Dorothy Parker

Gail Crowther, Dorothy Parker in Hollywood (Gallery Books);  Dorothy Parker, Constant Reader (McNally Editions)

In the background of many 'colourful' characters is a difficult upbringing. Dorothy Parker's brilliant, acerbic, contrary and yet much-loved personality very likely owes much to the damage done in her early years as outlined in Gail Crowther's first chapter before she goes into further detail about the 35 years spent on and off in Hollywood, itinerant, marrying the same man twice either side of one more addicted to booze than she was and gradually declining into squalor and spirited hopelessness.

Remembered mostly for her wit, which was both self-deprecating and at the savage expense of others in the Algonquin Hotel, New York, or in book reviews in The New Yorker, it was not always as much fun as that ongoing party might appear. Psychiatrists might diagnose it all as an elaborate defence mechanism but she was very good at it, her contracts as a screenwriter in Hollywood being of a magnitude that took quite some squandering. She did it all, though, not without a conscience and supported the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, the anti-fascists in Spain and other leftist causes with considerable commitment.

However greatly in demand she was for her film dialogue, it was precarious employment, often uncredited, with writers the most disposable of those involved in making films. Dorothy professed not to like films while being Oscar-nominated twice. She preferred books -or some of them- and they made up most of her few material possessions along with, strangely, a set of toy Napoleonic soldiers.

She might have written a great novel or two and been remembered alongide Ernest Hemingway who she had some time for but I suspect that sustained effort might have been beyond her. There are stories and poems and the short form appears to have suited her better, not least in her New Yorker book reviews, 1927-28, collected in Constant Reader, which are discursive and regularly dismissive although she knows what she likes which makes her praise worth having. As, for example, the unusual lengths she goes to in favour of Villon by D.B. Wyndham Lewis,

His latest biographer seems to be the only one who can know the poet and the thief with intimacy and affection, and yet hold back from getting a crush on him. 

She can't allow herself to express too much admiration for one book without taking out a handful of others in the process. That sort of dissatisfaction might be where she feels most at home since sustained happiness is something she doesn't appear to have the capacity for. Her two marriages to Alan Campbell, glamorous, good-looking and bi-sexual, were acts of great mutual devotion but possibly two people depending on each other, each believing the other to be their raft and salvation.

There's a danger that we might be entertained, compelled or mortified by Dorothy Parker and her turbulent life rather than read her writing, as happens with Oscar Wilde perhaps, and so a return to the Penguin Collected is something to do in the near future.

Emmanuel Bach and Jenny Stern in Chichester

 Emmanuel Bach and Jenny Stern, Chichester Cathedral, Jan 28

Rodolphe Kreutzer never played the Sonata for Piano and Violin no.9, op.47, dedicated to him by Beethoven. That's gratitude. He said he didn't like it, or anything else Beethoven had written for that matter, but perhaps it was too demanding for him. Gladly, Emmanuel Bach and Jenny Stern don't share his view.

In an interview last year, Andrew McVittie referred to sonatas, or at least some of them, as 'big'. That changed my conception of what constitutes size. I'd thought it depended on how many instruments were involved but it's not, is it. It's about length, range, scope, depth and such things. Thus a sonata for one or two musicians can be potentially 'bigger' than, say, a Haydn symphony and the Kreutzer is such a thing. 

You'd think it was a violin sonata, really, but without having kept count I'd estimate there are more notes for the piano in it and Jenny Stern fluently took the lead part as often as Emmanuel's violin sometimes or at least took part in exchanges of phrases. It is properly billed as for two instruments, requiring two frontpersons, not one.

In the Adagio sostenuto- Presto, Emmanuel was delicate in what at times, in 1802, was already retro baroque. The Andante is gentle variations on a song-like theme, gaining in decorousness, its serenity moving into a passage of trilling and pizzicato charm. One is never left feeling short-changed by Beethoven variations but, unlike what Dr. Johnson said of Paradise Lost, that nobody ever wished it longer, maybe we do in his case. The Presto was necessarily more spirited and spritely but in Emmanuel's hands here still tended towards more elegance than outright dash.

