View from the Boundary

A man with one bookmaker's account might be understood to just enjoy a harmless weekend punt. One could probably lend him a fiver with every expectation of getting it back. But how do we regard someone with two accounts. A bit of a liability, perhaps, on his way to the loan shark's tawdry clutches and then the workhouse.

But I have opened a new account with Paddy Power in order to take advantage of their free bet to use that to back up my investment on Hollinghurst for the Booker Prize (4/1) with a similar gratis stab at the Forward Prize, which is one of the more exotic markets that the Irish firm offer prices on.

They have Geoffrey Hill at 13/8 fav with Sean O'Brien at 2/1, David Harsent at 4/1, then Longley 8/1, Burnside 10/1 and Nurske 12/1. This is roughly in line with their respective kudos and reputation, one would guess, but I'm not convinced it takes account of the specific volumes in competition for this year's prize.

While Hill is undoubtedly the doyen of High Church English poetry, and could win the prize on that reputation alone, it's not likely to be his best work but I'm not to know whether it is or not. In betting against favourites, you do so in the hope they are not quite on top form. However, although a long-time admirer of O'Brien and all his work, I do regard Harsent's book as 'better' this year. And this is in the knowledge that O'Brien's form figures in the Forward Prize read 111.

Michael Longley's reputation seems to remain a little way ahead of his achievement for me while the prize going to an outsider would make it just one of those events in which the roulette ball goes into 0 or 00. So, I'm with Harsent on this and can't help but notice that twenty pounds on two 4/1 shots multiplies up to five hundred. A monkey, in fact. The only way I've ever had a monkey before is by saving up for one. Perhaps Hollinghurst and Harsent will deliver me one over the winter.

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Faber and Martin Amis would be the only ones who could know why a Selected Larkin (pictured) is required. I can't see the need for it myself but it's due out very shortly.

It will mean me going into a bookshop next month to check on the contents list and skip through Martin's introduction. I don't intend paying to have a copy for myself.

Faber's Selected Poems of Douglas Dunn 1964-1983 ends on page 262 whereas their Collected Larkin edition of 2003 has its last poem on page 198. It has always seemed to me that Larkin did the selecting of his poems before publishing, finishing or even writing them. His Collected Poems are also his Selected Poems. So the interest in Martin Amis's edition is only really in what he leaves out or what he says in his introductory essay. We know he admired the 'instantly unforgettable', 'mnemogenic' nature of Larkin's poems while taking a less sympathetic view of the unambitious, provincial nature of the man himself. We don't really need a new selection to read that point of view again but I will be seeing if I can find a High Street bookshop to sneak a look at whatever else he has found to say.

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And, finally, from Robert Robinson's knowing and worldly-wise memoir, Skip all that,

(though Bill Gaskill, who wore an ear-ring and went to parties dressed as Nijinsky, had met Lady Redgrave in the vacation and after she'd said to her butler 'Butler, would you bring Mr. Gaskill a glass of fruit juice,' Bill had asked her if this was the correct way of addressing butlers, and she replied, 'certainly, if their name is Butler'.)

Matthew Hollis - Now All Roads Lead to France

Matthew Hollis, Now All Roads Lead to France, The Last Years of Edward Thomas (Faber)

Sometimes you don't realize what you were missing until you've got it. Edward Thomas seemed fairly well served by commentaries and memoirs and so I wasn't really aware of the lack of a real biography. Eleanor Farjeon's book that covers the last four years, when looked at again, is really annotated letters from Thomas to her and there wasn't a biography by anybody that wasn't either friend or family.

Although, inevitably, Matthew Hollis's title tells us to expect the story of his last years, Thomas's early life is recounted in sufficient detail to make it a complete story. It is consummately well done, filling in with descriptions of other poets, the political situation that brings about the war and flashbacks to Thomas's family both seamlessly and right on time.

Although not advertised quite so clearly in the poems, Thomas was melancholic even beyond his contemporary in poetry, Hardy, and one of his greatest successors, Larkin. Dark moods and difficult relationships meant he rarely felt fulfilled or happy. His wife, Helen, would appear to have borne much of this in devout and long-suffering fashion. Thomas was by no means at home all the time and was not always an easy companion when he was. And she has first Eleanor Farjeon's and then the considerably more dangerous Edna Clarke Hall's rival charms to apparently contend with.

Thomas was a successful reviewer and a professional prose writer before meeting Robert Frost who was responsible for encouraging him to write poems. Hollis gives us a useful and comprehensive account of the Dymock Poets, the largely Georgian community that Frost was associated with. But the main significance of Thomas and his friendship with Frost was how they were both arriving at an idea of poetry that was between the haughty doctrine of Ezra Pound and the antiquated Georgian insistence on sentiment and traditional forms. It was speech rhythms and 'the sound of sense' that Frost was intent upon using and it was a very similar to what Thomas had been thinking and writing for some time, for example in relation to Robert Burns,

'It is as near to the music as nonsense could be, and yet it is perfect sense'.

