'Omnibus, Omnibus!'

 I don't suppose George Moore (that's him above, drawn by Manet) is much read these days, though his Esther Waters is still in print, and it was televised as recently as 1977 (recently? That's getting on for half a century ago.) It's a fine realist novel that is still, I think, worth reading – I've read it twice, and also tackled Moore's Confessions of a Young Man, his lively memoir of life among the Impressionists in the Paris of the 1870s and 80s, but I don't think I finished that one; I seem to remember something vaguely off-putting in the tone.
   It seems that putting people off was rather his métier, especially as he grew older and more irascible, falling out with many friends, including Yeats. Oliver St John Gogarty said of him: 'It was impossible to be a friend of his, as he was incapable of gratitude.' Much of his work (including Esther Waters) was controversial in its time, and he was happy to court controversy. One of his later novels, The Brook Kerith, sounds interesting (and controversial), relating how a purely human Jesus did not die on the cross, but survived, was nursed back to health, and lived to repent his pride in declaring himself the Son of God. Moore travelled to Jerusalem to research this one, and it was presumably what was on his mind when Edith Sitwell had the misfortune to cross his path, at the Regent's Park home of Sir Edmund and Lady Gosse (as she recalls in Taken Care Of):
'Mr Moore had not, I think, arrived in a very happy frame of mind; and this state was aggravated by the conversational habits of another guest. At first Mr Moore remained steeped in an impenetrable gloom, but after a while he turned to me, and in a voice shaking with indignation, hissed: "Yes, yes, yes, forty million thousand yes's. How can I talk when someone says yes, yes, yes?"
   To this question, no answer could be returned, so I remained silent. Afterwards Mr Moore relented so far as to speak of a most interesting book called the Bible, which contained the intimate history of a most interesting people, the Jews, and, as well, to inform me that he had discovered there was a vehicle called an omnibus which would take one to any destination, should one be fortunate enough to attract its attention. As we left the house Mr Moore perceived one of these vehicles, and rushed towards it crying "Omnibus, Omnibus!" But alas, he was not fortunate on this occasion, and did not attract he attention of the omnibus, which went on its way without him.'

'A rather solemn and high-toned mediocrity'

R.S. Thomas was never Poet Laureate – would he have accepted the post if offered?  Probably not, but he did accept, among other honours, the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1964, and had  no objection to being nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996 (Seamus Heaney won). Betjeman, of course, was Poet Laureate, from 1972 to 1984, and made a fine job of it; he was probably the last laureate who really fitted the role. 
   In his essay 'Thank You, No' Joseph Epstein – with one published poem to his name – admits that 'I would like to be asked to be poet laureate of the United States so that I could refuse it, for this seems to me a job that would bring much greater glory to turn down than to take up'. He takes a dim view of the American laureateship, and an equally dim one of the British original, at least in its more recent manifestations: 'Andrew Motion, the current poet laureate [Epstein is writing in 2005], whose biography of Philip Larkin fingered the best poet of his time for being politically incorrect, is the perfect man for the job. What is wanted in a poet laureate is a rather solemn and high-toned mediocrity, someone whose work, though perfectly acceptable in its time, is unlikely to divert the attention of posterity.' (True enough generally, but not of Betjeman, who was certainly neither solemn nor high-toned.) 
  'As one runs down the list of American poets laureate,' writes Epstein, 'the only explanation for certain names appearing there is that they are either women or black or otherwise "with the show", as they say on the carnival grounds. Make the ostensibly sweet bow in the direction of political correctness, and art, like reality in the face of a social science concept, leaves the room.' Those words were true when Epstein wrote them, and even truer now, in a world in which 'political correctness' has been replaced by 'wokeness', a much more potent and pernicious force, which has been carrying all before it, driving out art and reality alike. 

'Readers in a baize library'

 I must have half a dozen slim volumes of R.S. Thomas's poetry, mostly dating from his later years and published by Bloodaxe Books. Today, browsing in my favourite charity bookshop, I found yet one more – a posthumous collection called Residues (2002), the title Thomas himself had given to a file of typescript poems he left behind at his death, from which his literary executor M. Wynne Thomas compiled the slim volume. 
One of the poems in Residues is 'Remembering Betjeman' – an unlikely subject perhaps, as these were, on the face of it, two poets of very different kidney, and Thomas, the 'Welsh Ogre', was not the most clubbable of writers, nor the most anglophile. However, Betjeman had a very high regard for Thomas, and in his introduction to the collection Song at the Year's Turning: Poems 1942-54, wrote that 'the "name" who has the honour to introduce this fine poet to a wider public [this was Thomas's first mainstream publication] will be forgotten long before that of R.S. Thomas'.  In 'Remembering Betjeman' Thomas recalls a visit to his fellow poet's London house, overlooking the graveyard of St Bartholomew the Great. 

The only greenness
from your city
window was that of the grass
in the cemetery
outside. The stones
bent over it likes readers
in a baize library
out of the way
of the traffic. I caught
your gaze homing
there and changed the talk
from poetry to prose, 
enquiring from the living
what only the dead
knew, who had all time
on their side.
                      Into that room,
now that you have left
it, the view enters
unchanged; the grass
is absorbing, the readers
have not looked up
from their breathless
pondering of the manuscript
of the deaf and dumb.
It is a slow view, but one
never to be overtaken
by the hurrying images
of that other window
your successor has turned to,
tipplers at an existence
that has everything
this one has not 
except its repose. 

