Enquiry into the Pandemic and other stories

 Stop me if you've heard it all before, but....

I caught some of Choral Evensong on the wireless this afternoon. The mournful master of ceremonies was supplicating all our humblest devotions that the Good Lord would be merciful and help us in our struggle through times of plague. I soon switched over to a more rational broadcast. The preaching man's cart seemed to be ahead of his horse if he still thought prayer and devotion would provide any sort of solution a year or more into this crisis, real crisis. It hasn't yet, it never did and it never seemed like it would. Whatever made anybody think it might unless they were prone to the dreamiest and most fanciful if imaginings. The solution is provided by the vaccine, by science and apparently by Oxford University which goes to show that within some glorious architecture useful things can happen as well as confering 2:1's on spoilt, bumbling scoundrels. 

We must never let his government assume any credit for the success of the programme of inoculation which worked because it was organized by the NHS. It obviously wouldn't have worked if it had been the responsibility of his hapless government or, more specifically, him with his broad brush invocations to his vague idea of 'freedom'.

We can add to the complete lack of any answers provided by the church, the dominance in the lists of countries with the highest mortality rates of all those run by 'libertarians' - Trump's USA, the bloke from Brazil and, still well ahead, the United Kingdom. 

The study of history is advertised by the possibility that we might learn lessons from it even if evidence suggests it is allowed to repeat itself. Theories are tested, and proven or not, under extreme conditions, not justified by the few times they looked okay when circumstances were favourable. If there were sense to be had, the plague (which is by no means over yet) would have once and for all demonstrated the shortcomings of the blind optimism, the credulity, the medieval superstition and the implicit dangers of narcissism and machismo that right-wing politics and religion bring with them. They can't have the slightest claim on us henceforth, can they. 

The Jews might wait forlornly for the second coming, about which Simon Schama suggested in his TV history that they would prefer to wait forever rather than accept any new messiah because they witnessed the last one promising salvation, redemption and all those things but nothing actually improved two thousand years ago. But Israel is the country making the running at the top of the league for vaccinating its people, the Jewish religion being based on a principle of caring for each other, as is the NHS.

It seems to be a much better plan than the egoism, individuality and free-for-all in which money, corruption and power are given such a head start on the flimsiest agenda parading itself under the lurid but vacuous attractions of 'freedom'. 

Jean-Paul Sartre was interested in freedom. When the ladies in Monty Python phone him up and Simone de Beauvoir answers they ask, 'when will he be free' and Mme. de Beavoir replies that he's been trying to work that out for the last fifty (is it) years. He wanted to believe in it and tried his best but went through Anguish and Shame, found himself an Object-for-Others, supported the Soviet Union and fell out with Saint Albert Camus. And that is what thinking you might be free can do for you.

--

The radio chaannel I returned to in flight from Choral Evensong was Times Radio. Don't get me wrong, I've attended Choral Evensong in Portsmouth Cathedral, listened and joined in the hymn, but much of the text seemed to be about overcoming one's enemy. It wasn't all lovely, gentle and understanding. It was combative.

Times Radio is a fine thing. Private Eye doesn't seem to like it but it is Private Eye's self-appointed role to find fault. Which I do with it, if asked. Yes, Times Radio has the appalling Michael Portillo trying to sound thoughtful and with a grasp of issues but he's not on at a time when I'm listening. Stig Abell and Aasmah Mir might benefit from toning down the old codger vs. sensible lady double act on the Breakfast Show but Matt Chorley (10am - 1pm) has proved himself against my expectations and Mariella Frostrup is good. But the star is John Pienaar at Drivetime (4pm-7pm). I doubt if he comes cheap and it's good to see Times Radio trying. Radio 5 is too much football, Radio 4 can be a bit safe and worthy.

The Times on Saturday is the only print publication I buy. Times Radio means I'm hearing less of Radio 3 and the lack of music contributed a line to a recent poem. I just hope I'm not being tricked into believing things that aren't true. One would never know. Thus Leave, thus Trump, Boris and churches.

--

That wouldn't happen in horse racing. We are doing fine at Wiseguy House. Money does grow in trees sometimes. The Dan and Harry Skelton combination have five runners at Uttoxeter tomorrow, their favourite course. One could do worse than mix them all up in trebles and accumulators for small change and see what happens. You might be able to afford a new hat after.

