Some thoughts on poetry

Some thoughts on reading poetry THE ‘SYNTAX’ OF POETRY is seldom as easy to read as that of prose. It requires a different mode of reading, and the temptation is, never ‘to read line 3 until we are sure of the meaning of line 2.’ But this is an obstruction, a clog to the mind—one which impedes the flow, and misses ‘the music’ of the poem. We kill its spirit if we try to comprehend its meaning by means of ‘a set of propositions that can be laid end to end.’ Rather, we should let the music take us before we (attempt to) secure the sense. And if we remain bewildered at any point, this too can be fruitful. There are many passages in the poetry of T S Eliot which give us a meaning we do not understand—at first, or ever. 1 These passages should be savoured—which means learning to savour them. Further, to take an example from fiction, Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw is so cleverly written that we never can know exactly what went on at Bly Hall—so that we have to remain in mystery: and a mystery solved robs us of a certain delight which we ought rather to cultivate. I confess that I cannot read poetry without, simultaneously, studying it (on a course). But when I do study poetry under these conditions, I find it so enriching that I wish I could – or did – read poetry always (and perhaps ought to seek out courses, so that I can combine study with essay writing. Which latter is remarkably effective in getting a poet’s meaning and style into your mind—style being a carrier of meaning). Another problem I find, is deciding which of the poets on my bookshelves I should read—their qualities being, as I guess, equal as exemplars of different types of visualisation. I don’t have this problem of choice nearly so much with novels. But then novels deal (generally) with some central theme which you can immerse yourself in and take pleasure from its gradual unfolding. Whereas poems tend to jolt your consciousness with their quick and short measure expressions of emotions and states of being. And I doubt that we are so constituted as to easily dart from one state of mind to another. I’ve read several books about poetry, and although little of what I read seems to stay in my mind, a fair amount does ‘stick’ whenever I put my mind to it (as I am here). I never forget the importance of rhythm and stress—English being a stress–based language. Stress is very important in terms of meaning, as can be demonstrated by an example of prose: You sat with him. (Sotto voce: You’re mad!’) You sat with him. (Sotto voce: ‘Voluntarily?’) You sat with him. (Sotto voce: ‘Your taste is in question.’) You sat with him. (Sotto voce: ‘You, of all people …’) This perhaps goes some way towards an understanding of why it is that, if we give stress to some words in poetry (as if we were reading prose), then we may easily misunderstand what we are reading—because the shaping of a poem requires more subtlety – a greater compression of meaning – than is customarily required in prose (which is at least to say that there may be six ways of writing a sentence in prose, and perhaps only one in a line of poetry). However, this does not mean that there is only one way of reading a poem (and some writers, looking back at their earlier writing, have found passages unintelligible even to themselves). I have not mentioned Rhyme as an essential quality of poetry. This because so much Modernist and Post–Modernist poets – wearying at the endless rhymed couplets of so much pre–twentieth century poetry – have turned to internal rhyme, free verse, or verse which is prose put into verse format, and therefore not poetry at all. Internal rhyme often pleases me. It’s as if rhythm is given greater freedom to move through a poem, trace across its surface, and catch itself unawares in unexpected places. Line length too, becomes a matter for the ear to decide. In the example poem below, I’ve put some words and lines into italics, as those that possibly have stress and movement, but I imagine there could be many variations: Mind tide Press the spiral seashell to your ear: hear the ocean pound, a all around. a Feel the salt sand shift, as you press your feet onto the shore. b Watch the seabirds soar b into the air, without a sound. Hear the wave–dragged shingle roll and roar b beneath the swell. See the pallid ‘day moon’ ride the sky. Feel the deep connecting mystery of your soul. And think: No moon, no earth in stable orbit, no good, no evil, no judged: no human sign or impress upon the sluggish, tideless shore. 2 b There are two line–ending rhymes, and internally, several echoes, as ell, es, eel, and or. The last line reads, I think, with slow but heavy stresses: upon the sluggish, tideless shore. At a slug’s pace, as may be said. Poetry that is in fact (bad) prose I HAVE SOMETIMES TURNED on the radio and thought that I was listening to prose; whereas it was – apparently – poetry (and I should have been alerted to this by the tone of high seriousness with which it was being read …). THE NEW YORKER – a magazine whose articles are of world class standard – consistently publishes what can only be described as truly awful poems. And I can only assume that their editorial board is poetry–illiterate. Here as an example, from March 2021, is part of a poem titled ALLEGORY, by Gregory Pardlo: Professional wrestler Owen Hart embodied his own omen when he battled gravity from rafters to canvas in a Kansas City stadium. Like a great tent collapsing, he fell without warning, no hoverboard, no humming– bird’s finesse for the illusion of flight, no suspension of disbelief to hammock his burden—the birth of virtue— in its virtual reality. His angelic entrance eclipsed when his safety harness failed. He fell out of the ersatz like a waxwing duped by infinities conjured in a squeegee’s mirage. Spectators wilted as the creature of grief emerged to graze on their sapling gasps and shrieks … Hammocking his burden? Falling out of the ersatz? Conjured in a squeegee’s mirage? All this is risible, and if the NEW YORKER’S standard of journalism was on par with such pretentious drivel, it would cease publication overnight. Peter Hart, 26 July 2022 _______________ Notes 1 This paragraph is partly a paraphrase from a Book on Ezra Pound by the fine critic Donald Davies. And the part lines in quotes are verbatim from the same source. 2 The earth, spinning on its axis, has the same potential to wobble as does a child’s humming top. That is does not destabilise in this way is due to the gravity of the moon, which checks this potentially disastrous situation. Without the moon we would indeed be ‘all at sea.’ Charlotte Mew’s ‘Arracombe Wood’: using tradition to make something new I have loved this poem ever since I first read it. Technically it has a highly complex and inventive rhyme scheme: a b a b b a b b b b b b c c b c c c b The line, [There] ’Will be violets in the Spring; in Summer time the spider’s lace, is an alexandrine, consisting here of thirteen words. It may seem strange – as a long line – in this poem. But imagine: xxxArracombe Wood do think more of a crow – ’Will be violets in the Spring; xxxxIn Summer time the spider’s lace; And come the Fall, the whizzle and race ‘Spring’ here is an interloper, an isolated ‘ing’, rhyming with no other line–ending word. Perhaps Mew could have written different lines, but I think it far more likely that her poetic sense and knowledge of poesy suggested just this solution. I probably would never have discovered Mew, (1869–1928), had it not been for a series of booklets on ‘The Great Poets’, written by Michael Schmidt, and ‘folded up’ in The Independent newspaper. The poets in the last of the series were: Hardy, Housman, Mew. I looked at ‘Mew’ dumbfounded, but discovered that she was highly praised by Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon, John Masefield, and Walter de la Mare; and that a civil list pension was obtained for her. Hardy regarded her as ‘the greatest woman poet of the age’ (yet she has the distinction of being excluded from the ‘Norton Anthology of Poetry’ …).

