David Harsent - Loss

David Harsent, Loss (Faber)

If some poets' work looks a lot like their other work, then so can some reviewers'. I flatter myself that a rehash of things I've said here before constitute a review. Halfway through Loss I wondered whether I could assay the same sort of bad pastiche that I've taken to doing when Paul Muldoon publishes new poems but whereas Muldoon seems unreviewable to me and imitation is some kind of flattery, perhaps I can at least say something about David Harsent before one day accepting that, like music, one can no more review proper poetry than direct people towards it.
I steadfastly remain immune, even antagonistic, towards the idea of the 'poem sequence'. I don't know exactly why. It's perfectly harmless. Actually I do know why but I can't say. If the blurb here, and David, both say that Loss is a sequence then that's what it is but - stop me if you've heard it all before - such things are generally, if not always, either a long poem in sections or a collection of related poems, that is, The Waste Land or the Stratford man's Sonnets.
As my first piece of evidence, I cite the form of Loss, which is XX poems in the same elaborate but consistent form, viz,
14 lines that look like a prose poem but probably aren't;
a longer, often torrential, couple of pages of short-lined free verse - they vary in length but not by much;
four lines, rhymed abab;
and fractured lines in italics, with the protagonist, the sufferer, looking out of a window through the night.

There is so much unity to these 80 pages that it is as 'tight' a poem as something like The Sunlight on the Garden while still allowing David Harsent's facility to extend further and further into his dark theme. It's no wonder that the cover quotes John Burnside, who is the only one at least as good at doing such a thing. But, indeed, they could stand alone, as they have in magazines, because one is like the other except that one feels that the loss of the 'other', towards the end, transmutes into an awareness of the poet/persona/speaker's own mortality.
It appeared, for all the world, that David had lost his partner and that this was an account of his grief, not unlike those by Douglas Dunn, Christopher Reid or Julian Barnes, but more harrowing and nightmarish. But an internet check suggests that Julia Watson, who appeared in Casualty, is alive and hopefully well. I didn't really want to do that and now better appreciate the olde-worlde dogma we were taught at university 1978-81 that the text is all there is and biographical detail are not relevant.
So this is either some other loss or a work of the imagination and we shouldn't underestimate the powers of the imagination. What we might do is evaluate whether we prefer sincerity, or 'truth', over invention in literature. And the answer might be 'neither' because all you have to do is be any good.
Such concentration on the loss of someone else makes Larkin's fear for his own mortality seem very selfish but the difference is reduced as soon as the pity reverts to the one left behind rather than the one gone.


I didn't read David's Salt because it was reportedly made up of short poems. Yet another of my prejudices is against short poems, that include the briefer of Don Paterson's aphorisms and haiku in English. I could begin to feel like poetry's answer to Tommy Robinson, furious about harmless things, were it not for the rationale that in English one needs more than 17 syllables to get from one place to another. It rarely works.
So, while Fire Songs was a fine thing, I'm left alarmed that Night was 2011. Who knows where the time goes. Night ended with pages and pages, battering and battering us with its gin-drenched Elsewhere, and, apart from the fact it is now whisky and wine, Loss is from the same bloodline, blood being one of its leitmotifs, as well as Christianity, sleeplessness, fear, an abyss that is more terrifying for being white rather than black. There's bad going on out there as well as in here and don't we all know it.
One can admire it immensely but I won't ever be sure I 'like it'. I don't think one is supposed to 'like it' and it's not the sort of poem that would care if you did or not.    

Tis too late to be wise

Kitgut Quartet, Tis too late to be wise (Harmonia Mundi)

