Vermeer

No list should ever be regarded as the final answer. A Top 6 compiled today could easily be different by tomorrow and certainly unlikely to be the same in a few years' time. Nominating the Best Books in the House a while back, I should have included Andrew Graham-Dixon's Vermeer ahead of Benjamin Moser's The Upside-Down World. That doesn't mean Moser is taken off the short list but it does mean that Graham-Dixon is closer to being the actual best book in the house. And thus, for me, the Best Book Ever because if I knew of better ones, they would be in the house.

Such books need to be re-read at least once. While there are a lot of books in the world, and a lot of music and paintings, I prefer to stay with known masterpieces than explore unchartered territory in the hope of finding anything else as good because I suspect the odds are against it. Eventually one feels as if one is approaching the limits of the world one is happy to inhabit. Which is not to say that Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and a biography of Wittgenstein aren't lined up for the Autumn.

But Vermeer is nothing short of sensational in constructing not only a life but a comprehensive revelation of what those paintings mean where previously he was thought to be a 'sphinx' whose meanings were undecipherable beneath the quiet, the gorgeous treatment of light and something transcending the ordinary. It belongs right up alongside A.N. Wilson's Jesus and Katherine Duncan-Jones's Ungentle Shakespeare as a brilliant account of a life re-interpreted against some generally accepted versions except Vermeer comes across as much the preferable human being.

All the background detail of the warring history of the Netherlands is relevant where other such books sometimes pile it in to make something book length. The diligent research into contemporary records provides Vermeer with a much more coherent and credible life than Jesus Christ or Shakespeare have ever been provide with. Andrew Graham-Dixon concedes that he is often working with suppositions but I find little reason to doubt his whereas those made by biographers of Jesus and Shakespeare usually come with agendas, and much more dubious guesswork.

After the ongoing wars, mainly with Spain, that marked Vermeer's early years, a peace was arrived at. The famous View of Delft, previously thought to be a town glistening gently after some rain, is thus a celebration of ordinary, peaceful life.

The paintings were often done in pairs but their subsequent separation to galleries across the world helped to disguise the fact. Many of the best paintings of women alone in domestic settings were done for one patron and their themes are subtly religious - liberal, 'free-thinking', non-Calvinist religion - very slowly so that the artist was ever in debt to his patron, his mother-in-law who held contrary religious views and others. But the climax of Graham-Dixon's account is his explanation of the Girl with a Pearl Earring. It represents the moment that Mary Magdalene turned round and recognized the resurrected Jesus which thus puts the viewer in his place.

It could be the best book I've ever read, for several different reasons but that's the main one.

What We Can Know

 Ian McEwan, What We Can Know (Vintage)

It is 2119, it is post-Derangement and post-Inundation; sea levels have risen to make Britain an archipelago with no Thames, no Oxford, its settlements on what had been higher ground, the tops of village churches sticking up out of the water in places; Nigeria is a world power. While there is no racism, there are bandits abroad but people look back on the freedoms, cultural diversity and richness of life a hundred years before as something worth having. The Derangement was how the governments then (which means in our recent decades) knew all about climate change but did nothing about it. The Inundation is the vast migration of people from other countries that has effectively washed away any racist concern about what colour the population are, possibly it is mentioned because the majority are a light brown colour.

While Ian McEwan is a brilliant writer for most of his time, his novels usually seemed flawed in one way or another. Thus I'm on the lookout to find fault because Science Fiction is often wrong even if the 1960's dream of a 'walkie-talkie' has manifested itself in the mobile phone that so many people can't now bear to not look at for more than a few minutes. So, while I'm not surprised that Humanities, Eng Lit and poetry are sidelined to very minor roles in universities, I'm surprised that there are universities at all.

Francis Blundy was the great poet of the period in which he was only rivalled by Seamus Heaney. There was an even more magnificent novelist called Mabel Fisk in a later generation who produced work that puts her on the same level of eminence as Shakespeare. She isn't very important to the story but it is as interesting as it is unlikely that any artist in our fragmented culture will ever be regarded as comparable to Bach, the Beatles, Shakespeare or Rembrandt. Which makes one wonder if McEwan- immensely clever as he is- is not having a little joke with us.

But Blundy wrote a lost masterpiece, A Corona for Vivien, again thought to be impossibly beyond anything writeable in the early C21st. It might not be coincidental that the Vivien Blundy he writes it for has the same name as T.S. Eliot's first wife. After a longer first section of research into that poem, the second goes back to the early C21st where we are told what the poem was really about, by Vivien herself. 

