Donovan and Fred

 Today, the singer-songwriter Donovan, a man not given to understating his contribution to popular music, celebrates his 80th birthday. A while back, on the occasion of another Donovan birthday, I wrote this: 
'Today is the 67th birthday of that titan of troubadours, Donovan. Singer-songwriter, poet, mystic, visionary, man of letters, musical and psychedelic pioneer, Donovan was the most influential figure of his time, entirely changing the course of music history. Without him, the Beatles would have been just another beat combo, California's Summer of Love would never have happened, jazz, psychedelia and world music would probably not exist, and no one would ever have heard of Jeff Beck or Bob Dylan.

You might recall the 1965 meeting between Dylan and Donovan captured in D.A. Pennebaker's film Don't Look Back. The director later recalled that
'Of course, when Donovan met him he was very excited and decided to play something for him. Dylan said he liked 'Catch The Wind', but Donovan said, I've written a new song I wanna play for you. So he played a song called 'My Darling Tangerine Eyes'. And it was to the tune of 'Mr Tambourine Man'! And Dylan was sitting there with this funny look on his face, listening to 'Mr Tambourine Man' with these really weird words, trying to keep a straight face. Then Dylan says, Well, you know, that tune ... I have to admit that I haven't written all the tunes I'm credited with, but that happens to be one that I did write! I'm sure Donovan never played the song again.'
   Back in the Sixties, music fandom was intensely tribal, especially in the school playground, but often in the music press as well - Cliff v Elvis, Beatles v Stones (even, briefly, Beatles v Dave Clark Five), and of course Dylan v Donovan, which now looks rather like Beatles v Dave Clark Five. But let's be fair, Donovan - at least in the years when he was managed by Mickie Most - did produce a string of agreeable, even classic, singles. These, and indeed his early albums, were part of the soundtrack of my misspent youth, though A Gift from a Flower to a Garden finished it for me (Dear Flower - Thanks but No Thanks). But then there was the strangely wonderful 'children's album' HMS Donovan, which I remember (with a blush) being played worryingly often in my rooms at university...'

Nothing to add, really – except Happy Birthday, old chap!

As it happens,  Fred Astaire (né Austerlitz) was also born on this day, in 1899. No one could dance like him (especially when he was dancing with Ginger Rogers), and no one could put across a song as effectively as him – no wonder he was the songwriters' favourite. Here is a clip of classic Fred and Ginger – Irving Berlin's 'Cheek to Cheek', from Top Hat (1935). Enjoy...

The Great Centenarian

 Well, there's no escaping the Attenborough centenary – it's everywhere, and will be all day, with a special concert from the Royal Albert Hall on TV this evening. It was 100 years ago today that the Great Man, our most assured National Treasure, was born – in Isleworth, by the Thames in Middlesex (though he did not grow up there). I remember Isleworth from my childhood: it was there that, despite the state of the heavily polluted river, I saw my first (and for a long while last) Kingfisher. A flash of electric blue, unmistakable, unforgettable...
    So, Attenborough. In his prime a great broadcaster and communicator, and even a great Controller of BBC2, responsible for Kenneth Clark's Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man. As regular readers of this blog will know, I found Attenborough in his later years hard to take, such was his insistent focus on Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change. Having bought in to Paul Ehrlich's Malthusian predictions of planetary catastrophe caused by human overpopulation (which hasn't happened), Attenborough then bought in to CACC and its similarly dire predictions, continuing to push the notorious Michael Mann 's Hockey Stick model long after it had been shown up be mathematical nonsense. Though he was a genial fellow, a mensch and an all-round good egg, there was a disturbingly anti-human strand in Attenborough's thought. But never mind: he was, overall, a great good thing, his early achievements, I hope, outweighing later developments – and the quality of his brilliant earlier documentaries outweighing the gee-whiz visuals and lame commentary of much of his later work. Enough: de centenariis nil nisi bonum. Even I salute you, Sir David. 

   And here I'll append my own Nature Note: yesterday I saw my first swifts of the year – a pair flying high and passing from sight, and then, later, a single bird swooping down almost to within touching distance. Always a red letter day (and a little late this year), always a joyful, heart-lifting experience.

  And here, for good measure, what I think is one of the great nature poems (set in a garden, like Attenborough's latest series, The Secret Garden). It's by Emily Dickinson –

A bird came down the walk:
He did not know I saw;
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw.

And then he drank a dew
From a convenient grass,
And then hopped sidewise to the wall
To let a beetle pass.

He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all abroad, —
They looked like frightened beads, I thought;
He stirred his velvet head

Like one in danger; cautious,
I offered him a crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home

Than oars divide the ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or butterflies, off banks of noon,
Leap, splashless, as they swim.

