Venerable Indeed

Before the long haul north, the furthest I've been for twenty years, I spent some time with Bede and his History of the English Church and People. He lived up there, as did Aidan, Cuthbert and Alan Hull and as do Sean O'Brien and Rod Clements.

Of course it's up to us how we want to interpret reports of miracles, piety and other Christian propaganda but whether any of it is true or not it's beautiful in its way. Like Vasari's Lives of the Artists in which each biography expounds the rare talents of its subjects, all the bishops and holy men that Bede tells us about are paragons of devotion and one gets the impression that both Vasari and Bede are aching to say that each was uniquely so but are held back because the definition of 'unique' doesn't allow them. 

I know the feeling. I'd like to say, at one time or another, that maybe 50 pieces of music are the best I've ever heard but you can only say such a thing about one of them.

What impressed most, though, was Bede's 'poetics'. He was more than 1200 years ahead of Robert Frost with the idea that 'poetry is what gets lost in translation' when reflecting on some lines by Caedmon that,

This is the general sense, but not the actual words that Caedmon sang in his dream; for verses, however masterly, cannot be translated literally from one language to another without losing much of their beauty and dignity.

 

By all means it would be insular of us to only read poems, or anything else, written in our own language but unless we are fluent in any others, we put all our trust in a translator to know the work of those who wrote in all the others but the 'poetry', the sound of it, is altered and so we can get a sense of it but never the whole effect.

I can't help thinking the point has been made here before, Frost notwithstanding, but Bede knew as much and, for me, that more than anything else, makes him venerable indeed.

Michael Nott, Thom Gunn, A Cool Queer Life

 Michael Nott, Thom Gunn, A Cool Queer Life (Faber)

You wait for what seems like half your life for the book you most wanted to read to be first written and then published and by the time it is its subject has been deposed from his undisputed position as your favourite poet, specialist subject and maybe even, I might have once precariously thought, 'role model'.

The book turning up exactly on time, once it was due, was still a major event but its sub-title made me dubious and wary. 'Cool' means 'detached' but is also a vague term of vogue approval; 'queer' is a derogatory term reclaimed in an act of defiance by those radical and upfront enough to do so, which it would have been dangerous to do in the 1950's, 60's and later. Both epithets can reasonably be applied to Thom Gunn with all good intentions but putting them so prominently on the cover does him no favours. He was much more than that in his day and if by now he's been reduced to such a definition, his work is diminished by them. 

In PNReview, Volume 16 Number 2, November - December 1989, Donald Davie wrote that,

I have in the press - to use that portentous phrase - a book about British poetry since 1960. And as I put it together I was surprised by how insistently Thom Gunn shouldered to centre-stage.

And that's what he was, or looked like, then - a central figure encompassing long, historical perspectives in poetry as well as contemporary references; one who moved from highly discplined, metrical forms to 'freer' lines and one who set himself up as 'impersonal' in manner and removed from the 'confessional' excesses of some of his contemporaries although it is now increasingly difficult to say where any such boundary lay. To reduce him to cool and queer, as if he was a little bit Miles Davis and a little bit Walt Whitman but mostly poetry's Lou Reed isn't good enough. And the photograph on the front cover doesn't help much, either.

Few biographies resemble psychological case studies as much as this but few people spent quite so much time ostensibly analysing themselves, their relationships with others and the world. In a book advertised as being 'no holds barred', though, one still wasn't expecting to find that young Gunn shared his mother's bed after her second husband left and that Gunn was on the outskirts of being investigated regarding the assassination of JFK, via his friend Don Doody. Soon, though, these extraordinary details don't seem so extraordinary after so many chapters of drug excesses and compulsive promiscuity and, for such apparently streetwise geezers, his entourage do seem alarmingly prone to 'falling in love'. Michael Nott begins, though, with the suicide of Gunn's mother, to who he was so attached, which clearly had an enormous effect on him.