Of the several reasons for buying a record, having heard some of it on the wireless is one of the best. To see what it's like is one of the worst. That is a gamble with the odds stacked against you.
I heard one piece from this in the radio, and Record Review gave the impression it was by way of exploring the origins of the string quartet, you can never go wrong with Haydn but also I liked the title.
You won't really come away from it with a greater idea of the origins of the string quartet, it's an album with the finished article, a fine example of Haydn, at its centre, with four-part string pieces from 100 years earlier around it..
Purcell and Locke are more complex and shifting in these performances than one might expect. A comparison of the Curtain Tune on a ground from Purcell's Timon of Athens can be instructively set against the 1994 recording by Collegium Musicum/Richard Hickox to reveal the Kitgut Quartet as vibrant, spirited and energetic in comparison with the ceremonial feel of the closing passage of the complete masque.
It's as if C21st interpretations of C17th have been released by something more elemental in C20th music, not that we have any evidence how Purcell expected his music to sound. But the Kitguts use catgut strings, richer and more resonant than more recent innovations and in the Haydn Op. 71, no.2 we have the benefit of both worlds in a measured, ever inventive, nuanced performance that finds plenty and gains further from tremendous clarity in the playing and recording. That remains the highlight, nimble if not quicksilver in the faster tempi and gorgeous in its slower paces. It is the obvious highlight even after a number of hearings when further listening allows Purcell, Locke and John Blow's subdued finale to catch up a bit.
If at first I thought I'd just got an excellent Haydn quartet and would have preferred another, it is an album that works on its own terms and if it isn't quite the last word in wherer the string quartet came from like an equation that explains Purcell Fantasia + Matthew Locke Consort of Four Parts = Haydn Quartet, it is English music played with French panache.
String quartets as such don't take up as much of my time as they might, which is not to say that chamber music as a genre is under-represented, especially after the recent Beethoven and Brahms Trio Festival I've been having. But one day I might have them all to pick from, Shostakovich being already here and investigations revealing that in such editions as Brilliant Classics, one could use less than £500 of one's retirement lump sum on the Complete Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven. And since money is for buying the things you want, why wouldn't I. There would be no excuse for having nothing to do, one would just have to live long enough to play them all.

Coming Up for Air

Having picked up Northanger Abbey after a chance hearing of a small part of it on the radio, given Jane yet another opportunity and still not been quite convinced, I read George Orwell's Coming Up for Air over the weekend.
I impress myself that I can find such things upstairs but, having thought I'd read it over 40 years ago, when George Orwell seemed to be every sixth former's novelist hero, I'm not sure I had. I'm still very much Gordon Comstock from Keep the Aspidistra Flying, or not even that, but I was worried that the common sense, the intelligence we prided ourselves on circa 1977 and the politics would no longer convince after so long, as Orwell is re-assessed by Richard Bradford to see if he stands up to the Trump-Putin-China-silly oik Boris generation of world leaders.
He almost certainly does because, as the point has been made, China is now possibly more like 1984 than Soviet Russia was while God only knows how Western leaders now gormlessly preen about as if they were the point whereas once they only had to worry about the very obvious dangers of girls like the lovely Christine Keeler.
Coming Up for Air is a tremendous read, at fault only for the indulgent space allotted to the joys of teenage boys going fishing. Angling is the only sport that could be put up against car racing and golf as possibly even duller but it isn't really a sport and it might be Orwell's point about teenage boys in those days that they thought it was fascinating.
George Bowling is ordinary but doing well enough in the lower middle class position he's trapped in. His friend, Porteous, knows books and Latin and otherwise but George has a wife he doesn't like much, who doesn't trust him and you can't blame her and, in an England just pre-WW2, he is nostalgic for the world just pre-WW1. In among a few telling leitmotifs, 'stream-lined' is a recurrent adjective that means modern and bad.
He is a precursor of Larkin's Mr. Bleaney, of what Betjeman already was then but became more so, and a couple of generations before what Sean O'Brien echoes now. But George knows that you can't go back. WW2 is going to make sure of that, like WW1 had done, even if one couldn't have done anyway.
Of course he wasn't St. George Orwell any more than Albert Camus is a candidate for beatification but they got closer than most and the way he's carried forward all the way since we first read him at school is impressive.
--
He made the weekend as good, and glorious, as it was. Regular readers might have noticed that Racetrack Wiseguy disappeared from these pages as anonymously as Jacob Rees-Mogg was airbrushed out of the General Election campaign.
I struggle to tip the winner of a walkover at present but it has always been the great advantage of a diverse range of interests that when one is doing badly, others will compensate.
Having failed at the Saturday Times crossword for two weeks, the chess rating is on the up again but such things are like football clubs, and share prices. They go up and down and, really, it is of no interest if your team are pushing for automatic promotion to the Premiership but get completely done over in the Cup because only an idiot could possibly care.

There's a new book of poems by David Harsent on its way which means it could be a good year for the Old Guard in poetry, with O'Brien due in May. Poets worth having who are clever enough not to be only clever. And, putting the Orwell compendium back upstairs, I lingered over a re-read of The Goldfinch, very unsure that I could finish it before a Graham Swift re-issue arrived ahead of his new title due before you'd know it.

