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.

--

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. 

Romsey Abbey

 I got lucky only two nights before the event, finding that Angelina Kopyrina was playing in Romsey Abbey today.  An ideal day out at this sparse time of year. By now it goes without saying that the familiar Bach-Busoni Chaconne and Rach Sonata no. 1 are tremendous, especially played by her but at least until her next new repertoire, I've said all I can think of to say. But I can review Romsey, not to my knowledge having been there before.

There lots to like about it. In the relaxed centre was someone wearing a Gustav Mahler t-shirt. As I went into the Oxfam bookshop, Celebrate Summer by T. Rex was playing. The abbey is relatively modest but provides a spacious concert space in its nave. Following my recent reading of Catherine Nixey's account of how Christianity came to rule so much of the world, I was interested to see John Chrysotom featured in a stained glass window. Perhaps, though, its main claim to fame is the grave of Lord Mountbatten.

There's more to such buildings than grandeur although all the interior is grander than outward appearances seem to promise. Whether it was due to Angelina or not, Romsey rustles up a good-sized audience and, travel being not significantly more onerous than Chichester, I might be monitoring what goes on there in future.  

 Not necessarily a place 'proper to grow wise in' but Larkin doesn't say that such places are. He says 'someone...once heard' it was. It's always a good idea to deflect such thoughts onto somebody else even if one needs to invent an anonymous fictional character to deflect it on to. And I'm not convinced that the likes of Ethelflaeda, the first abbess, in the C10th are good people to be admired without question but they are  exotic and have been dead a long time and that gives them a strange glamour.

The Library Tour

 If it's not quite the Bodleian, I'm quite satisfied with my library. Not for the first time I conducted a short guided tour for a guest the other day. He liked it a lot, the way it takes over the whole house. I wonder how far it is to a bigger collection of poetry books. It could conceivably be only a couple of hundred yards round the corner to where Tony lives, though.

This latest tour was all too brief as I was careful not to want to bore my visitor with arcane collector's items but now I keep seeing things and wishing I'd shown him them.

The great thing for me, living among them, is that my tour is not a matter of being shown things as exhibits but re-reading them. I've not bought a new book for some time because I've not seen anything listed that demands reading so I make use of the stock. There would be no point in keeping them if I didn't do that. If books are great value to read them once they become of infinite value when one can read them, or refer to them, any amount of times from thereon in. How much does it cost to go to a cinema to see a film once? I don't know. It must be twenty years since I've been.

Revisiting Catherine Nixey's The Darkening Age followed on from A.N. Wilson's Jesus in going back over what might be closer to the truth about Christianity after all the upbringing and being surrounded by its culture that is so inculcated in us that we find it hard to dispel. One can suspect Catherine of zealotry as much as I suspect myself in her compilation of evidence against the rise of this vast aberration but it is the idea of 'gentle Jesus meek and mild' that is in the way of taking her point. One only wants to approach her work with the same scepticism that one considers the religion because even if she is preaching, as it were, to the unconverted, I'm not looking to have my prejudices confirmed, only for lesser known evidence in my favour.

John Chrysotom, the savage preacher, and Shenoute, the gaunt ascetic, are two heroes of the book, so crazy in their devotions one might call them 'hell-bent'. Catherine re-diagnoses the extreme devotions of early monks in modern terms as 'depressive' rather than pious. And the story in the end is really about how Christianity replaced Classical culture no less effectively than Greek and Roman culture had come to dominate Europe, systematically wiping out a huge percentage of its writing and art in the process.

--

And so, the next book to catch the eye was D.J. Taylor's 2004 biography of George Orwell.

While the essays might have been unchallenging to do for 'A' level nearly fifty years ago when we could more usefully have done Yeats, he is not quite so easily pinned-down on any political spectrum that is left between left and right. He didn't try very hard at Eton, served hos own interests and possibly could, being there on a scholarship with his parents, who couldn't have anyway, not paying fees. For all that we might have thought of Orwell as leftist but anti-Soviet, he makes for a mix of class distinctions and serious doubts about the limitations of socialism, which we always knew. I just wonder where his sympathies would lie now and I honestly don't know. 

Hereward the Wake

 Hereward the Wake is an unlikely hero of mine, not so much for his rearguard action against the Norman conquest in the area of Ely but for the filthy steam engine we used to see going under Perry Road bridge in the 1960's, pulling the fish train from Grimsby.

But now I identify with him in a more significant way. I, too, stood for as long as I could against the inevitable and had to give in eventually. There have been a few occasions on which

I might have benefitted from having a mobile phone but I liked not having one. Time moves on, though, and eventually one is revealed as being wilfully difficult by not having such a device and however much one reasons that we got by somehow without them in 1971, they have become all but compulsory. So now I have the simplest such thing one can buy and even that has a camera on it.

I had expected a difficult afternoon setting it up, not the 3 easy steps it blithely lists on the wholly inadequate leaflet provided. Whereas such instructions might be easy for those with a certain level of tech savvy, for me it was the equivalent of them being told to simply translate a few basic sentences into Latin. Two hours went by and I was locked into an inescapable circle of getting nowhere so I went by bus and foot to the nearest Tesco Mobile place where the helpful bloke fixed me up with all I need at no great expense.

I'd give you the number here so you could ring me up but I'm not in love with it and don't want to encourage it. Who would have thought that such an admittedly cheap and ingenious little thing would so soon be one of the Bare Necessities. I don't want to be the sort of person for who it is but, once in a while, it seems like I am.

I have admitted defeat with as much good grace as I could summon up. I take more pride in how long I held out, determinedly if not quite as fiercesomely as Hereward. 

Pride isn't it, though. I'm deep into a second reading of Catherine Nixey's The Darkening Age that convinces anybody who wants to be convinced what bad things Christianity did in achieving the status that it in due course did but at least they had pride on their list of deadly sins. It's a similar orthodoxy I've been so unwillingly, if less violently, pressed into. Some of us are not naturally inclined to do what everybody else does.

It's a long time now since Danny Baker said on the wireless that it was him, Frank Skinner and some other celeb that got by without mobile phones. I think they might not have lasted as long as I did. And Prof. Terry Eagleton, the doyen of Marxist Literary Theory, didn't even do e-mail. I was in sympathy with them, whose books I have, whose work I enjoyed. I will still be reading books on the train rather than gazing at this debilitating accoutrement.

It might be a while before it seems to me that texting you is the appropriate way of making contact. I don't mind at all arriving at an age old enough to not want to understand how younger people get by. I'm happy to have understood T. Rex and David Bowie when generations before me didn't.  

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)