Birthday, Rain

 Vladimir Nabokov was born on this day in 1899, though by the old calendar it would have been the 10th of April, and the following year it became the 23rd, so he celebrated his first birthday on our St George's Day. Anyway, here in England it's been a day (and night) of incessant rain, so here is a fitting poem by Nabokov, written in 1956...

Rain

How mobile is the bed on these nights of gesticulating trees when the rain clatters fast, the tin-toy rain with dapper hoof trotting upon an endless roof, travelling into the past. Upon old roads the steeds of rain slip and slow down and speed again through many a tangled year; but they can never reach the last dip at the bottom of the past because the sun is there.

'A Man Was Drawing Near to Me'

 This morning, I thought I'd try another Blindfold Poetry Selection. The slim volume I blindly took from the shelf turned out to be A Choice of Thomas Hardy's Poems – an attractive little book edited by Geoffrey Grigson, illustrated by Glynn Thomas, and published by Macmillan – and the poem it fell open at was 'A Man Was Drawing Near to Me'. I hadn't remembered reading it before, though I must have done: once, years ago, I even embarked on a doomed venture to read the Collected Poems, a volume of some 900 pages. Hardy, like many another poet, wrote too much, but the best of it is, for all its sometimes tortuous diction, very fine indeed. 'A Man Was Drawing Near to Me' is a haunting, mysterious affair – who is this man drawing near, and what does his 'gaze that bore My destiny' reveal? It could almost have been written by Walter de la Mare, though the result would have been smoother and more musical. The place names, by the way, are all from north Cornwall...

    On that gray night of mournful drone,
    Apart from aught to hear, to see,
    I dreamt not that from shires unknown
    In gloom, alone,
    By Halworthy,
    A man was drawing near to me.

    I'd no concern at anything,
    No sense of coming pull-heart play;
    Yet, under the silent outspreading
    Of even's wing
    Where Otterham lay,
    A man was riding up my way.

    I thought of nobody – not of one,
    But only of trifles – legends, ghosts –
    Though, on the moorland dim and dun
    That travellers shun
    About these coasts,
    The man had passed Tresparret Posts.

    There was no light at all inland,
    Only the seaward pharos-fire,
    Nothing to let me understand
    That hard at hand
    By Hennett Byre
    The man was getting nigh and nigher.

    There was a rumble at the door,
    A draught disturbed the drapery,
    And but a minute passed before,
    With gaze that bore
    My destiny,
    The man revealed himself to me.

London, Glass

 

Yesterday I was in London – always something of a shock to the system these days ('I had not thought death had undone so many', etc.) – to have lunch with an old friend. Afterwards we crossed the river to have a look at the Glass Heart exhibition at Two Temple Place – or rather, to visit Two Temple Place, which is always a pleasure: the extraordinary neo-Gothic house built for William Waldorf Astor in 1895 is like nothing else in London (or at least nothing open to the public – and indeed Temple Place wasn't until quite recently). The Glass Heart exhibition was interesting, mostly for some informative stuff about glass making and the glass industry, rather than what was on show. This included rather too much lumpish and unattractive recent work, and too little in the way of traditional stained or painted glass, though the Wahls, father and daughter, get a look-in, and there are bits of Morris & Co. material, mostly designs and sketches (and, in a different line, some nice engraved glass). Of course the best stained glass is, by its nature, in situ, and best seen in situ. Indeed, I found the two great windows that are in situ in the great hall of Temple Place the most enjoyable things I saw. They are by Clayton and Bell, and represent Sunrise (the East window) and Sunset (the West). And now I am back in Lichfield, with the cathedral and its wonderful Flemish glass ten minutes' walk away...

Chasing the Devil Out of Texas

 Today is the centenary of the birth, in Vinton, Louisiana, of Clarence 'Gatemouth' Brown (who got his nickname from a teacher who said he had 'a voice like a gate'). Brown was a popular performer but also something of a musician's musician, a versatile multi-instrumentalist – guitar, fiddle, drums, piano – who worked in a variety of genres, though he was at heart a blues man: he won a Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album in 1983 (for Alright Again!). Here he is showing he could also play a mean country fiddle – and still find time to enjoy a few puffs on his pipe during the keyboard solo...

Rowland Suddaby

 This image from the golden age of motoring – an age when oil companies commissioned quality artwork (and quality books, in the form of the wonderful Shell Guides, edited by Johns Betjeman and Piper) – caught my eye today. It shows Folly House in Darley Abbey, a place I've visited a few times: it's a village in the Derwent valley that is now part of the city of Derby and has some fine buildings dating from its 18th-century industrial heyday. Of the medieval abbey little remains, and Folly House I don't recognise at all –maybe I missed it? Adjoining Darley Abbey is the magnificent Darley Park, one of the country's finest public parks (IMHO). 
  Anyway, I like the picture, which looks rather like a cross between Eric Ravilious and recent David Hockney. The artist's name was new to me – Rowland Suddaby. He is, it seems, a pretty minor figure, with a decidedly meagre Wikipedia entry and not a lot more information online, though his pictures are dotted about the country here and there. His dates are 1912 to 1972, he studied at Sheffield Art College, moved to London, where he had some small success, then settled in Suffolk. He was a founder of the Colchester Art Society, whose exhibitors included Edward Bawden, John Nash and Cedric Morris. Suddaby worked largely in landscape, painting in a distinctive brushy style and favouring bare trees (rather crudely drawn) and grey skies. Along the way, though, he developed another speciality – arrangements of flowers placed in a window against a view. These, I think, work very well. Here are two I particularly like: first, a Window at 5 Portland Place (overlooking the BBC, All Souls and the then Langham Hotel) – 

