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.