My Life in Sport - Running

 My Life in Sport was a series that ended rather abruptly here four years ago after covering my modest careers in football, cricket and cycling. I think more pressing concerns of a literary nature needed attending to and I never got back to it. Well, there might be a bit of a hiatus in literary issues now as I take very kindly to Balzac and order three more but might not have much to say about them beyond the great enjoyment. I saw that Andrew Motion had a new book out earlier this year, there's a new recording of Spem in Alium with a James MacMillan counterpart to it and August Kleinzahler is now due in November but otherwise, there is time and space to fill and so My Life in Sport can cover running, chess, darts, pool and a short appendix on my brief, inglorious career in Gaelic Football. I kid you not. As my life in sport unfolds further it becomes more apparent that I had a lot to be modest about but there can be something gently soporific about a memoir.

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I finished second in the sprint on school sports day every year from infant school in Nottingham in the mid-60's to the 100 metres at big school in the mid-70's. Like most sports, I wasn't blessed with a huge talent but was better than most so I was good enough to take part respectably without often having much chance of winning. 

While cross country looked like voluntary masochism at big school, it did mean an eventual escape route from the barbaric form of outdoor pursuit that made rugby union considered suitable as sport in Gloucester, where the slightly more sophisticated round ball game, at which I was any good, was outlawed to unofficial, flapping track status. But David Bedford's zapata moustache and solo runs half a lap in front of toiling opposition made distance running look glamorous and so I did it anyway. School was conveniently- inconveniently, some might say - nestled on the outskirts of Gloucester at the bottom of Churchdown Hill and the cross country course made its way directly through the housing estate before crossing the dual carriageway by bridge, across the gradually increasing gradients of some ploughed fields punctuated by stiles and fences to some steep climbs and then back down again. Mud helped to make it more treacherous as winter deepened, Les Gray and Tiger Feet notwithstanding, and just in case we needed to get a bit fitter, we could just run the steepest field and do interval sprints up the hardest part. But, if anything, running downhill could be worse than going up.

It was both Spartan and Corinthian, to mix Classical metaphors, but one returned for more training and races without apparently questioning that other boys just went home and did their homework and I could have been listening to my Steeleye Span LP. It did make us a formidable team, though, and as one of the team putting in a solid block of high enough placings against schools in Cheltenham, Stroud and anywhere else within a minibus ride, I collected any number of medals and certificates as a matter of routine.

My debut in Cheltenham was fairly successful on a cold, November Saturday morning in the days before thermal sportswear and when 11 year old girls were sent out to run over hilly, long distance courses in no more than their PE kit which was likely to make them faint from exhaustion which some of them, unaware that some decades later female sport would be regarded as just as legitimate as male sport, duly did.

One of the courses for away fixtures included a section round the perimeter of Cheltenham racecourse, which could have been useful if we'd been passing during a race of interest, but another used Leckhampton Hill with a flat start along an unmade road, a sharp right turn to go up a steep incline, a mile or so along the top, a downhill road followed by a seemingly endless woodland path covered in soft fallen leaves, by which time one could see neither the runner ahead or the one behind. In this weird, solipsistic downtime, I played Al Green records in my head in the same way that UB40's Kingston Town was later to sustain me in long, isolated parts of 12 hour bike races. After the woods, it came out into a clearing and the finish was at the other side of a dip. Having not seen another runner for so long, I once emerged to see a procession of figures ahead of me, lined up as if ready for the taking, put my stylish soul record away and set off down the hill in pursuit of as many of them as I could get. I sailed past maybe a dozen until being locked in a determined battle to the line with a good athlete, his name was Howells, who didn't seem to think I should be going past him but I had some impetus behind me and was in the mood and, a few yards from the line, he gave way. You know you've been in a race after something like that but it makes it worthwhile   

We went further afield in search of greater glory, being the dominant force in the area and circa 1975 (I'll amend this for detail if and when I find dates on medals), possibly due to an injury to somebody better than me, I was one of the four that went to Cardiff for the Cantonian relay, which each leg being a 3 mile circuit (roughly, probably). I ran the second leg and was handed the baton in second place, not far off the leader, but I soon got to him and found him struggling, wheezing and making funny noises, the second leg being where teams usually put their weakest runner. For some moments, I enjoyed sitting on his shoulder knowing that I was going to beat him until I realized that I needed to go past him straightaway and put distance into him to give my team-mates an advantage on the last two legs. I wasn't used to the tactics that went on at the front of a race. It's only now that I realize I ought to have been worried about potential threats coming from behind but there weren't any. I fell over on a gravel path towards the end and bits of gravel stayed in my knee for a couple of weeks but it was a 'gold' medal and several minutes spent at the front of a running race, which wasn't going to happen to me very often.

