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 I'm not convinced I have unpublished poems not due to go elsewhere that really need to be in print and, perhaps more significantly, having decided I didn't want to read poems to a public audience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.