Bleak and bleaker, in the midwinter

 One expects Sartre to be bleak. All the anguish and nothingness generated by a world one has to make up for oneself offer few comforts. Philosophy tends towards bleakness, reducing all that might be imagined to what is only ostensibly there, but even modern philosophers aren't quite as despairing as those that used to abdicate all responsibility and use God to explain it all. I found Nausea to be realistic rather than grim, though, and for all the negatives in his writing, he is reported as being sociable and good company, while rarely failing to find reasons to fall out with his fellow travellers.

Conversely, one might imagine Edward Thomas to be well-balanced and kindly on the evidence of his writing. The sympathy with nature, the generous outlook, the measured, gentle, expanding music of Adlestrop make him seem most companionable. But we must be careful not to conflate the writer and the writing. The short stories, mostly very short, in The Ship of Swallows are as beautifully written and measured in their pace as anything in the poems. Within the mechanics of sentence structure, his appreciation of the countryside is as convincing as in any writer and he evokes a richness of experience comparable with any of the English composers that were his contemporaries.

But that's not what he was like. Under the sub-heading of 'character' in the index of Mathhew Hollis's biography, Now All Roads Lead to France, there are entries on 'dislike of crowds', 'fatalism', 'inability to love', 'indecision', 'introspection', 'melancholia' and 'nihilism' and that is betting without the story of when he took his gun out with him on a walk with the intention of shooting himself. If one can find 'the joys of Spring' in his writing, they were less evident in his personality.

Thus it strikes one as startlingly honest to read The Attempt, a story so close to that real-life episode that it's not possible to believe it's entirely fictional. If one thought one was in for some fresh air, bucolics and rolling hills in the distance, there's more to it than that. The Attempt doesn't end in death but is more harrowing than those that do and one detects under the surface that it is a major pre-occupation.

Among other glimpses of autobiography, there's the description, in The Pilgrim, of one whose,

head was bare, and his brown hair was untidy, and longer than is necessary for whatever purposes hair may be supposed to serve. He might have been twenty-five, and I  put him down as perhaps a kind of poet, who made a living out of prose.

First published in 1928, it's not obvious here when that was written but it's possible he didn't really need the advice of Robert Frost to write poetry if it was written at the same time as those that were published in his lifetime.

The stories often end with a hint of mysticism and can be open-ended, as opposed to inconclusive, and are for the most part fine miniatures. Towards the end, The Land of Youth ambitiously moves into myth, folk lore and Tir Na Nog with less success and so I missed out the unpromisingly titled The Making of the Worlds, of Gods, and of Giants. I very rarely omit any of a book I'm reading but, on the other hand, only read things that I think I'm likely to admire and so rather than build towards its best pieces, the book feels like it ends in an unannounced appendix. It could have ended sooner but perhaps that wouldn't have represented what Thomas did so accurately. Nonetheless, if you are prepared to be jarred out of any comfort zone you might have thought you'd be indulging in and don't mind the darkness that lies not so far below the pastoral idyll, it's an essential book for all who think that Edward Thomas is as central to C20th English Poetry as, say, T.S. Eliot.

Existentialism and the Turf

 Bryony and Rachael got involved is too much of a duel early doors in the King George and spoiled each other's chances which led to a bit of a turn up, if any Irish win in a major UK race these days comes as a surprise. Bravemansgame established himself as top of the UK novice chasers, though, and carries forward a few little doubles and trebles to tomorrow and Wednesday, while Legal Rights was the well-backed good thing at Fontwell to keep us ahead. Niall Houlihan is already a jockey of some note while not yet out of the 'conditional' status.

Artificial, and ultimately meaningless, as horse racing and all sport is, it generates 'engagement' and some relief from the contingency, alienation and rootlessness of existentialist anguish and nothingness. There's much in Sartre I don't personally hold with, like the free will and his politics, such as they were, but Nausea is a tremendous novel. My friend on the train the other day noted how returning to books one thought were good many years ago can reveal them as great disappointments later in life but Nausea has if anything improved. It's as much a treatise on phenomenology and all that follows from Sartre's development from Heidigger as it is a novel but we are better off regarding all writing as 'writing' and worry less about whether it is fiction, poetry, philosophy or rambling internet posting.

Many years ago at a conference I met a post graduate student whose thesis was on Larkin and Existentialism, which had potential even if there might not have been much explicit Sartre in Larkin's poems. Certainly not as much as in Thom Gunn, whose The Sense of Movement was a very vogue-ish 1950's exercise in the fashion. It wasn't obvious that Larkin had read Sartre but it would come as no surprise if he had because despite his insistence on having no interest in continental literature he re-works a few French poets to his own ends. But there it was, as large as life, in Nausea,

Things have broken free from their names,

a very clear pre-echo, about twelve years previous, of, 

                                              they

Have slipped their names,

in At Grass, with reference to the retired racehorses but also chiming unmistakeably with the structuralist idea that the signifier and the signified have nothing but an arbitrary connection. The thing in the world and the word assigned to denote it are only associated with each other through the use of language. Otherwise, the world and language are two systems that are not linked.

