'it was winter and he sailed quickly'

 Here's a poem for our times, although it was written more than half a century ago. 
The Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert (who claimed he was a distant descendant of our own George Herbert) was a modernist with a classical sensibility, his poetry constantly reaching back to the classics, partly in response to his own experience of the terrible history of Poland through much of the 20th century. He was all too aware of how destructive forces could wipe out countries and cultures, how history and its lessons could be forgotten or denied. His classicism is characterised by Al Alvarez as 'a strict and wary attitude to a situation which is at best prone to romanticism and at worst a violation of all sanity. It is a way of coping coolly with facts which could easily slide out of control.' 

Why the Classics
                         

                                 1
                         in the fourth book of the Peloponnesian War
                         Thucydides tells among other things
                         the story of his unsuccessful expedition

                         among long speeches of chiefs
                         battles sieges plague
                         dense net of intrigues of diplomatic endeavours
                         the episode is like a pin
                         in a forest

                         the Greek colony Amphipolis
                         fell into the hands of Brasidos
                         because Thucydides was late with relief

                         for this he paid his native city
                         with lifelong exile

                         exiles of all times
                         know what price that is

                                 2
                         generals of the most recent wars
                         if a similar affair happens to them
                         whine on their knees before posterity
                         praise their heroism and innocence

                         they accuse their subordinates
                         envious colleagues
                         unfavourable winds

                         Thucydides says only
                         that he had seven ships
                         it was winter
                         and he sailed quickly

                                 3
                         if art for its subject
                         will have a broken jar
                         a small broken soul
                         with a great self-pity

                         what will remain after us
                         will it be lovers' weeping
                         in a small dirty hotel
                         when wall-paper dawns

Herbert's poetry has the great advantage that it translates beautifully into English – that is to say that it reads as if it was written in English (maybe it's the ghostly influence of George Herbert). 

From Lichfield

 That's Samuel Johnson, brooding over the town of his birth, in the fine statue that stands on the market square in Lichfield, between his birthplace – now a museum and (as is only right) a bookshop – and St Mary's, formerly a church and now a library, information centre and 'hub'. The café, built into the nave as a kind of mezzanine, offers quite a view of the East end of the Victorian church (by Fowler of Louth). Those strange halo  things are not UFOs but lights.

Mrs N and I are in Lichfield, staying in the George Hotel, which has a framed quotation from Erasmus Darwin (the city's other most famous son) on the wall of the lounge:

'But thou! whose mind the well-attemper'd ray
Of Taste and Virtue lights with purer day;
Whose finer sense each soft vibration owns
With sweet responsive sympathy of tone;'
(at which point it ends abruptly, but it's nice to see it there). We're likely to be spending a good deal of time in Johnson's home town over the coming weeks and  months, as our son and his family have moved (t)here. And we shall be doing the same at some point. Yes, incredibly, Nige will be leaving the suburban demiparadise. Happily Lichfield is one of the very few places I would leave it for...

Counting Cambridges

 Here, as a counterweight to most of the current 'news', is a nice, cheering story. It's good to know that the Cambridges are taking part in the Big Butterfly Count, doing their bit to 'track the number of diversity of the insects', as the BBC puts it (I fancy these pieces are written in haste). 
  Oddly enough, I've just been writing about how the perceived 'uselessness' of butterflies had, in premodern times, the double effect of making them irrelevant or mildly deplorable in the Christian worldview and, from a more practical angle, not worth finding out about, still less distinguishing into species. All that useless beauty (to paraphrase Elvis Costello) began to cast its spell later: the first major butterfly books were produced by men (and women) who were as much artists as scientists. And, as more was found out about them, butterflies found a new kind of utility, embodying the wonder of creation and the purposes of God. Since then, a more purely scientific approach has taken over, and for a while utility was set aside – these creatures were worthy subjects of study in themselves. Now, at a time when it's safe to say that most people know far less about butterflies than their net-wielding great grandfathers would have done, the ever more popular insects have found a new utility – as 'vital parts of the ecosystem'. Each age sees butterflies in its own way and finds its own value in them. 
  Anyway, it is good that the Cambridges are taking a lively interest in butterflies. My own interest this year has been as lively as ever, but somewhat hampered by poor weather and too much domestic/family busyness, though I've managed to clock up my usual thirtysomething species (and hope for a couple more). Most recently, I took advantage of a rare sunny morning to pay a visit to my nearest decent patch of chalk downland, and found it alive with Chalkhill Blues – a sight to gladden the heart. But I wasn't counting.

