Elizabeth David on Death Row

In Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking (1960) the author reports an episode originally recorded in George Musgrave's A Ramble Through Normandy (1855):

He watched a couple (on their honeymoon, he thought) on board the river steamer at Rouen consuming a midday meal of soup, fried mackerel, beefsteak, French beans and fried potatoes, an omelette fines herbes, a fricandeau of veal with sorrel, a roast chicken garnished with mushrooms, a hock of ham served upon spinach. There followed an apricot tart, three custards, and an endive salad, which were the precursors of a small roast leg of lamb, with chopped onion and nutmeg sprinkled upon it. Then came coffee and two glasses of absinthe, and eau dorée, a Mignon cheese, pears, plums, grapes and cakes. Two bottles of Burgundy and one of Chablis were emptied between eleven and one o’clock.

If I ever find myself on Death Row and  invited to choose a last meal I think this would do for me as a pre-oblivion blow-out.  Or at least what Musgrave calls 'the precursors', up to but not including the endive salad. Things seem to start all over again with that 'small roast leg of lamb' so I'd opt simply for black coffee and a digestif  before taking the long walk, enjoying a final, guiltless, high tar cigarette.

Dover

If you've never seen a 'tilt shift' film here's the place to start.

It's a camera technique that's been around for a few years and produces startling results through a combination of selected focus, digital manipulation (less, though, than you might think) and high level perspective creating something quite staggering - making the real world look like a scale model of itself.

It doesn't sound like much - but the results are astonishing. The technique has been applied quite brilliantly to a very short film about Dover and its ferry terminal, and you can find it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu_OJ5gUfw8

If that doesn't melt your butter, here are the opening lines of Auden's fine poem about the town:

Steep roads, a tunnel through the downs are the approaches;

A ruined pharos overlooks a constructed bay;

The sea-front is almost elegant; all this show

Has, somewhere inland, a vague and dirty root:

Nothing is made in this town.

Whenever I read this I hear the brisk, strident, mildly hectoring tone of a 1930s documentary film commentator.  The last line is terrific, isn't it? Now look at the clip. Please. I haven't got all day.

Extract from Dover © The Estate of W. H. Auden

Marxist trainspotting

Looking at the poet, painter and film-maker Humphrey Jennings’ notebooks. In one margin he has doodled a charmingly naive sketch of a typical steam locomotive, a bit like Thomas the Tank Engine, with chimney, dome and cab, above which he writes:

You know when a locomotive is streamlined it loses its smoke stack, sometimes altogether;  
      and that produces a sort of worry in us. The sequence funnel, dome, valve and cabin, turns 
      into a class-series: top-hat, Bowler hat, cloth cap. 

'A sort of worry' when faced with a cultural signifier anticipates the reaction of later commentators like Roland Barthes. Jennings' view reminded me of the very different appearances of the American space shuttle (gleaming white, smooth, swept-back wings and sexily aerodynamic) and the Soviet space station, which appeared to be bolted together in a totally functional way, like an allotment shed. It had visible rivets and was (unless I'm making this up) painted a kind of bauxite colour like old railway trucks, with a stencilled hammer and sickle on the hull. One had the impression that the whole thing wasn't so much welded as caulked. This suggested a kind of collectivist integrity and 'all-hands-on-deck' quality that continues to exercise a strong appeal, to me at any rate. I've always preferred the unadorned, the utile and the functional to the modishly tweaked.  Russian engineers were clearly in charge of the project, not designers and (yet-to-be-invented) brand managers.

Whooo-hoooo!

Streamlined locomotives were much in vogue in Britain in the 1930s - the Mallard of the London & North Eastern Railway, designed by Nigel Gresley, is the most famous of the breed and remains to this day the fastest steam locomotive ever built. But the three other major private companies (the Southern, the Great Western and the London, Midland & Scottish) each had their own streamlined fleet, employed on crack express services. Perhaps it's just as important that streamlined engines look very fast, even when stationery - engineering's equivalent to modernist gestures in architecture. On display in York's National Railway Museum (where eager dads drag their underwhelmed offspring), the garter blue, red and black Mallard is coupled to a dynamometer car, an antique, wood panelled vehicle with clerestory roof and Edwardian doorhandles, packed with sensitively-calibrated devices for recording speed, fuel consumption, tractive effort, etc. and the contrast is every bit as striking as that between the space shuttle and Soyuz.

Streamlining was as much an aesthetic gesture as a speed-enhancing feature and following the nationalisation of the railways in 1948 these locomotives were stripped of their casings to allow easier maintenance and to reveal perfectly orthodox machines, beautiful in their own way and - yes - with the 'class-series' now visible.