And the complete and utter bliss of getting the Hammershoi on the wall probably outpointed everything else.
It had started well, having found a non-descript print in a charity shop for £2 that was unlucky enough to be in a frame that seemed to be the right size. The episode that followed, which was me putting my beloved print into the frame, was an imaginative re-make of Eric Sykes and Tommy Cooper in The Plank.
One should, of course, do things properly, in a planned way and get it right but I'm not one for that and think I know better. I got the ill-fated, sub-Cezanne watercolour out easily enough but didn't see why I should remove all the nails holding the back of the frame in. First of all I cracked the glass but, having put the glass on the floor, proceeded to stand on it. Hilarious enough until you notice your fingers bleeding and realize you don't want to get blood on the precious Hammershoi after it's come all the way from China, ruining my claim to a minimal carbon footprint in one aesthetic purchase.
So, from then on, I took it seriously and now there it is, the hooks on the back re-aligned and a thing of beauty.   
My own simplistic pop art, Lips & Bananas, can go in the corner where Gwen John's been biding her time for years and she can come out and be alongside Hammershoi, with the Vermeer on the other side, to make a triptych of geometric quietude to satisfy anybody who wants to put down their book for a moment and gaze at them while Andras Schiff takes you through Bach's Partitas.
Tis too late to be wise, that's all there is.
Perhaps art is all there is and might not be enough. 
It's going to need to be.  

The Way Out of Berkeley Square

Rosemary Tonks, The Way Out of Berkeley Square (Gambit, 1971, first published in Great Britain by Bodley Head, 1970)

Sometimes you really want to like something but it doesn't come up to expectations. One's investment in it is not only financial and time but also emotional. I was playing for high stakes with The Way Out of Berkeley Square. And won. If The Halt During the Chase was good and Businessmen as Lovers had much to like about it but will need another chance to entirely convince, this one is tremendous.

Arabella is 30 and 'stuck' in her life as housekeeper to her wealthy father, with her married suitor and beloved brother who is out in Pakistan, a poet and idealist looking for higher things in his life. It wasn't until some way into the novel that I began to wonder whose fault it is that she enslaves herself to three men and that is surely one question we might ask but not necessarily the main point.

I don't know if I've read a more fiercely intelligent writer than Rosemary Tonks - George Eliot in her time, maybe- and it's more apparent in her novels than it is in her poems. The poems exude louche disillusion. It's an exercise in itself to find the right words to define it precisely. I've tried 'morbid' and 'jaundice' in the poem below but, of course, the answer is the poems themselves, not a description or synopsis. In the novels there is more space to develop her piercing psychological insights and well-read reference points.
One report from someone who knew her mentions her fluency in other languages and how she might transpose into Italian in conversation. It suggests that apposite citings of Boris Godunov, Krapp's Last Tape, Tiepolo, Mandelstam and Heine are not showy name-dropping but things that came readily to a sophisticated mind.
More impressive than that, though, are the way she, as Arabella, unmasks the motivations of her characters. Her assignations with her 'Wolf', the 'happily married', predatory dinner date who is significantly older but physically, if not emotionally, attractive to her, show him to be transparent to her but that doesn't help when she wants him and doesn't want him in equal measure.
She admires her father in a parallel way while being repelled by his controlling nature and her brother, Michael, away in Karachi, is accorded something like saint status while ostensibly indulging himself and has successfully extricated himself from the family home.
Rosemary had pre-empted the vogue for the 'unreliable narrator' by a few years although it had surely existed before it became quite so much the fashion.

The guilt involved in invading the privacy of a writer who determinedly repudiated all her work, and worldly goods, by reading her work quite so avidly is more tangible with Rosemary than even reading the likes of Larkin's letters. In publishing the Letters to Monica, Anthony Thwaite suggested that Larkin knew he was 'writing for posterity' with others than Monica Jones reading over her shoulder. Whether James Booth was in a position to make the same point with the Letters Home is open to more doubt. At least the Rosemary Tonks poems and novels were in print once and Neil Astley's point is that there was no objection in her will and agreement with her estate was eventually achieved.
Exactly how much we can stretch this to infer anything from the work about the life could be difficult but Michael contracts polio in Karachi in the novel, which is the dramatic climax, which is what had happened to Rosemary. To extend that into reading a certain amount of Michael's venture to the East, his poetry writing and interest in high-minded, and international, writing, into something like a version of Rosemary herself is easy to do. In the first pages, he is described as someone who,
You can't force them to be happy if their way of being happy is to be half unhappy.

