For One Night Only

Good Evening, Bedhampton. 

 

This evening I report from the joint reading of poets from the Chichester and Portsmouth groups that took place in the elegant surroundings of the Waterloo Room in the Elms.

Well organized and timed to perfection, there was as much rain in the poems indoors as there was in the weather outdoors and plenty of memorials to relations, some accomplished readings, music, cake, hot drinks and wine. 

No wine for me, of course- not while I'm on duty. There's enough can go awry trying to remember what to say to an audience without confusing the issue with Merlot.

Being on last either means one is the last hope, like a no. 11 batter, or top of the bill like Ken Dodd on The Good Old Days or Oasis at Glastonbury. It's hard to tell and it's even harder to tell if one was any good. The set list was - Piccadilly Dusk, Fiction, Windy Miller, Rainyday Woman. The audience were kind and not as fearsome and unreceptive as one's worst imaginings had anticipated. I got on, one or two of the attempted funny bits got a bit of reaction, Windy Miller made me feel emotional when really one objective of art is to make that happen to those listening and I got off in one piece. I didn't mess up and that was the height of my ambition and now the sense of relief is almost glorious.

I don't have to do it again. Any further performances can stay on the page.

An afternoon of Romantic Russian chamber music in Petersfield

Valentina Seferinova, Anna and Mikhail Lezdkan, St. Peter's, Petersfield, Oct 18 

This week's family affair concerts were completed by father and daughter Mikhail and Anna Lezdkan, cello and violin, with Valentina Seferinova, piano, playing C19th and C20th Russian music from Tchaikovsky to Shostakovich.

The first half was Valentina and Mikhail with a solemn Andante Cantabile by Tchaikovsky, two pieces by Glazunov including the lithe Spanish Serenade, the exotic Orientale by Cui but most memorably the two fastest cello parts I've ever heard, from Mikhail. Seeing Rimsky-Korsakov's famous Flight of the Bumblebee on the programme I'd assumed it would be Valentina providing the fireworks but I've been wrong before and she provided the convivial romp of his Serenade op. 37 after Mikhail's dazzling performance made his cello do things I've not heard any other do. I know John Adams wrote something called A Short Ride in a Fast Machine but that was made to look like a Model T Ford in comparison. 

The first half ended with more Tchaikovsky, the Pezzo Capricciosio, which became capricious when changing from sonorous to dizzy but I don't think the speed record set by the bumblebee was quite equalled.

Valentina opened the second half with Rachmaninov's Barcarolle, op. 10, which, if you wanted it to, could have conjured a night éclaboussé des étoiles, a memorable phrase from Gide at 'A' level that has finally come in useful, meaning 'bespangled with stars'. And then Anna made her belated appearance and made it worth our wait, joining Mikhail for what was for me the find of the day in Glière's 8 Pieces for violin and cello, op. 39. From the sepulchral Prelude, through the retro baroque of the Gavotte, the enchanting Berceuse through to the rapid Etude, it proved that Glière must be a composer I need to know more about and that, not having seen Anna before, it is to be hoped she is available for more appearances in the area to bring us more of her poise, confidence and great talent.

But all that having been said, Shostakovich - for me- could pick up all those composers and carry them. That he wrote his op. 8 Piano Trio aged 16 is hard to fathom. Written not long after The Waste Land, it does all that Eliot's desiccated literariness might have wanted to achieve but, with the obvious advantage of music being better than poetry, does it infinitely more convincingly. Its barren beauty with the St. Peter's piano standing up well to Valentina's immense power and drama was both emotionally and aesthetically enthralling. I'm sure I've not heard either Valentina or Mikhail to such great effect before and then you multiply them by Anna and they are suddenly in danger of having provided the best performance I've seen this year.

It's been tremendous to see two events in two days so well supported in Petersfield. It shouldn't be surprising given the high quality of the musicians that have appeared but music is in the best of health there. We should all be glad and I'm sure all those who went on either day or both will be.

Duo Timossi in Petersfield

 Duo Timossi, St. Peter's, Petersfield, October 17

It being nearly two hundred years since Beethoven died and exactly a plentiful number of years since I was born, Sara Deborah and Alessandro Timossi's first instalment of their Violin Sonata cycle began to mark the first while inadvertently contributing to the happy occasion of the second. Petersfield has major Beethoven things lined up for 2027 and thus need to bring this part of them forward by way of a prelude to fit it all in.

The reason for beginning the series with nos. 4 and 5 is possibly that nos. 1-3 are no good. Not 'no good' by most terrestrial standards, of course, but some say not quite as good as Beethoven usually is, those being early work. It's a bit like saying some late Vermeer is only relatively 'workmanlike' when it can give most paintings and head start and still leave them behind. 

Op. 23's Presto is impetuous with Alessandro's piano on the verge of becoming stormy. The Andante is daintier and good humoured, maybe owing something to Haydn, and the Allegro featured an industrious piano part with Sara's violin aspiring to more rarefied air before they combined in a bravura climax. All of which was hugely to be enjoyed until, after an interval, op. 24 was something else again.

The optimism of the Allegro seemed to have an affinity with Sara's natural way of playing, the carefree melody leading into dance-like passages. Her excellent programme notes provide more than enough material for me to just lift parts out them out and give myself a day off so I will make use of how the Adagio hovers 'between Sehnsucht and hope' and be grateful to have learned the German for 'longing'. In the Scherzo, her violin was a fraction of a beat behind the piano, making for some engaging effect. I'm guessing that's not as easy to do as playing in strict unison, almost like getting it wrong deliberately, but it was only one more part of the technique of one of the top echelon of musicians in the catchment area I regard as my own. The gaiety of the Rondo finale was a joyous thing. The Spring Sonata, as it is known, is one of the many not given its name by Beethoven. While I'm sure it is meant to refer to the coming alive of the Spring season, an alternative interpretation could be that it's a reference to the energetic uncoiling of a spring, for those of us who enjoy artworks that can mean more than one thing at a time, and the whole concert was a great advertisement for the rest of the series in which I intend to collect the whole set.

Piano à Deux (Robert Stoodley & Linda Ang Stoodley) at Chichester

 Robert Stoodley & Linda Ang Stoodley, Chichester Cathedral, October 13

Autumn has properly arrived and with it comes three concerts in the diary this week, all family affairs which is a rare alignment.

The Stoodleys come with a complete show including shared commentary and even some choreography. First, though were two Brahms Hungarian Dances - no.5 rollicking and, I'd say, jokey and no.6 with further mood swings.

Some pieces are by now hard to separate from the uses they were put to long after their composers left them to us. Frank Muir made The Nutcracker Suite into Everyone's a Fruit and Nutcase and Bach found himself the author of an advert for cigars after the Berceuse from Fauré's Dolly Suite became, for some of a certain vintage, the comforting memory of Listen with Mother on the Home Service. Robert and Linda perhaps carried forward some of their Hungarian energy into their tempo which could have been dreamier because they didn't slumber through it. Mi-a-ou, as was explained, was not as feline as one might have anticipated because that's not what it's about, and then the rhapsodic onrush of Le pas espagnol in some ways anticipated Rachmaninov.

