A Tate Caption

Yesterday I took a stroll around the gallery we must now call Tate Britain. The walls of the Duveen Galleries are at present covered with school photographs (Steve McQueen's 'Year 3' project), which somehow failed to pique my interest, so I strode briskly past and turned left into the permanent collection. I always enjoy wandering around these galleries, revisiting old favourites and seeing what else might catch my eye.
 An old favourite – or rather two old favourites – that I would place high in my list of top Tate paintings are George Stubbs's Haymakers and Reapers, a pair of beautifully balanced, perfectly composed (iconic even) representations of two seasons of the English farming year. I love the colours, so delicately and luminously handled, the landscape settings and the paradoxical sense of calm and repose in these scenes of agricultural labour. The figures (including, of course, the horses and the dog) are beautifully drawn and perfectly placed. I'd say they are two of the finest, and most English, of English paintings. But enough of me – here, in its entirely, is the Tate Britain caption:
'As a depiction of labour, this picture [The Reapers] is greatly idealised. The workers are spotlessly clean despite their drudgery. The church in the distance, and the farm manager on the horse to the right, serve as reminders of spiritual and social authority. Stubbs's picture can be seen as a celebration of the order and nobility of rural life, in tune with the concern with efficiency shown by agricultural writers of the time like Arthur Young. Alternatively, you may think that his picture robs these workers of their individuality and denies the harsh realities of work for sentimental effect.'
 Really sells it, doesn't it? The subtext seems to be: put on your Marxist spectacles before you go near these paintings, then move smartly along. Nothing to see here. 

Hail, Bright Cecilia

It's St Cecilia's Day today.
This calls for some music –

and this, from John Dryden – A Song for St Cecilia's Day, 1687

Stanza 1 

From harmony, from Heav'nly harmony 

               This universal frame began. 

       When Nature underneath a heap 

               Of jarring atoms lay, 

       And could not heave her head, 

The tuneful voice was heard from high, 

               Arise ye more than dead. 

Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry, 

       In order to their stations leap, 

               And music's pow'r obey. 

From harmony, from Heav'nly harmony 

               This universal frame began: 

               From harmony to harmony 

Through all the compass of the notes it ran, 

       The diapason closing full in man. 

Stanza 2 

What passion cannot music raise and quell! 

                When Jubal struck the corded shell, 

         His list'ning brethren stood around 

         And wond'ring, on their faces fell 

         To worship that celestial sound: 

Less than a god they thought there could not dwell 

                Within the hollow of that shell 

                That spoke so sweetly and so well. 

What passion cannot music raise and quell! 

Stanza 3 

         The trumpet's loud clangor 

                Excites us to arms 

         With shrill notes of anger 

                        And mortal alarms. 

         The double double double beat 

                Of the thund'ring drum 

         Cries, hark the foes come; 

Charge, charge, 'tis too late to retreat. 

Stanza 4 

         The soft complaining flute 

         In dying notes discovers 

         The woes of hopeless lovers, 

Whose dirge is whisper'd by the warbling lute. 

Stanza 5 

         Sharp violins proclaim 

Their jealous pangs, and desperation, 

Fury, frantic indignation, 

Depth of pains and height of passion, 

         For the fair, disdainful dame. 

Stanza 6 

But oh! what art can teach 

         What human voice can reach 

The sacred organ's praise? 

Notes inspiring holy love, 

Notes that wing their Heav'nly ways 

         To mend the choirs above. 

Stanza 7 

Orpheus could lead the savage race; 

And trees unrooted left their place; 

                Sequacious of the lyre: 

But bright Cecilia rais'd the wonder high'r; 

         When to her organ, vocal breath was giv'n, 

An angel heard, and straight appear'd 

                Mistaking earth for Heav'n. 

GRAND CHORUS 

As from the pow'r of sacred lays 

         The spheres began to move, 

And sung the great Creator's praise 

         To all the bless'd above; 

So when the last and dreadful hour 

   This crumbling pageant shall devour, 

The trumpet shall be heard on high, 

         The dead shall live, the living die, 

         And music shall untune the sky.

Venezia Inondata

The recent exceptional acque alte in Venice have received much coverage in the news – coverage that has been predictably unilluminating, going straight from spectacular images of the flooding to talk of 'climate change' (a term that is shorthand for 'catastrophic anthropogenic climate change' and was adopted when 'global warming' failed to pan out as predicted). The real story, largely ignored by the news bulletins, has less to do with 'climate change' than with a host of other factors, not least corruption.
  I remember that even at the time of my first visit to Venice – 50 years ago! – there was much talk of a comprehensive solution to Venice's high water problems, envisaged in the form of some kind of flood barrier. When, after decades of discussion and mysteriously disappearing funds, this eventually took definite shape, as MOSE (MOdulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico), it soon became apparent to all but those driving the project that this was just the kind of monolithic, inflexible, over-engineered grand project that was likely to do as much harm as good in an environment as sensitive and complex as the Venetian lagoon. But every objection and critique has been swept aside and the juggernaut rolls on. The latest projection is that MOSE will be completed in 2022 – a mere 19 years after construction began – but don't hold your breath...
 No doubt a great deal more money will be siphoned off into secret bank accounts before it's finished (if it ever is). In 2014, 35 people, including the then mayor of Venice, were arrested on MOSE-related corruption charges, and it was estimated that some 20 million euros had gone astray. This led to management of the project being taken out of Venetian hands and placed in those of the famously efficient Italian state (which seems hardly to have improved matters). It's a sorry tale – and meanwhile the physical and social structure of Venice continues to suffer terrible degradation as a result, chiefly, of mass tourism on a wholly unsustainable scale, with thousands pouring in daily on the notorious grandi navi, giant cruise ships that have no place in a city as fragile as Venice. Getting rid of them would do more for Venice than MOSE is ever likely to do.

