charity-shop chuckouts

Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, later HM Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother

[Image source:  Daily Express]










I'm still waiting for the new smartphone to arrive. As a stopgap post, here's another particularly miscellaneous scrap of brief history that I wrote in 2005.

 

I’m clearing out, the way you want to sometimes, things that can go to Barnardos. Books, tapes and bric-a-brac.

 

Let’s start with the books. The first one is a Ladybird book with a smiling old lady on the front-cover. The lady is wearing a triple rope of pearls and she has pearl ear-rings to match; a floral dress. The eyes are kind, the smile perky, posed, and with a touch of authority, as if the photographer ought to feel lucky to get it. It is H M Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, and the author is Ian A Morrison MA Ph D. In sepia at the age of seven, looking out winsomely from a cosy wrap, she was Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. Robert the Bruce and Owen Glendwr were ancestors, the family had owned Glamis Castle since the 14th Century. They also owned coal-mines in the North-East of England, but that’s not in the book.** The book was published in 1982, so it precedes the marital troubles of the Windsors. Her daughters, Elizabeth and Margaret

 

were eleven and six years old before their father and mother were unexpectedly made King and Queen. Instead of taking Court life as their model, their parents looked on family life as a sanctuary in which people could develop despite the pressures on them in the outside world. The happiness of her own early days seems to have guided the way she and her husband decided to bring up their own family. This is important, because the pattern of family life that she set with Albert then... has been continued through to her grandchildren’s generation. Many people feel that this feeling of the Royal Family being a real family has contributed a lot their continuing popularity in the last part of the 20th century.

 

As more recent commentators have pointed out, this investment in the idea of a nuclear family has in the end risen up to bite her successors. If you want to maintain that vision it’s best to lose your husband early and become famous for your madeira at Clarence House.


** Like the Rees-Moggs, who were mineowners in Somerset.

 

Next book: Beer and Skittles by Richard Boston (1976). This is a document in the early days of campaigns for “real” beer. I suppose it was bound to start with alcohol; subsequently the same powerful feelings, of nostalgia for what has been lost and suspicion of profiteering technology that seems outside our control, has extended to food. Draught beer was rescued for CAMRA, the nurturers of heritage, and all the other complainers, mostly old or educated; while the youthful mass were easily diverted into valuing lagers and other well-advertised concoctions. The same pattern seems likely to keep organic food afloat as a minority option, harmlessly absorbing the shock of dissent, though in the latter case it is about much more than “the spreading curse of blandness”.   

 

Famous Reporter 24 (December 2001) – an Australian “literary biannual”. I’m in this one. The editor, Ralph Wessman, used to trawl the emails of the BritPo forum looking for likely candidates. But the best outcome of that sensible approach is the presence of Geraldine Monk’s defence of the author as individual, which I’ve read many times. “Once you do commit yourself to the public arena (small as it may be in our case) then you cannot seriously be striving for anonymity or an ego-less state.... Seems to me that the ultimate ego-less state is death which probably lasts a long time (hopefully) so why on earth anyone on earth should want to achieve it while on earth has always puzzled me – it seems a bit anti-life and definitely against the individual.” Go Geraldine!

 

The History Man (1975) and To the Hermitage (2000) by Malcolm Bradbury. Summary of the The History Man could easily make it seem a straightforward conservative satire; summary of To the Hermitage could easily make it seem a nostalgic adieu to the life of academic talk. Both conceptions do less than justice to an author whose comic vim insinuates a broad and complex vision, almost effortlessly making us feel that we haven’t done any thinking while we read. In fact, I admit it, I meant to write properly about these books but I’ve given up – it would just take too much thinking. Bradbury’s garrulous society is something I don’t feel up to adding to. Many others have read these books, and everyone seems to think well of them. The health goes deeper than being healthy diversions.