And that seems to me as good a way into understanding Rosemary and her repudiation of her previous life and work, which she took to fundamentalist lengths, as well as good reason to sympathize with and love her even if she wouldn't have wanted that either. It's possible that plenty of us know what she meant about bourgeois values, the superficiality of the worldliness she understood so well, including that of the literary world she was a bit of a star in but most of us decide to live with it as best we can rather than cut ourselves off so comprehensively.
She had shown she could do it if she wanted but decided she didn't want to.

I usually cover one envelope in notes and page references reading a book like this but The Way Out of Berkeley Square has filled two.

It gets to the point when one can't be bothered to be intelligent, even to oneself.

he indicates that I'm a bestial peasant, at the mercy of the flowing of my blood.

There is the almost subliminal inter-textual mention from another novel of having babies that needs some sort of forensic detection; the description of skating across a cracking frozen lake and glancing into the abyss below; the 'abysmal' jet flight; a brief mention of pop music, which was far better then that it is now, and specifically the highly evocative world of Peter Sarstedt. And that is only the highlights of the first side of the first envelope.
She is the very greatest at accessing the very dread beneath everything but she isn't Franz Kafka, she is witty, sexy and quite clearly capable of being a party animal, not bleak.

If this was the greatest novel in the English language, it would surely be in print and nowhere near as hard to hear about, never mind find, so I will not get carried away on a wave of hero worship. But what is the best novel. Dubliners isn't a novel so it's not that. Middlemarch, some of Hardy's deterministic pessimism, Camus, Gide, Balzac. Some say Tolstoy. More recently, Graham Swift's Mothering Sunday. Julian Barnes. Virginia Woolf. I don't know. It's a list I haven't done. But I do know that I've not enjoyed a novel this much for a long, long time.
Last year I said Ian Bostridge's book about Schubert's Winterreise was the best book I've ever read and so it must be but, like when you've written a poem you like and have to leave it a while before seeing if it's any good, I'll have to have a look back at The Way Out of Berkeley Square in due course and see if it's as close to 10/10 as it seemed on first reading.


  

For Rosemary

For Rosemary

The mist is gathering in the dark outside
between the churches and the convenience stores
and across the campus
where the students are learning to recite
their scriptures and doctrines
in their juvenile fashion.
I hope it lingers until the morning
with its chilled secrets.

Shift-workers are putting the hours in -
the taxi driver waiting
for the blurry traffic lights to change,
the night club doormen,
disgruntled heavyweights,
ready for something to kick off,
if only it would.

But I am morbid with memories,
jaundiced by romance,
like a revolution that failed
in Tashkent or Samarkand,
or a tired grandmaster
making repetitive moves,
obsessed with stalemate,
forever leaving myself behind.

Stephen Hough Brahms

Stephen Hough, Brahms, The Final Piano Pieces (Hyperion)

One expects a cover illustration of a record to have some relation to the music on it. The opening Fantasia on Stephen Hough's new Brahms release thus has more brio than expected and their expansive nature overall might come as some surprise.
The Hammershoi painting, like are all of his, is quiet. The sparsely furnished room is almost monochrome, the solitary figure is turned away from us and is looking elsewhere, specifically for someone or something, we might think, in the street, beyond the room. While it is quiet, there is plenty going on.
While this is Late Brahms, it's not the last things he wrote. Those, we are told in the notes, are a set of pieces for organ that came after the death of Clara Schumann. From 1892 and 93, when he was 59, which might have been older then than it is now, he wasn't quite going to make it to 64 and so, he had experienced the loss of several close friends and we are retrospectively tempted into reading them as somehow themed by an awareness of mortality, and valedictory. We are given a quote from 1894 that suggests he soon thought so himself, but maybe not quite at the time.
Thus, although one might think one hears a premonition of the Strauss Four Last Songs in places, like the Fantasia in E minor, track 4, we ought not let too much extraneous little knowledge, which can be a dangerous thing, colour our interpretation. What if we didn't have the word 'final' in the title of the album.
Including the three Intermezzos, op.117, 14 of the 20 tracks are intermezzos- 3 capriccios, a ballade, a romance and a rhapsodie. As music removed from their composers biography, they are 'thoughtful', they ruminate, not unhappily, and have a measured lyrical nostalgia. One can listen to them while looking at the Hammershoi and they fit each other very well, which not all of Brahms would. You don't have to be 59 to feel such moods or, in the case of a consummate artist, translate them into such work. His piano music is not that which comes in between Chopin's and Rachmanninov's. They come either side of him. I waited longer than I wanted for this to arrive- from Greece with Greek stamps on- but it was in plenty of time for my personal Brahms Festival, which is still going.

