Wilbur's Snowman

Richard Wilbur, who sadly died last October, would have been 97 today.
Here's a poem of his that suits a snowy day. In other hands, this one would easily slip into sentimentality, but Wilbur's control of form and tone, his precise weighting of every word, ensures that never happens – and, as so often with Wilbur's poems, the last line delivers a sharp transforming sting...

Boy at the Window

Seeing the snowman standing all alone
In dusk and cold is more than he can bear.
The small boy weeps to hear the wind prepare
A night of gnashings and enormous moan.
His tearful sight can hardly reach to where
The pale-faced figure with bitumen eyes
Returns him such a God-forsaken stare
As outcast Adam gave to paradise.

The man of snow is, nonetheless, content,
Having no wish to go inside and die.
Still, he is moved to see the youngster cry.
Though frozen water is his element,
He melts enough to drop from one soft eye
A trickle of the purest rain, a tear
For the child at the bright pane surrounded by
Such warmth, such light, such love, and so much fear. 

Uncle Logan Again, Eliot in his dressing gown, £10 worth of sardines and a bicycle

Some thirty years on from the last passage I quoted from Julia: A Portrait of Julia Strachey by Herself and Frances Partridge, Logan Pearsall Smith reappears, once again in a surprising, somewhat lurid light. Julia appends a postscript to a letter to Frances:

'PS Whatever do you think, Uncle Logan summoned me round the other morning and informed me that he has just left me £500 in his Will, isn't it lovely? He has done it, as he confessed to me with glee, "to annoy the rest of them. I don't like Christopher, and I don't like Barbara, and I don't like Karin and I never liked Ray [all members of his complicated family], but I do like you," says he, and adds, "Aunty Loo [Alys Russell, his sister and long-time companion] will be FURIOUS!" However perhaps his doctor will up and say that he was of unsound mind when the Will was drawn up (and certainly no voice will be raised to deny it). Anyway, the arrangement is that Logan is turning Loo out of the house on May 1st, as he can't stick her any longer. She has begged me with tears in her eyes to have her as tenant downstairs – I had to agree. So she comes on May 1st. Logan has gone mad in all literalness; it is very trying for us all.'
 Later Julia notes that 'there has been a certain tohu-bohu and brouhaha over the Will question'. ('Tohu-bohu' derives from the Biblical Hebrew phrase for the condition of chaos before God said 'Let there be light.')
 A few months earlier, Julia describes a visit to her uncle, in which he inveighs against his sister and her cosseting of their long-time cook, Mary, which he claims has thrown the household and his social life into chaos. He then moves on to 'picture dealers and what sharks they are, and connoisseurs too. "Rattlesnakes! Take Kenneth Clark, now."'
 Alas, we never learn what exactly Logan had against the future Lord Clark of Civilisation.

Another figure appears in a rather surprising light around this time too – T.S. ('Tom') Eliot, whom Julia seems to have liked, though not as much as his fellow resident of Carlyle Mansions, John Hayward (critic and editor).
 'When I was visiting him [Hayward] one night at Carlyle Mansions Eliot came in to see me. He was in his dressing-gown, having just had a bath, and seemed utterly distracted and Strindbergian, with his at-all-times remarkable manner accentuated into something quite ghostly and weird. I wondered for a moment if he were dead drunk; but I fancy not.'
 Julia is full of these vivid, tantalising glimpses. If only Strachey had been organised enough to keep a regular diary, it would have been quite a document – but she was all her life disorganised to a quite extraordinary degree, and with a crippling reluctance to bring any of her work to a finished state, still less publish it.
 Here's one more glimpse, of Raymond Mortimer (writer, critic, editor) preparing for war in March 1938, and correcting Julia's never very serious politics:
'I dined with Raymond and went to a play the other night. I enjoyed it very much, but I infuriated him by quoting Communist opinions culled from Philip [Toynbee], and he kept looking at me in horror and disgust over the creamy salmis and glowing purées on the marble dinner-table, saying, "Do pull yourself together, Julia! I thought you were quite a sensible woman!" Really I must make a resolution to keep my fingers out of politics. Raymond had just bought £10 worth of sardines and a bicycle to bicycle down the Great West Road on, in the event of war being declared, as he says all those with motor-cars will get stuck in a queue and never succeed in getting away.'

