This Is The Modern World

By now one needs to be 'of a certain age' to think that the 'modern world' was that represented by The Jam. Some of us have lived long enough to see 'modern' mean 'old-fashioned'. For me it was mainly represented by Concorde. Modernism as such, that art revolution that happened in 1911, was new enough when one first read T.S. Eliot or were aware of Picasso but poetry, philosophy and the world was already post-modern by then.

I'm not convinced that 'modern' sounds like a new thing to young people now. The New Look, La Nouvelle Vague, The New Wave that meant the Sex Pistols and certainly the New Seekers are definitely old now. It's a bad idea to brand oneself as 'new' because posterity will find the idea hilarious soon enough.

Modern is as old and tweedy as we used to think a Morris Minor was compared to, say, a Ford Capri.

 

Twice today it would have been of some use to have a mobile phone (and been conversant with how it worked) but I'm determined to hang out for as long as possible, e.g. forever, and be the last remaining person on the street, on a train or anywhere else, not transfixed by the tiny screen. I spend too much time in front of this quite big screen as it is.

The bank want my mobile number to text me a code to verify online purchases. We'll deal with that one day. More pressingly, making my way towards the final stages of the Collected Poems, I thought I'd investigate and maybe even set up the account to publish the book as a kindle with the facility of a hard copy. But, D'oh, the second level of verification required involves the same thing, a mobile number to send me a code. One can alternatively create such a code by downloading an app but after trying to follow several lists of instructions to do that, I can't waste a whole Friday night failing to achieve anything and I'd rather do this.

I am the new version of the Morris Minor driver, stuck somewhere in the past. I am a patient man, generally, and willing to try but sometimes maybe I'm unwilling to compromise and whereas I don't understand why people have objections to being vaccinated, I have my own precious objections to having to have a mobile phone.

So the Collected Poems might not be a kindle after all. It might just be a pdf document. So be it if the world won't come to meet its olde worlde intransigence.

The Intentional Fallacy Fallacy

At university, 40+ years ago, we were very much 'educated' that the study of literature was the study of texts. The 'Intentional Fallacy' by W.K. Wimsatt, Jr. and M.C. Beardsley was 'gospel' and, it seemed to me, propounded by the work of Lancaster's then highly fashionable tutors on the Stylistics and Criticism course, Geoffrey Leech and Mick Short. Their book was the set text for the course. Why wouldn't it be if that's what you were teaching and they could sell a copy to every student that signed up for it.

I tended to believe what teachers told me. Giving them back in essays the ideas that they had provided seemed the safest way of achieving passable marks. Having understood that a liberal, humanities education in the 1970's showed one 'how to think' and not 'what to think', we'd like to think, my doubts that it really did have accumulated ever since.

It wasn't only in The History Man, filmed at Lancaster on a suitably contemporary shopping precinct of a campus, that there was a given way of thinking, it existed in the predominantly Marxist Sociology Dept. there in the slightly less fictional world and in the Linguistics Dept., too.

I've not had much sight of what constitutes university education since then but it's possible that the education is delivered more than offered with concomitant 'correctness' advisable in exchange for a good grades.

I was taken aback ( ! ) at a conference in 1997 when presented with the proposition that the Intentional Fallacy, that the reader should not refer back to anything the author intended, was nonsense.

But, surely...the Death of the Author, Roland Barthes, the text.

No. I just went quiet.

 

Following up Anna Karenina with the great A. N. Wilson's biography of Tolstoy, of course you can't have the text without the life of the author it came from. Texts can't possibly be free-floating things that just happened. They came from a time and place and an author. That much has been apparent for quite some time but not often as clearly as it is in the case of Tolstoy. How far that should lead us into investigating the author and all their darkest corners is another matter because we are still reading the text rather than them but the idea that it exists in suspended isolation is absurd.

'Education' is a good thing, I'm sure, but for me carries the overtones that 're-education' in totalitarian states did and still does. In the same way that saying, 'I'm sure', implies some equivocation. All it can do is present you with what seems right at the time. One has to spend the rest of one's life unlearning what one was taught.

Collating the Collected Poems has shown me how I very gradually unlearnt what a poem ought to be like.

Universities have Theology Departments that train potential vicars, presumably predicated on the idea that there is a Christian God. Still. In this day and age. In some ways we are still medieval.

For all we know, in a phrase from Shirley Bassey, we congratulate ourselves on being wise by escaping one fallacy but only to potentially land ourselves in another. That might not be quite what Tolstoy meant but that's what I'm getting out of him. Maybe it's that condition that makes us 'human', for better or worse.

