Juggling

 The art of juggling was always beyond me. But I'm juggling books, quite enjoyably, for a few days. It throws up all kinds of unlikely links.

The Richard Jefferies book by Edward Thomas can be sensibly left until I've finished Restless Human Hearts. But the novel, for all its characters and maybe bittiness is taking some sort of thematic shapre for me and, since he is so enjoyable to read, the contemporary fault-finding of it seems disproportionate compared to its good points. It's a great performance even if technically flawed.

As below, the digressions are to be treasured rather than dismissed as 'padding'. And if at first there appear to be too many characters, maybe they all have places in the scheme of things. Two-thirds of the way through, it's possible to see the parallel stories of the various dissatisfactions as different attempts at resloving them. By the end, we might find which of them Jefferies thought the most workable.

It's unlikely to be the artificiality of vain, glamorous Carlotta. I'm thinking it might not be the religious devotions of Georgiana, or her ground-breaking short-term marriage contract. 

A captivating chapter in which a famous stained-glass window on the continent is found to be 'tame and flat' in comparison with one hidden in a corner of Gloucestershire - in Fairford, I reckon- that becomes a 'breathing reality, breathing fire and torture and misery indecribable' makes Ella the representative of art whose temperament prefers it to the actual, real world of love. But perhaps Jefferies's sympathies lie mostly with Heloise and her mystical attachment to nature.

 

It's not going to be quite so easy to empathize with Peter Bessell, the subject of Finding Dad by his son, Paul, however charismatic he was if one had met him. There is some sort of connection to Carlotta in how such people use and abuse others in pursuit of their own tawdry purposes. Bessell was an MP and part of a long tradition of deelpy untrustworthy types that has thrown up the likes of Profumo, Stonehouse, Maxwell, Johnson, Mandelson and, I dare say, my one-time hero, Jeremy Thorpe.

It looks like being a horror story about one bent on serving themselves in a Faustian pact with chance that they had no chance of ultimately gaining from but what does one expect from a book one saw advertised in the Daily Express. It was never likely to be morally uplifting.

 

Another one-time hero was Thom Gunn and, separating the artist from the art, he still rates in the top echelon of poets in his best work. And, again, to those who met him- which I once very briefly did- he was an utterly convincing charmer, if bringing with him some louche reference points. Graham Dixon, author of Oh Mother, What Did You Do?, knew him much better than that but any book that begins,

Linked with other Movement poets such as Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn....

must be dubious from the outset.

Dixon was given the postgraduate job at Berkeley of grading Gunn's undergraduate class's papers. I'd prefer not to have my work marked by someone who thought Hughes was a 'Movement' poet and so one reads him warily from thereon in. 

It must be significant that Dixon moved into psychotherapy and, as such, a case like Thom Gunn's must be irresisitible to him. It's not yet clear how much the over-diagnosis going on is Dixon's fault or largely understandable given his subject matter.  

It's quite possible that the account of Gunn provided by the book will prove to be worth having, with certain credibility but already it is making me look back on those days when the object under consideration in Eng Lit was the text and not the author. The revolution whereby the text was studied to the exclusion of any reference to its author was misguided but counter revolutions are often worse and by now poems can be reduced to symptoms in the diagnosis of the author who is put into the role of patient.

Some of Gunn's poems weren't very good but plenty were brilliant. It would be more rewarding to read those and understand why. Let's give Graham Dixon an even break and see if he can contribute.

Bunting, Jefferies, Edward Thomas

Books, like events, can be overtaken by others more pressing. Basil Bunting's letters were a diversion but not a priority for me. Having reached the end of the first part, I'll go back to them one day when more attractive propositions are harder to find. It's a good place to leave it, in December 1938, just as Bunting has told Ezra Pound where he stands vis a vis Ezra's unpalatable views,

You know as well as any man that a Jew has the same physique and a similar amount of grey matter as the rest of us. You know as well as any man that to hold one individual guilty of the sins of another is an abomination. You know as well as any man that the non-Jews have contributed their fair share, of the bankers and other millionaires of doubtful honesty...

Every anti-semitism, anti-niggerism, anti-moorish, that I recall in history was base...

and so, whatever one might decide about Bunting's poetry in due course, he has made his point and deserves much credit for that. I'm still not convinced I'm going to like him but that one letter makes the £1 I spent on the book £1 well spent and I'm glad of having read it.

--

There's an equally memorable, if entirely different passage in Restless Human Hearts by Richard Jefferies. There are several but one in particular for me. These shifts into meditation in some loose way are reminiscent of how Tolstoy makes his books the length they are, extrapolating lines of thought at intervals in his involved narrative.   

