'Plying with speed my partnership of knees'

 On this day in 1936 – 14 years after the publication of his Last Poems – A.E. Housman died in Cambridge at the age of 77. He was a reluctant poet, who seldom felt the urge to write verse, and that usually when he was feeling ill or depressed (it shows). Great poet though he was at his best, he regarded his poetry as a 'morbid secretion', akin to that which produces the pearl in an oyster, and he viewed his poems as being far less important and valuable than his contributions to classical studies. 
It would be easy to mark his death with one of his many death-haunted poems, some of which come close to Hugh Kingsmill's parody (the one beginning 'What! Still alive at twenty-two, A clean, upstanding chap like you?'). However, the elegiac was not the only tone that Housman could strike, and one atypical product of his that I've always cherished is this 'Fragment of a Greek Tragedy', a genuinely funny parody of Aeschylus and of the many bad translations thereof. The original version (below) was written for The Bromsgrovian, the magazine of Bromsgrove School, where Housman studied and, for a brief period after his Oxford humiliation (failing his Finals in Greats), taught. Clearly he sympathised with the struggles of his hapless pupils caught in the toils of Aeschylean translation...

[Alcmaeon and Chorus]

Cho. O gracefully-enveloped-in-a-cloak
Head of a stranger, wherefore, seeking what,
Whence, by what way, how purposed are you come
To this well-nightingaled vicinity?
My cause of asking is, I wish to know.
But if perchance, from being deaf and dumb,
You cannot understand a word I say,
Then wave your hand, to signify as much.
Alc. I journeyed hither on Ambracian road.
Cho. Sailing on horseback, or with feet for oars?
Alc. Plying with speed my partnership of knees.
Cho. Beneath a shining or a rainy Zeus?
Alc. Mud's sister, not himself, adorns my legs.
Cho. Your name I not unwillingly would learn.
Alc. Not all that men desire do they obtain.
Cho. Might I then know at what your presence aims?
Alc. A shepherd's questioned tongue informed me that -
Cho. What? for I know not yet what you will say.
Alc. - this house was Eriphyle's, no one's else.
Cho. Nor did he shame his throat with hateful lies.
Alc. Might I then enter, going through the door?
Cho. Go; drag into the house a lucky foot;
And, O my son, be on the one hand good,
And do not on the other hand be bad.
And then thou wilt be like the man who speaks,
And not unlike thine interlocutor.
Alc. I go into the house with legs and speed.

CHORUS

(Strophe)

In speculation
I would not willingly acquire a name
For ill-digested thought;
But, after pondering much,
To this conclusion I at last have come:
Life is uncertain.
This I have written deep
In my reflective midriff,
On tablets not of wax.
Nor with a stylus did I write it there,
For obvious reasons: Life, I say, is not
Divested of uncertainty.
Not from the flight of omen-yelling fowls
This truth did I discover,
Nor did the Delphian tripod bark it out,
Nor yet Dodona.
Its native ingenuity sufficed
My self-taught diaphragm.

(Antistrophe)

Why should I mention
The Inachian daughter, loved of Zeus,
Her whom of old the gods,
More provident than kind,
Provided with four hoofs, two horns, one tail,
A gift not asked for:
And sent her forth to learn
The unaccustomed science
Of how to chew the cud?
She, therefore, all about the Argive fields,
Went cropping pale green grass and nettle tops,
Nor did they disagree with her;
But yet, however wholesome, such repasts,
Myself, I deem unpleasant.
Never may Cypris for her seat select
My dappled liver!
Why should I mention Io? I repeat.
I have no notion why.

(Epode)

Why does my boding heart
Unhired, unaccompanied, sing
A most displeasing tune?
Nay even the palace appears
To my yoke of circular eyes,
The right one as well as the left,
Like a slaughter-house, so to speak,
Garnished with woolly deaths
And many shipwrecks of cows.
I, therefore, in a Cissian strain lament, And with the rapid,
Loud, linen-tattering thumps upon my chest
Resounds in concert
The battering of my unlucky head.