 

Discover Britain, the illustrated walking and exploring guide (AA, 2001). Something paradoxical in a motorist’s “walking” guide? – Well, you drive somewhere, then you have a walk. The walks in fact seem rather random, avoiding the obvious. This is a heritage coffee-table thing, surely too bulky for practical use. The titles of the walks are what chiefly take the attention: “Dorset Heaths of Thomas Hardy”, “Castles and Mansions in Peaceful Seclusion”, “The Heart of the Capital”, “Constable’s Suffolk Landscapes”, “Land of Legend, Lair of Outlaws”, “A Fairy Lake and the Black Mountain”, “On Elgar’s Malverns”, etc. This monument depends on a heady assemblage of tributes, e.g.  of Gordale Scar, “Wordsworth’s friend, the artist George Beaumont, rightly described it as ‘beyond the range of art’.”

 

Haynes Manual – Citroën 2CV, Ami & Dyane. I owned two 2CVs, and I did read about how to reverse the windscreen-wipers which are set up for left-hand drive, but I never got round to it, an expression which I am discovering could be the motto for most of the cultural residue that passes through households like this. The text is beguiling if you don’t understand it: “Lubricate the shaft splines.... Chock the axle arm to support it and drive the hub from the pivot to separate. Use a wooden block or soft drift.” Depressing, too. I want to “live” but do the same as yesterday – the less I accept it, the bigger the barriers seem.

 

Now for the cassette tapes. After selling the last 2CV I finally had a car whose engine was quiet enough for it to be worth putting in a music system, and I chose a tape player, which turned out be naive because I had not realized that tapes had just been phased out and you couldn’t buy any new ones. This was about three years ago. My only source of tapes was charity shops, and tapes have proved even less resilient than vinyl or CDs to the passing of time; most of the ones that still circulate and re-circulate were budget productions and don’t really work properly.

 

Beethoven, Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op. 125 (LSO, Wyn Morris) is a case in point. Besides, the flying-saucer theme in the first movement is inaudible over a car-engine, which spoils the drama. It was composed 1822-23, a fair while after the other eight. I’ve long wished to say that I don’t rate it compared to those other symphonies, but this isn’t true. I even like the choral finale (which I wished to say was just not symphonic). It’s an enormously brilliant work; every time new vistas open. The first movement, for example, passes way beyond the cavernous ice and hammer-blows with which it begins; much of it is, if not exactly friendly, certainly full and chequered like a river teeming with fish. All Beethoven’s scherzi are terrific, but the second movement here is like a gigantic, burly sort of gift, bearing its sumptuous trio with soft hands. And then there’s the slow, slow movement, the Beethoven we all like best. To finish, we begin as it were all over again, with a vast celebration.     

 

Liszt, Symphonic Poems. I have plenty of cheap taste when I want it, and I think these are great, but the recording level is desperately low. Les Preludes is possibly the best of them. Tasso is like a Scott romance in music, but better, and I know every note of it by heart. This poem is subtitled Lamento e Trionfo which is rather misleading. It begins with a fight, and then with an uneasy, melancholy series of scenes around the castle, including a nocturnal passage where a young girl is alone with her thoughts in a high turret. This music is briefly interrupted by some sort of royal fanfare, then there is a morning busyness including the preparations of musicians for a dance. These preparations gather momentum but suddenly fighting breaks out again. It’s good fighting, but much less cruel and bloody than the gladiators in Respighi’s Feste Romane. Up to this point the drama is entirely gripping and convincing, but now there’s a slightly awkward, too-sudden transition to the triumphant celebrations and triumphant blaze of brass at the end; Liszt gets the pacing wrong. It sounds as if the complexities of the earlier narrative have been merely cancelled. The whole piece is built with surprising consistency around Liszt’s method of “theme transformation”. In this case even a non-musician can hear that the motif of an ornamentally descending grace-note.      

 

Saint-Saëns, Piano Concertos 1-3 (Ciccolini). This, on the other hand, has never done it for me: garish, tasteless and supremely lacking in melodic invention. That ought to be a recipe for interest, and I’ve sometimes thought I found it by focussing on the dynamics, but I felt from the effort I was just working this up artificially. Probably this is a case where having the concertos one after another (inevitably playing the whole tape through) does a disservice to the music. I would feel quite excited about hearing one of them at a concert.