I've had to make a diagram to keep track of the relationships and dynamics between the characters in Restless Human Hearts. The title is rightly in the plural. Quite how all the infatuations relate to each other remains to be seen but I'm ready to guess that the vain, glamorous but hideous Carlotta is to be contrasted with the almost unearthly Heloise. 

The second part has already become melodramatic with a duel and a tragic riding accident and critics who find the book flawed- as only Jefferies's second attempt- might have a point but, such reservations aside, it still makes for great reading.

The pages that I was most taken by reflecting,

What a curious system it is to teach us, not only at school, but at home, and in the early part of our life, ideas and feelings which we must afterwards spend years in endeavouring to unlearn...

and the next long paragraph,

We know so much nowadays. Everything has been done. Every possible emotion has been felt in every imaginable manner. Every combination conceivable of human relationship has been worked out, and the quarry is empty....

And that was in 1875.

That by 2026 it seems to us that maybe it wasn't quite the case then suggests that if it seems so now, it might not be so yet, either. And thus might never be. As with Francis Fukuyama's pronouncement of the 'end of history', we are all tempted to think we've arrived at a crucial point only for the next generation to find themselves in among the next pile of theories, wonders, crises and absurdities. It must be a state of mind to think everything has been done rather than a piece of cultural analysis.

Kant, Hegel, Sartre, Derrida then Baudrillard all came and went but none of them turned out to be the last word. To arrive at Boulez two hundred years after Bach shows that it's not always linear progress. Surely pop music has run its course but only older people whose time has come and gone would say so. Mark Radcliffe on Sounds of the 70's said that the Bowie and T. Rex sounded so 'fresh' and could have been made now. But, no, they sounded tremendous because they were from the 1970's.

 

Alongside the Jefferies novel, I'll go further into the Edward Thomas biography of him that I remember the first chapter of- the detailed, evocative description of Wiltshire- which is gorgeous. And from there, we will see how far Jefferies Studies can go. There's no shortage of material. 

However, two other books due this week will be making their demands. 

Oh Mother, What Did You Do? Pose and Repose in the Life, Letters and Poetry of Thom Gunn by Graham Dixon promises a reassessment that will be interesting to assess, mostly because it depends what sort of assessment it reassesses.

Paul Bessell's Finding Dad might not prove to be uplifting, it being Peter Bessell's son's findings about his life which is likely to be louche, salacious and probably scandalous although it depends where one's scandal threshold is set. The story of Jeremy Thorpe, my teenage political hero, seems a bit quaint, a bit Midsomer Murders, post-Boris, in the Age of Trump and so quite cosy. We will see. I wouldn't have ordered it if I expected it to be a vindication of Bessell including evidence for his beatification.  

Shakespeare in Oxford and other stories

 When one's life is one big holiday, time spent anywhere else but at home is only an excursion, not really any more of a holiday than one was having anyway. Not being in favour of travel for travel's sake, I don't go as far as I might but a few days up the road, or railtracks as it was, proved to be time well spent.

Swindon doesn't feature large on the literary map but Richard Jefferies and his museum there turned out to be a rewarding visit. Restless Human Hearts, the early three-part novel from 1875, is highly readable, clearly delineated and with pertinent passages worth quoting that, in due course, I surely will. I knew of Jefferies only from the fact that Edward Thomas wrote a book on him and that he had lived in that place by Coate Water. With the likes of Thomas Hardy for competition, success as a novelist was never going to be easy but he stuck at it with some conviction, it seems, before making more of a name as a nature writer while Thomas progressed from countryside prose to major poetry status. Having reached a suitable place at which to leave Basil Bunting aside, I'll gladly divert to the more likeable Jefferies for the foreseeable.

The bus pass gets one to Oxford and back. I don't know if it was exam time but a number of young people around town in gowns made me wonder if they still wear them while reproducing their versions of Suetonius.

I was reacquainted with the gorgeous Alfred Jewel in the Ashmolean, spent a few minutes with Walter Sickert's Brighton Pierrots so familiar from my front room and don't know why the internet can't find me the de Hooch that I'm sure I saw there in among all the ancient porcelain. But a major personal breakthrough came thanks to the kind lady in St. Michael's Church whose forebearance allowed me to expatiate on some Shakespeare biography.

The font over in the opposite corner. Shakespeare once stood next to it when it was in another church.

Yes, in St. George's.

