Whose Testimony Is it Anyway

One is never left feeling short-changed by anything to do with Shostakovich. Portsmouth Libraries, for once, had to admit they couldn't find their copy of Testimony. I'll forgive them anything, though. They would even get it in for me from elsewhere for a small charge but I'd already found a copy for less than that.

Testimony is 'the memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov', his friend. But the 'unreliable narrator' has been around for a lot longer than when the idea became high fashion for that generation of novelists who did Creative Writing at East Anglia University with Malcolm Bradbury. 

Even the blurb on the back of this 1987 edition accepts that some suggested 'that Volkov invented part of it'. It begins with a story about a law lecturer who arranged for one of his lectures to be disrupted by a 'hooligan' and then asked the students to say what had happened and they all reported it differently and,

some even maintained that there had been several hooligans.

So much for eye witness evidence. So much, we might think, for the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, by the way. So much for any idea of history. I'm almost tempted - but not quite - to dig out my terrible second year university essay on Kierkegaard and subjectivity. We might be well advised not to believe what we read but it isn't necessarily the author's fault.

What we do get from Shostakovich's Testimony, enough of which must be faithfully enough reported to bring with it a sense of him, is at least as much of the clear-sighted, uncompromising artist he surely had to be in the extreme circumstances he worked in. Not for him was the decadent luxury of producing a few short poems each year, thinking he'd done enough, and having a long lie down after each one. As per Julian Barnes's The Noise of Time he spent his whole life in expectation of Stalin's goon squad coming to take him away and here he shows that he knew stories about plenty of those who did disappear. It remains quite a mystery why he wasn't one of them but perhaps by being as good as he was and signing whatever Soviet-line statement was put in front of him without even reading it, Stalin was fooled into keeping him on even though he was more dissident, and had more reason to be than those major Russians who did well for themselves in exile. He's very kind about Stravinsky's music, he's less so about Prokofiev but Rachmanninov doesn't even appear in the index. I don't think it's fair to call him 'ambivalent'. That surely undersells the subterfuge he so heroically brought off. 

The first-hand insights into Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk are valuable and not likely to be the bits suspected of being added by Volkov. For example,

I wanted to show a woman who was on a much higher level than those around her. She is surrounded by monsters. The last five years were like a prison for her.

It's hard to imagine that the artist can't help but bring some elements of autobiography into their work. And,

it turns out that a crime is worth committing for the sake of that passion, since life has no meaning otherwise anyway.

Yes, that crime is murder but murder was an everyday thing under Stalin and so perhaps not as unthinkable in Russia then, and in others places at other times, like England under the first Queen Elizabeth, as it seems to us cosy, middle-brow types who benefitted from living so much of our lives in the reign of the second Queen Elizabeth.

If the memoirs don't lead the reader back to the music they won't have been a complete success, however much of a vicarious thrill one gets from them, or how grateful they make one for having lived so far in such benign times. The Piano Sonatas won't be added to the CD collection, I'm well aware that the symphonies ought to be taken on at some point even if I'm happy enough to nominate Shostakovich as the Greatest C20th Composer without knowing much about them. But I returned to the Trio Sonatas and the Seven Romances on Poems of Alexander Blok which proved to be a fine soundtrack to chapter 5.

I'm glad to know the Russian word, yurodivy, someone who 'tells the world about his insights in an intentionally paradoxical way',

he plays the fool , while actually being a persistent exposer of evil and injustice.

There might have been something of the yurodivy in Shostakovich but you couldn't have called Alexander Solzhenitsyn that. I've never read what Solzhenitsyn thought of Shostakovich but Shostakovich has his reservations about Solzhenitsyn. He wasn't easy to impress. These two giants of C20th Russian art and Soviet dissidence each had their own ways of doing it and it's hardly for me to say who was the braver. But it's not easy to come away from their eloquent testimony liking Russians, or anything about Russia beyond the magnificent art it produced and it continues to be a failing, rogue state.

 

I'm only halfway through this immensely compelling book. It's entirely possible that the second half will generate as much to say again. In a way it's almost a good thing the library couldn't find me a copy, it's a book one wants in one's own library.

 

デッドエンドの思い出

 Banana Yoshimoto, Dead-End Memories (Counterpoint)

We seem to be a little bit behindhand with Banana Yoshimoto in translation.

デッドエンドの思い出 was published in Japan in 2003 but only now in English, by Counterpoint who are in Berkeley, California.

I'm sure all her titles would be made available in English translation with the same urgency as Murakami's are if there was sufficient demand for them so maybe there isn't. But I'm devoutly brand loyal and find it hard to let go.

