The Bridge over the Drina byIvan "Ivo" Andrić (Cyrillic: Иво Андрић) is the reading filling in the time between getting up, going back to bed, the few chores and the time I'm allowed out into society in between. It comes from talking to a Serbian person whose enthusiasm for some of my enthusiasms led me to look up the Nobel Prize winner they mentioned. I'm not convinced Ivo Andrić is the one they meant, whether he counts as Serbian, Bosnian or Yugoslavian or which side one should properly be on but I was glad to get it right when I said President Tito did well in the circumstances.
The bridge is naturally the main character in The Bridge over the Drina in the long time span of the narrative with the many characters, empires, conflicts and ordinary lives that take place on or around it. It's easy to see it as the representative of that which remains, impassive and enduring, while humanity wars and flounders in between the intervals of peace and prosperity and that's what life's like, isn't it. There is much to like in the characters he captures, whether as portraits of unforgiving despotism, victims of it or those who somehow get by but they come and go and are minor compared to the bridge which is an obvious symbol for lots of things to do with connection.
But it's a translation and one is only ever being given one angle of what it's like in the original. It might seem much more so in poetry that is allegedly 'heightened' language but I don't see why prose should be accorded second class status only because poetry regards itself as something a class apart
It would be insular and unforgiveably narrow-minded to only read books in one's own language but it's not possible to appreciate work properly in translation however much the translator brings to it. I suspect The Bridge over the Drina is better than what I'm making of it but there's no way I can tell.
Still, next up will be Dead-End Memories by Banana Yoshimoto. It's hard to believe the title in Japanese is any better than it is in English. What I'm going to do is try to find the title in Japanese, send it to my friend there and see how they translate it.
Seeing again the BBC's compilation programmes of Poets in Their Own Words, from Eliot and Ezra up to Seamus Heaney, one was encouraged to see the role of 'poet' as that of the commentator commentating on the state of the world from their detached position of profound other-worldiness. It didn't entirely convince me, especially when it spent so much time on such 'confessional' poets as John Berryman and Anne Sexton who were so wrapped up in themselves that suicide was their only ultimate option. Also, Allen Ginsberg and the Liverpool Poets, the mildly amusing English Beat surrogates, indulging themselves with their cul-de-sac of populism. At least Sylvia was a great poet.
It made me think how Poetry has so often regarded itself as 'beyond' the ordinary world of commerce, business and accountancy but even Poets in Their Own Words revealed the bardic, inspirational Dylan Thomas as one who worked hard at his great flourish of wordiness and also only put on the poet's disposition in public. Otherwise he was 'normal'.
Having inadvertently spent time among the crowds on their way to Southsea's Victorious festival on Friday, I was alarmed at how un-alternative they were. I was more tempted to engage with an older person I saw this morning going back into his respectable terraced house with his missus in a Sham 69 t-shirt. And Glastonbury has long been so commodified that it has no resemblance to the first 1970 show with T. Rex and Stackridge or this extra-ordinary line-up from 1971- Hawkwind, Traffic, Melanie, David Bowie, Fairport Convention and Quintessence. The mainstream is too powerful, one has to be very determined to stay 'alternative' if you don't have to. Lemmy joined Hawkwind shortly before they recorded Silver Machine and left not much longer after but they'd been at no.3 in the charts, seen what difference a bit of cash coming in made and suddenly were no longer the darlings of the free festivals. And later there were a few versions of Hawkwind trading on the name.
There isn't much money in poetry and so poets are less likely to be tempted, as Aswad were, out of their rootsy convictions by a Top 10 hit, but commercial success is the enemy of artistic invention. Poets generally don't like to think of themselves as beholden to anything less than their muse. Above musicians and painters, whose disciplines demand technique and talent, poets are encouraged to believe in themselves as prophets, seers and sages, the angels of the ages but they are more derivative and institutionalized than any. I saw a rapper called Dave on telly last night, the massed audience at Reading, or maybe Leeds, chanting his unsubtle verses along with him. Irony might not have been a strategy his work foregrounds at the expense of immediacy.
When Larkin wrote Toads, he might have still thought that being a writer was a better job than having a proper job but he corrected himself in Toads Revisited. He preferred to be institutionalized by the proper job of librarian rather than finding himself the more deceived by adopting the role of full-time writer, performing at festivals, unveiling the mystique like a fiarground sideshow and doing all that is required of any other professional.
It's a fine thing when musicians, novelists or even painters can earn a living from their work but poetry managed to shunt its way into a dead end that denied itself the necessary audience. Poets are every bit as much poets as accountants are accountants or grocers are grocers except that accountants and grocers will be found out if they're no good at their jobs whereas with poets it doesn't make any difference to anybody else. They express their difference but so do all the others, and everybody else.
Larkin didn't get everything right. I'm sure he would have seen through Boris Johnson but I don't know whether his latent Thatcherism would have blinded him to the triteness of Liz Truss. What he did know, though, was that he was 'institutionalized' and that you can't help it. His mainstream, accessible, common sense poetry was, in its way, against the grain of the fashions he inherited but English poetry would have been worse off without him.
To add to all the other anniversaries, it is roughly 300 years since Bach wrote his Cello Suites. One is spolit for choice for recordings of them, since they are the cornerstone of the cello repertoire and every cellist has to have their say in the matter. One ought to have Pablo Casals since it is due to him that we have them. After him, Steven Isserlis comes out of the many critical surveys very well. I still have Paul Tortelier on LPs, have Rostropovich from the BBC Music magazine and would have more if there were shelf space and time to play them. However, after waiting patiently, I'm glad to now have local superstar, Pavlos, and the first half of the story.
Space and time are what he brings to them, giving a feeling of unhurried immersion in the music from the famous opening bars onwards even if he only takes a few seconds longer than Casals over the Prelude to Suite no. 1. There is calm and some restraint, the cello close-up and intimate in the recording and the final bars of the Prelude shimmer rather than fizz. The Courante skips before the drowsy Sarabande and the maze of ideas is set out with the clarity of a lucid explanation.
Suite no. 2 is a more inward-looking set, the melancholy of its Prelude and shadows of the Allemande richly realized in solo lines that bring to mind the laments of Jean de St. Colombe in the film, Tous les Matins du Monde. Before plague and lockdown delayed the release of these performances I had taken the opportunity of asking the generous and ever-approachable Pavlos how many times he had played these pieces for the benefit of the record and he said three but one could keep on doing them indefinitely and have to stop somewhere. You wouldn't know. It sounds like an entirely coherent performance.
