'I never took up the lancet again'

 Talking of Keats... I've just read an essay, 'The Medical Keats', by Joseph Epstein, published in his gloriously named collection In a Cardboard Belt! (a reference to a line spoken by Zero Mostel's Max Bialystock in Mel Brooks's The Producers – 'Look at me now! Look at me now! I'm wearing a cardboard belt!'). Of course I'd always known that Keats had some medical training and could be numbered with Chekhov and Rabelais, Sir Thomas Browne and Tobias Smollett, Oliver Goldsmith and Somerset Maugham in the company of writers with medical training (in which company the self-taught apothecary-physician Samuel Johnson could almost be counted). What I had not realised until I read Epstein's essay, was how big a part his medical training played in Keats's life, and how much of that short life it consumed: as Epstein points out, 'Six of his twenty-five years, after all, were spent in medical surroundings and training, and these represented more than half his intellectually conscious life.' He was good at medicine, too, taking a real interest in the subject and passing all his examinations – no mean feat at a time when the great majority of medical students failed and dropped out. 
   Epstein rightly emphasises how tough Keats was, for all his extreme sensitivity. Anyone would have to be tough to endure surgical training at Guy's at that time, especially if you were assigned, as Keats was, to the worst surgeon in the hospital, William Lucas, Jr. William Hale-White (physician son of the author known as Mark Rutherford) wrote in Keats as Doctor and Patient (which Epstein quotes) that 'His surgical acquirements were very small, his operations generally very badly performed and accompanied by much bungling if not worse.' Lucas's colleague Astley Cooper described Lucas as 'neat-handed, but rash in the extreme, cutting amongst most important parts as though they were only skin, and making us all shudder from the apprehension of his opening arteries or committing some other error'. As for conditions in the dissecting room, a contemporary of Keats's wrote that 'On entering the room, the stink was most abominable. About 20 chaps were at work, carving limbs and bodies, in all stages of putrefaction, & of all colours ... while the pupils carved them, apparently, with as much pleasure as they would carve their dinners. One ... amused himself with striking his scalpel at the maggots, as they issued from their retreats.' Such scenes seem not to have unduly disturbed the young Keats, but watching Lucas's butchery surely had an effect, and enhanced his main inhibition – the fear of doing harm. Tough though he was, Keats did not have the steely temperament and massive self-confidence needed to perform surgery, especially in those days before effective anaesthesia and antisepsis. 'My last operation,' he told his friend Charles Brown, 'was the opening of a man's temporal artery. I did it with the utmost nicety; but reflecting on what passed through my mind at the time, my dexterity seemed a miracle, and I never took up the lancet again.'
  Who knows? If the young Keats had not been introduced into literary circles and decided that he must be a poet, he might well have spent the rest of his short life as a physician. Certainly, had he done so, the world would have been immeasurably poorer. 

