The Complete Hardy 5: The Hand of Ethelberta

In some of the lists of Hardy's Major Works in the front of the Penguin editions, The Hand of Ethelberta doesn't even get in. Not even Hardy himself seems to have regarded it so, having written it for a periodical as a professional job for money and no more than that.

I'm surprised at that because, like The Well-Beloved, it's a different but not a lesser thing. Both of them might have been as ahead of their time, in terms of 'literary theory', as the likes of Tess and Jude were on the social issues of their day.

The 'hand' of Ethelberta, we could be forgiven for thinking, might be about the standard theme of C19th English fiction - which of the various competitors for the hand of the nubile lady will win it in marriage. But it's not only that, the 'hand' is the much more modern question of authorship, about the relationship between the text and whoever wrote it. And, as such, any number of questions about how those relate to Hardy's own life, fiction and privacy can only multiply exponentially. 

Ethelberta has been widowed very young and her status serves to disguise humble beginnings. Her poems make her a literary celebrity and, like any Hardy heroine, she's not short of suitors. She could be seen as ambitious socially but her large family of siblings are cared for in her employment and she's too demure to be compared to Becky Sharp and in a Hardy-like usage as 'indifferentist' as Neigh is described. 

Our sympathies ought to be with Christopher Julian, an organist with no fortune, while Mssrs. Ladywell and Neigh are only in the field as also-rans but the title and property of Lord Mountclere, old and considered unsuitable by both families, succeed in winning the hand in question. Hardy produces a cliff-hanging story in the race to prevent the wedding in what is otherwise a pedstrian novel and somehow at the end we are happier for the brief coda in which Christopher marries Picotee, the sister, rather than any deep feelings for Ethelberta. She is too much of a blank slate - cool, detached and writerly - for us to care about her in the way we care about the likes of Tess. So if we can't put Ethelberta in with the top echelon of Hardy's work, it's 400 pages with some pertinent ideas in it and ought at least to be listed among the 'major' titles.

Shirley Turner, Peter Mallinson, & Lynn Arnold at Chichester

Shirley Turner, Peter Mallinson, & Lynn Arnold, Chichester Cathedral, Jan 14

At a concert in the Autumn I heard tell of how long Chichester's lunchtime concerts had been going or, rather, didn't because the answer seems to be 'as long as anybody can remember'. Thus, continuing the long and great tradition, a new year began with Mozart. Ah, vous dirai-je, maman! is variations on a well-known nursery rhyme with Lynn Arnold twinkling like a little star on the Chichester Yamaha, the strings in sympathy before violin, viola, them both in duet are playful as puppies, the shifts of mood like a mini encyclopedia of Mozart.

Few composers cover quite the range that Shostakovich does and I've been gratified to hear a bit more of his music locally in the last couple of years. The Five Pieces find him in quite a different temper from the vast symphonies and bleakly inventive chamber music. These miniatures move from the longing or nostalgia of the Prelude, through a happy Gavotte, the Palm Court elegance of the Elegy and Waltz before the quicksilver fun of the Polka, with Shirley Turner and Peter Mallinson deft and hugely enjoyable on a day off from the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

While this programme was for the most part composers in lighter moods, John Alexander's soft rains, based on the poetry of Sara Teasdale was ethereal if not other worldly. The stillness and timelessness of There will come soft rains led to Barter, not dissimilarly haunted, possibly by loss, and the leaves in Leaves were surely the last vestiges of them in November with Peter's eloquent viola line. I'm not always easily convinced that words naturally lead to music and I'm a little bit apologetic that, with poetry as my 'day job', I'm not familiar with Sara Teasdale's so I'll work backwards and check out if the music conjures the poems.

But we were soon re-awakened from such deep contemplation by Czardas. Many will know it when they hear it without knowing, like I didn't, that it was written by Vittorio Monti, an unlikely Neapolitan name for such mitteleuropean folk dance. Shirley relished the opportunity to imitate the mandolin and played the longest trill I've ever heard anywhere as the piece built with repressed energy into its frenetic dash, the exuberant interplay of vln and vla, notwithstanding the pizzicato, over Lynn's busy engine room.

