Record Review - Byrd, Pierrot Lunaire and Proust, Le Concert Retrouvé

Oh, let's blog on regardless. There is no time like the present.

You might remember a time when it was thought impossible to like both, say, Donna Summer and Led Zeppelin, pop music was so sectarian. I liked them both well enough and had their records at the time but there again, I'm contrary. Either that or open-minded. I remember how remarkable it seemed at Cohesian Tentacle, Gloucester's 'rock' night club, that they played Boogie Nights by Heatwave in among their staple fare of ZZ Top. Presumably because it had the word 'boogie' in it.

Never mind 'classical' music. Three such recent arrivals on disc present just as much of a mixture which can't be compared, only contrasted.

 

Schoenberg, Pierrot Lunaire, Patricia Kopatchinskaja (Alpha)

This is, of course, madness and, I'm glad to find, no less mad than it was 40-odd years ago when I purposefully sought out the mad and avant-garde before finding much longer-lasting joy to be had in the Brandenburg Concertos.

Patricia Kopatchinskaja is well-established enough as a violin player of enormous spirit and gusto that it she can do what she likes and making her own record of Pierrot Lunaire is what she wants to do, in the vocal part.

It's not singing and it's not spoken word, either. It's 'sprechgesang', which I'm glad to see Wikipedia at least define as 'expressionist' because that's what I'd have said. As Schoenberg explained, 

the note is initially indicated, but then immediately moved away from, either falling or rising 

and it would appear to be up to the vocalist where it goes.

Alpha records do some marvellous things and the sumptuous book that this comes in is another of them. It contains much useful history of how this came about, from the Commedia del'Arte, through French C19th poetry, which always seemed some way ahead of Tennyson and Browning, to the commission that Schoenberg said he would have done anyway.

It is music to concentrate on. The poetry is great, performed in German and so you do need the translation to make it worthwhile if your German isn't fluent. Otherwise it might be disconcerting for its own sake.

The disc is filled out with a slightly odd mixture of Strauss and Fritz Kreisler with more Schoenberg and Webern but by then one is less inclined to find anything strange. It's something one had to have although it's not likely to be played very often. It doesn't last too long and so it's ending comes in time for it not to be regarded as a merciful release. 

Perhaps it is the collapse of Romanticism we are hearing. The horror, the torment, the hideous beauty of the individual imploding. Except that, against all expectations, it ends in some sort of resolution.

 

Byrd, Byrd 1588, Alamire, Fretwork, David Skinner (Inventa)

Sanity, decorum and, if anything on two discs of 78 minutes each, plenty enough of it, make this about as opposite to the Pierrot as anything could be. It is great value, it is endlessly forgiving, restrained and welcoming but if Pierrot demands to be listened to or else there's no point, it's tempting to let this float by. That isn't out of the question but it would be a mistake to miss some of its more charming episodes.

Some of the poems set by Byrd are psalms, which one needs to be in the proper penitential mood for or else one would rather not be expected to take seriously their oddball devotions; there are poems by Ariosto, Walter Raleigh; the preposterous claimant to the works of Shakespeare (which isn't his fault), the 17th Earl of Oxford and Philip Sidney but the two laments on the death of Sidney, the glamorous soldier-poet who was revered even more than Boris Johnson is today, that end each disc are the highlights. Slow-moving, slow, moving and, if not quite as eternally wonderful as Josquin's lament for Ockeghem, deserving of being mentioned in the same sentence.

Grace Davidson's soprano is pin-sharp, it seemed to me, when it might have floated more. I've never been convinced that William Byrd was quite as good as Thomas Tallis. This won't be the most exciting record you've ever heard but it is all one expects of it and cleanses as pure water does.

 

Proust: Le Concert Retrouvé, T. Langlois de Swarte, T. de Williencourt (Harmonia Mundi)

But this, that only arrived this morning, is likely to stay on the playlist much longer.

One might have thought that with the Isserlis Proust disc that  arrived not long ago, one might not need more that is similar but it's mostly on the back of how good that disc was that this got in.

