Author: The Good Reader

The Burning of the Leaves by Laurence Binyon

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

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

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

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

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

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

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

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

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

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

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

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

 

 

 

 

Madam Life’s a Piece in Bloom by W E Henley

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

I have to apologise for the lack of posts recently. I’ve been in hospital having some rather serious surgery. Face masks all round, no visitors,  and Covid swab tests; it’s hardly surprising that the poem below popped into my mind. W E Henley wrote this in 1877. His Invictus is probably better known today, but I prefer this one. After all, we’ve all been trying to avoid meeting the ruffian on the stair recently, haven’t we.

 

Madam Life’s a Piece in Bloom by W E Henley

Madam Life’s a piece in bloom
Death goes dogging everywhere:
She’s the tenant of the room,
He’s the ruffian on the stair.

You shall see her as a friend,
You shall bilk him once or twice;
But he’ll trap you in the end,
And he’ll stick you for her price.

With his kneebones at your chest,
And his knuckles in your throat,
You would reason — plead — protest!
Clutching at her petticoat;

But she’s heard it all before,
Well she knows you’ve had your fun,
Gingerly she gains the door,
And your little job is done.

 

The Duel by Joseph Conrad

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

It really has turned into the summer of Conrad for me, as anyone who has read some of my earlier posts will know. I have greatly enjoyed re-discovering his writing. This one is another old friend, that I first read many years ago.

The Duel is one of Conrad’s novella-length works. It was first published in 1908 and is based on a real-life story of two officers in Napoleon’s army who fought a series of duels with each other over a period of many years.

In Conrad’s story, this mutual antagonism begins over a trivial incident when D’Hubert and Feraud are young lieutenants, and goes on for years, with the origin of the quarrel long since forgotten. Outsiders believe there must be some terrible enmity between them, that perhaps they fell out over a woman. It only ends when both men are retired generals.

This covers a longer period of time and is also told in a more conventional manner than many Conrad works. It is a linear narrative with none of the time shifts for which he is famous. It is mostly seen from the point of view of one character, D’Hubert.

It’s plain from the opening sentence that Conrad intended this to be rather more than just the story of the two main characters. “Napoleon the First, whose career had the quality of a dual against the whole of Europe, disliked duelling between the officers of his army.”

The tale of the long association of these two men becomes nothing less than the story of the rise and fall of Napoleon’s France, a picture of the era, its politics and its military attitudes. The two men “pursued their private contest through the years of universal carnage”.

These two soldiers fight campaigns all over Europe, and experience the harshness and brutality of the retreat from Moscow, described here in detail. Yet there is a sense in which their relationship as opponents somehow benefits them. The code of honour says that a duel can only be fought between those of the same rank, so as one of them climbs the ladder of promotion the other is inspired to follow him.

The defeat of Napoleon brings great changes. The plight of the cashiered ex-soldiers, the “living wreckage of Napoleonic tempest” who now languish on inadequate pensions is quite poignant. Feraud does not know what to do: “No longer in the army! He felt suddenly a stranger to the earth like a disembodied spirit. It was impossible to exist.”

But D’Hubert seems to regret this changed state of affairs, too. “He felt an irrational tenderness toward his old adversary, and appreciated emotionally the murderous absurdity their encounter had introduced into his life. It was like an additional pinch of spice in a hot dish.”

By the end the reader may think that this strange relationship was the most important of their lives to both men. Is than an echo here of that other Conrad “double” story, The Secret Sharer?

This story was originally called The Duel, but was later also published as The Point of Honour. The 1977 film adaptation used the title The Duellists. It is a very fine film, Ridley Scott’s first as director, with marvellous photography of the French countryside.

 

Victory by Joseph Conrad

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

Victory was one of Joseph Conrad’s later works, published in 1915. I can’t pretend to fully understand this complex novel. It’s not the easiest read, and yet it fascinates me for several reasons and I’ve read it more than once.

There is the resemblance to Shakespeare’s Tempest for one, although by the end the stage is littered with bodies more like Hamlet. Indeed, we might see the main character as a rather Hamlet-like figure.

The story is really fairly straightforward, but the telling of it is not, with the time shifts and changes of point of view characteristic of Conrad.

As so often with this writer, the title is ambiguous and possibly ironic; readers must decide for themselves who the winner is.

We are in Conrad’s familiar territory of the Malay Archipeligo. Axel Heyst has withdrawn from the world to live alone on the island of Samburan. His outlook on life has been influenced by his philosopher father. Heyst has drifted through life, believing that the only way to avoid doing harm is to avoid taking any action at all: “The world is a bad dog. It will bite you if you give it a chance; but I think here we can safely defy the fates.”

