Author: The Good Reader

Corporal Stare by Robert Graves

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Following on from my previous post, it appears that Remembrance Day events will now be allowed to go ahead this coming Sunday, as long as they are outdoors and follow social distancing rules. Don’t they usually take place outdoors anyway? I suppose the point is that no church services can take place.

So here is another poem from one of the poets most closely associated with the first world war. It was written in 1917. Graves later gave a more detailed account of the real life incident that inspired the poem in his famous prose memoir, Goodbye to All That. He writes there: “Ghosts were numerous in France at that time”.

Corporal Stare by Robert Graves

Back from the line one night in June,
I gave a dinner at Bethune —
Seven courses, the most gorgeous meal
Money could buy or batman steal.
Five hungry lads welcomed the fish
With shouts that nearly cracked the dish;
Asparagus came with tender tops,
Strawberries in cream, and mutton chops.
Said Jenkins, as my hand he shook,
“They’ll put this in the history book.”
We bawled Church anthems in choro
Of Bethlehem and Hermon snow,
With drinking songs, a jolly sound
To help the good red Pommard round.
Stories and laughter interspersed,
We drowned a long La Bassée thirst —
Trenches in June make throats damned dry.
Then through the window suddenly,
Badge, stripes and medals all complete,
We saw him swagger up the street,
Just like a live man — Corporal Stare!
Stare! Killed last May at Festubert.
Caught on patrol near the Boche wire,
Torn horribly by machine-gun fire!
He paused, saluted smartly, grinned,
Then passed away like a puff of wind,
Leaving us blank astonishment.
The song broke, up we started, leant
Out of the window-nothing there,
Not the least shadow of Corporal Stare,
Only a quiver of smoke that showed
A fag-end dropped on the silent road.

Peace by Walter de la Mare

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Remembrance Sunday is going to be a bit odd this year. The latest lockdown means that the familiar ceremonies at war memorials in towns and villages up and down the country will not now take place. We already knew that the ceremony at the Cenotaph in Whitehall was going to feature the politicians but not the public, and that there would be no march past. That seems a pity, as 2020 marks the centenary of the installation of the permanent memorial in Whitehall.

Here is a poem that does not fall into the usual definition of “first world war poetry”, as it was not written by a combatant and does not deal with life in the trenches. It was published in Walter de la Mare’s 1918 collection Motley.

De la Mare was already in his forties when he wrote it; how must he have felt twenty years later, when the peace he described was about to be shattered once again?  

Peace by Walter de la Mare

Night is o’er England, and the winds are still;
Jasmine and honeysuckle steep the air;
Softly the stars that are all Europe’s fill
Her heaven-wide dark with radiancy fair;
That shadowed moon now waxing in the west
Stirs not a rumour in her tranquil seas;
Mysterious sleep has lulled her heart to rest,
Deep even as theirs beneath her churchyard trees.

Secure, serene; dumb now the night-hawk’s threat;
The guns’ low thunder drumming o’er the tide;
The anguish pulsing in her stricken side….
All is at peace….But, never, heart, forget:
For this her youngest, best, and bravest died,
These bright dews once were mixed with bloody
      sweat.

The Temple by E F Benson

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The Temple by E F Benson was published in a magazine in 1924, and later collected in the volume Spook Stories in 1928. It begins, as so often with Benson, with two youngish, well-off bachelors deciding to take an extended holiday in a pleasant part of the country. It is Cornwall this time, and the two men are soon installed in a large seaside hotel, with its own golf links between the beach and the hotel grounds.

The narrator is a writer and his companion is an archaeologist who plans to investigate some of the antiquities of the county. The local people are superstitious about a nearby stone circle, believing it to be a pagan temple. The archaeologist says it can’t be, because the arrangement of the stones is wrong, but more importantly, it lacks a sacrificial stone in the centre. He is sure there must be a temple site somewhere in the neighbourhood and he is determined to find it.

