The Curse of Celebrity

Prince, then. Or the Artist Formerly Known as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince. I blogged earlier this year about the impact of death in a celebrity culture - see here. Some more thoughts on celebrity follow.

My American readers may be astonished to learn that I'd never heard of the Latina performer Charo, who is (I'm told) quite a big star in the States, a household name. I came across her online recently in a 1970s article entitled 'The TV Talk Shows' (Washington Post, July 14th 1977 (Style section, page B1)). in which she was cited as an early example of the way in which public over-exposure could damage a celebrity's popularity . 

The so-called "Q score", organised by one Steve Levitt, founder of Marketing Evaluations, Inc., was (and perhaps still is) a celebrity popularity rating service, and - to the surprise of many - Charo's Q score actually declined as her public exposure, her visibility as a celebrity, increased.

Before becoming nationally famous on talk shows in 1975 she was 'recognised' by 57% of the national television sample audience with a 'popularity quotient' (PQ) of 9%. By 1977 she was 'recognised' by 80% of the audience but her PQ had fallen slightly to 8%. Levitt noted sardonically: "If she was known by 100 percent of the world, chances are her popularity might go down to 7 or 6%". This is a counterintuitive result in the age of the Kardashians, but might serve tot make public figures think twice before appearing on chat shows, or come to that before appearing in public at all.

A Q score of 19 is considered the minimum level of likability for a celebrity to have any purchase on the public's affection and regard. In a 2005 survey of the dead celebrities most missed by the American public Lucille Ball came first, with a Q-score of 52, followed by Bob Hope (51) and John Wayne (48).

I have to say that the Bob Hope figure astonished me - has there ever been a less likeable performer?

Prince has died, and he was my age. Other than that we have little in common, although I was surprised to learn that he had at some point become a Jehovah's Witness, a fact that gives me pause when invited to reflect on his musical genius. Michael Jackson was another member of the cult, and was raised in it with troubling results. And (less illustriously) there's Hank Marvin of the Shadows. Prince was shrewd in managing his great fame, not least in spending several years recording and performing without a name at all, but a symbol. This elective anonymity simply added to the appeal. He was certainly recognisable - but I wonder what his Q score was, if any?

As for Charo, she's really something: a very accomplished Flamenco guitarist and, it seems. a force of nature. like Little Richard (who was surely the prototype for Prince). Her real age is a matter for speculation, but whatever age she is she doesn't look it. She was once married to the bandleader Xavier Cugat, if that's any guide. Her look is a kind of 1970s Bardot, turned up a couple of notches. Her excellent catch phrase is 'cuchi cuchi'. She has a quite astonishing energy and vitality, and I can see how repeated exposure to such an intense performer might wear thin with audiences. But in small doses she's terrific. Here's a link to something you might enjoy as much as I did: her appearance in, of all things, a Burger King training video

On 'grammar snobs'

Watch the journalist Mona Chalabi deliver an eloquent two-minute straight-to-camera piece for The Guardian online. The accompanying text reads:

Why is it that some people feel proud to be called a grammar snob? Mona Chalabi argues that those who correct others’ language are clinging to conventions that are unimportant. She says grammar snobbery is often used to silence those who have less of a voice in society.

I agree, more or less, with much of what Mona Chalabi has to say about social exclusion (although language expresses tribal allegiance throughout society, from the slick sound bites of your average politician to the torrential loquacity of rap lyrics), but I feel she makes a bad case so let me add what used to be called my' 'two penn'orth'. (And what follows will make more sense if you watch the short clip before reading this.)

With just two minutes in which to make her case Mona Chalabi makes no distinction between grammar, punctuation and vocabulary, and this is unfortunate. Like most people with strong feelings on such matters, she is not an expert but entirely confident that she is right. But she also makes no distinction between spoken and written language, or between the many registers within those two categories (formal/informal, for instance). Her assault on the anonymous cohort she labels 'grammar snobs' fails to gain traction and becomes a general complaint about how language is the property of one particular class. excluding 'those who have less of a voice in society'. 

