Sunny Prestatyn by Philip Larkin

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I think Sunny Prestatyn is one of my favourite Larkin poems. It was included in his 1964 collection, The Whitsun Weddings. I like the humorous tone, with that hint of something darker underneath. There is a disturbing suggestion of real-life violence here. The life of the poster can be taken as the story of a human life.

I can see in my mind’s eye exactly the kind of railway poster that Larkin is referring to. They used bold, primary colours, clean lines and idealised imagery to make British seaside resorts look more attractive than they could ever possibly be in reality. It’s this gap between the ideal and grim reality that the poem is all about. Just how sunny is Prestatyn, on the north Welsh coast, anyway?

We are still in the steam era here, just. And what was Whitsun? It is the Christian festival of Pentecost, taking place eight weeks after Easter Sunday. It therefore moves in the calendar, as Easter does each year. In 1972 the Whitsun bank holiday was replaced by the late spring bank holiday, giving a more predictable date each year, and the word “Whitsun” began to move back into the past, just like steam trains.      

Sunny Prestatyn by Philip Larkin

Come To Sunny Prestatyn
Laughed the girl on the poster,
Kneeling up on the sand
In tautened white satin.
Behind her, a hunk of coast, a
Hotel with palms
Seemed to expand from her thighs and
Spread breast-lifting arms.

She was slapped up one day in March.
A couple of weeks, and her face
Was snaggle-toothed and boss-eyed;
Huge tits and a fissured crotch
Were scored well in, and the space
Between her legs held scrawls
That set her fairly astride
A tuberous cock and balls

Autographed Titch Thomas, while
Someone had used a knife
Or something to stab right through
The moustached lips of her smile.
She was too good for this life.
Very soon, a great transverse tear
Left only a hand and some blue.
Now Fight Cancer is there.

The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene

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The Ministry of Fear, Graham Greene’s 1943 spy thriller set during the London blitz always seems to be underrated. There could be several reasons for that. It is one of the novels that he subtitled as “an entertainment”, which is always a problematic description with his work, and an invitation to take the book less than seriously. Greene is normally thought of as a realist but the tone here is quite odd, as if the physical displacement of the blitz has caused a psychic shock as well.  

Everything is seen from the point of view of the main character Arthur Rowe, who is himself a damaged person. We gradually learn that he was responsible for the “mercy killing” of his sick wife and served some sort of sentence for it, although whether in a prison or a hospital we are not quite sure. He carries a weight of guilt about with him because of this.

Rowe’s mind moves between the reality of the blitz, his dreams, and his childhood memories. This theme of nostalgia for childhood is introduced right at the beginning,  at a charity fête taking place in a square in bombed-out Bloomsbury. It is because the stalls remind Rowe of his past that he is drawn to the fair and it is at the “guess the weight of the cake” stall that he stumbles into a dark world of espionage. He has guessed correctly and won the cake, but it becomes apparent that it was intended that the cake should go to someone else. The stall was in fact a front for a network of fifth-columnists who have been blackmailed into spying for the Germans. This atmosphere of threat and coercion into spying is “the ministry of fear”. The Nazis have imposed it all over continental Europe and now it has come to London.    

From this point on, the plot becomes very complicated quite quickly. Rowe attempts to contact the organisers of the fair to put things right, but finds himself in a sort of living nightmare. After what appears to be a murder at a séance he becomes a hunted man, fearing that his past will make him the obvious suspect. There was something valuable to the spies in the cake and an attempt is made on his life. This is prevented by the lucky fall of a bomb nearby.   

The narrative takes an abrupt turn, when, after another explosion, the scene switches to a mysterious clinic, where a man called Digby is a patient with amnesia. We slowly realise that Digby is Rowe, who has forgotten most of his adult life and seems far happier living with his memories of the world before the war. Then we find out that the doctor running the clinic was at the séance, his assistant is the man who tried to kill Rowe, and the plot starts to move towards its conclusion. 

A clue as to how we should read the novel is that Rowe is described as follows: “He felt directed, controlled, moulded by some agency with a surrealist imagination.” Indeed, the strange atmosphere of the blitz as rendered here rather calls to mind G K Chesterton’s fantastic vision of London in The Man Who Was Thursday. There is a vein of the absurd running through The Ministry of Fear, for example when we are told after an air raid that “a man with a grey dusty face leant against a wall and laughed and a warden said sharply, ‘That’s enough now. It’s nothing to laugh about.’”