Soon after that passage in Sartre, we are treated to the classic passage Six o'clock in the evening with the imposing immanence of the tree and its roots, the feeling of being superfluous,

We were a heap of of existents inconvenienced, embarrassed by ourselves, e hadn't the slightest reason for being here, any of us, each existent, embarrassed, vaguely ill at ease,

and whatever fault one finds with Sartre, one can't deny he's a fine writer. But, having identified such discomfiture, there is only so much of it one can take and so having a few quid on the risk-taking, the adventure, the vicarious races at Kempton and elsewhere makes one somehow released from such torment, exercising the illusion of free will by choosing one's preferred horse and living more vitally through it. With some shrewdness, one likes to think. One is divested of one's rootlessness by temporarily allowing the outcome of the race to be one's own outcome.

I'm sure the Portsmouth library catalogue will have the Roads to Freedom trilogy which I'm sure I haven't read all of even though I may have begun The Age of Reason once. That will begin the new year for me, I reckon.

Meanwhile, The Ship of Swallows is a small boook of short stories by Edward Thomas that had so far passed me by even though I had thought my collection of the poems, prose and the novel was a fair effort. It's gorgeous writing, with Thomas well aware of being of city origins and enjoying nature and the countryside as such, but maybe it's necessary to be like that, as Joyce found writing about Dublin in Trieste. Perhaps country people wouldn't notice their surroundings with the sensitivity he does. One only wants more of this finely-tuned writing and if there is any it's likely to be found out about at the Edward Thomas Study Centre which is conveniently not far away in Petersfield so that will be a nice day out one day soon. 

The Ship of Swallows really ought to be a book to own rather than borrow but so quickly has my attitude changed from buying everything I read to resisting the urge that I'll try not to.

 

I made a right mess of the Racetrack Wiseguy piece below, confusing the Grand National with the Welsh National as the race that Secret Reprieve didn't get into last season. A lot of what one thinks one knows is wrong. A lot of what one reads is also wring because it was written by people who think they know but are wrong. Many of us are more confused than we know. However, we stumble on, at least believing that we are enjoying ourselves in difficult circumstances and, as long as we think we do it's not obvious what role authenticity has.

It's not often a new poem is repeated quite so quickly here. It's very rare. It's not happened before.

But I liked my new poem, which is all that really matters, before it got a better than usual response from the few I showed it to, e-mail being such a tempting device by which to intrude on the private time of others.

Of course the previous title was makeshift. It would have been given a better one had it ever found itself destined for print. Why, then, shouldn't it have one now.

It wasn't obvious, no phrases from within the lines suggesting themselves as candidates and so, as often can be useful in the creative process, one lets one's mind become malleable plasma and see what happens. That is how the poem was written after all. By not caring. So, here it is with its new, or latest, title. That process might never be over but eventually it needs to stop so I hope this is it.

You Won’t See Me Follow You Back Home

And poetry is like the sort of girlfriend

That leaves you on account of all your drinking 

Which you say isn’t half as bad as she says 

But still she won’t come back until you stop.

I know the Köchel numbers of sonatas,

The name that Alpha Cyngi’s better known by, 

The scores from long-forgotten cricket matches 

And that is all the use I claim to be.

 

We commit to no more than rainy Wednesdays 

In suburbs where the library’s always closed then 

And I perform repeats of all the stories 

She’s heard before in slightly different versions 

And then, if I’m polite enough to do so, 

I ask her how she is but not to dance.

Where They Are Now

 It's not prompted by the thought of Christmas cards, I was thinking it anyway, but I think Christmas cards to and from people one is only vaguely in touch with might be fading out. First class post is now 85p. In olden days many people had Christmas card lists of maybe 100. I don't mind if you think me frugal but spending £85 on sending festive greetings to people, many of who you have no other contact with, seems like an unnecessary burden on the postperson. I've already relieved the nice lady who delivers my post of many of the book orders by using the library, which is bad news for secondhand book dealers more than it is for authors, but the to and fro of Christmas post had never been much of an issue at this address.

No. I was thinking of all those people from the past that the internet brought back into view some years ago now. I can't have been the only one who looked and found what they could find about school contemporaries, those from the brief three years at university, previous work colleagues and anybody else one knew and lost touch with. I know I wasn't because I heard from some that found me. I didn't know whether to be flattered or terrified that they had gone to such trouble but it was mostly okay. They didn't mean any harm and I didn't owe any of them money.

