In Memory of Brian Wells

IN MEMORY OF BRIAN WELLS


Trinity Methodist Church, Albert Road, Southsea,
Thursday 25th October - 7pm for 7.30.

Poems by Brian read by his wife Sheila.
Readings by members of Portsmouth Poetry Society.

Light refreshments and copies of Brian's book, Opus Nine, will be available.
Proceeds to the Rowans Hospice.

Sebastian Faulks - A Possible Life

Sebastian Faulks, A Possible Life (Hutchinson)

Sebastian Faulks' new book announces itself as 'A Novel in Five Parts'. I'm not going to trouble to look up the dictionary definition of 'novel', I suspect it would say it is a work of fiction, usually in prose, but many would expect it to be one narrative, and of a piece. The five parts of A Possible Life have no common characters, are set in different places and in different times and nothing apparently carried over from one part into the next.
On that evidence, Joyce's Dubliners, generally recognized as a set of short stories, is more of a novel than this. But if it says it's a novel I'm not going to take issue and that is not going to delay us any further, but if you prefer to see it as five novellas I don't think you'll be thrown out of your local reading group. You'll need to give them a better reason than that.
In Part I, A Different Man, we are in familiar Faulks territory in WW2, soon behind enemy lines and then captured and being treated to the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp. It's not easy reading and one stops to wonder if one needs to know any more. The writing is superb and unflinching but also, we do need to be reminded from time to time in our complacent little lives, lest we forget. Geoffrey Talbot survives and escapes and eventually returns to France in search of the lost love that had ostensibly betrayed him, but under what duress we can't know. And then he settles into an afterlife of teaching in one of those idylls of a dry, bygone England.
Possibly the best story is next, The Second Sister, in which a workhouse boy finds his way through London's underclasses to property-owning prosperity, and with the sister of his first love who he married, who eventually recovers from a trauma that had made her a long term psychiatric patient.
Of the five children that Billy is one of, it is explained that it can't be either of the eldest two, or the youngest, that must go to the workhouse, and so,
Me and Arthur kept staring at each other.
A tenuous and abstract theme is emerging in which an intense and shared relationship is by circumstances made unequal and, as the blurb says, a 'mysterious consolation' is achieved after the wonderful but finite love is abandoned.
The relationship between Elena and Bruno in Part III involves the study of 'brain activity', revisiting the world of Faulks' novel Human Traces, except set very bravely in the year 2029 and onwards. This story has more of a twist in the end than the others, captivating though they all are. The question arises perhaps of how special our emotional attachments are or how much no more than the inevitable chemical result of such things as synapses within the otherwise non-individuated portions of flesh and nerve-endings that one human being might be.
Part IV is of spiritual enlightenment in the end, and memorable at the time until Faulks delivers his finale with a masterpiece that almost overshadows even the first two parts with You Next Time, an account by musician Jack Wyatt of his relationship with the successful singer-songwriter, Anya King.
It is a brillianty observed study not only of the music industry per se but also of how an artistic career- a pop music one here but it might be in any genre- is at its most exciting and creative before the commercial necessities of touring, recording and other treadmill activity that are visited upon the successful reduce it to drudgery and unglamorous pressure.
Faulks' prose changes key and foretells the inevitable end of the relationship well in advance of Anya's need to move on and Madeleine Peyroux-style disappearance. Jack has already jettisoned a perfectly exceptional girlfriend in Lowri, who gradually gets the message off-stage, as he takes on the role as Anya's manager. The fragility of such deep and unfathomable attachments tangentially reminded me of those in Banana Yoshimoto's stories, who seem at once transcendentally fulfilled by a mutual need for each other but have an endless chasm of loneliness inside them.
As the story reached its final few pages, I was sure I was going to cry like a baby at any given moment. Jack marries someone else eventually and has two children and sentences as disarmingly simple as,
and Becky indulged me by giving Pearl the second name of Anya.
threatened to breach the dam of tears with one gentle stroke. It didn't quite come that although there was moisture there for sure.
The story ends on the more complex idea that for all that we might make indelible marks on the lives of others, or more importantly, them on ours, and be a part of each other, it is also worth wondering how much we are a part of our own.
At Anya's last concert, one song is changed so that,
it was no longer a kind of novelty anti-love song ...it was a self-critical account of her inability to give herself to another person.
And, in the life afterwards, Jack is in a position to say,
It was no longer a matter of envy when I saw a beautiful woman sharing plans with laughing men.