Fritz Kreisler's La Gitana, programmed but almost by way of an extra like an encore, was a short poem evoking romance. The programme notes cited praise for Emmanuel's Brahms Concerto from Maxim Vengerov, no less, and the 'superb...very deep and emotional performance'. I wouldn't have said quite that about his Kreutzer but we can more than get by on immaculate, precise and thoughtful. We go to Chichester confident of top quality performances and never go away disappointed.

Michael Longley

Michael Longley was one of the poets whose new titles I routinely bought. They are diminishing in number. Last year the death of John Burnside reduced it to possibly the fingers on one hand and now it's one less than that.

Some comparison with Seamus Heaney is inevitable and if Longley's work doesn't quite compare with his, neither does anybody else's of that generation. It seems by all accounts he was an equally admirable person, though. I saw him do a reading at a conference in Oxford circa 2007 but, as I ought to be aware more often, was astute enough not to contrive any word with him. However, he was deeply impressive.

He was a major contributor to a special generation of Irish poets that, with Heaney, also included the great Derek Mahon, Ciaran Carson and more and put Ireland at the forefront of poetry in the British Isles.

He was a poet of both time and place, the place being the affinity with home in Carrigskeewaun with his wife, Edna, the much respected scholar, and family and the time being both that that he lived in and longer C20th perspectives. Without being lured into modernist difficulties or intellectual elitism, his poetry could resonate by simply being honest, sincere and sympathetic.

Angelina Kopyrina at Lunchtime Live!

 Angelina Kopyrina, Portsmouth Cathedral, Jan 23

Portsmouth Cathedral has capacity for plenty but the intimate St. Thomas's Chapel not quite so many. It didn't have room for many more today, though, even on an inclement January Thursday, which goes to show that when there is a box office performer to be seen and heard, the box office benefits.

Being the earliest of arrivals, always on an earlier bus rather than risking anything later being delayed, I make claim to a couple of choice seats early doors to see and hear from which is an education in itself. I don't want to say which of the array of musicians in the Portsmouth catchment area is greatest, favourite or best and don't need to beyond being glad to have them all but, were there to be such a prize to be awarded, anybody hoping to win it would need to be adjudged ahead of Angelina Kopyrina.

The Beethoven Sonata no. 18 is a gorgeous thing not quite on the grand scale of some later such pieces. I'm sure we'd have all gone home well impressed and happy enough by that. For the first time in several years I made no notes of suitable adjectives to describe the piece or the playing of it. I'd rather watch the hands, for once be immersed in the performance rather than the surrogate hack writing about it I do later. It was civilized, ornamented, fluent and exactly why Beethoven is essential without him becoming too glowering or tormented.

But in the event that was the first course of a meal that was to prove so much richer and deeper. Prokofiev must be a bit put out that it's a portrait of Shostakovich I now have on my wall over there to my left. His Sonata no. 7, op. 83, made for a powerful statement of intent.

At first in military phrasings but then more mysterious and captivating, the third movement was next marked 'precipitato', which suggests rain. I'm finding 'collapsed' and 'fallen' in dictionaries while the musical term, so it says here, is 'hurried' or 'impetuous'. But while reviews of music afterwards can't conjure it back to life, neither do these vague directions do any justice to what it sounds like in a performance like this.

We had heard Angelina handle the tentative, sensitive wonder of the slow tempi and been transfixed but, if art is enlarged by contrasts, the bombardment of the last couple of minutes of the Preciptato was another thing entirely. The Kopyrina we have been led to expect and gladly turn up for. Prokofiev, and Angelina, made their point. The Complete Piano Sonatas will be on their way to this house asap

I understand there's another of those storms they give a name to due here tomorrow. This one's called Eowyn. I don't enjoy them much, powerful and elemental though they may be. I'll probably take one look at the best it can do and think, oh really - but I was at Angelina Kopyrina doing her Prokofiev so...what, exactly.

I can bring along a few interested friends to a gig like this, confident that they won't be disappointed, far more confident than if I gave them the name of a horse to back. I turned and looked at them and it was obvious they were thinking what I was.