As it was, in almost all cases, there was no point. Much of it was from 40 years ago when we probably did have something in common but 'having things in common' is dependent on sharing the same circumstances and experience. Once your paths have diverted it's not obvious that any such bond you had will remain intact. And that much is evidenced by some of the associates whose internet presence I've found. I don't think that's 'stalking', is it. It's only my own non-celebrity version of Where Are They Now? I have been told I was hard to find. David Green is a common enough name but googling 'David Green poetry' narrows it down.

I don't know if I'm more concerned about what it was that people became, and being able to see how that could have happened, or that they didn't change at all. I look aghast at what some of them are doing now when I see (with most if not all examples being fictional so as not to offend), that they play golf, poker or are fans of comedy clubs, that they write up their professional profiles with transparent sales talk that a child could see through (obviously that's not made up), that they like Top Gear, Coldplay, go to the gym, have been successful as consultants or are writing their memoirs.

It can look awful, just as awful as if they hadn't apparently evolved any further than when I'd known them in some other part of England some decades ago. But, then, what would they think if they'd been at such a loose end that they somehow found me here, regretting having decided that 'poet' was what I wanted to be and only now trying to shift towards 'writer', masquerading as a music 'critic', still clearly devoted to books and with the dubious sideline in the shifty, perceived glamour of horse racing.

Is that anything to be or anywhere to have arrived at?

I'm sure the books help. Sartre's Nausea not only provided the rare pleasure of meeting a very astute lady on the train between Bath and Salisbury on Monday but also seems to be as good if not better than when I read it forty years ago after we'd agreed not everyting looks as good as you thought it was when returned to. But it's us that change, not the books.

Nausea isn't just about how strange it is to find oneself to be a living thing. It seems to me to be about time, too, its maddening effect and how it feeds into that strangeness. Things move on. I'm happy enough with those that I associate with now and have no need to look them up. Of course, those from previous times should be allowed to go their own way without me despairing of them. 

Nausea is more of a treatise on phenomenology than a novel of the Jane Austen type in which the heroine,

gets married, or doesn't, or dies,

and thus concerns itself with what is 'real' or seems real. It is brilliant at times while being mystifying at others. It's not obvious what one should do about it beyond falsifying one's engagement by, for example, having a few quid on a horse, as below, or persuading oneself that the results of a chosen football team make a difference to your life, which looks to me like 'bad faith' in Sartre's terms.

When the lady on the train got off at Salisbury I said it had been 'a pleasure' and she said she was going to say 'enjoy the Sartre', 

'but that's not the point of it, is it.'

She knew.   

Christmas with Racetrack Wiseguy

2021 was retrieved at the weekend thanks to Corals free-to-enter football game and me, at long last, landing the cash. Newcastle v. Man City was a bit of a gimme and then one eventually gets first goalscorer, corners and cards right. It had been an unsuccessful autumn but we can now record a plus of some sort for the year, have a go at the Christmas racing and hopefully carry forward some ammunition to start 2022 with. Christmas has been a watching brief in recent years with having to tread so carefully on the comeback trail last year and sticking with the diminishing profit I had the year before but we can safely have a go this year.

The King George Chase at Kempton on Boxing Day is second only to the Cheltenham Gold Cup in prestige. One needs to believe that Gold Cup winners are going to keep winning and Minella Indo returned without doing so, and so is a slightly suspect favourite. Kempton is entirely the opposite sort of track to Cheltenham and by now one should know that one takes on Frodon at one's peril. Thus, with the likes of Lostintranslation and Fiddlerontheroof resurgent and Clan des Obeaux still around, and Chantry House still improving, it is a cracking renewal. It might come down to the top Sports Personalities, Rachael and Bryony, but Frodon by now is all but the new Desert Orchid and is a tentative pick.

Earlier, Bravesmansgame has jumped like a dream so far and possibly only has one to beat. He can be expected to arrive at Cheltenham, or maybe Aintree, unbeaten to take on the sterner opposition from Ireland.

On Monday, Secret Reprieve still only has bottom weight in the Welsh National and so has a favourite's  chance of showing what a good thing he would have been last year had he got in. The long lay off need not be a worry since this would have been a long term target.

But it's the Mathieson Hurdle at Lepoardstown on 29th that we can trust with proper money. Sharjah, pictured, is a very consistent performer in top class hurdle races and with no Honeysuckle in opposition, only has to reproduce known form for even money to look more like an investment than a bet.

However  uch one has to spend, half can go on Sharjah and the other half can mix up the four selections in doubles, trebles and the optimistic four-timer.

Best of luck.

The Year in Review

 There was a time I handed out the most meagre of garlands in various categories here at this time of year. While that has fallen into abeyance for the most part, it still seems worthwhile to give some thought to it.

