Recent Acquisition - Lonely Infinite Distance

The annual Portsmouth & Hampshire Art Society exhibition in the cathedral was a few weeks ago now. Long enough, you might think, to assess my latest purchase.

I needed no time at all to like it a lot on the Sunday. I was only glad it was still inexplicably not sold when I went back on Bank Holiday Monday to buy it. When I say 'assess', I mean 'wonder what it's about'. It is ostensibly a smear of yellow in the top left corner of some dark blue.

It is Lonely Infinite Distance by Anthony Mayle, Acrylic, 29 x 29 cm. I don't know if it benefits from its title or if we are being nudged towards a meaning that we might find for ourselves, among however many others, but perhaps it helps.

Three weeks on, I'm more inclined towards a midnight winter moon than any time before sunrise when surely the sky would be a paler blue. The light is coming from behind what might be a ruined building, tentatively suggested but possibly cloud, too. But one attempts any definitive interpretation at one's peril, as one does with Hamlet, late Beethoven or Shostakovich, or Vermeer until Andrew Graham-Dixon recently spoiled all that by apparently explaining it all away.

The Moon doesn't cast yellow light and the foreground wouldn't be that shade of blue, if it ever is and so we are not invited to take it literally. 

There is immense subtlety in it that is entirely ruined by electric light, photography or even being looked at from any distance. There are tiny specks of white to be found in it alongside the detail of the brushwork and minute changes of shading when looked at up close. The colours can be enjoyed for themselves in a palette that at first might appear limited but infer the infinite in its fine nuances of shade. The distance to the source of its light is caught by the perspective that puts it well beyond that which it may or may not be emerging from behind. The loneliness might come from that sense of distance. I simply don't know if it would be better off without its evocative title.

I've been entirely happy with my two purchases from previous such exhibitions but this was the least expensive, never mind inflation, and while being the smallest, I'm not sure that paintings are priced up by measurement like Tony Hancock seems to think in The Rebel. But this is surely better, not for any potential mystical quality but for being less figurative, but not abstract either. Mainly, though, because it is gorgeous to look at and, like the music that is best to listen to and the literature that is best to read, it doesn't have to mean anything that could be set out in an essay.   

The Housekeeper

Rose Tremain, The Housekeeper (Chatto & Windus)

There's a sketch in A Bit of Fry & Laurie in which two critics try to outbid each other in how many 'levels' they found in a work under discussion. They could have found plenty in The Housekeeper. It is a novel about a fictional affair Daphne du Maurier didn't have that resulted in her writing Rebecca, which in turn reverses the original story to make the famous book.

The housekeeper is Danni, a Polish Jew, who tells the story not too unreliably of her affair with the writer who spends a summer at Manderville Hall and the echoes of Mrs. Danvers and Manderley are already in place. In its first half, their clandestine love is a paradise of release from their respective roles as highly dependable domestic and unhappily married, successful upper class author but events at a renewal of the Big Bash party that had been a highlight of society life when the Lady of the house had been alive begin a devastating unravelling of their dangerous liaison.

In some ways the Mrs. Danvers character is Miss Adelaide, the daughter due to inherit the hall, who understands none of its tradition and whose selfishness is as sinister and cruel as anything in du Maurier's work. It is at the Big Bash that she inadvertently comes in on Danni and Daphne and stumbles on their secret. But her privileged meanness of spirit is outdone by the way that Daphne drops Danni and reverts to her marriage for the sake of her public reputation. In a book full of convincing writing, the passages in which what had appeared to be sublime love and the satisfying of a desperate need turn into such bleak rejection make one wonder at the human capacity for enthralment.

Danni is telling her story in instalments from her subsequent work as an expert seamstress so it is fitting how many thematic threads are woven into Rose Tremain's work, representing yet another level by which any critic would have to be impressed. One wonders at the daring and ingenuity that make the model for Mrs. Danvers not Danni but Daphne du Maurier herself.

It seems I got lucky, deciding that this was a new novel worth reading when I read so few. It's not very likely I'll read any others this year but I don't rate my chances of finding a better one if I read a cartload. I will have to see what else looks promising in the Tremain back catalogue, never mind seeing what I might have missed in the du Maurier. The Housekeeper compares with anything from the last couple of decades- Mothering Sunday, The Sense of an Ending, The Goldfinch. I don't know if there are still suggestions about that the novel as an art form is finished but it quite clearly isn't.

Middlemarch and other stories

I was rewarded for my diligent scanning of the TV schedules when finding the 1994 dramatisation of Middlemarch by Andrew Davies on Wednesday night and the next two. It is a masterpiece of the genre.

