A Man Who Liked to Strike a Pose

Yesterday I was in London (my dear, the noise – and the people!) to have a leisurely lunch with an old friend. Afterwards, with time to kill before my homeward train left, I thought I'd pop in to the National Gallery to have a quick look around. Oh dear. The days of popping in – the days when Ronald Firbank's Mrs Shamefoot could drop in to tidy her hair in front of the Madonna of the Rocks – are long gone. Now airport-style security means long, slow-moving queues stretching into the middle distance, and zero chance of a flying visit. No wonder the gallery's visitor numbers are down by nearly half. Happily the National Portrait Gallery, around the corner, is far more penetrable, so I popped in there for a quick mooch. That was when I saw the self-portrait above, which made me audibly laugh. It's by a St Ives painter, Arthur Hayward (1889-1962), who clearly liked a joke. Here he portrays himself grandly as The Artist, striking a pose every bit as flamboyant and histrionic as any struck by Rubens or Rembrandt or Van Dyck. In the background is the harbour of St Ives, a subject Hayward painted many times, usually in an easy-on-the-eye Impressionist style – or is it actually a painting of the harbour? The same background appears again in the self-portrait below, in which Hayward, for some reason, paints himself in the guise of a Breton onion-seller (an 'Onion Johnny', as they were known). He has the beret, but not the traditional striped jersey, and he appears to be wearing a college scarf. The onions look good enough to eat.

Hayward also painted himself as a (presumably French) skier, in a self-portrait called Le Skieur. He was certainly a man who liked to strike a pose...

'of all seasons most gratuitous'

It's the first day of Astronomical Spring, the weather has warmed up, and the sun is shining from a blue sky as if at the beginning of a primary-school essay titled 'A Spring Day'. Who better to spoil the mood than dear old Philip Larkin? Here is his poem 'Spring', a Petrarchan sonnet that is not exactly full of the joys thereof –

Green-shadowed people sit, or walk in rings,
Their children finger the awakened grass,
Calmly a cloud stands, calmly a bird sings,
And, flashing like a dangled-looking glass,
Sun lights the balls that bounce, the dogs that bark,
The branch-arrested mist of leaf, and me,
Threading my pursed-up way across the park,
An indigestible sterility.

Spring, of all seasons most gratuitous,
Is fold of untaught flower, is race of water
Is earth’s most multiple, excited daughter;

And those she has least use for see her best,
Their paths grown craven and circuitous,

Their visions mountain-clear, their needs immodest. 

That poem is dated 19 May 1950. On this date (20 March) in the same year, Larkin wrote (or signed off on) this curious take on the writer's life. I like the second section particularly...

The Literary World

I
‘Finally, after five months of my life during which I could write nothing that would have satisfied me, and for which no power will compensate me…’

My dear Kafka,
When you’ve had five years of it, not five months,
Five years of an irresistible force meeting an
immoveable object right in your belly,
Then you’ll know about depression.

II
Mrs. Alfred Tennyson

Answered
begging letters
admiring letters
insulting letters
enquiring letters
business letters
and publishers’ letters.
She also
looked after his clothes
saw to his food and drink
entertained visitors
protected him from gossip and criticism
And finally

(apart from running the household)
Brought up and educated the children.

While all this was going on
Mister Alfred Tennyson sat like a baby
Doing his poetic business.

Guncle Horton

 Born on this day in 1886 was Edward Everett Horton, one the great character actors of the Hollywood Golden Age. He appeared, invariably playing a fussy, pompous, rather dim character, in all the classic Astaire-Rogers comedies, in which he made full use of his trademark double take (or sometimes triple take), the best in the business.  I've seen Horton described as 'Hollywood's first guncle', which brought me up short – what on earth is a 'guncle'? Apparently it's a contraction of 'gay uncle' – not a gay uncle in the mould of the egregious Uncle Monty in Withnail and I, but a benign and generous figure who is like one of the family, though not related, and is also what used to be called a confirmed bachelor. 
How confirmed a bachelor Horton was is not known, but he never married. He lived on a four-acre estate, Belleigh Acres (pronounced 'belly achers') which included houses for his brother and sister and their families, and a guest house – in which, in 1938, Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Last Tycoon. Much of the estate was compulsorily purchased to make space for the Ventura Freeway, but Horton was still left with a couple of acres and two houses. He carried on working to the end of his long life, dying at the age of 84 in 1970. 
Here is a little taste of Horton in action, with another great character actor and Astaire-Rogers regular, Eric Blore...

What Do Teeth Say?