In Town

Today I went up to town for a few hours, strolling around and dropping in on various establishments, including what must surely be the poshest bookshop in the known universe (and I don't mean Hatchards, which, compared to this one, looks like Book R Us). I didn't find anything I wanted, but enjoyed overhearing a slow-motion conversation of quite outstanding circular fatuity between a very posh cove in desultory search of a book and the equally posh bookseller. I didn't stay to discover the outcome, as time was dragging on and I was rapidly losing the will to live. So I went on my way, and as I went on it I couldn't help but notice that the Christmas shopping frenzy was already under way, even in the bookshops (though of course not in the one I'd just visited, where frenzy in any form was hardly to be expected).
  You can see where all this is leading, can't you? Yes, to this year's must-have Christmas present / stocking filler, The Mother of Beauty. This book has, I was astonished to learn, turned up in an obscure small bookshop in Carmarthen – heaven knows how it could have got there. A copy has also turned up on AbeBooks, with an eye-watering mark-up. Remember, you can get it for a mere tenner on Amazon. Here's the link...

Birthday

I've just realised that today is Auberon Waugh's 80th birthday – or it would be if he were still with us. That eventuality was never very likely, though: not only did he have a poor genetic inheritance (his father, Evelyn, died at 62) but he was also a heroic smoker and drinker, and accident-prone, as was shown most dramatically when he inadvertently shot – and very nearly killed – himself with a machine gun while on national service in Cyprus. On that occasion, while lying on the ground waiting for the ambulance, he famously made a joke of his situation, inviting his platoon sergeant to 'Kiss me, Chudleigh.' Chudleigh, alas, did not catch the allusion.
  The joke was typical of Waugh's attitude to life in general, his refusal, or inability, to take anything too seriously. The injuries he sustained left him with health problems all his life, but Waugh barely acknowledged them. He died at the age of 61, in January 2001, working to the end as one of the most brilliant, funny and original journalists who ever lived. And, of course, he left half a dozen novels, several if which I've written about here. Happily his memory lives on, and he is still widely – and rightly – admired, perhaps rather more so than when he was still with us. It would be wonderful if he were alive today – England has need of him.

Literary Grappa

My addiction to Ivy Compton-Burnett has kicked in again, and I'm back on the hard stuff – in this case, A Family and a Fortune (1939), which so far is showing every sign of being vintage Ivy. No doubt I shall be writing of it in due course, as I have written here of many of ICB's incomparable novels over the years.
Browsing just now in my files, I see that I also at some point wrote a short essay on Ivy's works – something I have only the very vaguest recollection of doing. I have no idea what audience I had in mind, nor if I ever tried it on any magazine. Most likely I just squirrelled it away and forgot about it; trying to 'sell' Ivy Compton-Burnett is pretty much bound to be a doomed project. However, here it is, for what it's worth. Someone might find it useful. It might even start a lifelong addiction...

IVY COMPTON-BURNETT: LITERARY GRAPPA

The novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett are absolutely unlike anyone else’s. Dame Ivy – a highly distinguished literary figure from the mid-Twenties through to her death at the end of the Sixties – is nearly forgotten today, and most of her twenty-odd novels are out of print. However, it’s easy to find many of them online (praise be to Amazon) – and they are well worth finding, though Ivy is very much an acquired taste. If she were a drink, she would be Grappa, that formidable Italian digestif – fierce, harsh and bitter at first sip, but, once you’ve got the taste for the stuff, strangely alluring and moreish, even addictive.

  Ivy grew up in a large, complicated and troubled Edwardian family. Her father died when Ivy was 16 and grief turned her mother into a fearsome, emotionally manipulative domestic tyrant – a role that Ivy seems to have taken over after her mother’s death. Two favourite brothers died young – one of influenza and one in the Great War – and her two youngest sisters died in an apparent suicide pact. ‘One was a good deal cut up by the war; one’s brother was killed, and one had family troubles,’ as she later summed up, with typical understatement.
 Then, apparently out of nowhere, came Pastors And Masters, the first of the stream of novels that were to make Compton-Burnett’s name. The tale of two talentless academics and a sorry act of plagiarism, Pastors And Masters set the template for all the subsequent novels (right down to the binary title). Like all of them – regardless of when they were written – it is set in the Edwardian period and in a social milieu some way north of middle-class. Like all of them, it depicts a small, airless, claustrophobic world – domestic or institutional or both - in which the characters talk endlessly in long, ultra-formal, finely nuanced conversations that teem with subtext, with unspoken motives and passions.