Some of the tunes are more familiar, with de Swarte on the Stradivarius and Williencourt on a piano given as much billing in another fine accompanying booklet.

Proust's intimate friend, Reynaldo Hahn need not have done anything else beyond his mock-baroque A Cloris, most perfectly set out by Philippe Jaroussky in the counter-tenor, but here done in an arrangement for pno and vln, and almost as good.

Robert Schumann and Chopin lead into Faure's Violin Sonata no. 1, which is a wide-ranging 23 minutes-plus that belie any assumptions one might still have that he, Ravel and Debussy mostly wrote for Classic FM's soprofic 10pm show. There's plenty more to be had from that and tomorrow I'll be having more of it.

The 3'27 of Francois Courperin would certainly have fooled me on piano rather than harpsichord but after more Faure and before the Hahn finale, there is some Wagner on piano.

I'm not against Wagner because of his anti-semitism. I'm also against Korngold, who was Jewish, and Bruckner for his immense dullness. I'm generally against Wagner because he's 'heavy metal' but some noisy rock bands still made some good tunes and so did Richard Wagner. The transcription by Liszt of Isoldens Liebstod, brings out the best of it, it's possible that less can be more and that we can once in a while forgive ourselves for the release we think we find in such surging emotions.

This must be the pick of the recent releases. I'm looking forward to hearing it more than once tomorrow.

Something of a Day

 

It's surely been something of a day, exhilarated by Rosemary Tonks (below, I meant it to be above), taking delivery of a further disc of music from Proust's salons (which will have to be reviewed alongside other recent arrivals another day) and having my chess, at least on this occasion, being reviewed generously by my opponent.

They're not all like that. Some, in a hopelessly lost position, prefer to let their time run out rather than resign, which is sulky and bad mannered. I sometimes play on in the hope of a lucky stalemate draw or compensating catastrophic error but some whose vanity is not injured by defeat appreciate the game enough to applaud good work even if it's not their own.

The point was that white had inadvertently sidelined his forces and his Queen isn't pretty over there. I had eyed up the chances of mine invading down into the corner and the rest followed naturally. I don't think there was any defence against it. It looks beautiful, might not be quite as clever as it looks but white was gracious enough to say 'Excellent', to which I replied, 'thank you, sorry'. Like many of my games with black, the opening was the Kan Variation of the Sicilian Defence, which sounds good but all the openings sound good. It seems I've recently played the O'Kelly Variation, including both the Venice and Yerevan Systems,  the Alapin Variation and the Bowdler Attack, which presumably has all the rude bits removed.

Rosemary Tonks - Opium Fogs

 

Rosemary Tonks, Opium Fogs (Putnam, 1963)

There appears to be some doubt about whether this was Rosemary Tonks's first novel, or Emir. Both published in 1963, Emir acknowledges this as 'by the same author' but the favour is not returned which might suggest that this came first.

1963 was quite a year for dubious goings-on, from Larkin's adventures 'between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP', Profumo, the Big Freeze and the last days of Sylvia Plath. 

Opium Fogs suits this zeitgest of sinister, gothic horror with its venal self-regard, ultra-sensitivity and ghoulish atmosphere.

I read it in two halves, not finding the same verve and gusto that runs through Emir and the later novels in the first half but overawed by its pace, energy and density as it ran grippingly, menacingly and awfully to its end. I'm not sure if that was an effect of the book or my reading of it, yet, but it soon proved to have the same eccentric, raw genius that makes it Rosemary and nobody else.

Gerard, a librarian, Dr. Bobo Swingler, Swingler's wife, Bebette, and the alluring Gabiella are locked into helplessly destructive infatuations and neuroses. Nobody in a Tonks novel can be in love happily,

'You're saying: a relationship is only ideal when it's precarious!' 

They have a chronic horror of themselves, each other and the wider world. The English way of life,

kills life - and...exactly resembles an old-fashioned mad-house, full of clamps, restraints, and booby traps, where the inmates feel a moral obligation to drag one another down, suck one another's blood and put out one another's eyes.

