Books Do Furnish A Room

Women reading: December

The December painting on my Women Reading calendar (see also 1st of each month this year) is Lady Tennyson on Afton Downs by Valentine Cameron Prinsep, a British artist who lived from 1838-1904, and was related to Tennyson's son through marriage.  Lady Tennyson, Emily, was the wife of poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and here she is seen walking by the sea on Afton Downs, on the south-western coast of the Isle of Wight (off the southern coast of England).  This is now a National Trust property, famous for its views and its butterflies; when Lady Tennyson was walking here, she and her husband lived nearby (though he had not been ennobled then).

  

Emily appears to be reading a letter, but perhaps her husband has given her a manuscript of one of his new poems?  They lived here in the 1850s and 60s, which would fit well with Idylls of the King, the first four books of which were published in 1859.  So she may be reading of Arthur's coming, and his winning of Guinevere, beautiful and faithless.  And he may be at home sitting for a friend of theirs, the pioneering photographer Julia Margaret Cameron - and one of her images is on the left.

 

 

Hawk In The Rain

Following my visit to the T S Eliot exhibition, I looked up this poem, of which there was a recording by Hughes himself.  This is strong, harsh poetry, contrasts the writer's loam clogged feet with the hawk's effortless aerial poise - but knowing, too, that the hawk must die and crash to the ground.  What fierce, bloody, stubborn power there is in Ted Hughes' Hawk In The Rain:

 

I drown in the drumming ploughland, I drag up
Heel after heel from the swallowing of the earth's mouth,
From clay that clutches my each step to the ankle
With the habit of the dogged grave, but the hawk

Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye.
His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet,
Steady as a hallucination in the streaming air.
While banging wind kills these stubborn hedges,

Thumbs my eyes, throws my breath, tackles my heart,
And rain hacks my head to the bone, the hawk hangs,
The diamond point of will that polestars
The sea drowner's endurance: And I,

Bloodily grabbed dazed last-moment-counting
Morsel in the earth's mouth, strain to the master-
Fulcrum of violence where the hawk hangs still.
That maybe in his own time meets the weather

Coming the wrong way, suffers the air, hurled upside-down,
Falls from his eye, the ponderous shires crash on him,
The horizon trap him; the round angelic eye
Smashed, mix his heart's blood with the mire of the land.

T S Eliot, publisher

On a recent Sunday morning, to the TS Eliot exhibition at the British Library.  It's small, but very good, focusing on his work as a publisher, supporting poets such as MacNeice, Spender, Ted Hughes and many others, and the exhibition consists mostly of letters and photographs, with one or two interesting recordings.  Sadly, it finishes on 6 December, so it's almost too late to see it now.  But it's was a fascinating insight into his work as a director at Faber & Faber (there was only one Faber, but he thought two sounded better!).  His fellow directors were well aware of his value to the company, as author, icon and talent speaker, but they were not in awe of him, as this heading from an alphabetical catalogue shows:

E is for Eliot, a very stern man.

His prose is severe, and his poems don't scan.

But many of those younger writers that he brought to the company were very much overawed, including Ted Hughes.  He said meeting Eliot, a quiet and slightly stiff persona, was like watching the Queen Mary bear down on you, very slowly.  Eliot wrote a lot of letters himself, and both manuscripts and typescripts exist, exhorting this poet or that to greater efforts, or recommending that the firm take someone up.  One of his great contacts, of course, was Auden, who took the mickey about some of the people Eliot met when doing lecture tours in the US:

T S Eliot is quite at a loss

When clubwomen hustle across

 At literary teas

 And say: "What if you please

Do you mean by A Mill On The Floss"?

As well as letters and pictures, there were many recordings to enjoy as well - the great man himself, reading from his own poetry, (you can him ploughing through the wonderful Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock here) and Ted Hughes reading Hawk in the Rain, and Auden reading As I Walked Out One Evening.  One prose writer he enouraged was Djuna Barnes, whose Nightwood you will probably know, but I confess I didn't.  All in all, a rewarding hour with an unsung side of the greatest poet in English of the past hundred years.

