There is no time to Pause

 Wendy Lesser continued to be a good companion to the end of Nothing Remains the Same. I'm very glad she finds no reason for the statue to come to life in The Winter's Tale and that that's she's not worried about it either. It's not yet clear that her enthusiasm for Paradise Lost and Huckleberry Finn will persuade me to return to those which would be re-readings because we read them, up to a point, at school. She has made a case for filling in some of the gaps in my earlier Ian McEwan and that might happen but I left off with some of his more inventive books recently and there are higher priorities, like what she says about Henry James and The Portrait of a Lady. I'm sure the Portsmouth Library Service can find me a copy of that but the biography of Balzac by Graham Robb has been commenced upon already on an afternoon when, honestly, it was all that there was left. I'm sure that is going to turn out to be as worldly as any of the many, many stories lifted from it as the prolific, corpulent maestro was wont to do. It's hard to credit in chapter 1 that at school he was regarded as lazy. That hardly seems fair but perhaps it is a misjudgement that teachers, employers, adults and practical types make of writers.

Yes, it might look like we are indolent and purposeless but the thinking needs to be done before the hard part, which is the writing. I found it difficult once to explain to an engineer, let's call him, why writers or artists were more important than those who built bridges. Bridges are fine, I said, but the engineers only need to build them so that the writers can go and see what's on the other side of the river so they can write about it.

Wendy ends with a chapter on Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock. I'm not always convinced that film is an art form comparable to literature unless it's French, very, very good, or Hitchcock and so I went through what DVD's I have and found that Vertigo wasn't one of them and, not being prepared to go through the rigmarole of signing up to the ITV hub to see Sheridan Smith's latest trauma in advance, it will be the life of Balzac for at least a week.

One sometimes needs the reassurance of something like the dedication of somebody as good as Wendy Lesser, on the dreariest of February Sunday afternoons, to be sure it is important to have spent so much of one's life reading stuff that other people have made up. One could be in danger of thinking it might not have been and perhaps even wishing one had been an engineer but she's a great help. I see there's at least one other book in her various back catalogue that might make it clearer yet, Why I Read. That should help enormously but I hope I don't entirely agree. 

There's much she says that one instinctively knows is right but there are things one is reluctant to take on trust. Thank heavens for that. Once literature is reduced to a list of right answers, it might as well be mathematics and the whole glorious, unending, sometimes maddening game will be over and the only precarious uncertainty left worth investing in will be horse racing.  

Lesser is More

 It wasn't that the history of Tamla Motown was a chore to read, it was useful and of interest, but one notices the difference when moving to a writer like Wendy Lesser. Nothing Remains the Same is her account of re-reading books she read in her early days and into her twenties after a gap of about 25 years. It's a pleasure to read her writing about the writing she's re-read, some of which I've not read, some of which I have and some I've equally re-read. It's in the quality of the prose and the intelligence. It matters less whether one agrees or not.

It's to be expected that books will look different second time around. We are different people by then. It's no different than the same book looking different to two different people. I am comforted by how little Wendy sometimes remembers of books. I thought that was just me and not eminent editor-critics. I remember impressions but not detail and often not endings. I have been known to come back here and look up what I thought here as a reminder of what I thought at the time.

Wendy's less impresssed by Anna Karenina and Middlemarch than she had been. Having only read Anna once, I can appreciate her shift but with Middlemarch I went in the opposite direction, finding much more in it after a 30-odd year break but I suspect my second reading only brought me up to somewhere closer to the level of her first.

She finds more in Pope and Wordsworth than previously, two poets at opposite ends of a scale where she occupies admirable middle ground in Donne, Gunn and, up to a point, Hopkins and Wilfred Owen. She is also good on the deeply flawed but sporadically great D.H. Lawrence, in the end lighting on the short stories and The Rocking-Horse Winner in particular as best, and proof of Lawrence's own verdict that,

once it is fathomed, once it is known and its meaning fixed or established, it is dead.

