There was a time, a long time ago, when I didn't ever read biographies. It might have been part of a purist thing when I thought novels were proper writing. It was probably related to how I didn't write anything apart from poems. But the story of a life can often be how one changes from one thing to another, like Wittgenstein writing the Tractatus and then, later, another book that contradicts it. So now I write poems rarely but have tried, with less or even less success, most genres except libretti or a maintenance manual for the Triumph Herald.
Similarly with biographies. I read more of them than novels these days. Mostly poets, my shelves overflow with them. Any number relating to Shakespeare, 4 Auden, 3 Larkin, 3 Eliot, 3 Donne. I'm not sure there's anything one can generalize from them and sometimes wonder about the biography of an apparently more mundane tradesperson, like the proprietor of a local grocer's shop. Why would that not be more interesting.
The lives of Pushkin and Byron are the high lives of Romantic excess. Those of Larkin, Charlotte Mew and Elizabeth Jennings not quite so much. Poets in previous centuries were mostly men of some privilege until the C20th it became a bit more democratic. Poetry can be a self-indulgent thing. Do those who dedicate themselves to it do so heroically for the sake of their art and do they use it as an excuse to sacrifice consideration for others in the interests of their pre-occupation.
How much suffering is it worth to produce art of some value. Beethoven surely suffered but was rewarded with a body of work that precious few can compare with. But since it was his own suffering, it's mainly up to him. I'm more concerned with those who made others suffer.
We might think of Ted Hughes, Eliot and Hardy whose treatment of the women in their lives was selfish. And now Vernon Scannell.
Finishing Walking Wounded today, these questions arose. He dedicated himself to his art and his manifesto is to be admired but he was one among several names of his period and hardly one of the greatest names of his generation. But the cost it came at was immense. That he couldn't help his drinking and habitual violence is one thing and his own distress as a result of it is what he had to bear. But it's not a pleasant book to read and one tends to think that a life's work of well-made but not colossally brilliant poems does not balance out the way he treated a succession of partners.
I'd never like to say that any mere art work would be worth the real life pain inflicted on others. Poems, and art of any kind, is second-hand, not real and only words on a page - however much they are valued as such- whereas bruises and injuries are first-hand and not imaginary. We must never allow ourselves to become so precious about art that we forget its secondary status.
Scannell was a novelist, too, and this reading sequence continues into an order for Feminine Endings, a late book apprently very thinly based on Arvon Creative Writing course with tutors who may not be but probably are Scannell and Hughes. It sounds very much like an industry insider job but that might not prevent it being any good. It follows on from the TLS review on 'the state of poetry', Rory Waterman's essays and reviews and the Scannell biography, which each suggested the next. In between, and loosely related, begun today, is That Little Thread, the last novel by John Lucas, admirable man. That has begun most readably.
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But, on the subject of 'bodies of work', the end of the Complete Works of Bach is sort of in sight. There's much organ music to go, the big oratorios and miscellaneous discs but the full picture is coming into sight. It's never a chore but one only gets through 172 discs by applying oneself to them dutifully.
After 50+ discs of cantatas one can't help but think that his reputation would have been no less if he had written half as many and the same is passably true of the organ music. I'm naturally suspicious of anybody too prolific but there are some who, having provided so much, you can hardly throw any away and, anyway, it's not the complete Bach because a couple of further pieces have been discovered and accredited to him while I've been listening to them.
And we need not worry too much about 'authenticity'. Some of us - me, at least- have been tuned in to the keyboard music through the piano, not invented in Bach's time so clearly not how he heard them, but the accidental stumbling across transcriptions for four hands by Gyorgy Kurtág. The fact that Cantata 106 is sublime overrides any consideration of how Bach heard his own music and whether it was keyboard music or a cantata in the first place doesn't matter much. All Bach played on the piano is a transcription.
Perhaps the vastness of Bach's output is reduced slightly by realizing that he had his way of doing it. It's not 172 discs of brand new ideas. But if we reduce our assessment a little bit on account of that, it gets multiplied back up again by thinking that if he had only written the solo violin music or only the Cello Suites, or only some of the cantatas or only the keyboard music, as examples, he would be a great composer. One thinks of the Beatles and their reputation, how they gave away songs to Cilla and others, and I have this way of gauging pop artists by how good no. 30 in their Top 30 is. Bach is light years ahead of Lennon-McCartney, individually and collectively, on that score and he's most likely seeing off the whole of the Motown Hit Factory, too.
It was a blessed day I picked up that box in Chichester. Maybe I should have bought the Schubert, too.
