Thomas Kyd: The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1587?)

Horatio (Tristan Sturrock)

[Image source: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/ren/researchcurrent/elizabethan_jacobean_drama/kyd/spanishtragedy/performancehistory/professional_productions/1997rsc/ . From Michael Boyd's 1997 RSC production at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon.]

So, in Act II Scene 4 they move in on Horatio, interrupting his love duet with Bel-imperia. They stab him to death, and then they make the murder into a spectacle by hanging him from a tree in his father's garden. The considerably upsetting impact lies in this gratuitous spectacle, not in the stabbing. Both in Kyd's play and in the later anonymous additions, Hieronimo keeps returning to the image of his son hanging from a tree, and so do we. It isn't just a death but a desecration.

From the killers' point of view, it doesn't make much logical sense. Lorenzo and Balthazar have drifted into murder by the simple means of never considering any alternative. It will cost them their own lives.

Well it wasn't supposed to go down that way.
But they burned his brother you know and they left him lying in the driveway... (Neil Young, "Tired Eyes")

From a prudential perspective, why would Lorenzo and his boys confront a potential avenger with an execution spectacle -- rather as if they were threatening a rival gang -- when a mere huddled stabbing would achieve their main object, i.e. of clearing the way to Bel-imperia? But from a poetic perspective, this "stylized violence", as the Shmoop author rightly calls it, is crucial, it makes the play tick.

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There's another spectacle in Act III Scene 3: Pedringano has been despatched to kill Serberine, and he now appears on stage carrying a pistol. He uses it too. As far as we know, this is the first time a firearm had appeared on the English stage. The audience must have been thrilled.

It still gives theatre audiences a little jolt now, because in the more familiar world of Shakespeare's plays firearms are conspicuously absent: there's a couple of mentions, but none appear on stage -- though, of course, a character called Pistol does. Chekhov complained about the dramatic necessity of a pistol shot, but in Tudor plays pistols were a rare thing. (The English word pistol only dates from around 1570.)

Probably Pedringano was carrying a wheel-lock pistol. It was the first kind of handgun that you could load in advance and then conceal until the time came to use it, the first that could be aimed and fired with one hand, and the first that responded the instant you squeezed the trigger. This was the type of gun that was used to assassinate William the Silent in 1584. In The Spanish Tragedy there's already been one imputed assassination by pistol (I.3), though it turns out to be fabricated.  Now Pedringano shows it to us for real.  Compared to stabbing, the advantage is that he can kill an unsuspecting Serberine from a distance. The disadvantage is that a pistol took ages to reload. So when the Watch surround Pedringano, he blusters but he's effectively unarmed.

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Kyd's play was very up to date. Kyd didn't attend university, but he made The Spanish Tragedy a display of his impressive learning: classical, linguistic and technological. His warfare was modern; for example, the "cornet" (cavalry company) led by Don Pedro (I.2.41). His Spain and Portugal, with their "western Indies" (III.14.7), were contemporary.  Yet he seems to have invented the plot of The Spanish Tragedy. It was a counterfactual history, but not too unlike the real one. Kyd was presumably well aware that Portugal was currently ruled by a Viceroy, and that the Spanish had defeated the Portuguese at the battle of Alcântara in 1580. That battle resulted from a dynastic crisis in Portugal, just like the dynastic crisis that looms over the end of The Spanish Tragedy.

Kyd's rulers are un-named. Still, in Kyd's own life-time there had only ever been one king of Spain: Philip II. And from 1585 onwards, England was at war with him. The English theatre of the 1580s gave vent to plenty of xenophobia and, in particular, hispanophobia  (e.g. in the play A Larum for London, about the 1576 Siege of Antwerp). This xenophobia incorporated a certain fascination with the foreigners, and an oscillation between respect and disrespect: material power but buffoonish hubris, for instance. Kyd's portrayal of Iberian courts and potentates is sometimes a bit like the portrayal of the French in early history plays like Edward III.

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The Spanish Tragedy starts with a self-introduction, "My name was Don Andrea..." (I.1.5). That's the old dramatic mode: it tells the audience what they are seeing. So too the soliloquies in which characters confide their thoughts and plans; and the frequent habit of addressing themselves by name within their speeches -- this was a Senecan feature, to remind the reader of closet-drama who the current speaker is.

What's really new is this kind of thing:


Enter PEDRINGANO.

[HIERONIMO.]
     Now, Pedringano.

PEDRINGANO          Now, Hieronimo.

HIERONIMO
     Where's thy lady?

PEDRINGANO          I know not; here's my lord.

Enter LORENZO.

LORENZO
     How now, who's this? Hieronimo?

HIERONIMO                                      My lord.

PEDRINGANO [to Lorenzo]
     He asketh for my lady Bel-imperia.

LORENZO
     What to do, Hieronimo? The Duke my father hath
     Upon some disgrace awhile removed her hence,
     But if it be aught I may inform her of,
     Tell me, Hieronimo, and I'll let her know it.

HIERONIMO
     Nay, nay, my lord, I thank you, it shall not need.
     I had a suit unto her, but too late,
     And her disgrace makes me unfortunate.

LORENZO
     Why so, Hieronimo? Use me.

HIERONIMO
     O no, my lord, I dare not, it must not be.
     I humbly thank your lordship.

LORENZO                                 Why then, farewell.

HIERONIMO [aside]
     My grief no heart, my thoughts no tongue can tell.       Exit.

LORENZO
     Come hither, Pedringano, seest thou this?

PEDRINGANO
     My lord, I see it, and suspect it too.

LORENZO
     This is that damned villain Serberine
     That hath, I fear, revealed Horatio's death.

PEDRINGANO
     My lord, he could not, 'twas so lately done;
     And since, he hath not left my company.

LORENZO
     Admit he have not, his condition's such
     As fear or flattering words may make him false.
     I know his humour, and therewith repent
     That e'er I used him in this enterprise.
     But, Pedringano, to prevent the worst,
     And 'cause I know thee secret as my soul,
     Here, for thy further satisfaction, take thou this.
          (Gives him more gold.)
     And hearken to me. Thus it is devised:    ...

(III.2.53-81, 1592 version)

Hieronimo wants to talk to Bel-imperia, but his neutral question to the servant Pedringano "Where's thy lady?" has momentous consequences. The last person he wishes to involve is Lorenzo. Lorenzo immediately scents trouble, he is kindly insistent on being of service, and Hieronimo slams into reverse. After he's gone, Lorenzo compares notes with Pedringano, then somewhat randomly points the finger at Serberine. Pedringano thinks that's a bit of a stretch, so some money changes hands. It doesn't occur to Pedringano, however, that  Lorenzo's remark to him, "I know thee secret as my soul", is just what he isn't thinking.

It's modern drama of a kind never seen before: a fluid, fast-moving, naturalistic series of exchanges, from which (without being told) we develop an idea of the characters' thoughts and intentions, in just the same way as when we witness exchanges in real life.

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HIERONIMO
     O eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears!
     O life, no life, but lively form of death!
     O world, no world, but mass of public wrongs,
     Confused and filled with murder and misdeeds!
     O sacred heavens, if this unhallowed deed,
     If this inhuman and barbarous attempt,
     If this incomparable murder thus
     Of mine but now no more my son,
     Shall unrevealed and unrevenged pass,
     How should we term your dealings to be just,
     If you unjustly deal with those that in your justice trust?
     The night, sad secretary to my moans,
     With direful visions wake my vexed soul,
     And with the wounds of my distressful son
     Solicit me for notice of his death.
     The ugly fiends do sally forth of hell,
     And frame my steps to unfrequented paths,
     And fear my heart with fierce-inflamed thoughts.
     The cloudy day my discontents records,
     Early begins to register my dreams,
     And drive me forth to seek the murderer.
     Eyes, life, world, heavens, hell, night and day,
     See, search, show, send some man, some mean that may—
                (A letter falleth.)

(III.2.1-23)

The heart of The Spanish Tragedy, Hieronimo's and Isabella's grief at their son's death, Hieronimo's anguish at being denied a hearing, his transformation from lawful judge to unlawful avenger, these are still essentially in the older mode: rhetorical, patterned, static, a character declaiming but not exactly conversing. These "complaints" were what early audiences fell for; and, eventually, what later audiences mocked. But in 1587 they were recognized as doing a very deep thing, shining a searchlight into the individual spirit and its dealings with a spiritual order, compared with which the new mode of naturalistic action deals only with the unimportant and deceptive surface of worldly things.

