Restless Human Hearts

That is one helluva book for only the second effort by a writer not successful in his day as a novelist and not much read now beyond the society doing such good work in and about his place on the outskirts of Swindon.

It's a Victorian 'sensation' novel full of drama and a certain amount of unlikeliness but a rip-roaring read in which one can suspend disbelief not only in its outrageously contrived climax but elsewhere, too, and care less about such considerations. Not least because its digressions are, for me, its highlights and not, as is suggested elsewhere, ballast to fill out the word count required for three volumes. 

What shall we do with ourselves? This is the cry of our age. We have exhausted all passions and all pleasures. 

I'm sure it was ever thus, or seemed so. 

 

It wasn't easy to keep track of who was who and how their often problematic relationships built into whatever the main theme is but Jefferies is a vibrant writer without having done a university creative writing degree and was writing the equivalent of a television drama to keep the audience agog. Quite how this lines up with the writing he's better remembered for, about the countryside, is not obvious beyond the radiant purity of Heloise but I'll be pursuing Jefferies further. Next in Edward Thomas's book on him that has been on the shelves for years but not, as far as I can remember, ever read in full.

The climax comes when the luxuriantly atttactive Carlotta is trapped in a railway carriage with a cobra and jumps out to escape from it. We might assume her dead as some kind of just desserts for her vanity and selfishness but she isn't and quite why a lady in a railway carriage had found herself in such a situation is perfectly reasonably explained away. In the circumstances, I'm surprised such dramas don't happen more often.

It's a big canvas and a crowded dramatis personae and art for art's sake might not have been its first concern. One can't make either Carlotta or Heloise the central character and, as such, it's more like the map of society laid out in Hardy's The Woodlanders than anything concentrated on the destiny of one.

One or two are lost along the way. But, having had all the excitement, Carlotta retires to Torquay as a monument to her former glory. Heloise is made ideal, reading Tennyson to her son which represents some idea of C19th English consummation, I dare say. It is a happy ending. 

But, for me, it might only be a beginning. There is stacks of Richard Jefferies to be had and if this is not regarded as his best work then I'm interested to see what is. I'll see what Edward Thomas has to say first. 

Graham Dixon, Oh Mother, What Did You Do?

Graham Dixon, Oh Mother, What Did You Do? (Pulchra Veritas)

A book that begins by identifying Ted Hughes as a Movement poet and proceeds to cite names such as Alan Ginsberg and Elliot makes one wary. Pulchra Veritas might well be Graham Dixon's own imprint and he doesn't appear to employ an editor. But he knew Thom Gunn and, as it turns out, the reader is rewarded with not only first-hand knowledge of the poet but some original and perceptive readings of the poems. That he turned himself into a psychotherapist after his literary studies is evidenced by his analysis of Gunn as a personality in parallel with the poetry. The subtitle Pose and Repose in the Life, Letters and Poetry of Thom Gunn is a summation of the main theme emerging, that of a search for respite from the traumas and discontent in Gunn's life. 

The poses adopted by characters in Gunn's poems, and by Gunn in real life, were always defence mechanisms to hold a threatening world at bay. The comparisons with Ted Hughes and the violence of nature were always dubious. Gunn is naturally a more withdrawn presence, adopting roles, attire and attitudes in order to get by.

Dixon's title comes from a diary entry by Gunn after his mother committed suicide when he was fifteen. As a psychoanalyst might, he makes much more of this devastating event, when Gunn and his brother found her, than purely literary commentaries do. It is not dissimilar to Sylvia Plath, gassing herself in desperation over her marriage.

It is that, several readings of early poems that find the coded homosexuality in them, Gunn's continued wearing of a Nazi leather belt and the late set of poems about the serial murderer, Jeffrey Dahmer, that make Dixon's account vividly one that shows Gunn exceeding perceived boundaries into amorality. While these elements of Gunn are not new discoveries, the prominence they are given puts emphasis on much more exotic material than the hippy, drug-taking bohemian scholar that had already marked him out as a maverick.