Eriphyle (within) Oh, I am smitten with a hatchet's jaw!
In deed, I mean, and not in word alone.
Cho. Methinks I heard a sound within the house
Unlike the accent of festivity.
Erip. He cracks my skull, not in a friendly way:
It seems he purposes to kill me dead.
Cho. I would not be considered rash, but yet
I doubt if all is well within the house.
Erip. Oh, oh, another blow! this makes the third:
He stabs my heart, a harsh unkindly act.
Cho. Indeed, if that be so, ill-fated one,
I fear we scarce can hope thou wilt survive.

A Man's Gotta Do...

 I was thinking recently, as I browsed the shelves of my favourite charity bookshop, that it's about time I read a man's book. Anyone who follows this blog must have noticed that, in the field of fiction at least, women are notably over-represented in my reading, with all those Ivys and Muriels and Willas and Penelopes and Shirleys and Barbaras. I make no apology for this: I think many of the best English and American novels of the 20th century were written by women, many of whom are still underrated. Of course I do quite often read novels by men, but do I read anything much written for men? Do I read anything written in genres that are themselves aimed at men? Well, in recent times I've read and hugely admired two novels that would have to be classed as westerns – Charles Portis's True Grit and John Williams's Butcher's Crossing, but both of these I think transcend their genre; I would class them as classic novels that happen to be westerns. I also greatly enjoyed Donald E. Westlake's The Comedy Is Finished, which I guess could be classed as a thriller, and is certainly a 'man's book'... Maybe it was time to just go ahead and read another, maybe even a western? Sure enough, as I thought these thoughts, the solution practically leapt off the shelf into my hand – a classic western, Elmore Leonard's Hombre, in a paperback edition with a cover unambiguously decorated with the image of a Colt 45 (or something similar). 'Come on,' it seemed to say, 'if you think you're hard enough...'
  As I'm still in a somewhat depleted condition thanks to this annoyingly persistent bug, Hombre has been the kind of undemanding reading I needed. It's a plain tale, plainly told, but artfully framed as the true account of one Carl Everett Allen, who saw it all with his own eyes, and was persuaded to write it down as best he could. In a disarming prologue, he writes that 'I was advised to imagine I was telling it to a good friend and not worry about what other people might think. Which is what I have done. If there's anything anybody wants to skip, like innermost thoughts in places, just go ahead.' Well, there's not much need for  skipping: Henry James it ain't. Carl is a young man, rather naive and much of the time as ignorant as we are of what's going on, so his telling of the story enacts a process of discovery in which he is alongside the reader. This works well, and keeps the reader hooked to the unfolding story, which is probably one that most people are already vaguely aware of – even I was, I think from faint memories of the 1967 Martin Ritt movie. It begins as a stagecoach tale, that classic set-up, as used in the 1939 film that made John Wayne a star (and, come to that, as in the haunting final section of the Coen Brothers' Ballad of Buster Scruggs) – strangers, or near strangers, who, from various motivations, end up together, making what becomes a perilous journey in a stagecoach, or rather a mud wagon that's been commandeered as a substitute. And one figure dominates all, the enigmatic Apache-reared outsider known as 'Hombre' (memorably Paul Newman in the film). When the party find themselves in mortal danger, will Hombre go his own way and save his own life, or rescue the people who have, in their different ways, treated him as an outcast? 
  As narrative is generally not the thing I read a novel for, Hombre has not yielded the deeper satisfactions of fiction, but I didn't expect it to, so I'm not complaining. Though I'm really no judge, it strikes me as a very good, maybe a classic, western, and I've enjoyed reading it. At the very least, it's made a refreshing change from all those Ivys and Muriels and the rest...