The major highlight was a return to live music which I did like never before, especially since September. All of them are reviewed here, they were all great and I'm not going to pick out any as being better than any others. I was glad of them all. With that came the new association with the Music in Portsmouth website that I hope will continue barring disaster, controversy or me being rumbled as a maverick dilletante disguising his lack of real appreciation under a haze of formulaic phrasing. It's possible I might reach a point at which I've run out of anything new to say and a robot could write what I say by which time I ought to abandon the mission but until then it's enjoyable enough to keep trying.

I've seen enough of Paul Muldoon by now to think something similar about his poems and so I declined to invest in Howdie-Skelp which left John Burnside's Learning to Sleep with a walkover in any Best Poetry Collection award I might make. However, having thought that Sebastian Faulks's Snow Country was the only new novel I'd read from 2021, I now realize that Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun was this year, too. Sometimes it seems like time flies but then at others the summer seems a long time ago. Both are fine books but, going against type, the Ishiguro was perhaps the more convincing even if it might be called science fiction. It would have been in the 1970's but by now time has caught up and it's a real rather than fantasy issue but a machine became emotional, for us at least who credit them as such in some anthropomorphic way.

I never used to do Sports Personality previously but it's of interest here, immediately dispensing with the BBC's limited shortlist. I didn't think the Mark Cavendish revival would be bettered, only getting a ride in the Tour de France at the last minute and then proceeding to take four stage wins to equal Eddy Merckx's long-standing record only to fail to go ahead on the Champs Elysees. Then Emma Raducanu was immaculate in the US Open final and became the most obvious nation's sweetheart since Vera Lynn. She might never win anything again but that night was tremendous. And then Bryony Frost, the most positive role model in any role, continued to win big races in her inspiring, jolly way, possibly outpointing even the wonderful Rachael Blackmore and winning an upsetting case of bullying and harrassment into the bargain, showing herself to be a fine ambassador at least in a sport that struggles to cover itself in glory. Tyson Fury's not a candidate for me because I don't regard beating people up as a sport. It has to be Emma, doesn't it, with the other two ladies highly commended.

I suspect that the disc of the year might have been one I didn't buy, with vol 2 of Arcangelo's Buxtehude Trio Sonatas and the recent Steven Isserlis release featuring music I have already, sometimes more than once. Looking through this year's reviews, the most memorable also include pieces I already had whether it be Monteverdi, Josquin des Prez or Renaldo Hahn.  The Laurenzi disc wasn't new this year so I think the answer is Emanuel Ax and Yo-Yo Ma's Beethoven Cello Sonatas.

--

Bargain of the Year was my recent move in the market to capture 19 back issues of About Larkin magazine, including that modest career highpoint when Picadilly Dusk and the possibly disownable, by now, The Cathedrals of Liverpool. I still think it's one of my better poems and I wouldn't disown it on account of A.N. Wilson's derision of Paddy's Wigwam but it does implicitly approve of something about Catholicism which has come to seem wrong. Sorry.

But the Larkin magazines never cease to find more to say even if Larkin's poems aren't among those that require much explaining. Reproducing papers from their academic conferences gives access to some lively thinking that would otherwise be hard to come by. I've found two echoes of what I thought already which makes me worry that it's too hard to have thoughts that others haven't had before.

In issue 9, from April 2000, that doyen of provocateurs, Terry Eagelton, offers,

A poem is no more a reflectioon of its author, than a chair is a reflection of a carpenter.

The carpenter analogy is a favourite of mine, not only in the comparison with a poet 'crafting', if we're lucky, poems from words like a carpenter crafts items from wood but also, notwithstanding the mistranslation in the Bible of the Greek, 'tecton', that humanity stands in the same relation to whaever caused them to exist as a table or chair does to the carpenter, which is that it's not in a position to know.

Trevor Tolley also impresses with a parallel when writing, in issue 18, that finding himself older in 2004 than many readers of contemporary poetry, he  feels,

at times like an old Bolshevik sitting in on seminars on the continuity of Russian politics.

And that is how it feels as the poets one is still interested become elder statespersons or are transferred from the category of 'living poets' to 'not living but much missed'. In the same way that I'm incapable of believing that there'll be another Hunky Dory, Electric Warrior or Diana Ross & the Supremes, I don't think I'm going to be capable of appreciating poems written by anybody born after the 1970's. That is almost certainly the wrong attitude but at least the late, great Prof. Tolley has put it into a form of words.

 

I can't have many complaints about 2021, with special thanks to the Portsmouth Library Service. If 2022 is as good, that'll be fine.

I dare say I'll be back again before the holiday season but, if not, Be Good. 