The contrast between this old mode and the newer, more rapid mode within the play produces Hieronimo's sense of standing still. Within the new mode, he is denied a voice, Lorenzo sidelines him with consummate ease, Hieronimo is framed as obsessed, deranged, a ditherer.

But wherefore waste I mine unfruitful words,
When naught but blood will satisfy my woes?

(III.7.67-68)

Why, is not this a strange and seldseen thing,
That standers-by with toys should strike me mute?

(III.12.3-4)

Hieronimo's eventual triumph results from muzzling Lorenzo's and Balthazar's discourse, or rather, from compelling it to conform with his own. It's a reassertion of formal language.

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[BEL-IMPERIA]
     ... But what's the cause that you concealed me since?

LORENZO
     Your melancholy, sister, since the news
     Of your first favourite Don Andrea's death,
     My father's old wrath hath exasperate.

BALTHAZAR
     And better was't for you, being in disgrace,
     To absent yourself and give his fury place.

BEL-IMPERIA
     But why had I no notice of his ire?

LORENZO
     That were to add more fuel to your fire,
     Who burned like Etna for Andrea's loss.

(III.10.67-75)

Bel-imperia was so melancholy, her brother Lorenzo tells her, that it angered their father, so Lorenzo locked her up to keep her out of sight. But he couldn't tell her why, because it would have made her melancholy worse.

In other words, her judgment was impaired by her excessively emotional state. (Lorenzo's real, though unstated, intention is to make Bel-imperia question her own appalled reaction to the killing of Horatio.)

A classic piece of gaslighting. Happily (at least for the audience) it doesn't work. Bel-imperia's commitment to revenge is absolute.


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Date of The Spanish Tragedy:

The only hard dates are July 1582 -- the Battle of Ponta Delgada (Azores), the very earliest date that the name Terceira (cf. I.3.82) is likely to have become known to Kyd;  and October 1592 (play registered -- and printed very soon after). But there's a range of other indications that we are probably talking about the mid-to-late 1580s. One discussion point is whether we can conclude that the play is earlier than the Spanish Armada (July-Aug 1588) on the basis that Kyd would surely have referred to the Armada if it had already taken place.

[But perhaps Kyd's "alternative history" might not have been able to sustain a direct reference to something so recent and so indelibly associated with Philip II as the Spanish Armada ...]

At any rate there's a pleasing fitness in finding The Spanish Tragedy right next to the first part of Tamburlaine (likewise "1587?").  The two authors knew each other (it would all go horribly sour six years later). These were, it seems, the biggest plays of the infant commercial theatre prior to Shakespeare's arrival around three years later. Both plays were brutal and spectacular.

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Bel-Imperia (India Semper-Hughes)

[Image source: http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/review-the-spanish-tragedy-at-the-old-red-lion/ . From Dan Hutton's 2016 production at The Old Red Lion Theatre in Islington. Bags of turquoise-blue blood were suspended above the action.]


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Shakespeare's debt to The Spanish Tragedy is great and yet limited.  The plays where it stands out are Titus Andronicus and Hamlet; both  the avenger-heroes develop different aspects of Hieronimo. I expect, too, that the Christopher Sly frame to The Taming of the Shrew (1590?)  owes its conception to The Spanish Tragedy's on-stage audience of Don Andrea and Revenge. The deepest debt, maybe, is to Kyd's multi-pronged deployment of blank verse, rhyme, rhetoric and prose. None of Shakespeare's other predecessors was so resourceful nor so close to his own practice.

Re Hamlet, we must credit Kyd with first recognizing the dramatic potential of an avenger's delay. A more surprising debt concerns the preparations for the play-within-a-play (ST 4.1, 4.3). Here we experience the strange effect of impassioned action suddenly being suspended while the participants talk mundanely about theatre matters. Hieronimo plans to kill Lorenzo and Balthazar, but just for a minute or two they are all just chatting about logistics. Shakespeare will turn this idea to huge account in Hamlet.

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Jacket of the indispensable 2013 Arden edition by Clara Calvo and Jesús Tronch. (Roy Bishop's jacket design depicts Bel-imperia's writing materials.)

The Q4 (1602) additions.

The Arden edition helpfully incorporates the 1602 additions into the main text, but distinguishes them by using a different font.

These additions contain some startling poetry.

[HIERONIMO to ISABELLA]
     ... This was the tree; I set it of a kernel,
     And when our hot Spain could not let it grow
     But that the infant and the human sap
     Began to wither, duly twice a morning
     Would I be sprinkling it with fountain water.
     At last it grew and grew, and bore and bore,
     Till at the length it grew a gallows, and did bear our son.
     It bore thy fruit and mine. O wicked, wicked plant!

[Wherever it was that I first studied The Spanish Tragedy, no-one mentioned Abel Meeropol's song "Strange Fruit"... I wonder if he had come across the old play, or was the trope of hanged bodies as fruit embedded in folk tradition?]

"Human sap"?? Didn't that merit a note, Clara Calvo and Jesús Tronch?.....

The authorship of the additions is unknown, but the name now most often mentioned is William Shakespeare, for instance by Brian Vickers on the basis of standard author tests. The frequent feminine endings certainly lend support to that, but other things don't, for instance the inversion "Would I". My impression is of a pervasively un-Shakespearean quality, but it could be that Shakespeare deliberately adjusted his manner to Kyd's play. Or maybe the additions were the work of several hands.

Though their poetry is sometimes fantastic, I feel the additions lead to a loss of dramatic concentration. They inadvertently demonstrate how well formed Kyd's original play was. Shakespeare, if he was involved, would have seen that too. When he wrote Hamlet (if it's based on a Kyd original, as many suppose) he went for a root and branch re-imagining.

["Kyd's" Hamlet is the play that Nashe referred to in 1589, was performed at Newington Butts on 11th June 1594, and at the Theatre in 1596, by the Chamberlain's Men in both cases. The word "probably" should be applied to all these statements. I'm taking these details from David Nicol's brilliant Henslowe blog:
http://hensloweasablog.blogspot.com/2018/06/11-june-1594-hamlet.html

]

Hieronimo (Peter Wright)

[Image source: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/ren/researchcurrent/elizabethan_jacobean_drama/kyd/spanishtragedy/performancehistory/professional_productions/1997rsc/ . From Michael Boyd's 1997 RSC production at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon.]

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The Spanish Tragedy and Shmoop's notes for school students were made for each other. Don't deny yourself the fun of reading the Shmoop-author's deadpan account of the play -- I especially recommend the scene-by-scene plot summaries.
https://www.shmoop.com/the-spanish-tragedy/

There's actually a deeper point here. This grimly bloody and anguished play tends to be taken not quite seriously, not quite as the tragedy it proclaims itself.  It has proved a popular choice for amateur or semi-professional productions. Reviewers complain playfully about how long it takes to get to the first murder. Balthazar is played for laughs, as a fop or coward or dimwit. This vague sense of a communal, festive entertainment possibly goes right back to 1587.

In my opinion this is to do with the play's denial of death; I feel an analogy with the mummer's play in which St George is killed and then revived by the Doctor. The Spanish Tragedy begins with the ghost of Don Andrea -- dead but not really dead. And it ends with the play-within-a-play in which the characters perform death but are actually supposed to be really dead... except that, since Kyd's play is really a play, they're actually not dead...  and anyway the play itself then describes them as continuing to exist in the not-meant-to-be-believed classical underworld. All of this loosens our hold on the inconsolable fact of death that was so powerfully realized in the laments of Hieronimo and Isabella over their dead son. The upshot, weirdly, is that the end of the play leaves us with a feeling of celebration.

Complete list of posts on Shakespeare and his contemporaries

Sean Bonney

I went on Facebook late yesterday and realized from all the activity something unusual must have happened in the corner of the poetry world I inhabit. It had. News had just broken of the sudden death of Sean Bonney in Berlin -- by "tragic accident", no further details as yet. The UK (and US) poetry communities were alive with shock and sorrow. A lot of people loved Sean.

So I'm breaking two of the unwritten rules of this blog 1. Avoid topicality: news stories, anniversaries, International/National Days, etc. 2. Avoid following straight on from a recent post. In this case I'm thinking about the one about Lola Ridge -- because Sean Bonney's poems are overtly left-political too, though in many ways the two poets couldn't be more different.

