PHD

 Glancing at one of the local trade directories that come through the letterbox week after week, I spotted an ad for a company called 'No.1 PHD'. Not, alas, a business offering help with finishing that troublesome thesis – a bit too niche for Lichfield, that – but one devoted to Plumbing, Heating and Drainage. With so many graduates doing the sensible thing these days and becoming plumbers, this seems oddly apt: they're choosing PHD over a Ph.D. And quite right too.

A Bit of Dickens

 Well, it's Charles Dickens's birthday today (born 1812). What can one say? He was the best of novelists, he was the worst of novelists, often in the same book, or even the same chapter. I found him early, through A Christmas Carol and Oliver Twist, and read him for many years, mostly for pleasure, sometimes as curricular obligation. I think Dickens's greatest gift is for the comic and grotesque, and he is therefore at his best with his comic characters, when he can give full rein to the unparalleled demonic energy of his imagination. And lord, he can be funny, genuinely laugh-aloud funny, even today – of how many Victorian humorists can that be said? For sheer enjoyment, my favourite of all his books is the Pickwick Papers, and my favourite character is the one and only Sam Weller (see here and here). Running him close, though, is Mrs 'Sairey' Gamp, the best thing in Martin Chuzzlewit. Mrs Gamp, the nurse-of-all-trades, with her capacious bag and monstrous umbrella, her imaginary friend Mrs 'Arris, her eye for the main chance and taste for gin, is as tumultuous a force of nature as Sam Weller, and very nearly as funny. For some years, the actress Miriam Margolyes did a brilliant impersonation of the immortal Mrs Gamp. Here she is in action at the Malton Dickens Festival (and it's worth seeking out her one-woman show, Dickens' Women on audiobook)...

Beerbohm and Searle

 Naturally, when I saw this item in the window of my favourite charity shop, I had to have it (never mind the tatty dust-wrapper) – a book of drawings by one of the best English draughtsmen of the 20th century, plus 'a letter from Sir Max Beerbohm'!
  Published in 1949, and already in its thirteenth impression in 1956, it was clearly a popular collection, even if the theme of 'The Female Approach' is little more than a peg to hang a clutch of variously themed (or unthemed) drawings on. The drawings are a joy, of course – but what of Sir Max's letter?
'Dear Ronald Searle,' it begins. 'You will perhaps remember that when, one evening, Dr Johnson's young friend Mr Langton, having read aloud to him the first two acts of a very violent tragedy by one of the lesser-known Elizabethan dramatists, said rather nervously, "But I fear, sir, that I weary you. I will read no more," Johnson replied, "No, no, Lanky. Let's go back into the slaughter-house." Perhaps he would not have said so but for the great liking he had for Langton. But rest assured that, though I like you very much, it is in full sincerity that I express great pleasure in finding myself back in the slaughter-house of St Trinian's and other places in which your phantasmagoric fancy goes so wildly rioting...' 
  Searle, with his wife Kaye (Webb, editor of Puffin Books), visited the Beerbohms in Rapallo in 1949, and the charming Searle had no difficulty in getting Max to write the preface for his next collection – The Female Approach. Searle drew Beerbohm at least twice: once in his habitual dress – 

And once for his eightieth birthday Festschrift, this time showing him in a toga with a laurel crown at a rakish angle. The caption reads 'Max accepts with resignation his place among the Classics'.

From Fawlty Towers to Chekhov (or Vice Versa)