I'm glad about that. I think of that as the 'magic' and what makes anything 'art' or art worth having.

I'm sure we were all enamoured of George Orwell as serious, more or less bright, teenagers but Wendy is less so now and she starts out by declaring she's not even going to try with The Catcher in the Rye, which is surely a teenager's book but I'm sure is more than the capturing of alienated adolescence in studied laconic style.

It's mot obvious that Wendy and I would see things the same way if only due to the difference in gender and talent. I haven't seen through George Eliot but I've yet to be persuaded at all by Jane Austen but anybody who could write so well about the Shostakovich String Quartets is worth reading and there will be more of her books here in due course.

--

I was most grateful to a friend at Portsmouth Poetry Society for printing off copies of my Free Verse introduction the other week.

I had gone for the bargain option of having a print cartidge refilled and it didn't work. It wasn't obvious, to me at least, that it wasn't the printer's fault but I need it still to scan in the Times crossword every Saturday. But such a state of affairs can't go on indefinitely and I ordered a new cartridge only to be dismayed that it still didn't work. Good money seemed to be following bad like a losing run at the races. But, undaunted, I kept on pressing buttons, watching videos on re-setting a Canon printer and going back to basics and, well, I never, eventually printed off the poem with the unsatisfactory title You Won't See Me Follow You Back Home.

So perhaps the re-filled cartridge will work, too, but I'll stick with what I've got for now.

Two poems that didn't prove deserving of printed status, as yet, were Rainyday Woman and Canute in Bosham. Perhaps they'll click into place and convince me but it's best if they do that sooner rather than later and appear to me at least as smooth, marble things of some beauty rather than bad carpentry in which one can see the joins.

 

But The Church Fair is done in the first and only draft it's likely to see. Perhaps 45 minutes of entirely derivative period (1957) English comedy. Like the novel, Time After Time, it was done for the sake of being able to say I've done it but, inlike the novel, was more enjoyable to do. I wish poetry didn't seem to be what I was better, or only more successful, at but it is the easy option and I did invest more time, effort and thought in it. The good thing for the writer is that the work remains for them how they imagine it looks, not what it looks like to its readers.

Which is roughly where we came in.   

--

Last week at Lichess, I stepped outside the comfort zone of fiddling about at 2 minutes + 1 second per move and my rating drifting aimlessly in the 1600's to reach for unimaginable heights by improving the 1972 I was preserving in the 'Classical', 30-minute discipline. It didn't go too badly and I found myself on the threshold of greatness, for me, at 1993, one win away from the Golden Fleece, the Holy Grail or the Novice Chase at Fontwell which is a rating of 2000. I'd have loved, cherished and left that undefended forever if I'd won the next match but I didn't and now I'm down somewhere near 1880. But I tried.

Also, in the Sports News. I was regarded by myself and others as a big-hitting batsman, for as long as it lasted, thirty years ago but any scoring rate I put up in those stately days by now looks like a medley of Boycott, Gavaskar and 'Barnacle' Trevor Bailey compared to what happened in the European Cricket League T20. With teams from Austria, Denmark, Norway and France, this is not 'first-class' and many from my generation would struggle to recognize it as cricket but 88-0 from 3.1 overs, which is 19 balls, in 13 minutes is something historic as the game further mutates. The 50 partnership came up in 10 balls, which is only one more than is mathematically possible without the bowlers donating more wides and no balls.

Tunbridge Wells v. Dreux T10

But don't worry about Tunbridge Wells. They played Dreux again in the play-offs and won by 50 runs.

Brighton Chamber Ensemble in Chichester

Brighton Chamber Ensemble, Chichester Cathedral, Feb 8

Did any other age spend so much time with the music of so long ago? In the C18th, audiences turned up in numbers to hear C18th music - Handel, Mozart and Haydn. David Hepworth has written about how quickly rock music became a heritage industry with bands living off back catalogue material more than new work and still today many people's idea of poetry is that of Keats and Wordsworth. We know what we like and we like what we know and I'm sure that if most concert programmes were made up of Ligeti, Schnittke and Thomas Ades, I'd be the first to ask why we had forgotten about Beethoven and Bach. Or, in this case, Brahms and Robert Schumann. 