I've always meant to, but have never got round to, reading his poetry in detail. But I've been reading some today.  Here's two or three recent things that I've copied from his blog:
http://abandonedbuildings.blogspot.com

[Sean had recently begun another blog (https://godsoftheplague.tumblr.com/), which I was on this morning but now can't get to.]



Heroes

1.

Mustapha Khayati, I got a question. When you were writing your dictionary, did you have any sense which words might be snitches and which might be scabs. While the Eiffel Tower continues to mean what it does, sending out signals no-one could ever translate, these questions continue to matter. Mustapha Khayati, say something. Fascism does what it does without a need for language.


2.

Jean Genet, if alive today, would be somewhere at the bottom of the ocean, entwined with all the other human bones. No-one would say his name. His fingerprints would be stored in an obscure data-mine. But his hatred for your world would be the same. His fist, his knife, his negligee. As the final oceans evaporated, his bones would begin to move. The kindness in his eyes long gone.


3.

If it turned out that Dante’s cosmology was true all along, then I would like Artaud to be the guide to Hell. He’d know how to deal with the tourists. He wouldn’t say a word or look you in the eye, and the screaming in your ears would be your own. If you were lucky, he would grasp you by the wrists. Somewhere, far from where we were standing, the earth’s final clock would explode. Basic flowers.


4.

If all of the letters in all of the alphabets of the world were pronounced simultaneously, they would not spell out the name Arthur Rimbaud. That name was taken out of commission some time ago. But still, try it backwards, in the hour before dawn. Watch the statues erected in his honour as they do not implode. Listen to his poetry, as it wanders the ruined cities, invisible to our sight.

5.

Baudelaire you knew it all along. Your skeleton compelled without question to scrape the earth forever, to ward off the bitter need that comes on it like a living clock. Smack makes death eternal, you know that well. As does its respectable twin, wage labour.



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Mustapha Khayati's On the poverty of student life (1966).



Our Death 28 / Dancer (after Emmy Hemmings)

I guess they’ve probably got me on their death-list somewhere. Probably quite far down. Not that I’m bothered - I’ve always been fairly careful inside my life, am quiet and am often frightened.

One day they smashed my heart. Since then I’ve been getting sicker. So what. The Angel of Death - if that’s what they call it - is on my side. I’m going to keep on dancing till they get me. They can nail me into whatever filthy little grave, I’ll never snitch on anyone.

All these banners and people and songs. Its like I’m flying through caverns, through grottoes and mythical tunes. I have bit-parts in other people’s dreams. I interpret their faces. The old, the sick, the beautiful, etc, none of them mesmerise me. A black cross in the centre of my room.


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Emmy Hennings' Wikipedia entry, which quotes her poem "Tänzerin" / "Dancer".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Hennings



In Fever: Notes on Les Chimères de Gerard de Nerval

 for Eva Collé

Don’t wait up for me tonight, the sky will be black and white

Yeh I’m in a bad mood as well. Cops are everywhere. But we know that - we murdered them. Lets talk about black stars.  Something stretched strings between them, and now they flutter like chords. Stars, a very bad mood. Pasolini wrote about singing, called it the “divine wind that doesn’t heal but rather makes everything sicker”. This is the fifth day of our fever. Cops make everything unreal. Songs get sung outside their cellular systems, from the centre of some kind of secretive world. Whisper those songs, then scream them. After that, kill all straight men. You know they want it.

Was thinking about that for a while this morning, then I thought about the human world. I’m sick of it as well. Was thinking that murder in the suburbs is the only real expression of the continued need for human love, where everything is turning to ice, yet everything is frozen in gold. When the sun hits the earth it shatters into all human data, calendars of the places music goes when its notes disappear. The same places the dead live, I guess. But this has little to do with what we say when we’re wasted, and everything is flooded with animal light. The human horizon covered in ashes.

A guy walks into the ocean. Kill him. The gesture is futile. He walks out of it again. Won’t shut his mouth, talks for several centuries about the devil and the hunger of screaming birds. Don’t waste your sympathy. The sky is packed with them, terminal birds that screech of all the terrible things that might happen. And behind them, timeless bells transforming all to the metal stains of what has already happened. And behind all of that are stars tracing out the fixed raptures of what ought never to have happened. There is no death anywhere. Our hatred of the rich is entirely justified.

Toward the end of his life Antonin Artaud wrote a poem complaining that no-one ever touched his body. But he seemed to think it was a good thing, that if anyone did then it would split to a million fragments and fill the known sky. Poor Artaud. Little did he know this goes on every night. There are bodies that fragment each dusk, that split into countless wild lenses that fall to earth at dawn and form a strange calendar of imaginary incidents, frozen cities, addictions, etc. What this implies is not utopian. The straight world never touches anything. It’s victims never do anything else.

Because I’m fearful the sky will shatter I would like to turn it to stone, to turn it to seven pebbles, each to mark a day of our fever. As in set fire to cars, put glue in locks, sugar in petrol. Also include bodies. Also include the shock and the curse of our loss. As in recite that curse, until the voice becomes a song, or the word becomes something outside its borders, the barricades we built across this life of great mourning in which the seeds of our hurt would bloom. The fascists who murdered Pasolini are now the owners of the world. Do not mourn or forgive. Shriek one time. Shatter glass.

The thirteenth returns, and everything we once thought inaudible. There is gunshot, there is fire in the suburbs, the fixed stars falling like cops or roses, the darkened rituals of the middle class. We replace them with pinpricks, with new forms of arson, and the dreams of a thousand archers haunting Trafalgar Square. Nothing returns. Our bodies, the names of stars. But nothing is forgotten, everything falls. Thirteen the only number, the sounds of thirteen fevers crackling inside our dreams. There are no dreams. We never sleep. An unknown light in the corner of our room.

That Fryksdal dance

Sometimes it's just called Fryksdalsdans and sometimes Fryksdalsdans Nr: 2 ... I think the name is down to Ernst Willners' piano version (see below). [Apparently Fryksdalsdans Nr: 1 is a waltz.]

Fryksdalsdans Nr:2 is a popular folk-dance tune in Sweden, and is usually performed with accordions and fiddles. (My own rendition, of course, is on the guitar.)

 YouTube supplies quite a few videos of people dancing to it. Here's just one:




The dance steps are described in the bible of Swedish folk dances, first produced in 1933 for the Svenska Ungdomsringen för Bygdekultur (now known as Svenska Folkdansringen -- the Swedish folk-dance society).

The correct name of the online version is Beskrivning av svenska folkdanser (5th edition, 1964) , Del 1 [Part 1].  Enthusiasts simply call it "the green book" (gröna boken). The description of Fryksdalsdans begins on page 151:
http://runeberg.org/folkdans/besk/0153.html

I also found a video of the Benny Andersson Orkester performing the tune in 2003 (a beaming Benny on the accordion)... the Abba man has for a long time championed traditional Swedish music.

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Fryksdal is in the NW of Värmland, which along with Dalarna tends to be regarded as the heart of Swedish folk culture.

Fryksdal was a farming and iron mining region. It was depicted by Selma Lagerlöf in Gösta Berlings saga.

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[Image source: supplied by Håkan Frykmo to the Facebook group "Svensk folkmusik".]

The tune seems to have taken its present form in the early 20th-century piano arrangement by Ernst Willners, a military bandmaster at Karlstad (the "capital" of Värmland). But some of its elements can be traced back to the start of the 19th century, at least (info from Magnus Gustafsson on the Facebook group "Svensk folkmusik").

Fryksdalsdans Nr:2 is in 2/4 time (it's a "schottis") and is not to be confused with the dance tune Fryksdalspolska, in 3/4 time. The latter supplies the melody for the popular Christmas song Nu är det jul igen, which I expect to sing a few times over the next month or two.

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And listen out for Sven-Ingvars' 1985 version, improbably turning the melody to new use..  a novelty schlager song.

 

The title given here is "Dansen den går på gröna äng" but I think the original title was "Fryksdalsdans 2". Sven-Ingvars are a long-running dance band first formed in 1956 in Slottsbron (Grums, a few miles down the lake from Karlstad). 