Jennings was writing in the 1930s, a time when class distinctions were immediately legible, not least through headgear - toffs wore toppers, clerks wore Bowlers and flat cloth caps were for the proletariat. It's interesting that, in Jennings's notebook entry it's the loss of the chimney (ie the top hat of the ruling classes) that provokes disquiet. Is he unconsciously asserting the legitimacy of the established order? Or simply that a locomotive without a chimney is aesthetically troubling, like a face without a nose?

Jennings is concerned with class distinctions (which will always be with us). Distinctions are not the same thing as barriers - and much was achieved in the last few decades to erode the very barriers that are now, alas, being rapidly re-erected. Distinctions are part of the texture of any society - not as the basis for hostility and discrimination but simply for recognition and understanding. Although, to be sure, we don't wear caste-defining hats much any more. Jennings would find modern Britain a far less legible culture.

Raphael's Judgement of Christ

A very short extract from Distant Intimacy, the forthcoming Frederic Raphael / Joseph Epstein correspondence (see my January 18th blog). Here's the former, on the Son of God:

He put down his betters in a very 1960s-ish way and showed off as he did it, but he never said anything that one wishes one had said oneself, did he?

A good point well made.

J. Christ (by Raphael)

I'm reminded of a friend at school (this would be in the 1970s) who once told our RE teacher (the aptly-named Mr. Oddie) that he'd been reading the Gospels very closely and thought they were all true. Then he added: "But I don't think they're important."

Bysshe. Rhymes with sissy.

In 1811 a small printing company in the sedate south coast resort of Worthing produced a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism in which its ninteen-year-old author made an eloquent case for disbelief in a Divinity. The writer was an undergraduate at University College Oxford named Percy Bysshe Shelley, and he opened his polemic with an appeal to rationality (a bad move, it turned out), arguing that reason is founded primarily on the evidence of our senses and that the senses are the source of all knowledge upon which the mind makes decisions, and that the experience of others - espcially the religious experience - 'occupies the lowest degree' of evidence supporting the existence of God. This went down badly with the authorities and Shelley was promptly  'rusticated' - expelled - from the University. Four months later he eloped to Scotland to marry his sixteen-year-old mistress. Ten years later he was dead, and famous - an exemplary radical, a trailblazing subversive.

Shelley doesn't appear in W. H. Auden's Academic Graffiti (1971), a lacklustre collection of clerihews, with fifty examples of the form alphabetically arranged from Henry Adams to Socrates' wife Xantippe. They are all donnish, whimsical, and erratically amusing although the witty illustrations (by Fillipo Sanjust) do most of the work, as Auden conceded in his introduction. Here's a random example:

Fulke Greville

Wrote beautifully at sea level;

With each rising contour his verse

Got progressively worse.

And another (with its clumsy use of take/taken):

William Blake

Found Newton hard to take,

And was not enormously taken

With Francis Bacon.

This slim volume is not the book for which Auden would want to be remembered. Neither is it, as one critic optimistically claimed, Auden's attempt to rival the popularity of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. A world-conquering musical based on a collection of four-line squibs about Thomas Aquinas, Rider Haggard, Karl Kraus and Nietzche would tax even the fertile genius of Andrew Lloyd Webber. But Academic Graffiti is good clean fun for the ten minutes or so it takes to skim, and if you're the kind of person who enjoys this sort of thing you'll leave the house with a spring in your step and a smile on your face. But to return to the point, the clerihew that particularly snagged my attention, and which links to the rusticated poet of paragraph one, is this:

Among the prosodists, Bysshe

Was the syllable-counting old sissy,

Guest,

The accentual pest.

Even by the book's highbrow standards these are vanishingly obscure figures. Auden (or his editor) provides a helpful gloss identifying the two men as Edward Bysshe and Edwin Guest, authors respectively of Art of Poetry (1702) and History of English Rhyme (2 vols, 1836-38). What comes as a shock is that, according to Auden, Bysshe rhymes with sissy.

For as long as I can remember I've referred to the author of Ozymandias and The  Masque of Anarchy as Percy Bysshe (to rhyme with 'fish') Shelley. I've never heard anyone pronounce Bysshe to rhyme with sissy. Have you? Of course you haven't. Nobody has, because nobody does. And if, in a moment of wild daring, you ever once ventured to pronounce Bysshe to rhyme with sissy in public, you'd never do it again because you'd be drowned out by the hoots and howls and catcalls. It would be like pronouncing 'Goethe' correctly to the citizens of Rancho Cordova . . .