Orlando Reade, What in Me is Dark

 Orlando Reade, What in Me is Dark, The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost (Jonathan Cape)

One possible title for a literary memoir by me- in the unlikely event of anybody wanting to read one- could be John Milton, His Part in My Downfall. My downfall was hardly of the magnitude of being cast out of heaven but my school career finished on a low note without a grade A in Eng Lit and it was in part attributable to Milton, Chaucer and Forster being grouped together on the same paper - the three books I cared less about- that I actually failed. And so I went to a third division university and never felt quite so scholarly again.

Orlando Reade's survey of the legacy of Paradise Lost has somewhat more import. I'm not convinced works should be taken incomplete, like we did only books 1 and 2 and only two of the Canterbury Tales, which are incomplete anyway. I'm still full of excuses nearly half a century later but this is the first time I've ventured back into it and so only now catch up with some idea of what it's all about from Orlando Reade's unfolding synopsis.

I can't help thinking that Satan is the hero, or at least one of some sort and flawed, as the chief rebel angel who will not serve. While Reade traces the hero worship of Milton as a poet down through Wordsworth to Eliot's shift in sympathy towards him and Pound's implacable refusal to serve him in turn, he also makes uprisings such as those in Haiti and against the slave trade relatable to Milton's republican, puritan sympathies. While the underlying ideas are coherently comparable we might think of Auden's 'poetry makes nothing happen' and whether it really took a poem to make slaves perceive the iniquity of their situation.

One thing we are made aware of is the extent to which Milton was regarded as the greatest of poets up to and including the Victorian age and how Modernism saw through the magnificence and he's not been quite so fashionable ever since.

Much of that might be due to how Theology has become the study of what humankind wrote about their own invention, God, rather than the study of the God that Western civilisation had predicated its morality, government and wars on ever since a charismatic Jewish boy arrived to tell people how to live. It very soon became complicated, though, with such perplexing questions about why God had given human beings free will when they'd have been better off, and much less culpable, without it. That might be one reason why I don't 'get it' but I can also see how a major work offers so many possible approaches and presents the human situation, in Adam and Eve, as conflicted between aspiration to perfection and an inherently compromised fallen condition.

Reade continues his survey of revolutionaries with a debt to Paradise Lost through George Eliot, Fidel Castro, Virginia Woolf, Hannah Arendt, Malcolm X and CLR James to the unlikely Jordan Peterson before returning to the parallel in the metaphor for Heaven and Hell provided by his own teaching being split between Princeton and New Jersey prisons. It makes for a broad, idiosyncratic sweep of cultural reference points not overly academic and never less than of interest. I'm not a lot further persuaded that I'm going back to the poem any time soon, though. I wouldn't dispute its significance or the place it has in the canon but I'm happy enough to have had the insight offered here rather than plough through the twelve books of it.

One big question remains about the very first line,

Of man's first disobedience and the fruit 

that Reade stresses in uniform iambics on syllables 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10. I'd understood it to begin on a blast of a fanfare with stresses on all except 8 and 9. If there's that much to think about in line 1, how much remains in the next 11 thousand of them. Sometimes one has to be satisfied with a passing familiarity on things that will never be one's first choice subjects.

The Shostakovich Symphonies, part 1

I felt compelled to do it although I knew it might not be a good idea. One can hardly proclaim Shostakovich as the Greatest Composer of the C20th with such thin knowledge of his symphonies as I had. I thought they were too big, noisy and portentous for me and so far, up to no. 6, I'm not far wrong.

No. 5 is a bit familiar, it being one of the best-known and it is justifiably so but while the best of these pieces are important and significant, none are likely to make any sort of challenge to the String Quartets, Preludes and Fugues or Sonatas in my idea of choice Shostakovich. Even if the music is 'better than it sounds', one ideally needs to know at what level or irony or satire he is working. Sometimes it's Soviet Socialist Realism, sometimes it's not and sometimes it's in code to get past Stalin.

While one could feel uncomfortable having doubts about Shostakovich as Stalin did, one can be reassured by thinking that it is for exactly the opposite reasons. If the machismo is sometimes a bit much, one might reflect that heavy metal was so steeped in parodies of itself that it became impossible to tell which of it to take at face value and which to understand as ludicrous pastiche except that, in that case, I don't care. The problem with that kind of parody is that it's done so lovingly and expertly that it remains a tribute and fails to be subversive.

