Beethoven would have been 250 in 2020, had he lived. Not until December 2020, actually, so all the commemorations and, let's face it, attempts to cash in, are a year early and it will seem all over by the time of his birthday but since Gramophone turned up today with plenty about him and they're publishing a special, separate magazine, too, I thought the least I could do was have my say.
He is the only composer to have his own tag at DG Books. That's because he got in early when I thought Bach, Handel, Mozart and Buxtehude would have them, too, but it looked like getting out of hand and so poets get their own tag, poetry once having been the main subject here, but not many others do.
It would be true to say that Mozart was my first music hero but it was Beethoven who was on my teenage bedroom wall, brooding and a bit scary on a black and white poster, later augmented by Deutsche Grammophon posters brazenly asked for from shops once they'd taken them down. Other teenage boys might have had Suzi Quatro or Stevie Nicks but by the age of 14, I gave myself a year's sabbatical from pop music, and listened to Beethoven, Shostakovich and Radio 3, as vainly elitist as a Rees-Mogg, considering myself above Pink Floyd.
The favourite recording was Carlo Maria Giulini's Pastoral Symphony on a cassette that must be somewhere near the most played thing I've ever owned, there not being quite so much to choose from then. As with Hamlet, I like to think I can pick it up from anywhere and do what comes next but I don't suppose I can. Not with Hamlet, anyway.
I collected symphonies because at that age I thought symphonies were what classical music was all about and composers who didn't write symphonies were of a lesser order. I know better now but then, one way or another I either bought or taped from the wireless all nine except I didn't dare play the ninth because it was on a C120 cassette and they were known to use thinner tape more easily chewed up by cassette players.
One Saturday morning, I bought an LP of 5 and 8 in Gloucester W.H. Smith's and I'm sure the girl in the upstairs record section said to her mate, it takes all sorts, as if I ought to be buying Deep Purple or Frankenstein by the Edgar Winter Group but I knew all that and didn't want it.
The Pastoral is still my favourite symphony and thus, by now, always will be and is where, if I ever get the opportunity, I would begin to explain, to anybody who will listen, the History of Western Classsical Music. It is where Romanticism has replaced Classicism, which must have seemed like progress at the time but, like so many things, you can't always immediately tell if what you've invented will turn out for the best.
It wasn't all symphonies, of course. 5 might have been very famous for its dramatic opening and in the exam for Music in the third year at school, we had to note down which bar we were on when the music stopped. I missed the repeat markings that sent you back to the start and so got lost immediately, realized as much and so just enjoyed the rest of the first movement and scored 0/30 while knowing more about Dvorak, Rachmanninov and Tchaikovsky than the rest of the class put together. I liked 7, too, for its outrageous rhythms, 'apotheosis' or not. But it was the Moonlight Sonata, Egmont, Fur Elise, it was his deafness and, yes, the drama of the Choral Symphony, not just the tub-thumping anthem but the first movement with which I tried to induce dreams, as had been discussed at school, and so played it under my pillow, fell asleep and dreamed of newspapers being delivered in bundles with headlines of war.
This was an artist, and a troubled one, possibly not much more troubled than Mozart but he looked it even if both of them could be as serene as they liked on the face of it.
Since then, there's been Tasmin Little playing the Violin Concerto for sheer joy in Portsmouth Cathedral. In protest at Richard Morrison finding fault with Mitsuko Uchida's performance of a concerto at the Proms, I bought her Complete Concertos, which isn't quite like seeing them live but Maria Luc played the Emperor to standing room only in Chichester earlier this year.
Neither Fidelio or the much revered Late Quartets are as forbidding as one might think but in the presence of the Grosse Fugue, there might be more to it than we'll ever know.
A recent visit to Chichester involved a Violin Sonata, along with similar by Brahms, and that meant buying the complete of both and they've been resident on the CD player for much of the time since.
It turns out that such early enthusiasms can last a lifetime without one ever finding anywhere near the bottom of them while other things (like sport, perhaps) don't.
So, happy 249th birthday to Beethoven. A lot of people were so keen to get in on it, they jumped the gun.
Monday, 30 December 2019
Rosemary Tonks - The Halt During the Chase
Rosemary Tonks, The Halt During the Chase (Bodley Head, 1972)
It's a pity this didn't cost the cover price of £1.80 but if you can't have what you want at my age you're never going to get it. The cost of this wasn't exorbitant but since it lived up to, if not exceeded, all expectations, I've broken the transfer record twice since in acquiring copies of two more of Rosemary's six novels. She might have disowned them, as she disowned everything else of her past life, but by any other than her own unworldly, disowning standards, there was no need to.
Reading so retrospectively, pruriently invading privacy like an academic poring over the finer details of their subject's inner life, one can't help but look for clues or early signs of Rosemary's subsequent disavowal of her literary life.
There's a visit to a clairvoyant, there's mention of mysticism and there's plenty of the finely-tuned world-weariness that drenches her poems in glorious despair,
You cannot hope to become a fertility tyrant of the middle classes, and earn the right to exclude, snub and humble others, without a story about babies (your own, of course. Talking about other people's babies isn't selfish enough. Therefore it's unnatural.)
Sophie is besotted with high-powered, careerist Philip but the relationship is in crisis. In a hotel room he tells her,
'I was going to ask you to come and live with me. But I can't promise you there won't be an emotional bust-up in five years' time. And then you'll be less well off financially than you are now'.
What a charmer.
Like Sophie with Philip, I desperately want to love this book but thankfully the book, unlike him, gives me every reason to.
Guy is the sensible option and much nicer but the compulsive nature of attraction doesn't comply with common sense,
Isn't buying new lampshades a form of slow death? And I remembered that even while I was doing that last week, I said to myself: 'How can I go out and buy lampshades when my heart is breaking?'
If The Halt During the Chase, its title most sophisticatedly taken from a painting by Watteau (who else), is comic, it is a dark sort of suffering comedy and comedy needs to be more than just funny if it is to be any good. The action, or inaction as it mostly is, moves to highly fashionable Paris, ever renowned for its 'taste' . Sophie had been quite taken with the clairvoyant,
sitting in a room papered with brown Victorian flock, crammed with brass and silver ornaments with so little taste that you could begin a whole new idea of taste from the tastelessness, all alone in a damp suburban house outside Brighton, he was happy!
And if all of that sardonic world view isn't good enough, the novel is only 158 pages (always a good thing), and Sophie is left with the prospect of a new life to make, perhaps, back with her mother, with who we had first seen her, them both reaching for 'a splash of vodka'.
--
Rosemary Tonks Studies is gathering momentum here, having thought the novels were beyond parsimonious finding and Neil Astley's Bedouin of the London Evening having been thought as far as one could sensibly take it.
Copies of the two poetry books had been changing hands for up to £1500, so it says on the internet, before Neil did his fine work on that.
But one gets nowhere if one doesn't try a bit harder. A signed poetry book on abebooks quotes the inscription on one but eventually one can find it, with its intelligent handwriting and bothersome erratum.
Having made three trips to Warblington Church, where Neil's book says she was buried with her mother, I gave up because I couldn't find it but we have it on the good authority of the Bournemouth Echo that,
One who got to know her was Alec Evans, maintenance worker at the Piccadilly Hotel in Bath Road, close to her home.
