Author: The Good Reader

Lenten Thoughts of a High Anglican by John Betjeman

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

An appropriate poem for this time of year, I think.

I’m not sure exactly when John Betjeman wrote this, but I think it’s one of his later ones from the 1970s. I find it fascinating. With its regular rhythms and rhymes, his poetry is often described as “Victorian” but the sensibility he expresses is quite different, a little bit subversive even, particularly when it comes to sex.

There are many contrasts within what is expressed here. The scene is set in a church and the title refers to a time of restraint, yet he imagines that the beautiful woman he admires is someone living outside conventional Christian morality.

There is a hint of religious doubt here and yet finally the woman’s beauty makes him think of the “unknown God”.

Might there be a veiled autobiographical meaning here? After all, Betjeman himself was “living in sin” as his catholic wife of many years refused to divorce him.       .

Lenten Thoughts of a High Anglican by John Betjeman

Isn’t she lovely, “the Mistress”?
With her wide-apart grey-green eyes,
The droop of her lips and, when she smiles,
Her glance of amused surprise?

How nonchalantly she wears her clothes,
How expensive they are as well!
And the sound of her voice is as soft and deep
As the Christ Church tenor bell.

But why do I call her “the Mistress”
Who know not her way of life?
Because she has more of a cared-for air
Than many a legal wife.

How elegantly she swings along
In the vapoury incense veil;
The angel choir must pause in song
When she kneels at the altar rail.

The parson said that we shouldn’t stare
Around when we come to church,
Or the Unknown God we are seeking
May forever elude our search.

But I hope that the preacher will not think
It unorthodox and odd
If I add that I glimpse in “the Mistress”
A hint of the Unknown God.

Plain Murder by C S Forester

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

Plain Murder was the second of C S Forester’s crime novels and was published in 1930. It’s really a portrait of what came to be known later on as a psychopath, although Forester does not actually use that word. It’s comparatively short and fast-paced, with not a word wasted and a good balance between plot and character.

Forester writes in a rather detached style, and the overall effect is like a cross between Patrick Hamilton and Georges Simenon, with a similar sense of the characters being trapped by circumstances and their own limitations. The nineteen thirties atmosphere is like a black and white photograph. It’s no surprise that these books have been called “London Noir”.        

It’s set in an advertising agency and when the story opens, three young men who work there are discussing what to do about the fact that their scheme to bribe clients has been discovered. Morris is the ringleader and he has rather pushed his colleagues, Oldroyd and Reddy, into going along with it. They fear dismissal without a “character” (a good reference), which would make it almost impossible to get another job. This is London on the verge of the great depression with no welfare safety net.

Morris realises that the manager, Harrison, has not yet told the owner of the company that he is going to sack the three of them. Noticing that the next day is Bonfire Night, he persuades the other two that the only way out is to murder Harrison. Oldroyd has a pistol and Reddy has a motorcycle; their participation is necessary for the plan to work and Morris convinces them that he alone will be criminally responsible. He carries out the killing, the noise of the shots covered by the fireworks, and then scornfully tells the other two that they are accessories to murder who could face hanging if discovered, so must keep their mouths shut about what he has done.

Morris appears to have got away with it. The police make no headway with their investigation and he is promoted to take Harrison’s place. The irony is that the working-class Morris is a much more vigorous and dynamic manager than the rather languid Harrison ever was.

Morris becomes more and more convinced of his cleverness and superiority, both as a successful criminal and someone who is going places in the world of advertising. Meanwhile, young Reddy’s conscience is troubling him deeply. Morris realises that Reddy is likely to blurt out exactly what has happened. He begins to think that he will have to be disposed of too. He approaches this problem like an artist thinking out a creative difficulty. Inspiration strikes when he sees his wife pushing their son’s pram at the top of the hill on the estate where they live. If she let go, there would be nothing to stop the pram running down the hill into the busy traffic on the main road at the bottom.

He contrives a meeting with Reddy and invites him to tea. While he is there, Morris slips away and tampers with Reddy’s motorcycle. Shortly after he leaves, the drive chain comes off because Morris has loosened it; the brakes won’t work because Morris has loosened them too and Reddy is unable to lose any speed as the bike accelerates down the hill and into the stream of traffic where he is killed. The police assume that the drive chain snapped accidently and the brakes were damaged in the subsequent crash. Forester suggests that the German police system, where every citizen has a file, might possibly have led the police to connect Reddy to Morris. If they had realised that Reddy worked at an office where the manager had been murdered in mysterious circumstances and that he had just left the house of another man who worked there, they might have taken a different view of events.

Morris has got away with it again. He now feels that he is a sort of superman and he starts to view other people as “mere tools and instruments that he could use and throw aside”. Forester tells us that the main characteristic of a criminal is “an unusual idea of the importance of his own well-being compared with the importance of the well-being, or the opinions, or the ideals of other people”.

