Proms, Flags

 It's that time of year again. Summer has elided into autumn, and that sure calendrical marker, the Last Night of the Proms, has been and gone. Watching it on television, I found this year's event rather underwhelming – too many musical 'lollipops' with little of substance to balance them, efficient but uninspired conducting, and rather too much downright silliness  (the spectacle of the BBC's finest musicians performing a classicised version of 'Bohemian Rhapsody' with straight faces will not be easily forgotten). Still, Alison Balsom delivered a typically brilliant farewell performance, the soprano Louise Alder showed real star quality, and I fancy Rachel Portman's 'The Gathering Tree' will be a big choral hit. The traditional finale could hardly fail, but I felt it could have done with rather more oomph. And of course the flags were waving. There were plenty of union jacks, especially towards the front, this being one of the few occasions on which waving the national flag is considered safe, not a step on the slippery slope to racism, ultranationalism and fascism (in contrast to the intolerably vulgar shows of patriotism at the 'far right' rally in London earlier the same day, sniff sniff). There were also large numbers of EU flags, and even EU hats, designed to be seen from above; indeed, I got the impression that the EU flags were more numerous than last year, and actually outnumbered the union jacks – will the Remainers never give up? I suppose, to take a charitable view, they are making the fatal error of mistaking the EU for that wondrous thing, Europe – and hence European civilisation, European music, etc. English classical music, except at its folky fringes, certainly belongs in the European tradition, just as English popular music belongs in the American tradition. But all that, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with the EU. 

The Comforters

 Lately it occurred to me that, what with one thing and another, I hadn't read a novel for quite a while – I think the last one was probably James Hamilton Paterson's Rancid Pansies. So I reached for a recent charity shop find, Muriel Spark's The Comforters. This was her first novel (one of the dwindling few I haven't read) and it finds her sprinting from the starting blocks with absolute assurance, already fully formed, unique and unmistakable. It was published in 1957, but it could have come from any period of her career, though it does play with some elements of late 1950s fiction, notably the 'Reds under the bed' thriller, the supernatural tale, and the more modish experiments with 'metafiction'. Caroline Rose, who is trying to write a book about the modern novel, finds herself plagued by the sound of typewriter keys and a voice narrating her own thoughts and actions, as if – exactly as if – she is a character in a novel that someone else, the 'Typewriting Ghost', is writing. This element of the story was inspired by Spark's own uncanny experiences while she was having a paranoid breakdown, brought on by overwork, stress, a baked-bean diet and the consumption of large quantities of dexedrine. Meanwhile, Caroline's off-and-on lover Laurence, a sports commentator (of all things) with an excessively inquisitive mind, has become convinced that his grandmother, in her cottage down in Sussex, is running some kind of nefarious gang – and when he finds diamonds hidden in a loaf of bread, this seems to confirm his suspicions. Caroline's friend, the self-styled Baron Stock, a bookseller of sorts, has suspicions of his own, and is convinced that he is on the trail of Britain's leading diabolist. Spark weaves these threads (and more) together with her familiar lightness of touch and, as ever, without wasting a word. She leaves you fully satisfied, and yet in a state of uncertainty as to what exactly it is that you have been reading. If only we could say the same about more recent fiction, which tends to leave you both unsatisfied and quite sure what you've seen reading...
   Oddly, Evelyn Waugh happened upon The Comforters just as he was finishing his own account of a paranoid breakdown, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Like Spark, Waugh was tormented by voices – brought on in his case by a hair-raising combination of bromide, chloral and crème be menthe, imbibed in response to rheumatic pains and insomnia. Both he and Spark had their breakdowns in January 1954, but Waugh did not intrude on Spark's hallucinations – no, she believed she was being persecuted by T.S. Eliot, no less, who was sending her coded messages in the programme notes to The Confidential Clerk and in his Faber blurbs. Anyway, Spark recovered, Waugh recovered, and the front cover of my edition of The Comforters has the endorsement of Evelyn Waugh: 'Brilliantly original and fascinating,' he says. And so it is. 
   

'Poplar, absolute danseuse...'

 The poplars are fell'd... Ten poplar trees in Lichfield's delightful Beacon Park have been felled by the council, on the perfectly good grounds that they were shedding huge branches onto well frequented paths. But it is always sad to see them go. As Cowper put it, in a beautifully crafted poem lamenting the loss of a line of poplars by the river Ouse near his home in Olney –

The Poplar Field 

The Poplars are fell’d, farewell to the shade
And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade,
The winds play no longer and sing in the leaves,
Nor Ouse on his bosom their image receives.

Twelve years have elapsed since I last took a view
Of my favourite field and the bank where they grew,
And now in the grass behold they are laid,
And the tree is my seat that once lent me a shade.

The black-bird has fled to another retreat
Where the hazels afford him a screen from the heat,
And the scene where his melody charm’d me before,
Resounds with his sweet-flowing ditty no more.