Wow. As Dana might have said, it was always going to be a cold, cold Christmas without Chichester Tuesday lunchtimes. One has almost forgotten the thrill they regularly provide but they return just in time. And as Petula would have understood, I...couldn't live without their love. It's never less than wonderful and maybe there's nobody left who can remember when it wasn't.

Other Stories and Stewartly

 Two books ordered from a well-known distributor of most sorts of goods on Thursday arrived within 24 hours on Friday. That's not always what one wants if trying for a delivery date when one will be in but on this occasion although I was out there was no need to bother the neighbours. Impulse buys prompted by an item in the TLS, Dorothy Parker will have to wait her turn but it's preferable to have something of a pile in waiting rather than not be knowing where to go next.

-- 

Salvator Mundi, a horse with a big home reputation to prove, won at Punchestown just now in a matter of strides below the distance to justify the strong support and my 5/6 looked pretty compared to the 8/15 SP. That was about all there was to like about it- which is sufficient, though, with him pulling hard early, not jumping well and not looking entirely like winning until that crucial burst of acceleration. He's doubtless a big talent but that performance doesn't get him onto the Cheltenham shortlist per se.

There are a couple of names on that shortlist already but it's a least a month until any sort of preview is due. The weather is doing its best to provide a mid-season break but what racing there has been has provided a useful sequence of winners- 11 out of the last 13 horses, not at fancy prices - the best of them was 5/2, but one can hardly help but compile a tidy profit if you get so little wrong.

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It seems like an age since the last lunchtime concert in these parts but Chichester on Tuesday is an interesting and varied programme to get us back into the rhythm, as it were and the run from here to Easter promises plenty of both familiar names of returning artists and some new in Portsmouth and Chichester.

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Very bad news from Times Radio is the arrival of Rod Liddle, the boorish commentator so idiosyncratic that he represents the SDP although it's hard to believe that's the same SDP formed by Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams. They've either taken a lurch to the right or have become simply a vehicle for Liddle's posturing in what he imagines to be a provocative way except it's just token garrulousness.

More in tune with enlightened sensibilities is my pile of books by Stewart Lee. How I Escaped My Certain Fate is both autobiography and transcripts of some of his shows. Of course, the likes of Morecambe & Wise and Tommy Cooper rehearsed their nonchalance to perfection and Stewart's hesitations, deviations and repetitions are of the same order as is made very clear in his extensive footnotes explaining how it all works.

It is 'art' not only in the sense of making the artificial appear natural but in its openly-stated awareness of itself as art. The footnotes, the references to itself and the recurrence of discussion about other stand-up comedians all fold inwards like a postmodern thing so that while reflecting on the world it is also a contemplation of its own processes and in book form that extends to an acceptance that it's not at its best in book form.

It's a hardline defence of 'woke' to be appreciated by those who remember what 'woke' was - a good thing identified by Barack Obama and not an insult aimed at anything that narcissists, maybe like Rod Liddle, find a bit too ethical for their solipsistic world view. With his English degree from Oxford, Stewart has every right to be as literary as he is and, like an anti-Trump, he can turn all negative reaction to him to his own purposes. He is more combative and entrenched than ideally suits me, like the stand-up answer to Mark E. Smith when I'd be more at home with the Jesus & Mary Chain than The Fall. But it's a long, long time since I paid to go to see a 'comedian'- more than thirty years since Ken Dodd, I think- and so Southsea in May, we will see how much the artform has moved on.

Not necessarily for the better, I suspect. Game shows, celeb quizzes, even 'comedy' shows these days are filled with people billed as 'comedians'. Perhaps comedy did eventually become the new rock'n'roll in as far as everybody is now a comedian where once everybody was a pop star. And perhaps it has also returned to its original purpose. By no means are all of this generation of standing-up, talking performers funny but perhaps they do fit what 'comedy' once was,

The classic conception of comedy, which began with Aristotle in ancient Greece of the 4th century bce and persists through the present, holds that it is primarily concerned with humans as social beings, rather than as private persons, and that its function is frankly corrective. The comic artist’s purpose is to hold a mirror up to society to reflect its follies and vices, in the hope that they will, as a result, be mended. 

