Elizabeth Bishop, Wilkie Collins

What came next off the top of the waiting pile of books was Elizabeth Bishop: A Very Short Introduction by Jonathan Post. 

It's a self-deprecating title, not all that short and somewhat deeper than a mere 'introduction', I'd think. In the same way that Vermeer was just about one's favourite painter before finding out that there is more to him than than one had thought, it offers some admirable analysis without yet providing material towards the sort of succinct sentence with which one could lazily, casually, claim to have summarized the work of other great poets. 

I'll leave out the details of those but one can give some sort of idea of what a poet is like in only a few words, obviously without doing them justice.

 

I can't even get close to providing an idea of what Elizabeth Bishop is like in one or two sentences. One would stand more chance with Shakespeare. 

Michael Schmidt's Lives of the Poets is a reliable place to return to when in need but even he only gives us 'travel', looking and seeing, and the ways in which she relates to Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell and John Ashbery but I'm not convinced how useful those correspondances are and find it as meaningful to compare her with Wallace Stevens whose poems, whatever you think they are about, turn out to be about much more than that. Or even not that at all.

You'd think A Very Short Introduction would show you the easy way in but no sooner have we had some biography, some hints about place, travel, gender and descriptions of nature than we are into all those abstractions that academics deal in. This is the twelfth book written by or about Elizabeth Bishop that I now have and it means she takes up just about a foot of shelf space which is three inches more than Edward Thomas but three less than Dr. Johnson. You'd think that by now I'd be in a position to define her, however loosely, but whereas in her poems 'less is more', more seems to make such an effort less possible in her case.

But perhaps that's why she's so good. Perhaps being indefinable is the endlessly interesting thing. Vermeer was very much that until Andrew Graham-Dixon came along and explained so much of it away. Larkin is relatively easy to write about. The fact that I've understood Thom Gunn to my own satisfaction hasn't diminished the greatness of his best poems. Of course, Auden, Rosemary Tonks and all that top echelon of my favourite poets. 

I'm not even saying that this elusiveness makes Elizabeth Bishop better than the others. She's not 'elusive', she's just -apparently- impossible to summarize. And that's a good thing to be.

Top 6, without commentary,

Sandpiper,

The Map,

Crusoe in England,

One Art,

The Shampoo, 

In the Waiting Room 

--

And so, we move on. Which is the greatest/best/most famous novel I've never read. Probably War and Peace, maybe something by Dostoevesky or Jane Austen. But I have read things by those authors. What about The Woman in White, picked up in the Chichester Oxfam shop recently. Hugely enjoyable in its first section and there's no reason to think it will falter. As far as C19th fiction goes, it might not quite be Hardy or George Eliot. I know Dickens has his admirers. Jane Eyre, George Moore, George Gissing, the Great French and Russians, Samuel Butler but Wilkie Collins might not be far away.

The 'action' might yet be to unfold but it was a great choice and won't be the Best Book I've Never Read for much longer.

--

I need a rest from the music writing and the midwinter hiatus arrives just in time. I'd write a poem is one presented itself but they don't. As with the essays, it's not easy to think of anything to say that I've not said before although that doesn't deter me here. Like, for example, intermittently saying how I'd so like to write some satisfactory fiction. Just one thing to begin with would do.

I'd be calling the new little effort The Woman In Black if Susan Hill hadn't got there first but I'd better finish it before giving any more thought to a title. A Perfect Muder, at about 3500 words proved longer than what most amateurish outlets want so I'll try to bring it in at under 3000. That's still a lot of words for me when poems rarely go beyond, say, 200. C19th novels have barely got beyond their opening scene in 3000 words but in those days both writers and readers had world enough, and time.

I'd better see if I can make further progress, even finish a tentative first draft. If one lets these things lie too long one doesn't go back to them. 

    

 

 

Donald Davie, Gioia and Bishop, Bach

Donald Davie was the paragon of a high church scholarly critic whose essays made it sound virtually impossible to write a good poem. Not in fashion these days, you'd think, he brought  rigour and directness to his readings of other poets that might make him seem a dry old stick were it not for flashes of humour and some sympathy.

His The Poet in the Imaginary Museum was suggested in recent Gioia Studies and arrived ahead of the tardy Gioia books. Although at first it seems abstruse stuff, one can see that he's telling you things you've realized for yourself, just expressing them in a higher form of considered utterance. He is enlightening on Wallace Stevens, Eliot, Lowell and others and even makes a case for poetry in translation that I might not entirely accept but can appreciate his effort. It will not be a book to read all of because some of the lesser known Americans are even lesser known now than they were fifty years ago but it is possible to enjoy the essays for their own sake without fully taking their points which is a bit like reading poems sometimes, the sound rather than the sense. 

