Racetrack Wiseguy

 Never missing a chance to promote the sport or their coverage of it, ITV Racing are always keen to read out any e-mail that says Thank Heavens for the racing, it is keeping me same during lockdown. And, yes, there is a lot like about it from the comfort of one's own home, seeing your old mates, as long as it doesn't start costing too much. Sky Racing's better in many ways, though. The main one being Alex Hammond.

The most golden of all the rules is don't chase your losses. Once the plan has gone wrong, wait for another day and don't scramble round looking for a way back in the last or at the evening meeting at 

Wolverhampton. That's not how to do it. Just hold a brief memorial service for the few quid you'll never see again and hold on until it's time to go again.

It is most disappointing that Cheltenham's off tomorrow because now that sport is rarely as exciting as it seemed to be for a young boy muchenamoured of it, Cheltenham remains some kind of special place. We will hope to bring back together the Three Wise Men nearer festival time to try to provide some answers but, making the best of what we have for now...

We'll go to Fairyhouse for the 1.58 and hope Gauloise can augment the good work she contributed to the Great Recovery of 2020 and see off the apparent confidence shown in Royal Kahala against her.

At the risk of causing a bilious attack at the Professor's house, I'll suggest making up a yankee by opposing some of the great Mr. Henderson's horses who may or may not be quite delivering their best at present. 

Miranda might overturn the Seven Barrows pair in the 2.05 at the prices; Pat seems to be not the only one that fancies Pat's Fancy in the 2.40 and one can make the case, if need be, that Philip Hobbs has a 25% strike rate with hurdlers over the last 14 days and so 11/2 about Musical Slave makes some sense in the 3.15. The yankee pays over 80/1 on a good day so you never know.

The Day I Met Thom Gunn

Like, the whining school-boy, with his satchel

but not so much the shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school,

is how this week I've returned to some desultory work on the Gunn book. I don't mind doing it once I get started but it isn't going to see print and so isn't worth it. It is my Key to All Mythologies, nominally giving me something to say I'm going whether I do it or not.
He has been my subject since the 1970's, being what I read towards the old 'S' level English, then
would have been the subject of my second year dissertation at university except Lancaster's English
Dept in 1979 didn't consider him a big enough subject for one unit of a degree and so I broadened it out to British Poetry since 1945. A few magazine articles and then the abortive first effort at the book in 1999 have delivered me to retirement age with unfinished business and no excuse to not do it. I
reached 30 thousand words before Christmas and awarded myself a rest. I have now reached 1982 and The Passages of Joy and thus an opportunity to insert the story of when I 'met' him. This is the long version.
-
A friend at Cambridge invited me there for a few days in November 1979 to take in a rare British
appearance that, it turns out, was in the Graduate Centre on the 14th and not, as I had thought, in
Trinity College. I have issue 2 of The Black & White Supplement, 30p fortnightly, to remind of all that
I've since forgotten.
I went down by train, changing at Leeds, on a bright day, reflecting that Prof. David Carroll had told us in a seminar, that he had realized that George Eliot would be his life's work when he first read her and he went on to edit the variorum edition of Middlemarch. I'm not drawing any parallels between that and my meddling in Gunn Studies. Later in the journey I remember Ely Cathedal dominating the fen lowlands, then the view across the lawn in Downing College. We had dinner 'in halls' one evening, if only to enjoy the rarified atmosphere with a few antique dons presiding at top table in front of a portrait of F.R. Leavis.
What I remember of the reading is the poem Bally Power Play about playing a pinball machine. So I
am grateful to the anonymous, dissatisfied reviewer in B&W Supplement for confirming that the poet's
waistcoat was leather and not suede as I thought it might have been and that his trousers were
corduroy. But he saw it as a celebrity appearance that students attended because they thought they
should and that it lacked immediacy. Well, not me, mate. I'd come from nearly the Lake District to see
him. He also says that afterwards they all drifted away, more interested in being first at the bar than the poems they had just heard. Again, not me.
Intrepidly, and admittedly I was the only one, I approached Thom Gunn and asked him to sign my copy of Touch which he very kindly did and dated it '1979'. Perhaps he was glad that at least one person cared as much as that because he offered the opening conversational gambit that it was his favourite of all the cover designs of his books. But could I ingratiate myself by making an obvious reply that they were some of my favourite poems, too.
No, I couldn't. I blew it, starstruck and not being able to think of the most obvious thing to say, I
shuffled away awkwardly and still regret it 42 years later. Any number of poets I've collared to sign
books at readings elsewhere in the intervening years know that I didn't remain shy for very long.