And this one, with a more rural (and vernal) view, is titled Flowers in a Window –

And here, for good measure is a bright Still Life with Flowers –

Daffodils, and the Walter Scott Publishing Company

 The daffodils are largely faded or gone, but there's still time for Robert Herrick's beautiful lyric, 'To Daffodils' – 

Fair Daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon;
As yet the early-rising sun
Has not attain'd his noon.
Stay, stay,
Until the hasting day
Has run
But to the even-song;
And, having pray'd together, we
Will go with you along.
We have short time to stay, as you,
We have as short a spring;
As quick a growth to meet decay,
As you, or anything.
We die
As your hours do, and dry
Away,
Like to the summer's rain;
Or as the pearls of morning's dew,
Ne'er to be found again.

My Herrick is an attractive little volume – date unknown, probably around 1900 – in the Canterbury Poets series, published by the Walter Scott Publishing Company at one shilling (5p in today's money) each. The company had nothing to do with the famous Walter Scott, but was founded by a Newcastle man of the same name, whose mission was to bring cheap but high-quality books – covering literature, ideas, history and much else – to the common man. The company was such a success that Scott, having started with nothing, died a millionaire.
The back pages of my Herrick volume give some idea of the range of the company's publications, and in doing so provide a fascinating snapshot of the mass-market end of the publishing industry at the turn of the last century. As well as the Canterbury Poets – over 100 volumes, each with an authoritative introduction (by Ernest Rhys in the case of Herrick) – the Scott Library (another hundred-plus volumes, slightly more expensively produced at one shilling and six pence) is also listed. This includes essays, letters, philosophy, and classics in translation. Anyone reading through both these libraries would end up well read indeed. And if they wanted to find out more about the lives of the authors, they could move on to the Great Writers series, each with a bibliography by J.P. Anderson of the British Museum. The life of Johnson, I notice, is by one Colonel F. Grant (who he?), but others are by more familiar names, including W.M. Rossetti, Edmund Gosse and Richard Garnett. Also advertised are 'Booklets by Count Tolstoy' (his sententious essays, attractively packaged) and, on a very different plane, The Useful Red Series, factual works on such topics as bridge, indigestion, consumption and choosing a piano. Finally, one volume gets a full-page announcement to itself: billed as 'A Book for Every Dinner Table', it is titled Musicians' Wit, Humour and Anecdote: Being On Dits of Composers, Singers and Instrumentalists of All Times, by Frederick J. Crowest, profusely illustrated with quaint drawings by J.P. Donne. 'Among the hundreds of stories abounding in wit and pointed repartee which the volume contains, will be found anecdotes of famous musicians of all countries and periods.' I think my own dinner table will get by perfectly well without this particular volume. 

Birthday

 It's Samuel Beckett's birthday today (born 1906). I would have thought I'd have marked the date quite often on the blog, but it seems I've only done so once. Since that was in 2009 – fifteen years ago, long enough for everyone (myself included) to have forgotten – I take the liberty of reprinting that piece. It has some choice quotations in it –

'Well, today is Samuel Beckett's birthday - he liked to claim that it was Good Friday the 13th, but that happy coincidence didn't occur in 1906, his natal year. It is also - despite all evidence to the contrary here in grey cold drizzly London - Spring, a season which always brings to mind the 'brief statement' (26 unparagraphed pages) made by the gentleman in the green baize apron in Watt, before he leaves Mr Knott's house, the gentleman who of course regrets 'everything' and who takes a dim view of the natural world and the turning seasons -
"The crocuses and the larch turning green every year a week before the others and the pastures red with uneaten sheep's placentas and the long summer days and the new-mown hay and the wood-pigeon in the morning and the cuckoo in the afternoon and the corncrake in the evening and the wasps in the jam and the smell of the gorse and the look of the gorse and the apples falling and the children walking in the dead leaves and the larch turning brown a week before the others and the chestnuts falling and the howling winds and the sea breaking over the pier and the first fires and the hooves on the road and the consumptive postman whistling 'The Roses Are Blooming in Picardy' and the standard oil-lamp and of course the snow and to be sure the sleet and bless your heart the slush and every fourth year the February debacle and the endless April showers and the crocuses and then the whole bloody business starting over again."
  The gentleman may regard the whole business as 'an excrement', 'a turd' - but isn't this an extraordinarily vivid and evocative piece of nature writing? In fact, Beckett often demonstrates a remarkably sharp eye (and ear) for landscape and close-up detail, for the sights and sounds of nature - the bleak landscapes of Molloy, for example (clearly rooted, as is the passage above, in the author's memories of Ireland), are brilliantly realised and linger long in the mind. Perhaps Beckett's attention to nature is all the sharper for his sense of man's inescapable alienation from it - it is a scene across which a man passes but of which he can never fully be (or feel himself) a part. There's another lovely passage earlier in the gentleman's monologue -
"The long blue days for his head, for his side, and the little paths for his feet, and all the brightness to touch and gather. Through the grass the little mosspaths, bony with old roots, and the trees sticking up, and the flowers sticking up, and the fruit hanging down, and the white exahusted butterflies, and the birds never the same darting all day into hiding..."

It seems to me that among Beckett's less celebrated talents is that of a brilliant, if eccentric, reluctant and against-the-grain, nature writer.'