A Bullet from the Back of a Bush

 The Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum is also, as is only fitting, a bookshop, and the other day there were a few books outside on offer at £1 each. One caught my eye immediately – The Still Moment. Eudora Welty: Portrait of a Writer by Paul Binding, a book I never knew existed. Naturally I snapped it up. 
  The Still Moment begins, arrestingly, with the murder of the black civil rights activist Medgar Evers outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi, the town where Eudora Welty lived and died. Evers was shot from behind in a targeted attack by a white man, and his death caused an immediate outcry, sparking riots all over the Southern States. Welty's immediate reaction was to write a short story about the killing, writing it in the first person because 'I am in a position where I know. I know what this man must feel like. I have lived with this kind of thing.' The story, 'Where Is the Voice Coming From?', was written at one sitting on the day of Evers's death, and sent immediately to William Maxwell at The New Yorker. He decided to publish in the next issue, but it turned out that Welty's insight into the mind, motive and modus operandi of the killer was so uncannily accurate that details had to be changed for fear of prejudicing the case against the man who had now been arrested for Evers's murder. 'The route taken, the hour, the how and why of the crime – Eudora Welty had divined them all.'
  Welty's protagonist, exasperated by the attention given to a high-profile black activist in his town, decides to take the law into his own hands and get rid of him. He drives to his target's house late at night, parks his borrowed truck behind a tree, and awaits the man's return. The shooting exhilarates him – 'I was on top of the world myself. For once' – and he feels he has done his duty by his community, acting true to his own and that community's convictions. 'I done what I done for my own pure-D satisfaction,' he boasts, unrepentant, revelling in his notoriety, and facing arrest and the possibility of the  electric chair with equanimity. In the event, the real-life killer, one Byron de la Beckwith, was tried twice in Mississippi and acquitted twice when the all-white juries failed to agree. It was not until 1994 that he was finally convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. 
  The murder of Medgar Evers inspired Bob Dylan's 'Only a Pawn in Their Game' – not his best or most successful protest song, though it gets off to a cracking start – 'A bullet from the back of a bush Took Medgar Evers' blood...' (Oddly, and coincidentally, reminiscent of the opening of Geoffrey Hill's 'The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy' – 'Crack of a starting-pistol. Jean Juarès dies in a wine-puddle.'). Here is young Bobby singing 'Only a Pawn' at the March on Washington in 1963...

A Tenor Centenary

 Born on this day exactly a century ago was the great Italian tenor Carlo Bergonzi. He was born near Parma, and according to Wikipedia he left school at 11 to work in a Parmesan cheese factory, where he was often in trouble for singing while at work (which seems unlikely in Italy). During the war he became involved in anti-Nazi activities and was interned for two years in a German prisoner of war camp. After being released by the Russians, he walked some 65 miles to get to an American camp, catching typhoid fever along the way. When he resumed his musical studies at the Arrigo Boito conservatory in Parma, he weight barely 80lb, but this seems to have had no long-term effects on his health, and he lived to the age of 90. 
  I came to opera late, and my way in was largely through cheap compilations of arias and duets, many of which, happily, featured Bergonzi's wonderfully natural voice, sometimes in combination with that of Renata Tebaldi, who seemed the perfect match. Their rendering of 'O Soave Fanciulla' from La Bohème still sends a shiver down my spine. Here it is...

Fleur's Jandals

 In my half sleep this morning, I half heard some talk of the New Zealand poet Fleur Adcock on Radio 3, and I believe one of her poems was read. Later, after I'd surfaced to face the day, I looked her up and was pleased to find that she is still alive – 90 now – and, since 2008, a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. Over the years I've come across quite a few of her poems, mostly in anthologies. She writes a kind of cool, jaunty, no-nonsense light verse which reads easily and often leaves a feeling of good cheer in its wake – which is not a common thing among modern poets. Indeed, one of her poems, 'Londoner', opens Wendy Cope's cheering anthology, Heaven on Earth: 101 Happy Poems. Mutatis mutandis, this one has a slight feel of Frank O'Hara about it, and it brings back to me something of the excitement I used to feel about being young and at large in London. Here it is – 

Londoner

Scarcely two hours back in the country
and I'm shopping in East Finchley High Road
in a cotton skirt, a cardigan, jandals* –
of flipflops as people call them here,
where February's winter. Aren't I cold?
The neighbours in their overcoats are smiling
at my smiles and not at my bare toes:
they know me here.
                                 I hardly know myself,
yet. It takes me until Monday evening,
walking from the office after dark
to Westminster Bridge. It's cold, it's foggy,
the traffic's as abominable as ever,
and there across the Thames is County Hall,
that uninspired stone body, floodlit.
It makes me laugh. In fact, it makes me sing.

