English Piano Trio in Chichester

 English Piano Trio, Chichester Cathedral, Apr 30

Pal Banda's cello came from the Esterhazy court in the time of Haydn so it's not entirely out of the question that it played the Trio in G minor, Hob.XV:1 when it, the piece and Haydn were all young. 

On a clear day, Haydn is your ideal man because he always seems such a cloudless musician. The opening moderato is sunny with Jane Faulkner and Timothy Ravenscroft exchanging intricacies and ornaments on violin and piano. The menuet and trio was eine kleine polished and, needless to say, civilized and such formality demands a presto finale. Its frolics and high-spirits didn't let expectations down. I'm not aware that Haydn knew it was possible to end any other way. There was never a dull moment and never a cross word.

Chichester's Yamaha piano has been played by any number of illustrious pianists but I doubt if any of them played the Trio, op.25 by Francis Edward Bache, pronounced Baitch, on it. No, I've not heard the name before either but I don't think it's anything to be ashamed of.

The Allegro brought to mind the famous Mendelssohn Violin Concerto and with his dates being the tragically short 1833-1858, that's a workable comparison. With Pal more prominent with a very fair share of the melodic line, it's a busy first movement and a very democratic piece because although the band is called Piano Trio, nobody is left in a supporting role for long and it is genuinely a trio. 

There were shades of melancholy in the Andante and the ghost of Mozart might have brought those in but the piano-led Allegro breezed happily without a care in the hands of these vastly experienced and impressively together players. There was still hardly a cloud in the sky.

Happiness writes white, as has been said, but we all benefit from some escape from our darker thoughts from time to time and the English Piano Trio provided a welcome tonic for the Chichester faithful.

Inspīrātĭo Ensemble

  Inspīrātĭo Ensemble, St Mary's Church, Hayling Island, Apr 28

Some favourite local musicians playing some very favourite composers provided every reason to venture into deepest Hayling Island. It's peculiar how one sometimes listens less to those composers whose music one likes best while seeing what else there is but Bach, Handel and Vivaldi produced pieces by the score ( ! ) so there's never a shortage.  

Inspiratio is a new venture that can only add further riches to what is already a vibrant local music community and today were  Catherine Lawlor, vln, Mikhail Lezdkan, clo, Amy Muller, pno, and Piers Burton-Page providing some witty, epistolary narrative in what became increasingly obviously not the voice of J.S. Bach.

The cello repertoire would have to be re-invented if the foundations now provided by the Bach Suites had not been stumbled on by Pablo Casals. Mikhail's account of No. 1 is calm to the point of understatement compared to some but the Courante was still acrobatic and his amicable sound was sympathetically housed by the Saxon surroundings.

In an all-Bach first half, the famous Air combined Catherine's singing violin line with Mikhail's ambulatory accompaniment but it was the Well-Tempered Violin and Cello that probably took more than just me by surprise. Three Preludes from that encyclopedia of keyboard invention, arranged Lezdkan, made for entirely convincing chamber music for strings. And there is no case to be purist about it because the composer himself never heard them in what is now their familiar piano versions. They were an unqualified success and with a few more such arrangements should be rushed in the direction of a recording studio as soon as possible. 

However, if the Bach letters as imagined by Piers sounded more full of bonhomie than we imagine Bach was then the vivacious Badinerie arrived in time to remind us that he couldn't have been curmudgeonly all the time. His music surely needs no advertisement by now but that session did a good job of advertising his personality as well as his talent for writing music for advertisements.

The value of such a worthwhile event isn't measurable in monetary terms but even then, the interval refreshments and 'retiring donation' arrangements were flawlessly giveaway.

Not quite a generation older than Bach were Vivaldi and Albinoni, for whose music Inspiratio were augmented by Amy Muller kindly and fluent on the piano for a Viv Sonata for Cello and Piano that invited us to try to separate out the fine differences between these contemporaries. By turns, reflective and lively with something like a gigue finale, it could easily have fooled me on the grounds that the cello by now can't help but sound like Bach.

Albinoni's dolorous Adagio had glimpses of a much later lark beginning to ascend in Catherine's violin and it's only Albinoni's because he said it was (apparently) in a more pre-copyright age.

But I'm more confident in telling Bach from Handel who, on most days, are my two composers of choice. The giveaways, in a three-handed Inspiratio Sonata for Violin and basso continuo, were the stately opening and decorous trills, the Queen of Sheba echoes in the second movement and those of the Water Music hornpipe in the finale. I'd be guessing if I said this was Catherine's most demanding challenge of the afternoon, not quite so much if I said I've seen her do more technically rigorous things before, not at all if I said she achieves them all so readily and I'd be hugely confident if I said this was the best way I've spent a Sunday afternoon for quite some time.

They will be there again, with Beethoven, Schubert and Mendelssohn - still very great composers- on Sun, June 23 and I intend to be so, too.  

Accommodating the Brahms and other stories

Filing away the Brahms Piano Works box-set might not sound like a big job but there can be collateral fallout. That shelf was full, you see, so it was again time for them to all budge up a bit and some at the end of shelves have to move up or maybe down. 