Gladly, though, Nott doesn't lose sight of the work that made Gunn famous, regularly tracing the real people and occasions into the poems. While Gunn was most insistent that he was not 'confessional' in the style of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, that's a matter of opinion. His pursuit of 'impersonality' in his poems was to be admired but it's more in the detached attitude of his language than any escape from self that he achieves because, in a very Gunn-like paradox, that attempt looks more and more like a New Age 'search for himself'. Whether consciously or not, Nott compiles a long litany of writers that Gunn takes as role models as if his thesis is that Gunn was a highly talented tabula rasa, like David Bowie became in pop music, who assimilated almost all he was from precursors - Shakespeare, Donne, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Camus, Sartre, William Carlos Williams, Yvor Winters, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, Ezra Pound. 

What he did try to achieve, in common with other 1950's poets, was the avoidance of 'bad principles' although not all of his reveiwers from My Sad Captains in 1961 onwards agreed that he was successful in that. He can be seen to become himself in a Damascene moment on a dusty road in France when all his reading, thinking and inwardness are illuminated by a sense of release which might be identified as where the adventure begins but time and again it becomes apparent that he was only at home in restlessness, that 'love' - for want of a better word- was a strategic enterprise and a hedonism that defied reasonable limits was his primary motivation. At an early stage it was remarked that,

"He laughs too loud, as if he's got something to prove...that was a bit too self-dramatizing..that isn't actually quite true to yourself."

For all that he might have thought poetry could provide some ecsape from himself, it was a brave attempt that didn't work whereas Larkin's manifold ironies that accepted his lot for the most part did pace Gunn's respect for his technical excellence but derision of his lack of ambition. 

Given his lifestyle, Gunn might be counted as lucky to survive the AIDS epidemic of the 1980's. He lost many friends who were memorialized in his 1992 volume The Man with Night Sweats, the book that restored him to more generalized critical acclaim after the perceived difficulties of his 'middle period', and most of those tributes were metrical. While there are free verse and syllabic poems to admire, that is also where more of his less successful or lazier attempts are and metre is overall what he did best.

He did not go gentle into any good night but propelled himself headlong into his decline with as much commitment as he had embraced life in what retrospectively looks like a programme of self destruction but, having given up work, he was bored, may not have wanted to live and became increasingly difficult to live with. His death at the age of 74 was entirely foreseeable although the heroin found in his body had not been known to be part of his regular diet.

Books are more significant if they change our minds rather than merely confirming what we thought already. In one way it's a dull book, detailing repetitive episodes of compulsive behaviour but for the vast majority of us who have led more sheltered lives it offers a view of a sub-culture which we might not have known quite how thoroughgoing and established it was. It also makes it more difficult to argue against Gunn being understood as a 'gay poet' because first and foremost it makes clear that that is what he always was.

Observer magazine 14/8/66

I am the very grateful recipient of this collector's item. I have often depended on the kindness of strangers but such generosity quickly tranforms them into friends. There's not much I want that I haven't got but this was one thing. With a visit to the Rosemary Tonks Archive in Newcastle University Library booked for soon, this is about all I was missing as a Rosemary collector.

R.S. Thomas is allocated the centre page spread with Rosemary as the photogenic front cover as The Observer caters for its literary readership with Poets and Their Worlds, the British selected as 1966's bigshots also including Larkin and Hughes, whose reputations waxed, Richard Murphy and Iain Crichton Smith, whose waned, and Thom Gunn who might not be regarded as the superstar he was then but a new, proper, big biography might reclaim some residual interest.

More space is given over to Jane Bown's photographs than any sort of commentary but the poets are given the chance to speak for themselves with one poem each which is not a bad idea. Their brief biographical notes don't offer much insight except for a glimpse of how significant marital status looked in 1966.

One now wonders how much we are being told subliminally by Gunn being 'unmarried', Larkin being a 'bachelor' and Hughes's wife, who is named, having committed suicide. By now we know much more about the 'sordid' detail between those distinctions between ways of being single but none of them really were in C21st parlance, they just weren't officially married. But that is what mattered then, even in The Observer.

It's a gorgeous thing that has been kept in pristine condition for 58 years and as its latest custodian I hope I continue to keep it so.

