Unintermittent and other stories

 Sometimes one word stands out in a sentence, in a paragraph or maybe poem. It's best if it doesn't do it so much that it distracts from  all the others too much but occasionally it works perfectly as part of the whole and one just thinks, wow.

One such word occurs in Stephen Hero when that main character is sitting in his Italian lesson, just before he sees Emma passing, out of the window, and makes his excuses to chase after her,

He followed his Italian lesson mechanically, feeling the unintermittent deadliness of the atmosphere of college in his throat and lungs, 

How well do I recall that feeling, most vividly from 'A' level History but other lessons, too. The negative construction is one of the things that Larkin took from Hardy and some of us lesser mortals have attempted since. It can work very well, the vividness of the thing that isn't there being made even more so by being heard even in its deleted condition. As in 1984, somehow 'doubleplusungood' it is mostly all good things but it is turned bad by the negative element. The 'deadliness' of the college atmosphere could have been descibed as constant but that's not as good as it not being intermittent.

 

It's hard to know how good a book Stephen Hero would be if it hadn't been modified into the Portrait. It would surely be very good but as 'art' it isn't quite as good as the final version. It's similarly hard to say how good second-rate songs by The Beatles, Stephin Merritt, Carole King, the Motown Hit Factory and all are because they are overshadowed by their better siblings but second-rate Beatles would be Tremeloes or Dave Clark Five and there's a term for second-rate Motown - Northern Soul and that is well worth having. If Stephen Hero wasn't the first draft of a James Joyce masterpiece it could have served as a very fine novel by some other inheritor of the tradition of George Moore and Turgenev.

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While it is customary to preview Cheltenham here, I don't usually review it.

There are always good stories and there are always many of the best horses but with Mr. Henderson's horses not well and either absent or uncompetitive, a few too many odds-on chances in sometimes relatively small fields it hasn't felt completely Cheltenham throughout. It seems churlish to sound a downbeat note but only 46000 there on Wednesday suggests it might not be quite what it once was.

Tuesday could hardly have gone better for me but while it is possible to enjoy sport for its own sake - like a good test match in cricket or that distant memory of Emma Raducanu during lockdown- horse racing is a balance sheet, it's accountancy and it's the stock market. One takes part entirely to what extent one wants to and your plus or minus is your scorecard and your reason to feel good or feel bad alone. 

However, the stone cold solid Galopin Des Champs retains the Gold Cup which precious few have been able to do - the loose horse was my main concern - and so we got in and got out in one piece, possibly the price of a pint to the good. And although I have a small interest in the next two races, that hardly matters. They'd amount to one more pint and eventually one can have seen enough horse flesh for one week.