Unmistakable presentiments of lilac interpose themselves just now

The subversions of Spring have yet to be catalogued with the slightest degree of orderliness. The dread season disgorges a flood of cliché, while for our oversight in mapping this most genetic of all solar domiciles, we accuse it of suddenness. On the matter of lilac, however, one was greatly heartened to find its tree attributed to the olive family, peerless pillar of Classicism that it is.

We shall go down to the gymnasium, then, inquiring of our scholars how best to pass this gauntlet.


All gone, the snow: grass throngs back to the fields,
the trees grow out new hair;
earth follows her changes, and subsiding streams
jostle within their banks.


The three graces and the greenwood nymphs, naked, dare to dance.
You won't live always, warn the year and the hour,
seizing the honeyed day.










Horace
Odes, iv, 7
Rosanna Warren, translation
J.D. McClatchy, editor
Horace: The Odes
  New translations by contemporary poets
Princeton University Press, 2002©

Une boîte for David John

keeping an eye 

  












     I am sober and industrious
     and would be plain and plainer
     for a little while
                       until my rococo
     self is more assured of its
     distinction.
     ..

Samuel Boux, anon


Frank O'Hara
To a poet
Donald Allen, editor
The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara
University of California Press, 1995©

On a displaced person, finding a way to write his life

David Toms' reminder to us all, that today is St David's day, would tend to put anyone in mind of a contemporary who placed Wales more vividly on the imaginative map than anyone else, going so far as to fuse himself with the vision he creates. People don't go to Wales, but English speakers are enchanted by its existence, and rightly don't resist contemplating it. For my generation its celebrant would not be Jan Morris, who is partly Welsh and partly lives there, whose The Matter of Wales: Epic views of a small country (1984) is certainly the best, first book to read and to keep for Wales. It happens not, however, to linger in the mind.

On the Black Hill (James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Whitbread Prize, 1982) does, as will its writer, for everyone who read this book when it came out. Naturally, there are critics who've suggested we are a passing fad - a verdict of less concern than any spirit of judging could imagine. One doesn't boast to say, we'll always have Bruce Chatwin; it's simply the case, that 90 percent of readers of this book's first edition were waiting for it before it was written. 


Their syndicate would have subscribed it, if necessary. And it was. They had read In Patagonia (EM Forster Award, Hawthornden Prize, 1977); they had read The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980; filmed by Werner Herzog); they had seen the riveting Mapplethorpe portrait, and by 1982 they would go with Chatwin to that 'end of the earth' which they'd learned would never be where they thought it was. Not even his hand-picked patron-mentor, Patrick Leigh-Fermor, would draw that character of following, on Chatwin's scale and intensity.

Bruce Chatwin (1940-1989) was the beau idéal of that culture and cast of mind whose slaughter by HIV had only begun when he bestowed Wales as a story they could love. He did such things, to what he saw. One of the most gorgeous things that can be read by him is a visit to Mme Vionnet, a destination which the many would have no reason to consider but for his gifts. Chatwin almost lost his eyesight for one of those talents, a brilliant appraiser's gaze that made him a director at Sotheby's, an extremely plausible spot to find a fair alumnus wraith of Marlborough, but not a common rank for a twink. 

The kid, for such he always seemed, was electric; but one resists saying his electricity was childlike, because there was something much, much more unsettling about him. He dreamed. A flickering physical resemblance to John Clare only underscored the natural poignant connection in their writing.

Since his death, many have leapt forward to name him as a fraud, and (by all means, the field is open) as a snob, a panderer, a user, a professional house guest. Such aperçus - all containing more than a silo of truth - are alike less in their self-indictments than in begging the question: Yes, isn't he a scandal, and what year is your Whitbread Prize? Of course he 'knew everybody' - the man was almost unendurably attractive to know. This page will not pile on that pyre of pals with Chatwin stories; it isn't why we're here, as he put it, and Rimbaud before him. 