 

The Abandonment and other stories

 It has been refreshing to get back to some Thomas Hardy short stories after the week with the Gunn letters. As I'm sure you'll know, a Hardy story is like a Hardy novel, only shorter but they are almost as good given that they don't have the same time to build their tragic dimensions.

The Gunn letters were no disappointment but they become increasingly seedy as well as libertine and a return to some decorum didn't go amiss. They also probably sank my long-term project, Wide Realm, the study of Gunn which had reached about 25 thousand words but wasn't ever really going to be necessary and seems even less so now. Its chances of seeing print were slim, it might have been a kindle but one would rather not know how much one might owe Faber for quoting lines from the books they have the rights to. Its purpose was to allow me to think I had an ongoing project and as such I could proceed with it to my own ends. I had nearly reached the point I'd arrived at in 1999 before the publication of Boss Cupid but I might be able to think up something else to do. We will have to see.

This morning, with new allusions to put into the basic idea, I re-wrote the Hammershøi poem that appeared (a long way) below here, about the painting. It's about the same painting - the one on the front room wall - but is a different poem. So I'm now surprised to find as many as nine poems in the file representing what I've done in just under three years since The Perfect Book  which isn't quite the doldrums I thought it was since four a year was always the going rate. While there might be a certain dilettante feel to being a writer who hasn't actually written much for a while, one really ought to give it a go if one can. 

The first obstacle to it is having something one cares about enough to write about, then one needs the words and the form to put them in. Counting syllables is usually the answer to the last one. Rhyme is optional but the decision needs taking early. But there aren't always as many words as one would like. I've used 'silhouette' in the new Hammershøi, having used it in the Prague Jewish Cemetery poem and once before in about 1978. It's the word I need in both cases but in such a small number of poems I can hear unsympathetic critics saying, 'he's got a thing about silhouettes'. I would notice something like that in a novel if a slightly unusual word was used on page 257 that I'd seen on page 48.

Still, I can check off the poems in the file against those that have appeared here and those that haven't, if surviving some searching readings, could go to the magazine I'd rather be in and then, failing that,  the one that might have them. It's been some time. It's been about three years. The only harm it does if my poems appear in print is that it presumably means somebody else's doesn't and it doesn't seem worth causing them disappointment when it doesn't matter to me.

--

One would gladly take today's weather and cut and paste it all the way across to September. Ideal for the weekly jaunt. But there will be July and August days to suffer but, as Harry Worth would have said, things could be worse.

The Thom Gunn Letters

 The Letters of Thom Gunn, ed. Michael Nott, August Kleinzahler and Clive Wilmer (Faber)

It was said in the 1950's that three new poets were the new dominant figures in the English poetry being written then - Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn. Since then, if some of Larkin's lines have passed into the language and Hughes has continued to be regarded as 'major', Gunn's reputation has been less secure.

Larkin has had three full-length biographies, three selections of letters, a minor industry of critical studies, various memoirs from those who knew him and even the 4-CD set of his favourite jazz records. Hughes has been the subject of two biographies, a large volume of letters and been played by Daniel Craig in the film of Sylvia, in whose prolifically documented life he also has a major part. Some of us for who Gunn was at least as important if not more so might have thought he was worthy of at least something like the same sort of coverage. We have waited until now for this significant step in the right direction and I'm sure we are grateful. The introduction makes it clear it is not a biography but it serves much the same purpose. Having seen Michael Nott designated as the 'official biographer' on the internet, that might be still to come but there isn't much to complain about now we have this to put alongside Clive Wilmer's annotated Selected Poems and those autobiographical essays that Gunn himself provided. There would be some justification for a Complete Poems, and even Complete Prose, because the notes here and the bibliographies show that much remains uncollected but, in the same way that one can be made to wonder if one should be reading other people's correspondance that might have been meant to be private, it might not be fair to read poems that the poet didn't see fit to collect. Larkin wasn't done any favours by his Complete Poems and can be regarded as the better poet if only because his three major books represent something not far from his Selected, it's just that his selection process took place at a much earlier stage and was more fastidious.