My fugitive years are all hasting away,
And I must e’er long lie as lowly as they,
With a turf on my breast and a stone at my head
E’er another such grove shall arise in its stead.

’Tis a sight to engage me if any thing can
To muse on the perishing pleasures of Man;
Though his life be a dream, his enjoyments, I see,
Have a Being less durable even than he.

Poplar trees are more liable than most to be cut down, simply because they are so brittle and so prone to shed branches, or indeed be blown over (they are shallow-rooted). But they are glorious things in their prime – trees with tremendous presence, beautiful alike to the eye and the ear (the rustling of their leaves is one of the loveliest sounds of summer). Here is Gerard Manley Hopkins lamenting his lost poplars – at Binsey, a village on the edge of Oxford – and deploring man's impact on nature, in language freed of all Cowperian restraint:
 
Binsey Poplars

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
   Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
   All felled, felled, are all felled;
     Of a fresh and following folded rank
                Not spared, not one
                That dandled a sandalled
         Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.
   O if we but knew what we do
          When we delve or hew—
     Hack and rack the growing green!
           Since country is so tender
     To touch, her being só slender,
     That, like this sleek and seeing ball
     But a prick will make no eye at all,
     Where we, even where we mean
                To mend her we end her,
           When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
   Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
      Strokes of havoc únselve
           The sweet especial scene,
      Rural scene, a rural scene,
      Sweet especial rural scene.

(The Binsey poplars, by the way, were replaced with a fine avenue that lasted until 2004.)
Hopkins's evocation of the poplar's restless presence in the opening lines is vivid, but I think Richard Wilbur catches it supremely well in this short poem, which pairs the poplar with the sycamore, another tree that grows abundantly in Lichfield, that city of trees –  

Poplar, Sycamore

Poplar, absolute danseuse,
Wind-wed and faithless to wind, trowelling air
Tinily everywhere faster than air can fill,
Here whitely rising, there
Winding, there
Falling to earth with a greener spill,
Never be still, whose pure mobility
Can hold up crowding heaven with a tree. 

Sycamore, trawled by the tilt sun,
Still scrawl your trunk with tattered light, and keep
The spotted toad upon your patchy bark,
Baffle the sight to sleep,
Be such a deep
Rapids of lacing light and dark,
My eye will never know the dry disease
Of thinking things no more than what he sees.

And here, for good measure, is one more poplar poem, by Siegfried Sassoon, recalling a moment of something like bliss – 

A Poplar and the Moon

There stood a Poplar, tall and straight; 
The fair, round Moon, uprisen late, 
Made the long shadow on the grass 
A ghostly bridge ’twixt heaven and me. 
But May, with slumbrous nights, must pass;
And blustering winds will strip the tree. 
And I’ve no magic to express 
The moment of that loveliness; 
So from these words you’ll never guess 
The stars and lilies I could see.

'Crickets – Crows – and Retrospects'

 Ever since the turn of the month I've been meaning to post a September poem – and now, thanks to an American friend who's an Emily Dickinson maven, I have one. Here it is...

September’s Baccalaureate
A combination is
Of Crickets—Crows—and Retrospects
And a dissembling Breeze

That hints without assuming—
An Innuendo sear
That makes the Heart put up its Fun
And turn Philosopher.

I think those few eloquent lines perfectly catch the elusive, melancholy feel of September, of summer quietly moving into autumn.  

Talking of which, the summer being over, we now have Butterfly Conservation's report on the findings of their Big Butterfly Survey, that annual exercise in citizen science, in which this year 125,000 people took part – and sure enough, as predicted here, they've managed to turn it into a bad news story. Everyone with eyes to see knows that 2025 was the best butterfly year we've had in a long time – but that goes against the approved narrative of relentless decline, so obviously a good deal of spin was called for. You can't blame Butterfly Conservation, whose fund-raising is always going to go better in a climate of urgency and crisis. Long-term decline in butterfly numbers is undeniably a fact, but things are far from simple. The Big Butterfly Count is never going to be anything more than a snapshot, and the most recent comprehensive survey, The State of the UK's Butterflies 2022, showed a mixed picture. Despite the background trend of overall decline, more than half of butterfly species showed increases in either abundance or distribution or both (and abundance was up by 35 per cent in Scotland). Also, it's worth bearing in mind that 1976, the year from which all these surveys start, was a hot dry summer of extraordinary butterfly abundance, followed by an immediate decline (the result of drought shrivelling so many food plants).  
Anyway, enough of butterflies – for now. 