Thus far no composer has had to be split across two shelves. The order is more or less chronological beginning at the bottom left and progressing to the top right. The likes of Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven and to a lesser extent Buxtehude, Schubert, Shostakovich, could have all their discs together on the same shelf but adding in the Brahms and a few others that hadn't made it back there meant that such decorum was no longer sustainable. Mozart Opera has had to be unjoined from the rest of Mozart.

A database full of downloads or a treaming service that claims to have 'everything' could not compare with this edifice of hard copy items. A good game is to be had by lying on the settee opposite, picking out a disc and trying to guess what it is. Now that they've moved again, the game just got harder.

--

The Duncan Hamilton Harold Larwood book was a cut above many sports books for being better written and it's story is an involving one with Larwood very much his own man, as well as being his captain's man, as well as for the most part the most aggrieved party, at least from the point of view of a Notts man who admires genuine fast bowling. What was to follow in future England Test matches against Lillee and Thomson and Michael Holding and the various batteries of West Indians was very much the same thing except for being a belated backlash from those outposts of the Empire. It might have been, and might in some ways still be, a class-ridden game but it was never one for faint hearts. See also, long distance cycling and, against certain opposition, football. Rugby Union is not much more than a brawl to begin so can't really be included in the same list.

Next up might be the Basil D'Oliveira book, so long put off, but another from my All Time XI. They were two players you might not think had much in common but one thing was that the opposition tried to influence the selection of the England team by having them out and, in order to save a test series, the MCC were not averse to becoming complicit in such dealings. So, while we are involved in issues of 'sportsmanship', it is worth considering whether the powers that be thought that sport was important enough to put it ahead of box office takings or not.

--

The sports pages are not likely to be reporting much about the winner of the Candidates Tournament and thus the challenger later this year for Ding Liren's World Chess Champion title. Dommaraju Gukesh (born 29 May 2006) is, thus, 17, and so surely hasn't had time to learn all the databases of opening theory off by heart. There must still be something intuitive, inventive and imaginative to chess despite the fact that there are tens of thousands of games being played on Lichess at any given time.

I worry that, like noughts and crosses, the game must have a limit that will one day be reached, that anybody who cares to will know the best move and presumably black can negate whatever white does and it's always a draw. Or not, in which case white can win.

That doesn't seem to be happening any time soon, though. 

By the same token, there are only so many words and thus a vast number of ways they can be put together but if the number of words is finite then the number of possible combinations would be, too. Unimaginably enormous, but finite. 

That they need to make sense doesn't matter because 'sense', or artistic effect, lies in the eyes of the beholder or at least the author, as a few generations of avant-gardistes have deomonstrated. But poetry isn't over yet, either. Some of us might have lost track of it or lost interested in tracking it but, like pop music, it is still going on its merry way and there are plenty intent on following it.

But, as I've found with the winter games - the jump racing and, for what it's worth, the football- it goes on too long. I want to know the answer, as in a novel, and how it ends. You don't get that with sport, Coronation Street or anything else that 'keeps on giving', though, because they are designed to keep on taking away. Some things look as if they should be finite but remain inexhaustible whereas with others one is exhausted with them long before they are.

 

The Happy Biography

 I don't know if I've read a happy biography. The ending is inevitably downbeat. Perhaps David Bowie's meticulously planned departure made an artful job of it, perhaps one shouldn't see the inevitable as downbeat or perhaps it's me, insisting on life's minor key passages or, indeed, mostly reading the biographies of poets who, as a type, may tend towards being troubled misfits.

It might have been a radio life of Bob Marley that first made me think of biography as a sub division of tragedy. The early days of the Wailers calling out of studio windows to passing girls - including, I think, Rita- were bound to seem ephemeral in the light of the strange circumstances of his untimely death, notwithstanding the outlandish success of a career that put Jamaica up among the top echelon of pop music-producing countries. Nothing lasts forever, Carpe Diem, Sic Transit Gloria Mundi, etc, etc.

Georges Simenon was prolific, wildly successful at what he did, with an immense energy for it but he wasn't happy and the final chapters of Pierre Assouline's biography are essays of assessment, the most profound of which reflect on his offspring. His only daughter, Marie-Jo committed suicide aged 25, the victim of a number of neuroses but the comparison is made with Lucia Joyce. Both of them were deeply loved by their fathers but their fathers were unable to help. 

I'm not entirely convinced that any parallels that might be drawn are due to their fathers' devotion to their writing. There will be any number of desperate cases not recorded in the biographies of authors. It is also inconclusive whether writers are significantly more melanchloic than non-writers but Sartre's 'grocer who dreams' that he thought was 'an offence to the customer' has a life also but not one that is investigated and written about like that of a famous writer. Perhaps it should be. One dispenses fruit and veg for a living and the other writes books but that's essentially the only difference between them.

--

Next up is Harold Larwood by Duncan Hamilton. The real business of the fallout of the 'bodyline' test series of 1932-3 is yet to come but will soon enough as it is a quick, straight-forward read. What we have so far, though, is some evocatively written insight of what now sound like barbaric lives in mining Nottinghamshire, a regime of strict Methodism and improbable gentlemen and players apartheid. It was a hard ball existence and cricket was a hard ball game. 