In My Beginning is My End

 It's not obvious how much longer it's going to take but the current Prime Minister's tenure has surely entered a phase one step closer to its end. There aren't many political careers that don't end in failure, viz Thatcher, Blair, Wilson and even Churchill, but it was never more apparent than in the current incumbent's case, the seeds of his demise were there long before he got within grasping distance of the much coveted position he has occipied so haplessly. Nothing was more obvious than that's what it would be like.

I progress, never less than entertained, at least, but not always impressed by A.N. Wilson's Our Times, and a similar process is involved in the reduction of him in my estimation, for what that's worth, from immaculate scholar to what one always thought he was, an oddity of bygone right wing sympathies. Or maybe they might not be as bygone as one would like to think.

Many of his pointed put downs are amusing, if highly critical, and he does just as good a job on Jeffery Archer as he does on Michael Heseltine, for example. That's not hard to do. But I eventually had to draw the line at Mary Wilson being described as 'dingy'. That's not Mary Wilson from the immaculate Supremes. Not even Wilson could be provocative enough to call Diana Ross or any other Supreme 'dingy' but I'm sure he could find fault if he felt like it in the cause of his throughgoing dismissal of most things. No, he meant, the self-effacing, third-rate poet (look, he's got me at it now) that was married to Harold. It steps over into 'ad hominem', or in this case 'ad feminam', to be quite so unfair. Her poems weren't as good as his hero Betjeman's who in turn wasn't as good as Larkin but that, at the very least, is unkind and unnecessary.

Thus, I will take my leave of Wilson for a while. It's quite possible he'll be returned to for The Victorians, among which he's likely to find more to his pre-socialist liking, and After the Victorians for these comprehensive surveys but for the time being, enough is enough. It's possible one can have a bit too much of anybody, as in The Thom Gunn Letters or Larkin's role in John Sutherland's account of Monica's life.

So, with time for one more requisition from the admirable service provided by the local libraries, I see they have some Edward Thomas short stories I didn't know about. They, and whatever else I find to go with them, will be Christmas reading, possibly with another look at the very un-Christmassy Nausea by Sartre. 

Christmas Oratorio

A review of last night's Christmas Oratorio by the Portsmouth Choral Union is at Music in Portsmouth, here,

 Portsmouth Choral Union - Bach Christmas Oratorio

 

You didn't read it here first

 Heaven knows I've been trying my best not to pass comment on the Prime Minister here any more but, even though it was obvious he couldn't do it, it can't have been me who was first to say so.

It's not an easy job. It demands application, seriousness, a sense of responsibility, all kinds of things like that. All the things that the self-regarding buffoon always very obviously never had. So, don't come crying to me, all you hapless Leavers who fell for his 'showmanship' and clowning. That's all he ever was and it's all he ever had. It was only a few weeks ago we were treated to the nightmare vision that he thought it had all gone quite well, on the whole, and that he might have a go at the 10 years that the likes of Mrs. Thatcher achieved and ended in tears and then Tony Blair hung on grimly for.

Ye Gods and little fishes. I think it was Milhouse van Houten in The Simpsons who said, 'I saw it would happen, and then it happened.' There's not much one can add to that.

--

For once a disc was a bit of a disappointment. The Brahms String Quartets, and Quintets, as recorded by the Budapest string Quartet, probably don't represent him at his best on a couple of plays but his best is a great thing and they're there to be returned to sometime.

--

Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Cafe was a magnificent account, though, and never less than vividly readable in an area that can't ever be made lightweight. There's more to a book like that than just setting it out and she entirely not only 'gets it' but makes it as accessible as is possible to a non-philosopher like me.

Sartre was one of those, like Balzac, for example, who wrote so much I can't imagine him having time for any other life. And it follows that there can't be much to write about if all you do is write, so he must have been very fluent.

The Family Idiot, on Flaubert and Madame Bovary, ran to 2800 pages without the fourth and final section ever getting written. That's betting without the constant flow of essays, books, forewords, novels and plays and that, for a degree in Existentialism in 1981, all we actually read was an early section from Being and Nothingness.

But he wasn't a good lad, genius in phenomenology though he may have been. Eventually demurring on his support for the Soviet Union, he only shifted to Maoist China, which is no more than from the frying pan to the fire and, significantly, he fell out with most of his friends. Sarah still has a point, though, that one can't help liking something about him.

But at that stage that most books reach when you realize it has reached a 'summing up' stage and, to be fair, it is on the next to last page, she says,

When I first read Sartre and Heidigger, I didn't think the details of a philosopher's personality or biography were important. This was the orthodox belief in the field at the time...

Thirty years later, I have come to the opposite conclusion. Ideas are interesting but people are vastly more so.

