Books Do Furnish A Room

Just for a handful of silver

Here is a great, swinging, passionate poem from my youth.  Who the lost leader was, I never knew, but I shared the despair as his betrayal, and the hope that one day he would return. This is Robert Browning's The Lost Leader, and I now understand that the lost leader is William Wordsworth, who Browning felt had (to be pompous) betrayed the poetic mission for social and financial advancement.

Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a riband to stick in his coat -
Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us,
Lost all the others she lets us devote;
They, with the gold to give, doled him out silver,
So much was theirs who so little allowed:
How all our copper had gone for his service!
Rags - were they purple, his heart had been proud!
We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him,
Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,
Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,
Made him our pattern to live and to die!
Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us,
Burns, Shelley, were with us, - they watch from their graves!
He alone breaks from the van and the freemen,
He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves!

We shall march prospering, - not through his presence;
Songs may inspirit us, - not from his lyre;
Deeds will be done, - while he boasts his quiescence,
Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire:
Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more,
One task more declined, one more footpath untrod,
One more triumph for devils and sorrow for angels,
One wrong more to man, one more insult to God!
Life's night begins: let him never come back to us!
There would be doubt, hesitation and pain,
Forced praise on our part - the glimmer of twilight,
Never glad confident morning again!
Best fight on well, for we taught him, - strike gallantly,
Menace our heart ere we master his own;
Then let him receive the new knowledge and wait us,
Pardoned in Heaven, the first by the throne!

Three men disappoint

Some books you should not read again, and for me Jerome K Jerome's Three Men In A Boat was one of them, though sadly I didn’t realise that before I read it a week or so ago.  Three Men in a Boat and the less well known Three Men on the Bummel have iconic status in humorous English literature, and I remember enjoying reading them when I was quite young – perhaps in the my last years at school.  I found them amusing then, and while I didn’t really remember much of them, thought that I was bound to find renewed delight in another look. 

Sadly not, for the laughter of yesteryear is, if not ashes, certainly dry fruit.  The style is odd – repetitive and picaresque in a rather annoying way, and the plot is non-existent.  The three men are rather undifferentiated, they are young and heedless, the sayings of any of them could  be transposed into the mouth of one of the others, and their relationships are trivial and irrelevant.  The book is not even really much about the three men and their journey, as the interruptions  - stories told by one of them, discursions of the most banal and romantic kind into English history, and reminiscences of earlier adventures – outweigh the main narrative and become, frankly tedious.  It was utterly of its time – but socially and in literary terms, it is now well out of fashion.

And yet, and yet, there is something there.  He writes with a whimsy and a sense of humour which is sometimes delicate and sometimes slapstick, somewhat reminiscent of Wodehouse, though without PG’s sprightliness or his comic genius.  His jokes are oft repeated, in different forms – “I love work, I can stand and look at it all day long”; turning back on one member of the party the criticism he has suffered himself; and portraying a single event in two diametric ways – as for example, when he anathematises steamers for not giving way to sculls and explains that he often sculls across their paths to infuriate them – and then, in a steamer, saying that running them down would be justifiable and even praiseworthy.  Some episodes, such as the fight between Montmorency (he’s the dog that accompanies them on their travels) and the kettle, are quite marvellous – the kettle hisses and snorts at him, but before it ever starts getting aggressive, some human takes it away – until Montmorency gets impatient and charges in just before it boils, with predictable results!

All very droll, but funnier in a short sketch of a few hundred words than in an extended novel.  Indeed, that’s what this book is, several dozen amusing stories stitched very loosely together into a single whole.  Perhaps the right way to read it is have it by the bedside, and just read a few pages at random every now and then.  But I did not do that, and for me, a hero has been shown to have feet of clay.

Of men - and a woman

Some books are just there, demanding to be read as Everest clamoured to be climbed; bigger and more imposing than others – daunting in prospect like some big mountain or steep rock face, but exhilarating and full of meaning when tackled.  I have read two massive books recently, and one was like this – Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men; the other, Primo Levi’s Moments of Reprieve, was subtler, gentler, and more welcoming – but both in few pages affirmed life (in the midst of death and tragedy), and both make you wonder if you are man enough to read them -  are you worthy, are you fit to get in the ring with this champion?

I have dealt with the Levi elsewhere, but here with the Steinbeck.  This was the book Penguin sent me for the Blog a Penguin scheme, although I was first sent Travels with Charley, which I thoroughly enjoyed but which could not be more different; strong, yes, but charming, whimsical, much more reflective and forgiving, though with real anger smouldering beneath the surface. (I’ve not posted reviews on either, because I can’t get the Penguin site to accept them!).

