Nathanael West

 Forty-five years ago, my forage into the C20th American novel for the sake of unit 305 included some Fitzgerald, Catcher in the Rye, Saul Bellow, The Bell Jar and The Sound and the Fury. A despairing look at Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. Not much else. My essays were on Eugene O'Neill/Tennessee Williams and Sylvia. I wish I'd read Nathanael West but I think I imagined The Day of the Locust was science fiction, as per that of the triffids, and even then that was a genre I disparaged with the utmost gusto.

One great reason for reading West would be that his books can be read in a day. Four of them fit into a neat little paperback. A better one is that he's tremendous.

Miss Lonelyhearts is almost shockingly cruel in places. I'd say 'cynical' by way of praise, where it is a good thing when understood properly, but most seem to take it as a negative the way it's come to be used. Since the whole theme of C20th American Lit seemed to be the 'American Dream' and its casualties, heaven knows where we are by 2026 when this tawdry view of it was available in the 1930's. The broken lives, the commodification of misery, maybe it's a shame it ends so dramatically but, as with Gatsby, it's as if it's not tragic enough unless it does.

The Day of the Locust is possibly more substantial although both belie their low word counts with big themes and quality writing. Here is the first famous fictional Homer Simpson and one wonders at the reference point because surely Matt Groening would have rest West. 

He is an awkward, downbeat character finding himself among the community of Hollywood extras who live with more hope for their film careers than their talents justify,

Faye's affectations, however, were so completely artificial that he found them charming. 

....

He believed that while she often recognized the falseness of an attitude, she persisted in it because she didn't know how to be simpler or more honest. She was an actress who had learned from bad models in a bad school.

 

There is a great deal to like about West and I'll pile straight into his other two novellas, grateful to have caught up with this element of a reading list from all those years ago. I did once add Sherwood Anderson, and Carson McCullers. I'd read some Hemingway before I got to university, and Ken Kesey. I don't remember Edith Wharton being on the list. The C20th was only 80% through. 

I'd like to think that eventually I will have read enough, and maybe even 'got it' enough, to be worthy of the B.A. (Hons) that, quite honestly, seemed like an underwhelming achievement but that might not be my fault. They seemed happy enough to present me with a certificate. I suspect that the conferring of degrees is not quite the great thing that those who don't have them imagine. Not in 1981 and maybe not in 2026 either.

But I'm here to celebrate Nathanael West, not denigrate educational qualifications. It's another victory for following one clue after another. I arrived at him via Weldon Kees and, yes, one can make the connection.

Audio

The Studio Album.

Piece of cake with this simple, home use technology. I'll knock up some sort of document to go with it, whether or not it amounts to sleeve notes, see if I can think of a better title than Audio and a picture for the cover and there it will be.

It looks like it e-mails okay, the file size not being too big to go, so it could be made freely available. It remains to be seen if I'll re-record it before doing that. It comes in two parts because, as recording engineer, I accidentally began a new file before track 3.

George Martin put Cilla through numerous takes for Anyone Who Had a Heart and Burt Bacharach wanted even more for Alfie before they were happy. I maybe ought to be slightly fussier than using my first takes without being quite so perfectionist but I'm not trying to make a million-seller.

The track listing is,

Twilight
Piccadilly Dusk
The Cathedrals of Liverpool
Starý židovský Hřbitov
Fiction
Move Over, Darling
Herbstregen
Situation
Rainyday Woman
Windy Miller
Romanticism
Success 

 

Twelve poems approximating to the greatest hits without that being a suitable title because I'm not claiming greatness for them, or even that they were hits. There is always a borderline area where one or two look lucky to get in ahead of one or two others.

But it's an enjoyable thing to do while also making one feel as if one is attempting to be a 'heritage' artist, re-packaging the back catalogue or, as the Sex Pistols more forthrightly put it, Floggin' a Dead Horse. But it might have the effect of initiating some rekindling of the motivation to try to produce more of such things. If the right idea shows up, I'd be glad to. Whether it does anything to encourage 'live' performances is another matter.

However, with a few weeks without musical events to report on, at least DGBooks is back to talking about books and even that which the original idea was to do, my poems. 

The Studio Album

     The new laptop promises to be quite a success. Already I've taken it upstairs and looked at a book on it from the safety of my remote eyrie away from the possibility of kids playing outside. I then went on to watch some greyhound racing and landed a modest gamble on the fav in the long distance open race, which always seems the sensible option in dog racing. Thus, while there is still money in the account, I availed myself of 10/1 about Jagwar for the National although if I were you I'd wait until the day when the advertised prices might be better.

However, I found the microphone and sound recording features, too.  

