the twice-washed tablecloth

 

Some genius here, from a recent Private Eye in their resident poetry correspondent's tribute to J. H. Prynne.

I need to say, firstly, that Private Eye is passed on to me by a mate, that I'd not spend my own money on it, but, secondly, that once in a while it gets it right.

This is a tremendous effort at pastiching Prynne, the very forefront and paragon of subverting what we were led to believe was poetry. Some of us might have got beyond that already by not accepting such things as that poetry must be made of rhythm and/or rhyme.

Regular, or longstanding, readers here will know that 'all you've got to be is any good'. 

Prynne and his like had a point but possibly suffered from labouring the one point they had at the expense of all others. It is potentially brilliant, definitely hilarious, but ultimately only of interest to its adherents if it refuses to come back to Planet Meaning.

Private Eye's uncredited pasticheur risks enchroaching on the brink of meaning in line 6, where Bowie is brought to mind, and the last three words that suggest Dover Beach. That might not be entirely their fault even if an editor in a position to do as much could have pointed out that they were at risk of meaning something not entirely untangential.

It's great how, trying to write about such writing, one is led into the same dead ends as theirs does. In a way, I'd so like to be convinced that theirs was an ever expanding universe of potential but I'm not. I think it's a party game and no more than that. I'm thrilled by the twice-washed tablecloth.

Is it old and thus a bad thing that it's only been washed twice or was it only bought last week and has been washed twice already. We are not to know and it is in such wondering that 'poetry' can sometimes be found. Elusive, 'thought-provoking', generative, lush.

The satirist, in one phrase, did for me more than my brief looks at real Prynne ever did. So, maybe I could go back to real Prynne, informed by that, and enjoy his poems more. And that's what I'd call 'irony'.        

The Richard Yates and Henry James Collections

In 2008, The Times reviewed The Collected Stories of Richard Yates so enthusiastically that I was persuaded to get myself one. It turned out they were right. I did my best to get involved in the Yates revival and collected all the novels via abebooks, most of them having to be sent from America. The film of Revolutionary Road appeared and a few months after I was about as complete as one can get in Yates, all the titles were re-issued in Britain. Still, my library has more interesting editions.

Now, last Saturday, Jem Calder celebrates The Easter Parade in the same paper's 'Rereading' feature and the great joy and benefit of having every worthwhile book one knows about was being able to go upstairs to fetch it and reread it myself. Explaining about him to a bookshop proprietor on Tuesday, she said he sounded like the American answer to the Angry Young Men and in some ways she's got it except maybe Yates is more middle class and a better prose writer than Alan Sillitoe. 

The Easter Parade follows Sarah and Emily, two sisters, through their disintegrating lives. Sarah, the elder, stays in a twenty year abusive marriage while Emily trawls her way through a litany of men who all seem suitable to begin with but prove not to be. As Yates invariably is, it's relentless in its downward spiral, the compensation only being the women's hope, or belief, that it will be for the best. It's heavy irony, it's brilliantly written. I'm not sure, as Jem Calder diagnoses, that,

the horror is just time's passing.  

That can be applied to most lives, or stories. In Yates it is more specifically the almost wilful self-deception of the two main characters and that they don't appear to have other options.

But that's what all those books upstairs are there for. To be returned to exactly as and when required. Yates remains right up at the top end of prose fiction and this latest return to him only proved that he's not going to be shifted from such a position.  

--

The Yates collection has been in place for years whereas the Henry James collection has sprung up in the last ten days. Following the immense success of The Aspern Papers/The Turn of the Screw, part of my mission on Tuesday in Chichester was to load up on whatever was to be found. I hadn't realized that the newly reopened premises where once were three storeys of second-hand books was now independent and new books. Impressed with her knowledge and charm, which I realized later is the salesmanship necessary to survive in the perilous world of retail books, I returned to pay the going rate for The Golden Bowl after a quick excursion to Oxfam where I was glad to find four other titles for only a bit more than the price of the pristine copy. I don't suppose she needed me to show her what she's up against in her admirable custodianship of the bookseller's dream life. Spending similar amounts in two bookshops and the flapjack shop, the flapjacks lasted three days, The Golden Bowl will last two or maybe three weeks and the four titles from Oxfam two or three months but I'll always be able to have the books again, which can't be said for the flapjacks.