He stood next to it at the christening of William Davenant, his godson.

Yes.

Who was born to Jane, or Jeanette, landlady of the inn where he stayed on his way from London to Stratford.

Yes.

Good. So can you tell me where that inn was, at no. 5 Cornmarket Street.

And, yes, she could. I'd been counting from the wrong end and finding a shoe shop. If you count from the other end, you find the Golden Cross, set back from the street in a courtyard and exactly the detail I was looking for.

Not only that but if you go on the right day in September, they will show you the room that Shakespeare stayed in.

I said I'm ready to accept that Shakespeare was the real father of Davenant, as later claimed by the boy. There might have been a bit of a trend for actual fathers being designated as god fathers in those days. She said, yes, in those parts it is widely believed to be so.

Without it being classed as a conspiracy theory, in any way subversive or unpatriotic. Just something that happened. And I found that most 'refreshing'.

I didn't want to outstay my welcome and appear any more of a bore than I had been already. Oxford surely has its share of them. So I'm glad I didn't think to ask whether there was any correlative local pride taken in the Earl of Oxford's claim to authorship, or that made on his behalf. Because that is a conspiracy theory, it is nonsense and it's a shame that such low-level rumour-mongering is allowed to pass as some kind of scholarship. Except it makes for a bit of a diversion, cul-de-sac though it turns out to be.

So, yes. Not a holiday but a useful day out and I felt much the better for it.   

Bargain Bunting

Yesterday I bought a book in a bookshop. That wouldn't have sounded remarkable years ago but it's extremely rare now. For a long time I've been much more likely to buy a cup of tea in a bookshop than a book. It's my fault when bookshops close and I have no recourse to disappointment. The Letters of Basil Bunting were in among sundry sale items for £1 in Waterstones and I even had to think about it at that but it looked worth a try. The sticker underneath the one that said £1 said £8. Today I looked it up on Amazon and there it's £37.50.

It's possible the letters are a reverse way in to understanding Bunting. I derive about as much from the poems as I do from his mate, Ezra, and that's not much. But the likes of Donald Davie and Thom Gunn held him in high regard and he is a 'major' figure of C20th poetry, if in a tradition that has never done much for me.

Any friend of Ezra's comes with any amount of warning signs and to call Bunting a maverick might be an understatement. But his political imprisonment was not for the same reason's as Pound's. He was a Quaker, pacifist and conscientious objector. I still can't help being suspicious of him, his severity and acerbic attitudes bringing to mind Geoffrey Hill, who he looks a bit like in old age and shares some aesthetic principles with, I'd guess.

So maybe the book will be enlightening. Whether it will lead to a Damascean conversion to Modernism, 'high church' seriousness and the elitism of difficult poetry remains to be seen and seems unlikely but there's a limit to have far one can get reading more and more about a handful of favourites and time spent outside of a comfort zone must be at least occasionally necessary even if it turns out to be unproductive. 

For a long time I've thought of Bunting and his like as generally a bad thing for poetry while not in the least objecting to that minority who write, read and enjoy such esoteric work. I suppose I take an equal if opposite view of those whose writing is too obvious. So maybe I'll report back on any alteration that this bargain buy brings about, either that I've embarked on an in-depth study full of enthusiasm or that my prejudices were only confirmed.    

Craig Greene & Robert Patterson at Lunchtime Live!

Craig Greene & Robert Patterson, Portsmouth Cathedral, Apr 16

Chopin and Debussy provide a nutritious and enjoyable staple diet for the piano repertoire, often heard and fare enough. If it seems we don't get enough Bach perhaps it is unrealistic to expect to live on champagne all the time because then what would one have left for a special treat. Gladly, Craig Greene and Robert Patterson served up Three cantata movements, arranged by Leonard Duck, which were exquisite and long on the palate.

The congestion of four hands over, under and across each other in Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring was like watching a game of Twister, the timing and teamwork required something to behold with it getting mighty crowded in the middle of the keyboard. These Edwardian settings were by no means overly sentimental but works of great artistry in themselves. Sheep May Safely Graze was beautifully done and Wachet Auf completed an idyllic triptych with the melodic line moving from Craig at the higher end of the register to Robert in the engine room.

Three popular classics from Bach's Greatest Hits done differently but gorgeously as if champagne had been successfully re-invented.

Before that, Schubert's Fantasie, op. 103, was imperious in its blaze of activity with no trace of the melancholy that I try to find evidence to the contrary of in his music. As such compulsive composers do, he goes to great lengths to find all that can be found in the thematic material if only because it must be there.

