Lunar Men

'Has the world gone mad?' is a question that answers itself. However, I can't recall any other time when I've known our society quite so deranged and hellbent on self-destruction. I do my best to avoid the news – especially the broadcast news – but it's impossible to get away from it...
  Happily, my latest lockdown 'big read', Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men, takes me back to a time when things were very different. The story of the Lunar Society, 'the friends who made the future', this is a big book about a big subject – a period of time, in the 18th century, when a group of amateurs, working in an atmosphere of conviviality, friendship and good cheer, sought to unlock the secrets of Nature and thereby reveal (as they cheerfully assumed) the workings of Providence. 'Natural philosophy', the mechanical and fine arts, experimental science, invention, business and manufacture all came together in a period of intellectual ferment in which 'philosophical friendship' sat easily with parties and dances, card games, drinking and conversation late into the night (the Lunar Men would often make their unsteady way home by moonlight). And this extraordinary flowering of the arts and sciences was played out in the true heart of England, the enduring Mercia, or more prosaically the Midlands – in the Potteries of Staffordshire, the rising manufacturing town of Birmingham, and the cities of Derby and Lichfield, the latter home both to the 'father of evolution' Erasmus Darwin and to Samuel Johnson, who said of his native town, 'Sir, we are a city of philosophers; we work with our heads, and make the boobies of Birmingham work for us with their hands.' If the Lunar Men were indeed making the future, they must surely have envisaged a very different one from what lies around us now.

Henry Newbolt

On this day in 1862 was born Henry Newbolt, a poet whose works (or a choice few of them) were part of the soundtrack of my boyhood. My father, who loved to recite verse while shaving in the morning, was especially fond of 'Vitai Lampada' (the one in which 'his captain's hand on his shoulder smote, "Play up, play up, and play the game!"') and 'Drake's Drum' ('Captain, art thou sleeping there below?'), the latter in plain English rather than Devonian.
  Newbolt, who was also a novelist, historian and influential government adviser, was to all appearances an utterly conventional establishment figure, but in fact his love life was thoroughly irregular. His wife, one of the Duckworth publishing family, had a passionate and long-running affair with her cousin, 'Ella' Coltman, and, after a couple of years' marriage, Henry too fell in love with Isabella, and they lived from then on in a complicated, but efficiently managed, menage a trois. 
  Newbolt's nostalgic affection for his alma mater, Clifton College, is apparent in many of his poems (including 'Vitai Lampada'), but before getting a scholarship to Clifton he was a pupil at Caistor Grammar School in Lincolnshire (an establishment whose later alumni/ae included comedienne Dawn French and Strictly Come Dancing's Kevin and Joanne Clifton). 

  Newbolt's poems are not all patriotic tub-thumpers, and sometimes, as in this one inspired by film footage of troops at the front, he could be thoughtful and moving: 

The War Films

O living pictures of the dead,
O songs without a sound,
O fellowship whose phantom tread
Hallows a phantom ground –
How in a gleam have these revealed
The faith we had not found.

We have sought God in a cloudy Heaven,
We have passed by God on earth:
His seven sins and his sorrows seven,
His wayworn mood and mirth,
Like a ragged cloak have hid from us
The secret of his birth.

Brother of men, when now I see
The lads go forth in line,
Thou knowest my heart is hungry in me
As for thy bread and wine;
Thou knowest my heart is bowed in me
To take their death for mine.

Finally, here's a curiosity – Henry Newbolt reading his own poems on a 78rpm disc...

Swift Storm

After the long May heatwave, the weather has certainly broken now. This morning was cool and blustery, with fine rain in the air, as I strolled through the park. Standing, looking vaguely about me, on the slope of a large depression known as the Hog Pit, I suddenly felt something airborne zoom past me, within inches of my face – then another, then another – and I realised I was in the midst of a swift storm. The birds were hurtling down and around the dip, then up again, still close to the ground (and to me), and into the air, circling, then down again, around, up again, all at tremendous speed... There must have been twenty of more birds – impossible to count them when they're moving so fast – obviously coming together to feed on some sudden abundance of flying insect life in the Hog Pit. Within minutes they had all drifted away, and it was as if it had never happened. It was a wonderful, exhilarating experience – as close as I've ever been to a swift in full flight. What magical birds they are...