Maybe Carol Ann Duffy had more of a point than I thought she had in her 'poetry is the music of being human'. It first sounded to me like the most vacuous, self-congratulatory defintion one could provide in support of one's own position in a minor industry but, no. If and when poetry tries to come to terms with being human and succeeds in making music out of it, that's what it must be.

Tormented by this ignorance

I've added the 'fiction review' label to this well aware that it was first published in book form in 1878 and that what I have to say about Anna Karenina comes nowhere near to being a review.

But if one does a website that claims to be at least in part about books one can hardly let the day on which one finishes such a book pass without marking the occasion.

For much of the way I wasn't entirely convinced it belonged alongside Proust, Joyce, George Eliot and all. Tolstoy paints a very broad canvas and, like Julius Caesar in Shakespeare's play, Anna doesn't have as big a part in the work she gives her name to as one might imagine. There's plenty of essay mileage to be had cross referencing her with Emma Bovary and Dorothea Brooke but she's nothing like the whole point and nothing but the point.

I gave myself a bit of a rest by not taking notes and page references, or not until part 8 ( of 8). Tolstoy has been brilliant in documenting the Anna/Karenin/Vronsky triangle but is building towards a wider perspective and the politics of C19th Russia takes up as much space as the emotional struggles. While Levin isn't exactly Tolstoy in the same way that Stephen Daedalus isn't Joyce, Paul Morel isn't Lawrence and Marcel isn't Proust, we know they are to some considerable extent and, as will become more apparent in A.N. Wilson's biography, Tolstoy- like Hardy and, quite possibly, Shakespeare - wasn't happily married.

If Julius Caesar only makers it to about halfway through his own play, Anna at least makes it to the end of part 7 of her novel. That last chapter is a highlight of all writing, and translation, but that is the end of her story and she casts less of a shadow on part 8 than you might think if the book's really about her. Tolstoy, like Julian Barnes more recently, likes to ruminate at some lengths over the consequences and so part 8 is Levin, Tolstoy's representative in the story, coming to terms with himself.

The only page reference I had noted was at three-quarters of the way through where an infant boy dies of croup. My few encounters with croup had previously been Private Pike in Dad's Army explaining to Capt. Mainwaring that his mother insists on him wearing his scarf to prevent him from catching it and for years I had taken it to be not only a droll but a fictitious one, too. Many years after I was taken aback to find out it was real. And now Tolstoy is responsible for me finding out it could be fatal. Anna Karenina was thus nearly as much a humbling voyage of self-discovery for me as it is for Levin.

He starts echoing things one recognizes, reading 'non-materialist' philosophers like 'Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer before,

So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any possibility of knowing what he was and why he was living in the world, tormented by this ignorance...

and we need not pursue the sentence any further without it getting out of hand. But he is finding 'inner peace'. A major theme and conflict for Anna, among others, has been between the sophisticated, often duplicitous city life in Moscow and Sr. Petersburg and the simpler, but less immediately stimulating, rural life.

Levin works his way towards an idea of 'good' that is outside of cause and effect, some sense of self that looks to me, as many such abiding within contradictions and difficulties do, like 'negative capability'. That would have been fine. Stop there. But Tolstoy can't stop writing and has to take it on a few more pages yet and allow him to rediscover his Christian 'faith'. 

D'oh. But it was the 1870's and Tolstoy was well ahead of his time.

 

Having sneaked a look at A.N. Wilson's foreword to the biography, he sets the scene and gives us some context, making a comparison between the flowering of C19th Russian literature with that of Elizabethan England and citing Pushkin as literature's equivalent of Mozart.

So, we'll get some Pushkin lined up for once the biography has been dispatched in what might be fairly short order. 500-odd pages. That's no time at all when something's any good.

From the Archives - two unvaluable manuscripts

Compiling the Collected Poems is proving to be a more painstaking but nonetheless enjoyable job than one might have thought. Deciding which poems should be included is the least of it. A Word document can do anything you want it to, one only has to find out how.

I have the more recent booklets saved already so they can be pasted in but the earlier ones need typing in ahead of them. Having to do that puts those poems through a more rigorous qualifying process when one wonders if they're really worth it. One notices phrases or idioms one used long ago, some of which are still okay but some make one pause. Some poems get in on account of lines I'd like to preserve while others now seem a bit too forced or mangled but then, one thinks, heaven knows how stilted some of, say, The Sense of Movement now looks and it didn't do him any harm.

It's good to do because it seems worthwhile and since it's long been my main intention to please myself rather than any other reader it still does seem worthwhile. But it is by no means a clear cut decision as to what stays in and what is thrown out. As when editing a magazine, there are some obvious choices that go in uncontested and some less impressive efforts that are eased gently towards oblivion but there's the area somewhere below halfway in the order of preference where it all hangs on a close call, at least one of which was made having typed out five lines of it before I thought, 'no'.

