RosieBell

The New Philistines

Review of The New Philistines: How Identity Politics Disfigures the Arts by Sohrab Ahmari

The Philistines identified by Matthew Arnold had a narrow and reductive view of the arts as only good if they upheld a particular morality. The 1890s and the aesthetic movement upturned them, the aesthetes were despised by the Social Realists in the 30s, who were taken on by the liberal creatives bursting out in the sixties, the New Leftists returned, along with the feminists, with shock and political art and now the identitarians have moved in. The identitarians are Ahmari's New Philistines, who judge, and sometimes make, art via their ideology, caring about the political point rather than craft or beauty. His contention that they dominate the culture is reinforced by how his frequent use of “beauty” and “truth” now seem antiquated as critical terms.

Ahmari has a reverential attitude towards high art, so Part I of his readable polemic, Intruders in the Temple, tells of how he was affronted by a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at The Globe. Emma Rice was the director and it included a sound-and-light show, a gay male Helena and the love juices were date rape drugs. I share his pain as I too have ground my teeth at a goose-stepping Coriolanus, say (Coriolanus is not a Fascist, and it made no sense). Directors making stupid political points are as annoying as hectoring comedians.

However for every modish production of a Shakespeare play with a Hoxton-hipster Hermia there's a straightforward, well-acted piece in robes and furred gowns. In the RSC production of King Lear I saw the other night Anthony Sher was a mound of pelt. Although the director had rehearsed it during Brexit, and thought there were parallels with bad decision-making and a union falling apart he did not present Cordelia as Angela Merkel nor Goneril as Theresa May and left us to draw the modern parallels about power and powerlessness and the times being disturbed.

It shows a particular cultural strength that the educated Shakespearean audience sees interpretations as variations on a theme, because the plays are so well known, as Athenian play goers liked to see what a playwright would do with the myth of Orestes or Dionysus.

I can't get too holy about Shakespeare. He has his longueurs and a lot of his humour is lost with his language so the actors have to force out laughs with cod-fingering. Cuts can be enhancements. There are plenty of excellent productions including those broadcast at local cinemas by the RSC and the terrific Wars of the Roses series on the BBC a while back.

Ahmari does make a good thrust about shallow gimmickry in theatre productions:-

The bhangra and Bollywood numbers, and actors of south Asian heritage in two leading parts, suggested an Indian sensibility. Now a Midsummer with a well-developed south-Asian concept – juxtaposing or blending say, the rich mythology of the subcontinent with English folklore – might have worked well. Such a concept would have required a sincere, rigorous encounter with these sources. Yet identitarian art is rarely capable of such engagement. The texture and weight of genuine difference elude art of this kind, with its ironic posturing and tendency towards the flattening pastiche. Identitarian art rarely manages to raise marginalise and 'subaltern' voices. Doing so successfully requires really listening to such voices in all their rich complexity – whereas identiarian art usually searches for subaltern props with which to bash the 'dominant' culture. Opposing the 'oppressive' mainstream is more important than examining the peripheral as it really is.

Actually I do wonder that Emma Rice wasn't castigated for cultural appropriation by Indians, or someone purporting to speak for Indians. These fashions change so fast. Emma Rice however will not be around to do brash shows based on Shakespearean texts. She has had her marching orders because her use of neon lighting is against the spirit of The Globe. The Guardian thinks that is a bad idea, and The Spectator a good. So it goes in culture-land.

Ahmari finds a parallel with other ideological arts e.g Socialist realism but “Say what you will about the Soviet critics, at least they were erudite. Not so with today's identitarian critics, who care little for art history and aesthetics. What they are blessed with is lots of opinions about everything – all of which invariably revolve around race, gender and class, power and privilege.”

I've seen just such criticism of the gooey headed Corbynistas from dialectic trained old Trots about the Corbys' lack of hard analysis. Unlike Victorian evangelists and Marxists, the identitarians have no authoritative scripture to use as a measure for their particular world view – Foucault comes closest, but Ahmari does not find his identitarians actually quoting so much as osmosing, which he lays out in the second part of his polemic, The Illiberal Imagination. This follows discussions at Artforum. I found it a useful primer for such terms as “queer”, “performative”, “visibility” and “legibility” (something lots of people want to see and enjoy).

Liberal societies have increased “visibility” in the form of social and political rights, and liberal-minded writers were part of this process eg the authors of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Oliver Twist. And as far as visibility is concerned the marginalised have moved more towards the centre. The RSC's King Lear had a lot of black actors without making any identitarian big deal about it and that would not have happened a generation ago. And those who fulminate against political corrrectness, would once have grumbled about a black Edmund and Cordelia.