So, although that generation that attend comedy gigs and laugh at every observation because that's what they're expected to do, perhaps what they are really doing is the equivalent of going to church to be improved by what they hear in the sermon. They are brought onside by the performer who ridicules some perceived folly and emerge as better people.

I'm not saying that Tarby, Bob Hope or Ted Ray were funny but fashions change and people are made happy by thinking that they've complied with their chosen orthodoxy. I like Stewart Lee because he represents some of my chosen orthodoxy. I don't laugh at him as much as I laugh at Dad's Army, Fawlty Towers, Blackadder or The Office and I hardly ever laugh at Ricky Gervais's stand-up because I can see it coming from a mile off and I think it's a big ask for anyone to stand in front of an audience and get them onside. I'm like the second house in the Glasgow Empire on a Saturday night. Stand-up is a much over-rated art form, very difficult to be good at and most of them aren't. Rock'n'roll was easier - two or three chords, 4/4 time, a drum beat and a chorus and a roomful of people who've turned up with the intention of dancing.

A Perfect Murder

 Much as I'd like to be a fiction writer, I'm not one. It's much harder to do than it looks and whereas poems benefit from fewer, more concentrated words, prose fiction needs more detail and authenticity than I can summon.

A Perfect Murder was called The Decline of English Fiction. That was always an unsatisfactory title, trying to be self deprecating and literary - by echoing the essay by George Orwell, but now that I've found a suitable minor variation on the title of the poem it was based on, it can be made available as a pdf. And thus is.

I'd send it to a magazine to try to get it into print somewhere if I could find any such magazine but I can't. If any did look likely, their idea of 'short fiction' is shorter than mine.

--

It's harmless enough doing that. What would be deeply harmful, both to my own feelings of self-worth and the very idea of music itself, though, would be me buying a guitar and writing the album of pop songs I still vaguely hanker after. 

It's the same as with anything else. One hears something and thinks I'd love to do that, suspending all awareness of the lack of competence in the necessary areas that would make the project a sure-fire disaster.

Everybody wants to be a pop star. Football managers want to be racehorse owners, cricketers want to be golfers and inside every poet there is a troubadour wanting to get out. I found myself looking at guitars earlier. They are remarkably inexpensive.

I must resist the temptation to prevent the horrors that would ensue. I must look at the poems again and be grateful I'm happy with them.

Charles King, Every Valley

Charles King, Every Valley, The Story of Handel's Messiah (The Bodley Head) 

While Charles King's title lifts a suitably inspirational phrase from Messiah, it could also point us towards how he explores every valley of the contemporary cultural context that brought Handel's most famous work about. It might seem like a long preamble to make for a substantial book but stick with it and it does all contribute to the whole story as it comes together.

In the early pages I was put off by some elements of King's writing. It only takes a couple of minor objections to set one against an author. Even though he knows it's Messiah and not The Messiah, he insists on calling it 'the Messiah' when we don't call other such things 'the Israel in Egypt'. He also says,

In most fighting seasons, some part of the Italian peninsula was overrun by armies, beset by pirates, or ravished by plague or smallpox.

and though 'ravished' is admissable, one can't help thinking he might have meant 'ravaged'. However, a few such trivial objections are soon overcome and, securing his footing, the narrative is soon convincing. 

The book is organized into three parts, entitled Portents, Sorrow and Resurrection, and they parallel the thematic scheme of Messiah in Charles Jennens' hither and thither selection of biblical texts. It might seem to us, especially with regard to Handel's music that the early C18th was a time of great confidence, 'enlightenment' and luxury but that takes no account of the world as drawn by Hogarth and satirized by Swift. It was and age of anxiety, with the house of Hanover insecure in the face of Jacobite pretenders, war and pestilence all of which was underwritten by the prosperity of some being largely dependent on the slave trade. It's an entirely coherent way of understanding Messiah in all its context and glory as a beacon of hope. 