The business goes from strength to strength and more staff are required. The owner brings his daughter to work there and Morris thinks she is a very attractive girl. If only he was not shackled to his wife! Here is another little problem for him to give some creative thought to. He is detached from reality now, completely misinterpreting the young girl’s mild flirting. And he realises that Oldroyd is becoming a problem for him too.

To go beyond this point would spoil the book for anyone who has not read it. I’ll just point out that there are three murders, one that the police can’t solve and two that are never thought to be murders at all. No-one is punished, or at least not by the law. The resolution is very satisfying to the reader. It’s a novel that is almost a hundred years old and has lost none of its power.

Nobody Comes by Thomas Hardy

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

With any major poet who produces a large body of work, there are the poems that become famous and end up in anthologies and a lot of less well-known ones that are, perhaps unfairly, overlooked. A trawl through Thomas Hardy’s 900-page Collected Poems reveals many hidden gems.

Nobody Comes is dated 1924, towards the end of Hardy’s long life. It is thought to have been inspired by a real-life incident when his wife was in hospital and he was waiting for news. Perhaps not surprisingly, there is a sense of isolation and loneliness here.

Some of the imagery is not quite what one expects from Hardy, with references to a car and a telegraph wire. You might not identify it as a Hardy poem if you did not already know. Yet this modern imagery is set against a more familiar rural background.

Perhaps some of the powerful sense of melancholy here is that of an elderly man adrift in a changing world.   

Nobody Comes by Thomas Hardy

Tree-leaves labour up and down,
And through them the fainting light
Succumbs to the crawl of night.
Outside in the road the telegraph wire
To the town from the darkening land
Intones to travellers like a spectral lyre
Swept by a spectral hand.

A car comes up, with lamps full-glare,
That flash upon a tree:
It has nothing to do with me,
And whangs along in a world of its own,
Leaving a blacker air;
And mute by the gate I stand again alone,
And nobody pulls up there.

A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

As well as novels, Richard Hughes (1900–1976) wrote poetry and plays. He was also the author of the first-ever radio drama, Danger, broadcast on the BBC almost one hundred years ago. That makes it a good time to look again at what is probably his most famous work, the novel A High Wind in Jamaica, published in 1929.

I don’t think I’ve ever come across another book quite like it. I’ve re-read it several times over the years. It is relatively easy to read but reveals new depths over time.

The story seems quite simple. Sometime in the late nineteenth century, after a hurricane wrecks the family home, a group of English children living in Jamaica are sent by their parents to go to school in England. The ship they are travelling on is attacked by pirates, who realise when they sail away that they have unwittingly hijacked the children as well as the cargo. The children take all this in their stride and at first assume it is all part of the plan for the voyage.

After some aimless cruising round the Caribbean, the pirates try to offload the children in Cuba. The rather incompetent pirates eventually manage to transfer the children to another ship and they arrive in London as intended. Yet during their time with the pirates two people die, one adult and one child. When this comes out, the pirates are put on trial and sentenced to death for murder. That’s it, more or less, except that there is rather more to it than the bare bones outline reveals. The story may be straightforward but the narrative method is not. What looks like a children’s adventure is more a piece of psychological modernism.  

It has a haunting, dreamlike atmosphere, particularly in the beautiful descriptions of the lush Jamaican countryside and the long slow days at sea, yet it is punctuated by sudden violent shocks. It has an exotic setting, pirates, and a cast of young characters, but it is not a children’s book. It’s a sea story but it doesn’t feel much like anything by C S Forester or Joseph Conrad. It’s a novel of empire that takes a fairly sympathetic view of the black inhabitants of Jamaica, given the time it was written.

The main character is a ten-year-old girl and much of the story is seen from her point of view. The novel starts with a first-person narrator, but we are never quite sure who he is or what his relation to events is. We gradually lose the sense of him as an individual and the story settles into omniscient narration, which allows Hughes access to the thoughts of all the characters, adults as well as children. It enables him to show how the adults and children misunderstand each other completely. They live in two quite different worlds, based on assumptions that they can’t communicate to each other. This is done with great skill, because the language never seems too sophisticated for the children or too simple for the adults. I think Henry James might have been attempting something similar with What Maisie Knew, but didn’t bring it off with the clarity of language that Hughes achieves.

It’s quite funny in places and much of the book is heavily ironic. Characters misunderstand each other, or misinterpret events because they have a partial knowledge about what has really happened. Only the reader knows the truth.

There is also a dark undercurrent lurking all the way through this book for the careful reader. Without giving too much away, it can be summed up by the lawyer’s questioning of Emily near the end: “When you were with the pirates, did they ever do anything you didn’t like? You know what I mean, something nasty?”  