Ahmari has fun with the appalling jargon his Artforumites use and its view of art as “a place where we can treat the self as historical and social material”. This particular idea has permeated through to artists whose work he goes to see in the third chapter. Some have talent but, “their curiosity is limited by politics; identitarian politics takes away their freedom to explore great big questions in an uninhibited way; without pre-determined answers and concepts. Foucault, hardline feminism and queer theory wrap their art like a straitjacket. If their English grammar sounds broken, it is because their creative grammar is, too, and the source of the brokenness is the same.”

His tour of identitarian art – videos and installations – and dance – political twerking – is amusingly terrible. My own experience of such things – neon tubes of slogans repeating banalities and amateurish looking videos saying things that are neither new nor true – has sent me along the road to the museum of handsome and interesting artefacts. The audience for this work is the highly educated white liberals that it castigates, the ones who take city breaks in grand European cities who have preserved their past.

Of course fashions change. “The Great Wall of Vagina”, plaster-casting 500 women's sexual organs that Ahmari evokes may be deemed to be transphobic in a year or two, and Judy Chicago's Dinner Party, which used a vagina theme in ceramics, is beautiful as well as polemical. Ideological art does not mean ugliness of course- as demonstrated by the great mass of Christian and Islamic art.  So the ugliness may come from lack of craft as anything else. That may be the fault of the art schools, as well as the zeitgeist. Also, while the subsidised galleries and the grant receiving artists may be at work on such things the commercial artists will be turning out posters and cards of quite a different complexion for the mass market. Modern culture is definitely not all of a piece, nor stagnant.

Ahmari's last chapter is about the effects of this ideological art on our society. “Ideas that being with elite, avant-garde institutions invariably trickle down to popular culture, then go on to impact our daily lives.” and he instances criticisms of eg Downton Abbey (which deserves it – the servant class was not treated with anything like that consideration but caste superiority has to be prettied up for the modern audience). Downton Abbey may be castigated by someone in the Guardian but it will be made as long as it makes money and Julian Fellows is ready to turn out scripts.

He thinks identitarian politics is responsible for the rise of white-rage politics of Trump and UKIP.

Is it any wonder, then, that Americans and Europeans are increasingly embracing nationalist parties and illiberal movements?..

Having been told for decades that the promise of universal rights is a lie, that group identity is all that there is to public life, that the Western canon is the preserve of Privileged Dead White Men, and that identitarian warfare is permanent, many in the West have taken up their own form of identity politics. .. When culture only rewards the assertion of group identity (black, female, queer etc.), the silent majority will want its slice of the identitarian pie. They can do identity politics, too; it's called white nationalism. ..

Surely identitarianism is a muted annoyance compared to eg mass migration, demographic changes, a globalised economy and the sense of the world is becoming a more dangerous place. But the cause and effect of culture and politics is a large subject. In crude terms, far more read The Sun and the Daily Mail than get annoyed by The Guardian.

“To repair our politics, we could do worse than to start by expecting better from our arts and culture.”- is Ahmari's final call, and that really is the chicken-and-the-egg. I would expect a generational shift for talent and brains will break out of a strait-jacket and they're at work somewhere on a hub near you. Our society does have teeth and a stomach and it's a wonder what it can digest.

After reading Ahmari I re-read Robert Hughes' Culture of Complaint, which has a similar theme, and is richer and funnier from someone wholly engaged with the art world. It was published in 1992 and how little has moved on from then. What Hughes calls political correctness, we now call identity politics but they are essentially the same thing, constant language policing, a favourite target for conservative satirists.

Satire loves to fasten on manners and modes, which is what PC [political correctness] talk is, political etiquette, not politics itself. When the waters of PC recede – as they presently will, leaving the predictable scum of dead words on the social beach – it will be, in part, because young people get turned off by all the carping about verbal proprieties on campus. The radical impulses of youth are generous, romantic and instinctive and are easily chilled by an atmosphere of prim, obsessive correction. The real problem with PC isn't 'post-Marxism”, but post-Puritanism.

Generous, romantic and instinctive I'd like to believe but what is reported from the universities is an equal impulse for correction, censoriousness and righteousness. And against the post-Puritanism is the post-Restoration of the alt right and Milo Yiannopoulos.

So though not as apocalyptic as Ahmari, I do share some of his concerns. It is a chronic condition for liberalism to be in danger as it is an unnatural state for a tribal species and it has plenty of enemies, whether the new Red Guards of identitarianism,, the Islamic Fascists and their idiot enablers, the Guardian Cultural Sensitives, the Lock-em-Up Tabloids, and a whiff of blasphemy laws from the government.