It was Noam Chomsky (I think) who said that grammar is 'a set of complicated rules to which there are exceptions'. Exceptions are what 'prove' such rules (and 'prove' in this case always means 'to test to the point of destruction' rather than 'to confirm'). What we have instead of rules, as any linguist knows, are patterns - some of them high frequency, some not - although many people, vaguely remembering their schooldays, tend to think that such patterns are rules that cannot be negotiated. They are wrong.

Grammar 'rules' (i.e. high frequency patterns) are essential for:

a) learners of any foreign language

b) teachers of learners of any foreign language

c) writers creating learner support materials for learners and teachers of any foreign language

The 'rules' are a way in, a means by which non-native users can get an early handle on the language. Not by any means the only way, or even the best way, but certainly a way. An example might be the 'rule' (or established convention) surrounding the order of adjectives before a noun in English - we tend to write and say 'the little red engine' rather than 'the red little engine' because a high frequency pattern among native speakers is to place adjectives of size before adjectives of colour.  No big deal, but worth knowing if you're a teacher or a learner or anyone with an interest in how language works. A French student, for instance, would find the idea of a 'colour' adjective coming before the noun as rather outlandish, because in her language it's the opposite - le petit train rouge -  different pattern, see? 

Chalabi builds her case on assertions unsupported by evidence, and such assertions can equally be rejected without evidence. (As a data journalist she might be expected to know this.) She says, inter alia, (and the use of that commonplace Latin phrase will probably strike her as typically condescending and patrician but it's quicker  for me to type those two words than 'among other things', or would have been without this defensive digression) that:

"It was once considered incorrect to begin a sentence with 'and' or 'but''.

Really? That's news to me. Considered 'incorrect' by whom? When? Where's your evidence? Is it now considered correct? Again, if so, by whom? Are we invited to suppose that in this hypothetical period in the unspecified past nobody began an utterance with either word? Or is this only in relation to writing? In which case a quick sniff around will find plenty of examples from novelists who broke this and every other 'rule'. Or don't novelists count? I can find nothing in Fowler's Modern English Usage to support her claim (and while Fowler is not such an authority today he certainly was in the past).

Here's another assertion:

'What about the rule that the standard pronoun would be 'he''?

I see what she's getting at - but there was never any such rule, only a widely-observed style convention (still contested). There were guides to writing in which recommendations were made; Fowler's Modern English Usage was the standard reference for anyone working with the language, although Mona Chalabi seems to make no distinction between descriptive and prescriptive analyses of language, or (and again) between spoken and written forms. That all such conventions were observed or ignored by many literate people is another matter.

She next, having despatched the matter of grammar, tackles vocabulary and defends the commonplace use of 'literally' (not, surely, anything to do with grammar at all but, in common with 'like', a high frequency word among younger speakers, as in 'so I'm like . . ' instead of 'I said').  Chalabi attacks those hypothetical critics who object to its use. Fine, but her scattergun approach does her case no favours - she simply adds to a list of things she assumes annoy 'grammar snobs' (whoever they are) and insists that they are legitimate because - well, because that's how people talk (though not write, surely?). She defends the use of 'literally' as a kind of slipshod intensifier, which is just fine by me. I wouldn't correct speakers who adopt this commonplace trope ('I'm literally snowed under'), because I'm not a 'grammar snob' (whatever that is). I note the use, and ignore it - as one might ignore spinach on somebody else's teeth. The commonplace use of 'literally' has nothing to do with Chalabi's position - it's more to do with one generation's irritation at another's collective idiolect (and Mona Chalabi had better brace herself for what will happen to her idea of English in around thirty years' time)

She claims that 'grammar snobs' are sure to be 'older, wealthier, whiter' than those they criticise. This is another assertion without supporting evidence although I suspect she's right. Her view is illustrated by a library image of a white, bearded middle-aged man in bottle bottom glasses, thin-lipped with fury. So - by implication - are the grammar slobs (see what I did there?) likely to be younger, less wealthy and less white? Where does that get us?