Sven-Ingvars' biggest hits were from the 1960s, but the claim in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sven-Ingvars that they were once "supported by" the Beatles is highly dubious. (It doesn't appear in the more detailed Swedish article https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sven-Ingvars .) 

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But since it's come up, the radio programme supplied as reference for the dubious claim describes the Beatles concert at Sundsta Läroverk in Karlstad on 25th October 1963. However, it makes no mention of Sven-Ingvars. One support act was The Telstars with Mona Skarström (the radio interviewee). The other acts included Ken Levy and the Phantoms (a British band popular in Sweden) and Jack Dailey. The Beatles Bible also mentions "local group" Svend Miller's Popstars, perhaps taken from here, but nowhere else on the internet confirms the existence any band with that name. Could this have been Sven-Ingvars?

The Beatles played two 25-minute concerts, probably the same set-list as for Eskilstuna (below). It was the first date of their whirlwind tour, and the first time they'd played anywhere outside Germany or Britain. (Though they were on Swedish TV the previous night.) Beatlemania was taking off in Britain, and the Beatles had a growing fanbase in Sweden in October 1963. But Mona Skarström gives the impression that the boys from Liverpool were relaxed and approachable.

The next day (Saturday 26th October 1963), the Beatles played two concerts at the Kungliga Tennishallen in Stockholm. They were second on the bill to US band Joey Dee and the Starliters. Also on the bill were Swedish band Jerry Williams with The Violents, and Suzie. 

On Sunday 27th October 1963 they travelled the width of Sweden and played three concerts at the Cirkus in Göteborg. Supporting them were Trio Me' Bumba, Ken Levy and the Phantoms, The Telstars with Mona Skarström, Jerry Williams with The Violents, and Jack Dailey. 

After Sunday's titanic efforts they gave only a single concert at Borås (Borås Hallen at Bockasjogatan) on Monday 28th October. This was the biggest attendance of the tour, around 2500 fans, and the music was almost drowned out by Beatlemania screams. I haven't found a record of who the other acts were at Borås.

 The final concert on this tour was at the Sports Hall in Eskilstuna on Tuesday 29th October 1963. The other acts were Jerry Williams with The Violents, Trio Me’ Bumba, and The Telstars with Mona Skarström. 

The Beatles set for Eskilstuna and maybe all the dates was: 

‘Roll Over Beethoven’

‘Please Please Me’

‘I Saw Her Standing There’

‘From Me To You’

‘A Taste Of Honey’

‘Boys’

‘She Loves You’

‘Twist And Shout’

‘Long Tall Sally’

Not bad!

The following July (28-29/7/64) the Beatles played two dates in Stockholm, at the Johanneshovs Isstadion, as part of their world tour. They played two concerts on each night. The other acts were The Kays, The Moonlighters, The Streaplers, Jimmy Justice, The Mascots and The Shanes.

(The information collected here came mostly from The Beatles Bible and beatlesnytt)

of fields Before I had had my milk

Dawn-wind

Wind, just arisen
(Off what cool matters of marsh-moss
In tented boughs leaf-drawn before the stars,
Or niche of cliff under the eagles?)
You of living things,
So gay and tender and full of play,
Why do you blow on my thoughts -- like cut flowers
Gathered and laid to dry on this paper, rolled out of dead wood?

I see you
Shaking that flower at me with soft invitation
And frisking away,
Deliciously rumpling the grass . . .

So you fluttered the curtains about my cradle,
Prattling of fields
Before I had had my milk.
Did I stir on my pillow, making to follow you, Fleet One --
I, swaddled, unwinged, like a bird in the egg?

Let be
My dreams that crackle under your breath . . .
You have the dust of the world to blow on.

Do not tag me and dance away, looking back . . .
I am too old to play with you,
Eternal child.


*

Poem by Lola Ridge, text as published in Poetry (October 1918). The text on PoemHunter has "mattress" in the second line -- which must be right, I suppose -- but inferior punctuation, etc.

Lola Ridge, b. Dublin 1873, emigrated age 4 to New Zealand, educ. Sydney, moved to San Francisco 1907 then New York. Worked as a model and in factories. First book, The Ghetto, about the Hester St area of the Lower East Side. Committed left-wing activist (her third collection is called The Red Flag), d. New York 1941.


*

East River

Dour river
Jaded with monotony of lights
Diving off mast heads….
Lights mad with creating in a river… turning its sullen back…
Heave up, river…
Vomit back into the darkness your spawn of light….
The night will gut what you give her.


*

An Old Workman

Warped… gland-dry…
With spine askew
And body shrunken into half its space…
Well-used as some cracked paving-stone…
Bearing on his grimed and pitted front
A stamp… as of innumerable feet.


*

Wall Street At Night

Long vast shapes… cooled and flushed through with darkness….
Lidless windows
Glazed with a flashy luster
From some little pert cafe chirping up like a sparrow.
And down among iron guts
Piled silver
Throwing gray spatter of light… pale without heat…
Like the pallor of dead bodies.


*

Here's one of the longer New York poems.


Flotsam

I

Crass rays streaming from the vestibules;
Cafes glittering like jeweled teeth;
High-flung signs
Blinking yellow phosphorescent eyes;
Girls in black
Circling monotonously
About the orange lights…
Nothing to guess at…
Save the darkness above
Crouching like a great cat.
In the dim-lit square,
Where dishevelled trees
Tustle with the wind—the wind like a scythe
Mowing their last leaves—
Arcs shimmering through a greenish haze—
Pale oval arcs
Like ailing virgins,
Each out of a halo circumscribed,
Pallidly staring…
Figures drift upon the benches
With no more rustle than a dropped leaf settling—
Slovenly figures like untied parcels,
And papers wrapped about their knees
Huddled one to the other,
Cringing to the wind—
The sided wind,
Leaving no breach untried…
So many and all so still…
The fountain slobbering its stone basin
Is louder than They—
Flotsam of the five oceans
Here on this raft of the world.
This old man's head
Has found a woman's shoulder.
The wind juggles with her shawl
That flaps about them like a sail,
And splashes her red faded hair
Over the salt stubble of his chin.
A light foam is on his lips,
As though dreams surged in him
Breaking and ebbing away…
And the bare boughs shuffle above him
And the twigs rattle like dice…
She—diffused like a broken beetle—
Sprawls without grace,
Her face gray as asphalt,
Her jaws sagging as on loosened hinges…
Shadows ply about her mouth—
Nimble shadows out of the jigging tree,
That dances above her its dance of dry bones.

II

A uniformed front,
Paunched;
A glance like a blow,
The swing of an arm,
Verved, vigorous;
Boot-heels clanking
In metallic rhythm;
The blows of a baton,
Quick, staccato…
—There is a rustling along the benches
As of dried leaves raked over…
And the old man lifts a shaking palsied hand,
Tucking the displaced paper about his knees.
Colder…
And a frost under foot,
Acid, corroding,
Eating through worn bootsoles.
Drab forms blur into greenish vapor.
Through boughs like cross-bones,
Pale arcs flare and shiver
Like lilies in a wind.
High over Broadway
A far-flung sign
Glitters in indigo darkness
And spurts again rhythmically,
Spraying great drops
Red as a hemorrhage.

*

Here's another of her poems remembering childhood. This is a section from the autobiographical sequence Sun-Up.


Celia

Cherry, cherry,
glowing on the hearth,
bright red cherry….
When you try to pick up cherry
Celia’s shriek
sticks in you like a pin.



When God throws hailstones
you cuddle in Celia’s shawl
and press your feet on her belly
high up like a stool.
When Celia makes umbrella of her hand.
Rain falls through
big pink spokes of her fingers.
When wind blows Celia’s gown up off her legs
she runs under pillars of the bank—
great round pillars of the bank
have on white stockings too.



Celia says my father
will bring me a golden bowl.
When I think of my father
I cannot see him
for the big yellow bowl
like the moon with two handles
he carries in front of him.



Grandpa, grandpa…
(Light all about you…
ginger… pouring out of green jars…)
You don’t believe he has gone away and left his great coat…
so you pretend… you see his face up in the ceiling.
When you clap your hands and cry, grandpa, grandpa, grandpa,
Celia crosses herself.