“It's a free country,” we would say self-righteously at my primary school during disagreements. That sentence had a long political and cultural history behind it. Do they still say it now?

The flippant nihilist

I only know Alexander Cockburn as an editor of the creepy Counterpunch, and his airy dismissals  of anyone who thought Israel Shamir a dodgy piece of work. 

There's a fascinating account of him by Paul Berman.

Cockburn is reminiscent of Christopher Hitchens - the English journalist who lives in America and writes stylishly about American and international affairs. The political framework may be leftwards, the cultural references English literature, quoted with ease to point the moral and adorn the tale.

Berman does explain why Cockburn was so indifferent about Israel Shamir's vile antisemitism:-

How systematically the man had gone after Israel, and how reluctant he was to say a word of criticism about the Soviet Union or the Islamic Republic of Iran or the terrorism of the anti-Zionists. Newfield took note of Cockburn’s hostility to Natan Sharansky, who in those days was a persecuted Jewish dissident in the Soviet Union. 

... In his column he took to sniping in my direction, not always wittily, which other people in the Voice newsroom attributed to his distaste for the Jewish concerns that sometimes cropped up in my writings. He accused me of “pandering” to the Jews by writing about Holocaust denial and Noam Chomsky (a rich theme)

Cockburn shared the Israel (or "Zionism") obsession of the anti-imperialist Left:-

he does attribute 9/11 to “recent Israeli rampages in the Occupied Territories”

Alexander Cockburn woshipped his father, Claud Cockburn, who had lived an adventurous life where history was happening and who in the Spanish Civil War had the mouths of high-ranking Soviet officials in his ear.

Claud Cockburn was, in spite of appearances, a fine man who would never have turned over names to the Soviet police in Spain. But then, proud of his father, Alexander includes within the Wreck a brief memoir by Claud of his Spanish experiences, which leaves the impression that, in regard to the Soviet police activities, Claud was not a reluctant participant. About his friend Guy Burgess and the other Cambridge spies, Claud remarks that idealistic motives were at work, and these were “sensitive and informed” young men. Claud cites his own “experience in the field of espionage, or rather, counter-espionage.” He was “a section leader of the counter-espionage department of the Spanish Republican government dealing with Anglo-Saxon personalities,” which does sound like a job dedicated to informing the police. "

Berman believes that Claud Cockburn was a dark inspiration for George Orwell:-

I have always supposed that, when Orwell laid out the principles of totalitarianism in Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of his inspirations was Claud Cockburn, British correspondent: a cheerful example of a man willing to say everything and its opposite in the interest of a totalitarian state, committed to the renunciation of truth, to the hatred of free-thinkers, to the cause of persecution, and to the cult of obedience.

In Orwell’s portrait, the totalitarian mentality was never a matter of ideology gone awry, nor a matter of lower-class resentments. The mentality was a contempt for everyday morality and human considerations. It was a flippant nihilism, attached to no cause or principle at all, apart from love of tyranny. And, to be sure, no sooner did the Spanish anti-fascists go down to defeat than Claud Cockburn turned on a dime and set about composing justifications for Stalin’s pact with Hitler.

You could think this was a total damning of Alexander Cockburn. But Berman pays due attention to his elegant style and his love of anecdote, which at the end made me think I'd enjoy at least flicking through words of the co-editor of Counterpunch - though his constant jeering (in which he sounds like Hunter S Thompson), would get tedious after a while.

Dashed hopes

Two things last week on the poignancy of happy expectations being crushed.

1. The last scene of Henry IV Part II. I saw the Royal Shakespeare's Company version beamed live at the cinema, with Antony Sher playing Falstaff. It's a melancholy play anyway, about sickness and mortality, but Falstaff takes on a new lease of life on hearing that his glamorous young friend, the Prince of Wales, has finally become king. Then comes the procession. and Falstaff greets the new Henry V-

FALSTAFF.
My king! my Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!
KING.
I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;

Falstaff and Prince Hal in happier times

Antony Sher took a long while to turn round to show his face, so the audience had time to dread the disappointment in it.

The second was this cartoon of the Set Text welcoming its readers:-

English academics on Twitter found their hearts breaking when they saw that.

King Lear

Event Cinema beamed in National Theatre Live's King Lear last week at a multiplex. It worked very well. The camera did do close ups and wasn't static but otherwise the direction made no attempt to make it much like a film. The last Shakespeare I saw was Ranulph Fiennes' Coriolanus which was very good, however it had been directed to make the language work in a naturalistic setting, with television broadcasts and so on. Here everyone was obviously speaking verse that wasn't attempting to be the language of ordinary life.

