Moore Music

 Last night on the vintage music quiz Face the Music – an awful smugfest, really, but strangely compelling – the guest was Gerald Moore, who had recently celebrated his 80th birthday. As well as being probably the finest accompanist who ever lived, Moore was blessed with a genial personality, a sense of humour and a talent for anecdote. He soon had Joseph Cooper and the panellists – Robin Ray, Joyce Grenfell and the humorist Paul Jennings – reduced to helpless laughter with his memories of the early days of studio recording and much else. After the show was over, my mind turned to his wonderful Schubert recordings – and to this, his own arrangement for solo piano (no voice) of 'An Die Musik'. Enjoy...

Graphite and Rubber

 I've always liked pencils – the look, the feel and the smell of them – and the best pencils are surely those with a nice sharp graphite point at one end and a little eraser conveniently placed at the other. Who first came up with that bright idea? Well, as it happens, it was on this day in 1858 that one Hymen L. Lipman registered the first patent for such a pencil. He was the leading stationer in Philadelphia, where he also launched the first envelope company in America. In 1862 he sold the pencil-eraser patent to Joseph Reckendorker, who rashly sued the German company Faber for infringement. Alas, after due deliberation, the Supreme Court ruled against him and declared that the patent was invalid because it was simply a combination of two already known things with no additional use. Oh dear. 

   Vladimir Nabokov loved pencils, and they turn up more than once in his writings. In his autobiography Speak, Memory, the young Vladimir, lying in bed with a childhood illness, visualises his mother entering a stationer's shop and coming out with her footman carrying a pencil – which must surely be a giant pencil. And then there she is, by his bed, bearing the gift of a gigantic, four-feet long Faber pencil that had hung in the shop window (and was, Nabokov was delighted to discover, a working pencil with four feet of graphite inside).  
   In chapter 3 of Transparent Things, Hugh Person finds a pencil in the half-open drawer of an old desk, and suddenly, in a vertiginous bravura passage, we have the whole history of that pencil...

It was not a hexagonal beauty of Virginia juniper or African cedar, with the maker's name imprinted in silver foil, but a very plain, round, technically faceless old pencil of cheap pine, dyed a dingy lilac. It had been mislaid ten years ago by a carpenter who had not finished examining, let alone fixing, the old desk, having gone away for a tool that he never found. Now comes the act of attention.

In his shop, and long before that at the village school, the pencil has been worn down to two-thirds of its original length. The bare wood of its tapered end has darkened to plumbeous plum, thus merging in tint with the blunt tip of graphite whose blind gloss alone distinguishes it from the wood. A knife and a brass sharpener have thoroughly worked upon it and if it were necessary we could trace the complicated fate of the shavings, each mauve on one side and tan on the other when fresh, but now reduced to atoms of dust whose wide, wide dispersal is panic catching its breath but one should be above it, one gets used to it fairly soon (there are worse terrors). On the whole, it whittled sweetly, being of an old-fashioned make. Going back a number of seasons (not as far, though, as Shakespeare's birth year when pencil lead was discovered) and then picking up the thing's story again in the "now" direction, we see graphite, ground very fine, being mixed with moist clay by young girls and old men. This mass, this pressed caviar, is placed in a metal cylinder which has a blue eye, a sapphire with a hole drilled in it, and through this the caviar is forced. It issues in one continuous appetizing rodlet (watch for our little friend!), which looks as if it retained the shape of an earthworm's digestive tract (but watch, watch, do not be deflected!). It is now being cut into the lengths required for these particular pencils (we glimpse the cutter, old Elias Borrowdale, and are about to mouse up his forearm on a side trip of inspection but we stop, stop and recoil, in our haste to identify the individual segment). See it baked, see it boiled in fat (here a shot of the fleecy fat-giver being butchered, a shot of the butcher, a shot of the shepherd, a shot of the shepherd's father, a Mexican) and fitted into the wood.

Now let us not lose our precious bit of lead while we prepare the wood. Here's the tree! This particular pine! It Is cut down. Only the trunk is used, stripped of its bark. We hear the whine of a newly invented power saw, we see logs being dried and planed. Here's the board that will yield the integument of the pencil in the shallow drawer (still not closed). We recognize its presence in the log as we recognized the log in the tree and the tree in the forest and the forest in the world that Jack built. We recognize that presence by something that is perfectly clear to us but nameless, and as impossible to describe as a smile to somebody who has never seen smiling eyes.

Thus the entire little drama, from crystallized carbon and felled pine to this humble implement, to this transparent thing, unfolds in a twinkle. Alas, the solid pencil itself as fingered briefly by Hugh Person still somehow eludes us! But he won't, oh no. 