The London scenes have an almost “Martian” quality, when the children, who have only ever lived in Jamaica, cannot imagine how a steam train could work. “Why do we have to sit in that box?”, as one of them says. The fog-bound streets of London contrast strongly with the sunlight idyll of their early years as Emily is absorbed into the normal life of a Victorian little girl, despite her experiences on the pirate schooner.

Towards the end, the novel takes on a page-turning urgency as the reader wonders how all of this is going to be resolved. What understanding is the adult world going to have about what really happened on the pirate ship? The real irony is that when Emily blurts out the truth at the trial, it is misinterpreted and the words “did she not know what she had done?” come as a shock to the reader, having two possible meanings.   

Published well after Freud, but set back at some unspecified period of the late 19th century, we are a long way on from Victorian ideas about the innocence of childhood here. The story demonstrates quite the reverse, in fact. The phrase “little savages” might be appropriate. It seems curiously ahead of its time, particularly when Emily realises that she might not have the same opportunities in life as the boys, when she grows up.

The American title was The Innocent Voyage, which is more appropriate, I suppose, but somehow not as poetic as the title under which I know it. It’s often seen as a forerunner of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, but apart from the exotic setting it is quite different, really.

The biographer Michael Holroyd has written very perceptively about this novel. He got to know the by then elderly Hughes when he was researching his biography of the painter Augustus John.       

Apple Blossom by Louis Macneice

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

Louis Macneice is closely associated with the nineteen thirties group of poets that included W H Auden. Many of his best-known poems date from that period. This one though is from much later, 1957.

I don’t want to say too much about it, because I feel that different readers may interpret it slightly differently. There may be an autobiographical element here. Perhaps Macneice had to be older to write it to convey the sense that life is still worth living after idyllic early years and that the present is connected to the past.

I suppose apple blossoms are more associated with the spring, but there is a powerful sense of optimism and renewal here that makes it appropriate for this first week of the new year.

Apple Blossom by Louis Macneice

The first blossom was the best blossom
For the child who never had seen an orchard;
For the youth whom whisky had led astray
The morning after was the first day.

The first apple was the best apple
For Adam before he heard the sentence;
When the flaming sword endorsed the Fall
The trees were his to plant for all.

The first ocean was the best ocean
For the child from streets of doubt and litter;
For the youth for whom the skies unfurled
His first love was his first world.

But the first verdict seemed the worst verdict
When Adam and Ever were expelled from Eden;
Yet when the bitter gates clanged to
The sky beyond was just as blue.

For the next ocean is the first ocean
And the last ocean is the first ocean
And, however often the sun may rise,
A new thing dawns upon our eyes.

For the last blossom is the first blossom
And the first blossom is the best blossom
And when from Eden we take our way
The morning after is the first day.

Brussels in Winter by W H Auden

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

It’s turned so cold that what we would normally expect in January seems to have arrived a bit early.

It has put me in mind of this 1938 poem by W H Auden. There are lots of poems about snow but fewer about winter. This one captures very well that sense of dislocation and transformation that the freezing weather brings, but winter here is a political metaphor as well.

As so often with Auden, who was writing about the 1930s, one feels that nothing has really changed, or that history is repeating itself.

I love that line near the end, “A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van”. It describes not only what this poem does, with its intensity and compression of language, but what poetry in general does, I think.

Brussels in Winter by W H Auden

Wandering through cold streets tangled like old string,
Coming on fountains rigid in the frost,
Its formula escapes you; it has lost
The certainty that constitutes a thing.

Only the old, the hungry and the humbled
Keep at this temperature a sense of place,
And in their misery are all assembled;
The winter holds them like an Opera-House.

Ridges of rich apartments loom to-night
Where isolated windows glow like farms,
A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van,

A look contains the history of man,
And fifty francs will earn a stranger right
To take the shuddering city in his arms.

 

Now that You Too Must Shortly Go by Eleanor Farjeon

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

First World War poetry used to mean poems written by men who had served as soldiers on the Western Front. The work of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenburg and others concentrated on conditions on the battlefield and the terrible consequences of combat for those involved.

More recently, the definition has widened, helped by Andrew Motion’s 2003 anthology, to include poems written by women that deal with bereavement and the situation on the home front.

So here, in the run-up to Remembrance Day is a poignant poem about the moment when a couple must part which speaks for itself, really. It is by Eleanor Farjeon (1881–1965), later a prolific author for children and perhaps best known today for the words to the hymn Morning has Broken.

Now that You Too Must Shortly Go by Eleanor Farjeon

Now that you too must shortly go the way
Which in these bloodshot years uncounted men
Have gone in vanishing armies day by day,
And in their numbers will not come again:

I must not strain the moments of our meeting
Striving for each look, each accent, not to miss,
Or question of our parting and our greeting,
Is this the last of all? is this—or this?

