Bounteous Plenty

There can be times when one scratches around wondering what to read next, mostly a steady stream of suitable items suggest themselves but sometimes, like now, one seems to hit a rich seam and look forward to a few weeks of bounteous plenty across several genres.

The recent find, The Dyer's Hand, exceeded expectations and moving on to the other, the George Eliot Essays, she's immediately in good form with her statement of intent for the Westminster Review and then 30 pages on Madame de Sablé, not least for forseeing text messages and Twitter from as far back as 1854 in,

the evident tendency of things to contract personal communication within the narrowest limits makes us tremble lest some further development of the electric telegraph should reduce us to a society of mutes, or to a sort of insects, communicating by ingenmious antemnnae of our own invention. 

There might have been a time when I'd have thought the George Eliot essays might be a bit dry, Victorian and Causaubon-ish but she's a lot of fun so far. Or maybe by now I'm sufficienyly dry, Victorian and Causaubon-ish to appreciate her.

'Long-awaited' but not necessarily with too much relish is the second half of Robert Crawford's scholarly biography of T.S. Eliot. The first half was a grim read, if I remember rightly, which wasn't Prof. Crawford's fault and maybe not entirely Eliot's but such things seem essential and must be done so it'll be on its way on publication day. There was a time, in the 1970's when it seemed generally accepted that Eliot was 'the' poet of the C20th just as much as Stairway to Heaven was the ultimate rock track. Neither of those assumptions are quite so convincing by now but one doesn't deny the continuing significance of Eliot or the job that Prof. Crawford has put in and vol. 1 would look silly on the shelf without vol. 2 next to it.

 

I waited for the Christopher Hogwood recording of the Coffee Cantata to arrive but it didn't. Probably because it looks like I didn't order it. But while one can keep buying more Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven, their shelves are full and other prteviously neglected composers have been presenting impressive credentials.

One never leaves an Angela Kopyrina recital without feeling blown away and that has more than once been due to her playing Liszt and so, hearing another torrential surge of another pianist doing something similar on the wireless, I looked out for records and one by Stephen Hough is on its way. I wasn't expecting it to be him but I'm sure I'll be in good hands.

Also, from Wigmore Hall yesterday lunchtime, Borodin's String Quartet no. 2, with particular reference to the third movement. While one might have thought one should have found out about most of what is worth having by now, there is always more. I had thought that the complete Bach Cantatas might be a retirement project but, two years in, there just isn't time enough, or world, with so much else to consider and, usually, enjoy.

I'm also most grateful for a tip received for a film called Reaching for the Moon (2013), about Elizabeth Bishop, which was immediately found for less than a fiver. And so, the guilt that I might feel about invading the privacy of people who ostensibly valued their privacy has every reason to increase. Quite possibly the three poets I am most interestd in are Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Larkin and Rosemary Tonks, all of who went to some lengths to protect their privacy. To which my best defence is that if they were that serious about being private they need not have published any poems.

On the subject of Rosemary, the project here was enhanced by finding this podcast from Lunar Poetry Podcasts in which Lucy Reynolds tells that Rosemary didn't disappear quite as completely as we thought, she was just a well-kept secret. Which means it's a good thing I hadn't finished my new essay on her yet and I can include that,

Lunar Poetry- Rosemary Tonks 

Which only leaves me to say how good three episodes from series 3 of Upstart Crow were on a repeat channel the other night. I thought I'd sen them all but I can't remember the Hamlet, Much Ado or Julius Caesar episodes which made for a great evening. It might have been thought that Ben Elton had been lost to worthwhile writing for some years and even that Upstart Crow was just Blackadder remade with Shakespeare instead of Edmund Blackadder but it keeps recycling its set piece jokes - the quality of public transport, Shakespeare lifting ideas from those around him and anywhere he can find them but, most perspicaciously of all, one feels, Ben Elton nailing Ricky Gervais with the host of the first London Theatre Awards. 

In the same way that I'm sure I'd have done better at 'A' level History if I'd had Blackadder as source material, students of Shakespeare ought to be given Upstart Crow ahead of Stanley Wells. 

Lester Piggott

Lester Piggott's name meant horse racing to a generation before Frankie Dettori. His family tree showed breeding that made him a Derby winner just as much as any of the horses that he rode. The fact that he rode so many Derby winners was partly due to him making sure he was on the best horse, the trial races being used as much for him to choose his ride than for the horses to prepare for it. Then, invariably, there he was, poised on the outside, tracking the pace coming round Tattenham Corner, ready to go when the right moment came.