At first sight, Washington Square isn't as good as the two novellas but it's still fine. It possibly anticipates at least Emily's story in The Easter Parade in how Catherine's relationship with the apparently feckless Morris Townsend doesn't work out, with some help from her severe father, who might have been right.

But, on further consideration, it's an open question. At first thinking it owed something to Jane Austen, or what I imagine Jane Austen to be like, it is perhaps anti-Austen in its beautiful, unrequited, possibly even Larkin-esque ending. Excellent reading.

And now, with all reason for hope, I go intrpeidly towards the big books. The Portrait of a Lady is all but 600 pages with James presumably indulging himself in his reams of prose but, as with Proust, that may not be a bad thing. 

The Cygnus Trio in Chichester

The Cygnus Trio, Chichester Cathedral, May 19

Tchaikovsky chamber music. Who knew. Ballets, big symphonies, the melodrama of the 1812 Overture, the Piano Concerto and one of the great violin concertos, yes, but he's not often, if ever, heard on these lunchtimes which are so often solo or small ensemble affairs. Well, the Cygnus Trio knew and the Trio in A minor, op. 50, is no small affair. Size isn't everything but neither is it to be measured by the number of musicians or decibels.

The Trio is in two lengthy movements, with the first, Pezzo elegiaco, in memoriam the pianst Nikolai Rubinstein, not textbook elegy perhaps with its grand gestures and energy. Javier Montañana's violin and Hannah Lewis's cello interacted lyrically before the theme was taken up by César Saura's piano. Some fitting solemnity was achieved in music that made much of relatively simple thematic material.

As could equally be said of the theme and variations of the second movement. There was no doubting this young trio's talent and the fine sound they made but some music can take its time to be convincing before thoroughly doing so.  César's opening exposition of the melody was almost devotional before the rapt violin and song-like cello did it their ways. It was quickly elaborated on with decorative piano and pizzicato strings, some tinkling top-end music box effects and Peter Ilyich taking on the challenges from Johann Sebastian and Ludwig to show how many different things he can do with the same tune.

It bounced around in dance and song and was in turn soulful, serene and spirited towards a presto climax with drama aforethought that had me thinking, not for the first time, that the end was due. He could have been hinting presciently towards Rachmaninov. But, no, in a consummately well-done final passage, the Trio made the Trio tread gently to its rest like a perturbèd spirit getting back to its grave before dawn.

The Turn of the Screw

A few months ago it was Dana Gioia I was so glad to 'discover', however belatedly. Now, it's Henry James who looks like taking high order among the writers of fiction that I've ever read. The tendency to want to make lists persists. It seems unhealthy but when one pronounces something as a 'favourite', it's useful to have defined to what degree. Not everything can be a priority, not everything a specialism and not everything a favourite. I'm less sure of my fiction writers than I am poets but, on the evidence of two novellas, Henry James looks destined to be very highly regarded.

The Turn of the Screw was better than The Aspern Papers and that was great. I'm glad the Introduction says that, like Hamlet, it,

will continue to inspire widely differing interpretations.

One is especially never sure in ghost stories exactly what is going on but Flora and Miles, the children, are impossibly charming yet increasingly and disconcertingly threatening. The presence of past domestic staff at Bly, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, as apparitions has something to do with it. It keeps the pages turning, especially with James's prose being so sumptuous and not as forbidding as I've assumed for so long without ever have checked for myself.

It's tempting in the first blaze of being impressed to put him ahead of long-established rivals. By all means, he's in many ways more sophisticated than Hardy and maybe George Eliot but it remains to be seen how he compares further down the line. I'm not throwing over Hardy on a whim after fifty years but it is much to James's credit that the comparisons even arise. It happens once in a while that the rest of a writer's back catalogue set me up for an extended session of reading. There is a lot of James. It is to be hoped that the two or three I pick up next are good choices. Much will depend on them as to how far into his work I go.

On Not Liking the Beatles

 The way I access the internet, via Firefox, shows me a selection of items that it seems to think I might like and, given the sort of thing that thrives on the internet and my reluctance to engage with much of it, it doesn't do badly at it.