The story is simple enough: two travelling labourers find work at a farm in California.  One of them, George, is a sharp cookie, wise in the ways of the world, and well able to look after himself.  Fortunately, he is also well able to look after his companion, the monstrously strong but simple minded Lennie Small, who has very simple aims in life, a very limited understanding, and a tendency to get into trouble through no fault of his except his weak understanding.  They end up on a farm where the owner’s son (Curley) has just married a cheap, fast girl who is already dissatisfied with her lot and is intent on stirring up trouble with the hands.  And there is one black guy, who works with them, but is apart.

The two of them have a dream – to save enough money to buy a small place of their own, and to settle there -  a dream which comes to be shared with a third member of the crew.  But boredom leads to carelessness, to wickedness, and to tragedy, a tragedy as black and intense as hell, and as predictable and as pitiless as a train. 

What is extraordinary about this book is it’s density; several strands are woven together in an extraordinarily economical story: this is a very short book, but every word counts.  And every word has been cut out of the rock and sweated over and polished, and made into a weapon. 

At the end, when the depth of the tragedy has burst upon you, and two men – Slim, “the jerkline skinner, the prince of the ranch” and George are finding an almost wordless sympathy with each other about the terrible things that have happened and which they have done; Curley, a shallow despicable man who has respect for anything except for his own vanity, and who has all the time stood outside the current of understanding and hope asks, (I don’t have the text to hand, so I paraphrase)  - what’s bugging those two?

If you read this book and still don’t know the answer, then there’s little hope for you – or the rest of us, I’m afraid.

These little piggies went on holiday ... Sunday Salon

 ... and these stayed at home.  We have all had this problem - how to prune the book list for a holiday - and how books keep adding themselves becasue they're so relevant.

I'm off to the South Pacific soon, and I naturally need a bird book, and a travel guide, and probably a book or two  - fiction or non-fiction - based on the places I'm visiting.  Then I need challenging new work, and a few comfort blankets.  And ideally, I'd only take 6 books .. well, this could be very hard!  And here's the pile of books I've reluctantly put aside, which will have to wait for my return:

 

Of this lot, I probably most regret Dampier's New Voyage Round the World, which just feels so appropriate - but it's so huge.  And here's the list from which, over the next few days, more will have to be culled so I that I can actually lift my bags (knowing that I'll probably buy something else at the airport!)

 

Niall Ferguson on Empire, a Dickens, an Austen, Tristram Shandy because Harriet said I must read it.  Hope Muntz's novel about the Norman Conquest, a mighty and eccentric tome about the Vanuatu of the 1930s by Tom Harrisson, who lived among the natives of Malekula by himself for a year - leaving any of these is going to be hard!  Not to mention the bird book and guidebook, and a terrestial map and a nautical chart of the area.

But I have my iPod, with dozens of novels, poems, and non-fiction books on it, so perhaps that will save me, and make up for those I leave behind?

Spring

As we enter autumn, this is a most inappropriate poem, unless we use it to remind ourselves that the coming winter will indeed pass away, but I came across it recently and liked it too much to put aside.  It is a bit hard to say why I like it, it's so spare and strong - and it's beautifully ambuguous.  You can read the final couplet as a positive comment on the coming morning, or you can see it, for a spring poem, as far from optimistic.  It has a feel of Eliot's Rannoch, by Glencoe.  But, inappropriate or not, sun or rain, here is Iain Crichton Smith's In The Spring.

In the spring, air returns to us,

wide, with a sense of windows,

and our ruinous virtues sparkle once more

like old cans in a ditch.

On such a day Hector set out

in leaf upon leaf of blue

in the spring that surged windily over Troy,

its banks with their whipped green swords,

before the fire sizzled, and the bones were given to the dogs,

and the sea pink reddened the shore.

Moments of reprieve

A brief note on Primo Levi's Moments of Reprieve, a marvellous, inspiring book which I referred to a few weeks ago.  Once I’d mentioned it, I had to get it off the shelf and read it again.  This is a book whose power is very modest, very quiet, almost saintly, and which ideally you should read as a counterpoint to If This Is A Man, the same author’s cathartic description of life, if life it can be called, in Auschwitz.   If If This Is A Man tells the raw, unvarnished horror, Moments of Reprieve captures some of the things which happened in prison camp which convinced him that the spark of decency, of dignity, and love was still alive, in some people at least.

