'So still the Tadpole cleaves the watery vale...'

 Browsing in the classic anthology of bad verse, The Stuffed Owl, I notice that Erasmus Darwin, that great son of Lichfield, is represented by several passages from The Loves of the Plants (praised at the time by Cowper, Hayley and Walpole), The Economy of Vegetation and The Temple of Nature. 
   Darwin, a true polymath, is a fascinating figure, but clearly not the great poet that Anna Seward (in her more generous moods) thinks him. I have given up on her biography of the great man, not least because she herself more or less gives up on trying to write his life after he moves from Lichfield to Derby. Miss Seward is, alas, seriously interested in Darwin only at the points where his life and interests happen to impinge on hers – which means, among other things, that she has no real interest in his scientific studies, his thinking and his inventions, but only in his poetry, which she analyses at great length. Her ambiguous attitude to her subject shows through even in her study of his verse, which includes frequent comparisons with other authors, often to the detriment of Dr Darwin. However, where she finds what she considers 'beauties', her praise knows no bounds. Of an 'animated apostrophe to Steel' in The Botanic Garden, she asks 'What has poetry more noble than these first six lines?' 

Hail adamantine Steel! magnetic Lord,
King of the prow, the ploughshare and the sword!
True to the pole, by thee the pilot guides
His steady course amid the struggling tides!
Braves, with broad sail, th' immeasurable sea,
Cleaves the dark air, and asks no star but thee!

What indeed...?
  There is something charming about the idea of an encyclopaedic tour d'horizon that embraces great swathes of what we would now call science – often new science and technology – and a pre-scientific world of nymphs and mythical creatures, all brought together into one vast edifice of heroic verse. Such was Erasmus Darwin's poetical oeuvre, the product of a particular time, when science and the arts could still mingle naturally, and, from the start, is was likely to date fast, and to appear to later generations as absurd, a noble endeavour brought down by bathos, a living example of what Pope called 'the art of sinking in poetry'. Hence Darwin's presence in The Stuffed Owl. Of the specimens of Darwiniana collected there, this passage from The Temple of Nature is perhaps the choicest, and I shall close with it:

So still the Tadpole cleaves the watery vale, 
With balanc'd fins and undulating tail;
New lungs and limbs proclaim his second birth,
Breathe the dry air, and bound upon the earth.
Allied to fish, the Lizard cleaves the flood
With one-celled heart, and dark frigescent blood;
Half-reasoning Beavers long-unbreathing dart
Through Eirie's waves with perforated heart;
With gills and lungs respiring Lampreys steer, 
Kiss the rude rocks, and suck till they adhere;
With gills pulmonic breathes th' enormous Whale,
And spouts aquatic columns to the gale. 

'With perforated heart' is a lovely touch, and the adhesive manoeuvres of the lamprey could hardly be more pithily described. 

Hedy Stuff

 For several days now, I've been more or less prostrated by a mystery bug – not the CCP Virus (as some wags are calling it, rather aptly I fear) – but one of the many lesser players now seizing their moment. You may judge the severity of my malaise by the fact that I haven't had a drink in five days – well, only one very weak Campari and soda, or rather soda and Campari. This is the longest drink-free run I can remember, so I hope it's doing me good. 
Today, anyway, I seem to be well enough to head back to Mercia  (Lichfield, to be precise).
As it's the 107th birthday of that extraordinary and lovely woman Hedy Lamarr, I take the liberty of reprinting a Nigeness post from 2009 – yes, this blog has been going that long (in fact a year longer)...

'This blog cannot let today go by without pausing to salute the great Hedy Lamarr, born (in Vienna) on this date in 1914. Described by Max Reinhardt as 'the most beautiful woman in Europe' (you can see his point), she gained early notoriety in a famous slice of arty porn, Ecstasy, prancing about in the altogether, skinny-dipping and assuming an orgasmic facial expression – achieved, she claimed, by the director pricking her in the bottom with a needle. Hmm...
Her first marriage, to a fascistically inclined Austrian arms magnate, was not a howling success, but, in his determination to keep her out of mischief, he would take his young wife with him to technical meetings – where, with her sharp mathematical mind, she picked up a lot of useful information about military technology. This would come in handy later in her life, when she had fled her husband and headed for Hollywood, movies, more husbands and lovers – and the invention, in collaboration with the avant-garde composer George Antheil, of a Secret Communications System, which they patented in 1942. Apparently this was an invention far ahead of its time, having to rely on the primitive technololgy of a piano roll, but it was, according to those who know about such things, an early version of frequency hopping, and a precursor of spread spectrum communications technology, which, according to Wikipedia, is 'a key to modern wireless technology'. So there you are – what a dame! Brains and beauty too... Happy birthday, Hedy, wherever you are.'