It regularly features Far Out magazine and a series on 5 artists that some iconic artist couldn't stand, in which number one for somebody from Pink Floyd was the other members of Pink Floyd. Well, there wasn't much left to do without Syd Barrett, the only interesting one, apart from resent each other.

But today we have 10 musicians who couldn’t stand The Beatles.

I'm slightly Beatles-sceptic in not accepting everything they did as holy writ but, born in 1959 and being most taken with She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, aged 4, they are in my musical DNA. There are great things in that early-middle period. But they haven't got into my top plenty bands for a long time, don't turn up often on DGBooks Radio and don't come anywhere near the conglomerate achievement of Tamla Motown.

But, who are these dissidents, then? For the most part, largely who one might expect, the usual suspects of the predictably dissident.

I knew Frank Zappa would be there, who is stratospherically in a category of his own in the 5 artists I can't stand. Painfully, boorishly, boringly contrary to a fault. John Lydon had to be there except I had a lot of time for what he did once although the same by now applies to him.

I'm not put out by Julian Casablancas because The Strokes were a busted flush of dumb posturing from the beginning, the answer to their first album, Is This It, being, No, It Isn't. 

We know Elvis and The Beatles didn't get on too well. We also might think Elvis wasn't that bright, or even a musician.

Van Morrison is over-rated and I don't care what he thinks. Similarly Todd Rundgren, although one would like to think better of both.

Trent Reznor is, or was, apparently in Nine Inch Nails. That doesn't register at all here. 

Quincy Jones later apologized for what he said.

 

Which leaves Lou Reed and Michael Stipe, both of who are probably ahead of the Beatles on any list I might make. You'd almost expect it of Lou, though, notoriously difficult as he was while notoriously brilliant at his best in what he did. Sometimes great artists are like that. And sometimes so are the rest of us but we have less of a get out clause.

Which leaves us with St. Michael of Stipe, the paragon of cool, indie sensitivity and surely better than the pop music equivalent of those literary troublemakers who go out of their way to deride Shakespeare.

And, yes, he is. Far Out put him at number one in their list to make it look more shocking but it's not what he said. He's maybe only slightly more Beatles-sceptic than I am. He likes other stuff more. Is all.

While this series of features has seemed worth a look, I've not investigated one before and now I have, I found one scurrilous. And so, 1 Magazine Whose Features Are Not To Be Trusted-

Far Out.

 

That doesn't mean it's not a good game and I can rarely help myself when the opportunity to make a list presents itself. So, 5 artists that I can't stand-

obviously Frank Zappa, inevitably Queen, necessarily Pink Floyd, quite possibly Black Sabbath and Music by John Miles.

But I'd prefer to be writing about things I like, not those I don't like. If you don't like football, Eurovision, the ongoing debacle of politics or Strictly Come Dancing, you don't have to. Don't, then.    

Ackroyd, Henry James, Four Poems, Next Prime Minister

Chichester's Oxfam bookshop served up Peter Ackroyd's essays in The Collection and Henry James, The Aspern Papers and The Turn of the Screw this week. 

Ackroyd will be taken in bite-sized bits. Going straight to his Larkin, by way of the Motion biography, one finds him taking a dim view of Larkin's dim views without any compensating consideration of the consolations. He is firmly set against the man and his poems and unforgiving. Looking at his verdicts on other poets, that seems to be his way. Undoubtedly highly astute and discriminating, he is also sometimes a bit cheap in his put downs and one is tempted to put him and his book down, too, in the same way. Much of the journalism comes from The Spectator and there's an unattractive disdain in his tone until he gets to a poet like Prynne who is one whose poems are difficult enough for him. 

Maybe it's a good idea to read writers one doesn't like sometimes but after a while this is one volume that might find itself back on Oxfam's shelves in due course.

Whereas Henry James, who I've long thought I wouldn't like, is likely to be collected much further. His reputation for overly involved sentences and being heavy going was not corroborated by The Aspern Papers which I have just enjoyed enormously and seen off in short order. Atmospheric, beautifully done and Venetian, one wonders at the intensity of obsession with the great poet, Jeffrey Aspern, and the fact that Juliana Bordereau, his girlfriend, is now 150 years old when 100 would be plenty but that was captivating stuff and it might have turned out that James was the greatest writer I'd not read before and whatever else Oxfam have of his is likely to follow The Turn of the Screw. 