Once I've compiled this large document and been through it time and again (but probably once or twice not enough), it remains to be seen how hard it is to make it into a kindle. Otherwise it'll be a pdf.

But, what about appendices. What about the 'juvenilia', what about acknowledgements. And what about a couple of original manuscripts, like these. 

I don't know if I still have any examples of the more chaotic drafts of poems that came less easily but these two, of Windy Miller and

Starý židovský Hřbitov, show how neatly poems can sometimes write themselves for you. That's all it took with them.

I find myself, whenever given the slightest opportunity, explaining that the most successful poems arrive fully formed and all you have to do is write them down. It's possible that one has to wait until one's ready before doing that and it can't be done at will.

But the very last thing we want here is a masterclass.

It might be decided that such esoteric archive material is more than such a lowly collection needs so here they are now anyway as I labour the point Keats made against working too hard, that If poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.

Compare and Contrast and other stories

 More great work from Saint Dominic last night. He's hardly flawless but he can be candid about many of his inconsistencies, some of which would have been admired by Machiavelli himself. But during the night I heard a Times Radio item about Michael Wolff, author of Landlside, the Final Days of the Trump Presidency, which provided an opportunity to compare the two chaotic, incompetent vanity projects.

Trump always seems the more terrifying, not least because he was 'in charge' of a more powerful country but at least perhaps he was in charge whereas it now turns out that Boris regards the Daily Telegraph as his 'real boss'.

While Laura Kuennsberg was her usual excellent self and pressed Dominic when she thought she had him in difficulties, her disbelief was taken quite lightly by Dom. What he said about Boris only filled in the first-hand witness detail of what we thought we knew all along and, while shocking, it no longer shocks. Yes, that's what he's like and always has been.

The difference between Trump and Boris is that one doesn't listen while the other listens but doesn't understand. The similarity is that they both suffer from a kind of maniac locked-in syndrome of being themselves. While Wolff said there is no other, hidden Trump, he only exists in the one-dimensional avatar that he presents, Boris is slightly different in that he can shift between convenient beliefs, ideas or policies almost by the hour if need be. There is nothing of any substance inside either of them but while Trump cannot be anything other than his awful, destructive, solipsistic self, Boris is malleable, forever shifting, very shifty and prepared to believe whatever suits the moment.

They both live in the moment.

While Trump is unchangeable and has to have facts, figures and history altered to suit him, Boris is like something that I noticed long ago in the fashionable left and capable of supporting whatever it looks worth his while to. The likes of Jeremy Corbyn seem generally well-intentioned but their righteous support of the Palestininan cause line them up with the anti-Semitic far right. 40 years ago, at University, the campus Marxists were in favour of the ayatollahs against the aristocratic Shah and supported Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

What we can do is follow Tyrone Mings, the footballer who someone pointed out is 'surely no Marxist', and monitor those things that politicians, or any of us, fail to condemn.

A highlight of Dominic's analysis was his daignosis of the broken system of 'democracy' that gives us a choice between Boris and Corbyn, as well as a system that puts the likes of him effectively in charge. One of his possible solutions was a 'new party'. We did try that before with the SDP which flattered to deceive and effectively went into the Liberal Party. I'd like to know more from Dom about this new party and whether it would be sensible, centrist and try its best to do the right thing or if it would be made up of the sort of sinister goons that he so expertly plotted the referendum and last General Election for.

He's a clever lad and his expertise is something you'd like on your side. The suspicion that he wins like Don Revie rather than like Brian Clough remains, though, and at present he's only admired for being the enemy of one's enemy. That doesn't make him one's friend.

--

Reading oneself over the last 40-odd years is more interesting than it might have been. Starting to put together the Collected Poems, I find I have 133 poems for it since the late 1970's, which is where it is likely to start. I'm surprised how much I like some of the old ones which I haven't looked at for years. It's not obvious quite where to draw the line but I've thrown out less than I thought I might so far. 133 poems from 40 or so years is not far off the rate of 4 a year I've long assumed is what I did.

I wonder if it might be called Pluperfect, contuining the theme of my titles and looking back twice, as it were. I might need to extend my computer expertise to make a kindle of it but there is time. I'll provisionally set myself a date of 17/10 to have it done by. One has to eventually accept that the bid for the rights to it from Faber or anybody else is looking unlikely and, no, I don't want to go out to try to sell copies by reading from it and being there to append my signature at festivals. It's not a commercial enterprise. It matters little to me whether anybody reads them or not. But the simple fact of having a 'project' to think about and do has immediately improved my quality of life.

