Vermeer

No list should ever be regarded as the final answer. A Top 6 compiled today could easily be different by tomorrow and certainly unlikely to be the same in a few years' time. Nominating the Best Books in the House a while back, I should have included Andrew Graham-Dixon's Vermeer ahead of Benjamin Moser's The Upside-Down World. That doesn't mean Moser is taken off the short list but it does mean that Graham-Dixon is closer to being the actual best book in the house. And thus, for me, the Best Book Ever because if I knew of better ones, they would be in the house.

Such books need to be re-read at least once. While there are a lot of books in the world, and a lot of music and paintings, I prefer to stay with known masterpieces than explore unchartered territory in the hope of finding anything else as good because I suspect the odds are against it. Eventually one feels as if one is approaching the limits of the world one is happy to inhabit. Which is not to say that Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and a biography of Wittgenstein aren't lined up for the Autumn.

But Vermeer is nothing short of sensational in constructing not only a life but a comprehensive revelation of what those paintings mean where previously he was thought to be a 'sphinx' whose meanings were undecipherable beneath the quiet, the gorgeous treatment of light and something transcending the ordinary. It belongs right up alongside A.N. Wilson's Jesus and Katherine Duncan-Jones's Ungentle Shakespeare as a brilliant account of a life re-interpreted against some generally accepted versions except Vermeer comes across as much the preferable human being.

All the background detail of the warring history of the Netherlands is relevant where other such books sometimes pile it in to make something book length. The diligent research into contemporary records provides Vermeer with a much more coherent and credible life than Jesus Christ or Shakespeare have ever been provide with. Andrew Graham-Dixon concedes that he is often working with suppositions but I find little reason to doubt his whereas those made by biographers of Jesus and Shakespeare usually come with agendas, and much more dubious guesswork.

After the ongoing wars, mainly with Spain, that marked Vermeer's early years, a peace was arrived at. The famous View of Delft, previously thought to be a town glistening gently after some rain, is thus a celebration of ordinary, peaceful life.

The paintings were often done in pairs but their subsequent separation to galleries across the world helped to disguise the fact. Many of the best paintings of women alone in domestic settings were done for one patron and their themes are subtly religious - liberal, 'free-thinking', non-Calvinist religion - very slowly so that the artist was ever in debt to his patron, his mother-in-law who held contrary religious views and others. But the climax of Graham-Dixon's account is his explanation of the Girl with a Pearl Earring. It represents the moment that Mary Magdalene turned round and recognized the resurrected Jesus which thus puts the viewer in his place.

It could be the best book I've ever read, for several different reasons but that's the main one.

What We Can Know

 Ian McEwan, What We Can Know (Vintage)

It is 2119, it is post-Derangement and post-Inundation; sea levels have risen to make Britain an archipelago with no Thames, no Oxford, its settlements on what had been higher ground, the tops of village churches sticking up out of the water in places; Nigeria is a world power. While there is no racism, there are bandits abroad but people look back on the freedoms, cultural diversity and richness of life a hundred years before as something worth having. The Derangement was how the governments then (which means in our recent decades) knew all about climate change but did nothing about it. The Inundation is the vast migration of people from other countries that has effectively washed away any racist concern about what colour the population are, possibly it is mentioned because the majority are a light brown colour.

While Ian McEwan is a brilliant writer for most of his time, his novels usually seemed flawed in one way or another. Thus I'm on the lookout to find fault because Science Fiction is often wrong even if the 1960's dream of a 'walkie-talkie' has manifested itself in the mobile phone that so many people can't now bear to not look at for more than a few minutes. So, while I'm not surprised that Humanities, Eng Lit and poetry are sidelined to very minor roles in universities, I'm surprised that there are universities at all.

Francis Blundy was the great poet of the period in which he was only rivalled by Seamus Heaney. There was an even more magnificent novelist called Mabel Fisk in a later generation who produced work that puts her on the same level of eminence as Shakespeare. She isn't very important to the story but it is as interesting as it is unlikely that any artist in our fragmented culture will ever be regarded as comparable to Bach, the Beatles, Shakespeare or Rembrandt. Which makes one wonder if McEwan- immensely clever as he is- is not having a little joke with us.

But Blundy wrote a lost masterpiece, A Corona for Vivien, again thought to be impossibly beyond anything writeable in the early C21st. It might not be coincidental that the Vivien Blundy he writes it for has the same name as T.S. Eliot's first wife. After a longer first section of research into that poem, the second goes back to the early C21st where we are told what the poem was really about, by Vivien herself. 

It's not as pretty as the legendary poem is thought to have made it sound. If McEwan was once nicknamed Ian Macabre on account of the horror in his early fiction, he modulated into the more sophisticated distaste of bourgeois sleaze in some later work. Some major poets benefitted, if that's the word, from prolific philandering and Blundy's one of them. Vivien is one of those impressed enough to reciprocate.

It is also a recurring theme in McEwan that we find everything overturned, like in Atonement and Sweet Tooth and so we do here, too. That things are often not what they seem is a fair point. What We Can Know is an involving read, especially of interest to anyone with an interest in contemporary poetry and it's reassuring to see that McEwan has as sound a grasp, as a novelist, of poetry as the recent Sebastian Faulks memoir has. But endings are notoriously hard to do.

Of course we don't get to read the miraculous poem, or any of the work of Mabel Fisk, because that would mean McEwan having to write it. As so often, he is very good but he ultimately fails us. It entirely worked in On Chesil Beach because that was the point. And it remains the point. Beneath the brilliant poem that didn't get left to posterity was something much darker. It's quite possibly a brilliant book. Vivien is surely the opposite of the 'unreliable narrator' unless her account is untrustworthy. Having enjoyed reading it so much, I wish I hadn't been left with the suspicion that Ian McEwan might have performed another of his elaborate tricks. 

Sebastian Faulks, Fires Which Burned Brightly

 Sebastian Faulks, Fires Which Burned Brightly (Penguin)

Sebastian Faulks makes a tremendous job of the memoir that he,

never wanted to write ... because I didn't think my life remarkable. 

 

Compared to whose, I wonder. It's surely well above average in terms of stories, achievement and his capacity to understand it. But, perhaps more than those things, he can write it himself rather than have it written for him like sports people and others usually have to. Always highly readable in his fiction, he is at least as much so in his life.