And Shostakovich was nothing if not subversive while miraculously evading punishment but he was outrageously brave and prepared to sign any old pronouncement written for him by apparatchiks, sometimes probably not even bothering to read them first.

The set of recordings by Rudolf Barshai was such a bargain at less than £1 per symphony that it matters little that once played they are unlikely to come off the shelf very often. With the Fitzwilliams's immaculate account of the Quartets offering such unfathomable depths it will take some kind of Damascean conversion to make the symphonies turntable hits ahead of them but there might yet be a penny or two that drops before I have all my prejudices confirmed.

Not quite prejudices. I have reasons for not liking Bruckner, Mahler, Wagner and Korngold as much as Bach, Beethoven et al. It's because I've heard enough to know that my priorities lie elsewhere.

 

 

The Complete Hardy 5: The Hand of Ethelberta

In some of the lists of Hardy's Major Works in the front of the Penguin editions, The Hand of Ethelberta doesn't even get in. Not even Hardy himself seems to have regarded it so, having written it for a periodical as a professional job for money and no more than that.

I'm surprised at that because, like The Well-Beloved, it's a different but not a lesser thing. Both of them might have been as ahead of their time, in terms of 'literary theory', as the likes of Tess and Jude were on the social issues of their day.

The 'hand' of Ethelberta, we could be forgiven for thinking, might be about the standard theme of C19th English fiction - which of the various competitors for the hand of the nubile lady will win it in marriage. But it's not only that, the 'hand' is the much more modern question of authorship, about the relationship between the text and whoever wrote it. And, as such, any number of questions about how those relate to Hardy's own life, fiction and privacy can only multiply exponentially. 

Ethelberta has been widowed very young and her status serves to disguise humble beginnings. Her poems make her a literary celebrity and, like any Hardy heroine, she's not short of suitors. She could be seen as ambitious socially but her large family of siblings are cared for in her employment and she's too demure to be compared to Becky Sharp and in a Hardy-like usage as 'indifferentist' as Neigh is described. 

Our sympathies ought to be with Christopher Julian, an organist with no fortune, while Mssrs. Ladywell and Neigh are only in the field as also-rans but the title and property of Lord Mountclere, old and considered unsuitable by both families, succeed in winning the hand in question. Hardy produces a cliff-hanging story in the race to prevent the wedding in what is otherwise a pedstrian novel and somehow at the end we are happier for the brief coda in which Christopher marries Picotee, the sister, rather than any deep feelings for Ethelberta. She is too much of a blank slate - cool, detached and writerly - for us to care about her in the way we care about the likes of Tess. So if we can't put Ethelberta in with the top echelon of Hardy's work, it's 400 pages with some pertinent ideas in it and ought at least to be listed among the 'major' titles.

Shirley Turner, Peter Mallinson, & Lynn Arnold at Chichester

Shirley Turner, Peter Mallinson, & Lynn Arnold, Chichester Cathedral, Jan 14

At a concert in the Autumn I heard tell of how long Chichester's lunchtime concerts had been going or, rather, didn't because the answer seems to be 'as long as anybody can remember'. Thus, continuing the long and great tradition, a new year began with Mozart. Ah, vous dirai-je, maman! is variations on a well-known nursery rhyme with Lynn Arnold twinkling like a little star on the Chichester Yamaha, the strings in sympathy before violin, viola, them both in duet are playful as puppies, the shifts of mood like a mini encyclopedia of Mozart.

Few composers cover quite the range that Shostakovich does and I've been gratified to hear a bit more of his music locally in the last couple of years. The Five Pieces find him in quite a different temper from the vast symphonies and bleakly inventive chamber music. These miniatures move from the longing or nostalgia of the Prelude, through a happy Gavotte, the Palm Court elegance of the Elegy and Waltz before the quicksilver fun of the Polka, with Shirley Turner and Peter Mallinson deft and hugely enjoyable on a day off from the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

While this programme was for the most part composers in lighter moods, John Alexander's soft rains, based on the poetry of Sara Teasdale was ethereal if not other worldly. The stillness and timelessness of There will come soft rains led to Barter, not dissimilarly haunted, possibly by loss, and the leaves in Leaves were surely the last vestiges of them in November with Peter's eloquent viola line. I'm not always easily convinced that words naturally lead to music and I'm a little bit apologetic that, with poetry as my 'day job', I'm not familiar with Sara Teasdale's so I'll work backwards and check out if the music conjures the poems.