Baden Powell's Second Career

 Wikipedia's daily List of Historical Anniversaries is a strange, but sometimes useful, thing. The list of births consists largely of names that mean nothing to me – and some of them are indeed strange. Born on this day, for example (in 1937) was one Baden Powell de Aquino, a Brazilian guitarist, who went by the professional name of 'Baden Powell' – a name that suggests almost anything but guitar playing, particularly in the bossa nova, samba and Latin jazz styles favoured by BP de Aquino.
   This Baden Powell was a beneficiary of his father's enthusiasm for Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scout movement and author of the imperishable Scouting for Boys. In Brazil, it is common for such parental enthusiasms to be inflicted on male offspring in the form of unlikely first names: Wikipedia lists, among many others, Wagner, Mozart, Donizetti, Emerson (as in Fitipaldi, the racing driver), Washington, Jefferson, Nobel and, er, Lenin. A curious convention – but it doesn't seem to have held Baden Powell de Aquino back. 
   (I fancy I might be hearing from my Brazilian follower Ricardo on this one. And, talking of foreign parts, I was startled to discover the other day that this blog has a bigger following in Sweden than anywhere else – indeed Sweden accounts for around two thirds of all views. What on earth could this mean?)

'Suddenly Ivy's face was on the screen...'

 'Write about what you know' is a bit of advice often handed out to would-be writers. This is probably not a great idea, as it is liable to get interpreted as 'write about yourself', and the results will be unfortunate. However, some very fine writers have lived by the precept – none more so, perhaps, than Ivy Compton-Burnett. She knew two things very well: the upper-middle-class milieu of late Victorian-Edwardian England, and the things that families do to each other. Having created a fictional world firmly based on these foundations, she never strayed from it into things she did not know – for example, the way most people lived in the modern world that had developed around her and from which she remained happily insulated. And yet she was insatiably curious about this strange world, reading and even approving of a good many contemporary novels (she even enjoyed Catcher in the Rye – 'Such a clever study of a boy') – and she read newspapers, though of course she never had a television. Ivy liked to steer the conversation towards such unlikely subjects as the price of refrigerators at the Army & Navy Stores, and she enjoyed interrogating her friends about various bewildering features of the modern world. 
  Thus is was that the last conversation (as it turned out) that her typist Cicely Greig had with Ivy [as recounted in Ivy Compton-Burnett: A Memoir] turned on the subject of labour-saving gadgets. She wanted details of any such things that Miss Greig had in her home.
Cicely described a wind-up oven timer, and 
'Ivy listened with great interest. "What else have you got?"
"Someone gave us a pressure cooker. That's marvellous if you want to cook something quickly." I told her about pressure cookers. 
Ivy said: "If these things are really so good, then why don't people have them?"
I said: "Some people do have them ... things like those alarm clocks that wake you up in the morning and make you a cup of tea at the same time."
Ivy was amused and wholly disbelieving...'
Then the subject of the electric mixer comes up. 
'"What does that do?" 
"It mixes," I said, disappointed that I couldn't make wilder claims for it. "You know, it saves you all that beating with a wooden spoon."
Ivy clearly didn't know, but she invited me to go on. Rotisseries, liquidisers, potato peelers... I was getting bored. But not Ivy.'
 Not quite the conversation you would want to remember a great writer by (albeit a slight improvement on the last words she spoke, which were to her devoted housekeeper, Mary, the night before she died: 'Leave me alone.').
Miss Greig found out that Ivy had died when 'some days later, I went to the television room at the club to hear the news, and suddenly Ivy's face was on the screen, and the announcer was telling us that she had died that morning.'

