Singing Doughty in the Bath

Reading my latest charity bookshop purchase – Ariel: A Literary Life of Jan Morris, by Derek Johns (with line drawings by Jan Morris) – I learn that Morris early in his career fell under the spell of Charles Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta. This is one of those books that is deeply enchanting to some and quite unreadable to others. James (as he then was) Morris was very much in the former camp: 'It called to me out of desert lands,' Jan recalled in an interview, 'but its meanings were less seductive to me than its sensually exciting rhythms ... For years I used to sing its opening paragraph in the bath, to a melody of my own invention.' That would have been something to hear... 
This is that opening paragraph:

'A new voice hailed me of an old friend when, first returned from the Peninsula, I paced again in that long street of Damascus which is called Straight; and suddenly taking me wondering by the hand, "Tell me (said he), since thou art here again in the peace and assurance of Ullah, and whilst we walk, as in the former years, toward the new blossoming orchards, full of the sweet Spring as the garden of God, what moved thee, or how couldst thou take such journeys into the fanatic Arabia?"'

Happily Doughty does not seem to have had much effect on Morris's literary style. A more benign influence was surely Kinglake's Eothen, the first book Morris read on the Middle East, an idiosyncratic and hugely enjoyable masterpiece. Here is the opening paragraph of Eothen:

 'At Semlin I still was encompassed by the scenes and the sounds of familiar life; the din of a busy world still vexed and cheered me; the unveiled faces of women still shone in the light of day. Yet, whenever I chose to look southward, I saw the Ottoman's fortress – austere, and darkly impending high over the vale of the Danube – historic Belgrade. I had come, as it were, to the end of this wheel-going Europe, and now my eyes would see the splendour and havoc of the East.'

That seems to me rather more musical than Doughty's paragraph, but I wouldn't care to sing either in the bath. 

Lush Life

 Until I happened to hear it on Radio 3 yesterday (at which point I suspended all activity and listened awestruck until it was over), I had somehow never come across Billy Strayhorn's brilliant song 'Lush Life', nor this perfect rendition of it by Ella Fitzgerald, with Duke Ellington (though I believe she had a different accompanist on the Radio 3 version). Listen and marvel at the sheer artistry of all concerned...

'those brilliant creatures...'

 This has been a beautiful autumn (here in the Southeast at least), with plenty of warmth and mellow sunshine, to say nothing of a prodigious abundance of conkers and just about every other tree fruit.
Here is a fittingly seasonal poem, a well-known and rather beautiful one, by Yeats (of the baleful influence)...

The Wild Swans at Coole

The trees are in their autumn beauty,	 
The woodland paths are dry,	 
Under the October twilight the water	 
Mirrors a still sky;	 
Upon the brimming water among the stones	         
Are nine and fifty swans.	 
  
The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me	 
Since I first made my count;	 
I saw, before I had well finished,	 
All suddenly mount	  
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings	 
Upon their clamorous wings.	 
  
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,	 
And now my heart is sore.	 
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,	  
The first time on this shore,	 
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,	 
Trod with a lighter tread.	 
  
Unwearied still, lover by lover,	 
They paddle in the cold,	  
Companionable streams or climb the air;	 
Their hearts have not grown old;	 
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,	 
Attend upon them still.	 
  
But now they drift on the still water	  
Mysterious, beautiful;	 
Among what rushes will they build,	 
By what lake's edge or pool	 
Delight men's eyes, when I awake some day	 
To find they have flown away?

Coole Park was in Yeats's day the home of Lady Gregory, who entertained the poet there and assiduously looked after him – so much so that he once said of her, 'I doubt I should have done much with my life but for her firmness and care.' Coole Park is today a nature reserve, part of an important wetland system, but its literary associations remain in evidence, and the Autograph Tree – a Copper Beech on which Lady Gregory's literary guests carved their initials – still stands. To judge by the photograph below, one George Bernard Shaw was especially determined to make his mark. No surprise there.

Hail Again, Zog!