 A staple of prostration telly – the kind of restful default TV that you (I anyway) end up with when you haven't the energy to watch anything more demanding, still less turn off and do something worthwhile – is the clip show, a compilation of 'best bits' linked by talking heads. These shows are generally dire, with too many talking heads, none of them with anything to say of the slightest interest, and too little actual content. Often, indeed, the talking heads seem to be there only to tell you what you've just seen, perhaps on the assumption that you're periodically lapsing into unconsciousness – which is not too wide of the mark. These clip shows usually take the form either of 'celebrations', often occasioned by an anniversary, or shock-horror compilations designed to show us how jaw-droppingly unwoke we were back in, say, the Seventies (it's usually the Seventies). 
  Last night on Channel 5 there was a clip show of the celebratory type titled Fawlty Towers: 50 Years of Laughs, and Mrs N and I, being suitably prostrated, found ourselves watching it. The surprise was that this particular show was well made and insightful, with talking heads who actually had something to say – Michael Palin, Dave Quantick and Robin Ince among them – and well chosen clips that illustrated just what a great comedy Fawlty Towers was. It didn't matter that the clips were short: this show was so precision engineered that it was packed with comedy content even on the smallest scale. Of course every clip was familiar, but virtually every one still raised an unforced laugh – and of how many 50-year-old (actually 49-year-old) comedy shows can you say that? The key element was that precision engineering, the thought and effort that had gone into crafting those intricate, minutely detailed scripts – oh, and a brilliant cast, all demonstrating perfect comic timing.
 The scripts were the work of John Cleese (Basil Fawlty) and his then wife Connie Booth (Polly), and I was interested to learn that, before Fawlty Towers, they collaborated on a short film called Romance with a Double Bass. This was based on, of all things, an early Chekhov short story (written in 1886). The original story is a slight affair, a three-page tale, but deftly done. It tells how an orchestral bassist, arriving early for a princess's ball, decides to cool off by taking a naked dip in a pond on the estate. As it happens, the princess too has had the same idea, both their clothes are stolen, and, after an embarrassing nude encounter, the bassist tries to smuggle the naked princess into the palace in his double-bass case. In 1974, when the film was made, comedies involving nudity and suggestively placed props were quite the thing, and so this improbable Chekhov adaptation came about. It's available on YouTube, but I can't say I recommend it. An interesting curiosity, though, and it does show Cleese developing the comedy acting skills that would come to the fore the following year in Fawlty Towers. 
  The bad news is that there has been talk of a belated revival of Fawlty Towers, starring Cleese and his daughter Camilla and 'probably' set in the Caribbean. However, it's beginning to look as if, with luck, this might never get made. 

Rachmaninov's Last Student

 I must pass this rather wonderful story on, having found it on Facebook, where Michael Goldfarb (hat-tip) had posted it. 
Rachmaninov's last student has died, in Pennsylvania, at the age of 99, after a nine-decade career.
Follow the link (and check out her Chopin)...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2024/02/03/ruth-slenczynska-rachmaninov-piano-student/

Evensong

 Evensong is surely the quintessential Anglican, and therefore the quintessential English, church service. Taking place in the softening twilight at day's end, it perfectly embodies the Church of England's preference for blurred dogmatic outlines, with the weight of meaning borne by beautiful words (at least in more traditional liturgical practice) and beautiful music, rather than by anything too stark and prescriptive (though there is no escaping the Apostles' Creed). Evensong, you might say, is a rite of 'ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds': Wallace Stevens certainly wasn't thinking of the Church of England when he wrote his twilit poem The Idea of Order at Key West, but the closing lines could almost be applied... 'Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, And of ourselves and of our origins, In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.' It is surely significant, too, that the archetypally English poem, Gray's Elegy, is a long meditation at twilight in an English churchyard – an evensong poem, if ever there was one. 
All of which is by way of saying that the Evensong I attended last night in the cathedral – a Solemn Choral Evensong for Candlemas – was one of the most perfectly beautiful services I have ever experienced, a simple, intimate, quietly perfect mix of words and music with never a false note, sustaining a calm, unforced exaltation. The music was Orlando Gibbons's Short Service, and there was one anthem, 'When to the Temple Mary Came' by Johannes Eccard. The choir, of course, were excellent.
Here is the Eccard anthem, sung by the choir of my old college...

'Gay lucidity'

 Well, it's February, and on this first of the month, with the sun almost shining, there is indeed a certain 'gay lucidity' in the air. The phrase forms the first line of a neat little poem by 'Michael Field', the name under which Katherine Harris Bradley and her niece Edith Emma Cooper wrote, with considerable success, attracting favourable attention from Walter Pater, George Meredith and Robert Browning, the last of whom inadvertently let slip the true identity of 'Michael Field'. The two ladies were passionately involved with one another, and were no doubt in what we would now call a lesbian relationship; such arrangements barely raised an eyebrow in Victorian times. Their poetic output was forgotten after their deaths (within months of each other, in 1913 and 1914), but the rise of 'Queer Studies' has led to some revival of interest. Here's the poem –

February

Gay lucidity,
Not yet sunshine, in the air;
Tingling secrets hidden everywhere,
Each at watch for each;
Sap within the hillside beech,
Not a leaf to see.


And here is one of 'Michael Field's translations from Sappho –

XXXVI

Yea, gold is son of Zeus: no rust

    Its timeless light can stain;

The worm that brings man's flesh to dust

    Assaults its strength in vain:

More gold than gold the love I sing,

A hard, inviolable thing.

Men say the passions should grow old

     With waning years; my heart

Is incorruptible as gold,

     'Tis my immortal part:

Nor is there any god can lay

On love the finger of decay.