There are stories of men trusting each other in the midst of thievery, of “free” (ie, conscripted but not Jewish or “criminal”) workmen bringing Levi food everyday for weeks and months, each time committing a capital offence.  There are tales of men who never lost their sense of humour, telling tales of Lilith, who in some versions, was created after Eve because it was not good for even God to be alone, and of her mischievousness (to put it no higher).  And there is a tale of a man whose life was music, who hummed and sang his to keep his identity and sanity, who was bitterly reviled by others, but who casts a spell on the whole camp by selling his bread ration when he is already starving to play for a short while on a stolen violin.

And there is my favourite story of all, of the Cantor who somehow keeps track of the Jewish calendar through all his imprisonment.  One day, there is an issue of soup, poor enough stuff, not much more than water, but a rare treat.  When he gets to the head of the queue, the Cantor says that it is a day of fast in the Jewish rite, and he begs that the soup be kept for him for the morrow.  This is extraordinary enough, all the men are starving to death, but he is firm.  The soldier does not immediately revile him either, but has a conversation about the fast.  But can you not break the rule when your need is so great?  Only if I was sure I would save my own life or another’s.  But you might die tonight from lack of food.  I might, but I am not sure of it, so I must keep the rule.  So here is greatness, strength of character to observe the ritual in the darkest times of despair and need, and to observe it with a cheerful heart.  But there is greatness, too, in the soldier’s response; he takes the mess tin, fills it with soup – more than a normal serving – and keeps it for the morrow, perhaps saving his humanity at the risk of his life.

This is a book of many aspects, all of them remarkable.  You will never read another book anything like it; you will find it hard to read without tears; it is a message that there is a candle in even the darkest night.

Austen revisited

I don't really approve of Jane Austen sequels, although I often get frustrated by the cavalier despatch of some major story line at the ends of her novels - what really happened to Aunt Norris, for example;  I'd like to be sure she was thoroughly unhappy and regretted her former snobby, petty minded bossiness - but I doubt it. 

But I have recently read Joan Aiken's Mansfield Revisited; and really, this is a very odd book for me to read.  For a start, I think Mansfield Park is probably my favourite Austen (though not the best), so I was reluctant to read anything which might spoil it.  And secondly - my caveat about Aunt Norris apart - it is a very satisfactory ending to the novel.  You don't have any doubt that Fanny and Edmund will be happy, and other characters like Susan are not developed enough to really engage your interest.

But I enjoyed it, and one fear was instantly dispelled.  Although Aiken is an accomplished writer, she (like almost everybody else who has picked up pen or played with a keyboard) is so far short of Austen that you could never get confused as to which is Austen and which is modern imitation - no danger of thinking that Susan's marriage (because this is the main focus of Aiken's book) actually happens in Mansfield Park.  In truth, this is mainly due to the plot, and the uneven pace and texture of the novel, which is already causing the novel to slip from my memory after a few days; on the other hand, some of the language is very good indeed.

For example, the opening paragraph, which annouces Sir Thomas's death while abroad might almost pass for the work of the Mistress; and Susan's comment that Lady Bertram bears her husband's death with insensibilty is quite as wicked as Jane herself. But Susan is too brash, and the plot too sudden to be more than a casual caprice, albeit an enjoyable one.  I set out on the book, thinking that such sequels ran the danger of diminishing Austen - I now realise that Austen is far too noble a work to suffer, and that these fanciful continuations are harmless, even if they will not find a significant place in my library!

Nursery rhyme

In Making Cocoa For Kingsley Amis, Wendy Cope carries off a great deal of humour with technical dexterity.  This last quality is perhaps most on display in two nursery rhyme parodies; the first is Baa, Baa Black Sheep as it might have been written by Wordsworth, and the second is Hickory Dickory Dock by no less a master than T S Eliot.  So here is A Nursery Rhyme - as it might have been written by T S Eliot, by Wendy Cope.

Because time will not run backwards
Because time
Because time will not run
                                                Hickory dickory

In the last minute of the first hour
I saw the mouse ascend the ancient timepiece,
Claws whispering like wind in dry hyacinths.

One o'clock,
The street lamp said,
'Remark the mouse that races toward the carpet.'

And the unstilled wheel still turning
                                                               Hickory dickory
                                                                 Hickory dickory
dock

__________________________

And, in case you don't have time to read Eliot's Waste Land, here are his 440 lines reduced to a mere 25 in Cope's Waste Land Limericks!