And Peter Porter

It's been good to see so many affectionate and admiring obituaries for Barry Humphries, who surely deserved them all. Many make reference to the generation of talented young Australians who headed for our shores in the Fifties and Sixties: Clive James, Robert Hughes and Germaine Greer are always mentioned, but rarely if ever the poet Peter Porter (about whom I have written many times on this blog). So this would be a good time to resume my one-man crusade to keep the name of this fine, abundantly talented poet alive. It also happens to be Wittgenstein's birthday (born on the same day in 1889 as Anita Loos, author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, fact fans), so I'll share this one, in which Wittgenstein, nearing his death, reads himself to sleep, and dreams. The first stanza is obscure, especially the third and fourth lines, but press on through and the poem yields its rewards. The six six-line stanzas are, as gradually becomes apparent, in the palindromic rhyme scheme ABCCBA, the same as Browning's 'Meeting at Night'...  

Wittgenstein's Dream

I had taken my boat out on the fiord,
I get so dreadfully morose at five, 
I went in and put Nature on my hatstand
And considered the Sinking of the Eveninglands
And laughed at what translation may contrive
And worked at mathematics and was bored.

There was fire above the sun in its descent,
There were letters there whose words seemed scarcely cooked,
There was speech and decency and utter terror,
In twice four hundred pages just one error
In everything I ever wrote – I looked
In meaning for whatever wasn't meant.

Some amateur was killing Schubert dead,
Some of the pains the English force on me,
Somewhere with cow-bells Austria exists,
But then I saw the gods pin up their lists
But was not on them – we live stupidly
But are redeemed by what cannot be said.

Perhaps a language has been made which works,
Perhaps it's tension in the cinema,
Perhaps 'perhaps' is an inventive word,
A sort of self-intended thing, a bird,
A problem for an architect, a star,
A plan to save Vienna from the Turks.

After dinner I read myself to sleep,
After which I dreamt the Eastern front
After an exchange of Howitzers,
The angel of death was taking what was hers,
The finger missed me but the guns still grunt
The syntax of the real, the rules they keep.

And then I woke in my own corner bed
And turned away and cried into the wall
And cursed the world which Mozart had to leave.
I heard a voice which told me not to grieve,
I heard myself, 'Tell them,' I said to all,
'I've had a wonderful life. I'm dead.'

'Like a language we once knew...'

 Late in the day – too late to write much – I learn that it is the 150th anniversary, a big one, of the birth of the underrated (but often, undeniably, verbose) Walter de la Mare. 
Penelope Fitzgerald wrote that De la Mare 'had a more exact ear than perhaps any other English poet. In his verse every pause, as well as every stress, falls into place like a language we once knew, but have to be reminded of' – and this is true of his verse at its best, which often means its shortest. Two very short poems of his that I particularly cherish are these: 

 Napoleon

'What is the world, O soldiers?
       It is I:
I, this incessant snow,
   This northern sky;
Soldiers, this solitude
   Through which we go
       Is I.'

(a perfect evocation of grandiose paranoia), and this chilling little number:

'Ann, Ann!
        Come! Quick as you can!
    There's a fish that talks
        In the frying-pan.
    Out of the fat,
        As clear as glass,
    He put up his mouth
        And moaned 'Alas!'
    Oh, most mournful,
        'Alas, alack!'
    Then turned to his sizzling,
        And sank him back.'

'The world that was ours is a world that is ours no more...'

