Q: 'Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and some others'

'I must here ... avow my belief that before starting to lay down principles of literature or aesthetic a man should offer some evidence of his capacity to enjoy the better and eschew the worse. The claim, for the moment fashionable, that a general philosophy of aesthetic can be constructed by a thinker who, in practice, cannot distinguish Virgil from Bavius, or Rodin from William Dent Pitman, seems to me to presume a credulity beyond the dreams of illicit therapeutics. By "poetry", in these pages, I mean what has been written by Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and some others.'
  So ends the short Preface to Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's Studies in Literature (published in 1918, in a handsome edition, by the Cambridge University Press – my latest charity shop find). 'Q', as he was generally known, had been appointed King Edward VII Professor of English at Cambridge in 1912. It was an appointment that raised eyebrows, as Q had until then been known chiefly as a journalist and popular novelist (and hard-working political activist in the Liberal cause – which probably helped to secure the position). This was a time when English Literature was the new kid on the academic block, and there was still some doubt about what exactly it was and how it should be studied. Sir Arthur, unlikely and unacademic figure as he was, had a lasting impact on Cambridge's 'English tripos', for one thing ensuring that it remained mercifully light on philology and Anglo-Saxon (Q, a Cornishman, regarded himself as a Celt), and for another insisting on the inclusion of a curious field of study called 'the English Moralists'. When asked who these English Moralists were, Sir Arthur would respond with 'a lyrical outburst' culminating in 'a roll-call of the great names – "Hooker – Hobbes – Locke – Berkeley – Hume "; and ending with an exhausted "my God", as emotion got the better of him' (these are E.M.W. Tillyard's recollections, quoted by John Gross in that wonderful book, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters). When, more than half a century later, I took the English Moralists option, the definition was indeed broad: I remember that it then took in St Augustine at one end and Freud at the other, with more English figures like Mill and Ruskin – and indeed Hobbes – also in the mix. I rather enjoyed the course, especially as my tutor often gave me a glass of whisky to dull the pain of intellection.
  In Q's time, Eng Lit was far from the dry, analytical academic subject it was to become. Sir Arthur himself, in his lectures and 'studies', 'seldom did much more than ramble cheerfully round the subject, shedding a vague glow of enthusiasm' (as Gross puts it). I don't recall anyone shedding the faintest glow of enthusiasm in my Cambridge days, apart from the outsider figure of  George Steiner, who managed to enthuse me mightily about Beckett, Nabokov and Borges in one extraordinary lecture (or maybe it was a talk to the English Society).
  One of the questions about Eng Lit that had to be decided in Sir Arthur's time was how close to the present the study of the subject should come. In one of the Studies, ostensibly on the poetry of George Meredith, Q declares that 'I think it is time to hint at least that the Modern and Medieval Languages Board intend to justify by practice what they meant when, in framing the separate English Tripos, they so far ignored academic tradition and dared the rage of schoolmasters – which, like that of sheep, is terrible – as to open the study of English down to our own times, declining to allow that any past date could be settled, even by university statute, as the one upon which English literature took to its bed, and expired, and was beatified.'
  Sir Arthur goes on to state his conviction 'that upon a school of English there rests an obligation to teach the writing of good English as well as the reading of it: to teach the writing of it through the reading. I want the average educated Englishman to write English as deftly, as scrupulously, as the average educated Frenchman writes French; to have, as at present he has not, at least an equal respect for his language.' Ah, if only that had come to pass...

Well...

Well, this arrived today, looking like the kind of thing that used to be delivered 'under plain brown wrapper'. They don't package poetry books like this any more...
Nor do many poetry collections of today have an author's Foreword entirely devoted to scansion. In it Ewart quotes the two lines he was taught in Latin classes as an example of how the elegiac couplet scans:
'Down in a deep dark dell || sat an old cow munching a beanstalk.
Out of her mouth came forth || yesterday's dinner and tea.'