 

But then Dana Gioia's Studying with Miss Bishop arrived and one is glad to hear about her idiosyncratic teaching methods, openly admitting when she doesn't 'get' poems and turning down the suggestion of Ashbery as a poet to look at because he's a case in point. Unorthodox and apparently disorganized she may have been but the diminshed numbers who didn't desert her course in favour of Lowell's perhaps found it more demanding, and instructive, than it first looked s if it would be. Gioia and Bishop ws a meeting of great minds, one in maturity with the other just setting out and Dana's memoir almost makes one see Harvard seminars as idyllic.

Two good people, wonderful poets making the most of a situation perhaps neither of them entirely relished but if there's anything better than reading them, or about them, separately it's reading about them together.

--

The Davie inroads were made to a soundtrack of the Complete Works discs of The Well-Tempered Klavier. I decided it was time to venture into something familiar although familiar it turned out not to be. 

Of course Bach would have played and heard his own music on the harpsichord or organ, not in the pianoforte versions we might be more accustomed to now so it's hardly for me to say it's wrong. But one instinctively thinks that what one knows is right and anything different is aberrant.

Robert Levin's harpsichord pieces take the quicker tempi at hectic, flashy speeds that sound all for pyrotechnic effect. Not all of it is recognizable as the measured, thoughtful exposition of the Bernard Rodgers 4-discs I've had for so long. Some upcoming spending spree might bring Tatiana Nikolayeva here to be made number one preference but Bernard has done good service. But the unity of the set is thrown away by a good proportion of the 48 being played on organ. Luminous, gorgeously recorded and glorious in their way they are a different thing to the harpsichord and clavichord performances, never mind piano, and it makes for something inconsistent. Not un-brilliant but not as if they are all one work, either. Having said that, having them on piano already it's no bad thing to have these entirely different versions because it ostensibly makes for different music.

Continuing with the sacred cantatas, BWV 41 and 42 made for a fine disc, the cello in the aria in 41 being another 'find' to return to again one day. And if I had only ever known the Well-Tempered Klavier as organ music then the French Suites, BWV 812-817, would have served the purpose the 48 have been doing for so many years and I'd have been none the wiser but that was all a bit of a bombshell, finding music to be quite so amorphous. And yet, really, while worrying about non-period instruments in the orchestral music, it's the switch to instruments that Bach would have known, away from the ersatz piano that has disconcerted me. You just can't win.

Four Missing Lines

 This memory thing is getting worse. I thought that crosswords and chess and suchlike were supposed to keep one's faculties fit and alert so God Only Knows what I'd be like without them.

Since other people are reading Romanticism, I thought I'd better have another look. One's own work can suddenly look different with the knowledge that it's out there now and it's too late to change it.

But, what is this? In Escape Artist, a 'stanza' of four lines is missing after the bit about Kind of Blue. It is,

How fashionable ! In Paris 

it meant the world but now 

the sensitive needle 

is condemned to the groove. 

 

I can't remember taking that out. It fits thematically with the LP, Rosemary Tonks living in Paris when Miles Davis was very much a thing, the metaphor of being stuck in a groove and it has her trademark exclamation mark. I can't think why I would have taken it out but equally can't see how I could have done so by accident. It is intact in the version published in the anthology it was contributed to and so, for the benefit of future professors wondering about the revisions in the collected version, no, I'm sorry, I can't explain.

What's done is done. Perhaps, if I did it deliberately, I had my reasons at the time but the layout of the pages in the book would accommodate the out-take perfectly well. I stare at the lines and think I like them well enough. I try to think why I might have removed them and can't.

For the time being it's harmlessly mystifying but it contains sinister implications of what is to come. When she was younger than I am now, Elizabeth Bishop found the milk on her desk which meant her glasses must be in the fridge. 

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say on a Sunday

 One of the most golden of rules in horse racing is not to chase one's losses. It isn't necessarily part of the recipe for success over the last several years but it certainly was part of the recipe for disaster forty years ago. However, everybody has to sometime break the rules, as Status Quo so cogently argued, and today was my third time of successfully doing so. 

At Sandown in December I piled into Stay Away Fay after the double went astray, yesterday the stake money on the ill-fated Hermes Allen was retrieved by lumping on Galopin des Champs and now the obvious Grade 1 4-timer at Leopardstown going amiss at the first opportunity is put right by diverting to Musselburgh for Liari.