Arthur Carr, captain of Notts, is an improbable hero in a cast of characters that by now belong in Ripping Yarns more than real life but there is evidence that they were real and anybody who thought the likes of Botham, Boycott, David Boon, Merv Hughes represented an age in which cricket had 'characters' might need to think again.

 

--  

One can suffer from fatigue in any undertaking. It is a tribute to the dedication of the likes of Larwood that they pressed on. I wouldn't. I've possibly seen enough of a season of horse racing by now and am happy to leave the annual plus where it is. I never quite realized how the football season drags on, either, until cashing in my bet on the divisions which now looks almost certainly a decision that passed up half of the profit. But, never mind. I won but should have won twice as much. It's just that it is a long haul, designed more than anything to persuade its followers to part with as much cash as it can. It's not the actual amounts that matter as much as that my little personal involvement could have been a yet more impressive win.

It is tiring, though, and good to have other things to turn to. The Easter recess put a hole in the music schedule but there's some good dates coming up, beginning with Inspīrātĭo Ensemble  It is to be hoped my adjectives come back refreshed as a very promising line-up of gigs leads up to summer.

Brahms has been composer of the month, or more, here, with the 6 discs of Piano Works so closely following upon the violin and viola sonatas. The pianists are a variety but that doesn't prevent it being a 'cycle'. For the most part it is pleasing if not compelling listening, and ideal accompaniment to reading as such but not always music that demands one puts the book down.

That is until disc 6 with the opus 116-119 sets but I had Stephen Hough  doing them already. It will not be filed on the shelves until I've been though from disc 1 again.

--

And, needless to say, something to write helps one to have a sense of purpose which isn't as easily come by as it was when attending paid work was a necessity.

A long, long time ago I can still remember when I regarded poetry as such a purist activity that I didn't want to write anything else but, like so many things, 45 years is long enough for things to go full circle. Even Larkin, by far best remembered for his poems, has a gravestone that says 'Writer', on account of his essays, jazz reviews and relatively minor novels. Yes, let's be that.

On a much less memorable scale, I'd put my poems first but I like doing the essays now, too. I have since done better than the one short story that appeared in print in the 1980's but I don't appear to be fitted for the prose job. That was convincingly demonstrated by the novel which was only done for the sake of having done such a thing. The play owes rather too much to All Gas and Gaiters but it is one. C20th serves as a poetry manifesto.

I need to improve in the novel department but you know it ain't easy, you don't know how hard it can be. Finding the lost, last ISBN number and in due course producing the last David Green (Books) title is more likely to be achieveable.   

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 Sometimes perhaps it's the little victories that are more pleasing than any one might have that could be regarded as significant.

Just now, I'd cashed out on the Henderson 'good things' at Exeter because non-runners in the 4.55 meant I could have a couple of quid profit without a horse setting foot on the track. Johnny Blue became a 1/6 shot and notwithstanding that there's no point in such a price, he wasn't rock solid business anyway.

And so it proved. And it's nice to be on the right side of a cashout for once. It's not only a couple of quid for nothing, it's an odds-on-sized stake saved.

 

Quietly, discreetly almost, creeping up the chess ratings at Lichess on 30-minute Classical games, this morning I got back up above a rating of 1900 for the first time in maybe three years. I did once achieve 1918 so a personal best is still three more wins away. 1900 is a minor landmark and 1919+ would be a better one. Feats don't fail me now but 2000 is still light years away.

 

One sees Maigret in a slightly different light on closer acquaintance with Simenon who made him up. It takes a prodigious talent to produce such a body of work but admiring the work for what it is isn't the same as loving him who it all. Of course he's going to be that which came to be known as 'alpha male' but that's not a guarantee of a good thing. All your Trump and Boris are 'alpha' but also unspeakably awful whereas maybe your Camus was more like a humanist saint, as if there could be such a thing.

 

I'm very gratified to see the 'metrics' of this chronic divulgence of words for word's sake looking as healthy as they've ever done while remaining well short of 'trending'. Thanks for being there. I often wish I could be a bit more Wittgenstein and say nothing when there's nothing to say but there's a difficult choice to be made between continuing to string words together because it doesn't feel as if there's anything else to do and not stringing words together and finding there isn't anything else to do.

Two Wiseguys at Cheltenham

Today, there was me, the bullishly self-proclaimed Racetrack Wiseguy and my namesake horse, Wiseguy, trained by the charming Mr. Henderson. I don't think of myself as brash and so am glad to have several years of records going back as evidence of the turf wisdom I've accumulated in sometimes hard-won ways. Today wasn't my most successful day at the track but a small helping of that wisdom was used to keep my financial liabilities on Wiseguy to an absolute minimum. Just because you and your namesake horse are at the same track on the same day doesn't mean one gets heavily involved on a 12/1 chance in the hope of a miracle. It was always a 33/1 chance in disguise.