In both that and the Bach, it's hard to say whether Craig or Robert had the best job or starring role, not least because there's really no such thing. But three of Dvořák's Slavonic Dances were a headlong flourish of dazzling tempi with Craig rollicking along among the high notes. I can't remember the last time I was quite so glad of a prime position to see the hands. Any faster would have made it unviable. I asked. They had tried. And it wasn't.

A brilliantly thought-out programme made for a joyful occasion with mostly familiar music re-presented gloriously. Schubert and Dvořák are both great, forever with special places in one's favourite music, but - as regular readers might one day tire of hearing me say- Bach is well beyond that.

Without any more dispensing of enthusiasm, I must get on the internet and see if there is a CD of those cantata movements for four hands on piano. I need to serve my own purposes and it's no longer obvious that what remains of our lives is going to be quite as amenable as it has been so far. We might find ourselves needing such rafts to cling to. The opportunity to hear Craig and Robert play them again might not present itself so four other hands will have to suffice.

Retirement Diary

Anecdotal Evidence today reflects on the realities of retirement. I'll soon be six years in, well aware that when meeting retired people some years ago and asking how long it had been and they said 'xx years', I thought it sounded like forever. Except, of course, it doesn't feel like it to the incumbent of those years, in yet another one of those tricks that time plays on us. 

Maryann Corbett looks like a name worth reading more of.

Meanwhile, mention of seeing a Vermeer from a correspondent coincided with me realizing that not all my art books were shelved together. In among the misplaced batch was the sumptuous catalogue of the Pieter de Hooch exhibition in Dulwich in 1998. And if retirement is about anything it's about reading and gazing at such a thing while proceeding through more of the Complete Bach. Followed by The Hissing of Summer Lawns in an attempt to play a pop record once in a while.

C17th Dutch painting is the choice Golden Age of all Golden Ages. Some might say C18th music with Bach and Handel, maybe Shakespeare is a one man show, 1960's Tamla Motown, please insert your own examples. But Vermeer, de Hooch, Carel Fabritius and their contemporaries up to and including Rembrandt, set a miraculous standard. Quiet, domestic and suburban, Delft was something of a backwater to host a gathering like them, apparently not thriving economically and it's true that many painters went to the more cosmopolitan and more lucrative Amsterdam. 

One thing you need for a Golden Age is outrageous talent and it doesn't take long looking at what we have from Delft to begin to recognize that but then one notices how short-lived those three, at least, were. Fabritius was so cruelly killed by the massive gunpowder explosion aged 32. Vermeer, at 43, apparently by something like a stroke or heart attack in reduced circumstances and de Hooch at 54 after seven years in the asylum about which no more is known. It's no use at all to them that their stories add a patina of sadness to their brilliant lives. There may or may not be a connection between the hard times of Vermeer and de Hooch who could have fared better in Amsterdam but Fabritius is another case entirely.

Look how many ways de Hooch recesses backwards through doors and windows, and into another painting, in this. The gentle foreground scene is extended into other places where perhaps even less is happening. He didn't have to do that but time and again he does it. 

 

And this detail is spectacular. No need for guns and shooting, charging horses or Trump in the role of Jesus Christ for that matter. This is heroic, not only to think that anything so ostensibly mundane was worth representing in art but to do it so magnificently. To contemplate such a thing is what retirement and not having to attend paid employment was surely intended for.

 

Marco Polo on Hormuz

 Towards the end of his vivid accounts of his travels, Marco Polo does what Lyse Doucet does so well and reports on a conflict. The malik of Kalhat 'had a powerful hold over' the sultan of Kerman due to his control over Hormuz and,

commands the gulf and the sea even more effectively. 

If only Donald Trump had read Marco Polo before getting himself embroiled out of his depth.

 

The Travels are full of good stories, whether they're right or wrong. It's very much the sort of thing that can bring me a poem and I've been in search of such a thimng for quite some time. A Million Lies, a couple of weeks ago, isn't really it but Witness is a better effort. It was to be in ten syllable lines and two eight-line stanzas but attemps at form like that can be discarded. Some rhythm can be maintained without them, having used it as a framework to begin with. It could be revised further yet but, grateful for it as I am, it might be allowed to stand as it is.

Witness 

this region is so far north that the Pole Star
is left behind towards the south.
                           Marco Polo, Travels

Except there is no such topography
in which anything is further north than north.
No wonder some weren’t having it
about him seeing unicorns
but not quite as advertised,
ugly brutes wallowing in slime.
Well, yes, that was preposterous
but not for one
who’d not previously come across
such a thing as a rhinoceros. He believed his eyes.