Chalabi is presumably capable of writing and speaking English to a level of proficiency required by her profession. She has influence, and with this comes responsibility. That she smilingly makes a deliberate grammatical howler in her summing up ('the grammar what they say it with') is itself a condescension - she knows the form is 'wrong' but deploys it self-consciously to demonstrate her lack of affiliation to a simple rule - or pattern - informing the use of relative pronouns. Would she make such a 'mistake' in a written document? Would she find any editorial intervention in her writing a mark of the grammar snob? Or is she capable of recognising that other standards than her own may prevail and that she (like all of us) always has something new to learn about the management of the language?

By suggesting that there are no standards in written and spoken English against which effective communication can he measured, Mona Chalabi invites learners to be complicit in their own marginalization, to settle for less by ignoring attainable standards of appropriate speech and writing. And standard spelling, while we're at it. But that's another blog for another time.

Of the more than 2,000 responses to this online moment the majority (or to use the more usual formulation 'the vast majority') are hostile to Chalabi's point of view. This may tell you something about The Guardian's readership (traditionally seem as progressive, liberal/left-leaning and educated) or the use of provocation to increase the number of website visits - 'click bait', I believe it's called.

On deodorants

Let's talk about personal hygiene. 

For years I favoured the Mennen Speedstick - the green ones (see below). I was introduced to this excellent male grooming product by a pal who had spent a few years in the States and associated the aroma with the good times he had there. Here's one:

Mennen products are hard to find in Britain (perhaps I'm looking in the wrong place) but can be picked up in France in any branch of Monoprix. I stock up on trips (or ask a well-disposed friend to do so) but ran out a few weeks ago. So the other day I went to a large store in North London to find what's on offer for chaps today. Not much, was the grim conclusion.  There were a few familiar brands - Nivea, Old Spice, Brut even, which took me back - but fewer than in the past. Lynx seems to be the aroma du jour and aimed at younger types  L'Oreal also (this came a s bit of a shock) and a few others.

Most of the smells I sampled were variants on mango chutney, or scented candles, or car air fresheners and corn plasters and - oddly enough - sweat. They all implied gymnasium locker rooms and the male sodality to be found therein. Showers, manly banter, flicked towels and all that. Not at all my kind of thing. 

Then I found something with the promising name Mitchum.

The labelling (apart from the brand) is in a font too tiny for the human eye to decipher - and I mean a human eye with an electron microscope. Who knows what's in there?

Before exposing my firm manly bod to the stuff I naturally looked up the ingredients on the company's UK website, where they could not be found. But they provide some reassurances. My deodorant of choice offers:

     Ultra powerful sweat and odour control
     Keeps you feeling dry and confident for 48 hours
     Contains aloe and vitamin E to soothe and condition skin
     Goes on clear
     dermatologically tested
     alcohol free

Why the last two features appear in lower case is of no concern. I like the thought of a roll-on deodorant that gives you confidence for 48 hours. So I went back to the store and bought one, for £3.99.

What is in there though? I looked it up. It seems that in the past the active ingredient was Aluminum Zirconium Tetrachlorohydrex Gly (20%), but this has since been replaced by Aluminum Sesquichlorohydrate (25%). Why is that? Further research is needed - but they both sound a tad Quatermass to me. The smell is fine - a bit like Mennen Speedstick to my untutored conk. Greatly artificial.

Mitchum was launched in 1970 by Revlon and was widely known (at least in the US) for its marketing slogan, "So effective you can skip a day". The slogan was dropped in 2007, and I'm not surprised. The French have a saying that loosely translates as 'today's sweat fine; yesterday's non!'