RIP Clive James

Sad to hear of the death of Clive James, though it's wonderful that he managed almost another decade after he was diagnosed with leukaemia – and, of course, he continued writing almost to the very end. If he hadn't been blessed with such a prodigious range of talents, and such a highly developed sense of humour, he could have been his adoptive country's great public intellectual – but who'd want to be that when you could be having fun on (and with) television, being the finest TV critic there ever was, relishing low culture as much as high, meeting and interviewing the stars, living the life? James did the lot, wrote the lot, read the lot, broadcast the lot. He seems to have had the energy, mental and physical, of ten men, and the productive capacity of many more. Of course, being the man he was, he did and wrote too much, but the best of his writings will surely endure.
  Looking back through what I've written about him here over the years, I found a couple of quotations worth repeating. One is a chilling piece of self-analysis from his Cambridge memoir May Week Was in June. Observing himself as his Cambridge days come to a close, he writes, in the third person, 'he sits writing in his journal. He has just told it that he is reasonably satisfied. The insistent suspicion that he has not yet begun, and has nothing to show, is too frightening to record. For someone who has good reason to believe that he doesn't exist apart from what he does, to doubt that he has done anything worthwhile is to gaze into the abyss.'
 The second quotation is from the epilogue to a collection of his brilliant radio talks, A Point of View, in which James ponders the role of the broadcaster in a world undoubtedly going mad

‘The business of the broadcaster isn’t to correct abuses. It is merely to point them out, to those capable of seeing the implications. By definition, that audience is already ahead of the broadcaster, so it doesn’t really need him, except for consolation. But consolation can be important at a time when it feels as if the world is going mad. Probably the world always feels like that. But today it raves in a multiform jargon that sounds all the more demented because of its approximation to common reason: the patois of a Bedlam that confers degrees. This peculiarly modern interlingua of unjustified omniscience, now that it is here, will probably never go away. It will always transfer itself to a new area, because there will always be people with an interest in inflating their own importance by distorting reality. But part of reality, a heartening part, is that there will also always be people who know sense when they hear it. To this valuable audience we must be careful what we say…’

Wise words, and but a few among many.
RIP.

'A warming to us all'

On this date in 1981, Philip Larkin wrote one of his last published poems (it was printed in The Observer a month later). In it, he wittily mourns his own waning facility and generously celebrates the continuing, indeed unquenchable, poetic vigour of his friend Gavin Ewart.


Good for You, Gavin

It's easy to write when you've nothing to write about
   (That is, when you are young),
The heart-shaped hypnotics the press is polite about
   Rise from an unriven tongue.

Later on, attic'd with the all-too-familiar
   Tea chests of truth-sodden grief,
The pages you scrap sound like school songs, or sillier,
   Banal beyond belief.

So good for you, Gavin, for having stayed sprightly
   While keeping your eye on the ball;
Your riotous road-show's like Glenlivet nightly,
   A warming to us all.


Ewart had a most unusual career, beginning as a wunderkind in the Thirties, then falling silent during the war years (when he served in North Africa and Italy) and for some while after, finding his poetic voice again in the Sixties, then becoming ever more prolific as he went on. I remember reading him in the Seventies and Eighties and finding his work entertaining, engaging, sometimes more, but often giving the impression of a profligate talent, writing too much and throwing away too little. He had a rare sense of humour and an easy mastery of every poetical form he tackled, which no doubt encouraged him to write too much – and, when he wrote about sex, as he very often did, he could be quite jaw-droppingly filthy: one of his later collections was banned by W.H. Smith, back in the days when they could still be called booksellers. Today Ewart, who died in the same week as Kingsley Amis (another friend and admirer), seems destined to be all but forgotten before long. Nothing of his is in print, except perhaps in anthologies, and his Penultimate Poems is available for 1p on Amazon – or was until I snapped it up just now.
Here is one of Ewart's that I found in Wendy Cope's excellent anthology, Heaven on Earth: 101 Happy Poems. A kind of free-verse almost-sonnet, it's a happy poem indeed, one of quiet gratitude, for summers, bracken, children, for having survived...