Going Back

Reading The Betrothed was one of my lockdown projects; the other was writing a short memoir of my life (strictly for family purposes, not for any kind of publication). That too is now done, and I've moved on to something that was more of a retirement project than a lockdown one: going through what I laughingly call 'my papers', i.e. the mass of cuttings, diaries and miscellaneous writings that have been hidden away for some years, unexamined, in two large boxes. So far – and I've barely scratched the surface – it's been a mixed, often interesting and sometimes rewarding experience, and has left me marvelling at the energy I once had, if nothing else. As a penance, I've been ploughing my way through what purports to be a novel, something I laboured over in (I think) the late Seventies and had never looked at since. I'm relieved that no publisher was foolish enough to take it on – and that it's mercifully short. 

  More interesting, by and large, are the book reviews, many of them of books I have no recollection of ever having read, let alone reviewed. And then there are the radio reviews – several years' worth of weekly reviews for the late lamented Listener. Naturally I have no recollection of most of the programmes I wrote about and am just skimming these pieces before replacing them in the box, for later generations to throw away. I also reviewed books for The Listener, and on the back of  a review of Paul Fussell's Caste Marks (long forgotten) in the issue of 7 June 1984, I found this – Gavin Ewart's poetical epitaph for the recently deceased Poet Laureate: 

In Memoriam Sir John Betjeman (1906-1984)

So the last date slides into the bracket
that will appear in all future anthologies –
and in quiet Cornwall and in London's ghastly racket
we are now Betjemanless.
Your verse was very fetching
and, as Byron might have written,
there are many poetic personalities around
that would fetch a man less!

Some of your admirers were verging on the stupid,
you were envied  by poets (more highbrow, more inventive?);
at twenty you had the bow-shaped lips of a Cupid
(a scuffle with Auden too).
But long before your Oxford
and the visiting of churches
you went topographical – on the Underground
(Metroland and Morden too)!

The Dragon School – but Marlborough a real dragon,
with real bullying, followed the bear of childhood,
a kind of gentlemanly cross to crucify a fag on.
We don't repent at leisure,
you were good, and very British.
Serious, considered 'funny',
in your best poems, strong but sad, we found
a most terrific pleasure.

Technically, this a typical bravura exercise, with its clever rhyme scheme (I make it abacdefc, with the added subtlety than the penultimate lines of each stanza rhyme with each other) and avoidance of all masculine line endings. Its tone is affectionate, at least towards the end – in contrast to another Ewart poem on Betjeman. It was rumoured that Gavin Ewart  – the subject of a very late Larkin poem – was considered as a possible successor to the Laureateship, but not for long, and no wonder: he wrote far too much, and too filthily, about sex. 

 Now, back to my papers...

Manzoni on the Riots

The Betrothed, as I've noted before, has some contemporary resonance as a 'plague novel' (though, as I've also pointed out, there is a great gulf between bubonic plague and Covid-19). The chapters devoted to the plague in Milan are brilliant examples of Manzoni's powerful historical imagination. They are well worth reading for their own sake, but certainly have something to tell us about what plague, or a perceived plague, does to human beings. And there are other parts of The Betrothed that also have contemporary resonance, and something to tell us – notably the chapters that revolve around the 'bread riots' in Milan.
  As rioting and looting engulf parts of several American cities, accompanied by mindless violence and the destruction of innocent people's businesses, Manzoni's cool words ring true:

'The destruction of sifting machines and bread bins, the wrecking of bakeries and the mobbing of bakers are not really the best methods of ensuring long life to a plenteous supply of bread. But that is one of those philosophical subtleties which a crowd can never grasp. Even without being a philosopher, however, a man will sometimes grasp it straight away, while the whole matter is new to him and he can see it with fresh eyes. It is later, when he has talked and heard others talk about it, that it becomes impossible for him to understand. The thought had struck Renzo at the very beginning, as we have seen, and it kept coming back to him now. But he kept it to himself; for when he looked at all the people around him he could not imagine any of them saying: "Dear brother, if I go wrong, pray correct me, and I will be duly grateful."'