Before the sixth form, it was getting harder to stay fit, it was becoming a sport for those who meant it more seriously and I managed to drift away but the summers meant one term of athletics on the track. I had declined the opportunity to be twelfth man in the first cricket match our year had had in favour of the Gloucester City Cycling Club's junior club run which consigned me to a role of maverick outsider in school cricket henceforth but gave me a free choice of what running events to do for my 'house' team because they were short of athletic talent. We needed to scrape as many points as we could wherever we saw fit. I was always going to be an each way chance in the 100 metres and so always did that but a brainwave in the fourth form decided me to go for the two laps of the 800 metres on the grounds that the sprinters had everything up to 400m covered and the stars of cross country won the 1500m upwards but there was a gap in the market so I won that by half the home straight and even tried to suggest, somewhere during this new-found domain, that I might have set a new school record. I don't know what made me think that but I was waved away without much consideration. First place there had taken me to the Gloucester trials in which there was hardly any opposition at all and so I went to somewhere in Bristol one hot, summer Saturday to wait all afternoon for the 800m in the county trials, having to borrow a pair of somebody else's spikes to run on a gravel track I'd not seen the like of before. From the off, I was run off my feet to hold fifth place in a tightly-packed bunch, could never have got any further forward because I was flat out all the way round and that was something like where I finished, never having had a glimpse of the front. And so I do very much know what it's like for a 33/1 shot that is sent to Fontwell for a novice hurdle and is inevitably an 'also-ran'.

In the meantime, year-in, year out, I ran the first leg of the 4 x 100m relay, benefitting from not having the responsibility of grabbing the baton but supposedly getting us off to a good start. Thus, I had an annual assignation round the first bend with Phil who ran the second leg but by the time it got to Andy who was the anchor, he'd have needed to be Valery Borzov to overhaul the leaders and I don't think we ever troubled the judge. 

I returned to defend the 800m title in the fifth form, fondly imagining myself thus favourite, but the emergence of the newly-sculpted physique of a grand rugbyman who for all I knew had been valued for his weight rather than his speed made me wonder. I didn't know he'd been spending time at Gloucester Athletic Club turning himself into a lump of dedicated muscle. He set off at a blistering pace that I could only follow in the unlikely hope that he'd gone off too quick but, of course, he knew what he was doing. I briefly lost second place going round the second last bend but I wasn't having that. I like to think I was gaining on the winner at the finish but he'd gone by then. It was fair enough. He'd put in a lot of work whereas I had thought turning up might be enough. And that was pretty much that as far as running was concerned, certainly the fitness it had provided had helped with the football but I wasn't really made to be an out-and-out runner.

I did 'run the world' a couple of times for Bob Geldof, not collecting sponsorship but paying my pound to do so on two laps of course based on Portsmouth's Mountbatten Centre, both as last minute decisions, one of them the day after drinking Guinness all evening with my mate in Gosport. You need some sort of target or else sport is, literally, meaningless so I saw a girl dressed as a waitress and decided I had to finish in front of her and did.

But in 1995, fit for long-distance cycling, I happened to be in Gloucestershire for the weekend, at my parents', for the Fairford Festival, which included a Fun Run which, for those who wanted it to be, was a race. It was 3k. The medal has been hanging on the back of my bedroom door for as much as twenty years so I knew where to find it.

As usual, I finished behind those who took it seriously but ahead of those who were 'just taking part', which is where my position in sport has always been. I finished 10th out of 130-odd but much of the big percentage of those behind me were families of four with little kids so the high placing flatters me more than somewhat.

I thought I'd have a go, turned up and thought I'd jog round for a laugh but, once in sport, one can't help but want to try. Lined up for the start, it didn't matter to me until the last moment when I suddenly became competitive and I found a place on the front row on the far left.

