New Town, Old Roots

 What's this then? It's All Saints, the parish church of Milton Keynes – the original Milton Keynes, that is, the charming little village that gave the new town its name and is now surrounded by its sprawling namesake. I was there yesterday, in winter sunshine, and had a good look at the church, inside and out; it's very fine, in my favourite style, the one we call Decorated (and the French call 'Flamboyant' – flaming), characterised by flowing lines and curves, especially in the window tracery. The nearby old rectory is also rather wonderful, and, as with many areas of the MK footprint, you would hardly know you were anywhere near a modern new town (though the sound of traffic is hard to escape). In the churchyard of All Saints are buried the remains of a hundred or so late Saxons whose bones were excavated in a field nearby. Farther on in the walk we passed through – on a metalled path, incongruously – a fine deserted medieval village. This 'new town' has old and deep roots. It was a sunny, blue sky day, for a wonder, and I saw, as well as drifts of Snowdrops, my first Winter Aconites of the year.
   Of Worthing I have little to report except that it was extremely windy, and at one point I had the humbling experience of being very nearly blown off my feet by a gust that must have been at least gale force. I think I have probably exhausted the subject of Oscar Wilde in Worthing (see here and here), and, looking for further literary connections, I discovered that two of our greatest nature writers – W.H. Hudson and Richard Jefferies – are both buried in the same Worthing cemetery. I must look into this...

Memorial Day

 Just to say that Radio 3's breakfast programme today, live from Auschwitz, was a simply wonderful broadcast, one of the finest, most beautiful and moving I have ever heard. Presenter Petroc Trelawny is shaping up to be a truly great radio broadcaster – and the music, and the stories told... Sometimes it was almost unbearable, but it was a magnificent, memorable piece of radio. If you missed it, it should be possible to find it on BBC Sounds. 

The Throwout Bearing

 A dreary, sodden day of wind and rain, with more of the same threatened, so here is something to bring a little cheer. It's an anecdote from Joseph Epstein's Never Say You've Had a Lucky Life. Especially If You've Had a Lucky Life, which is still my bedtime reading, slow reader that I am. This made me laugh out loud...
[At this point Epstein, a man who has had many jobs in his life, is in Arkansas working for the North Little Rock Urban Renewal Agency, where all his colleagues are Southerners.]
'One among them, a genial man named Harold Russell, was currently building his own house on weekends. When I happened to mention to him that I needed to replace something called a "throwout bearing" in my used Corvair – the car, by the way, featured for its flaws in Ralph Nader's book Unsafe at Any Speed – Harold told me that replacing it presented no real problem. "All you have to do is lift the engine and screw in the bearing underneath." Lift the engine? He told me that here all I needed was to get a #197 pulley, park the car between two strong trees, and with the aid of a the pulley lift up the engine and screw in the bearing. Simple enough, no? Had I attempted it, I could imagine the next day's headline in the Arkansas Gazette: "Jewish man found dead under Corvair Engine, Car Parked Between Two Trees in North Little Rock."
  For a few years afterward, whenever I brought one of my cars in for repair, I would casually mention that I had just installed a throwout bearing in it, suggesting that I had done it myself and thus was not a man for any mechanic to attempt to cheat. Much later I learned that only cars with manual transmissions, or clutches, had throwout bearings. Gotcha, Schmuckowitz! those various mechanics must have thought.'

  Which led me to read up about throwout bearings on the internet. Such is life. 
  And from tomorrow I'll most likely be out of action on the blog front for a few days, on family business in rain-lashed Worthing, then walking in rain-lashed Milton Keynes, or rather touring the historic villages that make up that much maligned New Town. 

'And that will be England gone'

 In 1972 the UK government participated in the UN Stockholm Conference on the Environment, submitting a number of papers, one of them titled How Do You Want to Live? Deciding that they wanted to commission a preface to set the tone of the report, they commissioned that notorious cock-eyed optimist Philip Larkin, and – surprise, surprise – they were not entirely satisfied with the result, publishing a bowdlerised version, under the plain title 'Prologue'. Larkin happily pocketed the fee, then reworked the poem, restored the cuts, changed the title to 'Going, Going' (completed on this day in 1972) and published it in High Windows. It's not one of his best poems, but, like so many of Larkin's, it ends beautifully, and contains some resonant phrases: 'I thought it would last my time', 'Things are tougher than we are', 'It seems, just now, to be happening so very fast', 'And that will be England gone', 'Most things are never meant', 'I just think it will happen, soon'...

Going, Going

I thought it would last my time –

The sense that, beyond the town,

There would always be fields and farms,

Where the village louts could climb

Such trees as were not cut down;

I knew there’d be false alarms

 

In the papers about old streets

And split level shopping, but some

Have always been left so far;

And when the old part retreats

As the bleak high-risers come

We can always escape in the car.

 

Things are tougher than we are, just

As earth will always respond

However we mess it about;

Chuck filth in the sea, if you must:

The tides will be clean beyond.

– But what do I feel now? Doubt?

 

Or age, simply? The crowd

Is young in the M1 cafe;

Their kids are screaming for more –

More houses, more parking allowed,

More caravan sites, more pay.