Never far from controversy, whether for stealing another jockey's whip or taking Ken Dodd's approach to tax, he came out of prison and went to the Breeder's Cup at the age of 54 to come from last to first to win on Royal Academy. His sardonic wit was never better illustrated than, when asked about his riding in that race, he said, 'same as usual, one leg either side'.

In contrast, his first retirement had been staged on a very ordinary day at Nottingham where he rode two losers and no doubt went home considerably richer for it. But he was always a significant booking. Not necessarily on short-priced favourites which did sometimes seem to get beate, but in smaller races where the trainer was making sure, and so was Lester.

When asked by a stable lad about the share of a prize he owed him, he said he was hard of hearing on that side, try the other ear, so the lad went round the other side and asked for twice the amount to which Lester replied, try the first ear again. 

A law unto himself, the 'long fellow' was strictly too tall to be a flat jockey and for breakfast he would have a cigar and a look at The Sporting Life. He knew what he was doing.

Happy Birthday, Gladys Knight

76 today. Thank you, ma'am.

A few other pop musicians with birthdays listed in The Times for today and tomorrow but no others deserving of such special congratulation. 

Wise Words from Wystan

Back with Great Uncle Wystan having seen off a couple of short books in the interim, The Dyer's Hand was a good find in Chichester Oxfam. He's expansive alright and one wonders if he's really worked out all his systems in advance or if he makes it up as he goes along. The Collected Shorter Poems is more readily enjoyable than the Collected Longer, biographical detail reports that he went from self-appointed mentor to a generation of poets, or Stephen Spender at least, as an Oxford undergraduate only to return there in his last years, still issuing truisms but more repetitively. He was not a disciple of the 'less is more' school.

At first, if that isn't just a little bit tiresome, one at least suspects a tendency to ramble as his later, American poems tended to but, then, we can all be guilty of that and, in among the outpourings of theories and analysis, there's much to admire.

He's very fair to D.H. Lawrence in the circumstances but, crucially, finds that,

Very few statements which poets make about poetry, even when they appear to be quite lucid, are understandable except in their polemic context.

Yes. What poets say about poetry, all those famous quotes, are agendas, justifying their own practice, not definitions.

He points out that Keats didn't say that 'beauty is truth, truth beauty'. It was the Grecian urn that said that. We'd better have a closer look at that, after all these years.

And, at a very difficult time when the mentality of the United States of America is under scrutiny again, Auden is brilliant in setting out some essential reasons why it is an entirely different culture - he might have said 'mindset' had the word been available to him - and that, no, for better (in that he cites seven major poets who can't be coralled into 'movements' or 'groups') or worse, for example,

as Americans, they were already familiar with the dehumanized nature and the social leveling which a technological revolution was about to make universal 

which, in 1963, was a long time before Donald Trump opened his Twitter account.

 

Auden reads his Shakespeare closely, is deeply suspicious of the avant-garde, perhaps puts in place more wisdom than we might want to be told but it turns out that much of it is right. Perhaps it's the confidence with which he dispenses it that threatens to offend before one has to accept, no, it looks like he's right.

Music Experience, Portsmouth Guildhall

 Portsmouth Music Experience

 I'm sure Portsmouth is making no claim to be a rival to Liverpool, Detroit, Kingston (Jamaica) or London as one of the most important crucibles of pop music but everywhere will put its best foot forward and try its best and it makes for some memories and memorabilia on the way back from the lunchtime cathedral concert of a Thursday afternoon. 

I don't come from Portsmouth originally and so am not patriotic about it but even without laying dubious claim to the Isle of Wight festivals, it can include Paul Jones, Simon Dupree & the Big Sound who led to Gentle Giant and Joe Jackson within its orbit but I saw no mention of Tears for Fears who I understood came from Waterlooville.

The Beatles played Portsmouth which must be headline news but they played a lot of places and more movingly, and historically, the T. Rex gig at the Locarno, Arundel Street on March 20, 1977, supported by The Damned, was to be their last.

There's a room devoted to Queen with a Brian May guitar but he'd have been better off in a better band and among the other guitars on view, George Benson's is the choice article.

There's plenty of it, and much to read, genuinely retrieving some mad, dubious and dangerous-to-know times with flower power, Tommy being filmed in Southsea with the requisite amount of mod-based burning down of things and for all the short-lived glory it conjures back there are far many more names that would have been forgotten without it, each trying their luck and not making it beyond the first steps on the treacherous treadmill to becoming Cilla or Cliff.

