I am so at home in Dublin, more than any other city, that I feel it has always been familiar to me. It took me years to see through its soft charm to its bitter prickly kernel - which I quite like too.

Louis MacNeice

Look at the birds of the air

Gilbert White (1720-1793), a country parson and naturalist best known for his Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, was born in his grandfather’s vicarage in that village and on four separate occasions later in life was to be curate there. The Natural History is presented as an account, by way of letters to his friends Thomas Pennant and Daines Barrington, of the zoology and more particularly ornithology of his parish. Some of the letters, however, were never actually posted but, it seems, “got up” for the book. White has been described as the first English ecologist; just as importantly perhaps, he was one of the finest stylists in the history of English prose. Here he is, in a letter dated September 9th, 1788, on birdsong.

… many of the winged tribes have various sounds and voices adapted to express their various passions, wants, and feelings; such as anger, fear, love, hatred, hunger and the like. All species are not equally eloquent; some are copious and fluent, as it were, in their utterance, while others are confined to a few important sounds: no bird, like the fish kind, is quite mute, though some are rather silent. The language of birds is very ancient, and, like other ancient modes of speech, very elliptical: little is said, but much is meant and understood.
The notes of the eagle-kind are shrill and piercing; and about the season of nidification much diversified, as I have been often assured by a curious observer of nature, who long resided at Gibraltar, where eagles abound. The notes of our hawks much resemble those of the king of birds. Owls have very expressive notes; they hoot in a fine vocal sound, much resembling the vox humana, and reducible by a pitch-pipe to a musical key. This note seems to express complacency and rivalry among the males; they use also a quick call and an horrible scream; and can snore and hiss when they mean to menace. Ravens, beside their loud croak, can exert a deep and solemn note that makes the woods to echo; the amorous sound of a crow is strange and ridiculous; rooks, in the breeding season, attempt sometimes in the gaiety of their hearts to sing, but with no great success; the parrot-kind have many modulations of voice, as appears in their aptitude to learn human sounds; doves coo in an amorous and mournful manner, and are emblems of despairing lovers; the wood-pecker sets up a sort of loud and hearty laugh; the fern-owl, or goat-sucker, from the dusk till day-break, serenades his mate with the clattering of castanets. All the tuneful passeres express their complacency by sweet modulations, and a variety of melody. The swallow, as has been observed in a former letter, by a shrill alarm bespeaks the attention of the other hirundines, and bids them be aware that the hawk is at hand. Aquatic and gregarious birds, especially the nocturnal, that shift their quarters in the dark, are very noisy and loquacious; as cranes, wild-geese, wild-ducks, and the like; their perpetual clamour prevents them from dispersing and losing their companions.
In so extensive a subject, sketches and outlines are as much as can be expected; for it would be endless to instance in all the infinite variety of the feathered nation. We shall therefore confine the remainder of this letter to the few domestic fowls of our yards, which are most known, and therefore best understood. At first the peacock, with his gorgeous train, demands our attention; but, like most of the gaudy birds, his notes are grating and shocking to the ear: the yelling of cats, and the braying of an ass, are not more disgustful. The voice of the goose is trumpet-like, and clanking; and once saved the Capitol in Rome, as grave historians assert; the hiss also of the gander is formidable and full of menace, and “protective of his young.” Among ducks the sexual distinction of voice is remarkable; for while the quack of the female is loud and sonorous, the voice of the drake is inward and harsh and feeble, and scarce discernible. The cock turkey struts and gobbles to his mistress in a most uncouth manner; he hath also a pert and petulant note when he attacks his adversary. When a hen turkey leads forth her young brood she keeps a watchful eye: and if a bird of prey appear, though ever so high in the air, the careful mother announces the enemy with a little inward moan, and watches him with a steady and attentive look; but if he approach, her note becomes earnest and alarming, and her outcries are redoubled.
No inhabitants of a yard seem possessed of such a variety of expression and so copious a language as common poultry. Take a chicken of four or five days old, and hold it up to a window where there are flies, and it will immediately seize its prey, with little twitterings of complacency; but if you tender it a wasp or a bee, at once its note becomes harsh, and expressive of disapprobation and a sense of danger. When a pullet is ready to lay she intimates the event by a joyous and easy soft note. Of all the occurrences of their life that of laying seems to be the most important; for no sooner has a hen disburdened herself, than she rushes forth with a clamorous kind of joy, which the cock and the rest of his mistresses immediately adopt. The tumult is not confined to the family concerned, but catches from yard to yard, and spreads to every homestead within hearing, till at last the whole village is in an uproar. As soon as a hen becomes a mother her new relation demands a new language; she then runs clocking and screaming about, and seems agitated as if possessed. The father of the flock has also a considerable vocabulary; if he finds food, he calls a favourite concubine to partake; and if a bird of prey passes over, with a warning voice he bids his family beware. The gallant chanticleer has, at command, his amorous phrases, and his terms of defiance. But the sound by which he is best known is his crowing: by this he has been distinguished in all ages as the countryman’s clock or larum, as the watchman that proclaims the divisions of the night.

Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne is published in the Penguin English Library series at £10.

9/09/2014

The Literary Racket

“These days,” writes Claire Tomalin in the Guardian’s “The Week in Books” miscellany (September 6th), “prizes sell books more than reviews”. But prizes, sadly, cannot be for everyone, which is presumably why, as John Dugdale relates in the same column, the novelist Stephan Q Harper had one of his fictional creations, Neville Addison-Graves III, review his (Harper’s) novel, Venice Under Glass, a detective story in which it seems all the characters are teddy bears, on a blog hosted by one Basil Baker (also apparently a bear). “You wrote a review of your own book?” a commenter called April asked; Harper breezily retorted that this was “standard practice”.

I am sure that most of us find such a proposition shocking, but the press, literary or otherwise, did not always adhere to the high standards of probity which are well-nigh universally in application today. Here is Edgar Allan Poe on how the literary racket worked (or how he thought it worked) in the 1840s:

Let in America a book be published by an unknown, careless, or uninfluential author; if he publishes it ‘on his own account’ he will be confounded at finding that no notice is taken of it at all. If it has been entrusted to a publisher of caste, there will appear forthwith in each of the leading business papers a variously-phrased critique to the extent of three or four lines, and to the effect that ‘we have received from the fertile press of So and So a volume entitled This and That, which appears to be well worthy perusal, and which is ‘got up’ in the customary neat style of the enterprising firm of So and So.’ On the other hand, let our author have acquired influence, experience, or (what will stand him in good stead of either) effrontery, on the issue of his book he will obtain from his publisher a hundred copies (or more, as the case may be), ‘for distribution among friends connected with the press.’ Armed with these, he will call personally either at the office or (if he understands his game) at the private residence of every editor within his reach, enter into conversation, compliment the journalist, interest him, as if incidentally, in the subject of the book, and finally, watching an opportunity, beg leave to hand him ‘a volume which, quite opportunely, is on the very matter now under discussion.’ If the editor seems sufficiently interested, the rest is left to fate; but if there is any lukewarmness (usually indicated by a polite regret on the editor’s part that he really has ‘no time to render the work that justice that its importance demands’), then our author is prepared to understand and to sympathise; has, luckily, a friend thoroughly conversant with the topic, and who (perhaps) could be persuaded to write some account of the volume – provided that the editor would be kind enough just to glance over the critique and amend it in accordance with his own particular views. Glad to fill half a column or so of his editorial space, and still more glad to get rid of his visitor, the journalist assents. The author retires, consults the friend, instructs him touching the strong points of the volume, and insinuating in some shape a quid pro quo gets an elaborate critique written (or what is more usual and far more simple, writes it himself), and his business in this individual quarter is accomplished. Nothing more than sheer impudence is requisite to accomplish it in all.

Not everyone, of course, can carry this off, men of genius and intellectual distinction being frequently too high-minded and/or lacking the necessary effrontery. “They, consequently, and their works, are utterly overwhelmed and extinguished in the flood of the apparent public adulation upon which in gilded barges are borne triumphant the ingenious toady and the diligent quack.”

