In book II of The Odyssey, Zeus sets forth two eagles from a mountaintop. The birds fly for a while upon the will of the air currents, watched from beneath by the assembled party of suitors, but then
they turned on each other suddenly in a thick shudder
of wings, and swooped over the heads of all, with eyes glaring
and deadly, and tore each other by neck and cheek with their talons,
then sped away to the right across the houses and city.The Odyssey, Richard Lattimore (trans.), II.151-4.
All eyes are on the birds, astonished by the spectacle: ‘their hearts half guessed things that indeed were to come to pass’ (trans. Walter Shewring, p.15). We are, of course, talking about a people that believe in augury – the ability to read the will of the Gods and to predict future events – by the flight patterns of birds.
Narratologically, it’s a very interesting moment in the story, which is why I turn to the Shewring translation to demonstrate this. At this point in the poem, we’re following the story of Telemachus. We’re yet to even meet Odysseus in the poem – all that is yet to come (though chronologically the majority of the story’s events have already happened, to be told later on in flashback). The bard has a peculiar vantage point in the poem; omnipresent, they are able to see both back through time, and forwards. The bard knows how the story will end, even though we, the listeners, perhaps do not.
As such, in terms of the narrative, the bard shares a similar position to that of the auger. Both can tell what is about to come, and this is what the Shewring translation makes clear: as much as the suitors do not want it confirmed to them, ‘their hearts half guessed things that indeed were to come to pass.’
It is that word ‘indeed’ that lays out the bard’s vantage point. Though in the ‘present’ point of his narrative the auger’s prediction of a ‘great wave of trouble’ (Shewring, p.16) is yet to occur, the word ‘indeed’ confirms the accuracy of these predictions, of the ‘half guessed things’ that the suitors dread might come. In so doing, the bard effectively confirms to accuracy of augury.
We tend not to give much heed to augury in our modern age. Aside from noticing the onset of seasonal change from the migration of birds – Vs of geese, the first summer’s swallows – it’s mainly in the superstitious counting of magpies that the belief echoes on. DEFRA pays attention to surveys of field birds in order to chart the effect that agriculture is having upon the countryside, and while we may predict some aspects of the future from this data, I am not sure it amounts to augury.
Nonetheless, we can learn a lot from what the birds are doing, mainly because they pay us little attention and get on with their own thing. The suitors’ undoing comes because Eurymachus does not pay heed to it, but attempts to shape the augury of the fighting eagles into a prediction to their advantage. But we cannot control what birds do. As God tells Job, man cannot shape the will of birds at all:
Doth the hawk fly by thy wisdom, and stretch her wings toward the south?
Doth the eagle mount up at thy command, and make her nest on high?
She dwelleth and abideth on the rock, upon the crag of the rock, and the strong place.
From thence she seeketh the prey, and her eyes behold afar off.
Her young ones also suck up blood: and where the slain are, there is she.
Job, 40:26-30
The point of augury is that birds – like fate – lay beyond our hands.
If all of this seems terribly distant, cast your mind back to last year when fate – the eruption of a volcano in Iceland – cleared the skies of aircraft over Britain. Remember how that felt. ‘But these are planes,’ you say, ‘we thought you were talking about birds.’
In 1937, Mervyn Peake, produced a startling poem which re-imagines Job’s eagle in the ‘to-day’ above a meadow. That he centres ‘The Metal Bird’ in ‘to-day’ is important, it’s a moment akin to Homer’s bard bridging the past to the future. In the poem, he calls it ‘Job’s eagle’ though of course the wording is ironic– what God is pointing out to Job is that he has no ownership of the eagle. The eagle follows her own path, finding out the slain, and in so doing may be thought to have more control over man, than man does over it.
It is important also that the ‘to-day’ of the poem is in April 1937, or rather, it is not surprising that Peake had these thoughts at that time. It is a poem of ‘half guessed things’ that ‘indeed’ will come to pass by the end of the decade. It is a poem written at a time when many writers were looking to the skies to conduct their own augury:
O hawk with naked eyes!
