Hannah Sullivan - Three Poems

Hannah Sullivan - Three Poems (Faber)

I wouldn't want to be one who bought books because they had won prizes. I had been aware of Three Poems before it won the T.S. Eliot Prize, saw an extract and decided against it but, never knowingly not wanting to give anything a fair chance, I looked again after the award and spent a few days looking forward to its arrival.
You, Very Young in New York, the first of the three long poems - and how much credit does Hannah gain by not calling any of them 'sequences', is an impressive piece of ventiloquism, in a voice redolent of Frank O'Hara, August Kleinzahler, maybe John Ashbery and the prolix, late Auden. I was already wondering if this really was the best poetry book of 2018 and I'd missed the boat in settling on Derek Mahon for my own purposes.
New York has seen it all, knows it all and has done most of it and the ennui of Hannah's poem adopts that attitude as well as anybody since Lou Reed,
                                              sated

By self-abjection

- the plenitude of life going on around the sameness experienced inside looks full of potential in long lines accommodated by the book's page dimensions so that they don't need extra indentation but one can only think that the emptiness inside is the same for everybody else.
It is 'poetry-chic', which is not to say that fashionable poetry was ever anything else, from Chaucer importing Italian influences, through Elizabethan sonneteering to Ezra's doctoring of English poetry, and it is not to say that it's anything other than profound pastiche, but it's still chic.

I was interested enough to look up more about Hannah and found, on her Oxford University website entry, that she argues,
 that the prosody of modern poetry is, to a large extent, determined by practices of lexical and syntactic repetition: reliance on noun-compounds and left-stressed polysyllabic words; techniques of parallelism and anaphora; and a preference for non-finite over finite verbs. 

and then we wonder why the likes of Stephen Fry and Jeremy Paxman accuse contemporary poetry of such things as talking to itself, elitism and having no general appeal.
I don't mind if it does, if it is or if it doesn't but poets can't complain about being marginalized if that's what they do. It is as if the centre cannot hold, it is 150 years since Tennyson was a poet and national figure and because there is a feeling that the elite are playing their own game, the likes of UKIP or Donald Trump are the benefactors of a backlash and thus Kate Tempest becomes the poet to represent what poetry is.

It might have happened before without me noticing but one of the judges of the T.S. Eliot Prize is here the first listed in those acknowledged as having 'scrutinized early drafts of these poems', who is then subliminally evoked in an adjective on page 18. It is a small world, I know, but I hadn't realized that the poetry world folded into itself quite so readily.

The New York poem is a fine thing and is only revealed as pastiche when one embarks on Repeat Until Time, which isn't.
It is an associative, concatenated meditation with something Four Quartets about it, heavier on ideas than it is on music and more concern with talking about 'form' that it is ready to demonstrate, which is notwithstanding the book's admirable stock of good lines, like, the 'diminished Mondrian' or,
The river cracks, slides on, a parquet floor for hens.

One might be surprised that Larkin is cited among those acknowledged for quotations among such as Theodor Adorno, Fitzgerald, Heraclitus, Shelley, Petronius and others valued for other than their uncool fogeyness. But that might be because Larkin is quoted at an angle if not quite misquoted.
Having had possibly The Trees and certainly Days alluded to, the 'almost-instincts of minor poets' are mentioned in order to ready us for,
What will survive of us?
Larkin thought it might be 'love',
But couldn't prove it.

But Hannah, or the 'persona' in her poem (which I doubt there is), is surely reading him backwards. What An Arundel Tomb did was go to great lengths to hollow out from beneath it all that there was beneath the memorable line that Larkin has been remembered for, which is irony upon irony for an ironist, especially when misread by an Oxford professor whose sense of irony isn't much.

The third poem, The Sandpit After Rain, is graphic with the crises of difficult childbirth and, at the other end of the life cycle, difficult dying. If the writing about sex earlier in the book might have challenged Murakami's win in the Bad Sex in Fiction Award had it been fiction or if nearly all writing about sex is surely awful, Hannah is first-hand and vivid on these big events while still carrying forward from New York a cynicism that refuses to Keatsify or pretend it's anything but what it is.
It is powerful writing and not without great lines,
My life is at a distance from my life
Like the Telegraph announcements column,
etc.

but it can seem needily confessional without being Sylvia, sometimes telling without showing as if, having forgotten how well it inhabited other voices in the first poem, it suddenly needs (lordhavemercy) to go back to a workshop to be reminded how to be impersonal.