It's not as pretty as the legendary poem is thought to have made it sound. If McEwan was once nicknamed Ian Macabre on account of the horror in his early fiction, he modulated into the more sophisticated distaste of bourgeois sleaze in some later work. Some major poets benefitted, if that's the word, from prolific philandering and Blundy's one of them. Vivien is one of those impressed enough to reciprocate.

It is also a recurring theme in McEwan that we find everything overturned, like in Atonement and Sweet Tooth and so we do here, too. That things are often not what they seem is a fair point. What We Can Know is an involving read, especially of interest to anyone with an interest in contemporary poetry and it's reassuring to see that McEwan has as sound a grasp, as a novelist, of poetry as the recent Sebastian Faulks memoir has. But endings are notoriously hard to do.

Of course we don't get to read the miraculous poem, or any of the work of Mabel Fisk, because that would mean McEwan having to write it. As so often, he is very good but he ultimately fails us. It entirely worked in On Chesil Beach because that was the point. And it remains the point. Beneath the brilliant poem that didn't get left to posterity was something much darker. It's quite possibly a brilliant book. Vivien is surely the opposite of the 'unreliable narrator' unless her account is untrustworthy. Having enjoyed reading it so much, I wish I hadn't been left with the suspicion that Ian McEwan might have performed another of his elaborate tricks. 

Sebastian Faulks, Fires Which Burned Brightly

 Sebastian Faulks, Fires Which Burned Brightly (Penguin)

Sebastian Faulks makes a tremendous job of the memoir that he,

never wanted to write ... because I didn't think my life remarkable. 

 

Compared to whose, I wonder. It's surely well above average in terms of stories, achievement and his capacity to understand it. But, perhaps more than those things, he can write it himself rather than have it written for him like sports people and others usually have to. Always highly readable in his fiction, he is at least as much so in his life.

While it is approximately chronological, at the suggestion of his publisher, it is more thematic with the ten chapters reflecting on school, thirteen years in journalism, booze, France, war, America and family in a variety of combinations. He is aware of the privilege he came into and, in some detail about his education, that it provides no insurance against the misery of private schooling. He 'borrowed' a friend's bike and escaped on one occasion.

He was clearly one of those whose talent was such that he succeeded in school and university without having to work very hard. Without going on any ideological excursions, it is apparent that his sympathies are properly placed, understanding where the world has gone so wrong and with an appreciation of wine, books, music and cricket. In his case it was Procul Harum that were in the right place at an impressionable age for him. It is to the eternal credit of the teenage Sebastian that it mattered to him whether the greatest pop record of all time was Be My Baby by The Ronettes or Then He Kissed Me by The Crystals. The passing references to an enthusiasm for golf are less excusable.

Insights into the writer's life are provided in the depth of research involved in producing the novels, not only about the wars that shaped the world in the twentieth century but also the development of psychiatry that may or may not have been related to them in understanding how humanity functions, or fails to. And also, a promotional tour of America that sounds genuinely horrific. If one thinks that producing full-length novels looks like hard work then selling them afterwards sounds worse.

Faulks is naturally funny. when suitable opportunities arise, and the count of 'laugh out loud' moments was impressive. Several, by no means on every page, but thus similar to Terry Eagleton's The Gatekeeper, similarly thematically organized and possibly done more in the spirit of a stand-up comedian but, as a writer's account of their own life, I can't compare it with anything that I enjoyed more. 

His interests extend well into poetry as I realized some years ago when he attended a session on Thom Gunn, who is mentioned in passing, at the Cheltenham Literature Festival almost inevitably being made aware on his way in how much a reader admired his work. What must it be like being Paul McCartney if a novelist can't go out in public without being harrassed in the same way that I'd bothered Clive Wilmer outside half an hour earlier.

Things come easily to a class act. None of his books are my biggest favourites but I have plenty of them. His memoir is as good as any of them, for some reason still not threatening any all-time list but tremendously enjoyable. It is almost comparable to the music of, say, Fleetwood Mac which is often hard to fault but somehow 'middlebrow' and thus not quite eligible for top honours. But they and he did well out of what they chose to do and are unlikely to worry that they are not quite James Joyce or the Velvet Underground in my book.

What's in a Name?