It has taken her most of her adult life to recover from the education she was provided with. I know what that feels like. From 1978-81, the orthodoxy we were taught was based on The Intentional Fallacy, the vogue instituted by Wimsatt and Beardsley, and the 'death of the author' of Roland Barthes. In the same way that universities are now all, apparently, 'cancel culture', it was then a correctness as written up in The History Man, a lot of righteous, loud Marxists setting the holier-than-thou tone and such a heap of doctrinaire claptrap that Roman Catholics would have admired the thoroughgoing adherence to sophistry even if they didn't like God not being a part of it.

One might be tempted to think it's no wonder university education wasn't paid for by students in those days. It was hopeless. But there's not much reason to think it's any better now and might be more rigidly set out now than it was then for all I know and the lecturers, as much fashion victims as the students with their Frank Zappa, John Coltrane and other misery LP's, were only doing what they thought was right.

--

You probably wouldn't accuse A.N. Wilson of having been among that crowd. His Our Times now gathers pace, including his unlikely, somewhat contrived joke that Naomi Campbell read Foucault.

Wilson is never slow to disparage any figure he can find reason to and he makes great entertainment, no doubt for himself as well as his readers, by doing so. He often has a point but his use of crabbing, malicious adjectives betray his fogey-ish, old High Tory sympathies when he describes the 'rent-a-mob'

of,

poets, dons, clergy and ankle-socked female graduates 

protesting about government policy in the Suez crisis while not colouring the right-wing denizens of the Garrick Club, Malcolm Muggeridge or the idea of Gloriana, which is always implied, with any similar undermining comment. 

He's more iconoclastic than iconaltry, though, not minding too much about whose reputation he derides and he praises the journalism of Paul Foot and is in the spirit of Private Eye, Have I Got News for You and, once, when he was on the upgrade, Jeremy Thorpe, in saying that Rab Butler and Macmillan, 'progreesivists at heart',  'allowed hanging to continue',

when weighing in the balance a fellow's mortal existence and their own chance of re-election.

 

It is a thrilling read, the better for Wilson's jaundiced view which is sometimes questionable, sometimes righteous but always Wilsonian. He's clever enough to bring it off in a way that the likes of our current Prime Minister would never be capable of.

It wouldn't be healthy to only read those things one agrees with, that tell you what you want to hear. Wilson is 'stimulating' but this book has reduced him from the status I had previously had him at and, having admired his immense scholarship over several books, and now seen the murky gremlin within him, might leave it a while before I return or more of his skewed vision.

Signed Poetry Books- Timothy Steele

 In an astute move in the transfer market, I acquired 19 back copies of About Larkin, the magazine of the Philip Larkin Society, which happily don't seem to include either of the issues I was in, and the booklet, Beatitudes, limited, numbered and signed thus by Timothy Steele.

It's tempting to play graphology when collecting, entirely for their own sake, books signed by poets. In Timothy Steele's case the precision and clarity of the signature are exactly as one might expect from the poems. Thom Gunn's, who was equally adept at formality, is similarly circumspect and one would imagine J.V. Cunningham's to be more so, if anything.

I don't know what happened with Timothy Steele, of whose work there is a bibliography going up to 2018 but whose last collection of poems still appears to be Toward the Winter Solstice, 2006.

But, if only at a glacial pace, the signed poetry books can still be added to when the opportunity arises.

The Chess

 Unless you knew where to look or habitually look in such places, you'd be forgiven for not knowing that the World Championship of Chess is being played for right now. It's not like the football that even the least footbally person can't avoid and it's not like Fischer-Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972 when once, and only once, chess was front page news intense with Cold War rivalry, paranoia on a personal level beyond the global and political and drama like that caused when a genius thinks better of turning up and, rather than perform at what he also did well, George Best was said to be taking refuge in the London flat of the Irish actress, Sinead Cusack.

There is something one can't help liking about genius, whatever else comes with it. George Best was completely gorgeous, so I thought, and I didn't want to deny it when it turned out he was less than that. Bobby Fischer wasn't quite as easy to like but he had the arrogance to not turn up and go 2-0 down, I think, before putting himself on a similar level to the likes of Bach or Mozart and making the Soviet flag-bearer, Spassky, look pedestrian.

We have not been treated to any such melodrama this time with Magnus Carlsen not even needing to go to extra time to beat Nepo, whose name is Ian, yes, just Ian, but then Nepomniachti, from Russia.

Carlsen is 2-0 up after 8 of the 14 scheduled games and so it's not going to be necessary to go to the short course quick deciders at which he is so adept and would have won anyway after 14 draws.

It's hardly for me to say, with my preciously preserved, best rating at Lichess at 1972 and Carlsen having achieved ratings well above 3000 there but there wasn't much of a struggle. Carlsen will bore the living socks off you in an endgame if he thinks there's a fraction of a chance but having given Nepo the doubled pawns the next time, that looked like the sort of thing I'd do, at a level many fathoms below, and then pursue the win, which is what happened.

