A Monument and a Mineral

Yes, a church monument! This is like old times... I came across this one in the church of St Nicholas, Chiswick, an old church largely rebuilt by Pearson in the 1880s, with the low broad aisles and ornate screens of a West Country church. For a wonder, it was (partly) open, and there, in the South chapel, was this fine alabaster monument, to one Sir Thomas Challoner, who died in 1615. What struck me about it was the curious combination of an old-fashioned central composition – man and wife facing each other in prayer – and the decidedly Baroque drama of the framing, with curtains swept back from a semi-circular canopy (Doric, with a pyramidal top) and, especially, the dashing figures of the two armed servants holding back those curtains. These figures are full of life, and carved with brio. Indeed, even the kneeling figures are very much livelier than most (and Sir Thomas's lady has her hair swept high in fashionable style). This monument, which has benefited from a recent restoration, seems to be the work of someone who really knew what they were doing – was it a foreign monument maker, or one of our own? Sadly, no one knows.
   What we know about Sir Thomas is that, as well as being a successful courtier, he introduced the manufacture of (potassium) alum to England, thereby ending the nation's dependence on the Papal States and Spain for this versatile mineral, widely used in tanning, dyeing and medicine. Sir Thomas had a cousin, also called Thomas, who, while prospecting for minerals in Ireland, recognised that certain plants grew where the minerals required for alum were present – and that those same plants grew on Sir Thomas's estate at Guisborough (the former priory lands, gifted to Sir Thomas's father). Challoner picked up on the hint, and so was born the English alum industry. It was to devastate the landscape of Northeast Yorkshire for years to come, as cliffs were quarried, forests felled for charcoal, and the land polluted by sulphuric acid and toxic ash. There's always a down side...

Larkin's Afternoons

Here's a suitably seasonal poem by our old friend, Mr Larkin. Published in The Whitsun Weddings (1964), it dates from 1959, and is vintage Larkin: beautifully crafted, simple but inventive in language, vividly present and intensely sad. 

Afternoons

Summer is fading:
The leaves fall in ones and twos
From trees bordering
The new recreation ground.
In the hollows of afternoons
Young mothers assemble
At swing and sandpit
Setting free their children.

Behind them, at intervals,
Stand husbands in skilled trades,
An estateful of washing,
And the albums, lettered
Our Wedding, lying
Near the television:
Before them, the wind
Is ruining their courting-places

That are still courting-places
(But the lovers are all in school),
And their children, so intent on
Finding more unripe acorns,
Expect to be taken home.
Their beauty has thickened.
Something is pushing them
To the side of their own lives.

The daring enjambment and near-repetition that leads the poem into its final stanza is a brilliant touch (he pulls the same trick, to different effect, with every stanza of 'High Windows'). 
  As parent and then grandparent, I have spent many hours 'at swing and sandpit', attending my children and grandchildren, and always too absorbed in the experience (in all its joy and, it must be admitted, boredom) to take a detached view. Larkin, childless and wifeless, and always one of the unconsoled, has an outsider's perspective – but there is truth in it, sadly. 

Talking of poetry, I have decided, on Patrick Kurp's recommendation (see Anecdotal Evidence passim), to  take a look at the American poet Turner Cassity. Having got my hands on a copy of his collection Between the Chains (1991), I opened it and found this epigraph:

'"We are too used to the idea of work to realise its meaning," said Hugo. "I had early suspicions of it, and dared to act on them."
"What a comment on life," said Lavinia, "that to be out of work is held to be sad and wrong!"
"Satan lies in wait for idle hands," said Selina.
"But only Satan, Grandma. And he is hardly seen as a model of behaviour."

Yes, it's Ivy Compton-Burnett, from The Mighty and Their Fall. I think I'm going to enjoy Turner Cassity.

