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.

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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.

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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.

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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.