I am reminded by this book how English poetry now is thought about and done by some very clever people but not, at this level, read by anybody outside of that select constituency. For all the things that I can admire about Three Poems, it raises more negative issues than its good points can compensate for. And, if that is where prize-winning poetry is at the moment, I'll have to very reluctantly be with Fry and Paxman, finish the biography of Tennyson I'm reading and reflect that it was ever thus.
That which is the height of fashion one year can look a bit daft a few years later. 

  

Cellini

Cellini, St. Faith's Church, Havant. Jan 27th.

One takes on the Sunday afternoon bus service at one's peril but sometimes needs must and, to be fair, it was fine. I could hardly allow anyone to play Handel and Shostakovich in Havant without me being there.
Cellini are Amanda and Stella on cellos and Jonathan on piano doing what the piano, continuo or orchestra would normally do in pieces not all of which were originally written for cellos but we don't let that worry us.
After a little taste of Haydn, the Sonata, opus 2 no.8, was not only not really for cellos but might not have been by Handel, either but, again, such detail is of no concern. The andante and largo sounded like Handel to me, who likes to think he knows the difference, but this is early in the catalogue when Georg was presumably doing his apprenticeship in the Italian style and so if the quicker movements sound like Corelli that would be no surprise. But the largo had already made the trip worthwhile.
Stella usefully explained who Klengel was, introducing the larghetto from Three Pieces for Cello and Piano before Jonathan was required to stand in for the whole chamber orchestra in Vivaldi's one and only Concerto for Two Cellos out of the 500-plus concertos he wrote, and it is one of the 499 in which one can't help but hear phrases from The Four Seasons. One would gladly listen to any amount of interplay between these two players as set out by any number of baroque composers and nobody could accuse Vivaldi of letting an attractive method go under-used.
Ennio Morricone's Gabriel's Oboe was another transcription that proved Noel Coward's dictum 'strange how potent cheap music is' because it was moving in Amanda's exposition
then echoed by Stella's seconmd cello part. One must not regard Morricone as anything less than those Radio 3 composers because, as Cellini showed, he wasn't doing anything much different here.
But the lesser-heard light-hearted Shostakovich provided a fine finale in Five Pieces, which were short and uncluttered by Stalinism, only augmenting the case for him as the greatest of C20th composers by being able to provide these gorgeous, almost Palm Court, miniatures in the same body of work as the Leningrad Symphony and the often bleak string quartets.
Cellini were tremendous, playing this music for the love of it, for donations to the church fund. I'm glad I took the trouble to look up what was on in the area only yesterday.

Patrick Hamilton - Impromptu in Moribundia

Patrick Hamilton, Impromptu in Moribundia (Abacus)

It's not really the done thing to review novels first published in 1939 but this has been hard to come by until re-issued by Abacus last year. It didn't come very highly recommended so I didn't even rush for it then. It is a satire very much in the tradition of Gulliver's Travels and, as such, different from Hamilton's usual constituency of the gin-soaked twilight world of London and Brighton boarding houses and the seedy downside of glamour.
We are off to an unpromising science fiction start with John Sadler being fired into deep space in the Asteradio, a tardis-cum-time machine, but once he lands in Moribundia we are in a familiar and transparently encoded version of 1930's London, Nwotsemaht, after which it will be preferable to refer to all these coded features by spelling them backwards.
Sadler finds it all very strange, from the balloons appearing in the air with the words people are speaking to rheumatism being visible on them by flashes of lightning. Luckily, all such ailments are immediately curable by wonderful products like Nourishine that are endorsed in thought bubbles by all that benefit from them. Nourishine is seen to transform the life and career of a stressed hotel receptionist, just like the adverts said it would.

As much of a story as Impromptu is, he only visits Moribundia for three months and then comes back so it consists of an episodic series of satirrical essays on, in turn, the upper classes, capitalism and advertising, the working classes and literature. Hamilton moved from Marxism to reactionary Conservatism but this work is even handed in satirising both privilege and the underclass, with the well-to-do upright, elegant and noble and the working class living dully repetitive lives with everything provided and nothing to wish for. Thus, for all the obvious targets, it is ambivalent and what at first seems to be a utopia is soon revealed as a dystopia and, as such, it is a better book than promised to be.
Hamilton's usual themes of class, failed love affairs, boorish behaviour and social mores are actually here just as evidently as in the books he is being rediscovered for. He is accurate to the point of cruelty in portraying human behaviour, which begins here with a fine appreciation of how the forthright humour of the cockney is unquestioningly admired by all as brilliant wit. At the other end of the cultural scale, it is accepted by all that the three great writers are Kipling, Newbolt and Buchan,
their supremacy remains unchallenged,
so that there is no critical discourse, and Marxism, which is 'promulgated in a definite system of philosophy known as Scitcelaid', would be greeted with horror,
if they were not hilariously laughed at, in this sane and happy land.