It is these vivid descriptions of London in the blitz that linger in the mind. “Most of the church spires seemed to have been snapped off two-thirds up like sugar-sticks and there was an appearance of slum clearance where there hadn’t really been any slums.”  Apart from its place in the context of Greene’s writing, it deserves to be remembered as one of the creative works recording the blitz for posterity, such as the photographs of Bill Brandt or the paintings of Graham Sutherland.

Piano by D H Lawrence

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D H Lawrence was considered an important writer when I was younger, but his reputation has declined somewhat since then. There are signs that interest in his work may be reviving, helped by the recent publication of a new biography, Burning Man: The Ascent of D H Lawrence by Frances Wilson.

Like Thomas Hardy, D H Lawrence was best-known as a novelist but was arguably at his best in his poetry. It was Lawrence’s novels and essays that went out of fashion, whereas the poems have continued to be included in anthologies. Many of his poems are written in a very loose, free verse style, but this earlier one from 1913 is tighter and more structured.

The poem gives a very accurate depiction of how memory works. The woman singing at the piano in the present day summons the memory of the poet’s mother. It’s not a conscious act but something that happens involuntarily. What Lawrence calls “the flood of remembrance” is the kind of memory that Proust was so interested in. Lawrence was also certainly aware of Freud’s theories quite early on, although he later argued against them.

We can all recognise that painful feeling of realising the impossibility of going back into the past. There’s a wistful longing for the security of childhood here. The poem gets it across very effectively and poignantly.

Ultimately though, Piano is a very enjoyable poem. With its long lines and strong end rhymes the poem itself has a musical quality.  

Piano by D H Lawrence

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

In Search of The Third Man by Charles Drazin

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The Third Man was a huge success when it came out in 1949, and has been regarded as a classic film ever since. This story of disillusionment and betrayal in a shattered and divided post-war Vienna has become part of the culture and over the years has been referred to in many other films, books and TV series. The title itself has entered the language, helped by its association with the Cambridge spies and Kim Philby’s denial that he was “the third man”. Indeed, it has been suggested that Graham Greene had his former intelligence boss Philby in mind when he wrote the character of Harry Lime.

It’s a measure of the impact of The Third Man that there is a museum devoted to the film in Vienna. There are even guided tours of the Vienna sewers, where the film’s dramatic climax takes place. In Search of The Third Man by Charles Drazin was published in 1999 for the film’s fiftieth anniversary.    

The circumstances of the making of the film have almost become a myth. Part of the reason for this is that it was brought to the screen by three high-profile creative artists. Over the years, Graham Greene, Orson Welles and Carol Reed gave their own versions of the making of the film. Each had their reasons for embellishing the facts or suppressing inconvenient truths.

Drazin goes back to primary sources to get behind these accounts, to establish the truth about the film, and in the process to explain how and why the myths became accepted as the truth in the first place.

For example, when the film was made, Carol Reed was regarded as one of the world’s great film directors, whereas Welles’ reputation was rather in the doldrums. Over the years, this position reversed itself, so it became easy for people to believe the claims that Welles had directed whole sections of the film himself. Drazin confirms once and for all that Welles’ only contribution beyond his acting was the famous “cuckoo clock” speech.

Appropriately, for a story that is so concerned with the difference between appearance and reality, it turns out that nothing is quite as it seems in this film. While watching it, you would assume that it was all filmed on location in Vienna, yet many shots were filmed in the studio back in England, and then knitted together seamlessly with the location footage by director Carol Reed. And it is assistant director Guy Hamilton’s looming shadow rather than Orson Welles’ that Joseph Cotton chases.

Drazin identifies how the theme of betrayal, so prominent here, runs through all Graham Greene’s writing. He explores in detail just how and why Greene might have based Lime on aspects of Philby’s early life. He suggests that Reed’s approach as a director was peculiarly in sympathy with the tone of Greene’s writing.

He also establishes that filmmaking is a collaborative process and the success of a film can never be wholly attributed to the work of only one or two individuals. There is a sort of mysterious alchemy about the whole process, and a certain amount of luck. The Third Man was one of those rare occasions in cinema when everything just aligned the right way, as if it was meant to happen like that. Yet a good deal of that luck could be put down to the creative intuition of Carol Reed and Drazin sees The Third Man as his film, more than anyone else’s. For example, it was Reed who tracked down the unknown zither player Anton Karas and insisted that his music should be used, rather than an orchestral score as was normal at the time.

