Oh, Babe What Would You Say

It's so long since I read most of the books in the house that I could pick up any of them and enjoy them as 'nearly new' and almost certainly reassess whatever it was I thought about them the first time.
I'm waiting for Julian Barnes' forthcoming Noise in Time, on the subject of Shostakovich, dubious about the whole idea of fictional biography but encouraged by the reviews so far. In the meantime, Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square was as gin-soaked and cruel as I had remembered it and a pitiless evocation of obsession, selfishness and the seamy twilight world of hotels, boarding houses and the bottom end of the theatrical world of agents and actresses between jobs. What a pleasure. Hamilton's first book, Monday Morning, written when he was 19, was due a reissue last year but it's difficult to find out what's happened about that. Amazon abandoned my pre-order a long time ago and now searching for it only brings up references to  the plans Faber had to make it available again.
So, yesterday I made the intrepid journey into the rich wilderness of the upstairs room that stores the less often required books and came back down with The Diary of a Nobody, A Confederacy of Dunces and Mansfield Park. And it's Jane Austen that I'm revisiting in the hope of defining the differences between her and George Eliot, which might be rephrased as why Eliot is so much better than Jane but let's not pre-judge the issue too hastily. You never know, this year might be my year of Jane Austen.
She has already delivered the observation that Tom, who
was just entering into life, full of spirits, and with all the liberal dispositions of an eldest son, who feels born only for expense and enjoyment.
I don't recognize myself in that perception of eldest children but a big question hangs over what Jane and I respectively understand by 'liberal'. And that might be the problem with Jane, 200 years on - which bits are her observations of contemporary custom and which are the social satire, because I'm not sure I'm in any position to say.
--
The avalanche of Bowie tributes and coverage meant that much overlapped, not least the often repeated leitmotif of his politeness. He was clearly someone of immense intelligence and it emerged how many of his pieces quoted any number of lesser-known books he had read. As happens with such great figures, it was also remarked more than once that his presence in a room made an immediate difference, which compares with those of us who can enter a room and it seems to everybody else in it that someone has just left.
But a comparison can be made between Neil Spencer's verdict on Station to Station, that it was 'awesome' (and, not quite so appreciably, 'Wagnerian') with Giles Coren, talking about buying CD's of what one already had on LP, that 'nobody' buys it twice. It's a shame that while Spencer, who editor of the NME during the Golden Age, can be so respectful and retains a grasp of pop history, Giles can only use the opportunity to denigrate wherever possible, as is his wont, while going to great lengths throughout to make it clear he was as impressed with Bowie as anybody, and he's not instigating the backlash. I'm sure we all have our favourites and so, reviving the old Top Six feature that was once a regular on this website.

Top Six David Bowie

Wild is the Wind
Rebel Rebel
Changes
Word on a Wing
Life on Mars?
Drive In Saturday

and even that leaves no room for many that the rules of the game always said couldn't be mentioned in naming only six and it counts All the Young Dudes as a Mott the Hoople record.

Stop! in the Name of Poetry

I'm not a big fan of the idea of the 'easy win' or the 'found poem' but neither do I think that the best poems are achieved by hard work. The best poems occur, almost naturally, almost as given things, if not quite by osmosis and, as can happen late on a Friday night, I was listening to some old favourite pop records and I wondered if some wise advice to all my poet friends, heroes and fellow travellers could be derived by replacing the word 'love' in Diana Ross and The Supremes' unsurpassable Stop! in the Name of Love with the word 'poetry'.
I know that if I hadn't written the worst half of all the poems I've ever written, I'd be the better poet for it. But it's not for me to say that the same thing applies to other poets.
Let's see what happens.

