More for Remembrance: A Singing War

The Blackadder version of the First World War - hellish trenches, futile slaughter, lions led by donkeys, etc - still seems to be the prevailing narrative, and Wilfred Owen at his harshest the poet of that war. Indeed, at 9 this morning, Radio 4 had Vanessa Redgrave reciting Anthem for Doomed Youth, and on Sunday, at a service in his Islington fiefdom, Jeremy Corbyn (that bewildered oldster you might have noticed at the Cenotaph) read Owen's Futility. These are powerful poems indeed, but Owen's war was his war; others had very different experiences and expressed very different feelings about it all. Among these, the poet and composer Ivor Gurney - though he did not ignore the horror - often found a kind of consolation in the masculine camaraderie of the shared ordeal. And he found music - as in this beautiful, if rough-hewn poem, First Time In...

After the dread tales and red yarns of the Line

Anything might have come to us; but the divine

Afterglow brought us up to a Welsh colony

Hiding in sandbag ditches, whispering consolatory

Soft foreign things. Then we were taken in

To low huts candle-lit, shaded close by slitten 

Oilsheets, and there but boys gave us kind welcome,

So that we looked out as from the edge of home,

Sang us Welsh things, and changed all former notions

To human hopeful things. And the next day's guns

Nor any Line-pangs ever quite could blot out

That strangely beautiful entry to war's rout;

Candles they gave us, precious and shared over-rations—

Ulysses found little more in his wanderings without doubt.

'David of the White Rock', the 'Slumber Song' so soft, and that

Beautiful tune to which roguish words by Welsh pit boys

Are sung—but never more beautiful than here under the guns' noise.

What was the 'beautiful tune'? Most likely it was Ar Hyd y Nos - All Through the Night. I guess we'll never know what the pit boys' 'roguish words' were...
The First World War was a singing war, especially among the Welsh (of course), but throughout the ranks and on both sides, as when Christmas carols, in German and English, drifted poignantly across No Man's Land during the short-lived festive truce.
And there is Siegfried Sassoon's glorious Everyone Sang:

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;

And I was filled with such delight

As prisoned birds must find in freedom,

Winging wildly across the white

Orchards and dark-green fields; on - on - and out of sight.

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;

And beauty came like the setting sun:

My heart was shaken with tears; and horror

Drifted away ... O, but Everyone

Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

Ivor Gurney was not a casualty of war. Though he went mad soon after, most of those who write about him now think that this would probably have happened anyway; he was mentally unstable before the war, prone to dramatic mood swings. Though he returned obsessively to his war experiences, it was less often in horror than in quest of his lost self and life and, as ever, home. Some very fine poems of his live on, and some beautiful songs. Let's end this musical post with three of the best - In Flanders, Severn Meadows and Even Such Is Time (a setting of Walter Ralegh's great poem).

Cory Wells

Gone to join the ever-growing celestial jam session is Cory Wells, founder member and lead vocalist of Three Dog Night, who had a huge hit with their funked-up cover of Randy Newman's Mama Told Me (Not to Come). Soon after the single hit the top of the US charts, Newman (typically) rang Wells to thank him for putting his kids through college. After a string of hits - all cover versions, therefore missing out on the big bucks - Three Dog Night broke up in 1976, by which time some band members were habitually, in Wells's word, 'incapacitated' for the usual rock 'n' roll reasons. Wells, a keen fisherman and a family man (married for 50 years), moved on to become a frequent contributor to magazines such as Field & Stream and, for six years, field editor of Outdoor Life. 'I need the serenity and the celestialness of the outdoors,' he said. 'Nature doesn't care if you're a rock star or a garage mechanic.' RIP.
Here's a reminder of Cory's surprisingly rough, bluesy voice, and of Three Dog Night's biggest hit.

Another for Remembrance

Hardy's In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations' led me back to a poem by Edward Thomas - one of his greatest, I think - on a similar theme. A similar theme, but in every other way different: Thomas's is a much more concrete, immediate and local poem, precisely local in time and place (scaled right down to the woodpecker's round hole in the fallen elm), with the author placed firmly inside the scene and participating in it. It is also written in a more relaxed, free and discursive style, in the loose iambic pentameter that comes so naturally to English verse and even, as here, to reported speech (thanks to Shakespeare). Drawing on a long English tradition of pastoral, and playing with 'Georgian' conventions, it twists and subverts them to create something quite new and fitting to its time and place. It is a brilliantly but effortlessly constructed poem, full of so much good stuff that with every rereading, I find, something new catches the light and flashes out...