It isn’t a dream….
It comes again and again….
You hear ivy crying on steeples
the flames haven’t caught yet
and images screaming
when they see red light on the lilies
on the stained glass window of St. Joseph.
The girl with the black eyes holds you tight,
and you run… and run
past the wild, wild towers…
and trees in the gardens tugging at their feet
and little frightened dolls
shut up in the shops
crying… and crying… because no one stops…
you spin like a penny thrown out in the street.
Then the man clutches her by the hair….
He always clutches her by the hair….
His eyes stick out like spears.
You see her pulled-back face
and her black, black eyes
lit up by the glare….
Then everything goes out.
Please God, don’t let me dream any more
of the girl with the black, black eyes.



Celia’s shadow rocks and rocks…
and mama’s eyes stare out of the pillow
as though she had gone away
and the night had come in her place
as it comes in empty rooms…
you can’t bear it—
the night threshing about
and lashing its tail on its sides
as bold as a wolf that isn’t afraid—
and you scream at her face, that is white as a stone on a grave
and pull it around to the light,
till the night draws backward… the night that walks alone
and goes away without end.
Mama says, I am cold, Betty, and shivers.
Celia tucks the quilt about her feet,
but I run for my little red cloak
because red is hot like fire.



I wish Celia
could see the sea climb up on the sky
and slide off again…
…Celia saying
I’d beg the world with you….
Celia… holding on to the cab…
hands wrenched away…
wind in the masts… like Celia crying….
Celia never minded if you slapped her
when the comb made your hairs ache,
but though you rub your cheek against mama’s hand
she has not said darling since….
Now I will slap her again….
I will bite her hand till it bleeds.

It is cool by the port hole.
The wet rags of the wind
flap in your face.


*

Terese Svoboda on Lola Ridge:

http://bostonreview.net/poetry/terese-svoboda-lola-ridge

and on her own journey into writing Ridge's biography:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/small-house-lola-ridge/

[Image source: https://therumpus.net/2016/11/anything-that-burns-you-a-portrait-of-lola-ridge-radical-poet-by-terese-svoboda/ .]

Tobias Smollett: Peregrine Pickle (1751)

1769 Print by Charles Grignion after Henry Fuseli

[Image source: https://research.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?from=ad&fromDate=1740&images=true&objectId=1651337&page=1&partId=1&searchText=commodore&to=ad&toDate=1790 . The scene is from Chapter II. The one-eyed Commodore Trunnion attacks Lieutenant Hatchway with his crutch after one sarcastic crack too many. Hatchway fends him off with his elevated wooden leg. On the left, Tom Pipes looks on undisturbed. The only person to whom this nightly performance is new is the phlegmatic figure on the right: Gamaliel Pickle, future father of the hero. The person in the doorway ought to be the landlord feigning astonishment, but I can't explain the flamboyant headgear.]




I've been racking my brains about how to encapsulate The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle for others and for my own later self. Because, let's face it,  in the internet era the occasions when we actually read through an 800 page novel are all too rare. In the end I've decided to just paste one of its 114 chapters (a short one).



CHAPTER XXXVII

Peregrine takes leave of his Aunt and Sister, sets out from the Garison, parts with his Uncle and Hatchway on the Road, and with his Governor arrives in safety at DoverThis, however, was the last effort of invention which they practised upon him; and everything being now prepared for the departure of his godson, that hopeful youth in two days took leave of all his friends in the neighbourhood, was closeted two whole hours with his aunt, who inriched him with many pious advices, recapitulated all the benefits which, through her means, had been conferred upon him since his infancy, cautioned him against the temptations of lewd women, who bring many a man to a morsel of bread, laid strict injunctions upon him to live in the fear of the Lord and the true Protestant faith, to eschew quarrels and contention, to treat Mr. Jolter with reverence and regard, and above all things to abstain from the beastly sin of drunkenness, which exposeth a man to the scorn and contempt of his fellow-creatures, and, by divesting him of reason and reflection, renders him fit for all manner of vice and debauchery. She recommended to him oeconomy, and the care of his health, bad him remember the honour of his family, and in all the circumstances of his behaviour, assured him, that he might always depend upon the friendship and generosity of the commodore; and finally, presenting him with her own picture set in gold, and an hundred guineas from her privy purse, embraced him affectionately, and wished him all manner of happiness and prosperity.
     Being thus kindly dismissed by Mrs. Trunnion, he locked himself up with his sister Julia, whom he admonished to cultivate her aunt with the most complaisant and respectful attention, without stooping to any circumstance of submission that she should judge unworthy of her practice; he protested, that his chief study should be to make her amends for the privilege she had forfeited by her affection for him; intreated her to enter into no engagement without his knowledge and approbation, put into her hand the purse which he had received from his aunt, to defray her pocket expenses in his absence, and parted from her, not without tears, after she had for some minutes hung about his neck, kissing him and weeping in the most pathetic silence.
    Having performed these duties of affection and consanguinity overnight, he went to bed, and was by his own direction, called at four o'clock in the morning, when he found the post-chaise, coach and riding-horses ready at the gate, his friends Gauntlet and Hatchway on foot, the commodore himself almost dressed, and every servant in the garrison assembled in the yard, to wish him a good journey. Our hero shook each of these humble friends by the hand, tipping them at the same time with marks of his bounty; and was very much surprized when he could not perceive his old attendant Pipes among the number. When he expressed his wonder at this disrespectful omission of Tom, some of those present ran to his chamber, in order to give him a call, but his hammock and room were both deserted, and they soon returned with an account of his having eloped. Peregrine was disturbed at this information, believing that the fellow had taken some desperate course, in consequence of his being dismissed from his service, and began to wish that he had indulged his inclination, by retaining him still about his person. However, as there was now no other remedy, he recommended him strenuously to the particular favour and distinction of his uncle and Hatchway, in case he should appear again; and as he went out of the gate, was saluted with three chears by all the domestics in the family.
The commodore, Gauntlet, lieutenant, Peregrine, and Jolter went into the coach together, that they might enjoy each other's conversation as much as possible, resolving to breakfast at an inn upon the road, where Trunnion and Hatchway intended to bid our adventurer farewel; the valet de chambre got into the post-chaise, the French lacquey rode one horse and led another, one of the valets of the garison mounted at the back of the coach; and thus the cavalcade set out on the road to Dover.
As the commodore could not bear the fatigue of jolting, they travelled at an easy pace during the first stage; so that the old gentleman had an opportunity of communicating his exhortations to his godson, with regard to his conduct abroad: he advised him, now that he was going into foreign parts, to be upon his guard against the fair weather of the French politesse, which was no more to be trusted than a whirlpool at sea. He observed that many young men had gone to Paris with good cargoes of sense, and returned with a great deal of canvas, and no ballast at all, whereby they became crank all the days of their lives, and sometimes carried their keels above water. He desired Mr. Jolter to keep his pupil out of the clutches of those sharking priests who lie in wait to make converts of all young strangers, and in a particular manner cautioned the youth against carnal conversation with the Parisian dames, who, he understood, were no better than gaudy fire-ships ready primed with death and destruction.
    Peregrine listened with great respect, thanking him for his kind admonitions, which he faithfully promised to observe. They halted and breakfasted at the end of the stage, where Jolter provided himself with a horse, and the commodore settled the method of corresponding with his nephew; and the minute of parting being arrived, the old commander wrung his godson by the hand, saying, 'I wish thee a prosperous voyage and good cheer, my lad; my timbers are now a little crazy, d'ye see; and God knows if I shall keep afloat till such time as I see thee again; but, howsomever, hap what will, thou wilt find thyself in a condition to keep in the line with the best of thy fellows.' He then reminded Gauntlet of his promise to call at the garison in his return from Dover, and imparted something in a whisper to the governor, while Jack Hatchway unable to speak, pulled his hat over his eyes, and squeezing Peregrine by the hand, gave him an iron pistol of curious workmanship, as a memorial of his friendship. Our youth, who was not unmoved on this occasion, received the pledge, which he acknowledged with the present of a silver tobacco-box, that he had bought for this purpose; and the two lads of the castle getting into the coach, were driven homewards, in a state of silent dejection.
    Godfrey and Peregrine seated themselves in the post-chaise, and Jolter, the valet de chambre and lacquey bestriding their beasts, they proceeded for the place of their destination, at which they arrived in safety that same night, and bespoke a passage in the pacquet-boat which was to sail next day.