The Fifty Year Rule

On the Essex walk, one of our number declared that he was now following a Fifty Year Rule in his novel reading – i.e. nothing more recent than the 1960s. He has recently reread two 'angry young man' novels – John Braine's Room at the Top and John Wain's Hurrry On Down – and found that they have worn well, whereas Hemingway (whom he had, like many in their youth, once rated very highly) he now found all but unreadable. Well, at our time of life, the fifty year rule is liable to send us back to the reading of our teenage years, and that often delivers a salutary shock of disappointment.
 My friend's self-imposed time limit is a more rigorous version of the undoubtedly useful Twenty Year Rule – wait at least twenty years to see if a successful novel was really worth reading (of course it can apply beyond the world of books too, most usefully in art). I realise that I semi-consciously follow that rule myself, rarely reading new or even recent fiction, and much of the time reading from beyond even the fifty-year limit, e.g. Willa Cather, Ivy Compton-Burnett. Maybe I'm missing some good stuff by largely ignoring novels published in the past couple of decades – any suggestions? – and it's equally true that much good stuff from farther back has gone out of print, so could be said not to have stood the test of time. But by and large the twenty-plus year rule holds good. Although really the first rule of Book Club is that there are no rules.

An Essex Walk and a Gray Talk

An eleven-mile walk in rural Essex on a cold February day might not be everyone's idea of fun – to be honest, it's not mine. Especially when a biting East wind, claggy ploughland and vast, hedgeless fields must also be factored in. However, there I was yesterday, striding along with my walking friends through just such country in just such a Siberian wind, and I'm sure it did me good. Certainly it was long overdue, being my first proper walk of the year.
 The churches on the walk were small-scale, unassuming buildings, all on the same pattern – West tower, nave, chancel, sometimes a small porch – and few notable monuments. However, in the church of All Saints, High Laver, is the tomb of the philosopher John Locke, who spent his last years living nearby in the household of Sir John Masham. Standing against the South wall, it's plain and simple – stone slab above brick tomb – but the tablet bearing Locke's self-composed Latin epitaph now hangs, protected from the weather, on the inner South wall. It's rather good. Here it is in English:

'Stop, traveller. Near this place lieth John Locke. If you ask what kind of a man he was, he answers that he lived content with his own small fortune. Bred a scholar, he made his learning subservient only to the cause of truth. This thou will learn from his writings, which will show thee everything else concerning him, with greater truth, than the suspected praises of an epitaph. His virtues, indeed, if he had any, were too little for him to propose as matter of praise to himself, or as an example to thee. Let his vices be buried together. As to an example of manners, if you seek that, you have it in the Gospels; of vices, to wish you have one nowhere; if mortality, certainly, (and may it profit thee), thou hast one here and everywhere.'


Back home and thawing out, I caught a new Point of View talk on Radio 4 by John Gray, making a welcome return after a run of A.L. Kennedy (groan) and Howard Jacobson. Gray's subject was The Dangers of a Higher Education. He explored 'the ignorance of the learned' – the sad fact that the highly educated are especially prone to Grand Theories and 'dangerously absurd' ideas – to which, happily, the less educated are largely immune, having a greater share both of common sense and of experience of the realities of daily life. Quite rightly, Gray takes a dim view of the postmodern neo-Marxist 'mishmash' that is being force-fed to so many students of the humanities and social sciences. Does this in any way give them a better understanding of life, or in any way equip them for the world outside Academe? Here is the link...

 John Locke had his own perspective on all this: 'There is frequently more to be learned from the unexpected questions of a child than the discourses of men'. Very true.

Dead Parrot, Dread Czerny

No, this is not a picture of the daily parakeet feeding frenzy in my garden, but of a quite different species, the Carolina Parakeet, which became extinct on this day 100 years ago (worth a Google Doodle, I'd have thought?). One of only two indigenous parrot species in the United States (and the only one across its range), the Carolina Parakeet suffered a catastrophic decline in the 19th century, the result of loss of habitat (watery old-growth forest) and, probably, some kind of epidemic disease. Extinction happened remarkably fast, and the last known live bird, Incas, died at the Cincinnati zoo on this day in 1918. It met its end in the same cage in which Martha, the last Passenger Pigeon, had died four years earlier.