The Whicker Man

 This blog is not going to let the centenary of the birth of Alan Whicker go unmarked. The great journalist and broadcaster, famous for his suave manner, slick phrase-making, highly distinctive delivery, clipped moustache, glasses and blazers, had a hugely successful career that spanned sixty-odd years and, in Whicker's World, much of the globe. He was a gift to impressionists and easily spoofed – most famously in the Whicker Island sketch on Monty Python – and he was quite happy with that, even though he had an impressive body of serious TV journalism behind him. I must admit I never took much notice of him until, in 2004, he came out with an extraordinary series, Whicker's War, in which he recounted his wartime experiences. As a member of the British Army's Film and Photo Unit in Italy, he filmed the landings at Anzio, and was one of the first to enter Milan, where he took into custody an SS general and his men, along with a trunk containing their payroll money and huge amounts of foreign cash. Whicker was also responsible for taking the British traitor John Amery into custody after his arrest by Italian partisans. Whicker's War vividly described these events and many others, as Whicker looked back on his war, often in sadness and sometimes in anger (particularly about the conduct of some American generals). It was a brilliant, eye-opening series, and (as I was writing about TV at the time) I gave it a rave review. Much to my surprise, I subsequently received a cheerily grateful postcard from Whicker, and this was followed by a failed attempt at meeting face to face (I couldn't get away from the office, alas, so never experienced the famous Whicker charm at first hand), and even a Christmas card, bearing an image of a well-muscled surfer with Whicker's face superimposed. We shall not, needless to say, see his like again. 

The Novelist, Her Typist and Her Critics

 Feeling my Ivy Compton-Burnett addiction stirring, and not having an unread novel at hand, I decided to read Ivy Compton-Burnett: A Memoir by Cicely Greig. Miss Greig was Ivy's typist from 1946 to 1969, typing each of her manuscripts as it came along and, in the process, becoming a friend as well as an admirer. 
  A typist's memoir – are there any others? – gives a unique perspective on a novelist's work, for the typist experiences it at close quarters, sentence by sentence, reiterating at one remove the work's creation. And Ivy was a great writer of sentences, composed with Ciceronian poise and surgical precision. Miss Greig analyses closely her technique of excising redundant words and dead phraseology – a technique of which, by virtue of her work, she had a close-up view. She and Ivy grew to understand each other in matters of style, both on the page and in life, where Miss Compton-Burnett's stern late-Victorian manner and very unmodern reticence put many off. Miss Greig saw through all that to the humorous and generous essence of Ivy, for whom friendship was the thing above all that made life liveable and worth living. 
  Miss Greig's (I can't bring myself to call her 'Greig') memoir is interesting also in the light it sheds on Ivy's relationship with the critics who reviewed her works. She was always curious to find out what they had to say, but never took any of it very seriously. Reading some of the reviews quoted by Miss Greig, it's easy enough to see why. For example, the reviews for Two Worlds and Their Ways included this from that humourless dullard C.P. Snow: 
'In order to read this novelist at all, much more to get the maximum out of her work, the reader has to perform a creative act himself; he has to supply the glue which sticks novels together, the ordinary commonplaces which make them real in terms of human sense. No novelist has ever asked so much of her readers; I think it is too much.' 
Two Worlds and Their Ways, writes Miss Greig, 'seems to have frightened Elizabeth Jenkins quite out of her wits. I never quite knew what the phrase meant until I read her review: 
"The work is frightening because it is in the true descent of English fiction – and this is what the family has come to. This dehydrated form of imaginative writing is one aspect of the Zeitgeist, of which artificial insemination and the atomic bomb are another."
Poor Ivy! And how we laughed over that one.'
Philip Toynbee, on the other hand, complained that Ivy's novels weren't frightening enough and didn't rise to the strenuous demands of the age (as defined by P. Toynbee). Her plots, he writes, 
'do not harrow or purge us, and we live in a sad age when not to be harrowed is not to be wholly won. We can only give full admiration where we have ourselves been given pain [!]. Nor is this demand as perverted as it might seem in this bare form. In so far as she fails to disturb us, Miss Compton-Burnett fails.'
  Well, there is plenty wrong with the fiction reviewers of today, but at least they don't write like that. We must be thankful.