In the Clavierstucke, op. 118, it is delicately introspective apart from the suddenly more upbeat Ballade.
There are some quicker tempi in those of op. 119 before the more strident finale of the Rhapsodie.

It was taken back to the beginning for another complete play in short order last night to accompany some very fine reading which made for a top quality evening. It's not for me to compare Stephen Hough with other pianists but he is suspected of being top drawer, with Martha Argerich, and wonderful during the more remote and elsewhere the music seems to be taking us.
It's not that far on the vast musical map from Isata Kanneh-Mason's Clara Schumann album, which was the best new record I heard last year and has not long been long filed in its place on the shelves after a long stay on the 'playlist' pile next to the CD player. I imagine this will do the same, as an early but very likely contender for this year's best. It could repel all boarders, see them off and still be the best of 2020 come December.

Balls

Balls

or, Dance and Danceability

I do not care to dance tonight. Do not
you wonder at them, gallivanting so.
I care not for banality, the false
steps that belie what they are thinking there.
And yet I smile and flirt somewhat and long,
accomplished as I am at such longing,
for more than chandeliers like these and men
whose charm is effortless. Word perfect, one
might say. It seems I have to marry one.

I fan myself, not needing to, as cool
as I need to be. Or cooler than that.
It isn't just the comedy, the fine
china or tapestries that unnerve me
relentlessly and oblige us to bear
it all without even a fainting fit.
It's also how, against our will, we then
find ourselves thus itemized in satire
for now I fear we have to fall in love.

Roddy Lumsden

Saddened indeed, to be checking out Bloodaxe for a book, and find that Roddy Lumsden has died.

As well as a quiz genius, most memorably demonstrated on Round Britain Quiz in a formidable partnership with Val McDermid, he was the ever-inventive poet that set the style, and standard, for a generation of imaginative, genre-expanding poets. But he was the one that did it, and led from the front, most effectively.
I met him unexpectedly at a National Poetry Day event on the South Bank some years ago where he astonished me with knowledge of a review I'd published in a magazine. His mind was an amazing compendium of retained detail and creative potential.
His 'ripple' poems, that end in words made up from the consonants in the title word, did what he said and created a compelling half-rhyme effect.
An Older Woman was a sonnet that rhymed the same throughout.
Women in Paintings was a big favourite of mine from 2013 and won the Best Poem category here in the unlamented poetry awards I used to review the year with.
Not All Honey was Best Collection in 2014 and So Glad I'm Me was the same in 2017. He brought a zest and energy to his poems that I simply didn't find anywhere else and that was reflected in the consistently compelling cover illustrations for his Bloodaxe books.
There had been health issues, I know, but such talent and commitment to his art comes rarely in a generation and he had comandeered most of that allocated to his. 

What Jane Austen Owes to Harry Worth; and Brahms in the Top Composers

Harry Worth, his finest hour

An unlikely story but stay with it.
I've never been a fan of Jane Austen and I've known it was my fault. I even saw Giles Coren on the telly trying to cure himself of the same affliction and allowing himself to be persuaded but I need to find out for myself.
I sat in front of Mansfield Park rather than read it when I was a student and didn't even need to. And then went back to it a couple of years ago to see if she compared with George Eliot and she didn't. I've never been able to tell which bits were funny.
However, yesterday on Radio 4 Extra, I listened to the episode of Harry Worth in Things Could Be Worse, which was the passably safe and homely one about the quiz show and let it run on into Northanger Abbey, which turned out to be a satire on the gothic novel and hilarious.
So today I found Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in one volume for a pound in the secondhand shop and by this time next week I should be out of the wilderness and be able to say, yes, of course, I adore Jane Austen. I've always wanted to.
--
I've always been able to say I like Brahms but never quite as much as in recent weeks. The opening bars, followed by the rest of, The Fourth Symphony is a given. He's always been generally fine and well within the scope of the acceptable face of Romanticism but the Violin Sonatas that followed the Chichester concert recently have only more recently been replaced by the Beethoven. And then some of the Final Piano Pieces, roughly op. 115-119, were on a Wigmore Hall recital soon followed up with Stephen Hough lauded as Record of the Month in Gramophone which in turn led to the Hammershoi painting on its cover being decided upon as that with which to fill the remaining space on the front room wall and today I might have found a suitable frame for when it arrives. One thing leads to another.
So, next, the moribund, anorak proclivity for listmaking raises its immature head again as I need to see where Brahms comes in my Favourite Composers. And who, if anybody, he has gone ahead of since a few weeks ago.
Lists are nuts and only detract from the proper enjoyment of art by trying to put things in their place somehow. The John Peel Festive Fifty, the NME Poll, and Smash Hits only defined their audience and that is all any such thing, from the Booker Prize, the T.S. Eliot or the Turner is ever going to do.
Still I need to know and so must do it. Brahms has probably gone ahead of Sibelius and Schubert but once you get beyond the essential few, it becomes a bit arbitrary. The lines denote Top 6 and  Premiership. I'm aware that Wagner, Bruckner, Korngold and Mahler aren't anywhere in it. I did once have a Mahler record but didn't bother to pursue getting it back.
And there is another Top 6 of One Hit Wonders that is Reynaldo Hahn, Gregorio Allegri, Robert Morton, Max Bruch, Pietro Mascagni and Albrechtsberger, for his Concertos for Jew's Harp.
Otherwise, it is,

