During the Late and Long Continuing Cold

During the Late and Long Continuing Cold, An Eightieth-Birthday tribute to Peter Didsbury, edited by Sean O'Brien and David Wheatley (Broken Sleep Books).

 Happy Birthday, Peter Didsbury. An expanded edition of his Scenes from a Long Sleep is published today and this festschrift, edited by Sean O'Brien and David Wheatley, is available for pre-order at Broken Sleep ahead of its imminent release date. It features poems by an impressively gathered cast of the great and good with such as Don Paterson, Ian Duhig, Carol Rumens, Rory Waterman, plenty more than that and some good wishes from Douglas Dunn. And me, actually. It's a bit like a non-league player finding themselves in the England squad for a friendly match. 

Peter Didsbury has long been a central figure in the story of how Hull became an unlikely-sounding epicentre of British poetry in recent decades, post-Larkin, post-Stevie Smith and a long time post-Andrew Marvell. If Larkin's provincial hideout in its university library began something there and attracted Andrew Motion, it is perhaps more properly Douglas Dunn who might be regarded as the godfather of its mafiosi although 'movement' might be a gentler term for what could be regarded as a more coherent grouping than The Movement ever was. 

It would surely be improper to submit the sort of poem one might place in the middle of a book to thicken it up, or for the editors to include such things, in a tribute to a respected writer and that hasn't happened. I must look further than I previously have into the work of Carol Rumens on the evidence of The Sense of Vision. If Paterson's Hedgehog appears to begin like Aesop, it becomes more like Einstein. If, as I sometimes suspect, we are not living in a Golden Age of British Poetry then the ongoing parade of talent now assembled here is evidence that it's not so bad after all. And there's little for poetry to fear from AI when O'Brien puts in a signature performance in The Lost Language of Trains that only he could have.

Didsbury is inimitable and I don't think anybody has dared to try. It would have been unwise. What has resulted is a profound tribute to one who has always done it his own way from a litany of admirers doing it theirs.   

 

Desert Island Books

 For a long time now I've had in mind a feature for here called The Best Book in the House. It would have been one of those 'World Cup' sort of games in which titles would qualify for the later stages from groups like Poetry, Fiction, Biography, Music, Sport, Painting, Philosophy and even Science.

There might, very approximately, be 2000 books in the house. That's not loads but, along with the CD's, space for them is becoming an issue but I like them and rarely part with any of them. But it is assumed I have all the best books I want because if I knew about any others, I'd buy them. Signed editions by Larkin, Auden, Eliot, Rosemary Tonks and Elizabeth Bishop being beyond sensible at the prices they are.

So, to cut the game short, I stood in front of the shelves one at a time and noted down likely contenders. It's a brutal way of doing it but I can't sit down and re-read them all like a Booker Prize judge. It's a competitive game and if something isn't conspicuous enough then it probably isn't a potential winner.

What came of that was a list of 20 that didn't even have Elizabeth Bishop on it. That's how cruel the process was. But the answer hasn't been arrived at yet and there is still time for decisions and revisions that a minute will reverse. In fact, there might not be an answer as such. The closest I might get is a list of Desert Island Books. From the 20, I've put stars against 7 and been left in that awful position of having too many to fit into the standard 8 so the list could well be extended to 10. I lined up the 7 that seemed to have become the essential elements. But I'm not sure.

Not on the team photo are Proust, Camus, Hardy, Hamlet, Rosemary and the copy of Touch signed by Thom Gunn in Cambridge in 1979 because it is the artefact and its significance that matters, too. As yet there are no music books but music is at its best as music and I don't listen to books, I read them, so we will see about that.

But the 7, here lined up in all their glory, are at least among the best books I've ever read.

Dubliners didn't take much thinking about. Of all prose fiction, the outrageously both most artful and most natural. Not just The Dead but the way the other stories expand towards it. James Joyce would have been as much of a hero if that was all he had written. Possibly even more so given my preference for not over-producing.