While it is approximately chronological, at the suggestion of his publisher, it is more thematic with the ten chapters reflecting on school, thirteen years in journalism, booze, France, war, America and family in a variety of combinations. He is aware of the privilege he came into and, in some detail about his education, that it provides no insurance against the misery of private schooling. He 'borrowed' a friend's bike and escaped on one occasion.

He was clearly one of those whose talent was such that he succeeded in school and university without having to work very hard. Without going on any ideological excursions, it is apparent that his sympathies are properly placed, understanding where the world has gone so wrong and with an appreciation of wine, books, music and cricket. In his case it was Procul Harum that were in the right place at an impressionable age for him. It is to the eternal credit of the teenage Sebastian that it mattered to him whether the greatest pop record of all time was Be My Baby by The Ronettes or Then He Kissed Me by The Crystals. The passing references to an enthusiasm for golf are less excusable.

Insights into the writer's life are provided in the depth of research involved in producing the novels, not only about the wars that shaped the world in the twentieth century but also the development of psychiatry that may or may not have been related to them in understanding how humanity functions, or fails to. And also, a promotional tour of America that sounds genuinely horrific. If one thinks that producing full-length novels looks like hard work then selling them afterwards sounds worse.

Faulks is naturally funny. when suitable opportunities arise, and the count of 'laugh out loud' moments was impressive. Several, by no means on every page, but thus similar to Terry Eagleton's The Gatekeeper, similarly thematically organized and possibly done more in the spirit of a stand-up comedian but, as a writer's account of their own life, I can't compare it with anything that I enjoyed more. 

His interests extend well into poetry as I realized some years ago when he attended a session on Thom Gunn, who is mentioned in passing, at the Cheltenham Literature Festival almost inevitably being made aware on his way in how much a reader admired his work. What must it be like being Paul McCartney if a novelist can't go out in public without being harrassed in the same way that I'd bothered Clive Wilmer outside half an hour earlier.

Things come easily to a class act. None of his books are my biggest favourites but I have plenty of them. His memoir is as good as any of them, for some reason still not threatening any all-time list but tremendously enjoyable. It is almost comparable to the music of, say, Fleetwood Mac which is often hard to fault but somehow 'middlebrow' and thus not quite eligible for top honours. But they and he did well out of what they chose to do and are unlikely to worry that they are not quite James Joyce or the Velvet Underground in my book.

What's in a Name?

 Susan Dwyer Amussen, What's in a Name? (Manchester University Press)

No historian thinks that Shakespeare didn't write his own plays. The main reason, in Susan Dwyer Amussen's account is that several of his contemporaries thought he did and none doubted it and it took 150 years for anybody to think otherwise. In a book subtitled How historians know Shakespeare was Shakespeare one might expect a bit more than an argument that is set out in one or two pages but the rest of the text is socio-economic, theatrical and local history that is at best only very loosely required to establish that the Stratford man wrote the plays and poems attributed to him. Or most of them. Not many by now dispute that there was collaboration with other writers involved.

It is interesting material and most books on Shakespeare's life necessarily include some context and background. It's not clear that knowledge of the apprentices rioting in London, for example, help us to establish that Shakespeare rather than Oxford, Bacon or Marlowe was the author of the oeuvre that bears his name. What the accumulated detail does do, more thoroughly than might be required, is show that Shakespeare, with his grammar school education, would have been perfectly capable of producing the work he did without going to university. There were others like him who, had they possessed the requisite talent, might have become similarly memorable. What is so often left out of the debate is the possibility of innate genius.

Susan writes carefully at times, like when only noting that the twins were born to Anne, but can be reduced to banality when reporting such things about London as,

Courtship, sex and marriage were critical parts of the life of the city. 

Not being a biography, the book isn't expected to cover the life in a coherent sweep but its progress surveys its trajectory, understandably concentrating more on the theatre than personal relationships. The recent claims about Anne living in London, based on a letter addressed to 'Good Mrs Shakespaire' are treated without prejudice as being possible without proving anything for certain but she brings the possible date for that forward to as early as 1598-9 and she imagines Shakespeare travelling between London and Stratford more regularly than I do. The purchase of the Blackfriars gatehouse so close upon his retirement from the theatre suggests he intended to retain business interests in London even if he did spend more time in Stratford. While all such possibilities can be considered, it's easy to get lost under a welter of such speculation when we simply don't know and probably never will.

No such biography, though, affects the authorship question. The reasons for thinking that Shakespeare wrote a vast portion of the work that is credited to him are simply stated. It is the far-fetched cases for other candidates put forward by those who think he didn't that are much more convincing that he did. Somebody wrote it all and there isn't a credible case to be made for anybody else. It is a much more unlikely story that such ideas ever gained the credence that they have- with such eminent adherents as Mark Rylance among them- but, as is credited to H.L. Mencken, the idea that one never went broke by underestimating the public is relevant once again.

Susan Dwyer Amussen has provided a well-researched, readable and possibly useful book on Early Modern England but its contribution to the Shakespeare Authorship question, while welcome, could have been presented in an essay. I'm not even sure how much of a question is left. I bought and read the book because it seemed to promise what might be some closure on the subject. Who is the gullible one now?  

 

PHAS Art Exhibition

 I'm glad I remembered to check up in time when the annual exhibition by the Portsmouth and Hampshire Art Society was. It was today, taking up the nave of Portsmouth Cathedral, and for the rest of the week.

Of course, as in a poetry magazine, there is plenty of work that is 'not one's kind of thing'. Most things aren't. But one reads, or attends, because there is likely to be something worth knowing about that one wouldn't have otherwise.

My first walk round made the work of Ric Robinson appear the stand outs. Three similar compositions to The Earth Dies Screaming , featured here.

That's a bit dramatic whereas another taking its title from another old pop record, Cruel Summer, might have been more muted until one realizes one doesn't want to be reminded of our 'new normal', parched summers. My favourite of what may or may not have been intended as a triptych was the other one, mostly in a blue that was nearly black and shades of black, something about not knowing about entering into the abyss. Not, as far as I know, taking its title from a piece of music but it might.

These were on sale for £600 and change. I take some convincing, especially when there was a much smaller item, something about eternal light disappearing, that was more affordable. I will have to go back and have another look.

But, nothing ventured, nothing gained. It was obvious who was Louise Griffiths-Kimber whose Preseli Hills was easily the most engaging canvas two years ago. She was kind enough to show me around her exhibits which included the Lord Mayor's Prize winner. Proper art people know their stuff. One of her pictures was of Whitby Abbey. I somehow had a feeling her favourite band would be The Cure.

