Good and Bad Timing and other stories

 The Letters of Thom Gunn is due on Mar 18th, right in the middle of Cheltenham races. That's bad timing but what can you do. Spring promises a major book each month with the biography of Charlotte Mew by Julia Copus due in April and the Oxford lectures of Prof. Armitage in May. So, before that jamboree, I have world enough and time, I think, to finish Humphrey Carpenter's biography of Benjamin Britten and read The Edwardians by Vita Sackville-West and then, I think finally, become a Graham Swift completist by reading Out of This World. And that is good timing. Because it was planned by me. It almost reminds me of being in work. Whichever projects went well seemed to be the ones I was involved in. Only joking.

Carpenter's biography of Auden is a fine thing and so it's no surprise to find that he does a good job, so far at least, on Britten. Britten doesn't belong in my top echelon of favourite composers but I've long been aware of this heavy volume and fancied it. There is some sort of aesthetic similarity, it always seems to me, between Britten and the greatest composer of the C20th, Shostakovich. The trouble, or the main issue, with Britten's story is probably also the reason why one wants to read it, which is not a good reason.

Whereas the biography of Malcolm Sargent from 1970, currently with my parents, doesn't investigate at all the dapper party animal's extra curricular activity, that which is legally only the concern of consenting adults in private seems to be the big issue in who Britten really was. If it wasn't for discussion of that, the book would be much shorter. On the one hand, it is who he was; on the other hand, it's none of our business. But if W.H. Auden is involved, and he was when sharing accommodation in New York with a Bohemian coterie that included Gypsy Rose Lee described by Peter Pears as 'sordid beyond belief', one can be sure he'd make it his business and sort it all out. Matching the accompanying music to one's reading should mean that I become familiar with the Britten discs I have during 600+ pages. I might even make it to disc 2 of the War Requiem.

 

Good poem in The Times today by Prof. Armitage, an unrhymed 15-line sonnet in worthy tribute to Keats as part of that particular anniversary. I have slightly ambivalent attitudes to both of them but much prefer to credit people with their best work rather than hold the other stuff against them.

 

Maybe more later.  I'd put today's Times crossword solution here like I used to except I've recently taken to e-mailing it in on the off-chance of a £20 Waterstone's voucher. There's no percentage in telling everybody the answers so that they can reduce my chances of winning so I'm not doing that anymore.