Several people who worked on The Third Man in a junior capacity, and who are interviewed here, went on to great things. John Hawkesworth was later responsible for the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes TV series and Guy Hamilton directed several James Bond films, as well as the Len Deighton adaptation, Funeral in Berlin.

This is a thoroughly well-researched, highly readable and enjoyable book, essential reading for anyone who loves the film. Sometimes, a “behind the scenes” book can lessen one’s enjoyment of a film. That is not the case here. Knowing the difficulties behind the production makes the film even more fascinating.        

Welles almost didn’t play the part of Harry Lime. Another actor prevaricated for so long about accepting the part that he had to be dropped from the production. Yet would we find the film so compelling today if it had been Cary Grant standing in that doorway?             

The Ship by J C Squire

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I don’t know much about J C Squire (1884–1958). He was one of those early twentieth century all-round “men of letters”, a type that does not really exist today. As well as a poet, he was the editor of the London Mercury, a literary magazine of the 1920s.  

I’m not sure of the date of this poem. It was certainly written before 1928, when the anthology I found it in was published. Like so many poems of that era, it can be taken as a metaphor for the first world war.

I have chosen to share it, though, because I find that the return of the ghost-like ship has taken on a different meaning as we finally come to the end of this strange phase of life that we have all been through together. The ragged crew have returned to harbour, with no material gain from their difficult voyage, just glad to have endured and made it back alive.   

The Ship by J C Squire 

There was no song nor shout of joy
Nor beam of moon or sun,
When she came back from the voyage
Long ago begun;
But twilight on the waters
Was quiet and gray,
And she glided steady, steady and pensive,
Over the open bay.

Her sails were brown and ragged,
And her crew hollow-eyed,
But their silent lips spoke content
And their shoulders pride;
Though she had no captives on her deck,
And in her hold
There were no heaps of corn or timber
Or silks or gold.

The Trees by Philip Larkin

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I don’t quite know what to make of Philip Larkin’s poems these days. They strike me just now as too relentlessly gloomy. That might be to do with my current circumstances, health worries and so on, and the strange dislocation of normality we have all endured over the last year. Perhaps he looks at life more directly than I am comfortable with.

It’s not an exact science, though, one’s taste in poetry. It feels slightly absurd to say that I find Larkin too gloomy, when Thomas Hardy is a real favourite of mine.

I chose this poem because it is May and I was looking for a poem to celebrate the coming of spring, which seems to have been rather delayed this year. I find that I had rather mis-remembered it. Only Larkin could write a poem about spring featuring the words “grow old”, “die” and “grief”. I suppose he is talking about the cycle of life.

That said, I cherish the poem for its use of “f” and “s” sounds to represent the leaves swaying in the wind. I think the last verse is one of the finest marriages of sound and meaning in the whole of poetry in English. To get the full effect, just read it aloud to yourself.

The Trees by Philip Larkin

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Seaside Golf by John Betjeman

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You don’t have to play golf, or even to like sport at all, to see what Betjeman is getting at here. The poem is about one of those rare, fleeting moments when everything just seems to click into place and go perfectly. Even the natural surroundings seem to be on the poet’s side. There’s a sense of optimism and positivity about this poem, and after the nightmare year we have just experienced, I think we could all do with a bit of that.   

Seaside Golf by John Betjeman

How straight it flew, how long it flew,
It clear’d the rutty track
And soaring, disappeared from view
Beyond the bunker’s back —
A glorious, sailing, bounding drive
That made me glad I was alive.

And down the fairway, far along
It glowed a lonely white;
I played an iron sure and strong
And clipp’d it out of sight
And spite of grassy banks between
I knew I’d find it on the green.

And so I did. It lay content
Two paces from the pin;
A steady putt and then it went
Oh, most surely in.
The very turf rejoiced to see
That quite unprecedented three.

Ah! Seaweed smells from sandy caves
And thyme and mist in whiffs,
In-coming tide, Atlantic waves
Slapping the sunny cliffs,
Lark song and sea sounds in the air
And splendour, splendour everywhere.


Against Oblivion by Henry Newbolt

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Henry Newbolt (1862–1938) is best remembered today for his patriotic ballads of British naval history that were very popular in the years before the first world war. His later poems, such as The Nightjar, are quite different in tone, more personal and reflective, but they have been completely overshadowed by the earlier ones, which is a great pity, I think.