Drawing & its relationship with colour

As I understand it, drawing is no longer a necessary practice at the art schools. Life drawing will, apparently, addle your mind! And drawing from life – it has been said – will block the (supposed) natural creativity of the student. But is this not rather like saying that a balanced diet, containing all the necessary nutrients for health of the body, will instead lead to a wasting away? Then too, it is claimed that the mastery of colour will be vitiated by the study of colour theory (as if all Van Gogh needed to do was pour out his unmediated emotions onto the canvas before him).1 Yet what loss there is in this lack of drawing—what impoverishment in the lack even of so small a drawing as this by Cézanne of Pissarro!

But why should an artist’s development of a colour language – such that it is a significant and recognisable part of their work – require drawing as a foundation? William Feaver gives a convincing answer to this question: "[Patrick] Heron’s bid for freedom from the limitations of landscape and from British constraints have always been betrayed by his lack of drawing. Colour alone is no substitute. In Matisse’s Red Studio the prevailing colour is tailored by the draughtsman. In Patrick Heron’s colour schemes drawing is just a preliminary to be obliterated." The Observer, 21 JULY, 1985 Oliver Jelly is equally convincing: "It is … always difficult to sort out a distinctive colour language at whatever stage of life or skill a man stands, but when such a language does appear it is not an early phenomenon of the owner’s life. He has always perfected a graphic or formal frame for the later effulgence." An Essay on Eyesight, 1963. In Googling Patrick Heron, I came across one the most formless and empty paintings I've ever seen: Hard Reds, Yellows and Blues, 1966 (Framed silkscreen print) Not even the use of the word ‘Hard’ will do anything to rescue this from the vaults of the art gallery (though it’s strangely grown on me—just a little).

But the idea came to me that I could perhaps breathe some life into this, the flatest of paintings. And so I tried some experiments, as (first version):

(Scond version)

I make no claim about these, but I have never before been able to use the bright and strong cadmium reds and yellows in my paintings. Most of my reds and yellows have been the earth/iron oxide colours: red and yellow ochre, Indian and Venetian red. So how I managed these colours – as it seems suddenly – I have no idea. Of one thing I am certain: I will do no more variations of Patrick Heron. Year after year I see so many works by the RAs (at the Summer Exhibition) which are repetitive and dead. Such painters have become static, and gone to seed. So much for colour, but what about the practice of life drawing? As far as I am aware, it is practiced only at the Royal Academy and Chelsea art schools (and by some contemporary artists, including for example Maggie Hambling). Matisse would have been appalled at this downgrading and often complete rejection of drawing.

Copying Utrillo: Place du Tertre

The title of this piece is misleading insofar as it suggests some sort of slavish process in which I was trying to make an exact copy of a painting to supply the considerable market for “originals”. But copying of this kind is a lifeless exercise, in which the (compound) colours and draughtsmanship of the original cannot possibly be reproduced.

Maurice Utrillo V, Place du Tertre. 1911

So what have I done? Certainly, I have kept broadly to Utrillo’s composition; as I have also taken cues from his colour palatte. In particular the earth colours: burnt umber, and red and yellow ochre. Other colours – emerald green, manganese violet, napthol red and kings blue (modern formulations of pigments) – I've introduced. Perhaps then, the colours and the handling of the paint are key to this not being a copy, but in some ways something new.