6/09/2014

Flattering the people

Whenever I hear a politician saying, as I’m afraid they quite often do, that “people aren’t stupid, you know”, what in fact I know is that he (most often he) believes that they are stupid, stupid enough at least to fall for the flattery implicit in suggesting that they are not. This is called populism, and it’s a political strategy that doesn’t often fail.

Seven years ago most of us seemed to believe, or want to believe, that we could go on cutting income taxes, having more in our pay packets, spending more in pubs or restaurants, saving little or nothing and that, far from imploding, this splendid boom was based on a failsafe mechanism (the more you spend the more you have – anyway, Charlie McCreevy knew what it was) that would only get boomier. And of course we weren’t stupid ‑ because people aren’t stupid, you know. In two years’ time it seems (going on current indications) people will go out to vote and with some relish set about “punishing” the political parties who have been dealing with the painful consequences of our previous non-stupidity and reward those who tell them that none of the very unpleasant and difficult things government has been doing since 2010 were either right or in the slightest necessary. And that, of course, won’t be stupid either, because people aren’t … yes, yes. But if people aren’t stupid, why do we have a word for it? Surely it wasn’t just coined for Afghan hounds.

The truth in this matter is surely the rather obvious one that some people are clever and some stupid, with an infinite spectrum in between, ranging from clever-clever to just a little dim to “I fell of the chair, Brian”. Of course the clever people will not always agree with each other either, for reasons of both interest and ideology. Clever Fine Gaelers with €150,000 a year coming in to the family home think it’s obvious that people who don’t contribute very much to national wealth (the “welfare classes”) should get very little more from the state than what might stop them falling down dead on the street. Clever Fintan O’Toole would be of one mind with the populist politicians, though for different reasons, that “ordinary people” aren’t stupid; on the other hand he thinks that government ministers, senior civil servants and specialist policy advisers almost universally are (stupid is in fact one of Fintan’s favourite words). But of course people are stupid, a little or very. And they can also be encouraged to be more so: indeed it is rather difficult to see what other function, say, the Evening Herald, is performing other than encouraging people to be stupid.

George Orwell dealt entertainingly with the problem of variable intellectual capacity through allegory in Animal Farm. In the new society that emerges after exploitation has been abolished all are encouraged to realise their potential. The results are generally positive but mixed:

The reading and writing classes … were a great success. By the autumn almost every animal on the farm was literate to some degree.
As for the pigs, they could already read and write perfectly. The dogs learned to read fairly well, but were not interested in reading anything other than the Seven Commandments. Muriel, the goat, could read somewhat better than the dogs, and sometimes used to read to the others in the evenings from scraps of paper that she found on the rubbish heap. Benjamin [a donkey] could read as well as any pig, but never exercised his faculty. So far as he knew, he said, there was nothing worth reading. Clover [a horse] learnt the whole alphabet, but could not put words together. Boxer [also a horse] could not get beyond the letter D. He would trace out A, B, C, D in the dust with his great hoof, and then would stand staring at the letters with his ears back, sometimes shaking his forelock, trying with all his might to remember what came next and never succeeding. On several occasions, indeed, he did learn E, F, G, H, but by the time he knew them it was always discovered that he had forgotten A, B, C and D. Finally he decided to be content with the first four letters, and used to write them out once or twice a day to refresh his memory. Mollie [a particularly pretty horse] refused to learn any but the five letters which spelt her own name. She would form these very neatly out of pieces of twig, and would then decorate them with a flower or two and walk around admiring them.
None of the other animals on the farm could get further than the letter A. It was also found that the stupider animals such as the sheep, hens and ducks were unable to learn the Seven Commandments by heart. After much thought Snowball [the Trotsky of the animal revolution] declared that the Seven Commandments could in effect be reduced to a single maxim, namely: “Four legs good, two legs bad”. This, he said, contained the essential principles of Animalism. Whoever had thoroughly grasped it would be safe from human influences. The birds at first objected, since it seemed to them that they also had two legs, but Snowball proved to them that this was not so.
“A bird’s wing, comrade,” he said, “is an organ of propulsion and not of manipulation. It should therefore be regarded as a leg. The distinguishing mark of Man is the hand, the instrument with which he does all his mischief.”
The birds did not understand Snowball’s long words, but they accepted his explanation, and all the humbler animals set to work to learn the new maxim by heart. FOUR LEGS GOOD, TWO LEGS BAD, was inscribed on the end wall of the barn, above the Seven Commandments and in bigger letters. When they had once got it by heart the sheep developed a great liking for this maxim, and often as they lay in the field they would all start bleating “Four legs good, two legs bad! Four legs good, two legs bad!” and keep it up for hours on end, never growing tired of it.