The third Suite, in C major, is by contrast exuberant and full of expansive playing. The song and dance of the Allemande and Courante have Pavlos chasing himself playfully through the lively score before the Sarabande takes some time to reflect ahead of the panache and phrasing of the great Bourrées and the presto race of the Gigue towards the needless-to-say anticipation of Vol. 2.
Good things come to those who wait. We did and they have.
Pavlos will be playing selected parts of Suite no. 1 in Chichester on Tues, 20 Sept,
Suddenly, eventually, the penny drops when reading a poet and one poem can help illuminate the rest of their work and, literally in this case, see it with the benefit of a better light.
The recently deceased Peter Scupham had for a long time been wrongly diagnosed by me as 'a bit difficult' but I hadn't been trying very hard. He was the friend of a friend and when I tried a bit harder I appreciated a good poet but still not one I was making a special case for.
Now, in receipt of a copy of his 1990 book, Watching the Perseids, something clicks and convinces me. The title poem is the best poem I've seen by him, in some ways a pre-echo of the masterpiece Stars Moving Westwards in a Winter Garden By Julia Copus. And now that I know he could do that, it makes me think his other work is a bit more like it.
Of course it is but one needs to look to find a reason to believe and can't do so until one's found it.
In the increasingly far off days when I'd not only publish booklets of my own poems but send out review copies, one perceptive critic reduced the first few of my Tycho Brahe poems as 'biography by numbers'. Fair enough. I much prefer to read about reservations readers have about my poems than unmitigated approval. While it's possible for such a verdict to reduce what I'd thought of my efforts it's unlikely to work the other way round but it's not going to shift it by much.
Biography, whether by numbers or not, has been a 'way in' to poems perhaps more often that it should have been for me. I think there were seven Tycho poems in the end, steadfastly refusing to be a 'sequence', the very idea of which still has the effect on me that the full moon does on Lon Chaney. Then there was Buxtehude, Chagall and, more recently and not yet in print, Canute, Rosemary Tonks and now a first draft, let's call it, of Agnetha Fältskog, Agnetha Afterwards, celebrating the reclusive years after Abba.
The poem already accepts it's 'none of our business' by way of apology for the intrusion, as the Rosemary poem, I hope, accepts. While they are intended as tributes, one does have to wonder if it would be more respectful to keep them to oneself in the same way that their subjects wanted to.
All biography is partial, in the sense of being incomplete and being one-sided. Even the most exhaustive account of a life misses out some detail that might have told the story a different way to some readers. So, we must be careful, at the very least, and acknowledge that we weren't there and didn't know the whole story.
But we never do, do we. We never know, when writing anything, what it looks like to anybody else. We never know, when backing the wrong horse, that another horse in the race would run faster on the day. We never know, when beguiled by a flamboyant politician that they were a wrong 'un. I'm still bemused, 45 years after the fact, that I got Jeremy Thorpe wrong and so it's only reasonable to think that far into the future, devotees of Johnson, Corbyn and the Truss disaster yet to come will still not quite grasp how they were the more deceived.
So the poem will be wrong. But, unlike in mathematics, there wasn't a right answer. It remains to be seen whether Agnetha Afterwards makes a poem or not. I took no offence that at least one astute reader didn't find the Tycho poems entirely convincing and only hope there's enough worth having in any such attempt to compensate for the perceived shortcomings but it makes one think and think again, in our age of both grotesque offence and highly sensitized offence-taking whether one even wants to enter the treacherous colosseum of ideas.
Looking forward already to what might be the highlight of the year, the painting I bought, below, Winchester 2 by Frank Clarke, is about colour and composition. Wordless, it outdoes Willam Carlos Williams by having 'no ideas but in things'. Painters and musicians have always had the advantage over writers by being free of words. One can't help but envy them.
There were a few options available for what to read next and I chose Stanley Middleton's Holiday, borrowed from my dad's extensive collection of Stan books, with him having been a teacher at father's school if not actually having had the chance to instil further literacy directly into my family. Uncle Don, my dad and I all wrote novels, of sorts, it could just about be said. Uncle Don was taken up by Hamish Hamilton, my dad's novella was a moving period piece and I finished a distant third, just grateful to have completed the course.
Holiday was joint winner of the 1974 Booker Prize, sharing it with subsequent Nobel Prize winner, Nadine Gordimer, and ahead of short-listed Kingsley Amis, Beryl Bainbridge and C.P. Snow, so it did well for itself but quite possibly deserved to.
The English seaside resort is a classic setting for the likes of Patrick Hamilton, Brighton Rock and John Cleese and Connie Booth and Stanley Middleton makes great use of it as a place of nostalgia, class distinction and the artificiality of manufactured good times because, of course, dysfunction is the main issue.
Whether the book now seems so much of its time, if not of a time before that, is because it is, because it was meant to be or because it is Middleton, is less obvious now. He was always 'genteel', with the more gruesome depths of psychology explored by D.H. Lawrence, for example, only implied beneath the respectability of affluent good manners and the requisite appreciation of music and literature that pass for 'education'. But, to be fair to Middleton, having read a few of his other books, it is in Hoilday that one can see more clearly that he knows what he's doing and that the gentility might be his natural habitat but that it is also the object of some irony, that it is not his fault and that he understands. He might not be as mild as I thought he was and there is an art beneath the sometimes almost wooden prose,
'You mean,' said Fisher,'that you're not judging her for anything she's actually said or done, but that she reminds you of some people whom you consider disreputable, and you therefore think she's something of that nature.'
Surely nobody in real life would ever construct such a sentence in conversation. It's Middleton all over, whose characters are forever making judgements on each other behind their backs. But I entirely take the point even if in such passages, Stan loses any claim to irony and just says, or lets his characters, say what he thinks.
The good things about Hoilday easily outweigh the reservations and it's not easy to think of books about which one has no rservations at all, they're only human. It's been a pleasure.
If it were entered into this year's Booker Prize, what chance would it stand. None at all. But, being somewhat dated myself by now, I might well prefer it to whatever they give the prize to.