O bloody eagle circling the dark skies!
Our century has bred a newer beauty,
The metal bird from the cold factory.
‘The Metal Bird’ considers the birds of the past replaced by aircraft. Like the eagles fighting over the suitors’ heads they have a foreboding menace:
Her shadow swarms the cold Welsh hill.
The hawk hangs like an unloos’d bomb
And fills the circular sky with doom.
As readers today, we have the bard’s vantage point; we know that these images will come to pass. But at this point Peake is simply looking up as an auger; reading the flight paths, feeling the menace. By the time the war began, Peake’s skies ‘now’ were filled with ministering deathly angels:
Now are gathering in the skies
Round the gates of Paradise
Those white angels who shall come
And gently bear her spirit home
Peake, from ‘Now are gathering in the skies’.
‘Oh, yes,’ says George Bowling bitterly in Orwell’s Coming up for Air, ‘I know you knew what was coming. But I didn’t. You can say I was a bloody fool not to expect it, and so I was. But it hadn’t even occurred to me.’
Peake was not alone in reading the metal birds of the 1930s. Coming up for Air published in June 1939, abounds with such premonitions:
suddenly a heavy shadow swept across me and gave me a bit of a start.
I looked over my shoulder. It was only a bombing plane which had flown between me and the sun. The place seemed to be creeping with them.p.201
There is a dark comedy to that wording of ‘only a bombing plane’, and the novel, which contrasts the years of peace at the start of the century with those of fear in the late-30s, ends with cruel bathos as one of these planes drops a bomb upon the town ‘by mistake’. By June 1939, the augury can have been hard to ignore – more preparation than premonition.
W.H. Auden’s poem ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’ written in January of that year opens with ‘the airports almost deserted’ aware that this is a brink, of sorts, between an old world and a new:
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
The aeroplane, the airport, marks that shift between the old and the new world. The metal bird with its ‘unloos’d bomb’, becomes an emblem for that shift between birds being outside of our control and – subtle distinction – outside our control and yet of our own making.
In building such planes we have taken ownership of our own fates, produced a new eagle that we can hardly control: ‘where the slain are, there is she.’
Orwell’s novel opens in the suburbs, the machine for living, and ends imagining their destruction – the bomb loos’d when a pilot on bombing practice accidentally touches the lever. In Auden’s poem, ‘Silence invaded the suburbs’ of Yeats’ mind.
In 1936, a young John Betjeman acted as augur of the metal birds himself in his poem on the ‘Death of King George V’. In this piece the shift between generations is less of a fierce earthquake than in Orwell’s novel.
The future will be one in which men don’t wear hats, and the past represented by the King’s ‘long dry’ stamp collection – but it is a poem of augury nonetheless:
Spirits of well-shot woodcock, partridge, snipe
Flutter and bear him up the Norfolk sky:
In that red house in a red mahogany book-case
The stamp collection waits with mounts long dry.The big blue eyes are shut which saw wrong clothing
And favourite fields and coverts from a horse;
Old men in country houses hear clocks ticking
Over thick carpets with a deadened force;Old men who never cheated, never doubted,
Communicated monthly, sit and stare
At the new suburb stretched out beyond the run-way
Where a young man lands hatless from the air.
As with Peake’s poem Betjeman points out the transposition of birds into planes, opening the first stanza with a surfeit of dead fowl. The plane is a private passenger flight, not one with an ‘unloos’d bomb’, but the signs of what is to come is all there, spelled out in the ‘new suburb stretched beyond the run-way’.
The birds are out of our hands, but to understand the future we must look to the skies.