But we were soon re-awakened from such deep contemplation by Czardas. Many will know it when they hear it without knowing, like I didn't, that it was written by Vittorio Monti, an unlikely Neapolitan name for such mitteleuropean folk dance. Shirley relished the opportunity to imitate the mandolin and played the longest trill I've ever heard anywhere as the piece built with repressed energy into its frenetic dash, the exuberant interplay of vln and vla, notwithstanding the pizzicato, over Lynn's busy engine room.

Wow. As Dana might have said, it was always going to be a cold, cold Christmas without Chichester Tuesday lunchtimes. One has almost forgotten the thrill they regularly provide but they return just in time. And as Petula would have understood, I...couldn't live without their love. It's never less than wonderful and maybe there's nobody left who can remember when it wasn't.

Other Stories and Stewartly

 Two books ordered from a well-known distributor of most sorts of goods on Thursday arrived within 24 hours on Friday. That's not always what one wants if trying for a delivery date when one will be in but on this occasion although I was out there was no need to bother the neighbours. Impulse buys prompted by an item in the TLS, Dorothy Parker will have to wait her turn but it's preferable to have something of a pile in waiting rather than not be knowing where to go next.

-- 

Salvator Mundi, a horse with a big home reputation to prove, won at Punchestown just now in a matter of strides below the distance to justify the strong support and my 5/6 looked pretty compared to the 8/15 SP. That was about all there was to like about it- which is sufficient, though, with him pulling hard early, not jumping well and not looking entirely like winning until that crucial burst of acceleration. He's doubtless a big talent but that performance doesn't get him onto the Cheltenham shortlist per se.

There are a couple of names on that shortlist already but it's a least a month until any sort of preview is due. The weather is doing its best to provide a mid-season break but what racing there has been has provided a useful sequence of winners- 11 out of the last 13 horses, not at fancy prices - the best of them was 5/2, but one can hardly help but compile a tidy profit if you get so little wrong.

--

It seems like an age since the last lunchtime concert in these parts but Chichester on Tuesday is an interesting and varied programme to get us back into the rhythm, as it were and the run from here to Easter promises plenty of both familiar names of returning artists and some new in Portsmouth and Chichester.

--

Very bad news from Times Radio is the arrival of Rod Liddle, the boorish commentator so idiosyncratic that he represents the SDP although it's hard to believe that's the same SDP formed by Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams. They've either taken a lurch to the right or have become simply a vehicle for Liddle's posturing in what he imagines to be a provocative way except it's just token garrulousness.

More in tune with enlightened sensibilities is my pile of books by Stewart Lee. How I Escaped My Certain Fate is both autobiography and transcripts of some of his shows. Of course, the likes of Morecambe & Wise and Tommy Cooper rehearsed their nonchalance to perfection and Stewart's hesitations, deviations and repetitions are of the same order as is made very clear in his extensive footnotes explaining how it all works.

It is 'art' not only in the sense of making the artificial appear natural but in its openly-stated awareness of itself as art. The footnotes, the references to itself and the recurrence of discussion about other stand-up comedians all fold inwards like a postmodern thing so that while reflecting on the world it is also a contemplation of its own processes and in book form that extends to an acceptance that it's not at its best in book form.

It's a hardline defence of 'woke' to be appreciated by those who remember what 'woke' was - a good thing identified by Barack Obama and not an insult aimed at anything that narcissists, maybe like Rod Liddle, find a bit too ethical for their solipsistic world view. With his English degree from Oxford, Stewart has every right to be as literary as he is and, like an anti-Trump, he can turn all negative reaction to him to his own purposes. He is more combative and entrenched than ideally suits me, like the stand-up answer to Mark E. Smith when I'd be more at home with the Jesus & Mary Chain than The Fall. But it's a long, long time since I paid to go to see a 'comedian'- more than thirty years since Ken Dodd, I think- and so Southsea in May, we will see how much the artform has moved on.

