Sounds of the 70's.

 Bob Harris is clearly still not well and we all wish him the best. Meanwhile, Shaun Keaveny, with a bit of help from Mark Radcliffe, has been making Sounds of the 70's sound much more like the decade I took part in. I was in Gloucester and then Lancaster, not hanging out in Nashville or California.

One gets the impression that Andy Burnham wants to be Prime Minister and feels no shame saying as much and so, on that basis, I want to do Radio 2's Sounds of the 70's. Equally blatantly, I've never made any secret of it.

My calling card sample show, put together this afternoon, is at Spotify now.

Sounds of the 70's

 

If only there could be a pop wireless show as good as that.

And yet, there could be and Version 1.0 is there already.  

 

Best Pianist Ever

 The Times yesterday, in marking 125 years of Wigmore Hall, published the 'ten greatest classical pianists', as chosen by an invited list of some current acknowledged stars. My contribution is not worth having but, as Portsmouth's answer to the musical question that nobody asked, I must pass a Sunday afternoon by putting in my tuppence worth. Me commenting on pianists is somewhat less appropriate than having an American tell me about cricket or a bricklayer advising me on poetry but one never can tell and one mustn't stereotype these people.

The Times panel surprised me somewhat by making Sergei Rachmaninov no. 1. He came with the sort of physical advantages that put him already ahead of most others, all other things being equal. There's no way I could have won a Tour de France up against the heart rates, lung capacity and other attributes of the likes of Miguel Indurain. And, a perennial second in the sports day sprint races at school, I wasn't Usain Bolt either.

Rach had such big hands he wrote music that was beyond others. Claudio Abbado had to help out Yuja Wang with a note she couldn't reach with her lesser spread. But he was a force of nature, too. The Times list goes 2. Richter, 3. Horowitz, 4. Radu Lupu, with Martha Argerich at 8 the only one still living. No Gilels, Gould, Arrau, Brendel, Ogden, etc, etc. but one could presumably make a list of fifty and still miss some.

On the basis of her Bach and Shostakovich, going in with my preferred repertoire, I'd be voting for Tatiana Nikolayeva. I spent formative years with two Mozart concertos played by Barenboim. I've always liked Mitsuko Uchida and hearing a Mozart Sonata, no. 5, the other day means her set of those will be ordered soon. In the flesh I've seen Steven Kovacevich, Emmanuel Ax, Isata Kanneh-Mason and local stars Angelina Kopyrina, who never fails to take the roof off, and Béla Hartmann. I'd have to have Angelina in any top 10 of mine.

I wouldn't be having Glenn Gould. While technical perfection would never be an important consideration for me, I'm not sure how far I'd go with innovative interpretation either. I'm listening more to the composer than what the performer does with their music so I will be all across Tatiana  whose 40-disc box-set has all the right pieces in it and, come a suitable windfall, all £100's worth of it will be given a home here.  

As ever, with such list-making, it's an unhealthy obsession and yet insists on being done from time to time as soon as one concedes that one thing is better than another. If Bach is a better composer than Piazolla then it figures that they can all be put in order of superiority. But aged maybe 13 or 14 and applying devoutly communist principles to anything I could think of, I took all the teams out of my football league ladder because none should be put above any other. Teams should play nicely, pass to each other and socialize pleasantly at half time and afterwards.

Which is, of course, even more ridiculous because it would abnegate the whole point of football. By now, I'd gladly accept that but not the abnegation of music because if we did that it would follow that I'd be just as likely to appear at the Menuhin Room, singing pop songs out of tune, as any proper musician doing something they are good at and all the great work that has gone into building the series would be demolished at a stroke.  

the twice-washed tablecloth

 

Some genius here, from a recent Private Eye in their resident poetry correspondent's tribute to J. H. Prynne.

I need to say, firstly, that Private Eye is passed on to me by a mate, that I'd not spend my own money on it, but, secondly, that once in a while it gets it right.

This is a tremendous effort at pastiching Prynne, the very forefront and paragon of subverting what we were led to believe was poetry. Some of us might have got beyond that already by not accepting such things as that poetry must be made of rhythm and/or rhyme.

Regular, or longstanding, readers here will know that 'all you've got to be is any good'. 

Prynne and his like had a point but possibly suffered from labouring the one point they had at the expense of all others. It is potentially brilliant, definitely hilarious, but ultimately only of interest to its adherents if it refuses to come back to Planet Meaning.

Private Eye's uncredited pasticheur risks enchroaching on the brink of meaning in line 6, where Bowie is brought to mind, and the last three words that suggest Dover Beach. That might not be entirely their fault even if an editor in a position to do as much could have pointed out that they were at risk of meaning something not entirely untangential.

It's great how, trying to write about such writing, one is led into the same dead ends as theirs does. In a way, I'd so like to be convinced that theirs was an ever expanding universe of potential but I'm not. I think it's a party game and no more than that. I'm thrilled by the twice-washed tablecloth.

Is it old and thus a bad thing that it's only been washed twice or was it only bought last week and has been washed twice already. We are not to know and it is in such wondering that 'poetry' can sometimes be found. Elusive, 'thought-provoking', generative, lush.

The satirist, in one phrase, did for me more than my brief looks at real Prynne ever did. So, maybe I could go back to real Prynne, informed by that, and enjoy his poems more. And that's what I'd call 'irony'.        

The Richard Yates and Henry James Collections

In 2008, The Times reviewed The Collected Stories of Richard Yates so enthusiastically that I was persuaded to get myself one. It turned out they were right. I did my best to get involved in the Yates revival and collected all the novels via abebooks, most of them having to be sent from America. The film of Revolutionary Road appeared and a few months after I was about as complete as one can get in Yates, all the titles were re-issued in Britain. Still, my library has more interesting editions.

Now, last Saturday, Jem Calder celebrates The Easter Parade in the same paper's 'Rereading' feature and the great joy and benefit of having every worthwhile book one knows about was being able to go upstairs to fetch it and reread it myself. Explaining about him to a bookshop proprietor on Tuesday, she said he sounded like the American answer to the Angry Young Men and in some ways she's got it except maybe Yates is more middle class and a better prose writer than Alan Sillitoe. 

The Easter Parade follows Sarah and Emily, two sisters, through their disintegrating lives. Sarah, the elder, stays in a twenty year abusive marriage while Emily trawls her way through a litany of men who all seem suitable to begin with but prove not to be. As Yates invariably is, it's relentless in its downward spiral, the compensation only being the women's hope, or belief, that it will be for the best. It's heavy irony, it's brilliantly written. I'm not sure, as Jem Calder diagnoses, that,

the horror is just time's passing.  

That can be applied to most lives, or stories. In Yates it is more specifically the almost wilful self-deception of the two main characters and that they don't appear to have other options.

But that's what all those books upstairs are there for. To be returned to exactly as and when required. Yates remains right up at the top end of prose fiction and this latest return to him only proved that he's not going to be shifted from such a position.  

--

The Yates collection has been in place for years whereas the Henry James collection has sprung up in the last ten days. Following the immense success of The Aspern Papers/The Turn of the Screw, part of my mission on Tuesday in Chichester was to load up on whatever was to be found. I hadn't realized that the newly reopened premises where once were three storeys of second-hand books was now independent and new books. Impressed with her knowledge and charm, which I realized later is the salesmanship necessary to survive in the perilous world of retail books, I returned to pay the going rate for The Golden Bowl after a quick excursion to Oxfam where I was glad to find four other titles for only a bit more than the price of the pristine copy. I don't suppose she needed me to show her what she's up against in her admirable custodianship of the bookseller's dream life. Spending similar amounts in two bookshops and the flapjack shop, the flapjacks lasted three days, The Golden Bowl will last two or maybe three weeks and the four titles from Oxfam two or three months but I'll always be able to have the books again, which can't be said for the flapjacks.

At first sight, Washington Square isn't as good as the two novellas but it's still fine. It possibly anticipates at least Emily's story in The Easter Parade in how Catherine's relationship with the apparently feckless Morris Townsend doesn't work out, with some help from her severe father, who might have been right.

But, on further consideration, it's an open question. At first thinking it owed something to Jane Austen, or what I imagine Jane Austen to be like, it is perhaps anti-Austen in its beautiful, unrequited, possibly even Larkin-esque ending. Excellent reading.

And now, with all reason for hope, I go intrpeidly towards the big books. The Portrait of a Lady is all but 600 pages with James presumably indulging himself in his reams of prose but, as with Proust, that may not be a bad thing. 

The Cygnus Trio in Chichester

The Cygnus Trio, Chichester Cathedral, May 19

Tchaikovsky chamber music. Who knew. Ballets, big symphonies, the melodrama of the 1812 Overture, the Piano Concerto and one of the great violin concertos, yes, but he's not often, if ever, heard on these lunchtimes which are so often solo or small ensemble affairs. Well, the Cygnus Trio knew and the Trio in A minor, op. 50, is no small affair. Size isn't everything but neither is it to be measured by the number of musicians or decibels.

The Trio is in two lengthy movements, with the first, Pezzo elegiaco, in memoriam the pianst Nikolai Rubinstein, not textbook elegy perhaps with its grand gestures and energy. Javier Montañana's violin and Hannah Lewis's cello interacted lyrically before the theme was taken up by César Saura's piano. Some fitting solemnity was achieved in music that made much of relatively simple thematic material.

As could equally be said of the theme and variations of the second movement. There was no doubting this young trio's talent and the fine sound they made but some music can take its time to be convincing before thoroughly doing so.  César's opening exposition of the melody was almost devotional before the rapt violin and song-like cello did it their ways. It was quickly elaborated on with decorative piano and pizzicato strings, some tinkling top-end music box effects and Peter Ilyich taking on the challenges from Johann Sebastian and Ludwig to show how many different things he can do with the same tune.

It bounced around in dance and song and was in turn soulful, serene and spirited towards a presto climax with drama aforethought that had me thinking, not for the first time, that the end was due. He could have been hinting presciently towards Rachmaninov. But, no, in a consummately well-done final passage, the Trio made the Trio tread gently to its rest like a perturbèd spirit getting back to its grave before dawn.

The Turn of the Screw

A few months ago it was Dana Gioia I was so glad to 'discover', however belatedly. Now, it's Henry James who looks like taking high order among the writers of fiction that I've ever read. The tendency to want to make lists persists. It seems unhealthy but when one pronounces something as a 'favourite', it's useful to have defined to what degree. Not everything can be a priority, not everything a specialism and not everything a favourite. I'm less sure of my fiction writers than I am poets but, on the evidence of two novellas, Henry James looks destined to be very highly regarded.

The Turn of the Screw was better than The Aspern Papers and that was great. I'm glad the Introduction says that, like Hamlet, it,

will continue to inspire widely differing interpretations.

One is especially never sure in ghost stories exactly what is going on but Flora and Miles, the children, are impossibly charming yet increasingly and disconcertingly threatening. The presence of past domestic staff at Bly, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, as apparitions has something to do with it. It keeps the pages turning, especially with James's prose being so sumptuous and not as forbidding as I've assumed for so long without ever have checked for myself.

It's tempting in the first blaze of being impressed to put him ahead of long-established rivals. By all means, he's in many ways more sophisticated than Hardy and maybe George Eliot but it remains to be seen how he compares further down the line. I'm not throwing over Hardy on a whim after fifty years but it is much to James's credit that the comparisons even arise. It happens once in a while that the rest of a writer's back catalogue set me up for an extended session of reading. There is a lot of James. It is to be hoped that the two or three I pick up next are good choices. Much will depend on them as to how far into his work I go.

On Not Liking the Beatles

 The way I access the internet, via Firefox, shows me a selection of items that it seems to think I might like and, given the sort of thing that thrives on the internet and my reluctance to engage with much of it, it doesn't do badly at it.

It regularly features Far Out magazine and a series on 5 artists that some iconic artist couldn't stand, in which number one for somebody from Pink Floyd was the other members of Pink Floyd. Well, there wasn't much left to do without Syd Barrett, the only interesting one, apart from resent each other.

But today we have 10 musicians who couldn’t stand The Beatles.

I'm slightly Beatles-sceptic in not accepting everything they did as holy writ but, born in 1959 and being most taken with She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, aged 4, they are in my musical DNA. There are great things in that early-middle period. But they haven't got into my top plenty bands for a long time, don't turn up often on DGBooks Radio and don't come anywhere near the conglomerate achievement of Tamla Motown.

But, who are these dissidents, then? For the most part, largely who one might expect, the usual suspects of the predictably dissident.

I knew Frank Zappa would be there, who is stratospherically in a category of his own in the 5 artists I can't stand. Painfully, boorishly, boringly contrary to a fault. John Lydon had to be there except I had a lot of time for what he did once although the same by now applies to him.

I'm not put out by Julian Casablancas because The Strokes were a busted flush of dumb posturing from the beginning, the answer to their first album, Is This It, being, No, It Isn't. 

We know Elvis and The Beatles didn't get on too well. We also might think Elvis wasn't that bright, or even a musician.

Van Morrison is over-rated and I don't care what he thinks. Similarly Todd Rundgren, although one would like to think better of both.

Trent Reznor is, or was, apparently in Nine Inch Nails. That doesn't register at all here. 

Quincy Jones later apologized for what he said.

 

Which leaves Lou Reed and Michael Stipe, both of who are probably ahead of the Beatles on any list I might make. You'd almost expect it of Lou, though, notoriously difficult as he was while notoriously brilliant at his best in what he did. Sometimes great artists are like that. And sometimes so are the rest of us but we have less of a get out clause.

Which leaves us with St. Michael of Stipe, the paragon of cool, indie sensitivity and surely better than the pop music equivalent of those literary troublemakers who go out of their way to deride Shakespeare.

And, yes, he is. Far Out put him at number one in their list to make it look more shocking but it's not what he said. He's maybe only slightly more Beatles-sceptic than I am. He likes other stuff more. Is all.

While this series of features has seemed worth a look, I've not investigated one before and now I have, I found one scurrilous. And so, 1 Magazine Whose Features Are Not To Be Trusted-

Far Out.

 

That doesn't mean it's not a good game and I can rarely help myself when the opportunity to make a list presents itself. So, 5 artists that I can't stand-

obviously Frank Zappa, inevitably Queen, necessarily Pink Floyd, quite possibly Black Sabbath and Music by John Miles.

But I'd prefer to be writing about things I like, not those I don't like. If you don't like football, Eurovision, the ongoing debacle of politics or Strictly Come Dancing, you don't have to. Don't, then.    

Ackroyd, Henry James, Four Poems, Next Prime Minister

Chichester's Oxfam bookshop served up Peter Ackroyd's essays in The Collection and Henry James, The Aspern Papers and The Turn of the Screw this week. 

Ackroyd will be taken in bite-sized bits. Going straight to his Larkin, by way of the Motion biography, one finds him taking a dim view of Larkin's dim views without any compensating consideration of the consolations. He is firmly set against the man and his poems and unforgiving. Looking at his verdicts on other poets, that seems to be his way. Undoubtedly highly astute and discriminating, he is also sometimes a bit cheap in his put downs and one is tempted to put him and his book down, too, in the same way. Much of the journalism comes from The Spectator and there's an unattractive disdain in his tone until he gets to a poet like Prynne who is one whose poems are difficult enough for him. 

Maybe it's a good idea to read writers one doesn't like sometimes but after a while this is one volume that might find itself back on Oxfam's shelves in due course.

Whereas Henry James, who I've long thought I wouldn't like, is likely to be collected much further. His reputation for overly involved sentences and being heavy going was not corroborated by The Aspern Papers which I have just enjoyed enormously and seen off in short order. Atmospheric, beautifully done and Venetian, one wonders at the intensity of obsession with the great poet, Jeffrey Aspern, and the fact that Juliana Bordereau, his girlfriend, is now 150 years old when 100 would be plenty but that was captivating stuff and it might have turned out that James was the greatest writer I'd not read before and whatever else Oxfam have of his is likely to follow The Turn of the Screw. 

--

In case it transpires that I return to the sullen art of poetry readings in the near future, I rehearsed with the microphone on the laptop and have produced a recording entitled Four Poems. It fits perfectly into the five minutes I'm guessing would be the requirement, even including thirty seconds to get up and walk to the front. I wouldn't want to do more than five minutes, not least because I'm not sure many would want to listen for any longer, but it's hardly worth going to do less.

Not having heard myself do it much before, it's not as easy as one might think to get it as good as it sounds in one's head. I know the rhythms are there because I put them in but it's necessary to concentrate to get them right.

After four attempts it wasn't bad, without being flawless, but not to worry. It was intended to be made available here but it looks like incorporating audio files isn't possible, or at least far too difficult for me to do. So I guess it doesn't matter anymore.

The four poems are Piccadilly Dusk, Fiction, Windy Miller and Rainyday Woman. 

--

Meanwhile, surely even the political obsessives at Times Radio must eventually weary of reporting and speculating on the process of arriving at our seventh Prime Minister in ten years. To think we once looked down on Italy for their rapid turnover of governments.

Running the country must be a hard job and yet those doing it feel the need to continue with the internal machinations of what is only really a game of realizing their individual ambitions.

Keir Starmer is a good man hard done by, let down by his own party more than anybody else because, like most recent Labour Prime Ministers, he's not really Labour. It can't be wrong to lack charisma because Attlee was the best there ever was but he's not very good at it. The parallels with his direct opposite, Boris, pile up, most noticeably when he announces he's going to do ten years when he might not have ten more weeks.

I tipped Shabana Mahmood here a fewc weeks ago but that was about as good as the feeling I once had for Amber Rudd. So far unblemished, she'd no more carry her backbenchers with her than Keir or any other bluish type who might try to balance the books as a priority. But it's an impossible outcome to call. And whoever wins this time has three more years to survive and so will by no means be guaranteed to lead Labour into the next General Election. When was the last time the leader of the Conservative party could be backed at 50/1, and more, to be the Next Prime Minister.

These are unlikely days but it's likely they will get unlikelier yet.  

Edward Thomas on Richard Jefferies

 Edward Thomas does Richard Jefferies something of a disfavour in his critical biography. It's a brilliant, clear sighted and appreciative account but it quotes so heavily from the Jefferies books that one feels as if one has been provided with the salient points, a generous selection of highlights and know Jefferies well enough from it without needing to go to the original texts unless one wants the fine detail. It's such a great tribute of close reading and deep appreciation that it threatens to eclipse the need for its subject.

I've had it here for years but it soon became apparent that I'd only ever read the first chapter, which is a survey of the countryside south of Swindon that I know not quite as well as they did from having ridden through parts of it on a bike in the 1990's.

Thomas and Jefferies are kindred spirits in many ways, being so attentive to nature. Thomas was really a city man, though, and appreciated the countryside as a visitor. Coate, when Jefferies was there, wasn't on the outskirts of Swindon, it was a separate place. Thus Jefferies is, or first was, the sort of rural man who, however thoughtful and dreamy he might have been, loved the natural world in the same way as Ted Hughes did and King Charles III once did, who both saw fit to kill it whether by gun, fishing rod or other device. To the credit of Jefferies, he at least progressed to a preference for watching a bit longer and preferring to delay or make less use of his weaponry. Whereas Hughes often seemed to be reducing animals to their visceral parts and Jefferies sometimes becomes all mystical about what nature has to offer, it is Thomas whose sensitivity to the elements might appear more mainstream to us now, who get our milk from Tesco and much of our countryside from train windows.  

The autobiographical The Story of My Heart, the hymn to female beauty The Dewy Morn and the novel without a plot, Amaryllis at the Fair, look like the places to go in due course, perhaps Amaryllis first, but, as has happened before, I intend to go further into a writer and then another turns up - and here comes Henry James- but Jefferies has been tremendous value so far and I'm by no means finished with him yet. 

Orpheus Leander & Gina Kruger in Chichester

 Orpheus Leander & Gina Kruger, Chichester Cathedral, May 12

 Following hard upon the excitement of the Menuhin Room's Portsmouth 100 extravaganza, it often seems to me a challenge for who comes up next on my little schedule. Not only that but my brief preparation for this was to listen to Alina Ibragimova and Cédric Tiberghien's Brahms. No pressure, then, but Orpheus Leander and Gina Kruger are a class act in their own right and weren't aware of such things anyway. 

First, though, George Meredith's poem about a lark has been somewhat eclipsed by the music it prompted Vaughan-Williams to write. But music is much better at transcendal ideas like,

As up he wings the spiral stair,
A song of light, and pierces air 

With fountain ardor, fountain play,
To reach the shining tops of day, 

Gina's piano evoked the warm, summer earth and the echoes of folk tunes until Orpheus's violin spiralled and trilled and eventually until refined itself out of sight.

Internet research suggests that his instrument might be by William John but whoever made it, it provided a great sound throughout in his hands.

The Brahms Sonata no. 3, op. 108, began with an unfolding Allegro, mildly agitato in both parts but it is the shorter Adagio that stays in the memory with three runs through its long, longing melodic line performing the old trick of leaving one wanting more. Delicate light from the piano illuminated what might, imaginatively, have been insect flight in the poco presto before the Presto finale generated passion and energy in what is only a part of the rich repertoire provided by Brahms's late chamber music.

By way of an encore, we had Autumn Leaves, as per Nat King Cole and Johnny Mercer, hinting that Orpheus could help himself to a career in place of Andre Rieu if ever he felt inclined to. We might wish he would but not at the cost of losing the Brahms et al. That might be too much of a waste of talent and a fine violin.

City of Portsmouth Centenary Recital

 City of Portsmouth Centenary Recital, Menuhin Room, May 9

Andrew McVittie and Valentina Seferinova's little black books must have been well thumbed as they assembled the cast for this starry, celebratory gathering. Portsmouth being a city for a hundred years is as good a reason as any to celebrate its vibrant musical community. If the programme couldn't quite accommodate the whole directory of locally-based talent, it represented a generous helping of it.

Whereas it might be usual for any perceived 'star names' to appear later by way of a climax, it's a great thing to get on first and have one's performance done and out of the way in order to relax and enjoy everybody else except Valentina and Karen Kingsley were to re-appear throughout after their piano duo setting of the Pomp & Circumstance no. 1 in all its wordless glory, and hope. So the first to relax was actually Sara Deborah Timossi whose Legende by Wieniawski, accompanied by Valentina, was soulful and poignant in all its Jewish heritage and maybe the performance I'd most like to hear again.

Karen then returned in solo mode to make Reginald Jevons's The Sea ripple and build, at which point I'd better apologize for these rather peremptory comments but so much was packed into such a seemingly short time if nowhere near as short as advertised. It literally, and inevitably, overflowed. 

The much-loved piano team, Kate Burrows and Helen Morris, were gorgeous in the meditative lilt of Rachmaninov's Vocalise before Angela Zanders was beautifully phrased, possibly with hints of rubato, in her Chopin Polonaise. Up to the interval Amanda Fox accompanied Melanie White's flute in her own The Wind in My Mind, an in memoriam full of longing delivered with a soaring, full tone at its climax.

Immediately impressive once we were seated again was Narina Dalali, brave enough to play more Rach within earshot of Angelina Kopyrina, a Moment Musicaux that was all waterfalls and executed with great clarity.

Melanie brought her flute back to play Deep Blue by Ian Clarke with Kate Ham's champagne harp, exquisite and spellbinding with elements of whale song, bringing together Portsmouth's centenary with that of David Attenborough.

I don't know how much Ian Schofield's Danza Eccentrica owes to Sarasate but it was definitely semi-Satie and quite possibly technically challenging although you wouldn't know that when it's Valentina back on the piano stool.

Some debate about the word 'stalwart' as applied to Karen and her partner in both music and life, Rob Blanken, seemed to be nervous about any connotations of age it brought with it but I travelled there by bus pass and I don't think the Kingsley-Blankens are qualified to do that yet so they are, thus, young. James Walker's Sonatina, in three movements, had them skipping together, then moodier and nocturnal before the final breezy rhythms.

By way of some elegant calm before the storm, Andrew, as ever the debonair soul of wit but today in his element and so more so as compere, contributed Phamie Gow's War Song, elegiac and reminiscent of the Maxwell-Davies Return to Stromness that he has so memorably performed before.

And then, not least because she is a hard act to follow, Angelina Kopyrina dominated the stage and the whole auditorium with the Liszt Mephisto Waltz. Heard it all before but it retains all its dazzling blast and blasting dazzle before and after its breathless midway contemplation each and every time and, each and every time she plays I think, nah, she's had plenty of standing ovations out of me, I'll take this for granted. I can't, though, and there I am again like a jump jockey unseated by their horse.

Except, Karen and Angela did follow, with Piazolla's Libertango. Very much not a favourite composer of mine but by then happy to be convinced by anything which Angela's expansive top end of the keyboard over Karen's angular inflections were completely successful in doing.

What a stunning occasion, what an impressive line-up to put together, what a joyous celebration and what a privilege to be there. It matters nothing to me whether Portsmouth is a city or not or how long it has been so. But it matters much more than most things that its musicians can put on a such a show for the love of it. If such events were put on more often they would, by definition, become more routine than special. On the other hand, what happened around these parts in 1927, I wonder. Something, surely. Don't worry. It was announced that Angela has plans to mark 200 years since Beethoven departed this life. It's good to have things to look forward to. 

Restless Human Hearts

That is one helluva book for only the second effort by a writer not successful in his day as a novelist and not much read now beyond the society doing such good work in and about his place on the outskirts of Swindon.

It's a Victorian 'sensation' novel full of drama and a certain amount of unlikeliness but a rip-roaring read in which one can suspend disbelief not only in its outrageously contrived climax but elsewhere, too, and care less about such considerations. Not least because its digressions are, for me, its highlights and not, as is suggested elsewhere, ballast to fill out the word count required for three volumes. 

What shall we do with ourselves? This is the cry of our age. We have exhausted all passions and all pleasures. 

I'm sure it was ever thus, or seemed so. 

 

It wasn't easy to keep track of who was who and how their often problematic relationships built into whatever the main theme is but Jefferies is a vibrant writer without having done a university creative writing degree and was writing the equivalent of a television drama to keep the audience agog. Quite how this lines up with the writing he's better remembered for, about the countryside, is not obvious beyond the radiant purity of Heloise but I'll be pursuing Jefferies further. Next in Edward Thomas's book on him that has been on the shelves for years but not, as far as I can remember, ever read in full.

The climax comes when the luxuriantly atttactive Carlotta is trapped in a railway carriage with a cobra and jumps out to escape from it. We might assume her dead as some kind of just desserts for her vanity and selfishness but she isn't and quite why a lady in a railway carriage had found herself in such a situation is perfectly reasonably explained away. In the circumstances, I'm surprised such dramas don't happen more often.

It's a big canvas and a crowded dramatis personae and art for art's sake might not have been its first concern. One can't make either Carlotta or Heloise the central character and, as such, it's more like the map of society laid out in Hardy's The Woodlanders than anything concentrated on the destiny of one.

One or two are lost along the way. But, having had all the excitement, Carlotta retires to Torquay as a monument to her former glory. Heloise is made ideal, reading Tennyson to her son which represents some idea of C19th English consummation, I dare say. It is a happy ending. 

But, for me, it might only be a beginning. There is stacks of Richard Jefferies to be had and if this is not regarded as his best work then I'm interested to see what is. I'll see what Edward Thomas has to say first. 

Graham Dixon, Oh Mother, What Did You Do?

Graham Dixon, Oh Mother, What Did You Do? (Pulchra Veritas)

A book that begins by identifying Ted Hughes as a Movement poet and proceeds to cite names such as Alan Ginsberg and Elliot makes one wary. Pulchra Veritas might well be Graham Dixon's own imprint and he doesn't appear to employ an editor. But he knew Thom Gunn and, as it turns out, the reader is rewarded with not only first-hand knowledge of the poet but some original and perceptive readings of the poems. That he turned himself into a psychotherapist after his literary studies is evidenced by his analysis of Gunn as a personality in parallel with the poetry. The subtitle Pose and Repose in the Life, Letters and Poetry of Thom Gunn is a summation of the main theme emerging, that of a search for respite from the traumas and discontent in Gunn's life. 

The poses adopted by characters in Gunn's poems, and by Gunn in real life, were always defence mechanisms to hold a threatening world at bay. The comparisons with Ted Hughes and the violence of nature were always dubious. Gunn is naturally a more withdrawn presence, adopting roles, attire and attitudes in order to get by.

Dixon's title comes from a diary entry by Gunn after his mother committed suicide when he was fifteen. As a psychoanalyst might, he makes much more of this devastating event, when Gunn and his brother found her, than purely literary commentaries do. It is not dissimilar to Sylvia Plath, gassing herself in desperation over her marriage.

It is that, several readings of early poems that find the coded homosexuality in them, Gunn's continued wearing of a Nazi leather belt and the late set of poems about the serial murderer, Jeffrey Dahmer, that make Dixon's account vividly one that shows Gunn exceeding perceived boundaries into amorality. While these elements of Gunn are not new discoveries, the prominence they are given puts emphasis on much more exotic material than the hippy, drug-taking bohemian scholar that had already marked him out as a maverick.

Dixon is insightful in his readings of such poems as Carnal Knowledge, Tamer and Hawk and Rastignac at 45 but also clear-sighted and confident enough to identify when the less successful parts of Gunn's uneven output fail. There are great poems in each of the books but some of the middle period, from Moly to Jack Straw's Castle, were experiments that didn't work. At times, in making the point, it might mean that Dixon has overlooked some fine poems that did but it's honest and time well spent to elucidate when even Gunn's talent was insufficient to carry his dark imaginings. If the LSD and prolific promiscuity went a long way in search of repose, it was a dangerous enterprise, didn't entirely work and the mantra from Gunn's early, if now dated, masterpiece, On The Move, that 'one is always closer by not keeping still' remained thematic for the rest of his life.

If the publication of Larkin's life and letters brought out unappealing detail that damaged his reputation, the same could have happened to Gunn but he didn't have quite such a reputation to damage beyond poetry readers of a certain age. In both cases one needs to be able to separate the work from the personality but friends and those who knew them for the most part liked both poets as people and if Larkin's later politics were unsavoury, Gunn is not overly concerned with politics. But one is never entirely sure what is hovering in the depths of his thinking even when he can write some of the most gorgeous poems of his or any other generation.

So, Graham Dixon's book is worth having as an honest and meaningful contribution to Gunn Studies. It is persuasive in making him more specifically a 'gay' poet, for better or worse than I, for one, had thought. It provides more about the vulnerability that the tough posturings of the Lines for a Book that he at least partially later disowned were written to overcome. One is the more aware of the contradictions and paradoxes of a life that he often successfully expressed but only sometimes successfully resloved. There was a time I thought that his apparent urbanity and intelligence put him in control of his poems and, by extension, of his life but it seems not. He was a sort of adventurer but it begins to look like those adventures were only ways of looking for escape. 

Paul Bessell, Finding Dad

 Paul Bessell, Finding Dad (Mirror Books)

What a mess, says Peter Bessell somewhere in the middle of this book. Whatever his talents were not- like business, honesty or 'faithfulness'- he was a genius of understatement. It comes before he is dragged back into a mire of problems in the trial of Jeremy Thorpe but after his downward-spiralling business disasters had led him to intend to commit suicide.

At first a success as a local entrepreneur and then MP, he expanded his horizons with ambitions that proved beyond his ability to sustain them and was soon out of his depth and accumulating unmanageable debt. He had been a lay preacher, a serial ladies' man and had nearby neighbouring fellow Liberal, Jeremy Thorpe, as his closest friend but the wreckless, fantasist party leader proved the paragon example of a friend that with the like of which one didn't need enemies. Having done a disappearing act to evade his creditors and somehow restored some equilibrium to his life, his earlier attempts to help Thorpe rid himself of Norman Scott, the troublesome part-time model, came back to do more than haunt him.

In California with his long-term mistress, the faithfulness that Bessell could never show to his wife or other girlfriends was ill-advisedly much more resolute in how he stood by Thorpe who had less compunction about selling him down the river. The charismatic but deeply flawed Thorpe had once brilliantly lampooned Harold MacMillan by re-working John 15:13 by suggesting that Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life but then was guilty of it himself. And yet it was that constancy that finally finished Bessell when, having no choice but to testify against him, it was Thorpe that was acquitted. Bessell's problem seemed to be that he never had much choice, not even being able to kill himself when he wanted to.

That Thorpe should need to rely on and then abandon such a dodgy, thin-ice operator as Bessell in the first place is indicative of what a ramshackle outfit the resurgent Liberal party of the 1970's was. If charm, generosity and this level of devotion to such a charlatan were Bessell's good points then his weaknesses both outnumbered and overpowered them. Paul Bessell's reconstruction of the story is understandably as sympathetic as any account by a son who loved his father can be expected to be but, desperate though his downfall is, it's not easy for anybody else to have a lot of sympathy for a liar, fraudster and one unfit for the high stakes games he chose to play. One's sympathy is for his wife, Pauline, who knew precious little of his triple life and rackety schemes.

A Very English Scandal (2018) was a farcically funny account of the Thorpe Affair but Finding Dad is harder to laugh at. Paul Bessell is thorough in putting together so much detail about the labyrinthine duplicity of a plot no fiction writer could invent and one reads through encounters with Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry Kissinger, two US presidents and the outskirts of the mafia with disbelief, sadness or horror but not to humorous effect.

It's to full of immorality for a morality tale and the hero has the wrong ratio of heroism to fatal flaws for it to be Shakesperean tragedy. It is more likely an insight into what sort of things are always going on with even Paul having to accept he didn't get to the bottom of it, like what sort of 'secret work' his father was doing, if any, for the American government or if it was simply an effective cover for the way he duped several women who thought they loved him into thinking that he loved only them. 

Having been reading three books at the same time, it was this that took over and was finished first. Not necessarily the best book but in some ways the most gripping and, in a competitive field, the most lurid. It's not to my credit that I was drawn to it over the others.