Never Dull

 More than a year ago, I bought a copy of Carlyle's The French Revolution, all three volumes of it contained in one slim India-paper volume. It has been my bedtime reading, off and on, ever since, and last night I finally reached the end, Chapter VIII of volume three, aptly titled Finis: 'Homer's Epos, it is remarked, is like a Bas-relief sculpture: it does not conclude, but merely ceases. Such, indeed, is the Epos of Universal History itself...' After a long, overheated passage of 'prophecy' from Alessandro Cagliostro, described by Carlyle himself as 'the Quack of Quacks', the author returns to take an elegant farewell: 
'And so here, O Reader, has the time come for us two to part. Toilsome was our journeying together [you're not wrong, Tom]; not without offence; but it is done. To me thou wert as a beloved shade, the disembodied or not yet embodied spirit of a Brother. To thee I was but as a voice. Yet was our relation a kind of sacred one; doubt not that! For whatsoever once sacred things become hollow jargons, yet while the Voice of Man speaks with Man, hast thou not there the living fountain out of which all sacrednesses sprang, and will yet spring? Man, by the nature of him, is definable as 'an incarnate Word'. Ill stands it with me if I have spoken falsely: thine also it was to hear truly. Farewell.'
   Well, it was quite a ride. This was a book that, as Carlyle put it, came 'direct and flamingly from the heart', and that is how it reads – impassioned, vivid, personal, written as if by an eye-witness who was in the thick of the action and now invites us to be there alongside him. Exclaiming, apostrophising, drawing the reader in with the first-person plural, he takes off into sometimes obscure flights of prose poetry, bringing in myths and scripture, scattering metaphors, references, personifications, archaisms and new-coined words left and right, always with an eye to bringing alive the extraordinary, often terrible events he chronicles. The effect at times is almost cinematic, wholly unlike any other history, and, God knows, it is never dull. 

 

So cross that he postponed his bath...

 I'm greatly enjoying Piers Brendon's Eminent Edwardians, finding it rather more agreeable reading than Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. Reading about the egregious press baron Lord Northcliffe brought home to me what a very Northcliffean organ his creation, the Daily Mail, still is – or at least was when I served my 22 years in Northcliffe House – and how Northcliffean the management style is/was. But I'll say no more (and Paul Dacre was always very nice to me). 
  I'm now reading about the languid aristocrat Arthur Balfour, Cambridge 'Soul', 'scented popinjay' and charming ornament of the highest society, who was steered into a political career by his uncle, Lord Salisbury, and ended up being Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905, leading his party into the political wilderness for 20 years. As his government fell apart around him, nothing dented his aplomb: Brendon writes that 'The only reverse that evoked a gleam of passion in him was the Duke of Devonshire's resignation in 1903; the Prime Minister was so cross that in order to write the Duke a stiff letter he postponed his bath.' Not exactly The Thick of It, is it?
  Balfour found it hard to reconcile himself to being in Opposition, and could scarcely believe that the 'natural rulers' of the country were no longer in power. He 'found himself compelled to "go about the country explaining that I am 'honest and industrious', like a second footman out of place" and enduring those "attendant horrors" of public meetings, the "subsidiary luncheons and dinners, which are fatal to one's temper at the moment, and to one's digestion afterwards.' He was surprised to find that his reappearance in the Commons as Opposition leader was 'the signal for ill-mannered interruptions' – and for a most ungentlemanly attack from the new Prime Minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, 'a man who resembled nothing so much as an enraged sheep', and whose name the absent-minded Lord Salisbury had never been able to remember. C-B caddishly attacked Balfour for the very thing he most prided himself on – his silky forensic technique, 'the spinning of diaphanous webs in which his adversaries became fatally enmeshed'. This art the enraged sheep denounced as mere 'foolery' – and much of the House agreed. Times had changed, and Balfour's ideal of parliamentary debate as 'concord enlivened by mellifluous displays of intellectual counterpoint' had, alas, gone for good.  
  Still to come: Mrs Pankhurst and General Baden-Powell. I'm looking forward to them both. 

Cheers to Beer

 I've only just realised, with a start, that today is National Beer Day.
 The date was chosen because it's the anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta, which has something to say about standard measures of beer and other drinks – and also, one would like to think, represents our traditional liberties, of which the drinking of beer, preferably in a pub, is a pretty good embodiment. Johnson was a great advocate of what we now call the pub: 'There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.' I think he would have loved Wetherspoon's, that most convivial of national institutions – and famed for its cheap, well kept beer. 
  National Beer Day enjoins us to raise a glass at 7pm in a national Cheers to Beer toast. I'll drink to that.

'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 abolitionist 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.