'Why is it this that stays...?'

Yesterday I was walking with my brother and walking friends by the Thames in London, from Southwark Cathedral to Rotherhithe, by way of St Margaret Pattens, All Hallows by the Tower, Tower Bridge, the Mayflower Inn (lunch) and St Mary, Rotherhithe, accompanied by a more than lively breeze and flurries of hail. In the event, this enterprise involved a total of something over eight hours of travel by train, London Underground and Overground, a chunk of it occasioned by a lengthy delay on the return journey to Lichfield. Never mind – I was equipped with two books to while away the time. One was Max Beerbohm's Mainly on the Air, a collection of pieces most of which were broadcast on the radio (and duly published in the late lamented Listener).  The other was my latest Dick Davis acquisition, a slim volume titled Belonging.
   Davis, as well as being a fine poet, is a widely admired translator of the classical Persian poetry that was one of the great achievements of that civilisation, centuries before Iran fell prey to a brutal, life-hating theocracy – which soon, God willing, will be gone, whereas the poetry of Fardousi, Hafez, Omar Khayyam and many others will live on. Here, in a poem from Belonging, Davis addresses those great poets –  

To the Persian Poets

What rights have I, trespassing in your rooms,
Pilfering your lines, sifting your sacred dust,
Searching for what you were and are not now?
As if I came to where Achilles flickered,
Drawn by the blood Odysseus spilt for him.

But, in another tongue, a stranger speaks,
The revenant who shows me what I am:
In whose hermetic words I recognise
The animals and angels of my heart,
My happiness, my longing, my despair.

This poem, too, honours the poets, albeit obliquely: Hafez was a native of Shiraz, Nayshapur was the home town of Omar Khayyam and of the sufi poet Farid uddin Attar. The poem also describes and explores a curious phenomenon I've often noticed myself, when after visiting some magnificent and supposedly memorable place, what I recall most vividly, often many years later, is an incidental detail, an apparently meaningless moment... 


Iran Twenty Years Ago

Each summer, working there, I’d set off for
The fabled cities – Esfahan, Kashan,
Or Ecbatana, where Hephaestion died,
The poets’ towns – Shiraz and Nayshapour,
Or sites now hardly more than villages
Lapped by the desert, Na’in or Ardestan . . .

 

Their names now mean a dusty backstreet somewhere

Empty and silent in the vivid sunlight,

A narrow way between the high mud walls –

The worn wood of the doors recessed in them

A talisman to conjure and withhold

The life and lives I never touched or knew.

Sometimes I’d hear a voice, a radio,

But mostly there was silence and my shadow

Until a turn would bring me back to people,

Thoroughfares and shops . . .

 

                                              Why is it this that stays,

Those empty afternoons that never led

To anything but seemed their own reward

And are more vivid in my memory

Than mosques, bazaars, companionship, and all

The myriad details of an eight year sojourn;

As if that no epiphany, precisely,

Were the epiphany?  As Hafez has it,

To know you must have gone along that way;

I know they changed my life for ever but

I know too that I could not tell myself

– Much less another – what it was I saw,

Or learnt, or brought back from those aimless hours.

From Max Beerbohm and Mostly On The Air, I offer you this little nugget: in the essay 'Music Halls of My Youth', Max reveals that he was such a devoted admirer of the 'frankly fantastic, but nevertheless very real, very human and loveable' singer Albert Chevalier (of 'My Old Dutch' fame) that he was 'sorely tempted to offer him an idea which might well have been conceived by himself: a song about a publican whom the singer had known and revered, who was now dead, whose business was carried on by his son, Ben, an excellent young man, – 'But 'e'll never be the man 'is Father woz'. The chorus was to be something of this sort: 
(Sung) 'I drops in to see young Ben
            In 'is tap-room now an' then,
            And I likes to see 'im gettin' on becoz
           'E's got pluck and 'e's got brains,
           And 'e takes no end o' pains, 
           But – 'e'll never be the man 'is Father woz.'

All together now...