On the Business Page, a score

 

Of spectacled grins approve

Some takeover bid that entails

Five per cent profit (and ten

Per cent more in the estuaries): move

Your works to the unspoilt dales

(Grey area grants)! And when

 

You try to get near the sea

In summer ...

It seems, just now,

To be happening so very fast;

Despite all the land left free

For the first time I feel somehow

That it isn’t going to last,

 

That before I snuff it, the whole

Boiling will be bricked in

Except for the tourist parts –

First slum of Europe: a role

It won’t be hard to win,

With a cast of crooks and tarts.

 

And that will be England gone,

The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,

The guildhalls, the carved choirs.

There’ll be books; it will linger on

In galleries; but all that remains

For us will be concrete and tyres.

 

Most things are never meant.

This won’t be, most likely; but greeds

And garbage are too thick-strewn

To be swept up now, or invent

Excuses that make them all needs.

I just think it will happen, soon.

Reading the poem today, it seems prophetic only in the sense that Larkin's England was indeed, as he sensed, going, going – but in all manner of ways, with changes that went far beyond the urban spread that is Larkin's preoccupation. If he had cast his net more widely, the results might well have been even more pessimistic, so perhaps it's just as well he didn't. His reflex pessimism was often, I think, quite shallow, half jocular, and frequently wrong. I recall that when he had his mother's ashes interred in St Michael's churchyard in Lichfield in 1977, the Rector told him that it was the last burial in the old churchyard, which also contained several earlier Larkin family graves. The churchyard would now, Larkin averred in a letter to Barbara Pym, be 'handed over to the Council to be landscaped into a vandals' playground or some such nonsense. I expect I shan't see all the old Larkin graves again ... as they will all be levelled and the stones taken away.' He was quite wrong, of course: the old churchyard of St Michael's is now a combination of well maintained historic burial ground and well managed nature reserve, and the old Larkin graves are still there, quite easily found. The one that eludes me, oddly, is that of Larkin's parents, which, having found it once (and photographed it), I have never been able to find again. 

Spot the Author

 This, believe it or not, is the great Southern writer Eudora Welty in her younger days, hamming it up for the camera (she was an excellent photographer herself). The picture is used on the cover of a volume of early writings, cartoons and odds and ends called Early Escapades, edited by her long-time friend Patti Carr Black. 'An evening with her,' Black recalls, 'was like being at vaudeville. She was great at one-liners and quick responses. She had such clarity and wit, you were always taken aback.' 

Manet Day: Two Artists Paint Each Other

It has become a tradition on this blog to mark the birthday (in 1832) of one of my favourite painters, the great Edouard Manet. This year's picture is one I have actually seen, on the canvas, since the last birthday. It hangs on the walls of the Barber Institute in Birmingham, which I visited last autumn. A portrait of Manet's friend and fellow artist Carolus-Duran, it is clearly unfinished (especially the landscape background), but it has a huge presence, in part because of its size: it is over 6ft tall and almost as wide. The nonchalant swagger of Carolus-Duran's pose is caught perfectly, and his dress suggests he has just ridden over from his nearby country home. Manet at the time was staying on the estate of a wealthy patron near Paris, where, he wrote, 'there is too much entertainment here to work seriously', but he and Carolus-Duran agreed to paint each other's portraits (Carolus-Duran was famous for his portraits of members of Parisian high society). In return for Manet's grand, if sketchy, swagger portrait, Carolus-Duran painted this affectionate, informal portrait of his friend, adopting a loose, easy style perfectly in keeping with its subject. It is perhaps the most attractive portrait we have of the often rather forbidding-looking Manet.

Sam and Dave

 Just realised that I missed a Johnsonian anniversary yesterday – blame it on Blue Monday. 
  It was on January 20th in 1779 that David Garrick, the most famous actor of his generation, died, predeceasing his friend, fellow Lichfieldian and one-time teacher, Samuel Johnson. 'I am disappointed,' wrote Johnson, 'by that stroke of death which has eclipsed the gaiety of nations, and impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure.' Johnson, the older man, had known Garrick since the latter's Lichfield boyhood (both were alumni of Lichfield grammar school), and the young David Garrick had been one of the handful of pupils who attended the school that Johnson and his wife established at Edial, a few miles outside the city. When this doomed venture collapsed, Johnson and Garrick, sharing a horse, set out for London in search of fame and fortune – which both of them eventually found. They remained firm friends, though Garrick was not above giving wickedly accurate impersonations of the Great Cham, and Johnson took a somewhat condescending attitude to his young friend's theatrical career, stellar though it was. He would, however, never allow anyone else to say anything at all disobliging about Garrick. 
  David Garrick's funeral procession was one of the longest seen in London, stretching all the way from the Strand to Westminster Abbey, where he was interred in Poets' Corner. Fittingly, he also has a memorial in Lichfield Cathedral, in the form of a bust, with Johnson's epitaph ('I am disappointed...') inscribed below. 
  In one of my favourite Johnson quotations, the great man tells Garrick that he shan't be joining him behind the scenes at the theatre any more: 'I'll come no more behind your scenes, David; for the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses excite my amorous propensities.'