Not necessarily for the better, I suspect. Game shows, celeb quizzes, even 'comedy' shows these days are filled with people billed as 'comedians'. Perhaps comedy did eventually become the new rock'n'roll in as far as everybody is now a comedian where once everybody was a pop star. And perhaps it has also returned to its original purpose. By no means are all of this generation of standing-up, talking performers funny but perhaps they do fit what 'comedy' once was,

The classic conception of comedy, which began with Aristotle in ancient Greece of the 4th century bce and persists through the present, holds that it is primarily concerned with humans as social beings, rather than as private persons, and that its function is frankly corrective. The comic artist’s purpose is to hold a mirror up to society to reflect its follies and vices, in the hope that they will, as a result, be mended. 

So, although that generation that attend comedy gigs and laugh at every observation because that's what they're expected to do, perhaps what they are really doing is the equivalent of going to church to be improved by what they hear in the sermon. They are brought onside by the performer who ridicules some perceived folly and emerge as better people.

I'm not saying that Tarby, Bob Hope or Ted Ray were funny but fashions change and people are made happy by thinking that they've complied with their chosen orthodoxy. I like Stewart Lee because he represents some of my chosen orthodoxy. I don't laugh at him as much as I laugh at Dad's Army, Fawlty Towers, Blackadder or The Office and I hardly ever laugh at Ricky Gervais's stand-up because I can see it coming from a mile off and I think it's a big ask for anyone to stand in front of an audience and get them onside. I'm like the second house in the Glasgow Empire on a Saturday night. Stand-up is a much over-rated art form, very difficult to be good at and most of them aren't. Rock'n'roll was easier - two or three chords, 4/4 time, a drum beat and a chorus and a roomful of people who've turned up with the intention of dancing.

A Perfect Murder

 Much as I'd like to be a fiction writer, I'm not one. It's much harder to do than it looks and whereas poems benefit from fewer, more concentrated words, prose fiction needs more detail and authenticity than I can summon.

A Perfect Murder was called The Decline of English Fiction. That was always an unsatisfactory title, trying to be self deprecating and literary - by echoing the essay by George Orwell, but now that I've found a suitable minor variation on the title of the poem it was based on, it can be made available as a pdf. And thus is.

I'd send it to a magazine to try to get it into print somewhere if I could find any such magazine but I can't. If any did look likely, their idea of 'short fiction' is shorter than mine.

--

It's harmless enough doing that. What would be deeply harmful, both to my own feelings of self-worth and the very idea of music itself, though, would be me buying a guitar and writing the album of pop songs I still vaguely hanker after. 

It's the same as with anything else. One hears something and thinks I'd love to do that, suspending all awareness of the lack of competence in the necessary areas that would make the project a sure-fire disaster.

Everybody wants to be a pop star. Football managers want to be racehorse owners, cricketers want to be golfers and inside every poet there is a troubadour wanting to get out. I found myself looking at guitars earlier. They are remarkably inexpensive.

I must resist the temptation to prevent the horrors that would ensue. I must look at the poems again and be grateful I'm happy with them.

Charles King, Every Valley

Charles King, Every Valley, The Story of Handel's Messiah (The Bodley Head) 

While Charles King's title lifts a suitably inspirational phrase from Messiah, it could also point us towards how he explores every valley of the contemporary cultural context that brought Handel's most famous work about. It might seem like a long preamble to make for a substantial book but stick with it and it does all contribute to the whole story as it comes together.

In the early pages I was put off by some elements of King's writing. It only takes a couple of minor objections to set one against an author. Even though he knows it's Messiah and not The Messiah, he insists on calling it 'the Messiah' when we don't call other such things 'the Israel in Egypt'. He also says,

In most fighting seasons, some part of the Italian peninsula was overrun by armies, beset by pirates, or ravished by plague or smallpox.

and though 'ravished' is admissable, one can't help thinking he might have meant 'ravaged'. However, a few such trivial objections are soon overcome and, securing his footing, the narrative is soon convincing. 

