Garfield Sobers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

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

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

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Auden, poem

 I'm not- at least yet- saying this is any good but it's only a few minutes since I said I might or might not sometime see about writing the poem about Auden that I dreamed about about ten hours ago. I just thought I'd see what happened during the Pinot Grigio.

I reckon I can still do it given an idea worth having. 

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.
At a European outpost, someone
holds a nervous gun. At home his mother
wonders whether the shooting has begun
while preparing dinner for his brother.

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 one might have thought, 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.

(revised 17/07)

Dreaming of Auden

 Nothing quite as boring as other people's dreams, is there. They are clearly the sub-conscious trying to sort out its baggage and anxieties, whether in obvious or symbolic ways, and while it's obvious that other people would dream about their obsessions, it's fascinating when we do so, so vividly, about our own.

This morning, in the last stages of R.E.M., I was back in Linden Huddlestone's sixth form class, circa 1977, and he had set us an exercise to write a poem that was a 'character study'. I immediately decided to write about Auden, sure that I could do it and knowing he had an interest in him. In the way that dreams mix up timescales, I probably wasn't aware that Mr. Huddlestone was an Auden admirer and I wouldn't have known enough about him to write the poem I might now, then. But that's neither here nor there.

I made a few notes of lines to put together to make my collage portrait and was confident I could make it work. But not necessarily before the end of the lesson when we might have to read it out or hand it in. But I was so sure I could do it that I thought I'd be fine saying, no, I haven't finished yet but I'll give it to you tomorrow and it'll be great. 

That was until I mislaid the notes I'd made and was desperately trying to reconstruct them. In real life, more than 30 years ago, I lost a poem, reconstructed it from memory, and then found the original and saw that they weren't very like each other. I was half re-making the fragments of the poem in a bit of a panic, knowing I'd miss the deadline and have to rely on my promise of a teenage masterpiece when I woke up.

The idea of the poem was still sharp enough for me to make approximations of a couple of lines once awake but I didn't write them down. They've all but gone now. I could go back to the start and undertake the exercise all over again. Or I could try to remember the idea for a poem I had the day before yesterday which seems to have gone completely. Either way, if anything came of them I'd put them here but don't come rushing back in expectation. It's rare for poems to realize the idea of how good they'll be. The best are those that somehow turn out to be something different in the process of making them and are better.

The Dewy Morn

My recent return to Coate Farm and the Richard Jefferies Museum found two copies of Amaryllis at the Fair in not very good condition and no copies of Bevis so I came away with The Dewy Morn. 

The title comes from a poem in The Passionate Pilgrim, 1598, attributed to Shakespeare at the time, open to some doubt now. It concerns the fortunes of Felice Goring, her infatuation with Martial Barnard and the wicked ways of the squire's steward, Robert Godwin who has no sympathy for the tenants on the estate.

The first few chapters elaborate at great length on how Felice's great natural beauty is one with the beauty of nature. If it seems overdone then it is a tribute to Jefferies that he can write so much on the subject to make his point so abundantly clear. She is full of love without having an object for it but she finds one in Martial, which seems to me one more of the profound things that Jefferies is capable of that make him a writer so worth reading in spite of his perceived faults. Restless Human Hearts contained many wonderful passages without, perhaps, being a great novel. Felice is compared to a woman's face the narrator had seen at a window,

Upon that face waiting had had set its seal unmistakably. She was waiting- she had been waiting years. No end to waiting. 

She plots to gain the attention of Martial,

Has anyone thought for an instant upon the extreme difficulty of knowing a person?

... People's entire destiny depends upon those whom they know. One's friends lift one or depress one to their level. 

But, maybe even better than that,  

Is it best to have a strong imagination, or to be entirely without it? 

Surprisingly, from the author of fiction, 

An imaginative mind creates for itself a beautiful world; but upon entering into practical life, at every step, first one and then another portion of the structure is shattered till the entire fabric falls to pieces. Dust under foot and bitterness to the taste are all that remain; a void heart, a hopeless future, a weary present.  

It's a melancholy reflection from a very writerly writer of the type that broods long enough on such things for them to be self-fulfillingly melancholy. Except, given a few more pages, this argument in favour of the practical life turns out to be by way of introduction to Godwin who has no notion of anything but the practical and that is what makes him a monster.

The book is to become a tract on the socio-economic condition of the rural poor who are closer to the land they work on than those who own it and, effectively, them. Published in 1884, ahead of any progress made by Socialism, there were plenty of writers making similar points but now that Socialism has come and maybe gone, one wonders at the partial success it had.

The Dewy Morn survives its slow, overly poetic beginnings to confirm Jefferies as an admirable writer if a flawed one. Not subtle, maybe not brilliantly clever but one that it is easy to be in sympathy with. The empathy with nature is idealistic and it is easy to see him as a lonely misfit in a society based on commerce, business and profit. Such a writer is maybe all he could ever have been so good for him that he was and that he is so fondly, if not widely, remembered as such. 