Not having studied the course, I didn't know that after proceeding down the High Street, we would turn sharp right so I lost several yards when everybody else did that but I stayed with it, established a position and, very unfamiliarly, ran rather than pushed the gears round. I was soon well behind those who had turned up with the intention of winning the race but ahead of those who presumably hadn't. I walked a bit near the Sports Centre so that I could at least put in an effort at the finish. I was vaguely aware of a bloke some way behind me and knew I had to beat him so calculated when I should recommence the running.

It wasn't pretty. I knew he was coming. I didn't actually know it was a Top 10 place that was up for grabs, that I had it and he was determined to nab it off me. I had to put it all in, as desperate, all out and concentrated as any of those sprint races in school - he was right on my shoulder, he was almost alongside- we went into the finishing funnel and I was still a short head in front. I don't think he was quite desperate enough to shove me out of the way but I did enough to let him know I was there.

10th, Top 10, is so much better than 11th.

 

Running was hard work with few of the compensations of long-distance cycling. I can't now imagine why I did it. But I seem to remember it with some enjoyment so it can't have been all bad.

If the opportunity arises (which is when I can't think of anything else to write about), we'll maybe do Chess next.      

 

Travelogue in Time of Plague

 I had forgotten I'd been to Luton for professional purposes in January. For the purpose of the day job I have since derelicted in favour of spending more time with my books. I had thought the furthest I'd been this year (from Portsmouth) was Chichester and, since lockdown, about four miles away on foot, which is only about three miles from the house as the crow flies. I did used to go on aeroplanes to other countries but increasingly came to agree with Larkin's dictum that he wouldn't mind going to China if he could come back the same day. I'm not convinced that travel broadens the mind unless the mind has already been broadened to appreciate the place travel takes one to.

But it was about time I extended back into at least some of the orbit I had previously voluntarily reduced myself to. Namely, Swindon, famous for its Magic Roundabout, a Wonder of the World listed just outside the Top 7, not far below the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

    If and when you go to such a place, it is customary to take a photograph or two and the Magic Roundabout from this vantage point is augmented by the ravishing backdrop of the County Ground where, in the retreating mists of time, I have witnessed the visits of such legendary names as Notts County, Crewe Alexandra, Newport County and, I'm fairly sure, Fulham.

I haven't got much of a list of places to go. Lubeck, where Dietrich Buxtehude did his best work, was once on it as was a tour of places Bach worked in Germany and I'm sure Japan would be great but I'm not going. I can't convince myself I believe in travel. I was glad to get to Swindon before the possibility of further lockdown.

Reading John Sears Reading George Szirtes

 What happened was - I was passed an old issue of Smoke magazine that had a poem by George Szirtes in it. I hadn't expected to find such a thing in such a place so it was a pleasant surprise. Smoke was the last word in littlepress magazines in the late 70's, it seemed to me, and has outlived all such that I knew about at the time to become a doyen. I was reminded that Szirtes was a poet I'd always intended to have a proper look at and so, with the help of John Sears' Reading George Szirtes, I did. While he's not the most difficult poet in the language, he's not Betjeman either so John's clear and informed commentary was useful. While the use of any sort of 'crib' was supposedly verboten at school and university, I've been out of there now for some years and it's up to me how I go about it. The guide to Ulysses ensured I had a much better grasp of Joyce than I might otherwise have had and, twenty years ago, my poem Re-Reading Derrida on a Train wasn't about reading Derrida first hand, it was about reading an explanation of him. I'm shameless, really.

There are a lot of useful ideas set out in the Sears book, some of which aren't specific to reading Szirtes. He cites Szirtes quoting Emily Dickinson saying that, 

art was a house that tries to be haunted

which I'm sure would be different ghosts for different artists but in Szirtes' case it might be his own 'lost selves'. 

'Awkward poetics' also puts a name to something that one likes to think one knew all along without knowing it had a name, 

the formal subversion of rhythmic and metrical conventions and the (connected, even consequent) discursive challenge to ideological orthodoxies. 

As the ideas make their way through discussion of the elusive, unstable nature of language, the fixity of art imposed on reality, academic literary criticism takes its place in the hall of mirrors that either extends indefinitely or seems to collapse back in on itself. On the one hand, poetry 'fixes' but on the other, language is elusive.

I start to doubt what meaning means-

it could be a linguistic trick,

as it once said in a poem. Well, not a proper poem, one by me, Re-Reading Derrida on a Train.