(Peregrine Pickle Chapter XXXVII (1st edition, 1751) -- corresponds to Chapter XXXIII in the 1758 revision)

It may justly be complained that my sample chapter fails to represent the book's hard-boiled character. That is true. Be assured that the advice of his guardians has no apparent influence on young Peregrine's conduct.

But still, there's a warm-hearted side to Peregrine Pickle too.

Here, anyway, is the hero within the affectionate "family" that's adopted him.  (Tom Pipes, you won't be surprised to learn, has set his heart on accompanying Peregrine, and turns up during a storm in mid-Channel.)

Peregrine's biological parents have rejected him. Smollett doesn't trouble to think up a complicated explanation; his mother just loathes him. It's stark and credible.

But he's been indulgently brought up by the immortal Commodore, who married his aunt -- though that hardly tells the story. (Aunt Grizzel's fondness for Peregrine, admittedly, is mainly motivated by the thought of spiting her sister-in-law.) Peregrine is a strapping lad, hot-headed, satirical, mischievous and handsome. He makes a lot of trouble. His attachment to that nautical trio the Commodore, Hatchway and Pipes is prominent among his rather few redeeming features. Peregrine's relations with women (including his beloved Emilia) aren't likely to win much approval. An unfriendly description of Peregrine could make him sound like a grossly over-privileged Bullingdon-style rake, who ceaselessly persecutes those less fortunate than himself.

And should the hero of a picaresque novel in the Spanish tradition be quite so wealthy, we wonder? The narrative engine of Gil Blas (Smollett had published the classic translation in 1748),  is the hero's need to make a living. Peregrine never has any thought of working, until, late in the book, he decides to go into politics; which, ironically, promptly results in the loss of what remains of his money.

But as it turns out, this gentrified variant on the picaresque works really well. To give him his due Peregrine is also loyal (in his own fashion), generous, and an enemy to all forms of oppression. He has other qualities that, if not exactly virtues, are attractive and healthy: spontaneity, warm passions, unaffected emotion, a total absence of insincerity or hypocrisy (except, of course, when executing one of his innumerable cruel pranks). And he often regrets his own misdeeds.

No man was more capable of moralizing upon Peregrine's misconduct than himself; his reflections were extremely just and sagacious, and attended with no other disadvantage, but that of occurring too late.

(Ch. XLV)

This we can relate to with some sympathy. But the paragraph then turns rather more sour. Peregrine has earnestly begged Emilia to write to him in Paris, but by the time her note arrives he's focussed on more glittering sexual triumphs, so ignores it. There's a volatility in the hero's attitudes (and in the reader's attitude to him).

If Peregrine is sometimes superhuman and sometimes subhuman, he also makes a surprisingly good Everyman. Some qualities he shares with his author (e.g. the satire, the hot temper). Peregrine on his continental travels is often quite obviously and naively standing in for Smollett himself (who travelled abroad in 1750 during the composition of Peregrine Pickle). At such times Peregrine is an unobtrusively normative and right-hearted observing eye. In Smollett's unwearying and rigorously non-self-analytical narrative, these potentially contradictory aspects of his hero make him, I think, more convincing. For example, Peregrine generally breaks free from the control of his pedantic and ineffectual governor Jolter; but every now and then, he confers with him and even accepts his advice. There's an elasticity to the relationship, as too with Pipes, Hatchway, Emilia herself and her brother (the Gauntlet of the above chapter). The relationships and attitudes change from encounter to encounter, they are not completely predictable.



*



Peregrine Pickle is, I suppose, in the hinterland of "English literature". It meant much to Scott, who admired its fertility of invention, its breadth and its poetry; and to Dickens, on whom it was enormously influential. (It's still a slight shock, when  Peregrine is finally cast into the Fleet for debt, to discover so many foreshadowings, not only of Pickwick's imprisonment, but of those supreme pages of Dickens in which he describes the Dorrit family's life in the Marshalsea.)

But the book is still usually described in slightly apologetic terms: it gets compared unfavourably with Tom Jones (1749), or with Smollett's own more admired (and shorter) novels Roderick Random and Humphry Clinker. Probably this perception goes back, not so much to the initially poor reviews (great books often get poor reviews), but to Smollett's revision (1758), which eliminated some of the coarser episodes and some of the attacks on public figures; it feels like an admission that Peregrine Pickle wasn't quite as it should be. Despite this doubtful start, it became much relished by the public for the next eighty years. Editions and illustrations abound.

The open quality of the novel and its hero give it, I think, a distinctive kind of appeal; though some may feel this openness goes too far when it admits the enormous digression of Lady Vane's Memoirs (as well as the briefer one about the Annesley case). They're interesting narratives, but they raise different kinds of questions than those that a fiction can resolve. Perhaps the real meaning we should place on the revision is that Smollett had stumbled on a literary form that was intrinsically open-ended.

1810 print by John Dadley after Luke Clennell

[Image source: https://research.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=3002120&partId=1 . This is Emilia, surprised and disgusted by the contents of "Peregrine's" letter... actually a travesty cooked up by Pipes after unintentionally destroying the original (Ch XXII; revised edn Ch XIX).]

1823 illustration by George Cruikshank

[Image source: https://research.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=3506196&page=2&partId=1&searchText=pistol%20duel%20 . On the ramparts of Antwerp: the duel (fomented by Peregrine) between the painter Pallet and his curiously-never-named companion the doctor (left). Peregrine is the doctor's second. Pipes, acting as Pallet's second, is preventing his retreat (Ch LXVIII; revised edition Ch LXIII.]

Squeezable

Plastic mustard containers from Portugal and Sweden

Regret? Certainly... But it's time to give up on unnecessary plastic packaging.

Mustard is so easy to buy in glass jars, much better from the recycling perspective.

In Sweden, but not in the UK, metal "tomato puree" tubes are also popular packaging for mustard and other similar pastes. That's another good solution, if you like squeezing out a trail.

I appreciate that plastic dispensers are the practical solution for burger vans and lounge bars. But I can't justify having them at home.

I suppose I'm not alone in sometimes looking at the supermarket shelves not as full of products we want to buy but as a series of commodities that someone is trying to shift: plastic, sugar, wheat...

*

The table condiment is usually made from White Mustard (Sinapis alba), Black Mustard (Brassica nigra), or the S. Asian Brown Mustard (Brassica juncea). But these plants and their allies have many other uses, e.g. as edible (canola) oil, biofuels, and even for cleansing soil contaminated with heavy metals.


Here's a great article (from an Australian/New Zealand perspective) about the different mustard species and their uses, properties, and chemistry:

https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/23/1/231/pdf


*

The electric guitar was the music of hydrocarbons.

*

Mortality      (Dödlighet)

1

We go on but they are gone, he
with his fingers on the
Gloster Gladiator.

From out at sea:
streets, suburbs. The patch
of tree trunks like coal. White light,
the redbreast hopping.

I'll race you home.
Once they glimpsed
the small creatures playing
on the fallen branch.
Was life long enough?

Lunch. Shepherd's pie in the elderly ward.

Cat's whisker. Can you hear?

We must preserve Venice.

Washing-machine. The hot grey
sun of Arabia. Mentally clear, ill.
Have you worn another hole
in that stocking?

Tender May time. I stretched --
No they had run off. In Kensington Gardens.

2

He arrived at the slow home --
easy, or hard? In its swept
all-shadow he
dispersed; his
shallow breaths, closed
lids, and now even
his ruins had
been left behind on the
journey. He had existed,
it made no difference. Beyond
the horizon, where turquoise still exists,
a tumult of rain-
and-sun moved through the gears,

Tomas Tranströmer: "Six winters"

[Image source: https://www.google.com/amp/s/vallterrier.com/2009/12/30/istapp-of-the-day/amp/ ]





Six winters     (Sex vintrar)




1

In the black hotel a child sleeps.
And outside: the winter night
where the big-eyed dice are rolling.


2

An elite of the dead fixed in stone
in Katarina churchyard
where the wind shakes in its armour from Svalbard.


3

One winter during the war while I lay sick
a giant icicle grew outside the window.
Neighbour and harpoon, memory without explanation.


4

Ice hangs down from the edge of the roof.
Icicles: the upside-down Gothic.
Abstract herd, udders of glass.


5

In a siding an empty railway carriage.
Still. Heraldic.
With the journeys in its claws.


