Ring Out, Wild Bells by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

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If ever there was a year we wanted to say goodbye to, it is this one. This poem is part of Tennyson’s long elegy, In Memoriam A H H. It was inspired by the death of his close friend, Arthur Hallam, in 1833 at the age of twenty-two, which led Tennyson to question his Christian faith. He thought it through for many years, before the poem was published in 1850.

The Ring Out, Wild Bells section comes near the end, where, after confronting his doubts, Tennyson has found his faith again. The bells of the local church are ringing in the New Year. We don’t have to be practising Christians to respond to the poem’s powerful and moving message of renewal, and hopes for better times to come.

Tennyson did not actually invent the unusual stanza form, but it has come to be so closely identified with his use of it in this long poem, that it is known as the “In Memoriam” stanza. As so often with Tennyson, if you read it aloud, it sounds like music. No other poet does that so well, in my opinion.       

Ring Out, Wild Bells

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
   The flying cloud, the frosty light:
   The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
   Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
   The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
   For those that here we see no more;
   Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
   And ancient forms of party strife;
   Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
   The faithless coldness of the times;
   Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
   The civic slander and the spite;
   Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
   Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
   Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
   The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
   Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Call for the Dead by John le Carré

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If you have never read anything by John le Carré I would recommend that you begin at the beginning. George Smiley arrived fully formed in John le Carré’s debut novel Call for the Dead, published in 1961. Everything that was to become so familiar about this much-loved character is there, right from the beginning. We learn how the academically inclined Smiley, who “had dreamed of Fellowships and a life devoted to the literary obscurities of seventeenth-century Germany” was recruited straight from Oxford into the nascent secret service in the 1930s.

He had been let go after a stressful undercover role during the second world war, but recalled to duty in the early days of the cold war. As this novel begins, Smiley is already middle-aged and somewhat at odds with his superiors, a rather marginalised figure. His role in this novel is more that of security officer than spy and may reflect le Carré’s own experiences in MI5. I think he might have had the real-life Portland spy ring, who were arrested at the beginning of 1961, in mind for this tale of spies passing on information in suburban Surrey.  

It’s apparent reading this novel now, that le Carré started his writing career in a very different world from the one we are used to today. It was published a mere fifteen years after the end of the second world war, after all. This is a time when displaced Jewish Germans are worried about the re-arming of West Germany and fear where it may lead. In fact, like so much of le Carré’s earlier fiction, there’s a sense that the real subject here is Germany. After all, Smiley’s love of German literature and language is le Carré’s own.

Smiley is called in to investigate Samuel Fennan, a civil servant who was a communist at Oxford in the 1930s, and who has been anonymously accused of being a spy. Smiley clears him in the vetting interview, but Fennan commits suicide that evening. If he had decided to kill himself, why did the man book an early morning alarm call for the next day?

Fennan’s wife is a concentration camp survivor. A German ex-agent of Smiley’s from the war years turns up in London, with tragic consequences. The introverted and scholarly Smiley may approach the business of counter-espionage as an academic exercise, but here he finds that danger has come to London, in the form of a network of East German spies. He is back in the field once again without leaving home.   

This is a taut, compact and atmospheric novel, only 160 pages or so, written in pin-sharp prose, very different to the more drawn-out style of his later novels. The key themes of loyalty and betrayal that will feature so prominently in the later novels are here. Le Carré’s descriptive talents and gift for believable dialogue are apparent at this early stage and his subtle feel for the nuances of English class distinctions makes its first appearance.

The downbeat atmosphere so associated with le Carré’s fiction is here, too. The only locations are a drab post-war London and its suburbs. It seems to be raining most of the time and the climactic scene takes place in the yellow London fog. Security is depicted as just another branch of the civil service, and a crucial conversation takes place in St James Park, a convenient place for those working in Whitehall to avoid being overheard.

We are told about Smiley’s troubled marriage to the wayward Ann. Characters are introduced who will feature in several future novels, Smiley’s younger colleague, Peter Guillam, and the dogged special branch officer, Mendel.

So much that le Carré was to develop further in later books appears here for the first time. There is Smiley’s prodigious memory, his ability to recall the numbers of all seven cars parked near his home in Bywater Street, Chelsea. The secret service is based in Cambridge Circus, and Guillam refers to it as “The Circus”.  The term “tradecraft”, a le Carré invention, meaning the mechanics of espionage, also originates here.

I am not sure if le Carré originally intended to write another novel about Smiley at this stage, because his career seems to be coming to an end even in this first book and it ends with his future uncertain. Fortunately for us, Smiley did resume his career as an intelligence officer. The events in Call for the Dead have a direct bearing on the plot of le Carré’s hugely successful 1963 novel, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, in which Smiley plays a minor role. Indeed, that later novel is actually a sort of sequel to the earlier one, Another good reason for starting at the beginning, with Call for the Dead.