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There have been a few minor anniversaries this year. The slightly delayed celebration of 50 years of Portsmouth Poetry Society is recorded here,
I simply had to be at the Wedgewood Rooms for the 50th Anniversary Tour of reggae legends, Black Uhuru, except that the Home Office didn't allow them the visa which surely sounds like some kind of infringement of human rights, not least because I get the price of the concert ticket refunded but not the booking fee. That's £2.25's worth of an atrocity when I take such care not to be the victim of scams.
Local period supergroup, The Consort of Twelve, mark 40 years on 11 Sept in Chichester with this programme,
which it would surely be madness not to go to and, least significantly of all, but important to me,
2 August 1972 was my first ever attempt at a bike race. 31.37 for 10 miles, aged 12, on the Newent Road from Maisemore north of Gloucester. It is the first of only thirty time trials recorded in my comprehensive, ironically titled, file My Brilliant Career but I didn't have any other careers I enjoyed more.
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And, Breaking News,
Vol. 1 of the Bach Cello Suites by Pavlos Carvalho is now available,
Good things eventually come to those who can wait and we have done. One could fill a shelf with recordings of that music and I would if there were world enough and time to give them all proper attention but Pavlos is on order, should be here soon. Listening to them will be the easy bit, thinking of something that sounds wise to say about them is a good reason to decide that appointing oneself as local music writer wasn't such a good idea after all.
It isn't over til it's over and it'll never be over for me. The Signed Poetry Books collection more or less stalled where it had got to a few years ago but is always glad of worthwhile additions. Thus, this afternoon, I was grateful for a signed copy of Grigson at Eighty, edited by R.M. Healey (Rampant Lions Press, 1985), which will be an informative way into the poet with its contributions from such as Peter Scupham, Roy Fuller, Anthony Thwaite, David Gascoyne and John Lucas as well as a collector's item.
No collecting is ever completed and done with. The University of Ballinacoorish say they have the complete archive of the work of Finbarr McCoodle but do they have the note he left out for the milkman that said 'two pints please' on February 11th, 1951. No, they don't, and so Professor Anton Schwiez, his biographer in a minor Hungarian university, has not been given the opportunity to pontificate on whether he wanted milk, porter or whisky. We have to find ways of getting to sleep without knowing.
Signed Poetry Books is always open to offers. It might have gone nearly as far as it can but you never know. If you have anything signed by Eliot, Auden, Larkin, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, Dylan Thomas, Derek Mahon, Roddy Lumsden or Rosemary Tonks, by all means post them to me.
You shouldn't need to have to read a book four times. It's a good thing if you think it's worth reading more than once and I always had The Great Gatsby high on any short list it qualifies for but still kept wondering if I was missing the point.
Mostly read on a return train journey to Swindon, having heard it was recently appointed Best Novel of the Last 100 Years which is since Ulysses, by some who should know I appreciate it more than ever and, notwithstanding that I find a list of Best Novels very hard to do, I am left with the slightly underwhelming accolade for it that if it isn't Gatsby then what is it.
It has the advantage of being short but that extends, as it were, into being concise. It's an exquisitely well-made thing that, if it means anything at all, could be said to aspire to the condition of a lyric poem, gently persuasive, at the distance established in it by having the narrator on the outside of the drama but drawn into it. It shifts, things aren't quite what they seem, fraud is always suspected beneath the shallow glamour and then, necessarily, the party is over.
In a way, asking what the best novel since Ulysses is is a bit like asking what the best pop music after, say, the Sex Pistols was or the best classical composer since Beethoven. The art form seemed to have reached a climax and all that came after could only re-work elements of it that had gone before. Poetry after The Waste Land had to acknowledge that it couldn't be done as previously but, like Auden, Larkin and Sylvia, it picked up the pieces and carried on. As did Brahms, Sibelius and Shostakovich. As did Prince.
Gatsby is nothing like Ulysses but is achieved with as much, if a different kind of, art. I've flicked through a few lists of Greatest Novels in search of anything better. For me, Camus is the obvious contender; I think The Catcher in the Rye would still stand up if I read it yet again even in the knowledge of all the objections raised against it but Mrs Dalloway was 1925 and To the Lighthouse was 1927 and so Gatsby is no certainty.
All those titles come from the first half of the last hundred years and I suspect it's easier to venerate things that have been around for longer. Ishiguro is still at it, as is Murakami and there's no telling with what admiration we might look back on Sarah Waters, Julian Barnes and Graham Swift at his best.
I'd be more definite in supporting the claims of Elizabeth Bishop, Larkin, Auden, Rosemary Tonks, Norman MacCaig and my usual hit parade of favourite poets if we were talking about poetry since The Waste Land but I was glad that the list of novels referred me back to Gatsby one more time because it was even better fourth time around, it made a couple of train journeys better than they would otherwise have been and they might be right.
My Culture Fix is a feature in the Saturday Times in which a celebrity of some perceived cultural import answers some searching questions. Melvyn Bragg got more than most of them do this week and so, having always wanted to have a go, here's me,
My favourite author or book
Dubliners is my favourite book and has been for maybe 40 years. I don't know if James Joyce loses any points at all for taking prose fiction to a place it couldn't be expected to return from. He did what he felt the need to do. He'd done Dubliners, and then Ulysses, and then Finnegans Wake and, unlike Haydn or Vivaldi or maybe even Bach, didn't see the need to do anything similar again.
The book I'm reading
Lady Macbeth of Mtensk and other stories by Nikolai Leskov, but I often read two books a week and sometimes find it hard to remember much about them a few weeks later.
The book I wish I'd written
Nothing by anybody else. Those books belong to their authors, not me. I wish I could write a novel worthy of the name. There could still be time but it's looking unlikely.
The book I couldn't finish
Possibly the first book I abandoned was My Childhood by Maxim Gorky which we were given to read at school. Maybe I should give it another try, about 48 years later, since most of what we were offered was good and it might have been Solzhenitsyn I was reading instead. I'm perfectly happy to pack up on books these days if need be. It needs to be a pleasure, not a duty. I was advised to stick with Captain Corelli's Mandolin beyond its first 50 pages and then it would be good but I didn't make the cut.
The book I'm ashamed I haven't read
None, really. I'm hoovering them up since finishing full-time work and so the likes of Don Quixote, much of Dickens, all of them, are all on the radar as long as I look and find a reason to believe I want to.
My favourite film
French, 1990's. Difficult to decide between Depardieu, Emmanuelle Beart and Vanessa Paradis. Tous les Matins du Monde, Un Coeur en Hiver and Noce Blanche. I'm not at all a film person but they were all sensational.