The Sweet Dove Died: A Strong, Sad Book

 So – The Sweet Dove Died, the Barbara Pym novel to which I turned after the harrowing experience of reading The Blood of the Lamb. The Sweet Dove Died was written in the Sixties, when Pym's star had sunk far below the horizon of fashionable taste, was rejected by 21 publishers in all (even when she sent it in under a male name), and finally published in 1978, after the great Pym revival occasioned by Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil both naming her, in a TLS feature, as the most underrated novelist of the century. 
  The version of the novel published in 1978 differed from its original form, partly in response to Larkin's helpful suggestions: 'With fewer characters and slower movement,' he advised, 'it could be a strong, sad book.' And a strong, sad book it is, also one with rather few characters (and not many pages: it comes in at a bit over 180). The central character is Leonora Eyre, an elegant and attractive middle-aged woman who is taken up by Humphrey Boyce, a pompous upmarket antique dealer, and his ineffectual but personable nephew James, a young man of ambiguous sexuality who has lost both his parents and been, in effect, adopted by Humphrey: 'There was something about the idea of an orphan that brought out the best in Humphrey, that desire to do good without too much personal inconvenience that lurks in most of us.'       Leonora is only too happy to be taken up by Humphrey and James, the former offering a convenient and conventional relationship (though the fastidious Leonora flinches from the prospect of sex with him), the latter something more emotionally satisfying and flattering to her self-image. Between Humphrey's assiduous wooing and James's undemanding adoration, Leonora is in just the kind of situation she likes, with a little world spinning devotedly around her. She is, as we gradually discover, self-centred and self-serving to a quite alarming degree, happy to behave ruthlessly in her own interests, while all the time convinced she is doing absolutely the right thing: whatever serves to keep her little world spinning to her satisfaction can only be the right thing, surely. 
  However, the cosy Humphrey-Leonora-James triangle comes under threat from outside, in the shape of the dangerously amoral Ned, an American whom James meets on his travels. On Leonora's first meeting with him, she feels an instant, cool antagonism, which turns to something more troubling when Ned pointedly quotes to her the seemingly innocuous little poem by Keats from which Pym's novel takes its title: 'I had a dove and the sweet dove died; And I have thought it died of grieving...' Ned goes on, 'his voice lingering over the words and giving them a curious emphasis. "O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied/With a single thread of my own hand's weaving."' Leonora is right to sense danger...
  The Sweet Dove Died darkens towards the end, and has little of the high comedy of her earlier works, but it has real depth, is full of acute observation, and, with its strongly drawn characters and tight, well managed plot, it makes for a richly satisfying read. I'd rate it very high among Pym's novels. And to think – if it hadn't been for Larkin and Cecil, we'd never have heard of it.

Heroic Futility, and R.S.T.

 My Facebook activity is sporadic (life's too short, etc.) and pretty random, but I do have spurts of activity from time to time. One of these recently resulted in me joining something called the Dull Men's Club. The stimulus – hardly the appropriate word – was a piece describing one man's heroically futile journey, by plane, train and automobile, all the way from the West coast of Scotland to Stourbridge in the West Midlands with the sole purpose of taking a ride on the Stourbridge Shuttle, Britain's shortest – and probably dullest – branch line, four-fifths of a mile between Stourbridge Junction and Stourbridge Town, a three-minute journey each way. An account of this adventure appeared under the aegis of the Dull Men's Club, and turned up out of nowhere on my Facebook feed. When I wanted to find it again, it had of course disappeared, so I threw caution to the wind and joined the Dull Men's Club. Or rather, as I later discovered, I joined one of at least three Facebook groups that go by that name (and between them have a worryingly large following) – and of course it was not the one that had carried the post I was looking for. Since then I have found this report, which gives the gist of the story, but is doesn't have the particular flavour of Neil Hughes's original first-person account. 
  Meanwhile, I've found that the Dull Men's Club (UK Chapter) does come up with some good, magnificently dull stuff, which I do find strangely amusing. I should say in my defence that I also recently joined an R.S. Thomas group (guaranteed to crack a smile), Dutch Golden Century Painters, UK Butterflies, Pursuing the Pre-Raphaelites, Painters from the North (i.e. Scandinavia) and other reputable groups. Not to mention my long-standing membership of the estimable Edinburgh Salon. But who could resist the saga of the Stourbridge Shuttle? Not me.
 And talking of R.S. Thomas, here is the poem for today, a sonnet – 'Young and Old'

Cold sea, cold sky:
This is how age looks
At a thing. The people natter,
The wind blows. Nothing they do
Is of worth. The Great problems
Remain, stubborn, unsolved.
Man leaves his footprints
Momentarily on a vast shore.

And the tide comes,
That the children play with.
Ours are the first questions
They shelve. The wind is the blood
In their veins. Above them the aircraft
Domesticate the huge sky.