6

Tonight snow haze, moonshine. The moonshine jellyfish itself
trembles before us. Our smiles
on the way home.  Enchanted avenue.

The second poem in Tomas Tranströmer's 1989 collection For living and dead (För levande och döda).  Here was the first one.

Katarina Church (Kyrka) in Central Stockholm [Image source: Wikipedia]. Since Tranströmer's poem the church has had to be rebuilt due to fire damage. New to the elite dead is Anna Lindh, the Minister of Foreign Affairs who was assassinated in 2003. Also here is the much-loved troubadour Cornelis Vreeswijk, who died in 1987, and going a little further back, Sten Sture the Elder (died 1503),  regent of Sweden and still a potent name forty years later, as recounted in Strindberg's Gustav Vasa.

[Image source: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/stockholm/naturfenomen-i-stockholms-skargard-lockar-dykare ]


Large influx of jellyfish in the Stockholm archipelago, October 2019.

12, Bath Road

Following my last post, I found myself revisiting my grandmother's house, which I still know so well.

Those grandparent addresses, 12 Bath Road and Fridhemsgatan 11 ("elva"), were the continuities that stuck. We ourselves, like other young families going places, moved house every couple of years, but Mutti and Mormor were more stable.

"Mutti" was our English grandmother, Ruth Peverett née Plowright. She lived in this quiet cul-de-sac street in Eastbourne, a street that I childishly assumed was named after the kind of bath you have before bed-time.

Mutti named her house "Odd Corner", but when you wrote a letter you still had to write "12 Bath Road". "Odd Corner" was optional, it was one of those things I conceived as a touch of extra pleasure to the recipient; as when I wrote " , Esq." to my father.

And I noticed that the shape of the street,  which ended in a blank wall, did indeed resemble a bathtub. Along both sides were small terraced houses. No. 12 was the innermost on one side, apart from a small office, a broker's or something. All the houses looked much the same, but the doors were different colours. Mutti's was black, which I considered very stylish. Though my secret favourite, a little way up the road, was primrose yellow.

*

We come into the hall, a corridor with a staircase at the far end. The doorway into the rest of the ground floor is on the right. Here in the hall was the bust of Beethoven, looking fierce and gloomy, and also the grandfather clock that we used to wind every other morning. As I tour the rooms now, I can see all the objects, one by one, so vividly that it's hard to believe that they aren't still there. But I know they aren't. After all, one of them, a heavy dome of blue Venetian glass, is right here today in my own flat in Swindon (I use it to prop open the bedroom door).

It was a small terraced house, with a cement back garden that contained a stone owl and a hydrangea planted in a bath-tub. To one side, a shed with an outside lavatory.

Sometimes I think I remember the house better than I remember Mutti herself.

But it isn't true. It's just easier to pin down static objects. A person is never static. Here she is, first thing in the morning, kneeling on the mat while she lays the coal fire in the grate. She's scrumpling up pages from an old copy of the Radio Times, or the church magazine. (She also used these resources to make squares of toilet paper.) When she's ready, we light a spill and apply it to the fire lighters at rear left, and rear right.  If the spill is less than half burnt, she stubs it out for next time. We see the warmth long before we feel it, like the sun on a winter morning.

If I ever chance to meet Mutti again (it's a chance I can't quite bring myself to give up on), I feel we won't be strangers, we'll interact as in this memory.

And yet I also know that even while she still lived, we had lost our togetherness. I was in my twenties, she was in a care home. I had already mislaid my Mutti and didn't know how to bring her back when I visited her. The present moment took over from nostalgia: the ceaseless shifting of her foot as she sat in her armchair and we tried to chat, but she now had no life of her own to chat about, and mine felt difficult to share. 12, Bath Road had gone while I was away at university, preoccupied with my own life, things that then seemed more important.



*

The glass dome, now in my flat

*

Repeatedly, if not regularly, new memories of that place and time still come back.

Mutti used to make rice cheese, a meal I adored just as much as the macaroni cheese we had at home. 

Mutti used to fold over the end of the sellotape so you didn't have to pick at it. (A lesson I ignored at the time, but have taken on board fifty years later.)  She pronounced it SEALOTAPE. She also pronounced Marmite as MARMEAT, I suppose on the French model. 

When Annika was born in October 1962, Mutti stayed up in Leicestershire to look after me.

I remember Mutti taking me to evenings of chamber music somewhere just up the road near the town hall (Haydn? Dvořák?). And to the rehearsals of the visiting symphony orchestra at the Congress Theatre: attending them was free.

When I returned from a summer fortnight in Lorraine at the age of fifteen, I stayed with Mutti (Mum and Dad would still have been in Sweden). I was in love. I told Mutti about Christiane Trabuc from Marseilles, at that time the most beautiful girl in existence. Mutti's eyes lit up, she was very encouraging; it was a side of her that I hadn't seen before. It made me certain that Mutti herself had been in love with her handsome French friend Pierre, whose photo hung on the wall above the dining table, along with a painting of a Paris street scene. 

A few years after that (I must have been at uni by now), I took it into my head to pay Mutti a surprise visit at 12 Bath Road; to come and stay with her. I thought it would delight her. Her look of shock when she answered the door, her evident difficulty at adjusting to my plan (I can't remember now if I did stay or not) . . .it remains with me as one of my grievous memories. One of those moments when I stupidly realized that things weren't the same any more, that Mutti was old and anxious and frail, and that the safe haven of my childhood no longer existed. 

The stone owl, now in my sister Annika's garden

But I find I'm repeating a poem I wrote thirty years ago. I've managed to track it down, I'm not recommending it, but it's useful for me so I'll paste it here.


*




Mutti


When I was a child & you were old
Your shadowy friends, the telephone calls
That interrupted our play - & how they'd talk!
But in the darkness of eight o'clock,
As definite as the hall clock,
I had you to myself & knew in sleep
How you put yourself to bed without a thought
Of anything but library books due for return
& the shoes put out to take to the menders.

The breeze in the road that blows the raindrops
Into resembling snow;
A cry of gulls out there,
Of rigging & the shouts of men
Preparing a ship to sail,
Not well imagined, but with a remembered scent
Of the morning wind flapping in flintwalled streets
On the way to church.

I am a little boy, whose feet stop well short of the bed-end, leaving a tranquil space that is draped in a gaily checkered shawl, & here the hot-water bottle makes an isolated hummock, like Glastonbury Tor.

Their origins & purposes obscure, I lay
& stared for a long time at the boxes
On the dresser, glass & pewter, intricate
& utterly placid, before it occurred to me
That it must be morning.

"Is that you dear?
Grannie's still in bed."

I never saw you sleep. I snuggled in beside you
While you read the prayer-book, advancing the bookmark
To another page, then turning to the end
To read a psalm. Later, I watched you dress,
Intrigued by your wrinkled belly and behind,
Folded like whipped cream in a bowl.

Then you fiddled at your dressing-table with an ebony hand-mirror, or tiny jars in silver braziers, half-full of vermillion & turquoise paste. You also powdered your nose, which age had softened and enlarged, so that like other grown-ups you appeared gigantic, even arboreal.

On an awkward knee-high table by the bed was a wireless installed by Tony; it gave constant trouble, you couldn't even tune it, you always said: "I'll ask Tony to fix it." & you pretended you didn't need it. Sacrifice was your commonest key.

In the days before my appetite increased
& yours disappeared,
Sometimes you made porridge in a small unstable saucepan.
Having styled yourself Mutti,
You persuaded me that you were somehow German;
Like your alpine jigsaws & Oberammagau.
& besides, you'd played the violin.
You appeared to inhabit the world of Brahms or Beethoven.

You gave me toast, cut into ranks of soldiers,
& spread with dripping & Marmite, which you mispronounced.

The dripping (later I worked it out) had been carried home triumphantly in a bowl covered in muslin, from a house where you had been asked to "help out", the fruit of a patient, humble request. I've heard you ask for vegetable water, & refuse to budge despite dissuasion, despite embarrassed offers to purchase all kinds of fresh vegetables for you. You had grown accustomed to the borders of service, rejecting thanks & rejecting thanks until our gratitude was swollen & inflamed like a fire to which you had applied the bellows. This odd behaviour was forgiven you.

Inappropriate, 26-inch screen,
Twin-garage gold, you wouldn't wear
Even in August in a garden
Where your dark silver hair & brooch,
Settled on coal-grey,
Defined your later age
& your attenuated ceremonial,
Empty of robust macaroni-stuffing appetite
If not compulsion.