Dixon is insightful in his readings of such poems as Carnal Knowledge, Tamer and Hawk and Rastignac at 45 but also clear-sighted and confident enough to identify when the less successful parts of Gunn's uneven output fail. There are great poems in each of the books but some of the middle period, from Moly to Jack Straw's Castle, were experiments that didn't work. At times, in making the point, it might mean that Dixon has overlooked some fine poems that did but it's honest and time well spent to elucidate when even Gunn's talent was insufficient to carry his dark imaginings. If the LSD and prolific promiscuity went a long way in search of repose, it was a dangerous enterprise, didn't entirely work and the mantra from Gunn's early, if now dated, masterpiece, On The Move, that 'one is always closer by not keeping still' remained thematic for the rest of his life.

If the publication of Larkin's life and letters brought out unappealing detail that damaged his reputation, the same could have happened to Gunn but he didn't have quite such a reputation to damage beyond poetry readers of a certain age. In both cases one needs to be able to separate the work from the personality but friends and those who knew them for the most part liked both poets as people and if Larkin's later politics were unsavoury, Gunn is not overly concerned with politics. But one is never entirely sure what is hovering in the depths of his thinking even when he can write some of the most gorgeous poems of his or any other generation.

So, Graham Dixon's book is worth having as an honest and meaningful contribution to Gunn Studies. It is persuasive in making him more specifically a 'gay' poet, for better or worse than I, for one, had thought. It provides more about the vulnerability that the tough posturings of the Lines for a Book that he at least partially later disowned were written to overcome. One is the more aware of the contradictions and paradoxes of a life that he often successfully expressed but only sometimes successfully resloved. There was a time I thought that his apparent urbanity and intelligence put him in control of his poems and, by extension, of his life but it seems not. He was a sort of adventurer but it begins to look like those adventures were only ways of looking for escape. 

Paul Bessell, Finding Dad

 Paul Bessell, Finding Dad (Mirror Books)

What a mess, says Peter Bessell somewhere in the middle of this book. Whatever his talents were not- like business, honesty or 'faithfulness'- he was a genius of understatement. It comes before he is dragged back into a mire of problems in the trial of Jeremy Thorpe but after his downward-spiralling business disasters had led him to intend to commit suicide.

At first a success as a local entrepreneur and then MP, he expanded his horizons with ambitions that proved beyond his ability to sustain them and was soon out of his depth and accumulating unmanageable debt. He had been a lay preacher, a serial ladies' man and had nearby neighbouring fellow Liberal, Jeremy Thorpe, as his closest friend but the wreckless, fantasist party leader proved the paragon example of a friend that with the like of which one didn't need enemies. Having done a disappearing act to evade his creditors and somehow restored some equilibrium to his life, his earlier attempts to help Thorpe rid himself of Norman Scott, the troublesome part-time model, came back to do more than haunt him.

In California with his long-term mistress, the faithfulness that Bessell could never show to his wife or other girlfriends was ill-advisedly much more resolute in how he stood by Thorpe who had less compunction about selling him down the river. The charismatic but deeply flawed Thorpe had once brilliantly lampooned Harold MacMillan by re-working John 15:13 by suggesting that Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life but then was guilty of it himself. And yet it was that constancy that finally finished Bessell when, having no choice but to testify against him, it was Thorpe that was acquitted. Bessell's problem seemed to be that he never had much choice, not even being able to kill himself when he wanted to.

That Thorpe should need to rely on and then abandon such a dodgy, thin-ice operator as Bessell in the first place is indicative of what a ramshackle outfit the resurgent Liberal party of the 1970's was. If charm, generosity and this level of devotion to such a charlatan were Bessell's good points then his weaknesses both outnumbered and overpowered them. Paul Bessell's reconstruction of the story is understandably as sympathetic as any account by a son who loved his father can be expected to be but, desperate though his downfall is, it's not easy for anybody else to have a lot of sympathy for a liar, fraudster and one unfit for the high stakes games he chose to play. One's sympathy is for his wife, Pauline, who knew precious little of his triple life and rackety schemes.

A Very English Scandal (2018) was a farcically funny account of the Thorpe Affair but Finding Dad is harder to laugh at. Paul Bessell is thorough in putting together so much detail about the labyrinthine duplicity of a plot no fiction writer could invent and one reads through encounters with Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry Kissinger, two US presidents and the outskirts of the mafia with disbelief, sadness or horror but not to humorous effect.