Novels

 My recent fiction reading has been something of a rollercoaster ride. Reeling from the impact of the horrific Lord Jim at Home, I took refuge in P.G. Wodehouse, whose works are a sovran balm for most of life's ills. I read and enjoyed Service with a Smile (1961), a Blandings novel in which the eternally youthful Uncle Fred sorts out a range of knotty problems presented by various combinations of misunderstandings, impostures, disapproving aunts and crossed wires, all to universal satisfaction – service with a smile indeed. I laughed several times in every chapter – what more could you ask? With my spirits restored, I next took from the shelf a volume I had been meaning to read for some while – Peter de Vries's The Blood of the Lamb. A long time ago – it would have been in the late Seventies and early Eighties – I was a huge fan of Peter de Vries's comic novels, reading them voraciously, and I know that at some point I did read The Blood of the Lamb, but I cannot remember how I responded, nor had I remembered anything about the book itself. I think now that, at the time, it simply bounced off me: I was too young.
  The fine line between comedy and tragedy has often been remarked upon, and it's commonly said that the best comedy comes edged with something dark, even tragic (which clearly does not apply to P.G. Wodehouse). It's certainly true that few writers can write equally convincingly in the comic and the tragic mode, especially in the course of a single work – yet that is what De Vries does in The Blood of the Lamb, which is, for much of its length, an essentially comic novel, but one in which tragedy strikes again and again: I can't recall another modern novel in which so many leading characters die (most of them, in this case, of a single affliction – TB). The narrator is one Don Wanderhope, raised in a strict Dutch Reformed household in Chicago, and his voice is much like that of any other Peter De Vries narrator, except that while telling his tale he is engaged in an epic argument, a battle even, with God, the God who could allow all these cruel deaths to happen. For about the first two thirds of the book, the comedy somehow remains dominant, despite all that is going on, but the rest of the novel is something else, something utterly heartbreaking, at times almost unbearably so. A reviewer in the TLS wrote that 'those who have laughed with De Vries in the past and during this book will not begrudge him their tears'. And I did not begrudge him mine, but once again I was left shaken and in need of a fictional calmative. 
  Happily I found just the thing on the shelves of my favourite charity bookshop – a Barbara Pym that I hadn't read, The Sweet Dove Died. I'm about two thirds of the way through, and loving it. I'll probably have more to say about it soon...

'Listening respectfully to the talk talk talk'

 Slim volumes of Thom Gunn's verse keep turning up in the charity bookshops that I visit, and I invariably snap them up (quite aside from the contents, which I have only come to appreciate in recent years, they are beautifully designed Faber paperbacks – the legacy of Berthold Wolpe – a joy to handle, and they take up very little shelf space). My latest buy was The Passages of Joy (1982) – a Johnsonian title, taken from The Vanity of Human Wishes: 'Time hovers o'er, impatient to destroy, And shuts up all the passages of joy'. Leafing through it, I found 'Keats at Highgate', a sonnet recalling Keats's fortuitous meeting with Coleridge on Hampstead Heath in April 1819. Here's the story as related by Coleridge, writing, with the premonitory wisdom of hindsight, years after the event (1832):

'A loose, slack, and not well dressed youth, met Mr. — and myself in a lane near Highgate. — knew him, and spoke. It was Keats. He was introduced to me and stayed a minute or so. After he had left us a little way, he ran back and said: “Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!” — “There is death in that hand,” I said to —, when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly.'

And here is the story as told by Keats, in the midst of a long letter to his brother and sister-in-law, soon after the event. His account – very different from Coleridge's – rings perfectly true, and includes a wonderfully vivid description of what it must have been like to be subjected to the unstoppable Coleridge in full flow: 

'Last Sunday I took a Walk towards Highgate and in the lane that winds by the side of Lord Mansfield's park I met Mr Green our Demonstrator at Guy's in conversation with Coleridge – I joined them, after enquiring by a look whether it would be agreeable – I walked with him at his alderman-after-dinner pace for near two miles I suppose. In those two Miles he broached a thousand things—let me see if I can give you a list—Nightingales, Poetry—on Poetical sensation—Metaphysics—Different genera and species of Dreams—Nightmare—a dream accompanied by a sense of touch – single and double touch – A dream related – First and second consciousness – the difference explained between will and Volition – so many metaphysicians from a want of smoking the second consciousness – Monsters – the Kraken – Mermaids – Southey believed in them – Southey's belief too much diluted – A Ghost story – Good morning – I heard his voice as he came towards me – I heard it as he moved away – I had heard it all the interval – if it may be called so.'

