Illusions Perdues, etc

It comes as no surprise when it all falls apart for Lucien in Lost Illusions. One had a feeling that was what was coming and it happens almost routinely. With a title like that and some knowledge of other Balzac, it's like watching the inevitable unfold, which is not to say it's not a great novel. 

What one wasn't in a position to know was that he might not have been quite the great poet that he, and we, were led to believe. Some examples of his sonnets are provided but, at a distance of 180 years and put through the filter of translation, how are we supposed to know they were bad. Nearly all poems of that period look bad by now to us post-modern ironists or ludic conspirators against sentiment and Romanticism and so we make allowances for that but one can't tell how much leeway to give them.

An obvious problem for a novelist writing about a genius poet and providing examples of their work would be having to write genius poems and they could only do that if they were a genius poet themselves. James Joyce gives us some lines by Stephen in the Portrait but surely a similar thing is going on there.

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There has been plenty to admire to be found in Search Party, the collected William Matthews and he has been worth the time spent with him. It comes with many of the doubts one could have about 'free verse' but my main concerns are with his continuing flagging up that he is writing a poem and a recurring tendency to think it's good enough to tell us that he 'loves' this or 'hates' that. We ought to be trusted to be able to intuit such things, if they mattered. And I'm not quite as devoted to jazz as he is but I don't blame him for navigating by his own reference points.

What his poems would benefit from is a kind of distillation process that would burn off his habits and leave something sparer, possibly more 'objective'. Perhaps it's a shame he didn't have Ezra Pound to edit him but one can take a lot from him before finding him a suitable place on the shelves and quite possibly never return to him again. He won't be the only one like that.

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Living by numbers, or 'managing by spreadsheet' as I used to call it in work, is how governments work rather than how we should run our lives. I understand that only Tibet (is it) gauges their performance by a happiness index rather than the dreary, hard facts of economic indicators. Other people, of course, measure their satisfaction entirely by means of sports results which seems vicarious to me.

But if numbers are the only way we have of understanding how we feel, then, that's fine. The increasing number of numbers by which my health is monitored as the years go by are all 'fine', I'm told. And my choice of indices, the chess ratings and the position of the turf account, are okay, too.

So, the Autumn with its programme of local concerts and jump racing is set fair and all I have to do is enjoy it. There will always be the residual doubt that I ought to be achieving more. Good Lord, the hangover from the old Grammar School indoctrination never leaves you. One thinks one should be doing something, like maybe writing the book one will be remembered by,  the 'legacy'. But what good would that do me. How much does it mean to Mozart that we love him so much now.

The Collected Poems are in a pdf. I've even gathered some prose pieces into a folder for what they're worth. The concert and theatre programmes have been sorted. I've put some old cricket records together. The bike riding was recorded in fine detail. Sadly, not much of the football career was written down but a couple of newspaper reports of goals scored in the lower divisions of the Gloucester Sunday League are somewhere.

I'm not thinking of dying yet - I'm ostensibly in good condition - but I like to think I'm putting my lands in order. And thus resonating back through Eliot, Dante and the book of Isaiah. I'd like to think I haven't lost faith in poetry because on Private Passions this week Francesca Stavrakopoulou, author of God, an anatomy was the latest to say that art is what we have instead of God. So, God (as it were) help us if we lose faith in that.

You could tune into Something Understood or Thought for the Day if you had a taste for inconsequential, meandering contemplation that leaves you none the wiser. I'm glad you came here instead.