My favourite play.
Hamlet. In a category of its own.
The Box set that I'm hooked on
Box set? Hooked on? If they're talking about DVD's, the question doesn't apply. But I spent some of the profit from horse racing a few years ago on Ton Koopman's box of CD's of the Opera Omnia, the Complete Works, of Dietrich Buxtehudeand it is one of my favourite things.
My favourite TV series
Fawlty Towers
My favourite piece of music
There's Spem in Alium, there's Josquin's Deploration on the death of Johannes Ockeghem, a lot of Tamla Motown back catalogue and hundreds of other candidates but I usually give it to the Buxtehude Trio Sonata, here,
The last piece of music that made me cry
The Carnival is Over by The Seekers when I found out Judith Durham had died last week.
The lyric I wish I'd written
As above, Smokey Robinson or Holland-Dozier-Holland, but they set a standard it was all but impossible to beat. I did my little best.
The poem that saved me
or, alternatively, ruined me by making me so devoted to it that it took the rest of my life to escape from it. My Sad Captains by Thom Gunn. It's a wonderful poem but one shouldn't become so mesmerised by one poem or poet.
The instrument I played
No more than 8 or 10 chords, badly, on cheap guitars but I always knew I wasn't a musician.
The instrument I wish I'd learnt
If only I'd been capable, it might have been gorgeous. By all means, piano or cello but there was no point. I've been stuck with words, doing as much as I can with them, all the time increasingly thinking that musicians and painters get by much better without them.
The music that cheers me up
The Buxtehude, asabove. All of the above but being 'cheered up' shouldn't have to be music's job.
If I could own one painting, it would be...
impossible to get insurance for it living in my house. Vermeers are so rare that they are priceless. It's not entirely out of the question that I might buy something by Maggi Hambling just to show that I could.
The place I feel happiest
It might be Prestbury Park, Cheltenham, as long as my horses are winning.
My guiltiestcultural pleasure
Isn't it such an English, maybe Victorian, thing to associate pleasure with guilt. Challenge TV have the 1980's gameshow, Bullseye, on seemingly endless repeat but watching it whenever I notice it doesn't make me feel guilty. I'd feel far worse about myself if I still liked Pink Floyd.
I'm having a fantasy dinner party, I'll invite these artists and authors...
or, rather, I'm not.
I'd gladly buy Shakespeare a few pints in a quiet corner of a pub, not to talk to him about poetry or plays but to get his version of his biography. Not to sell it, not for profit, only so that I might hear it from him. When did you move from Stratford to London, for example.
And I'll put on this music
No, none of that. It's far too much. Maybe invite Bach, Mozart and Handel round and play them the Velvet Underground, Metal Guru and Wig Wam Bam and see what they thought.
The concert I'm looking forward to
Black Uhuru in the Wedgewood Rooms, Southsea, followed by Tuesday lunchtimes in Chichester cathedral, and Portsmouth on Thursdays, throughout the Autumn.
The play I walked out of
Murder in the Cathedral, in Portsmouth cathedral. I didn't go back in after half time.
There's always been a more natural, organic way of making one's way across the complex terrains of literature, music and painting. It's by following up connections in the way that Classic FM once did, maybe still do, in a programme called (something like) If You Like That, Then Try This.
It works. Moving backwards from James Joyce many years ago, I found George Moore and Turgenev. Moving into other Japanese literature from Banana Yoshimoto and Murakami I found a whole new culture with Mishima, Tanizaki, Kawabata and all. Taking up every signpost offered by Thom Gunn I was directed to August Kleinzahler, Mina Loy, Dick Davis and other names well worth knowing as well as some more dubious.
But that's how it works and it works much better than a reading list provided by a course.
Shostakovich led eventually, the delay being entirely of my own making, to Nikloai Leskov, author of Lady Macbeth of Mtensk. One gets an idea of what he's on about after a few of his long short stories. The religion in some of them is off-putting until one realizes that his point is about the 'spiritual values' as espoused if not so often put into practice by Christianity, is how they are better demonstrated when coming from within rather than taken in more wholesale fashion from the church. As such, his sympathies are more with itinerants or vagrants who abolish material things in their way of life. And it comes as not much of a surprise that he found something of a soulmate in Tolstoy who moved from an interest in reform of Russian agricultural policy to his own line of Christian anarcho-pacifism. We know from years of student-like obsession with those things that called themselves 'left' that Russia was always the place to look for undigestible strung-together manifestos like krypto-syndicalist-anarcho-collectivism.
Perhaps my teenage years reading Solzhenitsyn in the 70's weren't such a waste of time after all. This week's walk was non-routine in a number of ways but included the serendipitous highlight of meeting the wife of a friend of a friend in more detail than I've met her before.
My friend and his friend only really want to talk about football but I've mentioned chess and the good lady, as it turns out, was introduced to Garry Kasparov at the age of 14 by her International Master chess-playing father. Who only then turns out to have been a crossword compiler. She herself, it turns out, is fluent in at least six languages but even then not quite the obvious ones.
I could still be there now exchanging names and notes and thoughts on chess players, Eastern Europe and languages but I came home and ordered The Bridge over the Drina by Ivo Andric instead.
One thing leads to another, but always in a direction of your own choosing. That's not free will, it's factors beyond your control pushing you in one direction rather than another, for better or worse. One was always going to do what one did. If Sartre could have made his philosophy more determinist rather than making it all our own fault by saddling us with the grim responsibilities of free will, he might have been on to something but 13 episodes of The Roads to Freedom will stay saved up to see about on those glorious long, dark winter days and nights.
There's a lot of territory to navigate out there. We each have to find our own way through. We are glad of any help we get. I can't help but want to fill in celebrity questionnaires whenever they appear. I've never done My Cultural Fix in The Times on Saturday and can sometimes find the choices of younger people almost things to pity them for but it was Melvyn Bragg this week, elderly by now and thus comparatively sensible. So let's have a go at the questions he answered (above).
Most of the time I'm perfectly happy with the books I decide to read. Maybe it matters less if they're from the library but if you get it wrong, you've still wasted your time whereas if you buy them, however cheaply, you've also wasted your money.
A first little session with Ronald Firbank's Valmouth wasn't promising. It seemed like buying a horse on the advice of a wide boy and getting it on the gallops only to wonder why. Maybe it's not the best Firbank book, maybe it will improve but maybe a contrarian like James Kirkup is not one whose tips one should trust.