Everyone understands, in everything written by Bruce Chatwin, he's the traveller, looking in. His style of travel writing, that great genre of empire's island language, is rather that of the exile accommodating himself to brief encounters and their demands for alacrity of response, performance, extraction, satisfaction, precise commemoration. His immoderate genius as a writer was the gift for putting the mosaic together again, as no one had seen it before. This creativity is the mendacity some idlers in criticism don't like; it's what many of us live for, and not only in our reading hours. We see it as bravery, we see it as honesty, we see it as a gift; but it is none of those things if you don't care for writing, and would just as soon forget about a man.

The man is at stake in the books. 






Going down to Comodoro Rivadavia I passed through a desert of black stones and came to Sarmiento. It was another dusty grid of metal buildings, lying on a strip of arable land between the fizzling turquoise Lake Musters and the slime-green Lake Colhué-Huapi. I walked out of town to the petrified forest. Wind pumps whirled insanely. A steel-blue heron lay paraylysed under an electric cable. A dribble of blood ran along its beak. The trunks of extinct monkey-puzzles were broken clean as if in a sawmill. (i)


All through that month the hyenas came into the streets at night and the city was silent by day. The King had played with his prisoner for a season and now had grown tired of his plaything. And the prisoner looked on death as a face unfolding from a mirror: he let himself hang limp when they dragged him out and threw him on the ground before the throne. The King stood over him, his shadow falling in a dark diagonal stripe: 'Why has Portugal sent three hundred and thirty-five ships to attack Ouidah?" "It hasn't." "Why did you kill my greyhound?" He opened his mouth to speak, but the guards stoppered it with a wooden gag. "So you think you're a white man?" the King sneered, and ordered him off to prison. (ii)


We climbed the length of Neruda Street and walked around the Hradschin: the scene of my futile researches during the previous week. We then sat in an orchard below the Strahov Monastery. A man in his underpants sunned himself on the grass. The fluff of balsam poplars floated by, and settled on our clothes like snowflakes. "You will see," said Utz, waving his malacca over the multiplicity of porticoes and cupolas below us. "This city wears a tragic mask." .. I commented facetiously that a taste for giants was usually a symptom of decline: an age that took the Farnese Hercules for an ideal was bound to end in trouble. (iii)


On the way home, Lewis took a short cut through Lurkenhope Park. He skirted the lake and then entered the gorge that leads to the mill. The sky was hazy and the beeches were bursting into leaf. Above the path was the grotto, reeking of bats, where - so the story went - a forbear of the Bickertons paid a hermit to gaze at a skull. Below, the river splashed against the boulders in mid-stream, and big trout lazily flicked their fins in deep green pools. Pigeons cooed, and he could hear the toc-toc of a woodpecker. In places, the winter floods had washed away the path: he had to watch his footing. Twigs and dead branches had caught in the bushes along the bank. He climbed a bluff. On the downward slope some lilies of the valley pushed up through a carpet of moss. He sat down and peered past the branches at the river. Upstream was a thicket of ash-saplings, leafless as yet, and beneath them a carpet of bluebells, wild garlic, and wood-spurge with sharp green flowers. Suddenly, above the sound of the rushing water he heard a woman's voice, singing. It was a young voice, and the song was slow and sad. A girl in grey was walking downstream through the bluebells. He froze until she started to climb the bluff. Her head had reached the level of his feet when he called out, "Rosie!" (iv)

How many canvases, had Chatwin scrutinised for Sotheby's, before her head had reached the level of his feet so infallibly, that the entire world could fall into place? His writing goes beyond the conventionally lapidary (which is all he claimed for it, himself) to the depth of memory's fusion with instinct. He understands when the picture takes place, and of course he makes it up. Famously, he would stay nowhere very long, he would make love with no one very well, he would befriend no one very truly. Yet he would see for them, as some people can sing, and they would love him for it.