If the Hughes letters are tormented by grief, overrun by superstition and forever trying to organize lucrative collector's editions of his work, Larkin's were firstly deliberately politically incorrect before he was revealed as a sentimental cartoonist of cute animals to the foremost among his girlfriends and then slavishly devoted to his mother. If I've long thought there were reasons to find Gunn closer to Larkin than to Hughes in their poems in some ways, it has always been obvious that they couldn't have been much further apart as personalities. Larkin is by now well-documented as the fogey retreating into social awkwardness, provincial, becoming more cynical and insular, some of which was both pretence and a means of defence whereas Gunn is nothing if not adventurous, becomes more attuned to America than England and makes his way towards a deep sympathy and humanity. We most of us knew about the drugs and the promiscuity if we took the time to care but I certainly didn't appreciate the scale on which it happened. Don't let anybody tell you the 1960's were exaggerated. It wasn't just The Grateful Dead. Once Thom Gunn was involved he kept it going for himself with great dedication for the rest of his life.   

If Larkin and Hughes in their different ways appeared 'right-wing', Gunn calls himself 'socialist', is genuinely anti-Republican and liberal but above all his agenda is hedonist. If we are all ruled by our compulsions, Gunn is increasingly devoted to his convulsions. He knows what he wants and he knows how to get it. By the end we might be bored by the unending procession of 'tricks' but he's still exhilarated. In December 1993 he writes of his drug intake,

I'll probably kill myself doing this kind of thing one of these days. Still, it's worth it

 

and in 2004, that is what happens - doing both of those things, the evidence seemed to suggest.

 

Seeing the poems mentioned as they are written and collected into books serves to emphasize that the trajectory of the poems was entirely autobiographical, from the Existentialist angst, through the LSD, hippy culture, gay liberation and AIDS to mature retrospectives. Not all poets' work lends itself to quite such direct associations with the life but for one who valued, prized and exemplified 'impersonality' in his work, he is more concerned with himself in it than one might have expected. He reflects in 2003,

I may not be a modest person, but I do believe in modesty in poetry.   

Perhaps it's not easy being one of the most talented of one's generation - most of us wouldn't know - and he employs a leitmotif of studied self-deprecation throughout his life before realizing he is a 'minor celebrity' in his later years. 

He is an exacting and forensic critic of other poets, expressing considerable reservations even about those he is happy to nominate as best, like Wallace Stevens, but his sympathies shift, as inevitably they will, from early admirations for Yeats and Auden to amendments of initial dismissals of Pound and Ginsberg to praising them in the highest terms later. Of his contemporaries, he accepts Larkin's expertise who in 1954 was 'fifteen times as good as me' but not what he employs it to say and never has a bad word for Hughes. His discriminating tastes never prevent him from, or possibly allow him to, some savaging of those things he finds fault with. 

Of his own work, the 'stylistic uncertainties' identified by Edward Lucie-Smith in 1970, as Gunn moved to free verse via syllabics, had already been acknowledged in a letter to his mentor, Yvor Winters, in 1966,

I have decided to give up free verse (I gave up syllabics two years ago), since I don't seem to be doing very well with it.

Free verse was due to return later but what might have looked like Lucie-Smith not appreciating Gunn's development towards being a poet equally adept in either form, he successfully read Gunn's mind at the time. Not that he got any thanks for it. The Poetry Wars were being fought vigorously then and Gunn wasn't above it all.

An insight into the economics of poetry at a time when not all poets had academic posts in university Creative Writing departments is offered by Gunn's reaction to winning £10k for the inaugural Forward Prize in 1992 for The Man with Night Sweats, which made his arbitrary decision to delay his next book until then also a lucky one. An amount like that made a difference to him and allowed him to think of retirement but in the event he continues teaching until 2000, when he is 69, by which time he can be offered $80k for a term of ten lectures and talk about whatever he likes and the property he bought in Haight is worth $1m, compared to the $33k he paid for it in 1971 due to the proximity of Silicon Valley and resultant gentrification of San Francisco. But, most laudibly, as one would hope, money wasn't the point of it for a 'poet', such rarified angels as they like to be.

 

700 pages took me a week to read, which is very good going by my standards. It was admittedly a book I've wanted and anticipated for longer than its editors conceived it, I dare say, but their scholarship has made it worth the wait and it's not obvious that a separate biography would add much more. There is no longer any excuse for not 'getting it'. It is all here. It might not have done Gunn any great favours in adding to my own regard for him as iconic but nothing about the life can detract from the paragon examples of his best poems. The wording of the law clearly states 'between consenting adults in private' and private is maybe where some of this material could have remained but the effect of the Gunn letters is only equal and opposite to that of the Larkin letters. I don't regard myself as strait-laced but some of the later pages here served as something of an education. 

