Maupassant, C18th Music, John Cooper-Clarke

Maupassant's not quite the writer I'd thought he was, for better and perhaps for worse. There is more variety in his stories than the 'shabby gentility' of lower middle classes struggling to appear respectable. The introduction to the Penguin Classics edition suggests the stories contain some misogyny but it's a society in which wives are legally the possessions of husbands, where mistresses are sundry appendages and Maupassant is worldly in dealing with it as such. 'Love' is like a market place and highly transactional at times.

Maupassant is the less deceived. Several stories are left open-ended if not always inconclusive. The reader is left with a fair idea of what the end would be if there was one. A Parisian Affair is a good choice to give the volume its title with its 'back-to-reality' theme that recurs time and again, as in Duchoux where the Baron de Mordiane feels stranded in,

the monotony of the same kind of evening....the same conversations on the same topics, the same badinage, the same jokes and same gibes about the same women

but his foray to find something more interesting seems to persuade him that the mundanity he knows is preferable to the world beyond it.

I had thought Maupassant quieter, like George Moore or William Trevor, but he can be more visceral. I'm sure he's a great writer but a longer look has shown him to be not exactly the one I had been led to believe.

 

Revisits are often enlightening, especially after a long hiatus. Buxtehude by Arrangement, the album of transcriptions for piano by August Stradal played by Meilin Ai, was at first underwhelming, it not being the real thing and the Preludes, Fugues and Chaconnes sounding somewhat reduced but it's wandered its way quite debonairly across the turntable a couple of times with expectations reduced and been the better for it. In many cases, it's not the work's fault how we approach it and arriving with the wrong preconceptions is our fault, not its. The Bach Cantatas in the Complete Works continue to throw up fine pieces from the depths of their vastness, the shimmering adagio strings, the lone violin or hautbois, the impressive vocal solos and the sweeping choruses. Of course one must not live by Bach alone and one wonders how limiting even such an inventive mind is until one of the real masterpieces, like the Piano or Violin Partitas, seem to provide inexhaustible richness on their own. Such is the paradox.  

 

Of Tuesday's acquisitions, the C18th English Violin Sonatas, headed by that Londoner, Geminiani, are state-of-the-art and fine company whereas Keith Jarrett's Handel Suites wander off a bit more harmlessly than one might like but, in the belief that Jarrett/Handel can't be an anodyne partnership, it will be given further chances. Béla Hartmann's Schubert disc was added to upcoming treats this afternoon.

But mainly, I'm glad to have plenty to put ahead of Eugene Onegin which was bought more out of a sense of dutiful required reading than its promise of undiluted pleasure. We will find out one day but not yet. Le Grand Meaulnes was there, waiting to be snapped up, in the Oxfam shop and so, having heard it recommended a while ago, I did. The Woman in White is a doorstop for the winter that has long floated about the less pressing reaches of intended reading lists. Humph's The Best of Jazz was picked up with my father in mind but he's a fine

writer and I might learn from it but John Cooper-Clarke's autobiography, I Wanna Be Yours, is joyfully engaged with straightaway before the library reservations arrive. Drollery from a remarkable man with a turn of phrase entirely his own, he is a class apart from other such 'pop' poets as Hegley, McGough and lesser names than them. I honestly don't think he's putting it on. He's telling it how it was, with an appreciation of all the absurdities, and he's apparently 'real'. He won't be entirely out of place on my Poetry Biography shelves.