At first the girl on the desk of Portsmouth Guildhall told me the exhibition wasn't open but she was good enough to chase after me into Guildhall Square to call me back and tell me that, actually, it was. That was kind. She didn't need to do that.

It was much in the same haphazard, disorganized spirit of so much old pop music that didn't really know what it as doing. Many of them might have deserved better but pop music is no different from any other business and the likes of the Sex Pistols were consummately well managed by making it look as if they were anarchic.

Two bands featured from the 1980's, when I first arrived here, Emptifish and Red Letter Day, prompted me to look them up on You Tube. Emptifish, for sure, were Portsmouth's answer to the Jesus & Mary Chain. It's funny, but what's available on You Tube doesn't re-create how good I remembered them being.

Good, comprehensive exhibition. Whether the history it is an exhibition of is quite what it claims to be is another matter.

Fumi Otsuki and Sarah Kershaw at Lunchtime Live!

Fumi Otsuki and Sarah Kershaw, Portsmouth Cathedral, May 26 

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. I had to admit, I'd run out of opening lines from famous novels to adapt in concert reviews and so, unrelated to the violin and piano concert by Fumi Otsuki and Sarah Kershaw, we end with Beckett, Murakami not having anything remotely suitable to offer.

Something of an innovation today was a few seasonal lines of Ted Hughes to read alongside the music, the 'soft excitements' of Hughes in one of his gentler moods perhaps being the relevant words to link with the programme.

Parry's restful, elegiac song in the Andante from his Violin Sonata in D was such a thing and the Cavatina by Joachim Raff was similar if becoming more impassioned and Fauré, who has been doing well in lunchtime concerts recently, completed a section of C19th music with a late Romantic Sicilienne.

The tempo quickened for the Allegro from Schubert's Violin Sonata, D.384 with its lively games on Fumi's fretboard and Sarah implying she'd make a good job of any Mozart in the accompaniment. In an odd misattribution, the following Sicilienne in E flat major was once thought to be by Maria Theresia von Paradis, a contemporary of Mozart's, but has since been awarded to Samuel Dushkin who came 150 years later. 

Possibly the highlight for me was a Melodie from Gluck's Orfeo and Euridice. While it's hardly for me to feel sorry for a talent like Gluck, I don't think he's as famous as he should be on the back of two wonderful operas and more so this was a most welcome outing for a piece where the baroque can almost be heard becoming 'classical'.

Entirely different, we were brought right up to 2021 and, I'm sure, the most recent composition I've heard, with Fumi's own Piano Sonatina no. 1, played by Sarah. Two movements of staccato, the first successfully hiding Vaughan-Williams's Lark from me, led to the more fluid and rolling third which paid different homage to V-W. I found out that the Sonatina no.2 is in the process of being written or else there would have been no need of this being no.1.

Having been delivered to the landscape of Gloucestershire by a circuitous route, Herbert Howells's Pastorale brought us back to the folk song we had begun with and those undulating meadows of farmland, birdsong and nostalgia and that's where Fumi and Sarah left us, with a gorgeous Spurn Point by Vaughan-Williams which might well be Yorkshire's answer to Land's End but compares with his Lark Ascending, the difference being that while the lark eventually disappears from us, this doesn't quite.

It was a beautifully conceived programme given with sincerity and sympathy, deserving of a bigger audience than it got but that is for those who weren't there to regret. There was nowhere better in Portsmouth to be.  

Footnotes

Footnotes matter more than they used to. I don't know if I reported below that the recent essay The Importance of Elsewhere, in About Larkin 53, required 25 in a piece of 3000 words. It's no longer good enough to sling together a bibiliography of anything one might have looked at. We must protect ourselves against any accusation of plagiarism and quote our sources. The academic process might seem to be putting the cart before the horse in valuing itself above anything an essay might have to say. Long gone are the days of my 1981 undergraduate dissertation on Marvell which was 15000 words with a bibliography and only 4 footnotes.

I was well aware then that I couldn't attribute an idea I'd read somewhere to its proper source but it would have been in the bibilography somewhere. 40-odd years later, that's far too lax and not acceptable. In the follow-up essay that I surely hope is all but finished now I've had to replace the citation I wanted to use with another by the same critic about the same poet that says much the same thing because I'm afraid I'll be asked to say where it says that and, having looked everywhere it might be, I can't find it.

It feels like a minor tyranny having to remember exactly where you read everything you ever read but that's how it is. We'll get by. I've spent too much of my life scanning pages of books trying to find lines to quote.

I'm sure it was around about page 60, in chapter 3, towards the bottom of the left-hand page.