Stop! in the Name of Poetry

(Holland/Dozier/Holland/Green)

to all the poets I've known

Stop! In the name of poetry
Before you break my heart

Baby, baby I'm aware of where you go
Each time you leave my door
I watch you walk down the street
Knowing your other poetry you'll meet
But this time before you run to her
Leaving me alone and hurt
(Think it over) After I've been good to you
(Think it over) After I've been sweet to you

Stop! In the name of poetry
Before you break my heart
Stop! In the name of poetry
Before you break my heart
Think it over
Think it over

I've known of your
Your secluded nights
I've even seen her
Maybe once or twice
But is her sweet expression
Worth more than my poetry and affection
But this time before you leave my arms
And rush off to her charms
(Think it over) Haven't I been good to you
(Think it over) Haven't I been sweet to you

Stop! In the name of poetry
Before you break my heart
Stop! In the name of poetry
Before you break my heart
Think it over
Think it over

I've tried so hard, hard to be patient
Hoping you'd stop this infatuation
But each time you are together
I'm so afraid I'll be losing you forever

Stop! In the name of poetry
Before you break my heart
Stop! In the name of poetry
Before you break my heart
Stop! In the name of poetry

BSO Beethoven and Shostakovich

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Valeriy Sokolov, vln, Kees Bakels, Beethoven 5, Shostakovich Violin Concerto no.1, Portsmouth Guildhall, Jan 14th.

Expectation can be a heavy burden. I've never had a bad word for any BSO concert here, and still haven't, but in this great time for Shostakovich, with Julian Barnes' book due out shortly and the great man looking all the more like the colossus that is such a strong candidate for Greatest Composer of the C20th, Valeriy Sokolov's account of the first violin concerto might not have lived up to the crazy standard one could have hoped for.
It begins in subdued fashion and the orchestra were fine with that. Sokolov's playing was soulful and almost gentle but, as it progressed, I began to wonder if this was the same concerto given such an electrifying performance at the Proms a couple of years ago. One passage sounded wooden and perhaps that was the desired effect but as the third movement began with its singing style passacaglia and moved into a sharp cadenza, there was no doubting Sokolov's technique. What on earth was he supposed to do, it was brilliant and led into the dramatic burlesque brio of a bravura finale but it hadn't quite taken me with it. You can't win them all.
I will be interested to find out what the encore was. When I guessed it was Ligeti's arrangement of Bach, I meant Kurtag, of course. The haunting crossover of something like Bartok with baroque phrases will be well worth finding out about.
Liadov's Kikimora filled the difficult position of hors d'oeuvres but opened the set poetically and atmospherically with its story of a 'diminutive but malicious witch with a body the size of a pencil'. In ten minutes, the piece uses much of the orchestra's range and Liadov can be looked at with some respect henceforth.
But if ever an old warhorse can be relied upon to guarantee an evening, it must be Beethoven 5. Everyone knows the first four notes, some of the most famous in music for their characteristic Beethoven chutzpah, and the rest of it only gets better.
I'll be forever haunted by a third form music exam, having to follow the score of the first movement and having to note down the bar at which the music was stopped. Being a musical illiterate, then even more so than now, I missed the indication that the first bars are repeated, immediately got hopelessly lost and soon sat back and just listened to the music. I scored 0 for that but was still in demand for end of term quizzes because the class knew that I was their best bet to have on their side for music questions, and other stuff most of them had never heard of, and probably still would be.
The first movement was fleet-footed and Kees Bakels nimbly defied the advancing years  (it appears it was his 71st birthday today but it wasn't mentioned), enjoying the music as much as anybody. The second movement has the gorgeous yearning phrases that I imagine Dvorak spent much of his life trying to imitate, not without some success, but Beethoven's not written a symphony until he's expressed something muscular, noble and spirited. This is when the Romantic temperament of the individual emerged from the discipline of Classicism but before it got out of hand. I can always understand why Beethoven is for so many the Greatest even if I'm more of a Bach man in the final analysis. And he never lets you down with an understated ending. No composer ever started the final flourishes of a symphony earlier than Beethoven. One climax, then another, a few more chords before building to what might or might not be the big finish until finally it is. It is a very good way of rousing the audience to more enthusiastic applause than they might have awarded had the music finished when it first sounded like it was going to. Thank you, Beethoven. In 1974, or thereabouts, when other teenage boys had pictures of Suzi Quatro, or possibly Led Zeppelin, on their bedroom wall, I had a poster of Beethoven. It's unlikely we will see the likes of him again.
And then, overheard at the bus stop,
Pierre Boulez died. The conductor who thought he was a composer.
Yes, 'thought he was'.
And David, erm, David Bowie.
Well, he won't be much missed.
I don't mind much what they say about Boulez as a composer but elderly people can be as delinquent, thoughtless and downright disrespectful as the young who don't yet know any better. On the other hand, there's nothing quite as entertaining as other people's conversations.
And, if you are nearby Portsmouth Central Library in the next few days, go in and pick up a handful of the CD's they're selling off at a pound a time, even the two-disc set of Messiah and 3-disc set of Alfred Deller were still only a quid each. They only need to be playable to be worth picking up a few. Mind you, those two, plus some Harp Concertos and the Berg and Stravinsky Violin Concertos aren't there any more.