Wiseguy has been an increasingly forlorn hope ever since winning at Exeter in the Autumn when it looked like a prospect over fences. I decided against asking Mr. Henderson for a photo opportunity in case he'd say, quite frankly, Mr. Wiseguy, you can take him home with you because I can't do anything with him.

But it's all in the game. Prestbury Park is God's own country and it was never going to be a bad day once Peaky Boy had landed the odds, workmanlike enough, in the first. I can't stand the mounting anxiety of races going by without having a winner so the main bet going in in race 1 is fine even if the pay out is much reduced by the fav not running. I might not have won if it had.

 

The celebrations that followed Manofthepeople's win the 4.25 were extraordinary and incomprehensible at first, outdoing the gobsmacked silence that greeted the Gold Cup winner, Norton's Coin, when I was there 40-odd years ago. Let's listen to the interview. Oh, I see. Paddy Brennan, stable jockey to the very local Fergal O'Brien had made it his last ride and retired then and there.

Some of the crowd at Cheltenham know their stuff. Not necessarily the chavvy blokes in suits or the alarming young ladies that some of them are with or those with more taste who aren't. They haven't got a clue and the bookmakers are very pleased to see them. Cheltenham is a 'cashless course' and you can't buy anything there without a card but bookmakers are keen to make it known that they'll take cash. They're not so fussy.

 

Win, lose or draw, it's a fine day out. It wouldn't be if the choice was only between lose, lose and lose but it isn't and the fun you can have reducing Radio 5, not least in its football coverage, to absurdam on the way home is an entertainment in itself. 

It's lucky for me that one of my friends is good enough to drive there once a year. He got no more than he deserved when he somehow picked out the last two very healthily-priced winners the day after being at Fratton Park to see his favourite football team win their league. I'm pleased for him. Sometimes the fates suddenly realize there's a good guy whose turn it is to have a couple of memorable days and so they make it happen. 

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

There might not be many pop albums worth reviewing these days - in my ungenerous estimation - but doing it is made easy on a computer, as above. You can have the album playing on You Tube, a lyrics website open elsewhere and type it in, all on the same screen. The old 70's gunslingers on the NME sat in an office with a record player, a record sleeve and a typewriter and that must have been quite complicated in comparison but at least they had better records to listen to.

--

I took part in the BBC's Abba vote where you can allocate 5 votes as you see fit across their list of tracks. I'm very much on an outsider with The Day Before You Came but it's a class apart. I gave that 4 votes and 1 to Knowing Me, Knowing You.

--

I see Rolling Stone had Dancing Queen at no.1 and that could be favourite but it's an open heat. On safer ground, I hope you all came here and heeded the Grand National advice particularly as I said I had a second free shot at the race but 'doubled down' on I Am Maximus because I couldn't find anything else I believed in so much and so now I Am Wiseguy-imus. 

--

It looks like our Saturday nights with Maigret on Talking Pictures have come to an end but they were a great pleasure and lasted for a year's worth. Bruno Cremer continues in French with sub-titles on Tuesday nights.

I was very pleased with myself below with my comparison of Simenon and Balzac but it seems I'm not the first to have made it. Pierre Assouline includes it in his comprehensive account. That wouldn't have been the easiest biography to write given the amount of books there are to have read.

There might be a lot of things to 'admire' about Simenon, such as the prodigious output and energy but, like a lot of writers, he doesn't seem easy to like - probably on account of the necessary self-possession necessary to be such. Not much came between him and his ambition and he negotiated a way through wartime France by means of as much good luck as good judgement or perhaps moral fibre. His politics were a confused business in as far as he had any which could be said of many 'right-wing' people and that's probably what he was although not in a Nazi way.

As a writer he wanted to be more than the Maigret and pulp fiction man and maybe he could have been but he was interested in making money, too, and the contrast between his monetizing of his art compared to James Joyce's makes for two different ways of approaching literary creation.

--

So, with my own monetizing activities in good order after Aintree, we go to Cheltenham well aware that Mr. Henderson's horses are capable of winning again and he will want to make up for lost time in what remains of the proper jumping season. That will be Plan A on what is often a wide-open card.

One mustn't fret about money lost or, by the same token, money not won. Cashing in most of my little escapade into football on Arsenal top 4 with Leicester, Derby and Wrexham to be promoted could easily have been a mistake but if Leicester falter further and go into the rigmarole of play-offs, that'll do. Otherwise I'll have to try to see it as an 8/1 shot landed rather than half of a 16/1 winner thrown away.

One has to be phlegmatic. Winning is the point of it and I'm doing that, worrying about by how much only makes one seem like a fat bloke wanting another pie.

Great Western Rail are repaying my journey back from Swindon in full after their usual hapless attempt to organize some trains so I got paid for hanging round at Westbury for two hours. It must cost them a fortune doing something they are so bad at. Perhaps they should move into water management or run the Post Office with a system designed by Fujitsu.

It's not funny, though. About 25 years ago I went to Winchester for a big meeting about problems with work computer systems that were provided by Fujitsu.

Plus ça change, plus la même chose, as it were.