It often isn't, if I find it at all.

By now one is aware that one needs an old envelope on which to note page numbers of anything one might want to refer to in a book one might write about but that's not much help for lines one read 20, 30 or 40 years ago, still vividly remember, but can't now find.

I've long acknowledged that I'd have made a terrible librarian. I would have been no better as an academic.

--

Daphne's I'll Never be Young Again went on its other two adventures in its second half. Whether it is love or infatuation that Dick goes through with Hesta it comes to its natural end, as does his burning ambition to be a writer, his father having been a big, famous and important one but, despite having the head start of access to a publisher, it isn't to be.

In the end, it's a better novel than it looks, maybe not as spell-binding as her best books were to be but with a gloriously deflating truth to it.

 

Meanwhile, a little walk to a local library to fetch the copy of the Martin Amis Larkin Poems, so why not enjoy the few hours it takes to read Peter Ackroyd's short life of Chaucer which was nearby. 

My Larkin shelf is already overcrowded and doesn't need the fifth or sixth iteration of the same poems for the sake of Martin's introduction which is appreciative of the poems but fails to notice, like many swaggering men who fancy themselves as 'alpha' types, that not everybody shares their needs.

But Ackroyd's 'brief life' of Chaucer is as concise and sensible as one could have in under 200 pages, evaluating speculation and anecdote, and arriving at an account of a man who had a job, ostensibly in royal or courtly service from the age of 14, and also wrote poems. Not, as we are somehow led to believe of poets, that the writing of poems was the main thing and, oh yes, they also had a job. 

That's not what it's like and neither should it be. Now that I have all day to write as many poems as I like, I don't. I might, just about, maintain the long-established average of four poems a year but, with more time to think about it, one also has more time to see through it, wonder how much it really matters and then not bother.

Credibility Vampire

Top marks to Hugo Rifkind for his column in today's Times and some highly insightful analysis of the Prime Minister.

Anybody can pile up the rebarbative adjectives and it's hard to miss or risk contradiction but once in a while somebody exceeds that 'shooting fish in a barrel' exercise and I dare say they feel temporarily better for it.

For a long time it was Matthew Parris who led the way with his brilliant 'incompetent scoundrel' but now Hugo is in with his analysis of how the Prime Minister is a 'credibility vampire' sending out ministers to defend the indefensible and undermining their credibility on his behalf, which sucks the credibility out of them, too. He cites Nadhim Zahawi as an example who might appear to be competent were it not for his ongoing dutiful defence of his line manager.

Hugo further explains how any of us who might try to unravel the rat's nest of Johnsonian fecklessness eventually become exhausted by the effort because no amount of reason or appeal to decency ever has any impact. The Prime Minister takes no notice and we begin to sound repetitive or even obsessive. Somehow it begins to look as if we are the weirdo. (I am paraphrasing here. I heard Hugo on Times Radio. I didn't expend £2.20 on a copy of a weekday Times.) One inevitably ends up feeling like banging one's head against the wall.

I've long got over any respect I had for Jacob Rees-Mogg's facade of punctiliousness now that he's been put into anything like a 'job'. I only ever found some peculiar accord with Victoria Coren-Mitchell when she broke with any decorum on HIGNFY and told him she found him 'strangely attractive' which outdid anything a Sex Pistol could say to Bill Grundy.

Dominic was always the evil svengali, using Johnson as the puppet to his own wicked ends but, like Dr. Frankenstein, he lost control of his monster. He might be trying to finish him off now but it's too late and he still hasn't succeeded.

So, while journalists, week after week, continue to predict 'a difficult few days ahead for no. 10', that becomes routine. That's what it's like. In such circumstances it might be difficult for any other Prime Minister but it's business as usual for this one. That is how he lives his life. He's been doing it for a long time now. The lying is a default setting. He's averse to 'the truth'. He prefers to tell the teacher that the dog ate his homework and get away with it because he always has done before.

Never a prolific poet, I'm almost maintaining my steady output of four finished poems per year but I need to count this recent doggerel to do so. It would be a shame to keep it private when I can make the slightest of contributions. I wish I didn't have to. I'd never have been tempted to put finger to keyboard on the subject of Theresa May.

Boris
after Hilaire Belloc

Boris told such Dreadful Lies,

It soon came as no surprise 

The boorish, scandalous, uncouth 

Yob had no concept of the truth 

And yet we remained agog 

That the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg 

Cared less for verisimilitude 

And in fact could be quite rude 

To those who pointed out this fault 

Which, even with a dose of salts, 

Was so plain for all to see 

And had no credibility. 