 Today being the birthday of King Zog of Albania (born 1895), and your humble servant being embroiled yet again in house move-related busyness, I take the liberty of reprinting a piece I posted on this day in 2009 –

'Today is the birthday of the self-proclaimed King Zog of Albania (born 1895), a glamorous, high-living figure who reigned as constitutional monarch from 1928 to 1939, replaced Islamic law with a Swiss-style civil code, survived more than 50 assassination attempts – in one of which he exchanged fire with his would-be assassins – invented the Zogist salute (right hand flat over the heart, palm facing downwards), was deposed by Mussolini, and ended his days as a Riviera recluse.
The throne of Albania seems for a while to have exerted a strange fascination. The cricketer – or rather, in John Arlott's phrase, 'the most variously gifted Englishman of any age' – C.B. Fry claimed he was offered it while on League of Nations business in Geneva in 1920. He might well have been – but one Otto Witte, a German circus acrobat and fantasist, claimed to have gone one better and been crowned King of Albania in 1913. Noting his resemblance to a nephew of the Sultan who had been invited by some Albanian Muslims to assume the throne, Witte travelled to Albania with a sword-swallower friend, and was duly acclaimed as King by local troops. In the five days before his ruse was discovered, he enjoyed the delights of the harem and took the opportunity to declare war on Montenegro. Unsurprisingly, no evidence was ever found to support Witte's story –but the Berlin police allowed him to describe himself as 'former King of Albania' on his identity card. I wouldn't be surprised if Albania's national hero, Norman Wisdom*, regales his captive audience at the twilight home where he now resides with tales of how he too was offered the throne of Albania.'

* Now no longer with us. Wisdom's films were the only Western movies the dictator Enver Hoxha allowed to be shown in Albania. This was perhaps to kill off any desire in the population to defect to the West. 

A Fire and a New World

This remarkable painting of spectators watching a fire raging through the San Marcuola district of Venice is a late work by Francesco Guardi, born on this day 310 years ago. Guardi used to get lumped in with Canaletto as another accomplished vedutista, but it soon became apparent that he was a much more interesting and original figure than that. Many of his paintings are 'caprices', imaginary scenes built around an architectural landscape of his own invention rather than what was before his eyes. With his free brushwork and subdued palette, he created a pictorial world far removed from Canaletto's crisply linear topographical works, something closer to Piazzetta. 
  I would place the picture above with Domenico Tiepolo's The New World (below) as one of the great paintings of the Venetian decadence. Both show the backs of a gawping crowd, gawping at the last novelties and spectacles of a world that is passing away, a decadent, outworn society amusing itself as it awaits its inevitable fate (The New World was completed in the year in which Venice fell to Napoleon). Both are infused with a very Venetian melancholy, the feeling of Browning's 'A Toccata of Galuppi's'. 'Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned...'

Dulness

 On the radio this morning, I heard the creator of the recent BBC TV series Marriage talking about the show and its divisive effect on viewers and critics, many of whom loved it and many of whom, myself included, were deeply unimpressed. He seemed like a nice chap, and I warmed to him as he talked feelingly about the dire state of TV drama and its ever increasing distance from anything like life as it is actually lived and people as they actually are. Marriage was a well intentioned attempt to return TV drama to something like real life – but I still think (having somehow ended up watching the whole series) that it was a failure, largely because it was, as so many viewers pointed out, dull. But let's be clear about the nature of that dulness: it was not dull because nothing happened. As someone once said, Waiting for Godot is a play in which 'nothing happens – twice', but it is an enthralling drama and has become a classic. In TV drama, I remember another series in which virtually nothing happened – Roger and Val Have Just Got In, with Dawn French and Alfred Molina. That was ten years ago now, but it still lingers in my memory, and it was utterly gripping at the time. Why? Because the characters at the centre of it (in fact the only characters we see) were so fully imagined and compellingly drawn, as well as brilliantly acted; the script made us believe in them, and want to know what was going on between them – what had happened, why were they the way they were? The direction and editing were tight, intensifying our interest in this seemingly ordinary couple doing nothing very much, and the script said enough and said it naturally, without the contrived pauses, silences and aborted utterances that were so plentiful in Marriage. There, the script was too sketchy to carry much weight,  and the characters too felt sketched in rather than fully realised. As for the direction, with its endless longueurs, this did nothing to dispel the sense of dulness – not the dulness of nothing happening but the dulness of a drama that is ultimately underdeveloped, underimagined.   
  On the radio, the show's creator told how he wrote Marriage during lockdown, just as he was discovering for the first time the music of Bach, which he now listens to to the exclusion of almost anything else. Another reason to warm to him. What a shame he didn't use some Bach as the music for Marriage, rather than that bizarre 'To the side, to the side' business that broke in at the end of every episode. 

Horowitz

 Born on this day in 1903 – in Kyiv, as it happens – was the pianist Vladimir Horowitz (pictured above, cutting a rug at Studio 54 in 1978). A dazzlingly virtuosic player, he became ever more the showman as his career progressed, but he had his quieter moments, and did much to bring Scarlatti's extraordinary body of work to the attention of the concert-going public. Here he is playing Scarlatti's beautiful B minor sonata...