Paddington's essential reading

Travelling again, and a really interesting list of books, all recommended by my good friend Paddington Bear.  Paddington and I have been friends for a long time – we share a passion for marmalade – but I have rather lost touch over recent years, and it was a surprise, as well as a joy, to see him the other hunched over one of the comfortable and secluded readers’ desks in the London Library.  He is as charming and amiable as ever, although a little more distrait and a little quieter (after all, he must be 60 now), and readily left his studies – he is working on a monograph on the spread of the Seville orange through Moorish Spain and eventually into the hands of the British traders and cooks - and with a little help from the catalogue and Helen in Readers’ Services, came up with this little collection of books about Peru:

Matthew Parris, Inca-Kola:  This was a very engaging, slightly wandering account of travelling in Peru about twenty years ago, by the ex-MP and Times columnist.  He is travelling with three friends, and you learn a lot about them and their foibles and adventures, and very little about Parris’ own, except at the end, where he goes on a long and hair-raising lorry journey by himself.  There is plenty of amusement, and delightful descriptions of the act of travelling and the incidental events of the road – the great sites, including Titicaca and Macchu Picchu are hardly described at all, certainly not in any “guide book” way – which is abslutely fine.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, Three Letters from the Andes: I am enjoying this slight volume by the great travel writer; the letters are pretty informal, but very easy to read and very immediate.  There is a wonderful reading list from the mountaineering group , each of them having brought a book or two.  There’s no pap at all, as between them they have Balzac’s Illusions Perdues, Henry James' The Bostonians and Spoils of Poynton, Aldous Huxley’s Chrome Yellow and Antic Hay, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Kim and Prescott’s Conquest of Peru!  There is also one of the most straight-faced but bizarre footnotes – after the word “Andrew” in the description of the companions meeting at the airport, a footnote offers the explanation “Duke of Devonshire MC”!  The accounts of the landscape, the people, and the struggles with hotels, are all most entertaining – especially of the hotel where the service at meals, and the provision of hot water, was utterly dismal: the food was inedible and the hot water non-existent; after a breakfast at which the eggs were “slimy”, there followed one in which they were like bullets, prompting one of the party to hurl it the length of the room at a mirror, where it exploded, scattering white and yolk shrapnel everywhere.  The management’s response was immediate and charming, and both food and hot water were thereafter beyond reproach!  But Leigh Fermor is also very good on the architecture and the sense of decay on abandoned Catholic churches, over-ornate and over-large, in remote areas, and other aperçus into a politically and socially very turbulent and tense modern Peru, while revolution was afoot in neighbouring Bolivia.

Christopher Isherwood, The Condor and the Cows: this is a travel book from around 1950, starting the United States (where Isherwood and Auden had spent the war, I think), and travelling through Venezuala, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru and eventually Bolivia and Argentina.  It's a very personal view, and a very entertaining one, with much more about politics and the state of the nation, though in a very anecdotal way.  He gently mocks American tourists, worried about money, security, and hygiene, and meets lots of interesting people - British and American expatriates, and Peruvian artists and writers; he doesn't seem very conscious that this is a rather privileged way of travelling, and that we could mock him for his distance from the real Peru just as much as he mocks others!  But he has a lovely touch - describing the difficulties of conversation in a language one has imperfectly mastered, he said it proceeded by statement alone, and gives an example:

"Peru is a very sad country".  "The best American poet is English and the best English poet is American".  "I once made love in the Vatican Library".

That final sentence passes you by, and then hits you like a sledgehammer.  What!?  How?  There is not a word of explanation.

... more Peruvian reading later.

 

 

Hello, possums!

T S Eliot is one of my very favourite poets; in The Waste Land he seems to have written the essential poem of despair and of cultural decay; in Four Quartets, he finds hope and understanding, though wholly without self deception.  But he comes down off his pedestal, and writes Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.  Choosing one is impossibly difficult - and there’s a solution for that, of course, but I am starting with the archetypal old ladies cat, fat and complacent, lazy, placid and sun-seeking, but with a secret do-gooding side.  This is T S Eliot’s The Old Gumbie Cat:

I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots;

Her coat is of the tabby kind, with tiger stripes and leopard spots.

All day she sits upon the stair or on the steps or on the mat;

She sits and sits and sits and sits - and that's what makes a Gumbie Cat!

But when the day's hustle and bustle is done,

Then the Gumbie Cat's work is but hardly begun.

And when all the family's in bed and asleep,

She tucks up her skirts to the basement to creep.

She is deeply concerned with the ways of the mice -

Their behaviour's not good and their manners not nice;

So when she has got them lined up on the matting,

She teachs them music, crocheting and tatting.

I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots;

Her equal would be hard to find, she likes the warm and sunny spots.