David Bowie

It must sometimes look like an arbitrary list of those awarded an obituary on this website but I generally know straightaway who qualifies and who doesn't. As word spread round the office early this morning that David Bowie had died, it was like those famous JFK stories about where you were when you heard, or Winston Churchill, or more latterly, John Lennon, Diana Spencer or Michael Jackson. For a moment there was the suspicion that it was one of those 'Paul McCartney is Dead' stories and I understand that news sources were checking it to make sure it wasn't but David Bowie was immediately someone I knew I had to say something about even if the internet will already be awash with so many others saying their piece.
For many of those of us who became teenagers early in the 1970's, Bowie was as significant as The Beatles. I had Beatles wallpaper in my bedroom in Nottingham until we left in 1967 but I wasn't even 4 when She Loves You was number 1 and so not in a position to quite appreciate The Beatles as they happened but from Hunky Dory, through Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs to at least Station to Station, he made a set of albums as good as anybody's comparable list and I was there by then.
Credited with a 'chameleon'-like talent to re-invent himself, he was really a borrower who took and re-used the styles of others to make his own, from Anthony Newley, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, German avant garde, soul and eventually leaving it to Brett Anderson and Suede to make more Bowie albums while Bowie made drum'n'bass records. One might have loved Marc Bolan more but you had to admire Bowie. Whether as Ziggy Stardust, The Dame, The Thin White Duke or a member of the ill-advised Tin Machine, he was always self-consciously Major Tom, Aladdin Sane, a Cracked Actor or something other. It was art and the world of Andy Warhol brought flamboyantly into the hit parade.
1975 looks in retrospect like a pop music desert after the passing of glam rock and before the Sex Pistols but while Led Zeppelin were making their ludicrous film, The Song Remains the Same (it's easy to say so now), and pop music was in such doldrums that I had absented myself to a diet of Beethoven, Shostakovich and Faust, Bowie was making Station to Station, which I will suggest is the real masterpiece above them all, that includes the original of the attached  Wild is the Wind.
Many stories will be heard over and again over the next few days, not least the memorable TOTP performance of Starman, some regrettable utterances about fascism and the 'homo superior' but I will remember Changes as Tony Blackburn's Record of the Week on the Breakfast Show which, now I check the Guinness Book of Hit Singles, I find failed to make the Top 40; I didn't understand a concert review in Sounds that said that Bowie had 'camped out on stage' (I pictured him sitting outside a tent) and, before I was corrected by some who knew better I thought Station to Station said,
It's not the side effects of her cooking,
I'm thinking that it must be love.

when, of course, now we all know it was not 'the side effects of the cocaine'.
Rebel Rebel remains an irresistible favourite alongside Drive-In Saturday, the futuristic vision of humanity having to re-learn how to 'make love' by watching old films,
His name was always Buddy
and he'd shrug and ask to stay
and she'd sigh like Twig the Wonder Kid 
and turn her face away.