He remembers a woman who was: “Very British, beautifully educated, speaking French and Italian. Sometimes she would be talking and I’d stop her because she’d strayed into Italian,” he says.
He understood she had been a writer and referred to her as ‘Mrs T’: “But only because she wore a baseball cap everywhere, like Mr T from off the TV.
“She liked to help in the garden here so I would give her a few jobs to do and we’d chat,” he says, although he still won’t break her confidence.
“She was a very private person.”
What they never did was talk about her former life; “She was done with that” and Rosemary eventually moved into the hotel.
“She knew she was dying and made clear arrangements for her burial – she bought the plot beforehand,” he says. When the end came he believes she was ‘at peace’.
I'm not sure that 'buying the plot beforehand' lines up with being buried 'in her mother's grave'. It isn't really any of my business.
However, with The Halt having been such a gladsome acquisition, the budget was made available for more such and as I came back from the shop this morning (milk, yoghurt, raspberries, San Mig), I waved across the road to our cheerful postlady and well I might. She'd just delivered not only a Beethoven Anniversary edition of Gramophone but also Businessmen as Lovers, which is just as good, and another is on its way. Acquiring the other three novels is going to need a seriously successful day at Newbury next month.
But this is exciting stuff for the ardent book lover. You don't know how much further you can get until you try and there's nothing quite like finding your soulmate who is so much better at doing everything you wanted to do, more chic, so much classier and who chose to throw it all away.
It's a pity this didn't cost the cover price of £1.80 but if you can't have what you want at my age you're never going to get it. The cost of this wasn't exorbitant but since it lived up to, if not exceeded, all expectations, I've broken the transfer record twice since in acquiring copies of two more of Rosemary's six novels. She might have disowned them, as she disowned everything else of her past life, but by any other than her own unworldly, disowning standards, there was no need to.
Reading so retrospectively, pruriently invading privacy like an academic poring over the finer details of their subject's inner life, one can't help but look for clues or early signs of Rosemary's subsequent disavowal of her literary life.
There's a visit to a clairvoyant, there's mention of mysticism and there's plenty of the finely-tuned world-weariness that drenches her poems in glorious despair,
You cannot hope to become a fertility tyrant of the middle classes, and earn the right to exclude, snub and humble others, without a story about babies (your own, of course. Talking about other people's babies isn't selfish enough. Therefore it's unnatural.)
Sophie is besotted with high-powered, careerist Philip but the relationship is in crisis. In a hotel room he tells her,
'I was going to ask you to come and live with me. But I can't promise you there won't be an emotional bust-up in five years' time. And then you'll be less well off financially than you are now'.
What a charmer.
Like Sophie with Philip, I desperately want to love this book but thankfully the book, unlike him, gives me every reason to.
Guy is the sensible option and much nicer but the compulsive nature of attraction doesn't comply with common sense,
Isn't buying new lampshades a form of slow death? And I remembered that even while I was doing that last week, I said to myself: 'How can I go out and buy lampshades when my heart is breaking?'
If The Halt During the Chase, its title most sophisticatedly taken from a painting by Watteau (who else), is comic, it is a dark sort of suffering comedy and comedy needs to be more than just funny if it is to be any good. The action, or inaction as it mostly is, moves to highly fashionable Paris, ever renowned for its 'taste' . Sophie had been quite taken with the clairvoyant,sitting in a room papered with brown Victorian flock, crammed with brass and silver ornaments with so little taste that you could begin a whole new idea of taste from the tastelessness, all alone in a damp suburban house outside Brighton, he was happy!
And if all of that sardonic world view isn't good enough, the novel is only 158 pages (always a good thing), and Sophie is left with the prospect of a new life to make, perhaps, back with her mother, with who we had first seen her, them both reaching for 'a splash of vodka'.
--
Rosemary Tonks Studies is gathering momentum here, having thought the novels were beyond parsimonious finding and Neil Astley's Bedouin of the London Evening having been thought as far as one could sensibly take it.
Copies of the two poetry books had been changing hands for up to £1500, so it says on the internet, before Neil did his fine work on that.
Having made three trips to Warblington Church, where Neil's book says she was buried with her mother, I gave up because I couldn't find it but we have it on the good authority of the Bournemouth Echo that,
One who got to know her was Alec Evans, maintenance worker at the Piccadilly Hotel in Bath Road, close to her home.
He remembers a woman who was: “Very British, beautifully educated, speaking French and Italian. Sometimes she would be talking and I’d stop her because she’d strayed into Italian,” he says.
He understood she had been a writer and referred to her as ‘Mrs T’: “But only because she wore a baseball cap everywhere, like Mr T from off the TV.
“She liked to help in the garden here so I would give her a few jobs to do and we’d chat,” he says, although he still won’t break her confidence.
“She was a very private person.”
What they never did was talk about her former life; “She was done with that” and Rosemary eventually moved into the hotel.
“She knew she was dying and made clear arrangements for her burial – she bought the plot beforehand,” he says. When the end came he believes she was ‘at peace’.
I'm not sure that 'buying the plot beforehand' lines up with being buried 'in her mother's grave'. It isn't really any of my business.
However, with The Halt having been such a gladsome acquisition, the budget was made available for more such and as I came back from the shop this morning (milk, yoghurt, raspberries, San Mig), I waved across the road to our cheerful postlady and well I might. She'd just delivered not only a Beethoven Anniversary edition of Gramophone but also Businessmen as Lovers, which is just as good, and another is on its way. Acquiring the other three novels is going to need a seriously successful day at Newbury next month.
But this is exciting stuff for the ardent book lover. You don't know how much further you can get until you try and there's nothing quite like finding your soulmate who is so much better at doing everything you wanted to do, more chic, so much classier and who chose to throw it all away.
Laura Cumming - On Chapel Sands
Laura Cumming, On Chapel Sands (Chatto & Windus)
Laura Cumming's retrospective memoir and investigation was listed in most of the Books of the Year lists I saw as well as being featured on Radio 4 but that wasn't why I read it. My first summer holidays were spent on Chapel sands and many more of my mother's were so it was a fitting choice of Christmas book for her and another that I greedily sat and read before the recipient, gradually spoiling it for them with my previews. But there's plenty left to enjoy. It is a compelling detective story that uncovers strange past family events.
Laura's mother went missing on Chapel St. Leonard's beach as a three year old before being found again a few days later. None of the previews I saw revealed the ending so I won't spoil it any further and won't do that either.
Childhood in the 1920's and after could be made a repressive regime of rules and behavioural expectations,
everything about eating seemed rude,
and the mysterious disappearance of Hugh Green, son of a local bigwig in Chapel, leaves an emptiness in his family that is compared to the discovery that a fancy, ornamental cake in a shop window is actually cardboard and hollow.
Laura's mother, known as Betty, aged 13, is accosted by a woman on a bus with a photo that purports to be evidence of who she really is; the Blanchard bread van from Hogsthorpe delivers to seemingly every house but theirs; going back to Chapel to enquire about the apparent abduction so many years previous, Laura is met with a silence that suggests the local people remember and know something.