On the Black Hill was ultimately filmed in Wales, and quite beautifully and successfully, given the odds against. I think it is known well enough, to be the chronicle of the lives of twin boys in a rustic farmstead, and the trials and dear pleasures that might be those of any simple family in the first two-thirds of the 20th Century, when all of its horrors but one could be known. The rapport of the brothers is too original and universal, eccentric and authentic, indisputable and implausible to be characterised, second-hand. In that bond is the place we readers will always call, Wales. It takes great daring to see, and release to inhabit. It's a terminus.

Of that final horror of the Century, Chatwin is sometimes regarded as an apostate, for pretending in his final collection, to a diagnosis of radically alluring rarity and glamour, as if served from a salver of discernment to his plate at Le Gavroche. Nobody I knew was so brain-dead as not to welcome his exertion of imagination as the most obvious corollary of one's own, in the face of the extreme arbitrariness of the human immune deficiency retrovirus. An improvisation of meaning was surely permitted to that Dixie eschatology with a Cross, which prayed for the death of one's friends. It seemed reasonable to cut Chatwin some slack.

He is at stake in the books and now, is extravagantly laid open in the Letters. It's said, by the prettiest critics, that they show how he lies; let us close with a fragment of one that shows what they mean, not what they say. It was written to his cousin in January, 1978, who had almost brought suit against him through his own father, for purloining family papers for his Patagonian book; she is named in the 2nd US edition, as a partial holder of copyright. (Later, in On the Black Hill, she would inspire a jealous cousin's hauling away of our heroes' mementos). Here is Bruce Chatwin, pleading to his family, a displaced person finding a way to write his life:

The picture I wanted to convey was of two people, of different ages and backgrounds, both stranded at the end of the world; both wronged by a society (which, for all I can learn of it, was considerably off-beam), both of whom found consolation in each other's company and fell in love. Otherwise, to me at least, their behaviour is inexplicable.

Orchids, Robert Mapplethorpe


citations:


i   
In Patagonia
Simon & Schuster, 1977©


ii  
The Viceroy of Ouidah
Simon & Schuster, 1980©


iii  
Utz
Viking Penguin, 1989©


iv
On the Black Hill
Viking, 1982©


Bruce Chatwin
Under the Sun
  The Letters of Bruce Chatwin
Nicholas Shakespeare and
  Elizabeth Chanler Chatwin, editors
Viking Penguin, 2011©

"Were you there .. ?"

Frank Buckles

Corporal Buckles drove an ambulance and kept a warehouse of death-dealing matériel on behalf the dynasty whose side this Nation took in the Great War. He died today. We can not conceive of the disson-ance to which this horrific dichotomy condemned this man's mind. We were very certainly there. He was a man before we knew him, who had the misfortune to survive as a public figure.


What would we like, one wonders, to recall our fond rapport? A leafy tree? A lark in Spring? A prettily surpliced chorister to limn the delectable sacrifice, abiding with us these 9 decades?

Whether or not as debris, refuse, garbage, filth, or writhing, moaning stench hauled back from the front in his wagon, we were there, today, as suppliers of his warehouse, of shiny implements of righteous, gleaming carnage, onward christian soldiers of immaculate benevolence. Garbage in, garbage out. Open churches, if it helps, and may our Lord let it. But give us our Homer, give us our civil-isation. Give us what we indolently praise as facts on the ground. Give us what we are. It doesn't run red. It runs black. It shouldn't run at all, but it does.










Willie Nelson
He was a friend of mine
Brokeback Mountain
Original Motion Picture Sound Track
Verve Music Group, 2005©

A picture I want in this blog

         

  voilà

Blue shade Sunday

The other day, an especially hip page cited a recent roll-out of frocks from a noted House, in which their differentiation seemed to depend upon the arbitrary selection of colour, as in an automotive show-room. The presentation raised the question of why the implications of colour - universally perceived if not universally agreed - were not more exploited in a searching act of design.

