Let's Mek It Beckett

 Next off the ranks is Samuel Beckett's Dream of Fair to middling Women, still part of the ongoing JoyceFest because it features a version of Lucia. I didn't feel like taking on another vast volume like Ellman or the biography of Ulysses just yet so I eyed Beckett with some trepidation and began. 

It owes a debt to Joyce and no mistake, published in 1932 when he was 26, it comes before the Wake but he would have been aware of what was being written by his chosen mentor. It's immediately more accessible to the extent that it is comprehensible and I have high hopes of it. As the title might lead one to expect, it carries an erotic charge but its language is the sort of joy that Joyce's much heavier technique outweighs in some ways to its disadvantage,

they kept it going in a kind of way, he doing his poor best to oblige her and she hers to be obliged, in a gehenna of sweats and fiascos and tears and an absence of all douceness.

That is brilliant and it's not the only bit that is.

We may be on a winner here and a visit back upstairs to revisit the likes of Murphy and Molloy after heaven knows how long could extend the queue of books lined up.

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We call Beckett 'Beckett', of course. We call Hardy 'Hardy', Dickens 'Dickens' and Larkin 'Larkin'. Sam, Thomas and Philip seem inappropriate. So would it be inappropriate to refer to some authors by their first names? It might seem to imply some familiarity, some casual acquaintance or even something patronising. Quite often here in book or music reviews I prefer first names if only to be friendly and not academically austere. It's different in each case. For some reason, I'd never call Paul Muldoon 'Paul' or Ms. Duffy 'Carol Ann' but, perhaps as long term favourites, Gunn is often 'Thom', O'Brien can be 'Sean' and Bishop is 'Elizabeth'. Sylvia is 'Sylvia' because she's famous enough as such, and if Dylan Thomas isn't always 'Dylan' it's in order not to confuse him with Bob.

The matter arises in regard to the essay due soon relating to Rosemary Tonks and Philip Larkin. I can see why it's not treating them on equal terms to call them 'Rosemary' and 'Larkin' but that's what I call them. I'm not 100% okay with calling Rosemary 'Tonks' but the 'house style' and academic propriety perhaps demand that I do so that's what it might have to be. Larkin is the institution that he has become and doesn't invite the informality of 'Philip' but 'Tonks' objectifies someone one has immense sympathy for and sounds too abrupt.

One of my first appearances in print, circa 1975, was in the letters page of the august Listener on that very subject. Linden Huddlestone, teacher of fourth form Eng. Lang., was a fellow subscriber and impressed that Thursday morning but word was, in a school where first names were rarely used before the sixth form, that it found little support in the staff room. Green !!! Good Lord, whatever next ??? He'll be wearing coloured socks and listening to pop music next. But, no, I wasn't. I was mis-spending my youth by taping Shostakovich String Quartets from the radio and reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

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There is much to look forward to on all fronts, not the least of which is the appearance of that essay in print making me feel somehow like a bona fide contributor to Rosemary Studies. Long term there are some absolutely choice artefacts that might become mine that will be fine to have for the want of having before they are assimilated into the library and are taken for granted.

Ahead of those, though, this week's arrival of the Busoni Fantasia Contrappunstica will be the playlist until the arrival of the Brahms Viola Sonatas. Both come from the repertoires of much-admired artistes I've met as collateral benefits of my ideal retirement job as hack concert reviewer. The Busoni is somewhere up in that rarified area of his Bach Chaconne, a wonderful hybrid of the baroque and C19th indulgence. That will last until the arrival of yet more Brahms chamber music, a glorious niche, some of which is due in Portsmouth's Menuhin Room on May 11, at 12.30, and if you can get yourself there you'd be doing yourself a big favour.