Whereas most sex scenes in books can be seen as candidates for the Literary Review's  Bad Sex in Fiction Award, with it being not such an easy thing to translate into the analytical structures of language, Rosemary's oppositional way of interpreting anything and everything wouldn't dream of trying to make it sexy,

Gabriella, alert to all the forces that were abroad, accepted the fog, the silence, and the ticking clock as unmistakeable signs of the displeasure of her invisible adversary.

And the rest, like all the rest, is the heaviest irony. 

They fell upon one another like tired animals, who have fatigue and ennui to make love for them when they pause.

If her characters feel bad about themselves, that is only a fraction of how badly they think of other people,

The only thing which has any meaning is the first moment of attraction between strangers: everything thereafter is farce and disillusion.

Some 37 years later, Lou Reed reflected in between morose songs that 'after the first kiss, it's downhill all the way' but, as in Emir, even Bohemia is associated with the 'shallow', 'low' and 'middle-brow'. There is no word in the language that Rosemary can't inflect with disdain but she does it with such gauche panache if not in a French way.

These first two novels are flamboyantly over-written. The later books possibly relaxed into something more considered without losing their acerbic edge but it's often the case that an artist's early work shows what they were about rather than after they have refined themselves and possibly lost something raw and more telling.

With great art work on the cover, Opium Fogs may be 'of its time' with its 1963 sleaziness but Rosemary's art went well beyond its place in time, compromising with nothing quite as mundane. I hope that my modest contributions to Tonks Studies, as well as better efforts elsewhere (if you know where to find them) are entirely unsuccessful in bringing further attention to her work. She wouldn't have wanted it. She disowned it to such an extent that she'd borrow her own books from libraries and destroy them. I'd prefer she thus remained our precious little secret. The asking price for what few copies of her books remain available offer some hope that she will.

 

Rosemary Tonks - Emir

Rosemary Tonks, Emir (Adam Books, 1963)

An enormous and gratefully received bit of good fortune came my way recently that provided the opportunity to read Rosemary Tonks's first novels, Emir and Opium Fogs, without the exorbitant expenditure required to own copies for oneself. It transpires that I'm not the only one whose most expensive book acquisitions are hers. The Bloater, which is the only one I'm now missing, should be along in its own time and then there will be nothing more to want.

I read Emir yesterday on the same day that I listened to a new recording of Schonberg's Pierrot Lunaire (review to follow soon-ish). One needs a lie down after a day like that. While I relished more adventurous artworks when I was young, enjoying The Faust Tapes and most things avant garde when I was about 13, I'm much more Bach, Handel and Mozart these days.

Not that Rosemary would have necessarily regarded herself as avant-garde or part of any such school or 'movement'. In Emir, she has as much scorn for the Bohemian, where one might have inadvertently put her, as she does for the conventional, the conservative and everything else. It is her deep dissatisfaction with everything that makes her both so gorgeous and so impossible. In retrospect, it comes as no surprise that she disowned all her worldly work, set off in search of something she found more meaningful, not altogether successfully, and almost literally disappeared. She might well not have been the easiest company in life but her writing is like nobody else's. Muriel Spark is the very gentlest and most comforting of companions compared to Rosemary.

A concensus of opinion rather than any verified dating makes Emir the first of her novels. It is as brilliant in its relentless dismissal of all social nicety as it is flawed by its lack of anything else. It is a comedy and, like all her novels, a brilliant one but to anyone coming unprepared to it, say via Joanna Trollope, it might look like grotesque tragedy. Houda, the poet about town, has more than one admirer but the others are bit parts compared to Eugene, the Emir, who is ladies' man, but,

At the same time that he sets fire to my nervous system, a flood of curses rises to my lips.

 

Or, 

These cabbage raptures are all very well, but at the other end of the railway line I shall need proficiency in all the meticulous cruelties of a twentieth-century love affair.

 

Perhaps its less a novel than a concatentation of maxims that look cynical but actually despair for want of something better. Perhaps only one of such searing intelligence as Rosemary's could produce quite such compulsive writing whether it's a novel or not. But once you've picked it up, forget doing anything else. It's not rambling or thoughtful, philosophical or ruminating like Tolstoy, George Eliot or maybe Balzac. She's the Sex Pistols. It demands to be read, right now, imperfect in so many ways that it may be.