Brighton Chamber Ensemble 'is a flexible group of between 3 and 8 players' and on this occasion began as a trio for two of the Schumann Canonic Studies. The first had Rachel Ellis on violin following in Siriol Hugh-Jones's cello which was then followed by Stephen Carroll-Turner who played the piano he also maintains to sound as good as it always does. It was a calm, lilting piece and disarmingly sane. The second was more urgent, if not capricious.

Ros Hanson-Laurent then joined on viola for the expansive, larger-scale Brahms Piano Quartet no. 3 in C minor, the 'Werther', which I'm not at all surprised to find is named after Goethe's novel of suffering the pains of young love. Clara Schumann, or at least the agonies she caused young Brahms, was the cause of it.

The Allegro non troppo begins shadowy and ominous and the work as a whole struggles to escape the unsettled emotions. If Haydn was credited with 'sturm und drang' then Brahms did a bit more with them. The piano melody with pizzicato cello gives a glimpse of lyrical equilibrium and something warmer but it's not to be entirely trusted. The unease continues in the Scherzo which might be a dance but is a careworn one. Rachel's trills at the end might be a thrill or a fluttering heart.

The rich flow of Siriol's cello opens a sumptuous Andante, is joined first by the violin with piano accompaniment and then the viola. The harmonious unity seems to be explaining away much of the hurt or regret as it makes its way to a satisfying completeness.

I look up the unfamiliar marking Allegro comodo to find 'comfortably fast', which refers to the tempo more than the emotion. It's tempting to wonder if each instrument is given a more prominent role in each movement and this is the piano's turn, which is busy throughout but somewhat 'agitato'. It reaches for its grandstand finish before a coda and then wraps itself up more suddenly than one might have thought.

I'm never one to entirely read the life into an artist's work unless they expressly say we should but, on the other hand, even the abstractions of music must come from somewhere and be autobiographical to a certain extent. That last movement owes some debt to Beethoven and Brahms struggled with his own doubts about how he compared with the even more tormented genius. 

In the first instance, one shouldn't have to put oneself through such anguish but in the second, he didn't miss by much.

This was a compelling account of yet more Brahms one might feel the need to explore further and it is to be hoped that the Brighton Chamber Ensemble, with whatever line-up, are in the vicinity again soon.

Sunday Notes

 My Cultural Fix is a questionnaire filled in by guest well-known people in The Times on Saturdays. It has been going long enough for patterns to have emerged, like most people who can't play the piano wish they could, a lot of people think Leonard Cohen should be taken seriously and those that have tried but failed or not even tried to read Ulysses or Proust think they should have. They're not as hard as you'd think but I feel the same about The Faerie Queen and Paradise Lost.

Two recent answers have impressed, though. This week Philippa Gregory says, in answer to 'the poem that saved me', that she's only been saved once and 'a poem would have been no use at all'. I've been surprised by all those previous respondents who considered themselves 'saved' by a poem. Colm Toibin nominated Buxtehude's choral music as 'under-rated' and good for him.

Of course, most are tempted to give fine-sounding answers to these questions about cultural reference points and are unlikely to cite Sugar, Sugar by the Archies but R4's quiz Counterpoint asks contestants to declare the first record they bought. Top marks to the lady that said Clog Dance by Violinski. We can be appalled or fascinated by other people's enthusiasms and occasionally agree to a large extent. A similar thing happens with the various Top 10's listed in Calling Out Around The World: A Motown Reader ed. Kingsley Abbot.

I know as much as I need to know by now about the hit factory, its history, personalities and process. It is mainly about 'being any good' but there's way of making sure you are and business is business. But the Top 10's, and the Top 100 voted for by the Motown fan club, diagnose some divergence between my long-established idea of top Motown and the more insider view. 