However, Nikolai Leskov is another C19th Russian to add to that impressive cast of writers well worth having. Katerina Lvovna is a bit like Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina, of course like Lady Macbeth, and dangerous but she'd be no Eustacia Vye, if these entrancing ladies could emerge from the page to appear before us. One has to be grateful in the end that they stay on the page.
But Leskov, only famous for the story behind the Shostakovich opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtensk, surely deserves to have more still available in translation and in print than he seems to have, which might be only one other book of stories.
Of course, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Turgenev but maybe not Gogol for me. Leskov is a writer as well as a story teller and so far there is a wildness trapped in the mundane and the routine that looks like being a central theme. As such, one can see how Shostakovich, such an inventive composer so full of musical ideas, found in Lady Macbeth such rich material when continuing to work under Stalin.
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It's only tenuously related to the news about Salman Rushdie but it is about 'freedom of expression' v. what anybody is going to do about it.
34 years after the publication of The Satanic Verses, the issue hasn't gone away. And we find that, hidden deep in old news, the translators of it into Norwegian and Italian survived attacks on their lives but the Japanese translator didn't.
I read Midnight's Children, The Moor's Last Sigh and a book of short stories. Salman is a flamboyant writer, pyrotechnic and, for what it's worth, 'Magic Realist', but I was never convinced. My involvement with Salman in the 1990's was much more because I looked like him. It wasn't me that said so, it was strangers who passed comment in public more than once or twice. One could almost make a Hitchcock film out of somebody who likes to think he's a writer but looks a bit like a writer that some fanatics want to kill and so wonders if he really wants to be a writer at all.
I was in the front bar of a pub in Gosport early doors where I had arranged to meet my mate, for example. The only other people in were a table of half a dozen readily identifiable as Royal Navy. One of them, not maliciously, said, loud enough for me to hear,
No, I don't think Salman Rushdie drinks in this pub.
What I should have said was, No, mate, you're right, it's me. Until you lot came in I thought this pub at 6.30 was the best place I could think of to hide.
It is intimidating, though, I'll give them that. Every line you write, every word you use, you have to watch yourself. And even if I'm confident it's not objectionable now, I can't know that it won't be the next time somebody else finds reason to be offended.
Lamont Dozier was the middle section of Holland-Dozier-Holland, mainly the arranger in the Motown Hit Factory firmly among the very greatest of pop songwriters where we might also put Carole King, Smokey Robinson, Stephin Merritt and maybe David Bowie, Elvis Costello, Lennon-McCartney and by all means provide your own favourites.
We might in a way have been brought up to respect the sort of singer-songwriter that is 'authentic' because they do it all themselves. Dylan, Kate Bush, Adele. But pop music is 'product' like anything else, and Shakespeare was part of a theatre process involving other writers, actors and shareholders in a commercial enterprise as much as Handel, successfully, and Mozart, possibly less so. Tamla Motown was every bit as much of a production line as the car factories that Berry Gordy based it on with himself as the final arbiter of quality control and Holland-Dozier-Holland, along with Smokey Robinson, were where the creative process began.
When they finally fell out with Motown, a first major hit elsewhere, Band of Gold by Freda Payne, was a Motown record in all but name so it was fitting that Freda's duet with Cliff, Saving a Life, was written by Lamont's son, Beau.
One is spoilt for choice by the back catalogue but it was tremendous the other day in Tesco Express that this was being played 58 years on,
I walked back home via Commercial Road with my new acquisition under my arm and thought I could decipher from the weird sounds of a busker playing an electric violin to a backing track that he was attempting Toni Braxton's Unbreak My Heart and, once I'd understood that, I was glad of it. I thought I might thus add that to my Playlist pieces because it's there in the Soul Show. However, going to You Tube to find it, I accidentally found out that Judith Durham had died last week. And that changed everything. It's not been a good week for wholesome Australian pop singers. Only the other day, it was Olivia who I had to say was 'not as good as The Seekers' but I didn't know then that Judith had died three days earlier.
The first Seekers Farewell concert was July 1968 and televised. It seemed like almost the end of the world even then. But it was only the first Seekers Farewell concert. Maybe Judith had thought she could do even better as a solo artist and not have to share the box office but she was neither the first or the last to find out that it doesn't always work like that. There was a special thing about The Seekers that maybe not even The Osmonds reproduced. One suspects Keith Potger might have been some of the brains behind it; Athol Guy on bass and backing vocals sees off all claimants to 'cool', whether they be Lou Reed, Miles Davis or Prince, and Bruce Woodley was the quiet one, the George Harrison, but they'd have been nowhere near as much without the illuminating voice and presence of Judith Durham, as safe and nice as Doris Day, as moving as Dusty Springfield and perhaps with an innocence that Diana Ross and Shirley Bassey couldn't conjure.
The Carnival is Over was the obvious record to finish the 60's Show of the Playlist with. I've used it to mark other finales, too, in the past but it is the only record to play now even though The Seekers weren't short of masterpieces, from the equally resigned gorgeousness of I'll Never Find Another You, through World of Our Own, Island of Dreams, Georgy Girl and Morningtown Ride. You look them all up and find Tom Springfield, Dusty's brother, was the genius at work behind them. Trying to write pop songs up against opposition like that who had such singers to sing them, one realizes much too late that one never stood a chance.
For all the devilish claims from artists affecting outrageousness, claiming authenticity or overturning the past in pursuit of short-term notoriety and some fast money, the mainstream will always see them off. Old editions of Top of the Pops never fail to show how the likes of The Seekers still look and sound tremendous alongside acts that seemed so very much of the moment at the time but came and went and are now only bad memories.
As was said about Olivia, nobody could have a bad word for Judith or The Seekers.
Though the carnival is over I will love them 'til I die.
So, herewith, the new painting. Gentle and therapeutic in these difficult times as well as, I think, 'art' without being ground-breaking or challenging. There's a lot to be said for doing traditional things well.
It's an extravagance in these financially shrivelled times, I dare say, but it's only the second actual painting I've ever bought and it is guaranteed the repay the investment by providing its price in enjoyment, especially when I hear how much sports fans pay to see short-lived, often disappointing, made-to-measure sport.
