Centenary

 Born exactly 100 years ago today was the naturalist, writer and (an endangered species, this) zookeeper, Gerald Durrell – a child of the Raj, born in Jamshedpur in British India. I owe his shade some gratitude, as his books were among the first to engage me in reading for pleasure. Some time around the end of the 1950s a relation I knew as 'Auntie Molly', who had somehow sensed that I might be a boy in need of the right books, gave me a hardback copy of Durrell's Encounters with Animals, illustrated with fine line drawings by Ralph Thompson. Being a budding young naturalist myself, I was immediately interested, plunged in, read it straight through more than once, and thereafter leapt on every Durrell title I could find. It was several years before, my literary taste having become a little more exacting, I tired of Durrell's style, though I was always interested to read about the remarkable animals he continued to encounter on his collecting trips.
  The book of his that kept me enthralled the longest was My Family and Other Animals, his not entirely reliable but utterly charming account of his boyhood years with his family on Corfu, described by his brother Lawrence as 'the best argument I know for keeping thirteen-year-olds at boarding schools and not letting them hang about the house listening in to conversations of their elders and betters'. My Family has had a long afterlife, having been filmed, televised and adapted repeatedly. It might still be around when Lawrence's novels (does anyone read them any more?) are all but forgotten, but its survival would not be down to superior literary merit, only (only!) to a superior ability to deliver pleasure. Durrell's works certainly delivered plenty of that to the young me, so I salute him now on his centenary. 

It's a Wonderful Film

 This wretched flu continues to toy with me mercilessly, one day giving every indication that it's coming to an end, the next surging back with renewed vigour, draining me of all energy. It's been quite a ride. And somewhere along the way, in keeping with Christmas tradition (one not observed for several years), the decision was taken to watch It's a Wonderful Life. This was not wise: I had overlooked the state of emotional frailty the flu had plunged me into. The result was that the titles were barely over before liquefaction set in, and by the end I was a wrung-out emotional wreck of a man, beyond help. The film is notoriously one that can wring tears from the stoniest heart, so a man in my condition was asking for trouble...
  What is it about It's a Wonderful Life? Like A Christmas Carol – with which it has clear parallels, not least in the Scrooge-like character of Mr Potter and in its time-shifting vision of what might have been – it has the power of fable, and it has a Dickensian simplicity. Essentially both A Christmas Carol and It's A Wonderful Life dramatise the same conflict, between a view of the world (Potter/Scrooge's) in which the 'bottom line' is everything and human beings merely interchangeable economic units, and one in which bonds of social and familial affection, custom and ceremony count for more than profit-and-loss and create something of infinitely greater value. George Bailey is a man at the point of breaking under the relentless pressure to surrender to the grinding logic of Potter's ruthless accounting and betray the community that he has done so much to build. Of course we know how it will end, but Frank Capra's storytelling and (in particular ) Jimmy Stewart's performance are so compelling that the film gains power as it goes along, building such a head of emotional steam that by the end... well, there won't be a dry eye or an unwrung heart. Okay, it's sentimental, it's hokey and all the rest, but It's a Wonderful Life is also a cinematic masterpiece of rare potency. 
  By the way, when George Bailey is granted a vision of how 'Potterville' (the former Bedford Falls) would have ended up but for him, the pleasure-crazed asocial dystopia – all cocktail bars and gambling dens and low dives – seemed, mutatis mutandis, sadly reminiscent of the centres of some of our depressed English towns today. This represents, I suppose, the triumph of 'limbic capitalism' – capitalism relentlessly titillating the pleasure centres to keep us coming back for more of what does us no good at all.  

Bug and Bland

 I have been laid low by a pretty vicious dose of flu, which struck, with exquisite timing, on New Year's Eve and shows no intention of releasing its grip just yet. Physical lethargy and mental hebetude reign. However, I note that today is the birthday of the appalling Hubert Bland, first husband of E. Nesbit – and that I wrote about him exactly ten years ago today. So, back to the archive...

'Woman's metier in the world – I mean, of course, civilised woman, the woman in the world as it is – is to inspire romantic passion... Romantic passion is inspired by women who wear corsets. In other words, by women who pretend to be what they not quite are.'
So opined Hubert Bland, born on this day in 1855. A founder member of the Fabian Society, Bland would be an even smaller footnote than he is, had he not also been the husband of the great children's writer E. Nesbit. Clearly no feminist, he was also a rum kind of socialist, holding strongly pro-imperialist views and characterising democracy as 'anti-national and vulgar'. A large, pugnacious and fearsome man, with a voice 'like the scream of an eagle' (according to Shaw), Bland completed a full house of contradictions by joining the Roman Catholic Church in his middle age, though he was barely observant. Nobody seems to have had a good word to say for him, and yet many otherwise intelligent people fell under his spell – including, alas, Edith Nesbit.
 Edith was just 18 when she met Bland, and they married in haste, with Edith seven months pregnant. At first Bland lived partly with Edith and partly at home with his mother and her companion – whom Edith later discovered to have had a son by him. And there turned out to be another woman who believed herself to be Bland's fiancée. But worse was to come later, when Edith discovered that her good friend Alice Hoatson was also pregnant by Hubert, who bullied Edith into taking in Alice and the child. Thirteen years later, Alice bore another child by Hubert, who was also taken in to the household and adopted.
 Bland also found time to father three children by Edith, of whom her favourite son Fabian tragically died at the age of 15 in a botched tonsilectomy. By now Nesbit was launched on the successful career as a children's writer that would support Hubert and the family and enable them to entertain on a grand scale – though Edith was often upstairs writing, sustained by gin and cigarettes. Around 1911, Hubert began to go blind, and Edith, of course, cared for him until his death in 1914. Happily, she went on to remarry – this time to the genial and much less problematic Thomas 'the Captain' Tucker, at the time an engineer on the Woolwich ferry. They ended up living companionably and very happily in New Romney, where Edith died. She is buried in the churchyard of St Mary in the Marsh, her grave marker made by her grieving second husband.