Englishness is a regular target for her satire but Frenchness, or any other alternative option, isn't given any better welcome,

An English garden is way out of time. And from it, London appears to belong to a backward race where whole castes are separated from one another by the mis-pronounciation of a single word, by the stitching of a glove. 

Houda is, of course, a poet as was Rosemary in her best work. I'm not sure if Rosemary seriously thinks that 'poet' is the higher calling because I certainly don't but many still believe poetry to be something more refined than prose. It isn't. Why would it be. In among the scathing, ultra-sensitive, unforgiving insights into what she sees as superficial, there is great 'poetry'. I think it was a bright tie seen through a long, white beard that was like 'a regatta seen through sea fog'.

She does her best to go 'beyond the grasp of the ratepayer' because,

Beauty is a grocer's work.

 

Emir is a joyous book, as enthralling for all the reasons some readers think it's bad as for all the gauche, showy things that make it good. I'm not sure if I didn't enjoy it as much for its total lack of compromise as I liked the later, supposedly better-made novels.

At least she tried.

I will go back in search of her grave again if it is, as it is said to be, not very far from here. With others among my favourite writers recently losing points, Rosemary Tonks never does.

  

Charlotte Mew by Julia Copus

 Julia Copus, This Rare Spirit, A Life of Charlotte Mew  (Faber)

Charlotte Mew's work wasn't in danger of disappearing but it might having been fading from view. I hadn't been a great admirer, thinking of her as something like Stevie Smith, perhaps, but a look at the poems recently in preparation for the arrival of this book and now reading it, I entirely take the point. This detailed, evocative biography with its useful insights into the poems and fiction, has done both Lotti and me great favours.

The poverty and mental illness in her family caused great difficulties, each exacerbating the other, one might think, but Charlotte is remembered as being cheerful and good company while not pursuing celebrity. Her friendship with Thomas and Florence Hardy was a genuine thing and one can see why they would have admired each other but she disdained unwelcome attention and got on with the real job in unadvatageous circumstances.

Those circumstances, in the late Victorian and subsequent periods, with the old attitudes to the position of women only very gradually beginning to relent, the treatment of the physically or mentally infirm and finely calibrated indices of 'respectability' are clearly set out by Julia who also doesn't entertain any of the speculation about Charlotte's sexuality or private life beyond recording who speculated about what. In the same way that Charlotte attended to her work, cared for it and knew its place, such things, if there even were any, are not the story and are 'between consenting adults in private'. For once, we can be grateful for that.

Mew's stance was that literary renown had nothing to do with personal celebrity.

 

I'm not aware of any previous critical work by Julia Copus but she shows herself to have a great talent for it, beginning with how she demonstrates the themes of the first published story, Passed, provide so much of what was to follow in the poems. Like Hardy, Edward Thomas and Larkin later, Charlotte became  known as a poet having first been a writer of prose. The traffic seems to be mostly in the opposite direction a hundred years or so later now that poetry would be the very last way any writer would choose to make a living. 

In her day she was as successful as any female poet, gaining the attention of Ezra Pound and more Modernist figures as she lived through that date in 1910 identified by Virginia Woolf as when 'human character changed'. She belongs to that perceived change, apparently too similar to Hardy to be entirely C20th but certainly ahead of her time and not Victorian either.

But grief and chronic mental instability run through her life and all about her. They have a destructive effect on the slight, increasingly white-haired figure who is taken for being ten years older than her actual age although Edith Sitwell wouldn't have been the most sympathetic of witnesses to that.

In the poems Sea Love and I Have Been Through the Gates, 

we encounter a dispirited figure in an empty landscape, standing among the ruins of an idyll they once believed in.

Her suicide, by drinking undiluted disinfectant, at the age of 59 seems to have been planned for some time. 