 Last night on BBC4 (the only TV channel that does anything to justify the licence fee), I watched a rather wonderful documentary from 1977 called The Queen's Realm: England. Described as 'an aerial anthology of English landscape, poetry and music', it was directed and produced by Ed Mirzoeff and curated and contributed to by John Betjeman, who is very much the presiding spirit of the film. The aerial footage is impressive, and must have seemed quite cutting-edge at the time. It's all filmed from a helicopter – no drones then – presumably using the then novel Steadicam. Landscape, townscape and seascape, all flow by, all artfully mingled with judiciously chosen music and poetry; the effect is often beautiful and sometimes very moving. The poets featured include, among many others, Shakespeare (the John of Gaunt speech opens the film), Wordsworth, Tennyson, Hardy, Hopkins, Clare, Housman, Auden, Larkin and, of course, Betjeman – all immaculately read, by Michael Hordern and Richard Pasco, Prunella Scales and Junet Suzman, and, of course, old Betj himself. 
  What was most striking about the film was that – leaving aside some unchanging and unchangeable landscapes – it was showing us a lost land, a country so very different from the one we now live in, despite the relatively short distance in time. It was a country where factory chimneys still belched smoke, and industrial buildings from earlier times were still in use, where a building's purpose could be read from its appearance – no anonymous out-of-town hangars then – where fields still grew and harvested crops rather than solar panels and wind turbines. It was still a country, clearly, that made things, and one where people did recognisable jobs with simple names and clear purposes, unlike our increasingly abstract present, where so much that was solid has melted into air – a world in which, if you ask someone what their job is, chances are you won't understand the answer (if indeed it means anything). This was a world before computers in every home and office, before mobiles phones, before even the Sony Walkman. It was decidedly a more human world, and a simpler one, more innocent perhaps. I found myself mourning it, and wishing undone so much of what has happened since – even the internet itself, which might well prove to be the most destructive invention ever unleashed by mankind on itself. And yet I love it, and would, I fear, be lost without it. Damn it, if it wasn't for the internet I wouldn't be here, i.e. writing on this blog, which in turn wouldn't be here. This is all getting too vertiginous...
  Oh yes. One of the poets featured, whose work I didn't recognise and had to identify via Google (yes, that internet again) turned out to be Laurence Binyon, about whom I have written before, here and here. This was the passage featured in The Queen's Realm – it's the first stanza of a longer (too long) poem called 'The Burning of the Leaves':

'Now is the time for the burning of the leaves.
They go to the fire; the nostril pricks with smoke
Wandering slowly into a weeping mist.
Brittle and blotched, ragged and rotten sheaves!
A flame seizes the smouldering ruin and bites
On stubborn stalks that crackle as they resist.

The last hollyhock's fallen tower is dust;
All the spices of June are a bitter reek,
All the extravagant riches spent and mean.
All burns! The reddest rose is a ghost;
Sparks whirl up, to expire in the mist: the wild
Fingers of fire are making corruption clean.

Now is the time for stripping the spirit bare,
Time for the burning of days ended and done,
Idle solace of things that have gone before:
Rootless hope and fruitless desire are there;
Let them go to the fire, with never a look behind.
The world that was ours is a world that is ours no more.

They will come again, the leaf and the flower, to arise
From squalor of rottenness into the old splendour,
And magical scents to a wondering memory bring;
The same glory, to shine upon different eyes.
Earth cares for her own ruins, naught for ours.
Nothing is certain, only the certain spring.'

The Queen's Realm is available on the BBC iPlayer, for how long I don't know.  

Alarm? What alarm?

 I was not looking forward at all to receiving the 3pm alarm that was supposed to be going out from somewhere within The Government to every smartphone in the land, so I was relieved when the hour came and nothing happened, no message, no sound, not on my phone nor on Mrs N's.
Call me an anarcho-libertarian but my heart does not warm to the thought that any government has the power to send anything to every smartphone in the nation – and now it seems they can't, even after months of preparation, planning and prepublicity. This incompetence has its reassuring side, but it was also one of the things that worried me about the original plan. Imagine, for a start, the potential for false alarms, mistimings and (in a geographically limited alarm) alerting the wrong people in the wrong place. Much more worrying are the possibilities of hacking a not fully secure system: imagine what havoc the likes of Just Stop Oil or Extinction Rebellion might wreak if they could muster the brain power (which happily seems most unlikely), imagine what bad actors from, say, China or Russia might do...  Still, early reports suggest that a considerable swathe of the smartphone-owning population failed, like me and Mrs N, to hear a peep from The Government. I hope they now abandon this silly and potentially dangerous experiment. 