Later, the two men are aware of an ominous atmosphere while walking in a wood: “. . . I was conscious of some gathering oppression of the spirit. It was an uncomfortable place, it seemed thick with unseen presences.” They think nothing of it, emerging back into the sunshine to come across a pretty cottage that appears to be uninhabited. The hotel is beginning to fill up for the season. Would it be possible to stay in the cottage instead? Enquiries are made and the cottage is indeed available at a knock-down price because the previous occupant committed suicide.

The wood on the hill overlooks the cottage. What are the lights that can be seen moving about in it at night? And just what is the large stone that forms part of the kitchen floor of the cottage?

It turns out that the cottage has been built in the centre of the pagan temple, with disastrous consequences. This is not entirely a surprise to the reader, and as I’ve said before, it’s not really suspense that is the appeal of a Benson story, but the sense of inexorable progress towards a malign fate that cannot be avoided.

He also has a wonderful gift for conveying the sense of place in his elegant, precise prose. His stories are often set in a remote part of the English countryside, with a local large town, such as Hastings, often given its real name but the village or hamlet where the action takes place given a fictional name, allowing Benson some room for invention.

The Temple fits neatly into the genre that is today known as Folk Horror. The central idea is also not as far-fetched as it might appear. After all, something similar happened at Avebury in Wiltshire, where the stones of the circle were knocked down in the eighteenth century and used to build houses in the village that grew up inside it. I suspect Benson might have been inspired by the restoration at Avebury that was beginning at around the time he wrote his story.

I’ve also written about Pirates, another tale by Benson.

The Sad Variety by Nicholas Blake

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The Sad Variety is Nicholas Blake’s penultimate novel featuring the detective Nigel Strangeways. It was published in 1964, so at this point the series had been going for almost thirty years, yet there is no sign of any decline in Blake’s powers or interest in his characters. This story is a compelling mixture of Golden Age detection and the harsh realities of the Cold War.

Here, Strangeways is asked by the security service to keep an eye on an important scientist, Professor Wragsby, who is spending the Christmas holiday at a guesthouse with his wife Elena and eight-year-old daughter Lucy. The girl is kidnapped by two British communists working for a Russian agent. She is ransomed, not for money, but for secrets. So far, so obvious you might think, the story will concern the attempts to get her back.

Things become far more complicated very quickly. The kidnappers arrive in the district with a small boy in tow. They cut and dye Lucy’s hair and substitute her for the boy, so as not to arouse suspicion. What will they do with the rather mysterious boy? It becomes obvious to Strangeways that the kidnappers must have a contact at the guesthouse and he has to try and work out who it is.

The guests are a mixed bunch. There’s a retired admiral and his wife, a young CND supporter and her beatnik boyfriend and a rather bland single man. They all have their secrets, as Strangeways discovers. The revelation when it comes is a real surprise to the reader, linked, as it is, to another jaw-dropping plot twist.

Lucy is a very intelligent and resourceful girl and much of the story is seen from her point of view. She comes up with a clever way of communicating her situation. Blake had written about resourceful young people before, in his 1948 children’s book The Otterbury Incident, published under his real name, C Day Lewis.

This novel is a masterclass in increasing tension and sense of threat and it becomes a real page-turner as the plot reaches its climax.

It takes place at a very specific time, the hard winter of 1962/63. The snowbound countryside, described with Blake’s customary poetic skill, almost becomes another character in the story. The really clever thing is the way the wintry conditions that make it so difficult to get anywhere are integrated into the plot. For example, a body lies undiscovered in a snowdrift, and the Russian agent thinks he is about to be arrested, not realising that the soldiers are only there to clear the roads.

Day Lewis was one of the political poets of the 1930s and the novel represents his final break with left-wing politics. It’s no surprise that the Hungarian uprising of 1956 features so prominently here, because this was the event that caused many former left-wing sympathisers such as Day Lewis to take a long, hard look at Russia and the inhumanity of the communist regime.