He lied to Parliament, the Queen, 

Which is a crime so obscene 

In olden days it was enough 

To have got one’s head chopped off. 

One untruth gainsaid the last 

But that was in the recent past 

And so to him now mattered less 

As he created yet more mess 

And dug himself deep into holes 

And such complex rigmaroles 

He forgot what he’d done and said 

And where his inventions had led 

And then thought he could extricate 

Himself and perhaps also placate

Those who knew that he had lied, 

Including lots on his own side, 

By issuing apologies
Though they were less sincere than his

Rococo version of events 

And defied all common sense. 

Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry,
Change the subject in a hurry, 

Say we have to wait and see 

And then say it’s too late and he 

Was getting on with the job 

Or some other thingamabob 

Because detail is not his thing

And he preferred to try to wing 

It as he’d always done before 

But surely there can’t be much more

And historians will soon write 

How he went down with a fight 

With all his boats and bridges burnt 

But still with no lessons learnt.

'A Bookshop Idyll'

 There was a time, a long time ago, when an in-depth survey of a good bookshop's poetry shelves seemed to serve as an index of all that was worthwhile. Everything that was there must be good, or else they wouldn't be there. The contemporary poets among them must be the current inheritors of the great traditions and as important as Keats, Chaucer and all those poets we'd be given to read at school.

On a trip to Cambridge, I stood before the comprehensive shelves of the Heffers poetry section, awestruck. A few years later I was to be first thrilled but soon disabused of any such notion when they ordered two copies of my first self-produced booklet, Museum (1990), and realized that they must simply order everything with an ISBN.

I was reminded of how impressionable I was then when a student-aged relation of a friend was reported as asking, 'what? you mean he's got books in Waterstones?' vis a vis somebody else, not me, as if that conferred immortality or made you a bit like T.S. Eliot.

One advantage, or at least result, of the perspectives gained from the passing of years is the realization that not everything that is made so readily available is made so because it's important. Shops are there to sell things for their benefit, not as a High Street version of the Bodliean from which you can buy things. Poetry sections are not what they were and you can pick up all manner of undemanding but lucrative fodder but not the poems of Fulke Greville. Heffers in Cambridge might well still stock some esoteric titles but that will be because they are on the reading lists of university courses.

Now, visiting bookshops much less often, I am interested to see what the poetry section has but not as an indicator of what's serious, big and necessary. It's the other way round now. I check to see which titles by Larkin, Auden, maybe Elizabeth Bishop and such they have, to see how well the shop measures up to my expectations, not me up to theirs.

I'll Never Be Young Again

 It's true enough. But I'll Never Be Young Again is my this week's reading and Daphne du Maurier's second novel. It's almost reassuring to find it isn't quite the masterpiece that the likes of Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel are.

It's ostensibly a bit of a boy's own adventure and, I dare say, bildungsroman. None the worse for that but comparatively 'early work'. Some artists begin with their best work, their one big idea, and make a career out of never quite repeating it whereas the best, it seems to me, start good and improve to produce even better things. Daphne's bibliography, besides providing plenty to be going on with, shows that her best work was just about to happen but I'll Never Be Young Again might yet exceed its beginnings. Even if it doesn't, it's an interesting stage in her development.

I like to think that some of these orders I place have the Portsmouth Library Service bringing out from store rooms copies that would never have been asked for again and I give them one more outing. Certainly in this case, the internet can't find an illustration of the cover of the 1976 Heinemann reprint.

-- 

Highlight of the week, however, was the film, It Always Rains on Sunday on Sky Arts last night. 1947, with Googie Withers as well as pre-Dixon Jack Warner as a copper and Alfie Bass as a small time gangster sidekick. It was much more than the period piece I anticipated and entirely suited to the black and white it was made in. It is to be hoped it's never remade in colour because it couldn't be improved on for that, if at all.

Crooks, the seedy downside of 'glamour', 'realism' and a desperate, well choreographed chase through a railway shunting yard at its climax are all parts of something that exceeded all my expectations.

--

Other websites that I have a hand in now advertise events marking the 50th anniversary of Portsmouth Poetry Society. For reasons we need not go into now, the society now has two websites ( ! ) but the important news is the celebratory reading on Tuesday 19th July at 7.30 at St Francis Church, Hilsea, Portsmouth, PO2 9LX.

And the accompanying new edition of Calliope with poems by members.