The Mitchum brand was purchased by the Revlon Corporation in the late 1960s from what was originally known as the Paris Toilet Company (why on earth drop that brand name?) and later the Golden Peacock Company (ditto - and I'd like to have been at the PTC board meeting which voted on the change). The earlier companies carried an extensive line of cosmetics and it was a chap called Bill McNutt who is credited with inventing the antiperspirant. 

Before the company was sold to Revlon it had been based in Paris, Tennessee (ah - penny drops). What I haven't been able to establish is any connection between the product and the very great actor Robert Mitchum. What man wouldn't want to smell like him? What man wouldn't, at least for a time, want to be him? Him, and Cary Grant, but for very different reasons. Mitchum was a natural, Grant an elaborate self-invention. They were both, for my money, the greatest screen actors Hollywood ever produced, and I struggle to think of a third. Not Brando. Jimmy Stewart probably, but that's more on account of the films he starred in - he was always the right actor, if not a great one. Try swapping Grant and Stewart around in the films they made with Hitchcock. See?

But back to personal hygiene. It seems to me that manufacturers are missing out on a huge potential market of men (and women to, I expect) who don't want to smell of deodorants or even expensive colognes blended expertly by Penhaligons. What we want (by which I really mean what I want) is to smell of things other than myself or a high street deodorant.

So what aromas would be welcome in a range of male deodorants fit for the modern male (by which, again, I mean myself)?

I'd suggest the following:

a) freshly unboxed Apple laptops;
b) mild creosote (for country weekends);
c) the leather seat smell of mid-century British saloon cars (such as the Morris Oxford);
d) warm digestive biscuits;
e) Plymouth gin with lime overtones;
f)  cordite;
g) plush cinema seating;
h) Paris metro (before they banned smoking);
i) Kettle's Yard (beeswax, linen, modernist artworks);
m) brand new Indian-made traditional leather cricket balls (one of the best of all smells, in my book);

What we need is a revolution in male deodorants comparable to that moment in (I think) the 1960s when plain crisps gave way to cheese 'n' onion, salt 'n'vinegar - and après ça le déluge. We have, I assume, the technology to fabricate any aroma, however niche, just as we can now synthesise any and every taste.

Any takers? 

Political booklists

How many of these have you read?

Lord Melbourne by David Cecil
Montrose by John Buchan
Marlborough by Sir Winston Churchill
John Quincy Adams by Samuel Flagg Bemis
The Emergence of Lincoln by Allan Nevins
The Price of Union by Herbert Agar
John C. Calhoun by Margaret L. Coit
Talleyrand by Duff Cooper
Byron in Italy by Peter Quennell
The Red and the Black by M. de Stendhal
From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming
Pilgrim's Way by John Buchan

These were President John F. Kennedy's ten favourite books. Perhaps like me you're taken aback by the presence of two off-trail Buchans and a Fleming. But the list prompted me to look up a few other lists by comparable heads of state and sundry other political figures. Ready?

Margaret Thatcher (described by friends as 'an avid reader') admired, among others Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty  and "anything by Winston Churchill”. Her favourite historians included Robert Conquest, Andrew Roberts and Norman Stone. Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal was also reportedly a favourite.

Tony Blair cited Treasure Island, Zola's Germinal, The Lord of the Rings and  Isaac Deutscher's three-volume biography of  Leon Trotsky. Then Walter Scott's Ivanhoe ('a work of genius') and three squirmingly pious   choices Jesus was a Jew by Arnold G Fruchtenbaum, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes by Amin Maalouf and Jon Rothschild, and Muhammad by Martin Lings.

In Cameron on Cameron the PM cites Goodbye to All That and David Copperfield, and claims that Graham Greene is his favourite author. All fine - although most of us will recognise them as GCSE set texts. Has he read anything since?

Nigel Farage? The 39 Steps.

David Milliband (on Desert Island Discs) chose Ulysses, but (and this is unbelievably annoying) did so on the grounds that in such circumstances he"'might get through it". Having your cake and eating it - a solid philistine view, that -  a craven recognition that it's the greatest of novels coupled with a  crowd-pleasing admission that he's never read it, having more important things to do.

Boris Jonson claims to like Wodehouse. His favourite film is something called Dodgeball starring somebody called Ben Stiller. 

Donald Trump? The Bible, of course. It's even better than his second favourite book, but I'm damned if I can bother to type the title of that - it's a book written by Donald Trump, or at leafs published under his name. Od the Good Book he says: “The Bible means a lot to me, but I don’t want to get into specifics,” 

Hilary Clinton? The Brothers Karamazov.
Gordon Brown? The Snail and the Whale.
John Major? Trollope's The Small House at Allington
Diane Abbott? Vanity Fair. ("I admire Becky Sharp – she is absolutely unstoppable")

I could go on.

Cisgenderism and the Beats

"The Guardian’s own list of 100 best novels written in English had a mere 21 written by women. How many had strong female characters? How many had lead characters of colour? Or with a disability? Or who identified as anything other than cisgender and straight?"

These and other question posed by the American writer Lynnette Lounsbury in The Guardian (4th April 2016), were prompted by her belated realisation that the Beat writers she formerly admired 'had no place for women'. 

If female Beat writers are marginalised (and she is right to insist that they are) then a factor contributing to their marginalization is readers such as Lounsbury. To put it bluntly: she should read more widely. Female Beat writers include Carolyn Cassady, Elise Cohen, Diane di Prima, Brenda Frazer, Joyce Johnson, Hettie Jones, Edie Parker and Anne Waldman, but Lounsbury mentions only two of these in her article. None of them is as well known as the big Beat beasts (and I needn't list the reasons for this), but then many writers of the period, male and female, Beat and whatever-the-opposite-of-Beat-is, are equally neglected. I find Lounsbury's position problematic - she might as well complain that there aren't enough Presbytarians in Middlemarch, and no cats at all in the Holy Bible. Beyond noting the marginalization of women in Beat literature and complaining about it, she does little or nothing to address the issue apart from plugging her own Beat novel.

The 'mere' 21 female writers in The Guardian's top 100 were selected - as were the other 79 - by Robert McCrum. Here they are: 

Jane Austen  Emma (1816)

Mary Shelley  Frankenstein (1818)

Charlotte Brontë  Jane Eyre (1847)

Emily Brontë  Wuthering Heights (1847)

Louisa May Alcott  Little Women (1868-9)

George Eliot  Middlemarch (1871-2)

Edith Wharton  The Age of Innocence (1920)

Anita Loos  Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925)

Virginia Woolf  Mrs Dalloway  (1925)

Sylvia Townsend Warner Lolly Willowes (1926)

Stella Gibbons  Cold Comfort Farm  (1932)

Elizabeth Bowen  The Heat of the Day (1948)

Harper Lee  To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)

Muriel Spark  The Prime of Miss Jean Brody  (1960)

Doris Lessing  The Golden Notebook (1962)

Sylvia Plath  The Bell Jar  (1966)

Elizabeth Taylor  Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont  (1971)

Toni Morrison  Song of Solomon (1977)

Marilynne Robinson  Housekeeping (1981)

Penelope Fitzgerald  The Beginning of Spring (1988)

Anne Tyler  Breathing Lessons (1988)

I've read all of these apart from Lolly Willowes (which is completely off my radar, but sounds interesting), To Kill a Mockingbird (one can't read everything) and the last four on the list (and I really must get around to Marilynne Robinson soon). McCrum ends the series (arbitrarily, he admits) in the year 2000 with Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, another novel that's so far failed to snag my attention.

Are we invited to infer that there hasn't been a novel at least as good as any of these written by a woman during the past three decades? A very thoughtful and good-humoured response to McCrum's list came from Rachel Cooke. I find myself in complete agreement with almost  everything she has to say and admire all the female writers she cites, although I think she's a bit harsh about H. G. Wells (who surely invented 'mansplaining'?)