And here, finally, is Thom Gunn's sonnet: 

Keats at Highgate

A cheerful youth joined Coleridge on his walk
(“Loose,” noted Coleridge, “slack, and not well-dressed”)
Listening respectfully to the talk talk talk
Of First and Second Consciousness, then pressed
The famous hand with warmth and sauntered back
Homeward in his own state of less dispersed
More passive consciousness – passive, not slack,
Whether of Secondary type or First.

He made his way toward Hampstead so alert
He hardly passed the small grey ponds below
Or watched a sparrow pecking in the dirt
Without some insight swelling the mind’s flow
That banks made swift. Everything put to use.
Perhaps not well-dressed but oh no not loose.

Searle's War

 Today is Ronald Searle's birthday. He was born in 1920, and died at a grand old age in 2011 (an event marked on this blog). It was amazing, going on miraculous, that he even made it through his twenties: serving with the Royal Engineers in Singapore in 1942, he was taken prisoner by the Japanese and spent the next three years in the notorious Changi jail, at various camps, and working in the Kwai jungle on the even more notorious Burma railway, the well named 'Death Railway'. He contracted beriberi, dysentery and malaria, among other afflictions, was frequently beaten, and, like all the prisoners of the Japanese, kept on starvation rations. And through it all he drew, on whatever scraps of paper he could come by, recording what was going on around him, even though he knew he would have faced almost certain death if his drawings were discovered. A fellow prisoner described Searle at work: 'If you can imagine something that weighs six stone or so, is on the point of death and has no qualities of the human condition that aren't revolting, calmly lying there with a pencil and a scrap of paper, drawing, you have some idea of the difference of temperament that this man had from the ordinary human being.' 
  Searle hid his drawings, often under the mattresses of fellow prisoners dying of cholera, hoping that the Japanese guards would be too fearful of infection to go near those beds. Astonishingly, some 400 of his drawings survived the war – and so did Searle, who went on to have a glittering career as an illustrator. Most of his PoW drawings are now in the permanent collection of the Imperial War Museum, a valuable record of the brutality visited on their prisoners by the Japanese. They are remarkable not only for their skill but for their calm, dispassionate documentation of the often horrific scenes he recorded; there is none of the expressionistic anguish you might expect. More about this remarkable body of work, about Searle's war, and about the illustrated memoir he subsequently wrote, To the Kwai and Back, can be found here.

March

 The first day of March (St David's Day), so here is a March poem – indeed a poem of two Marches, in which Thomas Hardy, writing in 1913, looks back to the March day in 1870 when he and his new love, Emma Gifford, rode out to Beeny Cliff (in Cornwall), he on a bicycle, she on horseback 'with bright hair flapping free'. She was a bold horsewoman, and remembered in later life 'scampering up and down the hills on my beloved mare alone, wanting no protection, the rain going down my back. … The villagers stopped to gaze when I rushed down the hills … for no one dared except myself to ride in such wild fearless fashion.' Poor Emma made the mistake of marrying Hardy: it was a notably unhappy relationship, partly because of her increasing eccentricity and delusions of grandeur, partly because of his difficult personality. After she died in November 1912, Hardy's mind went back to the early days of their relationship, when there was still some chance of happiness. He revisited the scenes of their romance, and wrote some of his best poetry in the elegiac sequence published as Poems of 1912-13, from which this one is taken... 

Beeny Cliff

March 1870 - March 1913

O the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea,
And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free –
The woman whom I loved so, and who loyally loved me.

The pale mews plained below us, and the waves seemed far away
In a nether sky, engrossed in saying their ceaseless babbling say,
As we laughed light-heartedly aloft on that clear-sunned March day.

A little cloud then cloaked us, and there flew an irised rain,
And the Atlantic dyed its levels with a dull misfeatured stain,
And then the sun burst out again, and purples prinked the main.

Still in all its chasmal beauty bulks old Beeny to the sky,
And shall she and I not go there once again now March is nigh,
And the sweet things said in that March say anew there by and by?

What if still in chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore,
The woman now is – elsewhere – whom the ambling pony bore,
And nor knows nor cares for Beeny, and will laugh there nevermore.

['Mews', by the way, are gulls.]