I like it and am impressed when champions retain their titles and continue to do so. I don't have many more reasons to like Magnus than that but I don't have any reasons to dislike him either. It's not his fault that he's good enough to repel all boarders but if that's the best the challenger can do, he's going to be in place for some time yet.

Three at a Time

 Many years ago I heard someone explaining that if you have two pairs of shoes and wear them on alternate days they will last longer than if you wore one pair everyday until they wore out and then the other. I can see how that might apply to athletes needing recovery days in their training schedules but not so much how it preserves shoe leather. I'm not sure either what effect reading three books at a time has compared to reading them one after the other.The inestimable Portsmouth Library Service had my next two reservations ready when I was only halfway through Some Tame Gazelle. What happens is that one book grabs you ahead of the others and takes precedence, the second fills in after a big slice of the first and the third choice does well to stay in contention, doesn't get much of a look in and hopes to be returned to later like the abandoned lover in Dusty Springfield's I Just Don't Know What To Do with Myself.

Sarah Bakewell is doing a fine job on the philosophy cool kids in At the Existentialist Cafe. Much better than one might expect of someone who dropped out of Essex University but maybe that's the point and a requisite qualification. I wasn't sure if I'd read it but upstairs it's Agnes Poirier on similar ground. Sarah pitches her discussion of the philosophy just right, for me at least. Although Sartre is reasonably accessible in translation, the likes of Hegel, Derrida and all are often better accessed through critiques or summariesIf Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir didn't understand Husserl then, frankly, what chance do the likes of me have.

Sartre is a brilliant writer and already it's looking less than jollity over Christmas for me as I'll go back to Nausea for another look. But Camus is the preferred option. Camus thinks it's all absurd, Sartre thinks everything has meaning and believes in action. It's a crucial difference and, much though there is to admire in Sartre's analysis and his way of setting it out, I can't see it his way. One example cited is football, in that if it looks absurd to you then you aren't engaged in watching it 'as football' but surely that's the point of his concept of 'bad faith'. You need to suspend your perception of absurdity in order for it to matter what happens.

Sartre's Roquentin knows batter when,

Lacking the routine or family which lend structure to most people's lives, he spends his days in the library or wandering about, or drinking beer in a cafe that plays ragtime music on the record player.

It sounds to me like he's got it right.

Sartre's biggest problem is his belief in 'freedom' which is admittedly better thought out than the vacuous use of the word by our current Prime Minister and means nothing at all once examined.  

For me 'freedom' has always been an illusion caused by the fact we believe ourselves to be always making choices. That 'freedom' causes 'Anguish' and I can see all that follows but he's closer to something useful in his other big idea, 'Nothingness'. 

If we were in a position to know all the factors impingeing on us when we make our choices - such things as personality traits, circumstances, economic and social pressures - then it would be possible to calculate which decision we'd come to. But we can't do that any more than I could forsee that Allmankind would fade innocuously well below the distance at Huntingdon today. We aren't as free as we'd like to think we are and, more in the spirit of Camus, it's better to adapt to our limitations.

There's plenty more to come, I'm sure, and with rain forecast for tomorrow and Tuesday, it's likely to be finished by Wednesday and then I'll be free to read A.N. Barbara Pym or somethging else. It will seem to me that I'm making the choice, not realizing that it's already decided for me and any volition I credit myself with is illusory.

A.N. Wilson, after so much praise for his immense scholarship has gathered here, especially in recent weeks, is jumping less well in Our Times, his big survey of the second Elizabethan period. He has always been vaguely suspected of being suspect but given free rein, as it were, on contemporary issues, he is revealed as what one always thought he was, a disgruntled Telegraph reader with an erroneous belief that at some time in the past things were preferable.

He detects a 'malaise' that he can't extricate from Britain loss of empire and post war reduction to less than a major world power. In previous books he has acknowledged that such status had been built on piracy, tyranny, indistrialisation, colonisation and the slave trade. Those important points don't seem to bother him when he lauds the likes of belligerent, chippy old right-wingers like Pergrine Worsthorne who found their sense of entitlement threatened by 'socialism'. It's not a pretty sight to see such a fine mind floundering on ethical issues.

Many of those of us who once had at least some sympathy for Socialism might by now have accepted its shortcomings but that is not to say that unrestrained Capitalism and all that comes with Donald Trump is at all preferable. At least Socialism meant well. And Wilson is big enough to admit that post-war rationing fed poor people better than they'd been fed before, compared to rich people, and it was ironically a Socialist principle.