A big selling point for both projects is that there is little likelihood of your time being taken up with poems by me. I'm not convinced I have unpublished poems not due to go elsewhere that really need to be in print and, perhaps more significantly, having decided I didn't want to read poems to a public audience again, I was told that the late and very great Derek Mahon hadn't done either in his later years. That's good enough for me. It's not some big, portentous statement or withdrawal to a yet more ethereal orbit, it's just that if it doesn't feel right you don't do it.

I would, however, encourage anybody in the area with appropriate sympathies to get there if they can. PPS is doing good work, 50 years is an achievement for such a club and a couple of Portsmouth's poets have been a part of it from almost its inception. I'd be disappointed if anybody reading this attended and was disappointed. 

Thomas Weelkes at Chichester

Rose Consort of Viols and the Cathedral Choir, Chichester Cathedral, May 17

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. One thing that Chichester Cathedral did was employ an organist, more than once, having dismissed him in between times, for drunkenness and blasphemy but if you're going to build a cathedral opposite a Wetherspoons and then employ a creative artist, you make yourself a hostage to fortune.

Thomas Weelkes died 399 years ago and so more might be anticipated next year, like a CD currently in preparation by today's performers, although if Weelkes was a local man, remembered in the stained glass beneath which I usually sit, Chichester also has the Belarussian-French artist, Marc Chagall, the Cheltenham composer, Gustav Holst, royal portraitist, Graham Sutherland, and the great Philip Larkin poem as prime exhibits so it's not struggling. 

It is often not useful to think of an artist and their art as one thing and certainly not in the case of Weelkes whose music is sober and not in the least profane. In his day more than in the time since, music involved observance of discipline ahead of any expression of the self. In the Hosanna to the son of David we were immediately into a gently soaring treble line, the economical number of choir here producing a pure, well-balanced sound under Charles Harrison, the current incumbent of Weelkes's old position. They were augmented by the velvety period viols of the Rose Consort for the Magnigicat and Nunc Dimittis in a smooth tapestry which for nearly an hour was to be undisturbed.

The Consort provided interludes by way of two Pavanes and two In nomines, the pavanes serene in their mellow restraint and the In nomines cascading unhurriedly. Nothing happens too quickly in this music. You won't be surprised by not knowing what's coming next as you would be in Haydn's Symphony mo. 94.

O mortal man was perhaps slightly more intricate; Most mighty and all-knowing lord made use of the two excellent counter-tenors whose names were not given on the programme and Christ rising again, as the finale, built and grew in stages from solos through ensemble parts to the full choir.

The programme advertised the event as 'a special lunchtime concert...', which it most definitely was although it's not easy to remember any Chichester lunchtime concert that wasn't special in some way. The disc due next year for the 400th centenary will be worth looking out for, sure as it will be to provide solace for the perturbed spirit.

Reviewing the Performance

 I know so little of the culinary arts arts that I once argued that surely recipes are just like experiments in third form Chemistry and that as long as everybody follows them accurately they will surely turn out the same whether it is the Galloping Gourmet, Delia Smith, Raymond Blanc or Fanny Craddock doing it.

It was obviously not the case but I couldn't see why not. I was well aware that neither cookery or fashion were my areas of expertise and was told that when it came to poetry I'd do better but it later turned out I was wrong about that, too.

The score of a piece of music tells the players which notes to play and a metronome marking can stipulate the precise tempo so surely all performances by competent musicians are going to sound the same. Except that recordings of the same piece can vary in length by a few minutes and, if they did all the sound the same Saturday mornings wouldn't have Record Review.

I have half a dozen recordings of the Couperin Lecons de Tenebres and Spem in Alium and more than one of several others and now, I really should have known, two complete Entführungs, many of them different for understanable reasons but when I heard a piece on the radio at the weekend and looked up what it was, I found I had a recording of it already.

It was the last part of Bach's Coffee Cantata, BWV 211. The Naxos disc was the first CD I ever bought but it hasn't been played for years because when one has Nathalie Stutzmann singing Bach cantatas that's what one plays. But I listened to the Naxos disc and heard nothing that sounded like what I'd heard on the wireless, which was Emma Kirkby and Christopher Hogwood being authentic and 'period' rather than making Bach sound C19th. It makes a difference. While one would like the Complete Cantatas, 72 discs is more than are likely to get played, realistically, and so I'll have Kirkby/Hogwood Coffee and Peasant because it doesn't half make a difference.

One can't help but listen to the music if one hasn't heard it before but if you have then it becomes more about what the performance does with the music.