The book is organized into three parts, entitled Portents, Sorrow and Resurrection, and they parallel the thematic scheme of Messiah in Charles Jennens' hither and thither selection of biblical texts. It might seem to us, especially with regard to Handel's music that the early C18th was a time of great confidence, 'enlightenment' and luxury but that takes no account of the world as drawn by Hogarth and satirized by Swift. It was and age of anxiety, with the house of Hanover insecure in the face of Jacobite pretenders, war and pestilence all of which was underwritten by the prosperity of some being largely dependent on the slave trade. It's an entirely coherent way of understanding Messiah in all its context and glory as a beacon of hope. 

Not much of the book is about the oratorio itself, really. While the account of African Muslim, Diallo, is in some tangential way a sub-text to the main theme, his life's adventure through slavery in America to high social standing in England has very little directly to do with Handel. But we are offered a glimpse of an early possible girlfriend in Georg Freidrich's life, one Vittoria Tarquini, when he was widely thought to have had none. It is also suggested that in his early days in London he was suspected of spying for Germany. Much more relevant to Messiah is the story of Susannah Cibber, the star performer, whose irregular marital arrangements all but finished her reputation before she, too, as per the general theme, achieves not only redemption but greater glory, as does the book itself.

It's not quite what it says on the tin but in many ways it's more than that, a survey of an uncertain and difficult world - and we can understand that- in which hope is achieved, some good is done and things of lasting value are put in place.

That might be the point of it and, appearing now as it does, it might serve to make us think our own times might do something comparable. Charles King doesn't get everything right but he does enough to show he's on the right side in such asides as,

If women later seemed sparse in the historical record, lost amid generals on the battlefield and savants thinking up Western civilisation, it was because male historians worked very hard to miss them. 

I read it mostly to the accompaniment of the opera Alcina. The counterpoint thus achieved between Handel's imperious light and glory and the less glorious reality of what the human character can often be like and how the world is really run was most instructive.

Pluperfect ver 2.0

 A second edition of the Pluperfect, Collected Poems pdf is now available.

It includes all of Romanticism but has lost those later poems that didn't make the cut into that.

Font sizes, line gaps, page numbers, poems with one line that goes over a page. Oh, you know it ain't easy. You don't know how hard it can be but without being obsessively perfectionist about it, I want it that way.

On Not Being a Poet, and another story

 Patrick Kurp's ever excellent Anecdotal Evidence is particularly good today. There's nothing quite as satisfying as finding worthwhile authorities chiming in with one's own preciously nurtured pet subjects and here he cites,

Robert Francis (1901-87) was an American poet probably best known as a protégé of Robert Frost. In 1980, Francis published 'Pot Shots at Poetry', a collection of brief prose observations and aphorisms. One is titled “Wordman.” Francis tells us he would be happy not to be called a “poet” because the word is used to describe “not just people who write poems, but special people.” In other words, it’s a self-aggrandizing honorific, like 'El Jefe'. Francis seeks a “stubbornly plainer” word and suggests “wordman,” a man or woman who works with words: “So let me be called a wordman and let what I write be called word arrangements.”

I think 'writer', as per Philip Larkin's gravestone, is the preferred option but we're not going to fall out about that. He has it exactly right and apparently for the right reasons.  It's almost because I don't want to be called a 'poet' that I don't want to do poetry readings because to do such a thing makes it look very much as if one sees oneself s a poet rather than as a writer that has some poems among those hings one has written.

As has been said here  in the past, I suspect we've never recovered from Romanticism - some apparently are still prepared to elevate the term to the level of a title of their book- when the likes of Keats, Wordsworth and Shelley communed in their highly sensitised ways with sublimity. But that was over 200 years ago and by now we are better defined by distancing ourselves from such rarefied atmospheres.

--

Another confluence of a greater mind with mine comes about in Charles King's Every Valley - more about which later in the coming week, his far-reaching book on Handel's Messiah. There is much C18th background being put in place to make for the full context, and a substantial book, and it might even lure me into some C18th literature which not much has ever done before but he sells me the idea of The Dunciad if not the poem itself. But, firstly, I'm very taken with Jonathan Swift's Academy of Lagado,

whose random phrasemaking machine calculated every thought it was possible to think. 