'I cannot tread even a limited space of air'

 'I suffer from a strong suspicion that things in general cannot be accounted for through any formula or set of formulae, and that any one philosophy, howsoever new, is no better than another. That is in itself a sort of philosophy, and I suspect it accordingly; but it has for me the merit of being the only one I can make head or tail of. If you try to expound any other philosophic system to me, you will find not merely that I can detect no flaw in it (except the one great flaw just suggested), but also that I haven't, after a minute or two, the vaguest notion of what you are driving at.' This is Max Beerbohm, in 'Laughter', the last essay (and one of the best) in his collection, And Even Now. I'm with him on philosophy in general, much though I've enjoyed sampling the more entertaining philosophers – Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer – but have never read Bergson, whose essay on laughter inspired Beerbohm's own. Alas, Bergson's essay did not help Max: 'I have profited from his kindness no more than if he had been treating of the Cosmos. I cannot tread even a limited space of air. I have a gross satisfaction in the crude fact of being on hard ground again, and I utter a coarse peal of – Laughter.'
  In fact, as Beerbohm straight away admits, he did no such thing; he merely smiled. 'The joyous surrender' of hearty laughter, he suspects, is becoming a thing of the past. 'It may be that in the early ages of this world there was far more laughter than is to be heard now, and that aeons hence laughter will be obsolete, and smiles universal – everyone, always, mildly, slightly, smiling.' He adduces examples of wild, tumultuous laughter from the annals of literary history – Byron and Moore convulsed with helpless mirth over the line 'When Rogers o'er his labour bent' (with even Rogers himself joining in); and Johnson's mighty fit of laughter one night by Temple Bar, when Johnson 'to support himself, laid hold of one of the posts at the side of the foot pavement, and sent forth peals so loud that in the silence of the night his voice seemed to resound from Temple Bar to Fleet Ditch.' Such laughter would indeed be a rare thing nowadays, when loud, raucous laughter is common enough, but seldom betokens mirth or good cheer, more a form of self-assertion bordering on aggression. Mercifully, the real thing – helpless, joyous laughter – still comes naturally to children, as it always did: I remember well the fits of irresistible giggles that would convulse me in boyhood, often, agonisingly, on solemn occasions. The most uninhibited, joyful laugh-er I know today is my second youngest grandson, William, who abandons himself to mirth with absolute delight and can end up literally rolling on the floor. Laughter survives; it surely always will. 

The Sheriff's Ride

 

Today was the day of the Sheriff's Ride, a grand Lichfield tradition, in pursuit of which the Sheriff, riding on horseback and followed by a train of other riders – these days including many on bicycles – perambulates the city (in former times county) boundary, in a less hands-on version of 'beating the bounds'.  I was up too late, and with too much to do, to see this year's procession, but I am heartily glad the tradition survives: 'How but in custom and ceremony are innocence and beauty born?' (as Yeats put it). 
  Samuel Johnson's father, Michael, happened to be Sheriff in the year of his son's birth, and led the ceremonial ride – presumably on a sturdy mount, as Michael was built on much the same generous lines as Sam; indeed Mrs Piozzi described him as 'a man of still larger size and greater strength than his son'.  After the ride, Johnson recalled, his father 'feasted the citizens with uncommon magnificence'. Michael Johnson was at that point approaching the apogee of his career as bookseller, businessman and widely respected local worthy. Sadly, in the years to come, he declined into genteel poverty, largely as a result of his lax business habits, a falling-off in the book trade, and the expenses of a growing family. Johnson, who spoke little of his parents, recalled that 'My father had much vanity, which his adversity hindered from being fully exerted.' Both his father and his mother are buried in St Michael's church, Lichfield, where a memorial stone in the nave floor carries a long Latin epitaph composed by their son in 1784, the year of his death and of his last visit to Lichfield. 

A Wealden Walk

   I've been off gallivanting again, but am now back home. This gallivant was a two-day walk (rather little of which was spent actually walking) down in Sussex, with my brother and the doughty remnants of the walking group. We spent the first day and night in Chichester, that fine town, where my brother, an expert on the subject, gave us an exhaustive tour of the cathedral – the site of the Arundel monument that inspired Larkin's famous poem, and of a touching memorial to William Collins, not to mention a fine statue of Sir William Huskisson, the first person to be run over by a railway engine, and some superb modern artworks commissioned by the art-loving Dean Hussey (whose own collection is now housed in Chichester's excellent Pallant House gallery). 
  The next day – only yesterday, but it seems longer ago – we drove north to walk in the Rother valley, beginning and ending in heather-and-gorse-clad heathland, but mostly in the lush, well-wooded river valley (the picture above shows Stedham bridge) – beautiful Wealden countryside, with glorious views of the South Downs. There had been much rain overnight and we had to shelter from a couple of morning downpours, but most of the time we had sun, and walking in such surroundings at the turn of summer/autumn was a delight. Even better, the walk route took in four lovely little Sussex churches, tucked away amid trees, all but one quite unspoilt by Victorian restoration. The undoubted gem was St George's, Trotton, home to some spectacular medieval wall paintings – below are the Seven Works of  Mercy from the west wall – and two very impressive brasses to members of the Camoys family (one commemorating the commander of the left flank at Agincourt and his wife, the widow of Harry Hotspur). There were butterflies too – Whites and Speckled Woods in abundance, with a Humming-Bird Hawk Moth thrown in. All of this, and we'd barely walked five miles. The riches of the English countryside are truly  inexhaustible.