Lucas, Bach Piano, Scannell

There was always much to like about John Lucas, Many years ago I read his survey, Modern English Poetry: From Hardy to Larkin. Later his book on Notts cricket, The Trent Bridge Battery. Another time I'd ordered books from his Shoestring Press. And eventually I realized it was all the same bloke, also jazzman, Prof. of English and novelist. 

Recent obituaries mentioned his last novel, That Little Thread (Greenwich Exchange, 2023), thought it sounded worth a go and was proved right. Peter Simpson, Professor at a Midlands university, is approached by a 'wide boy' who had been the unlikely father of a child born to 'Paddy', a star student from twenty years earlier who left before graduating and reportedly died during childbirth. And thus we are on the trail of what really happened.

One might think a novel about middle class academic life written by one such could be a bit self-contained and there are larger concerns beyond its limited milieu but they have lives like anybody else and the fact that theirs is based around writing essays in pursuit of a certificate shouldn't detract from its potential too much.

It's a steady, good book done by one who had done it before and knows how to. It brought to mind Jane Jarmain who is the similarly brilliant, tragically early casualty in Sean O'Brien's Afterlife and perhaps there are comparisons to be made beginning with that motif. 

The future of thge novel is perenially in question but there's no shortage of them. The problem might be that Finnegans Wake seemed to have knocked the ball out of the ground once and for all but, like Theodore Adorno's dictum that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz, there still was. 

Further novels by Lucas might well be on their way here soon. 

--

The disc Allusions and Beyond by Piano Dup Takahashi-Lehmann arrived with its 2.33 of the Bach/Kurtag Gottes Zeit from Cantata BWV 106. Two further such miniatures follow it without achieving the same stillness.

Before them, an arrangement for four hands of Brandenburg Concerto no. 5 is worth having although for once perhaps the very familiar orchestral original is difficult to improve on.

Although I can see how an album or programme can benefit from contrasts, I think I prefer discs that are 'more of the same'. The shift into Bernd Alois Zimmerman's 'Monologe' takes us immediately faraway when we might not be ready to go. If it's philistine not to find its modernist plink, plonk and crash intellectually invigorating then it must be the effect of time increasingly putting a cap on my sympathies for the avant garde. Having been there and done that, I don't feel much need to go back. And then the Brahms Haydn Variations come as some relief but it turns out to have been a disc mainly bought for 2.33 of outrageous charm.

--

Not dissimilar to the Lucas book is Vernon Scannell's Feminine Endings (Enitharmon, 2000), a set piece of the contemporary poetry world all about a residential poetry course. One of the tutor poets is older, male and traditional, the other is female and more challenging. The marital situation of the hosts is becoming fragile as are some of the paying guests, one of who is taking a lot of interest in news reports about the latest woman found murdered. And the premises where it all takes place with readings and writings of poems is haunted.

For all the ready-made humour to be found in the poetry world and the forseeable attitudes and opinions of those involved, it's a neat book encompassing more than might have been expected ot it and Scannell gets it right. It's fairly clear where he stands, that he is more or less Gordon Napier, brought in as a last-minute, stopgap replacement for the indisposed Brian MacDuff, who is presumably George MacBeth.

Some of the poets mentioned are fictitional but most of the poems are real. I don't think it's obvious who Gabriella Cornwell is which is a good thing because it might be actionable but at least she wins a major, international prize for her opaque efforts. It could be used as a text to introduce the poetry of its time and might yet be if I pursue the recently occuring idea to do something about the 1990's which, whether or not it did at the time, looks like a Golden Age by now.