The Russian agent Petrov is a nasty piece of work, who enjoys violence for its own sake. Paul, the British communist, has been blackmailed by the Russians into taking part in the plot because of his homosexuality. He is thoroughly disillusioned with the Party: “I don’t set myself up as a model of the virtues, but at least I don’t pretend that whatever suits my book is the truth, like you and your bloody Party do.”          

The Burning of the Leaves by Laurence Binyon

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I have written before about the way in which familiar novels, stories and poems have taken on new meanings with the unforeseen events that we have all been living through this year.

This poem is a new discovery for me. How did I not find it until now? It is regarded as one of the best about the impact of the blitz on London in 1941, yet lines leap out from it as if they were written recently about what has been going on these last few months.

It is a long poem in five sections, too long to quote in full here, so I have just included the first two sections. There are lines that seem to me startlingly appropriate for the situation we find ourselves in now. I think that Binyon, who was not a young man at this point, poured all his dismay at what he saw happening around him in London into this poem.

The second part describes the sadness of the closed and empty theatres during the blitz. It is sobering to read this during a week when it seems that cinemas may have closed forever.

A poem for this season of autumn then, and truly a poem whose time has come again.

The Burning of the Leaves by Laurence Binyon

I
Now is the time for the burning of the leaves.
They go to the fire; the nostril pricks with smoke
Wandering slowly into a weeping mist.
Brittle and blotched, ragged and rotten sheaves!
A flame seizes the smouldering ruin and bites
On stubborn stalks that crackle as they resist.

The last hollyhock’s fallen tower is dust;
All the spices of June are a bitter reek,
All the extravagant riches spent and mean.
All burns! The reddest rose is a ghost;
Sparks whirl up, to expire in the mist: the wild
Fingers of fire are making corruption clean.

Now is the time for stripping the spirit bare,
Time for the burning of days ended and done,
Idle solace of things that have gone before:
Rootless hope and fruitless desire are there;
Let them go to the fire, with never a look behind.
The world that was ours is a world that is ours no more.

They will come again, the leaf and the flower, to arise
From squalor of rottenness into the old splendour,
And magical scents to a wondering memory bring;
The same glory, to shine upon different eyes.
Earth cares for her own ruins, naught for ours.
Nothing is certain, only the certain spring.

II
Never was anything so deserted
As this dim theatre
Now, when in passive greyness the remote
Morning is here,
Daunting the wintry glitter of the pale,
Half-lit chandelier.

Never was anything disenchanted
As this silence!
Gleams of soiled gilding on curved balconies
Empty; immense
Dead crimson curtain, tasselled with its old
And staled pretence.

Nothing is heard but a shuffling and knocking
Of mop and mat,
Where dustily two charwomen exchange
Leisurely chat.
Stretching and settling to voluptuous sleep
Curls a cat.

The voices are gone, the voices
That laughed and cried.
It is as if the whole marvel of the world
Had blankly died,
Exposed, inert as a drowned body left
By the ebb of the tide.

Beautiful as water, beautiful as fire,
The voices came,
Made the eyes to open and the ears to hear,
The hand to lie intent and motionless,
The heart to flame,
The radiance of reality was there,
Splendour and shame.

Slowly an arm dropped, and an empire fell.
We saw, we knew.
A head was lifted, and a soul was freed.
Abysses opened into heaven and hell.
We heard, we drew
Into our thrilled veins courage of the truth
That searched us through.

But the voices are all departed,
The vision dull.
Daylight disconsolately enters
Only to annul.
The vast space is hollow and empty
As a skull.



Writers react to the rise of the motor car

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At the end of Patrick Hamilton’s novel Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse, there is an extraordinary passage in which he depicts the rise of the motorcar as a plague of black beetles spreading out all over England. The beetles have taken over and made human beings their slaves and attendants. The novel was published in 1953 but set in 1928.