EUROPEAN LITERATURE IN ENGLISH
a Continuing Education course by Dr James Bainbridge, University of Liverpool
20 weekly meetings from Friday 14 October, 10.30am-12.30pm
Enrolment closing date Tuesday 4 October, 2011. £126/£76
Four narratives from nineteenth century Europe present vibrant studies of family life and social progress: of passion, and jealousy, and deceit. Come and explore these startling stories; Tolstoy, Anna Karenina; Maupassant, Bel Ami; Balzac, Cousin Bette; Ibsen, The Wild Duck
15826
To enrol on the course, visit here: http://www.liv.ac.uk/conted/summer_2009/courses_in_liverpool/index.htm
IN BRILLIANCE PAST THE SOUTHPORT PIER
Tuesday 11th October, 2-4pm, Holy Trinity Parish Church, Formby
In 1942 the writer Mervyn Peake (author of the Gormenghast series) was a patient at the Southport Convalescent Hosiptal. Whilst there, his poetry explored both his confinement in the hospital and the freedom of the sea beyond its windows. This session, led by Dr James Bainbridge, will examine these poems in detail against Peake’s correspondence from this period of his life.
The University of Liverpool is a partner in the Sefton Coast Landscape Partnership Scheme and is developing a wide variety of lectures, workshops and part-time courses for both the general public and staff and volunteers. The scheme is supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund and events are free to Sefton residents.
Phone 0151 794 6900 for further information.
This summer’s reading has provided some unexpected bedfellows; books mainly read for a variety of university courses I’m teaching next semester, have brought up unlikely pairings – observations that are amusing me, but are unlikely ever to see the light of day either in class discussion or in print. There’s a massive knot of thought I want to pursue about Balzac and furniture, for instance, but which I fear might turn into a lifetime’s (somewhat unnecessary) work.
So, I’m going to use this blog for the moment to jot down some of these half-formed, rather straggly ideas, and in all probability never return to them. I don’t know if there’ll be anything here of interest to anyone else.
Crabbe, it is clear, was a pretty avid reader of Frances Burney, and there’s much to be made of the connections between tales such as ‘The Frank Courtship’, ‘Clelia’ and novels such as Evelina. Mr. Villars’s warnings of prudence at the start of the novel:
A youthful mind is seldom totally free from ambition; to curb that, is the first step to contentment, since to diminish expectation, is to increase enjoyment.
has that same sense of censorial behaviour that Crabbe both parodies (in the dangers of playing cards and ribbons) and yet, one feels, also heartily believes. For Crabbe, there’s a sense that one is an innocent until the age (off hand, I’d need to check for certainty) of twenty-two – that no great sin can be undertaken before that point, that one remains the blank slate until adulthood. In the case of Grimes, that’s a particularly interesting view, as we see the character’s youthful behaviour, but it seems likely that Crabbe still felt this was a formative stage, that his accountability would only come once he was an adult.
I find, with some degree of shame and inexperience, that I’m much fonder of children in literature than in life. There’s a strain of book-child that I’m fairly certain does not exist in the real world, but which I feel would ultimately improve the human race if it did. It’s the somewhat serious, somewhat sad child; the all-to-knowing child. Iris Murdoch paints them rather well, though I think my favourite of this kind appears in Bede’s Life of Saint Cuthbert – not Cuthbert himself who is depicted as sporting, and very much a typically boisterous kid, but a three-year-old who solemnly watches him play before bursting into tears, imbued with, and certain of, the knowledge that the older boy is to become a great holy man.
There is a sense of this in Balzac’s Cousin Bette with children able to control the hearts of men entering their old age. In Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child, children function in a very different way, their unknowingness being a foil to the candour of adult and university life. Daphne at the start is innocent witness to events beyond her knowledge – an erect penis mistaken for a cigar case seems pronounced in this new age peopled more by innocents than psychoanalysts. But later in the novel, her own child becomes witness to an event – the death of an adult – that he is given no framework to understand. The death seems to paralyse Wilfred in a childlike state for the rest of his life, his mother still exerting Villars-like influence upon his ambitions when he is well into his 50s.