All day she sits beside the hearth or on the bed or on my hat:

She sits and sits and sits and sits - and that's what makes a Gumbie Cat!

But when the day's hustle and bustle is done,

Then the Gumbie Cat's work is but hardly begun.

As she finds that the mice will not ever keep quiet,

She is sure it is due to irregular diet;

And believing that nothing is done without trying,

She sets right to work with her baking and frying.

She makes them a mouse-cake of bread and dried peas,

And a beautiful fry of lean bacon and cheese.

I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots;

The curtain-cord she likes to wind, and tie it into sailor-knots.

She sits upon the window-sill, or anything that's smooth and flat:

She sits and sits and sits and sits - and that's what makes a Gumbie Cat!

But when the day's hustle and bustle is done,

Then the Gumbie Cat's work is but hardly begun.

She thinks that the cockroaches just need employment

To prevent them from idle and wanton destroyment.

So she's formed, from that lot of disorderly louts,

A troop of well-disciplined helpful boy-scouts,

With a purpose in life and a good deed to do -

And she's even created a Beetles' Tattoo.

So for Old Gumbie Cats let us now give three cheers -

On whom well-ordered households depend, it appears.

802,701 AD

I went to bed the other evening without enough to read, and lazily restricted my choice of extra material to those books which were within reach while remaining under the duvet.  This limited my choice to a small group of science books and novels from U – Z.  I chose, on a whim, H G Wells' The Time Machine, which in my ancient Penguin edition is collected together with a number of other shorter stories.  The Time Machine is by far the longest, and the other stories are very short by comparison – the most well-known being The Man Who Could Work Miracles. 

In his day, and even in my youth, H G Wells was a great figure and a great favourite with the boys in my school, though I suspect the girls found him much less interesting.  So, on this return, I was a little disappointed.  Like The War of the Worlds, which I read a few months ago, the imagination is tremendous, and the story is powerfully told and carried through with great force; but the language now seems very old fashioned, and the science, so powerfully imagined, now seems childish and vague, with lots of rather robotic social relations and rather clunky and didactic dialogue.

The hero of The Time Machine leaps forward thousands of years, to the date in the title of the post, where lots of rather sad eugenically inspired evolution stuff explains the physical and mental deterioration of the human race(s) – I would have been more interested if Wells had had a shot at what might have been 200 or 500 years into the future, although that would not have been so impressive a leap of the imagination, but it might have been more involving.  A great classic, but a little past its read-by date.

Some of the shorter stories are rather more fun – the story of The Man who could do Miracles, for example, is amusing and cleverly constructed, and The Hammerpond Park Burglary and The Stolen Bacillus are pithy, well constructed and amusing - and they remind us of Wells' range of voices and material, which was huge.

 

Grave Doubts

John Moss is a Canadian writer who wrote to me recently asking me to look at one of his books, murder mysteries which are not well known over here, although he tells me he is often seen as writing in a rather English tradition.  He kindly sent me Grave Doubts, a Toronto murder mystery – and rather more – featuring a duo of detectives who are partners at work in the City murder squad, but whose friendship is as much more than that as it can be without them being partners in another sense.

I thought it was actually quite interesting, although I didn’t think it was really very English in style, although the concentration on Canadian (Toronto) history naturally led you away from that.  What I did think, was that it was decidedly not American, which you might assume if you didn’t know how much that irritates most Canadians!  The story starts very intriguingly, with a pair of bodies discovered in an old house, mummified by having been concealed behind a wall which made the space both airless and dry.  They are in a loving embrace, but they lack their heads.  The detectives – Miranda Quin and David Morgan – visit the site out of interest, and find various archaeological investigations under way.  The heads appear, in a loving kiss, nearby in the same building.  Predictably, the ancient bodies turn out to be modern, cleverly faked up, which means that the old building features which concealed them were faked too.

This naturally limits the number of people involved, and it rapidly becomes clear that the likely perpetrators are among the group of people they met when they visited the site of the immurals – the archaeologists, the pathologist, and the buildings expert and, unbelievably, the policewoman on duty.  This cramps the novel slightly, but it remains engaging, although Grant can be a slight bore with his showing off and unlikely intellectual musings.  At this point, the novel took an unlikely turn to my mind, though I quite enjoyed it in a detached sort of way.  The perpetrators – because that’s obvious what they were – then engaged in a complex game of leaving clues for the detectives with increasing bravado in the name of a disinterested interest in perfect fakery, with no personal motives for the two original murders or the several others later discovered.  The culmination comes in a James Bond style cliffhanger at the end, with a race against time to prevent one of the detectives being killed in a gruesome and macabre scene.