It was set in a modern state. The battle scene roared with fighter aeroplanes flying low and Lear was evidently a military dictator. One of the most effective scenes was when they meet at Gloucester's house beneath a statue of Lear as the ruler in his younger days, while the dispossessed Lear is further stripped of his dignities by his haggling daughters. Those to me are the darkest scenes, when the power has shifted to the cruel and the wicked like the daughters, their henchmen and Regan's husband the Duke of Cornwall. Goneril, (Kate Fleetwood) was especially good as a hard bitch.

Simon Russell Beale as Lear was a little on the cuddly side and I found the last scenes where he is dazed and gentle the most affecting.

The friend I went with said Lear had always been presented to her as Shakespeare's greatest play and I suppose with its cruelty and elementalism - the stark realities of power - it suits a modern taste. The scene with Lear, the Fool and Edgar pretending to be mad out in the storm talking about horrors have a Beckett quality. This is man, stripped of dignity. I was taught that Lear was a play about a godless and arbitrary world. "The gods defend her" Albany says of Cordelia and then "Enter Lear with Cordelia dead in his arms".

Kate Fleetwood - hard as nails as Goneril

But this world is not nihilistic even if it is harsh. It is quite clear who is wicked, who is good, who deserves punishment and who does not. There is a god of judgement in Lear, and that is us, the audience. We know that Cordelia is a saint and offers Lear redemption. In fact his humbling - the mighty pulled from his seat has a streak of Christianity to it. What happens to Cordelia, Lear, Gloucester is terrible, but it is not meaningless.

Cycling philistinism

It's a tragedy. Oscar Wilde, having just written his finest work, The Importance of being Earnest, sues the Marquess of Queensberry, father of his love object Lord Alfred Douglas, for libel, and then is arrested for gross indecency and serves 2 years in jail. Victim of the horror of homosexuality in the nineteenth century, victim of the feud between thevindictive Marquess and his equally vindictive son.

Wilde and Lord Alfred are less attractive in their pursuit of rent boys than they would be if they had been just knocking each other off as consenting private adults.  Wilde however  is rightly a gay martyr, his Soul of Man under Socialism is a manifesto that still attracts the artistic and romantic and though Wilde enjoyed the glamour of the aristocracy he lampooned it as well and was no snob.  So the Marquess, pugilist, hard riding fox hunter and general sportsman, who wrote like the kind of deranged commenter that you would end up banning on a blog thread, seems an appropriate enemy for an aesthete. 

But I did jib a bit at this piece by Jeannette Winterson:-

Wilde's fatal amour, Lord Alfred Douglas, was son of the Marquess of Queensberry, who was a bully, womaniser, gambling addict, cycling bore and amateur boxer (to him we owe the Queensberry rules). In his personal life there was no such thing as fair play. Queensberry was a vicious pugilist detested by his family. A caricature of masculinity, he loathed the cult of art and beauty that Wilde championed, and under the guise of saving his son from sodomy, he set about bringing down Wilde at the height of his fame."

Well, according to The Marquess of Queensberry: Wilde's Nemesis by Linda Stratmann his desire to save his son from sodomy wasn't a "guise" but genuine and thought of as reasonable by his contemporaries.  He wasn't much of a gambler either, though his son and heir Percy, was.  He was certainly a bully and also an obsessive - "monomaniac" as his contemporaries said.

But cycling bore? Queensberry did bang on about a lot of things, including his dislike of Christianity (he wanted an eco-burial) but where did Winterston get that?

According to Stramann when he was 49 he had given up riding horses and became a keen cyclist.

In an interview with the Westminster Gazette (April 1895) he said:-

No man was ever fond of riding or of horses that I have been but the only riding worth having is what you get in racing or in following hounds. Park riding and that sort of thing is not worth talking about. Well, I got tired of riding, and I have given it up, but from my experience of riding and cycling I say that cycling is the better and more useful exercise. I know nothing like it to keep one fit.

He had a cycling accident so could not attend Wile's first criminal trial.

He became president of the Bath Road Cycling Club and often accompanied members on their weekly runs. He frequently went out on a tandem.

He took part in a bicycle challenge in 1896, completing a 10 mile course in 35 minutes, 43 seconds - that's about 17 miles per hour - which doesn't sound that impressive.

He was twice fined 15 shillings for riding a bicycle on a footpath. (Evidently the police were more rigorous those days at enforcing regulations.)  The second time was to avoid muddy roads. 

