly with
humans leads to. She has completely lost the lightness and
grace of a bird. Her tail sticks up over her protruding rump
like a too large hat in bad taste. Her rare moments of ecstasy,
when she stands on one leg and glues up her round eyes
with filmy eyelids, are stunningly disgusting. And in addition, that
parody of song, throat-slashed supplications over a thing un-
utterably comic: a round, white, maculated egg.
   The hen brings to mind certain poets.

[translation by Czeslaw Milosz]

Minced Oaths

 An American friend inquires – as well he might – what 'a Herbert Spencer of a cold' might mean. As I told him, I'm probably the only person on the planet who still uses the phrase (to universal bafflement). I came across it years ago in, I think, a novel by H.G. Wells (Love and Mr Lewisham?), where a character says he has had 'a Herbert Spencer of a day'. He means of course a Hell of a day, and it's an example of what is known as a 'minced oath', where an innocuous form of words, with the same initial letter, is substituted for a profanity.  There is no actual connection between Hell and Herbert Spencer, except that neither is a lot of fun. Another example where the name of a famous person is put to this use is 'what the Dickens?', which has nothing to do with the writer, but is simply a way of avoiding saying 'devil'. Similarly the exclamation 'Gordon Bennett' is a way of avoiding naming the deity. The Gordon Bennett thus invoked was the wealthy publisher, sportsman and celebrity (in his day) Gordon Bennett Jr, who, among other things, sponsored Stanley's expedition to Africa to find David Livingstone. And then there's the sad case of 'sweet Fanny Adams' (a way of avoiding the expression 'sweet f*ck-all'). Fanny was an eight-year-old girl whose brutal murder in Alton, Hampshire,  in 1867 caused a national outcry. But that's enough minced oaths. 
   Meanwhile, my own Herbert Spencer of a cold still has me firmly in its grip, so I have entirely missed out on the Devon jaunt I was looking forward to. Hey ho.