Peter Hart, after Utrillo's Place du Tertre. 2021

However much of the above may be true, my painting is an historical curiosity in that the Place du Tertre no longer looks anything like it did when Utrillo painted it. Quiet as it may be due to current circumstances, it is normally bustling with tourists and diners–out. The restaurant to the right, Chez la Mere Catherine, is still in business, with seating flowing out onto the pavement. Yet all the other clutter of our times – and in particular cars and the shop and restaurant chains – has made this kind of street scene impossible as a subject. ¹ And painters like Monet, Pissarro, and Van Gogh would have despaired at what they saw (and it may be said of the countryside that modern farm machinery lacks all the poetry of the horse–drawn plough—and the idea of a combine harvester in a landscape by Constable or Stubbs is inconceivable).  

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It can be seen that I have only sketched in a few of the cross bars on the shutters, and have included only one chimney pot. Also I have barely sketched vin tabac on the café to the right and not included patisserie on the shop next door. The reason for these omissions is to prevent what might be called irrelevant details detracting from the overall composition. ² So,   vin tabac adds scarcely more than a variation to the texture and colour of the painting. Additionally, I've changed the rectangle above the café into a circle, because otherwise the composition would be dominated by squares, rectangles, and triangles, leading to monotony. The circle also echoes the curves of the pavements to the left and the right (though I was not aware of this at the time of painting).

Echoes and contrasts of all kinds are important as compositional elements. Probably it can readily be seen that the red–browns, the ochre, the blues, and the violets are distributed across the picture plane. But there is also the emerald green on the side of the building next to the café on the right, which is repeated on the “scuff–edging” of the building on the far left (and perhaps vestigialally on the shop front in the centre). All these aspects of a painting guard against tiredness and mindless repetition, and tend (if successful) to a certain dynamism. These qualities were all emphasised by Ruskin, in some of the finest art criticism ever written. Yet this troubled genius was forever judging paintings to the degree that they represented “truth to nature”. ³  This poses the question, “Are either Utrillo’s painting or my “copy” of it, “true to nature?” I have no more interest in this than Utrillo did! What he sought out were opportunities to explore composition and – crucially – colour. And my use of his work is really no more than a variation of his colours and shapes on a flat surface—bearing no more than a vestigial reference to any extant reality.     

Notes

John Register, Parking Lot by the Ocean, 1976. Acrylic

¹ There are some exceptions to this. Edward Hopper includes cars in some of his compositions, but they are back–grounded and usually peripheral. Another painter (also American) is John Register, a sober realist who invested mundane subjects – very often a chair or chairs in the setting of an office, a café, or a waiting room – with a sort of poetry of uneasy expectancy. In the reproduction below he has transferred this atmosphere to an automobile. Register has been compared to Hopper, but said, “With Hopper you witness someone else's isolation; in my pictures, I think you, the viewer, become the isolated one.”    

²

Cezanne, The Black Clock, c 1870

If Cézanne included a bottle in his still lifes he would never include the lettering on the label, because he did not want any distraction from the timelessness of his compositions. Similarly in The Black Marble Clock, Cézanne has not painted the hands on the clock face. Laurence Gowing has pointed out that, “… the hands would have been below the critical size for inclusion in this summary sweep of tones” (Cézanne: The Early Years, 1859–1872). I agree with this, but I think another reason for the omission of the hands is to prevent the distraction of people making stupid remarks, such as, “Look he painted this at seven thirty–three”—or whatever.

³ I doubt that truth to nature, as Ruskin perceived it, has ever been possible. Most paintings are studio productions. And if artists set their easels up at a particular place outside, they will find that the lighting and shadows change so much, as the hours – and sometimes even minutes – pass – that to capture how their subject looked at a particular moment is impossible. Even Ruskin undermines his own theory of “truth to nature” when he writes, in The Elements of Drawing, “… it would never be possible for you to gradate your scales so truly as to make them practicably accurate and serviceable; and even if you could, unless you had about ten thousand scales, and were able to change them faster than ever juggler changed cards, you could not in a day measure the tints on so much as one side of a frost–bitten apple.”     

Tramps and vagrants: the disappearance of a class of indigents and down and outs

As background for an upcoming course ¹ I'm reading J F C Harrison’s Early Victorian Britain, 1832–51. Though I should say ‘rereading’, because I first read it in the 1970s when I was doing an evening class on English social history at the Working Men’s College, London (founded by Frederick Denison Maurice in 1854). I have never forgotten Harrison’s book: it is one of those small gems, like Bindoff’s Tudor England, and I find that I am appreciating it even more, some forty–five years later (which I think demonstrates a rare quality of writing, given how often our fond memories seem so flat when revisited!). A particular passage caught my attention, and set me of on writing this piece:

By the 1840s there was a regular body of nomads who frequented the casual wards of the workhouses. The tattered figure of the regular tramp was for many years to come a familiar figure by the English roadside: today [1979] he has all but disappeared . . . That vagrancy was the nursery of crime was accepted as axiomatic: habitual tramps became first beggars, then thieves and finally convicts. Today a beggar is a rare sight in England, and a whole generation has grown up scarcely knowing what the term means. (p60)         

I wondered about this, because although I have scarcely been aware of any people who I would describe as vagrants or as beggars (as ubiquitous, varied, and colourful as they were in the nineteenth century) I have been aware of tramps, from the 1960s up to the second decade of the present century. However, as an historian, Harrison is very careful to warn against making assumptions, and extrapolating ideas from the limited data which is all we have to go on when attempting to make conclusions about times when we were not alive (or even, it might be said, when we are alive—because most of what we think we know is necessarily based on testimony). So what I have to say about tramps relates only to those places I have happened to live in; and what the situation might have been in Bradford, Glasgow, Exeter, or any other place where I have not lived, I cannot possibly say (without at least undertaking the work of a scholar in the field of social history).

I have no recollections of tramps in 1950’s St–Leonards–on–Sea where I was a junior, but I'm fairly sure that they were around. I do remember a sad woman who had St Vitus Dance – a form of chorea – who my father unkindly called “bigger–banger” (as a result of the uncontrollable stamping of her feet on the pavement).

It was not until I lived in Camberwell in the 1960’s that I became fully aware of tramps. I remember that there seemed to be a kind of noontide (of just two or three) of them every day, passing from Brixton to Camberwell Green.² And I'm not sure if my memory serves me correctly, but I remember them as wearing brown great coats, and sporting matted beards. But these people were not criminals – even if occasionally petty thieves. From my observations they simply lacked any energy to put into the work of crime (because crime is a form of work). They were truly lost souls, tramping the streets year in year out. I imagine that they sometimes slept rough and sometimes sought shelter at a Salvation Army hostel (or even a “spike”). These were I think some form of the common lodging houses of Victorian Britain, and still seemed to be around post–ww2—judging at least from a conversation I had with a down and out in Newcastle in 1964³: he involuntarily shuddered when I mentioned the word. But the kind of tramp I'm talking about seemed – perhaps from the 1970s on – to metamorphose into “the homeless” (and in the eyes such people I would occasionally see a terrible despair—whereas in the tramp’s eyes there was nothing to read).

Having moved from London to Cambridge in 1988, I didn’t give much further thought to tramps until I was volunteering one evening at the Cyrenian Centre, giving food to the homeless.⁴ There I met two tramps who (so I felt) were definitely in what I would describe as the “London mould”. One of them told me he had been on the road for thirty years and the other for forty years—though how they could keep track of time it was difficult to say. However, that they had been tramps for an unconscionable time was quite clear; one of them had decidedly lost his sense of reality, and – to borrow a term from pseudo–psychology – was living on a different plane to the rest of us.

My last sighting of my classical “great coated, heavily bearded” tramp was in Hastings in 2013. I was staying in the town because my mother was in hospital. And one evening I decided to look around the town centre. It was during the winter, and was dark—though a fair number of young people were out and about. I came across the tramp in the doorway of a large shop, and just as I reached him he let out an incoherent roar, and scattered a handful of the shop’s leaflets to the four winds. And he was as wild as some creature we might imagine emerging out of the incomprehensible pages of the Book of Ezekiel (or a drawing struck by William Blake as illustration to one of his more obscure imaginings). He was a man tramping over the earth as if it did not belong to him. How lucky we are with our roofs over our heads and our comfortable beds!  

Notes

1/ The course is on art history, but I have a feeling that art – as with so many subjects – cannot be studied in a vacuum.

2/ One winter’s day, when snow was on the streets, I saw a tramp sitting on the wall outside of the house I was living in. I made some sardine sandwiches, and took them down to him. Not a word was said—no word needed saying. Back upstairs I had the satisfaction – pleasure, really – of seeing him eating them. It was such a small thing – a small moment – but I never forget it.

3/ I was in Newcastle, because I’d discovered the pleasure of (the uncertainty of) hitchhiking: where would it take you? I saw more of the north of England than I ever have since. I stayed in Youth Hostels.

4/ I had, as it were, been “roped in” to do this voluntary work. A student from Cambridge University was also there, and she seemed quite frightened by some of the men who turned up. One of them fell into a drunken stupor, and we had to call the police to remove him!       

True Christianity?

   

True Christianity?

(Note: this is not a new blog, but one that I've made some changes to.) 