Typhoon by Joseph Conrad

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One of the few pleasures of this strangest of years has been re-discovering the works of Joseph Conrad. Here are my thoughts about his 1903 novella, Typhoon.

Captain MacWhirr is a man of absolutely no imagination. He is also a man of few words. When his chief mate, Mr Jukes, uses a figure of speech, he takes it literally, much to Jukes’ amusement. MacWhirr’s distrust of language applies to the written word, too. When the barometer drops alarmingly, promising extremely bad weather ahead, he consults a book in his cabin. The advice is to change course and avoid the storm altogether. MacWhirr cannot see the point of this, just as he did not when  he heard something similar spoken by a fellow captain. Lengthening the voyage will cost time and therefore money, so how can he justify to his owners a diversion to avoid a storm he has not actually seen? He decides to head straight on into the typhoon and power through it.

One always thinks of Conrad as a writer of the age of sail, but the ship here is actually a steamer. In every other way, though, we are in the pre-technology era. There is no radar and no wireless communication to warn of tricky conditions ahead.

When the storm hits, it is of a fury and violence that no-one on board has experienced before. They are dependent on themselves and the judgement of the captain. “Captain MacWhirr could expect no relief of that sort from anyone on earth. Such is the loneliness of command.” Fixtures and fittings are swept from the deck by the fury of the gale. So much water falls on to the deck that Jukes believes himself to have been swept overboard at one point. If the wheelhouse or the funnel are lost, the ship will be helpless.

Pretty soon we are in that familiar Conrad territory of men battling the savage elements, while fearing that the ship may be plunged into oblivion at any moment. How do they hold their nerve when every moment could be their last?

This is described with that almost hallucinatory vividness that is so characteristic of Conrad’s writing. The reader feels as if they on that ship.        

In his author’s note, Conrad is careful to point out that this story did not derive from direct personal experience. Nonetheless, it is steeped in Conrad’s deep professional knowledge of the sea, ships and the kind of men who sail them.

It shows his mastery of the shorter forms and he skilfully expands our insight into the characters’ thoughts by including some of their letters to family and friends.

In many ways, it is the opposite to Lord Jim. In that novel of 1900, Jim has a romantic conception of himself, deriving from his reading of boys’ adventure fiction, as a man who will rise to the occasion when the moment of danger comes. When he submits to panic like the others, it shatters his idea of himself, and he takes drastic steps to atone for his failure.

Here, through sheer stubbornness and determination, MacWhirr faces the danger head on. He restores Jukes’ flagging resolve with these words: “Keep her facing it. They may say what they like, but the heaviest seas run with the wind. Facing it – always facing it – that’s the way to get through. You are a young sailor. Face it. That’s enough for any man. Keep a cool head.”

He even tries, in his way, to do the right thing by the Chinese coolies in the hold below, unlike Jim’s fellow sailors who abandon the pilgrims aboard the Patna to their fate.

As always with Conrad, there is a lot going on here and you certainly do not need to have read Lord Jim to appreciate Typhoon. It stands up by itself.

To his wife and grown-up daughters MacWhirr has become a distant figure, a mere financial provider. In a brief coda, Mrs Macwhirr is shown yawning over the letter her husband sends her describing his experiences in the typhoon. There is a certain irony in Conrad, that supreme man of words, giving us characters who place so little importance on language, whether spoken or written.                

Walter de la Mare looks back at childhood

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For many years, I avoided the writing of Walter de la Mare under the impression that he was a children’s author. He did write many poems and stories for children, but he also wrote for adults. In fact, his work rather blurs the distinction. The subtitle of his 1923 poetry anthology, Come Hither, makes this clear: “For the young of all ages”.

I suppose De la Mare is best known today for his adult short stories. These are often described as ghost stories, but the presence of the supernatural is so subtle and elusive, hinted at but barely seen, that they may disappoint those readers expecting something more conventionally spooky. You often finish a De la Mare story with a feeling of “what just happened there?”, but rather than being frustrating, this makes them all the more fascinating.

The Almond Tree is a story about a child written for adults. Indeed, it is a story about a child’s misunderstanding of the behaviour of the adults around him. It is not a ghost story, but shares the sense of mystery, the feeling that the explanation is there somewhere if only one could grasp it, that De la Mare’s ghost stories have.

As with a lot of De la Mare’s stores, it is quite difficult to convey the atmosphere of The Almond Tree. It is at first warmly nostalgic although it goes on to deal with a tragedy that is never fully explained.

The narrator is a man recalling his early childhood years as an only child at an isolated house in the deep countryside, with only adults for company. He observes his father’s absences from the household and feels the tension between his parents. He does not really understand that the lady his father introduces him to is his mistress.

As the situation worsens, so does the weather, and the climactic events of the story take place in a beautifully described wintry landscape.