Hyperbole is all that one has left
when one can’t see a limit to such wealth
and strangeness so that it looks infinite
like the universe still does and might be yet.
He didn’t tell the half of it, he said,
recalcitrant and not giving an inch,
for we see what we think we see. It’s true
as far as we know and not for them to say. 

During the Late and Long Continuing Cold

During the Late and Long Continuing Cold, An Eightieth-Birthday tribute to Peter Didsbury, edited by Sean O'Brien and David Wheatley (Broken Sleep Books).

 Happy Birthday, Peter Didsbury. An expanded edition of his Scenes from a Long Sleep is published today and this festschrift, edited by Sean O'Brien and David Wheatley, is available for pre-order at Broken Sleep ahead of its imminent release date. It features poems by an impressively gathered cast of the great and good with such as Don Paterson, Ian Duhig, Carol Rumens, Rory Waterman, plenty more than that and some good wishes from Douglas Dunn. And me, actually. It's a bit like a non-league player finding themselves in the England squad for a friendly match. 

Peter Didsbury has long been a central figure in the story of how Hull became an unlikely-sounding epicentre of British poetry in recent decades, post-Larkin, post-Stevie Smith and a long time post-Andrew Marvell. If Larkin's provincial hideout in its university library began something there and attracted Andrew Motion, it is perhaps more properly Douglas Dunn who might be regarded as the godfather of its mafiosi although 'movement' might be a gentler term for what could be regarded as a more coherent grouping than The Movement ever was. 

It would surely be improper to submit the sort of poem one might place in the middle of a book to thicken it up, or for the editors to include such things, in a tribute to a respected writer and that hasn't happened. I must look further than I previously have into the work of Carol Rumens on the evidence of The Sense of Vision. If Paterson's Hedgehog appears to begin like Aesop, it becomes more like Einstein. If, as I sometimes suspect, we are not living in a Golden Age of British Poetry then the ongoing parade of talent now assembled here is evidence that it's not so bad after all. And there's little for poetry to fear from AI when O'Brien puts in a signature performance in The Lost Language of Trains that only he could have.

Didsbury is inimitable and I don't think anybody has dared to try. It would have been unwise. What has resulted is a profound tribute to one who has always done it his own way from a litany of admirers doing it theirs.   

 

Desert Island Books

 For a long time now I've had in mind a feature for here called The Best Book in the House. It would have been one of those 'World Cup' sort of games in which titles would qualify for the later stages from groups like Poetry, Fiction, Biography, Music, Sport, Painting, Philosophy and even Science.

There might, very approximately, be 2000 books in the house. That's not loads but, along with the CD's, space for them is becoming an issue but I like them and rarely part with any of them. But it is assumed I have all the best books I want because if I knew about any others, I'd buy them. Signed editions by Larkin, Auden, Eliot, Rosemary Tonks and Elizabeth Bishop being beyond sensible at the prices they are.

So, to cut the game short, I stood in front of the shelves one at a time and noted down likely contenders. It's a brutal way of doing it but I can't sit down and re-read them all like a Booker Prize judge. It's a competitive game and if something isn't conspicuous enough then it probably isn't a potential winner.

What came of that was a list of 20 that didn't even have Elizabeth Bishop on it. That's how cruel the process was. But the answer hasn't been arrived at yet and there is still time for decisions and revisions that a minute will reverse. In fact, there might not be an answer as such. The closest I might get is a list of Desert Island Books. From the 20, I've put stars against 7 and been left in that awful position of having too many to fit into the standard 8 so the list could well be extended to 10. I lined up the 7 that seemed to have become the essential elements. But I'm not sure.

Not on the team photo are Proust, Camus, Hardy, Hamlet, Rosemary and the copy of Touch signed by Thom Gunn in Cambridge in 1979 because it is the artefact and its significance that matters, too. As yet there are no music books but music is at its best as music and I don't listen to books, I read them, so we will see about that.

But the 7, here lined up in all their glory, are at least among the best books I've ever read.

Dubliners didn't take much thinking about. Of all prose fiction, the outrageously both most artful and most natural. Not just The Dead but the way the other stories expand towards it. James Joyce would have been as much of a hero if that was all he had written. Possibly even more so given my preference for not over-producing.

Religion doesn't feature much in my life. One has to respect that of others while finding it absurd. Jesus Christ had more impact on the world than anybody since, though, and the CofE Conservative, A.N. Wilson, is the ultimate scholar in explaining who he was, in Jesus.