--

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I should be able to see off the Gunn book and review it here before embarking on the adventure north. I'll save all there is to say for then but a few page references noted on the customary old envelope already take me a little way into that. If you reach the end of a book and then have to decide what to say about it it's maybe too late by then.  

The Legend

Prospects of a return to competitive cycling, or any other sort come to that, were being downplayed after an unexpected sighting of this legend* (see footnote) of 1990's distance events at a track in Swindon at the weekend. A few stone over an ideal racing weight means there's not really world enough, or time, for a comeback some 10 or 12 years after last getting on, and then off, a bike but it felt better than I had any right to expect it to.

The track was never my thing but the chance to ride with the family's young apprentice squad on my niece's bike, who looked as good as she ever did on it and much better than me, was much too difficult to pass up. Cycling can be undertaken without any competitive element whatsoever but it's surprising how quickly all that kicks back in when a likely-looking rival is available. What transpired was a Race for the Ages as I chased my 7yo great nephew down the back straight but had to sit in behind him through some highly technical twists and turns, waiting to pick him off in the finish.

That wasn't a given thing, though. He was well aware of where I was and as I came on the outside to do him for a turn of pace, he showed trackcraft beyond his years and edged across to block me. Well, I could hardly risk crashing such a nice bike so kindly lent so I had to switch inside, a bit like Lester Piggott did on Vacarme in the Richmond Stakes at Goodwood in 1983 for which he was disqualified but, like Lester, I made sure I got there first and they can ask questions later.

It's true I got beat in the re-match but I didn't know it was a re-match, didn't even realize he was on the track, but an honourable draw is the most sporting result. 

You never quite forget how to do it. It all comes flooding back. It is, in fact, a bit like riding a bike.

 

* legend, for these purposes it is only necessary to be considered a legend by one admirer. I did precious little to be such to anybody else but I felt like one and irony is my preferred mode of writing anyway.

Worth Waiting For

The Perfect Stranger by P.J. Kavanagh has bided its time very patiently upstairs for over twenty years, more like twenty-five, since arriving as part of a large box of books donated to my library. There could still be more such good books unread up there, I don't know.

Having not been so taken with the signed Selected Poems returned to after being sent in that direction by Derek Mahon, PJK's memoir is every bit as good as the praise it is accorded. 

Somewhat itinerant in these early years, he very naturally becomes the non-conformist 'poet' in family, school, as a mis-fit in proper jobs, in Paris and in the best bits in the army, most notably at Catterick where the humour goes up a couple of gears,

At the highest, windiest, most improbable point of World's End Camp, by itself (I'm sure all the other huts had long since blown away) stood the P.O. Block. Except that we lived in it, it was uninhabitable.

In the Foreword, Kavanagh expresses doubts about the book's status as autobiography and explains why he didn't provide a sequel. It's a pity he didn't but we are better off being grateful for what we have rather than regretting what we don't have.  

Browsing

 'Browsing' is an unpleasant word for an enjoyable thing to do. Perhaps it subliminally suggests eyebrows which bring to mind caterpillars. I'm not sure if that's how words work for everyone but they do it like that for me.

Browsing is non-committal, indolent and restful with all the benefits of Existential freedom  before the burden of choice brings the shame and nausea of having committed oneself. I browsed my own books for things to look at, which is what they are for. I haven't looked at much poetry on a regular basis for quite some time so I picked out-

Don Paterson, Landing Light, in which the accomplishment seems to be beyond my reckoning. Don's books on the Shakespeare Sonnets and Michael Donaghy are brilliant and there are poems I like a lot, too, but sometimes it's best to admit when one is not on the right wavelength.

Paul Muldoon, Maggot, which is from 2010 and thus a little after his finest hour. A little bit forced, still fine in places but maybe the strain of continuing to be Muldonian and then even more so was begiining to show.

Sylvia Plath, the original version of Ariel as introduced by Freida, is still devastating in its language and, like Rothko perhaps, finds a way of dealing with its extreme themes. It's far too difficult, especially in the light of Freida's honest introduction, to have an opinion about events one was not a part of but I've long been convinced that Sylvia was a far greater talent than Ted.