It is as moving and tragic a story as any poet's, not least for the quiet dignity of its subject when not all poets or artists have quite such a powerful claim on our sympathy. And not least either for the thorough, well-organized and beautifully-written job Julia Copus makes of it. I've read biographies of plenty of poets whose work I admired more and might have been expected to have more interest in but I haven't read many, hardly any, that were more memorable and worthwhile. Julia has done Charlotte a great service.

---

Twice in the book, the adjective 'decent' is used to mean 'of an acceptable standard'. In about 1977, I used it in the same way in an 'A' level essay on Paradise Lost, explaining (as if I would know) how Milton created a 'decent picture of Hell'. I was told in the margin that this was not the right word, it then presumably still only properly being the opposite of 'indecent'. But times have changed and now it passes a Faber editor. Perhaps I was ahead of my time, too. 

Magazines I've Been In (cover version) and other stories

 I saw recently a fellow/rival/other 'poetry blogger' list all the magazines he's been in. It was Tim Love at  litrefs that I see via Clarissa's ever useful index at The Stone and the Star. 

What could be more self-indulgent, I thought, as well as much less impressive, than do my own - from memory but it will be almost complete. It is of no interest whatsoever unless you were around on the 'littlepress' scene of the late 70's from where many of these long defunct magazines come. It's possible that even their editors can barely remember them by now.

Poems - Navis, Sepia, Sandwiches, South, The Chair, The Incurable, Poetry Nottingham, Calliope, About Larkin, Period Piece and Paperback, Joe Soap's Canoe

I thought there were a few more than that. One or two of them took some remembering. Navis seemed like some sort of coup because they had recently published a couple of Thom Gunn poems. On the back they listed poets in the current issue in block capitals and some from previous issues below in smaller type so I was given more prominent billing than him ( !!! ). That is some sort of prized possession.

Reviews - PN Review, Sepia, The Reader, Allusions.

I've always thought it was some sort of editorial accident or oversight that a review by me got into PN Review but if anybody knows what they're doing, surely Michael Schmidt does. I think it was an act of kindness.

Fiction - Fisheye

 

The point is really that by now I don't see the point when I can show the world anything I feel like here almost before the ink's dry should I feel the need rather than wait months to find out if I'm in and then a few more to see it in print. Long gone is the thrill I heard Simon Armitage describe not so long back when he saw his first published poem in days before the term 'hard copy' would have been used to describe it.

--

But, on something of a photographic day, I can add a further picture to illustrate a poem, which is The Trees by Philip Larkin, in which they come back to life 'like something almost being said'. Not always associated with quite such optimism, he was writing of them 'coming into leaf' but blossom makes a prettier picture, or two.

And I also like to keep a record of the long hair I'm enjoying having in the circumstances and so I asked Yoko if she could take a picture today. The Grateful Dead have asked me to join them. But maybe it's about time we updated the 'masthead' portrait with this by Cosham's answer to Annie Liebowicz.

Mew, Mew, Football's Askew and a sonnet I might scrub

Another overly cautious delivery date was applied to the biography of Charlotte Mew by Julia Copus.  Originally due on the same day as John Sutherland's Monica Jones last Thursday, it was no great hardship that it didn't come then but the revised date given was some six weeks or more ahead. Then it was due on Sunday. Then it arrived on Saturday. They certainly err on the safe side.

It is a fine thing indeed and I'll explain more next week. Seven years in the making, Julia says on Twitter. (Twitter !!! What have I become).  I have something of a collection of poet's biographies by now, from Chaucer to three Audens, from numerous Shakespeares, through Wyatt, Herbert, those indulgent Romantic types to Mina Loy and later C20th. As a piece of work in itself, irrespective of its subject, this is as good as any of them and a high quality read. But next week is when to say why.

Charlotte Mew wouldn't have been anywhere in a list of favourite poets for me but I read a selection from the Selected recently as a precursor to the arrival of this and I thought I found a bit more, certainly reasons for the perceived kinship with Hardy. With the help of this life, though, which includes some insightful approaches to the poems, too, she comes into better focus and claims a place among the worthy names of the early C20th as a poet, not as a 'woman poet'.