Robert and Linda's arrangements of seven songs from his op. 21 were presented in three sections, the bigger canvas of Melody running into the enchantment of Loneliness after Linda got up, nipped round the back and took up the right-hand stool while Robert moved to his left while transposing into the second piece, a neat manoeuvre I'd not seen before but  saw more than once today. Then, Lilacs was a thing of some delicacy, The Ratcatcher had the merest suspicion of Scott Joplin and Spring Waters was a cascading downpour. Rachmaninov somehow always manages to convince either in spite of, or by doing something more than, the Romantic excess that he could otherwise be thought guilty of. To finish, the lushness of How Fair This Spot led up to the climax with What Wealth of Rapture, with a big clue in its title, and with Linda leaving Robert solo to the last few bars of a very amicable, impressive, well-rehearsed set.   

It's been a while since I did Chichester, the summer being such an inconvenience, so it's good to get back towards the old routine. 

Wittgenstein, 2

 There's not a great deal of point reading a book one doesn't understand and my copy of the Tractatus is purely decorative but, as hoped, Ray Monk's biography does a fine job of explaining as much of Wittgenstein as I'm ever likely to grasp. 

It brings with it some big surprises, not least the Christianity. For someone devoted to logic and equations, coming from an interest in mathematics, God seems like an unlikely conclusion to arrive at. For all his deep, deep thought and austerity, it is disappointing to find him relying on mysticism and using certain words to mean specifically what he wants them to mean, rather what is more widely understood by them, seems like a big abdication of responsibility if not a letdown from someone who, I had thought, was better than that.

Wittgenstein was an Idealist, where ideas come before things. I simply can't see how that can be. Plato was an Idealist, Aristotle a Realist. It seems to me an Idealist is the more likely to get locked into their own thinking. If reading this book results in Wittgenstein going down in my estimation, as a philosopher, I'm glad to find that Derrida was only mistakenly seen as an Idealist but,

In reality, Derrida meant that our access to the world is always mediated by systems of signs, traces, and differences, making a pure, unmediated "view from nowhere" impossible. 

I am indebted to Google's AI summary for that and am grateful. While a small part of my paltry B.A. (Hons) was in Philosophy, I'm not up to it.

But I am glad to be making some trivial sense of it all and the biography has edged out The Anatomy of Melancholy in this heavyweight contest for my attentions. To think of Wittgenstein teaching in primary schools in rural Austria is remarkable. He meets his one and only known girlfriend in his mid-thirties. He could have had access to great family wealth but disdained it for reasons that Ray Monk suggests come from his difficult upbringing. Three of his brothers commit suicide and it is an idea that recurs to him at regular intervals. Whether one is interested in Philosophy or not, it is a remarkable life to read but, as with so many 'genius' types, not a happy one.

Roughly halfway through the book, I'm keen to press on towards the ending, knowing that he changed his mind, like so many of us do. That bleak, haunted look says much about the downside of the sort of intellect that makes almost everybody else struggle and so I'm wondering if any change of mind brought him back from the brink of madness because if you are that clever and yet still have to rely on mysticism, your own definitions of words and if you look mad, act mad and even the finest minds can't understand you, that could be what you are. I don't want to think that. I want him to escape the prison of his tautologies and dubious ways of escaping meaninglessness. As such, it is quite an exciting book. 

Wittgenstein

 122 pages, of nearly 600, and the life of Ludwig Wittgenstein is a thoroughly worthwhile read. That comes as a pleasant surprise when I had anticipated heavy going and impenetrable passages of epistemology. So far so good with how Ray Monk's account in narrating the life with a manageable level of detail supported by summaries of the ideas in which one can at least believe one has an idea what is involved in the ideas. 

The first point seems to be how well Wittgenstein did to avoid suicide with siblings and contemporaries making such a vogue of it. Being brilliant to the point of exhaustion and beyond the comprehension of almost all the rest of humanity can't be easy, taking oneself off to Norway to be alone to think incessantly about logic wouldn't usually be considered healthy. But he lives at an intensity that only such dedication can provide purpose and fulfilment and, while being well liked by some, he can be difficult and important relationships with Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore suffer as a result. There is clearly more to logic than first year Philosophy where inductive arguments seemed straightforward. 

I had thought I was in sympathy with what I understood of his thinking but, at first at least, he rejects empiricism - the evidence of one's senses- in favour of the processes of logic to the extent that he denies it's possible to know there isn't a rhinoceros in the room when Bertie has looked under the table and everywhere else without finding one. But I know the Tractatus is eventually retracted so we will wait and see if he later concedes the rhinoceros-less condition of most domestic accommodation in England.

I'm also surprised how he suddenly accepts Christianity which I wouldn't have thought could be established by empiricism or logic. I'm not convinced by the example of rain in the proposition that 'it's either raining or it isn't', which sounds true because it must be one or the other, but one or two spots might fall on one person and not the person next to them on Southsea seafront and so they would disagree whether it was raining or not. And I'm not yet sure that Wittgenstein escapes from the language that he necessarily has to use to express his abstract ideas. It has long seemed that words in sentences are not sufficient and that their limitations are his.

Madness surely lies waiting for anybody bold enough to take on such enormous questions and no philosopher yet has provided a system that wasn't critiqued and found wanting by the next generation. With Derrida and post-Structuralism it appeared to collapse into meaninglessness and truth was elusive. However attractive one might find elements of Sartre, Barthes or Baudrillard, it could be that nobody really got much further than Socrates. 

As you can see, I haven't grasped it but maybe nobody else has either. To be a total adherent of any philosopher requires the sort of act of faith that Christianity depends on which puts it all down to God while omitting to explain where he came from. But if there was an answer, the game would be over and that would be that. In the meantime, Wittgenstein is a compelling figure with his towering genius ultimately taking him on an arduous journey to nowhere but, gladly, worshipping Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms so at least he got that right.  

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

A pattern begins to emerge after the third Rose Tremain novel in short order. She does the raptures of love very well, time and again, this time in The Gustav Sonata, but also the counter-balancing pain and difficulties.

Central to The Gustav Sonata is the humanitarian offence of falsifying the dates of Jews escaping Nazism into 'neutral' Switzerland and the question of who betrayed who when the police chief who facilitates as many migrants as he can before the border is secured more tightly against them is betrayed by his wife.

It's a complicated web of relationships in which the widow is left trying to lure Gustav, the son, into a relationship in her old age. Meanwhile, Gustav's close childhood friend has a career as a concert pianist undermined by stage fright. It makes for a grim book, no less beautifully realized than The Housekeeper or Absolutely & Forever, but somehow more discomfiting as the unhappiness outweighs the rapture.

