James Taylor - You Got a Friend

The first time I saw colour television in all its glory was when I went round to another boy's house, whose father owned local supermarkets and whose mother was much more like Polly Brown from Pickettywitch or Lulu than one's contemporary's mothers were supposed to be. We had colour in our house in due course and the first memorable comment on it I remember was my grandfather's, who said it must be much better for the horse racing.

James Taylor was on Top of the Pops when I first saw the difference that colour made. His guitar was orange, the background profoundly deep blue. James Taylor was a week or two into the four weeks he had at number one in my own, personal chart that I compiled as a matter of priority every Tuesday when I got home from school, that it turned out my best friend had also been privately doing and, eventually, everybody else did, too.

James Taylor, then, seemed entirely 'the business', the lank-haired, sensitive minstrel poet capable of expressing all the need for love we thought we felt alongside the possibility of warmth, the habitual loner who nonetheless had the opportunity of being brought inside.

I knew You Got a Friend word for word then, proved I still did more than once many years later and could probably still do it now. But it took a while to realize how little of the credit for it was due to James, who was very 'mainstream', almost offensively 'easy listening' when all the credit was due to Carole King, who it looks like might be playing piano unobtrusively on this, who was, more than likely amongst others, one of James's several celebrity girlfriends while his studied act of being serious and sensitive passed as art.

Best of luck to the boy but the dreary role of singer-songwriter, of which there were plenty then, doesn't look quite so meaningful or impressive now and definitely not when it turns out you never even wrote your own greatest hit.    

Tired and Emotional

Next off the pile of books waiting to be read is Peter Paterson's Tired and Emotional, the life of Lord George Brown. I'm not often one for political biography but am a specialist in Jeremy Thorpe Studies and once read Ben Pimlott's Harold Wilson, who was a bit of a favourite as I understand he is of Keir Starmer. I thought George Brown would be funny but I was wrong. It's grim, unpleasant and acrimonious, like politics and the internal workings of the Labour Party (like the Conservatives) generally are.

Perhaps Paterson, being a raffish-looking journalist from the Telegraph, Spectator and Mail as well as The New Statesman, couldn't be expected to be a sympathetic biographer but it's hard to see how anybody else would have been a great deal more so. The hard drinking certainly was no help but his abrasive personality and inferiority complex in the company of intellectuals were as much the cause of his haplessness. We take for granted his ambition to which a wife is sacrificed in the same tradition as writers as selfish as Thomas Hardy, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin. We also realize that such ambition results in much underhand maneouvering but George isn't as good as that as Harold. An appalling picture of all the major Labour figures of the 1950's and 60's - Bevin, Bevan, Gaitskell, Wilson, Crossman, Callaghan, Brown and more - masquerading as 'brothers' while forever plotting against each other makes Boris Johnson, Gove, Sunak, Truss and the rest of the sorry litany of recent Conservatives only look like the latest version of a long-established template for a shambles and no way to run a darts team never mind a country.

George Brown only belonged to the Labour Party because of his impoverished beginnings, as well he might, but he otherwise belongs to that demographic of working class right-wingers who are mis-fits in their professed allegiance, populist at the expense of principle, anti-semitic and, in his case at least, a gift to the right wing press and a liability.

But there's nothing new under the sun in such matters. Having got halfway with it, I'll persevere in the hope that perhaps the pathetic figure he becomes by the end elicits some sympathy. And then I can move on to something more edifying, making a mental note not to be tempted in to Thatcher, Blair or anybody else. Such a parcel of rogues in a nation.

World Cup Report

I didn't expect to be doing a World Cup Report here but I got involved, almost by accident.

The biography of Lord George Brown isn't sumptuous reading and so, given that I'd happened to see Brazil playing like 1970's Brazil in the second half v. Serbia, I was lured in to take the odds-on to beat Switzerland this afternoon.