I know I shouldn't do it and I've got away with non-textbook practice. I'd prefer it if Plan A went right and not be led into temptation.

--

David Kalstone's posthumously published, and unfinished, Becoming a Poet adds to the thrilling shelf of excellent books on Elizabeth Bishop, a great poet but one that it could be easy to write badly about.

This book is half and half about her relationships with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. The first remained on good terms even if Elizabeth insisted on going her own way and they were less of a kind that some would make out. Lowell, though, is more difficult. Like Eliot he is forever on the verge of, or having, a breakdown. For some reason he seems to think that Elizabeth might marry him and he puts a private letter from her almost verbatim into a poem. 

While Bishop is admirable in almost every way, Lowell is not and so with some cross-pollination in their poems it is tempting to have a better look at Lowell. Some 45 years ago I thought he might have been 'the business' but, try as I might, I couldn't convince myself then and so, with some prejudice against him, he might have even less chance now.

--

And so I arrive at the bottom of those books that have been waiting their turn and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, bought to complete the run of Kundera  novels. I think it was the first I ever read and that which brought him to our attention. And that's possibly because it's the best of them. It does those things that Kundera does most convincingly.

Whether it was life in Prague under Soviet rule that made life seem so precarious I don't know but, as ever, it is for him a 'contingent' affair - 'affair' often being the operative word - fragile and insecure but potentially luminous. 

--  

The end of the writing of C20th is probably in sight. At 30000 words, it won't be what it set out to be but one doesn't realize how hard doing the actual work on such a thing will be. Even to produce such a paltry thing of that is a big enough undertaking for me and at least I didn't abandon it. It's been enyoyable enough to do without straining myself and I've found out plenty in the process while recycling many of the set piece things I've said at least once elsewhere before.

--

In the end I didn't abandon The Decline of the English Novel, the latest attempt at a novel, either. It just became The Decline of English Fiction, as a 3400 word story. The title comes from Orwell, of course, as well as being self-deprecating and making reference to its theme of 'fictions'. 

I will put that title on it next job and make it into a pdf just in case anybody wants to see it. By all means I'll e-mail it if you'd like to see it. I won't be troubling the likes of The New Yorker but some of the lesser outlets for short stories I've found look a bit naff. I'd like to think I can get poems into print if I see fit but fiction is another matter.

--

So, I'll soon be at the end of another stage of 'works in progress' and on the lookout for the next things to read and write. Anything's possible, one might hope, but it has to be the right thing. There is a glimpse of Existential angst in the prospect of the freedom that suggests when the corollary is the despair at the thought that there might be the nothingness and alienation of finding no such thing to do.

I'd better think of something, then. One doesn't live by routinely rotating the available adjectives to report on musical events alone. It's too late now to undo the fragments of Sartre that counted towards a minor subject of Philosophy 43 years ago. It all seemed very convincing but sometimes it's better not to know and be happier living vicariously by the horse racing results.

 From time to time in This Reading, and Writing, Life one can see the end of the current plan coming into sight. One's whole life doesn't consist of reading other people's accounts of their worlds and how they saw them, or providing further versions of one's own, since the necessity of earning a living came to an end but having reading, and writing, projects on the go provide the foundations for fighting off the 'existential' angst of being alive without ordained purpose which can then be augmented with the music, the horse racing and the walking for the sake of coming back again.

Sometimes, despite the vast landscape of literature still left unread - the Cervantes, the Edmund Spenser, the biography of Gerard Manley Hopkins - nothing seems urgent and, coming to a stage at which C20th can be left, like all such big projects of mine, in a first draft on which further work seems beyond me, it's not obvious what I'd do instead.

But then there are days, like yesterday, when anything seems possible. In the most vivid of these brief epiphanies, a poem sometimes emerges but I'm happy with less. It had been suggested that Dylan Thomas should have a chapter in C20th which wasn't the original plan but, yes, he should and without it the account would lack that dimension.

I thought a contrast with Alun Lewis would bring out the salient features of the two of them and give me the chance to side with the lesser-known underdog against the fraudulent windbag which, of course, Dylan wasn't really. And so the 'book' can keep me occupied for a little longer yet and reach 30 thousand words and creep into the category of 'short book' when Motion's book, admittedly only on Larkin, looks a similar length. And early signs are that putting together some pages on Dylan will be as useful to me as setting out some thoughts on Eliot, Heaney and the others that I have. It might make a pdf yet and be regarded as a job done, if not especially well done.