If Laura hadn't found the answer there wouldn't have been a book but she broadens out the detail into a period piece that meditates on both economic and emotional austerity, various types of loss, downgraded expectations and stoic acceptance.
What one doesn't realize, perhaps - or I didn't- is that one's sympathies might for much of the time be misplaced but the reader isn't to know any more than those whose lives were lived on false premises did. They are the last to know.
There is much to be admired in the heroic, ordinary lives of those who may or may not be seen as the victims and Laura goes as far as she can in understanding those we might think of as the wrongdoers and takes the opportunity where she can of using her day job as art critic of The Observer to inform her account with parallels in art history.
It's probably best if we don't go back to Chapel because it won't be like we remember it on Tomlinson's Caravan Park where my grandfather had his caravan, a short walk over the sand dunes where one had to be first to see the sea. The perils of starfish and jellyfish on the beach probably aren't there any more, Walter Keeton won't be on holiday from his work batting at Trent Bridge and neither will Alfred Tennyson be there before him. It will be less genteel, probably the worse for it, and one can't go back but there are more ghosts there than even we knew about.
Any book that is read in a day can be highly recommended on that evidence alone because I didn't put it down much. There are only about half a dozen such books that I've ever done that with.
Laura's mother went missing on Chapel St. Leonard's beach as a three year old before being found again a few days later. None of the previews I saw revealed the ending so I won't spoil it any further and won't do that either.
Childhood in the 1920's and after could be made a repressive regime of rules and behavioural expectations,
everything about eating seemed rude,
and the mysterious disappearance of Hugh Green, son of a local bigwig in Chapel, leaves an emptiness in his family that is compared to the discovery that a fancy, ornamental cake in a shop window is actually cardboard and hollow.
Laura's mother, known as Betty, aged 13, is accosted by a woman on a bus with a photo that purports to be evidence of who she really is; the Blanchard bread van from Hogsthorpe delivers to seemingly every house but theirs; going back to Chapel to enquire about the apparent abduction so many years previous, Laura is met with a silence that suggests the local people remember and know something.
If Laura hadn't found the answer there wouldn't have been a book but she broadens out the detail into a period piece that meditates on both economic and emotional austerity, various types of loss, downgraded expectations and stoic acceptance.
What one doesn't realize, perhaps - or I didn't- is that one's sympathies might for much of the time be misplaced but the reader isn't to know any more than those whose lives were lived on false premises did. They are the last to know.
There is much to be admired in the heroic, ordinary lives of those who may or may not be seen as the victims and Laura goes as far as she can in understanding those we might think of as the wrongdoers and takes the opportunity where she can of using her day job as art critic of The Observer to inform her account with parallels in art history.
It's probably best if we don't go back to Chapel because it won't be like we remember it on Tomlinson's Caravan Park where my grandfather had his caravan, a short walk over the sand dunes where one had to be first to see the sea. The perils of starfish and jellyfish on the beach probably aren't there any more, Walter Keeton won't be on holiday from his work batting at Trent Bridge and neither will Alfred Tennyson be there before him. It will be less genteel, probably the worse for it, and one can't go back but there are more ghosts there than even we knew about.
Any book that is read in a day can be highly recommended on that evidence alone because I didn't put it down much. There are only about half a dozen such books that I've ever done that with.
Saturday, 28 December 2019
The Greatest - The Times and Life of Beryl Burton
William Fotheringham, The Greatest, the Times and Life of Beryl Burton (YouCaxton)
Last year I read the book about Alf Engers that I had bought for my father for Christmas before he did, while I was there. This year I completed the double by doing the same with Beryl Burton. That's selfish but, in mitigation, he read as much as he could of the book he bought for me before I brought it home with me, which was the new biography of Ken Dodd. By Jove.
But selfish is what one needs to be sometimes. At least if you are going to succeed in the way that Beryl Burton did, setting standards unthinkable not only for her gender but crashing through many 'glass ceilings' long before feminism had thought of the phrase. An appreciation of what she achieved in the Otley CC 12 Hour in 1967 was given in some detail by Paul Sinha on his Radio 4 programme of obscure quiz knowledge earlier this year. It's still somehow outrageous that such knowledge should still be regarded as 'obscure' and news to many of those who heard it then but the art of amateur time trialling on bikes, then much more than now, was our special secret.
I'm not convinced that we wanted people to know, the same as it is with those of us who think we know about a certain sort of sensible poetry. For all that William Fotheringham looks back in anger at the shambles of organisation of British cycling, bemoans how much more Beryl might have achieved had cycling, women's rights and opportunities been better catered for and how she was left with nothing else to do, it doesn't read like that to me.
Beryl Burton was Yorkshire and, even if I left in 1968 at the age of 8, I'm Notts. There is a difference. They were militant, we were moderate. Beryl came from Boycott country, like Fred Trueman, Brian Close, Ray Illingworth. Had I been good enough, I'd have batted with Derek Randall.
Her decades of unimaginable record setting and unassailable title-holding might only amount to the same dreary litany of facts and figures that make sports biography usually such a dull area, written by ghost writers because the subject is no writer and written for sports anoraks who know no better than to think such statistics matter. But Beryl's story comes down to two illuminating episodes.
The first is the increasingly most famous licorice allsort that she passed to top male rider, Mike MacNamara, when she caught him from two minutes behind in the Otley 12 in 1967 before making the male 12 Hour record only a sub category of the overall record with her 277.25. Even then she turned down the chance of extending it by finishing 45 seconds early.
The other is when Denise, her daughter, beat her in the National Championship Road Race in 1976 and she struggled to come to terms with it. Maybe you need to be like that if you are so concentrated on winning but what not all of us knew is that Denise still lived at home and Beryl wouldn't even give Denise a lift to the start first thing that morning. My dad was kinder than that and thought nothing of taking me to the Swindon Road Club '10' in 1995 when I put 4 minutes into my mother and father on their tandem. I was spoilt rotten.
Beryl blamed her defeat, probably quite rightly, on the fact that she had to set the pace in the leading group and was left vulnerable to attack in the finishing sprint from those who had hung on to her back wheel. But that is what cycling's like. Even she couldn't continue to dominate in such different disciplines as the relentless churning out of miles in marathon 12's while retaining the speed and immediate acceleration to win in last-minute sprints and short distance pursuits on the track.
If Fotheringham does his journalistic best to diagnose some flaw in Beryl and decides she had nothing more than winning at cycling as an obsession, he's already shot himself in the foot by detailing the friends she had as an ordinary club member, as well as her knitting, baking and even, yes, ironing, that I'm sure Alf Engers didn't do.
Considering the headlines made this week by Fallon Sherrock, who has beaten two men in the Darts, yes, Beryl had more than plenty going on and that was all the Good Yorkshire, not the Boycott Yorkshire.
What she started out with was debilitating childhood illness, unexpectedly failing the 11-plus and then the hard work on a rhubarb farm. And then she never let it show that she had to try to keep up but what she ended up with, as well as taking on Eastern Bloc opposition with state-sponsored advantages, was,
her enduring ability to time trial the living daylights out of any stretch of road in Britain.