For the most part these days I find football quite a dreary business. I know these top players are brilliant at what they do because I used to do it, until 1977. Vinicius Jr. especially caught my notice playing outside left today. It's more those that follow the game that put me off than the players themselves, the TV camera picking out a child of maybe 5 shaking his fist and snarling when his team scored was obviously behaviour he's picked up from seeing others do it and he thought he should, too, but it wasn't pretty.

I had a reminder of what 'involvement' was like when Fulham had a run to the Europa Cup Final in 2010, the impetus gathering as they kept winning through, including a rocking night vs. Juventus when they came back from nowhere on a wing and a prayer. But since then I see scores, think yes, no or maybe and that's about it.

However, encouraged to invest in Brazil today, I too was to be found waving my arms about when they went in front, came to have a look at the Cash Out value of the bet and didn't understand why it was so miserly until realizing the goal had been chalked off. But I was rewarded with more thrills when Casemiro scored a goal that was allowed to stand. Corals would do well to tempt us to cash out with better offers because I would have but for their derisory bid to call it quits by paying me nowhere near enough.

On the other hand, their small bet 'bundles' are value for having a small interest. I could cash in Mbappe to be top goalscorer and Argentina to win it, have my money back and leave a Brazil-France final and Brazil to win outright as shots to nothing but we'll see. It's hardly money one would worry about.

But we have a free hit, effectively, at Mr. Henderson's Ile de Jersey in the first at Southwell tomorrow and Ronaldo to score first in Portugal 2 Uruguay 0, which sounds like it's started, and still be in front on the deal.

Come on, the football.

Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite

 Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite, The Transformations of John Donne (Faber)

The 2006 biography by John Stubbs, John Carey's Life, Mind and Art and J.B. Leishman's The Monarch of Wit cover John Donne as well as need be for most readers, with Dr. Johnson and T.S. Eliot's reputation-making essays, but one never thinks there isn't room for more. Not, at least, when it's written with such flair as Katherine Rundell's biography. It seemed a bit showy at first and colourful more than scholarly, but it is vibrant and entertains vividly with its sharp insights and implications.

Donne's life hardly needs making more vivid. The horrors of religious persecution, his brother's death in prison, war, his own imprisonment, the deaths of so many of his children, including seeing a ghost, plague, poverty, the death of his wife and his own final illnesses as well as his necessary career advancement in high places make for lurid drama. His transformations from 'super-Catholic' to the orthodoxy of Protestantism, from self-styled libertine to a crowd-pulling, box-office preacher of some severity, from the world into abstraction and from embracing life to embracing death are a scintillating and often gruesome story that maybe need Katherine Rundell's brilliant mind and incisive prose to accommodate them.

Donne's change of religion is a sensible move in the circumstances given his brother's gory death on a charge of hiding a priest whose end is gorier still but his apparent switch from luxuriating in rakish pleasures to that of a hardline, devotional moralist, it is suggested, was brought forward by the death of Anne, his wife, who spent all her sixteen years of married life having children. It has long seemed to me that Donne's reputation as a womanizer was largely self-made and Katherine seems to agree,

Was, then, Donne a great tumultuous lover: a conqueror of swathes of women? After so much time and so much entropy, we can only guess: but, almost certainly not.

Certainly, once married, he seems uxurious and those who write so much of sensuality are likely to be imagining most of it but he's a compelling personality, a risk-taker by nature and I'm not at all sure. Anne's father, Sir George More, who has legitimate doubts about the marriage to a 'scribbling reprobate', once he hears about it, hears rumours that Donne was,

as sexually promiscuous as his poetry implied

and so Katherine isn't categorical on this most prurient of questions.