As the team’s head-brass flashed out on the turn

The lovers disappeared into the wood.

I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm

That strewed an angle of the fallow, and

Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square

Of charlock. Every time the horses turned

Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned

Upon the handles to say or ask a word,

About the weather, next about the war.

Scraping the share he faced towards the wood,

And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed

Once more.

                       The blizzard felled the elm whose crest

I sat in, by a woodpecker’s round hole,

The ploughman said. “When will they take it away?”

“When the war’s over.” So the talk began—

One minute and an interval of ten,

A minute more and the same interval.

“Have you been out?” “No.” “And don’t want

to, perhaps?”

“If I could only come back again, I should.

I could spare an arm. I shouldn’t want to lose

A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,

I should want nothing more. . . . Have many gone

From here?” “Yes.” “Many lost?” “Yes, a good few.

Only two teams work on the farm this year.

One of my mates is dead. The second day

In France they killed him. It was back in March,

The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if

He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.”

“And I should not have sat here. Everything

Would have been different. For it would have been

Another world.” “Ay, and a better, though

If we could see all all might seem good.” Then

The lovers came out of the wood again:

The horses started and for the last time

I watched the clods crumble and topple over

After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.

On Remembrance Sunday

‘The history of Waterloo field is to be ploughed and sowed and reaped and mowed: yet once in a way these acts of husbandry were diversified with a great battle, where hosts decided the fate of empires. After that agriculture resumed its sullen sway.’
The young Thomas Hardy copied this passage from Charles Reade into his notebooks. No doubt it was still in his mind when, years later, he wrote his great and justly famous poem of wartime, In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'...

                       I

Only a man harrowing clods

    In a slow silent walk

With an old horse that stumbles and nods

    Half asleep as they stalk.

                       II

Only thin smoke without flame

    From the heaps of couch-grass;

Yet this will go onward the same

    Though Dynasties pass.

                       III

Yonder a maid and her wight

    Come whispering by:

War’s annals will cloud into night

    Ere their story die.

    Hardy takes his 'breaking of nations' theme from Jeremiah: 'Thou art my battle axe and weapons of war: for with thee will I break in pieces the nations, and with thee will I destroy kingdoms.' This chimes with a passage in Les Murray's wonderful poem, The Say-But-The-Word Centurion Attempts a Summary (which Bryan A commends in a recent tweet):
'If death is now the birth-gate into things unsayable
in language of death's era, there will be wars about religion
as there never were about the death-ignoring Olympians...'
Too sadly true. Read the whole poem here, and marvel. Bryan calls it the best argument for Christian belief he has ever read. If this is true, it is surely because it is less an argument than a dazed recognition.

Peppa Pig and the Word of the Year

As usual, the Collins' Word of the Year is disappointing. 'Binge-watch'? It isn't even a word, but two yoked together by the all-purpose 'binge', extended from 'binge drinking' (which, by the way, is correct - no hyphen. Strictly, 'binge-watching' would mean watching binges.) I know this Word of the Year lark has more to do with publicity than lexicography, but even so...
 From the shortlist, I'd have gone for 'manspreading', a word that clearly and usefully describes an everyday phenomenon for which there was previously no word. And what of 'transgender'? So last year, surely - the happening sexual identity badge of 2015 must be the wonderful 'genderqueer'.
 Talking of binge-watching, I have perforce spent the past couple of days doing just that with Peppa Pig (a subject of which I have written before). The adorable granddaughter has been decidedly out of sorts, and only repeated viewings of this porcine soap opera (interspersed with the occasional Pingu or Charlie & Lola) will keep her happy, or at least reconciled to her lot.  For the grandparents this is a strange experience that brings on a unique condition of brain-dead numbness that after a while is almost pleasant.
 Funny the little things you notice too - like the fact that the part of George Pig is performed by not one but two actors. George, I should explain, is Peppa's little brother, whose contribution to the dialogue consists entirely of stereotyped grunts and the word 'Dinosaur'. Okay, at this point some dedicated Peppahead might point out that, in the episode Cuckoo Clock, George says 'Cuckoo' more than once, and in the classic Rainbow episode from season three he manages the word 'blue'. However, this is still not much of a part for one actor, let alone two. Do the pair of them get together and have anguished meetings, digging deep to find George's motivation, the inner hurt that drives him? Do they practise method acting, carrying those grunts over into their daily lives, emitting only the word 'Dinosaur' at their smart dinner parties, to the admiration of all? Do both actors essay both word(s) and grunts, or is one the grunt artist, the other the Dinosaur specialist?
 Throughout the course of this Peppa binge, Daddy Pig, I have to report, retained his legendary uselessness, his catchphrase 'I'm a bit of an expert at these things' proving sadly wrong time after time. However, in the episode where Peppa goes to ballet class, he reveals wholly unsuspected skills, demonstrating an impeccable plié, relevé and sauté to universal admiration - all done with a degree of ballon that belies his weight. I found this strangely moving, but by then I was pretty far gone...