My favourite bit, though, is domestic not sport-related,
Immediately after crossing the line in a National Championship time trial, Burton...had spotted some cheap potatoes and was going back to buy some.
Sad though Fotheringham tries to make the story, with her compulsion to continue riding when she could have stopped, with mounting injury problems and not winning any more, I don't think he makes the case for the emptiness inside that he finds in Beryl.
Never being satisfied is at most the least one needs to have to dominate above one's division in the way that she did. For sure, her claim that she had no natural talent are absurd because natural ability plus commitment are essential to any such longevity at far beyond the top of any chosen discipline but that's Yorkshire for you, claiming that it was just grit and determination.
It's a great book and a fine tribute but that's more due to Beryl than it is to William Fotheringham's attempt to interpret her.
But selfish is what one needs to be sometimes. At least if you are going to succeed in the way that Beryl Burton did, setting standards unthinkable not only for her gender but crashing through many 'glass ceilings' long before feminism had thought of the phrase. An appreciation of what she achieved in the Otley CC 12 Hour in 1967 was given in some detail by Paul Sinha on his Radio 4 programme of obscure quiz knowledge earlier this year. It's still somehow outrageous that such knowledge should still be regarded as 'obscure' and news to many of those who heard it then but the art of amateur time trialling on bikes, then much more than now, was our special secret.
I'm not convinced that we wanted people to know, the same as it is with those of us who think we know about a certain sort of sensible poetry. For all that William Fotheringham looks back in anger at the shambles of organisation of British cycling, bemoans how much more Beryl might have achieved had cycling, women's rights and opportunities been better catered for and how she was left with nothing else to do, it doesn't read like that to me.
Beryl Burton was Yorkshire and, even if I left in 1968 at the age of 8, I'm Notts. There is a difference. They were militant, we were moderate. Beryl came from Boycott country, like Fred Trueman, Brian Close, Ray Illingworth. Had I been good enough, I'd have batted with Derek Randall.
Her decades of unimaginable record setting and unassailable title-holding might only amount to the same dreary litany of facts and figures that make sports biography usually such a dull area, written by ghost writers because the subject is no writer and written for sports anoraks who know no better than to think such statistics matter. But Beryl's story comes down to two illuminating episodes.
The first is the increasingly most famous licorice allsort that she passed to top male rider, Mike MacNamara, when she caught him from two minutes behind in the Otley 12 in 1967 before making the male 12 Hour record only a sub category of the overall record with her 277.25. Even then she turned down the chance of extending it by finishing 45 seconds early.
The other is when Denise, her daughter, beat her in the National Championship Road Race in 1976 and she struggled to come to terms with it. Maybe you need to be like that if you are so concentrated on winning but what not all of us knew is that Denise still lived at home and Beryl wouldn't even give Denise a lift to the start first thing that morning. My dad was kinder than that and thought nothing of taking me to the Swindon Road Club '10' in 1995 when I put 4 minutes into my mother and father on their tandem. I was spoilt rotten.
Beryl blamed her defeat, probably quite rightly, on the fact that she had to set the pace in the leading group and was left vulnerable to attack in the finishing sprint from those who had hung on to her back wheel. But that is what cycling's like. Even she couldn't continue to dominate in such different disciplines as the relentless churning out of miles in marathon 12's while retaining the speed and immediate acceleration to win in last-minute sprints and short distance pursuits on the track.
If Fotheringham does his journalistic best to diagnose some flaw in Beryl and decides she had nothing more than winning at cycling as an obsession, he's already shot himself in the foot by detailing the friends she had as an ordinary club member, as well as her knitting, baking and even, yes, ironing, that I'm sure Alf Engers didn't do.
Considering the headlines made this week by Fallon Sherrock, who has beaten two men in the Darts, yes, Beryl had more than plenty going on and that was all the Good Yorkshire, not the Boycott Yorkshire.
What she started out with was debilitating childhood illness, unexpectedly failing the 11-plus and then the hard work on a rhubarb farm. And then she never let it show that she had to try to keep up but what she ended up with, as well as taking on Eastern Bloc opposition with state-sponsored advantages, was,
her enduring ability to time trial the living daylights out of any stretch of road in Britain.
My favourite bit, though, is domestic not sport-related,
Immediately after crossing the line in a National Championship time trial, Burton...had spotted some cheap potatoes and was going back to buy some.
Sad though Fotheringham tries to make the story, with her compulsion to continue riding when she could have stopped, with mounting injury problems and not winning any more, I don't think he makes the case for the emptiness inside that he finds in Beryl.
Never being satisfied is at most the least one needs to have to dominate above one's division in the way that she did. For sure, her claim that she had no natural talent are absurd because natural ability plus commitment are essential to any such longevity at far beyond the top of any chosen discipline but that's Yorkshire for you, claiming that it was just grit and determination.
It's a great book and a fine tribute but that's more due to Beryl than it is to William Fotheringham's attempt to interpret her.
The Poetry of Stanley Middleton
Poetry and Old Age, Selected Poems of Stanley Middleton, ed. Philip Davis (Shoestring Press)
These poems read like the poems of a novelist, somebody once said, but not with reference to Stanley Middleton's poems. The occasion was over 40 years ago when a well-meaning friend sent a handful of my juvenilia ( I think I was 17 or 18) to Stephen Spender. Spender possibly didn't read the accompanying letter carefully enough and then took a short cut. The letter said that my uncle had recently had a novel published, not me.
But it might be time for the line to be re-used, not quite as such a back-handed compliment because Stanley Middleton certainly was a novelist whereas it's starting to look unlikely that I will be.
There is nothing wrong with being amateur. It means 'doing it for the love of it' and amateur poets are for the most part sincere and not hostage to their poetic techniques, agendas or manifestos. If Stanley produced 45 novels of immaculately thoughtful, understated, provincial humanity as not even the 'day job', which was Head of English at High Pavement Grammar School, Nottingham, the poems were his respite from doing that, like the piano or organ-playing and so he's no more a candidate for the poetry anthologies of the period than he is for musicianship prizes, none of which means that for a specific audience of those who care, this is not a valuable book to complete their insight into a worthy and worthwhile artist.
Modesty becomes him, almost to a fault. In These poems are like nail clippings, he instinctively retreats from star status,
These should be of themselves, author forgotten,
Shine, meaning accomplished, for how they're said.
His self-effacing approach is often his theme.
Philip Davis was a pupil, became a friend and eventually editor of these poems that weren't necessarily written with publication in mind. The selection is not chronological and includes extracts from two novels that feature poetry, Two Brothers and Old Age and Poetry, one published and one not. There is a suggestion that accomplishment in one area only makes one want to be something else. How many cricketers can't wait to escape their round of batting, bowling and fielding in favour of the golf course. Novelists want to be poets; poets want to be musicians; classical musicians want to be pop stars. And some poets want to be novelists but it's just too hard to do.
In In Mem E.T. Died 4 July 1994, Stan offers a glimpse of the lines he might have written more often, with Larkin's formal elegance as a template, had he concentrated more on the poems,
God
knows my friend has died, dull
with narcotics, sharp brain flat
Though those who watched more full
of pain than she who could
estimate the exact variety of the world
which extends beyond his usual remit of art appreciation, sympathetic observance of his suburban environment and intimations of mortality. God is there as much as his music, friends and humanity are, which is where he parts company with Larkin but that's his business.