Religion doesn't feature much in my life. One has to respect that of others while finding it absurd. Jesus Christ had more impact on the world than anybody since, though, and the CofE Conservative, A.N. Wilson, is the ultimate scholar in explaining who he was, in Jesus.

Another life I've taken some interest in is Shakespeare's and it makes one wonder quite high-powered married life can be when Andrew and Katherine Duncan-Jones were husband and wife for many years. Her Ungentle Shakespeare is readily the choice on Shakespeare biography in a wide but often dubious field.

Naturally, the Collected Larkin, I don't mind which. Poetry made sensible, perhaps more than it ever had been before, and the better for it.

Dr. Johnson's Selected Essays. Why. To tell you that, sir, would be no more necessary than to tell you why you breathe. It brings life to you and sustains it.

Not Donne's poems, spectacular though they are but a choice of books about him and them in which John Carey and others are deeply impressive but I enjoyed John Stubbs the most, as I remember.

That's a similar sort of tight choice as when there can't be room for more than one book about C17th Dutch painting but one is overrun with options. So, it isn't Andrew Graham-Dixon's Vermeer or Laura Cumming's Thunderclap. It's not the Vermeer because there's more to it than that and it's not quite Laura because, like Benjamin Moser, she brings herself, and her father into the story. I was enchanted by all three books, almost as much as by the art they take as their premise but Benjamin nicked it by making me wish I lived in Utrecht and so The Upside-Down World it is.

 

It might be best to leave it at this 7 that have seemingly selected themselves rather than not be able to decide on one more and so extend it to 10, then why not 20, 50 or 100. The carnage of any selection process is horrific. What I'd like as the next choice, as ever, is a remedy for the compulsion to want to make lists.

Grand National Preview with Racetrack Wiseguy

 It's too soon to say that the Grand National is getting easier but Willie Mullins is making it look so, even if he thus makes it harder for everyone else. He had five of the first seven last year, including the first three and could have as many as eight runners this year. The money has been for I Am Maximus, the 2024 winner and close second last time and those first two can't be left out again while they are obviously kept specially with this date in mind.

It looks like we are in another period of hardy perennials like we used to have with Red Rum, L'Escargot, Corbiere and Tiger Roll turning up time and again with solid credentials. Taking last year's race as a form guide, Nick Rockett and Grangeclare West are given a couple of pounds extra which makes it too close to call and by now none of them can be regarded as handicap good things.

I was in a betting shop not long after West Tip won in 1986 and some geezer was saying how his mate had made it a handicap certainty whereas his interlocutor said he had thought something else had been. Red Rum and Tiger Roll maybe but with 40 runners over more challenging fences in those days where anything can happen, such 'handicap certainties' are only such after the event. 

But it's not easy to look further down the weights to find much with which to take on this politburo of proven heavyweights. I'm happy to put lines through Banbridge, Gerri Colombe and Haiti Couleurs who have all had their moments but don't look to me like having another one here. Spillane's Tower, maybe; Iroko might be thereabouts; Panic Attack wouldn't come as a shock but, even given that it hasn't been quite the all-conquering season for Mullins and his recent strike rate is below par, you'd think he's ready again for this and so one surely has a sensible chance in what used to be regarded as such a hard race to pick. Not for me, it wasn't, though. Horses that I'd seen stay and jump once kept up a steady percentage of successes.

However, while not being able to keep Maximus out of the first four, I can't get away from Jagwar, receiving a stone from the big guns, after the way he finished at Cheltenham over the shorter trip having had to come from too far back. That looks ideal as an indicator since there is clearly still something in his handicap mark with a further win surely waiting to happen.

And since the weight difference between him and Johnnywho, who beat him half a length there, remains the same, the story suddenly writes itself. It could be all yellow and green and an index to the various different caps used to subtly mark out the JP McManus horses from each other and 1-2-3-4 for the likeable owner of an empire of horseflesh.

So,

1. Jagwar

2. I Am Maximus

3. Spillane's Tower

4. Johnnywho     

 

Update. With Spillane's Tower now running on Thursday, make that 3. Johnnywho, 4. Iroko.