I enjoyed this as a narrative which kept me interested, and it was full of surprises, though often in an unsurprising way – that is, the plot has several unexpected twists and turns, but the original set up was so constrained, you knew the killer or killers came from a vary narrow group of people with an odd set of motives.  But Moss manages to throw in a mild lesbian fling, a lot of Canadian history, some pretty evocative writing about the Canadian landscape and townscape, and some rather self-consciously aware social observations.  Not, in my view, a great thriller/mystery, but a perfectly acceptable one, and one with a lot of unusual features.  I’ll read another if John Moss succeeds in getting them into British bookshops!

 

Money makes the world go round

Browsing the bookshelves the other day, I came across Dana Gioia's The Gods of Winter from 1991.  I remembered a few poems from this collection, and determined to share one with you.  Gioia ("joy-uh") is a Californian of mixed Italian and Mexican parentage, though I think few echoes of that come through in the poems I've read, which seem to have a wholly authentic liberal American voice.  You can find more about him here.  I couldn't decide between two poems so I've added a link to Rough Country, which will resonate with those who like the wild places - and although it's clearly about California, it has wonderful Scottish echoes too.  But this week's offering is tough, technically accomplished and pretty funny - here is Dana Gioia's Money:

 

Money, the long green,
cash, stash, rhino, jack
or just plain dough.

Chock it up, fork it over,
shell it out. Watch it
burn holes through pockets.

To be made of it! To have it
to burn! Greenbacks, double eagles,
megabucks and Ginnie Maes.

It greases the palm, feathers a nest,
holds heads above water,
makes both ends meet.

Money breeds money.
Gathering interest, compounding daily.
Always in circulation.

Money. You don't know where it's been,
but you put it where your mouth is.
And it talks.

After the storm

The night after my walk round Eggardon Hill, there was a tremendous gale and violent rain, and as soon as possible the next morning, I hurried to the coast, hoping for boiling seas and scudding skies.  I walked from Burton Bradstock, over sandy cliffs with seagulls elegantly wheeling, as if storm winds were nothing, and down onto the very western end of Chesil Beach, small pebbled here, but still frustrating and demanding walking.  Great sea and skyscapes, lots of small birds fighting the wind – including a flock of stonechats (left) – and lots of dogs having more fun than their owners.

In several of the pictures, you can see, small, low and distant, the highest point on the south coast, Golden Cap, with its distinctive flat profile.

 

Momijigari revisited

Some pure self indulgence here – my Dorset garden is awash with beech leaves, smothering the lawn, blocking the gutters and shrouding the bare bushes, caught in cobwebs and swirling constantly down in the wind.  I love them, glistening in russet and gold when wet, crisp, browner and yellower when dry, and I have just assembled a few pictures of the mother tree and the leaves it is shedding.  Some I have played with in the photo-editor – I think they’re fun, but if it’s a bit too much like Ikea art, I apologise!

 

love is more thicker than forget

Here's some more e e cummings.  I don't know why this works, I just don't - it must be something to do with the brilliant mastery of metre and words which seem to be related but actually aren't - so, in my post title, there are so many grammatical and verbal errors you can't count them - but, hey, doesn't it mean something quite strong and visceral.  And I can't talk about something I don't understand; or at least, I can't unless I think I might understand it, and here, I just give up and revel in it.  So this is e e cummings' love is more thicker:

 

love is more thicker than forget

more thinner than recall

more seldom than a wave is wet

more frequent than to fail

 

it is more mad and moonly

and less it shall unbe

than all the sea which only

is deeper than the sea

 

love is less always than to win

less never than alive

less bigger than the least begin

less littler than forgive

 

it is most sane and sunly

and more it cannot die

than all the sky which only

is higher than the sky

The delicate masterpiece of the Abbé Prévost

Manon Lescaut is hardly a novel, more a long short story, although still almost picaresque. It is a classic I have heard of again and again in my reading – and the title of the post is from Dorothy Sayers’ Clouds of Witness, when the book holds the key to the crime Wimsey is solving -and gives his friend the book to read while he brings the case (of course) to a triumphant conclusion.  I have had a copy for a couple of years, but something about this book discouraged me, made me feel it would be worthy but dull.  Well, apologies to French friends and fans of Abbé Prévost, but how right I was!  I really struggled with Manon Lescaut.