The Libertines - All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade

 The Libertines - All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade (EMI)

Few pop artists are as good in their later work as in that which made them famous. Mozart and Rembrandt's last work was probably their best but on Hackney Diamonds the Stones were their own best tribute act and The Day Before You Came was a different sort of Abba but even the most talented of pop acts, whatever glories they achieve as they develop, don't seem to end up in a better place than some of those they had been to. Peter Doherty, though, whether with Carl Barat or not, and having survived that dangerous age of 27, is proving more durable than the mercurial phenonmenon that he looks as if he should have been.

If All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade doesn't quite have a Can't Stand Me Now on it then we shouldn't have expected it to but it is an instant hit as soon as it begins and continues what has for the most part been an impressive catalogue.

The survey of broken England's dreaming is brought forward from 1976/77 and nothing new but it's the Clash more than the Sex Pistols he owes the bigger debt to, Mustangs bringing to mind All the Young Punks, the downbeat lives retaining a defiant optimism under 'dishwater skies' while I Have a Friend begins like the Buzzcocks. Merry Old England is a mordant meditation on the migrants who see it as a place of opportunity nonetheless.

Oh S*** is another of those in which Pete relies heavily on the degraded demotic, as he did in Gunga Din, but one of their signature guitar riffs makes it an immediate crowd pleaser. Using Swan Lake for a tune was done by Public Image Limited on the Metal Box album in 1979 so that's hardly innovative but stabbings weren't such an everyday occurence then. Untimely death has been a regular part of Pete's life and he takes a chillingly matter-of-fact view of it, especially when one realizes how much Songs They Never Play on the Radio owes to Karen Carpenter on Yesterday Once More. They are not so far apart given the breakdown of the genre barriers that pop music was once defined by. The irony is that wholesome, gorgeous Karen died aged 32 and delinquent Peter is still with us at 45. But after an album with hardly a missed beat on it, that was the track I played over and over.

 

His ongoing insociance and faux vulnerability combined with his smartarse self absorption makes for the sort of mystique that hangs around a certain sort of creative artist but all one has to be is any good and his formula goes on working and providing, disarmingly and often charmingly. For me he's the last of the English geezers. Pop music has been over for some time, commodified, sanitized, recondite and all been done before. It's the same with poetry in which I similarly have difficulty with anybody much under the age of 45, and 'classical' music by anybody much younger than me. Those ships have continued to sail without me. Doherty, though, is retro as well as keeping on giving. I was reminded that I picked up the Babyshambles Down in Albion album a couple of weeks ago. Once I got round to it, it was a bit makeshift and unconvincing. Anybody can have a bad patch because form is temporary but class is forever and he came through into an unlikely 'maturity', if you can call it that in someone who remains somehow child-like.

Songs They Never Play on the Radio

 

 

It's this week's Record of the Week at DGBooks and on DGBooks Radio.

We've not such a thing before and probably won't have one again but we're having one this week.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 I don't think I'm exactly 'trending' but the metrics suggest that a few more than usual having been turning up here recently so you are all most welcome. 

Tomorrow is a particularly difficult day with a very fine concert in the Menuhin Room clashing with one of the last big days of horse racing until it goes literally flat for the most part until October, for me at least. It's an awful decision to have to make and if I hadn't landed the odds today I'd probably go to the music but I'm not a one-trick pony and there are other great music events lined up so it's all about Aintree tomorrow and right now I'm in that delirious moment of thinking that anything's possible and re-investing some of today's profit will land me five grand I won't know what to do with when my homework proves 100% correct and pays well over five grand. 

It might not, of course, but somehow horse racing brings out the optimist in those of us usually so devoted to pessimism.

--

Found in among the radio schedules this week was an old Great Lives on Radio 4Extra, the half hour in which a well-known person makes the case for a hero of theirs and, it seems, somebody else makes the case against. 

I always want to take part in any such enterprise but can't be sure who I'd nominate for that because I can often see the case against. From cricket, though, both Basil d'Oliviera and Derek Randall seem hard to find fault with; Elizabeth Bishop from poetry; I'd be glad to defend Danny Baker. And there are still one or two non-famous people from real life who haven't been far short of perfect.

But guess who Bernard Manning nominated - Mother Theresa of Calcutta. Not Roy 'Chubby' Brown. Mr. Manning had a serious, spiritual side, you see, didn't regard himself as offensive and didn't think it was proper for little kiddies in faraway places like India to be left in dustbins. He was not a complicated man. He knew what he thought and he thought what he liked. 

I wouldn't say he was provocative. One of the most underwhelming assessments of a poem at our local poetry group is 'thought-provoking'. But, no, not at all - what thoughts did it provoke.

Mr. Manning's insistence that he wasn't racist consisted of saying that he treated everyone the same and made jokes about all kinds of people and he once did a benefit gig for a little Pakistani kid. And, yes, maybe, or maybe not. But he made me feel racist by making me realize that it wasn't just Yorkshiremen I found rather too forthright, it was Mancunians, too, so perhaps having provoked such thoughts in me some 22 years after the fact, Mr. Manning should have appeared on Radio 4 more often. Like on Thought for the Day which I think continues on its dreary way. Or perhaps I'd go on Great Lives and nominate Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees-Mogg. 

