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| 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.
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 ...)
Labels: Camille Saint-Saëns, Geraldine Monk, Gustav Mahler, Jean Sibelius, Johannes Brahms, Joni Mitchell, Lawrence Sterne, Ludwig van Beethoven, Malcolm Bradbury