History

 I've been watching the reruns of Simon Schama's A History of Britain, a sweeping 15-part series that dates back to a time long before Schama became an annoying metroliberal pantomime dame – and to a time when the BBC would put good money into producing a straight, intelligent narrative history, presented without gimmicks and authored by an actual historian. Imagine that happening now, quarter of a century on, when narrative history is barely taught in schools, and profound historical ignorance is the norm. How did this sad state of affairs come about? It's hard not to blame the constitutional vandal Blair, perhaps the first British Prime Minister to entirely lack a sense of history, except as something to be 'on the right side of' – a notion barely less fatuous than 'things can only get better'.  (The right side of history of course meant the left side of politics.) A proper sense of history, i.e. the past, is, it seems to me, essential for any society, any nation to thrive, and ignorance of it can only lead to decline, and indeed fall. But when, like Blair, you are a globalist 'anywhere man', with no firm belief in national identity or cultural roots, the past barely exists; you live in an eternal present. This seems to be what far too many people are now content to do, aided and abetted by institutions that have no interest in transmitting the story of the past, unless through the lens of our present preoccupations. Perhaps it will be down to the novelists and poets to keep alive some genuine sense of the past? 
   Here is Philip Larkin taking a deep dive into history – seventeenth-century Holland, to be precise – in a sonnet written on this day in 1970 and drawing inspiration from the genre paintings of Jan Steen –

The Card Players

Jan van Hogspuew staggers to the door
And pisses at the dark. Outside, the rain
Courses in cart-ruts down the deep mud lane.
Inside, Dirk Dogstoerd pours himself some more,
And holds a cinder to his clay with tongs,
Belching out smoke. Old Prijck snores with the gale,
His skull face firelit; someone behind drinks ale,
And opens mussels, and croaks scraps of songs
Towards the ham-hung rafters about love.
Dirk deals the cards. Wet century-wide trees
Clash in surrounding starlessness above
This lamplit cave, where Jan turns back and farts,
Gobs at the grate, and hits the queen of hearts.
Rain, wind and fire! The secret, bestial peace! 

Birthdays

 Today is Mrs N's birthday – and that of the inventor of the piano, Bartolomeo Cristofori (born 1655). One of his pianos, built in Florence in 1720, survives in playable condition, and this is what it sounds like (the pianist is Dongsok Shin, and the piece is a Scarlatti sonata, K9). Having a wooden rather than a metal frame, a Cristofori piano is a delicate instrument, compared to what came later, but the action (a fiendishly complex affair) is essentially that of a modern piano...

Couples

 An interesting piece in The Times yesterday, about literary couples, i.e. cohabiting couples composed of two writers, each pursuing their own projects or, sometimes, collaborating. American examples include Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt,  Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig. From this side of the pond, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath of course, Claire Tomalin and Michael Frayn – and our old friend Kingsley Amis and his wife of 18 years, Elizabeth Jane Howard. Their honeymoon in Spain seems to have been positively idyllic, at least according to Howard: 'In the mornings we wrote sitting opposite each other at the table, our typewriters almost touching in the small space. Then we went to the beach...' 
 As we know, that happy time did not last, as Howard was soon struggling with the domestic demands of looking after the needy and demanding Amis – plus a house full of friends and family – and coping with his drinking. I've written about the Amises' life in their 'bloody great mansion' before, and the wonder is that Howard put up with it for as long as she did (and somehow managed to carry on writing). In happier times, I was interested to learn from the Times piece, she and Amis once 'decided to write a few pages of each other's novels'. The novels were Howard's After Julius and Amis's One Fat Englishman. They duly swapped manuscripts, briefed each other on where the plot was going, and set to work. According to Howard, the chapters that resulted from this work-swap experiment went unnoticed and unsuspected. I guess there's an opening there for a literary sleuth, armed with the latest tools of textual analysis – though perhaps there is more important work to be done...

'One of the most unmeddlesome of women'

 Having recently read Richard Holmes's excellent account of Tennyson's early years, The Boundless Deep, I was amused to come across this picture, in J.G. Riewald's Beerbohm's Literary Caricatures (a great book for browsing in). It shows Thomas Woolner, the only sculptor in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, sculpting his portrait bust of the still beardless Tennyson in 1857 – the bust that is now in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. The caption reads: 

Mrs Tennyson: 'You know, Mr Woolner, I'm one of the most unmeddlesome of women; but – when (I'm only asking), when do you begin modelling his halo?'

'A single Hound'

 Consciousness. I know I have it, but have no idea what it is or where it comes from (nor does anyone else, whatever they may say). I am equally sure that I have a soul, but again have no idea what it is or where it comes from. Are consciousness and soul the same thing, or aspects of the same thing? Is soul perhaps a deeper form of consciousness, one that somehow connects with a reality beyond time and space? Both consciousness and soul seem identical with our ultimate selves. We inhabit consciousness, and infer everything else. 
  These are deep waters. Over to you, Emily Dickinson –

This Consciousness that is aware
Of Neighbors and the Sun
Will be the one aware of Death
And that itself alone

Is traversing the interval
Experience between
And most profound experiment
Appointed unto Men—

How adequate unto itself
Its properties shall be
Itself unto itself and none
Shall make discovery.

Adventure most unto itself
The Soul condemned to be—
Attended by a single Hound
Its own identity.

This poem was sent to me by my friend, the Emily Dickinson maven, who regards it as one of her most profound. I agree – it's a gem.