Now that sounds like someone who loves cycling rather than a cycling bore. There's no mention that he talked about cycling all the time to people who weren't interested. Presumably he talked to members of the Bath Cycling Club about cycling - but then, they would have been interested. In the 1890s cycling was popular among the rich, until the wretches took up motoring and aviation.

"A caricature of masculinity, he loathed the cult of art and beauty that Wilde championed,." says Winterson.  Queensberry seems to have been indifferent to art and beauty, except for beauty in women, horses and Nature. So you can call him a Philistine, and also a vile man who brought down a kind and talented man. But Winterson is showing her own Philistinism - that cycling in itself (which she presumably doesn't like) is an activity only for bores.  Similar prejudices are held by modern aesthetes and progressives against sports - which was one of Norman Geras's themes.  "It is . .  a type of philistinism for those ignorant about sport to overlook the beauties and the excitements it can offer." 

The Secret History and Rebecca

Donna Tartt's new novel, The Goldfinch, has been extensively covered with mixed reviews. 

I tried The Little Friend, but couldn't get into it.

I did like The Secret History, which is an excellent psychological thriller. It is rather like Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca.  Both novels are full of atmosphere, set in picturesque surroundings (Vermont, old college and Cornwall, stately home). Both are well constructed with plenty of suspense. Both are told by a diffident narrator who is out of their depth when they become part of a life that is way above their expectations and experience.  Above all both are suffused with discreditable emotions that we would be embarrassed to admit to.  In Rebecca it is jealousy and the sense of being out-classed. The narrator's great revelation is that in fact Rebecca was not the marvellous creature that she has always felt inferior to.  The climax:- "He had never loved Rebecca". In The Secret History the discreditable emotion is the desire to become part of the inner ring, the in-crowd, of being ready to compromise virtue and sense to be accepted by a glamorous elite, which in more mundane circles would mean risking your brain trying out dodgy drugs. The glamorous elite falls apart, some dead, others living mean existences.

Both end with the narrator in exile, in Rebecca it's a dull hotel in the South of France, in The Secret History a second-rate job in California. These are- not horrible fates, but for the narrators it is a sense of irreparable loss and diminishment. 

Excellent psychological thrillers both, but not novels of any great depth.

Speeding Up Jane Austen

I've been unwell so my brain has only been up to mild entertainment on the internet. The paid companion who used to read to rich semi-invalids in Victorian time has been digitised and democratised.  We all have paid companions now.

Philanthropists on the internet upload films and television serials and now I can watch Jane Austen adaptations by the dayful.

I was taught that when you watch a film adaptation of a novel you should judge it by its own merits, not how it relates to the source material. Also, that good films are usually made not out of great novels but okay ones. However, watching differing versions of Jane Austen is like watching different versions of classical plays. Will the Ghost of Hamlet's father be a projection of Hamlet's own mental state or a material ghost? Will they set Julius Caesar in 1930's Italy or modern Africa or among the mafia?  The enjoyment includes assessing the interpretation. What will they do with - well to start - 

Persuasion 2007:-

 

Not bad - rather a nice Anne Elliott with her inward pain and patience, though her sister Mary is shown as neurotically deranged, not just snobbish and fretful.  But that last scene when Anne runs through Bath seeking Captain Wentworth.  Young ladies in Jane Austen's time did run but in the countryside, not through the streets.  Anne was going it like Jessica Ennis.  Jeez - it's the curse of the feisty heroine. To be attractive to modern eyes a film woman has to be physically energetic and outspoken.

So here's Billie Piper playing at shuttlecock, chasing a pug dog and generally tearing about like a mad thing with tumbling hair. Billie Piper is charming and was delightful as a companion to Doctor Who. She would make a delicious Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey. Here she's totally miscast playing Fanny Price - timid, bookish and delicate - in a garish adaptation of Mansfield Park (2007), where Mary Crawford, who is a sophisticate, flashes her ankles at Edmund Bertram and William Price dances the hornpipe. So when the internet didn't let me watch the third chunk of upload I was happy to give up on a vibrant adaptation for the perpetual motionists. 

 


Billie Piper - no Fanny Price did not look as cute as that

I hadn't much liked the film of Mansfield Park (1999) which had shown the influence of Edward Said* by including scenes of the slave trade (mentioned in one sentence in the book) but I did find the 1983 BBC version. The adaptation was faithful to the book and it made 1983 seem as spacious and stately as the days when families listened to Dickens novels being read out loud.  This adaptation got the novel's atmosphere - the formality, the authority of the paterfamilias, the repressed emotion obliquely expressed in walks through a grand garden or private theatricals. .