I want to quote Panic in Detroit, Rock 'n' Roll Suicide, and so many others, like Heroes, Suffragette City, the Lou Reed tribute Queen Bitch, Life On Mars, because there were so many things of such cleverness, the most astute arbiter of that elusive quality that some call 'cool', whatever that was. And like any genius, I dare say he could be naff at times. But so could the Beatles.
Quite brilliantly, it didn't mean much but it meant everything. I was never enough of a devoted fan at the time but he was a part of all of it and just about the most essential figure in pop music for those of us lucky enough to be the right age to know as much. He wouldn't have got away with it now but in amongst Alice Cooper, T.Rex, Roxy Music, the New York Dolls, Kiss and all, he really didn't seem that unusual, just better than most. I'm not even sure he was a trendsetter of any kind, but he was clever enough to make it look as if he was leading the way.
In a week when we lost Lemmy, only really notable in my book for singing on Silver Machine, and Ed 'Stewpot' Stewart, a childhood stalwart from Junior Choice and Crackerjack, I'm sad that those significant names are so completely overshadowed by David Bowie who made such a vast contribution to the soundtrack of our lives. He even made it possible for Queen to make a good record.
I'm a bit more stunned now, having written this, than the disbelief I felt this morning when I thought I must have misheard what was being said.
 

George Eliot

2015 was my George Eliot year. Having re-read Middlemarch 35 years after sitting in front of it for hours during the summer of 1979 in preparation for the Victorian Literature course of B.A. (Hons) English Lancaster 1981, I was impressed ten times more than that first experience of it when I was more overwhelmed than unconvinced and so I moved on to Daniel Deronda. Keeping a wary eye out for bargains, I was lucky enough to find Scenes from Clerical Life, Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss on a bookstall for 50p each and, when they didn’t have change for my two pound coin, waved away the 50p in lordly fashion. I can’t remember where my Felix Holt came from but remember reading it on a train in September and I finally finished Romola late on New Year’s Eve.

In trying to draw some conclusions about Eliot’s novels, with their various moral, political and intellectual themes, I first want to bring together a blueprint in which a virtuous, sometimes scholarly, and sometimes apparently based on Marian Evans herself, central character has their ostensible destiny compromised and re-routed to an alternate fate. This might be the sub-text to the whole body of work that one’s end is not in one’s beginning but is decided more by what happens than what was seemingly meant to be, that ‘nurture’, or something like it, is always going to modify ‘nature’ decisively. To simplify seven novels, and some of them very big ones, to such a glib paraphrase is absurd but I’m not involved in a dissertation here, only a note. Middlemarch on its own would reveal ten times more on a third reading and I will make a point of reading it every thirty five years to allow it to disclose more each time.

But Silas Marner’s carefully hoarded savings are cruelly stolen only to eventually bring him a greater reward in bringing up a child; Adam Bede stoically misses out on the girl he adores but finds a life of contentment with the girl one might not have expected; Romola, somewhat misguidedly perhaps, devotes herself to the wrong man more than once before becoming fulfilled without being attached to a man; Dorothea Brooke idealizes the academic work of Casaubon but discovers too late in marriage to him quite how desiccated such a bookish life can be, and Daniel Deronda pursues the vain, spoilt but, of course, beguiling Gwendolen but it is Gwendolen’s loss when she marries the dreadful, manipulative Grandcourt and Deronda finds discovers his inheritance in Jewish culture.

If I left out The Mill on the Floss there, it is not because it doesn’t fit the vague template of an Eliot plot but because it does it differently. Maggie Tulliver is a wonderful, signature creation, an ardent learner full of possibility and promise. Her relationship with the sensitive Philip is valuable and she cares less about his disability but her father is in dispute with his and it causes a rift in the family, particularly with her much-loved brother.  Her destiny, appallingly, is to be re-united with her brother in drowning in the  pre-Lawrentian. Although one must regard Middlemarch as Eliot’s greatest achievement, it is difficult not to like The Mill on the Floss, in a very competitive field, as much as any of her books.