One knows what one's going to get with Banana by now. Having begun with the 'other' weirdness, it seemed at the time, of Kitchen in 1988, she either became 'mainstream' or the mainstream became her.

The first of the five stories here, House of Ghosts, uses all the usual ingredients of a Banana story in her recipe that can include, yes, ghosts and food but also young people, loneliness, intimacy, dysfunction or trauma and some kind of resolved acceptance of a happy enough ending. 

Her books may or may not be set texts on courses about New Age therapy or mindfulness but I'm not going to hold that against them. Maybe, reading it just before the outpouring of emotion for HM Queen Elizabeth II, there is a similar need to suspend irony, satire and disbelief, disarm oneself of one's instinctive critical habits and be prepared to believe. I'm almost as happy to accept Banana at her words as I was the late Mrs. Elizabeth Windsor  but woe betide them if I ever find out they were not being honest with us.

Iwakura and Secchu echo the ghosts in the house they live in, in House of Ghosts, by sharing their lives to the point of 'becoming one', or feeling like they have, as did Baucis and Philemon in Ovid and few stories are more moving than that.

In Mama!, the trauma is a case of deliberate food-poisoning in the workplace canteen by a malcontent but it serves to bring Matsuoka more 'into the world' by the care shown for her from her previous, more insular attitude,

I'd thought that people who liked to get carried away with romance were people who could afford to be careless with love - the kind of love you could let run freely and then drain away, like city water from a faucet.

Writing must surely be in some way autobiographical and it's possible to suspect that lines early in Not Warm at All might be such a thing in Dead-End Memories when they say,

at some point you reach the final prospect: the last vista of the thing, beyond which there's no further to go.

A few names, like Wittgenstein, Derrida, Nietzsche or Shakespeare might be able to claim they went a bit further than Banana Yoshimoto but they didn't always leave you feeling better about things. As with most things for her, it might be a lifestyle choice.

In the title story the narrator finds out that her fiance, working away in another town, has taken up with somebody else but even the hurt that comes with that becomes a part of her that she assimilates, lives with and makes her wiser for at least the purposes of a story about survival and the possibility of happiness.

I don't entirely trust Banana or share her consolations. I've never quite been able to decide, find out or otherwise discover if her books deserve more to be compared with Tolstoy or Jilly Cooper. I wouldn't object to either but I'd like to know. I can't help liking them, though, whether it's literature or only a readable commodity I'm enjoying.

According to the list of 'Also by' titles in the front of this, I'm only missing Argentine Hag from being a Yoshimoto-in-English completist but, although very tempted by it, it doesn't come cheap and is likely, let's face it, to be very much the same as all the others. So it can wait.

The Times questionnaire on Saturdays, My Cultural Fix, asks their celebrity guest to admit to a 'guilty pleasure'. I can't even say if that might mean something like this. I don't think it is but even if it was, as I understand it, one is innocent until proven guilty. I'll gladly admit to the pleasure but it's for somebody else to prove the guilt.

Abba, The Day Before You Came

 By the time Abba put out their last single, The Day Before You Came, it was all over. That was a great shame because, having built a world-dominating career on some brilliant pop trash, they became more inward-looking, more or less like Sweden's answer to Fleetwood Mac, making classic pop music out of relationship dysfunction, did Knowing Me, Knowing You and One of Us, before delivering this masterpiece, in the style of a film that could only have been made in France, even if it wasn't, which suggested that they could have been 'writers' after all. 

Nobody got far as a pop singer without being fantastically good-looking. Elvis Costello's achievement is all the more admirable for that but Agnetha got a head start.

The Eurovision Song Contest win wasn't, it turns out, any sort of surprise. They knew what they were doing. They were a supergroup already. It was unfair to ask the other countries to expect to have any chance.

In retrospect.

But, in retrospect, it had been becoming obvious for a long time that Abba weren't a four-piece group but that the other three were Agnetha's backing musicians.

It might not have got any better if they had admitted it was that and had written more songs for her and tried to keep it going.

Why would you if you simply don't feel like doing it any more.

 

No, this is perfect.

Prince, Little Red Corvette

 

I guess I should've known
By the way you parked your car sideways
That it wouldn't last
See, you're the kinda person that believes in makin' out once
Love 'em and leave 'em fast

 

When I e-mailed those song words to an eminent lady not long after Prince died, it was only because I thought they were great words, we had been exchanging thoughts on the great man's premature demise, she had e-mailed me first, the correspondance didn't have much further to go and I didn't hear back from her.