A slightly cheerier anniversary (though many piano students might not agree) is of the birth of Carl Czerny in 1791. Czerny was a prodigiously talented pianist and a prolific composer. As a child he was taught by Beethoven, and later had all the great man's works by heart, able to play any of them at the drop of an opus number. Czerny in turn taught and mentored Liszt, and wrote much music across many genres. But his name lives on for his didactic piano exercises and studies – 'the dread Czerny' as in Donald Justice's evocative sonnet...

The Pupil

Picture me, the shy pupil at the door,
One small, tight fist clutching the dread Czerny.
Back then time was still harmony, not money,
And I could spend a whole week practising for
That moment on the threshold. Then to take courage,
And enter, and pass among mysterious scents,
And sit quite straight, and with a frail confidence
Assault the keyboard with a childish flourish!

Only to lose my place, or forget the key,
And almost doubt the very metronome
(Outside, the traffic, the laborers going home),
And still to bear on across Chopin or Brahms,
Stupid and wild with love equally for the storms
Of C# minor and the calms of C.

A Most Unlikely Tour

Last night on Radio 4 I heard a repeat of an engaging programme about Yorkshire County Cricket Club's unlikely tour of North America in 1964, when Beatlemania was at its height. There's an article about the tour, written by Dan Waddell (son of 'Voice of Darts' Sid, fact fans),  here  – a more complete account of events, getting increasingly bizarre, and funny, as it goes along. Stick with it – it's a great read for anyone who remembers the Yorkshire team in their mid-Sixties pomp.
 Many of those Yorkshire greats are dead now – but not, of course, the one and only Geoffrey Boycott, who contributed a few memories to the radio documentary. Young Boycs suffered an abreaction to a smallpox vaccination on the flight to New York, so was not in the best shape when the tour began. Another (non-Yorkshire) contributor remembers him sitting in silence as a party, drinking beer after beer – which seems uncharacteristic of him, though not of the rest of the team, whose drinking often left them groggy and hungover when play began, a factor that no doubt contributed to a couple of shaky performances. Boycott recalls Fred Trueman striding into the opposition's dressing room, cigar in hand, to remind them what rubbish they were – and, on one occasion, coming to the crease wearing a stetson. Of the Beatles, Boycott concedes that 'They were a little bit bigger than us'.
 Also sharing his memories was John Hampshire ('Me name's John – call me Jack and th'interview's over'). He ruefully recalled the extent of the touring Yorkshire team's sponsorship – 'a collapsible chair and a raincoat'. Different times...

Herons Letting Themselves Down

Remember those far-off days when herons were mysterious and elusive birds, dwellers in remote watery places, rarely encountered and, when spotted, quick to take off and fly away? Seeing one at all was an event, and there was a magic in their angular primeval appearance, their improbable expanse of wing ('the heron shakes out his pac-a-mac of wings'), heavy flight and length of leg and beak. There was no other bird like it in this country – and that is still the case, though the broadly similar egrets are making inroads.
 Now, however, herons are so numerous that seeing one – for anyone who keeps even half an eye open for bird life – is very far from being an event. And, what's worse, the herons have lost all their shyness around humans and joined the ever swelling ranks of loud, aggressive suburban scavengers. In my local park (the one with the most water), there was great excitement yesterday afternoon as a dozen and more herons gathered on a lawn where someone was scattering bread around in considerable quantities. I've seen plenty of herons in the park before, stalking in the shallows, perching in the trees and  hanging around on the edges of the regular crow-gull-pigeon-duck-squirrel-goose feeding frenzies. But this lot were something else. These herons were mobbing their benefactor, fighting with each other, shrieking and flapping their huge wings, and seeing off all smaller birds in their eagerness to stuff themselves with all the food available.
 This display of ruffianly behaviour was an ugly and depressing sight – and no doubt a sign of things to come. The herons are taking over. I just hope the infinitely cleverer crows are busy planning a sustained counter-offensive.