 Almost everything – the action, characterisation and character development, sudden twists and shocking revelations – is carried by dialogue alone; there is virtually nothing else in a typical Ivy Compton-Burnett, apart from unhelpful thumbnail sketches of the characters and rudimentary stage directions. Most of the rest you have to work out for yourself, reading that extraordinary dialogue with care and close attention to discover – gradually or, often, explosively – what is really going on. You have to be on your toes even to keep track of who is speaking, as these conversations often involve several people, sometimes talking over each other or aside. It’s rather like listening from outside a door – something Ivy’s characters frequenty do. (They also have a habit of suddenly appearing from nowhere, like Jeeves.)
 Yes, I know, all this sound like hard work, and no one would describe Ivy Compton-Burnett as an easy read – she herself once said that her novels were ‘hard not to put down’. However, once you have plunged in, you gradually begin to get your bearings, and then the fun begins. For these novels are – for all the seething tensions, vicious power struggles and murderous resentments – comedies. Comedies of the darkest hue – featuring all manner of dastardly deeds, up to and including murder – but comedies none the less. They might even make you laugh (they do me) – more with a shocked gasp than a hearty chuckle, but it’s laughter all the same.
 The comedy comes partly from the contrast between all that endlessly refined dialogue and the baseness and dark emotions that drive it, and partly from the author’s shameless use of creaky plot contrivances that could have been lifted straight out of popular Victorian fiction. But of course it’s pointless trying to analyse comedy – far better to dive in and read.
 Where to begin? In a sense, it hardly matters, as every Compton-Burnett is very much like every other (and very much unlike anything else), but her own two favourites were Manservant And Maidservant – a novel in which life ‘downstairs’ mirrors the emotional battleground ‘upstairs’ - and A House And Its Head, a devastating portrait of masculine domestic tyranny.
Ivy’s opening paragraphs are always, to put it mildly, arresting. Here’s how A House And Its Head begins:

‘”So the children are not down yet?” said Ellen Edgeworth.
 Her husband gave her a glance, and turned his eyes towards the window.
 “So the children are not down yet?” she said on a note of question.
 Mr Edgeworth put his finger down his collar, and settled his neck.
 “So you are down first, Duncan?” said his wife, as though putting her observation in a more acceptable form.
 Duncan returned his hand to his collar with a frown…’

And here are the opening exchanges of Manservant And Maidservant:

 ‘”Is that fire smoking?” said Horace Lamb.
 “Yes, it appears to be, my dear boy.”
 “I am not asking what it appears to be doing. I asked if it was smoking.”
 “Appearances are not held to be a clue to the truth,” said his cousin. “But we seem to have no other.”’
[The fire is indeed smoking – there’s a dead jackdaw in the flue.]

Now read on…
No, really – do.

 

Moore's Silence, James's Amenities

Today is the 132nd birthday of Marianne Moore, so a poem is surely called for.
Here is her 'Silence', a poem full of wise words, which she attributes to her father. This is odd, as she never met her father, who suffered a psychotic episode, and split up with her mother, before she was born. The name of Longfellow pops up again here, by way of his grave (in Mount Auburn cemetery, west of Cambridge, Mass.)...

My father used to say,
"Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow's grave
nor the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self reliant like the cat --
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth --
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint."
Nor was he insincere in saying, "`Make my house your inn'."
Inns are not residences. 

Talking of inns – here is Henry James, in English Hours, reflecting on the traditional English inn:
'I have sometimes had occasion to repine at the meagreness and mustiness of the old-fashioned English inn, and to feel that in poetry and in fiction these defects had been culpably glossed over. But I said to myself the other evening that there is a kind of venerable decency even in some of its dingiest contingencies, and that in an age in which the conception of good manners is losing most of its ancient firmness one should do justice to an institution that is still more or less of a stronghold of the faded amenities.'
Well, that 'ancient firmness' has only weakened since James's time, and those 'faded amenities' have faded yet more. Those who work in what is nowadays oxymoronically called the 'hospitality industry' display a hollow form of 'good manners' that is no more than a matter of following a script. This helps things to run smoothly – at least until circumstances demand a departure from the script – but at a cost in character, spontaneity and variety. James would not be impressed.
To our ears, his phrase 'faded amenities', in the context of an inn, suggests something very different from, and more concrete than, James's meaning. 'Amenities' is a word he uses broadly and freely to convey all those things that make life pleasing, decent and liveable. On his memorial stone in Chelsea Old Church, James is described as a 'lover & interpreter of the fine amenities, of brave decisions & generous loyalties.'