Two Summer Poems

The theme for today's virtual (e-mail) meeting of Portsmouth Poetry Society is 'Summer Poems'. 

As it happened, I was making a start on the Collected Poems and so aware of these two fairly similar efforts. The first is from a booklet from 1994 and the second from 2006. And since then I've found a third that isn't quite so insect-fixated.

 

Summer 

  

The quick stirring of stalks marks

the cover a reticent

animal has just vanished 

from, whose curious nerves spark 

thrills ahead of its fervent 

instincts. And it's not ambushed. 

 

It leaves its latest bolt-hole 

faintly warm, like the minute 

heat of my tyre-tracks, cooling 

to nothing on the road. All 

afternoon immaculate 

miracles have been playing:

I ride through insects that fizz
and tremble at the strange gift
of flight, that cannot explain
how generous the light is

and all the world's shadows shift
fractionally up the lane.

 

One Last Summer

 

Although this might be one last summer,

one last outrageous blossoming,

it has the epic nonchalance

to pause in a maze of thought:

 

the dusty, nervous sparrows,

helpless in their careful lives,

look askance and struggle

to understand their restlessness

 

whereas, brought forward from the pre-historic,

the dash and gleam of brief insects,

too clever to know anything,

are perfect in their confidence.

 

It might be an unremitting love,

the unthought presto of passing

thrills and their long, heroic habits

flooded with favourable light.

Flying Finish and other stories

 For the benefit of those highbrows who devote themselves to the likes of Tolstoy at the expense of reading Dick Francis, I'd like to outline the story of Flying Finish.

As is customary in a Dick Francis book, the horse and jockey survive various scrapes and the skullduggery of the villains and each chapter ends cliff-hangingly looking as if they can't possibly make it to Cheltenham for the Champion Hurdle but deep down you imagine they probably will and they do. 

In the last chapter they get there in one piece - okay, one piece each - and set off for a couple of laps of Prestbury Park. It's not quite going to plan but they are in position to challenge for the lead coming to the last but I think they hit the hurdle or don't quite get it right and set off in pursuit of the leader up the hill, closing, closing but the line comes just too soon and they get beat and 'that's racing'.

 

Mark Cavendish's story in this year's Tour de France was no less dramatic.

It's some years since his heyday and Golden Age when he racked up wins in sprint stages and specialized in the final stage on the Champs-Élysées.  He is now 36 and it looked very much like he was a back number, riding in lesser races for smaller teams, not getting into the Tour, suffering depression and a syndrome or two. Nobody expected to see him in the Tour this year until the main sprinter in his team was indisposed a couple of days before it and he came in as a late replacement, four behind Eddy Merckx in the Most Stage Wins list. Still nobody thought he would threaten that. It wasn't something that could happen.

However, with a well-drilled team around him and a convenient dearth of top sprinters there to take him on, each of the absentees with their own reasons, he won a stage to the great joy of his devoted supporters, of which I'm one, no longer having many current favourite sportspersons to follow. He won two more and then equalled Merckx in some kind of fairy tale fashion and still had two chances to get number 35.

Having missed the first of those it was still all set up for a historic finale in Paris and Corals made him 8/15 fav to do so. I didn't back him because I didn't want to jinx him and could hardly bear the tension. Some things are surely more important than cruel hard cash even in this age of monetized sport. But it did look like money for nothing and more than 50% interest on your money in an afternoon is a very competitive rate compared to what you'll get out of an ISA.

Towards the end of a meaningful horse race, which means one with significant money involved, I tend to rise from my horizontal couch position to the 'edge of my seat' and so I did for this in the last 5 kms. 

Where's the Green Jersey. That'll do. That's okay. Lost the ideal position. Commentator says he's got it back. And then the last 500 metres is like the last furlong of a flat sprint handicap at Goodwood and frankly it all happens too quickly. Oh, no, he's boxed in on the rails. I'm sure he missed a beat stuck in behind with nowhere to go before the gap came too late and that's him, in green on the right of the picture in third, beaten maybe a length.

He won the green jersey which is regarded as second only to the yellow, confounded any but the most outrageously optimistic expectations and for me only has Gareth Southgate to worry about for Sports Personality of the Year because he is one, charismatic and with attitude, somehow apologetic in manner and apparently vulnerable while being supremely good at what he does. I'm not usually very taken with sporting nicknames and am happy for my litany of heroes to be called Derek Randall, George Best, Alex Higgins, Janet Tebbutt, Michael Holding, etc. but The Manx Missile suits Cav very well.