It did have some odd touches.  Sylvestra Le Touzel who played Fanny looked like an actress from the silent film era, when they widened their eyes emphasising the whites. She moved awkwardly with the same lunging gait as Joyce Grenfell playing a hockey mistress and in outburst was hysterical to the point of needing medication. Henry Crawford was repellent - creepy instead of attractive. And Lady Bertram was catatonic rather than just languid.  Anna Massie was excellent as the meddling Mrs Norris, as was Samantha Bond as Maria Bertram. The final great scene was touching, Edmund and Fanny are sitting by a window one rainy Sunday evening when he tells her of his final disillusionment with Mary Crawford. No running about, only their two faces and the rain outside on the paths and lawns.

 

Sylvestra Le Touzel as Fanny Price - slightly weird

I am now part way through the 1971 production of Persuasion, again done at an easy pace and staying close to the novel.  The autumnal scenery and the women trailing their dresses and shawls on the Cobb at Lyme are very good, the ladies of the English leisure classes at their pretty play. They have also added some poetry for Anne to quote (that time's equivalent of songs for life's soundtrack).  Anne Elliot has an absurd hair style, a kind of beehive. But she is good, the grown up woman always trying to make the peace among the exuberant giggling girls. All the characters are done well, except for a shrieking Louisa Musgrove who is such a pain you think Captain Wentworth shows bad taste in his flirtations. I was quite pleased when she was knocked unconscious.

 


Anne Firbank with bad hairstyle

I find there was a 1960 version of Persuasion but it was cleaned out by the BBC in the 1970s.

The Disciple: Master - will we have eternal life?
The Master : If we are digitised, my child.

*Culture and Imperialism

Lord of the Trees

As everyone knows, ash dieback has arrived and may wipe out tens of millions of ash that make up about 30% of Britain's trees.  Even for those who couldn't tell an ash from an oak, this is a terrible thought.   Britain is an urban nation and its people use the woods and countryside for refreshment.  The favourite activity among the British people is a stroll in the country.  Some of the those strolling will be gardeners, or know something of botany and be able to name the trees, but many will only see the "trees" - bare and budding, green or yellow leafed, according to the season.

Larkin, who caught British attitude to their churches (affection, residual wonder, ignorance) in Church Going also caught the city-dweller's view of trees.  "The trees are coming in to leaf"  he says about the signs of spring approaching that the workers in a city will comment on along with the lengthening days and the crocuses in the park. What trees he doesn't specify - oaks, beech, lime or whatever else grows in a city park. Their relations to human beings are symbolic - that of life renewing  - begin "afresh, afresh, afresh."

An earlier rural age, when writing about trees, knew their names and properties - the uses of the timber and the fruit.  So in Edmund Spenser's Fairie Queene you have one of those lists that medieval poets loved so much, whether of birds, animals, sins, virtues or mythological figures.  His people take shelter in a grove:- 

Much can they prayse the trees so straight and hy,
The sayling Pine, the Cedar proud and tall,
The vine-prop Elme, the Poplar never dry,
The builder Oake, sole king of forrests all,
The Aspine good for staves, the Cypresse funerall.

The Laurell, meed of mightie Conquerours
And Poets sage, the Firre that weepeth still,
The Willow worne of forlorne Paramours,
The Eugh obedient to the benders will,
The Birch for shaftes, the Sallow for the mill,
The Mirrhe sweete bleeding in the bitter wound,
The warlike Beech, the Ash for nothing ill,
The fruitfull Olive, and the Platane round,
The carver Holme, the Maple seeldom inward sound.

"The Ash  for nothing ill" - I thought that faint praise like calling someone "harmless" - then read this:-

The resilient and ubiquitous ash has always been respected for its benevolent or healing properties. At least three British saints threw their wooden staffs to the ground to see them sprout miraculously into ash trees.

Among the rituals associated with the tree is a widespread practice involving the passing of an injured or ill child through a cleft deliberately made in the tree, which subsequently heals over, as does the child.

There is usually a utilitarian aspect to such veneration, and ash wood has been used to make ploughs, axles, blocks (on sea and land), planks and all manner of sporting accoutrements, from tennis racquets to oars.

The ash then is the healing tree and the making tree.

Spenser's tree list is not what someone could realistically observe in a forest. Olives and beech are unlikely to co-exist on the same terrain. These are trees that are known and trees read about jumbled together, but it's an educated man of his time's view of a tree.  They are fine to look at and, being useful, are woven in to human life.   

But then came the Romantics and trees became part of Nature with a capital "N". Hopkins in Binsley Poplars. 

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,   
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,   
All felled, felled, are all felled;   
 Of a fresh and following folded rank   
 Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled   
Shadow that swam or sank   
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.   
 