Let me explain. In this Californian town there was, until quite recently, a public place called Goethe Park. It has now been renamed River Bend Park, and this is because the Goethe in question was not the author of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (or Werthers Original as I think of it), but another Goethe entirely. Charles M. Goethe (1875-1966) was a prosperous Sacramento businessman who left his colossal $24 million fortune to California State University and he was also a complete shit - a virulent racist, keen eugenicist and Nazi sympathiser. He therefore, according to a deadpan press release from the town council, 'did not represent the general feeling of the community.' So all the institutions bearing his name - the university arboretum and botanic garden, the Charles M. Goethe Middle School (now renamed the Rosa Parks Middle School) and the aforementioned Goethe Park - have now been airbrushed out of local history and Charlie Goethe is no longer a stain on the Sacramento brand. Fair enough - he was a thoroughly nasty piece of work and we live in more enlightened times. But what interests me is that the park bearing his name was always referred to by the folk of Sacramento County as GAYtee Park, with stress on the first syllable. That, they agreed among themselves, was how Goethe, their Goethe, the wrong Goethe, should be pronounced. Like 'Frood' (for Freud) and 'Sow-crates' (Socrates) in the paradigmatic Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (dir. Stephen Herek, 1993). I admire their take on the savants of the past - "no pantywaist European pronunciation for us. We're Sacramentians, dammit." Likewise the vast majority of people now agree that 'Bysshe' sounds like 'fish', or 'fishy' and you'd be a damn fool to say it different.

Time for a tangent - have you noticed the way the assumed views of 'the vast majority of people' are now flourished as a way to defend (say) the government's position on very complex and contentious issues? It doesn't amount to anything approaching an argument but is, rather, an end to argument, with a unreflecting deployment of 'might is right' reasoning. Is there any chance of some statistician confirming that 'the vast majority of people' are just as likely to be wrong about something as right? 'The vast majority of people' - and this includes me of course - are fundamentally unsound when it comes to just about everything under the sun - economics, string theory, engineering, science, architecture, linguistics, art and literature and so on because these are all specialist domains, not for the amateur.The vast majority of people are decent, kindly, reasonable, hard-working, good-humoured and law-abiding. But that doesn't make them right.

In any case that 'vast' is hyperbolic - and certainly no improvement over what was until very recently known as 'an overwhelming majority'. (The indefinite article works well there.) In such inflationary rhetoric 'the vast majority of people' is simply an unreflecting invocation of a shadowy mob that in the speaker's view would be likely to share his prejudice. In a society that prizes - indeed fetishises - individualism, it's sobering to reflect how often we - or, if you insist, the vast majority of us - are presumed to be in total accord. It's also unnerving, in our post-secular culture, to see the decay of public discourse and the collapse of reason. Shelley would have views on this, and might even blog on the subject.



Clerihews © The Estate of W. H. Auden

More poets - official

Since my 4th January blog 'How many poets are there?' I've learned (from the forthcoming Frederic Raphael/Joseph Epstein correspondence Distant Intimacy) that there are today 26,000 poets officially registered in the United States.

Epstein provides this information and sourly wonders where you should go to register . . .

I suspect the figure, if not plucked from thin air, is based on census returns or IRS data, or extrapolations from some kind of consumer research and should not be taken any more seriously than  those citizens who 'self-identify' as Jedi Knights, Klingons, warlocks or Hobbits. Many of them are likely to turn their hand to verse as well.

26,000 registered poets is (depending on your point of view) a heartening confirmation of cultural advancement or dispiriting evidence of the opposite. The 2011 International Who's Who of Poets listed just 4,000 working in English worldwide.

What's going on here? Or rather there?

Gone (after Robert Lowell's For the Union Dead)

The old South Kensington Museum

Is not a place I'll ever see again, though

Once I trawled contentedly around
The shallow dioramas,

Pressed brass buttons

To make things spin or glow,

Approving then the forced perspectives and

The little figures in their period gear.

Then, after scrabbling for that golden ball
I stood with other children at the automatic door,

A wondrous harbinger of soon.

I took my son last week

And he was all agog

To see the mighty three-ton lens from Castle Birr

Ground for a year, none bigger ever made, but

Now (they said) no longer on display -
Lugged off to some remote suburban store.

And what we saw on every floor
Instead of all the things we'd come to see

Was all the crap that's taken over science.

Gone the Deltic Locomotive,
Baby blue with golden whiskers, 

Gone too Caerphilly Castle, 

Signal box and tram, The working model coal mine

Gone. 

Downstairs a loud Australian "worked the room"

As schoolkids shrieked. 

Balloons went bang, the whole place stank

Of feet, was all unserious.

It's also all so gone to pot:

A lot of other stuff's been thrown out. 

A sad-eyed warden told me that

The maritime gallery, a favoured place,

Was closing soon to (can you believe)

Become a new hands-on display of telecoms.

Gone the brass and iron apprentice models

Gone the engines, blueprints and maquettes,

Gone the wide-hipped dreadnoughts

Fishing sloops and trawlers, clippers and destroyers

Blue riband Cunarders

And London's only model quinquireme.

They're phasing out the simple stuff

The dirty heavy simple stuff

That made us what we used to think we were.

That past, the only one we have, is going, going, gone

While out on Exhibition Road

The street is full of motor cars, pedestrians and air.