Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 I don't think I'm exactly 'trending' but the metrics suggest that a few more than usual having been turning up here recently so you are all most welcome. 

Tomorrow is a particularly difficult day with a very fine concert in the Menuhin Room clashing with one of the last big days of horse racing until it goes literally flat for the most part until October, for me at least. It's an awful decision to have to make and if I hadn't landed the odds today I'd probably go to the music but I'm not a one-trick pony and there are other great music events lined up so it's all about Aintree tomorrow and right now I'm in that delirious moment of thinking that anything's possible and re-investing some of today's profit will land me five grand I won't know what to do with when my homework proves 100% correct and pays well over five grand. 

It might not, of course, but somehow horse racing brings out the optimist in those of us usually so devoted to pessimism.

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Found in among the radio schedules this week was an old Great Lives on Radio 4Extra, the half hour in which a well-known person makes the case for a hero of theirs and, it seems, somebody else makes the case against. 

I always want to take part in any such enterprise but can't be sure who I'd nominate for that because I can often see the case against. From cricket, though, both Basil d'Oliviera and Derek Randall seem hard to find fault with; Elizabeth Bishop from poetry; I'd be glad to defend Danny Baker. And there are still one or two non-famous people from real life who haven't been far short of perfect.

But guess who Bernard Manning nominated - Mother Theresa of Calcutta. Not Roy 'Chubby' Brown. Mr. Manning had a serious, spiritual side, you see, didn't regard himself as offensive and didn't think it was proper for little kiddies in faraway places like India to be left in dustbins. He was not a complicated man. He knew what he thought and he thought what he liked. 

I wouldn't say he was provocative. One of the most underwhelming assessments of a poem at our local poetry group is 'thought-provoking'. But, no, not at all - what thoughts did it provoke.

Mr. Manning's insistence that he wasn't racist consisted of saying that he treated everyone the same and made jokes about all kinds of people and he once did a benefit gig for a little Pakistani kid. And, yes, maybe, or maybe not. But he made me feel racist by making me realize that it wasn't just Yorkshiremen I found rather too forthright, it was Mancunians, too, so perhaps having provoked such thoughts in me some 22 years after the fact, Mr. Manning should have appeared on Radio 4 more often. Like on Thought for the Day which I think continues on its dreary way. Or perhaps I'd go on Great Lives and nominate Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees-Mogg. 

Oh, I'm sorry, there seems to have been a misunderstanding. No, I don't think they led great lives but they thought they did.

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An impressive life was lived by Georges Simenon as detailed in Pierre Assouline's biography. Even in its early stages Simenon possesses an energy and self-possession that few could hope to match. He knows what he wants and he knows how to get it, wise enough to know that he can't write the good books he aspires to without doing an inordinate, highly committed and opportunistic apprenticeship writing generic bad ones.

I was once impressed by the factory method by which Dick Francis produced his cliff-hanging thrillers, one per year, according to his plan. However, that is pedestrian and lazy compared to Simenon's timetable in which novels could be delivered on a 15-day timetable.

It is the literary equivalent of Tin Pan Alley, the hit factories and it doesn't mean that the end product is the worse for it but the definition of 'special' includes the idea that it can't be endlessly produced on a large scale. Even Tamla Motown disintegrated under such pressure in due course.

So many words, so many works, remain suspicious. There has to be a formula. Not every Shakespeare sonnet, Mozart symphony or Rembrandt painting is quite as good as the best of them. Perhaps not all of Bach is quite as good as the very best of him. And so Simenon, much as we might enjoy his work, benefitted from 'facility'. Like Balzac. He did it easily, not without hard work but without difficulty.

I'm impressed but I'm impressed in the same way that I've sometimes been by the way people have been brilliant at things that I don't want to do - Tiger Woods, Lewis Hamilton, Kirkland Laing. I still like to think that less is more, that a small number of truly great things is better than a vast pile of good things. That's the case for Elizabeth Bishop, not J.S. Bach but, as ever, there are no rules.