It's to full of immorality for a morality tale and the hero has the wrong ratio of heroism to fatal flaws for it to be Shakesperean tragedy. It is more likely an insight into what sort of things are always going on with even Paul having to accept he didn't get to the bottom of it, like what sort of 'secret work' his father was doing, if any, for the American government or if it was simply an effective cover for the way he duped several women who thought they loved him into thinking that he loved only them. 

Having been reading three books at the same time, it was this that took over and was finished first. Not necessarily the best book but in some ways the most gripping and, in a competitive field, the most lurid. It's not to my credit that I was drawn to it over the others. 

Juggling

 The art of juggling was always beyond me. But I'm juggling books, quite enjoyably, for a few days. It throws up all kinds of unlikely links.

The Richard Jefferies book by Edward Thomas can be sensibly left until I've finished Restless Human Hearts. But the novel, for all its characters and maybe bittiness is taking some sort of thematic shapre for me and, since he is so enjoyable to read, the contemporary fault-finding of it seems disproportionate compared to its good points. It's a great performance even if technically flawed.

As below, the digressions are to be treasured rather than dismissed as 'padding'. And if at first there appear to be too many characters, maybe they all have places in the scheme of things. Two-thirds of the way through, it's possible to see the parallel stories of the various dissatisfactions as different attempts at resloving them. By the end, we might find which of them Jefferies thought the most workable.

It's unlikely to be the artificiality of vain, glamorous Carlotta. I'm thinking it might not be the religious devotions of Georgiana, or her ground-breaking short-term marriage contract. 

A captivating chapter in which a famous stained-glass window on the continent is found to be 'tame and flat' in comparison with one hidden in a corner of Gloucestershire - in Fairford, I reckon- that becomes a 'breathing reality, breathing fire and torture and misery indecribable' makes Ella the representative of art whose temperament prefers it to the actual, real world of love. But perhaps Jefferies's sympathies lie mostly with Heloise and her mystical attachment to nature.

 

It's not going to be quite so easy to empathize with Peter Bessell, the subject of Finding Dad by his son, Paul, however charismatic he was if one had met him. There is some sort of connection to Carlotta in how such people use and abuse others in pursuit of their own tawdry purposes. Bessell was an MP and part of a long tradition of deelpy untrustworthy types that has thrown up the likes of Profumo, Stonehouse, Maxwell, Johnson, Mandelson and, I dare say, my one-time hero, Jeremy Thorpe.

It looks like being a horror story about one bent on serving themselves in a Faustian pact with chance that they had no chance of ultimately gaining from but what does one expect from a book one saw advertised in the Daily Express. It was never likely to be morally uplifting.

 

Another one-time hero was Thom Gunn and, separating the artist from the art, he still rates in the top echelon of poets in his best work. And, again, to those who met him- which I once very briefly did- he was an utterly convincing charmer, if bringing with him some louche reference points. Graham Dixon, author of Oh Mother, What Did You Do?, knew him much better than that but any book that begins,

Linked with other Movement poets such as Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn....

must be dubious from the outset.

Dixon was given the postgraduate job at Berkeley of grading Gunn's undergraduate class's papers. I'd prefer not to have my work marked by someone who thought Hughes was a 'Movement' poet and so one reads him warily from thereon in. 

It must be significant that Dixon moved into psychotherapy and, as such, a case like Thom Gunn's must be irresisitible to him. It's not yet clear how much the over-diagnosis going on is Dixon's fault or largely understandable given his subject matter.  

It's quite possible that the account of Gunn provided by the book will prove to be worth having, with certain credibility but already it is making me look back on those days when the object under consideration in Eng Lit was the text and not the author. The revolution whereby the text was studied to the exclusion of any reference to its author was misguided but counter revolutions are often worse and by now poems can be reduced to symptoms in the diagnosis of the author who is put into the role of patient.

Some of Gunn's poems weren't very good but plenty were brilliant. It would be more rewarding to read those and understand why. Let's give Graham Dixon an even break and see if he can contribute.

Bunting, Jefferies, Edward Thomas

Books, like events, can be overtaken by others more pressing. Basil Bunting's letters were a diversion but not a priority for me. Having reached the end of the first part, I'll go back to them one day when more attractive propositions are harder to find. It's a good place to leave it, in December 1938, just as Bunting has told Ezra Pound where he stands vis a vis Ezra's unpalatable views,

You know as well as any man that a Jew has the same physique and a similar amount of grey matter as the rest of us. You know as well as any man that to hold one individual guilty of the sins of another is an abomination. You know as well as any man that the non-Jews have contributed their fair share, of the bankers and other millionaires of doubtful honesty...