Philip and Steve's Furniture Removal Company

 Neil Hannon, that fine singer-songwriter, lead singer and sole permanent member of the Divine Comedy, was born on this day in 1970. To mark the anniversary, Radio 3 played Philip and Steve's Furniture Removal Company, an affectionate, funny and clever spoof of New York minimalism. It was inspired by Philip Glass and Steve Reich's foray into the removal business when they were impoverished musicians living in NYC in the early Sixties. Hearing it this morning cheered me greatly, so I share it here –

'If you live in New York City in the 1960s
And you're tired of having your stuff scuffed
And tossed about by some Boulez-loving lout
Who is out to make your home all atonal,
Call Philip and Steve's Furniture Removal Company.
They will, with minimal disruption to your routine,
Change your whole scene,
They'll take it apart, put it back together,
Strangely familiar but never quite the same.
They'll do it again, and again, and again...'

Review

My latest contribution to that excellent magazine, Literary Review – 

 The Wood that Built London: A Human History of the Great North Wood By C.J. Schüler (Sandstone Press 321pp £19.99) 

 There was a time, not so long ago, when woodland stretched across south London in a great seven-mile swathe from Croydon (literal meaning ‘crocus valley’) to Deptford. It was not until Victorian times, when it was already seriously depleted, that it was given a name – the Great North Wood. Now that it is depleted still further, reduced to scattered patches amid suburban sprawl, it is attracting renewed attention and being recognised as an important survival of ancient woodland. That’s ancient woodland, not wild wood: there is scarcely any of that, or of any other true wilderness, in this country. The ancient woodland was a working environment, intensively managed to provide timber for building, wood for domestic and agricultural use, charcoal for kilns, bakers’ ovens and smiths’ forges, and wild food for humans and beasts. The history of the Great North Wood is ‘not only a natural history, but a human one’, as C.J. Schüler puts it in the introduction to his timely and informative survey of the past and present of this remarkable woodland. 

 The story begins to take shape in Anglo-Saxon times. By 871, Croydon and all its surrounding land had come into the possession of the Archbishop of Canterbury (hence the bishop’s palace that can still be seen in that unlovely town). A hoard of Anglo-Saxon coins was dug up by railway workers in 1862, between Thornton Heath and Selhurst, and a medieval hoard turned up in a garden near Beulah Hill in 1953 – close to the site of another treasure not mentioned by Schüler: the stolen World Cup, found in woodland by a dog called Pickles in 1966. 

 The history of the Great North Wood comes into focus with the arrival of the Normans, whose scrupulous record-keeping has gifted historians with masses of dry but invaluable material. Inevitably, records of legal disputes form the backbone of much of the history Schüler narrates, and he does his best to tease human interest out of the documentary evidence. It certainly leaves no doubt of how valuable a resource the woodland was, and how carefully it was managed to avoid damage and loss. In the sixteenth century a big new landowner emerged in the shape of Edward Alleyne, the wealthy theatre owner and actor who, in 1619, founded the College of God’s Gift in Dulwich (later to evolve into Dulwich College). A substantial remnant of the great wood still survives in Dulwich, adjoining the other major survival, Sydenham Hill Woods. 

 As time went on, events in the wider world impinged on the Great North Wood – the Great Fire of London, plague, the Civil War, the terrible storm of 1703. Medicinal springs were found, and gypsies became a popular feature of the woods around Norwood. Demand for charcoal fell in the 18th century, causing much woodland to be grubbed up. Enclosure Acts also made inroads – but none so destructive as the relentless spread of suburbia in Victorian times and later. Nevertheless, much of the surviving Great North Wood retained its rural character well into the 19th century, when its restful charm was enjoyed by Blake, Samuel Palmer, Ruskin, Dickens and others, including the philosopher John Stuart Mill, who was a keen plant spotter, the first to record the wild cherry (Prunus avium) in Dulwich Woods. The coming of the railways, and the re-erection of the Crystal Palace on Penge Peak, both had a big impact on the area, and gave rise to some striking collisions of past and present, as when the parishioners and dignitaries of Camberwell, beating the bounds of the parish, processed through the dining rooms of the Crystal Palace, causing much astonishment. 