In April one seldom feels cheerful;
Dry stones, sun and dust make me fearful;
Clairvoyants distress me,
Commuters depress me - 
Met Stetson and gave him an earful.

She sat on a mighty fine chair,
Sparks flew as she tidied her hair;
She asks many questions,
I make few suggestions - 
Bad as Albert and Lil - what a pair!

The Thames runs, bones rattle, rats creep;
Tiresias fancies a peep -
A typist is laid,
A record is played - 
Wei la la.  After this it gets deep.

A Phoenician called Phlebas forgot
About birds and his business - the lot.
Which is no surprise,
Since he met his demise
And was left in the ocean to rot.

No water.  Dry rocks and dry throats.
Then thunder, a shower of quotes!
From The Sanskrit to Dante.
Da. Damyata.  Shantih.
I hope you'll make sense of the notes.

And if you want to look up more Wendy Cope - I recommend the Strugnell poems, of which there is a great variety, this is where to look.  Enjoy!
 

Liverpool: Walker

During my recent visit to Liverpool, I also visited the Walker Art Gallery, one of a massive collection of Victorian public buildings in a heavy Victorian classic style, with good views out across the city.  Sadly, they've slightly lost their sense of place, with major roads too close behind them - but out to the front, there are gardens and a square - with Wellington on a huge column.  The Walker calls itself one of the great art collections of the world, which is frankly ridiculous, but it's a good collection with some interesting pieces.

There is quite a lot of Victorian sentimentality - sickly genre pictures and very dramatic pseudo-historical themes (And When Did You Last See Your Father?)  but I wanted to see two things. 

First was the well known painting just completed by Ben Johnson, an immensely detailed cityscape, which I found rather sterile and disappointing.  But the earlier cityscapes were of interest, showing Liverpool at the height of its mercantile prowess in the nineteenth century - and like Johnson's work, showing as complete various buildings which were in fact still under construction, which is why the cathedral has the wrong number of towers in one picture!

And my other aim was to see a handful of British and continental pictures of some distinction, and here are a few of them.  Below is Jan Beerstraaten's Warmond Castle in a Winter Landscape from the seventeenth century, a bright crisp winter scene of some drama.  The castle is an accurate representation of the building in question, but the church is imaginary!

Below are two powerful ladies: on the left is Marguerite of Navarre (wife of King Francis I of France) by Jean Clouet, active in the early sixteenth century; note the marguerites in her hair - and note also the ring-necked parakeet on her wrist, perhaps an emblem of chastity or a family emblem.  Then an exotic bird, it has become very familiar in south-eastern England, where its brilliant green, long tail, and loud screeching has become part of any walk along the Thames in west London, for example. And on the right is a very white Queen Elizabeth, allegedly by Nicholas Hilliard, though he normally worked, very finely, in the miniature format. It's known as the Pelican portrait, although it's not a good one, as the face is completely empty and something appears to have gone wrong with the perspective there - but as a political document, its fascinating, for this is presumably how she wanted to be seen, stern and slightly inhuman.

 

To the left is a British painting of 1577, but of hand unknown.  It is a detail from a double portrait of Sir George Delves and his wife - their conjoined hands are at the head of this post - and has an elegance and grace that the portrait of Elizabeth, which must have been painted with a couple of decades, wholly lacks.  I like the individual leaves on the tree, the careful detail of his ruff and his sword hilt, and I like the way the painter has fused emotional alertness with calm and delicacy.

And below is a detail from a large family portrait, of Sir Thomas Lucy and his family, showing seven of the thirteen children he was to have; it is an eighteenth century copy of a seventeenth century original by Cornelius Johnson.  I like the quiet solidity and calm of such paintings, which change in style as the centuries pass, but which are common over some three hundred years.

Liverpool has a whole number of galleries and museums I didn't have time to visit, and I must arrange another visit - though sadly, I gather the lambananas have gone, auctioned off for charity at several thousand pounds apiece.

Birthday numbers: Sunday Salon

Cornflower and Sarah have been celebrating birthdays recently - and I'm pleased about that, because there is clear statistical evidence that the more birthdays you have, the longer a life you will lead (though there are some curious statistical outliers in February, who live around four times longer than everybody else on a per birthday basis).  But the interesting point about these two bloggers is that they share their birthday - 11 September (they even share the year, though that's not relevant today - I guess it's sometime in the late 1970s).