 

Some pages later, I'm glad to see Peter Porter cited on the 'pointlessness of poetry', again glad to have more of my suspicions augmented if not confirmed but Szirtes refuting that with his belief that it provides redemption is welcome, too, because I like being shown to be wrong, or at least given the option. 

Not everybody has quite such personal and family histories to make poems from, or such a sympathetic reader as John Sears to elucidate them. It is made clear how the poems develop from one book to the next and how they make Szirtes special as an artist but integral to his period of European history. It comes as no surprise that he was a keen remainer or that it would be beyond the simplistic leave campaign's capacity to understand why. I found the string quartets and other chamber music of Grazyna Bacewicz seemingly appropriate shifting, lyrical, tortured accompaniment to the stimulating time spent with Sears-Szirtes.

We have lost our history, in a similar way that we have in the new Sean O'Brien book reviewed below, and it has become 'consumable unexperienced information'.

There are any number of references one might take up mentioned in Reading George Szirtes, one of the more tempting being Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, which accidentally led me to the unlikely literary discovery that Barthes read Larkin and lifted ideas directly from his poems. Another would be to pick up Reel or get myself further Szirtes books and read them unaided. They don't seem quite so daunting anymore. 

Reading Sean O'Brien in the Bath

 Sean O'Brien, It Says Here (Picador)

The phrase, 'it says here' defrays responsibility for what is being said. In the title poem of Sean O'Brien's new book of poems, with which it begins, we are about to 'go beyond' whatever it was we thought we were about. Those who hear previous literature chiming through new work will find Kipling, Auden, Frost and Lady Chatterley's Lover and probably a few more that I missed. But those came from a history we have by now lost, now that the England that Larkin witnessed disappearing in Going, Going has gone. And with it seem to have gone any identity, self-determination or the free will we thought we had been granted but is forever beyond our grasp.

In Archonography, which the dictionary might not have but seems to mean 'the study of those who claim the right to rule, or to exercise power',             

                                 where we stand

And what we stand on must be nothingness, 

 

and although in Names, names will be the only thing left, in It Says Here the halt in the woods has had 'its name painted over' and in Three Songs, 'my place',

never had a name to call itself

If we are beyond identity and history, we have moved beyond the security, and constraint, of language, too.

 

In between two sections of shorter poems is Hammersmith, now in X cantos, I and II having appeared in a limited edition in 2016. Its lineage is by Somebody Else, from Ghost Train, out of Elegy, from November, the original 'in memoriam' for Sean's mother now extended into an imaginative, rather than documentary, reconstruction of his parents' early days together in London, as a useful note explains. 

The Boat Race, as it was in Somebody Else, is representative less of an England that once was but one that even then imagined itself to be and the loss is not of a Golden Age but of the idea of such a thing and, as Sean explains in his note, ' -perhaps the attempt to find or rectify something- is endlessly deferred'. From those first cantos, the poem extends further into recesses that meditate on and magnify themes from the rest of the book and the O'Brien oeuvre, its incessant song bringing back Ryan from his early work, who may or may not be an alter ego, and now also Mulligan, 'an indigent, long dead poet...who unhelpfully alludes to his unfinished and possibly lost poem about the Thames' that Hammersmith might or might not finally be.

If the rest of the book explores the world so many decades after the times it conjures, with our new post-meaning, post-truth culture of Trump, climate change, displacement of population, the moral vacuum of so many world leaders including our own little local problem called Boris (which Sean doesn't specifically name any of), the saddest diagnosis is not so much that,

                           The aunts

Do not approve of history

 

but that,

                                   Socialism

Proved too good for us. It asked too much.

 

The revolutionary's Olivetti

Lies beneath its crust of fag-ash

Like a relic of Pompeii.

 

Because, in those days, it must have seemed like there was a chance.

 

While the O'Brien litany of rebarbative complaint is familar, it maintains its powerful music and enough metaphor and all those poetry things that school used to like to teach us about but with vernacular enough to mean the teacher will need to pick poems carefully or else it will be Catullus XVI all over again.

In previous books, there was some respite with such poems as The Beautiful Librarians in the book of the same name or Goddess in Europa, both in their mannered magnificence but there is less consolation here. Even art itself is not explicitly cited as a means of redemption although Hammersmith ends with the slightest of hints that that is what it's been doing. 