The event of the child discovering an old, dead lady is a stark motif – itself somewhat Murdochian (I’m thinking the old man recalling killing a dog in The Nice and the Good – the stark transition between innocence and knowledge), though for me recalling a line by Alan Bennett which throughout my own childhood I rather perversely kept close to my heart–– and which now, even more perversely, I don’t seem to be able to find to quote it correctly, but which runs something like:
A: Have you ever seen a dead body before?
B: Only once. At school.
Which weirdly brings me back to Crabbe and images of dead children – in ‘Grimes’; in ‘The Voluntary Insane’, and of course, in his own wardrobe.
There are days in May when it is literally impossible for any person with health and leisure enough to walk into the country to believe in determinism, original sin, or the ultimate futility of all existence. There are days in autumn and winter when it is all but impossible not to think of these things.
Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies, p.239.
The Walker: Wolfgang Tillmans
18 September 2010 – 12 December 2010
Yesterday, to the Walker to view the Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition. It is Remembrance Sunday and, as I arrive, Orangemen have begun assembling on the steps to St George’s Hall to lay poppy wreaths at the cenotaph. Men in black suits, bowler hats and embroidered sashes across their shoulders – apparently engaged in their own separate, afternoon service.
The bowler hat, Tessimond’s emblem of the everyman, has become peculiarly their own. The reason why Orangemen wear bowler hats today, has shifted from the origins of the custom. They now wear the hat because they are Orangemen, a ritual shared only by fox hunters, equestrian sales-persons, cabaret stars, and nervous fancy-dressers undecided whether to say ‘Laurel’, ‘Oddjob’ or ‘that guy out of Clockwork Orange’ when they arrive.
The bowler has become particularised. This undermines its origins as the great millinery leveller of class; it now denotes sectarianism. Even the universality of remembrance can be made schismatic.
Initially the Tillmans exhibition offers no such divisions. The pieces are scattered amongst the gallery’s permanent collection responding to the works that are always on display. Rather than being grouped together in one room, this accordant approach seems to say ‘it’s all just the same – whether it’s a seventeenth century Dutch interior, or a fifteenth century altar piece – it’s all just things to look at.’
I like that.
What exhibitions like this have the power to do is to challenge the ways in which we look at historical works as well as inform the way we see the modern pieces. The Tillmans exhibition certainly does that; many of the pieces explore the physical material of the photograph – paper – which in the context of a room filled with images of Christ painted on rough bits of wood, has a pretty electric quality.
The main problem is that there is no freely available map to the exhibition, which in some ways creates a sense of Homeric wandering throughout these rooms, but ultimately is very annoying. There is an uncertain sense that you might have missed something that you went there to see. There is a guidebook available from the gift shop for £1.50 – which is a reasonable price – only this is where my issue with the exhibition began. I did not have £1.50.
Being able to locate the works in a free, public exhibition is not interpretation that should need to be paid for. It hampers accessibility. This should not be privately owned information.
The Walker is one of Britain’s most important national galleries. Not simply because of the staggering collection, but because of what the institution represents. In the 1980s, the militant council leader Derek Hatton threatened to sell off Liverpool’s collection. Thatcher’s response was to nationalise all of the city’s galleries and museums. In 2001, when the Labour government introduced free entry to the national collections, the city was suddenly blessed with seven freely accessible cultural venues. This has had an unmeasurable effect on Liverpool; unwittingly Thatcher’s actions have led to the free distribution of education and cultural nourishment amongst all people of the city. This should be a fundamental human right. Liverpool should be a model for all other places to follow.
The £1.50 is therefore a small quibble when the rest of the exhibition is, by act of parliament, free. I found however that it highlighted a key issue about some of the works. In a room filled with eighteenth century society portraiture, Tillmans has hung a large chromogenic print – Faltenwurf (Morgen) II (2009). It is a beautiful, textural piece. Filling the frame is a chair, over the back of this hangs a slightly crumpled t-shirt, inside out, seams showing. On the seat of the chair is a pair of navy-blue tracksuit bottoms. The positioning of these items perhaps implicitly recalls Sarah Lucas’s sexually provocative sculpture Pauline Bunny (1997), though the setting in Tillmans’s photograph is perfectly naturalistic. There is no reason why this should not be straightforward documentary.