Daphne, Wystan and Chess

The long overdue foray into Daphne du Maurier got off to a tremendous start with My Cousin Rachel. I didn't doubt that it would but you don't know until you've tried. It hardly needs me to point out what a fine prose writer she is with something sinister never far from our minds but, as a consummate storyteller, she ends chapters at crucial moments, like a cliff-hanging Dick Francis, while one always has a sense of foreboding, knowing what's coming but forever being led into it. Patrick Hamilton has a similar sense of the inevitable but Daphne perhaps manipulates and sometimes even deceives our expectations more subtly.

Needless to say, more Daphne is on order. I'll Never be Young Again sounds promising. Rebecca, The Birds and Don't Look Now, all tremendous films, can wait a bit longer before making their cases for the book being better than the film, which it often is but those are films which might have gained the high ground.

 

Meanwhile, two astute recent purchases from my local travels, both immaculate secondhand at £3.99 with cover prices of £20, were difficult to choose between for which to start first. The introduction to George Eliot's Selected Essays advertised a brilliant mind at work in a time that suddenly seems very far away but Auden's Oxford Essays+ in The Dyer's Hand demanded earlier attention. Including his Oxford lectures from his professorship, which began in 1956, they stand alongside such equally impressive contributions to the august chair as those of Heaney, Muldoon and Armitage.

Mr. Auden's foreword begins,

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

It is made to look equally true that it is much easier to do, making grand sounding generalizations about what 'poetry' is or isn't and how it comes about. It still needs to be ostensibly worthwhile, though, to be the least bit meaningful. There are plenty of maxims about 'poetry' that sound profound but don't mean much at all. I have a lot of time for Carol Ann Duffy's poems but less for her summation that 'poetry is the music of being human'.

I'm not going to say 'useful' because it's not obvious how useful poetry is. The vast majority of the population get by without it. Auden knows that and, despite being one of those who pours out words habitually, preaches to the converted very convincingly. 

It's easy to like writing in which one can see oneself, or what one imagines or hopes oneslf to be, and Auden's poems put him safely in the elite group of my favourites, thus it's no surprise that so much of what he says is agreeable. That doesn't mean it's right because there are other sorts of poets who wouldn't like it as much and by now we must have realized there are no prescriptions. But one is drawn into the security of a book by reassurances like,

There is a certain kind of person who is so dominated by the desire to be loved for himself alone that he has constantly to test those around him by tiresome behavior...Does this explain a good deal of avant-garde art?

!!!   I would hardly dare write such a sentence myself but am glad to quote Prof. Auden saying so. As an admirer of The Faust Tapes, aged 13, a devotee of Mark Rothko and having enjoyed some memorable unorthodox poems in magazines in the late 70's, I'm all in favour of the avant-garde when it's any good but Auden nails what I've been thinking for a long time now that such art is mainly about the artist promoting themselves as so very different when actually, by now, Marcel Duchamp was 110 years ago and the avant, if it has nothing else to offer, has become a retro sideshow.

The other great highlight, although one is not short of choice, so far, is,

A poet has not only to educate himself as a poet, he also has to consider how he is going to earn his living. Ideally, he should have a job which does not on any way involve the manipulation of words.

I'm not sure how that reflected back on his own mature career because superstar status for the likes of Eliot, Hughes, Heaney or him make such demands as leave little time for working in Tesco but if poetry is to avoid being about poetry and restricting itself to a yet more limited, specialist, highbrow audience, then, yes, of course, have a proper job and allow the poems to be 'occasional' in all available senses of the word.

The dyer's hand is stained with the stuff of their own occupation, which is what it amounts to, and Auden, for all his prolix reflections on the subject, knows that. At the risk of adding to all the pat wisdom on the subject, poetry is crucial to those involved in it but irrelevant to many that aren't. A long time ago, I'd have been watching the cup final, convinced of its importance but once I'd decided not to take the 25/1 about Liverpool winning 2-1 with Mane as first scorer, I don't care. I'm doing this instead.

--

But if sport matters less beyond the gradual accumulation of pocket money taken from bookmakers, there is still chess.

I returned to tournament play recently, wondering what would happen if I played in a low grade at 1+1, a minute on the clock with a second added to your time for each move. It amounts to maybe 10 games in half an hour making every move within seconds.

I finished officially 5th out of 193, here,

Lichess 11/5/22 Bullet Arena    

and only 5th and not 3rd because level points are separated by overall ratings.

I declined a draw in my last match which I went on to win but, having gone over the allotted time of the tournament, that didn't count for the point that would have made me 3rd outright. I now suspect that my opponent was wiser to the game and we could have taken a point each. One suffers from making instant decisions in the later stages and can only hope the opposition blunders first and resigns quickly.