 

It says here elsewhere that Larkin became more direct and uncompromising in High Windows. I hadn't realized that Sean had such space to move into but even in Larkin there were glimmers of light in the darkest moments.

It also says here elsewhere that Poetry in English 2000-2020 might not have quite the same magnitude of names that 1900-1920 had. 1900-1920 was a period of seismic change and so likely to contain significant figures but I'm doubtful about the last two decades being able to compete. Sean O'Brien is a name that suggests itself for the teamsheet. It's who else to put in that I'm concerned about.   

'It says here' was a phrase I used here from time to time in the past. Now I can't do so without looking as if I'm trying to be intertextual. And sic transit, the language uses itself up and echoes with itself.

TV and Radio

 There's never anything on the telly these days, is there, even though we've all got 300 channels to pick from. Unless you like gormless things like celebrities for the sake of celebrity or grim people pointing guns at each other, it's not something you'd switch on without good reason.

But Sunday afternoon presented multiple options as far as the eye could see, all at the same time. They were all things I'd happily watch but I can keep abreast of about 3 programmes at once, especially if a couple of them have adverts in.

ITV Racing's first ever visit to Perth was a good advert for the UK's most northerly track, showing its picturesque surroundings and general nice place demeanour. As it happened, my interest in that was curtailed early doors when Scardura unseated its jockey at the first. Not so long ago the Tour de France would have been de rigeur, sans pareil or le mot juste for me but I'm off the pace with it these days so look at it in glances but I found one of those small compensations of lockdown culture was that the BBC had cricket back, after all these years, and a good game of baseball it turned out to be. 

Meanwhile, at 3pm, I remembered to tune to R2 for Johnnie Walker's opening sequence to Sounds of the 70's and see what he plays first, which is a landmark moment in the week. Except Johnnie was having a day off and Nile Rodgers was 'curating'. First up, Curtis Mayfield, Move On Up, followed by Stevie Wonder Superstition and, if anything, better was still to come. I almost cried. The only DJ that could provide a better set would be me. Johnnie is a debonair and quite appropriate host for those who write saying that they got married in 1976, are sitting with a nice glass of red thinking about the fifteen times they've seen the Eagles and could he play something by Jackson Browne, which he does, but I think Nile and I could do better, with a bit less Springsteen and Queen and a bit more Al Green.

But, after the racing on ITV, it was George & Mildred. You simply don't flick through other channels while that is on but you can see how the cricket's going during the adverts. Meanwhile, on Talking Pictures, there was Cliff Richard in Take Me High from 1973, which I recorded, and For the Love of Ada, with Wilfred Pickles and Irene Handl, which I will catch another time.

With Mitsuko Uschida playing the Moonlight Sonata on a mixed programme conducted otherwise by Simon Rattle with Stephen Fry turning up to enthuse on the Prom in the evening, the only way anybody apart from them could see it, a good bit of the licence fee was justified on one Sunday in August so heaven only knows what it really should be. It is more of a bargain than anything one can think of. 

Larkin Diary

It was a windy day, as it happened, that I devoted to reading Philip Larkin's Collected Poems. I had realized how little time I had spent reading my favourite writers and so the day after I finished Ulysses, I gave a day over to the Collected Poems. There is a choice of two. There is no need of Prof. Bradford's Complete unless you think everything he wrote on a birthday card counts as part of the oeuvre. Of course it doesn't. And so, out of Anthony Thwaite's two versions of the Collected, one can have the books with the poems in the order they were first published, with appendices of uncollected poems, or you can have the original edition that put them in chronological order of composition.

I chose the former option but, never mind what other questions it raises, the choice gives two different poems as where to start, either I, All catches alight, with its refrain of,

A drum taps, a wintry drum

or Going. Both are morbid. Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn, who were Larkin's rivals for poetry celebrity in the 1950's, begin Selecteds or Collecteds with somewhat more bravura. We might be in for a dreary day but one wouldn't be doing such a thing unless one knew we weren't. But, reading The North Ship first, in the 2003 Collected, promoted to a place alongside the three 'mature' collections, one can't help noticing how windy it is and not just because of the weather outside. It begins in VI and is mentioned specifically in thirteen of the XXXII poems and implied in a few more. We know already that this wind will blow through several poems in later collections, like Wedding Wind, Mr. Bleaney, Talking in Bed and gently in At Grass. I hadn't noticed quite how much its chilly restlessness defined the early work.