 Susan Dwyer Amussen, What's in a Name? (Manchester University Press)

No historian thinks that Shakespeare didn't write his own plays. The main reason, in Susan Dwyer Amussen's account is that several of his contemporaries thought he did and none doubted it and it took 150 years for anybody to think otherwise. In a book subtitled How historians know Shakespeare was Shakespeare one might expect a bit more than an argument that is set out in one or two pages but the rest of the text is socio-economic, theatrical and local history that is at best only very loosely required to establish that the Stratford man wrote the plays and poems attributed to him. Or most of them. Not many by now dispute that there was collaboration with other writers involved.

It is interesting material and most books on Shakespeare's life necessarily include some context and background. It's not clear that knowledge of the apprentices rioting in London, for example, help us to establish that Shakespeare rather than Oxford, Bacon or Marlowe was the author of the oeuvre that bears his name. What the accumulated detail does do, more thoroughly than might be required, is show that Shakespeare, with his grammar school education, would have been perfectly capable of producing the work he did without going to university. There were others like him who, had they possessed the requisite talent, might have become similarly memorable. What is so often left out of the debate is the possibility of innate genius.

Susan writes carefully at times, like when only noting that the twins were born to Anne, but can be reduced to banality when reporting such things about London as,

Courtship, sex and marriage were critical parts of the life of the city. 

Not being a biography, the book isn't expected to cover the life in a coherent sweep but its progress surveys its trajectory, understandably concentrating more on the theatre than personal relationships. The recent claims about Anne living in London, based on a letter addressed to 'Good Mrs Shakespaire' are treated without prejudice as being possible without proving anything for certain but she brings the possible date for that forward to as early as 1598-9 and she imagines Shakespeare travelling between London and Stratford more regularly than I do. The purchase of the Blackfriars gatehouse so close upon his retirement from the theatre suggests he intended to retain business interests in London even if he did spend more time in Stratford. While all such possibilities can be considered, it's easy to get lost under a welter of such speculation when we simply don't know and probably never will.

No such biography, though, affects the authorship question. The reasons for thinking that Shakespeare wrote a vast portion of the work that is credited to him are simply stated. It is the far-fetched cases for other candidates put forward by those who think he didn't that are much more convincing that he did. Somebody wrote it all and there isn't a credible case to be made for anybody else. It is a much more unlikely story that such ideas ever gained the credence that they have- with such eminent adherents as Mark Rylance among them- but, as is credited to H.L. Mencken, the idea that one never went broke by underestimating the public is relevant once again.

Susan Dwyer Amussen has provided a well-researched, readable and possibly useful book on Early Modern England but its contribution to the Shakespeare Authorship question, while welcome, could have been presented in an essay. I'm not even sure how much of a question is left. I bought and read the book because it seemed to promise what might be some closure on the subject. Who is the gullible one now?  

 

PHAS Art Exhibition

 I'm glad I remembered to check up in time when the annual exhibition by the Portsmouth and Hampshire Art Society was. It was today, taking up the nave of Portsmouth Cathedral, and for the rest of the week.

Of course, as in a poetry magazine, there is plenty of work that is 'not one's kind of thing'. Most things aren't. But one reads, or attends, because there is likely to be something worth knowing about that one wouldn't have otherwise.

My first walk round made the work of Ric Robinson appear the stand outs. Three similar compositions to The Earth Dies Screaming , featured here.

That's a bit dramatic whereas another taking its title from another old pop record, Cruel Summer, might have been more muted until one realizes one doesn't want to be reminded of our 'new normal', parched summers. My favourite of what may or may not have been intended as a triptych was the other one, mostly in a blue that was nearly black and shades of black, something about not knowing about entering into the abyss. Not, as far as I know, taking its title from a piece of music but it might.

These were on sale for £600 and change. I take some convincing, especially when there was a much smaller item, something about eternal light disappearing, that was more affordable. I will have to go back and have another look.

But, nothing ventured, nothing gained. It was obvious who was Louise Griffiths-Kimber whose Preseli Hills was easily the most engaging canvas two years ago. She was kind enough to show me around her exhibits which included the Lord Mayor's Prize winner. Proper art people know their stuff. One of her pictures was of Whitby Abbey. I somehow had a feeling her favourite band would be The Cure.

 

You might go in search of art but, time and again, you return with pop music.
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Do I want this painting, for the price I think was being asked- title not properly remembered, the name of the artist so easily forgotten- I think I probably do. Partly for the colours but also for the way it's not quite abstract but only vaguely figurative. And it is gorgeously small and intelligent like the wonderful dog that was on the no. 21 bus on the way home. I'm not in a position to look after a dog but I can just about find space for one more painting.