What interests me is the sense of surprise you have when you find someone shares your birthday; given that there are only 365 (or 366) possible dates, and billions of us on the planet, it should be quite routine.  So, question for the day - how many people do you need on a bus so there's a 50-50 chance two of them have the same birthday?  And how many before it's, to all intents and purposes, a certainty?  Answers below the heron (courtesy of Dark Puss, taken in Regent's Park, and of almost no relevance to this post except that it's a fine photograph of a noble bird).

But, as this is really a literary and bookish blog, some birthday words.  First, from Dylan Thomas, in Poem in October:

My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
    Above the farms and the white horses
            And I rose
        In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
        Over the border
            And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.

Or, in a rather different mood, this from Anthony Burgess' Earthly Powers:

It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.

 

Answers:  If there are 22 people in a room, there's a 50% chance two of them have the same birthday (Note, this is NOT the chance that one of them has the same birthday as you).  With 46 people, that becomes 95%, which is "very significant" in statistician speak.  And with 72 people, it's indistinguisahble from certainty at three decimal places - though of course, absolute certainty isn't achieved until you have 367 people (with 366, all of them could have different birthdays, though it's staggeringly unlikely).

Anyway, I hope Cornflower, Sarah, and all other birthday readers have lovely days!

Note to the mathematically inclined:  This is in essence a very simple calculation, but 29 February adds complication - either you do the calculation with 365 and ignore the extra day, or you do it with 366 and assume 29 February is just as likely as any other date.  Both assumptions are distortions, but they don't make any practical difference.

My lot's a king's

I have a guilty love for Masefield's poetry - these pages have seen Cargoes already, and will see more.  But the verses are slight things, with a slightly sing-song metre, and this can make you think they are without substance.  So I have chosen this rather sorrowful poem - sorrowful in the sense that the speaker is resigned to perishing "meanly in the dark", but fulfilled if only he can catch in poetry the beauty of his love.  This is John Masefield's Born for Nought Else.

Born for nought else, for nothing but for this,
To watch the soft blood throbbing in her throat,
To think how comely sweet her body is,
And learn the poem of her face by rote.

Born for nought else but to attempt a rhyme
That shall describe her womanhood aright,
And make her holy to the end of Time,
And be my soul's acquittal in God's sight.

Born for nought else but to expressly mark
The music of her dear delicious ways;
Born but to perish meanly in the dark,
Yet born to be the man to sing her praise.

Born for nought else: there is a spirit tells
My lot's a King's, being born for nothing else.

Liverpool: bananas, lambs and gulls

On my recent visit to Liverpool, I could not help seeing "lambananas"! Apparently the original was 18 feet high, yellow, and made of concrete - the creation of the artist Taro Chiezo, it was somewhat pompously conceived as a warning against the dangers of genetically modified food.  But it was never intended to breed itself, which is what's happened in this year of culture in Liverpool - they're all over the place.  Here are a few of my favourites - although I see from a few minutes web exploration that I saw only a tiny proportion of those dotted all round the city - four foot high, and painted in every conceivable way.

Above, the bronze "original" - except it ain't.  And below, the 5 a day lambanana in the Walker gallery.

And, above, workmen and the community - but there's a whole lot more and wilder - there's a show on You tube which proves that there are lambananas everywhere.  As my favourite babe with brains would say - interesting, but slightly weird.

And for no real reason at all, a herring gull paddling for worms on the lawn of the gallery:

On difficulty in writing

I've come across several things about how hard writing is recently, especially poetry.  Ngaio Marsh gave a radio broadcast in which she gave advice to a young man who had written to her, expressing his desire to write for a living: and her title, and the whole tenor of her talk was, "Oh, you poor boy!".

And I've just listened to John Betjeman read Summoned by Bells, his verse autobiography (though it only covers his early years, until roughly his mid 20s).  This is what he has to say about the problem:

... For myself,

I knew as soon as I could read and write

That I must be a poet. Even today,

When all the way from Cambridge comes a wind

To blow the lamps out every time they're lit,

I know that I must light mine up again.

He focused on encasing in poetry "the things I saw and felt; I could not think"; and felt that "the gap between my feelings and my skill was so immense, I wonder that I went on".

And Betjeman, very early in his life, was taught by T S  Eliot, and gives him some poems ("The Best of Betjeman"!), recorded in a particularly notable passage of Summoned By Bells:

I thought myself as good as Campbell now

And very nearly up to Longfellow;

And so I bound my verse into a book,

The Best of Betjeman, and handed it

To one who, I was told, liked poetry -

The American master, Mr. Eliot.