Even today a person who lives wholly in the present — a person who goes with the flow and is fully committed to life — is spoken of disapprovingly as ‘materialistic’.
A bizarre word…

Don Cupitt, Mysticism after Modernity

I have on occasion been “accused” of being an atheist or a materialist—as if I had “magicked up” these words specifically to fling a pot of paint over the sentiments of those who are of any religious persuasion whatsoever. Yet I truly do not want to call myself anything; and I am quite serious when I say that I would like to think of myself as a part of the natural order of things, as much as a blackbird, a squirrel, or what you will—and I found out from Springwatch that we share a remarkable number of genes with the humble worm: 70%. And it is an illusion to think that we are free to believe whatever we like. We can, for example, choose whether to holiday in Berlin, Paris, or Rome. But is that not the limit of (deliberate) human choice? It is true that I may undergo a revelatory experience which is so extraordinarily numinous that I have no choice but to believe that which I feel has been vouchsafed to me. But here equally I have no choice in the matter. So, if someone asks me what I believe, I can only say that I believe that life is a profound mystery; that the question “what is the meaning of life” is not a legitimate one to ask; and if there was a meaning in the sense implied, it would be beyond belief that we have not by now discovered what that was—or why indeed we have been kept in the dark since the dawn of consciousness! ¹ And then, as Loren Eiseley writes, “The why of things eludes us, and as long as this is the case, we will have a yearning for the marvellous, the explosive event in history. Indeed so restless is man's intellect that were he to penetrate to the secrets of the universe tomorrow, the likelihood is that he would grow bored on the day after.”²

“Ah, so that's what it's all about . . . [yawns] . . . anything good on the telly tonight?”

But seriously, I do not yearn after the why of things at all. I think it must all remain a mystery—except occasionally we are vouchsafed some moment of understanding which, alas, we can never explain to anyone else. And what the poets and painters give us is not verisimilitude, but something which is different to the world—and which haunts us with a certain frisson, which we can, if we are so minded, be happy to experience for the rest of our life.  

But to give flesh to the title of this piece: I owe a great debt to Harry Williams,³ and in particular to his book The True Wilderness (comprising sermons given when he was Dean of Trinity College, Cambridge, in the late 1960s). I read that book over and over again, and if I say it changed my life I am not exaggerating (and, like a child totally absorbed by some enchanting story, no solitude was at that time too great for me). In one of William’s sermons he describes a scene from the film, ‘Never on a Sunday’, in which the “Beautiful Ilya . . .  a corrupt, sociable, sensitive, independent, happy-go-lucky streetwalker in the bustling Port of Piraeus” is visited one evening by a young and painfully shy sailor. Effectively he is paralysed by a fear of not knowing what to do—just as we teenagers of the 1950s were crippled with the notion that we had to acquire a ‘technique’ (while being sadly unaware of the kindness and understanding of so many girls and young women). But Ilya is one of those latter, and she softly sings to the sailor, who loses his inhibitions, and . . .  in William’s words, is redeemed. This has nothing to do with morals, and everything to do with the lifting of one of those things that were preventing the young sailor from fulfilling a natural part of his life (and we do not always have such means readily at our disposal).

There is then a Thought for the Day which I will never forget, given by Jon Bell of the Iona Community—and which would not have resonated with me so deeply had I never read Harry Williams. Bell had been visiting a single mother in a Glasgow flat, and he asked: “Morag, how do you manage?” She told him that there was a gay couple in one of the other flats, and that they did shopping and ran other errands for her—and how once a week one of the men would babysit for her, while the other took her dancing. This was true kindness, true charity—freely given, and healthful to all involved. And the man who took her dancing was of course also well able to protect her. And I believe that Christ – as I glean his character from Williams’ interpretation – would have seen this in exactly the same light.

Finally, there is something that I would not relate had I had the slightest intention of effecting a particular result—which was anyway impossible because I was entirely ignorant of the circumstances that obtained. I must explain!

I was attending the last class of a course at Homerton, College, Cambridge, entitled ‘Doing the right thing’ (moral philosophy).⁴ The last thing we discussed was abortion. It’s not something I take lightly, but I abhor the “pro–life”, single issue extremists—those who harass staff at Planed Parenting clinics in America, and have killed at least eleven people since 1993. All I can remember is, that I spoke with sincerity to the effect that it is extremely difficult to form laws in this area, because each case had to be handled with great sensitivity, and that judgement had better take a back seat—or absent itself altogether.

Well, that was that, the class ended, and I made my way to the bus stop. I had hardly reached the stop, when a girl from the class came running after me, calling out my name. She just reached me as my bus pulled up, and we stood for a few seconds simply looking into each other’s eyes, without a word being spoken by either of us. I knew, and she knew that I knew, that at some time she had an abortion, and that at some level she was deeply unhappy about it. And what I said in the class had helped lessen the burden for her—all unbeknown to me. This happy remembrance can still make my eyes water when I recall it.

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1/ I'm a member of a Humanist group, but I am not a Humanist. Which is to say that, I have not read any of the literature put out by Humanists UK, the National Secular Society, or of any other Humanist group or association. (Though I did, way back in the day, read Corliss Lamont’s The Philosophy of Humanism, which I much enjoyed, though without any idea that humanism was anything other than a synonym for a non–believer—in God). Also, I do not believe in proselytising of any kind. It is no business of mine to try and change the mind of anyone else, or to pour scorn on their beliefs (even though my past “copybook” contains some fairly egregious expressions of just this kind). However, I do think that such cults as the Moonies and the Jehovah’s Witnesses are fair game. And if anyone thinks I'm a Nihilist or a Cynic, they’re barking up the wrong tree! There is only one categorisation that I do not particularly mind, which is “freethinker”—which is how my mother had the courage to describe herself on admission to hospital to give birth to me: in the Salvation Army Hospital for Mothers! (Of course, to be a freethinker requires discipline, but it is in no danger of hardening into doctrine—and so freezing the warm stream of thought, so to express it.)