For one whose poetry was such a 'combinatorial, plastic process', who did not, like Thomas Parnell and Alexander Pope, believe that 'art had rules'; who 'did not want to sound like other poets' and was a 'neologamist' who,

accounts for the first recorded use in the Oxford  English Dictionary of around 340 words in the English language,

it would have been a great opportunity to meet Johannes Kepler when appointed chaplain on an ill-fated diplomatic mission to Bohemia in 1617. Kepler was re-designing our understanding of the heavens at least as drastically as Donne was mangling many people's idea of poetry. Luckily, Kepler is unaware that Donne was the author of Ignatius His Conclave which had scurrilously implicated his own mother as involved in witchcraft but if the trip wasn't a political success, Donne's career didn't suffer for it and it was a significant step on his way to the post of Dean of St. Paul's which was lucrative enough after so many financial worries and he was good at even if he thought he preferred to go to Venice as ambassador.

Having had quite a life, though, Donne took to death with some relish as if it were the same sort of metaphysical abstraction that he made his poems from. He had only been Dean for two years when serious illness first gives him a close-up view of it in 1623 and from then on, he's increasingly devoted to it until delivering his sermon about not asking 'for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee' and organizing his own passing, in sermons and the design of his shroud and statue, in a more thorough way than even David Bowie did more recently.

One could hardly fail, you might think, with a life like that to recount but there's a lot of it to organize and making an incoherent mess of it would be equally easy for an undisciplined biographer. Katherine Rundell uses the material in a virtuoso performance, never over-laden with detail and hugely readable in 24 themed chapters that follow seamlessly, 300 economical pages that include illustrations so that it is no hardship to be richly entertained and informed at the same time, making light of its deep import. It's no surprise at all that it's a prize-winner and already featuring on lists of Books of the Year. It very much belongs with Carey, Leishman, Stubbs, Johnson and Eliot. 

Racetrack Wiseguy

 One of the horses recommended below was a non-runner but the other four all passed the post first. Sadly in the big race, we had parted company with our jockey at the first fence and taken the wrong course and  the draconian rules of the Jockey Club don't regard that as winning. We have to get by in the face of such mindless adherence to petty details but we still do. 

It was a pay day. Pay days are never quite as big pay days as they might have been had we done it slightly differently but doing it the way we do it is our safeguard against disaster and it is only money after all.

In my first move into ownership I have my first runner tomorrow. Which only means I finally found the right place to click to join the Coral Racing Club. The fraction I own of Annie Mc in the 2.00 at Carlisle must be microscopic and I'm not backing it.

But one doesn't stop when it's going okay. Soaring Glory (Carlisle 1.00), American Mike (Navan 1.20) and Marble Sands (Leicester 2.10) can't be made worthwhile for careful money unless it's in a treble but if they all go in, that's a new high point for the year and if any let me down then we're still doing fine. The end of year account should surely now be only a matter of whether there can be some further profit-taking or if the account balance needs to be all carried forward as ammunition for next year.

 

The reason why pay days are never quite as big pay days as they might have been is because one bears in mind where one would be if nothing comes back. It is 'batting like Boycott', adding two more wickets to the score and so batting as if it is 50 for 2 when it's actually 50 for no wicket. It's not pretty, it's not exciting but it's pragmatic and it can be made to work. I didn't bat like that myself but the workhouse wasn't waiting to take me in if I got out cheaply. Would that it had been. It would have concentrated the mind.

Racetrack Wiseguy

Luccia (Newbury 12.15) did well to swerve a race against Queens Gamble at Cheltenham last time but will have to make her acquaintance eventually, you'd think. She can remain unbeaten, first up tomorrow, though, with Mr. Henderson's horses in good order and I'm glad enough of 2/1 with that all gone already and 13/8 as good as it gets at the minute.

That would actually do but it's unlikely I'll sit and watch all afternoon without having a less serious interest like any other Saturday punter.

I don't think Thyme Hill's a 2/5 shot to beat McFabulous in the 12.45 and would be tempted to put the odds against into some sort of combination, both of them being horses that I like but have let me down more than won in the past but fences was always where McFab was going whereas Thyme Hill would still be going over hurdles, maybe, had he not turned out to be such a 'nearly man'.