* 'Jandals', a conflation of 'Japanese' and 'sandals', is a New Zealand word for light sandals with a thong between the first two toes. 

'It's perhaps not surprising...'

 I was amused to read in the latest issue of Butterfly magazine that counting butterflies reduces anxiety by nine per cent on average, while also 'enhancing mental wellbeing'. It seems that spending just 15 minutes watching and counting butterflies made people 'feel more connected with nature'. Who'd have guessed? The research that came up with these findings was conducted by Butterfly Conservation in collaboration with the University of Derby, and comes ahead of this year's Big Butterfly Count, in which thousands of people note what butterflies they see, and in what numbers. 'It's perhaps not surprising that spending time in nature, looking at butterflies, is good for our mental health,' says Butterfly Conservation's head of science, with commendable understatement. The finding is of course yet another example of science validating what we already knew, thereby making it somehow more 'true' than it was before receiving this essential endorsement. And there's more, equally unsurprising: it seems the salutary effects of watching butterflies  last for six or seven weeks after the butterfly watching ends. 
  All this is, I suppose, mildly heartening, but I fear those taking part in this year's Butterfly Watch might find the experience less sustaining than usual. It's been a dire butterfly season so far, with way too much rain (and wind) and way too little in the way of sunshine and warmth. As it happens, I'm just back from a couple of days in Worthing ('Worthing is a place in Sussex. It is a seaside resort'*), where this morning the sun was shining brightly and the wind had dropped, so I was hoping to see some butterflies as I took my constitutional – but no such luck: in particular places where before I've seen the likes of Painted Ladies, Red Admirals, Commas and more, nothing was flying but a few whites and a single Speckled Wood. I'm already dreading the jeremiads that will surely follow the results of this year's Big Butterfly Count... 

* Jack Worthing to Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, which was written in Worthing.)

'The writer of some infidel poetry'

 This day in 1822 was the date of the most archetypically, even iconically, romantic of all the Romantic poets' deaths – that of Percy Bysshe Shelley, drowned in the Ligurian sea, and cremated on the beach by his friends. Unmoved, the London newspaper The Courier marked his death thus: 'Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned; now he knows whether there is a God or not.' 
  The famous littoral cremation did not go entirely smoothly. I tell the story in my book, The Mother of Beauty (still available on Amazon or direct from me), writing of
'Shelley’s dramatically informal ‘pagan’ cremation on the beach at Viareggio, an event stage-managed and later much mythologised by the writer and adventurer Edward Trelawny. Shelley drowned when the boat he was sailing was caught in a sudden storm, and his body was washed up ten days later at Viareggio, along with his two sailing companions. They were identifiable only by their clothes – and, in Shelley’s case, a volume of Keats that he had crammed into his pocket. With the help of Italian soldiers who were on hand, guarding the bodies, Trelawny built the funeral pyre and set it alight, while his friends Byron and Leigh Hunt looked on. The fierce heat of blazing resinous pine took Trelawny by surprise and drove the onlookers away to a safe distance. As the flames began to die down, Trelawny poured on frankincense and salt, then wine and oil, in the manner of the ancient Greeks, and that was that. The three men then took a long swim out from the shore, and, in one final romantic gesture, Trelawny seized Shelley’s heart from the embers of his pyre. (That heart now resides in the Shelley family vault at St Peter’s, Bournemouth, along with the body of Mary Shelley and the remains of her parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, dug up from the churchyard of Old St Pancras).'
The volume of Keats was Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and other poems (1819). There is some doubt over whether the unburnt remnant snatched from the pyre was actually Shelley's heart or some other organ, perhaps his liver. Either way, Trelawny gave it to Leigh Hunt, who for some while refused to hand it over to Mary Shelley, but finally relented. There is doubt too about the final resting place of the presumed heart, which might be at Christchurch Priory rather than St Peter's, Bournemouth. A piece of jawbone, also retrieved from the pyre, was eventually donated to the Keats-Shelley Memorial in Rome.  