2/  From The Firmament of Time

3/ I do not know who wrote William’s obituary in The Guardian (January, 2006), but the last paragraph reads: “Had he been able to compose his own funeral address, he might, true to form, have taken its theme from Edith Piaf's Je Ne Regrette Rien. But there may be many thousands who regret that we never found the opportunity to tell him how much we owed him, and how much we loved him.” 

A few years ago – travelling to Rye by train – my wife and I found ourselves sitting opposite a man with twinkling eyes, who was wearing a cross which we soon discovered consisted of silver–plated nails recovered from the rubble of the ww2 bombed Coventry Cathedral. The man was travelling with his wife and a small dog to spend time at a retreat in Burwash (also in Sussex). I know that at least two readers of this piece will have guessed the identity of the man! He was the former Bishop of Coventry, the Rt Reverend Simon Barrington–Ward. He was one of the most delightful men that my wife and I have ever met. In the course of our conversation, I told him how much I owed to Harry Williams’ writing and that I wished I’d written to him to express my gratitude. “He’ll know”, he said, “He’ll know.”! 

I was saddened to see from the obituary that Simon Barrington–Ward died just this year. For some years he lived in the same street as us, and we did have the occasional short conversation with him – usually when he was walking his dog – but I'm sure he would not have minded if I’d knocked on his door once, and asked him if we could talk more about Harry Williams—and I have no doubt, many other things. It’s taken the lockdown to show us how much we let go by that would have enriched us if we had lifted our eyes from the pavements. We've had W H Davies, Hazlitt, and Wordsworth to teach us this; and if we haven't learned now, I seriously wonder if we ever will—and a return to supposed “normality” is the least desirable of all possible outcomes. Yet I have hope. I remember some moss which had made happy purchase on a window sill. It dried out one summer, turned brown, and seemed dead. But then it rained for a day or two, and when I next looked it was as verdant as if it had ever been situated by some flowing brook!         

4/  These lessons were given by Dr Russell Re Manning, and they were so inspiring that – after the first evening – we took no further coffee breaks. And at the end of the last class we gave him a spontaneous round of applause.

 

 

Stoicism: notes on a much misunderstood philosophy

The Stoics get a bad press. It is thought that to behave stoicically is to suppress emotions; to face all problems with a stiff upper lip; and generally to live like an anaemic soul, instead of a full–blooded human being.

Hardly could a more oversimplified and misleading view of the teachings of the Stoic philosophers be proposed or entertained. Their analysis of the emotions is one of the subtlest ever proposed, and is scarcely equalled – in terms of its use of reason – until the publication of Kant’s The Moral Law. Further, it’s as valid and strikingly original today as it was in Classical Greece and Rome.

For the Stoics, emotion was not in itself bad, or a thing to be avoided, provided its expression was natural, rather than culturally inculcated. It is a good question to ask, “What constitutes a natural emotion?” Well, consider: if you are brought up in a culture where, on the death of a member of a community it is customary for women to weep and for men to flagellate
themselves, it is surprising that a child, on becoming an adult, will behave in exactly the same way? But is this natural? At the time of the death of Princess Diana, Carol Sarler, writing in the Times identified “a new pornography of grief”, which seemed to grip so many of us following the tragic death of a person with whom we have never exchanged a single word.  

There is some savour in this of the great public exhibitions of grief – accompanied by weeping and lamenting – on the death of European kings in the Middle Ages. Common to the historical and contemporary manifestations of the phenomenon, is the sheer unnaturalness and extravagance of emotion, characterised as it is by a willing public immersion in a sea of collective grief. This passage from Huizinga’s perennial classic The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924), wonderfully illustrates the tenor of life in these times:

The frequent processions . . . were a continual source of pious agitation. When the times were evil, as they often were, processions were seen winding along, day after day, for weeks on end. In 1412 daily processions were ordered in Paris, to implore victory for the king, who had taken up the oriflamme against the Armagnacs. They lasted from May to July, and were formed by ever–varying orders and corporations, going always by new roads, and always carrying different relics. The Burgher of Paris calls them “the most touching processions in the memory of men”. People looked on or followed “weeping piteously, with many tears, in great devotion”. All went barefooted and fasting, councillors of Parlement as well as the poorer citizens. Those who could afford it carried a torch or taper. A great many small children were always among them. Poor country people of the environs of Paris came barefooted from afar to join the procession. And nearly every day the rain came down in torrents.  

Was ever there so miserable a picture? I cannot remember all that Huizinga wrote, but I imagine that this encouragement of public mourning and lamentation was a means of keeping the people on side of king and country. But if so, it was cruel policy by any standard, and completely contra to the true spirit of Stoicism.       

