Jeffrey Turner

 Jeff Turner had been gathering together those poems of his I don't already have with a view to an essay surveying his work. We were due to meet soon but now won't be doing after his death on Saturday, after a short period of incapacity.

We were employed by the same civil service department in the 1990's and he turned out for the cricket team a number of times into his late 50's. 

He wasn't one to advertize his talents unduly. On one occasion, about some business in the office where he worked, I noticed a booklet on top of an open briefcase and, being inquisitive beyond my remit, found it to be a catalogue of rare and antiquarian books. Asking whose it was, Jeff owned up and said it was from Peter Scupham, a friend of his and a poet of some reputation. It transpired that Jeff attended weekends at Scupham's historic family pile in East Anglia with Anne Stevenson, Anthony Thwaite and more.

It wasn't until some years later that our conversations about poetry developed much further on walks. I gave him copies of my booklets as they appeared and he gave me his. Most memorably, asking him to sign one in the pub after a walk, he produced the box that contained his italic pen, assembled it and in due course proceeded to add his idiosyncratic signature.

He didn't do anything in haste but did everything he did thoughtfully, not least his poems. Whereas our poems were more or less from a similar area of the poetry map, mine are often written in short order once they are ready to be written but one couldn't imagine Jeff's coming without a more careful process.

They are characteristically deep meditations, often on nature or the place of humanity in it. I asked if he felt Edward Thomas was any sort of model for him but he thought not,

I've never consciously styled myself on Thomas. I think it's a matter of vaguely similar outlook and temperament. I'd like to write like Auden but that wouldn't be honest. Bishop, Wilbur and certain poems by Rimbaud have a style which I like to refer to when in doubt.  

Elizabeth Bishop I can see now, as in her Sandpiper perhaps. And that, like her, his published output amounts to relatively few poems which suggests that both either only wrote poems when something significant enough presented itself or that their quality control didn't allow through poems that they weren't entirely happy with.

Jeff published two booklets, The Angled Boat and The Other Parish, and there are a number of limited edition poems produced by the Chestnut Press, and Gruffyground, at their invitation, on handmade paper. I will hope to compile a bibliography and see if the essay his work deserves is possible but it might be limited to an appreciation more than anything definitive. 

I know that he was placed in the National Poetry Competition more than once. On one occasion,

'The Gecko' was an entry in the Arvon competiton when Paterson won it. It didn't earn a prize, only a commended which didn't worry me too much as Michael Donaghy got the same and he wasn't upset at all. 

There was also an appearance on Radio 3 alongside James Michie and an accompanying 'short-lived' magazine called 3.  

He had been 'chuffed' when I asked if he might be part of a reading I was looking into proposing to next year's Portsmouth BookFest. He need not have been concerned that he would 'lower the standard', his modest dignity would have enhanced the event. His last e-mail from a few weeks ago ends with a promise to write at more length 'tomorrow'.

At an early stage of making some notes on The Angled Boat, I wondered whether it would be appropriate to make some lateral comparison of Jeff's poems with those of John Donne. Any similarity is not immediately obvious but it could be that Donne's 'metaphysical' way, where his entreaties to girlfriends or meditations are a vehicle for his showy ingenuity, is not unlike Jeff's contemplation of tiny detail being a way into exercising his lines into quiet, sometimes extraordinary, performances. In Moss, for example, it takes him beyond,

This solanum, winter cherry, is dead.

But I keep it for the moss

that brims the pot and for the six 

muted orange fruits that hang like moons

above an unattempted planet.

 

in a way that is like Blake seeing a world in a grain of sand.  

 

I never came away from any discussion of poetry with Jeff feeling anything but the wiser for it. He was the 'less deceived', once saying that 90% of poems aren't much good; that Eliot's attitude in his critical essays was that, 'this is all a bit too hard for you', and that an obituary of Thom Gunn I did for another website was good 'in parts'. But the value of his discriminating approach was that one was allowed to feel that if and when he said kind things about your work he probably wasn't just being polite. Although he was always that, too.   