We can be grateful to John Lucas at Shoestring Press, and Philip Davis, for providing this labour of love and remembrance, for those who wanted to know.
But it might be time for the line to be re-used, not quite as such a back-handed compliment because Stanley Middleton certainly was a novelist whereas it's starting to look unlikely that I will be.
There is nothing wrong with being amateur. It means 'doing it for the love of it' and amateur poets are for the most part sincere and not hostage to their poetic techniques, agendas or manifestos. If Stanley produced 45 novels of immaculately thoughtful, understated, provincial humanity as not even the 'day job', which was Head of English at High Pavement Grammar School, Nottingham, the poems were his respite from doing that, like the piano or organ-playing and so he's no more a candidate for the poetry anthologies of the period than he is for musicianship prizes, none of which means that for a specific audience of those who care, this is not a valuable book to complete their insight into a worthy and worthwhile artist.
Modesty becomes him, almost to a fault. In These poems are like nail clippings, he instinctively retreats from star status,
These should be of themselves, author forgotten,
Shine, meaning accomplished, for how they're said.
His self-effacing approach is often his theme.
Philip Davis was a pupil, became a friend and eventually editor of these poems that weren't necessarily written with publication in mind. The selection is not chronological and includes extracts from two novels that feature poetry, Two Brothers and Old Age and Poetry, one published and one not. There is a suggestion that accomplishment in one area only makes one want to be something else. How many cricketers can't wait to escape their round of batting, bowling and fielding in favour of the golf course. Novelists want to be poets; poets want to be musicians; classical musicians want to be pop stars. And some poets want to be novelists but it's just too hard to do.
In In Mem E.T. Died 4 July 1994, Stan offers a glimpse of the lines he might have written more often, with Larkin's formal elegance as a template, had he concentrated more on the poems,
God
knows my friend has died, dull
with narcotics, sharp brain flat
Though those who watched more full
of pain than she who could
estimate the exact variety of the world
which extends beyond his usual remit of art appreciation, sympathetic observance of his suburban environment and intimations of mortality. God is there as much as his music, friends and humanity are, which is where he parts company with Larkin but that's his business.
We can be grateful to John Lucas at Shoestring Press, and Philip Davis, for providing this labour of love and remembrance, for those who wanted to know.
Friday, 20 December 2019
The Year in Review
It was a wise decision to announce this time last year that after 10 years of making the most dubious and least-coveted awards in poetry and an extended set of categories that I would stop.
I haven't read very much new poetry at all this year. If I had any flimsy authority a few years ago to nominate what I considered the Best Poem or Best Collection of the year, I'd struggle to name even a few new books that were published this year.
I don't think I read any new novels in 2019 but Best Book would have to be Daisy Dunn's In the Shadow of Vesuvius, ahead of Julian Barnes.
Best Event was Wincanton races on 17th October as I marked my 60th successful orbit of the Sun with some choice company and the authoritative win by Sebastopol that was flagged up in these pages.
On a higher brow it was Isata Kanneh-Mason's recital at Turner Sims, Southampton, with her mostly Clara Schumann with the rest of the shortlist having been Chichester Cathedral concerts.
I was gratified to see the Anamorfosi album by Le Poeme Harmonique nominated as best disc of the year in Gramophone by Alexandra Coghlan on which the instability of the text was highlighted by a new Allegri Miserere but having had two Gramophone experts agree with my selection last year, I'm not going with that because it is too much altogether and I can't play it all in one go so Isata takes that as well because her debut album was as perfect as you can get without going to see her play it.
I read the best book I've ever read in Ian Bostridge's Winter Journey but the two I am reading at present, which won't take long, are excellent, too.
Rosemary Tonks's last novel, The Halt During the Chase, is not a disappointment. It could have been because expectations were high so the fact that it isn't makes it great, and a bargain at nearly £150 cheaper than the other available copy.
Marjorie MacNeill's Norman MacCaig, a Study of his Life and Work is as lucid and admirable as its subject and so looking like a huge success.
They should both be read, appreciated and carefully filed before Christmas, some of which will be spent looking at what I bought for others. Stanley Middleton's poems will be of interest, as will Laura Cummings's On Chapel Sands and the new Beryl Burton biography. I'll have to purloin them later if I can't finish them in the allotted time. Last Christmas I was inconsiderate enough to read the Alf Engers biography before its rightful owner.
So, that's it. I'm glad to see the number of 'postings' this year is well down on previous years so I must have been doing something more productive.
Happy Christmas, etc.
I haven't read very much new poetry at all this year. If I had any flimsy authority a few years ago to nominate what I considered the Best Poem or Best Collection of the year, I'd struggle to name even a few new books that were published this year.
I don't think I read any new novels in 2019 but Best Book would have to be Daisy Dunn's In the Shadow of Vesuvius, ahead of Julian Barnes.
Best Event was Wincanton races on 17th October as I marked my 60th successful orbit of the Sun with some choice company and the authoritative win by Sebastopol that was flagged up in these pages.
On a higher brow it was Isata Kanneh-Mason's recital at Turner Sims, Southampton, with her mostly Clara Schumann with the rest of the shortlist having been Chichester Cathedral concerts.
I was gratified to see the Anamorfosi album by Le Poeme Harmonique nominated as best disc of the year in Gramophone by Alexandra Coghlan on which the instability of the text was highlighted by a new Allegri Miserere but having had two Gramophone experts agree with my selection last year, I'm not going with that because it is too much altogether and I can't play it all in one go so Isata takes that as well because her debut album was as perfect as you can get without going to see her play it.
I read the best book I've ever read in Ian Bostridge's Winter Journey but the two I am reading at present, which won't take long, are excellent, too.
Rosemary Tonks's last novel, The Halt During the Chase, is not a disappointment. It could have been because expectations were high so the fact that it isn't makes it great, and a bargain at nearly £150 cheaper than the other available copy.
Marjorie MacNeill's Norman MacCaig, a Study of his Life and Work is as lucid and admirable as its subject and so looking like a huge success.
They should both be read, appreciated and carefully filed before Christmas, some of which will be spent looking at what I bought for others. Stanley Middleton's poems will be of interest, as will Laura Cummings's On Chapel Sands and the new Beryl Burton biography. I'll have to purloin them later if I can't finish them in the allotted time. Last Christmas I was inconsiderate enough to read the Alf Engers biography before its rightful owner.
So, that's it. I'm glad to see the number of 'postings' this year is well down on previous years so I must have been doing something more productive.
Happy Christmas, etc.
Monday, 16 December 2019
Tamer and Hawk and other hawks
The Gunn book was supposed to be something to do once I finish full-time work but I've got no more idea when that will be than you have. I thought I'd make some notes by way of preparation and it starts to look as if I might be able to do it. There's surely plenty to say and there is enough biography and autobiography already in print to lift. I mean 'cite'. All it needs is organizing, which is the enjoyable bit; and then writing, which is the drudgery where it might falter.
