Off

I'm afraid I'm off gallivanting again - this time to the Cotentin Peninsula for a few days. I shall be on the Poole-Chergourg ferry at an unearthly hour tomorrow morning, heading for France for the first time this year. A bientot, mes amis...

Lessons of the Web

In this glorious Indian Summer weather, the spiders are making merry. I'm sure we haven't had such abundance and diversity in years. There are webs in every corner and vantage point in house and garden, and when I step out in the morning my face and hair will be instantly draped in filaments of gossamer - not a pleasant sensation in itself, but happy proof that the spiders thrive. What's especially gratifying is the range of types and species  to be seen. It seemed a few years ago that the all-conquering incomer, the Daddy Long Legs Spider, with its lethal free-form web and voracious appetite, would wipe out all competition and establish an arachnid monoculture - but no, the threat passed and spider biodiversity returned. What Daddy Long Legs Spiders I see now are pale shadows of their former fearsome selves, and the big fat-bodied boys are back in charge.
 The spider, tirelessly weaving its wondrous creations, has long been seen as an object lesson ('If at first you don't succeed, try, try again') and is irresistible to poets, good and bad. Among the good might be counted Walt Whitman, who saw in the spider's web an image of the soul - or rather (of course) his soul...

A noiseless patient spider,

I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,

Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,

It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,

Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,

Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,

Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,

Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

    

And Emily Dickinson, whose writings abound in spiders and spider imagery. In this poem she sees in the spider's web an image of her own hermetic art...

  A Spider  
sewed at Night
Without a Light
Upon an Arc of
  White –

  If Ruff it was  
of Dame
Or Shroud of Gnome
Himself himself
  inform –

   Of Immortality  
His Strategy
  Was Physiognomy – 

(That's in Dickinson's original layout and punctuation.) She also wrote that 'the spider as an artist has never been employed though his surpassing merit is freely certified by every broom and Bridget throughout a Christian land - neglected son of genius I take thee by the hand'.
 And then there's Kay Ryan who, uniquely, sees the web from the spider's point of view, as an image of the sheer strenuousness of life...

SPIDERWEB

From other
angles the
fibers look
fragile, but
not from the
spider’s, always
hauling coarse
ropes, hitching
lines to the
best posts
possible. It’s
heavy work
everyplace,
fighting sag,
winching up
give. It
isn’t ever
delicate
to live.

Mr Fortune's Maggot

Periodically, over the years, several people have urged me to read the novels of Sylvia Townsend Warner. Somehow I never got round to it - until now, when I have taken the plunge and read her Mr Fortune's Maggot (1927). (That's 'maggot' in the sense of 'a whimsical or perverse fancy; a crotchet'.)
 I knew I was in for something special just from reading the author's Preface (to the Virago edition), which describes how the whole essence of Mr Fortune's Maggot came to her in a dream, which she wrote down as fast as she could; the first third of the novel is, she says, exactly as she dashed it off, with scarcely a word's alteration.

 'I was really in a very advanced stage of hallucination when I finished the book - writing in manuscript and taking wads of it to be typed at the Westbourne Secretarial College in Queens Road.
 I remember writing the last paragraph - and reading over the conclusion, and then impulsively writing the Envoy, and beginning to weep bitterly.
 I took the two copies, one for England and one for USA, to Chatto and Windus myself. I was afraid to trust them by post. It was a very foggy day, and I was nearly run over. I left them with a sense that my world was now nicely and neatly over.'

 So ends the Preface - and who could not read on after that? Especially after noting in the list of Thanks, 'I am greatly obliged to Mr Victor Butler for his assistance in the geometrical passages, and for the definition of an umbrella'.
 Mr Fortune's Maggot is the story of the Rev. Timothy Fortune, a sweet-natured and well-meaning ex-bank clerk who becomes a missionary and ends up on the remote South Sea island of Fanua, where in three years he makes just one (apparent) convert, a delightful boy called Lueli. A kind of innocent but intense love swiftly develops between the missionary and his convert, who becomes his pupil as Mr Fortune sets about educating him in the knowledge and concerns of a wider world. This process gives rise to some of the funniest passages in the book:

