Another Magazine Gone

 I was sorry to learn that the UK edition of that old warhorse Reader's Digest is to close down, unable to stay afloat in today's magazine market. When I was a boy my parents, like almost everyone else, had Reader's Digest (and even a few of the books they published) in the house, and from an early age I would leaf through it, often mystified – especially by the 'humour' ('Laughter the Best Medicine', 'Humour in Uniform') – but finding plenty to interest me, sometimes in 'Towards More Picturesque Speech' or 'It Pays to Increase Your Word Power', often  in the articles on science and medicine: in those days I wanted to be a doctor, a desire that left me as soon as I found out how much dreary science I'd have to do at school. Readers' Digest was a product of its time – aspirational, self-improving, decently conservative, unchallenging (though it campaigned hard to establish the link between smoking and lung cancer) – and was still in its heyday in the Fifties and Sixties when I first knew it. Not only was it in every home (or so it seemed) but in every doctor's or dentist's waiting room, along with the long since departed Punch.
   In my youth, of course, I had no time for it, but much later I did once have the curious experience of writing for it. The excellent Russell Twisk, the Listener editor who had bravely taken me on as radio critic in the course of a successful shake-up of the magazine, went on to be the UK editor-in-chief of Reader's Digest, so naturally I tried to get some work off him. I needed the money – and, by golly, the money turned out to be good. However, I had never had to work so hard to write a piece that amounted to little more than extended picture captions (it was to celebrate the tercentenary of the Glorious Revolution that brought William and Mary to the throne). Then, when I thought I'd finally crossed the finishing line, I came up for the first time against American-style fact checking. For one who tended to rely on winging it, bluffing and improvising, this was a major shock to the system. I was quite relieved when a couple of further ideas I put to Reader's Digest were turned down.
  And now Reader's Digest is following Punch and indeed The Listener into the ever growing graveyard of defunct magazines. Many more will follow it, I fear.

Rudyard: Kiplings, Funambulists and Swallows

 Talking of public monuments, here, viewed from behind, is a tree sculpture that overlooks Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire, which I visited at the weekend. I took the picture from behind because, frankly, it looks better: seen from the front, that tightrope walker has an unnerving look of the Monopoly Man about him. The sculpture, carved from a beech tree, overlooks the lake, and is intended to commemorate the feat of Carlos Trower, the 'African Blondin', who in 1864 (and again in 1878) walked across the lake on a tightrope 100ft above the water. He was not actually African but African-American, and I'm surprised he isn't better known in these days when 'black history' is so popular.  His feat was replicated in 2016 by funambulist Chris Bull, aka Bullzini, as the climax of a day of activities replicating Rudyard's heyday as a Victorian inland resort to which hundreds of thousands of day trippers and holidaymakers flocked, arriving on the North Staffordshire Railway. Among these visitors were John Lockwood Kipling and Alice Macdonald, who met there on a visit from Burslem, and were so taken with Rudyard Lake that they named their first son after it. 
  The lake was not intended as a tourist resort when it was created in 1799 as a canal reservoir, but such was its size – nearly two and a half miles long – and the beauty of its setting in a wooded valley that it was bound to become one, once the railways had reached it. It is still beautiful today, and visitors still come, though probably in smaller numbers than in its Victorian heyday – and they no longer arrive by train: there is now only a miniature railway, running in the summer months along the shore of the lake. When I was last at Rudyard, in 2016, I saw my first swallows of the year there, skimming the surface of the lake – and again this year my first swallows were waiting for me at Rudyard. They were two and a half weeks later than in 2016 – a testament to this year's cold wet April. I wonder if the swifts will be late too...

'The age of the statue is dead'

 The unveiling of the latest appalling public statue – of the late Queen and her (rather more lifelike) corgis, in Rutland, a delightful little county that doesn't deserve such an outrage – prompts an excellent piece by Ben Lawrence in the Telegraph. He's right that 'the biggest problem with modern statues is that they're awful' – think, if you can bear to, of the Diana statue in Kensington Gardens, or the giant Lovers looming over St Pancras station. However, there are exceptions – one, indeed, being the statue of John Betjeman that also stands at St Pancras, another the Larkin statue (also by Martin Jennings) in Hull. Only recently a pretty good statue of Coleridge (by Nicholas Dimbleby) was unveiled at Ottery St Mary. I should also mention that Lichfield has two good public statues – of Erasmus Darwin and St Chad, by Peter Walker. However, these are outliers, and Ben Lawrence is surely right that 'the age of the statue is dead' – the age, that is, of the naturalistic public monument, a statue that served a purpose, was skilfully made, and invoked a kind of grandeur that has become quite alien to our levelling, denigrating culture. Alas. 