Emilija Karaliūtė at Lunchtime Live !

 Emilija Karaliūtė, Portsmouth Cathedral, Sept 24

One might imagine that one has heard of most musical instruments but, as with most things, I reckon there's always more one doesn't know about than one does. Thanks to Emilija Karaliūtė, those who were in Portsmouth Cathedral today can at least transfer the kanklės from the first category into the second. It is a Lithuanian flat-bed harp, related to the zither or perhaps more distantly to the dulcimer or Indian santoor. If Frank Muir defines it as such on Call My Bluff, you will know to pick him. More important than that, though, or whether what Emilija plays on it is folk or classical music, is that it is gorgeous.

One becomes absorbed in the instrument to the extent that the differences between folk pieces, Debussy and Handel that might be apparent on the piano are less noticeable. 

The stillness and mystery of The Forest Idyll by Alfonsos Mikulskis quickened into something sparkling and then another composer new to most of us, I dare say, Juozas Naujalis and his Dear Lithuania was melodic. The 'classical' part of the programme was segued into by way of the delicacy and shimmering of a Prelude by Jonas Švedas before a sumptuous On Wings of Song by Mendelssohn. It's not only a matter of two hands playing different parts, as with the pedals on a piano or harp, the strings were adjusted by hand, presumably to mute or sustain the notes.

Strictly speaking, the Passacaglia, HWV 486, might have been identifiable as Handel with its walking left hand lower line under the decorative right while The Girl with the Flaxen Hair was reflective. But then the usually reliable stock of adjectives failed me in the finale, Land by Takatsugu Muramatsu. Not beyond words but maybe more abstract and modern - the composer being born in 1978 - than evocative of anything specific if not the pure sound of the kanklės itself.

Emilija was a tremendous find for the Lunchtime Live series, deeply appreciated by a gathering, many of who, like me, must have been very glad to have taken a chance on music that could have been anything for all we knew. A rarity and a special, luminous thing. And now we do know and are grateful for the privilege of having heard it and all about it.

Not Going Out

Absolutely brilliant, going into its 15th series, second only to The Last of the Summer Wine for longevity but light years ahead of it for remaining any good.

It might provide some insight into a more recent 'generation gap' than any I was aware of in the 1970's but Lee Mack's reference point is Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, not Hunky Dory or Bolan Boogie, so whereas he is confounded by the values of a generation that supplanted his, I'm not sure which side I'm on. I thought I was meant to sympathize with him, satirizing himself as he so gallantly does, but I don't know. The moment when one anticipated it would suddenly all go quiet and he could be heard accusing them all of being 'snowflakes' was one of several genuine lol moments, so unusually being seen and heard fresh and new and not as part of an addiction to Fawlty Towers, Dad's Army, The Office, Blackadder, The Royle Family, Early Doors or Only Fools and Horses.

It is sensational work that Lee Mack is continuing to do. He should be offered something on a forthcoming honours list so that he can decline it. It's just what he does, or one of the things - the best of them- and such things, when they are good enough, are their own reward.

 

Recent Acquisition - Lonely Infinite Distance

The annual Portsmouth & Hampshire Art Society exhibition in the cathedral was a few weeks ago now. Long enough, you might think, to assess my latest purchase.

I needed no time at all to like it a lot on the Sunday. I was only glad it was still inexplicably not sold when I went back on Bank Holiday Monday to buy it. When I say 'assess', I mean 'wonder what it's about'. It is ostensibly a smear of yellow in the top left corner of some dark blue.

It is Lonely Infinite Distance by Anthony Mayle, Acrylic, 29 x 29 cm. I don't know if it benefits from its title or if we are being nudged towards a meaning that we might find for ourselves, among however many others, but perhaps it helps.

Three weeks on, I'm more inclined towards a midnight winter moon than any time before sunrise when surely the sky would be a paler blue. The light is coming from behind what might be a ruined building, tentatively suggested but possibly cloud, too. But one attempts any definitive interpretation at one's peril, as one does with Hamlet, late Beethoven or Shostakovich, or Vermeer until Andrew Graham-Dixon recently spoiled all that by apparently explaining it all away.