That dear good man, with Prufrock in his head

And Sweeney waiting to be agonised,

I wonder what he thought? He never says

When now we meet, across the port and cheese.

He looks the same as then, long, lean and pale,

Still with the slow deliberating speech

And enigmatic answers. At the time

A boy called Jelly said “He thinks they’re bad” -

But he himself is still too kind to say.

 

Eliot, of course, is both a much greater and a more cerebral poet, but even he had difficulties - indeed, he believed, at one stage of his career at least, that difficulty in both writing and reading was inseparable from any meaning or value.  This tells you how he struggled (from Burnt Norton):

 

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them.

 

And I have just read a fine description of Sassoon helping Wilfred Owen with some of his early war poems, in Pat Barker's Regeneration:   Owen has said that he spends about 15 minutes every day on his poetry, and Sassoon says:

 

Good God, man, that's no use!  You've got to sweat your guts out.  Look, it's like drill.  You don't wait until you feel like doing it.

Pullman's Table: Sunday Salon

Have you seen the Writer's Table feature which Waterstone's are running? At the moment, it's Philip Pullman's selection, and I saw him talking about it in the Times last weekend.  It's a sales gimmick, of course, but I always welcome opportunities to broaden my reading and find new things (well, almost always). 

Pullman's selection was a particularly interesting one, I thought.  Of the 40 books he was allowed, I would say at least six of the authors represented could well have been on my list - not that W's are likely to ask me - Kipling, Le Carre, Burton, Dawkins, Mann, and Rilke, though only in the case of Rilke would I have chosen exactly the same book (Duino Elegies, a marvellous, spellbinding series of poems, even in translation).  Several other books I would very much like to read - Hogg (Justified Sinner), the Woodhouse and the H G Wells, and the Penrose book of science too. 

A couple of books caught my eye immediately - Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys was on the list, with this description -

Powys evoked the English landscape with an almost sexual intensity. Hardy comes to mind, but a Hardy drunk and feverish with mystical exuberance.

Well, I loathe Hardy, but this sounded as if it had to be read, and anyway, an author who dares call his hero Wolf demands attention.  So I brought it from the library, finding in the process that Powys wrote a very full diary of a couple of years living in Dorset, so I got that too.  See, the list has already worked its magic.

And Kolymsky Heights by Lionel Davidson might be worth a look: "The best thriller I've ever read, and I've read plenty. A solidly researched and bone-chilling adventure in a savage setting, with a superb hero. "

Other books on his list I can take or leave - the Kleist (Marquis of O) for example, which never gripped me, or Musil's Man Without Qualities, or all the childrens' books.

But there's one book not on his list, because it's not in print in the UK.  He wanted to include The Balloonist by the American novelist MacDonald Harris; I looked for this in the library, but could only  find Screenplay.  I have never heard of this author, but I'm looking forward to giving this a go.  Normblog has an intriguing essay with more information - he's got Pullman on Harris.

So a very intriguing list, which took me in a number of unexpected directions.  While I was at the library, I got some pre-reading for my next holiday, and a novel about the Norman Conquest by Hope Muntz, called  The Golden Warrior - so the "read me now pile" is toppling over!

Swift recipes

Dean Swift's poetry includes some Verses made for Fruit-Women; from them is helpful advice on the the value of oysters and the use of oranges - the full set is available here, and covers herrings, apples and asparagus among others.  Oysters and Oranges by Jonathan Swift:

Charming oysters I cry:
My masters, come buy,
So plump and so fresh,
So sweet is their flesh,
No Colchester oyster
Is sweeter and moister:
Your stomach they settle,
And rouse up your mettle:
They'll make you a dad
Of a lass or a lad;
And madam your wife
They'll please to the life;
Be she barren, be she old,
Be she slut, or be she scold,
Eat my oysters, and lie near her,
She'll be fruitful, never fear her.

____________________

Come buy my fine oranges, sauce for your veal,
And charming, when squeezed in a pot of brown ale;
Well roasted, with sugar and wine in a cup,
They'll make a sweet bishop when gentlefolks sup.

No suggestion, you notice, that you should actually eat the orange in its own right.  And ale with orange squeezed in - I think not, thank you!

Liverpool: Tate and Klimt

In August, I visited Liverpool as I often do, on business; but this time, I took a day out to visit the city itself, in all its pride as City of Culture.  First port of call was the Tate in Albert Dock, to see the Klimt exhibition.  But first, I had to pass a lightship for sale - the temptation to buy it and moor it in London, on the Thames opposite my office, was quite considerable!