A Cather Anniversary

 On this day in 1947, Willa Cather died in her Park Avenue home, at the age of 73, not of the cancer that she had been living with for some while, but of a cerebral haemorrhage. Her life partner Edith Lewis, in accordance with Cather's instructions, subsequently destroyed most of the manuscript of an unfinished final novel, Hard Punishments, set in medieval Avignon. Fragments of it have subsequently surfaced, and it sounds like yet another departure for an author who, as A. S Byatt put it, reinvented the novel form with each new work she wrote: this would have been her only novel set entirely in the Old World. Cather was interred in the Old Burying Ground of Jaffrey, New Hampshire, where Edith joined her 25 years later. 
  For years Willa Cather was little more than a name to me, as to most readers on this side of the Atlantic, so I came to her very late – in 2012, I think – initially by way of My Antonia, the last of the 'Prairie Trilogy', soon followed by another little masterpiece, A Lost Lady. As I read on through her novels (search 'Willa Cather' on this blog for my reactions), finally devouring all of them – and much of the shorter fiction – my admiration and wonder grew and grew, and I realised that I was dealing with a truly classic writer, one of the greats. Indeed, if someone has to be the Greatest Novelist of the 20th Century, I would be happy to nominate her – and, as the reputations of many of the male contenders for that title continue to fall away, that might come to seem a pretty sound choice.

Birthday, Rain

 Vladimir Nabokov was born on this day in 1899, though by the old calendar it would have been the 10th of April, and the following year it became the 23rd, so he celebrated his first birthday on our St George's Day. Anyway, here in England it's been a day (and night) of incessant rain, so here is a fitting poem by Nabokov, written in 1956...

Rain

How mobile is the bed on these nights of gesticulating trees when the rain clatters fast, the tin-toy rain with dapper hoof trotting upon an endless roof, travelling into the past. Upon old roads the steeds of rain slip and slow down and speed again through many a tangled year; but they can never reach the last dip at the bottom of the past because the sun is there.

'A Man Was Drawing Near to Me'

 This morning, I thought I'd try another Blindfold Poetry Selection. The slim volume I blindly took from the shelf turned out to be A Choice of Thomas Hardy's Poems – an attractive little book edited by Geoffrey Grigson, illustrated by Glynn Thomas, and published by Macmillan – and the poem it fell open at was 'A Man Was Drawing Near to Me'. I hadn't remembered reading it before, though I must have done: once, years ago, I even embarked on a doomed venture to read the Collected Poems, a volume of some 900 pages. Hardy, like many another poet, wrote too much, but the best of it is, for all its sometimes tortuous diction, very fine indeed. 'A Man Was Drawing Near to Me' is a haunting, mysterious affair – who is this man drawing near, and what does his 'gaze that bore My destiny' reveal? It could almost have been written by Walter de la Mare, though the result would have been smoother and more musical. The place names, by the way, are all from north Cornwall...

    On that gray night of mournful drone,
    Apart from aught to hear, to see,
    I dreamt not that from shires unknown
    In gloom, alone,
    By Halworthy,
    A man was drawing near to me.

    I'd no concern at anything,
    No sense of coming pull-heart play;
    Yet, under the silent outspreading
    Of even's wing
    Where Otterham lay,
    A man was riding up my way.

    I thought of nobody – not of one,
    But only of trifles – legends, ghosts –
    Though, on the moorland dim and dun
    That travellers shun
    About these coasts,
    The man had passed Tresparret Posts.

    There was no light at all inland,
    Only the seaward pharos-fire,
    Nothing to let me understand
    That hard at hand
    By Hennett Byre
    The man was getting nigh and nigher.

    There was a rumble at the door,
    A draught disturbed the drapery,
    And but a minute passed before,
    With gaze that bore
    My destiny,
    The man revealed himself to me.

London, Glass

 

Yesterday I was in London – always something of a shock to the system these days ('I had not thought death had undone so many', etc.) – to have lunch with an old friend. Afterwards we crossed the river to have a look at the Glass Heart exhibition at Two Temple Place – or rather, to visit Two Temple Place, which is always a pleasure: the extraordinary neo-Gothic house built for William Waldorf Astor in 1895 is like nothing else in London (or at least nothing open to the public – and indeed Temple Place wasn't until quite recently). The Glass Heart exhibition was interesting, mostly for some informative stuff about glass making and the glass industry, rather than what was on show. This included rather too much lumpish and unattractive recent work, and too little in the way of traditional stained or painted glass, though the Wahls, father and daughter, get a look-in, and there are bits of Morris & Co. material, mostly designs and sketches (and, in a different line, some nice engraved glass). Of course the best stained glass is, by its nature, in situ, and best seen in situ. Indeed, I found the two great windows that are in situ in the great hall of Temple Place the most enjoyable things I saw. They are by Clayton and Bell, and represent Sunrise (the East window) and Sunset (the West). And now I am back in Lichfield, with the cathedral and its wonderful Flemish glass ten minutes' walk away...