It’s only about 140 pages, but I grounded after 60 pages, and had to really force myself back to duty.  I then finished it in a concerted effort, but it felt like taking enemy ground under fire, and the relief as I turned over the last page was something indescribable.  I really don’t know what the fuss is about, I found it shallow, contrived, unconvincing, and just plain boring.

Chevalier Des Grieux is a young man intending to study to become a Knight of St John (or a Knight of Malta, same thing), with a marked tendency to priggishness – boringly good, moralising left, right and centre, and tempted by a career in the Church.  He meets, by chance, a beautiful young woman – Manon – who turns his head in spite of an appalling series of accidents, betrayals and disasters.  All ends in the worst possible disaster, with Des Grieux weeping on Manon’s grave in New Orleans, and then coming back to become a reformed character (yawn, yawn).

I found the moralising insipid and tedious, but the real weakness of the whole thing was its plot.  Action comes thick and fast, but the causes of action are either obscure or laughable.  Tremendous escapes are made from secure prisons by just walking out; an Abbé decides not to mention a murder he has witnessed, and so saves Des Grieux; a man decides to risk his life and his reputation after half an hour’s conversation with Des Grieux to whom he feels a lifelong friendship; an enemy duels with Des Grieux – is left for dead, recovers immediately, and saves Des Grieux from a terrible fate through his great good nature! The plot is more farce – more Boccaccio or Chaucer – than novel or uplifting moral treatise, and in the end, I could no more believe in Manon’s unfading attraction and virtue than I could in the choking, suffocating, disabling love he feels for her.

On Eggardon Hill

One recent weekend, over and round Eggardon Hill in Dorset, just east of Bridport, and just a few miles from the sea.  This is, I suppose, a steep natural hill, on which Iron Age people built a fort – there are also Bronze Age burials.  I parked near the summit, walked the length of it, admiring views in all directions, including the glinting, shifting sea, and scrambled down the steep north slopes – followed lanes and a disused railway, and circled the hill, climbing it again to find my car.  It is in the middle of gorgeous Dorset country, steep combes, copses and gorse commons, and farms and villages everywhere – just what foreigners think of as the English countryside.  I was there on a grey afternoon, with weak sunshine occasionally nervously casting shadows and then changing its mind; I started late, and then added to my route, so by the time I neared the summit for the second time, climbing steeply from the south, it was growing dark and mist was falling fast – a suitably pre-historic crepuscularity.

Here are some photographs of a brisk, exhilarating afternoon's walking!

Secrecy and sickness

You may recall my irritation with the BBC’s Emma, a reaction that seems widely shared to judge by television critics in the paper.  I felt the need to cleanse my palate, and indeed have picked up Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility with both relief and joy.  Yes, there are lingering elements of the gothick in Marianne’s passionate ideas, her love and despair; and the confusion over Edward Ferrars’ engagement is perhaps too drawn out for credibility.  Yet the overall is charming, witty and engaging, and the quietly barbed comments about the boorishness, selfishness, or mere stupidity of people have lost nothing in two hundred years.

In his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, Toby Tanner remarks that “Sense and Sensibility is, of course, about sense and sensibility, but it is also about secrecy and sickness”.  I find that an illuminating comment, and an immediate balance to the modern tendency to portray Jane Austen as a kind of up-market rom-com, a mere comedy of manners and young love – though her novels are all of that, as well.  And “balance” itself is an interesting word, because Tanner draws attention to Jane Austen’s belief that balance is a prime virtue in her characters’ behaviour, or should be at least an aspiration, or a development of age and experience; he also draws attention to the way her prose directly achieves that balance in metrical and syntactical form: “The prose, like the plot, tends towards, and even acts out, those steady symmetries which Jane Austen regarded as indispensable for a truly civilised existence”.

This is an engaging book, and the characters of the two main female characters – Eleanor and Marianne – are contrasted without being stereotypes, and the three men providing the emotional interest are also all interesting – Edward, shy but upright, perhaps a more impressive figure in truth than Hugh Grant made him out to be, but certainly not full of address and élan; Willoughby, a weak scoundrel whose romanticism is offset by his mercenary flaws, although he comes to harbour at last, not happy, but at least knowing why he has missed happiness; and Colonel Brandon, whose virtues are sub-fusc but extremely well laid.  Each of them is flawed, each has redeeming characteristics, and each, probably, gets his just deserts,  Nor are minor characters any less interesting, Mrs Jennings with her inconsequential chatter and her gossip is a particular favourite of mine, from the same stable that produced Mrs Bates, but there are many others, demonstrating narrowness, boredom, goodwill, cupidity and selfishness, generosity and every other vice or virtue Jane’s readers could conceive.