 This morning I was obliged to visit my dentist (the best dentist I've ever had, as it happens) to have a troublesome and half-wrecked wisdom tooth removed. This was my third wisdom extraction, so I knew what to expect, but my dentist was impressively quick and thorough, and I felt almost no pain this time. I'm still getting over the anaesthetic, but all seems well.
  While I was sitting in the waiting room, I was entertained by various videos about dental health and the wonders that can be worked on your teeth by cosmetic dentistry. 'Your teeth,' one video declared, 'say a lot about you.' Indeed, the video continued, they say more about you than your car, your clothes or your hairstyle. Naturally, I wondered what my teeth might be saying about me (apart from expressing the wish that they'd been better looked after in my early years). I think they would clearly say just two things: that I am English – they are very English teeth, i.e. overcrowded and uneven; and that I grew up in a time before straightening and whitening became the norm. My car would have nothing to say, for the very good reason that I don't drive one. My clothes would confirm that I am English, that I grew up when men dressed properly, and in my mature years I reverted to type. And my hairstyle (if such a word applies)? That would say simply that I am blessed with luxuriant hair, and in my old age am making the most of it. 
  I wish this anaesthetic would wear off...

'Even the small violet...'

 This post comes with a big tip of the hat to Anonymous, a frequent commenter (along with Unknown), who in a comment under 'Daffodil Time' directs me to a poem by John Clare that I did not know. I find it quite beautiful and, for all its questioning tone, cheering. So here it is for all readers, however anonymous and unknown, to enjoy...

The Instinct of Hope

Is there another world for this frail dust
To warm with life and be itself again?
Something about me daily speaks there must,
And why should instinct nourish hopes in vain?
'Tis nature's prophesy that such will be,
And everything seems struggling to explain
The close sealed volume of its mystery.
Time wandering onward keeps its usual pace
As seeming anxious of eternity,
To meet that calm and find a resting place.
E'en the small violet feels a future power
And waits each year renewing blooms to bring,
And surely man is no inferior flower
To die unworthy of a second spring?

Daffodil Time

 It's daffodil time, and this morning Radio 3's Poem of the Day was the inevitable 'I wandered lonely as a cloud' (a meaningless opening line unless you follow it past the enjambment into the next: there's nothing intrinsically lonely about a cloud. And Wordsworth wasn't 'lonely' either: he was walking with his sister Dorothy, whose journal entry inspired the poem.) It's a piece that is perfect in its way – as a (mercifully) succinct expression of Wordsworth's poetical philosophy, and as an effective, easily learned recitation piece.
For myself, when it comes to daffodil poetry, I would plump for Robert Herrick's equally perfect 'To Daffodils', a poem from which the word 'I' is refreshingly absent. Herrick does not present himself as a lone sensitive soul vibrating in sympathy with divine Nature – in fact he doesn't present himself at all: his poem is about what 'we' might feel, an inclusive and inviting 'we', not the exclusive, attention-seeking 'I'. It is simple (effortlessly concealing its art) and direct, and beautifully expresses the transience of all things, daffodils and 'we' humans alike...

Fair Daffodils, we weep to see

You haste away so soon;

As yet the early-rising sun

Has not attain'd his noon.

Stay, stay,

Until the hasting day

Has run

But to the even-song;

And, having pray'd together, we

Will go with you along.

We have short time to stay, as you,

We have as short a spring;

As quick a growth to meet decay,

As you, or anything.

We die

As your hours do, and dry

Away,

Like to the summer's rain;

Or as the pearls of morning's dew,

Ne'er to be found again.

Rereading

 Back in 2021, I read The Maias, Eça de Queiros's mighty masterpiece, all 600-plus pages of it. Now I find myself rereading it, having been asked to write something about it for a literary magazine. I hadn't expected this – indeed I seem to have been so confident I wouldn't be returning to The Maias any time soon that I must have donated it to one of the charity shops: such fat volumes clear a lot of shelf space. It might be lurking somewhere on my chaotically disorganised shelves, but I was unable to find it, so I bought another copy of the same (Carcanet) edition. 
And here I am, immersed again in Eça's sprawling, richly detailed portrait of the life of an aristocratic family in Lisbon during the late 19th-century decline of the Portuguese monarchy and nation. And here's the thing – I'm enjoying it even more this time round than last. It seems to be yielding yet more riches on second reading, and my admiration for Eça's brilliant management of such a huge narrative only grows. Although I know roughly what will happen, I'm every bit as excited as I was first time round, and enjoying Eça's distinctive qualities even more: he is clear-sighted and ironic but forgiving and essentially comic, sometimes satirical but never didactic, and always treading lightly. For all its length, The Maias is immensely readable; you could call it a literary page-turner – and there are a lot of pages to turn. I'm delighted to be reading it again. Nabokov said that 'all reading [meaning real reading] is rereading', and he had a point.