Hanging the piece in this room, as Tillmans’s commentary on the wall makes clear, draws parallels between the use of textiles in the photograph and in the eighteenth century portraits around it.
‘Faltenwurf’ is one of those peculiarly brilliant German words that sums up an idea that English fumbles into a sentence. I suppose, ‘drapery’ is close, but it is not that. The Faltenwurf of Joshua Reynolds, Joseph Wright of Derby and Thomas Gainsborough that surround this photograph, shows the class and status of the sitters. Wright is known to have borrowed clothing and jewellery from his clients to include in their portraits, though the general custom of the period – as particularly prevalent in the works of Reynolds – are for these fabrics to have no personal connection to the individual portrayed. They are simply props from the studio that reappear in portrait after portrait. Like the bowler hat, they are identifiers of a specific group rather than a specific individual. Rich folds of taffeta and silks, all in abundance, state plainly that these are figures with a great deal of cash.
It is fetishistism. The physical object is used as a vehicle for a larger idea and feeling. It simplifies the vast and complicated human character into a series of physical commodities. In Tillmans’s Faltenwurf, this is taken to a greater level, by removing the sitter from the portrait completely. His work is no less a portrait than these others, but in common with the historical society paintings, the image of the sitter is a somewhat two-dimensional reduction. What do we take from Reynolds’s countless paintings of the daughters of Dukes? That the women are fair, and lovely, and wealthy, and young? Though doubtlessly they were, this seems a divisively simplistic rendering of all these personalities.
What do we assume of Tillmans’s absent sitter? The inside out t-shirt placed on the chair implies disrobing. The man who has worn these clothes is now not in them, and this gives an implicitly sexual air to the scene. The creases are not abundant folds, but suggest wear. They are the creases of a garment that has not been ironed since it was washed.
The clothes in the photograph do not suggest wealth. They are cheaply produced. They are practical, perhaps, but they are signifiers of mass-production; of sports shops with endless discount sales. This is sportswear, but it is not the sportswear worn by a professional athlete.
In the far left of the picture, from one of the tracksuit pockets, protrudes a red Biro pen. I found myself wondering about this object most in the picture. It is the cheapest available type of pen, but that it is red is curious. The pen-user has either made a specific choice to write in red, or they are precluded from choice. Conceivably, these are the clothes of a P.E. teacher – but I am not entirely convinced by this. The bottom right of the image has a door hinge. It is heavily painted over.
‘There is this disparity in class between my picture and these society portraits, if one can call them that’, Tillmans says in the text panel beside the picture. Reynolds’s folds are those of the landed gentry, Tillmans’s are those of the working class male. Yet it is more than that – Reynolds’s folds are dressed, Tillmans’s are undressed. Like Reynolds, Tillmans celebrates these objects, but he also sexualises them. There is something voyeuristic about the photograph. It is, in a sense, a celebration and eroticism of the sitter’s poverty. The sitters in Reynolds’s paintings hold the power through their dress, Tillmans’s sitter is nude of his.
Of course this is not unique to Tillmans. There is a strong theme through gay culture of glorifying the working-class male. At weekends City bankers go to clubs dressed as working class skinheads; countless men fetishise cheap sportswear and the attire of builders and road diggers. Masculinity, held up for obsessive glorification, is thought by many to be most potent in the man who has the poorest paid occupation.
Yet this image is as thinly drawn as the fair and lovely Duke’s daughter. In another room of the exhibition one wall is dominated by the huge black and white work, Empire (Punk) (2005). The piece is an enlarged fax of one of Tillmans’s early photographs. It is a fitting metaphor for the punk movement; the modern punk does not respond to the same pressures and conflicts of the first punks. They are a reproduction of the image, applying themselves to specific fetishised objects in the same way that the Orangeman wears the bowler hat.