It is a good time to wait before overdoing the Tremain, for fear of the law of diminishing returns applying to Music & Silence. Thus The Anatomy of Melancholy might add intervals of relatively light relief during 600 pages of Wittgenstein's life. When the primary texts are hard going- and Wittgenstein is surely a paragon example of that- then a biography can be an easier point of access. It looks like even Ludwig himself didn't expect anybody to understand his Tractatus. 

--

The archive Middlemarch recently on BBC4 with Juliet Aubrey, Rufus Sewell, Robert Hardy et al was a masterpiece of both costume drama and seminal novel, a fine example of why the BBC is still worth all of its licence fee and would be even more so if showing more of what it has stored away and caught up with a few more recent good books.

I was once told that my preference for George Eliot over Dickens was somehow inevitable, I'm not now entirely sure why, but surely she is in a different class. Maybe Dickens is a bit more 'obvious' and Eliot is dealing with things more subtly but one can hardly accuse Dickens of creating lurid caricatures when Patrick Malahide's Casaubon, Aubrey's Dorothea, Hardy's Brooke and Sewell's Ladislaw were clearly delineated- to great effect- with minor parts tending towards cartoons, but all the better to make its points in a costume drama that, for the most part, resolves into a happy enough ending.

--

Meanwhile, Unearthed: The Mystery of the Shaman Woman arrived at phenomenal conclusions from the discovery of a Mesolithic- 9000 year old- burial site in Germany. It's not for me to say that they came to some very specific conclusions from a few old bones and what was found with them but to create a female shaman who could put herself into a trance by leaning her head back to cut off the blood supply to her head and becoming renowned as a healer is a huge step.

Most compelling was how the discovery, once taken up by the Nazis as an Aryan icon, all white, blond and blue-eyed, was re-made as dark-skinned and the news to me that Europeans were dark-skinned 9000 years ago and those of us who became 'white' only did so due to a change in diet, starchy foods apparently gradually making us paler.

I'd have thought that was an absolute godsend to all us liberal left, 'intellectual elite' who don't think that white is naturally superior. Alongside the documentary about the vast libraries of Timbuktu, it all begins to make Western white culture- all that Bach, Shakespeare, relativity and space exploration- look more like a recent aberration in the longer perspectives of history.

Given the prognostications about the 10% chance of AI finishing off humanity in the next ten years, it could just be that, quite beautifully, all that arrogance and cleverness brought with it its own downfall. It was already clear that if AI was asked to solve such problems as climate change it would realize that it was caused by human beings and, if asked to prevent it, would thus wipe out its cause. It would be a great shame if there was nobody left to appreciate the irony so I suggest we appreciate now, in advance, just in case.   

From the Heart

Tongues and Grooves, From the Heart, Square Tower, Old Portsmouth, Oct 1 

The long-established poetry series, Tongues & Grooves, nowadays mostly presents From the Heart where readers, whether poets or not, undertake to recite poems that are not their own from memory. I find it hard enough to read poems in front of an audience with the text right in front of me so it's unlikely I'd take on the challenge but one way for my good mate, Kev, to improve his status towards 'best mate', should he feel the need, was to choose one of my poems to learn. The very least I could do was turn up to support him.

Maybe about half of the performers get through without being prompted, which is impressive. Nobody attempted They flee from me by Thomas Wyatt but I'm sure that's what the words do under the pressure of performance. And it is the reader's performance rather than the poem one is appreciating. Shelley's not a huge favourite of mine but the recitation of Ozymandias was exemplary. Neither was the poem read by Cat Sawkins but she just about cleaned up in what became a family double when Maggie did Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow which I possibly could have done about fifty years ago but it's not a game that what can expect to improve at with age. Maggie's reading of The Rain Stick, from Seamus Heaney's brilliant book The Spirit Level, was usefully illustrated by the very thing and probably my favourite poem of the evening but it was strange to find oneself applauding a great reading of one's least favourite poet in English Literature - Kae Tempest- but that's how it works. Gareth Toms doing the nearby Armitage public poem, The Theatre of the Sea, revealed him as something of a showman.

It was impressive that a couple of those whose main job was to provide the interval barber shop choir extended their involvement by performing poems, too. And if Maggie is as thoughtfully gifted a presenter as she is a poet then in Janet Ayers she has an ideal co-host whose confidence and demeanour are always well-ahead of the potentially precarious situations of microphone malfunction, unremembered lines or anybody winning too many raffle prizes.

I had no idea what to expect. Poetry readings can, on occasions, be dire experiences. Anybody who fancies having a go at doing poetry 'live' could easily be a recipe for disaster. But many of them have done it before and there's more talent out there than one might think. Poetry isn't always the uplifting, therapeutic thing it is sometimes claimed to be. But at Tongues & Grooves, From the Heart took on all my doubts and cast them aside with the most gracious ease. Hugely enjoyable show in all its variety and good will.

 

 

 Kevin Rogers, once frontman of the Von Trap Family, finds himself performing Romanticism by David Green nearly fifty years later. That's progress for you.  

Anatomy and other stories

The last time I saw Jeff Turner, he said The Anatomy of Melancholy was his favourite book. It might have been prompted by me saying it looked forbidding and I'd done a dissertation on Andrew Marvell at university rather than have to read it as part of C17th Lit. Nonetheless, I took it as a recommendation, promoted it up my list of forthcoming reading and now it is underway. It will be a leisurely project, mindful of the advice that it can be read selectively rather than from cover to cover.

It's nowhere near as forbidding as its size and title might make one think. Burton portrays himself as Democritus Junior. Democritus was the philosopher who laughed at human folly and Burton finds the same attitude as an antidote to his melancholy. In a torrent of classical references, he comes across like Dr. Johnson or Montaigne as sane and reasonable in the mad world of human ambition and endeavour. The book would be much reduced in length if his quotations from the Latin and Greek were not followed by a translation but if we could only have one or the other, most of us would prefer the translation. 

Like Johnson and Montaigne, he is good company. Not necessarily what one would expect of someone who spent their whole C17th adult life at Oxford University. But his melancholy was real and the remedy, which was to write the book, seems to work. As Johnson also advises, keeping busy is good for you and lassitude a bad thing so the Anatomy very neatly provides the answer to its own question.

--

Meanwhile, now into The Gustav Sonata, Rose Tremain's books don't yet look like stalling on me like Henry James did. So far, three quite different novels have similar underlying themes. She does intense love very well, and then undermines it.

In Absolutely & Forever, it is clearly nothing of the sort as Marianne is so totally given to Simon until they marry other people less than happily but, as it turns out, wouldn't have been much more successful marrying each other in the circumstances.

Good novels can still be written after Ulysses and the Wake which had seemed to take the form and blow it up. If Adorno didn't actually say that no poetry could be written after Auschwitz, he might have implied that it shouldn't be but much good work followed on from re-adjustments after two World Wars. Pop music raced from Bill Haley to the overblown late 60's, prog and punk but still emerged to keep on producing for fifty more years to date. It might be hard to compare Rose Tremain and Julian Barnes, say, with Virginia Woolf as 'high art' but they are brilliant at what they do within their more limited ambitions.