Towards the end of the story, we realise what the boy has not understood – that his mother is pregnant. 

The main body of the story is framed by another narrative, that although short, is very important to our understanding of what has happened. Without giving too much away, there is a further twist. Two scraps of dialogue right at the end prompt us to think again and re-interpret some of what we have just read, and may possibly explain the source of the problems between the narrator’s parents.

De la Mare’s finely wrought prose style and narrative method do not make his work the easiest of reads. The reader has to do quite a lot of work, but for me the reward is worth the effort.

The Almond Tree gives you plenty to contemplate once you have laid it aside. Like other De la Mare stories, it reminds me quite strongly of the later stories of Rudyard Kipling, the ones that employ a similar method, where what is missing from the story, what is not said, is as important as what is said.

The Almond Tree was first published in 1923. I think it may have been quite influential on later writers, because I can see traces of it in Graham Greene’s story The Fallen Idol and L P Hartley’s novel The Go-Between.

There is an excellent 2010 BBC radio version of The Almond Tree, read by the actor Julian Wadham, whose voice suits the story perfectly. This was included in a series called Ghost Stories of Walter de la Mare, rather oddly.

If the above makes you think that De la Mare’s writing might be for you, I have also written about another of his stories, The House. 

The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy

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It can often be difficult to date a Hardy poem exactly. He wrote poems for many years before he started to publish them in the early twentieth century when his  career as a novelist began to wind down.

There is no such problem with The Darkling Thrush, because Hardy included a very specific date at the bottom of the poem. This confirms for us that the note of hope the speaker of the poem finds in the song of the bedraggled thrush, was a hope for the new twentieth century.

It’s one of Hardy’s best-known and best-loved poems, and it’s not hard to see why. With its strong rhythm and end rhymes it is powerfully musical, and a vivid evocation of a bleak, dead, and inhospitable wintry landscape. What is the message here? I think it is that when all seems lost, there is some hope, if only we can find it.

It’s a little early in the year for a winter poem, perhaps, but after the year we have all just experienced, Hardy’s song of hope speaks to us once more, as strongly as it ever did.   



The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy

I leant upon a coppice gate
      When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
      The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
      Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
      Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
      The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
      The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
      Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
      Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
      The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
      Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
      In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
      Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
      Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
      Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
      His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
      And I was unaware.

31 December 1900

Carol Reed’s Night Train to Munich

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I haven’t written about a film for a while, but I enjoyed this one so much I really felt I had to. Night Train to Munich is an earlier film directed by Carol Reed, now most famous for The Third Man.

Rex Harrison plays a British agent who impersonates a German officer in order to exfiltrate a Czech engineer and his daughter from Nazi Germany at the very beginning of the second world war. His manner is very characteristically English: flippant on the surface and deadly serious underneath.

This 1940 film is best described as a comedy thriller. If you like the earlier sort of spy fiction, the chances are you will enjoy this, because it feels like a compendium of John Buchan, Eric Ambler and Sapper. Indeed, at one point our hero says “I’m not Bulldog Drummond, you know”. It’s also an example of that genre of films and novels set on long-distance trains that flourished in the 1930s.

One of the things that is striking about this film today is the strength of the anti-Nazi propaganda message. No opportunity to either ridicule or criticise the Nazi regime is missed. It’s depicted as a mixture of brutality and absurd bureaucracy. Early scenes take place in a concentration camp, at this stage depicted as a place for political prisoners. Even Mein Kampf is sent up: “They give a copy to bridal couples over here.” “I don’t think it’s that sort of book, old boy.” It’s almost shocking to hear Harrison, in his guise as a loyal Nazi, say that “England is controlled by the masons and the jew Churchill”.

An awful lot is packed into a suspenseful and brisk ninety minutes or so and the whole thing moves along at a cracking pace, with several clever plot twists, and one in particular that is a real surprise, even today.

I found myself thinking that this is like a Bond film before there were Bond films, and indeed, wondering if Ian Fleming saw it. The finale on the Swiss border will seem familiar to anyone who has seen Where Eagles Dare, so again, I wonder if Alistair Maclean saw the earlier film at some point.

The film has been considered as a sort of follow-up to the earlier and more famous The Lady Vanishes, also written by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, the scriptwriters here. Despite the repeat appearance of the Charters and Caldicott characters and Margaret Lockwood, I think the resemblance is overstated. For a start, despite the title, far less of Night Train to Munich actually takes place on the train. Carol Reed’s directorial style is also quite different to Hitchcock’s, grittier and more realistic and this, as well as the urgency of the wartime situation, gives the film a very different atmosphere.

John Buchan wrote that thrillers should have “a story that marches just within the bounds of the possible” and that is very much the case here. If you fancy a bit of lockdown escapism, Night Train to Munich is available free on Amazon Prime.

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.”