 

You might go in search of art but, time and again, you return with pop music.
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Do I want this painting, for the price I think was being asked- title not properly remembered, the name of the artist so easily forgotten- I think I probably do. Partly for the colours but also for the way it's not quite abstract but only vaguely figurative. And it is gorgeously small and intelligent like the wonderful dog that was on the no. 21 bus on the way home. I'm not in a position to look after a dog but I can just about find space for one more painting.

 

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 There's been some discussion about abandoning books on the wireless in the last few days. As usual, I'd like to contribute.

The Ambassadors by Henry James was a recent abandonment for me after he had flattered with his shorter novels only to deceive as I ploughed on through some longer ones. Before that, The Letters of Basil Bunting were overtaken by more pressing concerns.

My first attempt at Proust, forty years ago, got as far as finishing vol. 1 of 3 but I returned to it in lockdown and rated it very highly indeed. Also, I went back to Human Traces by Sebastian Faulks with some success. The first book I gave up on, I think, was My Childhood by Maxim Gorky at school. I didn't pursue Bleak House at university but struggled through it thirty-odd years later. I have Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time and Captain Corelli's Mandolin in common with many others as being unfinished. There is no virtue in reading things dutifully and without pleasure or understanding if you don't have to.

I don't know if I've wondered it here but I've often wondered what percentage of words ever printed are ever read. I buy The Times on Saturday and I'm sure I don't read anything like 5% of it although I read some of the crossword clues any number of times.

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The Upside-Down World is still a great book as I re-read The Best Books in the House but I suspect it's not as good as Andrew Graham-Dixon's Vermeer and so that short list might be due some amendment. Benjamin Moser features a bit more in his own book than one ideally wants and his ordering of chapters front loads his account of C17th Dutch Art with Rembrandt, Vermeer, Carel Fabritius and Pieter de Hooch so that it loses some impetus, certainly with Frans Hals for who he makes a strong case but his group portraits of society men aren't anything I'd want on a wall of mine. There are, nonetheless, some very worthwhile observations on both the painters in question and art in general.

Even Vermeer might have to wait, though, because an order is due at the weekend- What's in a Name? putting together the reasons for allowing Shakespeare his own plays, the latest McEwan and the Sebastian Faulks memoir rather than the new novel. First up, I will be back on the Shakespeare trail. Dismissing the claims of Marlowe, Bacon, Oxford and the increasingly absurd list of challengers to the authorship- which is none of their faults- isn't difficult work. The hard part is ridiculing those making claims on their behalf enough to shame them into shutting up about it.

The reason for spending more than £35 on new books was to save a couple of quid postage on a battery.

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Equally absurd episodes in my recent day-to-day life have included referring to the manual to put this replacement computer together, not making much sense of it and eventually realizing it was the manual for the boiler. I'm increasingly beset by such problems when only trying to function at a basic level and get by. Perhaps I just need to concentrate harder on practicalities and not spend my time wondering if the Archduke Trio quite brings time to a standstill in the same way that the Shostakovich Viola Sonata the Schubert Quintet do.

 

But perhaps it's not all over yet. Tesco Mobile took not much interest in advising how I should download photos from the new, very basic, mobile phone to the computer. So I came home and found out for myself, following their advice to 'keep trying'. And thus now I can show you the action from the Copnor Road last Friday when I witnessed a car on fire in the morning and saw the burnt out remains in the afternoon. 

And I've been able to send a poet a picture of her poem featured on a no. 2 bus. 

679 Songs

 Playing DGBooks Radio on Spotify, as I sometimes do, it says it is now 679 songs and thus, as it has been for a long time 'over 24 hours'.

It's no rubbish. All carefully considered. I never seem to find it necessary to delete a title. Radio stations can be fairly 'niche' these days, making sure you will hear, say, Dire Straits at least three times a day and two of them will be Sultans of Swing. That failed attempt at 'cool' isn't on DGBooks Radio.

So, 679 x 3 and a half minutes, according to the calculator on the computer, makes 2376 and a half minutes. Divide that by 60 and  it makes 39.6 hours of the best possible, choice pop music. No Queen guaranteed. Tune in.

It will be sometime before it becomes my official Top 1000 but 679 tracks, none of which I see fit to delete means I'm two-thirds of the way there. I'll give it some thought. At first, thinking of it as a radio playlist, I tried not to overload it with favourite artists but if it's shifting towards a Top 1000, it will be necessary to look further into Bowie, T. Rex, Motown, the Magnetic Fields, Al Green, reggae and Northern Soul. Once one has had a thousand guesses there will not be room to say, oh, that one should have been in. There will be no prize for being no. 1001.

Is the fifteenth best track by Bowie better than the best thing Queen ever did without his help.

Yes, it is.   

Shadowy Lives

 It says at the top here, and has done for some time that,

The website is now what it has become, ... It will be about whatever suggests itself. 

I quite the way that from time to time a theme develops, rather than the mere repetition of old opinions and prejudices that have been set out several times before.

Coming to the end of Katherine Duncan-Jones's Ungentle Shakespeare, it is every bit as impressive as Jesus by A.N. Wilson and is doing a similar thing. Both are shedding highly informed and rational light on lives that have got out of hand in traditional re-tellings and idolatry. Germaine Greer was one who, in her life of Anne Hathaway, scorned the 'bardolaters' for who Shakespeare could do no wrong but even their devotion is paltry and half-hearted compared to that of Christians and their versions of Jesus. Wilson knows the scriptures and reads them with an alert scepticism and Duncan-Jones brings the same intelligence to her interpretation of Shakespeare. Implicit in both of their approaches is an understanding that their subjects are human. If they weren't then their work would have been less likely to be relevant. Wilson is Church of England and maybe his ex-wife was, too, but the C. of E. in recent decades has been quite liberal on belief in God and perhaps they have an inkling that gods are the product of man's imagination.

Where the tradition Sunday School Jesus was meek and mild and suffered little children to come unto him, we come away from Wilson with the impression of a firebrand preacher who wanted Jews to be better Jews, not establish his own church. He was a troublesome political figure crucified by the Roman rulers. Similarly, Shakespeare, on account of his sublime writing, was elevated to the sweet Swan of Avon who charmed everyone who met him and understood the human situation sympathetically. Such an account overlooks the litigious businessman building a portfolio of investments, a misogynist with an ongoing disgust towards women and an obsession with establishing his gentlemanly status. Both built up sizeable followings in their lifetimes while both would surely be astonished not only at their influence over 2000 and over 400 years later but also the myths and legends put about by their subsequent followers that have become so widely accepted.