 'Since the teaching had to be entirely conversational, Lueli learned much that was various and seemingly irrelevant. Strange alleys branched off from the subject in hand, references and similes that strayed into the teacher's discourse as the most natural things in the world had to be explained and enlarged upon. In the middle of an account of Christ's entry into Jerusalem Mr Fortune would find himself obliged to break off and describe a donkey. This would lead naturally to the sands of Weston-super-Mare and a short account of bathing machines; and that afternoon he would take his pupil down to the beach and show him how English children turned sand out of buckets and built castles with a moat round them. Moats might lead to the feudal system and the Wars of the Barons. Fighting Lueli understood very well, but other aspects of civilisation needed a great deal of explaining; and Mr Fortune nearly gave himself heat apoplexy by demonstrating in the course of one morning the technique of urging a golf ball out of a bunker, and how English housewives crawl around on their hands and kneed scrubbing the linoleum.'

 The education of Lueli is not exactly a howling success, especially when Mr Fortune is inspired to pass on the rudiments of plane geometry:

  'Calm, methodical, with a mind prepared for the onset, he guided Lueli down to the beach and with a stick prodded a small hole in it.
 "What is this?"
 "A hole."
 "No, Lueli, it may seem like a hole, but it is a point."
 Perhaps he had prodded a little too emphatically. Lueli's mistake was quite natural. Anyhow, there were bound to be a few misunderstandings at the start.
 He took out his pocket knife and whittled the end of the stick. Then he tried again.
 "What is this?"
 "A smaller hole."
 "Point," said Mr Fortune suggestively.
 "Yes, I mean a smaller point."
 "No, not quite. It is a point, but it is not smaller. Holes may be of different sizes, but no point is larger or smaller than another point."
 Lueli looked from the first point to the second. He seemed to be about to speak, but to think better of it. He removed his gaze to the sea.'

 Mr Fortune's Maggot has been described as a satire on imperialism and Christian evangelism, but it is something far bigger and deeper than that, especially after the dramatic crisis of the story, triggered by an earthquake and volcanic eruption, in the course of which Mr Fortune loses not only his own God - which he finds surprisingly painless - but also, by his own imperious actions, Lueli's god (embodied in a wooden idol), which he finds infinitely more painful.
 What this novel is, above all else, is a love story - a tender and entirely convincing account of the special love between Mr Fortune and Lueli, and how that love leads to a shattering emotional climax, from which Mr Fortune struggles to find a path to redemption. Happily, in the end, he does. And by then the author is as much in love with Mr Fortune as is Lueli. Indeed, she wrote of him: 'I love him with  a dreadful uneasy passion which in itself denotes him a cripple...'
 Sylvia Townsend Warner has a style all her own, and reading this book is an exhilarating, unsettling experience. You never quite know where you are with her, or she with her creation. The poet Gillian Beer writes that her novels 'at once baffle and possess the reader. Douce, whimsical and shifting seamlessy across verbal registers, they suddenly expose us to appalling suffering that cannot be set aside.' That seems a very good summing-up, as does John Updike's: 'Her stories tend to convince us in process and baffle us in conclusion; they are not rounded with meaning but lift jaggedly toward new and unseen developments.'
 I should just add that Mr Fortune's Maggot also describes its island setting - and the terrible eruption that threatens to destroy it - with extraordinary vividness. Her only source for these passages was a single book - the letters of a woman missionary in Polynesia - borrowed from the Paddington Public Library.

Glass and More

So, following Mary's tip (see below under 'Launching'), I made my way to Norbury - no, not the South London suburb - and duly found the church of St Mary and St Barlok (an Irish saint), in its picture-perfect setting, tucked away in rolling wooded countryside and forming a wonderfully picturesque ensemble with the manor house (1670s) and outbuildings. It is a quite extraordinary church, and most untypical of Derbyshire. The mighty chancel, flooded with light, is the kind of 'lantern in stone' you'd expect to come across in the flatlands of East Anglia. It seems to dwarf the nave (they are of more or less equal length), and was actually built first. Those tall wide windows, which look so Perpendicular, date to around 1300, when they must have looked quite startlingly 'modern' and daring in their pared-down structure and great expanse of glass.
 And there's more than glass to see here. Standing in the chancel are two extraordinarily fine alabaster monuments (the best in England, according to the notice in the church) to members of the Fitzherbert family, the lords of the manor. Once one of the great English dynasties, the Fitzherberts paid a heavy price for their adherence to the Old Faith. The chap in my photograph above was a serious photographer who was painstakingly working his way around the monuments taking close-ups of the superb carving. As I took my picture with my cost-nothing mobile phone, I cheerily suggested he get rid of his tripod and fancy camera and try one of these. He took it in good part.
 Among the other pleasures of this Derbyshire trip were a walk in Lathkill Dale - perhaps the most beautiful of them all - a drink in the pub that is home to the hen racing world championships (The Barley Mow, Bonsall), and one of the finest pizzas I've ever had, served in a decidedly eccentric one-woman pizzeria - more like a front parlour - in Wirksworth (Gino's - bring your own wine, and be sure to check it's actually open). The weather yesterday was sunny, and butterflies - far more numerous than down South now - were flying in abundance: Speckled Woods galore, Red Admirals and Peacocks, and a profusion of Tortoiseshells; the one below was inside Norbury Church, settled on that great East window.