Hamilton had his own reasons for disliking cars. He had been badly injured in a hit-and-run incident in the 1930s. To ram the point home, he gave his villainous anti-hero, Gorse, an association with cars and the motor trade. There is something of this idea that cars may not altogether be a good thing in Nicholas Blake’s 1938 novel The Beast Must Die. The hit-and-run driver who kills a young boy and tries to cover it up is a garage owner. This novel was inspired by a “near miss” incident involving the author’s own young son.

In 1927, H V Morton had published an account of his travels round the country, In Search of England. In his foreword, he was much more enthusiastic about the rise of the petrol engine than Hamilton or Blake. He sees the provision of coach services and “the popularity of the cheap motor car” as reviving road travel and making remote areas of the countryside more accessible than they were in the railway age. He laments the “vulgar” behaviour of some visitors, but thinks that in general, the age of the car will lead to a greater understanding and love of the countryside, which will therefore help preserve it. The seaside holiday will go out of fashion, he suggests, to be replaced by the country holiday.

Compare this to a report in the “I” newspaper of 16 November 2019. It is headed “Pay As You Go”, and continues “As UK resorts clog up with traffic, Dean Kirby reports on a plan to charge tourists a congestion fee in the Lake District.” There is now a conflict in many areas between tourist traffic and local road use.

Things have been heading this way for a long time. Some years ago, I went to Lyme Regis in Dorset. From the top of a double-decker bus, I could see the “park and ride” car park, necessary to prevent the town’s high street seizing up completely in the summer. A little further off, was the disused viaduct of the now closed railway line to the town.

We tend to think now of the inter-war years as a “golden age of motoring”, bringing to mind the image of a uniformed AA patrolman saluting a passing sportscar, the only vehicle on an otherwise empty road. We can’t really blame H V Morton for not having a crystal ball, but it’s interesting that he did not seem to have thought out the implications of increased car use.

We see the 1930s as the Shell Guide era of motoring. Paul Nash took the photographs for the Dorset volume. But these detailed descriptions of rural England were sponsored by a petrol company. The original editions were spiral bound so they could be opened flat on a car seat. Admittedly Hamilton was writing with the benefit of hindsight, but he seems to be one of the only writers who saw that Britain would have to change to accommodate the motor revolution.

Of course, it was a fictional character who appeared as early as 1908, who caught the deep appeal of this new form of personal transport. I am thinking of Mr Toad, staring after the speeding car with a gleam in his eye. Despite his string of accidents and fines, Toad could not resist getting into a car again. “Toot Toot!”

Nashe’s Elegy

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I have seen this poem by Thomas Nashe (1567–1601) given several titles; the one at the head of this piece, “Adieu, farewell earth’s bliss”, or “Elegy in Plague Time”.

I think I first came across it in the anthology 100 Poems by 100 Poets.

I once heard it read on the radio by Andrew Motion when he was the poet laureate. He brought it wonderfully to life, with his slightly gloomy voice making the refrain at the end of each verse sound as if it were being pronounced by a vicar in church.

I never imagined that I would live through a time when a poem about the plague took on a new immediacy. It comes from an age when people believed in Christianity as we believe in science today. We like to think we are much more rational these days, but some of the events of this strange last few months have made me wonder if that is really true.

Some things never change, as the poem reminds us.

Nashe’s Elegy

Adieu, farewell earth’s bliss,
This world uncertain is;
Fond are life’s lustful joys,
Death proves them all but toys,
None from his darts can fly.
I am sick, I must die.
    Lord, have mercy on us!

Rich men, trust not in wealth,
Gold cannot buy you health;
Physic himself must fade,
All things to end are made.
The plague full swift goes by.
I am sick, I must die.
    Lord, have mercy on us!

Beauty is but a flower
Which wrinkles will devour;
Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath clos’d Helen’s eye.
I am sick, I must die.
    Lord, have mercy on us!

Strength stoops unto the grave,
Worms feed on Hector brave,
Swords may not fight with fate,
Earth still holds open her gate.
Come! come! the bells do cry.
I am sick, I must die.
    Lord, have mercy on us!

