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.

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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.