--

Meanwhile, there is never a downside to extending the Elizabeth Bishop section of the library. David Kalstone's Becoming a Poet is as good as any other commentary, and better than some, at re-directing one back to the poems and further enhancing her position among the very most complete poets of the last, and any other, century. It's only now, perhaps, that I feel some sort of grasp of the overall point of what she was doing beyond being impressed by one poem after another without being able to define what it was.

Poetry is at its best when some element remains elusive but unless one can find a certain amount of 'meaning' to nail down it might as well be John Ashbery on who there is no chapter in my monograph. I've sometimes thought of buying his Collected Poems to paddle about in but I don't need hundreds of pages to be mystified by when one poem will do.

 

More Moore

 One collateral benefit of writing C20th, my overly ambitious attempt to provide my account of the poetry in English of the period, has been the discoveries, and re-discoveries, found along the way. It's actually much harder work than it looks and a perfect illustration of Homer Simpson's maxim that if something's hard to do it's not worth doing. But if the end result doesn't justify the time spent on it then re-engaging with the 'major' names and concocting reassessments of them has been enlightening for me.

Next year will begin with Marianne Moore for me, prompted by putting in a paragraph or so on the relationship- friendship-  Elizabeth Bishop had with her. If poetry really was the competitive sport that competitions and lists of 'greatests' sometimes make it appear to be, then it is the adorable and paragon example of Elizabeth Bishop that wins the C20th for me. I think Auden and Larkin are in a photo-finish for second place. But even if it is only on the strength of two poems, Poetry and The Steeple-Jack, I thought Ms. Moore was the ideal candidate for further enquiry once the last Stevie Smith book is put on the shelf and so I ordered the Complete Poems, the biography and Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell by David Kalstone. I checked the shelves to confirm that I don't already have the last of those but it wasn't until out this afternoon that I remembered I do, of course, have the Collected Ms. Moore. I hope my attempt to cancel that order gets noticed in time. I am becoming increasingly vague about what I have and what I don't. If I were to live into old age I'd quite possibly end up with shelves of multiple copies of books I was never sure whether I had them or not. 

The first week or so of a New Year can seem to be like emerging bleary-eyed into some sort of new beginning but it's not. Years could be said to begin on one's birthday, or at Rosh Hashanah, and I see that the Islamic New Year is in July but whether we need one at all is open to question. Reading more Marianne Moore represents no sort of new start, she's just next off the taxi rank for a more detailed look and fits well with this profile of less than gregarious figures, like Stevie, Elizabeth and Larkin, who saw fit to devote themselves to their solitary art at least as much as they did to imposing themselves on others. 

I'm sorry that Stevie didn't get an index label to the postings on here regarding her but, strictly speaking, those labels are for poets and it is her prose fiction I've been concerned with. Thus, we'll set one up for Ms. Moore because poetry was what she did, in the hope that there will be more, much more about Moore, to say.

Elizabeth Bishop Exam Questions

It's been 'pop' music here recently, I can't help but notice. We can't have that all the time. It's a relatively quiet period for lunchtime concerts.

A few years ago I was doing what I could to help a friend with her Open University essays. Shostakovich, Ovid, Heaney and Hughes, that sort of thing. I was looking forward to the C20th Literature course and Elizabeth Bishop because I hoped the essay question might direct some attention to what it is about her poems that makes her quite the paragon example. But it wasn't to be. My friend chose to do Children's Literature and so I got some time off.

But it recently occurred to me that there would be exam questions on Elizabeth Bishop on the internet and there are,

Elizabeth Bishop Exam Questions

They don't help much, mostly only giving candidates the opportunity to write what they know, or think.

But maybe it was a bad idea and I was expecting too much. Maybe the reason why she is one of the poets whose work I haven't yet found any fault with is because one can't quite say. Maybe 'poetry' at its best is something that can remain elusive.

School and exams did their best to put us all off poetry by reducing it to the 'I-Spy' project of identifying alliteration, assonance, rhyme and even irony, ambiguity, synecdoche and zeugma. I'd much rather poetry didn't do such things, or at least make any effort to. It's much more impressive to 'be any good' without having shown how hard you've tried.

And that's why Elizabeth Bishop is 'any good' - because it's not easy to say why. Detachment, I reckon, has a lot to do with it. Putting some distance between what is being said and what it might, possibly, mean. But even that is straying a bit close to irony.