And Derek Mahon, whose prose pieces in Red Sails I had entirely forgotten about. On boozy writers, P.J. Kavanagh, The Gallery Press and advertising work in America, he is wide-ranging, somewhat austere and admirable. He gives pop music short shrift - The Beatles, Stones and Dylan - but has some time for Joni. I was heartened to see that one of the Kavanagh poems he cites is Blackbird in Fulham which was my PJK 'breakthrough' moment and he refers us to the memoir which is upstairs and unread so that will be coming off the shelf for an ideal read on forthcoming trains.

Some Things Old, Some Things New

It was a bad day in the EMI print room one day in 1989. The booklet in my 3-CD set of Beethoven Piano Trios (Bareboim, Zuckerman, du Pré) is fine on the outside but the inside pages are from a booklet for Mozart's Vespers. Perhaps it's a collector's item but I doubt it. Not to worry, the music is wonderful, prompted by last week's Ghost in Chichester, and having them all played by this supergroup is very much the sort of long-term benefit that such concerts can lead to.

I'd very much like to get Beethoven into my Top 3 Composers but Bach, Handel and Mozart are unwilling to cede their places so I go with a four. I may or may not find upstairs the black and white poster of him I had on my bedroom wall in the 1970's, fearsome though it was. As it is, not being clear which would be the best biography with which to improve on the basic one I have, I might get the Letters and thus have the life at first hand, as it were.

--

He's hardly a discovery, it's just a very old enthusiasm coming back rejuvenated. Latest to be revisited from the bookshelves has been the Richard Yates Collected Stories. Whaddaya, Crazy, one of the greatest prose fiction writers. I hitched a ride on the Yates revival in 2002, liking to think I helped in a modest way with an essay in a magazine just like more recently I've jumped aboard the Rosemary Tonks bandwagon, early enough to pay plenty for rare, old editions before both were re-issued in paperback. That's the cost of being in the vanguard but it's well worth it for the feeling of having known. 

Where Rosemary owed much, had she felt inclined to be revived, to Neil Astley, Yates was more to do with Leonardo di Caprio.

--

Also due soon are Sean O'Brien, Juniper (Dare-Gare Press) and the inordinately long awaited Thom Gunn biography and so that constitutes the Summer Reading list.

 

Nicola Meecham at the Menuhin Room

 Nicola Meecham, Menuhin Room, Portsmouth, July 6

It was thirty years, my homework tells me, before Beethoven's Piano Sonata no. 23, op. 57, acquired its 'impassioned' title. It wouldn't be his only piece it could be applied to but such names can only pass into common usage by popular consent. Among the crueller revenges that fate took on Beethoven as retribution for his monumental musical gift was the onset of his loss of hearing, from about 1803, and it's hard not to think that the Appassionata was at least in part his 'rage, rage against the dying of the sound', about 150 years before Dylan Thomas exhorted us all to do similarly against that of the light.

Fate might be the point as the 'fate motif' that it opens with is not far from that of the Fifth Symphony. Adopting his heroic stance, Beethoven tempts the pianist to get carried away into something too grandiose but Nicola Meecham is wise to that and informed her performance with nuance and expression to provide the necessary contours on this mountain. She opens the Andante with a dampened statement of the theme, almost staccato it seemed to me, before it blossoms into the sumptuous variations.

The Allegro becomes Presto with each hand busier in its turn or with them busy in unison. Beethoven is grandstanding, not for the first time, but in his case it doesn't count as a bad habit. I'm often very taken with musicians like Nicola who play from memory and envy what they carry in their memory, obviating the necessity of carrying round with them a gadget with earpieces in order to have music wherever they go.