As Sean O'Brien wrote in his tribute,

The only rule was endless latitude.

Let the unready falter and retire -

 

and, as so often, he's right. It might be either this or Mr. Bleaney. But most of us find a position somewhere in between. 

Gunn's Rock

 Larkin's Jazz is a 4-CD set of the early sort of trad that the jazz section of the Larkin Society compiled to represent his favourite music. There was also an article in About Larkin magazine in which Trevor Tolley essayed a guess at which records might have comprised the poet's collection.

It's interesting to know for some, no doubt, and would make for a lively evening's listening but beyond illustrating why Sidney Bechet was his very favourite and wrote a poem in tribute to him, it might not inform the poetry very much.

I'd be the first to accept that I don't belong in the same paragraph, or even chapter, as Larkin or Thom Gunn but I can't think how any of my favourite pop music, which is many and various, has anything to do with any poems I ever wrote. Doris Day's Move Over Darling was probably my favourite record aged about 4 and provided the title for a nostalgic poem a few years ago. There was a forgettable poem called I Don't Want to Talk About It that stole from Uncle Rod. I can't think that 4-CD's, which I'd love to compile, would have any intersection with my poems.

Classical music would do better. Some Mozart opera and a minuet would have meeting places, as would Buxtehude and Bach and a piece called Farewell to Philosophy by Gavin Bryars which I adapted to a 1990's poem called Farewell to Poetry. But the point is that music is music, poems are poems and they have a close relationship but not necessarily the specific music a poet listens to or likes best and the poems they write.

However, the Thom Gunn letters are going down smoothly and quickly with a review likely here by the weekend, perhaps. One is forcibly reminded that the 1960's did certainly happen as advertised to those who were best-placed to take part. No, not the bowler-hatted London business types interviewed by TV reporters about Lady Chatterley. But it was definitely happening in San Francisco among Gunn and his friends. 

One can do the same sort of job that Prof. Tolley did for Larkin's music for Gunn's by noting which contemporary records he sees fit to mention in letters. It doesn't bring many surprises. Pop music in the 1960's hadn't quite fragmented into quite the bewildering range of genres that it did later even if it seems to have become homogenized since (to those of us who have stopped caring). Gunn's listening looks canonical, mainstream and 'of its time' to us by now but must have seemed innovative and exciting then. In fact it now simply looks wrong, having no mention that I've seen yet of Motown, Otis Redding, Aretha or any other black artist apart from Jimi Hendrix but it's not wrong on racist grounds or any other multi-cultural agenda, it's wrong because Motown, Stax and all those records re-discovered by the Northern Soul discos of the 70's were the best pop music.

Without attempting the full discography, Thom Gunn's record collection which, for all I know, might be meticulously catalogued in an American university archive next to Hart Crane's cutlery and Laura Riding's recipe books, it could have included-

Bill Haley & the Comets, Rock Around the Clock,

Elvis Presley, the Sun Sessions, Jailhouse Rock (I guess at some of the tracks)

The Beatles, everything up to and including Rubber Soul and Revolver; Strawberry Fields Forever.

The Rolling Stones, everything up to Their Satanic Majesties Request

The Small Faces, Itchycoo Park

Bob Dylan, Lay, Lady, Lay; The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll

Joan Baez, The Grateful Dead, Country Joe & the Fish, Soft Machine, The Band, Janis Joplin, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and the one I'd not heard of, Blue Cheer, a San Francisco psychedelia band named after a brand of LSD.

John Lennon & the Plastic Ono Band,

Clapton gets a mention as do the Bee Gees but unless there's more to come that isn't in the index, it goes as far as Bruce Springsteen who is credited with being,

the best new singer since - who shall we say? Elton John maybe.

 

A poster of Sid Vicious is mentioned but not the music. There is a dark poem, The Victim, about Sid and Nancy but how much he admired the music is hard to say. Many of us did.

One might have thought Madonna or Chic or all that came out of the New York gay disco scene might get a mention but it hasn't yet. I'll come back and correct this if it does but I suspect his night life was more about leather bars and cruising than being there for the dancing.