It might have been the rosy tint on the brickwork at the centre of the painting that drew me in, the reflections in the water are almost as much of a regular feature in a certain sort of painting as rhyme is in a certain sort of poetry, but it's part of the composition with the trees on either side, the welcome lack of human figures that we are told are good to have but certainly aren't compulsory and so it has a quiet geometry about it as I carve it roughly into twelve blocks of colour in the most elementary of art appreciation exercises.
As with the recondite task of writing about music, words are what painting is free to go beyond and not have to 'mean' anything and so, to a writer, they are like a day off from work, like it is for those cricketers who prefer playing golf or those poets who really wanted to be pop singers.
Frank Clarke is genuinely local, it having been the annual exhibition of the Portsmouth and Hampshire Art Society. As happens when discovering about any creative artist, one 'quite likes' most of their work but it is one item that stands out, makes them special and draws you in to the rest of their work. It's a mighty long way from the Portsmouth and Hants Society to any short list of all-time favourites and there's precious little coherence to be found in my favourite painters, even taking the elements of colour, composition, quietness, geometry and subject matter- but not all of them at once- from Winchester 2 and trying to look to find such reasons to believe. Someone like me finds it hard to live without such things, though, even if 'all you have to be is any good'.
So,
Top 6 Painters
Vermeer, without a shadow of a doubt from the soft light he uses, is the greatest. Most immediately for the quiet but also for the composition, the untold stories happening elsewhere but, when you see them in real life, for the paint. The art of poetry is about the use of words and painting's about the use of paint. After 350 years the detail and the way he did it are gently amazing. It can't have been a real world any more than Bach's Well-Tempered Klavier is a real world but it reflects on such a thing from a refined distance.
Maggi Hambling is entirely the opposite in many ways, passionately applying the paint to the canvas and often allowing it to run down as if the intensity of the moment cared less about such precision than Vermeer's. It's involved with life and love and sex and death, war, climate change, something vaudevillian. And panache. We are grateful sometimes that that's all it is and that she can only bring a fraction of her real-life lack of compromise to the paintings.
Mark Rothko went to the other extreme by gradually becoming less figurative, his blocks of colour seeping into each other and getting darker until they stopped generating a pulse, went black and he committed suicide. Entirely inappropriately, one might think, he's grouped with Jackson Pollock as an Abstract Expressionist which only goes to show how much use such labels are. Jack the Dripper painted chaos and killed himself inadvertently in a big, flash car whereas Rothko painted dark meditations. The only thing they had in common was the booze.
The dark side of Walter Sickert was only that he was for a while suspected of being Jack the Ripper. He was a sort of Whistler, maybe a bit French, which was a good thing at the time, and like Degas, but it was his Brighton Pierrots, a print of which remains the main feature of my front room, seen in the Ashmolean, that sprang him into my big league for its evocation of downbeat, end-of-season, poorly attended showmanship. His Ennui is a dreadful insight into a 'relationship' and, like so much of his work, achieves something that poetry probably couldn't.
We could flood the market with contemporaries of Vermeer, like Pieter de Hooch and Carel Fabritius, in the same way that one could readily provide a Top 6 of composers that concentrated on Bach, Handel and Buxtehude and it would be hard not to. However,
leaving out Rembrandt would be almost as much a crime as leaving out Shakespeare from a list of writers. Like Shakespeare, or David Bowie or the Beatles in pop music, he seems to set a standard that gets taken for granted and so doesn't feel like a personal favourite. But it's the time that passes, isn't it, in the self portraits, perhaps even the courage needed to record its effect but, still, the paint. What he says and how he does it. There doesn't need to be much more to any sort of art appreciation than that.
Which leaves us with the free hit, the sometimes unlikely sixth choice often done because, quite honestly, one last choice isn't enough when there are so many deserving candidates left.
They queue up like customers trying to get served in a busy bar, hoping to catch the eye. One isn't supposed to extend a Top 6 by crediting near misses but they are my rules so I can break them. It feels as if I ought to have another Old Master, maybe Titian for his blue and longevity, but more likely the Brueghel of The Fall of Icarus, as per Auden. Marc Chagall has been a long-time favourite with his dreamy people and farm animals floating above the Russian shtetl, it could be Canaletto with his busy scenes of Venice or Hieronymous Bosch and his nightmares. Or, if we want more quietness,Vilhelm Hammershøi, who is also a choice exhibit in the front room. I don't even know yet but I've just gone back and put Hammershøi in bold, impressed by his monchrome and forgiving how he seems to me to have got the shadows wrong in the print I have.
And, while I was doing that the big bang at the front door was two books landing on the food recycling box. Not many houses in this street had deliveries of Nikolai Leskov and Ronald Firbank books today, one wouldn't think and so now at least there is some 'summer reading' with which to fend off the heat.
And so, the 'desk' is cleared. There's a Larkin essay and a Rosemary Tonks essay with respective editors, one with more chance of being found suitable than the other, and there's nothing else to write about from the ongoing vignettes on pop records for the Playlist project that will always be there.
The Wake is finished and done with and filed on the shelf and, to be fair to it, I could say much more about it than I could say about many of the other books up there that have faded to only the foggiest of impressions. So, having seen again most of what the BBC Archives have on Larkin on BBC4 last might, I sat and re-read some of the essays in Required Writing today, impressed all over again by their common sense, not only in the likes of The Pleasure Principle which is almost his manifesto and might just suggest a further Larkin essay, mixing it in with previous pieces on 'what is poetry' and only occassionally raising a doubt about whether he would still be allowed to say some of the things he says.
Next up will be Testimony, the Shostakovich memoir, from the library, and Leskov's Lady Macbeth of Mtensk, the source of the exhilarating opera but before them, tomorrow I go to collect my new acquisition for the front room art collection and so that will be here soon to enjoy and, to go with it, whether I've done it before or not, we can have Top 6 Painters, perhaps extrapolating from the new acquistion and what is good about it to how it relates to my six favourite painters, which will be a disparate list mostly having in common the fact that they have nothing in common.
But these are truly the 'dog days'. Not joyful days spent in the company of dogs which are creation's reason to be cheerful and have faith in nature but sultry, oppressive days in which the unruly sonne gives us no place to hide. Why does it, through windows and through curtains call on us?
Perhaps it is why bookish publications provide their summer reading supplements as if it is a time when reading is all there is to do except that reading, like anything else, is more enjoyable in more comfort.
