On Anne Valery

After seeing Robert Hamer’s comic masterpiece Kind Hearts and Coronets for the first time (in a small Paris cinema in - I think - 1978, where it was entitled Noblesse Oblige), I wrote this short poem and thirty years later had the great and entirely unexpected pleasure of meeting the actress Anne Valery, who played the Girl in the Punt opposite Alec Guinness. So I dug up the poem and typed it out and gave it to her and we became friends, although we met only a handful of times. When she died last year newspaper obituaries confirmed what an extraordinary talent she was. Read one of them here. Her glamorous 1940s studio portrait hangs to this day above the bar of the French House in Soho. What a girl.

The Girl in the Punt   for Anne Valery


Murderous Louis
Unhitches his belt;
Slips into the opportune water
Calmly improvising
His first perpetration.

The unknowing pair
Drift over the weir
The adulterous punt
Topples and is lost -
And we’re compromised.

What of the girl,
The cast-off mistress -
What fate is worse than death?
As the slaughtering counterjumper
Dispatches each D'Ascoyne in turn

What do we learn
About ourselves?
Why don’t we care more
About the lost innocent,
Our lost innocence?

‘Never to be content again with hemp’ –
A hangman’s loss, but worse for us.
Malignity’s a silky inhalation.
I’d do the same I guess, for Sibella,
She has a voice, at least.

But the girl in the punt –
She’s a pretext for a drowning,
A foregone conclusion,
Drenched in a torrent of Guinness
And Hamer’s harmful gaze.

Best. Thing. Ever.

Here's a short clip of David Attenborough's encounter with the Bower Bird, a creature with the most elaborate courtship ritual in nature. Apart from the breathtaking loveliness and strangeness of the bird's behaviour, what impresses is Attenborough's calm, admiring commentary. He also knows when to let the pictures speak for themselves. 

Younger, fizzier telly presenters would shriek and laugh and make camp deflationary comments when faced with such material, because that's what they do, and what their producers encourage them to do. They fill the space where wonder, humility and knowledge once prevailed.

Stalin wasn't Stallin'

Here's Stalin Wasn't Stallin' performed by The Golden Gate Quartet. Recorded many years later by the great Robert Wyatt (see blogs passim). Catchy.

On the real thing

In the current issue of the Times Literary Supplement there is a full-page advertisement for THE COMPLETE PROSE OF T. S. ELIOT offering 'unprecedented digital access to material that has been restricted or inaccessible for almost fifty years'.

This is an event. For the first time in one place the collected, uncollected and unpublished prose of one of the most prolific and influential writers of the twentieth century

Volumes 1 and 2, covering 1905-1918 and 1919-1926 respectively, will be available on Eliot's birthday, 26th September.

But (and this is a big but, so BUT) this invaluable edition will not be available in book form, only as an online resource. At least I can see no sign in the advertisement that there are any plans to make the material available in print.

This, if the case, is a watershed moment and one to note with sorrow. As Faber continue diligently and exhaustively to publish Eliot's letters (rather too many of which are short formal notes to contributors The Criterion and humdrum exchanges that would best appear in an online archive), the Complete Prose (every bit as important as the correspondence and, what's more, intended for a public readership) will languish on an academic website. Eliot scholarship is still first rate, and I have no doubt that the Complete Prose will be diligently edited by Ronald Schuchard. What's lost to the reader, however, is a continuity, and a physical engagement with the print medium which was, of course, Eliot's only publishing option. This is a real loss, and not only for those of us who still value books as convenient tools (provided they have all the once-standard apparatus of footnotes, index etc).

Not unrelatedly - I went recently to a screening at the BFI Southbank (the former National Film Theatre, a title now dropped presumably because it implied that there's something special about the capital and that the provinces simply aren't up to scratch when it comes to definitive institutions). The film in question was Chinese and made in 1948, Spring in a Small Town.

But it wasn't really a screening. The film wasn't projected from behind us onto the screen because there was no film to project. What we had paid to see, it turned out, was a digital version - a DVD. If I'd wanted to see this film on DVD I'd have bought the DVD.

Nowhere in the BFI Southbank programme was this made clear and while I can hardly accuse the programmers of deception I expect they've talked this through and decided that the average punter isn't too fussy so why bother to flag up what amounts to a mild deception? But how would it be if the Old Masters in the National Gallery were suddenly and without explanation replaced with high-grade photocopies? We'd feel short-changed, wouldn't we? To say the least.

On author sightings

Here's my TLS podcast about Hugo Ball's novel FLAMETTI.

The recording was interrupted by a Dada moment when the fire alarm went off and pre-recorded voices (one briskly male, the other soothingly female) insisted that this was not a drill, that it was a drill, that we should all leave the building, that we should not leave the building . . . and so on. You can probably tell from the panicky wobble in my voice the point at which the recording started again following the distraction.

My suggestion in the podcast (and in the accompanying TLS review) that one character in the novel, a condescending dandyish poet with pince-nez and 'lidless red rimmed eyes' is based on James Joyce has prompted no excited responses whatever. If it is a sighting it's really of great interest. There are to be sure many novels which manage to incorporate Joyce as a character,  notably Flann O'Brien's wonderfully funny The Dalkey Archive. If it is indeed Joyce in Flametti it must be the earliest example of such an inclusion as a character in the work of another writer. Unless you know different? I can find no link between Joyce and Hugo Ball, or the Cabaret Voltaire, other than the fact that Joyce was resident in Zurich in 1916 when the night club was established.

About author sightings: a  few months ago there was a a lot of interest in the discovery of Dylan Thomas milling around as an extra in a crowd scene in a film shot on Pendine Sands - read about that here. My favourite example of an author caught on film is the fleeting appearance of Raymond Chandler in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity. This went unnoticed for half a century. Read about that and watch the clip here.

On Lauren Bacall

The death of the great Lauren Bacall aged 89 prompts two stories.

When she first met Humphrey Bogart on the set of To Have and Have Not (she was 19, he 45), Bogie strolled over and decided to have some fun, telling her to take off her glasses (she was very short-sighted). "Without your glasses you;re a swell-looki' kid" he said.

"Without my glasses you're not so bad." she sliced back. BANG!

The other story concerns an acquaintance of mine who found himself at a charity lunch in the 1980s, seated next to an American woman wearing a veil (perhaps to conceal some recent 'work'). He had no idea who she was and made the usual small talk. Struggling slightly, he asked her whether she was interested in the theatre at all, and whether she'd seen any shows in London. "My husband was an actor', s he said, but not giving anything away. They then chatted inconsequentially about this and that and only after lunch broke up did the penny belatedly drop. He told me he was glad he had no idea he was sitting next to an actress he admired above any other - he would have been completely tongue-tied. 'You don't wake up in the morning expecting to meet Lauren Bacall', he added, still starstruck, and who can blame him?

The Big Sleep is not only my favourite American film but possibly my favourite film tout court. We should all watch it today, savouring the first encounter between Bogart (as Marlowe) and Bacall) as General Sternwood's elder daughter). Just watch them - they both seem to be on heat.

Zang Tumb Tumb

Here's a really great thing. The Italian Futurist poet Marinetti delivers a sensational reading of his Zang Tumb Tumb. You'll love this.

It's an onomatopoeic rendering of The Battle of Adrianople during the First Balkan War, beginning in mid-November 1912 and ending on 26 March 1913. Zang Tumb Tumb is the origin of all sound poetry - Hugo Ball's dadaist 'verses without words' came three or four years later, at Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire. I'm about to record a podcast about Hugo Ball, and am daunted at the challenge of performing his Karawane. Marinetti is a tough act to follow.