Now that we live in an age that allows biographical references back in and accepts that the text does not exist in isolation from the time and circumstances in which it was written, my main reasons for admiring her, as well as the poems, are that she was hospitalized for five days after a drinking session and that, at the age of about 59 or 60, she found her glasses in the fridge which meant the milk must be on her desk.

They don't make them like that anymore.

I've generally always thought that 'novelist' was a proper job and 'poet' almost something one did for pleasure, like some do gardening, and it didn't matter what sort of job one made of it. It's best not to worry because most poetry is terrible. Good poetry is almost impossible.

In trying to fend off the seven months since I've written a poem I liked much becoming eight, I have committed some lines to a Word doc on the subject of Ronnie Spector, see below, but it's not quite happening and so is likely to show tell-tale signs of having been 'worked on' and so it's likely to go with the failed companion piece on Agnetha Fältskog and await an idea for a third female pop icon to make a triptych of bad tributes.

But, you never know. In retrospect, I'm not sure what all the fuss was about with Blondie once we'd been treated to Denis but she eventually came back with Maria which was the best thing she ever did so one never quite gives up hope. And we are back on pop music again. Sorry about that.

Meet the Supremes and other stories

 You can't win them all. Following the New Year's Eve windfall at Newbury I suddenly can't find a winner this year so follow me in on Grey Diamond (Sandown, 1.50) tomorrow at your peril. Take it easy. There's plenty of ammunition left with which to take on 2023 in due course.

Only because of such high expectations, Meet the Supremes was a fraction of a disappointment, too. From 1962, it includes the earliest singles which weren't big hits but it does begin with the gorgeous Your Heart Belongs to Me (Robinson) and follows up with his Who's Lovin' You, great but done better by The Miracles and later by Michael with the Jackson Five. After that, it's a bit more bubblegum but possibly only below par because the immaculate standard was to be set by the Holland-Dozier-Holland years and a bit more sophistication. Still, The Sounds of Detroit remains an essential thing. The Miracles album is a sheer joy, the Contours a bit more raucous and the Marvin Gaye and Marvelettes still to be properly explored.

Any one track from the Miracles album is worth more than all the accumulated long-haired, denim-clad 'rock' of the 70's put together. It is pop genius.

-

Tremendous news for the local classical music audience round here, though, is the new series of Portsmouth Menuhin Room Concerts, beginning on Sat 11th February, 12.30, for an hour. It's hard to know which would be the highlights because they probably all will be (although surely that's not what a 'highlight' is) but the Shostakovich Piano Trio with Angela Zanders on April 22, James Lisney playing the Diabelli Variations on June 3 and Danny Driver's Goldberg Variations on July 1 would be the most unmissable for me.

-

I watched Reaching for the Moon, the film about Elizabeth Bishop, for the second time recently and so took it to Portsmouth Poetry Society and read The Shampoo, which is featured in it. I wonder sometimes if I should talk about my most favourite things because one might come across as a salesman rather than an admirer who only wants to share their enthusiasm. The Shampoo, I maintained, is such a good thing it's hard to know how to explain it beyond its tight construction, its music and (I don't think I said), its avoidance of all bad practice. Except, only possibly, that first rhyme on rocks/shocks. Poetry is an artificial thing but, certainly in poems like this, wants to look natural. Perhaps it's when poems are obviously artificial but look natural is when they work, if and when they do. If 'rocks/shocks' draws some attention to itself that's a bad thing. But in almost any other poet it might look as if the rhyme scheme was leading the poem, in Elizabeth Bishop it is given the benefit of any doubt.

It might be such esoteric worries as this that prevent me from simply getting on and writing some poems but if they're not good enough I don't want to write them and I would prefer to have an idea that insists on being written. I can't sit in front of a blank sheet of paper and come away later with a poem. The paper would remain blank. I wouldn't sit down - although I'm usually supine during the process - until there was something to write. It's been four months now. It's been that long before. It's not exactly a problem but there is satisfaction to be had when it happens so I hope it happens again sometime.  

Recent Acquisitions

I was indebted to a correspondent for a tip for the film, Reaching for the Moon (2013), a dramatisation of the relationship between Elizabeth Bishop and Lota Soares. It might not be quite essential to any Bishop devotee but it's well worth seeing.

It makes use of the villanelle, One Art, and The Shampoo and seeing it again might reveal more of the poems in it. She tells Robert Lowell that she'd like her epitaph to say she was the 'loneliest person in the world' and, accused by Lota of being somewhat emotionally unforthcoming she replies that,

you can't expect someone born in the desert to swim like a fish.