On another wall of this room a small photograph of a market trader at his stall, Cameron (2007). Handsome, almost provocatively cruising the viewer, thumb by the broad beans, ‘Red Oak Lettuce £1’. Everything’s for sale.
This room is displayed with other works depicting people working; most strikingly is William Hamo Thornycroft’s life-size bronze The Mower (1894). It is a staggeringly homoerotic work. Shirtless, save for a leather strap, one thumb enticingly lowering the waist of his trousers, the sculpture is a bucolic fantasy of the farm labourer as a sexually potent symbol of health and happiness. He is not engaged in work but is relaxed in leisure. He enjoys the sun upon his muscular chest. He does not suffer from the physical deformities common to his class at this time, he seems unmarked by the long workless winter that has gone before – he does not, in fact, look poor at all.
In ‘The Village’ Crabbe writes of the artist’s portrayal of working class figures in this way:
From this chief cause these idle praises spring,
That themes so easy few forbear to sing;
For no deep thought the trifling subjects ask;
To sing of shepherds is an easy task:
The happy youth assumes the common strain,
A nymph his mistress, and himself a swain;
With no sad scenes he clouds his tuneful prayer,
But all, to look like her, is painted fair.
I grant indeed that fields and flocks have charms
For him that grazes or for him that farms;
But when amid such pleasing scenes I trace
The poor laborious natives of the place,
And see the mid-day sun, with fervid ray,
On their bare heads and dewy temples play;
While some, with feebler heads and fainter hearts,
Deplore their fortune, yet sustain their parts
Then shall I dare these real ills to hide
In tinsel trappings of poetic pride?
Crabbe was concerned with the fact that labourers were not the ‘happy youths’, ‘nymphs’ and ‘swains’ that poetry supposed them to be. Such works ignore the social injustices that shape these figures, and to some extent are complicit in their oppression.
Tillmans’s images continue this tradition of the pastoral fantasy, though in a post-industrial age the shepherd has been replaced by the scally. They are problematic subjects, made more so by the exhibition’s assumption that its visitors will have, and should have to have, £1.50 to spend on a guide.
In the past couple of weeks I’ve been summarizing accounts of writers who claimed Crabbe as an influence. Joyce. Forster. Pound. Most recently I’ve been trying to track down any physical proof of V.S. Pritchett’s claim that Turgenev translated Crabbe into Russian. Turgenev certainly knew of, and liked, Crabbe’s poetry. The Suffolk clergyman had been celebrated in a series of essays by Turgenev’s friend Alexander Druzhinin, who held him up as a model for the Russian writers to emulate:
In order to curb the flood of false naturalness it is most useful to study the genius of the sensible naturalists, among whom Crabbe […] holds first place.
However, whether or not Turgenev actually translated him, I can find no evidence, and for the moment need to lay the matter to one side.
In a sense it’s a strange thing to be doing, rooting through people’s letters and libraries for evidence of having read one poet. Finding a reference doesn’t necessarily mean they liked him, it certainly doesn’t mean he influenced their work. But in some instances it’s clear; Dickens reworks an entire Crabbe poem into a short story. James Joyce is effusive in his praise. In other cases, George Eliot say, remembering reading him as a youth, you have to recognise that he was just another writer amongst many who may, or may not, have made a mark.
And then you come across something like this, and you wish more people did it, an open admission: future reader, don’t look at me, I know nothing of Crabbe:
And I can’t intend to funk it: I mean I will, if you will permit, be really serious and utter what I have gathered in my journey as to the sad and unillumined thing that is a life devoted to the humaner letters. I don’t know who you are. You may, I mean, be intending to devote yourselves to studious careers— to casting light on the love letters of Keats, the autobiography of Chaucer or the bibliography of Crabbe. In that case I have nothing to say to you: those are, what again the late Mr. James would have called, parages I know nothing of, for I have concerned myself in life solely with literature as a means of expression. So, if you are the future archivists, librarians or text emendators of the world I can be of no use to you. But I hope that some of you – indeed I hope still more that all of you – cherish within your hearts the ambition to hand on the sacred fire of imaginative writing.