The world bites back in the form of three of the nastiest villains in literature, who come to Heyst’s island intending to relieve him of the fortune that they believe he has hidden there.

This has been brought about by two actions of Heyst’s that were well-intentioned. He rescued Morrison from financial ruin and became his business partner. Morrison, however, died on a visit back to England. Then, when visiting the hotel on a neighbouring island owned by Schomberg, Heyst rescued a young woman, Alma, from a life of near-slavery as a member of a travelling orchestra, and took her to live with him on the island.

Schomberg coveted Alma for himself, so he now dislikes Heyst intensely. He is in any case, a gossip and teller of tales, who has been spreading the story that Heyst murdered Morrison and stole his money. The nefarious trio of Mr Jones, Martin Ricardo and Pedro turn up at his hotel and thoroughly frighten him, so he persuades them that Heyst is sitting on a fortune to get rid of them.

The world bites back in the form of three of the nastiest villains in literature, who come to Heyst’s island intending to relieve him of the fortune that they believe he has hidden there.

This has been brought about by two actions of Heyst’s that were well-intentioned. He rescued Morrison from financial ruin and became his business partner. Morrison, however, died on a visit back to England. Then, when visiting the hotel on a neighbouring island owned by Schomberg, Heyst rescued a young woman, Alma, from a life of near-slavery as a member of a travelling orchestra, and took her to live with him on the island.

Schomberg coveted Alma for himself, so he now dislikes Heyst intensely. He is in any case, a gossip and teller of tales, who has been spreading the story that Heyst murdered Morrison and stole his money. The nefarious trio of Mr Jones, Martin Ricardo and Pedro turn up at his hotel and thoroughly frighten him, so he persuades them that Heyst is sitting on a fortune to get rid of them.

When they arrive on the island, Heyst’s position is complicated by the fact that his Chinese housekeeper, Wang vanishes to the far side of the island, taking Heyst’s gun with him.

The stage is now set for the drama of the later part of the novel, which takes place in an intense, dreamlike atmosphere, under the shadow of the nearby live volcano sputtering on the horizon.

It is the trio of villains who make this novel so compelling. The “gentleman” Mr Jones, is tall and emaciated, with a face like a skull and a hollow voice. He is subject to strange depressive fits and bears more than a passing resemblance to Mr Kurtz from Heart of Darkness. His henchman is Martin Ricardo, repeatedly described as catlike, an unrestrained killer, with a knife concealed under the leg of his trousers. The third is Pedro, a hardly human, Caliban-like figure, treated like an animal by the other two. Heyst says: “Here they are before you, evil intelligence, instinctive savagery, arm in arm. The brute force is at the back.”

For me, Ricardo is the most interesting and vital character in the book. His twisted mind and the strange relationship that he has with Mr Jones feels quite modern. Jones hates women and it is Ricardo’s longing for Alma that causes them to fall out. This aspect of the novel anticipates the later psychological crime fiction of writers such as Graham Greene and Patricia Highsmith.

Indeed, Greene used Heyst’s words from Victory as the epigraph to his 1978 cold war spy story, The Human Factor. “I only know that he who forms a tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered his soul.”

Read now, Victory feels like the inspiration for a lot of later writing and one of Conrad’s most influential works.

Battle of Britain by C Day Lewis

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

DSCF3223 (2)

The skies over South East England have been quieter and emptier than we are used to of late. Eighty years ago they were full of warplanes as the Battle of Britain began.

This poem was written in 1970 by the then poet laureate, Cecil Day Lewis, for the thirtieth anniversary.

The big-budget cinematic re-enactment of the battle was released around that time, and if my memory is correct, this poem was printed in the programme for the film.

I like the way the narrator of the poem is a witness to the real events, speaking to someone younger for whom they are history. It deserves to be better known, I think.

 

Battle of Britain by C Day Lewis

What did we earth-bound make of it? A tangle
Of vapour trails, a vertiginously high
Swarming of midges, at most a fiery angel
Hurled out of heaven, was all we could descry.

How could we know the agony and pride
That scrawled those fading signatures up there,
And the cool expertise of those who died
Or lived through that delirium of the air?

Grounded on history now, we re-enact
Such lives, such deaths. Time, laughing out of court
The newspaper heroics and the faked
Statistics, leaves us only to record

What was, what might have been: fighter and bomber,
The tilting sky, tense moves and counterings;
Those who outlived that legendary summer;
Those who went down, its sunlight on their wings.

And you, unborn then, what will you make of it—
This shadow-play of battles long ago?
Be sure of this: they pushed to the uttermost limit
Their luck, skill, nerve. And they were young like you.