 

'This can hardly be too vehemently recommended'

 Back in the days when the late Sage of Tiverton and I were exchanging frequent text messages, he somehow convinced himself that my nightly routine was to retire to bed and read Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian. I've no idea where he got this notion, as I had never read the much praised Memoirs, but it was a book I had long intended to get round to reading one day. This state of affairs continued until very recently when, spotting it on the shelves of my favourite charity bookshop, I nerved myself to buy it and – yes, at last – read it. I am not sorry: I'd say it is perhaps the best thing of its kind I have read. 
   Published in 1951, after a very long gestation, it is, as the title suggests, an account of his life written in the first person by the Emperor Hadrian (who is remembered today chiefly for his wall, his love of Antinous, and his poetical farewell to his soul, 'Animula vagula blandula...'). His death drawing near, Hadrian sets out his memoir in the form of a long letter to his grandson Marcus Aurelius (of the ever popular Meditations), who will in due course succeed him. Yourcenar's endeavour was inspired by a sentence she came across in Flaubert's correspondence: 'Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.' It's a questionable statement (Christ had been around a good while by the time of Marcus Aurelius, and the old gods had gone nowhere), but the idea is strong, even intoxicating, and it spurred the young Yourcenar to write the first of many versions of her Hadrian. These she mostly destroyed, retaining just one eloquent sentence: 'I begin to discern the profile of my death'. With this sentence, she wrote later, 'I had at last found a point from which to view the book'. 
   The dying Hadrian is an entirely convincing figure, and the world he inhabits, both outer and inner, has the ring of authenticity. Yourcenar devoted years to research, but her approach is not that of the encyclopaedically inclined Flaubert, who liked to throw in everything including the kitchen sink – has anyone ever read Salammbo a second time for pleasure? She had created the whole of Hadrian's world in her head, and all she had to do was place him in it (in this she resembled Penelope Fitzgerald in her later novels). Because the book is, of course, written in the first person, no explanation, no wider view, is needed. You are in Hadrian's world, his empire, his philosophy, his career, his struggles and triumphs, loves and losses, enemies and lovers, memories and (few) regrets, as he surveys his past, assesses his present and prepares, with Stoic calm, to leave the world. Written in an elegant and balanced (indeed classical) prose, Memoirs of Hadrian is an astonishing feat of historical imagination on Yourcenar's part. When it came out, it received rave reviews, one of which – by Raymond Mortimer in the Sunday Times – is quoted on the back of my (Penguin) edition: 'As a picture of the whole various Empire with its manners and beliefs, no less than as an imaginary portrait of its ruler, this can hardly be too vehemently recommended.' They don't write them like that any more, but he's right, and I am so glad I finally got round to it.

Poet to Poet

 It's World Poetry Day today (though it should be World Music Day, as it's Bach's birthday).
To mark the occasion I've assembled a little collection of poems in which one poet addresses or encounters or hails another – thereby doubling the poetical headcount. Or even tripling it, as here, where Keats encounters Homer by way of Chapman's wonderfully vigorous translation, and is moved to write one of the finest sonnets in the language –

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Auden's great elegy 'In Memory of W.B. Yeats' is also one of the finest things of its kind. It's too long to quote in its entirety here, but the beautiful closing section will suffice –

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
          William Yeats is laid to rest.
          Let the Irish vessel lie
          Emptied of its poetry.

          In the nightmare of the dark
          All the dogs of Europe bark,
          And the living nations wait,
          Each sequestered in its hate;

          Intellectual disgrace
          Stares from every human face,
          And the seas of pity lie
          Locked and frozen in each eye.

          Follow, poet, follow right
          To the bottom of the night,
          With your unconstraining voice
          Still persuade us to rejoice;

          With the farming of a verse
          Make a vineyard of the curse,
          Sing of human unsuccess
          In a rapture of distress;

          In the deserts of the heart
          Let the healing fountain start,
          In the prison of his days
          Teach the free man how to praise.  

The great, nurturing friendship of Robert Frost and Edward Thomas made a poet of the latter and a better poet of the former. Here Frost remembers his friend... 

I slumbered with your poems on my breast
Spread open as I dropped them half read through
Like dove wings on a figure on a tomb
To see, if, in a dream they brought of you,
I might not have the chance I missed in life
Through some delay, and call you to your face
First soldier, and then poet, and then both,
Who died a soldier-poet of your race.
I meant, you meant, that nothing should remain
Unsaid between us, brother, and this remained—
And one thing more that was not then to say:
The Victory for what it lost and gained.
You went to meet the shell’s embrace of fire
On Vimy Ridge; and when you fell that day
The war seemed over more for you than me,
But now for me than you—the other way.
How over, though, for even me who knew
The foe thrust back unsafe beyond the Rhine,
If I was not to speak of it to you
And see you pleased once more with words of mine?