It took me more than three books to come to a standstill with Henry James. Two more volumes look resentfully down at me from the stockpile on the top shelf. But Music & Silence, sure to be taken from there before they are, looks different again by being 'historical'. Now that I've found her I won't her go. I won't build my world around her. The biography of Wittgenstein will fit in somewhere. But it would have been a great pity if the du Maurier book hadn't led me to her.

How would we ever know what we had missed. We have to trust that in the time we had, we found as much as we could. 

--

The replacement of the headphones damaged beyond repair when some ceiling fell in last winter has resulted in me playing some long unplayed discs. I've not been playing 'pop' discs for years.

Garbage, the Jesus & Mary Chain, Matchbox Twenty, Joni Mitchell. Impressive things too good to be left lying around disused forever. Hejira is complicated stuff, Garbage Version 2.0 a little bit posturing but the interest is often in the texture of the sound the bands make more than the words.

I was reminded about when I was pointedly asked in the office 'if I still liked Matchbox Twenty' by one whose idea of 'cool' still included Pink Floyd. I most vibrantly replied that I did. Rob Thomas is a brilliant, passionate songwriter and singer who once said their ambition was to be Fleetwood Mac and that's a fine thing to want to be. I think the point my interrogator might have been trying to make was that they aren't regarded as quite as 'cool' as the Velvet Underground, the J&MC, Wyclef Jean, the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and suchlike.

But now, DGBooks Radio presses on towards 1000 tracks. There's Cliff, the Osmonds, What Are You Doing Sunday? by Dawn and The Archies. Pop, pop, pop music. To be enjoyed, not rated on a 'cool meter' where, anyway, Floyd struggle to get 3/10, Queen hardly get off the mark and Zappa is less than zero.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 There's a new usage abroad. 'Bad actors' are people who do bad things. It appears it comes from a novel. It is suddenly all over the place.

We have recently been inundated with people 'leaning into' things, before that every interviewer asked at least one 'good question' per interview and before that it was 'look' or 'listen' before any reply, somewhat abrasively, as if the questioner wasn't going to. These epidemics are contagious. They catch on quickly when they do and for a while can be heard every day.

This morning it was reported that the Fairford incident might have involved a 'foreign actor' so I e-mailed in to Stig and Kate at Times Radio Breakfast,

Are there any suggestions who the foreign actor involved at Fairford was?

Was it possibly Gerard Depardieu.

Were there also bad actors involved?

Could they have included Donald Sinden.

 

Perhaps too facetious even for their sometimes contrary attitude. They didn't read it out. I'll use it here instead.

--

This morning I found out that Google AI will set you a quiz on any given subject, if asked. I scored 8/10 on Lindisfarne island, 10/10 on Lindisfarne the band, 9/10 on Cliff Richard, 5/5 on Thom Gunn and 3/4 on Sean O'Brien. So I wondered what the chances were that it could set me a quiz on myself.

None. But in the process I found these kind words here,

Richard Williams Facebook  

That's entirely fair enough. He's a good lad.  

 

My ultra modest career continues to kick off in a few new directions as Kev Rogers prepares to recite Romanticism, the poem not the whole book, at an event in the Square Tower, Old Portsmouth, on Thursday evening. Then on Weds 21st, I'm helping out Portsmouth Poetry Society in their role as the local Stanza group in a joint reading with Chichester. I'd invite you to come and be there but numbers are limited and my guest allocation is spoken for.

All these small things make me wonder if I'd tried harder and put myself about more when I thought wider recognition was desirable I may or may not have been a contender. But I'm glad I didn't. I wouldn't have been much good at it. The poems, such as they are, have been allowed to be what they are and find what direction they found away from too much attention. Like Rick Nelson in Garden Party, if I couldn't please everyone I was better pleasing myself, as it were.

Jeffrey Turner

 Jeff Turner had been gathering together those poems of his I don't already have with a view to an essay surveying his work. We were due to meet soon but now won't be doing after his death on Saturday, after a short period of incapacity.

We were employed by the same civil service department in the 1990's and he turned out for the cricket team a number of times into his late 50's. 

He wasn't one to advertize his talents unduly. On one occasion, about some business in the office where he worked, I noticed a booklet on top of an open briefcase and, being inquisitive beyond my remit, found it to be a catalogue of rare and antiquarian books. Asking whose it was, Jeff owned up and said it was from Peter Scupham, a friend of his and a poet of some reputation. It transpired that Jeff attended weekends at Scupham's historic family pile in East Anglia with Anne Stevenson, Anthony Thwaite and more.

It wasn't until some years later that our conversations about poetry developed much further on walks. I gave him copies of my booklets as they appeared and he gave me his. Most memorably, asking him to sign one in the pub after a walk, he produced the box that contained his italic pen, assembled it and in due course proceeded to add his idiosyncratic signature.

He didn't do anything in haste but did everything he did thoughtfully, not least his poems. Whereas our poems were more or less from a similar area of the poetry map, mine are often written in short order once they are ready to be written but one couldn't imagine Jeff's coming without a more careful process.

They are characteristically deep meditations, often on nature or the place of humanity in it. I asked if he felt Edward Thomas was any sort of model for him but he thought not,

I've never consciously styled myself on Thomas. I think it's a matter of vaguely similar outlook and temperament. I'd like to write like Auden but that wouldn't be honest. Bishop, Wilbur and certain poems by Rimbaud have a style which I like to refer to when in doubt.  

Elizabeth Bishop I can see now, as in her Sandpiper perhaps. And that, like her, his published output amounts to relatively few poems which suggests that both either only wrote poems when something significant enough presented itself or that their quality control didn't allow through poems that they weren't entirely happy with.

Jeff published two booklets, The Angled Boat and The Other Parish, and there are a number of limited edition poems produced by the Chestnut Press, and Gruffyground, at their invitation, on handmade paper. I will hope to compile a bibliography and see if the essay his work deserves is possible but it might be limited to an appreciation more than anything definitive. 

I know that he was placed in the National Poetry Competition more than once. On one occasion,

'The Gecko' was an entry in the Arvon competiton when Paterson won it. It didn't earn a prize, only a commended which didn't worry me too much as Michael Donaghy got the same and he wasn't upset at all. 

There was also an appearance on Radio 3 alongside James Michie and an accompanying 'short-lived' magazine called 3.  

He had been 'chuffed' when I asked if he might be part of a reading I was looking into proposing to next year's Portsmouth BookFest. He need not have been concerned that he would 'lower the standard', his modest dignity would have enhanced the event. His last e-mail from a few weeks ago ends with a promise to write at more length 'tomorrow'.