I 'read' it as part of Victorian Lit at university but much of it passed me by, aged 19, it being far too mature a book for someone so jejune. Re-reading it several years ago led me into a year of George Eliot and I appreciated it a bit more but still this easy-access serving of it 'on a plate' is very much worth having. I realize it is not, as someone told me last year, 'just a soap opera' but one of the most complete novels in the language although I'll never have been adequately prepared to talk about it with our tutor, Prof. David Carroll, whose major achievement was editing the variorum edition.  

My sympathies are first with the gentle scholar, Edward Casaubon, and for a bit longer than they should be when he is revealed as a moody obsessive whose work is an escape from life designed not to have an ending. Dorothea is compromised between her frustrated devotion to him and the more dangerous glamour of Ladislaw. Her sister, Celia, is characterised in the succinct line that he is 'fonder of geraniums', in which the lack of ambition is a safeguard against hope, ambition and disappointment.

Juliet Aubrey is surely a bit too good-looking to be Dorothea, who must in some part be the scholarly Mary Ann Evans, but needs must in a TV drama and actors need to be much sexier than the characters they are playing or else there's a danger we won't sympathize with them enough. 

 

I remember Prof. Carroll telling us how he realized that Middlemarch would be his life's work and it must be great to have such a project. At Lancaster, a bit of a low grade backwater in the university system in the late 1970's, one could hardly blame the academic staff for using the opportunity to pursue careers beyond the teaching of students who hadn't been accepted by anywhere more prestigious. Richard Dutton worked on Ben Jonson, Norman Sherry on Graham Greene and Bill Murray talked about whatever he felt like which was often himself. 

I like the idea of having such a specialist area but there is too much of everything to spend too much time on one thing. Three books arrived this week that immediately go ahead of the two remaining Henry James books left over from that over-ordering. It turned out to be easy to decide in what order to read them.

The Anatomy of Melancholy can be looked at from time to time, in extracts, maybe by the bedside, and is too daunting to read from beginning to end. Considered by some 'the best book ever written', one needs to know about it in the knowledge that one is never going to know all about it. 

A biography is sometimes a better way into a writer than reading their books and Wittgenstein is likely to be a paragon example of that. So, potentially heavy going as it may be, it was obvious that The Housekeeper by Rose Tremain was the one to pick up first. 

A good decision. It will be good to have a review of a brand new novel on here shortly and then, quite likely, look through the back catalogue of Rose Tremain to find what I'd been missing.

The Idler no. 44, 17 Feb 1759

Continuing with the Best Books in the House, I took the Selected Essays of Dr. Samuel Johnson with me to help recent train journeys pass. Those pieces are ideal for such purposes. He is never less than good company but sometimes one looks, looks again and wonders when his jobbing journalism becomes something like a poem one wants to learn word perfectly.  

The Idler no. 44, 17 Feb 1759, on memory, is such a thing. 

Its paragraph in which,

From the vexation of pupillage men commonly set themselves free about the middle of life, by shutting up the avenues of intelligence, and resolving to rest in their present state,

resonated almost like no other passage I've ever read.

First of all it sounded very loosely like my idea that poets- some of them- reach 'maturity' at 30 but either start to repeat themselves or pack it in at 60. It is such a baggy theory as to be meaningless but, having thought it once, I still credit it with the merest shred of validity.

More than that, though, it sounds like the age at which pop music stopped for me and I shut up the avenues of intelligence and resolved to rest in my present state. I due course, the same has applied to new poetry. There must be pop music and poems worth having by young people out there somewhere but I'm not sure I could find it for looking. The books and records I have already, DGBooks Radio on Spotify and the anthology I have in my head are plenty enough for me.

Dr. Johnson's brilliant discursion on the role of memory leads him to perhaps favour the art of Forgetfulness and I entirely appreciate his reasons for doing so when he means leaving behind those things in the past that come with associations one might not want to remember. Except that by now I prefer the past to the future and with age there can come more forgetfulness than one might have wished for.

But, yes, like an old raincoat, Dr. Johnson won't ever let you down. He entirely belongs among the Best Books in the House but I won't give up entirely on books I've not read before because, like when Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were discovered, it was thought there might yet be a bit more out there.

So, Rose Tremain's new novel about Daphne du Maurier, a biography of Wittgenstein and Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy should arrive on Thursday. To the tune of Dana's Cold, Cold Christmas - it's gonna be a highbrow Autumn with those books, dreaming of all those I could have re-read instead.