Marco Polo on Kubilai Khan

In Marco Polo's Travels, I went straight to the bit about Genghiz Khan but soon found much more follwing that on Kublai Khan, as per the Coleridge poem we learnt at school. It's a remarkable and gripping account. 

As with most history, power is glorified and Marco might not be an objective witness even if he is in some ways reliable. At school the teaching seemed to assume that the likes of Julius Caesar, monarchs, God and their like were to be admired. In the 70's there was still much more residual belief that Britain ruled the waves and that rulers were the great and good like we were. On closer inspection, and in hindsight, it now looks like we too readily accepted the publicity of tyrants and turned blind eyes to their methods.

Marco's in-depth account of Kublai's reign is a tremendous, sustained, overawed account of its immense grandeur. It lacks irony, passes over the methods by which it ruled as if, and because, they were commonplace and to be expected. But now we can see Marco's report as a precursor of President's Trump's chronically ongoing reports on himself, how nobody has ever seen anything like it, it's the most successful presidency ever in the most powerful country ever and all the statistics that can be used to measure it are off the scale. 'Measureless to man', indeed.

Except there is one episode recording an uprising despite the highly organized discipline with which the empire was held in place. The place has maintained the tradition. I hadn't realized that where Kublai ruled from is much where Beijing is now.

But the people eventually had seen enough of how Ahmad, a governor with great influence over Kublai, managed things much more for his own benefit than even any others in such positions did. Having revolted and Ahmad having been assassinated, Kublai turned up to investigate and found out about the 'abominable outrages committed' and, as we might expect, 

caused all the treasure that Ahmad had amassed in the Old City to be brought into the New City; and put it with his own treasure; and it was found to be beyond all reckoning.

But don't all 'great' rulers, or many of them, find the same thing. Piers Gaveston for Edward II, the Duke of Buckingham under James and Charles I, Peter Mandelson, Dominic Cummings, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

Surely history is cyclic and doesn't make linear progress.

I'll either go back and start at the beginning with Marco or find another sensational bit but I'm sure he'd be glad to know that, 800 years after writing up what he found on his long holiday excursion, it is still providing enthralling entertainment. 

Take Four Books - Romanticism

Radio 4 has a programme called Take Four Books. In it, an author talks about one of their books and then three others that were 'influences' on it. I can't help wanting to have a go at any questionnaire, desert island or suchlike and so, realizing that my level of celebrity is well below that required to get an invitation, do it anyway, here.

I can't think that my trio of such models for Romanticism will bring in any surprises. Least of all, Philip Larkin.

Some of the ways these 'influences'- terrible word redolent of the 60's, drug culture and being 'under the influence' but it's better than 'influencers'- are consciously adopted and some less so. I arrived at my own method of trying to 'avoid bad practice' before I found a very similar phrase used to describe Larkin and The Movement of the 1950's. For me, thus, not wanting to do the wrong thing, it means irony, understatement rather than anything overblown, trying to avoid sentimentality, being readily understandable and doing so within chosen forms and seeing the poem as, hopefully, a piece of music. Mostly that.

But Larkin is also an example for not writing too much, doing what he does carefully and finding something lyrical and worth having rising from his low expectations. Low expectations of this life, not of what might be written about it.

Situation is a bit like This Be The Verse - same number of lines, same rhyme scheme but I have 10 syllables in a line where he has 8. Finding a rhyme on 'the coastal shelf', I was well aware that it's a simile memorably used in the Larkin and wondered if it was too obviously a steal. But his use of it doesn't mean the phrase can't ever be used in poetry again and it stayed in, becoming an echo in a poem about 'going nowhere slowly' which is what the likes of Mr. Bleaney are doing.

Success implicitly acknowledges a debt to Posterity. One could find further, if vaguer, echoes of Larkin elsewhere but since I'm sometimes unsure whether I'm listening to Beethoven or Mozart, for example, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

 

Sean O'Brien has more than once been credited as a master of iambic pentameter. He undoubtedly makes good use of it and I've seen manuscripts with stresses on where he's been checking he's got it right. I'm less concerned with precise adherence to classical standards and count syllables more than metrical beats but, more than that, only really want the rhythm to flow and find that fitting the stresses over lines of defined length are a great help, not a hindrance.