But that is not to say they are perfect. Each novel has had its critics, on points of credibility within the plot or other technical objections. But disbelief has to be suspended and Eliot’s prose is glorious enough to be enjoyed for its own sake and overcomes any such prescriptive requirements. It is not only how she can write a sentence but how she will pass comment with informed liberalism and, more often than one might expect, with knowing humour.

In The Mill on the Floss, Mr. Tulliver winks and smiles,

With the natural pride of a man who has a buxom wife conspicuously his inferior in intellect.

And in Silas Marner,

A dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters a desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.

Her biographers mention how Herbert Spencer decided against marrying her because she was too intellectual- that might have been his loss, not hers- and it was unfortunate that  while I was reading Romola Giles Coren, the well-known acerbic columnist in The Times, expressed ironic surprise that anybody read George Eliot for pleasure. Romola is certainly a challenge at times but comes to life in its climactic second half and it did take three years of research into Florence in the 1490’s to make into quite such a dense account of Savaranola, the Bonfire of the Vanities and Romola’s story woven into it. But I wouldn’t have spent a year reading almost no other fiction than hers if it hadn’t been for pleasure. And Giles is noted for being less reluctant than his more dignified sister in reaching for the unnecessarily cheap shot whenever he’s run out of ideas for anything more witty to write.

Coming historically, and thematically, between Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, it’s easy to see George Eliot as a novelist that brings together elements of both but is surely more satisfying than either. Dickens has been given more attention as a writer, possibly as a more populist story teller but not necessarily as such a sophisticated writer. It is inevitable that she is something of an icon for feminists but hers is not the sort of feminism than regards the masculine as a tyranny that needs to be subverted by replacing it with the reverence of everything female instead. Many of Eliot’s male characters are sensitive, benign and well-meaning and the female can be as selfish and deplorable as any man, and so her attitude appreciated the more noble aspirations of diversity before such an idea became a vehicle for the use of any perceived minority to make inordinate claims for their victim status. As Jenny Uglow says,

Part of George Eliot’s aim is, in contrast, to celebrate diversity, to pick out the cygnet among the ducks, and to deny the existence of a norm.

And that, alongside the consummate prose, the profound portraits of humanity and the sheer intelligence is what makes her not only the greatest of C19th novelists but of any period. It is not Eliot, it is Jenny Uglow, that is disrespecting ducks there. Unfortunately, Jenny has rather missed the point. In a George Eliot book, a duck would have lived some sort of happy life, paddling about in a pond whereas a cygnet would have always been in danger of growing up into a self-regarding, graceful but potentially aggressive swan.

If It Wasn't Christmas

My mate's daughter is at University doing Pop Music. It has been suggested that if she needs help with the words to any of her compositions, I might be able to provide it.
Before Christmas, watching Danny Baker's SKY Arts programme on Christmas Hits, I noticed that such records are still being made. It's not just Slade, Wizzard, Mud and The Pogues, there are recent records of some note by Leona Lewis and Darlene Love. When I say 'recent' I mean within the last 25 years. So I wondered whether to attempt such a thing rather than wait for my assistance to be requested.
Below is the resulting first draft, ready to be edited, changed, adapted howsoever the musician sees fit, or quite understandably, perhaps discarded, but it appears here to lay some claim on the title, idea, lines or anything about it deemed to be original so that, in the event of the Worldwide Christmas no.1 hit, some of the royalties arrive here.
Lds & Gnlmn, you heard it here first.