 

Again, this corresponds to my own concern that chess, or language, can't be infinite and so in theory and in due course, every possible chess game will have been played and every possible piece of writing been written. And since two ideas that I've had on my own had already been thought by others previously, the long, long process of everything that could happen having happened has been underway for some time.

The Portrait Gallery

 Two separate deliveries this afternoon brought firstly the Charles King Every Valley book on Messiah and the frames for the new portrait gallery.

It went well to begin with, the pictures are great and fit the A3 frames perfectly as A3 pictures should. Oh, yes, here I was expertly curating the library I live in to further effect, I thought. I had thought it all out, too, to ensure a disaster-free installation. In particular, having found a serviceable frame for the Hammershøi print in the front room several years ago, the ensuing battle to fix it intact onto the wall provided a sequence that made Eric Sykes and Tommy Cooper in The Plank look like consummate professionals.

The first great length I went to to ensure the highest exhibition standards applied to my gallery, I measured the distance to the floor from the nail on which Shostakovich now hangs so that Joyce would be level with him. It's hard to believe I took such a precaution but once I've reverted to haplessness I see it through determinedly. I had soon bent three pins knocking them into the wall having sought out the proper pin for the job well in advance when things had been going well.

Being a mindful curator, Joyce is directly above the shelf of his books. Shostakovich was selected to go next to him on account of being C20th. On the other side it hardly seemed to matter anymore that the pictures should be level. In fact it's probably best that they aren't - to make it look like asymmetry was the idea. So Handel takes the place of a small picture from Szentendre, just up the Rhine from Budapest, while Shostakovich replaces a Gwen John print. Mercifully the other wall is softer and the pin went in easily and Josquin des Prez goes where had been a picture of Glasgow by Avril Paton. If the British Museum has 99% of its artefacts in storage I won't feel so bad that those items that have been up for a long time are given a rest.

It might be that this haphazard picture hanging becomes the way they are, like lines left in a poem pro tem before going back to them gradually solidify into the finished version. At first they are a tribute to my practical hopelessness and a reminder why Mr. Next Door does any such job that needs doing properly but I could hardly ask him to do anything as straightforward as that. Such a reminder seen every day might get on my nerves, though. I'll have to see how it goes. They are such great pictures it's hard to spoil them but if anybody can, I can.

The Complete Hardy 4: A Pair of Blue Eyes

I diagnose the reason why I don't appreciate Jane Austen as being that I can't tell which aspects of the characters' behaviour are intended as comedy and which are social conventions of Jane's time that she regards as entirely to be expected. A similar problem comes about in A Pair of Blue Eyes in which 32 year old Henry Knight can't accept that his first girlfriend, the 19 year old Elfride, has been kissed before. It's worse than that, though, the widow, Mrs Jethway, blames Elfride for the death of her young son who was also smitten but who received less encouragement previously. And the suitor in between, Stephen Smith, was quite naturally an old friend of Knight. One would never wish a Hardy story to be short of complications and they are only the most of them.

In a way, not being able to be sure quite unworldly Hardy thought his characters to be is in keeping with the ambivalence of how relatively tragic and comic the novel is. The two rivals, both dispossessed of the beloved but equally interested in returning home to Cornwall to relaim her ahead of the other, are surely a hapless double act- and somehow we by then realize they must be- before entirely forseeably neither is the winner.

It is no more absurd or demanding of our suspension of disbelief than any of the later catalogues of twists of fate that make up the framework of Hardy's art and he sets up some memorable set piece situations on it. Perhaps my favourite is Knight and Elfride watching the return of Stephen on the ship, the landbound and seagoing parties watching each other through telescopes but there's a huge amount to enjoy, as ever, in the fabric of the writing and the dynamics of the social relationships involved. 

A note on Hardy's names is also due. Like Shakespeare who never missed an opportunity with even minor characters like Moth, Osric, Bushy, Bagot and Green, in this book - just for one example- Hardy delineates class status with names like Luxellian, Swancourt, Knight, Smith and Worm to leave little doubt about birthrights. 

It's a brilliant book.

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What remains of the Hardy project are novels I've read before but so long ago that a reminder is overdue but still anticipated with great enthusiasm. The Hand of Ethelberta, Two on a Tower and Under the Greenwood Tree will follow.