It has sometimes been said, and sometimes by me, that Sebastian Faulks isn't going to write another Birdsong, but I was always very happy with other titles of his, too, and now there's this one I don't think we should see it like that.
After Julian Barnes and Alan Hollinghurst last year and the recent McEwan and Winterson, I think it's fair to say that the mainstream of British literary fiction writers are in fine form, as good as they've ever been.
There might be an advantage to a novel in five parts. Who would settle for having their heart broken once when you can have it done five times in the space of a few days.

Got up and finished joint third

Just as Camelot failed to emulate Nijinsky's triple crown by not adding the St. Leger to his 2000 Guineas and Derby wins, so I failed to live up to my own hype and could only dead-heat with Denise Bennett for third place in Portsmouth Poetry Society's 2012 competition.
Congratulations to John Dean on his win with a spirited defence of rhyme and metre, which were never as such under attack. And to Cliff Blake on his second place.
So, the dream of completing a unique treble this summer is over. Having added the Olympic Bag Boggling gold medal (somewhere below) to my majesterial win in a Fantasy Tour de France game, I really needed to lift that cup to put me in with a chance of Sports Personality of the Year.
But we will be back, trying again, next year.

Here's my poem. The theme of the competition was 'a lifeline',

Life Line 

Your future is in the palm of your hand.

Your life is written on the life line there.

What happens next will be what fate has planned. 

So pay the palm reader what they demand

And let them interpret it if you dare.

Your future is in the palm of your hand. 

Life is pre-ordained on that fragile strand,

That faint fault line of which we should beware.

What happens next will be what fate has planned. 

But nothing that you do can countermand

Its fractures or the way it leads nowhere.

Your future is in the palm of your hand. 

So, as our aeroplane comes in to land,

Bumping through that turbulent airport air,

What happens next will be what fate has planned. 

We hope the pilot is in control and

You check your life line and then we compare.

Your future is in the palm of your hand. 

I don’t believe all this, you understand,

But if others choose to that’s their affair.

Your future is in the palm of your hand.

What happens next will be what fate has planned.

Portsmouth Cathedral Lunchtime Live

David Price, organ, Portsmouth Cathedral, Sept 13th

A new season of lunchtime recitals got underway with Portsmouth Cathedral's organist giving a programme of some considerable variety that demonstrated the organ's range and dynamics.
Looking at the running order, it was as if he was expecting me as he began with a vigorous Prelude and Fugue by Dietrich Buxtehude and followed it with selections from Messe pur les Couvents by Francois Couperin, two composers held in high regard at this house.
The Couperin set used some of the more muted and melodic stops. I'm afraid the full organ sound always makes me anticipate Vincent Price and there is more to the instrument than that.
Daniel Purcell was the brother of one of England's finest composers, Henry, but a dab hand on his own account on the evidence of a stately Minuet and Air.
Elgar's Chanson de Nuit and Chanson de Matin was the best known piece, taken a bit hastily for me in this arrangement and thus losing the usual elegant smoothness and the finale was an energetic and climactic Festival Toccata by Percy Fletcher, a little more Reginald Dixon in its early passages but reverberating grandly at its finish.
It was a pleasing excursion for 45 minutes on a gorgeous Thursday, exactly the sort of day that makes this time of year my favourite. If I can make it to any more of these recitals, I will. In particular the countertenor we are promised on October 4th.

Praise to the Holiest in the Height

When asked, 'have you got vertigo?', Spike Milligan would answer, 'no, I only live round the corner.' On Tuesday, rather less droll, I'd have said, 'yes'.

The Tower Tour at Salisbury Cathedral is two hours of excellent entertainment, but you need to be prepared to climb a few narrow winding sets of stairs and also have a head for heights. I'm one of those unfortunate people who enjoys a panoramic view but doesn't enjoy the feeling that at any moment I might not be able to stop myself falling off a precarious, high place.
In fact, I was probably worse looking over from the walkway at the clerestory level than on the outside at the base of the spire which is a few floors higher but when the guide asked 'are there any more questions', I only just prevented myself from saying, 'yes, can we go back down now?'. Another Milligan remark, which might indicate a similar incapacity in the Goon, was that it wasn't the height he was scared of-, that's fine- it's the ground that kills you'.