June 1966

Lying flat in the bracken of Richmond Park
while the legs and voices of my children pass
seeking, seeking: I remember how on the
13th of June of that simmering 1940
I was conscripted into the East Surreys,
and, more than a quarter of a century
ago, when France had fallen,
we practised concealment in this very bracken.
The burnt stalks pricked through my denims.
Hitler is now one of the antiques of History,
I lurk like a monster in my hiding place.
He didn't get me. If there were a God
it would be only polite to thank him.

Book News latest

I'm not given to blowing my own trumpet, but I can't deny that I find it very pleasing when someone else does it for me – especially when that someone is Patrick Kurp, the best reader any writer could hope to have. Among other things, his piece about The Mother of Beauty on his Anecdotal Evidence blog explains what my book is, and what it was intended to be, better than I've yet managed to do myself.

(For anyone minded to buy a copy, the quickest and easiest way, at least if you're in the UK, is via Amazon – here's the link. Alternatively, send me an email and we'll try to come to some other arrangement. Remember, Christmas is drawing ever closer...)

From Bruno to Handel

A funny thing happened on Strictly Come Dancing last night. The flamboyant Bruno Tonioli, while showering (well deserved) praise on one of the performances said that it reminded him of Mark Morris's style of choreography. If any choreographer gets mentioned on Strictly, it's invariably Bob Fosse, so this was an interesting, and unexpected, development.
As it happened, this came only a couple of days after I'd discovered (thanks to my Derbyshire cousin) Mark Morris's choreography for the Handel duet I wrote about recently on this blog. It struck me as very beautiful, wonderfully responsive to the music, joyful, inventive, light and altogether lovely to look at. There's a taster below – enjoy!

More Tate

A picture that caught my eye at the Tate, and seemed new to me (though I'm not certain it was), was a self-portrait by William Dobson, painted around 1640. This dramatically conceived and lushly painted work is high-impact stuff and hard to miss. At a glance, you could almost mistake it for a Velzaquez. It is very clearly the work of an accomplished and more than confident portraitist – as is proven by the other Dobsons hanging nearby: a tender but sharply observed portrait of, probably, his wife, and a much grander bravura portrait of the gorgeously named Royalist Endymion Porter in all his glory, looking like a man whose veins flow with good claret.

  John Aubrey rated Dobson 'the most excellent painter that England has yet bred', and the art historian Ellis Waterhouse labelled him 'the most distinguished purely British painter before Hogarth'. Today his number one fan is the redoubtable Waldemar Januszcsak, who has called Dobson 'the first British born genius, the first truly dazzling English painter'. He surely deserves to be better known, to emerge from under the gigantic shadow of Van Dyck. Maybe there were other English painters of the period who deserve to be better known? Perhaps, under Charles I, there was a golden age of English painting running in parallel with the golden age of English church monuments (as celebrated in this book)?
  Be that as it may, several other Tate paintings caught my eye, including another from the 17th century (later, though) – a Portrait of a Young Girl by Mary Beale, a very successful portraitist. This intimate informal study is unfinished, but none the worse – and perhaps rather the better – for that.

  A painting I felt sure I'd never seen before was The Room in Which Shakespeare Was Born by Henry Wallis, he of The Death of Chatterton fame. The minute detail, fresh colour, sharp light and closeness of observation in this little picture is quite astonishing.

 And then there were two, very different examples of a sub-genre for which I'm always a sucker – Dieppe pictures: a view of the Café des Tribunaux by Sickert, one of his best in that line

and Ben Nicholson's Auberge de la Sole Dieppoise, a semi-abstract piece featuring Barbara Hepworth's face reflected in the window of a Dieppe eaterie –

(And here, not from the Tate's collection, is an image of the Auberge de la Sole Dieppoise in its heyday. The building now houses an estate agent's offices.)