I didn't wait around for the interviews to hear what he said about next year but I dare say he'll be back aged 37. It's great to see the comeback, like Kauto Star, a few by Muhammed Ali and even Lester Piggott but I'm not particularly concerned about the record. That doesn't really matter. It was a tremendous story as it was. It could have been written by Dick Francis.

Oh, yes. It already had been.

---

Back with the Tolstoy, one can't help thinking that it's mainly about 'how best to live' on some well-intentioned, holistic level.

I think 'a purpose' would come into my manifesto for that and while I'm not complaining about a life of uninterrupted leisure and have no particular ambitions to achieve beyond keeping the turf account in the plus and the chess ratings respectable, even approaching 62 it surely isn't quite over yet.

A big, new project needs many gallons of impetus behind it because it will surely need to overcome difficulties. I heard a 'poet' on the wireless a few weeks ago who had written 14 sonnets and then a fifteenth made up of the last lines of the other 14. Now there's a challenge. So I managed one and then had to have a lie down ever since.

It needs to be worthwhile. It doesn't have to see print and have one traipsing round Ledbury, Cheltenham and all the festivals trying to sell copies. Heaven forbid but one likes to think one's achieved something. While watching the TdF I had little difficulty resisting the urge to get a new bike.

But I have had a sort of place-holding idea that might stretch out for a while.

The Collected Poems, from the late 1970's to now, paring down the booklets from what seemed worthy of print then to what still does now. It might not be a big document if I'm diligent enough but moving into the computer, kindle and download age, I needn't wait any longer for Farrar, Straus and Giroux to ask for the rights. Doing it as a pdf saves on paper, cost, waste, environmental footprint and could be updated for later editions, one imagines, very easily.

So maybe I'll do that.The more recent volumes are on Word docs, it will encourage me to think twice about typing out again any poems that aren't and I can persuade myself I'm editing, if not 'curating', that body of work while thinking of a title, a cover picture and some gentle sentiments for a foreword.

Maybe that's what I'll do.

 Sure is hot out there. I've done my daily ration of Anna Karenina outside and am now allowed in. Long gone are they days of the 1980's when I was a dedicated sunworshipper and the 1990's when I was a long-distance cyclist always monitoring the weather to fit in 200 miles during a summer week. I am the most sun-drenched now that I've been since those faraway days and I hope the sunlight vitamins are proving beneficial. 

Beyond halfway in the Tolstoy I am not yet tempted to put it alongside Proust, maybe Middlemarch and suchlike in the Greatest Novel category. By all means Tolstoy is a great writer but my interest in agrarian reform in C19th Russia isn't a big part of my life. The zeitgeist of the Proust was dominated by the Dreyfuss Affair which is more in my line. I have begun to wonder, though, if there is an underlying template shared by these big novels having noticed that Karenin's role is vaguely the equivalent of Casaubon in George Eliot, that Anna has obvious parallels with Emma Bovary but my memory fails me on so much detail and I can't remember what happens to Ladislaw and how far he compares with Vronsky. I may be the wiser once I move on to the great A.N. Wilson's biography of Tolstoy and find out what it all meant.

--

Following the wonderful performance by Young-Choon Park last week, I availed myself of her recordings of the Appassionata, Tempest sonata and the Mozart that includes the Rondo alla Turca. I'll never regret having done that. Not being any sort of musician myself, I can feel her breathing that music in places with her phrasing and thoughtful shifts of emphasis from gentle touch to a bit more ff. 

What more of a retirement idyll can one require than a day like yesterday, dropping in on another Portsmouth poet on the way to lunch with Yoko, picking up the August Gramophone, noticing the eight cygnets born earlier this year at Hilsea are all doing well and then reading about Josquin to the accompaniment of such gorgeously done piano. If I were a multi-billionaire I'm not convinced I'd want much more than that, like travel to the beginnings of outer space. I once went to Istanbul, which included my few hours outside Europe but 'travel' has never been the point of it for me. What little I took from what I saw of the telly version of War And Peace was the fulfilment of being at home, on one's own land, as it were, surrounded by those things one chose to be surrounded by.  

The secret might be in not wanting more than that.

--

But three-quarters of my regular social life has been threatened by positive tests for plague. It didn't prevent the trip to Chichester to see Pavlos and it only meant a circumspect move to outdoors yesterday but it has caused a hiatus in the Tuesday walking.

As we intrepidly approach the relaxation of so many measures put in place to counteract the virus, it is concerning to note that the government are accepting an inevitable kick-up of infections. My own evidence confirms that it's happening already, never mind what exponential co-efficient Freedom Day causes a week or so later.