Lounsbury's questions bear repeating in reference to the 21 books written by women listed above, and can be answered:

How many had strong female characters? 

Almost all of them, from Emma Woodhouse to Flora Poste, Miss Jean Brodie and the redoubtable Mrs Palfrey. Do many novels past or present actually feature weak female characters? No, because that would not be interesting. From Moll Flanders to Nancy in Oliver Twist, fictional female characters tend to be quite resilient individuals - empowered, even. Jane Eyre doesn't say 'Reader, he married me'.

How many had lead characters of colour? 

Lamentably few of them (but isn't there grounds to suppose that Heathcliff is black?). One cannot re-cast novels in the way one can have, say, an all-black King Lear (a production of which is currently running at Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre to huge critical acclaim). That there are few 'lead characters of colour' in the English language novel since Bunyan and Defoe is  not a flaw or omission, simply a fact that cannot be undone, which we may choose to regret, or ignore, or be angry about.  It's a shame that Joseph Conrad's great novel, originally published in America as The Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle, is unlikely to appear on any future list, given its title. But it is one of the most powerfully anti-racist novels ever written, and should be valued as such.

Or with a disability? 

Again very few. Frankenstein is, I suppose, about a radically disabled man (although the modern Prometheus is in fact assembled from cadavers rather than a single reanimated individual, as the latter approach would have been a blasphemous reference to resurrection and caused the author no end of problems. The Creature is a whole. bunch of guys, a one-man gang). There are, I might point out, plenty of male cripples in literature, and not just physical cripples, from Quilp and Quasimodo to Lord Jim, Tiny Tim and Humbert Humbert. 

I learned recently that the single most read book on American university campuses is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. If undergraduates are reading that instead of Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock (published the same year and included in the McCrum 100) that seems to me a Good Thing. But it would be a Better Thing if they were to read both.

Or who identified as anything other than cisgender and straight?

Orlando comes immediately to mind, although Woolf's novel is not on McCrum's list. But this brings me to the real subject of today's blog. The term 'cisgender' was new to me, so I looked it up on the ever-reliable Wikipedia. which told me:

Cisgender (often abbreviated to simply cis) is a descriptor for those whose experiences of their own gender agree with the sex they were assigned at birth. It may also be defined as those who have "a gender identity or perform a gender role society considers appropriate for one's sex." It is a complement to the term transgender.

As I say I'd never come across the term before and couldn't understand why it wasn't already covered by 'straight' or even 'heteronormative'. We all know that gender is partly a cultural construct (i.e. the 'role society considers appropriate for one's sex', with the implication that society is likely to be at odds with the non-compliant, the differently gendered). I'd point out to Lounsbury that there is one big reason that there are vanishingly few gay characters in literature before the increased tolerances of the 1960s that followed the passing of the Sexual Offences Act in 1967, because to publish novels which endorsed or described homosexual acts was illegal and carried not only harsh prison sentences for those authors and publishers reckless enough to risk their livelihood and freedom) but also social ostracism. Leasbianism was never illegal in Britain, although Radclyffe Hall's  sapphic pot-boiler The Well of Loneliness was subject to prosecution (and is a rotten novel by any standards).  

Back to Wikipedia:

There are a number of derivatives of the term in use, including cis male for "male assigned male at birth", cis female for "female assigned female at birth", analogously "cis man" and "cis woman", as well as cissexism (or "cissexual assumption" or "cisnormativity").

The novelist Ian McEwan came under attack recently when he said in a lecture that . . . but you can look it up for yourself. These are deep and murky waters and we - most of us - navigate with some difficulty. Not, in my case at least, because of any conscious or unconscious 'transphobia'.