--

One last aspect of the KDJ book is her setting out of the last part of Shakespeare's career before retirement circa 1613. Throughout her book she has very sceptical about the success of the marriage to Anne and she is consistent in explaining that the purchase of the Blackfriars gatehouse with three trustees was a move to prevent the property being left to her. 

She was writing before the discovery of the letter addressed to 'Good Mrs. Shakespaire' which has been dated to the 1600's. With William living as a 'lodger' in Silver Street from circa 1604, any credence given to that letter might need to be put nearer to 1610. The purchase of the gatehouse is not until March 1613. The incumbent there on Shakespeare's death, John Robinson, could plausibly have been in his service.

Anne being in London circa 1610 fits with the idea of some reconciliation that is reflected in the themes of the 'late plays' that were written from then onwards. But it doesn't look like such a complete reconciliation that such an asset was to be left to her. And the famous difficulties of interpreting what the bequest of the 'second best bed' in the will is meant to mean. None of which makes it impossible to form an idea of what was happening. There is no need to explain away every detail in a convoluted way and come up with a story that fits it all in for the sake of it. We don't know for sure and it's best to say as much.

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But a third title of the seven shortlisted for Best Book in the House is on a comparable theme. KDJ is quick to correct the often-heard truism that 'not much is known about Shakespeare's life'. Not enough, certainly, but quite a bit. Not all of it reliable, as in the case of Jesus Christ. But much more guesswork and assuming are needed if one wants to imagine the life of Vermeer, another raised to quasi-saintly status on the back of the tremendous legacy left in his work. Due, possibly next up, as I re-read the best books I've ever read, is Benjamin Moser's The Upside-Down World, which isn't a life of Vermeer but alongside Carel Fabritius and Pieter de Hooch, he is one of the foremost in the greatest Golden Age anywhere in any genre, Dutch C17th Painting. Not everybody will agree. There is a time around 1720 when European music was doing especially well. There was 1971 when pop music was very wonderful for the most part.

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On a slightly less elevated level, I'm most gratified that my mate, Kev, has chosen my poem, Romanticism, to read at an ongoing local event where readers recite poems from memory. I said I could thus attend in support and if one was required to perform I could do Rainyday Woman which I do know. Gladly, in what is a wise guideline, one isn't supposed to do one's own poems and one hardly wants to instigate a celebration of oneself.

What I do like, though, is how people choose poems of mine, when required, that are among the best of them. Over the years that has also included The Cathedrals of Liverpool, Windy Miller and Situation. There is something reassuring about others liking the one's I like best. It would be awful if none of my favourites ever got a mention and people chose titles that, in retrospect, might have been lucky to get into print. There are a few of those.

One thing KDJ says about Shakespeare's late plays is how they are 'backward-looking', partly at his own career, like The Tempest. He was only 52 when he died but he seemed to know he had done enough. Again, not imagining myself quite in the same league, I have been spending some time reviewing the oeuvre, aged 66. Poems rarely came in battalions but single spies and they come less often than ever. But I'd rather have one worth having per year- when it used to be four- than none at all. It isn't over til it's over.    

Ungentle

 Ungentle is what one needs to be in literary studies, or anywhere else. As well as less deceived. It's exactly what Katherine Duncan-Jones is in her Ungentle Shakespeare and the book is not only well worth its place on the shortlist of Best Books in the House, it is putting up a serious challenge to her ex-husband, A.N. Wilson's Jesus to be the best book in the house.

What she brings to Shakespeare biography is 'disinterest', in the way Thom Gunn was once at pains to stress, does not mean 'not interested'. She comes with no motive or need to make Shakespeare hers or in her own image. Behind much such work is an impulse to make him like oneself - like 'happily married', 'virtuous', in line with one's own ideology- anything like that as long as one feels some kinship with the perceived greatness.

Katherine has no ulterior motive in noticing what little part women take in Shakespeare's life. She goes into great detail on many things but where many pass over the pursuit of 'armigerous status', the acquisition of a coat of arms, the issue of achieving 'gentle' status is central here. But that is almost eclipsed by how she describes his cult hero, pop star, standing among the young when at the height of his powers in the early 1600's and maybe feels that the customary tributes paid by other poets to the deceased queen and incoming king are beneath him. She is not only deeply immersed in the culture and lesser known work of the time but good enough to bring insight to bear on it.

Who knew- I didn't even though I've read this book before- that Hamlet has a companion piece in John Marston's Antonio's Revenge as well as Twelfth Night having too much in common with Marston's What You Will. There is a depth to KDJ's scholarship that is not to be found in other generally available Shakespeare biography.

She wouldn't have been aware of the discovery of a letter addressed to 'Good Mrs. Shakespaire' in London in the 1600's that has been used to claim that Anne moved to London and William lived with her there, thus establishing the happy marriage. It's not for me to dispute the provenance of the letter but it's not only Katherine that has Shakespeare lodging in Silver Street from 1604 onwards, Charles Nicholl has a whole book about the period in The Lodger. I wouldn't have thought the biggest theatrical name of the day would live with his wife in lodgings. Katherine's version of him sees him as almost itinerant in London, like a rock star on tour, while piling up assets in Stratford. 

One doesn't have to answer every question that might arise about the life but one can take the most persuasive bits of likeliness, one of which is that conjugal relations between William and Anne came to an end in the 1580's. 

If you are only going to read one book on Shakespeare's life, it ought to be this one but it might be necessary to read another one before it in order to appreciate how good it is. 

Gone So Soon

 One straightforward way to measure how much one has enjoyed a book is how long it took to read. Michael Henderson's That Will be England Gone was a quick two days. Not necessarily agreeing with it all, and maybe it lays on the lament for bygone days a bit too much in the end, it is nonetheless engaging stuff, Henderson being in a position to namedrop from high, like Simon Rattle and Harold Pinter downwards.

I don't agree that Nottingham is in the north. Henderson uses the Trent to make his north-south divide and says Nottingham feels like the north. I feel no more northern than I do southern but consider myself from the midlands. The West is bounded by Dorset, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire; the East is East Anglia and Lincolnshire; it's around Stratford that the South becomes the Midlands and about Stoke or Sheffield where the Midlands become the North.