Oh, I'm sorry, there seems to have been a misunderstanding. No, I don't think they led great lives but they thought they did.

--

An impressive life was lived by Georges Simenon as detailed in Pierre Assouline's biography. Even in its early stages Simenon possesses an energy and self-possession that few could hope to match. He knows what he wants and he knows how to get it, wise enough to know that he can't write the good books he aspires to without doing an inordinate, highly committed and opportunistic apprenticeship writing generic bad ones.

I was once impressed by the factory method by which Dick Francis produced his cliff-hanging thrillers, one per year, according to his plan. However, that is pedestrian and lazy compared to Simenon's timetable in which novels could be delivered on a 15-day timetable.

It is the literary equivalent of Tin Pan Alley, the hit factories and it doesn't mean that the end product is the worse for it but the definition of 'special' includes the idea that it can't be endlessly produced on a large scale. Even Tamla Motown disintegrated under such pressure in due course.

So many words, so many works, remain suspicious. There has to be a formula. Not every Shakespeare sonnet, Mozart symphony or Rembrandt painting is quite as good as the best of them. Perhaps not all of Bach is quite as good as the very best of him. And so Simenon, much as we might enjoy his work, benefitted from 'facility'. Like Balzac. He did it easily, not without hard work but without difficulty.

I'm impressed but I'm impressed in the same way that I've sometimes been by the way people have been brilliant at things that I don't want to do - Tiger Woods, Lewis Hamilton, Kirkland Laing. I still like to think that less is more, that a small number of truly great things is better than a vast pile of good things. That's the case for Elizabeth Bishop, not J.S. Bach but, as ever, there are no rules.

Aintree Preview

Cheltenham isn't what it once was, the Grand National isn't either, policemen have been looking younger for longer than I care to remember and my favourite TV programmes are Dad's Army and the Maigret's from the 1960's and 1990's on Talking Pictures TV.

It is still possible to back winners, though, and I suppose I'd even take an interest in golf if I could make it pay. Don't quote me on that.

It is no longer proper to refer to the 'loony bin'- and for good reasons - but anybody suggesting we take on Willie Mullins tomorrow could be a candidate for such a place with Irish racing and him in particular in such ascendency over horses that live in the UK. One really, really would like to see Mr. Henderson back winning big races with Shishkin and Sir Gino but their prices don't seem to have the lingering doubts factored in and, even if they did, a good effort by an 8/1 loser doesn't pay out. There's no room for sentiment even in compiling my modest annual profit. I do enough daft things as it is and I'm talking myself out of those horses as I write.

Firstly, though, tomorrow, we'll start with the last where Honky Tonk Highway looks like she's being backed for the in form Skelton stable who helped themselves to lesser prizes at Market Rasen today. Having always been a believer in Grey Dawning, who convinced at Cheltenham, I'll just about take the short price that he's recovered from those efforts and will be able to confirm the form. They'd be the bets with the other races swerved with the possibility that Saint Roi might prevent the Skeltons having it all their own way but I'd rather have the races in a different order and not do that until we are winning.

 

On Friday, Chianti Classico was almost too good to be true at Cheltenham and would have to be very tempting if he could do that again but Mystical Power is surely a Mullins good thing after making me think I was off to a winning start there. Aintree could be that fraction easier and he could be the best business of the three days.

I remember very glibly, some 40 years ago in the pub, telling someone that I didn't always back the winner of the National but I'd always find a winner elsewhere on the card. To be fair, I didn't do too badly at the big race but I can see no reason why Teahupoo doesn't win the hurdle at 3.05 and that goes into the trebles from the four horses in bold type here that is the bet.

The more optimistic and ambitious types might want to flirt with the idea of untold riches and the excitement of the race which was once, like the Cup Final, something that almost everybody was interested in but now they aren't. I'm slightly put off by two of the three pundits on the At the Races preview, including Matt Chapman, agreed with what I'd done already, I Am Maximus, pictured. That would be hard to take for Mr. Henderson who trained him once but now Mr. Mullins does and the case was made that if anything in this field has the potential to be better than we know already, it's him. I hear my friends saying Mr. Incredible and Vanillier and I can see why they do but I went through the race again, looking for somewhere to hedge with a free bet and I decided to double down on Maximus rather than cover it with something else.

 

Cheltenham's gorgeously quieter meeting comes next week and then, as I always say, I shut up shop and wait for the October pay days. It's never quite like that but heaven knows I try.

Rosemary's Way Out

It wasn't quite as apparent as I'd hoped that a re-read of The Way Out of Berkeley Square by Rosemary Tonks would provide enough about 'being stuck' to base a whole essay on the theme of it. There's some and it might be enough but I don't know if it will seem like too much of a contrivance. It can be very hurtful when someone as eminent as Prof. Sir Stanley Wells along with all the other accoutrements that apply to his name, and his coterie of faithful followers, pile in to discredit one's work. Stan didn't make much of a case beyond his blustering outrage eight years ago but it would be worse if somebody were to find a fault that I suspected might have actually been there.

The first move would be to compare Arabella's situation in Berkeley Square with those of the Dubliners and Stephen Dedalus in Portrait.