 
[Image source: https://www.ebay.com/itm/JONI-MITCHELL-FOR-THE-ROSES-CASSETTE-TAPE-ASYLUM-/221940846540]

Joni Mitchell, For the Roses (1972) and The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975). And I’d have chucked Court and Spark, too, if I could have found it. But I’m keeping the earlier albums, Clouds and Blue. In those earlier records you can hear what I really care for, her voice and her expression of a generation’s feelings. These later albums strive to be brilliant, detached and critical, and I don’t think even she with all her talent can do any of that within the parameters of rock. You end up admiring her desire to make an adult music, at the same time that you feel her incapacity to realize the issues at a musical level.

 

Mahler, Symphony No. 1 in D. I do like this, principally the first and last movements, but I’m a mere visitor to Mahler’s oeuvre and his preoccupations; and since I’m 46 already, I perhaps always will be. It’s time to put it aside and wait for another space; if there is one, so much the better, but I hardly expect it.

 

Brahms, Sonatas for Cello and Piano. These are not Brahms’ most persuasive works, especially the first of them; its first movement has too much of the same expansive melody. It seems to think it’s very fine. The second is better, the first movement heroic and the finale one of those Brahmsian constructions that is faceted; it seems too short and you never want it to end. But here Brahms seems to have solved his problem of balance rather drastically, by reducing the cello-part to a source of bold pizzicati and zooshing sound-effects; he seems to have written it right through on the piano and doesn’t want to leave any space. I’ve heard these sonatas a hundred times, always one after another in this murky, greyish recording.

 

Sibelius, Symphony No 2 in D. My least favourite Sibelius symphony, though I have come to admire that gigantic second movement more with the passing of time. The finale is admittedly his worst, the kitchen-sink failing to disguise the lack of crucial ideas.   

 

Lawrence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey – abridgment read by Donald Sinden. This was mildly entertaining, once, and less so, twice. I haven’t read the book, but it seems to be the same joke over and over. Very disappointing, remembering the vast wonderments of Tristram Shandy.

 

The bric-a-brac: a two-level lunch box that splits apart when you don’t want it to, with the Chino-English motto, “food is suel of human body”. A vase for a single stem (this should be called a solitaire) that could conceivably be just the thing, but somehow never is. A shower-radio, still in its packaging because I’ve already got one. I must admit that it’s become an indispensable part of the routine of waking up. In this fragile part of the day I am briefly immersed in Chris Moyles, Comedy Dave, Rachel, Dominic and Carrie. I am as uncritical and ego-less as an animal, except I also laugh. 


By 2005, Moyles and his team had succeeded in increasing the morning audience, with his programme's audience swelling to 6.5 million. (Wikipedia)

 

Some of these things I feel sorry to part with, especially the vase. It seems important to get rid of at least one thing that I think I’ll miss. What lies behind this belief is the feeling, as Gösta Ågren puts it, that “your life slowly becomes more important than you”. As he also probably says, to possess something is no longer to have it. Only now, while writing these two pages, have I briefly had my things again.

 
*




Note (2018) :  I feel anxious to state that I no longer hold the negative opinions I expressed about, e.g Brahms' 1st Cello Sonata or Sibelius 2. Of Saint-Saëns's piano concertos or those Joni albums I can't speak so securely, not having encountered them since, but I still feel an impulse to distance myself from those blanket dismissals.


This deprecation of former critical opinions has been my common experience when re-posting older pieces from my defunct website.


Does this change in my views reflect a growth of critical timidity, or grandfatherly sentimentality perhaps? I don't think so. I've learnt over and again, how most of my former critical dismissals arose from lack of understanding. I believe other people's critical dismissals, likewise, are mainly down to ignorance.


Though I was already 46 when I wrote this piece,  I still shared in some degree the deficiencies of the teenage Miss Bertrams: of "self-knowledge, generosity, and humility"*. It is, of course, a larger issue of our times than just talking about books or music.


Pankaj Mishra; Against the Culture of Cruelty (in the NYRB)








(* A little trailer for Mansfield Park, which I'll be blogging about soon ...)