So, beneath the piercing account of a society instantly recognizable as 1930's London, and by no means too dated even now, but described in very opposite terms, is a dark view of the way we live, superficially very funny but with a bleak sub-text.
It took me a long time to get around to reading Impromptu but I'm glad I did. It reads as easily as a comic but reveals itself as more sinister as it progresses, which makes it fit entirely with the rest of Patrick Hamilton who is, as ever, highly recommended.
But I notice among the list of other titles 'by Patrick Hamilton', five other plays beyond the well-known Gaslight, which seems to have quite recently passed into the language in 'gaslighting', and Rope. While that means there are five more plays to read, if not find productions of, they do look very difficult to acquire. We'll see. 


 
     

Natalie Clein - Clarke and Bridge

Natalie Clein, Christian Ihle Hadland, Clarke Viola Sonata, Bridge Cello Sonata (Hyperion)

It's me billing this as a Natalie Clein album, not Hyperion. It is not long before one realizes that these sonatas could have had and piano added to their titles without overstating its contribution, which is more than accompaniment.
Rebecca Clarke's Viola Sonata is here in its cello version, a mix of any number of influences both English and something like Debussy, lyrical at first but lively in a second movement vivace, in which the piano does more of the rapid work, until the third movement's adagio opening seems to capture some post-war reflectiveness. It doesn't work as background music but rewards proper listening. Fourteen years younger than Vaughan Williams, I'm grateful that the booklet points that out so that one can make the necessary connection. The third movement becomes allegro if not agitato before the piano shares the main line in what could anticipate Shostakovich's chamber music.
We then have three short pieces by Frank Bridge, the song-like Serenade, and serenade-like Spring Song, before a fitful Scherzo.
The main point, though, might be the Cello Sonata, dated here 1913-17, with its damaged rapture. If this is also a duet, one is aware of the cello carrying the theme as the senior partner. In two not quite equal movements, the first has a melancholy less damaged than the second, that can again be read into the dates of its composition. That much is apparent from the opening bars of the second movement with its long sequence of four different marked tempi.
The set finishes with six short Studies in English Folk Song by Vaughan Williams, evocative and as nostalgic then as we can feel a double nostalgia for now. The fields, the scenery, the England and, somewhere in there, the drover, are suggested but not expanded on, presumably in the knowledge that rather than outstay one's welcome, it's better to leave them wanting more and the album finishes quietly.      

Larkin - Letters Home

Philip Larkin, Letters Home, ed. James Booth (Faber)

On the publication of Letters to Monica, Anthony Thwaite pre-empted any concerns about the reading of private letters by saying that Larkin was aware he was 'writing for posterity' and the letters would be read 'over his shoulder' by an audience beyond Monica Jones. The precedent of publishing letters was set long before Larkin's generation. Whether James Booth can stretch the same reasoning to cover Larkin's letters to his mother, with a few to his sister and an appendix of some replies, is a further question.

Had the three volumes of letters now available been published in reverse order, his reputation would have gone from the quaintly domestic, through thoughtful erudition to the cartoon reactionary with a complete checklist of poltical incorrectness and it would by now be at its low point. As it is, the letters have become gentler as the books have been published and so some, if not all, of the damage done by the Selected Letters has been repaired.

From Oxford and through his junior library positions to the eventual Chief Librarianship at Hull, Larkin writes home very conscientiously, providing an account of his life in tiny detail sometimes on an almost daily basis. They are written from an England of Rain Stopped Play, noisy neighbours, drab Sundays and bad railways not quite unrecognizable by now but as gone as it was predicted to be in the poem Going, Going. They are illustrated with relevant drawings of creature characters representing himself and his mother, Eva, and addressed to 'my dearest old creature', and long before one reaches the end one is likely to have surrendered to their fey whimsicality and recovered from finding them mawkish.
If there are occasional apologies for unspecified outbursts of bad temper on visits 'home', Philip and Eva are mutually dependent with their minor anxieties seeming enormous to them and she can't have been easy, worrying more about stormy weather than is reasonable. She is, however, a discriminating reader and, give or take misplaced apostrophes, clear and literate. The same could be said of Sydney, his father, whose 'discrimination' might have gone further than it ought, but he dies in 1948 leaving Eva on her own for a further twenty-six years.