When father overwhelms me with domestic tasks I've often wondered whether it's because he wants me to leave home and is driving me out, or whether he wants at all costs to keep me there by giving me so much to do that I can't roam abroad.

It's there alright and much else besides and both Rosemary and Joyce are heavily reliant on autobiographical material even if Rosemary transfers her illness to Arabella's brother, Michael, who has the same name as her real life husband and is in Karachi writing poems.

Some who believe themselves to be poets can't help but reflect on the situation and Rosemary, through Michael, like Joyce through Stephen, has a very familiar dissatisfaction with it,

Until a year or two ago I loved bookshops; but as I grew up, I grew level mentally with some of the books inside them and the disappointment was very great. No philosopher, when read, seemed truly to philosophise, no erotica was really erotic; no poetry was ever poetry. 

(and there's more worth having before...)

The fact that he [Michael] can't manage without books and never stops reading doesn't alter his contemptuous attitude towards them. 'I don't like the air around here, Pigeon, but I have to breathe it because there's nothing else.' That's Michael.

And it sounds like Rosemary, too. Sometimes you find a few lines in which an already favourite writer excels even themselves and it's not quite clear whether one falls in love all over again or if it only serves to confirm what you knew already. Going even further, in the last few pages, Michael says,

that from now on he's separated forever from the English poets by his sufferings and his experience, whereas before he was separated only by his contempt.

Rosemary can try to hide behind Michael but I can see her there, not least joining those bits up with the comments in her interview in which she despaired of 'English' poets in the 1960's 'not writing passions' which one could easily think refers to Philip Larkin as per the essay due any time soon in the Larkin Society journal.

I'm not taking sides because they are both at the very top end of my list of favourite poets and Larkin could be just as disparaging about other poets and often was.

The new essay, should it ever get done, would compare and contrast the 'ways out' of the various paralyses that Rosemary, Joyce, Larkin, Hardy and others either find or fail to. It might work. I might get away with it. And if I don't, as long as I've enjoyed it it won't matter.

We might like to glorify such things as 'work' but they're not. They are pleasure.

The Reading List

 One goes on a bit of a spree and builds up a pile of books in waiting and then a few weeks later they've nearly all gone again. I might not feel like immediately launching into the heavy detail of Richard Ellman's Joyce and so that can be held over.

I was more than usually taken with Saturday's episode of Maigret, Pytor the Latvian, the one in which Torrence is murdered. Apparently the first one that Simenon wrote but the fifth to be published except there is little chronological sense to the Maigret novels and Torrence appeared in plenty more. 

Perhaps Simenon was the C20th's answer to Balzac, writing over 400 novels that is about three times as many as Balzac but they are usually one third of the length. And they still found time to have busy, busy lives. So I've not only ordered Pyotr from the library but a Simenon biography. And while writing this an e-mail arrived to say that the biography is ready to collect so I went and collected it.

That raises the question of whether to re-read The Way Out of Berkeley Square by Rosemary Tonks next which had been the plan. I can feel an essay coming on which is part of the 'earned surplus' of reading where reading is that without which one can feel adrift and in need of something else to do when it isn't always obvious what that should be. But at least I am in credit.

The first line of Way Out of Berkeley Square is,

'I'm thirty, and I'm stuck'.

Like a lot of what seem to be good ideas, Arabella's first line generates the idea in all its glory and all one has to do is assemble the piece like an MFI wardrobe. A bit easier than that, let's hope.

Being 'stuck', paralysis, in need of an escape route, ennui and all such synonyms relates also to Rosemary's poems and brings to mind Dubliners, Portrait and parallels between themes in Rosemary's and Joyce's highly autobiographical work and contrasts between how they dealt with it in their lives. It could be enough to compare and contrast the two of them, a strategy that can be relied on to provide an essay's worth of points to be made. But not too much effort has to be put into casting around among other favourite authors to extend it further and, while wondering if that is what makes them favourite authors, survey the theme across wider literary perspectives.

In no particular order, at present, there's Hamlet paralysed into inaction; there are Hardy's characters unable to avoid the fates that their circumstances and determinism deal out to them and there are Beckett's characters stuck in their own absurdity. Sean O'Brien's post-Larkin, post-Thatcher ennui provides recurrent tableaux of alienatation in need of elsewhere. I might have to forego the rich seam of Larkin on the subject for fear of using him too often but I think Sartre, maybe Salinger, I dare say Eliot if need be can play their parts and I really must make out some sort of plan before all this bounteous enthusiasm for dereliction passes.  

One asks for nothing more than something to be involved in. And that, really, is the whole point.

The Half-Hearted Archangel

Light verse, perhaps.  

Who'd have it. Well, Auden did because he edited the Oxford book of it and wrote plenty that might be called as much. If it's good enough for him, it ought to be good enough for me.

Who's to say what's 'light' and what's serious. Robert Lowell was serious but once copied out a letter from his friend Elizabeth Bishop and passed it off as a poem and was surprised to find she wasn't quite so much his friend any more. Was he serious?