The introduction explains that Larkin agreed to a re-issue by Faber of The North Ship in 1966 'however reluctantly' and the decision might have been swayed by financial motives rather than artistic ones. As the appendices of uncollected poems will later show, he was an astute judge of his own work and best remembered for those poems he published in the three main volumes which does all the selecting needed to make a Selected Poems hardly necessary.

Larkin's reputation as a poet has firmed up since being identified twenty or thirty years ago in places as a 'great, minor' poet and compared with George Herbert to a high placing in the BBC's 2014 Nation's Favourite Poet poll and more consistent recognition alongside Eliot, Auden, Yeats, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney (please provide your own list) as one of the 'major' poets in English of the C20th with a number of his lines passing into the language. He may have been seen as 'minor' as a result of being more downbeat, everyday and apparently less inclined to grand gestures like,

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

or

April is the cruellest month

but while it might since have been realized that Literature doesn't have to be 'big', it might also have been noted that Larkin does deal with all such themes, often ironically rather than overgrandly and with reference to previous literature if that happens to be a requirement of serious work. Philip Sidney, Theophile Gautier and Thomas Hood, not to mention Shakespeare, are names we can cite if and when that essay needs writing.

It is often poetry about things that others might have found 'not worth stopping for', but reading through the Collected in one sweep it is such poems as Church Going, An Arundel Tomb and The Whitsun Weddings that one does stop at with the same satisfaction that a Ralph MacTell audience pay more attention to Streets of London. They are worth stopping for and there are good reasons why they are the best-known but there's an equal and opposite reaction in finding fine things in half-recalled poems, too.

For all of Larkin's complaints about the 'life reprehensibly perfect' spent and not getting 'the fame and the girl and the money/All at one sitting', he begins in The Less Deceived, and never really stops, comparing his lot with that of others and decides he's doing selfishly very nicely. There is no sense that he really wanted such things - and he ostensibly had them, anyway- but one might reflect that he would have been better off not comparing himself with Kingsley Amis. Perhaps the implication is that those who think they've achieved 'fulfilment' are the more deceived.
If he doesn't habitually begin with grandiose first lines, one soon starts to notice what little noise his endings make, too, in each poem that we stop at. If it is regularly pointed out that a Larkin poem broadens out from the specific to a wider perspective, they do also end on a diminuendo, like,

If only that so many dead lie round.

'Nothing, like something, happens anywhere'.

somewhere becoming rain.

With bridles in the evening come.  

or,

That vase.

and if we think that

What will survive of us is love.

is a momentous, optimistic thought to end on then we haven't noticed how the preceding lines, not just the last stanza but the whole poem, has hollowed them out from inside by explaining they are 'untruth', 'hardly meant' and only an 'almost-instinct' only 'almost true'.

These are quiet endings compared to

Shantih. Shantih. Shantih.

or

That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

If love is repeatedly the thing that Larkin suspects he might have missed out on, 'that much-mentioned brilliance' that they say should fall, 'like an enormous yes', he has been aware since page 48, in Reasons for Attendance, that 'what calls him',
                  is that lifted, rough-tongued bell
(Art, if you like)

and he wasn't the first artist and won't be the last who searched for transcendence only to find it in their own, or other, art.

Towards the end of The Whitsun Weddings, Send No Money, that the chronology identifies as one of the later poems in the book, from 1962, prefigures a hardening attitude expressed in more regular use of the vulgar or vernacular that is a noticeable difference between High Windows and the other two mature collections.
The Old Fools, The Card Players and an awareness of the corporate -we might even say Thatcherite- world in Going, Going and Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel are less inclined to gloss over dissatisfactions with compensations and Vers de Société only changes its mind at the last minute.
While remaining capable of a poem as gently moving as Dublinesque, High Windows is the least attractive of the three books due to a coarsening of view, and of language. Not necessarily by much but noticeably. They can look like poems done less carefully, less caringly, or less sensitively.

If the first appendix of poems, 1940-1972, show what a good editor of his own work he was, the second, 1974-1984, shows that he was nowhere near a further volume, notwithstanding the brilliant, brutally honest Aubade, which I thought I might have noticed forming as early as 1943/4 in Dawn, which is IV in The North Ship, with its,

How strange it is
for the heart to be loveless, and as cold as these.