But I itched to get a few words done and was taken with this idea of where to start. If the book is never completed, at least this note makes a minor contribution to Gunn Studies.
--
Tamer and Hawk, in Thom Gunn's first book of poems, Fighting Terms, published in 1954, is the early masterpiece.
Whereas Yeats's
falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
is a hawk symbolic of lost connection, dysfunction and resulting anarchy, in The Second Coming,
and Gerard Manley Hopkins's Windhover is,
this morning, morning's, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling underneath him steady air,
and dedicated To Christ our Lord, the wonder of nature being implicit evidence of the presence of God,
and Ted Hughes's first book, The Hawk in the Rain begins with the poem of that title before he continues in Lupercal with Hawk Roosting and its masterful bird with,
no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.
Gunn's hawk is joined to its tamer in a symbiotic relationship of mutual control and sensual, limited freedom.
It was unfortunate that Gunn and Hughes were published together in the joint Selected Poems by Faber in 1962 because it led them to be inappropriately bracketed together on account of perceived themes of machismo and violence. Had Philip Larkin been included in a three-way Selected, which proved not possible due to Larkin's copyright agreement at the time, it might not have looked like that. It would have been more apparent that Gunn occupied a more central attitude between the 'gentility' in Larkin detected and derided by Al Alvarez in his introduction to The New Poetry, also from 1962, and the 'risk-taking' of Hughes that he so admired. It was Hughes that knew the difference and later pointed out that Gunn was 'a poet of gentleness'.
--
So that's 284 words. Including quotes. It took some checking to make sure it's right because it has to be because if you get one thing wrong, somebody will find it. In other people's books, that might be me. And it might not even be right and I'm not sure where the Hughes quote first appeared.
It could be a long job but the days will need filling with some sort of job.
But I itched to get a few words done and was taken with this idea of where to start. If the book is never completed, at least this note makes a minor contribution to Gunn Studies.
--
Tamer and Hawk, in Thom Gunn's first book of poems, Fighting Terms, published in 1954, is the early masterpiece.
Whereas Yeats's
falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
is a hawk symbolic of lost connection, dysfunction and resulting anarchy, in The Second Coming,
and Gerard Manley Hopkins's Windhover is,
this morning, morning's, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling underneath him steady air,
and dedicated To Christ our Lord, the wonder of nature being implicit evidence of the presence of God,
and Ted Hughes's first book, The Hawk in the Rain begins with the poem of that title before he continues in Lupercal with Hawk Roosting and its masterful bird with,
no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.
Gunn's hawk is joined to its tamer in a symbiotic relationship of mutual control and sensual, limited freedom.
It was unfortunate that Gunn and Hughes were published together in the joint Selected Poems by Faber in 1962 because it led them to be inappropriately bracketed together on account of perceived themes of machismo and violence. Had Philip Larkin been included in a three-way Selected, which proved not possible due to Larkin's copyright agreement at the time, it might not have looked like that. It would have been more apparent that Gunn occupied a more central attitude between the 'gentility' in Larkin detected and derided by Al Alvarez in his introduction to The New Poetry, also from 1962, and the 'risk-taking' of Hughes that he so admired. It was Hughes that knew the difference and later pointed out that Gunn was 'a poet of gentleness'.
--
So that's 284 words. Including quotes. It took some checking to make sure it's right because it has to be because if you get one thing wrong, somebody will find it. In other people's books, that might be me. And it might not even be right and I'm not sure where the Hughes quote first appeared.
It could be a long job but the days will need filling with some sort of job.
Saturday, 14 December 2019
Today's Times Crossword Solution
A bit of a return to form, dispatched before noon. At least, let's hope it is. I need some change of fortune.
Have you ever been made to look a fool by Tony Blackburn. I was this morning.
Having sent in a request to Sounds of the 60's, I thought I had ascertained from the website that he would play it this morning, the artist being listed in the preview. So I was awake by 6.21, listened until 8 and didn't hear it, checked the playlist and found it was another record by Wayne Fontana that he played. The family were up, or at least tuned in for 6 a.m. to no avail.
I was Tony Blackburn's fallguy. I was Henry Magee to his Benny Hill.
Thursday, 12 December 2019
What do you say, now, if it's a nice day, now
Just in case of abject misery during the night, here's the antidote.
Tuesday, 10 December 2019
My Astute Swoop in the Book Market
From time to time I continue the optimistic search for the novels of Rosemary Tonks at affordable prices. I only have to be reminded of her to return to her poems and realize that I love her even more than I did before. It's an interesting exercise to find out exactly what price one will go to but finding Halt During the Chase, the last of the six novels, First Edition (as if there were any others), 1972, for £27.11 inc p+p and VAT because it's coming from France, helped define that.
The other copy available on Amazon New and Used is £174.74.
I can hardly wait for it to arrive and be its new owner because I want to be as much as I can one of that small but elite group of Rosemary admirers. Gathering the other five novels might never happen because they won't all be findable under £30 but, if I ever do, I hope I don't go through what I did with Richard Yates, putting together the complete works for myself, nearly all from America before they were all re-issued in paperback here. I don't think that will happen with Rosemary.
It led me to wonder if I could fit her into my Top 6 Poets. Top 6 was a feature here once and still can be if anybody wants to contribute one. On any theme but literary, musical or art for preference. So,
Top 6 Poets
Philip Larkin and Thom Gunn go in automatically. I might not even be particularly interested in poetry if I wasn't interested in them.
Elizabeth Bishop also has her own shelf here and perhaps only suffers in comparison for not having been regarded as essential for as long.
John Donne. Can't be left out.
Auden. Huge respect. I prefer to judge people on a significant amount of 'best' work rather than an average over an excessively prolix output.
And, so, the sixth place, which had gradually become a bit of a 'wild card', like a Top 5 plus 1. I can get Rosemary in there and that's where she might belong but I spent some time last night making a list of candidates and there's twenty-two others.
The serious contenders for the sixth place are Norman MacCaig, whose Collected can't be opened without something wonderful being found there; Shakespeare, Ovid, and then gradually the case to be made becomes more partial. So that's nine. The six is the five plus one from the repechage.
Bearing in mind that my Top 6 is an odd combination of 'best' in some objective way and 'favourite' in as much as I like them (which is where Rosemary's chance to get in ahead of Shakespeare and Ovid lies), the other 18, in some sort of order but not a definitive order, are Seamus Heaney, August Kleinzahler, Derek Mahon, Chaucer, Sean O'Brien, Sylvia Plath, Edward Thomas, Catullus, Tony Harrison, Louis MacNeice, Roddy Lumsden, Thomas Hardy, Keats, Horace, Paul Muldoon, Eliot, Marvell, Tennyson.
And that is about the 'canon according to me', plus things by Alun Lewis, Douglas Dunn, Julia Copus, maybe Fulke Greville ought to be in the canon, Baudelaire and the list goes on, as lists tend to do, with the proviso that one has overlooked somebody essential like the author of Wulf and Eadwacer.
So, since the point was to see if Rosemary Tonks makes it into the Top 6 or not, let's put her in.