In fact, this was not really an exhibition of Klimt at all, but one about the Vienna Secession, and the vibrant world of art and design in the city in the first decade of the last century.  Imagine, Mahler, Freud, Klimt and countless others in the city at the same time.  So, if you went to see the great blockbuster pictures, Klimt's glamorous and erotic women, you would have been largely disappointed.  Not entirely, as the picture on the left shows - his Judith II (Salome) from 1909, like many of his women combining sexuality with predation, violence, threat.  Other portraits in the exhibition show a softer vision of women - and exceptionally, a man - but the great dramatic portraits of golden patterned beauties are not here.

But there is a very fine series of rooms on the Werkstatte and the Secession, twinned movements in art and design which threw off the shackles of the old even more emphatically than impressionism (to which the Secession gave a warm welcome) and art nouveau - or jugendstil as it became in German.

A particular symbol of the Secession was their own building, the famous "golden cabbage" which you can see in Vienna today, as proud and glorious as ever.  It was opened in 1898  -  with the motto Der Zeit Ihre Kunst; Der Kunst Ihre Freiheit above its doors - To every age, its art; to every art, its freedom.  Personally, I think it sounds better in German.  Here were the famous annual exhibitions, with wonderful posters and challenging art from Klimt, Schiele, Kokoshka and many others - most famously the 14th exhibition in 1902, with Max Klinger's Beethoven statue and Klimt's great frieze.

Above is the colourful portrait of Eugenia Primavesi from 1914, brilliantly patterned and much less threatening than some of Klimt's more famous work.  He also painted a lot of landscapes, wallpaper rich meadows and orchards, flowers rich and symbolic, but with a childlike, impressionistic feel to them as well.  Another part of the exhibition was the wonderful architecture and design - here is a magnificent adjustable armchair by Josef Hoffman, 1908, in beech and mahogany -what a joy in the library that would be.

Below is Klimt's portrait of Rose von Rosthorn-Friedmann from 1901, a glamour portrait recalling Sergeant or Whistler, with a soft palette and still an edgy, sparkling feel to her jewelry and dress.

And another piece of exquisite design, a marvellous silver fruit basket, also by Hoffman, from 1904, and only a foot high - one of a number of very fine smaller pieces for dining table or desk.

And to end with, a 1903 painting called Life Is a Struggle (The Golden Knight) from 1903, which has a stiff, determined knight, upright in the stirrups facing bravely that which was unknown, and which must surely defeat him, but with bravery and commitment.  Apart from the Uchello like harmony of the masses and spaces, look at the exquisite designs - the bridle, the flowery sward, the helmet.  In the end, life was too much of a struggle for Vienna itself, where an empire and a way of life passed in the First World War more completely, more finally, and less regretted, perhaps than anywhere else in Europe.  Klimt died in 1918, sui generis but still influential and entrancing.

 

Seeds, seeds, glorious seeds!

I do suggest you visit this marvellous slide show from Kew Gardens, five gentle minutes illustrated with fantastically beautiful highly magnified pictures of seeds.  Stunning just aesthetically, even if you're not a plant buff! (Don't forget to turn the captions on if you want to know what they all are).

And, you'll learn why you never see a fig tree in flower (I have one in my garden, and in 12 years I'd never noticed).

Good in Evil

Pat Barker's Regeneration is the first volume of a trilogy (the others are The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road, the Booker prize winner in 1995).  I would probably never had read it had it not been sent to me by The Times, but I am glad I did.  It is a work of fiction, but with a strong basis in fact, and focuses on the psychiatric treatment of young men who have cracked in some way under the stress of fighting in the trenches of the First World War.  But it is not a grim book at all - although it does occasionally describe horrors, much of it focuses on the warmth and humanity of the army psychiatrist Rivers, working at the Craiglockhart hospital just outside Edinburgh.

One of his patients is Siegfried Sassoon, who has - after some notably brave army service - decided that the war is being waged too long and could be stopped, and says so publicly, inviting court-martial.  His friends manage to get him boarded for a nervous breakdown instead, which is just not true.  His conversations with Rivers are very fine, and are a central part of the book, although there is much else - among the other patients is Wilfred Owen, for example, and they work together on his (Owen's) poetry.  It is not the horrors of the war that are so compelling, though, but the relationships between the broken men and Rivers; he deals with their difficulties and their aggression and defiance with real sensitivity and the diffidence that comes from realising both that he is only at the very doors of knowledge, and also that he too could suffer these ills.