If It Wasn’t Christmas

Don’t be mad at me

I love you, baby, but I’m not quite free

You know I won’t be kissing him with the same feeling

I want to hold your hand

I don’t want to hear your reprimand

With you everything has a new meaning

It’s not going to snow and the mistletoe

Is the only thing that can see I’m pre-occupied

If it wasn’t Christmas, I’d be right there by your side

You won’t be far away

It might as well be Acapulco Bay

But the distance between us will not last forever

It’s hard to compromise

I want to be the only one in your eyes

You know I’m not trying to be clever

And then I’ll follow a star to be where you are

And have no need of any other thing as my guide

If it wasn’t Christmas, I’d be right there by your side

The past’s behind us

With our regrets and mistakes

But for the rest of our lives

I’ll do whatever it takes

There’ll be no need for presents

Underneath a tree

Because I will have you

And you will have me

If it wasn’t Christmas, I’d be right there by your side

                (If it wasn’t Christmas, I’d be right there by your side)

If it wasn’t Christmas, I’d be right there by your side

                (If it wasn’t Christmas, I’d be right there by your side)

Larkin's Photographs

Richard Bradford, The Importance of Elsewhere, Philip Larkin's Photographs (Francis Lincoln)

The Complete Poems was an exhaustive edition of more Larkin poems than might have needed to see print. There have been the books of juvenilia, the fiction, the letters, the Letters to Monica, the Required Writing, then more of it and the jazz reviews. With three biographies and a number of memoirs by those who knew him, it could have seemed as if there was nothing else that needed doing but that was betting without his photography.
But this is a very welcome book and not quite what one could have expected. Richard Bradford makes it into a 'life', with chapters devoted to family, friends and girlfriends in a chronological order accompanied by a useful commentary. I expected full page reproductions of black and white studies of cemetries, country churches, Hull, the hinterland of Holderness as well as portraits of those he knew well but it is more personal and less art for art's sake than that.
The story, and the way it is presented, stresses Larkin's compartmentalised life, keeping his relationships separate as best he could, not only one girlfriend from another but all of them from Kingsley Amis, his friend with who he can be compared and contrasted. There was a hiatus in correspondance with Amis, more or less coinciding with more time being spent with Monica, who was not a favourite of the novelist's. And we appreciate how it wasn't clear in their early days which of them was going to be the poet and which the novelist, either.
Early impressions of Martin Amis compare him with Mick Jagger but the photographs, more tellingly, show Monica to be the most imposing and photogenic of Larkin's womenfriends, with Ruth Bowman, seen in 1947 aged 16, illustrating a time before teenagers as we have known them since the 1950's, looking particularly mature in retrospect.
Alongside Betjeman, Larkin is at ease; next to Ted Hughes, there is no need for the text to suggest that there was no chemistry between them. Larkin's cars are a stately Vanden Plas and a Singer- distinguished, choice vehicles seen on holidays in the British Isles, which were taken from Mull to Sark and places in between. Where, in Going, Going, he wrote of
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
               this is one of the books in which he imagined such things lingering on. And it is a treasure.
With some gadgetry, he takes self-portraits, posing as he takes breakfast, for example, and for the most part is very much the bookish Oxford man but, in early middle age he presents a debonair image of one who knew what he was about. It has been remarked how girlfriends are pictured in similar poses, as if there is something sinister about that, but it takes some noticing and reviewers bringing such suggestions with them are importing them from other suspicions they nurture from elsewhere. Give the man a break.
All biographies are sad, recounting the years of achievement and success before their subject is a household name, to be followed by the necessity of living up to it and then the inevitable demise but, once released from the tangled web of contingent relationships that Larkin allowed to build up around him, these photographs make an admirably understated album that describe how a very major figure can lead a relatively ordinary life, extraordinary though it may seem.
In the Foreword, Mark Hayward-Booth calls it, 'this first book of photographs by... Philip Larkin', so we can perhaps look forward to further volumes. There is less art in this one than there might have been. It is inward looking and probably not the selection that Larkin would have made himself. There are clearly more letters and archive material available but by now enough is known of the man to make publication of such material a recondite exercise. More of the photographs that he took on his bicycle rides or on holiday would be welcome, though, just to enjoy some good, old pictures rather than use them for yet more psychoanalysis.