--

In case it transpires that I return to the sullen art of poetry readings in the near future, I rehearsed with the microphone on the laptop and have produced a recording entitled Four Poems. It fits perfectly into the five minutes I'm guessing would be the requirement, even including thirty seconds to get up and walk to the front. I wouldn't want to do more than five minutes, not least because I'm not sure many would want to listen for any longer, but it's hardly worth going to do less.

Not having heard myself do it much before, it's not as easy as one might think to get it as good as it sounds in one's head. I know the rhythms are there because I put them in but it's necessary to concentrate to get them right.

After four attempts it wasn't bad, without being flawless, but not to worry. It was intended to be made available here but it looks like incorporating audio files isn't possible, or at least far too difficult for me to do. So I guess it doesn't matter anymore.

The four poems are Piccadilly Dusk, Fiction, Windy Miller and Rainyday Woman. 

--

Meanwhile, surely even the political obsessives at Times Radio must eventually weary of reporting and speculating on the process of arriving at our seventh Prime Minister in ten years. To think we once looked down on Italy for their rapid turnover of governments.

Running the country must be a hard job and yet those doing it feel the need to continue with the internal machinations of what is only really a game of realizing their individual ambitions.

Keir Starmer is a good man hard done by, let down by his own party more than anybody else because, like most recent Labour Prime Ministers, he's not really Labour. It can't be wrong to lack charisma because Attlee was the best there ever was but he's not very good at it. The parallels with his direct opposite, Boris, pile up, most noticeably when he announces he's going to do ten years when he might not have ten more weeks.

I tipped Shabana Mahmood here a fewc weeks ago but that was about as good as the feeling I once had for Amber Rudd. So far unblemished, she'd no more carry her backbenchers with her than Keir or any other bluish type who might try to balance the books as a priority. But it's an impossible outcome to call. And whoever wins this time has three more years to survive and so will by no means be guaranteed to lead Labour into the next General Election. When was the last time the leader of the Conservative party could be backed at 50/1, and more, to be the Next Prime Minister.

These are unlikely days but it's likely they will get unlikelier yet.  

Edward Thomas on Richard Jefferies

 Edward Thomas does Richard Jefferies something of a disfavour in his critical biography. It's a brilliant, clear sighted and appreciative account but it quotes so heavily from the Jefferies books that one feels as if one has been provided with the salient points, a generous selection of highlights and know Jefferies well enough from it without needing to go to the original texts unless one wants the fine detail. It's such a great tribute of close reading and deep appreciation that it threatens to eclipse the need for its subject.

I've had it here for years but it soon became apparent that I'd only ever read the first chapter, which is a survey of the countryside south of Swindon that I know not quite as well as they did from having ridden through parts of it on a bike in the 1990's.

Thomas and Jefferies are kindred spirits in many ways, being so attentive to nature. Thomas was really a city man, though, and appreciated the countryside as a visitor. Coate, when Jefferies was there, wasn't on the outskirts of Swindon, it was a separate place. Thus Jefferies is, or first was, the sort of rural man who, however thoughtful and dreamy he might have been, loved the natural world in the same way as Ted Hughes did and King Charles III once did, who both saw fit to kill it whether by gun, fishing rod or other device. To the credit of Jefferies, he at least progressed to a preference for watching a bit longer and preferring to delay or make less use of his weaponry. Whereas Hughes often seemed to be reducing animals to their visceral parts and Jefferies sometimes becomes all mystical about what nature has to offer, it is Thomas whose sensitivity to the elements might appear more mainstream to us now, who get our milk from Tesco and much of our countryside from train windows.  

The autobiographical The Story of My Heart, the hymn to female beauty The Dewy Morn and the novel without a plot, Amaryllis at the Fair, look like the places to go in due course, perhaps Amaryllis first, but, as has happened before, I intend to go further into a writer and then another turns up - and here comes Henry James- but Jefferies has been tremendous value so far and I'm by no means finished with him yet.