Oxford Open Doors

 It's a long ride from Swindon but it's free with the senior bus pass. There were places it might be worth looking inside. I was in good form and had finished the Times crossword just beyond Faringdon, taking care to only fill it in when one wasn't being thrown about by the prolifically pot-holed roads.

Neither of the student guides I asked in St. John's College had the faintest idea where Larkin's rooms might have been and some of the more recent architecture was a bit like that at Lancaster, so not uplifting. I've been in a couple of unprepossessing Oxford colleges before and was hoping for more.

Magdalen is surely that but I might have been expecting too much. The nameplate at the bottom of a staircase presumably indicated the accommodation of a professor that lived there and it brought to mind the dessicated-looking elderly dons who came in to sit at top table for dinner in halls at Downing College, Cambridge, in 1979, taking half an hour from their Herodotus for some bleak sustenance. It was so-so.

The main object of interest was the Painted Room in Cornmarket Street where Shakespeare may or may not have stayed with the Davenants on his journeys between London and Stratford. Not in that room, the guides didn't think, because they thought the Davenants served wine and might not have taken paying guests but William probably stayed at an inn nearby. I decided against enquiring what they thought about the prospects of him having fathered William Davenant while he was passing through. But one wants to see these places when the rare opportunity presents itself. It may not help much but there's a vague sense of feeling slightly more a part of it by having been. For example, I hadn't realized that the Davenant's premises included a branch of BetFred. Had Shakespeare been in Oxford on St. Leger day, he might have had his couple of ducats each way on the 11/1 winner.

But the main action of Oxford Open Doors for me was extra curricular. It was necessary to queue to see the Painted Room, only 15 being allowed in at a time. Time was on my side so I did, disappointed to be 16th in line for the next intake but at least glad to have a bit of wall to lean on to read the Times Saturday Review while I waited.

There appeared, in a blaze of entitlement and extreme self-confidence, a lurid caricature of Bullingdon Club and Brideshead Oxford who, to be fair to him, might not have noticed the 45 minute queue but took alarmingly quick exception to being informed of the procedure by the lady in charge of crowd control, not that such a role ought to be too demanding at such an esoteric attraction.

He immediately asked for the lady's name and she offered a variation of the Sicilian Defence by asking for his. He said that he didn't like her manner.

At that point I looked up from my reading matter and said that she had been perfectly civil to him and it was him that was being rude.

Excuse me, he said, are you reading your newspaper or listening to our conversation?

I said I'd been pretending to read the paper but had in fact been listening to him being rude. His reaction was to push his hand into my face thus causing my hat to fall from my head and onto the ground and then he exited stage left in some haste.

What a man. I'm not sure I've witnessed such outlandish gaucheness in the flesh before. Perhaps not even on telly in the blond Etonian, Bullingdonian, Oxfordian Prime Minister we had a few years ago whose behaviour was consistently boorish. 

I would be glad to renew our acquaintance and perhaps interview him but unless he finds this reference, recognizes himself and makes contact, it seems highly unlikely. I don't want to press charges for assault- that idea hadn't even crossed my mind until someone else suggested it. We had a lorra lorra fun there in the name of Englishness and our cultural heritage. I'd really like to find out more about him.  

Vermeer

No list should ever be regarded as the final answer. A Top 6 compiled today could easily be different by tomorrow and certainly unlikely to be the same in a few years' time. Nominating the Best Books in the House a while back, I should have included Andrew Graham-Dixon's Vermeer ahead of Benjamin Moser's The Upside-Down World. That doesn't mean Moser is taken off the short list but it does mean that Graham-Dixon is closer to being the actual best book in the house. And thus, for me, the Best Book Ever because if I knew of better ones, they would be in the house.

Such books need to be re-read at least once. While there are a lot of books in the world, and a lot of music and paintings, I prefer to stay with known masterpieces than explore unchartered territory in the hope of finding anything else as good because I suspect the odds are against it. Eventually one feels as if one is approaching the limits of the world one is happy to inhabit. Which is not to say that Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and a biography of Wittgenstein aren't lined up for the Autumn.

But Vermeer is nothing short of sensational in constructing not only a life but a comprehensive revelation of what those paintings mean where previously he was thought to be a 'sphinx' whose meanings were undecipherable beneath the quiet, the gorgeous treatment of light and something transcending the ordinary. It belongs right up alongside A.N. Wilson's Jesus and Katherine Duncan-Jones's Ungentle Shakespeare as a brilliant account of a life re-interpreted against some generally accepted versions except Vermeer comes across as much the preferable human being.