I find this visual representation of my first go at reading a poem a thing of rare beauty. The title and each of the fourteen lines come in similar, but all different, shapes of sound suggesting variety within discipline which is what I like to think it is - like something by Haydn, perhaps. It has immediately given rise to ideas of recording a little album of poems. I've never doubted that poems are to be read aloud, it's just I don't like doing it in public for a number of reasons. But recorded in private without all the protocols of the 'live' reading, much of that is avoided.

So, something to think about. 8 poems, maybe 10, all done on one file hoping it would be of e-mailable size although I have my doubts.                        

Schubert and Melancholy

I remain haunted by having said a couple of months ago that I 'never found Schubert down-hearted'. Not the only daft thing I ever said and for the most part I meant it but the disbelief it was met with makes it one of the more questionable of recent times. I've not seen Lilac Time, the 1934 film with Richard Tauber, so I can't blame it on that.

I spent much of a day playing discs of Schubert and still found much more 'lightness of touch' than depression. I don't find the Unfinished Symphony at all pessimistic.

I wondered if melancholy was a temporary condition or a character trait and found it can be both. Sadly, as it were, Robert Burton's Anatomy was rather longer that what I wanted to read 45 years ago in C17th Lit. I expect both Montaigne and Dr. Johnson are good on the subject, and more succinct.

So I ordered a Schubert biography from the library. He's about the most important composer whose life I've not read yet anyway. Elizabeth Norman McKay's book is excellent, balancing the demands of the life, the music, contemporary ideas and events very well and covering the 31 years in 340 pages in plenty but not too much detail.

But if ignorance is no defence, it looks like I'm guilty as charged. It says the Piano Sonata, D. 784, is,

one of the darkest of all his compositions, autobiographical in the emotions it expressed of pain, distress, anger, and ill temper,

and, yes, I was familiar with it. 

Perhaps the best short answer to a complicated question is summarized in a chaper on Two Natures in which Schubert could be a sociable, attractive and popular personality but increasingly refusing to be bound by social convention. The latter part led one witness to note,

how powerfully the craving for pleasure dragged his soul down to the slough of moral degradation.

It seems likely that debauchery, of which the book is short of lurid detail, was a factor in his death just short of 32. There is a suggestion that his friend Schober was a bad influence.     Quite how he found the time for such indulgence as well as reaching well over 900 opus numbers in so brief a life is hard to say, especially as there were fallow periods and illness.

It's a remarkable life, as were those of Mozart and Beethoven, to name only two. So is there some law that genius is bound to live an extraordinary life. Not necessarily, despite the prodigious output of music and children, Bach doesn't appear to have been outrageous.

But I'd better be more careful about my pronouncements. No, I don't generally find Schubert's music down-hearted but he was clearly 'bi-polar'. For me, though, it is the 'sincere, incapable of malice, friendly, grateful, modest, sociable, communicative of joy' character that comes most through the music. The world's not an easy place to negotiate for some and his talent and commitment was to his art rather than applied to the world. He comes across as a sort of ruined saint, somehow not quite on a par with Beethoven but not very far behind him at all.  

Leora Cohen & David Gray in Chichester

 Leora Cohen & David Gray, Chichester Cathedral, Mar 24

There might come a time when, due to climate change, thousands of years of literature and music will need to be annotated with footnotes explaining the characteristics of the seasons described in such things as Chaucer, Vivaldi and Keats's Ode to Autumn. For the time being, though, they are still more or less recognizable and this year in the UK, Spring arrived exactly on time and with it some musical programmes to mark the event.

As with several of his pieces, it wasn't Beethoven that gave the Spring Sonata its name and he might not have had it specifically in mind in the abundance of the Allegro. The sharing and coherence of Leora and David together belied the fact that he was a late stand-in for the advertised pianist. The Adagio was indeed molto expressivo, captivating as I think (did it?) shift into the minor key and it might most credibly have been a nocturne. After a capricious Scherzo, it turned out to be the cheery, classical Rondo that I, for one, went home with playing on repeat in the memory.

It is a measure of Beethoven's colossal status that such a piece would count as a major item in the oeuvre of many lesser names but would take some time to arrive at when listing his. I'm glad to find that the Violin Sonatas are on my shelves - these days I can never remember- and so I'm grateful for this reminder to go back to them.

Grieg's To Spring was sonorous and song-like, Leora's violin rich over David's finely modulated piano but one imagines Lili Boulanger's D'un matin de printemps was where their technique was more thoroughly tested. Mercurial and flighty but with spaciousness in its more extended lines, it was possibly the most Spring-like piece, being 'changeable' as the day's sudden turn back to cool and overcast reminded us that it can be.