--
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, in a purgatory of indecision worthy of Hamlet or Prufrock, I keep kicking the can down the road on when to pack in full-time paid work. I'm stuck between Larkin's Toads and Toads Revisited in a place that even he didn't envisage.
The concern is what fruitfully might fill the days rather than the further accumulation of cash that I probably won't ever need. 'Fruitfully' is the important word but the fruit doesn't have to be an end result, it can be mere enjoyment.
The other thing I sketched out on the back of an envelope last night was chapter 1 of my Thom Gunn book. How to write a book, as I discovered in writing a 'blizzard of errata' in the one draft of my bike racing novel, is to make a few notes on the back of envelopes, one envelope per chapter, and then sit in front of the bloody computer and bash it out. That is horrendous work if you have to make up a story but it might not be so bad just trying to organize 40-odd years worth of thinking, and assimilating other people's ideas, about a favourite poet. It might just be possible. It doesn't matter if it doesn't see print.
It is ten years, I notice, since August Kleinzahler's book on Music was published and I enquired of him at his appearance at the LRB Bookshop if there were any late, unpublished Gunn poems and he just about said 'no', and I asked if any biography was forthcoming and he said there might be. But it hasn't transpired. If you want a job doing, you sometimes have to do it yourself. It won't be a biography, it will bring together a shelf-full of books into a summary of what I made of them.
Publishers, by all means get in touch. Don't all rush at once.
The other copy available on Amazon New and Used is £174.74.
I can hardly wait for it to arrive and be its new owner because I want to be as much as I can one of that small but elite group of Rosemary admirers. Gathering the other five novels might never happen because they won't all be findable under £30 but, if I ever do, I hope I don't go through what I did with Richard Yates, putting together the complete works for myself, nearly all from America before they were all re-issued in paperback here. I don't think that will happen with Rosemary.
It led me to wonder if I could fit her into my Top 6 Poets. Top 6 was a feature here once and still can be if anybody wants to contribute one. On any theme but literary, musical or art for preference. So,
Top 6 Poets
Philip Larkin and Thom Gunn go in automatically. I might not even be particularly interested in poetry if I wasn't interested in them.
Elizabeth Bishop also has her own shelf here and perhaps only suffers in comparison for not having been regarded as essential for as long.
John Donne. Can't be left out.
Auden. Huge respect. I prefer to judge people on a significant amount of 'best' work rather than an average over an excessively prolix output.
And, so, the sixth place, which had gradually become a bit of a 'wild card', like a Top 5 plus 1. I can get Rosemary in there and that's where she might belong but I spent some time last night making a list of candidates and there's twenty-two others.
The serious contenders for the sixth place are Norman MacCaig, whose Collected can't be opened without something wonderful being found there; Shakespeare, Ovid, and then gradually the case to be made becomes more partial. So that's nine. The six is the five plus one from the repechage.
Bearing in mind that my Top 6 is an odd combination of 'best' in some objective way and 'favourite' in as much as I like them (which is where Rosemary's chance to get in ahead of Shakespeare and Ovid lies), the other 18, in some sort of order but not a definitive order, are Seamus Heaney, August Kleinzahler, Derek Mahon, Chaucer, Sean O'Brien, Sylvia Plath, Edward Thomas, Catullus, Tony Harrison, Louis MacNeice, Roddy Lumsden, Thomas Hardy, Keats, Horace, Paul Muldoon, Eliot, Marvell, Tennyson.
And that is about the 'canon according to me', plus things by Alun Lewis, Douglas Dunn, Julia Copus, maybe Fulke Greville ought to be in the canon, Baudelaire and the list goes on, as lists tend to do, with the proviso that one has overlooked somebody essential like the author of Wulf and Eadwacer.
So, since the point was to see if Rosemary Tonks makes it into the Top 6 or not, let's put her in.
--
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, in a purgatory of indecision worthy of Hamlet or Prufrock, I keep kicking the can down the road on when to pack in full-time paid work. I'm stuck between Larkin's Toads and Toads Revisited in a place that even he didn't envisage.
The concern is what fruitfully might fill the days rather than the further accumulation of cash that I probably won't ever need. 'Fruitfully' is the important word but the fruit doesn't have to be an end result, it can be mere enjoyment.
The other thing I sketched out on the back of an envelope last night was chapter 1 of my Thom Gunn book. How to write a book, as I discovered in writing a 'blizzard of errata' in the one draft of my bike racing novel, is to make a few notes on the back of envelopes, one envelope per chapter, and then sit in front of the bloody computer and bash it out. That is horrendous work if you have to make up a story but it might not be so bad just trying to organize 40-odd years worth of thinking, and assimilating other people's ideas, about a favourite poet. It might just be possible. It doesn't matter if it doesn't see print.
It is ten years, I notice, since August Kleinzahler's book on Music was published and I enquired of him at his appearance at the LRB Bookshop if there were any late, unpublished Gunn poems and he just about said 'no', and I asked if any biography was forthcoming and he said there might be. But it hasn't transpired. If you want a job doing, you sometimes have to do it yourself. It won't be a biography, it will bring together a shelf-full of books into a summary of what I made of them.
Publishers, by all means get in touch. Don't all rush at once.
Tuesday, 3 December 2019
Buxtehude in Portsmouth
I had been so undecided about which to go to that I thought I might stay in. Luckily, I found this, at Music in Portsmouth,
Renaissance and Baroque Music (including Buxtehude’s Magnificat), 20th/21st-century carols, including Schofield’s Illuminare Jerusalem, which was written for the choir in 1992.
Buxtehude in Portsmouth rarely, if ever to my knowledge, goes beyond some organ repertoire in Lunchtime Live! recitals. There was a Membra Jesu Nostri in Sussex a while ago, Boxgrove Priory maybe, but that's not easily accessible. So, I really must make the effort. It's the sort of occasion that one has to attend because if the likes of me don't, who can you expect would.
Monday, 2 December 2019
Seeing Things
I thought I must be 'seeing things', an hour and a half programme on Saturday night all about Seamus Heaney. So I turned the telly on and there it was.
Seamus Heaney and the music of what happens was more biographical than literary with first hand reportage from Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon and several brothers, Marie and a daughter. So, the early days, the marriage, the television work, the Troubles, a quick rise to star status, Harvard, the Republic, the Nobel Prize, the stroke and noli timere. It was just about what was required for 'the general reader, without saying quite enough about why he was any good.
It's usually the words, you see, that make a poet great, rather than what they say. Michael Longley is a very good poet and would have attracted more attention had Heaney not been there but he is only in second gear in comparison. It's the difference between Shakespeare and his contemporaries and between Mozart and Salieri. There was nothing about the delicate music, the apparent naturalness and the richness of the language that came as standard.
But there's always one, isn't there. In this case it is A.N. Wilson, the doyen of English fogeyness, who I generally approve of for his fey Derek Nimmo-ishness as well as his Jesus book. He wasn't in this programme, of course, but I saw a disparaging remark by him about Heaney recently which didn't seem like the first so I've looked him up on the subject. He's always at it, it seems. There's always one.