Wit with his wantonness
Tasteth death’s bitterness;
Hell’s executioner
Hath no ears for to hear
What vain art can reply
I am sick, I must die.
    Lord, have mercy on us!

Haste, therefore, each degree,
To welcome destiny.
Heaven is our heritage,
Earth but a player’s stage;
Mount we unto the sky.
I am sick, I must die.
    Lord, have mercy on us!

100 Poems by 100 Poets

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What a great idea this is, 100 Poems by 100 Poets, an anthology published in 1986. The earliest poet is John Skelton (b1460) and the latest Sylvia Plath (b1932) but the poems are arranged alphabetically by the poet’s name, so the older ones are mixed in with the more modern, the British with the American.

For those new to reading poems, it’s a great introduction to some wonderful poetry, a slender volume that’s more accessible in every way than some bulkier anthologies. It was compiled by Harold Pinter, Anthony Astbury and Geoffrey Godbert. Their criteria for inclusion were that the poem should have been written in English, no living poets would be included and that the poem selected should be representative of the poet’s work as a whole.

For those more familiar with poetry, some of the choices, both of poet and poem, may be surprising, but an exercise like this was not intended to be definitive nor could it be. It’s rather reminiscent of those list programmes that used to be on the television, a good starting point for a discussion. Every poetry enthusiast could make their own choice and each would be equally valid.

I myself would choose different poems to represent A E Housman, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling and Louis Macneice than the ones here, but that sort of proves my point. I think on the whole it is a bit of a case of “right poet, wrong poem”. Everyone will find one of their favourite poets missing. For me, Walter de la Mare is a serious omission.

Perhaps the best thing is the inclusion of some poems by poets who are known for just one or two poems today, such as “Adieu, Farewell Earth’s Bliss” by Thomas Nashe, “Madam Life’s A Piece in Bloom” by W E Henley and “The Latest Decalogue” by Arthur Hugh Clough.

In fact, this was one of the books that started me on my poetic journey. I would not be able to make these judgments today if this book had not pointed me in the right direction years ago. In fact, I might not be writing this piece at all if I had not come across this book.

If you want to start reading poetry, and are looking for a guide to some of the best written in English over the last 500 years or so, then this book is a very good place to begin.

I’m still working on my own list!

There is one strange and haunting poem included here that I’ve not come across anywhere else, so here it is.

Let it Go by William Empson (1906-1984)

It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange.
   The more things happen to you the more you can’t
      Tell or remember even what they were.

The contradictions cover such a range.
   The talk would talk and go so far aslant.
     You don’t want madhouse and the whole thing there.

N or M? Agatha Christie’s wartime spy story

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Agatha Christie did not only write whodunnits; from time to time she dabbled in the spy story. I think N or M? is by far the most effective of those. It sees the return of her married couple sleuths, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. In the summer of 1940, with invasion looming, they are enlisted to winkle out German spies in a quiet south coast seaside town. Or rather, Tommy is enlisted and Tuppence very cleverly gets herself into the game.

It was published during the war in 1941 and it’s intriguing to read a story of this sort written in the heat of the moment when invasion was still a real possibility. This is not a completely realistic novel, but it does reveal some of the atmosphere and attitudes of the time.   

I suppose this is what would today be called a comedy thriller, because as well as the air of suspicion and menace, where anybody might be someone other than who they seem to be, there is a good deal of humour running through the story.

The couples’ children are rather sorry for their middle-aged parents and their desire to find active roles in the war effort. They remain convinced, almost to the end, by the cover story that Tommy is a sort of filing clerk and Tuppence is visiting an elderly sick aunt.

In fact, both the elder Beresfords have put themselves back in harm’s way, by going undercover at Sans Souci, the guest house in Leahampton which the secret service is convinced is the centre of an enemy spy network, with its male and female leaders, codenamed N and M.