JS Bach, by a country mile.
Mozart
Handel
Beethoven
Josquin des Prez
Buxtehude
---
Shostakovich
Tallis
Purcell
Monteverdi
Brahms
Francois Couperin
Byrd
Schubert
Sibelius
Mendelssohn
Puccini
Gluck
Vivaldi
Haydn
---
-somewhere in here come all those baroque composers from Corelli, Telemann, Albinoni, Geminiani and Frescobaldi to both Scarlattis and all the others-
 
Erik Satie
Charpentier
Elgar
Poulenc
Biber
Chopin
Berlioz
Clara Schumann
Britten
Dvorak
Tchaikovsky
Verdi
Robert Schumann
Ravel
Saint-Saens
Debussy

and then, certain that you've missed out someone essential - Errolyn Wallen, Ockeghem, James MacMillan and numerous other Bachs, one ought never to make a list again.

Happiness and Tears, the Ken Dodd Story

Louis Barfe, Happiness and Tears (Head of Zeus)

Alexei Sayle one asked why the music hall died out and answered his own question with, 'because it was crap'. Much though I am an admirer of Alexei's work, I have lived long enough since to prefer The Good Old Days to his Comedy Store rants and whereas that once so vital 1980's trend had come and gone, the music hall still survived. As Louis Barfe points out,
Variety died on 11 March 2018, the day Sir Ken Dodd died.
The long tradition of Dan Leno, Max Miller and Robb Wilton, that Doddy's act was a culmination of, and then some, would have ended sooner had it not been for his longevity.

His account is lively, full of illuminating anecdotes taken from interviews with Diddy David Hamilton, Danny Baker and others that knew and worked with him. It is not hagiography but balances the relentless exuberance of the stage show with the serious student of humour, the very Englishness and the difficult relationship with money. Like Tommy Cooper, whose stage fiasco was precisely worked out, but unlike Larry Grayson, who was naturally if endearingly inept, the tatifillariousness was as much a science as an art to the extent that Doddy really did have a Giggle Map that recorded which jokes worked best in which parts of the country and he had read widely on comic theory early and studied his heroes closely from the wings. The map was a map of the UK. He had no ambition to 'break America', which the likes of Morecambe and Wise failed to do, which is a good job because they wouldn't have known what to make of his fairy tale world of jam butty mines and Northern English crackpot whimsy.

If the 1960's was so all-conquering that he could keep The Beatles off number one in the hit parade and choose to do what he liked best, in live theatre, ahead of television and radio work, it was the 1980's that might have cost him dearly with his trial for tax irregularities. It cost him a fair amount, having employed the impregnable adversarial talents of George Carman whose miraculous result in the acquittal of Jeremy Thorpe was finessed by this further success against all the odds, and some might say, evidence. But, be that as it may, there is no such thing as bad publicity (although Gerald Ratner may not agree) and interest in Doddy redoubled after his court case. As Louis Barle reflects, Lester Piggott might have retained his honours and liberty had he employed Carman.
The trial had the effect of opening up more of Doddy's private life than he would have liked. A defence that he was so concentrated on his glee-making that he had no time for his financial affairs sits uncomfortably with the bank accounts, like that in the Isle of Man, that had slipped his mind. Also, Barfe finds evidence of a controlling nature in other areas of his life that somehow didn't extend to something as important to him as money. Stories similar to those of Marc Bolan paying the rest of T. Rex a wage of £40 a week while they were at the height of their powers are repeated in Doddy's pay policy. None of which should cast any aspersions on the generosity of either of them when it suited them. To call someone a 'complex' character is often a euphemism for something darker but Louis Barfe explains Doddy well enough in the space of 236 pages plus 10 of Introduction. Admirers are always going to be disappointed if they idealize their heroes and expect them to be anything other than human.
Happiness and Tears looks a bigger book than it is due to an appendix of 115 pages of Doddology, a non-exhaustive catalogue of theatre, television and radio appearances of little ostensible use beyond triggering nostalgia for the show business names that appeared alongside him, many of them now forgotten but for such listings, some you might not have thought and others one can be more, or less, grateful for being reminded of. In no particular order, because they might fall into different categories for each of us, Talfryn Thomas, Charlie Caroli, Gracie Fields, Alma Cogan, Yehudi Menuhin and, really, everybody else you can think of and then all those you can't.
By Jove, missus. By Jove. What a beautiful day, what a beautiful day to exercise the chuckle muscle and revisit the glories of the last and greatest of a generation. Shakespeare was a scriptwriter, missus, they couldn't touch him for it. Louis Barfe has provided a well-judged, measured account of the unaccountable. As it were.   