Manzoni understands well how mobs work: how they form, the various cross-currents at work within them, and the way certain operators can exploit these cross-currents to achieve their ends:

'In popular uprisings there are always a certain number of men, inspired by hot-blooded passions, fanatical convictions, evil designs, or a devilish love of disorder for its own sake, who do everything they can to make things take the worst possible turn. They put forward or support the most merciless projects, and fan the flames every time they begin to subside. Nothing ever goes too far for them; they would like to see rioting continue without bounds and without an end. But to counterbalance them, there are always a certain number of other men, equally ardent and determined, who are doing all they can in the opposite direction, inspired by friendship or fellow-feeling for the people threatened by the mob, or by a reverent and spontaneous horror of bloodshed and evil deeds. God bless them for it!'

There seem to be rather too many of the first sort at work in America just now.

Christo and Koch

Hearing of the death of Christo – the artist who got famous by wrapping up very very big things, up to and including stretches of coastline – set my mind wandering back to Kenneth Koch's 'The Artist', a poem published in 1962 that foresaw much of what was to come in the art world, from Claes Oldenberg's gigantic Pop Art forms to Conceptual Art, by way of Land Art, Earthworks, site-specific environmental installations, etc.
The poem begins with the somewhat megalomaniac artist bidding  farewell to one of his works:

'Ah well, I abandon you, cherrywood smokestack,
Near the entrance to this old green park!...'

Soon he is looking back fondly to one his early works –

'I often think Play was my best work.
It is an open field with a few boards in it.
Children are allowed to come and play in Play
By permission of the Cleveland Museum.'

Next he makes steel cigarettes for the Indianopolis Museum, but then he really gets going with Bee –

'Bee will be a sixty-yards-long covering for the elevator shaft opening in the foundry sub-basement
Near my home. So far it's white sailcloth with streams of golden paint evenly spaced out
With a small blue pond at one end, and around it orange and green flowers...'

But this project is soon dwarfed by the next one. A newspaper reports  –

'The Magician of Cincinnati is now ready for human use. They are twenty-five tremendous stone staircases, each over six hundred feet high, which will be placed in the Ohio River between Cincinnati and Louisville, Kentucky. All the boats coming down the Ohio River will presumably be smashed up against the immense statues, which are the most recent work of the creator of Flowers, Bee, Play, Again and Human Use...'

The artist picks up the story –

'May 16th. With what an intense joy I watched the installation of The Magician of Cincinnati today, in the Ohio River, where it belongs, and which is so much part of my original scheme ...
May 17th. I feel suddenly freed from life – not so much as if my work were going to change, but as though I had at last seen what I had so long been prevented (perhaps I prevented myself!) from seeing: that there is too much for me to do. Somehow this enables me to relax, to breathe easily...'

The poem ends with the artist confronting his greatest creative challenge –

'June 3rd. It doesn't seem possible – the Pacific Ocean! I have ordered sixteen million tons of blue paint. Waiting anxiously for it to arrive. How would grass be as a substitute? Cement?'

Indeed. Why not? What limits can there possibly be to Art?

June

A new week, a new month – and new hope that this disgraceful lockdown is beginning to ease, or at least to fray at the edges. It's become increasingly clear that it was never necessary, is quite probably counterproductive, and that the costs – in economic and social terms and in lives lost – will far outweigh any presumed benefits. Not that Boris Johnson had any choice but to impose it, such was the clamour at the time from the public, the media and 'The Science' (Boris's far too loud backing band). What still astonishes me, sentimental nostalgist that I am, is the eagerness with which the English people embraced a wholesale confiscation of their liberties unprecedented in peacetime – and many of them still seem to want it to go on and on and on... Happily others are busy releasing themselves from this bondage already, hence the perceptible fraying at the edges and the noticeably more relaxed atmosphere. The churches, however, remain firmly closed, locked and, to all intents and purposes, redundant. If the Church of England had set out to prove once and for all its complete irrelevance, it could hardly have done a better job. What it tells us about that institution is deeply depressing...
On the other hand, it's certainly been a spring to remember. The weather has been simply astonishing, at least here in the Southeast – all through April and May, day after day of unbroken sunshine. And the butterflies! I've never before seen so many Green Hairstreaks, Grizzled Skippers and Small Blues [below], and I've already spotted two species I wouldn't normally expect to see till well into June (Large Skipper and Meadow Brown). The 'lockdown' has kept me closer to home than usual, and as a result I've discovered lepidopteral riches in places I would not have looked before. Today, as the sun still shines, my plan is to go a little further afield to see what discoveries await me...