But there is another contemporary twin to such imbalance, typified by the kind of extravagant celebration and outpouring of joy that greeted the “triumph” of nomination for the Olympic Games in 2012. “Fever pitch” might be an accurate description of such a state of mind; and its apparent antithesis to the “condition” of public mourning does not rule out a common parentage. But, almost immediately, the pendulum swung the other way—as news first filtered through, and overwhelmed us as we heard of the horrific bombings of tube trains and busses in London on the 7th of July. Our reaction to this was different to that occasioned by the death of Diana (which may perhaps best be described as ersatz). It was, I think, naturally visceral, and truly empathetic towards those who were the innocent victims of these vicious, senseless, and (alas) utterly arbitrary acts of death–dealing, maiming, and traumatising. Nothing good came out of that day. But was not our deep–felt, but quieter reaction to this tragedy more natural?

In the light of the above examples, it is hardly surprising that the Stoics warned of the dangers of excessive emotion: such as occur as a result of socially inculcated (or learned) reactions to events, which have probably become second nature, but which loom out of all proportion, thereby causing an incapacitating disturbance of the mind. “A push may start a log rolling, but the reason it rolls is because it is round.”¹ Likewise, unhealthy emotions are pent up – or primed – such that the smallest incident may unleash them (often with disastrous results, such as are reported daily in the news). So, consider, would it be appropriate for a judge to feel anger when sentencing someone who had committed a heinous act? No; the judge may feel opprobrium – at some stages of the trial – and this may be an unavoidable response; but that natural emotional response will not determine the length of the sentence handed down. Nor will judges carry over such responses to their next case: otherwise they would be unfitted to concentrate on the matter in hand, and might even pass down a harsher sentence (reflective not of the facts of the case, but of the emotional state of their mind).

For the Stoic, high spirits were lauded; pleasures enjoyed – as they came along in the natural course of events; and, as Cicero said, it would be madness not to pursue something that you feel would be good for you. What the Stoics were against was excessive yearning; corrosive envy or bitterness; grief so deeply felt and long extended that a lost friend would be miserable were they able to witness it; ambition which, if unrealised, would seem unbearable; and any emotion which went beyond what was either natural or desirable (to the person who was clear–eyed about the things that really matter). However, to be a Stoic did not mean that you should not try for high office.  For example, Marcus Aurelius (an exemplary Stoic) became emperor. But, for the Stoic, such positions were regarded as “preferred indifferents”, which if not fulfilled would not cause them to become bitter, envious, or irascible (or indulge in any other form self–defeating response).

So, for the Stoics emotions are natural and necessary for a life worth living. But they would endeavour not to be carried away on an emotional tide so strong that it bordered on madness. And if you want to see the results of emotions out of control and generally wreaking havoc, you need do no more that watch Coronation Street, East Enders, or Hollyoaks; and then ask yourself, “Is this the way I really want to live?”

Suppose though that everyone lived the more rational – though still high–spirited, explorative, and risk–ready – life of a Stoic? Would this mean the death of literature – because of an insufficiency of drama in people’s lives? No; this will never happen, because irrationality and illogicality flow like ichors though the minds of multitudes! So we need fear no loss of such plays and novels as Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, King Lear, Madam Bovary, The Clockwork Orange, or The Handmaid’s Tale. And then Seneca’s Medea is as tragic a play as anyone could ask for.

End note:

Stoic thought sometimes seems to turn our normal way of viewing things on their head. In the Tusculan Disputations, Cicero writes “. . . as compassion is distress due to a neighbour’s misfortunes, so envy is distress due to a neighbour’s prosperity. Therefore, the man who comes to feel compassion comes also to feel envy.” How can compassion be put on the same footing as envy? This is made clearer later in the same disputation: “It is urged . . . that it is useful to feel rivalry, to feel envy, to feel pity. Why pity rather than give assistance if one can? Or are we unable to be open–handed without pity? We are able, for we ought not to share distresses ourselves for the sake of others, but we ought to relive others of their distress if we can.” I take it from this that if we feel compassion or pity, we had better turn these emotions into action, otherwise they will become unhealthy, and shrivel into some kind of absurd, useless luxury. And if we find ourselves envying our neighbour, then we had better turn to Emerson: “There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”

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¹ This sentence is from Professor Margaret Graver’s Cicero on the Emotions: Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4 (Translated and with Commentary). Chicago, 2002. I could not have written this piece without that book. The Introduction and Commentary are written with great clarity; and the translation reads wonderfully (it is not necessary to know Latin to appreciate this).

My grandfather, my step–grandmother (and Dickens & Nelson)

Joe, his wife, Lily, and his sister (also Lily)

and an unknown clerical gentleman

I have recently rediscovered some of the letters that my grandfather sent to my father, and these have more than family interest. Here first is an insight into London schooling in the late nineteenth century. (My grandfather left school in 1899. The family lived in Bermondsey, close to Tower Bridge). I have transcribed the letters into Courier New—a font which is an aesthetic insult to typography, and which I think has no other use than to reproduce the results of the typewriter:

I remember full well, that I left school on my 13th birthday, and the master told my mother, that I was a bright boy, but oh so lazy!  Of course it was very fortunate that I discovered what ignorance meant as soon almost as I stepped out of the school ground.  Of course one can never really make up for lost time.  But then one has to remember that the old London Board School never set out to make scholars.  As long as simple arithmetic and elementary spelling were assimilated, the job was done. Believe it or not though, I did not even get that far.

