194 Today

 Manet Day again – the great Edouard's 194th birthday – and I realise that I've never posted on the subject of one of his best-known and most mysterious paintings, Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe. There might be a reason for this, as I'm not sure there's much that can usefully be said about it. It's certainly not helpful to apply reductionist Marxist/feminist/sociological critiques to the Déjeuner (as has been often done), but I guess it's worth tracing the painting's affinity with works by Giorgione and Titian (The Pastoral Concert, The Tempest), Raimondi/Raphael (The Judgment of Paris), even Watteau (La Partie Carrée) – as ever, in art and literature alike, the way to the future is by way of the past. However, the Déjeuner remains, and I imagine will for ever remain, a strange and deeply mysterious painting, one in which nothing looks quite 'right'. I lived for some months with a print of it over the fireplace in my university rooms and must have spent many hours staring at it and wondering. It's a painting of strange beauty and tremendous power – hence its long afterlife and 'iconic' status – and I could happily spend more hours staring at it, but I don't think I'd emerge with anything much more to say. Bon anniversaire, Monsieur Manet. 

'It would be only polite to thank him'

 The dismal weather of this interminable January – grey days, relentless rain, damp cold (the worst sort) – is only to be expected, I suppose, but it does depress the spirits and eat into the soul. It's time for a cheering poem, preferably set in summer – and here's one, taken from Wendy Cope's great little anthology Heaven on Earth: 101 Happy Poems. It's by the ever sprightly* Gavin Ewart – 

June 1966

Lying flat in the bracken of Richmond Park
while the legs and voices of my children pass
seeking, seeking: I remember how on the
13th of June of that simmering 1940
I was conscripted into the East Surreys,
and, more than a quarter of a century
ago, when France had fallen,
we practised concealment in this very bracken.
The burnt stalks pricked through my denims.
Hitler is now one of the antiques of History,
I lurk like a monster in my hiding place.
He didn't get me. If there were a God
it would be only polite to thank him.


* 'So good for you, Gavin, for having stayed sprightly
   While keeping your eye on the ball;
Your riotous road-show's like Glenlivet nightly,
   A warming to us all.'
                                    Philip Larkin Good for You, Gavin

Gloria

 This morning Radio 3 noted the 65th anniversary of the first performance of Francis Poulenc's Gloria, in Boston, by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The ever chirpy Tom McKinney marked the occasion by playing the first two movements of the great work (the second of which, 'Laudamus Te', was inspired, according to Poulenc, by the sight of monks playing football). Poulenc was happy with the Boston premiere – 'very good, very fine, a success' – but had found the final rehearsal even better, indeed 'sublime'. That is certainly the word for the final movement, 'Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris', surely one of the most beautiful pieces of 20th-century sacred music. Here's a link, to a performance by the same orchestra, with Kathleen Battle the soprano soloist...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41VpR9QqHyM&list=RD41VpR9QqHyM&start_radio=1

Whiskers Then and Now

 One of the minor regrettable features of modern life (and there are plenty of major ones, heaven knows, but I'm not going there) is the prevalence of whiskers on men's faces: from the full-on righteous hipster beard to carefully curated (or not) permanent stubble, by way of every possible form of facial hair display – though Piccadilly Weepers seem to be out of favour. When did this inexorable spread of face fungus begin?  When did it become acceptable for pillars of the establishment such as BBC director generals and UK attorney generals to appear in public with stubble all over their faces? (Never, in my book.) What are they trying to tell the world? That they can't be bothered to shave? More likely, alas, that beneath that formal suit lurks a rebel soul, a pretty hip kind of guy. Where did this madness come from, and when? There's probably material for a semiological thesis there...
  With the Victorians, it seems, there's a simple answer (at least according to Richard Holmes – yes, I'm still reading The Boundless Deep, but I am reading other stuff, and I've very nearly finished). We tend to think of nearly all Victorian men as bearded, or at least extravagantly whiskered – but it was not always so: before the 1850s Tennyson, Darwin, Dickens, Charles Lyell, Edward Lear and Thomas Carlyle, to name but a few leading lights, were all clean-shaven. In 1847 there was only one bearded member of the House of Commons, and the majority of male visitors to the Great Exhibition of 1851 were not bearded. There were signs of a coming change of fashion in the early 1850s, and one of the factors driving it was that in 1850 the army had officially permitted beards and moustaches. By the mid-1850s, beards had become virtually obligatory in the fighting regiments, and the photographs that came back from the Crimean War – the first of their kind – showed our soldiers bearded to a man. It was the impact of these photographs, Holmes argues, that led the hitherto clean-shaven English to grow beards. As for Tennyson's beard, this began with an experimental prototype in 1851 (to the alarm of his long-suffering wife), then reappeared in more luxuriant form in 1853, and finally became the wondrous and fearful thing on display in Julia Margaret Cameron's literally iconic photograph, the one the poet himself described as 'the Dirty Monk'. As with so many beards, one rather wishes he hadn't...