Apart from being the mostly quaint and often endearing read that it is, one reason to help justify Prof. Booth's great dedication in producing this book is how it augments his biography, PL, Life, Art and Love, in further revealing a sympathetic side to Larkin. Usually derided as 'the hermit of Hull' and 'miserabilist', he got about these islands and enjoyed himself enough in his appreciation of some of the finer things. Martin Amis went to unnecessary lengths in producing a Selected Poems, in 2011, the only point of which seemed to be its introduction in which the brooding bad boy of contemporary English fiction derided his father's mate for living in Hull, as if London, anything more cosmopolitan or the world were braver and preferable options. But, even now, it's still not possible to go to China and come back the same day and so lots of us still aren't going to bother.

Although clearly aware of his pre-eminent status in English poetry, his daily concerns are more with buying tweed; the garden, eventually; seeing his mother; good, bad or indifferent hotel food, obviously gin and the value of having time to himself. This compares with the fixations of the Ted Hughes letters which, from memory, were trying to arrange collector's editions of his poems to be published on auspicious days as indicated by horoscopes and lamenting the carnage that he saw happening around him without noticing that it was him that had caused it.
But Larkin has a defence mechanism in place that doesn't allow him to like anyone until he has reason to. Stammering, bookish and reluctant to dance, it is less easy to impress with quiet erudition up against opposition like Amis, pere et fils, and the likes of Hughes, who he understates as,
as famous as I am, only younger: a great thug of a man, never does any work  

and so it is these disparaging assessments that make for such entertainment, given that he met Auden, Iris Murdoch, obviously Betjeman and Cecil Day-Lewis a number of times and, it seems, Agatha Christie plus, perhaps top of his own charts, the Queen.
He 'loathes' Norman Iles at Oxford in 1940, which  came as an early shock to me because I met Mr. Iles some 39 years later and one couldn't wish to meet a nicer bloke, but it is the shy person's defence against that which they can't deal with and he's fine with Norman henceforth.
The DeputyLibrarian at Hull, the unfortunate Arthur Wood, is a 'goggling little ass' in 1960 and never improves in Larkin's bilious estimation of him; I expect they are a rum lot is his expectation of some landladies who take in students that he has to speak to, and in 1975, at the Ilkley Literature Festival, having shown up for the presentations,
M & I legged it before the poetry-reading began,

which might well have been wise. In later life, with Monica, he is admirably worried about being met on the stairs of a hotel, sneaking a bottle of booze up to their room rather than have to pay bar prices and be sociable.

All of which is traditional, English sitcom or postcard humour except this is in the life of the finest poet of his generation until, it begins in the early 1960's and even insinuates itself into these letters, James Booth is not such an apologist that he can leave out evidence of the worst bits.
Up to a point, one can accept that the 1960's and 70's were the age of On the Buses, Love Thy Neighbour and casual racism that was then a staple of mainstream humour ahead of any Corbynite fundamentalism or the fact that it is by now simply illegal. Larkin wasn't the only one who failed to grasp the benefits of immigration and thus regarded West Indians as some kind of undefined threat, despite his extensive collection of 'negro' jazz records. One tries to forgive as much as one can until,
in 1970,
I regret the banning of cricket as a giving-in to forces of disruption more baleful than apartheid could ever be,

where, in so few words, he undoes all the much good work put together in the rest of the book.
We know he goes to Lords for test matches, eventually achieves membership of the MCC, but he has missed the whole point of  Basil D'Oliveira, and that undermines all the minute detail of a photograph of some darned socks (Good Grief); the complaints about the weather; the genius poker hand he played, keeping Monica, Maeve and Betty onside and somehow his mother understanding; the brilliant administration of the library and, meanwhile, knocking out not just these letters and all the others but the diaries we must now be becoming more grateful to Betty Mackareth for destroying, and the poems, too.
No more is necessary, no more is needed if all we would like is some background to the poems without finding ourselves implicated as weird voyeurs into the life of someone who regarded himself as private.
It is a hugely enjoyable read, meticulously edited to distraction by Prof. Booth, but not the first book on any list of required Larkin reading. Once you've read the poems, you want the Required Writing.

Just because someone writes like an angel, that doesn't mean they're an angel. Like George Orwell said, and Larkin concurs, good writers aren't ipso facto good people. I was saving that line up for Shakespeare but I'll give it a little rehearsal here now.