I don't agree that Marlowe lived in Shakespeare's shadow. He's been in that shadow since a few years after his death but didn't live in it.

I can sympathize with the view that,

Oasis specialized in rancid stupidity,

but that doesn't mean they didn't make two and a half great albums before Noel ran out of ideas and Liam's gormless swagger became recondite.

I'm not entirely convinced Ian Botham was a 'Somerset man' but he's neither completely a Yorkshireman either, not having been born there, but since publication, he has been awarded the baronetcy Henderson thought him worthy of, ahead of the knighthood, if more for services to Brexit than cricket.  It is Henderson's concern for such gin-swilling, doddering delineations that make one read him increasingly cautiously, realizing that his sympathy for Larkin includes some politics and isn't only literary but in both cases one can appreciate the work while taking exception to some of the attitudes.

And Henderson laces his text with as much poetry as Jeffrey Bernard used to have vodka in his vodka and tonics. It is powerful and engaging and tremendous value for those of us of the right age to 'get it'. But we are of an age just old enough to remember the introduction of the Sunday 40-over bash, the John Player League and remember it fondly. There must have been an old guard in place then who didn't think that was cricket and so, just possibly, we are only in the same position sixty years later in finding the Hundred meaningless. It's only by a matter of degrees that sport is meaningful or meaningless and we are defined in our attitudes by our age as we are by our given names. Not many of those dutifully doing as they are told and taking an interest in the Hundred are called Michael or David.

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So, onto the next of the shortlist of the recent Best Book in the House survey. Quite remarkably, two of the seven shortlisted authors were married, A.N. Wilson and Katherine Duncan-Jones. The latter's Ungentle Shakespeare is the equal of her husband's Jesus and 'less deceived' rigour. She allows herself some imaginings because Shakespeare biography can hardly do without some but hers are at a level beyond the wish fulfilment with which many furnish their versions, apparently trying to bend Shakespeare into the hero they want him to be. It is deeply impressive and a tremendous thing that, having bought it once, I can read it as many times as I like and look at it whenever I want to. Like now.

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Already at August 11th, one plays one's way through a summer like Brian Close negotiating the last session of Michael Holding at the Oval. Not as resiliently and ending with fewer bruises but with survival in mind. One knows that September is not so far away but summer is stockpiling its armoury. What happens when there is no more water in one's taps, if it never rains again. I dare say it will. When Aberdeen saw no sunlight for two months earlier in the year and it rained every day, I knew what the story would be six months later. Stig Abell on Times Radio complains about the monotony. Yes, but that's a bit aesthetic, like complaining about Vivaldi all sounding the same; a bit middle-class, as if the weather should entertain us- almost like moaning about wind gathering turbines spoiling a bit of landscape when actually they are trying to gather the power that makes your fridge able to cool your pinot grigio.

If I were called on to construct a religion, I'd make use of water and, if I were a poet worth having, I might fill out a book with a poem that said so even if it wasn't one of my best. 

That Will Be England Gone

It's always worth listening to recommendations or what other people are reading. If it sounds good, one's hit rate is likely to be more than one title that suits for each one that doesn't. One such thing is certainly That Will Be England Gone by Michael Henderson. Ostensibly a book about cricket, it extends into other preoccupations of the author's and, being of the same age as him, they overlap with mine without being a perfect fit.

The setting is the 2019 cricket season but the perspective is much longer, referring back to Neville Cardus and John Arlott as commentators and bringing in almost any of the great players one can think of as well as some less great. With the book's title and each chapter's coming from Larkin, one would anticipate a lament for a world Going, Going if not already gone. By the time one achieves a certain age, one is likely to prefer things how they used to be rather than the way they are going. Henderson is no fan of the T20 or the Hundred that was due when the book was written. We prefer the things we decided we liked when we first found them, not how commercial strategies have shaped them since. Very much the same applies to pop music- maybe all music, television, film and nearly everything.

Beyond Trent Bridge, Basil D'Oliviera, Mike Proctor and Fred Trueman, Henderson has loving things to say about Bach, Beethoven, Auden, Ken Dodd and an England that there was even if it wasn't quite as idyllic as any edited version of it our selective memories might want to provide.

Like a Larkin adherent ought to be, Henderson is 'less deceived'. While not entirely defending Bernard Manning, he cites an appearance on Parkinson on which Esther Rantzen said that 'anybody could tell a dirty joke' to which he replied, 'All right, let's hear you.' Other undermining of received opinion is in a few paragraphs questioning John Lennon and his Working Class Hero status, a record that by now is surely impossible to hear without taking it to be ironic, like Imagine. But for me Henderson exceeds himself in his summation of Schubert,

Yet for all his anguish, there is no anger. For all the joy there is no affirmation...In Schubert's music everything is provisional, an emotional state that reflects more truthfully the balance of our own imperfect lives.

That is what I wish I'd said when blundering into saying I never felt Schubert was down-hearted but I'm not a good enough writer to put anything so subtle into words. When reading a book like this, as so many times before, I'm tempted to think I could do something comparable but over and above the realization that, no, I couldn't, come brilliant things like that. Never mind the informed detail that, whether he researched it or knew it already, Henderson pads out his text with material that isn't padding at all.

He includes Test Match Special in his litany of fings that ain't what they used to be, which is ungenerous. He has mentioned in passing how F.S. Trueman's mask became part of his face in the role of plain-speaking Yorkshireman and it was he, during test matches, who chronically 'didn't know what was going on out there'. Well, get us a commentator who does, then. Trevor Bailey was taciturn and Blowers another caricature so the current team involving Aggers, Tufnell, Cookie and Vaughan are not as unacceptable as is argued here. 

But we are all conservatives now. Henderson might be a more or less acceptable Conservative, his main jobs having been with the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail but he's been in the more liberal press, too. The Golden Age isn't coming back and one day people who are young and impressionable now will look back on the 2020's with the same feelings of loss and regret as Henderson, I and others perceive the 1970's. Except my mother's Best Notts XI featured Reg Simpson and Walter Keeton rather than Hadlee, Rice and maybe not even Sobers.