It took me a few days before I thought, OMG, she must have known, surely, that I was only citing great writing. The trouble with Prince is that there's not much of him you can quote without it being overloaded, drenched in the sort of need that could easily lead to depravity.

If I'd been born ten years earlier, I would not have been able to see beyond the Beatles. Born when I was, and having 1971 as the annus mirabilis, it is Marc Bolan and David Bowie that represent an attitude in 'rock' and 'pop' music that is in the blood and can only be bettered by the Motown Hit Factory. But if I'd been born ten years later, it would have been Prince.

He was a bit more than a year older than me and thus one of a generation of overwhelmingly gifted artists that also included Michael Jackson and Morrissey.

You had to go out and buy the 12-inch Little Red Corvette c/w 1999 and you had to have the Purple Rain album. Other musicians might have played all the instruments and done everything on their records but none of them did it as well as this. I'm still not ashamed of having once nominated Marc Bolan as 'best guitarist' - I didn't really know - but I understand that later, when asked, Eric Clapton said it was Prince and so at least he got that right.

It's Little Red Corvette we have here because it was seminal, important. It's not as if the back catalogue doesn't have so many others to offer. MOJO magazine eventually stopped asking their star interviewees what they thought of Bob Dylan and instead asked what they had to say about Prince.

I slightly 'missed the boat' by being a fraction too old to stay interested in everything he did but the short list of pop geniuses who did most of it all by themselves begins with him. It's not always advisable, it's not always possible but, if you are perfectly capable, it's a good idea.   

'Romanticisim' first draft

Not much is of more interest to me than finding three pages of Rosemary Tonks's journal on the website of Newcastle University library, seeing some of the workings of Sean O'Brien poems, where he puts the stress marks in to prove to himself he was within the parameters of iambic pentameter, or such books as Trevor Tolley's Larkin at Work, in which he makes his way through Larkin's notebooks fasitidiously uncovering the process by which the likes of Church Going and The Whitsun Weddings were arrived at.

Not always easily, it seems.

I don't mind how hard Larkin, Rosemary and Sean worked at their poems but I do have doubts about poets I have less respect for putting in painstaking work to make them look as if they arrived in a glorious blast of inspiration. Dylan Thomas is one, who Caitlin was recently on telly again saying he said could spend all day putting in or taking out a word from a line. 

I had thought that was a joke Oscar made about his extreme aestheticism but, no, it's what Dylan actually did. 

Similarly, Allen Ginsberg, apparently, maybe, reportedly, spent a lot of time making Howl look as if it was a spontaneous outburst. It either was or it wasn't. If it was, I'm bored by it; if it wasn't, he should be ashamed of himself.

I would luv it, luv it, in the words of Kevin Keegan, if I could spend weeks, months or even years making a poem better and better until it was as good as it could be. But, when would I know.

For my purposes - and my purposes are the only purposes there are- a poem can look good enough within hours, if not minutes, but certainly within a day or two. Once I like what they look like, they are done.

Romanticism was first of all a few ideas for lines written on the back of my printed-off train ticket to Netley. I did a bit more on Netley Station waiting for the train, had the line endings in before I got home, typed it up and, very unusually for me, took the advice of a friend who questioned,

gorgeous/ with tuberculosis

 

I had thought that was brilliant at first but had to change it. It became restless. I found a better title. It underwent some minor surgery. I abandoned any attempt at a rhyme scheme early doors and then sacrificed any attempt at metrics or syllable count in favour of a music of its own it might have anyway.

 

It's not obvious that any university's library is going to want to blow the very slightest part of their budget on bidding for evidence of how I wrote poems and neither would I. So, here it is anyway.

Some scribble on the reverse side of a train ticket, not wanting to waste paper, becomes a poem that does all a poem had to do. It made its author happy to have written it.     

Miriam Kramer & Nicholas Durcan

Miriam Kramer & Nicholas Durcan, Chichester Cathedral, Sept 6

Summer is a fine thing in fiction, poems or in Vivaldi but for me it need not stand upon the order of its going. The first signs of autumn are most welcome, the drop in temperature, the nights drawing in and, not least, the return of the lunchtime concert season at Chichester, Portsmouth and other such admirable places nearby. There are plenty in the diary from now until the end of November and I'll be trying to find appropriate things to say about them here while the limited stock of language can do any justice to them. I wouldn't be so bold as to call them 'reviews' but maybe 'some sentences arising'. Attending and listening is only half a job. Having some response makes it more complete. To misquote Socrates, the unexamined performance is less worth hearing.  