Playing roles themselves, both  are only too aware of how the other guests conform almost too perfectly to stock “types”. There is the young mother with her toddler, the young German refugee, the large, elderly Irish woman, the retired gent fussy over his health with his wife whose only purpose in life sems to be to minister to his needs, the retired army man; and so on. Which of them are spies?

Both Beresfords use spy tradecraft. Tuppence puts an eyelash in the fold of a letter she leaves out on view, and checks the paper with fingerprint powder later. The couple’s contact is a man who appears to be fishing at the end from the pier.  

It’s interesting that in a novel that mentions codebreaking work and features a personal code used between Tommy and Tuppence, there should be a character called Major Bletchley. Questioned by MI5 about this, Christie claimed that she had once been on a train for a long time as it waited at Bletchley station.

The novel has quite a resemblance to the final chapters of The Thirty-Nine Steps, with the seaside house making a convenient location for boat landings and signalling out to sea. The vision of the upper echelons of the armed forces and government being riddled with spies and nazi sympathisers also owes something to Buchan. Indeed, it is the uncertainty about who to trust that leads to the Beresfords becoming involved. Having been out of the intelligence game for so long, they are not known to the enemy spies.

The pace picks up towards the end with chases over the downs and a bewildering series of revelations as to who is and isn’t a traitor.

There’s a good deal of sympathy here for German refugees, and a grudging respect for enemy spies who risk their lives, as opposed to traitors who sell their own country out. Tommy and Tuppence were involved in this sort of thing in the last war and remember Edith Cavell, the British nurse shot by the Germans for spying, and her statement “Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone”.

Tuppence recognises that although people are encouraged to hate the German people as a whole, that doesn’t mean that she does not sympathise with the feelings of individual Germans caught up, like the British, in this awful situation. This applies particularly to the mothers of those involved in the war, and indeed maternal feeling is one of the main clues leading to the eventual solution.     

Christie offers an interesting explanation of how the Nazis plan to take over Britain, not by an armed invasion, but by an internal coup of British nazi sympathisers. The appeal of nazism is to “pride and a desire for personal glory”. It is “the cult of Lucifer”. As always with Christie, there is a firm basis in Christian morality. After all, the title is taken from the Book of Common Prayer.

Deer by John Drinkwater

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It feels like it happened to someone else now, but just before the lockdown started I had a temporary job. To get there, I took a train down a rural railway line, a sort of reverse commute, if you like, going away from town.

I was sitting in a modern electric train yet passing through countryside that couldn’t have changed too much since the line was built over one hundred years ago.

Every morning in the pale March sunshine, I saw scenes that reminded me of the paintings of Eric Ravilious. Where was that rusting water tank on a muddy track? Where exactly was that row of ancient cottages, or those fields accessible only by footpath? I made a mental note to look on the map and visit them one day.

I saw kestrels and buzzards flying over fields that were full of rabbits and pheasants. There were sheep, horses and, to my great surprise, deer. Did someone own these creatures, or were they wild? One evening, I saw a lone deer exploring the woods on the bank of a narrow river, and I decided they must be wild.

That brings me rather neatly to the poem below. John Drinkwater (1882-1937) was one of the group of poets who lived in or visited the Gloucestershire village of Dymock in the years just before the first world war. Others included Rupert Brooke and Edward Thomas. I don’t know exactly when this poem was written, but it does capture rather well what I felt when I saw the deer.

 

Deer by John Drinkwater  

Shy in their herding dwell the fallow deer.
They are spirits of wild sense. Nobody near
Comes upon their pastures. There a life they live,
Of sufficient beauty, phantom, fugitive,
Treading as in jungles free leopards do,
Printless as evelight, instant as dew.
The great kine* are patient, and home-coming sheep
Know our bidding. The fallow deer keep
Delicate and far their counsels wild,
Never to be folded reconciled
To the spoiling hand as the poor flocks are;
Lightfoot, and swift, and unfamiliar,
These you may not hinder, unconfined
Beautiful flocks of the mind.

 

*old word for cattle