I realize that libertarians like the Prime Minister don't actually believe in doing any governing. It's just as ironic that Nigel Farage only ever got himself elected to the European parliament he wanted to abolish that Boris only wants to be Prime Minister for vainglorious reasons and prat about without taking any responsibility for anything. But what is meant by this diafanous notion of 'freedom' that he, Trump and the villainous Brazilian President stand for. Death, as a statistical percentage figure, really. It won't have come as any comfort to those who died as a result of government laissez-faire that they were returned to the state of dust from which they came in the interests of the freedom of others to dance, attend indoor events and move about the world by aeroplane to indulge in holidays.

Quite hilariously on the radio the other day it was noted how at a wedding the rings were sanitized and all possible precautions were observed in a show of great propriety as if nobody had given any thought to what the happy couple were going to be trying their best at a few hours later.

Also heard on the wireless was a profile of the heroic Prof. Chris Whitty who is the modern sage and model of self-deprecating nobleness and expertise that does worthwhile things for their own sake and is good at them. You know there's something wrong with the mutation of democracy we lived under when the choice of Prime Minister at an election is between Johnson and Corbyn but, the inevitable fiasco having come to pass, there is a gibbering compulsive liar in charge while the sensible expert is abused in a public place by libertarians.

This is a false summer, it's sinister. I realize that Workington, Hartlepool and Bolsover had their reasons for not wanting the theoretical Marxism of Corbyn but that wasn't a good enough reason to visit such pestilence on us. He says he 'vaccinates, not vacillates'. No, he doesn't. It's not him that vaccinates, it's the NHS, and he vacillates on a weekly basis. And then has the nerve to present it as if he's 'saving the NHS'. No, it saved him.

There is simply no cure for people who believe what they want to believe, including me, and a good proportion of people are doing more or less what they can in the circumstances. It's them we depend on and need to encourage. Next week threatens to be when it flips over and heads back towards Square One, where we were eighteen months ago.

I'm sure our Christian friends have been doing all they can through the power of prayer but quite why they persist in the face of all the evidence is hard to fathom. Christianity is Literature and some of it's very good. I always enjoyed the last thing, late night broadcast of Compline on Radio 4 that was discontinued some years ago,

Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour,

while not being entirely convinced about the 'sober' part, I can see how it works here.

Take care. Look after yourselves. Thanks for being there.

Hamnet - Maggie O'Farrell

 Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet (Tinder)

I came into possession of this book unexpectedly. Even though it is ostensibly relevant to a specific area of interest, I hadn't intended to read it but when the opportunity presented itself, I gave it a go. 

Biography and fiction are two quite different things but in the case of Shakespeare biography, the line between them becomes blurred. Shakespeare's life provides some solid facts but plenty of room for his many biographers to fill in the detail as they see fit with their imaginings and suppositions. Some do it more convincingly than others. In Hamnet, though, Maggie O'Farrell is writing fiction and making no claim to historical accuracy. While it is generally thought that the boy attributed to Shakespeare as one of twins born to Ann Hathaway died of plague there is no forensic evidence that shows he did. Published in 2020 and thus presumably conceived and begun before the outbreak of the Covid pandemic, Maggie found herself inadvertently the author of a best-selling plague novel in times of plague.

Shakespeare isn't named as such in the book but almost ghosts his way through it as 'the Latin tutor', the absent husband and father and such in the same way that it has been said that there is a Shakespeare-shaped hole at the centre of his own biography. As a winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction it is possible to read it as a female book, written as much from the points of view of Agnes, as Ann is known, and the other twin, Judith. Agnes is from the country, witchy and mystically possessed of intuitive knowledge. John Shakespeare, the father of the dramatist and poet, is unsympathetic and boorish. Shakespeare is impractical, a bit dreamy and not regarded as fit for much responsibility in the artisan, provinicial trades of Stratford.

One of several things that are less easy to equate with what is known of Shakespeare's life is his devotion to Agnes. That is difficult to read into the accounts of the writer who needs to get away from Stratford and family life to make his name and fortune as the Greatest Writer of All Time in London. Agnes doesn't believe it, either, and is suspicious that there is 'another woman' in London. In this account there isn't but in real life it's hard to believe there weren't other people or else where did the Sonnets come from.

In a brilliant passage in the middle of the book the progress of the plague from Africa via Italy by boat, carried by fleas from monkeys, rats and cats is traced in fine detail that evokes a wider trading world at the end of the C16th. It is Judith that first catches it, given a much more kindly portrait here that she is allowed in most accounts, but Hamnet that dies of it as a result of their close bond as twins that share so many things.