No, the 'dog days' are so called because of the appearance, in the Northern Hemisphere at least, of Sirius, the dog star, Alpha Canis Major, which although giving its name to this sultry, increasingly heatwave, period, brings with it the promise that it should be over in a few weeks. A clear evening sky in Autumn, if you live anywhere far enough from city lights to appreciate it, can be relied upon to feature Orion in all its glory, the belt pointing upwards to Aldebaran and down towards Sirius. I'm looking forward to knowing they're there whether I see them or not but will enjoy the corollary of the chill in the air anyway.
I'm not for the most part a crying sort of person and generally don't but sometimes I feel like I should.
The gorgeous Olivia, not as good as The Seekers, better than Linda Ronstadt and gentler than Suzy Quatro. If not for her, the sky would fall and, as one of the kindest-seeming of 70's pop artists departs this life, it almost seems like it has.
In doublings farcity where gargoyles are confetti, I chanced on a tale called Sin Again, Mate. And I feel it re-echo though my queazy bone marrow like a pickled and fickle act of bravado. Choice Joyce was furious, less injurious and pluvial alluvial convivial analysis of paralysis essayed towards a degree for someone, a 2:1, me. I was a dead loss at a level but had flu by those gnats in a poor trait of a Jung man and then they tolled us at Hanover city not to do you, you sees.
And so now, only in oldage for whumpandfifty, having re-read of bloomsday with a guyed book, it had to be Donne. Attempted at least at last at a feast unexempted perempted by not wanting to dye untainted untaunted unsainted by its allegorical metaphorical anti-Eliotical circular murkier quirkier mindbendinglytranscendinglyalmostunendinly trivialconvivial whirred ploy. By the shimmering, simmering waters of, the evolving, involving waters of, the incomprehensible, indispensible waters of. The Wake.
Philip Larkin would have been 100 years old on Tuesday, 9 August, and so, in line with other media, one feels one ought to do something to mark the occasion and some sort of assessment of where we stand with him is the obvious thing to do.
One can't defend the indefensible indefinitely, as many in the government recently and eventually realized. Yes, Larkin became increasingly right-wing and no amount of excusing it as fourth form ribaldry or the influence of badly-chosen friends alters the fact that he was Thatcherite among many other failings. I wonder if shy, awkward, stammering men who lack confidence take up uncompromising ideas to bolster their confidence. Perhaps it takes more generosity of spirit to be liberal but he had plenty to be confident about as the most immaculate English poet of his generation with a big job he was good at in charge of a university library and he only turned down the O.B.E. because he thought he was worth more. We shouldn't conflate the idea of 'great writer' with 'great human being'. There's not much in Shakespeare biography to suggest that he was any better than a hugely talented writer shrewdly investing his profits from the theatre and looking after himself and his own status ahead of anybody else's but if we removed every writer from our reading lists on account of perceived flaws in their character we would have finished reading everybody left standing a long time ago.
The very idea of a canon of literature came under attack some years ago now, the assumption that there is a more or less agreed list of greats that represent literature through the ages. Certainly, we all have our own lists but each period can only provide a limited number of names that it will be remembered by. And some things, we can't help but think, are of more value than others even if fashions might change and reputations will wax and wane within those rarified strata.
Larkin was recognized as one of the most accomplished poets of his generation in English at an early stage, which happened once it dawned on him that he was the new Thomas Hardy and not the new Auden or Yeats. But the English poetry of the 1950's was regarded in some places as inherently 'minor'. It didn't have the high church intellectualism of Eliot, the engagement of Auden or the flamboyant flourish of Dylan Thomas. Certainly, 40-odd years ago, it was commonplace to regard Eliot as some kind of scripture, so monumental that he cast his shadow over C20th English poetry in the same way that Beethoven had over C19th European music.
But Larkin's ordinariness and common sense were persuasive. Difficulty, implying cleverness, authority and thus 'greatness' eventually began to look dubious. Not everybody was happy being bullied by footnotes, esoteric reference points and the need for A Student's Guide. The times when a poet like Tennyson could be a national celebrity were long gone. John Betjeman and maybe Roger McGough were recognizable to many but, with considerable talents for being themselves in their whimsical ways, Larkin wrote poems worth returning to time and again. Austerity, like discrimination, can be good things when properly applied and, in paring down his poems to remove their excesses and then only publishing those he regarded as successes, he set an example worth following and without very much of a train of public appearances, big launches or other self-promotion, got his Companion of Honour, plaque in Westminster Abbey and lines that passed into the language.
He did treat people badly, not least Monica Jones, but he didn't know how not to. The point has been made, with regard to Larkin and any number of others, that we can admire the work without applying the same level of admiration to its author. As Andrew Motion said on the wireless, they were friends even though they didn't vote the same way. Good Lord, if we only had as friends people who voted the same way, we'd have significantly fewer and you need as many as you can get.
It's not at all clear which names are likely to be remembered as 'greatest' and representative of C20th poetry in English and it's for the best if it remains like that. My half dozen nominations aren't likely to be the same as yours. But Larkin has grown into a contender despite the adverse publicity. It's about the writing. I don't think he was quite John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester although he might have wanted to be.
The first record to be played on Radio 1, by Tony Blackburn in 1967, was famously Flowers in the Rain by The Move. A small, unprepossessing man, some might be rude enough to say, Roy Wood surely knew about, loved and was determined enough to succeed at pop music to do so. Three or four times, firstly, after Idle Race, with a highly respectable series of hits with The Move, then, saying he was going to proceed further than where John Lennon had got with I am the Walrus, set up the Electric Light Orchestra and made a brave attempt at doing so with 10538 Overture, full of cellos and orchestration, before quickly moving on to create Wizzard.
His devotion to pop music was never better expressed than in his solo single, Forever, with its verses successively paying tribute to the Beach Boys, Eddie Cochran and Neil Sedaka. But, brilliant and apparently self-made as he was, he was, like George Harrison, Led Zeppelin, Ed Sheeran, Rod Stewart and legions of others, accused of lifting his tune from a previous record. Angel Fingers does sound a bit like By a Babbling Brook by Donald Peers.
Have a look for yourself,
It is the same, isn't it. What Roy has done is give it pop-obssesed, teen idolatry words and given it pop-obsessed Phil Spector 'wall of sound' production. That's because, like we all were, he was pop-obsessed and was paying tribute which anybody who finds it necessary to make their own art finds it necessary to do.