You'd think West Balboa (1.55), lightly raced and getting weight from some of the others and the stable going all out for what they can get, would be worth a shot at 7/2.

I heard something about Annsam for the old Hennessey Gold Cup at 3.05 months ago but can't see it myself although it might go into a small change mix of hopeful guesses for small change. I'm a big fan of Fiddlerontheroof but these big prizes are proving just beyond him at the weights and I'm not an each way person. Of course, all the big stables are having a go and most have found some form now so the percentage call, at 9/1, is maybe Threeunderthrufive.

I wouldn't be thrilled about the price of Amarillo Sky in the last but would have him at 2/1. If it were to win, it contributes at whatever price and I like what Joe Tizzard's been doing since taking over the yard and so that's probably two yankees once we've got Luccia in the bank. Those four and then put Annsam in instead of Threeunderthrufive for the other one, for no more than you'd spend on a cup of tea, you understand.

If Luccia doesn't win, we cry, sulk, console ourselves that at least we finished The Times crossword and think again, very carefully. But she will win.

Sean O’Brien, Embark

 Sean O’Brien, Embark (Pan Macmillan)

continued from below. I've read it now. Twice through and some bits more than that.

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One day there might be a concordance to the Complete O'Brien that will help establish that words relating mortality and not-being occured more frequently in the later work. He wouldn't be the only one but where we were once alienated or, in fact, 'somebody else', we are no longer even as substantial as that.

Embark arrived as I was midway through Katherine Rundell's recent biography of John Donne (see above, in due course) and with mention of its 'metaphysic' slipped into the summary on the back cover one is tempted towards comparisons with him more than the conventional one with Auden.

Opening with The Desks, we are immediately taken down into familiar subterranean O'Brien territory and faced with an 'examination' that we suspect might have deeper significance than an 'O' level. It's the first but by no means the last time a poem considers leaving towards what might be the next world which was increasingly what concerned Donne. The thesis would include that as well as considering to what extent their poems saw the world through abstractions and 'this life' as a contingent, fleeting thing.

Song looks more like Donne the longer you look at it and in it,

West of the furthest west is set

a single adamantine gate

and on that gate a lock.

but, if that's all there is to it, all there is to do is burn one's books, possess one's soul and wait.

Elsewhere, disposing of books, such worldly ideas as time and place as those represented by the Michelin Guide to Languedoc are

neither here nor there

a friend is remembered for writing of,

the life, the only life,

here between nowhere and never,

and, in The Runners, women running with their dogs are,

   so self-possessed , yet too pre-occupied

with elsewhere and with afterwards to be

entirely present.

 

Formalities, though, finds O'Brien more Larkin-like than he's ever been before in a sonnet re-make of Aubade except,

I and I alone was the disease

 

and then, in Waterworks,

'science shows' that we are the disease

prompts us to read 'dis-ease' not only as illness but being ill at ease in a way that a C17th poet was likely to have expected, I dare say.

I had the benefit of hearing Debussy's Cathedrale engloutie played a few months ago and so had no need to look up that it means 'sunken'. Sean uses the motif twice, alongside a number of other poems that recall his Drowned Book and Waterworks ends with its nightmare being found to be real, as did Thrillers and Cheese thirty years ago. It always looked to me as if Seamus Heaney's last two books went back over his earlier work when he reached and passed 60. Sean's work as he was approaching 70 is doing a similar thing. 

The disposal of the Michelin Guide wouldn't have been the only book that went in that clear-out and Prospero, who did very much the same thing, features in The Island from which this book's title comes in another leavetaking in which it

Has no story left to tell, 

and 

love could hardly matter less,

but it's never clear where we are embarking to go to, only that it will be elsewhere.