Not much of the book is about the oratorio itself, really. While the account of African Muslim, Diallo, is in some tangential way a sub-text to the main theme, his life's adventure through slavery in America to high social standing in England has very little directly to do with Handel. But we are offered a glimpse of an early possible girlfriend in Georg Freidrich's life, one Vittoria Tarquini, when he was widely thought to have had none. It is also suggested that in his early days in London he was suspected of spying for Germany. Much more relevant to Messiah is the story of Susannah Cibber, the star performer, whose irregular marital arrangements all but finished her reputation before she, too, as per the general theme, achieves not only redemption but greater glory, as does the book itself.

It's not quite what it says on the tin but in many ways it's more than that, a survey of an uncertain and difficult world - and we can understand that- in which hope is achieved, some good is done and things of lasting value are put in place.

That might be the point of it and, appearing now as it does, it might serve to make us think our own times might do something comparable. Charles King doesn't get everything right but he does enough to show he's on the right side in such asides as,

If women later seemed sparse in the historical record, lost amid generals on the battlefield and savants thinking up Western civilisation, it was because male historians worked very hard to miss them. 

I read it mostly to the accompaniment of the opera Alcina. The counterpoint thus achieved between Handel's imperious light and glory and the less glorious reality of what the human character can often be like and how the world is really run was most instructive.

Pluperfect ver 2.0

 A second edition of the Pluperfect, Collected Poems pdf is now available.

It includes all of Romanticism but has lost those later poems that didn't make the cut into that.

Font sizes, line gaps, page numbers, poems with one line that goes over a page. Oh, you know it ain't easy. You don't know how hard it can be but without being obsessively perfectionist about it, I want it that way.

On Not Being a Poet, and another story

 Patrick Kurp's ever excellent Anecdotal Evidence is particularly good today. There's nothing quite as satisfying as finding worthwhile authorities chiming in with one's own preciously nurtured pet subjects and here he cites,

Robert Francis (1901-87) was an American poet probably best known as a protégé of Robert Frost. In 1980, Francis published 'Pot Shots at Poetry', a collection of brief prose observations and aphorisms. One is titled “Wordman.” Francis tells us he would be happy not to be called a “poet” because the word is used to describe “not just people who write poems, but special people.” In other words, it’s a self-aggrandizing honorific, like 'El Jefe'. Francis seeks a “stubbornly plainer” word and suggests “wordman,” a man or woman who works with words: “So let me be called a wordman and let what I write be called word arrangements.”

I think 'writer', as per Philip Larkin's gravestone, is the preferred option but we're not going to fall out about that. He has it exactly right and apparently for the right reasons.  It's almost because I don't want to be called a 'poet' that I don't want to do poetry readings because to do such a thing makes it look very much as if one sees oneself s a poet rather than as a writer that has some poems among those hings one has written.

As has been said here  in the past, I suspect we've never recovered from Romanticism - some apparently are still prepared to elevate the term to the level of a title of their book- when the likes of Keats, Wordsworth and Shelley communed in their highly sensitised ways with sublimity. But that was over 200 years ago and by now we are better defined by distancing ourselves from such rarefied atmospheres.

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Another confluence of a greater mind with mine comes about in Charles King's Every Valley - more about which later in the coming week, his far-reaching book on Handel's Messiah. There is much C18th background being put in place to make for the full context, and a substantial book, and it might even lure me into some C18th literature which not much has ever done before but he sells me the idea of The Dunciad if not the poem itself. But, firstly, I'm very taken with Jonathan Swift's Academy of Lagado,

whose random phrasemaking machine calculated every thought it was possible to think. 

 

Again, this corresponds to my own concern that chess, or language, can't be infinite and so in theory and in due course, every possible chess game will have been played and every possible piece of writing been written. And since two ideas that I've had on my own had already been thought by others previously, the long, long process of everything that could happen having happened has been underway for some time.