I am not immune to reason but am sceptical about the view that any of us is entitled to complete self-realisation entirely on our own terms, not least because some forms of self-realisation are illegal (and rightly), others noisy and anti-social, others offensive. Ultimately, self-realisation on one's own terms may challenge society (the social construct that Thatcher claimed didn't exist) and this is no bad thing, so long as we agree that there is such a thing as society, based on shared standards, beliefs, aspirations, history and allegiances. I'm not talking about North Korea here, but about Britain, a nation with a (more-or-less) shared unity of purpose, a consensus that some things are good and others bad, that tolerance is better than prejudice, that women have equal rights, that forced marriages and domestic slavery and so-called 'honour' killings are wrong, that murder and cruelty and child abuse are intolerable, that evading or avoiding tax by storing money in offshore portfolios is dodgy even if legal, that eating people is wrong,  and so on. 

The fact is that when the rights of an individual are incompatible with the norms of society then something has to give, or there has to be some compromise and accommodation on both sides but (as the line goes in Fiddler on the Roof): "When a poor man eats a chicken one of them is sick".  

It's usually the chicken. Transgendered members of society do not so much threaten the status quo as question it, and any such interrogation is beneficial in a society that claims tolerance and understanding as its core values. What muddies the waters is the overlap with celebrity culture (let's not go there) and the even more pervasive cult of individualism and self-entitlement that comes with late capitalism.

But to return to Lynette Lounsbury's complaint about novels in the past not reflecting today's standards of diversity and equality. We cannot change that, however much we might wish to, and all that is revealed in such a complaint is (in E. P. Thompson's useful phrase) 'the massive condescension of posterity'. 
  

On Raymond Devos

The French (technically Belgian) performer Raymond Devos (1922-2006) was an odd fish - 'uninonewordutterable' as Ben Jonson put it, in a formulation that Devos himself would have admired. Devos is best known (although not well-known) outside the Francophone world for his appearance in a  single scene towards the end of Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 masterpiece Pierrot le Fou.

The set up: Belmondo is in pursuit of Anna Karina and arrives at a ramshackle quayside where Devos is sitting, murmuring to himself. What follows hardly needs subtitles, and is sublime. Belmondo can barely keep a straight fave and Devos quietly, magnificently, assumes complete command of the scene and, by extension, the whole film. Watch it, and then watch it again, here. It's a marvellous example of what French film critics call temps mort - a moment when, as it were, the movie stops for a while and any plot is suspended to follow some utterly irrelevant digression, or reflection, or some other business that has nothing much to do with the story We don't get may of these moments in today's hyperkinetic blockbusters.

You may also be startled by Devos' astonishingly close resemblance to the art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon. Are they by any chance related?

On Kenneth Allott

From 1938 comes 'Lament for a Cricket Eleven', a fine poem by Kenneth Allott . It can be found is several anthologies, notably Philip Larkin's Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse (my favourite of the several versions, not least because it includes the single most harrowing poem in the language: 'The Stockyards' by Sir John Squire, which I've never seen in print elsewhere. Do seek it out).

I was reminded of the Allott poem by my good friend Patrick Lyndon, who tells me that he once recited the poem as a schoolboy to an assembly hall full of aghast schoolmasters (do we still have 'schoolmasters'?). It was a remarkably precocious choice. Here it is:

Lament for a Cricket Eleven 

Beyond the edge of the sepia
Rises the weak photographer
With the moist moustaches and the made-up tie.
He looked with his mechanical eye,
And the upshot was that they had to die.  

Portrait of the Eleven nineteen-o-five
To show when these missing persons were last alive.
Two sit in Threadneedle Street like gnomes.
One is a careless schoolmaster
Busy with carved desks, honour and lines.
He is eaten by a wicked cancer.
They have detectives to watch their homes.  

From the camera hood he looks at the faces
Like the spectral pose of the praying mantis.
Watch for the dicky-bird. But, oh my dear,
That bird will not migrate this year.
Oh for a parasol, oh for a fan
To hide my weak chin from the little man.  

