How to Do Dickens

 'I think the best you can do in a movie is to be faithful to the author's intention in all areas. With the two Dickens films I did [Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948)], they are, oh, pencil sketches of these great novels that he wrote, but I think they are faithful. I wouldn't have been ashamed to show him the films.'

So said the film director David Lean, whose Great Expectations is perhaps the greatest Dickens adaptation ever made – a 'pencil sketch' of the novel indeed, but wholly faithful to the author's intentions and to the spirit of the original work. I suggest that Stephen (Peaky Blinders) Knight, author of the latest Dickens travesty to hit our TV screens – yes, Great Expectations – have Lean's wise words inscribed in pokerwork, framed and hung prominently over his writing desk. I also suggest that the BBC give up on Dickens – they seem to have quite lost the ability to adapt his works faithfully, or indeed watchably. 

Butterflies on the Piano

 It's World Piano Day, so I'll take the opportunity to smuggle in my favourite subject – butterflies...
The development of the piano in the Romantic period hugely extended the expressive and mimetic possibilities of the keyboard, and one of the things the modern instrument lent itself to particularly well was evoking such natural phenomena as the flight of a butterfly.  Grieg's Schmetterling and Moritz Rosenthal's Papillons set out to do this overtly, but perhaps the best evocation of a butterfly flitting busily from flower to flower was apparently written with no thought of Lepidoptera – Chopin's Etude Opus 25, number 9, the 'Butterfly' Etude, which only acquired its name when listeners and players started noting the remarkable resemblance. Not only the music, with its high-speed alternation of staccato and marcato, but also the movements of the pianist's hands across the keys perfectly evoke the restless flight of a butterfly. Here it is played by the Lithuanian pianist Lukas Geniusas – 

Meanwhile, I have still not so much as glimpsed a single butterfly this 'spring', thanks to all this cold and rain and wind – and it's very nearly April. I am feeling the lack.

Genius in Action

 I was rather startled to come across this image today – yes, a Ludwig van Beethoven action figure, complete with stool. The poor man appears to be wearing an industrial-strength hernia truss, and, understandably in the circumstances, he doesn't seem to promise much more in the way of 'action' than sitting down on the stool. The box bears the stirring quotation: 'What I have in my heart must come out; that is the reason why I compose.' 
  Well, I guess if any composer was going to get his own action figure, it would have to be Beethoven, the most 'iconic' of them all. But are there any others? Trawling eBay, I found a Bach ('The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul') and a Mozart ('Silence is very important. The silence between the notes are [sic] as important as the notes themselves'), both of slightly higher quality – if you can imagine such a thing – and both fetching higher prices than poor old Ludwig Van. 
  As for action figures of artists, I could only find one – inevitably, Vincent van Gogh ('I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream'). Here the manufacturers have really gone to town, providing two removable heads(!), paintbrush, 'pallet' [sic], easel, frame and four paintings. Alas, no one seems to have made a Jackson Pollock action figure... 

'The dead say little in their letters...'

 A while back, I posted a moving (to me at least) poem about an old family photograph, written by Ned Balbo, which I linked to a similarly themed and still more moving poem by Donald Justice. Now I find a third poem about the extraordinary emotional power of familial relics by another American poet, Dana Gioia –

Finding a Box of Family Letters

The dead say little in their letters

they haven't said before.

We find no secrets, and yet

how different every sentence sounds

heard across the years.

           

My father breaks my heart

simply by being so young and handsome.

He's half my age, with jet-black hair.

Look at him in his navy uniform

grinning beside his dive-bomber.

 

Come back, Dad! I want to shout.

He says he misses all of us

(though I haven't yet been born).

He writes from places I never knew he saw,

and everyone he mentions now is dead.

 

There is a large, long photograph

curled like a diploma—a banquet sixty years ago.

My parents sit uncomfortably

among tables of dark-suited strangers.

The mildewed paper reeks of regret.

 

I wonder what song the band was playing,

just out of frame, as the photographer

arranged your smiles. A waltz? A foxtrot?

Get out there on the floor and dance! 

You don't have forever.

 

What does it cost to send a postcard

to the underworld? I'll buy

a penny stamp from World War II

and mail it downtown at the old post office

just as the courthouse clock strikes twelve.

 

Surely the ghost of some postal worker

still makes his nightly rounds, his routine

too tedious for him to notice when it ended.

He works so slowly he moves back in time

carrying our dead letters to their lost addresses.

 

It's silly to get sentimental.

The dead have moved on. So should we.

But isn't it equally simple-minded to miss

the special expertise of the departed

in clarifying our long-term plans?

 

They never let us forget that the line

between them and us is only temporary.

Get out there and dance! the letters shout,

adding, Love always. Can't wait to get home! 

And soon we will be. See you there.

Dana Gioia, whose work I am only just beginning to discover, is a poet and critic who is very much better known in America than on this side of the Atlantic. His career path makes him unusual among poets: a graduate of Stanford Business School, he rose through the corporate world to become vice-president of General Foods before deciding, in 1992, to devote himself full-time to writing (and, later, being head of the NEA). With his background, his easy, unpretentious manner and his preference for formal verse, he does not fit the prevailing British idea of what A Poet should be.

Here are a couple more by Gioia: this quietly intriguing, dream-like poem –

Equations of the Light

Turning the corner, we discovered it

just as the old wrought-iron lamps went on—

a quiet, tree-lined street, only one block long   

resting between the noisy avenues.