At an early stage of making some notes on The Angled Boat, I wondered whether it would be appropriate to make some lateral comparison of Jeff's poems with those of John Donne. Any similarity is not immediately obvious but it could be that Donne's 'metaphysical' way, where his entreaties to girlfriends or meditations are a vehicle for his showy ingenuity, is not unlike Jeff's contemplation of tiny detail being a way into exercising his lines into quiet, sometimes extraordinary, performances. In Moss, for example, it takes him beyond,

This solanum, winter cherry, is dead.

But I keep it for the moss

that brims the pot and for the six 

muted orange fruits that hang like moons

above an unattempted planet.

 

in a way that is like Blake seeing a world in a grain of sand.  

 

I never came away from any discussion of poetry with Jeff feeling anything but the wiser for it. He was the 'less deceived', once saying that 90% of poems aren't much good; that Eliot's attitude in his critical essays was that, 'this is all a bit too hard for you', and that an obituary of Thom Gunn I did for another website was good 'in parts'. But the value of his discriminating approach was that one was allowed to feel that if and when he said kind things about your work he probably wasn't just being polite. Although he was always that, too.   

Emilija Karaliūtė at Lunchtime Live !

 Emilija Karaliūtė, Portsmouth Cathedral, Sept 24

One might imagine that one has heard of most musical instruments but, as with most things, I reckon there's always more one doesn't know about than one does. Thanks to Emilija Karaliūtė, those who were in Portsmouth Cathedral today can at least transfer the kanklės from the first category into the second. It is a Lithuanian flat-bed harp, related to the zither or perhaps more distantly to the dulcimer or Indian santoor. If Frank Muir defines it as such on Call My Bluff, you will know to pick him. More important than that, though, or whether what Emilija plays on it is folk or classical music, is that it is gorgeous.

One becomes absorbed in the instrument to the extent that the differences between folk pieces, Debussy and Handel that might be apparent on the piano are less noticeable. 

The stillness and mystery of The Forest Idyll by Alfonsos Mikulskis quickened into something sparkling and then another composer new to most of us, I dare say, Juozas Naujalis and his Dear Lithuania was melodic. The 'classical' part of the programme was segued into by way of the delicacy and shimmering of a Prelude by Jonas Švedas before a sumptuous On Wings of Song by Mendelssohn. It's not only a matter of two hands playing different parts, as with the pedals on a piano or harp, the strings were adjusted by hand, presumably to mute or sustain the notes.

Strictly speaking, the Passacaglia, HWV 486, might have been identifiable as Handel with its walking left hand lower line under the decorative right while The Girl with the Flaxen Hair was reflective. But then the usually reliable stock of adjectives failed me in the finale, Land by Takatsugu Muramatsu. Not beyond words but maybe more abstract and modern - the composer being born in 1978 - than evocative of anything specific if not the pure sound of the kanklės itself.

Emilija was a tremendous find for the Lunchtime Live series, deeply appreciated by a gathering, many of who, like me, must have been very glad to have taken a chance on music that could have been anything for all we knew. A rarity and a special, luminous thing. And now we do know and are grateful for the privilege of having heard it and all about it.

Not Going Out

Absolutely brilliant, going into its 15th series, second only to The Last of the Summer Wine for longevity but light years ahead of it for remaining any good.

It might provide some insight into a more recent 'generation gap' than any I was aware of in the 1970's but Lee Mack's reference point is Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, not Hunky Dory or Bolan Boogie, so whereas he is confounded by the values of a generation that supplanted his, I'm not sure which side I'm on. I thought I was meant to sympathize with him, satirizing himself as he so gallantly does, but I don't know. The moment when one anticipated it would suddenly all go quiet and he could be heard accusing them all of being 'snowflakes' was one of several genuine lol moments, so unusually being seen and heard fresh and new and not as part of an addiction to Fawlty Towers, Dad's Army, The Office, Blackadder, The Royle Family, Early Doors or Only Fools and Horses.

It is sensational work that Lee Mack is continuing to do. He should be offered something on a forthcoming honours list so that he can decline it. It's just what he does, or one of the things - the best of them- and such things, when they are good enough, are their own reward.

 

Recent Acquisition - Lonely Infinite Distance

The annual Portsmouth & Hampshire Art Society exhibition in the cathedral was a few weeks ago now. Long enough, you might think, to assess my latest purchase.

I needed no time at all to like it a lot on the Sunday. I was only glad it was still inexplicably not sold when I went back on Bank Holiday Monday to buy it. When I say 'assess', I mean 'wonder what it's about'. It is ostensibly a smear of yellow in the top left corner of some dark blue.

It is Lonely Infinite Distance by Anthony Mayle, Acrylic, 29 x 29 cm. I don't know if it benefits from its title or if we are being nudged towards a meaning that we might find for ourselves, among however many others, but perhaps it helps.

Three weeks on, I'm more inclined towards a midnight winter moon than any time before sunrise when surely the sky would be a paler blue. The light is coming from behind what might be a ruined building, tentatively suggested but possibly cloud, too. But one attempts any definitive interpretation at one's peril, as one does with Hamlet, late Beethoven or Shostakovich, or Vermeer until Andrew Graham-Dixon recently spoiled all that by apparently explaining it all away.

The Moon doesn't cast yellow light and the foreground wouldn't be that shade of blue, if it ever is and so we are not invited to take it literally. 

There is immense subtlety in it that is entirely ruined by electric light, photography or even being looked at from any distance. There are tiny specks of white to be found in it alongside the detail of the brushwork and minute changes of shading when looked at up close. The colours can be enjoyed for themselves in a palette that at first might appear limited but infer the infinite in its fine nuances of shade. The distance to the source of its light is caught by the perspective that puts it well beyond that which it may or may not be emerging from behind. The loneliness might come from that sense of distance. I simply don't know if it would be better off without its evocative title.

I've been entirely happy with my two purchases from previous such exhibitions but this was the least expensive, never mind inflation, and while being the smallest, I'm not sure that paintings are priced up by measurement like Tony Hancock seems to think in The Rebel. But this is surely better, not for any potential mystical quality but for being less figurative, but not abstract either. Mainly, though, because it is gorgeous to look at and, like the music that is best to listen to and the literature that is best to read, it doesn't have to mean anything that could be set out in an essay.   

The Housekeeper

Rose Tremain, The Housekeeper (Chatto & Windus)

There's a sketch in A Bit of Fry & Laurie in which two critics try to outbid each other in how many 'levels' they found in a work under discussion. They could have found plenty in The Housekeeper. It is a novel about a fictional affair Daphne du Maurier didn't have that resulted in her writing Rebecca, which in turn reverses the original story to make the famous book.

The housekeeper is Danni, a Polish Jew, who tells the story not too unreliably of her affair with the writer who spends a summer at Manderville Hall and the echoes of Mrs. Danvers and Manderley are already in place. In its first half, their clandestine love is a paradise of release from their respective roles as highly dependable domestic and unhappily married, successful upper class author but events at a renewal of the Big Bash party that had been a highlight of society life when the Lady of the house had been alive begin a devastating unravelling of their dangerous liaison.