The Moon doesn't cast yellow light and the foreground wouldn't be that shade of blue, if it ever is and so we are not invited to take it literally. 

There is immense subtlety in it that is entirely ruined by electric light, photography or even being looked at from any distance. There are tiny specks of white to be found in it alongside the detail of the brushwork and minute changes of shading when looked at up close. The colours can be enjoyed for themselves in a palette that at first might appear limited but infer the infinite in its fine nuances of shade. The distance to the source of its light is caught by the perspective that puts it well beyond that which it may or may not be emerging from behind. The loneliness might come from that sense of distance. I simply don't know if it would be better off without its evocative title.

I've been entirely happy with my two purchases from previous such exhibitions but this was the least expensive, never mind inflation, and while being the smallest, I'm not sure that paintings are priced up by measurement like Tony Hancock seems to think in The Rebel. But this is surely better, not for any potential mystical quality but for being less figurative, but not abstract either. Mainly, though, because it is gorgeous to look at and, like the music that is best to listen to and the literature that is best to read, it doesn't have to mean anything that could be set out in an essay.   

The Housekeeper

Rose Tremain, The Housekeeper (Chatto & Windus)

There's a sketch in A Bit of Fry & Laurie in which two critics try to outbid each other in how many 'levels' they found in a work under discussion. They could have found plenty in The Housekeeper. It is a novel about a fictional affair Daphne du Maurier didn't have that resulted in her writing Rebecca, which in turn reverses the original story to make the famous book.

The housekeeper is Danni, a Polish Jew, who tells the story not too unreliably of her affair with the writer who spends a summer at Manderville Hall and the echoes of Mrs. Danvers and Manderley are already in place. In its first half, their clandestine love is a paradise of release from their respective roles as highly dependable domestic and unhappily married, successful upper class author but events at a renewal of the Big Bash party that had been a highlight of society life when the Lady of the house had been alive begin a devastating unravelling of their dangerous liaison.

In some ways the Mrs. Danvers character is Miss Adelaide, the daughter due to inherit the hall, who understands none of its tradition and whose selfishness is as sinister and cruel as anything in du Maurier's work. It is at the Big Bash that she inadvertently comes in on Danni and Daphne and stumbles on their secret. But her privileged meanness of spirit is outdone by the way that Daphne drops Danni and reverts to her marriage for the sake of her public reputation. In a book full of convincing writing, the passages in which what had appeared to be sublime love and the satisfying of a desperate need turn into such bleak rejection make one wonder at the human capacity for enthralment.

Danni is telling her story in instalments from her subsequent work as an expert seamstress so it is fitting how many thematic threads are woven into Rose Tremain's work, representing yet another level by which any critic would have to be impressed. One wonders at the daring and ingenuity that make the model for Mrs. Danvers not Danni but Daphne du Maurier herself.

It seems I got lucky, deciding that this was a new novel worth reading when I read so few. It's not very likely I'll read any others this year but I don't rate my chances of finding a better one if I read a cartload. I will have to see what else looks promising in the Tremain back catalogue, never mind seeing what I might have missed in the du Maurier. The Housekeeper compares with anything from the last couple of decades- Mothering Sunday, The Sense of an Ending, The Goldfinch. I don't know if there are still suggestions about that the novel as an art form is finished but it quite clearly isn't.

Middlemarch and other stories

I was rewarded for my diligent scanning of the TV schedules when finding the 1994 dramatisation of Middlemarch by Andrew Davies on Wednesday night and the next two. It is a masterpiece of the genre.

I 'read' it as part of Victorian Lit at university but much of it passed me by, aged 19, it being far too mature a book for someone so jejune. Re-reading it several years ago led me into a year of George Eliot and I appreciated it a bit more but still this easy-access serving of it 'on a plate' is very much worth having. I realize it is not, as someone told me last year, 'just a soap opera' but one of the most complete novels in the language although I'll never have been adequately prepared to talk about it with our tutor, Prof. David Carroll, whose major achievement was editing the variorum edition.  