I'm afraid I remain intermittently obsessed with the litany of objections to Christianity and, extending outwards from it, a huge proportion of what was offered in the sixteen years, was it, of education I was presented with. It has taken me this long and counting to recover from so much of what I was told.

Somewhere along the way somebody said poetry was the highest form of art but I can't help but suspect they didn't have a record player.

This poem isn't entirely serious because I did it with reference to a rhyming dictionary on a rainy Tuesday afternoon for something to do. It appears to have too much of an agenda to be 'poetry' but, then again, its agenda is to have less of such a thing so maybe it is serious after all. Something better may come of it but I amused myself for a while with it and if enjoyment isn't the point of poems then I don't know what is.

The Half-Hearted Archangel 

Shepherds might have been less impressed
By an archangel steeped in doubt
And they’d be right. How can you trust
Someone who’s not prepared to shout
their message as if it is true
and also so beyond belief
that there is nothing else to do
but take or leave it. Such is life.

Some poets, or some poets once,

Were thought to be like archangels,

Possessed of such wild importance

That they, too, belong in gospels
Where they reveal their radiant news
Which would, of course, be news to us,
Sequestered in our downbeat views,
Who think such things must be bogus.

 

Come off it, lad, they should have said,
We’re shepherds and we’ve seen it all
And there is not the slightest shred
Of evidence in such a tall
Story to make us leave our flocks.
Away with you. Leave us in peace.
What you say’s a load of rubbish.

Such attitudes would have released

 

Them from their role in the scriptures

And make for better poetry
And, yes, less dramatic pictures
But much, much less idolatry

Because poetry need not say
Anything so daft or absurd.
No archangel should betray
In the beginning was the word.

The Most Dangerous Book

The most basic summary of James Joyce's life would cover his eye problems, his poverty, probably his devotion to his work being equalled only by his devotion to drinking and the censorship of Ulysses. Yes, yes, yes, one thinks but one needs a fuller account like that by Kevin Birmingham to appreciate the extremities of each element and how they came together to make for such an extraordinary life. To compare the biography of Ulysses to that of The Waste Land is to put a campaign of monumental heroism in the name of art and literature up against a bout of hypochondria.

It's hard to say which feature of the story is the most astonishing. The efforts of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice were determined. Certainly Ulysses pushed at boundaries far beyond those that had made Tess of the d'Ubervilles and Jude the Obscure seem shocking only a couple of decades earlier but if they thought it was filth it was a good thing they didn't read the letters between Joyce and Nora. They might have been well-intentioned but their case was flawed in as far as not being clear how anybody could be corrupted by a book they couldn't understand.

Joyce's devotion to booze makes his achievement in writing such a book all the more staggering as he was delivered home regularly barely able to stagger himself. And, the 'Oxen of the Sun' episode cost him 'a thousand hours of work' which compares with the couple of hours each Sunday afternoon one winter in which I dutifully churned out a first draft of Time After Time - 50 thousand words - in order to be able to say I'd written such a thing. That calculates to, say, 24 x 2 = 48 plus a bit of thinking and planning such as it was but it was more than enough for me to realize what hard work writing a novel is, even a very poor one.

Joyce,

was so cold in their last residential hotel that he wrote with blankets over his shoulders and a shawl wrapped around his head. He wrote whenever he wasn't bedridden with fits of pain, and he thought about writing whenever he was.

And his eysight was failing, too.

In due course there was financial and practical support from the small, committed band of sponsors and believers but his itinerant life with his family was a further burden on the creative process. It is they that are the heroes of the story as much as Joyce in a way because without them it wouldn't have happened and for once Ezra Pound is one of the good guys which is unusual for him. That is a measure of what an unlikely story it is.

After the fact, Modernism looks like an inevitable done deal but it looks like no such thing in this account of what it was like at the time. Like any revolution it came from the underground and took a lot of organizing against the odds and the combined powers of the authorities in place. Like a lot of revolutions it looks in retrospect as if it had to happen but maybe there are even more revolutions thyat need to happen but don't.

The two major revolutions in Western art, literature and music, for me at least, were Romanticism and Modernism. I wouldn't be a complete devotee of either but recognize the benefits they brought with them alongside the collateral damage. Romanticism made us all self-indulgent and Modernism required us to be highbrow. It is necessary to give some credit where it's due to Pound who was otherwise not a good man but one wonders if the Moderrnist achievement would look quite so extraordinary without Joyce who, like Picasso, showed that he could do it properly before taking it several stages beyond. Ulysses was at the giddy limit and then the Wake went where nothing has ever been since. Literature has been 'after the fact' ever since.

It is a story of heroism, if in artistic terms only. Ulysses makes no difference to the vast majority of people's lives. It's not even one of my favourite books and I'm some sort of low-level literatus, I'd like to think. Whether it was worth it depends on one's point of view but it must have been essential for Joyce or else he wouldn't have given himself to it so completely and then extended the project infinitely beyond itself. Perhaps it is through such involvement that one can find fulfilment or perhaps he was uncompromisingly selfish and the fallout from his life and work contiunes to wreck those of others. Not least the professors who devote theirs to deciphering what might otherwise be regarded as madness.