But, although subsequent attempts have done less to threaten the podium, I might get somewhere in one of them.

Speranza ft. Graham Bint in Petersfield

Speranza with Graham Bint, St. Peter's Church Petersfield, May 12

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where it was, and what it was like. St. Peter's is in the Square in Petersfield which, on a sunny May lunchtime like today is as kind and gentle as an episode of Camberwick Green. A sizeable audience gathered in its wide, illuminated space. I'd had time to visit the famous bookshop already and had come out with George Eliot's essays, poems and reviews but that could wait while the musicians warmed up with a few preview fragments.

Graham Bint had been poorly 11 days ago when the Fauré Quartet had been due but he was back in fine form for today. The Mozart String Quartet, K. 428, hasn't changed a great deal in the last week and a half but if Noel Coward observed 'how potent cheap music is', it doesn't stand up to repeated hearing while the likes of Mozart can be heard time and again with no diminshed enjoyment. It was by no means too soon to be reminded of the gorgeous Adagio resolving itself into a dew or watch the acrobatics of the violinist's fingers, Cathy Mathews and Sue Bint in the Allegro vivace. The reason why one could listen to Mozart forever, had one world enough, and time, is the sanity, the imagination and all it implies as an 'earned surplus' of bringing them together so coherently. And any number of other reasons.

Cathy had done her bit and Graham took over on piano for the Fauré Quartet for piano, violin, viola and cello in C minor, op. 15, which I'm a bit surprised to find was premiered as early as 1880. I'm sure it could pass for being a decade or two younger than that. It opens with a rich sweep, expansive and passionate, the piano and strings involved in intricate cross currents and tides. The sound was immediately fuller than the differentiated parts of the Mozart. The scherzo began with pizzicato strings that introduced a flighty piano part. As is always advisable, I find a position with a view of the keyboard whenever I can and thus appreciated quite how busy Graham's fingers were throughout. Half an hour is a long time to keep sprinting.

I am ever likely to be taken by the melancholy of a fine Adagio and Wendy Lowe's cello was solemn until Sue's violin led off into a sedate line until the movement grew into something more resonant which made me wish Elgar had written a piano concerto which, it turns out, he tried to but never finished. The Allegro finale had Graham's page-turner almost as busy as he, Janis and Wendy were as the onrush of the lava of notes spilled out with zest and gusto. The group were as thrilled to be playing as the audience were to be treated to such a spirited account. They are immensely likeable and clearly doing it for the right reasons. The music they played today and the way they played it, like it was in Gosport the other day, is reason for optimism which, of course, is what speranza means. 

Suddenly it all becomes clear.

David Alexander in Chichester

David Alexander, Chichester Cathedral, May 10

Last night I dreamt I went to Chichester again. And then today I did. It's been 11 weeks and that seems a long time. The last time David Alexander played Chichester it was by video link only so the usual big box office audience will have improved the experience for him.

Mendelssohn played a big part in the C19th Bach revival and so it seems fitting that his Variations Seriueses, op 54 set of with a 'walking' right hand that could have come from a partita but they soon go beyond such pastiche into a magical mystery tour with David's assurance handling the shifts of mood from a busy animato to something like Rachmanninov, a vivid Presto and a subdued ending.

The other two sets of pieces related to childhood with Octavio Pinto's Scenas Infantis being five innocent miniatures moving from the skittering Run, run!, the suggestion of a bugle in March, little soldier and the berceuse of Sleeping Time before a return to a brief burst of energy in Hobby-horse.

Robert Schumann's Kinderszenen, op. 15 provides much more idyllic memories of childhood than his tormented mature years dealt him. It is like a notebook of ideas in which each could be expanded to fuller exposition but, again David conjured different tempers from a collection that were not variations but were more homogeneous than variety demands. The delicate, evocative Traumerei and the hint of a chill down the spine in Furchtenmachen, translated as 'frightening' were most memorable before Der Dichter Spricht, 'the Poet Speaks', which slowed to a stop and delivered to the spellbound listeners the profound silence that some poets strive for many more would be well-advised to.

Chichester is by all means the choice setting among the venues providing this wonderful circuit of lunchtime concerts and they either never fail or I'm a good judge of which events to attend but great things happen all across my orbit which was extended west to Gosport recently and is intended to go north to Petersfield on Thursday. There's every reason to remain parochial and not have to take on the hectic London streets from Victoria to Wigmore Hall with so much happening nearby. The mountain continues to come to Mahomet.