The 'rainy Wednesdays/ In suburbs where the library's always closed then' could perhaps have come from O'Brien with its rain, library and the sense of ennui on long afternoons. It doesn't, though. It comes out of real life as part of an objective correlative for a kindly relationship that doesn't aspire to love. That's Larkinesque, too, in a way but I'd much prefer to define the gradations of acceptable equilibrium than aspire to some hyperbole of high passion and be found wanting. Which is what Romanticism, the poem, is about. Keats and his accomplices found themselves entranced by anything transcendent but, actually, were at least as much in love with the ruins of it.

 

So I needed a third influence. A poet who moves between rhyme, unrhymed lines, metrical lines and 'free verse' if need be. That would be Thom Gunn, for a very long time a great hero of mine, but this book isn't as Gunn as I've sometimes thought I've been before. And I'm never going to be as Rosemary Tonks as my liking for her might make me want to be because I'm not the world's most passionate guy and her trademark exclamation marks are dramatically intended whereas I'd never do such a thing unless, as in Escape Artist, as pastiche or with other second-hand inferences.

But her dissatisfaction with this life, or the world as she finds it, is somehow akin to mine, as it is in their own ways for Larkin and O'Brien and I wouldn't want to pass her over even if, as pastiche often remains, Escape Artist can't help being still more Green than Tonks.

So,

Philip Larkin, Collected Poems 

Sean O'Brien, Ghost Train 

Rosemary Tonks, Bedouin of the London Evening

 

but, having just done that, I'd no more go on Take Four Books than I'd take up any other quite so public exposure. Larkin was ambivalently equivocal about such exposure and Rosemary went to extraordinary lengths to try to extricate herself from it. Talking about oneself could be a stage further on towards madness from talking to oneself. One is better leaving such work as one sees fit for whatever attention readers want to apply to it. It's for commentators to do the commentating.   

The Rest of West and other stories

Moving on to the two lesser known of Nathanael West's novellas, proved to be more of an excursion into the exotic than Had been expected. The Dream Life of Balso Snell and A Cool Million are both picaresque, a bit like Don Quixote and Candide, but also grotesque.

The introduction to the Wordsworth Classics edition says of Balso Snell that,

To call this a work of precocious undergraduate humour might seem ungenerous to both undergraduates and their literary efforts. One critic, Daniel Aaron, reviewing it in 1947, called it 'scatalogical and pretentiously wise' and this is such an exact judgement that it demands little elaboration. 

Snell's adventures having entered the Trojan horse via its posterior aperture result in encounters with literature and ideas that are ingenious in parts, taken to extremes and sometimes cleverly funny. That doesn't add up to a satisfactory work but it's only 20000 words and so one can stay with it. If it's a critique of literary endeavours then its gaucheness can be explained away as an element of its methods. If it is deliberately appalling some might count such appallingness as part of its success. The thing about 'experimental' writing is that there is no need for it to see print unless the experiment came off. As such, it's hard to like but of interest in its strangeness.

All of West's stories end in violence, as if some terrible end is inevitable. In A Cool Million, Lem Pitkin sets off to New York to make his fortune, as promised by the American Dream. Through a terrible series of misadventures he loses an eye, half a leg, his teeth, is scalped but remains undaunted as his ongoing disfigurement proceeds. It is a cartoon-like inversion of the myth that anybody can make it in New York. His death is not the end of his debasement, though, as he is taken up as a symbolic hero by the National Revolutionary Party, the vehicle for an ex-President that has loud echoes in the USA today, who proclaim that,

'He did not die in vain. Through his martyrdom, the National Revolutionary Party triumphed, and by that triumph this country was delivered from sophistication, Marxism and International Capitalism. Through the National Revolution its people were purged of alien diseases and America became again America.'

