William Maxwell: Gasping Again

I recently finished another William Maxwell - The Folded Leaf, which dates from 1945 (the title comes from an early Tennyson poem quoted as the epigraph: 'Lo, in the middle of the wood, The folded leaf is woo'd from out the bud...' and is peculiarly apt to a novel about adolescence - and one that ends, as this does, in a kind of enchanted wood that represents the reopened life, full of possibilities, of one of the two lead characters). Once again I'm left gasping by the masterly subtlety of Maxwell's art, by how completely he inhabits his characters - especially the two boys whose intense friendship, or rather love, is at the centre of the novel. Among other things, The Folded Leaf is an astonishingly accurate portrayal of the sturm und drang of adolescence, the exalted heights, the crushing depths, the fantasies, passions, daydreams and delusions. It's also, perhaps more surprisingly, very good on the physical delight of fighting - the favourite pursuit of the energetically physical, inarticulate, popular Spud Latham, who befriends the cerebral, pigeon-chested, unhappy Lymie Peters, and sparks in him a fierce, passionate love. The novel, set in the 1920s, essentially traces the course of that love - which is intensely physical and yet not sexual - as the boys grow, go to college and, when a girl appears on the scene, are driven apart and into... Well, to say much more would be to give away the plot. Suffice to say that events reach a terrible climax - almost unbearable after the reader has spent so long in the skin of Lymie and Spud and in their world (as ever, Maxwell is expert at touching in the telling detail). The ending, when it came, I found quite breathtaking - as I said, it left me gasping. And I still don't know how on earth Maxwell does it - he has this gift for creating what seems an entirely free-standing world ('very much lived and very much seen,' as Edmund Wilson puts it) but he is never far away, slipping into the action at frequent intervals, often appearing merely to digress - but all is, in the end, to the point, and Maxwell's touch is gossamer light; this is no omniscient narrator crashing onto the scene, nor a puppetmaster peeping out from behind the curtain. All is of a piece, all is one creation. And what a creation! I cannot for the life of me understand why Maxwell is not regarded, at least on this side of the pond, as one of the 20th-century American greats.

Hail the Shale

A hundred years ago today, Charles Walcott discovered the astonishing depository of bizarre and exceptionally well preserved fossils known as the Burgess shale. Stephen Jay Gould's book about the Burgess lifeforms, Wonderful Life, is one of the most enjoyable science-related books I've read. His demolition of the simplistic 'Tree of Life' model of evolution strikes me (layman and fop that I am) as very persuasive, as does his argument that the species that survived this explosion of lifeforms were no better adapted - and often worse adapted - than those that became extinct. It all boils down to one simple truth - Nothing's that simple. Even that.

I Should Have Known...

... shouldn't I? The least slighting reference to the eternal verities of the warmist creed and the Anonymouses of this world pitch in, bringing an unwelcome touch of bile to a blog normally characterised (I like to think) by good humour, good manners, sweetness and light - oh and foppish snorting of course. I'm not even a denier, merely a sceptic - it seems to me the only sustainable(!) position with a subject so vast and so little understood and in the face of warmist proposals that would, if fully enacted, give the world's economies more of a pasting than anything, ever, world wars included. To inflict that sort of thing on the world, you need to be absolutely sure of your ground - far surer than is possible in the present state of knowledge. The hysterical stridency of the warmists' assertions and their denunciations of other views look less like science to me than religion - this is the attitude of the religious zealot, priggishly asserting the purity and rigour of his belief, not the scientist rationally defending a theory. And the more prominent warmists don't endear themselves to the rest of us when their actions so conspicuously contradict their beliefs - e.g. Prince Charles recently jetting around South America with his huge entourage of retainers, warning us how little time we've got to 'save the planet' (the planet? I think the planet will be fine, thanks Chazza) while emitting more carbon that the rest of us would manage in a lifetime of Easyjet holidays. It seems that We - the unenlightened plebs - must mend our ways, not Them - the elect, the illuminati, the saved. A plague on 'em, I say (snorts foppishly and exits, vowing never to mention the subject again).

The Met Office Does Its Bit for Global Warming

Ah the delicious irony - the Met Office supercomputer, dedicated to mapping global warming, emits 12,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, making the Met Office building one of the most globe-warming (if you buy into the anthropogenic model) in the country. What should also be pointed out is that, so far, the Met Office supercomputer has proved spectacularly useless, as weather forecasting in this couuntry remains the bad joke it's always been - it's just that now it's an incredibly expensive and polluting bad joke. It hardly bears thinking about that the calculations of this mighty mathematical engine are a key element in the climate change projections that are driving government policies around the world. The Met Office and its mighty supercomputer have managed to call the last three summers wrongly, and have a record on forecasting tomorrow's weather that is little better than hanging up a bit of seaweed. Why should they be any more reliable on climate change?

A Pretty Decent Band

Hot on the heels of the death of Ellie Greenwich comes news of the passing of that fine keyboard player Larry Knechtel (who also, among much else, worked with Phil Spector). Knechtel was, along with James Burton, part of the creme-de-la-creme session band on John Phillip's masterpiece Wolfking Of LA, his rolling, lazy piano essential to the album's unique sound. As my old friend, the Sage of Tiverton, remarked, we'll have a pretty decent band waiting for us - but he ain't going till Hal Blaine is of the company. And me I'm holding out for James Burton...

Keats and Chekhov - Mentshn

When I set out for the Surrey hills on the day commemorated in this post, I found myself with a bag quite heavily laden - what with inordinate quantities of drinking water (I am always thirsty), binoculars, sandwiches, the indispensable Guide to the Butterflies of Britain and Ireland by J.A. Thomas, etc - so I needed to keep my reading matter compact and lightweight. I took down my little blue clothbound OUP Selected Letters of John Keats from the shelf... Needless to say, I am now completely hooked again by this greatest, most vivid, fresh, profound, spontaneous, funny, generous and lovable of all letter writers, and the volume has become my daily reading. It is almost a truism that Chekhov is the only great writer who can unequivocally be called a good man, a thoroughgoing mensch. Is this not also true of Keats, who is so endlessly unselfish, resourceful, tough and practically caring (the hardest kind), so cordially concerned about others, so firmly connected to the world by the ties of human affection and obligation, and so careless of himself and his art when those ties take precedence? Surely he too is that rare combination of good man and great artist. Is it coincidence that both he and Chekhov had medical training? I think it probably is - medicine is not a profession noted for the production of good, or even nice, men - though his medical grounding might explain why Keats, even in his airiest flights of fancy, is always intensely - sensuously and tragically - aware of earthy physical reality.

War Record

I note that on this day in 1896 the shortest war in history was fought, coming in at 38 minutes from start to finish. That's a record unlikely ever to be broken - but then they said the same about Frank Marriott's record-smashing run in his Stanley Steamer in 1906...