All the background detail of the warring history of the Netherlands is relevant where other such books sometimes pile it in to make something book length. The diligent research into contemporary records provides Vermeer with a much more coherent and credible life than Jesus Christ or Shakespeare have ever been provide with. Andrew Graham-Dixon concedes that he is often working with suppositions but I find little reason to doubt his whereas those made by biographers of Jesus and Shakespeare usually come with agendas, and much more dubious guesswork.

After the ongoing wars, mainly with Spain, that marked Vermeer's early years, a peace was arrived at. The famous View of Delft, previously thought to be a town glistening gently after some rain, is thus a celebration of ordinary, peaceful life.

The paintings were often done in pairs but their subsequent separation to galleries across the world helped to disguise the fact. Many of the best paintings of women alone in domestic settings were done for one patron and their themes are subtly religious - liberal, 'free-thinking', non-Calvinist religion - very slowly so that the artist was ever in debt to his patron, his mother-in-law who held contrary religious views and others. But the climax of Graham-Dixon's account is his explanation of the Girl with a Pearl Earring. It represents the moment that Mary Magdalene turned round and recognized the resurrected Jesus which thus puts the viewer in his place.

It could be the best book I've ever read, for several different reasons but that's the main one.

What We Can Know

 Ian McEwan, What We Can Know (Vintage)

It is 2119, it is post-Derangement and post-Inundation; sea levels have risen to make Britain an archipelago with no Thames, no Oxford, its settlements on what had been higher ground, the tops of village churches sticking up out of the water in places; Nigeria is a world power. While there is no racism, there are bandits abroad but people look back on the freedoms, cultural diversity and richness of life a hundred years before as something worth having. The Derangement was how the governments then (which means in our recent decades) knew all about climate change but did nothing about it. The Inundation is the vast migration of people from other countries that has effectively washed away any racist concern about what colour the population are, possibly it is mentioned because the majority are a light brown colour.

While Ian McEwan is a brilliant writer for most of his time, his novels usually seemed flawed in one way or another. Thus I'm on the lookout to find fault because Science Fiction is often wrong even if the 1960's dream of a 'walkie-talkie' has manifested itself in the mobile phone that so many people can't now bear to not look at for more than a few minutes. So, while I'm not surprised that Humanities, Eng Lit and poetry are sidelined to very minor roles in universities, I'm surprised that there are universities at all.

Francis Blundy was the great poet of the period in which he was only rivalled by Seamus Heaney. There was an even more magnificent novelist called Mabel Fisk in a later generation who produced work that puts her on the same level of eminence as Shakespeare. She isn't very important to the story but it is as interesting as it is unlikely that any artist in our fragmented culture will ever be regarded as comparable to Bach, the Beatles, Shakespeare or Rembrandt. Which makes one wonder if McEwan- immensely clever as he is- is not having a little joke with us.

But Blundy wrote a lost masterpiece, A Corona for Vivien, again thought to be impossibly beyond anything writeable in the early C21st. It might not be coincidental that the Vivien Blundy he writes it for has the same name as T.S. Eliot's first wife. After a longer first section of research into that poem, the second goes back to the early C21st where we are told what the poem was really about, by Vivien herself. 

It's not as pretty as the legendary poem is thought to have made it sound. If McEwan was once nicknamed Ian Macabre on account of the horror in his early fiction, he modulated into the more sophisticated distaste of bourgeois sleaze in some later work. Some major poets benefitted, if that's the word, from prolific philandering and Blundy's one of them. Vivien is one of those impressed enough to reciprocate.

It is also a recurring theme in McEwan that we find everything overturned, like in Atonement and Sweet Tooth and so we do here, too. That things are often not what they seem is a fair point. What We Can Know is an involving read, especially of interest to anyone with an interest in contemporary poetry and it's reassuring to see that McEwan has as sound a grasp, as a novelist, of poetry as the recent Sebastian Faulks memoir has. But endings are notoriously hard to do.

Of course we don't get to read the miraculous poem, or any of the work of Mabel Fisk, because that would mean McEwan having to write it. As so often, he is very good but he ultimately fails us. It entirely worked in On Chesil Beach because that was the point. And it remains the point. Beneath the brilliant poem that didn't get left to posterity was something much darker. It's quite possibly a brilliant book. Vivien is surely the opposite of the 'unreliable narrator' unless her account is untrustworthy. Having enjoyed reading it so much, I wish I hadn't been left with the suspicion that Ian McEwan might have performed another of his elaborate tricks.