I wrote in a post about Thomas Hardy’s poem At Castle Boterel that the lockdowns had affected my sense of time, with the past becoming as vivid to me as the present. Perhaps it is simply a question of having much more time to think than usual. The short poem below is therefore another one that seems quite appropriate at the moment.

Newbolt may well have been thinking about Dunwich in East Anglia. A once thriving community was reduced to the size of a small village by coastal erosion, with the greater part of the town being lost to the sea. The story goes that the church survived intact under the water, complete with its bells, that can still be heard on land when conditions are right.

It makes a wonderfully appropriate metaphor for the process of recovering memories long forgotten. Newbolt contemplates the remembrance of things past, rather like Proust. Who’d have thought it?


Against Oblivion by Henry Newbolt

Cities drowned in olden time
Keep, they say, a magic chime
Rolling up from far below
When the moon-led waters flow.

So within me, ocean deep,
Lies a sunken world asleep.
Lest its bells forget to ring,
Memory! set the tide a-swing!

The Man Who Was Thursday by G K Chesterton

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It’s difficult to know where to start with this book. G K Chesterton’s 1908 novel is subtitled “a nightmare” and certainly resembles a dream rather than a conventional, realistic novel. After all, it starts with a sunset and ends with the dawn. This tale of an undercover policeman investigating an organisation of bomb-throwing anarchists has something in common with Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, written at around the same time, but Chesterton treats the same theme completely differently.

The members of the Central Anarchist Council are known by the days of the week, and Gabriel Syme, a poet who is in reality a policeman, manages to get himself elected to this body as “Thursday”. The president of the council is the sinister and grotesque “Sunday”, but who is he really?

The story proceeds by a succession of surreal and bizarre incidents, such as hidden rooms, chases, and confrontations to a conclusion that reveals some sort of logic was operating all along. It anticipates Kafka, whose writing career was to start some years later; perhaps of British authors of the time, it is closest to H G Wells.

Just what sort of book is it? A thriller? It’s quite short and very fast paced. Plainly, some sort of allegory is intended, but whether political, philosophical or religious, or a mixture of all three is hard to say. A lot of people have expended a lot of effort over many years to work out just what Chesterton might have meant by it all.

Chesterton was a poet as well as a writer of prose, and initially trained as an artist. It is not surprising that one of the great strengths of this book is the visual quality of the descriptive prose. The images are so striking that they lodge in one’s memory. This is particularly the case in the scenes set in London. The red-brick suburb of Saffron Park in the sunset and the relentless chase through the city streets in the falling snow are unforgettable. The effect is almost psychedelic and rather like an episode of a late-1960s TV show.

He also makes considerable use of the idea originated by Poe that the best way to keep something hidden is to leave it in plain sight.

Chesterton is best known today as the author of the Father Brown stories. His catholic priest detective is something of a riposte to Sherlock Holmes, solving crimes by intuition and knowledge of human nature, rather than logical deduction. Given that he was also a notable Christian apologist and converted to Catholicism in 1922, it seems sensible to concentrate on the religious interpretation of The Man Who Was Thursday.

It is a peculiarly enjoyable book; the experience of reading it is quite cheering. Just when you think you know what might be going on, Chesterton throws in another twist that makes you question what has just happened. That may be why it has stayed in print, despite the difficulty of interpreting it. If you are new to the writing of G K Chesterton, though, I would recommend that you start with Father Brown, before tackling this one. 

L’Art, 1910 by Ezra Pound

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I am beginning to wonder whether I will ever be able to go to an art exhibition again, so on this first anniversary of the UK lockdown, here is an appropriate poem.

Every word counts in this short, haiku-like poem. In the title, for instance, we have “L’Art” rather than “Art” and that specific date. This was the year of the post-impressionist exhibition in London that introduced Van Gogh, Cezanne and other French modern artists to a puzzled public.

The poem is a very good example of imagism, the poetic style that sought to make a break with the more wordy Victorian style of poetry, just as artists were trying to find new means of visual representation.

There are strange clashes here, red and green, food and poison, but the overall impression is a sense of excitement, helped by that exclamation mark and the use of the word “feast”. To me, it conveys the sheer pleasure of oil paint thickly applied to the canvas.     

L’Art, 1910 by Ezra Pound

Green arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth,
Crushed strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes.