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. 

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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 ideal, until I replayed it again and found a mistake in the very first line.

Fake is sometimes more expensive than real, in Piccadilly Dusk, not 'more important'. It stands as the obbligato error that appears in every booklet I ever produced except, appropriately enough, for The Perfect Book. 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. 

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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.