My sympathies are first with the gentle scholar, Edward Casaubon, and for a bit longer than they should be when he is revealed as a moody obsessive whose work is an escape from life designed not to have an ending. Dorothea is compromised between her frustrated devotion to him and the more dangerous glamour of Ladislaw. Her sister, Celia, is characterised in the succinct line that he is 'fonder of geraniums', in which the lack of ambition is a safeguard against hope, ambition and disappointment.

Juliet Aubrey is surely a bit too good-looking to be Dorothea, who must in some part be the scholarly Mary Ann Evans, but needs must in a TV drama and actors need to be much sexier than the characters they are playing or else there's a danger we won't sympathize with them enough. 

 

I remember Prof. Carroll telling us how he realized that Middlemarch would be his life's work and it must be great to have such a project. At Lancaster, a bit of a low grade backwater in the university system in the late 1970's, one could hardly blame the academic staff for using the opportunity to pursue careers beyond the teaching of students who hadn't been accepted by anywhere more prestigious. Richard Dutton worked on Ben Jonson, Norman Sherry on Graham Greene and Bill Murray talked about whatever he felt like which was often himself. 

I like the idea of having such a specialist area but there is too much of everything to spend too much time on one thing. Three books arrived this week that immediately go ahead of the two remaining Henry James books left over from that over-ordering. It turned out to be easy to decide in what order to read them.

The Anatomy of Melancholy can be looked at from time to time, in extracts, maybe by the bedside, and is too daunting to read from beginning to end. Considered by some 'the best book ever written', one needs to know about it in the knowledge that one is never going to know all about it. 

A biography is sometimes a better way into a writer than reading their books and Wittgenstein is likely to be a paragon example of that. So, potentially heavy going as it may be, it was obvious that The Housekeeper by Rose Tremain was the one to pick up first. 

A good decision. It will be good to have a review of a brand new novel on here shortly and then, quite likely, look through the back catalogue of Rose Tremain to find what I'd been missing.

The Idler no. 44, 17 Feb 1759

Continuing with the Best Books in the House, I took the Selected Essays of Dr. Samuel Johnson with me to help recent train journeys pass. Those pieces are ideal for such purposes. He is never less than good company but sometimes one looks, looks again and wonders when his jobbing journalism becomes something like a poem one wants to learn word perfectly.  

The Idler no. 44, 17 Feb 1759, on memory, is such a thing. 

Its paragraph in which,

From the vexation of pupillage men commonly set themselves free about the middle of life, by shutting up the avenues of intelligence, and resolving to rest in their present state,

resonated almost like no other passage I've ever read.

First of all it sounded very loosely like my idea that poets- some of them- reach 'maturity' at 30 but either start to repeat themselves or pack it in at 60. It is such a baggy theory as to be meaningless but, having thought it once, I still credit it with the merest shred of validity.

More than that, though, it sounds like the age at which pop music stopped for me and I shut up the avenues of intelligence and resolved to rest in my present state. I due course, the same has applied to new poetry. There must be pop music and poems worth having by young people out there somewhere but I'm not sure I could find it for looking. The books and records I have already, DGBooks Radio on Spotify and the anthology I have in my head are plenty enough for me.

Dr. Johnson's brilliant discursion on the role of memory leads him to perhaps favour the art of Forgetfulness and I entirely appreciate his reasons for doing so when he means leaving behind those things in the past that come with associations one might not want to remember. Except that by now I prefer the past to the future and with age there can come more forgetfulness than one might have wished for.

But, yes, like an old raincoat, Dr. Johnson won't ever let you down. He entirely belongs among the Best Books in the House but I won't give up entirely on books I've not read before because, like when Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were discovered, it was thought there might yet be a bit more out there.

So, Rose Tremain's new novel about Daphne du Maurier, a biography of Wittgenstein and Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy should arrive on Thursday. To the tune of Dana's Cold, Cold Christmas - it's gonna be a highbrow Autumn with those books, dreaming of all those I could have re-read instead.