'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.