It's a book that can make its proper reader laugh out loud and also feel like crying but time and its effects are its underlying theme, as it is in so much of the literature that is brought in to such good effect. Researching what other books Michael Henderson has published, there's only the previous title, 50 People Who Fouled Up Football, that must be out of date by now being pre-Infantino and, one might guess, more about money than time.   

Orwell, Auden

One comes away from D.J. Taylor's Orwell biography well-informed but probably knowing less what to think of the man than before. To call someone a 'complex character' is often to cover a multitude of things one would rather not say but with Orwell, he's perhaps a complex character. I'm not entirely convinced by the socialism but these days I'm not entirely convinced by socialism anyway. And the idea of 'secular saint' would be overshadowed by the knowledge of what some saints were really like. Being austere might qualify him as such but it's not what the phrase is meant to imply.

But he got shot through the throat for his efforts and was apparently almost manically devoted to his writing so he deserves some sympathy. All but disowning his early novels, which are fine, the great success of Nineteen Eighty-Four might be some way ahead of what it deserves except for its brilliant insights into totalitarianism. I'd long thought of him as not a difficult writer but his life reveals quite a difficult man.

--

I'm never much of one for the poetry workshop. Any editing process is a private thing and unshareable, being personal to oneself, and I'd much rather wait for the poem to be ready to be written before trying to write it when it is then more likely to write itself.

But the Auden poem was presenting difficulties in lines 5-8. I sat outside for some time trying various options but it seemed never to be satisfactory until the bright idea of leaving them out. It's always an idea and I think it worked. I'm happy with this now. Best thing I've done since the last booklet- which isn't saying much- but possibly a candidate to go on the highly selective Collected list which now extends to 27 poems.

 
 

Auden 

The cigarette he sucks is surrogate
for something more than likely sexual,
the eyes can summarize a likely mate
like something due to be intertextual.

The lines that might look careworn are in fact
a rare affliction or a gift that came
to him as queerly as a lovers’ pact
that turned out, as can be the case, the same

as everyone else’s do – electric
at first but too soon too habitual
to seem more than the sort of magic trick
that might or might not happen to us all. 

 

Fifteen Poems

 So, having idly wondered about my own poems the other day, what better inconsequential thing to do of a Sunday afternoon, while Lulu plays her Sounds of the 70's, than pick over them. Not pick over them as much as see what there were. One can forget. What little time spent reading poems these days is not spent on my own.

I looked through the booklets and, with strictness aforethought, noted those certain for any short list onto a spreadsheet. I ended up with fifteen titles which is a frugal Selected, not the selective Collected I had in mind. Then, to put them in order, I played Devil Take the Hindmost and worked up from no. 15 as the game intensified.

It was in hindsight a game that was designed for Rainyday Woman to win because that is foremost in my thoughts. I'm the last person who ought to be picking such a list but I wouldn't expect anybody else to do it and there are precious few I could trust not to miss the point.

A further session would be needed to extend the list to the 30-40 that might constitute the selective Collected but it's a job that's never quite over, one's preferences in any such list varying almost from day to day. 

It was worth doing, not just the process of doing the list but the little look at what I ever produced in this esoteric endeavour. I'd be the first to allow I have much to be modest about but poems, in a mostly underachieving sort of life, were one of the few things I sometimes wasn't bad at. I'm glad that the list is dominated by later titles. A proper artist improves with time rather than begins well and proves unable to follow up. I'm not ashamed to be the author of,

Rainyday Woman

Fiction

Windy Miller

The Cathedrals of Liverpool

Piccadilly Dusk

Cygnus

Herbstregen

Starý židovský Hřbitov

Tycho Brahe at Uraniborg

Romanticism

Success

Situation

Summer

Kiss

Move Over, Darling

 

Pilgrimage

 I try to make a point of visiting the grave of Rosemary Tonks each summer. Today it provided a good reason to get out of the house. Bus to Emsworth, pleasant walk back to Warblington. Especially good to look upon some water, salty and probably polluted though it may be. The wireless said it's not going to rain until Autumn. Proper communing with oneself, the lines of Rainyday Woman inappropriately revolving in my head as what began as a modest little lyric takes on greater proportions and significance and, unforgivebly self-absorbed, I wonder whether to put my own poems into an order of perceived merit to see how high it stands. And to see where the cut-off point comes where the Selected Poems would reach down to. I'd call it Collected but it would be quite strictly chosen. Which poem would be the unluckiest of all and be the first not to get in. 

The idea of an autobiographical note would be even more vain for a poet of my uncelebrated status. Thom Gunn did such a thing because he thought somebody else would do it if he didn't. And then, many years later, somebody did - in great detail probably far beyond what Gunn had thought likely. But the great advantage of not being noteworthy is that such a thing is not required. As far as the poems go, it's just the poems. If I wanted somebody to study me I'd go to a psychiatrist.

--

It was Orwell who wrote that writers are 'vain, selfish and lazy' and there is something akin to Larkin in his English austerity. Both socially out of their depth at Eton and Oxford respectively, their writing has a candour that doesn't always equate to honesty but it's writing so there's no need for it to be entirely honest.

I think one of the big issues with Orwell is the Socialism. He has traces of the anti-semitism that have more recently been found alongside such ideology and he has snobbery which may or may not be an unfortunate bi-product of the sort of elitism that values worthwhile work. His involvement with the poor looks laudable on the surface but may contain a sort of fetishism. To his credit, like Auden, he was committed enough to the cause to go to Spain in the 1930's but the big umbrella term, Socialism, covers a lot of ground. Keir Starmer and Arthur Scargill both expressed themselves as such. It is clearly well-meant thing but it appears in many forms. 

My first experience of it was really how, at election time, council estates would have Labour posters proliferating whereas 'better' areas would be Conservative. Oh, how I wished that they would all listen in church or in assembly at school and the well-off would vote Labour to help the less well-off and the disadvantaged would stoically accept their lot, be embarrassed to vote for help and do something about improving their position if they wished to.

Not Conservative was, and remains, the obvious thing one must be to be righteous but then one went to university and witnessed the righteousness of the left first-hand and was put off all those beloved fragments of Bolshevism almost for life. 

It's not an easy course to navigate, one's way through Socialism even if one instinctively think it is right. I will continue to follow Orwell's particular difficulties with it, in D.J. Taylor's account, always aware that about fifty years ago, I noted in the special book of quotes I kept that it says in Keep the Aspidistra Flying,

Every intelligent boy of sixteen is a Socialist. At that age one does not see the hook sticking out of the rather stodgy bait.  