O if we but knew what we do   
When we delve or hew—          
Hack and rack the growing green!   
Since country is so tender   
To touch, her being só slender,   
That, like this sleek and seeing ball   
But a prick will make no eye at all,         
Where we, even where we mean   
To mend her we end her,   
When we hew or delve:   
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.   
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve       
Strokes of havoc únselve   
The sweet especial scene,   
Rural scene, a rural scene,   
Sweet especial rural scene.

The tender and fragile country that needs protection.  It is a beloved being under assault from humanity, its foe.  But the rural scene - were these trees being cleared for factories, housing developments or as part of woodland management?  The "rural scene" is English countryside, where trees are felled, coppiced, pollarded and generally managed.   Felling trees is not necessarily wanton destruction.  But there are only two attitudes towards Nature in Hopkins - being her friend and fan or  her destroying foe.  We are here, the trees over there as separate being. 

The complete tree-worshipper was Tolkein.

Frodo . . . laid his hand upon the tree beside the ladder: Never before had he been so suddenly and so keenly aware of the feel and texture of a tree's skin and of the life within it.  He felt a delight in wood and the touch of it, neither as forester nor as carpenter. It was the delight of the living tree itself.

Tolkein's forests and trees are his most atmospheric writing - whether the gloom of Mirkwood, the malice of the willows in the Old Forest, and reached its apotheosis in the Forest of Fangorn with the Ents, who are half tree and half human:-

Some recalled the chestnut: brown-skinned Ents with large splayfingered hands and short thick legs.  Some recalled the ash: tall straight grey Ents with many-fingered hands and long legs; some the fir (the tallest Ents), and others the birch, the rowan and the linden."

Tolkein said of how he was inspired by trees:-

One of its sources was a great-limbed poplar tree that I could see even lying in bed. It was suddenly lopped and mutilated by its owner, I do not know why. It is cut down now, a less barbarous punishment for any crimes it may have been accused of, such as being large and alive. I do not think it had any friends, or any mourners, except myself and a pair of owls."

From the introduction to Tree and Leaf

So he gets fictional revenge on the cutters and loppers when the Ents and their arboreal infantry charge as a heavy brigade on Isengard, the evil fortress of the tree-killer Saruman. The tree-men rip down the hellhole of stone and metal like a tree's roots can split stone.  Nature takes revenge on the industrial revolution.

At the end of The Lord of the Rings the tree-killer Saruman has continued his evil work by felling trees in The Shire and replacing them with polluting machinery.  He is of course routed and the trees finally prevail.

Tolkein's forests are rather empty of other forms of life - very few birds (which a medieval poet would have had perching on every branch ) and scuttling mammals that I can find even in our fragmentary woods.  A more modern sensibility (post Rachel Carson) that loves the natural world sees trees as habitats and that the loss of swathes of trees is not just those trees gone but the ecosystem they sustained of birds, mammals, fungi, and invertebrates.  A whole world has been lost.

Lost worlds is of course the background of Lord of the Rings.  We are constantly told that Middle Earth has dwindled from an unfallen time when the Elves taught Ents to talk, and the warriors and heroes of this age are picking up the pieces from an earlier grander time. But this is fantasy for the child in us, not grown up tragedy.  Gandalf falls into a deep crevasse, everyone weeps and sings laments, but then he comes back to life.  (Can you imagine Hamlet springing back to his feet, or Lydgate in Middlemarch losing his obstructive wife and making scientific breakthroughs after all?) Along with the pseudo elegaic tone you get the fairy tale ending of all being put right.  The returning Hobbits thwart Saruman and Sam's magic powder makes saplings grow at four times their normal rate.

I remember the yellow marks like the cross on a plague victim's door on the trunks of elms which meant they would be destroyed.  A couple of weeks ago I saw a wych elm sapling in my local park - but I won't ever see the great elms again.  "Many fair things will be lost," says Elrond.  Many fair things have been lost - hedgehogs and sparrows, hedgerows and elms - and now the ash tree.  A percentage of the trees will be resistant to ash dieback and will grow again - but at a much slower pace than the Shire did. Evolution is a magic that takes time.  A species may prevail, but the individual will not be there to see it.

Rhythmic prose

 

Distinguished literary critic James Wood kitchen-table drumming.  I'm a big admirer of Wood's literary criticism - any drummers around to say what they think of his drumming?

Should he stick with the day job?

Occasionally Wrong

Carol Ann Duffy does rise to her job as Poet Laureate by turning out occasional  poems, though she doesn't always rise to the occasion.  In her poem for the Olympics she sank like a Lib Dem poll; like Tony Blair's credibility; like the brotherly love in the Coalition - insert your own political metaphor. 