Having been on tour with the actors in Kent due to the closure of the theatres in London, Shakespeare returns to Stratford just too late after which Maggie O'Farrell provides a moving 'poetry of absence' that one might think echoes several highlights in Shakespeare's writing. In a short Author's Note at the end of the book Maggie points out that,

The Black Death or 'pestilence', as it would have been known in the late sixteenth century, is not mentioned once by Shakespeare, in any of his plays or poetry,

and wonders about its possible significance, as if it was taboo or too painful to mention. But what about Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2,

Tis now the very witching time of night, When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out contagion to this world;   

which looks to melike a mention without needing to give it any more thought.

The stresses in a long-distance marriage with Shakespeare away, devoted to his theatre work and Agnes left with the children in Stratford are easy to accept but, to much local surprise, he buys New Place back at home for them to live in. The ne'er-do-well has apparently done very well and the only partially-literate locals can barely credit it.

It makes for a good story but highly unlikely that Agnes makes the trip to London with her reliable yeoman brother, Batholomew, to find him but find him she does, first seeing him on stage in the play that so heartlessly took the dead boy's name for use in an entertainment, playing the ghost. Not much of that is the point according to my preferred account of the life but it is all very much the point in how Maggie makes such an impressive story from the template of the biography as we have it. I had thought that perhaps she could have woven an equally good novel on the same themes without it being based on Shakespeare but the horse comes before the cart and it gains immensely more for being what it is.

If we say it's 'convincing', it convinces as art, by its imagination, its technique, its humanity and conception. It's not the first and won't be the last thing to take liberties with what really might have been. John Shakespeare has generally had a bad press and isn't spared here. Judith, the state of the marriage and Agnes herself can be grateful for being presented more positively than they are accustomed to. But, with Coleridge, we 'suspend our disbelief' and the measure of good writing is is how far it allows us to.

It's great that books like this, and the likes of the recent Ishiguro, can spend so long in the Top 10 Bestsellers, showing that a significant number of people are reading books that are worth reading. My own prejudice against it made me not want to but one doesn't know until one's tried and I am most grateful for being so unwontedly given the chance. I'm never more delighted than when being proved wrong in happy circumstances. It makes one think that more Maggie O'Farrell ought to be worth looking at but the rest of her work will need to look sharp to be this good and I'm a bit occupied with Tolstoy for the time being so I hope she can wait. 

Young-Choon Park in Chichester

 Young-Choon Park, piano, Chichester Cathedral, July 9

If Beethoven had only written the Piano Sonatas he would have been a major composer but he did other things besides. It's easy to believe that Schubert learned a lot from him and his achievement would have been comparable had he lived as long which wasn't all that long in either case. Young-Choon Park's performance today provided an excellent opportunity to compare rather than contrast. Beethoven's Sonata in C sharp minor, the 'Moonlight', was written in 1801 when he was 30; Schubert's Sonata no. 19 in C minor comes from 1828 when he was 31 and wasn't due to live much longer.

There is no messing about in the opening of the Schubert, announcing its arrival with some gusto before the first movement progresses through song-like passages and rippling effects. It could be Beethoven. The second movement is restrained and even sombre before a glorious extended race to the end in a sustained dash. The left hand drives the momentum while the right hits some bright, shiny top notes, the point having been made and embellished further in a bravura composition that demanded power and virtuoso technique from Young-Choon.

Moving into the famous opening of the moonlight reflected on the water of Lake Lucerne (as the critic, and not Beethoven, saw it) was an immediate contrast with very much the opposite temperament required from the pianist but she did that even better, if anything. Being so well-known doesn't mean it can't still hit the same emotional spot so tellingly, especially with such a delicate touch. There was a fluid texture to the interpretation that might have come from the sustain pedal but having been one of the first Beethoven pieces I knew, some forty-odd years ago, it was just as alive and vivid now. And that's how you can tell if something's any good.

It's not all moonlit, though, and after a melodic middle, there was the thunder and lightning of the Presto Agitato third movement. 'Agitato' indeed, the moonlight epithet doesn't give you any warning of that which makes it a bit of a misnomer but one is tempted to see where Schubert got his idea from and then did his best to take it further.

These are two huge sonatas, once again illustrating that an orchestra isn't required to provide large scale music. Mozart did what he did exquisitely but the next generation took it that much further and it was a wonderful thing to have Young-Choon to provide them so impressively. If one ever wonders if it's the composer or the performer that is the most important, neither can do without the other.

This was a memorable performance even by Chichester's usual high standards and they've had Steven Kovacevich. It's great to have such concerts back and realize how much one missed them. That might be it for me for a little while there but the plan is to be back on Tuesdays from Sept 14. 