 

The bleakness has its own music throughout as well as both the customary rigour and the habits that we have become accustomed to. One would be suspicious of and almost instinctively take exception to a writer re-inventing themselves at 70 but it is to be hoped this isn't quite the valediction it sometimes reads like. I don't imagine Sean to be a devout church-goer in any other sense than Larkin was and so whether God turns out to be the answer as it was for Eliot, Auden and Bob Dylan, I'd leave open to some doubt.

If there are poems in Embark to put alongside those in Ghost Train and the glorious Beautiful Librarians, they might prove to be those saved up for the last three. It's best to start with a good one and end well, too.

The Reader, after Daumier, The Language and Star of Bethlehem provide a gentler finish than any thunderous climax that was best avoided. The book in brief might be summarized in The Language, where,

This dark is light enough to see the slick rain

shining on the slates like an effect

designed by God and yet no more designed

 

than all the nothingness your training 

leads you to infer.

 

And finally, Star of Bethlehem, an in memoriam in which the flower whose 'tiny candour' provides the tender vehicle that 'must be enough' when art, it had been said in Europa was 'all there is and might not be enough'. It's a bit like Auden changing his mind about whether we must love another and/or die. Both poets decided on the more optimistic alternative.         

 

Sean O’Brien, Embark

Sean O’Brien, Embark (Pan Macmillan)

First of all it’s pop music that moves on and leaves you behind, then it’s sport. They begin to look like young people’s games. I’m sure it’s not their fault so it must be mine but I didn’t foresee it happening with contemporary poetry by which one could once set one’s bearings. But if the days of my collection of 1990’s Poetry Reviews now seem like a Golden Age, there are still a handful of poets whose new books are an occasion and Sean O’Brien is central among them.

The pre-release, promotional paragraph here,

Embark 

doesn’t leave a reviewer much to add because that has long been the case and it continues to be.

There are a few poets (Elizabeth Bishop, Derek Mahon, Norman MacCaig) whose books one can open at any page confident of finding a faultless poem. There is another category (Auden, Hughes and maybe even Eliot) who had periods in their lives when they wrote better poems than at others. A third type spread their masterpieces almost from their beginnings throughout their lives (Thom Gunn, and possibly Larkin and Heaney although they almost qualify for the first group). Sean O’Brien is one of this last group who provide unforgettable highlights at their best. I’m still regretting not having made more of that first line of Europa,

The grass moves on the mass graves

that I might first have suspected of some verbal playfulness but has haunted me, on and off, ever since. The only rule out of all those that have been offered about poetry is that it first of all needs to be a piece of writing in which the line ends are decided by the author and not the compositor but it should also remain with you, in the unlikely event that it’s any good.

Familiarity with an artist’s work makes it harder to evaluate it against that of others when comparison with the rest of their own work is so difficult to avoid. Beethoven 4 would be much highly regarded if it didn’t come in between 3, 5 and 6. Embark is the only book of new poems I’ve bought this year, there not having been any by John Burnside, Julia Copus or the few others I’d look out for and so I can’t be sure it’s in a class of its own among this year’s releases but it is in as far as it’s the only one that’s been trusted with being given the chance. We must be due a report in The Observer announcing a new renaissance in English poetry, they come round with the regularity of a planet on an astrolabe, but you don’t have to believe all one reads in the papers and it might just be a few gatherings among a new generation who think they’re the first to make a break with tradition and be the new young guns.

We might all have thought we were that once but Sean O’Brien was never one for such vogues. Art does well to respect the tradition it owes a debt to and aspires to become a part of. Even Ezra Pound, for all the shift in taste he engineered, did that - more than most - and O’Brien takes part willingly in the aspects of the discipline he sees fit to adopt.

Those that one remembers becoming the inheritors of that tradition are the Old Guard sooner than one cares to notice. Sandy Denny never did find out where all the time went. Much of the old Northern Powerhouse that included Tony Harrison, Douglas Dunn amongst others for who compromise wasn’t their first preference have gone quiet leaving Sean the last remaining that we might think ‘major’ but Embark came through the letterbox a few minutes ago so I’d better read it.

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