There are also some very fine considerations about the causes of stress and breakdown, and some engaging portraits of those suffering and their relationships with each other, as well as more down to earth portraits of female munitions workers in the town, and the staff of the hospital itself.  There is also a particularly good description of Aldeburgh, where Rivers goes while on holiday to visit an ex-patient.  I won't tell you about that, but the portrait of the East Anglian town with barbed wire along the beach, the great open skies followed by storm - the lifeboat putting out, and not coming back til dawn - that is worth reading in itself.

The title of this post obviously refers to the work that Rivers is doing in a hellish situation, but I was reminded of a book about the later war, Primo Levi's Moments of Reprieve, which every human being should read.  It's about all the good things that people did when Levi was in Auschwitz - moments of selfless behaviour, of generosity, of decency and virtue - among both prisoners and on one remarkable occasion, the guards too; and its written in a prose so careful, so light, that it's almost poetry.

In praise of islands: Sunday Salon

A number of books about islands on the go or in mind today.  I read Swallows and Amazons recently - or rather listened to it on CD in the car - and noted the sense of privacy and independence that comes with an island - the territory is clearly demarcated and their are the obvious problems about getting there which emphasise whose it is! 

More recently, following a couple of interesting articles in Slightly Foxed, I have been looking at A New Voyage Round the World by William Dampier; the voyage lasted many years, from 1679 to 1691, and the book, an immediate success, was published in 1697.  Heh, they got decent holidays in those days!  Dampier was an interesting man, half traveller, half pirate, he had all sorts of adventures, but was also an acute observer and keen diarist, and has a fine straightforward way with words - so "The Lime is a sort of bastard or Crab-limon".  His comments cover social customs, agriculture, wildlife, landscape, history, and he spends much of his time on and around the islands of the Caribbean and of the South Pacific.  Well worth a browse - and when I've finished my browsing, I'll probably post again.

Another book I wanted to read was Raymond Firth's We, The Tikopia, an account of his anthropological explorations among the Tikopia, who inhabit a small, very isolated island in the Solomons Islands.  Firth published this "well known classic of the genre" (the " marks indicate that I'd never heard of it, I fear) in 1936, after decades of living there.  However, I found a copy and blanched at its length, technicality and denseness, so have taken up his much smaller History and Traditions of Tikopia.  Another, very accessible, book about this area is Arthur Grimble on the Gilbert (and Ellice) Islands, which I read as a boy.

Other island books come to mind - Stevenson's Treasure Island, of course, and Ballantyne's tiresomely moral but still exciting Coral Island.  And Joe Coomer's Pocketful of Names, off the New England coast, which I read with pleasure a few months ago. And Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, of course, off the coast of Chile, and .. but I could go on for ever - and no doubt you will anyway point out the favourite island books I have missed!

Enjoy your Sunday - I'm about to cycle out in pouring rain to give a tour at a wildlife centre - and in this weather I have a strong hunch there will be no customers!

Here, by this brook, we parted

Last week, I gave you Tennyson's The Brook, a fantastically accomplished piece of verbal music, without any deeper significance, but gorgeously liquid on the tongue.  And I said I would try and convince you that it was serious poetry.  To do that, I shall put the poem in context - it is not meant to be a poem by itself at all - it is a poem within a poem, it is the song of the brook itself, talking to an old man dreaming - and the "outside poem" (properly called The Brook) is a masterpiece of observation and feeling.  It's quite a long poem, so here is just the first third or so: here is one of the great technical masters of English poetry in all his emotional and verbal pomp - Tennyson's The Brook:

Here, by this brook, we parted; I to the East

  And he for Italy - too late, too late;

  One whom the strong sons of the world despise;

  For lucky rhymes to him were scrip and share,

  And mellow metres more than cent for cent;                

  Nor could he understand how money breeds;

  Thought it a dead thing; yet himself could make

  The thing that is not as the thing that is.

  O had he lived!  In our schoolbooks we say,

  Of those that held their heads above the crowd,          

  They flourish'd then or then; but life in him

  Could scarce be said to flourish, only touch'd

  On such a time as goes before the leaf,

  When all the wood stands in a mist of green,

  And nothing perfect: yet the brook he loved,            

  For which, in branding summers of Bengal,

Or ev'n the sweet half-English Neilgherry air

  I panted, seems; as