In some ways the Mrs. Danvers character is Miss Adelaide, the daughter due to inherit the hall, who understands none of its tradition and whose selfishness is as sinister and cruel as anything in du Maurier's work. It is at the Big Bash that she inadvertently comes in on Danni and Daphne and stumbles on their secret. But her privileged meanness of spirit is outdone by the way that Daphne drops Danni and reverts to her marriage for the sake of her public reputation. In a book full of convincing writing, the passages in which what had appeared to be sublime love and the satisfying of a desperate need turn into such bleak rejection make one wonder at the human capacity for enthralment.

Danni is telling her story in instalments from her subsequent work as an expert seamstress so it is fitting how many thematic threads are woven into Rose Tremain's work, representing yet another level by which any critic would have to be impressed. One wonders at the daring and ingenuity that make the model for Mrs. Danvers not Danni but Daphne du Maurier herself.

It seems I got lucky, deciding that this was a new novel worth reading when I read so few. It's not very likely I'll read any others this year but I don't rate my chances of finding a better one if I read a cartload. I will have to see what else looks promising in the Tremain back catalogue, never mind seeing what I might have missed in the du Maurier. The Housekeeper compares with anything from the last couple of decades- Mothering Sunday, The Sense of an Ending, The Goldfinch. I don't know if there are still suggestions about that the novel as an art form is finished but it quite clearly isn't.

Middlemarch and other stories

I was rewarded for my diligent scanning of the TV schedules when finding the 1994 dramatisation of Middlemarch by Andrew Davies on Wednesday night and the next two. It is a masterpiece of the genre.

I 'read' it as part of Victorian Lit at university but much of it passed me by, aged 19, it being far too mature a book for someone so jejune. Re-reading it several years ago led me into a year of George Eliot and I appreciated it a bit more but still this easy-access serving of it 'on a plate' is very much worth having. I realize it is not, as someone told me last year, 'just a soap opera' but one of the most complete novels in the language although I'll never have been adequately prepared to talk about it with our tutor, Prof. David Carroll, whose major achievement was editing the variorum edition.  

My sympathies are first with the gentle scholar, Edward Casaubon, and for a bit longer than they should be when he is revealed as a moody obsessive whose work is an escape from life designed not to have an ending. Dorothea is compromised between her frustrated devotion to him and the more dangerous glamour of Ladislaw. Her sister, Celia, is characterised in the succinct line that he is 'fonder of geraniums', in which the lack of ambition is a safeguard against hope, ambition and disappointment.

Juliet Aubrey is surely a bit too good-looking to be Dorothea, who must in some part be the scholarly Mary Ann Evans, but needs must in a TV drama and actors need to be much sexier than the characters they are playing or else there's a danger we won't sympathize with them enough. 

 

I remember Prof. Carroll telling us how he realized that Middlemarch would be his life's work and it must be great to have such a project. At Lancaster, a bit of a low grade backwater in the university system in the late 1970's, one could hardly blame the academic staff for using the opportunity to pursue careers beyond the teaching of students who hadn't been accepted by anywhere more prestigious. Richard Dutton worked on Ben Jonson, Norman Sherry on Graham Greene and Bill Murray talked about whatever he felt like which was often himself. 

I like the idea of having such a specialist area but there is too much of everything to spend too much time on one thing. Three books arrived this week that immediately go ahead of the two remaining Henry James books left over from that over-ordering. It turned out to be easy to decide in what order to read them.

The Anatomy of Melancholy can be looked at from time to time, in extracts, maybe by the bedside, and is too daunting to read from beginning to end. Considered by some 'the best book ever written', one needs to know about it in the knowledge that one is never going to know all about it. 

A biography is sometimes a better way into a writer than reading their books and Wittgenstein is likely to be a paragon example of that. So, potentially heavy going as it may be, it was obvious that The Housekeeper by Rose Tremain was the one to pick up first. 

A good decision. It will be good to have a review of a brand new novel on here shortly and then, quite likely, look through the back catalogue of Rose Tremain to find what I'd been missing.

The Idler no. 44, 17 Feb 1759

Continuing with the Best Books in the House, I took the Selected Essays of Dr. Samuel Johnson with me to help recent train journeys pass. Those pieces are ideal for such purposes. He is never less than good company but sometimes one looks, looks again and wonders when his jobbing journalism becomes something like a poem one wants to learn word perfectly.  

The Idler no. 44, 17 Feb 1759, on memory, is such a thing. 

Its paragraph in which,

From the vexation of pupillage men commonly set themselves free about the middle of life, by shutting up the avenues of intelligence, and resolving to rest in their present state,

resonated almost like no other passage I've ever read.

First of all it sounded very loosely like my idea that poets- some of them- reach 'maturity' at 30 but either start to repeat themselves or pack it in at 60. It is such a baggy theory as to be meaningless but, having thought it once, I still credit it with the merest shred of validity.

More than that, though, it sounds like the age at which pop music stopped for me and I shut up the avenues of intelligence and resolved to rest in my present state. I due course, the same has applied to new poetry. There must be pop music and poems worth having by young people out there somewhere but I'm not sure I could find it for looking. The books and records I have already, DGBooks Radio on Spotify and the anthology I have in my head are plenty enough for me.

Dr. Johnson's brilliant discursion on the role of memory leads him to perhaps favour the art of Forgetfulness and I entirely appreciate his reasons for doing so when he means leaving behind those things in the past that come with associations one might not want to remember. Except that by now I prefer the past to the future and with age there can come more forgetfulness than one might have wished for.

But, yes, like an old raincoat, Dr. Johnson won't ever let you down. He entirely belongs among the Best Books in the House but I won't give up entirely on books I've not read before because, like when Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were discovered, it was thought there might yet be a bit more out there.

So, Rose Tremain's new novel about Daphne du Maurier, a biography of Wittgenstein and Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy should arrive on Thursday. To the tune of Dana's Cold, Cold Christmas - it's gonna be a highbrow Autumn with those books, dreaming of all those I could have re-read instead.

Oxford Open Doors

 It's a long ride from Swindon but it's free with the senior bus pass. There were places it might be worth looking inside. I was in good form and had finished the Times crossword just beyond Faringdon, taking care to only fill it in when one wasn't being thrown about by the prolifically pot-holed roads.

Neither of the student guides I asked in St. John's College had the faintest idea where Larkin's rooms might have been and some of the more recent architecture was a bit like that at Lancaster, so not uplifting. I've been in a couple of unprepossessing Oxford colleges before and was hoping for more.

Magdalen is surely that but I might have been expecting too much. The nameplate at the bottom of a staircase presumably indicated the accommodation of a professor that lived there and it brought to mind the dessicated-looking elderly dons who came in to sit at top table for dinner in halls at Downing College, Cambridge, in 1979, taking half an hour from their Herodotus for some bleak sustenance. It was so-so.