Another life I've taken some interest in is Shakespeare's and it makes one wonder quite high-powered married life can be when Andrew and Katherine Duncan-Jones were husband and wife for many years. Her Ungentle Shakespeare is readily the choice on Shakespeare biography in a wide but often dubious field.

Naturally, the Collected Larkin, I don't mind which. Poetry made sensible, perhaps more than it ever had been before, and the better for it.

Dr. Johnson's Selected Essays. Why. To tell you that, sir, would be no more necessary than to tell you why you breathe. It brings life to you and sustains it.

Not Donne's poems, spectacular though they are but a choice of books about him and them in which John Carey and others are deeply impressive but I enjoyed John Stubbs the most, as I remember.

That's a similar sort of tight choice as when there can't be room for more than one book about C17th Dutch painting but one is overrun with options. So, it isn't Andrew Graham-Dixon's Vermeer or Laura Cumming's Thunderclap. It's not the Vermeer because there's more to it than that and it's not quite Laura because, like Benjamin Moser, she brings herself, and her father into the story. I was enchanted by all three books, almost as much as by the art they take as their premise but Benjamin nicked it by making me wish I lived in Utrecht and so The Upside-Down World it is.

 

It might be best to leave it at this 7 that have seemingly selected themselves rather than not be able to decide on one more and so extend it to 10, then why not 20, 50 or 100. The carnage of any selection process is horrific. What I'd like as the next choice, as ever, is a remedy for the compulsion to want to make lists.

Grand National Preview with Racetrack Wiseguy

 It's too soon to say that the Grand National is getting easier but Willie Mullins is making it look so, even if he thus makes it harder for everyone else. He had five of the first seven last year, including the first three and could have as many as eight runners this year. The money has been for I Am Maximus, the 2024 winner and close second last time and those first two can't be left out again while they are obviously kept specially with this date in mind.

It looks like we are in another period of hardy perennials like we used to have with Red Rum, L'Escargot, Corbiere and Tiger Roll turning up time and again with solid credentials. Taking last year's race as a form guide, Nick Rockett and Grangeclare West are given a couple of pounds extra which makes it too close to call and by now none of them can be regarded as handicap good things.

I was in a betting shop not long after West Tip won in 1986 and some geezer was saying how his mate had made it a handicap certainty whereas his interlocutor said he had thought something else had been. Red Rum and Tiger Roll maybe but with 40 runners over more challenging fences in those days where anything can happen, such 'handicap certainties' are only such after the event. 

But it's not easy to look further down the weights to find much with which to take on this politburo of proven heavyweights. I'm happy to put lines through Banbridge, Gerri Colombe and Haiti Couleurs who have all had their moments but don't look to me like having another one here. Spillane's Tower, maybe; Iroko might be thereabouts; Panic Attack wouldn't come as a shock but, even given that it hasn't been quite the all-conquering season for Mullins and his recent strike rate is below par, you'd think he's ready again for this and so one surely has a sensible chance in what used to be regarded as such a hard race to pick. Not for me, it wasn't, though. Horses that I'd seen stay and jump once kept up a steady percentage of successes.

However, while not being able to keep Maximus out of the first four, I can't get away from Jagwar, receiving a stone from the big guns, after the way he finished at Cheltenham over the shorter trip having had to come from too far back. That looks ideal as an indicator since there is clearly still something in his handicap mark with a further win surely waiting to happen.

And since the weight difference between him and Johnnywho, who beat him half a length there, remains the same, the story suddenly writes itself. It could be all yellow and green and an index to the various different caps used to subtly mark out the JP McManus horses from each other and 1-2-3-4 for the likeable owner of an empire of horseflesh.

So,

1. Jagwar

2. I Am Maximus

3. Spillane's Tower

4. Johnnywho     

 

Update. With Spillane's Tower now running on Thursday, make that 3. Johnnywho, 4. Iroko.

Marco Polo on Kubilai Khan

In Marco Polo's Travels, I went straight to the bit about Genghiz Khan but soon found much more follwing that on Kublai Khan, as per the Coleridge poem we learnt at school. It's a remarkable and gripping account. 

As with most history, power is glorified and Marco might not be an objective witness even if he is in some ways reliable. At school the teaching seemed to assume that the likes of Julius Caesar, monarchs, God and their like were to be admired. In the 70's there was still much more residual belief that Britain ruled the waves and that rulers were the great and good like we were. On closer inspection, and in hindsight, it now looks like we too readily accepted the publicity of tyrants and turned blind eyes to their methods.