Every anti-semitism, anti-niggerism, anti-moorish, that I recall in history was base...

and so, whatever one might decide about Bunting's poetry in due course, he has made his point and deserves much credit for that. I'm still not convinced I'm going to like him but that one letter makes the £1 I spent on the book £1 well spent and I'm glad of having read it.

--

There's an equally memorable, if entirely different passage in Restless Human Hearts by Richard Jefferies. There are several but one in particular for me. These shifts into meditation in some loose way are reminiscent of how Tolstoy makes his books the length they are, extrapolating lines of thought at intervals in his involved narrative.   

I've had to make a diagram to keep track of the relationships and dynamics between the characters in Restless Human Hearts. The title is rightly in the plural. Quite how all the infatuations relate to each other remains to be seen but I'm ready to guess that the vain, glamorous but hideous Carlotta is to be contrasted with the almost unearthly Heloise. 

The second part has already become melodramatic with a duel and a tragic riding accident and critics who find the book flawed- as only Jefferies's second attempt- might have a point but, such reservations aside, it still makes for great reading.

The pages that I was most taken by reflecting,

What a curious system it is to teach us, not only at school, but at home, and in the early part of our life, ideas and feelings which we must afterwards spend years in endeavouring to unlearn...

and the next long paragraph,

We know so much nowadays. Everything has been done. Every possible emotion has been felt in every imaginable manner. Every combination conceivable of human relationship has been worked out, and the quarry is empty....

And that was in 1875.

That by 2026 it seems to us that maybe it wasn't quite the case then suggests that if it seems so now, it might not be so yet, either. And thus might never be. As with Francis Fukuyama's pronouncement of the 'end of history', we are all tempted to think we've arrived at a crucial point only for the next generation to find themselves in among the next pile of theories, wonders, crises and absurdities. It must be a state of mind to think everything has been done rather than a piece of cultural analysis.

Kant, Hegel, Sartre, Derrida then Baudrillard all came and went but none of them turned out to be the last word. To arrive at Boulez two hundred years after Bach shows that it's not always linear progress. Surely pop music has run its course but only older people whose time has come and gone would say so. Mark Radcliffe on Sounds of the 70's said that the Bowie and T. Rex sounded so 'fresh' and could have been made now. But, no, they sounded tremendous because they were from the 1970's.

 

Alongside the Jefferies novel, I'll go further into the Edward Thomas biography of him that I remember the first chapter of- the detailed, evocative description of Wiltshire- which is gorgeous. And from there, we will see how far Jefferies Studies can go. There's no shortage of material. 

However, two other books due this week will be making their demands. 

Oh Mother, What Did You Do? Pose and Repose in the Life, Letters and Poetry of Thom Gunn by Graham Dixon promises a reassessment that will be interesting to assess, mostly because it depends what sort of assessment it reassesses.

Paul Bessell's Finding Dad might not prove to be uplifting, it being Peter Bessell's son's findings about his life which is likely to be louche, salacious and probably scandalous although it depends where one's scandal threshold is set. The story of Jeremy Thorpe, my teenage political hero, seems a bit quaint, a bit Midsomer Murders, post-Boris, in the Age of Trump and so quite cosy. We will see. I wouldn't have ordered it if I expected it to be a vindication of Bessell including evidence for his beatification.  

Shakespeare in Oxford and other stories

 When one's life is one big holiday, time spent anywhere else but at home is only an excursion, not really any more of a holiday than one was having anyway. Not being in favour of travel for travel's sake, I don't go as far as I might but a few days up the road, or railtracks as it was, proved to be time well spent.

Swindon doesn't feature large on the literary map but Richard Jefferies and his museum there turned out to be a rewarding visit. Restless Human Hearts, the early three-part novel from 1875, is highly readable, clearly delineated and with pertinent passages worth quoting that, in due course, I surely will. I knew of Jefferies only from the fact that Edward Thomas wrote a book on him and that he had lived in that place by Coate Water. With the likes of Thomas Hardy for competition, success as a novelist was never going to be easy but he stuck at it with some conviction, it seems, before making more of a name as a nature writer while Thomas progressed from countryside prose to major poetry status. Having reached a suitable place at which to leave Basil Bunting aside, I'll gladly divert to the more likeable Jefferies for the foreseeable.