The main object of interest was the Painted Room in Cornmarket Street where Shakespeare may or may not have stayed with the Davenants on his journeys between London and Stratford. Not in that room, the guides didn't think, because they thought the Davenants served wine and might not have taken paying guests but William probably stayed at an inn nearby. I decided against enquiring what they thought about the prospects of him having fathered William Davenant while he was passing through. But one wants to see these places when the rare opportunity presents itself. It may not help much but there's a vague sense of feeling slightly more a part of it by having been. For example, I hadn't realized that the Davenant's premises included a branch of BetFred. Had Shakespeare been in Oxford on St. Leger day, he might have had his couple of ducats each way on the 11/1 winner.

But the main action of Oxford Open Doors for me was extra curricular. It was necessary to queue to see the Painted Room, only 15 being allowed in at a time. Time was on my side so I did, disappointed to be 16th in line for the next intake but at least glad to have a bit of wall to lean on to read the Times Saturday Review while I waited.

There appeared, in a blaze of entitlement and extreme self-confidence, a lurid caricature of Bullingdon Club and Brideshead Oxford who, to be fair to him, might not have noticed the 45 minute queue but took alarmingly quick exception to being informed of the procedure by the lady in charge of crowd control, not that such a role ought to be too demanding at such an esoteric attraction.

He immediately asked for the lady's name and she offered a variation of the Sicilian Defence by asking for his. He said that he didn't like her manner.

At that point I looked up from my reading matter and said that she had been perfectly civil to him and it was him that was being rude.

Excuse me, he said, are you reading your newspaper or listening to our conversation?

I said I'd been pretending to read the paper but had in fact been listening to him being rude. His reaction was to push his hand into my face thus causing my hat to fall from my head and onto the ground and then he exited stage left in some haste.

What a man. I'm not sure I've witnessed such outlandish gaucheness in the flesh before. Perhaps not even on telly in the blond Etonian, Bullingdonian, Oxfordian Prime Minister we had a few years ago whose behaviour was consistently boorish. 

I would be glad to renew our acquaintance and perhaps interview him but unless he finds this reference, recognizes himself and makes contact, it seems highly unlikely. I don't want to press charges for assault- that idea hadn't even crossed my mind until someone else suggested it. We had a lorra lorra fun there in the name of Englishness and our cultural heritage. I'd really like to find out more about him.  

Vermeer

No list should ever be regarded as the final answer. A Top 6 compiled today could easily be different by tomorrow and certainly unlikely to be the same in a few years' time. Nominating the Best Books in the House a while back, I should have included Andrew Graham-Dixon's Vermeer ahead of Benjamin Moser's The Upside-Down World. That doesn't mean Moser is taken off the short list but it does mean that Graham-Dixon is closer to being the actual best book in the house. And thus, for me, the Best Book Ever because if I knew of better ones, they would be in the house.

Such books need to be re-read at least once. While there are a lot of books in the world, and a lot of music and paintings, I prefer to stay with known masterpieces than explore unchartered territory in the hope of finding anything else as good because I suspect the odds are against it. Eventually one feels as if one is approaching the limits of the world one is happy to inhabit. Which is not to say that Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and a biography of Wittgenstein aren't lined up for the Autumn.

But Vermeer is nothing short of sensational in constructing not only a life but a comprehensive revelation of what those paintings mean where previously he was thought to be a 'sphinx' whose meanings were undecipherable beneath the quiet, the gorgeous treatment of light and something transcending the ordinary. It belongs right up alongside A.N. Wilson's Jesus and Katherine Duncan-Jones's Ungentle Shakespeare as a brilliant account of a life re-interpreted against some generally accepted versions except Vermeer comes across as much the preferable human being.

All the background detail of the warring history of the Netherlands is relevant where other such books sometimes pile it in to make something book length. The diligent research into contemporary records provides Vermeer with a much more coherent and credible life than Jesus Christ or Shakespeare have ever been provide with. Andrew Graham-Dixon concedes that he is often working with suppositions but I find little reason to doubt his whereas those made by biographers of Jesus and Shakespeare usually come with agendas, and much more dubious guesswork.

After the ongoing wars, mainly with Spain, that marked Vermeer's early years, a peace was arrived at. The famous View of Delft, previously thought to be a town glistening gently after some rain, is thus a celebration of ordinary, peaceful life.

The paintings were often done in pairs but their subsequent separation to galleries across the world helped to disguise the fact. Many of the best paintings of women alone in domestic settings were done for one patron and their themes are subtly religious - liberal, 'free-thinking', non-Calvinist religion - very slowly so that the artist was ever in debt to his patron, his mother-in-law who held contrary religious views and others. But the climax of Graham-Dixon's account is his explanation of the Girl with a Pearl Earring. It represents the moment that Mary Magdalene turned round and recognized the resurrected Jesus which thus puts the viewer in his place.

It could be the best book I've ever read, for several different reasons but that's the main one.

What We Can Know

 Ian McEwan, What We Can Know (Vintage)

It is 2119, it is post-Derangement and post-Inundation; sea levels have risen to make Britain an archipelago with no Thames, no Oxford, its settlements on what had been higher ground, the tops of village churches sticking up out of the water in places; Nigeria is a world power. While there is no racism, there are bandits abroad but people look back on the freedoms, cultural diversity and richness of life a hundred years before as something worth having. The Derangement was how the governments then (which means in our recent decades) knew all about climate change but did nothing about it. The Inundation is the vast migration of people from other countries that has effectively washed away any racist concern about what colour the population are, possibly it is mentioned because the majority are a light brown colour.

While Ian McEwan is a brilliant writer for most of his time, his novels usually seemed flawed in one way or another. Thus I'm on the lookout to find fault because Science Fiction is often wrong even if the 1960's dream of a 'walkie-talkie' has manifested itself in the mobile phone that so many people can't now bear to not look at for more than a few minutes. So, while I'm not surprised that Humanities, Eng Lit and poetry are sidelined to very minor roles in universities, I'm surprised that there are universities at all.

Francis Blundy was the great poet of the period in which he was only rivalled by Seamus Heaney. There was an even more magnificent novelist called Mabel Fisk in a later generation who produced work that puts her on the same level of eminence as Shakespeare. She isn't very important to the story but it is as interesting as it is unlikely that any artist in our fragmented culture will ever be regarded as comparable to Bach, the Beatles, Shakespeare or Rembrandt. Which makes one wonder if McEwan- immensely clever as he is- is not having a little joke with us.

But Blundy wrote a lost masterpiece, A Corona for Vivien, again thought to be impossibly beyond anything writeable in the early C21st. It might not be coincidental that the Vivien Blundy he writes it for has the same name as T.S. Eliot's first wife. After a longer first section of research into that poem, the second goes back to the early C21st where we are told what the poem was really about, by Vivien herself. 