Such a programme makes it plain that where the words come from is essential to any understanding of them and the more one thinks about the old 'text is all there is' approach, the bleaker it looks. The Irishness, the bog people and, indeed, the avoidance of anything partisan beyond the poem declining Motion and Morrison's offer of the post of figurehead to a generation of British poets are crucial and one begins to wonder if any poets should be read without a biography to accompany the poems. But few are going to be awarded a book biography, never mind a television documentary. Most are sadly not going to be deemed worth the effort. Although I'd be grateful of a similar thing on J.H. Prynne, I can't see it happening. The very idea. Perhaps it's a podcast for a devoted admirer to do.
But we are grateful for what we are offered, even if the poet needs a Nobel Prize to qualify.
--
So, three and a half years' worth of TLS went upstairs into a room it's not advisable to try to navigate in the dark. The Gramophones fitted onto the music book shelves and that freed up the bottom shelf of the bookcase here in the back room which now reads, top to bottom- poetry biographies, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Bishop/Sean O'Brien, Philip Larkin and Shakespeare biography. And I now have my choice of lying down places in the front room restored and that is that minor crisis resolved. I knew you'd be relieved.
--
The Beethoven and Brahms Violin Sonatas both took their separate times to arrive and then did. You may be aware by now that I've only really got one line on each composer and the Brahms line is that he forever felt overshadowed by Beethoven. But, on first playing these sets, I'm not sure I don't prefer Brahms if we keep it to violin sonatas. Of course, there are three discs of Beethoven (Renaud Capucon/Frank Braley) compared to one of Brahms and so maybe the latter is more readily assimilated but it's smoother, for want of a better word, even if one suspects - knows, really- that there is much more going on in Beethoven.
The recent need to re-aarrange books and records again is a big hint that perhaps I have plenty and less time needs to be spent clicking on things to make them arrive the following week. In the end its the sheer weight of the stuff - but that won't persuade me to move to a kindle and downloads. So those two sets are likely to be the playlist for some time. Something there is that does love a violin sonata.
I suspect a big part in the early Brahms preference is Alina Ibragimova who might be just about the violin player of her generation, and not overlooking Cedric Terberghien on piano with her. In a piano sonata, the piano does all its own work but it is usual for other instruments to have a piano to help which says a lot for the range, resources and completeness of the piano compared to much of the opposition.
--
But, on the subject of buying fewer books and thus borrowing them where possible, it's not got off to a good start. Volume 1 of Simon Schama's The Story of the Jews isn't going to be easy to give back. Like the origin of many things (the universe, the Thames, the Prime Minister's tendency towards pathological lying), the origin of the Jews is vague but thereby more interesting. From the start, there was always a debate about what was properly Jewish . In fact, that debate might be what it is. But Ezra, Ezekiel and all those Old Testament writers are made real, mainly because they were. It took a while for the idea that anyone human wrote those words to be accepted ( ! ). I'm only disappointed that it's David that might not have been.
Imagine that. A religion, or anybody with a doctrine, making things up.
But, Schama is scholarly, or at least a great summarizer of other scholars and Vol. 1 should be finished and handed back in time for Vol. 2 over Christmas. Or perhaps I should say Hannukah.
Seamus Heaney and the music of what happens was more biographical than literary with first hand reportage from Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon and several brothers, Marie and a daughter. So, the early days, the marriage, the television work, the Troubles, a quick rise to star status, Harvard, the Republic, the Nobel Prize, the stroke and noli timere. It was just about what was required for 'the general reader, without saying quite enough about why he was any good.
It's usually the words, you see, that make a poet great, rather than what they say. Michael Longley is a very good poet and would have attracted more attention had Heaney not been there but he is only in second gear in comparison. It's the difference between Shakespeare and his contemporaries and between Mozart and Salieri. There was nothing about the delicate music, the apparent naturalness and the richness of the language that came as standard.
But there's always one, isn't there. In this case it is A.N. Wilson, the doyen of English fogeyness, who I generally approve of for his fey Derek Nimmo-ishness as well as his Jesus book. He wasn't in this programme, of course, but I saw a disparaging remark by him about Heaney recently which didn't seem like the first so I've looked him up on the subject. He's always at it, it seems. There's always one.
Such a programme makes it plain that where the words come from is essential to any understanding of them and the more one thinks about the old 'text is all there is' approach, the bleaker it looks. The Irishness, the bog people and, indeed, the avoidance of anything partisan beyond the poem declining Motion and Morrison's offer of the post of figurehead to a generation of British poets are crucial and one begins to wonder if any poets should be read without a biography to accompany the poems. But few are going to be awarded a book biography, never mind a television documentary. Most are sadly not going to be deemed worth the effort. Although I'd be grateful of a similar thing on J.H. Prynne, I can't see it happening. The very idea. Perhaps it's a podcast for a devoted admirer to do.
But we are grateful for what we are offered, even if the poet needs a Nobel Prize to qualify.
--
So, three and a half years' worth of TLS went upstairs into a room it's not advisable to try to navigate in the dark. The Gramophones fitted onto the music book shelves and that freed up the bottom shelf of the bookcase here in the back room which now reads, top to bottom- poetry biographies, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Bishop/Sean O'Brien, Philip Larkin and Shakespeare biography. And I now have my choice of lying down places in the front room restored and that is that minor crisis resolved. I knew you'd be relieved.
--
The Beethoven and Brahms Violin Sonatas both took their separate times to arrive and then did. You may be aware by now that I've only really got one line on each composer and the Brahms line is that he forever felt overshadowed by Beethoven. But, on first playing these sets, I'm not sure I don't prefer Brahms if we keep it to violin sonatas. Of course, there are three discs of Beethoven (Renaud Capucon/Frank Braley) compared to one of Brahms and so maybe the latter is more readily assimilated but it's smoother, for want of a better word, even if one suspects - knows, really- that there is much more going on in Beethoven.
The recent need to re-aarrange books and records again is a big hint that perhaps I have plenty and less time needs to be spent clicking on things to make them arrive the following week. In the end its the sheer weight of the stuff - but that won't persuade me to move to a kindle and downloads. So those two sets are likely to be the playlist for some time. Something there is that does love a violin sonata.
I suspect a big part in the early Brahms preference is Alina Ibragimova who might be just about the violin player of her generation, and not overlooking Cedric Terberghien on piano with her. In a piano sonata, the piano does all its own work but it is usual for other instruments to have a piano to help which says a lot for the range, resources and completeness of the piano compared to much of the opposition.
--
But, on the subject of buying fewer books and thus borrowing them where possible, it's not got off to a good start. Volume 1 of Simon Schama's The Story of the Jews isn't going to be easy to give back. Like the origin of many things (the universe, the Thames, the Prime Minister's tendency towards pathological lying), the origin of the Jews is vague but thereby more interesting. From the start, there was always a debate about what was properly Jewish . In fact, that debate might be what it is. But Ezra, Ezekiel and all those Old Testament writers are made real, mainly because they were. It took a while for the idea that anyone human wrote those words to be accepted ( ! ). I'm only disappointed that it's David that might not have been.
Imagine that. A religion, or anybody with a doctrine, making things up.
But, Schama is scholarly, or at least a great summarizer of other scholars and Vol. 1 should be finished and handed back in time for Vol. 2 over Christmas. Or perhaps I should say Hannukah.