The Corvine Ascendancy

 Every morning these days, when I stare blearily out of my bedroom window – which commands a wide view of the trees all around – I see dozens of crows, lined up ominously on every branch, as if auditioning for Hitchcock's The Birds. There is no mistaking the fact that, at least around here, crows are very much in the ascendant, along with their pied brethren the magpies, their spivvy cousins the starlings, and the less obtrusive (so far) jackdaws. Like Kay Ryan, I have a soft spot for crows, but they do seem to be having a depressing effect on the local population of smaller, sweeter-voiced birds. So far this winter in the garden – despite some proper cold snaps – I have seen none of the visitors to the feeders that I've had in previous years here: no greenfinches, chaffinches or even goldfinches, no blackcaps, no siskins. The sparrows and robins are thriving as ever, the tits are at least getting a look in – and of course wood pigeons are still waddling proprietorially around the lawn – but really it does seem to be the case that the more there are of crows, the less there is of anything else. Goldfinches – our 'proud tailors' – used to be everywhere, but I see far fewer these days, and I miss them.
Talking of which, there is a lovely little goldfinch poem by the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam – 

My goldfinch, I'll toss back my head—

let's look at the world, you and I:

a wintry day, prickly as stubble,

is it just as rough on your eye?

Tail like a boat, black and gold plumage,

dipped in paint from the beak down—

are you aware, my little goldfinch,

what a goldfinch dandy you are?

What air there is on his forehead:

black and red, yellow and white—

he keeps a sharp lookout both ways,
won't look now, he's flown out of sight.   

Life

 Life, in twelve short lines, by the wonderful (and still with us) Dick Davis –

A Mystery Novel

Alone and diffident
You enter what is there:
The world that does not care
For your predicament,

For mysteries of who
You must become, or what
Your place is in the plot
To which you have no clue.

Turn pages; suffer time:
And, look, you are the thread
Unravelling from the dead;
The clue; the plot; the crime. 

Tennyson's Oestrus

 Edward FitzGerald (who's appeared on this blog before) was a staunch friend and supporter of Tennyson, but he was not initially much impressed by In Memoriam. Writing to Tennyson's brother Frederick, he declared that 'it seems to be with him now, at least to me, the Impetus, the Lyrical oestrus is gone...' Richard Holmes (yes, I'm still reading, and enjoying, The Boundless Deep) thinks this is 'a curiously biological term for Fitzgerald to use, as the oestrus (from the Latin) means the period of sexual receptivity in specifically female creatures. It is the time when they are capable of being made pregnant. For FitzGerald, Tennyson's real lyrical gift was in some profound sense feminine. It was a brilliant imaginative fertility.' Well, maybe, but surely it is more likely that FitzGerald was using the word in its non-biological sense. The root is the Greek oistros, a gadfly (a word Socrates used to describe himself), from which something that stings or goads one on, a stimulus, a strong impulse, and hence on to its biological meaning. Vivaldi was using the word (in its Italian form) to describe a creative impulse when he called his great collection of concerti L'Estro Armonico – and surely FitzGerald was thinking along those lines when he used it of Tennyson.  In the entry for 'oestrus' in the OED, the second citation is 'The Impetus, the Lyrical oestrus, is gone – E. FitzGerald'. In our more relaxed times, he might have said he thought Tennyson had lost his mojo. He hadn't, of course.