Rosemary Tonks - Businessmen as Lovers

Rosemary Tonks, Businessmen as Lovers (Bodley Head, 1969)



The copy that I recently made such an audacious swoop for in the transfer market doesn't look like this. If you want the dust jacket with its illustration, it looks like it will cost you another hundred pounds on top of what I paid. But I'm not a 'book collector' in the sense of wanting 'fine', 'first edition' or 'collectable', it's about the words and the copy I now have has all the words and that's good enough for me.
Following on so soon from The Halt During the Chase, it's not always wise to go straight into the same author immediately. Sometimes the books can overlap or interfere with each other. My George Eliot year became like that and the Julian Barnes back catalogue was a bit like it, too. But, on the other hand, I'm like a three year old at Christmas and I can hardly wait.
The first signs are it's a masterclass. 'Two young women, Mimi and Caroline, travel south through the French Revolution of 1968 on their way to the Italian island of Livone', and it begins with the sort of understated decorum that one thinks of with all those great first sentences, or two, in Salinger, in Lady Chatterley, 1984, Tale of Two Cities or Pride and Prejudice, except it is more nonchalant and disarming,
There is a train that shunts around Paris from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de Lyons. If you've just crossed the Channel and you're going straight on to Italy, you have to sit in it while it does this.

It might be making claims for Rosemary to say she's eschewing the grandeur of Caesar's opening to De Bello Gallico, while going in the opposite direction, but she's got the precise ennui of someone who is on their way to somewhere they think is more glamorous and has to sit and suffer the inconvenient details of getting there.

I read this over two days with immense pleasure on the first day to halfway and then wondered where it went on day two in the second half. And now, in that quick calculation of counting 10 words in a line, let's give it 25 lines to a page and multiply by 150 pages, I'm not sure it's 50 thousand words. I don't mind what it is because, as ever, 'all you have to be is any good' but I spent the winter before the winter before last making sure I'd done 50 thousand words so I could call it a novel. And now I find I either wasted a few weeks or Rosemary wrote 'novellas'.
The first half is joyous with its cast of ex-pats and continental types, satires one dare say now but in 1969 not everybody thought Peter Sarstedt's Where Do You Go To, My Lovely was funny. Christine Keeler, so much in our thoughts at the moment, hadn't been that long ago and sex, as even Larkin knew, appeared to be some kind of novelty nobody had thought of before and had become as much a currency as Bitcoin now claims to be.
Of her mother, Mimi says,
She looked over her life carefully and, not finding enough of the things she considered necessary for a life, decided to die.

Sir Rupert Monkhouse is an archaeologist, and as such we might now retrospectively compare him with Casaubon from Middlemarch as fossilised and 'past it' at 59. I take no offence, reading this aged 60 in the last days of 2019, at young Rosemary, publishing this at the age of 37 in the age of Simon Dee, the E-type Jaguar, a couple of years before the Rolling Stones recorded their best LP, because it is a period piece and, unimpeachable as she is, she later repudiated all her work.
It is entirely my fault I want to read as much of her as I can. She'd prefer I didn't, was her stated intention.

Rupert,
instantly puts on his archaeological knighthood, which he does by becoming tense, clever and remote.
La Prostitutess is Sir Rupert's 'elegant mistress', and their relationship is what the slight plot depends on, which is a surprising happy ever after, that sex isn't just for young people.
It ought to be beneath Rosemary's dignity to be quite so didactic because didactic is the last thing that literarure should ever be but perhaps in 1969, when Donovan was still in places thought to be the English Bob Dylan, it might still have been like that.
In the meantime, Rosemary has hung a lot of acute observation on the fragile structure of this story,
I plait my hairpiece, and it comes out very thickly and gives me an interesting fat head. I suddenly look prim and good at chess.
It's unlikely Victoria Coren-Mitchell has read this book and it was published after Dorothy Parker died but either of them would have been glad of that.