 The later history of the Great North Wood has been of one long, broadly successful rearguard action against those who would subsume the remaining woodland into their development plans. Schüler details countless disputes, proposals, protests, inquiries, meetings, reports and surveys. Happily, from all of that agitation, the major surviving part of the Great North Wood – Dulwich and Sydenham Hill Woods – emerged as properly conserved and managed woodland. This is no longer a working environment, but now performs an equally valuable function as a beautiful and biodiverse ecosystem, thriving improbably close to London. Schüler details the abundant wildlife, plant and animal, to be found in the surviving woods, and describes their management, and the ways in which the public are engaged. As in almost all nature writing these days, the author comes over all apocalyptic as he looks to the future, and there are signs of a ‘woke’ outlook – is it fair to describe Sir Hans Sloane as ‘naturalist, slave-owner and founder of the British Museum’? Was being a slave-owner really the second most important thing about him? Never mind – you have to take your hat off to an author who gives a section of his last chapter the title ‘Covid’s Metamorphoses’.

Miss La La

I've often admired this extraordinary painting  – Degas's Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando – in the National Gallery. With its neck-cricking viewpoint and awkward pose, not to mention the complex structure of the circus dome, it was a fantastically difficult subject, even for Degas, who made numerous sketches and studies before arriving at the final picture. 
  I must admit I had never wondered who Miss La La was – until today, when I came across a potted biography of her on a Facebook site. She was born Olga Brown in Szczecin, then German/Prussian territory, now in Poland. Her father was black and her mother white, and she began her circus career at the age of nine. Miss La La achieved great success as an aerialist, trapeze artist and human cannon ball, but her most impressive acts depended on the prodigious strength of her teeth and jaws: being pulled up to the full height of a circus dome, as in Degas's painting, while hanging on with her teeth only; hoisting people up by the same means; and hanging upside down from a trapeze while clenching a chain bearing a firing cannon between her teeth.
  In 1888 Olga married an African-American contortionist and had three children, then disappeared into obscurity, dying some time after 1919. She has her immortality, thanks to Degas.

'And now the leaves...'

 On this day 60 years ago, Philip Larkin wrote a fine seasonal sonnet, which was left among his uncollected works – 

And now the leaves suddenly lose strength.
Decaying towers stand still, lurid, lanes-long,
And seen from landing windows, or the length
Of gardens, rubricate afternoons. New strong
Rain-bearing night-winds come: then
Leaves chase warm buses, speckle statued air,
Pile up in corners, fetch out vague broomed men
Through mists at morning.
                                           And no matter where goes down,
The sallow lapsing drift in fields
Or squares behind hoardings, all men hesitate
Separately, always, seeing another year gone –
Frockcoated gentleman, farmer at his gate,
Villein with mattock, soldiers on their shields,
All silent, watching the winter coming on.

Structurally this is an odd one: proceeding conventionally enough for the first seven lines, then there's an awkward turn to usher in the long sentence that rounds the sonnet off, resetting this autumn scene in a long historical span – yet another great Larkin ending.
'Rubricate' is a bit awkward too, but an apt evocation of the effect of reddening trees punctuating the landscape like the red-letter rubrics in a manuscript. 

Hotel Poems

 Lately, for various reasons, I've been spending quite a lot of time in hotels. This has led me to conclude that bland, low-price chain hotels are best for sleeping in, while older, more upmarket hotels are best for everything else, e.g. sitting around observing the passing scene. Here is Peter Porter doing just that, in the opening poem of his 1975 collection, Living in a Calm Country – 

At the Castle Hotel, Taunton

Today it's not scones but tea-cakes
   (And the sound of ambulances
   in the reconstructed streets) –

Rich voices are discussing the new Warden
   (The Show is the best for years,
   the Architects' watercolours outstanding) – 

Pearls and brogues survive, cashmere clings 
   (Is this the Ark of Adultery
   or two old friends killing time?) –

Interlopers must wait for their tea
   (There's only one waitress on today,
   her footsteps are masked on the stairs) – 

Hands want something to do, eyes won't idle
   (Country Life in a rexine folder:
   who buys, who sells all these houses?) – 

O impossible England under the modern stars
   (Mr Edward du Cann* thanks the voters
   of Taunton for their generous support) –

So much beauty, so unexpectedly preserved
   (And we two strangers have today
   honoured gentle Eliot at East Coker) –

Not only the pleasant eating by the road
   (And the cider factory, the industrial
   archaeology with the rural) – 

But the pattern of beauty changing in the air
   (Fields painted by history, a steam
   of seasons softening what lives) – 

Somerset for survivors and a good things too 
   (Seventeenth-century farmhouse,
   part-converted, owner abroad) – 

Seen from Ilminster spire, everything is safe
   (It is being kept for posterity
   but where do the people of England live?)