My Girl, with the Temptations singing Smokey is perhaps the most ubiquitous selection but after that I don't think I'm purist enough to agree with the dedicated afficiandos. Nobody likes I'm Still Waiting and the only list it appears in is the best-sellers, with the likes of Lionel Richie. Walk Away Renee is not generally regarded as a Four Tops essential. Others of mine are eclipsed by the likes of Dancing in the Street which is obviously not as good as Nowhere to Run. But it's not a time trial and one person's idea of 'best' is another's also ran.

No, there's no need to ask. My Top 8 Tamla Motown are so long carved into me that they can't be erased. In no order, because one couldn't-

Diana Ross & the Supremes - Stop ! in the Name of Love

The Four Tops - Walk Away Renee

The Temptations - Just My Imagination

The Isley Brothers - This Old Heart of Mine

The Jackson 5 - I Want You Back

Diana Ross - I'm Still Waiting

Martha Reeves & the Vandellas - Nowhere to Run

Smokey Robiinson & the Miracles - The Tracks of My Tears

 

at least five of those have at one time or another been said by me to be the greatest pop record of all time, most recently the Jackson 5.

The Elgins, Heaven Must Have Sent You is making a case for itself for a place in the last two but the heartbreak comes in having to leave so many masterpieces out. Many of What Becomes of the Broken-hearted, I Heard it Through the Grapevine, My Girl, Stoned Love, Baby I need Your Lovin and more of the unashamed glamour of Miss Ross & the Supremes and Brenda Holloway can't be in a 10. Twenty would still mean leaving out so many gorgeous things so the Top 10 is left open at the end, like all the first drafts or abandoned projects I leave to go back to on some unspecified future date.

 

Which I hope won't include The Church Fair, the slight period comedy that I've gradually compiled over the winter with all its derivative inter-textual references to All Gas and Gaiters, Oscar Wilde, Fawlty Towers and The Two Ronnies. Books are made out of other books. But I'll have achieved it if I can do more with Act 5 than reprise all that's been written so far.

Writing should be written because it needs to be, not because one is aiming for a word count, but I'd like it to be a bit more than a pilot for a sitcom. Somebody at school once timed an ITV episode of Thirty Minute's Worth, starring Count Arthur Strong's ancestor, Harry Worth, at 17 minutes. Guidance on the internet suggests that 130 per minute gives an idea of duration. I doubt if I'll make it an hour's worth but it'll do.

One day I might have the capacity, ability and inclination to publish kindles on Amazon. The Collected Poems, the Collected Essays, the play. Never mind the music writing. Now, there's something to look forward to.

  

David Price at Lunchtime Live!

David Price, Portsmouth Cathedral, Feb 3 

David Price, Portsmouth Cathedral's own organist, provided a diverse programme of English music in anticipation of the 70th anniversary of the Queen's accession at lunchtime today.

Some might say Purcell is England's greatest composer and I'd be one of them and five short pieces by him were a fine way to begin. The Rondeau was a grand opening, Fairest Isle somewhat smaller in scope, the wonderful When I am laid in earth is solemn and ethereal, How blest are the shepherds perhaps insociant before the famous Trumpet Tune was in there somewhere, almost buried amnong a fanfare.

Francis Jackson's Prelude on East Ackham is a benign hymn tune that contrasted with the Trumpet March written by Geoffrey Bush for the 1981 royal wedding in which the modernist dazzle and disruption might have anticipated the marriage that it celebrated.

Much more restful is the peaceable drift of the Lullaby for a Prince on the occasion of the birth of Prince William by Arthur Wills. The rousing finale, William Walton's Crown Imperial march accumulated and gathered itself towards its emphatic splendour to complete a vivid, glowing set that was most welcome on an otherwise non-descript day.

The young talents of the Grammar School musicians are back next week and guaranteed to impress. They will be worth an hour of your time if you're anywhere in the area.