I've just checked and, yes, the 14th is a Tuesday. The programme gave Beethoven's dates as 1712-1773 which are actually the dates of the composer's grandfather. One can't believe everything one reads but one has to know it's wrong before being able to do anything about it. And maybe we could have had the movements set out for us as we usually do, like, Adagio Sostenuto, Allegretto and Presto Agitato in the Beethoven.

I'm only joking. I'm astonished that people are now being asked prices like £27.50 to see T. Rextasy featuring Danielz who must surely by now be twice as old as Marc was when he died but it only cost, like, 75p to see T. Rex at the height of their powers. Even factoring in the travel to nearby Chichester, these concerts for whatever donation you see fit are the greatest offer imaginable.

Pavlos Carvalho

 Pavlos Carvalho, St. Paul's Church, Chichester, July 5

The second of my voyages out for the resurrection of the live music habit was to see the much-loved cellist, Pavlos. My own website comes in useful as my own record of what I saw when and a pattern is emerging by which I see him every two years. Having seen him do nos. 1 and 3, then 3 and 5 and now 1 and 2 of the Bach Cello Suites, it is to be hoped that in 2023 he'll do 4 and 6.

We had our doubts about the acoustics in St. Paul's Church but we need not have worried. The sound was immediately resonant and not much resounds as well as the opening of Suite no. 1 in G major, its relatively simple construction (when you breakm it down) sounding all-encompassing, like the first notes of The Well-Tempered Klavier, and all else follows as if by some pure but inventive logic of its own.

The same music can sound different every time one hears it. I wouldn't want to line up my favourite musicians - Steven Isserlis, Yo-Yo Ma, Natalie Clein, Mstislav Rostropovich, Pablo Casals et al and stretch my limited musical vocabulary to beyond breaking point by saying what the differences were in their Bach suites but Pavlos here began methodically, it seemed to me, setting it out clearly and unhurriedly. That changed in the Sarabande, which quickened the pulse and the dance steps.

Pavlos is always as convincing as a talker as well as a cellist and not only enlightening but uplifting to listen to. He could talk all day as well as play all day and, with a young student of his in the front row, must make for an inspirational teacher. The one word, among the numerous, to save from his talk between the two suites was 'cathartic', and having checked - not wanting to trip over its meaning - it is,

providing psychological relief through the open expression of strong emotions.

 

And, yes, that is Bach more than any other artist and especially in the music for solo instruments whether it is the keyboard work, for preference these days on the piano that he wouldn't have heard it on, violin or cello. It's not that other composers aren't but none are so thoroughly cleansing as Seb.

I was also grateful for the explanation of the 'Neapolitan Sixth' chord although I'm hoping there isn't a question about it in the exam.

The second Suite is pre-dominantly darker with the lower register suggesting doubt more than exuberance. Not for the first time one wondered how much, if anything, Bach owed to St. Colombe and Marin Marais, so memorably re-created by Depardieu pere et fils, in Tous les Matins du Monde, because phrases from Jordi Savall's soundtrack echoed regularly for anybody familiar enough with it. 

Again in no. 2, the contrast was between the tempi of the first movements and the sudden energy injected by the Sarabande. I wasn't aware of such a difference before and wonder if this is something Pavlos is emphasizing. Not all of the echoes of St. Colombe's viol support his contention that these suites are not to be taken too seriously but their greatness lies in their capacity to be what you want them to be and find so much in them. Bach reportedly said that all his music was written 'for the glory of God' but it is also suggested that pieces like this, The Art of Fugue, the keyboard Inventions were studies for instrumental practice whereas one book is dedicated to the missus so we had better not worry why Bach wrote what he did but that he did and that, in a long-treasured phrase from Michael Bywater in the Independent on Sunday in the 1990's, he 'flatters us by being of the same species'.  That was in the context of some Bach music being sent out in to space in the hope that other 'intelligent' life would understand it which Michael thought was 'just showing off'.

The Suite no. 2 in D minor carries forward the impetus of the Sarabande to a thrilling ending that gave Pavlos's fingers a good work out on his fretboard.

It's colossal. It's almost certain to make you feel better for having been there. This is one great ambassador for music, for the cello and for Bach. His recording of this music was stalled after finishing the first three for reasons that have been widely reported in the news but those will soon be available digitally before the other three are recorded and, so he says, we might have the discs in six months. Not being an optimist myself, I think we'll be glad of them once we have our hands on them. While I'd love to have Steven's, Natalie's, Yo-Yo's as well as those I do have, I will make a point of having the gospels according to Pavlos.