Enough of the soundbite abstract nouns,
austerity, policy, legacy, of tightening metaphorical belts;
we got on our real bikes,
for we are Bradley Wiggins,
               side-burned, Mod, god;
we are Sir Chris Hoy,
Laura Trott, Victoria Pendleton, Kenny, Hindes,
Clancy, Burke, Kennaugh and Geraint Thomas,
               Olympian names.

We want more cycle lanes.

               Or we saddled our steed,
or we paddled our own canoe,
or we rowed in an eight or a four or a two;
our names, Glover and Stanning; Baillie and Stott;
Adlington, Ainslie, Wilson, Murray,
               Valegro (Dujardin's horse).

(No we aren't and we didn't.  Speak for yourself.  "We" mostly sat on the sofa.)

She has received a lot of derision for it , and nowhere more than at That Place, where some commenters complained that Betjeman would have done it better, and inquired how would Larkin have done it? 

"Lamia" produced this fine pastiche, which caught the Larkin mood (glass three quarters empty and a fly drowning in the remaining liquid).

Prize-giving MMXII

by Philip Larkin

With a stern blazered smile the judge draws near,
Headmasterly, to where I loiter, bald
Bowing my head, and blinking behind my specs.
And then a velvet fumbling, a falling into place
As something heavy slithers round my neck
To hang in awkward gaudiness. A cheer,
And then the National Anthem strikes up gold.

Gold? Or something else? Stepping down slowly
From the podium to piss, I wonder
What it was all for. ‘Run for Team GB’
They said. But where does one run from here?
The crowds will quietly drift away,
The stadiums will crumble into pieces.
The asphalt lanes will gather weed and leaf.
This cycling Kraut, that weightlifting Bolivian,
That crew of sailing Japs, each year will sink
A little further into blank oblivion.

And poised between my thumb and finger
This cold token of autumnal grief.
In a bare wintry drawer it will linger,
for a while, gathering dust, unsold,
Among dead stamps and a leaflet about wine.
An old wives' charm to ward away new failure.
Something to please the nephews and the nieces.
Something to taunt those pricks in Australia.

In the Olympic bar I stand a drink
For a Danish woman and some ass from Spain.
The hot triumphant evening turns to thunder,
And somewhere out beyond the finish line
The first small medals of rain. Strange to think
We will never be so happy again.

The theme "Lamia" has taken. that no happiness endures, is in the tradition of Pindar, the poet who wrote poems to celebrate the victories of the original Olympic athletes.  Here are the last verses of his Ode to Aristomenes of Aegina, the winner of the boys' wrestling contest.  He speaks of the humiliation of the losers as well as the joy of the winners:-

Now from on high on four young bodies
You hurled your strength with fierce intent.  For them
No happy homecoming from Pytho was decreed,
As that of yours, nor at their mother's side
Could pleasant laughter ring a joyful greeting
For their return.  But shunning hostile eyes, they creep
By quiet paths, o'erwhelmed by their ill-fortune,

But he to whom is given new glory
In the rich sweetness of his youth, flies up,
Aloft, high hope fulfilled on wings of soaring valour,
In realms that brook no dullard cares of wealth,
But man's delight flowers but for a brief moment,
And no less swiftly falls to the ground again, shattered,
By destined will that may not be gainsaid.

Creatures of a day!  What is man?
What is he not? A dream of a shadow
Is our mortal being.  But when there comes to men
A gleam of splendour given of Heaven,
Then rests on them a light of glory
And blessed are their days.

(Translated by Geoffrey S Conway)

Duffy of course is entitled to write about the Government's economic policy with the fiercest anger - but a poem about the Olympics is not the best place to start, at least not in this tone - Yay Hoy! Boo Cameron! Inserting a local political message jars with the events and sounds ridiculous.  "Lamia" as Larkin and Pindar describe an event which becomes haloed with a universal theme.  

When Larkin did write an occasional poem it was for the opening of the Humber Bridge, which became part of a broader theme of isolation and joining. If he'd been in Duffy mode he would have added something about more money should be spent on cycle paths, and damned transport policy generally.

 

The winds play on it like a harp; the song,
Sharp from the east, sun-throated from the west,
Will never to one separate shire belong,
But north and south make union manifest.

Lost centuries of local lives that rose
And flowered to fall short where they began
Seem now to reassemble and unclose,
All resurrected in this single span,

 Reaching for the world, as our lives do,
As all lives do, reaching that we may give
The best of what we are and hold as true:
Always it is by bridges that we live.