Marco's in-depth account of Kublai's reign is a tremendous, sustained, overawed account of its immense grandeur. It lacks irony, passes over the methods by which it ruled as if, and because, they were commonplace and to be expected. But now we can see Marco's report as a precursor of President's Trump's chronically ongoing reports on himself, how nobody has ever seen anything like it, it's the most successful presidency ever in the most powerful country ever and all the statistics that can be used to measure it are off the scale. 'Measureless to man', indeed.

Except there is one episode recording an uprising despite the highly organized discipline with which the empire was held in place. The place has maintained the tradition. I hadn't realized that where Kublai ruled from is much where Beijing is now.

But the people eventually had seen enough of how Ahmad, a governor with great influence over Kublai, managed things much more for his own benefit than even any others in such positions did. Having revolted and Ahmad having been assassinated, Kublai turned up to investigate and found out about the 'abominable outrages committed' and, as we might expect, 

caused all the treasure that Ahmad had amassed in the Old City to be brought into the New City; and put it with his own treasure; and it was found to be beyond all reckoning.

But don't all 'great' rulers, or many of them, find the same thing. Piers Gaveston for Edward II, the Duke of Buckingham under James and Charles I, Peter Mandelson, Dominic Cummings, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

Surely history is cyclic and doesn't make linear progress.

I'll either go back and start at the beginning with Marco or find another sensational bit but I'm sure he'd be glad to know that, 800 years after writing up what he found on his long holiday excursion, it is still providing enthralling entertainment. 

Take Four Books - Romanticism

Radio 4 has a programme called Take Four Books. In it, an author talks about one of their books and then three others that were 'influences' on it. I can't help wanting to have a go at any questionnaire, desert island or suchlike and so, realizing that my level of celebrity is well below that required to get an invitation, do it anyway, here.

I can't think that my trio of such models for Romanticism will bring in any surprises. Least of all, Philip Larkin.

Some of the ways these 'influences'- terrible word redolent of the 60's, drug culture and being 'under the influence' but it's better than 'influencers'- are consciously adopted and some less so. I arrived at my own method of trying to 'avoid bad practice' before I found a very similar phrase used to describe Larkin and The Movement of the 1950's. For me, thus, not wanting to do the wrong thing, it means irony, understatement rather than anything overblown, trying to avoid sentimentality, being readily understandable and doing so within chosen forms and seeing the poem as, hopefully, a piece of music. Mostly that.

But Larkin is also an example for not writing too much, doing what he does carefully and finding something lyrical and worth having rising from his low expectations. Low expectations of this life, not of what might be written about it.

Situation is a bit like This Be The Verse - same number of lines, same rhyme scheme but I have 10 syllables in a line where he has 8. Finding a rhyme on 'the coastal shelf', I was well aware that it's a simile memorably used in the Larkin and wondered if it was too obviously a steal. But his use of it doesn't mean the phrase can't ever be used in poetry again and it stayed in, becoming an echo in a poem about 'going nowhere slowly' which is what the likes of Mr. Bleaney are doing.

Success implicitly acknowledges a debt to Posterity. One could find further, if vaguer, echoes of Larkin elsewhere but since I'm sometimes unsure whether I'm listening to Beethoven or Mozart, for example, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

 

Sean O'Brien has more than once been credited as a master of iambic pentameter. He undoubtedly makes good use of it and I've seen manuscripts with stresses on where he's been checking he's got it right. I'm less concerned with precise adherence to classical standards and count syllables more than metrical beats but, more than that, only really want the rhythm to flow and find that fitting the stresses over lines of defined length are a great help, not a hindrance.

The 'rainy Wednesdays/ In suburbs where the library's always closed then' could perhaps have come from O'Brien with its rain, library and the sense of ennui on long afternoons. It doesn't, though. It comes out of real life as part of an objective correlative for a kindly relationship that doesn't aspire to love. That's Larkinesque, too, in a way but I'd much prefer to define the gradations of acceptable equilibrium than aspire to some hyperbole of high passion and be found wanting. Which is what Romanticism, the poem, is about. Keats and his accomplices found themselves entranced by anything transcendent but, actually, were at least as much in love with the ruins of it.