Free Verse

 It was my star turn at Portsmouth Poetry Society this evening, some thoughts on free verse having been my theme for this year's programme. It went very well with a good turnout, not necessarily due to me being the advertised box office attraction.

I hadn't been entirely convinced about my introduction and so had circulated James Fenton on the subject, too, but it went well enough with the kindly people of PPS so here is another chapter towards some eventual Collected Essays.

--

 

Free Verse

Two of the best known remarks about ‘free verse’ are Robert Frost’s, regarding Carl Sandburg, that it is like ‘playing tennis without a net’ and that it is ‘cut-up prose’ which is less easy to attribute to anyone in particular. They both contain within them the idea that free verse isn’t quite the ‘real thing’ but it is for me because, after all these years, I’ve settled on a definition of a poem that says it is,

a statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or word processor, who decides where the lines should end.

That might not be the most ambitious or Romantic idea of what poetry is and some will find it underwhelming but poetry is a wide church and ‘in my father’s house are many homes’.

In trying to find out where free verse all began I expected to find evidence of it before C19th France but I haven’t. Homer, Horace and Ovid didn’t see any reason to rhyme but they are devout in their adherence to their sometimes complex rhythmic patterns. In one of his most amusing excursions, Simon Armitage explained the structure of one of the medieval poems he has translated, possibly Gawain and The Green Knight, and for thousands of years, it seems, poetry was a very disciplined art.

‘Verse’ implies structure, the most easily found definition on the internet being, 

writing arranged with a metrical rhythm, typically having a rhyme.

‘Poetry’ doesn’t have to be that. The same source gives, 

literary work in which the expression of feelings and ideas is given intensity by the use of distinctive style and rhythm.

That might not be the whole story but a significant difference between the two definitions is ‘arranged’. Perhaps free verse likes to pretend that it hasn’t been quite so deliberately ‘arranged’ but I’d be disappointed if it hadn’t.

Wherever there’s an accepted rule there will always be somebody who sees fit to break it and claim for themselves some sort of revolutionary status. Artists, including poets, are often among the sort of people who enjoy being iconoclastic. That’s fine. Go ahead.France in the C19th might also have been where the other, equally apparently oxymoronic ‘prose poem’ emerged. They were busy, trying their damnedest to break rules. Neither those who think that poetry should rhyme or those who think that they’re part of a revolution need do any more than show us a good one.

Rhyme might also have come into English poetry from Italy or France in the Middle Ages, Italian and French being languages in which it can be difficult to avoid rhyme whereas in English one has to try a bit harder and, often to subtle effect, use ‘half-rhymes’. In English, with it being more difficult to achieve, it can be either richer if done carefully or look awkward if the rhyme has appeared to dictate the choice of words. And there are those who still think they don’t have anything to do with metre, syllable counts, rhymes or word patterning because their ‘voice’ is pure and natural.

Unfortunately for them, the language will have done it for them. Having accepted language, rather than, say, colour or music, as their medium, they have made themselves its prisoner. The late, great Roddy Lumsden once told of poets who showed him poems that they said contained none of the verbal effects traditionally associated with ‘poetry’ until he had a look and pointed out inadvertent assonance, rhythm and all such other linguistic ‘special effects’ taught in school as being those things to be identified and appreciated as ‘poetry’. The effect of such prescriptive teaching was to put many pupils off poetry for good, as if it was a homework exercise to be answered, an equation to be solved or some scripture that revealed wisdom rather than something to be enjoyed.

Perhaps language can’t help being poetry. Tony Harrison once reported over-hearing perfect iambic pentameter on a train in the sentence, 

He worked for British Gypsum outside Leek.

It happens whether you want it to or not. The point about poetry, or art of any kind, is that it is presented as such, as per the ‘found objects’ of Marcel Duchamp and the Modernist debt to France seems bottomless. We could spend less time worrying whether a poem is ‘poetry’ or not and concern ourselves more with whether it’s any good or not.