Perhaps, since I'm 150 pages into volume 2 of Robert Crawford's life of T.S. Eliot, there is mileage to be had out of poetry, or indeed all art, seen as an outlet for the emotionally restricted.

Lota is clearly the 'alpha' half of the relationship but it's always triangular, at least an isosceles triangle, with Lota's previous partner, Mary, never far away.

As can happen with such films, or anything else, one can begin unconvinced but, after 114 minutes, can be lured in and moved by it in the end. It will certainly stand another look.

-

Stephen Hough's 2-disc Liszt Piano Music is by no means all as diabolic and showy as the Mephisto Waltz that it opens with and make Liszt such a compelling composer in live performance. There is some of that but having seen such pieces in concert in recent months, one misses the visual stimulus of seeing how they do it with only the disc. However, compensation is to be had from a number of much softer pieces, such as Les jeux d'eau a la Villa d'Este and they provide meditative accompaniment to reading as well as being silkily gotgeous and make the stormy maestro a fuller character through these lesser-heard pieces.

No. 2 is the more melodic and memorable of the String Quartets on the Lindsays' recording of those by Borodin, occupying a place somewhere near Tchaikovsky on the musical map, perhaps, but is another welcome addition to the shelves that will get a few more plays before being filed there to take its chances.

--

We await with interest the outcome of the Conservative MPs' opportunity to express confidence in their leader. Paddy Power are no longer offering odds about it which suggests the conclusion is foregone but the market fluctuated throughout the day with 'no confidence' as short as 2/1 at one stage.

I note that my MP, Penny Mordaunt, is joint third favourite to be the next party leader, which might not be the same thing as Prime Minister, and it would be useful to know who votes which way because when the current Prime Minister is eventually removed and his diminishing band of supporters look towards their next career moves, we'd like to know who it was that saw fit to keep him in place.

There probably will be some kind of future post-Trump, post-plague, post-Boris and post-economic crisis but what we won't be needing is the likes of the Moggs who so resolutely defended the indefensible. Even rats have the sense to leave sinking ships.

Bounteous Plenty

There can be times when one scratches around wondering what to read next, mostly a steady stream of suitable items suggest themselves but sometimes, like now, one seems to hit a rich seam and look forward to a few weeks of bounteous plenty across several genres.

The recent find, The Dyer's Hand, exceeded expectations and moving on to the other, the George Eliot Essays, she's immediately in good form with her statement of intent for the Westminster Review and then 30 pages on Madame de Sablé, not least for forseeing text messages and Twitter from as far back as 1854 in,

the evident tendency of things to contract personal communication within the narrowest limits makes us tremble lest some further development of the electric telegraph should reduce us to a society of mutes, or to a sort of insects, communicating by ingenmious antemnnae of our own invention. 

There might have been a time when I'd have thought the George Eliot essays might be a bit dry, Victorian and Causaubon-ish but she's a lot of fun so far. Or maybe by now I'm sufficienyly dry, Victorian and Causaubon-ish to appreciate her.

'Long-awaited' but not necessarily with too much relish is the second half of Robert Crawford's scholarly biography of T.S. Eliot. The first half was a grim read, if I remember rightly, which wasn't Prof. Crawford's fault and maybe not entirely Eliot's but such things seem essential and must be done so it'll be on its way on publication day. There was a time, in the 1970's when it seemed generally accepted that Eliot was 'the' poet of the C20th just as much as Stairway to Heaven was the ultimate rock track. Neither of those assumptions are quite so convincing by now but one doesn't deny the continuing significance of Eliot or the job that Prof. Crawford has put in and vol. 1 would look silly on the shelf without vol. 2 next to it.

 

I waited for the Christopher Hogwood recording of the Coffee Cantata to arrive but it didn't. Probably because it looks like I didn't order it. But while one can keep buying more Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven, their shelves are full and other prteviously neglected composers have been presenting impressive credentials.

One never leaves an Angela Kopyrina recital without feeling blown away and that has more than once been due to her playing Liszt and so, hearing another torrential surge of another pianist doing something similar on the wireless, I looked out for records and one by Stephen Hough is on its way. I wasn't expecting it to be him but I'm sure I'll be in good hands.

Also, from Wigmore Hall yesterday lunchtime, Borodin's String Quartet no. 2, with particular reference to the third movement. While one might have thought one should have found out about most of what is worth having by now, there is always more. I had thought that the complete Bach Cantatas might be a retirement project but, two years in, there just isn't time enough, or world, with so much else to consider and, usually, enjoy.