It's not as pretty as the legendary poem is thought to have made it sound. If McEwan was once nicknamed Ian Macabre on account of the horror in his early fiction, he modulated into the more sophisticated distaste of bourgeois sleaze in some later work. Some major poets benefitted, if that's the word, from prolific philandering and Blundy's one of them. Vivien is one of those impressed enough to reciprocate.

It is also a recurring theme in McEwan that we find everything overturned, like in Atonement and Sweet Tooth and so we do here, too. That things are often not what they seem is a fair point. What We Can Know is an involving read, especially of interest to anyone with an interest in contemporary poetry and it's reassuring to see that McEwan has as sound a grasp, as a novelist, of poetry as the recent Sebastian Faulks memoir has. But endings are notoriously hard to do.

Of course we don't get to read the miraculous poem, or any of the work of Mabel Fisk, because that would mean McEwan having to write it. As so often, he is very good but he ultimately fails us. It entirely worked in On Chesil Beach because that was the point. And it remains the point. Beneath the brilliant poem that didn't get left to posterity was something much darker. It's quite possibly a brilliant book. Vivien is surely the opposite of the 'unreliable narrator' unless her account is untrustworthy. Having enjoyed reading it so much, I wish I hadn't been left with the suspicion that Ian McEwan might have performed another of his elaborate tricks. 

Sebastian Faulks, Fires Which Burned Brightly

 Sebastian Faulks, Fires Which Burned Brightly (Penguin)

Sebastian Faulks makes a tremendous job of the memoir that he,

never wanted to write ... because I didn't think my life remarkable. 

 

Compared to whose, I wonder. It's surely well above average in terms of stories, achievement and his capacity to understand it. But, perhaps more than those things, he can write it himself rather than have it written for him like sports people and others usually have to. Always highly readable in his fiction, he is at least as much so in his life.

While it is approximately chronological, at the suggestion of his publisher, it is more thematic with the ten chapters reflecting on school, thirteen years in journalism, booze, France, war, America and family in a variety of combinations. He is aware of the privilege he came into and, in some detail about his education, that it provides no insurance against the misery of private schooling. He 'borrowed' a friend's bike and escaped on one occasion.

He was clearly one of those whose talent was such that he succeeded in school and university without having to work very hard. Without going on any ideological excursions, it is apparent that his sympathies are properly placed, understanding where the world has gone so wrong and with an appreciation of wine, books, music and cricket. In his case it was Procul Harum that were in the right place at an impressionable age for him. It is to the eternal credit of the teenage Sebastian that it mattered to him whether the greatest pop record of all time was Be My Baby by The Ronettes or Then He Kissed Me by The Crystals. The passing references to an enthusiasm for golf are less excusable.

Insights into the writer's life are provided in the depth of research involved in producing the novels, not only about the wars that shaped the world in the twentieth century but also the development of psychiatry that may or may not have been related to them in understanding how humanity functions, or fails to. And also, a promotional tour of America that sounds genuinely horrific. If one thinks that producing full-length novels looks like hard work then selling them afterwards sounds worse.

Faulks is naturally funny. when suitable opportunities arise, and the count of 'laugh out loud' moments was impressive. Several, by no means on every page, but thus similar to Terry Eagleton's The Gatekeeper, similarly thematically organized and possibly done more in the spirit of a stand-up comedian but, as a writer's account of their own life, I can't compare it with anything that I enjoyed more. 

His interests extend well into poetry as I realized some years ago when he attended a session on Thom Gunn, who is mentioned in passing, at the Cheltenham Literature Festival almost inevitably being made aware on his way in how much a reader admired his work. What must it be like being Paul McCartney if a novelist can't go out in public without being harrassed in the same way that I'd bothered Clive Wilmer outside half an hour earlier.

Things come easily to a class act. None of his books are my biggest favourites but I have plenty of them. His memoir is as good as any of them, for some reason still not threatening any all-time list but tremendously enjoyable. It is almost comparable to the music of, say, Fleetwood Mac which is often hard to fault but somehow 'middlebrow' and thus not quite eligible for top honours. But they and he did well out of what they chose to do and are unlikely to worry that they are not quite James Joyce or the Velvet Underground in my book.

What's in a Name?

 Susan Dwyer Amussen, What's in a Name? (Manchester University Press)

No historian thinks that Shakespeare didn't write his own plays. The main reason, in Susan Dwyer Amussen's account is that several of his contemporaries thought he did and none doubted it and it took 150 years for anybody to think otherwise. In a book subtitled How historians know Shakespeare was Shakespeare one might expect a bit more than an argument that is set out in one or two pages but the rest of the text is socio-economic, theatrical and local history that is at best only very loosely required to establish that the Stratford man wrote the plays and poems attributed to him. Or most of them. Not many by now dispute that there was collaboration with other writers involved.

It is interesting material and most books on Shakespeare's life necessarily include some context and background. It's not clear that knowledge of the apprentices rioting in London, for example, help us to establish that Shakespeare rather than Oxford, Bacon or Marlowe was the author of the oeuvre that bears his name. What the accumulated detail does do, more thoroughly than might be required, is show that Shakespeare, with his grammar school education, would have been perfectly capable of producing the work he did without going to university. There were others like him who, had they possessed the requisite talent, might have become similarly memorable. What is so often left out of the debate is the possibility of innate genius.

Susan writes carefully at times, like when only noting that the twins were born to Anne, but can be reduced to banality when reporting such things about London as,

Courtship, sex and marriage were critical parts of the life of the city. 

Not being a biography, the book isn't expected to cover the life in a coherent sweep but its progress surveys its trajectory, understandably concentrating more on the theatre than personal relationships. The recent claims about Anne living in London, based on a letter addressed to 'Good Mrs Shakespaire' are treated without prejudice as being possible without proving anything for certain but she brings the possible date for that forward to as early as 1598-9 and she imagines Shakespeare travelling between London and Stratford more regularly than I do. The purchase of the Blackfriars gatehouse so close upon his retirement from the theatre suggests he intended to retain business interests in London even if he did spend more time in Stratford. While all such possibilities can be considered, it's easy to get lost under a welter of such speculation when we simply don't know and probably never will.

No such biography, though, affects the authorship question. The reasons for thinking that Shakespeare wrote a vast portion of the work that is credited to him are simply stated. It is the far-fetched cases for other candidates put forward by those who think he didn't that are much more convincing that he did. Somebody wrote it all and there isn't a credible case to be made for anybody else. It is a much more unlikely story that such ideas ever gained the credence that they have- with such eminent adherents as Mark Rylance among them- but, as is credited to H.L. Mencken, the idea that one never went broke by underestimating the public is relevant once again.

Susan Dwyer Amussen has provided a well-researched, readable and possibly useful book on Early Modern England but its contribution to the Shakespeare Authorship question, while welcome, could have been presented in an essay. I'm not even sure how much of a question is left. I bought and read the book because it seemed to promise what might be some closure on the subject. Who is the gullible one now?