I enjoyed Sense and Sensibility all the more because I was comparing it to the BBC’s insensitive Emma, and revelling in the language, the observational acuity, and the wit.  But honesty compels me to say that even this, refreshing and cleansing as it was, is not the very best Miss Austen has offered us – it must play second fiddle to Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion.  But what a fantastic novel to have written when not at the top of your form!

Women reading: November

The November painting on my Women Reading calendar (see also 1st of each month this year) is Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Jane Morris (The Blue Silk Dress) from 1868.  Jane Morris, of course, was William Morris's wife, and has the ultimate "pre-Raphaelite" face, heavy haired, sensuous, but rather distant and remote, suitable damsel for chivalric danger.  Across the top of the picture is an inscription which names the sitter and gives the date, then continues (in Latin) "famous for her poet husband, more famous for her face, may she now be famous for my picture".

I love these pictures in a guilty way, so technically accomplished and yet so near kitsch and sentimentality - and often in the pre-Raphaelite canon, stepping boldly right over the line into insufferable, cloying sickliness.  But this is a woman you would, must admire, but perhaps one you would take care not to be introduced to, lest she should be "La Belle Dame Sans Merci".

She seems to be reading a manuscript, perhaps a mediaeval one, more likely some faux-ancien concoction of her husband's.  Perhaps it's his 1868 poem, The Earthly Paradise, or perhaps its a draft of the forthcoming (1869) Grettis Saga: The Story of Grettir the Strong, which he translated (with Eirikr Magnusson) from the Icelandic; either of these, in a manuscript of his own, would fit the picture tellingly!

 

Voice, love and hate

Rupert Brooke, a young man's poet, and a young man when he wrote all his poetry (he died at 27 in 1915), is not always much loved nowadays.  But he could write, though the bitterness and immaturity of some of his writing seems gauche and overwhelming to a modern taste.  I liked him when in my teens, and I still find him quotable and occasionally very enjoyable, though I am sometimes laughing up my sleeve as I read.  This is a passionate, confused poem ahout a girl he loves - or hates, and it draws heavily on the symbolism of night, silence and woods which is so common in Brooke, with an ending of fierce bathos.  This is Rupert Brooke's The Voice:

Safe in the magic of my woods

  I lay, and watched the dying light.

Faint in the pale high solitudes,

  And washed with rain and veiled by night,

Silver and blue and green were showing.

  And the dark woods grew darker still;

And birds were hushed; and peace was growing;

  And quietness crept up the hill;

 

  And no wind was blowing …

 

And I knew

That this was the hour of knowing,

And the night and the woods and you

Were one together, and I should find

Soon in the silence the hidden key

Of all that had hurt and puzzled me  -

Why you were you, and the night was kind,

And the woods were part of the heart of me.

 

And there I waited breathlessly,

Alone; and slowly the holy three,

The three that I loved, together grew

One, in the hour of knowing,

Night, and the woods, and you -

 

And suddenly

There was an uproar in my woods,

The noise of a fool in mock distress,

Crashing and laughing and blindly going,

Of ignorant feet and a swishing dress,

And a Voice profaning the solitudes.

 

The spell was broken, the key denied me

And at length your flat clear voice beside me

Mouthed cheerful clear flat platitudes.

 

You came and quacked beside me in the wood.

You said, "The view from here is very good!"

You said, "It's nice to be alone a bit!"

And, "How the days are drawing out!" you said.

You said, "The sunset's pretty, isn't it?"

 

    *   *   *

 

By God! I wish - I wish that you were dead!

Logue's Homer

Husbands and All Day Permanent Red are the fourth and fifth volumes in Christopher Logue’s version of Homer’s Iliad, covering respectively Books 3 & 4 and “The first battle scenes” of the original.  The first two Homeric volumes, War Music and Kings were quite tremendous, lifting me off my feet with their power, rawness and imagination – Homer, always a favourite, had never been this exciting.  So I was keen, after a gap of many years, to try these volumes too.