I'm also most grateful for a tip received for a film called Reaching for the Moon (2013), about Elizabeth Bishop, which was immediately found for less than a fiver. And so, the guilt that I might feel about invading the privacy of people who ostensibly valued their privacy has every reason to increase. Quite possibly the three poets I am most interestd in are Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Larkin and Rosemary Tonks, all of who went to some lengths to protect their privacy. To which my best defence is that if they were that serious about being private they need not have published any poems.

On the subject of Rosemary, the project here was enhanced by finding this podcast from Lunar Poetry Podcasts in which Lucy Reynolds tells that Rosemary didn't disappear quite as completely as we thought, she was just a well-kept secret. Which means it's a good thing I hadn't finished my new essay on her yet and I can include that,

Lunar Poetry- Rosemary Tonks 

Which only leaves me to say how good three episodes from series 3 of Upstart Crow were on a repeat channel the other night. I thought I'd sen them all but I can't remember the Hamlet, Much Ado or Julius Caesar episodes which made for a great evening. It might have been thought that Ben Elton had been lost to worthwhile writing for some years and even that Upstart Crow was just Blackadder remade with Shakespeare instead of Edmund Blackadder but it keeps recycling its set piece jokes - the quality of public transport, Shakespeare lifting ideas from those around him and anywhere he can find them but, most perspicaciously of all, one feels, Ben Elton nailing Ricky Gervais with the host of the first London Theatre Awards. 

In the same way that I'm sure I'd have done better at 'A' level History if I'd had Blackadder as source material, students of Shakespeare ought to be given Upstart Crow ahead of Stanley Wells. 

Poetry as Therapy

Poetry as therapy is the sort of New Age, almost medieval treatment I'm not likely to believe in. Poetry might possibly cause more problems than it solves or maybe it's just the people that write it that make it seem so.

However, medieval is by no means always bad and I had thought I might sit down with some poems and see if it did me any good, with special reference to my loss of interest in the genre. I took the Firebox anthology with me to Chichester yesterday and in there, Sean points out Elizabeth Bishop's The Bight as a precursor to Craig Raine's 'Martianism'. 

The local library is closed on Wednesdays so I couldn't go and collect The Elizabethans by A.N. Wilson that they've got in for me. So, early this evening, I took books by Bishop, Sean, Julia Copus and Roddy Lumsden from the shelves and read a few poems, mainly reliable old favourites by those reliable, old favourites.

They were good, actually. Even if one's lost faith with the art in general, it takes more than that to dim the admiration for the best things.

It is always seeing other people do things well that makes one want to try it for oneself, or it always has been for me and before long, well, an idea of sorts. Poems, for some of us, come as much from other poems as they do from 'life'.

11 syllables per line with 10 in the last of each stanza, not making any claims to sonnet form, in some ways autobiographical, in others meta-textual or whatever it's called, but mostly ironic, downbeat, making no claims for itself, declaring itself a work-in-progress and so far, so good, I'm not displeased with it.

One Day Perhaps I Will Think of a Title

And poetry is like the sort of girlfriend

That leaves you on account of all your drinking 

Which you say isn’t half as bad as she says 

But still she won’t come back until you stop. 

I know the Köchel numbers of sonatas,

The name that Alpha Cyngi’s better known by, 

The scores from long-forgotten cricket matches 

And that is all the use I claim to be. 

We commit to no more than rainy Wednesdays

In suburbs where the library is still closed then 

And I perform repeats of all the stories 

She’s heard before in slightly different versions 

And then, if I’m polite enough to do so,

I ask her how she is but not to dance.

Ivor Gurney by Kate Kennedy

 Kate Kennedy, Dweller in Shadows, a Life of Ivor Gurney (Princeton)

I needed persuading about Ivor Gurney's poetry and for the most part I still do. Julia Copus provided plenty of evidence to upgrade the impression I've long held about Charlotte Mew but Kate Kennedy has more of a job on with Ivor who is less easy to like.

One can form one's own impressions of poets from biographies and letters. Elizabeth Bishop is easy to like, as are Auden, and maybe Keats. One has to accept the shortcomings of Hardy, Edward Thomas and Larkin while retaining some residual sympathy for them, especially in the light of what they achieved. My big hero, Thom Gunn, was done few favours by his letters. I don't regret having not met Shelley, Baudelaire, Ted Hughes, Robert Lowell or Byron.