Thomas's example, and when he begins to write poems he does so prolifically, has come to influence the next generations more than could have been imagined with Larkin, Andrew Motion and Glyn Maxwell to name only the few at the head of a long list of those openly acknowledging a debt to his understated, plain but lyrical style.

While Rupert Brooke is among the first to enlist for the war and one of the first of the poets to die, others follow but Thomas is uncertain. He is not nationalistic but also appreciates the necessity of defending the countryside he has such an understanding of.

Thomas's experience of the war was very different from that of the other soldier poets. Where Sassoon, Graves and others had rushed to enlist and then recoiled at the horror of their experience of the conflict. Thomas's war seemed to be running in reverse. ..the longer the war went on the more committed he appeared.

Hollis does well in not dwelling at all on the poignancy of Thomas's death, with his doubts about the war in the first place, his apparently lucky run of just missing shells and the end of the war being only so few days away. The books dispels some of the assumptions that might make Thomas such a popular figure. Not completely the saintly nature lover and sensitive soul of the poems and prose books, he was clearly difficult. And neither just someone who turned to poetry a few years before he was killed but a well-connected literary man from Oxford University. His legacy is perhaps now even more important than the poems he wrote but, in navigating a way between Pound and the Georgian anthologies, he remains central to English poetry in the twentieth century with an influence that is not abating yet.

Matthew Hollis has done a wonderful job in providing exactly the book that was required. Immaculately conceived with a well-judged balance of material from friends, family, the literary world and history, it is both sensibly and sympathetically written. The reader is left with nothing more they could have wished for from it.

Proms - Handel, Rinaldo

Prom 55, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Handel, Rinaldo

Glyndebourne brought their Rinaldo to the Proms and I had made it my nap selection from this year's programme in order to realize a minor ambition of seeing a Handel opera without going bankrupt by seeing it at Covent Garden. While Nigel Kennedy's Bach sounded great and I was also vastly impressed by the Shostakovich Violin Concerto by Lisa Batiashvili broadcast, I still think I was on the winner here. There was, of course, the Tallis Scholars, too, but I'm afraid perfection isn't quite good enough any more.

It wasn't exactly as one might have expected, being billed as 'semi-staged'. It was thoroughly staged, acted and choreographed as well as costumed. The conflict was realized as a school playground bullying issue which, somewhat riskily for the blood pressure of some of the middle-aged and respectable audience, involved some of the naughtiest schoolgirls one's wildest dreams might leave you wondering where that had all come from once you'd woken up and found it hadn't actually happened. Rinaldo was Sonia Prina, looking somewhat like a fourth form Frankie Valli, but this production if not the opera as a whole was one where the main role was not the one named in the title. Brenda Rae was strikingly (in more ways than you'd think) impressive as the dominatrix schoolmistress, Armida. And she was ably supported by the wicked furies. Oh, yes, and there were some blokes dressed as schoolboys as well.

So, it was somewhat more than a literal exposition of this drama of Christians and Saracens and a very playful interpretation visually. Which is not to say that anything was sacrified in the integrity of the music, which would have still sounded as wonderful as ever on the radio except one looked across at Martin Handley in the Radio 3 commentary box and wondered how he was explaining what had just happened on stage to the listeners at home. But still, the best known aria, Almirena's Lascia ch'io pianga, beautifully done by Anett Frisch, had a packed Albert Hall rapt in attentive hush. Normally, that would have been the highlight but Act 2 ended with Brenda Rae prowling first the stage, then a few rows of very nervous audience with her cane clearly bursting with disciplinary needs, before selecting an unwilling Prommer who politely demurred, and then the orchestra while all the time the magnificent director Ottavio Dantone was filling with continuo of a particularly obbligato nature, until it was indicated he should cease. It was magnificent theatre.

How much of this burlesque was originally written in by Handel and his librettist, Giacomo Rossi, for the first performance 300 years ago might be a subject for further academic enquiry but you don't get this much genuinely well-done entertainment in the more popular arts and this would be a tremendous advert for opera if only it could reach those who assume it's just opera, i.e. interminable melodramatic singing.

There were superb scenes of school involving bicycles, satchels and playground football as well as as much good (I mean 'bad', of course) corporal punishment as you could - ahem- shake a stick at.

Dantone's direction was superb. Radio 3's own Chi Chi Nwanoku was on bass, William Towers turned up as a wonderfully coiffeured Magician, Luca Pisaroni was a bad Argante, which was good, but even without the staging, the great visual jokes, the very contemporary theme of blatant pornography and specialist rubberwear, Handel's music is, of course, sublime and sumptuous. It has been said that when sending out speculative messages into space for other life forms to understand who we are on this planet it would be showing off if we sent them recordings of Bach. If we had sent them Handel, they'd be here by now.

Top 6 - David Bowie

So, David Bowie is thinking of retiring, on his next birthday when he will be 65. How very gentrified.

For me, he could have retired 35 years ago but for our particular generation he was then as important as The Beatles, The Stones or Elvis Presley before him. Much is made of his magpie or chameleon character, perhaps stealing from or adapting to fashion and then somehow making it look like his idea but I can't think of any musician that didn't take what had gone before and do something else with it.