*Edward du Cann was a rather louche Tory politician who was MP for Taunton. He was an Oxford friend of Kingsley Amis.
  In this miniature portrait of 'impossible England' at a particular time and in a very particular place, two distinct poems run in parallel, in a kind of antiphon, before they converge at the end – typically clever stuff, and in places beautiful (the last-but-two stanza, 'But the pattern of beauty changing in the air...'). 

Philip Larkin is also specific about place and time in his sonnet, 'Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel', a scene of dimly lit ('darkly' lit indeed) desolation. I am old enough to remember when provincial hotels at quiet times were like this – but this is not just a well made descriptive poem: the five lines after the break, and especially the enigmatic closing sentences, take it into another dimension. 

Light spreads darkly downwards from the high
Clusters of lights over empty chairs
That face each other, coloured differently.
Through open doors, the dining-room declares
A larger loneliness of knives and glass
And silence laid like carpet. A porter reads
An unsold evening paper. Hours pass,
And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,
Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.

In shoeless corridors, the lights burn. How
Isolated, like a fort, it is –
The headed paper, made for writing home
(If home existed) letters of exile: Now
Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages.

The Royal Station Hotel survived to become the 'iconic' Mercure Hull Royal Hotel. 

  Here's another hotel poem – or one that begins in a hotel: Anthony Hecht's 'Lagoon', his 'version' of a Joseph Brodsky poem. The hotel is the Pensione Accademia, where Ruskin stayed when he was working on The Stones of Venice, and I know it because I stayed there a few years ago. In the poem it's Christmas time, and the place seems as desolate as Larkin's Royal Station Hotel...

I
Down in the lobby three elderly women, bored, 
Take up, with their knitting, the Passion of Our Lord
        As the universe and the tiny realm
Of the pension 'Accademia', side by side, 
With TV blaring, sail into Christmastide,
        A look out desk-clerk at the helm.

II
And a nameless lodger, a nobody, boards the boat, 
A bottle of grappa concealed in his raincoat
        As he gains his shadowy room, bereaved
Of memory, homeland, son, with only the noise
Of distant forests to grieve for his former joys,
        If anyone is grieved.

III
Venetian churchbells, tea cups, mantel clocks,
Chime and confound themselves in this stale box
        Of assorted lives. The brazen, coiled
Octopus-chandelier appears to be licking,
In a triptych mirror, bedsheet and mattress ticking,
       Sodden with tears and passion-soiled.

IV
Blown by nightwinds, an Adriatic tide
Floods the canals, boats rock from side to side,
      Moored cradles, and the humble bream,
Not ass and oxen, guards the rented bed
Where the windowblind above your sleeping head 
      Moves to the sea-star's guiding beam.....

After which, something cheering is called for. Here is Frank O'Hara, as usual skipping merrily through whatever's bobbing about on the surface of his mind. 'Hotel Particulier' hardly seems to be about any particular hotel, but it's fun – and I've always liked the last sentence, which invariably springs to mind when I enter a new hotel, though I've yet to try it on the desk-clerk...

How exciting it is
                              not to be at Port Lligat
or learning Portuguese in Bilbao so you can go to Brazil

Erik Satie made a great mistake learning Latin
the Brise Marine* wasn't written in Sanskrit, baby

I had a teacher one whole summer who never told my anything
                                                           and it was wonderful

and then there is the Bibliotheque Nationale, cuspidors,
glasses, anxiety 
                          you don't get crabs that way,
and what you don't know will hurt somebody else

how clear the air is, how low the moon, how flat the sun,
et cetera,
               just so you don't coin a phrase that changes
can be 'rung' on
                          like les neiges d'antan
and that sort of thing (oops!), (roll me over)!

is this the hostel where the lazy and fun-loving
                                       start up the mountain?

* The Brise Marine is a poem by Mallarmé – and, as it happens, the name of a hotel at Cap-Ferrat.