Last sight of all it may be with these eyes,
Last touch, last hearing, since eyes, hands, and ears,
Even serving love, are our mortalities,
And cling to what they own in mortal fears:—
But oh, let end what will, I hold you fast
By immortal love, which has no first or last.

Ozymandias by Shelley

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

I’ve been watching the BBC programme Russia 1985–1999 and of course it contains scenes of huge statues being toppled as communism was overthrown.

Shelley’s well-known poem about the ephemeral nature of power has been increasingly on my mind in this strange year of war and political upheaval.

It dates from the early nineteenth century and it’s an amazing thought that empires and tyrannies have risen and fallen since then, yet the poem itself has survived. Shelley himself has become like the sculptor that he describes.

It’s somehow reassuring to think that like Ozymandias, Vladimir Putin will one day be just another half-forgotten figure from the past.

Ozymandias by Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Two Plays about John Betjeman by Jonathan Smith

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

Something of a treat this for Betjeman fans, from Radio 4 extra. These two linked plays, Mr Betjeman’s Class and Mr Betjeman Regrets were first broadcast in 2017. Benjamin Whitrow does an excellent job of capturing the older Betjeman’s distinctive tones. He died during production and his role was completed by Robert Bathurst but you would never know.

The first play deals with Betjeman’s expulsion from Oxford, leading to his time as a prep school teacher, a role for which he is comically unsuited. This is just the latest in a line of disappointments for his father, played very well by Nicky Henson.

Betjeman junior is not the sort of son he would have preferred. He has no sympathy for John’s aesthetic leanings and a major cause of the difficulties between them is John’s lack of interest in taking over the family business. He thinks that his son’s university education has made him look down on his middle-class origins and turned him into a social-climbing time waster.

The second play is perhaps the stronger of the two, building on the themes of the first one. The older Betjeman is a National Treasure now. The success of his poetry and TV appearances have made him wealthy, but he is not altogether happy. He’s confused about his sexuality, and irritated that his poetry, although popular, is dismissed by critics who prefer the complexity of Eliot and Auden.

He ponders the breakdown of his marriage and his wife’s conversion to Roman Catholicism. He reflects that the feeling of guilt this gave him was actually very helpful in inspiring his writing. It was always a slightly difficult relationship and communication between them was conducted in mocking tones. Betjeman wonders whether he might have driven his own son away by talking to him in the same way, without quite realising that he was doing so.

There’s a sad sense of history repeating itself here, and the feeling that the young Paul Betjeman would have been more the kind of son his grandfather wanted. John’s inability to catch the ball when playing beach cricket with his father is repeated in a scene on the beach with his own son, who would prefer a father keener on games.   

Something that comes across very strongly is John Betjeman’s deep love for the Cornwall that featured so often in his poetry, the village of Trebetherick where his parents had a house, and the church of St Enodoc, where Betjeman himself is now buried. For much of the play, Betjeman is seated on a bench in the churchyard musing over his life. Both plays make full use of the fluidity of time and place that audio drama can convey so much more effectively than any other medium.

There is quite a lot of quotation from Betjeman’s poetry in both plays but I’m not sure what the autobiographical source was. He did write a verse memoir of his early years, Summoned by Bells, in which he says that his father’s monument in Highgate cemetery “points an accusing finger at the sky”.

The Persian Version by Robert Graves

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

Here’s another poem from Robert Graves. He wrote this one during the second world war, referring back to classical antiquity to comment on current events.

It refers to the battle of Marathon in 490BC, at which the Greeks halted the Persian invasion. The major source for this is the Greek writer Herodotus, known as “the father of history”. He more or less invented the idea that history depends on who exactly is telling the story.

Graves would have been familiar with questioning the news, wondering whether the latest British military success reported on the BBC had actually happened quite as it was described.

We can appreciate the timelessness of this poem today, when the news about what is happening in Ukraine depends on whether it is from a Ukrainian or Russian source.

The last two lines here are a magnificent example of what we would now call “spin”, putting the best possible interpretation on what was actually a defeat.   

The Persian Version by Robert Graves

Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon
The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.
As for the Greek theatrical tradition
Which represents that summer’s expedition
Not as a mere reconnaissance in force
By three brigades of foot and one of horse
(Their left flank covered by some obsolete
Light craft detached from the main Persian fleet)
But as a grandiose, ill-starred attempt
To conquer Greece – they treat it with contempt;
And only incidentally refute
Major Greek claims, by stressing what repute
The Persian monarch and the Persian nation
Won by this salutary demonstration:
Despite a strong defence and adverse weather
All arms combined magnificently together.