If you want The Dance, you need the other edition, the 1988 version, but I didn't miss its unmade ramblings and if Larkin didn't see fit to finish it, polish it or publish it, I'm not convinced we need to read it. But what a day well spent it was, being reminded of the art of understatement, of clarity and poems being so well made. It didn't result in much reassessment and was never likely to. I never felt sorry for him and his complaints were mainly a strategy of disguise, pretending to be a curmudgeon in order to defend that which he wanted to defend.
But, perhaps like Hamlet, one can pretend to be mad and then not know whether one has become mad or not. One can put on a miserable disposition, almost for a joke, and find it suits you.

Ulysses Diary - Final Edition

 I finished Ulysses yesterday. It took three weeks in tandem with the commentary by Harry Blamires which is confirmation enough that one can give up the day job and spend time rewardingly.Like so many colossal masterpieces, it is mainly funny but a lot of other things besides. One note I made in Molly's soliloquy at the end was of,

I hate that confession when I used to go to Father Corrigan he touched me father and what harm if he did where and I said on the canal bank like a fool

It's an old joke, considering he's already done where was Moses when the lights went out by then but he does it so well. In The Times on Saturdays they get some well-known person to say that they wished they'd learnt the piano and that Fritz Lang is their favourite film-maker and they are also asked who they'd invite to dinner and they say Ghandi, David Attenborough, Dorothy Parker and Frida Kahlo but apart from not wanting anybody to dinner, I wouldn't want Joyce because I'd be so hugely out of my depth.

I was glad to see,

the infantile discharge of decomposed vegetable missiles, worth little or nothing or less than nothing

because someone once questioned whether there could be 'less than nothing' in a poem of mine (how dare they), Walking on Water,

And underneath, the grizzly, staring fish, 

suspended rigid in the glassy dark,

dreamed of nothing or even less than that. 

 

Well, if it's good enough for Joyce, it's good enough for me.

But above all else, the last section, which must be its best-known part, raised the whole thing to something better. To think there was still a fuss about D.H. Lawrence in 1963 when this had, eventually, been published in 1922 makes one wonder but it makes me wonder more about endings and how Joyce takes all he had before and goes beyond it. 

In Dubliners, he has built from slight beginnings to The Dead and then in its last pages provides the most sublime prose ever to be put on paper and, then, as Dubliners moves into the Portrait, to Ulysses and then Finnegans Wake, he keeps raising it to something more adventurous as if they were all part of an overall design. His grandstand endings only give him the starting place for what he does next.

But not everyone does that with endings. Beethoven signposts the endings of his symphonies from some way off and makes big performances out of them. Shakespeare's endings, in the plays, sometimes clear up quietly after the climax and we will see in Larkin Diary here soon, maybe tomorrow, how Larkin is adept at diminuendo finishes, having broadened out his theme not long before.

 

I can't nominate Ulysses as the greatest novel ever because I've only recently don't that for Proust and it's not even the best thing he wrote, which is The Dead, but three weeks of Ulysses did nothing to make me ever think about removing Joyce from the position of undisputed champion of prose fiction. And, much as I always feel bad about reading the letters of Larkin, Elizabeth Bishop, Mozart, Ted Hughes and I think that's all I have to confess to (and you can see how all that Catholicism can drag you down), I think if there's no other Joyce to be had than his, then we'll have them.

I found the fragment, Giacomo Joyce, upstairs. I think another look at that will provide the necessary excuse to delay the Wake and one doesn't live by Joyce alone so Balzac might be next anyway.

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Much of today was spent reading Larkin, the Collected, and I dare say this evening I'll read the uncollected that were belatedly collected in the Collected, and in between I continued to find my slow way back from a minus position towards equity on the racehorsing enterprise. I missed Vocalised winning at Bangor because I was making notes on High Windows. Although I much prefer winning by 6 lengths like With Thanks did at Catterick to the short head that Vocalised won by, it still pays out and retrieving a large deficit a little bit at a time is a long job but we may get there yet. Racetrack Wiseguy is your man in form but there's nothing doing tomorrow.

 

Come back soon for some thoughts on Larkin. I hoped there would be days like this and there are.