Few opportunities are missed to celebrate the, then, clear advantages of Italy and its weather, and men, compared to England. London was then,
People being lived by their lives,
and might be much more so now but I'm not there often enough to say. It could be more pandemic than epidemic. Until Caroline's Persian is,
exquisitely dressed. Dark grey sea-island cotton shirt, lighter grey silk tie and handkerchief with the sheen of good gin.

Never less than percipient with her metaphors, Rosemary's novels add depth to the themes of her poems and there is huge amounts to be enjoyed in them. Whether or not Businessmen as Lovers is as good as The Halt During the Chase or quite worth the cash per se remains to be seen because it will need reading again in the not-too-distant future but you never know if you don't try to find out and I'm glad I know, or am in a position to.
Way Out of Berkkeley Square is up next, currently languishing somewhere between the seller's done business and my letter box, in a jiffy bag. By all means tune in soon to find out what that's all about. 

Two Parker Pens

A beguiling story of considerable inconsequence. I'd do in French in an effort to replicate the lower middle class gentility of Maupassant but it would take too long and I'm not sure I remember the past anterior tense.

--

There was a time when I struggled to find a pen. That's a sorry state of affairs if one considers oneself a poet. Now that I don't, I have plenty. I've purloined them at any opportunity and now bedroom, bathroom, computer desk and front room all have them.
I also save envelopes to make notes on about books, in the unlikely event of a poem or lists for lists's sake. They, too, arrive more quickly than I can use them and had to be sorted into a more orderly pile in those glorious, indolent days between Christmas and New Year when only fools, horses and essential services work.
Charities, events and advertisers give out pens and I'll have them. I have a handful garnered from Corals hospitality at Ascot and Sandown. They look nice and shiny in their blue livery but are no good at writing uphill from a supine position. There's the red one from Chichester Cathedral and a black one from Cheltenham racecourse when I went on a mad spending spree having told the bookies which horses would win. But the best are the pair of Parker pens, pictured.
The one above may or may not be the one from The Times at the Cheltenham Literature Festival a few years ago. If it is, the writing wore off very suddenly. I lost it while staying with my sister, she said that one wasn't theirs so it must be mine. I've never been completely convinced but it's a nice thing, as evidenced by appreciative comments from the fairly-famous poet who signed one of her books for me with it at Cheltenham on a later visit.
The other is thoughtfully inscribed and was provided with my birthday cake last year so that I could fill in the crossword on the cake, had I been able. It is a gorgeous thing and sits between thumb and forefinger 'snug as a gun', in Heaney's compact, unnerving phrase. I was surprised to find it is the same size as the other because it doesn't feel like it.
However, I had been unable to compare their relative size for some time. For a while I hadn't cared to and then, when I wanted to, I couldn't find the first one. The point was, the birthday one writes blue and The Times crossword is so unsightly begun in one colour and completed (if at all) in another. The same with one's diary. I'd prefer it all in black, not some concerts in blue, some race meetings in black and the dinner dates with French actresses in whatever colour came to hand in the heat of the moment.
Earlier this year I had ordered a black refill for the top one and thought there was a pack of two. Unable to find the spare, in the same way that I can't these days always find the book or CD I want but then order a book I already have, like Edna Longley's on Louis MacNeice, I looked up on Amazon past orders and found there had been two. Not that that told me where the spare was.
So I thought I'd swap the black from the Times pen into the birthday pen once it turned up. And, given those glorious free days, I did have time to find it. Yes, you're ahead of me if you've stayed with it this far. It was down the back of the settee, along with £14 in pound and two-pound coins. What a day that was.
So now the birthday pen writes black and so will The Times pen, if it is The Times pen and if the spare black refill ever eventually shows up.
--
Meanwhile, the space on the front room wall hasn't been worrying me at all but I've been aware I could have another picture. Maggi Hambling and Chagall were candidates but nothing suitable in my parsimonious price range was available. Vermeer, Gwen John and Walter Sickert are already putting in fine work but, first up on the record buying for 2020 is the Stephen Hough Brahms with this quiet, completely wonderful Hammershoi on the cover. So, that's it. Found it, ordered. Now all we need is a frame to accommodate it. That might be the hard part.