I only wondered if putting the big ticket item first might overshadow what was to follow. He's not an easy act to follow. Boris Pasternak, better known for writing film scripts for Omar Sharif and Julie Christie, could have devoted his life to music but chose literature instead. His Two Preludes here were broad in vision if short in duration hinting that there might have been a Zhivago Symphony in him but Scriabin took the other route and Nicola ended with his Six Preludes, op. 13, and Sonata-Fantasy, op. 19, beginning with some portent in the Maestoso before the frillier Allegro and on into a sea of lulls and fff that one could happily get lost in and, I have to admit, I did. Not that it detracted from the enjoyment.

Nicola readily and impressively maintained the tradition and high standards of the Menuhin Room series. I'd be more superlative if I saw less of such things because, by definition, not everything can be special but it happens that most things are and that makes a nonsense of the language. Recent weeks have been tremendous. I don't really want a rest from such things but I'm going to have one. It might help re-set the battered lexicon, the 'word-hoard' as Seamus Heaney called it, before the Autumn season across the region where I can already see a litany of wonderful-looking things lined up in wait.

Francesca Romana di Nicola at Lunchtime Live!

 Francesca Romana di Nicola, Portsmouth Cathedral, July 4 

The harp is music's equivalent of champagne - pure, sparkling and clean. It has to be saved for special occasions because we would be spoilt if we had it all the time and so we get by very well on the white wine of violin, red wine of cello and maybe the piano is water. Today it provided the perfect antidote to the scurrilous politics going on around us. 

Francesca Romana di Nicola's Miniature is a series of short pieces for solo harp that come with poems by Juan Kruz Igerabide, here read by him in Basque with English translations provided, that gave some context and elucidation to the programmatic music.

One soon becomes accustomed to the luminous effect in the Moorish mystique of Arabian Habanera, the hypnotic The Running and the lingering light and fading embers of Sunset. In Passage one hears further dance rhythms which I blamed on the bossa nova and while not being sure I found Ravel, who is mentioned in the poem, quoted in Walking, it was Basque in flavour.

I entirely take the point that poetry is 'that which gets lost in translation' and thus is only truly itself in its original langauage but I was very taken with the

               faint shivers

of serene vertigo

in Thought. 

Garden brought to mind jazz influences and prompted the unlikeliest of comparisons between this iridescent sound and the earthier songs of Fats Waller. Horizons was suitably spacious before Magic ended the set not with any classical climax but gently,

decontaminated by the pure air of sentiment 

which summarized the whole programme. Magic, indeed.

That was a special occasion and a rare pleasure bringing with it something exotic, the sound of the harp not only for its own sake but in some evocative and exquisite compositions and poetry in words, too. It was tremendous to see it so well attended. Champagne would have been ideal to go with it.

Solarek Piano Trio in Chichester

 Solarek Piano Trio, Chichester Cathedral, July 2

It wasn't Beethoven that put the ghost into his Trio in D major, op. 70 no. 1. Somebody else found it there and, as with other of his work that he didn't give such names to, that's what it became known as. Before the haunting, though, the Solarek Piano Trio began with Soir et Matin by Mel Bonis which was picturesque and atmospheric, Marina Solarek's violin and Ellen Baumring-Gledhill's cello sharing the evening motif while Robert Bridge's piano was dusky underneath. The morning was in a noticeably higher register, gently awakening in a way that vaguely brought to mind Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe.

Beethoven is rarely over-shadowed on any programme, though, and the Ghost Trio was the main event. The Allegro dashed in its vivace e con brio way with Ellen performing some of the fastest fingerwork I've possibly ever seen on a cello but then the Largo was where we were to expect some chill in the air. Yes, it is muted and mournful and perhaps in search of lost passion, its desolate theme mistily in the violin and then the piano with Robert also revealing the perturbèd spirit. The Presto was boisterous in Beethoven's muscular way, the two string players apparently having their attempt at some Mozartian salon elegance continually interrupted by cartwheels and acrobatics from the piano and having to join in. The Trio was not on my record shelves but is yet another thing that will have to be added thanks to the wide-ranging education provided by all these tremendous events. There's no point buying one, I'll have the lot. Barenboim, Zucherman and Du Pré it is, then.

Chichester's summer lunchtime series ends next week but the Autumn list is already available with a lot to look forward to on it because one is never disappointed there.