Prudence is fine for a hundred dollar work shirt, but it struck one as a little mean in a pricey statement, recalling, paradoxically, Henry Ford's "available in every colour as long as it's black" approach to the Model A. Can a profile, expressive in orangoutang-tongue coral, be inter-changed with one in drowned-for-two-days blue, one wondered. More to the point, in these matters, Would we like to think so. The first sense that enters the mind in the use of coverings, is touch, in the broadest sense. We are aware of transforming our texture, which bears on how we are seen. The first obligation of the devil, then, is to comprehend desire.

..
I see my vices
lying like abandoned works of art
which I created so eagerly
to be worldly and modern
and with it
what I can't remember
I see them with your eyes.

Frank O'Hara
Poem V (F) W
 Texas Quarterly, Spring, 1962
Donald Allen, editor
The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara
University of California Press, 1995

Saturday commute xvi: staying away and coming back

I have learned - but again and again I forget - that abstraction is a bad thing, innumerable and infinitesimal and tiresome, worse than any amount of petty fact. The emotion that comes from blurring my retrospect is warmer and weaker than the excitement of whatever happened, good or bad. It is like a useless, fruitless vegetation, spreading and twining and fading and corrupting; even the ego disappears under it .. 


Therefore I scarcely noticed how long my dear friend stayed away in her bedroom; and therefore I was glad when she came back. 


For me, putting a stop to so-called thought is one of the functions of friendship.

Today we cap a visibly strenuous week, between the lines of the page, with commendation of a very brief novel which reads as a literate guest's observations of an afternoon in the country house of a good friend. This is far from the most acute passage in the book, but it cor-responds with the day. I can think of several valued readers who would like it very much; I think it's pretty fancy work, myself. But I cite this passage for its quiet intelligence, and I adopt this image to carry it because of the expression and the figure - attentive, curious, receptive, uncensorious; eleg-ant, not grand; perceptive and fluent. An interesting phrase, isn't it - the functions of friendship.








Glenway Wescott
The Pilgrim Hawk
 A Love Story
1940, 1968©
New York Review Books, 2001©

We've been late to issue protocols on the buttering of toast

Have you noticed, how desperately we have been failing our undoubted destiny, to preach to the choir a new Rule or several dozen, on the lactic anointment of one's charred and chosen morning slab of grain? Yet here we are, having crossed not less than the inaugural bi-annum of this page, without having issued the slightest ukase on preserving our regard. Can this be continued, much less condoned, given the reader's anxious appetite for the humiliation of the humble? Our pastorship weighs heavy on the hour, our flock in prurient lowing, growing weary of delay. Meanwhile, society's first line of defense, the breakfast table, tips toward anarchy.

Bring us, then, dear readers, your tired and musty paddles of that spreadship, and we shall assay them with such gratifying contempt, as to lower you to the Crown's abandoned vaults at Garrard, for something grotesque enough to salve diurnal bread with the supplest churnings of Normandy. And in glazing's quiet gavotte we shall command you, in sallies forth and back of lapping's soft acoustic, so that the much impasto'd ceiling of the simplest breakfast nook, and of the fêted cranium, might stir more gently to cessation of the fast. It galls us worthily to've left you to a crude dispatch of dawn.

Gather, darlings. The treacle of our testament is warm to waft delight, impartial and more provident in ormolusive light. Delicious shall our edicts be, of anechoic gush, that swells to fill the golden bowl, expedient to flush. Exult to hear how we consult the substance of your tears, translating them to hubris you may stuff between your ears. We offer regulation, thus, to soothe the direst need, for codes of frantic cognizance t'identify the breed.

How perfectly unclotted, then's, our ration of life's cream, to let its variegation represent the striver's dream. We pour it, copious, from the tap to salve our boredom's scream, reluctant to beat back against the silly, frilly stream. Bring now, the loaf, we should with butter, toast; we'll score it with the riddle of the griddle that we boast. Belovèd is that implement with which we flame the host, to rest upon our plate to mark the way we love to coast. 


I'll favour you with codicils of rules from time to time, to keep abreast of others in the nursery that they mime.