Wild is the Wind is the first name on the team sheet for a Top 6, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbpMpRq6DV4&ob=av2n , sublimely made and passionate from the masterpiece Station to Station album.

Rebel Rebel was a kind of mission statement for all the contrivance of gender confusion.

Heroes, equally impressive and more sinister in the German version, was a colossal classic of uber mensch traum but it might be better if we didn't spread this critic vocabulary on too thickly or someone will think it's serious.

Life on Mars? was a god awful small affair but you don't expect zeitgeist kultur like that to get in the charts anymore ( d'oh, sorry).

Word on a Wing is the next off Station to Station, from which virtually any would do.

And, in the accustomed position of having one selection left but a dozen candidates, even though I thought I saw you in an ice-cream parlour, drinking milk shakes cold and long, I'll take Changes.

Robert Robinson

Lines in Memory of Robert Robinson

So, Farewell, then, Robert Robinson,
Master of erudition and Call My Bluff.

The next word is PANELGAME.

Frank,

Imagine if you will, you are having dinner in an Arab country.
You need to mop up the last of your first course, which was a spicy soup.
Your host offers you some bread. It won’t be a slice of Mother’s Pride or Hovis,
It will be a homemade Pan-el-Game, pronounced pan-el-garmay.

Patrick

I, I, I don’t know if you’ve ever wondered about those windows sometimes built into the side wall of a pantry. They were used to keep an eye on the vegetable patch from the comfort of indoors to defend against turnip thieves. First introduced in France, they were known as Pane des Legumes, which became anglicized as Panelegume and then Panelgame.

Joanna Lumley.

It’s Panelgame. You bring together some writers of light, humourous entertainments with an actor and celebrity or two and play a parlour game of no particular significance to provide half an hour of television.

Would that it were, my dear, would that it were.

What I did on my holidays

O, dear me. Is it August already and the internet's audience figures are dipping because some of my readers think I've gone missing. Well, I'm sorry but a rest is as good as a change, as nobody ever said.
Just imagine if ITV1 didn't broadcast for a week and a half. Wouldn't that be awful.
But, like any jobbing columnist, I can attempt to dress up sundry items from my little life to pass off as entertainment. It is only a crying shame that I'm not Giles Coren or his sister or Robert Crampton and receive five figure amounts into my bank account for such lazy jottings-down.
I've been on my holidays, you see. Not the sort of holiday that my nephew, Chris, is on, who is just about to arrive in Mongolia having driven there in a tiny motor car through places like Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and, perhaps most dangerously, England.
http://www.thewongwayround.co.uk/
With all fingers and toes crossed, it is starting to look as if they might make it but we don't count chickens here. But best of luck to the intrepidness of their adventure. I've been pick-pocketed in Prague and Budapest and then sort of lost the will for such wild exploration but I hope they are finding that lots of different sorts of foreigners can be really nice to you.
My spirit of going into the unknown is tested when I begin to worry about having my ticket checked on the train from Bath to Swindon if the connection from Portsmouth has been late and put me on a later train than my ticket explicitly stipulates. This is nerve-end stuff as I have no idea what I'd do if I was thrown off at Chippenham.
But once I've arrived, I can relax a little bit. Not being at work for a week is an amazing elixir of freedom and laxity but I can't explain why because any word here about the way my office is run might end in unspeakable investigations although one can take some meagre comfort in the fact that Stalin didn't die in vain.
As well as blessing various relations with my presence, I saw some of the most minor tourist attractions in the area on a couple of nice, gentle walks, like Faringdon Folly and Cirencester Amphitheatre.
I had in mind a couple of titles from my father's bookshelves that I might read, including a tribute to Stan Barstow in a look at A Kind of Loving but I settled on Stanley Middleton's early novel, Harris's Requiem, which, being from 1960, was somewhat more pointed and less genteel than his later books and it did prove most diverting.
The usual and expected controversies over the rules of Scrabble were encountered in both Fairford and Swindon, which is strange when one reflects that the rules are quite clear for everyone to read and understand. But having come from behind and nicked the result off my dad with JEERINGLY in Fairford, I did an exhibition round against my very sporting and kindly sister in Swindon last night, beginning with FAINTLY and, 84-0 up after one play then put in a personal best of 449. She said she thought I'd come home and put something about that on my website. I said I didn't think I would.
And, also, well played to those players of Rummikub who did well at that.

The full programme for the Cheltenham Literature Festival was published this week. I hope I'm not forcing myself on my family more often than they would like but I can't help but think that I really ought to be there for this, http://www.cheltenhamfestivals.com/find-events/literature/l305-david-harsent-sean-obrien-paul-muldoon and so I'll try to be.
David Harsent has come from a dark horse position to strong favourite to lift this website's award for best poetry collection of 2011; Muldoon, amongst many other glories attached to his name, was best poem according to me last year, and O'Brien is so habitually listed on every prize list that I'm thinking I'll have to leave him off one of mine this year. But Cheltenham is so lovely, I can hardly bear not to go and see such a dream line-up of clever, smartarse, curmudgeonly, middle-aged talent. They are everything I ever wanted to be. And I haven't come this far to give up now.