Gerontius, and a Jarring Phrase

A while back, having read a devastating German and a sour Austrian novel back to back, I vowed to return to English fiction with my next selection from the charity shop fiction shelves. Those trusty shelves duly obliged by delivering into my hands Gerontius by James Hamilton-Paterson, a novel that I remembered having intended to read when it came out (in 1989 – 35 years ago now!).  
  Gerontius is a beautifully written, psychologically convincing account of a sea voyage undertaken in 1923 by an ageing Sir Edward Elgar, taking him over the ocean to Brazil and on into Amazonia as far as Manaus. He is known to have visited and admired the grand opera house there, but otherwise the whole unlikely episode is barely documented, so Hamilton-Paterson has free rein to make of it what he will. So far, I am only about halfway through – it's a fat book and I'm a slow reader – but I am impressed and thoroughly engrossed. As well as being an account of a sea voyage, Gerontius is also a journey around Elgar's life and mind, his anxieties and preoccupations, his uneasy relationship with his muse and with the social world, his grief for his wife, his many exasperations, his love of tinkering and 'japes', his susceptibility, perhaps, to something like late-life romance... I've read nothing else by this author – described on Wikipedia as 'the most reclusive of British literary exiles' – but I'm strongly tempted by a novel titled Cooking with Fernet Branca., which sounds very different indeed from Gerontius. 
  Anyway, to the point, if it is a point. There I was, reading away in Gerontius, when I was snagged by a jarring phrase that struck me as surely an anachronism. A character uses the expression 'economical with the truth', which I don't recall ever having heard before it entered the mainstream in 1986 after a senior civil servant (Sir Robert Armstrong) used it in the 'Spycatcher' trial. Surely no one in 1923 would be using the phrase? The idea itself, but not the wording, can be found in Mark Twain – 'Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economise it' (1897) –  and Edmund Burke: 'As in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an economy of truth' (1796). It seems the actual words 'economical with the truth' might well have been in circulation, but are only recorded in obscure sources – The Iron and Metal Trades: Birmingham, 1897 ('One can say without being economical with the truth that they are in a state of "masterly inactivity"'), The Weekly Underwriter, 1897 ('The insurance superintendent of Kansas is said to be very economical with the truth'), and the record of debates in the New Zealand House of Representatives, 1923 ('It is not well to be too economical with the truth'). So the use of the expression in Gerontius is perhaps not anachronistic; it just sounds that way. Not that it matters. 

'I humbly hope to meet again and to part no more'

 I've dropped in on the little church of St Chad's, overlooking Stowe Pool in Lichfield, several times, but had somehow failed to spot these two Johnsonian tablets on the South wall until the other day. The upper one (harder to read in the picture) commemorates Johnson's stepdaughter, Lucy Porter, daughter of his wife 'Tetty' and her first husband, and the lower commemorates Catherine Chambers, 'the faithful servant of Michael Johnson [Samuel's father] and his family'. Catherine Chambers's tablet was erected long after her death, but Lucy Porter's is contemporaneous. It reads: 'In a Vault near this Place are deposited the Remains of LUCY PORTER, who died the 13th of January 1786, aged 70 Years. To whose Memory, in Gratitude for her liberal Acts of Friendship conferred on him, this Monument is erected by the Revd J.B. Pearson.'
  Pearson had reason to be grateful. He and Lucy Porter had become close friends in her later years, and at times he was the only person she would admit to visit her. His visits, and their games of piquet, apparently cheered her, though there were times when he exasperated her. Mrs Thrale/Piozzi relates, on the authority of Johnson himself, how 'being opposed one day in conversation by a clergyman who came often to her house, and feeling somewhat offended, cried out suddenly, 'Why, Mr. Pearson,’ said she, ‘ you are just like Dr. Johnson, I think: I do not mean that you are a man of the greatest capacity in all the world like Dr. Johnson, but that you contradict one every word one speaks, just like him.’
However, their friendship was strong, and Lucy Porter's gratitude real. Pearson, who was Curate of St Chad's, was the principal beneficiary in her will, inheriting a handsome sum of money and many Johnsonian relics – her final 'liberal Acts of Friendship'. 
   Johnson's relations with his stepdaughter were not entirely easy. Though he was, by all reports, 'ever attentive and kind' to Lucy, she was generally indifferent. He told Mrs Thrale that Lucy 'considers me one of the external and accidental things that are taken or left without emotion', though she seems to have warmed somewhat to him later in life. Recently a New Year letter from Johnson to his step-daughter came up for auction. It begins: 'Dearest Madam – I ought to have begun the new year with repairing the omissions of the last'. Johnson wishes Lucy 'long life and happiness always encreasing [sic] till it shall at last end in the happiness of heaven'. He meanwhile is 'pretty much disordered by a cold and cough', has just been 'blooded' [bled], and asks her to give his love to 'Kitty'.
  This 'Kitty' is the same Catherine Chambers memorialised in the lower tablet in St Chad's. She was officially Johnson's mother's maid, but became much more than that, living with her for 35 years, and caring devotedly for her in her last illness. Johnson always held her in very high regard. He is quoted on her memorial tablet (erected in 1910): 'My dear old friend Catherine Chambers; she buried my father and my mother and my brother ... I humbly hope to meet again and to part no more.'