 

They are tremendous books of quotes - Shakespeare, Joyce, Roger McGough, Carole King, Bob Dylan, The Beano and more. It is now that one appreciates not having thrown such things away. 

Romsey Abbey

 I got lucky only two nights before the event, finding that Angelina Kopyrina was playing in Romsey Abbey today.  An ideal day out at this sparse time of year. By now it goes without saying that the familiar Bach-Busoni Chaconne and Rach Sonata no. 1 are tremendous, especially played by her but at least until her next new repertoire, I've said all I can think of to say. But I can review Romsey, not to my knowledge having been there before.

There lots to like about it. In the relaxed centre was someone wearing a Gustav Mahler t-shirt. As I went into the Oxfam bookshop, Celebrate Summer by T. Rex was playing. The abbey is relatively modest but provides a spacious concert space in its nave. Following my recent reading of Catherine Nixey's account of how Christianity came to rule so much of the world, I was interested to see John Chrysotom featured in a stained glass window. Perhaps, though, its main claim to fame is the grave of Lord Mountbatten.

There's more to such buildings than grandeur although all the interior is grander than outward appearances seem to promise. Whether it was due to Angelina or not, Romsey rustles up a good-sized audience and, travel being not significantly more onerous than Chichester, I might be monitoring what goes on there in future.  

 Not necessarily a place 'proper to grow wise in' but Larkin doesn't say that such places are. He says 'someone...once heard' it was. It's always a good idea to deflect such thoughts onto somebody else even if one needs to invent an anonymous fictional character to deflect it on to. And I'm not convinced that the likes of Ethelflaeda, the first abbess, in the C10th are good people to be admired without question but they are  exotic and have been dead a long time and that gives them a strange glamour.

The Library Tour

 If it's not quite the Bodleian, I'm quite satisfied with my library. Not for the first time I conducted a short guided tour for a guest the other day. He liked it a lot, the way it takes over the whole house. I wonder how far it is to a bigger collection of poetry books. It could conceivably be only a couple of hundred yards round the corner to where Tony lives, though.

This latest tour was all too brief as I was careful not to want to bore my visitor with arcane collector's items but now I keep seeing things and wishing I'd shown him them.

The great thing for me, living among them, is that my tour is not a matter of being shown things as exhibits but re-reading them. I've not bought a new book for some time because I've not seen anything listed that demands reading so I make use of the stock. There would be no point in keeping them if I didn't do that. If books are great value to read them once they become of infinite value when one can read them, or refer to them, any amount of times from thereon in. How much does it cost to go to a cinema to see a film once? I don't know. It must be twenty years since I've been.

Revisiting Catherine Nixey's The Darkening Age followed on from A.N. Wilson's Jesus in going back over what might be closer to the truth about Christianity after all the upbringing and being surrounded by its culture that is so inculcated in us that we find it hard to dispel. One can suspect Catherine of zealotry as much as I suspect myself in her compilation of evidence against the rise of this vast aberration but it is the idea of 'gentle Jesus meek and mild' that is in the way of taking her point. One only wants to approach her work with the same scepticism that one considers the religion because even if she is preaching, as it were, to the unconverted, I'm not looking to have my prejudices confirmed, only for lesser known evidence in my favour.

John Chrysotom, the savage preacher, and Shenoute, the gaunt ascetic, are two heroes of the book, so crazy in their devotions one might call them 'hell-bent'. Catherine re-diagnoses the extreme devotions of early monks in modern terms as 'depressive' rather than pious. And the story in the end is really about how Christianity replaced Classical culture no less effectively than Greek and Roman culture had come to dominate Europe, systematically wiping out a huge percentage of its writing and art in the process.

--

And so, the next book to catch the eye was D.J. Taylor's 2004 biography of George Orwell.

While the essays might have been unchallenging to do for 'A' level nearly fifty years ago when we could more usefully have done Yeats, he is not quite so easily pinned-down on any political spectrum that is left between left and right. He didn't try very hard at Eton, served hos own interests and possibly could, being there on a scholarship with his parents, who couldn't have anyway, not paying fees. For all that we might have thought of Orwell as leftist but anti-Soviet, he makes for a mix of class distinctions and serious doubts about the limitations of socialism, which we always knew. I just wonder where his sympathies would lie now and I honestly don't know. 

Hereward the Wake

 Hereward the Wake is an unlikely hero of mine, not so much for his rearguard action against the Norman conquest in the area of Ely but for the filthy steam engine we used to see going under Perry Road bridge in the 1960's, pulling the fish train from Grimsby.

But now I identify with him in a more significant way. I, too, stood for as long as I could against the inevitable and had to give in eventually. There have been a few occasions on which

I might have benefitted from having a mobile phone but I liked not having one. Time moves on, though, and eventually one is revealed as being wilfully difficult by not having such a device and however much one reasons that we got by somehow without them in 1971, they have become all but compulsory. So now I have the simplest such thing one can buy and even that has a camera on it.

I had expected a difficult afternoon setting it up, not the 3 easy steps it blithely lists on the wholly inadequate leaflet provided. Whereas such instructions might be easy for those with a certain level of tech savvy, for me it was the equivalent of them being told to simply translate a few basic sentences into Latin. Two hours went by and I was locked into an inescapable circle of getting nowhere so I went by bus and foot to the nearest Tesco Mobile place where the helpful bloke fixed me up with all I need at no great expense.

I'd give you the number here so you could ring me up but I'm not in love with it and don't want to encourage it. Who would have thought that such an admittedly cheap and ingenious little thing would so soon be one of the Bare Necessities. I don't want to be the sort of person for who it is but, once in a while, it seems like I am.

I have admitted defeat with as much good grace as I could summon up. I take more pride in how long I held out, determinedly if not quite as fiercesomely as Hereward. 

Pride isn't it, though. I'm deep into a second reading of Catherine Nixey's The Darkening Age that convinces anybody who wants to be convinced what bad things Christianity did in achieving the status that it in due course did but at least they had pride on their list of deadly sins. It's a similar orthodoxy I've been so unwillingly, if less violently, pressed into. Some of us are not naturally inclined to do what everybody else does.