The Husbands is principally an account of the attempt to bring the Trojan war to an end, by single combat, as ten years' strife had not resolved the issue.  Agreement is reached, sacrifices are made, and oaths taken, and the combat begins between Paris and Menelaus, the rival Trojan and Greek husbands of Helen, peerless among women.  But when Paris is wounded, the gods carry him off to save him, and cause treachery in the Trojan ranks, ensuring that the war will go on – and, eventually, that Troy will be destroyed.  Logue’s rendering is free, modern, and imaginative:

Hera and Athene hear of the plan to stop the fighting by making a common sacrifice to Him (Zeus, lord of the Gods):

“What for?”

“For peace.”

“Peace – after the way that Trojan treated us?” [Paris had judged Helen more beautiful than either of them]

“Peace, home, friendship, stuff like that.”

“It must be stopped.”

“At once.”

And so, with faces like NO ENTRY signs they hurried through the clouds.

 

All Day Permanent Red is a vigorous account of some of the early battle scenes of the Iliad, and captures well the chaos and brutality of war, and the drunken glorying in combat of glory-intoxicated men, often in a fierce modern idiom:

 

Drums in the dust. Inside its mid-ridge overcast

Flags tossing above the agitated forms.

Chylabborak, holding the centre firm.

Blurred bronze. Blood? Blood, like a car-wash:

“But it keeps the dust down.”

 

Both of these volumes are full of excitement and wonderful lines, but they’re not, in my view, the best volumes of Logue’s Homer; I find them harder to follow than the earlier ones, but it’s full of life and energy, and of modern, lively images that bring the Greek concepts and passions very alive.  If you’re new to Logue’s Homer, you mustn’t be put off by this – it’s fantastic reading and the narrative force and glorious poetry of War Music is an utterly wonderful achievement.

In the mustardseed sun

Today, my friends tell me, is a special day - and my mother, back in 1956, would certainly have agreed - and she, more than anyone else, would have known why this post is appearing at 1.15 in the morning!  To mark the day, here is an extra poem, Dylan Thomas' On His Birthday.  What verbal thunder, what meaning and chaos intermingled, what glory and delight - and final, bitter sadness.

  In the mustardseed sun,
By full tilt river and switchback sea
  Where the cormorants scud,
In his house on stilts high among beaks
  And palavers of birds
This sandgrain day in the bent bay's grave
  He celebrates and spurns
His driftwood thirty-fifth wind turned age;
  Herons spire and spear.

  Under and round him go
Flounders, gulls, on their cold, dying trails,
  Doing what they are told,
Curlews aloud in the congered waves
  Work at their ways to death,
And the rhymer in the long tongued room,
  Who tolls his birthday bell,
Toils towards the ambush of his wounds;
  Herons, steeple stemmed, bless.

  In the thistledown fall,
He sings towards anguish; finches fly
  In the claw tracks of hawks
On a seizing sky; small fishes glide
  Through wynds and shells of drowned
Ship towns to pastures of otters. He
  In his slant, racking house
And the hewn coils of his trade perceives
  Herons walk in their shroud,

  The livelong river's robe
Of minnows wreathing around their prayer;
  And far at sea he knows,
Who slaves to his crouched, eternal end
  Under a serpent cloud,
Dolphins dive in their turnturtle dust,
  The rippled seals streak down
To kill and their own tide daubing blood
  Slides good in the sleek mouth.

  In a cavernous, swung
Wave's silence, wept white angelus knells.
  Thirty-five bells sing struck
On skull and scar where his loves lie wrecked,
  Steered by the falling stars.
And to-morrow weeps in a blind cage
  Terror will rage apart
Before chains break to a hammer flame
  And love unbolts the dark

  And freely he goes lost
In the unknown, famous light of great
  And fabulous, dear God.
Dark is a way and light is a place,
  Heaven that never was
Nor will be ever is always true,
  And, in that brambled void,
Plenty as blackberries in the woods
  The dead grow for His joy.