The Renaissance Choir in Southsea

 The Renaissance Choir, Church of the Holy Spirit, Southsea, July 11

There is no higher accolade I can give than my Concert of the Year award and having chosen the Renaissance Choir with much of the same programme last year I thought there was little left for me to say this year. On the other hand, the occasion was their 50th anniversary and Peter Gambie's penultimate as conductor and so it ought not to go unremarked.

The choir wasn't exclusively Renaissance for long and in recent years have ventured into the avant-garde with great success considering what an intrepid undertaking that is. Thus Jackson Hill's bewitching A-ki no ko-e followed hard upon the cool, smooth lines of the Graduale from Victoria's Officium Defunctorum. Having thought I wasn't going to write about it, I took no notes, didn't spend all my time searching for 'les mots justes' and was an unusually passive witness almost at a loose end, it felt like.

But everything was of interest, not least the anniversary commission, Ian Schofield's Songs of Hope, setting words by Maggie Sawkins, an ideal illustration of Peter's words in the very useful book provided, The Renaissance Choir: 50 years, about how they,

sing with passion when necessary, with delicacy when appropriate. 

Split between the two halves of the concert, its stand-out passage was Our song is where it starts- fuller and richer as if that was where it had been building towards.

Byrd's Ne Irascaris is a glorious lament and Byrd something of a choir speciality. One is readily wrapped in its textures, and theirs, before I wonder whether one should just luxuriate in those or ponder such academic questions as whether the pattern of notes at 'Jerusalem' is the same as that in,  And then, if it is, whether it constitutes theft or homage. Three questions prompted by one word in a text. Some might say academics think too much at the expense of enjoyment.

But nothing really compares with or prepares one for the sublime Allegri Miserere, with soloist Jenni Halliday. It can't be helped that it can only have its initial thrill on its first hearing but hearing it a second time was a major reason for attendance being essential. Music at its best aspires to this condition of something beyond knowledge and very few things achieve it so compellingly.

The second half regathered itself through more Victoria, some kindly Eric Whitacre and the second half of Songs of Hope before the contemporary Miserere of James MacMillan, bringing the penitence forward into a new austerity of great depth. The standing ovation flickered and was kindled here and there before spreading to become all inclusive, almost certainly with elements of appreciation for the 34 years of Peter Gambie's direction in it.

I'm not one for the herd instinct but am glad to join a good cause. I'm much happier expressing support for the Renaissance Choir than joining those dressed in obbligato football shirts. Nobody else along Albert Road was wearing a Josquin des Prez t-shirt but I contend that he wrote better songs than those Eng-er-lund anthems. I don't mean to be all haughty about it and I expect the incoming musical director has plenty of ideas of her own but I don't see much Josquin listed in the choir's history and a Renaissance Choir that doesn't sing his music would be like the story of 1960's pop music without The Beatles.

Either way, she inherits a choir in tremendous form pulling in sizeable appreciative audiences. It's quite a prize to have won in what must have been a competitive process to see who sets its future direction.  

The Complete Works of Bach

And so there it is, then. Just within the year of having bought the 172 discs, all of them have been played, if not quite every note heard as I left the room for a few minutes. I finished this morning with some most enjoyable flute sonatas with dogged bassoon keeping up the bass line, and then keyboard arrangements of concertos by other composers. I think halfway through the year it was announced that some further fragment attributed to Bach had been discovered but the definite list of the complete works, lost and/or found will forever be beyond us and so one can't worry about that.

Perhaps it's inevitable that there's a feeling of, is that it, then, like there would be if one read all literature, knew all there was to know or witnessed the whole universe. It wasn't infinite after all even if at times it implies eternity. And, in such a reductive, begrudging mood, one might have to say Bach is reduced rather than increased by the idea one has 'heard it all'. Of course, it's not been inwardly digested. I never did get to the end of John Eliot Gardiner's Music in the Castle of Heaven which becomes a survey of the cantatas more than anything else. One lifetime wouldn't be enough to grasp it all so thinking that one has in any way covered Bach would be a silly mistake. 

But perhaps some of the mystery has been taken away. One was familiar with most of the best bits. As with reading 'all of literature', one would find great things one didn't know about but one does know Hamlet, John Donne, Anna Karenina, Dr. Johnson. One would become accustomed to the mannerisms and ways of doing things of anybody and Bach benefits from a sense of impersonality more than most. The more convincingly one can slip the surly bonds of personality, the 'greater' and more eternal one can appear to be, if indeed escaping them is desirable.

So, other composers will now get more of a look in again and I can check back through these postings for BWV numbers noted along the way for things to play again.