 

Magic or Miracle

This is getting ridiculous. There I was this morning, with Mrs N, having coffee in the garden – their garden – with a couple of local friends when I noticed a small-to-middling pale brownish butterfly fluttering about near the top of a tall shrub, then settling right in my eye line, but too far away to be identified. I got up and walked over to take a closer look, and... But you're probably ahead of me already – yes indeed, it was another Brown Hairstreak! That's two, of the four I've seen in my whole adult life, both spotted in the past few weeks (see 'And Then...') and both coming as a total surprise, the last thing I expected to see. This was another female, quite faded – and no wonder, this late in the season – and less lively. She spent a while investigating the leaves she was on, then flew away rather sedately. Two Brown Hairstreaks, both quite out of the blue – what a summer this has been...
   I have been reading (in Jeremy Thomas and Richard Lewington's beautiful and authoritative Butterflies of Britain and Ireland) about the life cycle of the Brown Hairstreak, which is – as with so many butterflies – quite a story. When the caterpillars, which look like tiny green slugs, come down from the trees to pupate, the chrysalids that they become are looked after by ants, which respond to a chirruping call made by the chrysalis (how?). Some Blue butterflies, which have all kinds of complicated relationships with ants, also produce chirruping chrysalids. Despite their attendant ants (Myrmidons, you might call them), the Brown Hairstreak chrysalids are vulnerable to predators, including mice and shrews. Thomas vividly describes this predation:
 'Once [a chrysalis] is unearthed, a shrew pounces on it in a frenzy of excitement and squealing, tearing and scattering the case into tiny fragments, while gobbling up the sticky contents. A mouse is more restrained. It sits up on its hindquarters holding the chrysalis in both hands, as a squirrel might a nut. It neatly nibbles the chrysalis until not even the hard cuticle remains.' 
  The 'sticky contents' are the undifferentiated goo into which the caterpillar dissolves before re-forming, as if by magic or miracle, into a butterfly. Astonishingly, experiments have shown that adult moths (which go through exactly the same metamorphosis) can retain memory of what they 'learnt' as caterpillars. e.g. avoidance of a particular odour – this after a near-total dissolution of the tissues and the nervous system. How can that be? 

Fire and Plague

 On this day in 1666, the Great Fire of London was still raging, two days after it began, and scenes of devastation lay all around. 'London was, but it is no more,' wrote John Evelyn, summing up the destruction. Thirteen thousand houses, 87 churches, 50 livery halls, the Guildhall and four bridges had been destroyed, and a hundred thousand people made homeless, by the time it burnt itself out. 
  London rose from the ashes, of course, renewed and rebuilt as a Baroque city of brick and stone. And among the other good things that, paradoxically, came of the Great Fire was an end to the Plague that had been scything its way through the population ever since the previous summer. The death toll, in recorded deaths, was nearly 70,000; actual deaths might well have numbered 100,000 – this out of a total population of around half a million. So around fifteen to twenty per cent of London's population had died.  Today that figure would be somewhere around a million and a half to two million deaths.
  How does our current 'plague', Covid-19, compare? The figure for deaths in London is below 7,000, which is around 0.08 per cent (and that's the number of deaths from any cause within 28 days of testing positive, so the real figure is probably a good deal lower). That's the kind of statistic that puts things in perspective. Or should do. 

Remembering Rameau

 The great French composer Jean-Philippe Rameau died on this day in 1764 – which gives me the perfect pretext for paying a return visit to Teodor Currentzis's astonishing album of his music, The Sound Of Light...
Within a generation of his death, Rameau's music was wholly out of fashion and all but forgotten. It was well into the 19th century before there was even a flicker of a revival.  When, in response to the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War, the French began revisiting the glories of their cultural past, Rameau was one of the beneficiaries, and his works began to be performed again in the 1890s. Debussy was one of those who sat up and took notice, recognising in Rameau a kindred spirit, one who, like him, was a great keyboard composer who went on to create entirely new sound worlds. One of the works that particularly impressed him was Rameau's lyric tragedy Castor et Pollux, revived in 1903. Much earlier, Berlioz had also studied Castor et Pollux, and had been particularly struck by the 'air accompagné' Tristes Apprêts – a piece that could hardly be more appropriate on the day of Rameau's death. Currentzis takes it daringly slow and, with the wonderful soprano Nadine Koutcher, creates something of almost unearthly beauty. 

