Two Epics End (well, for now...)

 Over the weekend, to my own mild surprise, I completed the book on butterflies over which I have been labouring for an unconscionably long time. This project originated two or three years ago with a considerably shorter book, more of a very long essay, in which, to my very much greater surprise, a mainstream publisher showed a genuine interest – however, reasonably enough, he wanted it longer and more coherently organised, along the lines of a social history of the British enthusiasm for butterflies. This is the version I have finally managed to complete. Why did it take so long? Too much else going on in my life, I'm afraid – the big house move and all its attendant complications and frustrations, the demands of family life (chiefly, but by no means only, grandparenthood), all on top of the usual day-to-day business that eats up so much potential writing time. Not to mention sloth, late rising, procrastination and an over-developed taste for taking leisurely strolls. However, it is now done, and after a final reread I'll be sending it off...
  And as that long-drawn-out epic comes to an end, so does another one – tomorrow all our stuff (including books and CDs, hurrah) comes out of storage and will be delivered to the Lichfield house, where all is at last in a state of readiness. And here I must put in a word for the builders and associated tradespeople of the Lichfield area. In the past couple of months we have (of necessity) had the house deep cleaned, rewired, painted (inside) throughout, floored with timber, and had various plumbing and plastering issues sorted out. Everything has happened with little or no waiting time, everyone has got down to the job with total dedication – no sharp intakes of breath, no 'It'll cost you', no disappearing half way through to see to other jobs or visit the bookies – and everyone involved seems to be so well connected in the trade that they can call in others or recommend others at the drop of a hat. The work has been done perfectly, promptly, on schedule and on budget, and everyone has been friendly and obliging. After years of dealing with London builders, this feels like going to building trades heaven. I like it here.

Onegin and Slippers

 Every once in a while, Radio 4 takes a break from being unlistenably woke and springs a welcome surprise. Last week, from Monday to Friday in the Book at Bedtime slot, it was Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, in the excellent 1990 translation by James E. Falen, which made use of Nabokov's literal prose translation but turned it back into sparkling Pushkin stanzas. What's more, it was read – by Rhashan Stone, who I discover is a black American actor and comedian settled in the UK – with a perfect balance between the drive of the action (inward and external) and the structure of the verse (and he clearly understood what he was reading, which is so often not the case with readings like this). It was a joy to hear – and you can still catch it, all five episodes, on BBC Sounds.

And another good thing. Yesterday I had occasion to buy a pair of slippers, which I did from a stall in the market place. 'They're made in England now,' the stallholder told me as he handed them over. They were very cheap, so I was surprised to hear this, but he explained that this firm used to have all its shoes made in China, but now transport costs have risen so much that they find it cheaper to make them here. This struck me as excellent news, and I hope it applies across more areas of manufacturing – it would be wonderful to be taking back at least some of all that manufacturing we cheerfully outsourced to a totalitarian country which makes no secret of its ambition to take over the world at the first opportunity. Let's hope my slippers are a straw in the wind. 

Ralph Stanley

 The great bluegrass singer and banjoist Ralph Stanley would have been 96 today. Like many, I first became aware of him thanks to the Coen Brothers film O Brother Where Art Thou? Ralph's electrifying a cappella performance of 'O Death' was one of the musical highlights of that brilliant movie – but here he is earlier in his career, with his brother Carter, performing something much cheerier: 'Mountain Dew'. 

Past and Present

 Last night I caught a TV documentary (BBC4) on the 1951 Festival of Britain. It made poignant viewing – and deeply saddening too, if one, for example, compared the joyful, imaginative and brilliantly conceived celebration on the South Bank with the dismal, aborted  'Millennium Experience' at Greenwich half a century later.  While the former was packed with content and meaning and driven by an optimistic spirit, the latter was devoid of content or meaning and driven by nothing but a felt necessity to spend a great deal of money on some kind of spectacle. Greenwich ended up as an all too vivid demonstration of the sheer vacuity of the time, whereas the South Bank – and Battersea Park, and the Lansbury Estate in Poplar with its 'living architecture' – were bursting with vitality, and projected a strong message about the state of the nation, surging back from the privations (and authoritarianism) of wartime and looking forward to a bright and happy future. Some of the most striking footage was of couples – hundreds of them – dancing (in basic ballroom style) in the open air at the Festival site: everybody danced then. And a huge crowd lustily singing 'Jerusalem': everybody sang too – 'community singing' was still very much a thing in those days. And here's another index of how much, and how much for the worse, things have changed since those Festival days: the documentary was enlivened by West Indian voices and calypso songs, all celebrating the wonders of London and the mother country and the great Festival. Oh dear, oh dear, how long ago it seems... Today we have 'drill' music and sullen, angry rap. It is hard not to conclude that in the seventy-odd years since the Festival of Britain, we have been trundling rapidly towards hell in a handcart.
  Apart from the Royal Festival Hall, almost nothing remains of the built legacy of the South Bank festival – and still less, alas, of its spirit. But at least the musical legacy survives: by chance I heard this morning on Radio 3 Vaughan Williams's  beautiful choral setting of 'The Cloud-Capp'd Towers', one of three Shakespeare songs commissioned for the Festival. What was the musical legacy of Greenwich? Was there one? 

  
 

Clemence

 Clemence Dane (born Winifred Ashton), a playwright and novelist very successful in her time, was born on this day in 1888. Despite being a prolific screenwriter, she seems to have remained (as her rather sweet features suggest) one of life's innocents. In his cheering memoir, Life's Rich Pageant, Arthur Marshall recalls her...