  There he might wander bare
With the spirits of the horseshoe bay
  Or the stars' seashore dead,
Marrow of eagles, the roots of whales
  And wishbones of wild geese,
With blessed, unborn God and His Ghost,
  And every soul His priest,
Gulled and chanter in young Heaven's fold
  Be at cloud quaking peace,

  But dark is a long way.
He, on the earth of the night, alone
  With all the living, prays,
Who knows the rocketing wind will blow
  The bones out of the hills,
And the scythed boulders bleed, and the last
  Rage shattered waters kick
Masts and fishes to the still quick starts,
  Faithlessly unto Him

  Who is the light of old
And air shaped Heaven where souls grow wild
  As horses in the foam:
Oh, let me midlife mourn by the shrined
  And druid herons' vows
The voyage to ruin I must run,
  Dawn ships clouted aground,
Yet, though I cry with tumbledown tongue,
  Count my blessings aloud:

  Four elements and five
Senses, and man a spirit in love
  Tangling through this spun slime
To his nimbus bell cool kingdom come
  And the lost, moonshine domes,
And the sea that hides his secret selves
  Deep in its black, base bones,
Lulling of spheres in the seashell flesh,
  And this last blessing most,

  That the closer I move
To death, one man through his sundered hulks,
  The louder the sun blooms
And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults;
  And every wave of the way
And gale I tackle, the whole world then,
  With more triumphant faith
That ever was since the world was said,
  Spins its morning of praise,

  I hear the bouncing hills
Grow larked and greener at berry brown
  Fall and the dew larks sing
Taller this thunderclap spring, and how
  More spanned with angles ride
The mansouled fiery islands! Oh,
  Holier then their eyes,
And my shining men no more alone
  As I sail out to die.

So sweet a kiss ...

This is a gorgeous, sensual poem, albeit slightly disturbing too.  It's a sonnet by Montgomerie (?1547 - 1597), written in Scots.  It's not at all as difficult as it might look on a quick glance, with only one word really puzzling - yistrene means 'last night'.  It's a sonnet to his mistress, and it says, roughly: I stole such a kiss from you that I left my life within your lips; my spirit followed, and then I sent my heart to look for my spirit, and you have kept all three; so if your breath had not kept me going, I would have died.  This is Captain Alexander Montgomerie's To his Maistres:

 

So swete a kis yistrene fra thee I reft,
In bowing down thy body on the bed,
That evin my lyfe within thy lippis I left;
Sensyne from thee my spirits wald never shed;
To folow thee it from my body fled,
And left my corps als cold as ony kie.
Bot when the danger of my death I dred,
To seik my spreit I sent my harte to thee;
Bot it wes so inamored with thyn ee,
With thee it myndit lykwyse to remane:
So thou hes keepit captive all the thrie,
More glaid to byde then to returne agane.
Except thy breath thare places had suppleit,
Even in thyn armes, thair doutles had I deit.

 

Books in the dark

Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night is one of those books which looks as if it will be really interesting when you get around to reading it – bit it looks quite serious, and in the meantime, there’s a tense thriller or a weepy novelette to tempt you away.  While, after several months, I ceased to be tempted away recently, and opened the Manguel in earnest, starting with a description of his own library in a medieval barn in the Loire valley.

It’s clearly a book to read in instalments, and I shall pick it up from time to time when in Dorset, where I have left it.  But the first essay – The Library at Night – has an interesting observation: that during the day, Manguel is in charge, is orderly, productive, sequacious of learning and successful in finding the books and references he needs.  But at night, the library is in charge – Manguel is lead astray, ideas coming from the books themselves, producing a chaos and litter of meaning only half understood, of books in the wrong places, of time expended without progress.  Maybe this is why Montaigne famously did not venture in his library after dark, though I find any experience I have in a library always combines the two states, whether my visit is diurnal or nocturnal.

Each successive chapter of the book is called The Library as ...; the first three are The Library as Myth, Order, and Space ...  These are delightful exercises – full of wit, insight and instruction – with comments that every collector of books will recognise:

The existence of every library, even mine, allows readers a sense of what their craft is truly about, a craft that struggles against the stringencies of time by bringing fragments of the past into their present.  It grants them a glimpse, however secret or distant, into the minds of other human beings, and allows them a certain knowledge of their own condition through the stories stored here.

And everywhere there are discussions of the key problems of the library – what to keep when space is limited, whether to discard (No, never!), in what order to keep the books.   Again and again, the tendency of the books to govern the reader or librarian, rather than vice versa, raises its head.  We learn about the library of Alexandria, about the ordering of the earliest Chinese catalogues, and about the life of digital media.  For the book lover, there is delight on every page.

I have arranged, in homage to Manguel's vision of the library at night, that this post will appear at 13 minutes after midnight - a suitable dark time of the soul, although I might well still be reading.