 

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 There's been some discussion about abandoning books on the wireless in the last few days. As usual, I'd like to contribute.

The Ambassadors by Henry James was a recent abandonment for me after he had flattered with his shorter novels only to deceive as I ploughed on through some longer ones. Before that, The Letters of Basil Bunting were overtaken by more pressing concerns.

My first attempt at Proust, forty years ago, got as far as finishing vol. 1 of 3 but I returned to it in lockdown and rated it very highly indeed. Also, I went back to Human Traces by Sebastian Faulks with some success. The first book I gave up on, I think, was My Childhood by Maxim Gorky at school. I didn't pursue Bleak House at university but struggled through it thirty-odd years later. I have Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time and Captain Corelli's Mandolin in common with many others as being unfinished. There is no virtue in reading things dutifully and without pleasure or understanding if you don't have to.

I don't know if I've wondered it here but I've often wondered what percentage of words ever printed are ever read. I buy The Times on Saturday and I'm sure I don't read anything like 5% of it although I read some of the crossword clues any number of times.

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The Upside-Down World is still a great book as I re-read The Best Books in the House but I suspect it's not as good as Andrew Graham-Dixon's Vermeer and so that short list might be due some amendment. Benjamin Moser features a bit more in his own book than one ideally wants and his ordering of chapters front loads his account of C17th Dutch Art with Rembrandt, Vermeer, Carel Fabritius and Pieter de Hooch so that it loses some impetus, certainly with Frans Hals for who he makes a strong case but his group portraits of society men aren't anything I'd want on a wall of mine. There are, nonetheless, some very worthwhile observations on both the painters in question and art in general.

Even Vermeer might have to wait, though, because an order is due at the weekend- What's in a Name? putting together the reasons for allowing Shakespeare his own plays, the latest McEwan and the Sebastian Faulks memoir rather than the new novel. First up, I will be back on the Shakespeare trail. Dismissing the claims of Marlowe, Bacon, Oxford and the increasingly absurd list of challengers to the authorship- which is none of their faults- isn't difficult work. The hard part is ridiculing those making claims on their behalf enough to shame them into shutting up about it.

The reason for spending more than £35 on new books was to save a couple of quid postage on a battery.

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Equally absurd episodes in my recent day-to-day life have included referring to the manual to put this replacement computer together, not making much sense of it and eventually realizing it was the manual for the boiler. I'm increasingly beset by such problems when only trying to function at a basic level and get by. Perhaps I just need to concentrate harder on practicalities and not spend my time wondering if the Archduke Trio quite brings time to a standstill in the same way that the Shostakovich Viola Sonata the Schubert Quintet do.

 

But perhaps it's not all over yet. Tesco Mobile took not much interest in advising how I should download photos from the new, very basic, mobile phone to the computer. So I came home and found out for myself, following their advice to 'keep trying'. And thus now I can show you the action from the Copnor Road last Friday when I witnessed a car on fire in the morning and saw the burnt out remains in the afternoon. 

And I've been able to send a poet a picture of her poem featured on a no. 2 bus. 

679 Songs

 Playing DGBooks Radio on Spotify, as I sometimes do, it says it is now 679 songs and thus, as it has been for a long time 'over 24 hours'.

It's no rubbish. All carefully considered. I never seem to find it necessary to delete a title. Radio stations can be fairly 'niche' these days, making sure you will hear, say, Dire Straits at least three times a day and two of them will be Sultans of Swing. That failed attempt at 'cool' isn't on DGBooks Radio.

So, 679 x 3 and a half minutes, according to the calculator on the computer, makes 2376 and a half minutes. Divide that by 60 and  it makes 39.6 hours of the best possible, choice pop music. No Queen guaranteed. Tune in.

It will be sometime before it becomes my official Top 1000 but 679 tracks, none of which I see fit to delete means I'm two-thirds of the way there. I'll give it some thought. At first, thinking of it as a radio playlist, I tried not to overload it with favourite artists but if it's shifting towards a Top 1000, it will be necessary to look further into Bowie, T. Rex, Motown, the Magnetic Fields, Al Green, reggae and Northern Soul. Once one has had a thousand guesses there will not be room to say, oh, that one should have been in. There will be no prize for being no. 1001.

Is the fifteenth best track by Bowie better than the best thing Queen ever did without his help.

Yes, it is.