'The physical side of life had passed her by, together with the words, slang and otherwise, that accompany it. She had no idea at all why people laughed, or tried tactfully to conceal laughter, as time and time again she settled for an unfortunate word or phrase. Inviting Mr Coward to lunch during the war when food was difficult, she boomed encouragement down the telephone: 'Do come! I've got such a lovely cock.' ('I do wish you'd call it a hen,' Noel answered.) Asking her friend, Olwen, what she had secured for a summer picnic, she was heard to yell up the stairs, 'Olwen, have you got crabs?'... To use correctly, in a literary sense, the words 'erection', 'tool' and 'spunk' was second nature to her. When wishing to describe herself as being full of life and creative energy, she chose, not really very wisely, the word 'randy'. To hear a large and imposing women of fifty announcing to a roomful of actors that she felt randy was really something. She never cottoned on to the fact that the name 'John Thomas' had a hidden significance, and she was heard one day expatiating about the different sides to a person's nature: 'Yes, every man has three John Thomases - the John Thomas he keeps to himself, the John Thomas he shares with his friends, and the John Thomas he shows to the world.' 'Of course, Winifred,' people said, when they could speak.'

[Readers with remarkable powers of memory might notice that this is the substance of a post I put up on this date in 2010 – thirteen years ago! How long has this blog been going on? Very nearly fifteen years, I discover on consulting the archive, and this is post number 4,236. Blimey.]

Worthing

 As Jack Worthing helpfully explains to Lady Bracknell, 'Worthing is a place in Sussex. It is a seaside resort.'
I was there over the weekend – on family business, which meant I had little time to explore, but what I saw of the place I mostly liked. There are certainly some very attractive buildings, from elegant balconied terraces to picturesque flint-faced or colourwashed cottages, and the beach and promenade are no doubt very agreeable when not lashed with icy gale-force winds. The hotel we stayed in boasted that among its previous guests were Charles Dickens (is there a Victorian seaside hotel in which he did not stay?) and Oscar Wilde. 
  Wilde certainly knew Worthing, and he spent a long holiday there in the summer of 1894 – the last summer before his fall from grace. He was staying in a rented house (long since demolished), with his wife Constance and their two sons, and, intermittently, the troublemaking Lord Alfred Douglas ('Bosie'). In the course of this seaside sojourn, he had a sexual relationship with at least one local boy; the unhappy Constance fell in love with another man, a bookseller friend of the Wildes called Arthur Humphreys; and Oscar, in dire need of money, wrote his finest and funniest work, The Importance of Being Earnest. Bosie, typically, claimed that much of the play was written while he was sitting in the room with Oscar, and that some of its best lines were taken from his, Bosie's, sparkling repartee. 
  Worthing obviously gave Jack Worthing his surname, and an entry in the Worthing Gazette seems to have given the fictitious Bunbury his. There is more about all this in Antony Edmonds's book Oscar Wilde's Scandalous Summer: The 1894 Worthing Holiday and Its Aftermath. Edmonds also wrote a book about Worthing's other major literary connection, Jane Austen's Worthing: The Real Sanditon. Austen visited the then embryonic resort in 1805, and no doubt behaved very much more decorously than Oscar.

Mrs Bridge

 With nearly all my books in storage (not for much longer, thank G--), I'm still largely dependent on Lichfield's fine charity bookshops for my reading. The other day I spotted a Penguin Modern Classic I'd never heard of, by an author whose name was equally unknown to me. Mrs Bridge by Evan S. Connell was one source – the other being, as you'd expect, Mr Bridge – for a Merchant-Ivory film, Mr and Mrs Bridge (1990), but I had never seen that either, so I had no idea what to expect when I opened Mrs Bridge.
  It was published in 1959, but is set in the Thirties and Forties. The eponymous Mrs Bridge is an unfulfilled upper-middle-class (in English terms) housewife, wife of a successful lawyer, mother of three, resident of a prosperous suburb of Kansas City. Nearly everything that unfolds in the course of the novel is told from her perspective, which, as she increasingly but haltingly realises, is too narrowly circumscribed to make sense of much that is going on around her. Though it is a tale of growing unhappiness and alienation, it's told with a deftly comic touch that makes it much more readable than most such chronicles of suburban dissatisfaction. The tone is bittersweet, mildly satirical, but at heart affectionate and sympathetic (Mrs Bridge is partly based on the author's own mother). It unfolds in a series of short vignettes, some as little as a paragraph, none more than half a dozen pages – 117 of them in a novel of 180-odd pages – and this works to turn what might, in more traditional form, have been a plod into something that sparkles with a distinctive brilliance. I've greatly enjoyed reading it, and I think it deserves its 'modern classic' status.
  The copy I have has been heavily pencil-marked, with many underlinings, circled words and marginal exclamation marks. I was intrigued to find at one point that the underliner had written in the margin 'Afternoons. Larkin'. This was linked with an arrow to a sentence beginning 'The house was so quiet that she began to think how noisy it had been when all the children had been there, how very much different everything had been...' Mrs Bridge has been pushed to the side of her own life... 

Afternoons

Summer is fading:
The leaves fall in ones and twos
From trees bordering
The new recreation ground.
In the hollows of afternoons
Young mothers assemble
At swing and sandpit
Setting free their children.
Behind them, at intervals,
Stand husbands in skilled trades,
An estateful of washing,
And the albums, lettered
Our Wedding, lying
Near the television:
Before them, the wind
Is ruining their courting-places

That are still courting-places
(But the lovers are all in school),
And their children, so intent on
Finding more unripe acorns,
Expect to be taken home.
Their beauty has thickened.
Something is pushing them
To the side of their own lives.

['Afternoons' was written in 1959, the year Mrs Bridge was published.)