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)

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.