It's grim to think that some of those above get listed but the Mamas & the Papas don't but if pop music was a thing worth falling out about, few of us would have many friends. In the same way that one can't imagine how exciting it must have been to be there for the premier performance of the new Bach, Beethoven or Mozart, it must have been good to be there at the time. As it was when Marc Bolan was on TOTP, we first heard Hunky Dory or saw - who shall we say? The Clash maybe.

There might be a book of Poet's Music that somebody could do. I could start it here by asking a few but I'm not going to do it now. I'll give it some thought.

  

Forty Years On

 Of course, forty years ago I'd have loved to have hair as long as this and been in T. Rex but it wasn't allowed. I'm glad of the small consolation that I can have my belated time with it now even if beatnik has not been the look in vogue for quite a while.

Happily Ever After and other stories

I don't know what all that fuss was about, below, telling me the Gunn letters were delayed by a month or even two.  They soon followed up with an e-mail that it would be here tomorrow (Sunday) and then it arrived today. All's well that ends well, of course, but it seems like management of expectations taken to an unnecessary extreme in an unlikely episode of Amazon learning from the Civil Service.

A proven, and often used, technique was to announce very bad news, leave it for a bit and then come back and say it won't be so bad after all. Like announce 10 thousand job losses, endure the inevitable outcry, and then come back and say it'll only be 5 thousand which suddenly sounds okay when 5 thousand would have sounded horrendous enough if it had been the original figure and was what they meant anyway.

But it's a fine and mighty thing at 700+ pages and I'm well underway, calculating that with Sunday and Monday getting me beyond halfway, I could be back here reviewing it by the end of next week. I'm sure the last remaining denizens of 60's and 70's counterculture will be flocking here for my lucid insights.

The always excellent Anecdotal Evidence says he gets a couple of hundred readers. Good for him; he deserves it. That's not bad. But today's post, To Furnish out an Essay, is one of the best of them, especially,

A reader asks why I write something daily when I have, at most, a few hundred readers. That’s a few hundred more than I ever expected, and I don’t, for the most part, write for them. An honest writer will admit he writes to please himself (which occasionally means earning a few bucks, though not in this case). It can be a benign form of egotism. No one is forced to read your words. Writing this way is like carving your name in the bark of a tree deep in the woods: “I am here.” Some will find that a comfort; others, an annoyance; most will never see it. The rest is momentum.

That is exactly it and there's no point me trying to explain it when somebody else has done it so well already. I was floored at a University entrance interview, aged 17 or barely 18, when asked if I wrote for myself or with an audience in mind. I'd never heard the commonplace question before, only knowing that 'poet' looked like something worth being so I wanted to be one for the very reasons Gunn identifies in a letter as early as 1954, 

The trouble is, hell, I don't know if I want to be a poet. By 'being a poet' you are resoundingly different from other people, and tho that has its attractions as I'd be the first to admit, you train yourself into a state of mind which you think superior to that of other people.

 

It's a gauche, young person's attitude that needs must be grown out of as soon as possible but this, along with much of what he says about poetry elsewhere, is what one always thought but ne'er so well expressed oneself.  

I can tell I'm going to have plenty to say. And it's the saying of it I feel compelled to achieve. Whether anybody else reads it, appreciates it or cares makes no odds to me. I wish I'd known that in the Autumn of 1977 when I was asked because then I might have gone to Exeter University which seemed okay at the time but I think I had the wrong idea about interviews. I might have assumed they needed to impress me and not me them. 

--

Another deep impression that made me 'want to be' something, as well as seeing George Best play football, amateur cyclists riding time trials and test match cricket on the telly, was Alex Higgins on A Question of Sport identifying horse races. Most followers of the sport should be able to identify the finishes of last year's Champion Hurdle or Gold Cup but I was impressed at the time. Along with the mystique of the pre-race arithmetic of 9/4 becoming 2/1 and then 15/8 and the reverence I accorded to my grandfather's devotion to this esoteric sport, it made me want to be such a person.

This year's Cheltenham Preview at least did better than last year's so thanks to the other two wise men for their input. We all went in and came back out in one piece and the headline news was the heart-breakingly wonderful Rachael Blackmore whose scintillating win on Honeysuckle I did draw your attention to ahead of it actually happening.

As it says in the epigraph to Gunn's book, The Sense of Movement, 

'Je le suis, je veux l'etre'. 

                    Auguste in 'Cinna'. 

 

One's capacity to flatter oneself when one feels like it seems to have no limit.