Barry Humphries

 Sad to hear that Barry Humphries, that man of many parts (some of them rather revolting), has died. He had achieved a good age (89), but even so, as well as grieving his family and friends, his death subtracts from the gaiety of nations. And we can be absolutely sure that he will have no comic successor: his comedy teetered perilously close to the edge even in the more relaxed climate of his peak decades; it would have plunged straight over the edge of the permissible today. The creation that first brought him to notice in this country, the archetypal 'ocker' Barry Mackenzie (in a strip cartoon in Private Eye, drawn by the excellent Nicholas Garland), was a man of unreconstructed attitudes, to put it very mildly, with an endlessly inventive way with Australian profanities. Humphries was so steeped in the murkier byways of Australian slang that he could effortlessly coin new expressions that fitted perfectly into the lexicon. Indeed, there's surely a potential thesis for someone in identifying Humphries' contributions to the Australian language – it must be vast. Maybe it's already been written...
  While Humphries achieved his comic apotheosis in the rise and rise of Dame Edna Everage, housewife superstar, his love of inventive profanity found new expression in the character of Sir Les Patterson, Australian cultural attaché, whose sole professional remit seemed to be the promotion of Tasmanian Blue cheese, a large portion of which was often secreted hygienically down the front of his trousers. With his hideous leer, stained (with God knows what) suit , bulging belly and florid complexion, he was every bit as appalling as our home-grown grotesque, the long forgotten Frank Randle – but, unlike Frank (who had only catchphrases and a drunk act), he had a wonderfully inventive way with language, managing to plumb depths unknown even to Barry Mackenzie. Some of this is preserved in Sir Les's indispensable (to drunken satyromaniacs abroad) book, The Traveller's Tool (1985). I had a copy, which I lost long ago, but I certainly remember it as being quite hair-raisingly, eye-wateringly filthy, and displaying, shall we say, a less than respectful attitude to the legions of oriental ladies who attended to Sir Les's urgent priapic needs. The Traveller's Tool was never reprinted, and is now only available at an exorbitant price. It hardly needs saying that such a book today would not even have made it over the publisher's threshold, let alone found its way into print. The publisher, by the way, was the perfectly respectable Michael O'Mara, and there was no outcry when the book came out. We recognised what comedy was in those days, i.e. something whose business was only to make you laugh – and The Traveller's Tool certainly did that, turning the initial gasp of horror into genuine laughter by the sheer inventiveness of the language and the utter shamelessness of the leering Sir Les's depravity. 
  Humphries created many other characters too, and the most interesting of them, I think, is the one that was Peter Cook's favourite, Sandy Stone, a decent, quiet man living a solitary, rather sad life in a Melbourne suburb. The polar opposite of Sir Les, Stone was a character Humphries worked on over the years: 'Slowly the character has deepened,' he said in interview in 2016, 'so I began to understand and appreciate him, and finally feel myself turning into him.' Indeed, Humphries began to play him without make-up and wearing his own dressing gown. Clearly he could identify with both Sandy Stone and Sir Les; no doubt (says the amateur psychologist) they represented opposite poles of his divided personality. The complete Sandy Stone soliloquies, published in 1990 as The Life and Death of Sandy Stone, might even prove to be Humphries's most lasting work. 
  And there was more: Humphries was fascinated from boyhood by the Aesthetic movement, and became a major collector of 1890s art and books. Like his friend John Betjeman, he had a particular interest in his near-compatriot, the artist Charles Conder (who is mentioned here), and at one time owned the largest collection of Conder's works in private hands. 
  Like many people of huge talent and strong drive, Humphries kept performing for rather too long after his wit had lost its razor-sharp edge – but what a talent it was, what a wit, and what a man. There will never be another. RIP.