“The Literary Life” a lecture given by Ford Madox Ford
Here Begins Our Lasting Joy
There are few things that have ever brought me so much pleasure as The Beiderbecke Trilogy, written by Alan Plater who has died today aged 75.
The series are a curious beast; intelligent, warm, funny (though gently so, rarely displaying much effort in reaching for the jokes), political, plotted as if by slight-of-hand – in short, it is extraordinary, the most sophisticated kind of writing, and yet also an exercise in realizing a lost craftsmanship. This is the television of dry-stone-wallers, wicker-weavers and the cottage pew. In some respects it appears to be Last of the Summer Wine with a moral and social conscience – but that appearance is in itself deceptive. It is so very, very much more.
There is something that Stephen Poliakoff says about what he calls ‘slow television’; that rarely in the current day do producers allow a programme – a limited unit of time – to linger on any single visual scene. It’s easy to understand why this is the case, that in a tightly packed schedule, it seems obvious that every moment must be justified to funders by something happening. Silence, stillness – well, that just seems a waste – and yet it is an insult to imagine that audiences can only read the things that are being said, that they only respond to plot, and dialogue, and flashing lights, and speed. Bleak House at break-neck speed, Little Dorrit in little snatches – great, but it’s not the only way, and it reduces the viewer’s need to consider the events and the non-events on our screens.
Which is why Beiderbecke was brilliant. In 1986, Plater dared to devote several minutes of a television programme to establishing shots of the windows of a modern comprehensive school. Written down, that doesn’t sound much. These images, the sight of children walking inside cages of uniform glass – evocative of Hitchcock’s opening to North by North West (an allusion picked up on in the 1988 Beiderbecke Connection: “This usually reminds us of a film”) – say so much about Britain in the twentieth century, and yet they say nothing, they are merely accompanied by a soundtrack of Bix Beiderbecke’s “bullets shot from a bell.”
There are so many brilliantly judged moments; there is a shot in The Beiderbecke Connection which pans through windows as Trevor tucks ‘first-born’ into bed, taking in Jill leaving the house to eventually show the yellow van driving away in the distance, which parodies Orson Welles perfectly, but with all of the skill of the original. There is the slowest car chase imaginable that turns into some Busby Berkeley routine from above. Big Al quoting Henry VI, which is such an affirming moment of there being goodness in the world: “Here begins our lasting joy”.
The programmes are full of such allusions, my favourite being in the 1987 Beiderbecke Tapes where they encounter an American ex-serviceman who speaks only in Fitzgeraldean aphorisms. Sitting upon a bench in Edinburgh in the rain, he says of Jill and Trevor:
I believe those kids already found themselves a bit of action. Sweetly, and tenderly, and in the afternoon.
It’s a gorgeous line. I’ve not been able to track down whether it is a quotation from something, but suspect it was original to Plater who had the most tremendous ear for dialogue. Either way it’s very, very good and deserves to be remembered. It all does. It’s really a most brilliant thing.
“The Interdicted Space”: Dreaming and Madness in the Poetry of George Crabbe
EXTRACT 1
[…] a melancholy or half-mad person is somewhat in the same condition with him who, not being thoroughly awake, is doubtful whether his dream be not true or something real. The difference between dreaming and madness, (which is nothing material in the present case) seems to be only this; that the bodily organs […] of mad-men are shattered, or put out of their natural frame and order: in dreamers, there is a stupor which possesseth them. But the effects are the same […]
Zachary Mayne, Two Dissertations Concerning Sense, and the Imagination: With an Essay on Consciousness,
(London: J. Tonson, 1728), p.188.