The Death of J.G. Farrell

 The BBC News website has provided this blog with a good deal of innocent fun over the years – see, for example, this and this – so it's only fair to pass on the good news when something worth reading appears there. Today's 'news' included a strangely popular item on the recycling challenge posed by the Pringles carton (and, I might add, many single malt whiskies – nightmare!), but we're going to pass that one by in tactful silence, my point being that today there was also an item worth reading. It was a well made piece on an author I've written about here more than once – J.G. Farrell – and it includes an interesting and terribly sad account of the circumstances of his death.   'He looked at me. And then he turned round and looked at the children...'
I do not recommend following the link to a confected 'outcry' over the forthcoming ITV dramatisation of The Singapore Grip, to which I look forward, not without a degree of trepidation – trepidation that would be rather greater, of course, if it was going out on the BBC. 

Minimifidian

'Oh, why is the mind minimifidian, even to its own ends?'

'Minimifidian' was a new one to me. I discover that it means having or requiring little faith. The sentence above comes from a letter that A.J.A. Symons wrote, late in his short life, to his brother Julian. The word 'minimifidian' is probably one that Symons picked up from Frederick Rolfe, the subject of his classic biography, The Quest for Corvo. Julian quotes the letter in his biography of his brother, A.J.A. Symons: His Life and Speculations. The speculations, by the way, were more financial (or quasi financial) than philosophical.
  Julian's biography of 'A.J.', as he liked to style himself (he understandably hated his first name, Alphonse, and adopted Alroy as a substitute), is a fascinating study of a fascinating man, a true one-off, who died (in 1941, at the age of 41) with much of his potential unfulfilled – though whether it would in fact have been fulfilled is an open question: A.J. was one of those writers who would rather do anything than get down to writing, and he spent much of his life engaged in agreeable displacement activities. Many of these enabled him to rise in society to a level he found congenial. As a young man, he founded the First Edition Club – a kind of lavish London club for rich and convivial bibliophiles (there were such things in those days) – and later, with André Simon, the Wine and Food Society, another way of enjoying himself while, theoretically, making money. Only when both these went into decline did A.J. turn seriously to writing, publishing his masterpiece The Quest for Corvo. His later endeavours, including a very promising biography of Oscar Wilde, were left unfinished at his death.
  Apparently born out of his time, A.J. was fascinated by the literary scene of the 1890s – then quite out of fashion – and became a serious scholar and bibliophile in that field. From boyhood, he was obsessed with certain types of games, developing a fantastically complex Race Game based on horse racing. Later he became fascinated by Victoriana – again unfashionable – collecting music boxes and other such toys, building a 'nationally important' collection of the latter. This could all be taken as so much time wasting by a man who should have been devoting himself to writing, but it was all of a piece with his singular character. His brother makes it clear that he was a man of immense charm and great conversational gifts – also an elegant dandy, who insisted on wearing the double-breasted waistcoat long after it had passed out of fashion – but it seems Julian did not always find him sympathetic, especially in his younger years, and it is easy enough to imagine how infuriating A.J. must sometimes have been. His biography (which I read on the recommendation of Stephen Pentz, having written here about The Quest for Corvo) is sympathetic but balanced and, as John Betjeman said of it, 'a very clever book'. Fittingly, the author has a quotation from his brother as one if its epigraphs:
'To say nothing but good of the dead is a pious convention which has reduced biography to the level of memorial sculpture. I had no wish to add to the number of literary tombstones reciting in favourable phrases the virtues of their subjects.'
No more did Julian. I think A.J. would have been impressed by his younger brother's effort.