That was when you visited
Cross-country, changing at Heathfield;
I imagine you over-heating
Toting a tiny suitcase
Of olive-black leather
Or some cheap substitute
Not without elegance
The neatness of rationing.

Adolescence's
Quick sympathy, long absences,
Clumsy calls you couldn't manage:
It is autumn, beauty.
& you getting smaller,
Breasting the leaves,
Gasping for air.

With iron face I mourned your destruction
Before it happened. Perhaps you didn't see,
In the long quiet pauses, while you shuffled your feet,
& I timed my visit to end for the train.

An evening alone, & with inordinate effort
I try to recover the rules of a patience
We shared a quarter-century ago.
"Once in a Blue Moon" you said it was called;
But I must misremember, for it comes out every time.

And what was her name?
How fully I enjoyed the lack of confidences,
Your ready recognition
That all was beyond me.

The poetry of cruelty

The poet, notwithstanding this discouragement, begg'd hard that he might exhibit a specimen of his performance; and being restricted to a few lines, he repeated the following stanzas, with the most rueful emphasis.

Where wast thou, wittol Ward, when hapless fate
From these weak arms mine aged grannam tore:
These pious arms essay'd too late,
To drive the dismal phantom from the door.
Could not thy healing drop, illustrious quack,
Could not thy salutory pill prolong her days,
For whom, so oft, to Marybone, alack!
Thy sorrels dragg'd thee thro' the worst of ways?

Oil-dropping Twick'nham did not then detain
Thy steps, tho' tended by the Cambrian maids;
Nor the sweet environs of Drury-lane;
Nor dusty Pimlico's embow'ring shades;
Nor Whitehall, by the river's bank,
Beset with rowers dank;
Nor where th' Exchange pours forth its tawny sons;
Nor where to mix with offal, soil and blood,
Steep Snowhill rolls the sable flood;
Nor where the Mint's contaminated kennel runs:
Ill doth it now beseem,
That thou should'st doze and dream,
When death in mortal armour came,
And struck with ruthless dart the gentle dame.

Her lib'ral hand and sympathising breast,
The brute creation kindly bless'd:
Where'er she trod grimalkin purr'd around,
The squeaking pigs her bounty own'd;
Nor to the waddling duck or gabbling goose,
Did she glad sustenance refuse;
The strutting cock she daily fed,
And turky with his snout so red;
Of chickens careful as the pious hen,
Nor did she overlook the tomtit or the wren;
While redbreast hopp'd before her in the hall,
As if she common mother were of all.

For my distracted mind,
What comfort can I find?
O best of grannams! thou art dead and gone,
And I am left behind in sad funereal lay,
Ah! woe is me! alack! and well-a-day!

These interjections at the close of this pathetic elegy, were not pronounced without the sobs and tears of the author, who looked wishfully around him for applause, and having wiped his eyes, asked the chairman's opinion of what he had read.

(Peregrine Pickle, Chapter CII.)

*

Snow Hill, area with a water conduit, in the City of London. Presumably the "sable flood", however, were the foul waters of the adjacent River Fleet, still uncovered in 1751. This was near to Smithfield Market, evidently the source of the offal, etc.
The Mint:  a notorious slum area in Southwark (it had been a "liberty" for debtors until 1723).

*

The irony is, this is clearly supposed to be a very bad poem, but from the arresting over-alliteration of the first line, I find that I at once begin to read it with more attention and enjoyment than most other poems of that age. I'm even touched. (After all, I adored my own grandmothers, and I've written poems to them.) I was touched, too, by the redbreast hopping at her feet. For Smollett, that kind of naturalism, in a poem, was evidently crashingly bathetic.

In both Peregrine Pickle and the later pamphlet Habbakkuk Hilding, Smollett makes personal attacks on Sir George Lyttelton* (politician and patron of the arts) and on his favoured author Henry Fielding. Lyttelton had kept the young Smollett dangling with unfulfilled promises concerning his play The Regicide. No-one really knows what Fielding had done to become the target of Smollett's venom. Smollett portrays Lyttelton as a vain poetaster susceptible to the crudest flattery, and implies that Fielding profited from venal practices attached to his Westminster magistracy (practices that Fielding in fact was instrumental in stamping out).

These lines are based on Lyttelton's once-admired Miltonic elegy "To the Memory of a Lady lately deceased", written in 1747 following the death of his young wife Lucy in child-bed (Smollett's stanzas correspond to stanzas 7,8,11 and 17 of Lyttelton's 19-stanza poem). Smollett's burlesque is commonly called "cruel". And indeed, however little we may think of the original poem, such a record of personal grief hardly seems fair game. 

Smollett was temperamentally combative. An opponent's distress tended to make him more merciless. But he usually regretted his assaults, and was not intransigent. He later wrote generously of Lyttelton in the Continuation of his History of England, and of Fielding in his introduction to the translation of Don Quixote.

[Info from Scott's excellent 1821 note on Smollett:

http://spenserians.cath.vt.edu/BiographyRecord.php?action=GET&bioid=4563

]

*

Anyway, Smollett did induce me to read through Lyttelton's poem. The first stanza, at least, has a broken plainness of thought that I liked very much.

I.
At length escap'd from ev'ry Human Eye,
From ev'ry Duty, ev'ry Care,
That in my mournful Thoughts might claim a Share,
Or force my Tears their flowing Stream to dry,
Beneath the Gloom of this embow'ring Shade
This lone Retreat, for tender Sorrow made
I now may give my burden'd Heart Relief
And pour forth all my Stores of Grief,
Of Grief surpassing ev'ry other Woe
Far as the purest Bliss, the happiest Love
Can on th' ennobled Mind bestow,
Exceeds the vulgar Joys that move
Our gross Desires, inelegant, and low.

Also the sixth, about the couple's children:

VI.
Sweet Babes, who, like the little playful Fawns,
Were wont to trip along these verdant Lawns
By your delighted Mother's Side,
Who now your Infant Steps shall guide?
Ah! where is now the Hand whose tender Care
To ev'ry Virtue would have form'd your Youth,
And strew'd with Flow'rs the thorny Ways of Truth?
O Loss beyond Repair!
O wretched Father, left alone
To weep Their dire Misfortune, and Thy own!
How shall thy weaken'd Mind, oppress'd with Woe,
And drooping o'er thy LUCY'S Grave,
Perform the Duties that you doubly owe,
Now She, alas! is gone,
From Folly, and from Vice, their helpless Age to save?

These are the subsequent passages that Smollett most closely parodies:

VII.
Where were ye, Muses, when relentless Fate
From these fond Arms your fair Disciple tore,
From these fond Arms that vainly strove
With hapless ineffectual Love
To guard her Bosom from the mortal Blow?....

VIII.
Nor then did Pindus, or Castalia's Plain,
Or Aganippe's Fount your Steps detain,
Nor in the Thespian Vallies did you play;
Nor then on Mincio's Bank
Beset with Osiers dank,
Nor where Clitumnus rolls his gentle Stream,
Nor where through hanging Woods
Steep Arno pours his Floods,
Nor yet where Meles, or Ilissus stray. ....

[XI.]
...Ev'n for the Kid or Lamb that pour'd its Life
Beneath the bloody Knife,
Her gentle Tears would fall,
As She the common Mother were of All.

XVII.
For my distracted Mind
What Succour can I find? ...

*

I get confused by this titles thing.

I think "Sir George" would have been the correct form in 1751. George became baronet on the death of his father in that year, but I dare say had already been knighted (at that time, the automatic right of a baronet's eldest son on reaching the age of 21). A few years later, following a stint as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he was raised to the peerage, thus becoming Lord Lyttelton.

It feels misleading to apply a later
honorific when talking about an earlier period in someone's life. That would be like talking about Sir Paul McCartney setting fire to a condom in Hamburg.

But this can get over-pedantic. The author of Rob Roy was plain Walter Scott at the time, but it would be ridiculous to object to Penguin Books putting "Sir Walter Scott" on the jacket. That's become his author-name, regardless of chronology.

And of course women authors have mostly preserved their author name, ignoring later marriages, never mind honorifics. (The Shakespearean scholar Ann Righter was an exception, confusing generations of students by publishing her later books as Ann Barton.)