EXTRACT 2
Come near,—I’ll softly speak the rest!—
Alas! ‘tis known to all the Crowd,
Her guilty Love was all confest;
And his, who so much Truth avow’d,
My faithless Friends.—In Pleasure proud
I sat, when these curs’d Tidings came;
Their Guilt, their Flight was told aloud,
And Envy smil’d to hear my Shame!
I call’d on Vengeance; at the Word
She came:—Can I the Deed forget?
I held the Sword, th’accursed Sword,
The Blood of his false Heart made wet;
And that fair Victim paid her Debt,
She pin’d, she died, she loath’d to live;—
I saw her dying—see her yet:
Fair fallen Thing! my Rage forgive!
‘Sir Eustace Grey’, 116-131.
EXTRACT 3
Those Cherubs still, my Life to bless,
Were left: Could I my Fears remove,
Sad fears that check’d each fond Caress,
And poison’d all parental Love;
Yet that, with jealous Feelings strove,
And would at last have won my Will,
Had I not, Wretch! Been doom’d to prove
Th’ Extremes of mortal Good and Ill.
In Youth! Health! Joy! In Beauty’s Pride!
They droop’d: as Flowers when blighted bow,
The dire Infection came:—They died,
And I was curs’d— as I am now——
Nay, frown not, angry Friend, — allow,
That I was deeply, sorely tried;
Hear then, and you must wonder how
I could such Storms and Strifes abide.
‘Sir Eustace Grey’, 132-146.
EXTRACT 4
Then I was cast from out my State;
Two Fiends of Darkness led my Way;
They wak’d me early, watch’d me late,
My dread by Night, my Plague by Day!
Oh! I was made their Sport, their Play,
Through many a stormy troubled Year,
And how they us’d their passive Prey;
Is sad to tell: but you shall hear.
‘Sir Eustace Grey’, 164-179.
EXTRACT 5
There are two senses, tho’ very nearly allied, in which the expression Darkness and Light are to be understood: Darkness signifying to us the dominion of ignorance and sin, and Light that of wisdom and virtue; and in a second though closely connected sense, the evil spirits, and above all the first and greatest of these are called the powers of darkness, and the Prince of these powers. While the heavenly company of angels and ministering spirits are the children of light.
National Library of Scotland, John Murray Archive, MS. 42099.
EXTRACT 6
A task very difficult, and if the presumption of the attempt may find pardon, it will not be refused to the failure of
the poet. It is said of our Shakespeare, respecting madness;
“In that circle none dare walk but he:”–
yet be it granted to one, who dares not pass the boundary fixed for common minds, at least to step near to the tremendous verge and form some idea of the terrors that are stalking in the interdicted space.
Preface, Poems, (1807)
EXTRACT 7
I returned late last night, and my reflections were as cheerful as such company could make them, and not, I am afraid, of the most humiliating kind; yet, for the first time these many nights, I was incommoded by dreams, such as would cure vanity for a time in any mind where they could gain admission. Some of Baxter’s mortifying spirits whispered very singular combinations. None, indeed, that actually did happen in the very worst of times, but still with a formidable resemblance.
George Crabbe, 21st July 1817, in Selected Letters and Journals of George Crabbe, p. 211.
The Rejected Member’s Wife
We shall see her no more
On the balcony,
Smiling, while hurt, at the roar
As of surging sea
From the stormy sturdy band
Who have doomed her lord’s cause,
Though she waves her little hand
As it were applause.
Here will be candidates yet,
And candidates’ wives,
Fervid with zeal to set
Their ideals on our lives:
Here will come market-men
On the market-days,
Here will clash now and then
More such party assays.
And the balcony will fill
When such times are renewed,
And the throng in the street will thrill
With to-day’s mettled mood;
But she will no more stand
In the sunshine there,
With that wave of her white-gloved hand,
And that chestnut hair.
Thomas Hardy, January 1906.
JRWB 