Miriam Kramer and Nicholas Durcan set the new season in motion in fine style with a glittering dash through their arrangement of The Carnival of the Animals, reducing the Saint-Saëns to ten minutes but still including a few little surprises along the way before a bravura finish.

Schubert's Fantasia, D.940, was contrastingly crepuscular, showing off another aspect of Miriam's tremendous technique. Robert Schumann's Fantasiestücke, Op.73, began in a similar mood but moved through the gears, via some interplay between piano and violin, on its way to a 'fiery' ending. How much time a musician or sportsperson seems to have is an indicator of talent to spare but not all violinists have so much time to spare that they can turn the page of the pianist's music for them.

It wouldn't be sensible, or possible, to pick a highlight from the programme, not with an arrangement of the Brief Encounter music - Rachmanninov Piano Concerto no. 2, slow movement- here entitled Preghiera (Prayer) which could have built to another big finish but decided not to and then more Saint-Saëns with Danse Macabre and all its ghostly effects, including the 'ricochet' bouncing of the bow on the violin strings. But also, I thought, some traces of baroque stylings in the violin. A hint of Vivaldi or a Bach partita. To find such a lucky guess confirmed by Miriam saying she plays Bach, who is her favourite composer (which is the right answer), makes me wonder if I could have a future in this job but I dare say I'll get it wrong as often as I'll get it right. She is the focus of attention in these pieces but I suspect Nicholas is doing plenty and it's a duo act and not a soloist with her accompanist.

It's possible that after the summer drought, of local live music as well as water, the first refreshing splash seems so great that it is more gratefully appreciated than usual. I guess so but, on the other hand, I doubt it. Miriam and Nicholas would be a tremendous show whenever you saw them. And they were an excellent way to get back into the happy routine.

The Beatles - If I Fell

 The Beatles were over-rated. To say as much in an age where blasphemy might not be an offence in itself but has been replaced by 'cancel culture' anyway might be taking a chance but idolatry gets out of hand whether it's applied to Shakespeare, Bob Dylan, Mozart or Bach. And Tamla Motown made consistently better records than the Beatles did, as they should have. There were more of them.

I was a fraction too young to be actually there at the time but, thanks to my parents doing their best for me, I had Beatles wallpaper on my bedroom wall at the age of 5, a framed picture of them by my bed, a plastic guitar on which to do 'yeah, yeah, yeah' and a metal drum-kit on which to be Ringo. George, the thoughtful, possibly the most sensitive and the youngest one was the only one I never thought was me.

The likes of She Loves You, I Wanna Hold Your Hand or Please, Please Me were a 'big bang' that no new thing in pop music before or after could equal. The impact of any would-be revolution since, even including the Sex Pistols, has arrived with diminishing returns.

Great artists will improve, and so they did, arriving at Revolver and Rubber Soul, but it might also be true that becoming too famous while you're still at it makes you feel a bit too god-like, as if your every thought was a gift you had a duty to pass on to your worshippers.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is not, as it is so often listed, the best pop album ever made. To misquote John Lennon on the subject of Ringo, if he ever said it, it's not the Best Album Ever, it's not even the Best Album by the Beatles. 

Success has its end in its own beginning and the Beatles spent nearly as much time 'making it' in Hamburg and the Cavern as they did at the top of the world, by all means more important to a lot of people than Jesus, before imploding, but it's not easy being that big. I don't think it was Yoko's fault- people always need somebody else to blame- and I don't think it was Paul's fault. He would probably have carried on and we would have been saved from Wings. It was John's fault, always the difficult one, the not quite as talented one, even if his solo efforts, not necessarily including Imagine, might outweigh Paul's.

But nothing lasts forever and a better reason for finishing in 1970 was that there wasn't much left for them to do. Motown had hit records before they did, and after, but whether it's the money that confuses them, the egos involved or simply that you've done as much as you could have, there might not have been much more to come.

There are any number of highlights. To ascertain the strength in depth of artists like Lennon-McCartney, Holland-Dozier-Holland, Smkoey Robinson, Carole King or Stephin Merritt, you see what no. 30 is in a list of their best records and see how good that is. The Beatles could easily be Top 5 at that but, in a competitive heat heat for no. 1 involving  I Should Have Known Better, Yesterday and She's Leaving Home as well as those early classics and a couple of cover versions, Baby, it's this. 

    You can see where Doherty and Barat got the idea of singing at the same microphone, loving each other and falling out, from.