I've peeped ahead to see Wilson mischieviously suggesting that Margaret Thatcher and the Sex Pistols were doing similar things, iconoclastic and motivated by, apparently, deep frustrations. It's a brilliant comparison in as far as both sides would find themselves unflattered by it. What Wilson seems to miss, with his limited appreciation of pop music, is how brilliantly contrived- by Malcolm McLaren - the Sex Pistols were, like a real life cartoon, as subversive from within the system as Salvador Dali. Whether Margaret Thatcher was that or not, I wouldn't like to say.

Meanwhile Barbara Pym waits patiently, like the sort of unrequited type that might appear in one of her novels. I will go back to her after my involvement with sexier types and the challenge of arguing with Wilson. She is less concerned about the tree-ness of a tree or bemoaning that our country no longer bullies the world for the benefit of its own enrichment. That alone makes her in many ways a more likeable writer.

Myles Tyrrell in Havant

Myles Tyrrell, St. Faith's, Havant, Dec 1 

Today was a musical mystery tour. I didn't know what Myles Tyrrell was going to be playing but it was a chance worth taking. I can't remember the last time a lunchtime concert in Chichester, Portsmouth or Havant was a disappointment. 

Myles began his own chronological tour with a charming, chiming, neat Sonata in B minor by Scarlatti. I haven't seen quite so many crossed hands as I have in recent weeks but perhaps that's a reflection of how adept I've become at making sure of a seat with a view of the keyboard. I'm not sure I've seen them quite so much in evidence as here, though.

I expressed the hope a few weeks ago that the number of Scarlatti sonatas that have turned up on programmes recently - and they're always most welcome - didn't mean we were being offered less Bach. Myles had that covered by also including the Sinfonia 11, BWV 797, by that other star of the class of 1685. As Myles explained, it was 'emotional' which I like to see Bach get credit for and if there are suitable Italian markings for 'falteringly' or 'circumspectly' they would have been appropriate here.

Mozart's 12 Variations on 'Ah, vous dirai-je Maman are the exhaustive embellishments on Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star which begins so disarmingly simplistically before quickly becoming extravagant, inflecting, moving the tune about and at its best when almost leaving its starting point behind and becoming something else entirely, like a cadenza for one of the concertos. By the end one could feel that it seemed like there were more than twelve and he has made his point but it scores top marks for his trademark ingenuity.

Possibly a highlight in Myles's hands were the Drei Intermezzi, op. 117, no. 1 by Brahms which contributed further to my own small Brahms revival. Taking its lead from Lady Anne Bothwell's Lament, it is shadowy, sombre but memorable and immensely satisfying. I must remember to prevent myself from going and ingratiating myself with these performers afterwards but it's always useful, and impressive, to have a quick word about some aspect of the music and, with Myles as with all of them, it turns out they really do know what they're doing.

Lili Boulanger's Trois Morceaux pour piano were adventurous, impressionistic but soon rising to a higher emotional pitch in D'un vieux Jardin, noticeably sprinkled with light, as advertised, in D'un jardin clair but I was surprised by Cortege which was a bit too cheery to be funereal. That was the pretext on which I went and 'had a word'. Of course, one shouldn't learn foreign words only on the basis of their context. We might be accustomed to corteges being funeral corteges but they are processions more generally. Lili Boulanger, dying at the age of 24, belongs in that sainted group of artists of who we can only imagine what they might have gone on to achieve.

Before her, though, we had two contrasting short pieces by Edward Macdowell whose To a wild rose, yes, did sound more English than American in its melancholy acceptance but I thought Song in changing moods from Sea Pieces evoked folk tunes, the prairies and maybe even Oklahoma at a stretch.

Myles gave great value, beginning a selection from Christopher Norton's Latin Preludes, two rumbas, a mambo, a samba and a bossa nova, at the advertised finishing time. That's fine. Several among us would he happy to stay all afternoon. We had by now come a long way from Scarlatti into something akin to jazz and with me so often prone to the loosest associations, there could have been echoes of Keith Jarrett's old Cologne masterpiece. It might just be me. I sometimes wonder if hearing a line from Demis Roussos in Errollyn Wallen's Cello Concerto wasn't taking that a step too far. But the Mambo rocked before the final Samba III auditioned for the job of a show tune.

It's been tremendous seeing so many great concerts, mostly so conveniently put on at lunchtimes and with the local area blessed beyond what it might reasonably expect with so many fine and dedicated musicians glad to perform in such becoming surroundings. 

I won't be so much glad of a rest as in need of it after the fitting climax of a Christmas Oratorio. It's less me that needs the rest than my tiring, limited vocabulary. I might have to start making up my own adjectives when so much of my time is spent trying to find the most fitting for what I'm hearing but there being only those that already exist to choose from. I'm afraid mere language often isn't up to the job and what I ought to be doing is just saying, 'this was good, here it is'. If it was possible to convey it in words, music wouldn't be necessary but it isn't, so it is.