R.S. Thomas and Wallace Stevens are two poets you wouldn't naturally yoke together, but the yankophobic Welshman was a huge admirer of this particular American. Here is his heartfelt 'Homage to Wallace Stevens' –

I turn now
not to the Bible
but to Wallace Stevens.
Insured against
everything but the muse,
what has the word-wizard
to say? His adjectives
are the wand he waves
so language gets up
and dances under
a fastidious moon.
We walk a void world,
he implies, for which,
in the absence of the imagination,
there is no hope. Verbal bank-clerk,
acrobat walking a rhythmic tight-rope,
trapeze artist of the language,
his was a kind of double-entry
poetics. He kept two columns
of thought going, balancing meaning
against his finances. His poetry
was his church and in it
curious marriages were conducted.
He burned his metaphors like incense,
so his syntax was as high
as his religion.
Blessings, Stevens,
I stand with my back to grammar
at an altar you never aspired
to, celebrating the sacrament
of the imagination whose high-priest
notwithstanding you are.

Elegies and poetic epitaphs can be pompous, overblown affairs – Shelley's 'Adonais', anyone? But there's no danger of that when Gavin Ewart's on the job. Here is his preposterously rhymed 'In Memoriam Sir John Betjeman (1906-1984)' –

So the last date slides into the bracket
that will appear in all future anthologies –
and in quiet Cornwall and in London's ghastly racket
we are now Betjemanless.
Your verse was very fetching
and, as Byron might have written,
there are many poetic personalities around
that would fetch a man less!

Some of your admirers were verging on the stupid,
you were envied  by poets (more highbrow, more inventive?);
at twenty you had the bow-shaped lips of a Cupid
(a scuffle with Auden too).
But long before your Oxford
and the visiting of churches
you went topographical – on the Underground
(Metroland and Morden too)!

The Dragon School – but Marlborough a real dragon,
with real bullying, followed the bear of childhood,
a kind of gentlemanly cross to crucify a fag on.
We don't repent at leisure,
you were good, and very British.
Serious, considered 'funny',
in your best poems, strong but sad, we found
a most terrific pleasure.

Which naturally brings us to Philip Larkin's tribute to Ewart, one of the last poems he completed – 

Good for You, Gavin

It's easy to write when you've nothing to write about
   (That is, when you are young),
The heart-shaped hypnotics the press is polite about
   Rise from an unriven tongue.

Later on, attic'd with the all-too-familiar
   Tea chests of truth-sodden grief,
The pages you scrap sound like school songs, or sillier,
   Banal beyond belief.

So good for you, Gavin, for having stayed sprightly
   While keeping your eye on the ball;
Your riotous road-show's like Glenlivet nightly,
   A warming to us all.

And finally, here's Richard Wilbur elegantly wishing a happy birthday to poet and Blake enthusiast Kathleen Raine – 

For K.R. On Her Sixtieth Birthday

Blow out the candles of your cake.
They will not leave you in the dark,
Who round with grace this dusky arc
Of the grand tour which souls must take.

You who have sounded William Blake,
And the still pool, to Plato's mark,
Blow out the candles of your cake.
They will not leave you in the dark.

Yet, for your friends' benighted sake,
Detain your upward-flying spark;
Get us that wish, though like the lark
You whet your wings till dawn shall break:
Blow out the candles of your cake. 

Butterflies and Waldemar

 Another glorious spring day, and this morning I took a walk in hope of seeing more butterflies. There was much to enjoy – birdsong (including chiffchaffs now), flowers and early blossom – but, as it turned out, the slight touch of chill in the breeze was enough to deter the butterflies, fussy creatures that they are. However, I did see my first tortoiseshell of the year – Small Tortoiseshell I should say, as the lovely Large Tortoiseshell is now re-established as a British species. And later I was entertained by two Peacocks and a Brimstone (all at the same time) in the garden. 
  Talking of butterflies, I saw one on television last night, in a most unlikely setting – acting as a fig-leaf over the nether privities of the dwarf Nano Morgante, in a startling double-sided portrait by Bronzino (the butterfly was of course highly stylised). This featured in Waldemar Januszczak's typically lively and entertaining series on Mannerism. I hadn't really thought much about Mannerism as such (though I've written here about Moroni, Parmigianino, Andrea del Sarto and others), but Waldemar brings home its extraordinary, intense energy and all-encompassing range, from utterly grotesque sculpture and wildly over-the-top ceiling paintings to hauntingly beautiful portraits – definitely Mannerism's strong suit. Self-portraits too – I was interested to learn about the prolific and prodigiously gifted self-portraitist Sofonisba Anguissola, who painted the remarkable family group below (Sofonisba on the left). However, Januszczak was surely stretching things too far when he tried to enlist Palladio in the Mannerist ranks. Really? 

Sebastian

 And the birthdays just keep on coming – this time it's John Sebastian, of Lovin' Spoonful fame, and he's 82 today. I loved the Spoonful from the first time I heard them, and still regard Sebastian as a fine songwriter. Here is one of my favourites – a good-time song with some very clever lyrics...