Gurney can't have been an easy job for Kate Kennedy because it is a grim story not alleviated much by his poems but she does him what justice she can in this admirable work of detailed research and objective sympathy.

While 'war poetry' is often one of the first genres of 'poetry' readers are likely to be introduced to, its message being clear and not hard to sympathize with, it is only subject matter and it is somehow inevitable that poetry isn't sufficient for the job. The horrors of war for those that were there are possibly more than poetry is equipped to deal with but the best poets, and poetry, might need something more nuanced to bring the best out of them. Not all the most talented poets went to war but Gurney wasn't one of them. My interest in him relates to most of my school having been done in Gloucester and the area to which he was so attached. Barnwood House Hospital, which proved not secure enough to prevent Ivor's repeated escape attempts, was close to where we lived but Kate's caption to the photograph of it that says it was 'burnt down' is not supported by any memories in my immediate family or anything to be found on the internet.

One reads things from time to time that one has reason to doubt which makes one wonder how much else one has taken on trust that wasn't true. One thing that this book does much to establish, though, from Kate's research and evidence she was provided with, is that Gurney's mental instability was not entirely due to the trauma of war and subsequent damage. He had every right to it, having been injured twice, but witnesses from pre-war Gloucester report him being known to be 'batchy' and known as 'Crazy'. Well done, that man.

It's a complicated psychiatric case to take on for anyone whose interests are mainly literary and musical but if we begin at the beginning, the difficult, unloving mother is hard to omit from any attempt. Having formed close attachments to older women, possibly as surrogate mother figures, a major disruption occurs with the ending of what might have been a more appropriate relationship with a nurse, Annie Drummond, that immediately precedes the first mention of his identification with Beethoven. He has already found some kinship with the Gloucester poet, F.W. Harvey, who described himself in lines that might equally apply to Gurney, as walking,

             behind himself, as if to catch

The motive: - An accessory to the fact

Faintly amused, it seems,

Behind his dreams.

 

Those lines are more coherent that many of Gurney's that arbitrarily leave out the definite or indefinite article or habitually put adjectives after their noun whether for laboured emphasis or to accommodate a rhyme but Gurney's poems often look unfinished as well as clinging unhealthily to his much beloved Gloucestershire background with its deep traditions of elvering, big, brown River Severn and the story of an ox so fat it got stuck in the street between what came and went as Debenhams and the shops opposite. Gloucester and its idyllic surroundings begin to look like another substitute mother that he can love. 

Without wanting to encourage comparisons with another self-obsessed poet, Walt Whitman, or giving any credence to ideas that Gurney's vague associations made him any sort of Modernist like Ezra Pound, there are things worth having in his poetry, such as,

The nurses move like music through the room;

 

and, from this account, it seemed to me the best poetry came post-Barnwood, which had been 'more like a genteel retirement home for deluded generals than an asylum', in the early days of the less salubrious time spent in Dartford, in poems like Cut Flowers.

Comparisons with the genuinely inventive poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins aren't useful. Strings are pulled to find Gurney a job in the tax office in Gloucester but despite his short-lived best efforts he proves unemployable. Any amount of Freudian analysis leads drearily to questions about 'sexuality' and gets us nowhere. The biography 'takes off', in the wrong direction, and eventually demands our sympathy as Gurney's condition deteriorates, with moments of lucidity and heroic support from his life-long friend, Marion Scott, and gestures from the likes of Vaughan Williams but the world can be a cruel place and only has so much time to try to help those so locked into themselves that they are capable of believing themselves to be Beethoven or Shakespeare. There's not much comfort to be had. Gurney as a poet is no more than a poor man's Edward Thomas. If we go anywhere in search of something to make a case for him it needs must be as a composer, possibly in the song settings of poems by his contemoparies but, I suspect, better in the sonatas and other chamber music that took Brahms as a model.

There must have been any amount of talent that went astray or was wasted having not been aligned with some organizing principle, some direction or less of an inclination in the artist to indulge themselves. The pieces need to be made to fit together. Lesser talents than Ivor Gurney's have made more of themselves by having been better directed. We might compare where Gary Lineker and Paul Gascoigne eventually found themselves with respect to what gifts they were born with.

It's a sad story and if you must read the biography of a suicidal writer there are better writers and less grim stories available but Kate Kennedy's been through it on our behalf and, if you feel any need to know, it is all here. You will be forgiven if afterwards you only feel like retreating into something less dispiriting, like Balzac or the recent best-seller, Hamnet. That's what I did.