 

 

Bysshe, Bash, Bosh

 How much of what we read can we trust. I don't mean in the Age of QAnon where all abandon hope that enter there but in the relatively more considered area of literary biography. 

Following my briefest of surveys of the Romantic Poets recently I ordered Richard Holmes's biography, Shelley, the Pursuit. I wasn't expecting to be converted to Shelley who gives Byron and Blake stiff competition in a competitive field for being the most excessive but I had read that he was 'by all accounts the most lovable of human beings'. 

It is to both Shelley's and Holmes's credit that a biography of someone who didn't reach the age of 30 can be quite so gripping and detailed. He died at the same age as Marc Bolan almost to the day and maybe the two of them justify further comparison, but elsewhere. But, only 117 pages in to the scholarly 733 of the book, it's already difficult to see how he's going to become quite so 'lovable'.

His atheism, advocacy of 'rights' on social issues and anti-materialism all add up to him being way ahead of his time which is needless to say for many of us now but still woefully not clear to many others. One can't help but admire a certain sort of idealist even if Holmes also uses the word, 'libertarian', which has taken on more sinister overtones in recent decades.

On the other hand, while it is not to his father's credit that he disowned such a troublesome radical who got himself inevitably sent down from Oxford, it is neither quite within Percy's remit to be glad to be rid of such family ties and yet still expect to finance himself by claiming on their fortune. In that respect he most closely resembles Baudelaire who was probably a better poet but was forever dependent on handouts to pay for his indulgence in morbid gothic self-absorption and the paragon example among all those who have given poets a bad name ever since.

The comparison with Marc Bolan might lead to thinking of Shelley not in terms of T. Rex who turned out wonderfully well but other late 60's rock acts. The film of The Song Remains the Same might be a case in point but Led Zeppelin were at least a little bit any good.

The comparison depends on how it all seemed natural, and fashionable, at the time but was overblown, sold itself on the premise of a new age of liberation and high moral principle but, in hindsight if not then, was the most outrageous confidence trick because actually the work they produced was vacuous and no good at all.

Shelley's got 600 more pages in which Holmes might redeem him but I'm looking forward to it more in the expectation of outrageousness than I am of heroism. One thinks of poets now as being side-lined, involved in their own little cultural backwater and not being quite such 'colourful characters'. Not quite but even if they aren't, we could be grateful for that.

Last Chapter of a Novel

Last Chapter of a Novel

They’ve made it to the end

and the prose is slowing down. 

They are none the wiser, 

though, and still think there’s a chance 

that the story 

will redeem them 

and their fate will not be thus. 

 

But their author who thought

of them and of little else 

besides each and every 

morning had other ideas. 

So they are left 

as uncertain 

as he or she was and so

  

they are a group portrait

and as such are immortal, 

looking through a window 

on a view that’s picturesque 

where the future, 

if there were one, 

was expected to arrive.

--

I can't even now remember where it was this weekend I read about someone imagining the lives of fictional characters after the end of their stories. It might have been in Vita Sackville-West's Heritage that had lots to enjoy in it and was seen off in short order. It is, of course, an erroneous idea because, as L.C. Knights pointed out, it is not appropriate to ask How Many Children had Lady Macbeth? There are none mentioned in the text; you might have thought she didn't have any but the question should be not put.

It made me think of it from the characters' point of view. There they are, stranded in the words that make them live, presumably thinking there is more to them than what their creator wrote down about them, except there isn't. And there but for the grace of whatever author was wicked enough to create us, are we, forever stuck in our eternal present which is forever the end of our story as far as we know.

 

I'm a bit more confident about my other recent poems, Walsingham and Background Music, but for whatever reason want to keep them to myself for the time being.

This sudden burst of creativity is welcome whether or not the poems are any good. One likes to be writing something at least. The release into 'letting go' and just doing it probably comes from a feeling of not worrying whether it's any good or not, let's just try.

One maybe needs to bat like Gower more than Boycott or else one runs the risk of spending too long producing what you regard as a masterpiece but nobody else likes it.