Useless

Susan Hill's Howards End Is on the Landing is not short of surprises - the most dramatic of which is her frank, and frankly astounding, admission that she can't stand Jane Austen. Less surprising perhaps is that she worships Virginia Woolf just this side idolatry. But this admiration leads into unexpected territory - that of the John Bull Printing Set. Being the kind of chap who likes to rely on lazy stereotypes, I'd assumed the John Bull Printing Set was a boy thing (partly on the grounds that girls would have more sense than to fall for its delusive charms). But no - keen to emulate her Bloomsbury heroine's establishment of the Hogarth Press, Susan pounced with glee on the John Bull printing set she was given one childhood Christmas. And she loved it. Indeed she goes to far as to say 'No one who missed the era of the John Bull Printing Set can say they have lived.'
 Hmm. The trouble with the John Bull - and I speak from bitter memory here - was that a more useless printing system could scarcely have been devised. The type came in the form of rubber strips (John Bull's main business was in puncture repair kits), from which each individual letter, number or punctuation mark had to be removed with a pair of tweezers. A large proportion of these tiny bits of rubber would inevitably be lost, and setting those that remained, a piece at a time, in the little wooden rack that served as the printing block was the devil of a job. Not only was it extremely fiddly in itself, you had to be sure that each letter was the right way round (i.e. its mirror image) and the right way up - not easy with tiny Ss and 2s and Zs. When you eventually got to the point of printing, you'd often find you'd got something wrong and have to dismantle the whole forme. And you didn't have much time to devote to printing, as the ink pad that came with the kit would run dry annoyingly fast.
 Even the dedicated Susan Hill didn't get far in her printing operations, and eventually abandoned John Bull in favour of producing handwritten stories and newspapers. Most John Bull adopters never got beyond setting up and printing their own names to stamp on the title page of books, or anywhere else that ownership might be asserted. I still have some old Observer's books stamped with my name - in abbreviated form as I didn't even have enough usable letters for my full name (my set was from the cheaper end of the range). Some of these books contain alternating or overprinted stamps of my name and my brother's, tracing long-running ownership disputes. We each of us had a country named after us too; they slugged it out in epic two-man Test series in the park, and laid claim to various patches of local territory. Indeed I still regard a small traffic island at the end of our boyhood road as sovereign territory of Nigelliana, and keep a proprietary eye on it. But that's another story...
 

Titian's Butterflies

Here's an image to brighten a foggy November morning. It's a butterfly painting by the gloriously named Titian Ramsay Peale, born on this day in 1799. The sixteenth child and youngest son of the American naturalist and painter Charles Wilson Peale (the first man to paint George Washington), his brothers included a Raphaelle, a Rembrandt and a Rubens.
 Titian was, like his father, a noted naturalist and painter. He was also a great collector, especially of butterflies, and devised an excellent method of displaying specimens in sealed cases with glass fronts and backs. As a result of his care, some of his specimens have survived in good condition to the present day. And, happily, he left behind some very beautiful and accurate watercolour paintings of his favourite creatures.
 The museum founded by his father and continued by him was America's first popular museum of natural science and art, but it unfortunately went bust in 1843 and had to be sold on. Titian went to work in the US Patent Office and before long become a pioneering photographer. He died at the ripe old age of 85.