What ‘free verse’ needs to do is establish itself as something other than ‘chopped-up prose’ and it might do that by demonstrating that it has achieved cohesion and artistic effect however it sees fit. That might be deciding where the lines end, internal rhythms, semantic fields or even the failed attempt to avoid any such thing.

Perhaps there’s no such thing as ‘free verse’ and it lives a deluded life, like so many of us possibly do, believing itself to be free when it can’t be, a bit like Jean-Paul Sartre. 

--

What I decided in the end was that I don't first concern myself in music with time signatures or what key it's in. Neither do I worry whether, say, Billie Holliday is jazz, soul or blues. It's only a matter of whether it's any good or not and I found T.S. Eliot coming to a similar conclusion in his 1917 essay, Reflections on Vers Libre, that,
we conclude that the division between Conservative Verse and 'vers libre'  does not exist, there is only good verse, bad verse and chaos.

Great minds might think alike but also mine thought likke his did.

Antonio Oyarzabal in Chichester

 Antonio Oyarzabal, Chichester Cathedral, Feb 1

La muse oubliée is Antonio Oyarzabal's project highlighting female composers. One day, it is to be hoped, no such theme might be necessary but there are centuries of concert programming to make up for in which it was almost unthinkable that they weren't all male. At school I can remember only one book we read that was written by a woman and I'm not sure we realized then that Harper Lee was female. Some of Antonio's composers in his set of miniature pieces are a bit better known than others.

Mana Zucca's Prelude was lush, not too far from Rachmanninov, and expanded before receding back to its gentle opening. Amy Beach's Scottish Legend was not dissimilar but less demonstrative, with echoes of Scottish song. Women of Legend by Mel Bonis is four character portraits that made Phoebe, Desdemona, Viviane and Melisande sound dreamy, summery and warm. 

All of those composers were, broadly, from the first half of the C20th and had a certain amount in common. That might be more due to them having been alive at the same time than being of the same gender. Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre was a more familiar name - to me at least - and the selection of dances from her Pieces for Harpsichord brought a shift to baroque keyboard mannerism that Antonio brought a different fluency to.

What will remain as the most vivid memory of his playing in this set, though, will be his sensitivity and the soft light, as winter sun came through the upper windows into Chichester's sympathetic space, of the impressionistic two 'jardins' of Lili Boulanger's Three pieces for piano before the Cortege, which we had in Havant before Christmas from Myles Tyrrell. Either this music isn't quite oubliée or my regular attendance at local lunchtime concerts is proving beneficial in making lesser known work familiar. It's reassuring to see some coherence in what I said then about Myles's performance and what I heard today.  

More substantial and technically demanding were the April Preludes by Vítězslava Kaprálová, who died aged only 25 in 1940, and who will need to be investigated further. Her music is darker, understandably more troubled and shadowy but perhaps more accessible than those brilliant but difficult chamber music discs of Grażyna Bacewicz that I mean to return to eventually. It was a great way to finish, taking us further and beyond where we had been quite comfortably.

But I thought there was time for an encore and a small helping of Fanny Mendelssohn restored the atmosphere of well-being. I'm not yet cured of the affliction that makes me seek out a quick word with the performer afterwards and not having caught what he had said about the encore provided a passable pretext today.

They are never less than friendly, open and keen to help. I can think of some poets who could learn from such an attitude to their audience. The musicians seem to have less to be defensive about and perhaps enjoy what they are doing more.

One can't help but be impressed and I'm rarely less than that. Even though the attendance in Chichester is always very good, we were encouraged to spread the word, take a friend and, in effect, 'make it mightier yet'.

I'm doing what I can but, honestly, get there if you can. You are unlikely to regret it. I might see you there next week for the Brighton Chamber Ensemble doing Brahms and (Robert) Schumann. I'll be the one in row 4 or 5 trying to take notes unobtrusively or else by the time I get home I'll have forgotten.