--

Slightly less high-mindedly, we don't spend much time on football here but I've been surprised at the coverage given to the plans for a new European Super League. I heard so much about it and what everybody thinks about it on the wireless that I searched for a station that wasn't doing current affairs and listened to Smooth FM for a couple of tracks until something unbearable by Chicago came on.

Surely such a league is what football has been edging towards for years, pitching teams of equal riches and capacity against each other rather than know the top three or four in the league before the season starts.

Fulham, Norwich, West Brom, Crystal Palace, Burnley and their like are middle-weights best matched against each other than having to play Manchester City or Liverpool into whose first XVI, none of their first XI would get.

Ideally, going entirely the other way, it would be preferable if aeroplanes weren't carrying extended squads and backroom boys across Europe each week for the sake of a kickabout. The Golden Age of Lawton, Finney and Lofthouse had them going to away matches by train. But, abandoning all hope of that, it is surprising how credulous the devoted supporters can be when they imagine it's 'their club'. It was made obvious when Manchester United were sold off and disgruntled purists went off to form FC United of Manchester that it was anything but their club. They are the customers in the same way that I am a customer of Tesco. I pay them for things I want just like those who want to watch certain people play football pay them for the privilege to do so. If that gives them some erroneous sense of ownership, belonging or tribal identity, they need to understand it is of their own making.

It doesn't matter to me whether the new league happens or not. I would have thought it stood every chance on the grounds that international football is a bit of an afterthought by now and I can't see many young players being put off by an international ban like Bobby Charlton might have been. It is an unashamedly commercial practice, rather than the art it might have once been on the playing fields of Gloucester circa 1970. But mainly, Boris Johnson has promised to do everything in his power to prevent it. I would be delighted to see him on the opposite side of a chess board or poker table. You only have to ask the Covid-19 virus how hard it is to outwit his best preventative efforts. I'm afraid it's too late to ask the 130000 victims it has so far claimed in the UK what they think.

Kerry Packer's rebel cricket circus didn't last long but cricket is now unrecognisable from the game it once was when a required run rate of six an over seemed out of the question. Things move on, mutate and can't be expected to stay the same. If the new league was UEFA's idea and there was relegation and promotion between it and the next level of European competition, rather than what seems to be a closed shop, I'm sure it would be fine. The Good Lord only knows what Arsenal and Tottenham are doing in it anyway.

Those upset about the selling off of their identity, if that's what it is, might want to consider how long any of the professionals stay at their beloved club once a better offer turns up. I could have been distraught at Arsenal's 97th minute equalizer against Fulham if I'd felt like it. But it makes no difference to my life whether my favourite team stay in the Premier League or not. Several managers have been in charge since I last saw them play and a few hundred players have played for them. I didn't make the effort to go and see them and none of them made the effort to read my poems, as far as I know. We have no relationship.

-

But if Scott Parker, Ademola Lookman or Bobby De Cordova-Reid happen to have tuned in, here's one for them.

There is a train line not far from my house and I've seen them passing, concatenations of unoccupied carriages, for a year or more now. It's a bit of an obvious subject but I like the echo with Rod Stewart's Downtown Train. I knew there was a poem in there somewhere but couldn't get a first line. Eventually I did and then the other words formed an orderly queue and slotted themselves in. I'm rarely immediately convinced about any poem and like to come back a few days, or even weeks, later, to see if it looks any good.

I seem to have lost any motive to see my own poems in print so it can wait in a file on a memory stick with the others. Any thrill is in the making and then, if one is lucky, in the finished article but I need not bother any wider public beyond those who find themselves here.

Lockdown Trains

The suburbs look away as they pass through

on their way to countryside and stations 

still deserted but that is what they do 

and continue to go through the motions.

 

Like actors who only ever rehearse

a play from the Theatre of the Absurd 

the government chronically reimburse, 

they’ve lost the plot but yet can still be heard

 

ahead of their arrival as the lines

twitch with the knowledge of them imminent. 

They shatter headlong through the air empty, 

unconscious that the role that they refine, 

seething because they think it is urgent, 

is a mime of what they were meant to be.