Roy Wood, not as obviously such a matinee idol as Bryan Ferry or as extrovert as Rod Stewart, was a shy man hiding behind all that hair make-up who made his own inspirational art out of previous art, which is what Shakespeare did.
Angel Fingers is a profound love song. Not to another person but to pop music itself.
Sometimes there's no need to go looking one's next dose of aesthetic engagement, it comes to you.
A second volume of James Kirkup was about as much as one would want of him in quick succession. The mis-fit outsider role is explored in some depth and to good effect but he knows everybody and has a bad word for most of them. The British Council are given their own special category of opprobium, not least because they don't like him either. The pacifist, vegetarian, perhaps even anarchist stance is both idiosyncratic and icomoclastic at the same time but we can at least credit him with sticking to his principles. One thing he does provide, though, is a bit tip for Ronald Firbank, part of his high camp, Wildean milieu and so, spending a few days dutifully progressing through a few more pages of the Wake, I'll await the arrival of some Firbank with high hopes.
I ventured down to Fratton to see what wise woman in her secondhand bookshop had but she was closed. She did, however, have a poster in the window advertising Black Uhuru upcoming in the Wedgewood Rooms. Having missed Lee 'Scratch' Perry there a couple of times in recent years, I was compelled to make sure of the mighty Uhuru who I last saw 42 years ago in Brighton, not for a moment imagining I'd see their 50th Anniversary Tour.
Doing some long overdue, it seems, homework, I was saddened to find that Puma, the girl, died aged 36 in 1990, so it's not her on the picture, then. Dire pangs of remorse swept through me, looking through their discography, seeing the album I unloaded in the heartbreaking vinyl sell-off. But, as so often, one's memory can't be relied on. Leaving to Zion isn't on the Red album, it's on Black Uhuru, but, worse than that, it looks like they don't usually play it. How could they not. It's like Argentina going into the World Cup without Maradona. Maybe I'll e-mail them and ask if they can play it in Southsea.
The glory years were those with Sly'n'Robbie who then were to reggae what Chic were to disco, all conquering and doing wonders for any act they felt like helping. So maybe I'm not expecting anything ground-breaking butI'd be inconsolable if Black Uhuru were in town and I wasn't there. That will make two pop concerts this year, the first since the Jess Davies Band which was four years ago and quite a bit more than that since three times in London for The Magnetic Fields. It clearly isn't over til it's over. They'll have me sitting in doing Jo Whiley's show soon at this rate.
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Long overdue, though, was a better listen to Shostakovich's opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtensk, which, with its loud and quiet contrasts, doesn't lend itself to explaining itself away in the front room. It is well served by headphones, they are on the CD player upstairs and the Haydn Piano Sonatas have done their bit to the extent that they are in danger of defining the room. Lady Macbeth is an exhilarating thing and demands closer attention which is not helped by having the libretto and synopsis on a disc. I'd much rather have it in the booklet. But it will get more attention, Shostakovich having an ever stronger claim on Greatest C20th Composer even though I'm not giving him much credit for those big symphonies.
I live in hope that the Larkin Society journal can make use of my latest contribution, the essay on Rosemary Tonks is done, I think, although I'm not sure it is what the publications I have in mind for it want and Thomas Hardy for next year's Portsmouth Poetry Society programme is done. So now would be a very good time for an idea to be visited upon me, the little event, glimpse or something in another book that triggers the miniature novel, some poems or anything worthy of the time spent on it. Time doesn't wait for a writer to come up with their next idea. Otherwise I'm just nominally, and very gradually, compiling the pop music book that will never be finished.
Tune in next week to see the new acquistion painting and I don't think I've done Top 6 painters before so I'll try to justify that disparate list. Summer, and August especially, can be a barren time for highlights but it's not looking bad at the moment.
Portsmouth and Hampshire Art Society Annual Exhibition, Portsmouth Cathedral, until August 10
I'm still strangely exhilarated by finding Rosemary's grave yesterday and now have no excuse not to be finishing my little essay on her. But one needs must keep busy and be out and about as much as possible. The Portsmouth and Hampshire Art Society send me an invitation to their show every year because I once bought a painting there and so today I went.
The Portsmouth area is rich in musicians as is reported here on a regular basis and it also has a thriving poetry community with several inter-woven groups meeting to pursue their different strategies. I'm less familiar with the painters, not having quite the same grasp of the genre and, while liking what I like, come to it with less of an idea why. Having as one's two favourite painters Vermeer and Maggi Hambling is a bit like having Byrd and Schoenberg as one's two favourite composers but there's possibly someone somewhere who does.
The exhibition had many angles covered from local scenes, landscape, portrait, pets, wildlife and some School of Mondrian. As with music, I'm mainly in awe of the skill involved because I don't know how it's done. There might be a trick to it- there is with writing- but I can see that even those pictures I cared less for took some doing. I'm not going to list names, firstly because that means leaving worthy people out and secondly because I didn't look them up beyond looking through the folder with their profiles.
However, the first one I really liked was sold and then I enquired about another. I sat for as long as it took to convince myself that one is only young and impetuous once and we may not be the young ones very long, went and had another look and then over to the desk to help them work their debit card machine.
Surely in times like these it is beyond the pale to be indulging in art. It's the sort of thing a spoilt brat Prime Minister would do, preferably with other people's money. So much of the walk home was spent justifying the extravagance - how I've spent very little on books this year, hardly anything on records and this month's Visa bill had nothing on it. I could have bought some shoes and I'll have to do that soon anyway but I'm due a few quid on the Premium Bonds this month. It's very much the same process one goes through when establishing ipso facto you are surely due a bottle of wine, really ought to support one's local chip shop or don't actually need to do some grim household chore until next week. The decision is foregone. It's only the reasoning behind it, if any, that needs filling in.
I'll collect Winchester 2 by Frank Clarke next Thursday when I will put a picture of it here so you can decide for yourselves if it was money well spent. It's a bit more expensive supoorting local painters than it is the musicians and poets but you are the owner of the artefact itself. There might be some patrician pleasure to be had from that but the point is to be able to look at it, the very thing. The front room artspace will thus be re-organized next week with Frank going into my eyeline from where I sit, Dave Brimage vacating that position after his long encumbancy and moving to where either my Lips & Bananas is, or it will depose the pastel shades of Gwen John and whichever moves out will most probably go upstairs to the library reading room.
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