 

Angelina Kopyrina's Rachmaninov in the Menuhin Room

Angelina Kopyrina, Menuhin Room, Portsmouth, Mar 20

Sometimes everyone's a winner. In a special Friday event in the Menuhin Room, Angelina Kopyrina was provided with a dress rehearsal before she takes her Rach to Paris, the piano benefitted from the box office proceeds going towards its maintenance but, most of all, the audience witnessed a grandstand of a performance that possibly, if possible, went beyond what we've had from either Angelina or the piano before.

Having completed her Ph. D. with the catchy title, Rachmaninov’s piano sonatas: Issues of performance interpretation considered through the historical background, artistic influences, the scores, and performance practice, the two sonatas are central to the things she does. By way of preparation for this event, I did some homework, too, and played a standard-issue sort of recording- if there is such a thing- over and again in the hope of finding comparisons.

Much of that is inevitably down to the difference between a disc played on a machine made by Sony and a piano played in real time right in front of you but there was more to it than that. There was more definition and contrast in Angelina, slower when slow at the beginning of no. 1, more fff when necessary and certainly quicker when quick. I understood that where the disc does 41.04 for no. 1, Angelina takes a few minutes off that. 

The first movement evokes Faust, so beloved of those diabolic Romantic types, and comes as a downpour of extravagance and anguish but where I'd anticipated something much calmer regarding Gretchen in the second it still came with intensity and fire. The third marched towards its fateful climax in a mesmeric, torrential struggle.

During the Q&A afterwards I felt it a point worth making that some of us, if not her, might have benefitted from an interval in order to recover a little bit from the experience but within a couple of minutes, we were into no.2.     

The quality of the Steinway no doubt helps in such an avalanche but after ten minutes it was already undoubtedly a standing ovation performance and I'm not sure I've ever seen such after the first piece in a programme but, as Andrew said, it's the first time it's happened in the Menuhin Room. 

I often thought, when training towards long distance cycling events, that it was the effort one put in after one felt one had reached one's limit that built fitness, stamina and resilience and maybe rest is bad for you. Thus there was no time to reflect or discuss what we had been through so far. Perhaps it is character-building to continue onwards but, yes, there would usually be an interval for the benefit of the faint-hearted.

The Sonata no. 2, op. 36, is about bells more than anything else while being half the length of no. 1 but still achieving similar giddy heights. The Lento second movement finally put some ethereal beauty in among the blitz, poignant and with great emotional depth. For once not sitting on the far left, I was in front of Russell in his accustomed position on the right and so saw nothing of the keyboard, only Angelina wrapped in her rapt attention like everybody else was. But, of course, it can't end like that and with the most impulsive of gestures, we were left thrilled if also battered but safe in the knowledge that there was no other Friday lunchtime like it available anywhere else.

Up to now my favourite Angelina repertoire has been the Bach-Busoni Chaconne and the Prokofiev Sonata, the Beethoven almost being taken as a given thing but, as a performance, this probably tops the lot. I'd still prefer Tatiana Nikolayeva and her Well-Tempered Klavier for the long-term relationship of the years on the desert island. But, having thought that the best thing I'd go to all year happened in Wigmore Hall in January and that question was a one-horse race closed there and then, I'm glad now to have a shortlist of two. 

Georgina Duncan at Lunchtime Live!

 Georgina Duncan, Portsmouth Cathedral, Mar 19

English Literature graduates can make fine pianists. There's Andrew McVittie. There's Georgina Duncan. There isn't me but two out of three ain't bad.

Georgina began with her favourite composer, Grieg and To Spring, suitably sunlit. Her repertoire is Romantic and Impressionist with Robert Schumann's Kinderszenen next moving from innocence, through some hasty keyboard work and a bit of a sing-song to some lingeringly phrased Traumerei. 

Of particular interest was John Field, only a generation younger than Mozart, and two Nocturnes in which perhaps the right hand might have been playing a Mozart sonata over a lush left hand by Chopin.

Grieg's Gade was a country walk en plein air and Hjernad (Homeward) an invigorating striding out before running up the steps to the front door. A highlight for me, though, was the 'uncharacteristically showy' Impromptu, op. 90 No. 2, performed like the Minute Waltz with deft fingerwork and exuberance unleashed.

The Impressionist parts were provided by Debussy's prelude Bruyeres which could have been shadows in the clair de lune except I find it means 'heather'. Ravel's Sonatine, M.40, second movement, offered wide panoramas, before more Debussy, Cakewalk from Children's Corner, was a boisterous finale, almost ragtime, maybe verging on Erik Satie's quirkiness.

All of which made for a happy programme confidently presented by a young pianist with verve and enthusiasm and, it is to be hoped, a bright future.