The bus pass gets one to Oxford and back. I don't know if it was exam time but a number of young people around town in gowns made me wonder if they still wear them while reproducing their versions of Suetonius.

I was reacquainted with the gorgeous Alfred Jewel in the Ashmolean, spent a few minutes with Walter Sickert's Brighton Pierrots so familiar from my front room and don't know why the internet can't find me the de Hooch that I'm sure I saw there in among all the ancient porcelain. But a major personal breakthrough came thanks to the kind lady in St. Michael's Church whose forebearance allowed me to expatiate on some Shakespeare biography.

The font over in the opposite corner. Shakespeare once stood next to it when it was in another church.

Yes, in St. George's.

He stood next to it at the christening of William Davenant, his godson.

Yes.

Who was born to Jane, or Jeanette, landlady of the inn where he stayed on his way from London to Stratford.

Yes.

Good. So can you tell me where that inn was, at no. 5 Cornmarket Street.

And, yes, she could. I'd been counting from the wrong end and finding a shoe shop. If you count from the other end, you find the Golden Cross, set back from the street in a courtyard and exactly the detail I was looking for.

Not only that but if you go on the right day in September, they will show you the room that Shakespeare stayed in.

I said I'm ready to accept that Shakespeare was the real father of Davenant, as later claimed by the boy. There might have been a bit of a trend for actual fathers being designated as god fathers in those days. She said, yes, in those parts it is widely believed to be so.

Without it being classed as a conspiracy theory, in any way subversive or unpatriotic. Just something that happened. And I found that most 'refreshing'.

I didn't want to outstay my welcome and appear any more of a bore than I had been already. Oxford surely has its share of them. So I'm glad I didn't think to ask whether there was any correlative local pride taken in the Earl of Oxford's claim to authorship, or that made on his behalf. Because that is a conspiracy theory, it is nonsense and it's a shame that such low-level rumour-mongering is allowed to pass as some kind of scholarship. Except it makes for a bit of a diversion, cul-de-sac though it turns out to be.

So, yes. Not a holiday but a useful day out and I felt much the better for it.   

Bargain Bunting

Yesterday I bought a book in a bookshop. That wouldn't have sounded remarkable years ago but it's extremely rare now. For a long time I've been much more likely to buy a cup of tea in a bookshop than a book. It's my fault when bookshops close and I have no recourse to disappointment. The Letters of Basil Bunting were in among sundry sale items for £1 in Waterstones and I even had to think about it at that but it looked worth a try. The sticker underneath the one that said £1 said £8. Today I looked it up on Amazon and there it's £37.50.

It's possible the letters are a reverse way in to understanding Bunting. I derive about as much from the poems as I do from his mate, Ezra, and that's not much. But the likes of Donald Davie and Thom Gunn held him in high regard and he is a 'major' figure of C20th poetry, if in a tradition that has never done much for me.

Any friend of Ezra's comes with any amount of warning signs and to call Bunting a maverick might be an understatement. But his political imprisonment was not for the same reason's as Pound's. He was a Quaker, pacifist and conscientious objector. I still can't help being suspicious of him, his severity and acerbic attitudes bringing to mind Geoffrey Hill, who he looks a bit like in old age and shares some aesthetic principles with, I'd guess.

So maybe the book will be enlightening. Whether it will lead to a Damascean conversion to Modernism, 'high church' seriousness and the elitism of difficult poetry remains to be seen and seems unlikely but there's a limit to have far one can get reading more and more about a handful of favourites and time spent outside of a comfort zone must be at least occasionally necessary even if it turns out to be unproductive. 

For a long time I've thought of Bunting and his like as generally a bad thing for poetry while not in the least objecting to that minority who write, read and enjoy such esoteric work. I suppose I take an equal if opposite view of those whose writing is too obvious. So maybe I'll report back on any alteration that this bargain buy brings about, either that I've embarked on an in-depth study full of enthusiasm or that my prejudices were only confirmed.