'White with fury and contempt'

'When I was about twelve years old,' Edith Sitwell recalls in Taken Care Of, 'my father determined that He (I must really use a capital letter in this connection) must be portrayed for posterity ...  After a good deal of fussing, he decided that Sargent was to be the artist whom he would take under his wing, and he set about teaching the gentleman in question his business.
  My father was portrayed in riding-dress (he never rode), my mother in a white-spangled low evening gown and a hat with feathers, arranging, with one prettily shaped, flaccid, entirely useless hand, red anemones in a silver bowl (she never arranged flowers, and in any case, it would have been a curious occupation for one wearing a ball-dress, even if, at the same time, she wore a hat). 
  The colour of the anemones was repeated in my scarlet dress. I was white with fury and contempt, and indignant that my father held me in what he thought was a tender paternal embrace. (I was freed from my Bastille* during the period of the sittings.) Osbert and Sacheverell, sitting on the floor, playing with my mother's black pug, were the only beings that seemed to have any trace of life. Mr Sargent, a kind and charming man, kept them more or less quiet by reciting to them the following verse, repeated at intervals: 
        There was a young lady of Spain
        Who always was sick on the train – 
        Not once and again,
        Or again and again –
        But again and again and again.
  The portrait was painted against the background of one of the great Renishaw** tapestries – depicting Justice, as it happened.'

* The 'Bastille' was a hideous torture device intended to correct Edith's slight stoop and weak ankles. Under the direction of a Mr Stout (who looked like 'a statuette constructed of margarine'), she was, she recalls, 'incarcerated in a sort of Bastille of steel. This imprisonment began under my arms, preventing me from resting them on my sides. My legs were also imprisoned down to my ankles, and at night-time these, and the soles of my feet, were locked up in an excruciating contraption. Even my nose did not escape this gentleman's efficiency, and a band of elastic surrounded my forehead, from which two pieces of steel (regulated by a lock and key system) descended on each side of the organ in question, with thick upholstered pads at the nostrils, turning my nose very firmly to the opposite way which Nature had intended, and blocking one nostril, so that breathing was difficult.'
 Edith's dreadful father made much of her crooked nose when setting up the portrait with Sargent, who, exasperated by Sir George's constant fussing, revenged himself by painting Edith's nose straight and giving a slight kink to her father's. 

** The Sitwell family seat in Derbyshire.

Rescued

After a worryingly long midsummer absence, the Peacocks are back in good numbers, but some of them seem to have a death wish. This one I rescued from the middle of the road, where she had already survived the passage of one SUV (the wheels passed either side). I coaxed her onto my hand, took her home, and introduced her to the Buddleia bush. She seemed quite happy, and gratefully posed for the above photograph.

Hail

 A pleasantly warm summer day today, after overnight rain. Things were very different on this day in 1879, when a massive hailstorm, accompanied by incessant lightning, destroyed just about every glasshouse in the Thames valley. At Kew Gardens, some three thousand panes of glass were destroyed in the Temperate House, and seven hundred in Paxton's great Palm House. In total, the great hailstorm broke 38,649 panes along the length of the Thames valley, and the total weight of broken glass was computed as 18 tonnes. However, the 1879 storm was itself nothing like as serious as the hailstorm of August 2nd, 1846, when, in temperatures of 32 degrees C, hailstones smashed more than seven thousand panes of glass at the Houses of Parliament, three hundred at Old Scotland Yard and ten thousand in Leicester Square, as well as almost every pane of the Regent Street arcades, Somerset House, the Burlington Arcade and the picture gallery of Buckingham Palace, which was also flooded as the rain poured in. 
 Imagine the hysterical reaction if any of that happened today. The air would be thick with warnings of  impending apocalypse; there would be wailing and gnashing of teeth, rending of garments, and calls to repent our climate sins before the planet disappears under a mountain of hailstones. Back in the olden days, by contrast, they seem to have taken 'extreme weather events' (of which these hailstorms were by no means the worst) in their stride, putting it all down to that old unreliable, the English weather.  

Taken Care Of

 How's this for a Preface?

'This book was written under considerable difficulty. I had not recovered from a very severe and lengthy illness, which began with pneumonia. The infection from this permeated my body, and the bad poisoning of one finger lasted for fifteen months. This was agonisingly painful, and I could only use either hand with great difficulty, as the poison spread gradually. The reminiscences in this book are of the past. I do not refer to any of my dearly loved living friends. I trust that I have hurt nobody. It is true that, provoked beyond endurance by their insults, I have given Mr Percy Wyndham Lewis and Mr D.H. Lawrence some sharp slaps. I have pointed out, also, the depths to which the criticism of poetry has fallen, and the non-nutritive quality of the bun-tough whinings of certain little poetasters – but I have been careful, for instance, not to refer to the late Mr Edwin Muir (Dr Leavis's spiritual twin-sister). I have attacked nobody, unless they first attacked me. During the writing of certain chapters of this book, I realised that the public will believe anything – so long as it is not founded on truth.'

The writer is Edith Sitwell, and the illness she describes was all too real: she died shortly after writing this arresting Preface, on December 9th, 1964. It prefaces her autobiography, Taken Care Of, which I happened upon at a bookshop in the outwardly unprepossessing (new) market hall in Shrewsbury. This bookshop, with its well chosen, well curated and keenly priced stock, is presided over by, of all the unlikely things, an attractive young woman – a great rarity in a world traditionally peopled by festering male misanthropes. She clearly knows her stuff too... Anyway, I snapped up Taken Care Of, and I fancy it's going to give me a lot of pleasure, as did my earlier foray into Sitwell country, English Eccentrics –
 see here and here and here.
The opening chapter is titled 'An Exceedingly Violent Child', and begins with a quotation from Kierkegaard ('I am Janus bifrons: I laugh with one face, I weep with the other'), and later chapter headings include 'In Disgrace for Being a Female', 'The Primulas Had Meant No Harm', 'The Turkish Army Put to Flight' and 'Vulgarity As It Has Been, Will Be, Ever Shall Be, Amen'. I think it's going to be quite a ride.