Launching

For the next few days I'm going to be in Derbyshire, where my cousin is launching her new novel, The Green Table - details here - into the world. I haven't yet read it myself, but have heard good reports... Meanwhile, here's something of mine from another corner of the blogscape, about a writer I've mentioned from time to time on Nigeness.

The Music of Time Passing

The other evening, as I reached for a favourite CD of Dvorak string quartets (12 and 13, played by the Lindsays), it occurred to me that, as I grow older, I am more and more drawn to chamber music, songs, choral works and smaller-scale orchestral pieces - and less and less to the full-blown symphonies and big concertos that were the core of my listening decades ago when I first began to take an interest. Nowadays, many of those mighty works - especially those of the Romantic composers - seem uninviting, overblown, even bombastic and intimidating. This is unfair of course, as a judgment, but it expresses the way I often feel now, as I drift away from the grand and monumental to forms of music more intimate, perhaps 'lighter' in weight, subtler in effect, more impressionistic and allusive than overtly expressive. This has happened within the oeuvre of individual composers - notably Beethoven, whose symphonies I've more or less abandoned in favour of the late quartets - and likewise there are composers whose works I could only ever stomach on a small scale, most notably Mahler, and others I would in earlier years have written off as frivolous but now love, e.g. Poulenc.
 I don't think I am alone in experiencing this movement in my musical taste as I grow older, and I suspect it might apply beyond the field of music. My reading seems to be heading in broadly the same direction, and I'll probably never get round to tackling those big blockbuster classics that I didn't read in earlier years. I marvel at the sheer stamina I had as a youthful reader, and know I could never emulate it now. As I also tend to read more slowly, I am less drawn to books that I know will take up weeks, even months, of my reading time - weeks that could be filled with a variety of lesser (in scale) delights.
 I think the big stuff is best read when relatively young, when it will make more of an impact (on a necessarily less furnished mind) and when it will be more completely absorbed, will sink down and settle, forming a rich and fertile subsoil. Even if much of it is, to the conscious mind, forgotten (as it is in my case), something of that bulk reading will, I believe, continue to diffuse into all our later reading, colouring it, however faintly, and deepening and enriching our responses to what we read. With the spadework done, we can range at large, discovering that, with the fading of our youthful mental acuity, our vision becomes broader, less clearly defined, but deeper in insight and appreciation. Or so I like to believe.
 Some similar movement seems to happen in the careers of some great artists, as they leave behind the unageing monuments of their prime and set sail into chartless waters - Titian's extraordinary late paintings, or Turner's, Beckett's Ill Seen Ill Said, Nabokov's Transparent Things, final condensates of their creators' genius. Or indeed Beethoven's late quartets. None of these would have been possible without what came before; they are the fruits of time and ageing - and, as we age ourselves, we respond to them more and more. Those ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds...
 Talking of which, here is a beautiful piece I came across on YouTube the other day, by the Latvian composer Peteris Vasks - that's him taking a reluctant bow at the end of the performance. Enjoy, marvel.

A Great-Uncle Writes...

I'm wondering if anyone out there has any suggestions for books to give to a bright and bookish about-to-be 16-year-old girl (my great-niece). Last year she read and enjoyed Gwen Raverat's Period Piece and E. Nesbit's Long Ago When I Was Young - so this is a girl whose reading extends, happily, way beyond recent fiction.
 I'm wondering about My Antonia, So Long See You Tomorrow, The Member of the Wedding, True Grit? Funny they're all American...
 Any ideas?