That sounds familiar and if the current incumbent was thought to have read any literary fiction, you'd think he'd read that. Thus, while The Day of the Locust is a fine book and Miss Lonelyhearts a success, it's almost in West's more dubious books that he's more interesting. Neither Balso Snell or Cool Million add much to his literary reputation but the former adds the dimension of surrealism and a genuine shock value and the latter by now looks prescient about MAGA and all the unhinged mania that comes with it.

I don't need to make room for West in the top echelon of my favourite prose fiction writers. It's by no means as fixed a list as its poetry equivalent anyway. But there was enjoyment to be had in reading him and I'm glad I did.

-

Next up, seized upon in the Chichester Oxfam shop because I was in the market for it anyway, Marco Polo's Travels. I'm expecting something picaresque and unlikely-sounding from him, too.

--

But last night. well on the way to justifying the licence fee on its own, the Radio 3 concert was Tenebrae with the Britten Sinfonia doing James MacMillan's Seven Last Words from the Cross, the Allegri Miserere and other almost as compelling pieces. 

It must be approaching thirty years since the MacMillan was broadcast late one night and the first disc of it subsequently appeared. It comes now with the big advantage of being familiar but that brings with it no trace of contempt, only a deeper thrill, if anything. A colossal piece that is both austere and shines forth. There is The Protecting Veil, the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, Errollyn Wallen, the Philip Glass Violin Concerto but MacMillan, with Veni, Veni and Isobel Gowdie to be taken into consideration, has provided music as memorable and powerful as any living composer.

Worth looking up. 

Southampton

 The daylight needs to be disposed of, the bus pass can take you anywhere. At the pace of its own choosing, admittedly. I lived and worked in Southampton for a time circa 1983 or 84 and then more happily worked there 1987-91. While I go through it on trains from time to time I've not got off much in the last ten years. Eight years ago for the Jess Davies Band on the release of the one and only record I had a hand in writing and then to see/hear Isata Kanneh-Mason play Clara Schumann. I'd have to check older diaries to see when it was we went to see Bowling for Soup. A free bus ride to see it again, then.

It was never an unpleasant place but it's always lacked charisma. Two 'careers' that I only ever regarded as jobs sent me there but I never wanted to stay. I arrived just in time to find a Corals and see Planters Punch, the only runner for Mr. Henderson at Bangor, steered home by Nico. Then it was lucky I went to the Art Gallery first because it closes at 3pm, somewhat weirdly. They have an early Hambling, an Auerbach, Van Dyck, Renoir, Gainsborough. There was an exhibiton by Emma Richardson but sadly the painting about ghosts isn't available on the internet to put here. It was far and away the most captivating. 

But, all these years on, the places where I lived and were employed are all gone. The dive where I lived has been replaced, or maybe only remodelled into an updated building of similarly compact living spaces. I followed the walk into Above Bar and wasn't sure of the precise premises where I'd suffered the indignities of junior retail management in an unsuitable job with wildly incompatible colleagues. While they seemed to think salesmanship was an honourable profession, it was clearly pathologically absurd to me. 

And the office block I worked in later in the first glory days of a life in the civil service has been replaced, as have so many buildings, with apartments. And yet there is still a housing crisis.

At first I thought it was The Dolphin we sometimes had our liquid lunches in and it seemed like the ultimate degradation that it is now a gym but on the way back The Red Lion was still there. But all trace of the imposing administrative centre overlooking the park has vanished, as by now have several of the friends I had in there 35 years ago. At least in Nottingham the houses, school and church I knew were still intact along with Trent Bridge, Meadow Lane and the City Ground.

But, notwithstanding those golden years of introduction to the civil service culture to which I owe so much, Southampton never had it for me. I'm not saying I feel at home in Portsmouth but one loses such affiliations by moving about too much and instead become a ready-made outsider, especially if one's temperament suits it so well anyway.

So, no, in spite of the several good people I ever knew who had Southampton allegiances, I'll know to keep on passing through and not go back. It featured on my university applications as first choice in 1978 for reasons that are hard to think of by now. I'm not convinced I missed much, or that Southampton University did, when nothing came of that.