It's a long time now since Danny Baker said on the wireless that it was him, Frank Skinner and some other celeb that got by without mobile phones. I think they might not have lasted as long as I did. And Prof. Terry Eagleton, the doyen of Marxist Literary Theory, didn't even do e-mail. I was in sympathy with them, whose books I have, whose work I enjoyed. I will still be reading books on the train rather than gazing at this debilitating accoutrement.

It might be a while before it seems to me that texting you is the appropriate way of making contact. I don't mind at all arriving at an age old enough to not want to understand how younger people get by. I'm happy to have understood T. Rex and David Bowie when generations before me didn't.  

Garfield Sobers

 It's been a long time since the last obituary here. The qualifications required to be remembered are arbitrary. I either think someone is worthy or I decide against.

It's possible that I saw Garfield Sobers play at Trent Bridge circa 1966 v. the International Cavaliers of a Sunday afternoon but I remember Gamani Gooneseena and, I think, Basharat Hassan better. On that occasion, the ball was retrieved by a small boy in the crowd- me- after boundaries not once but twice within a couple of minutes and returned to one of them. Sadly, we got home to find that my grandparents had not been watching this televised game and so there was never any witness to my only telly cricket appearance.

Sobers is twelfth man in my All Time XI because the criteria for selection is me liking them rather than being grim enough to pick the best players because I want to win but, yes, he would be an obvious pick as the greatest all-rounder ahead of batter and specialist cover point, Derek Randall, or perfect gentleman amid the apartheid issues of the 1960's, Basil D'Oliviera, if winning was what it's all about. And Sobers entirely fitted with the ethos of playing cricket properly, not in the gritty often Australian way of sledging, abuse and machismo but by simply being better at it.

I don't remember Sobers as any sort of fast bowler because he was medium pace by the time I saw him but one remembers very well the occasion of his six sixes in an over at Swansea. The last of them went out of the St. Helen's ground. Whether it actually landed in the road where Aunty Joyce lived is in some doubt and could be apocryphal but one doesn't easily dismiss any chance of a connection with such a story.

Quite why Sobers chose to join Notts is hard to fathom. Maybe, like me, he had sympathy for underdogs. The bottom three counties in the league then were perennially Notts, where we lived; Glamorgan, where we went on holiday and Gloucestershire where we moved to. I'm not sure how much he helped. Notts were to become a cricketing power in the 1980's with the more pragmatic Clive Rice aided by Richard Hadlee but Sobers brought a bit of class if not silverware.

His numbers in test cricket stack up impressively against any Botham, Kapil Dev or Imran Khan one wants to compare him with and stories of his off-field excursions are not outdone by any Keith Miller, David Boon or other such party animal. Not highly paid for being the best at the sport he was performing in by today's standards, he chose to blow much of those earnings on horse racing and so was never rich but was supported by jobs from the Barbados government.

The most impressive thing, for me, is how, having been the very best at what he did, he said he would have rather have done something else- golf !!!

I can see his point, financially perhaps, but there must be a limit to what one would do for money and golf wouldn't be one of them for me, especially if you are only going to throw it away anyway. It was a life well-lived, blessed with outrageous talent. I don't think he had much to complain about. There's more to it than piling up cash.  

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

The climax of The Dewy Morn is more political than personal, the triangle of Martial, Felice and Godwin seemingly only having been constructed to make a point more important to Jefferies. The squire, Cornleigh Cornleigh, is presented as such a useless article, alongside his steward, Godwin's, venal devotion to duty, that one can't help suspecting Jefferies of overloading our sympathies unnecessarily but, more subtly, the tenant farmers are presented s their own worst enemy in their subordination and respect for a system that exploits them to the limit.

As in a Hardy novel, motivations run deep and over long periods and Godwin's nine year infatuation with Felice is as crucial to his animosity towards Martial Barnard as his martinet application of the terms of tenancy on the estate. Mary, Felice's maid, is an innocent victim not unlike Hardy's Marty South in The Woodlanders and such a plot building to its final dramas is worthy of the Dorset man even if Jefferies delineates good and bad in such absolute terms. In as far as the diatribe on the condition of the rural poor will allow, we are left with a happy ending.  

That  was a few quid well spent, books already being by far the best value entertainment one can have and further Richard Jefferies will be pursued in due course.

--

The temperature outside is perfect. I hardly wanted to come in but it's nearly time for Sounds of the 70's. The return to comfortable conditions, especially with quiet reigning, is as welcome s the end of toothache or the restoration of other normalities usually taken for granted. And, one book finished, a return to Dr. Johnson and his tremendous sense was most fitting.

I had heard it suggested that his Lives of the Poets were dubious. I thought, well, literary criticism was a different thing in the C18th. Fashions change. One day we might be less impressed again by Paul Muldoon's ludic outlandishness.

So, I read a bit of Johnson on Abraham Cowley.  The problem, stated in several different ways, is summarized in how,

by a voluntary deviation from nature in pursuit of something new and strange; and that writers fail to give delight, by their desire of exciting admiration. 

Johnson's preconception of what constitutes 'nature' might be getting in the way of appreciating the ingenuity but he has a point if he thinks that cleverness on its own isn't enough. I don't think he's far wrong and, of course, criticism is there to be taken or left as much as the primary texts are.

But I progressed to the Selected Essays, 500 pages of highlights from The Rambler, The Adventurer and The Idler, produced prolifically from 1750-60. It can be opened anywhere and it is brilliant, often melancholy in its implications but wise to the consolations of philosophy. Returning to any of those seven Best Books in the House has not so far disappointed and I'm thinking I got that shortlist right.

For the most part he is in pursuit of happiness or at least wondering what is the point. And that is the point. Much of it lies in being active or absorbed in life rather than dilatory but observing the folly of others helps a lot, like,

others...lie down to sleep and rise up to trifle, are employed every morning in finding expedients to rid themselves of the day, chase pleasure through all the places of public resort, fly from London to Bath and from Bath to London, without any other reason for changing place, but that they go in quest of company as idle and vagrant as themselves.  

It's not the highest state of satisfaction to despair that others lead more pointless lives than you do but their example can be learnt from. Avoiding their behaviour reduces your own chances of the encounter with what Sartre would identify two hundred years later as existential angst. There might be ironies involved, though, in how the likes of Johnson and Sartre were concerned about it whereas those so 'passionately' following the fortunes of England - and, especially, Scotland- in the World Cup attribute meaning to their vicarious belonging to such a cause and believe themselves to belong to something.

Paradox, Negative Capability, whatever it is - we are all on one side of it or the other.