It's a great thing to see, though, more an education in engineering and architecture than spiritual matters with plenty more things to wonder at along the lines of 'how did they do that'. Well, medieval architects were apparently no less ingenious and tremendously accurate than those of any other period.
The third picture here (not taken by me) is looking up inside the spire with its 700 year old timber scaffolding which, we were told, the tour would have allowed us to go up by the set of ladders in the 1950's. I don't think I've ever been more grateful for a Health & Safety ruling.

What a Day for a Dave Green

The in-tray is currently awaiting the Danny Baker memoirs, the new Sebastian Faulks and then Sasha Dugdale's verdict on the Best British Poetry of 2012 so I knew I needed a book or two to read with a week off work coming up. On a recent visit to Portsmouth Central Library I had negotiated the supermarket self-service machine quite successfully so I thought I'd go and get myself a couple of books on Friday lunchtime.
But, D'oh, of course, when you get there you remember, Portsmouth Central Library is closed on Fridays. But it might have been a blessing in disguise. I was thrown back on my own resources, my own library, in which there must always be something worthy of re-reading. Some of them not having been looked at for thirty years, reading many of those books is like reading them for the first time.
Andre Gide has been waiting patiently there year on year in several paperbacks and must be worth revisiting. When I say all this is 're-reading', I've arrived at page 88 of The Counterfeiters (Les Faux Monnayeurs) utterly convinced I've never read it at all before. It's nothing like what I thought it was about and I'd surely remember this if I'd read it. It's one of those books that makes me want to do a Top 10 Novels just so that I can put it in.
It keeps saying things that I thought I had thought for myself, like,
You remind me of certain English people - the more emancipated their opinions, the more they cling to their morality; so that there are no severer Puritans than their free-thinkers
and in Edouard's journal, in somewhat heavy prose,
The anti-egoistical force of decentralization is so great in me that it disintegrates my sense of property - and, as a consequence, of responsibility. Such a being is not of the kind that one can marry. How can I make Laura understand this?

I believe Gide was a great intellectual hero, perhaps more in France than in England, in his day but we don't seem to hear so much about him now. I can see how D.H. Lawrence has become less fashionable than he once was but Gide looks as good as he ever did and I'm grateful to Portsmouth Library for being closed and the unlikely benefit to me of an austerity cut in their service.
From the pictures here, it's also not a very sobering thought to see what 37 years can do to how one looks. Between, say, 1983 and 1930. Not very sobering I say because it makes one reach for another glass of wine.

But the third library in the story, after Portsmouth Central and mine, is that of Chichester Cathedral.
It would have been a mildly interesting trip to see it yesterday, and to see the bishop's private chapel with its C13th roundel and the remains of some lapis lazuli that pre-dates Titian's use of it. That would have been fine but it is betting without the Tractatus with a John Donne signature in it.
There are presumably more Donne autographs remaining than there are of Shakespeare. There are perhaps six Shakespeares, all on legal documents. But I don't now if I'm ever going to be in a position to ask to see any of them or, even less likely, touch the item (which I did very gently and with reverence) and be allowed to take a picture of it. But if you don't ask, you never know. So while I'm on a roll, I think I'll phone up Emanuelle Beart to see if she wants to come round to share a bottle of cabernet sauvignon. Tesco Express is still open.

I know there are people who go all the way to Florida to have the cheap and tacky time of their lives in that sunshine. That's nice for them, and good luck, but I don't think that's for me when Chichester has such rare and esoteric thrills hidden away, waiting to be discovered.

 

Signed Poetry Books - John Donne

This feature is usually only for books of poems signed by their authors and owned by me but today we make a rare exception.
Parts of Chichester Cathedral not normally open to public visitors were open today as part of a Heritage Day and one such part was the library.
It turned out to be a fine opportunity, if a little rushed in guided groups. All the browsing time allowed was taken up for me in asking if I could see the volume signed by John Donne, who had been a friend of the owner of a good proportion of the books.
It is not a poetry book but a Tractatus de Rerum Ecclesiastes, or some such laugh-a-minute Treatise on Church Issues.
So, there it is, I touched a book that Donne touched. My week off has begun in spectacular fashion.