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.