The streetlamps splashed the shadows of the leaves   

across the whitewashed brick, and each tall window

glowing through the ivy-decked facade

promised lives as perfect as the light.

Walking beneath the trees, we counted all   

the high black doors of houses bolted shut.   

And yet we could have opened any door,   

entered any room the evening offered.

Or were we deluded by the strange

equations of the light, the vagrant wind   

searching the trees, that we believed this brief   

conjunction of our separate lives was real?

It seemed that moment lingered like a ghost,   

a flicker in the air, smaller than a moth,   

a curl of smoke flaring from a match,   

haunting a world it could not touch or hear.

There should have been a greeting or a sign,   

the smile of a stranger, something beyond

the soft refusals of the summer air

and children trading secrets on the steps.

Traffic bellowed from the avenue.

Our shadows moved across the street’s long wall,   

and at the end what else could I have done   

but turn the corner back into my life?

And this, about a feeling we can probably all identify with at some level –

The Letter

And in the end, all that is really left

Is a feeling—strong and unavoidable—

That somehow we deserved something better.   

That somewhere along the line things

Got fouled up. And that letter from whoever’s   

In charge, which certainly would have set   

Everything straight between us and the world,

Never reached us. Got lost somewhere.   

Possibly mislaid in some provincial station.   

Or sent by mistake to an old address   

Whose new tenant put it on her dresser   

With the curlers and the hairspray forgetting   

To give it to the landlord to forward.   

And we still wait like children who have sent   

Two weeks’ allowance far away   

To answer an enticing advertisement   

From a crumbling, yellow magazine,

Watching through years as long as a childhood summer,   

Checking the postbox with impatient faith   

Even on days when mail is never brought.

Richard Coles

 The BBC has done it again – not only dropping the Rev. Richard Coles from Radio 4's Saturday Live, a show he has presented for 12 years and for which he was a perfect fit (and by miles the best of its presenters), but bungling his departure with a typical mix of crass insensitivity and sneaky, face-saving machinations. This sad story has attracted little notice, largely because the BBC has done its best to bury it, but The Guardian yesterday ran an illuminating interview with Coles, whose response to his shabby treatment by the Corporation is admirably restrained. His last show goes out live this Saturday. I fancy it will be a moving farewell...
Meanwhile, the BBC has delivered its standard-issue weasel words, assuring us that Richard 'continues to be part of the Radio 4 family. We look forward to working with him on future projects.'   

Van Dyck and Brambell

 Born on this day in 1599 was the great Flemish painter Anthony Van Dyck, who spent part of his dazzling career in the court of Charles I, showing the English how portraiture should be done. The picture above is one of Van Dyck's quieter, more intimate works, a portrait of Cornelis van der Geest, an Antwerp spice merchant and art collector. It hangs in the National Gallery (one of the few London attractions that I miss).

To descend from the sublime to the ridiculous, today is also the birth date (in 1912) of the comic actor Wilfrid Brambell. I don't think I have anything to add to this piece from 2012. 

Poem

 Good grief, it's World Poetry Day again! 
So here's a poem, one that I'd place among the very best of the later 20th century, and one that's too little known, at least on this side of the pond – Richard Wilbur's 'A Baroque Wall Fountain in the Villa Sciarra':

Under the bronze crown

Too big for the head of the stone cherub whose feet   

      A serpent has begun to eat,

Sweet water brims a cockle and braids down

            Past spattered mosses, breaks

On the tipped edge of a second shell, and fills   

      The massive third below. It spills

In threads then from the scalloped rim, and makes

            A scrim or summery tent

For a faun-ménage and their familiar goose.   

      Happy in all that ragged, loose

Collapse of water, its effortless descent

            And flatteries of spray,

The stocky god upholds the shell with ease,

      Watching, about his shaggy knees,

The goatish innocence of his babes at play;

            His fauness all the while

Leans forward, slightly, into a clambering mesh   

      Of water-lights, her sparkling flesh

In a saecular ecstasy, her blinded smile

            Bent on the sand floor

Of the trefoil pool, where ripple-shadows come

      And go in swift reticulum,

More addling to the eye than wine, and more

            Interminable to thought

Than pleasure’s calculus. Yet since this all   

      Is pleasure, flash, and waterfall,   

Must it not be too simple? Are we not

            More intricately expressed

In the plain fountains that Maderna set

      Before St. Peter’s—the main jet   

Struggling aloft until it seems at rest

            In the act of rising, until   

The very wish of water is reversed,

      That heaviness borne up to burst   

In a clear, high, cavorting head, to fill

            With blaze, and then in gauze   

Delays, in a gnatlike shimmering, in a fine

      Illumined version of itself, decline,

And patter on the stones its own applause?

            If that is what men are

Or should be, if those water-saints display   

      The pattern of our aretê,

What of these showered fauns in their bizarre,

            Spangled, and plunging house?

They are at rest in fulness of desire

      For what is given, they do not tire

Of the smart of the sun, the pleasant water-douse

            And riddled pool below,

Reproving our disgust and our ennui   

      With humble insatiety.

Francis, perhaps, who lay in sister snow

            Before the wealthy gate

Freezing and praising, might have seen in this   

      No trifle, but a shade of bliss—

That land of tolerable flowers, that state

            As near and far as grass

Where eyes become the sunlight, and the hand   

      Is worthy of water: the dreamt land

Toward which all hungers leap, all pleasures pass.