I have since made attempts amongst other things, to acquire a smattering of Latin, but with no success.  Fortunately I took interest in the French language, and this gave me my chance on the Continental. [Attending Railway Union conferences in Belinzona, Switzerland]

My grandfather did indeed learn French, and I am sure many other things at evening classes. I don’t think that he ever read Samuel Smiles’ Self Help, but he definitely embraced the ethos of Victorian self–improvement. His father was a goods–yard shunter on the railways, and Joe started off as a signal clerk. He worked his way up gradually, and eventually became manager of the Bricklayers Arms Goods Depot in south London. The depot was one of the largest in the country, and of vital importance during WW2. Consequently it was extensively bombed and at times not too far removed from war–front conditions. Post–war Joe worked in railway offices at Victoria Station.

My (paternal) grandmother died before I was born; and Joe remarried. He met his second wife as a result of involvement with the Labour Party. Joe was a keen unionist, and his second wife (Joy) was what used to be called a ‘silver spoon socialist’. She was a member of the Cecil family, and her father owned much of the land around the village of Bletchingley, Surrey – that is until he successfully managed to gamble most of it away . . . However, Joy was a truly committed Labour Party member and was re–elected as Labour candidate for the Rural District of Godstone & Parish of Bletchingley, Surrey – in the very heart of Conservative country – year after year. That was because people knew that   she cared – and indeed she would willingly turn out in the middle of the night to help someone. During Neil Kinnock’s leadership of the Labour Party she was given one of two annually awarded Kier Hardy prizes for outstanding local political activity. Their marriage was amazing in a way: Joe from the working class roots, and Joy from the upper or ‘landed’ classes. Further, Joe was twenty years older than Joy. Nevertheless, it worked wonderfully. Joe became quite the squire in a way – in Bletchingley – and I remember one Christmas his giving the post–boy a half crown. This was a gesture of genuine kindness, but also I think a demonstration of Joe’s standing in the community!  Joe’s letter continues:   

I am left with the impression that grandfather Hart was about twenty years older than grandma, in which case he would have been born about 1807. He seemed to have suffered from continuous ill health, which having no private means, caused the family some financial hardship. I learned that he was at one time a news reporter for a journal called “The South London Press”. He probably did some clerical work in the City of London. When he was alive, the family had a small house in South London near the Church of St George. –This is “Little Dorrit’s” church of Charles Dickens fame. (I have seen many of your soldiers visiting the church during the war)* The church was known as St George in the Fields when it was built. The district was bombed, but the church escaped serious damage.

Grandma Hart always referred to grandfather as “poor Hart” They appear to have lived quite happily together. It might be asked why  I did not fill in further details from my father or aunts. I suppose the short answer would be that as I grew older, my interest diminished.

On looking back I think it should be noted with some interest that both grandparents could read and write, which considering the state educational facilities of the early part of the last century, marks them as being a little above the average.  As a child I was very fond of Dickens (and I still am) and when talking with me [sic] to grandma about a copy of Pickwick Papers which I had just received from a library, she remembered when it came out first, in weekly parts, and how “poor hart” [as grandma Hart always referred to grandfather] purchased a copy on the day of issue, and with what zest they both enjoyed reading it.  One of my boyhood heroes was Nelson, and you can imagine how widely I opened my eyes when grandma told me that she knew and had spoken with a man who had fought in Trafalgar under Nelson.  Another was George Stephenson, the power behind the steam locomotive, and it was a wonder to me how grandma could possibly got [sic] before there were railways!  From this starting point I elicited the information that when she first came to London, it was from the White Hart Inn at Lewes [Sussex], that she started by stage coach from about the year 1839.  Apparently, as was not unusual, she left the village to take service in London as a girl of eleven or twelve, but in what capacity or where, history is silent.  

  Great grandfather Mabbott held some sort of semi official office with the Lewes Town Council. At one time he was Town Crier. This would require him to wear the gold braided cocked hat and cloak, and after ringing his bell on the steps of the old town hall, and calling “Oyez, Oyez” proceed to read to [sic] councils notices and proclamations, followed by personal notices of things lost and found, and announcements. . .[I do not have the next page]    

Joy, my step–grandmother, taken 

before she met my (paternal) 

grandfather

 





  

Joe and Joy at Little Coldharbour, near Bletchingley, Surrey. Probably taken in the early 1950s, or possibly in the late 1940s. It is perfectly clear how happy they were – former working class boy from Bermondsey, and former member of the Cecil family! I was lucky enough to spend holidays with them—and never was boy so happy!

                                  

*This reference to the war is puzzling. It is true that London was bombed during the First World War, but not nearly as extensively as during the Second World War. But I imagine that Joe still knew this area as a result of his work at the Bricklayers Arms goods depot.