 

So I needed a third influence. A poet who moves between rhyme, unrhymed lines, metrical lines and 'free verse' if need be. That would be Thom Gunn, for a very long time a great hero of mine, but this book isn't as Gunn as I've sometimes thought I've been before. And I'm never going to be as Rosemary Tonks as my liking for her might make me want to be because I'm not the world's most passionate guy and her trademark exclamation marks are dramatically intended whereas I'd never do such a thing unless, as in Escape Artist, as pastiche or with other second-hand inferences.

But her dissatisfaction with this life, or the world as she finds it, is somehow akin to mine, as it is in their own ways for Larkin and O'Brien and I wouldn't want to pass her over even if, as pastiche often remains, Escape Artist can't help being still more Green than Tonks.

So,

Philip Larkin, Collected Poems 

Sean O'Brien, Ghost Train 

Rosemary Tonks, Bedouin of the London Evening

 

but, having just done that, I'd no more go on Take Four Books than I'd take up any other quite so public exposure. Larkin was ambivalently equivocal about such exposure and Rosemary went to extraordinary lengths to try to extricate herself from it. Talking about oneself could be a stage further on towards madness from talking to oneself. One is better leaving such work as one sees fit for whatever attention readers want to apply to it. It's for commentators to do the commentating.   

The Rest of West and other stories

Moving on to the two lesser known of Nathanael West's novellas, proved to be more of an excursion into the exotic than Had been expected. The Dream Life of Balso Snell and A Cool Million are both picaresque, a bit like Don Quixote and Candide, but also grotesque.

The introduction to the Wordsworth Classics edition says of Balso Snell that,

To call this a work of precocious undergraduate humour might seem ungenerous to both undergraduates and their literary efforts. One critic, Daniel Aaron, reviewing it in 1947, called it 'scatalogical and pretentiously wise' and this is such an exact judgement that it demands little elaboration. 

Snell's adventures having entered the Trojan horse via its posterior aperture result in encounters with literature and ideas that are ingenious in parts, taken to extremes and sometimes cleverly funny. That doesn't add up to a satisfactory work but it's only 20000 words and so one can stay with it. If it's a critique of literary endeavours then its gaucheness can be explained away as an element of its methods. If it is deliberately appalling some might count such appallingness as part of its success. The thing about 'experimental' writing is that there is no need for it to see print unless the experiment came off. As such, it's hard to like but of interest in its strangeness.

All of West's stories end in violence, as if some terrible end is inevitable. In A Cool Million, Lem Pitkin sets off to New York to make his fortune, as promised by the American Dream. Through a terrible series of misadventures he loses an eye, half a leg, his teeth, is scalped but remains undaunted as his ongoing disfigurement proceeds. It is a cartoon-like inversion of the myth that anybody can make it in New York. His death is not the end of his debasement, though, as he is taken up as a symbolic hero by the National Revolutionary Party, the vehicle for an ex-President that has loud echoes in the USA today, who proclaim that,

'He did not die in vain. Through his martyrdom, the National Revolutionary Party triumphed, and by that triumph this country was delivered from sophistication, Marxism and International Capitalism. Through the National Revolution its people were purged of alien diseases and America became again America.'

That sounds familiar and if the current incumbent was thought to have read any literary fiction, you'd think he'd read that. Thus, while The Day of the Locust is a fine book and Miss Lonelyhearts a success, it's almost in West's more dubious books that he's more interesting. Neither Balso Snell or Cool Million add much to his literary reputation but the former adds the dimension of surrealism and a genuine shock value and the latter by now looks prescient about MAGA and all the unhinged mania that comes with it.

I don't need to make room for West in the top echelon of my favourite prose fiction writers. It's by no means as fixed a list as its poetry equivalent anyway. But there was enjoyment to be had in reading him and I'm glad I did.

-

Next up, seized upon in the Chichester Oxfam shop because I was in the market for it anyway, Marco Polo's Travels. I'm expecting something picaresque and unlikely-sounding from him, too.

--

But last night. well on the way to justifying the licence fee on its own, the Radio 3 concert was Tenebrae with the Britten Sinfonia doing James MacMillan's Seven Last Words from the Cross, the Allegri Miserere and other almost as compelling pieces. 

It must be approaching thirty years since the MacMillan was broadcast late one night and the first disc of it subsequently appeared. It comes now with the big advantage of being familiar but that brings with it no trace of contempt, only a deeper thrill, if anything. A colossal piece that is both austere and shines forth. There is The Protecting Veil, the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, Errollyn Wallen, the Philip Glass Violin Concerto but MacMillan, with Veni, Veni and Isobel Gowdie to be taken into consideration, has provided music as memorable and powerful as any living composer.

Worth looking up.