At Year's End

 Here is a new year/old year poem by the great Richard Wilbur.
The weather here is nothing like so wintry, just windy and damp, but we're promised some cold stuff and clear skies soon... 

Year's End

Now winter downs the dying of the year,   

And night is all a settlement of snow;

From the soft street the rooms of houses show   

A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,   

Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin   

And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake

The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell   

And held in ice as dancers in a spell   

Fluttered all winter long into a lake;   

Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,   

They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns   

Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone   

A million years. Great mammoths overthrown   

Composedly have made their long sojourns,   

Like palaces of patience, in the gray

And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise   

But slept the deeper as the ashes rose

And found the people incomplete, and froze   

The random hands, the loose unready eyes   

Of men expecting yet another sun

To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.   

We fray into the future, rarely wrought

Save in the tapestries of afterthought.

More time, more time. Barrages of applause   

Come muffled from a buried radio.

The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

Happy New Year, everybody!

Another Britain, Another World

 One of my Christmas presents was this – About Britain No. 8: East Midlands and the Peak, one of a series of little books produced for the Festival of Britain in 1951. The delightful title page of this one is by Sheila Robinson, one of the Great Bardfield artists, and others in the series are by Kenneth Rowntree and Barbara Jones, among others. The general editor (and author of the first two volumes) was Geoffrey Grigson, one of the last English writers who could fairly be described as a 'man of letters'. The introductory Portrait of the region in my East Midlands volume is written by none other than W.G. Hoskins, author of the classic The Making of the English Landscape. 
  The preface, presumably written by Grigson, breathes the spirit of quiet confidence, hope and national pride that characterised the Festival of Britain: 'The Festival shows how the British people, with their energy and natural resources, contribute to civilisation. So the guide-books as well celebrate a European country alert, ready for the future, and strengthened by a tradition which you can see in its remarkable monuments and products of history and even pre-history.' Over the ensuing decades, that spirit sadly ebbed away, as was demonstrated all too clearly by the farrago of vacuous ahistorical gestures that were the best the cultural panjandrums could come up with to mark the Millennium. 
  Opposite the title page of my volume is this bookplate – another reminder of how long ago the Festival was...

'Not to mistake the men he saw, As others did, for gods or vermin'

 Browsing in Thom Gunn's Poems 1950-1966 in bed last night, I happened on one I hadn't noticed before – 'Epitaph for Anton Schmidt'. With no clear idea of who Anton Schmidt was, I looked him up, and discovered that he was an Austrian who, recruited into the Wehrmacht on the outbreak of the Hitler War, used his position to help Jews in Lithuania, hiding them in his apartment, securing them work permits to save them from the death pits of Ponary (where up to 100,000, mostly Jews, died), aided the underground in the Vilna ghetto, and used Wehrmacht trucks to transfer Jews to safer locations. Having saved some 300 Jews, he was arrested in January 1942, court-martialled, sentenced to death and shot on April 13th. An ordinary-seeming man of no special gifts, described as 'a simple sergeant' and 'a socially awkward man in thought and speech', he seems to have been motivated only by basic human decency, underpinned by a firm Roman Catholic faith. After the war, he was promptly recognised as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, but there was no official commemoration of him in Germany until 2000.  

Epitaph for Anton Schmidt

The Schmidts obeyed, and marched on Poland,
And there an Anton Schmidt, Feldwebel,
Performed uncommon things, not safe,
Nor glamorous, nor profitable.

Was the expression on his face
‘Reposeful and humane good nature’,
Or did he look like any Schmidt
Of slow and undisclosing feature?

I know he had unusual eyes
Whose powers no orders might determine,
Not to mistake the men he saw,
As others did, for gods or vermin.

For five months, till his execution,
Aware that action has its dangers,
He helped the Jews to get away,
– Another race at that, and strangers.

He never did mistake for bondage
The military job, the chances,
The limits; he did not submit
To the blackmail of his circumstance.

I see him in the Polish snow,
His muddy wrappings small protection,
Breathing the cold air of his freedom
And treading a distinct direction.

This is a poem that needs no commentary. I will only draw your attention to the surely unique rhyme of 'Feldwebel' (sergeant) with 'profitable'. And here is a photograph of Anton Schmidt. There is indeed something in those eyes...

Greenstreet

 Today is the anniversary of the birth of Sydney Greenstreet, a remarkable actor with an unusual career path. I wrote about him on this day 11 years ago, which seems like a decent interval, so here's a reprise – and do open the embedded video link to see Greenstreet and Lorre in action in a comic cameo:

https://nigeness.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-late-starter.html