One climbs mountains in a storm of fear,
Begs to be unroped and left alone.
One went mad by a tape-machine.
One laughed for a fortnight and went to sea.
Like a sun one follows the jeunesse dorée.  

With his hand on the bulb he looks at them.
The smiles on their faces are upside down.
" I'll turn my head and spoil the plate."
" Thank you, gentlemen." Too late. Too late.  

One greyhead was beaten in a prison riot.
He needs injections to keep him quiet.
Another was a handsome clergyman,
But mortification has long set in.
One keeps six dogs in an unlit cellar.
The last is a randy bachelor.  

The photographer in the norfolk jacket
Sits upstairs in his darkroom attic.
His hand is expert at scissors and pin.
The shadows lengthen, the days draw in,
And the mice come out round the iron stove.
What I am doing, I am doing for love.
When shall I burn this negative
And hang the receiver up on grief?"  

© The Estate of Kenneth Allott

Patrick recalls changing 'randy' to 'rowdy', no doubt to avoid a thrashing. I'm intrigued by that early appearance of 'tape-machine' in the fourth stanza - when did they become part of daily life?

I know only a handful of Allott poems, scattered throughout anthologies from the 1930s, and was prompted by this poem to see what Allott books were available on my favourite website - www.abe.com, the thinking man's Amazon. It's the most addictive thing - you enter an author's name and a title. You can specify first or later editions, hardback or paperback, signed or unsigned and so on. The terrible thing I do is to sort from the highest price down, beginning with mouth-watering and unaffordable manuscripts and fabulous association copies, or de luxe limited editions, or authors' letters to their their publisher  or editor or - well, you name it,  

Among the 300 or so books listed under Allott (including a fine biography of Matthew Arnold, a stage adaptation of E. M. Forster's A Room with a View and many editions of other poets) I found an absolute treasure , which I snapped up. Here it is:

New Oxford Poetry 1936 was published after a four-year hiatus in a series that began in 1910 and is still going strong. This volume was edited by one A. W. (Alastair) Sandford, who appears to have left little trace. Past editors included (big breath) Dorothy L. Sayers, Aldous Huxley, Robert Graves, Vera Brittain, Kingsley Amis, Anthony Thwaite, John Fuller and Bernard O'Donoghue. As for the contributors, look 'em up here. It's a breathtaking list.

Only fifty copies of New Oxford Poetry 1936 were printed in this de luxe format, making my copy rare by any standards. There was a standard issue, greater in number, and I expect the de luxe version was snapped up by the contributors for presentation to loved ones (or proud retention). My copy has been signed by all twenty-seven contributors including Allott (who contributes an early poem entitled The Albatross). My next task will be to find out what I can about the other contributors, most of whom appear to have had illustrious, if not always literary, careers after graduation. Among them are Paul Engle (1908-1991), founder of the Iowa Writers' Course, a trailblazing creative writing programme that attracted a lustrous cohort including Robert Lowell; Sydney Carter (1915-2004), later to write the hymn 'Lord of the Dance' ('Dance! Dance! Wherever you may be, / I am the Lord of the Dance said he'); the Cairo poet Alan Rook who co-edited the wartime Oxford magazine Kingdom Come (backed by the family planning advocate Marie Stopes and dubbed by some wag Condom King); the writer and traveller Patrick Howarth (1905-2006) the altogether remarkable Margaret Rhodes; the distinguished scholar of Russian literature Henry Gifford (1913-2003); the future Labour peer  Rufus Noel-Buxton (1917-1980) and twenty others yet to be identified.

There's enough material here for several future blogs, if my readers can stand it - although I'd like to do something more  . . .  substantial?

Allott's Collected Poems, introduced and annotated by Michael Murphy, were published by Salt in 2009 (a snip at £11.99) and come with enthusiastic plaudits from Seamus Heaney, Russell Davies and Julian Symons.  You can order it from the publishers here.