And yet, relatively speaking, “Four legs good, two legs bad!” is a fairly complex notion. Purely as a slogan, I think “End Austerity Now” has it beat.

1/09/2014

More gin for the editor please

William Maginn, who died one hundred and seventy years ago today in Walton-on-Thames, aged just forty-nine, was one of the heroic figures of the rumbustuous world of the early Victorian periodical press.

Maginn moved from his native Cork to London in 1824 and was almost immediately appointed Paris correspondent of The Representative, a new paper set up by Scottish publisher John Murray. In Paris, it was said, he “drank much and wrote little”. He was soon brought home and the paper did not long survive. Maginn moved to the ultra-Tory Standard, but came into his own as editor of Fraser’s Magazine, founded in 1830. Fraser’s, according to John Gross (in The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, 1969), was “crammed with doggerel, innuendo, burlesque, furious insults, scholarship run mad”, all under the auspices of the (fictional) editor and lord of misrule, “Oliver Yorke”.

Thomas Carlyle found Fraser’s an invaluable source of income, but thought the magazine itself “a chaotic, fermenting,  dung-hill heap of compost”. He could not keep up with the regular carousing of its team of contributors (he himself took his wine watered) and was eventually glad to leave behind Oliver Yorke and his “all-too Irish mirth and madness”.

Maginn had been a child prodigy, entering Trinity College Dublin and confounding the professors with his knowledge of the classical languages at the age of eleven. He had been taught by his schoolmaster father, an apparently humane man who nevertheless could not resist cramming his clever son and pushing him out into the world as a marvel and an advertisement for the achievements of his school. To Greek, Latin and Hebrew, he eventually added a clutch of modern languages and in honour of his learning he was chiefly referred to by his colleagues simply as “the Doctor”. He also wrote squibs under the pseudonym Sir Morgan O’Doherty.

The drink was to get him in the end. “Maginn’s career,” writes Gross, “is a reminder that economic conditions are never quite enough in themselves to account for the calamities of Grub Street [the literal, in nineteenth century London, and metaphorical, ever since, home of the poorly paid hack writer]. A man of his stamp would have come to grief in any period, and all the patronage in the world would hardly have sufficed to damp down his talent for self-destruction.”

His friend John Gibson Lockhart offered a fine epitaph:

Here, early to bed, lies poor William Maginn,
For your Tories his fine Irish brains he would spin …

But for all his brains, he had the good man’s weakness, which got him in the end:

But at last he was beat, and sought help of the bin,
(All the same to the Doctor, from claret to gin)
Which led swiftly to jail, with consumption therein;
It was much, when the bones rattled loose in his skin …
Barring drinks and the girls, I ne’er heard of a sin,
Many worse, better few, than bright broken Maginn.

21/08/14

Home is a sad place

“You can look out of your life like a train,” wrote Philip Larkin, who was born in this day in 1922, “and see what you’re heading for, but you can’t stop the train.”

In the week in which he turned forty, Larkin was shocked by the death of Marilyn Monroe – and, for him, unusually sympathetic. “I’m sure Hollywood is a ghastly place to work in for anyone like her, everyone wanting to screw you and get a cut for doing it, nobody really helping you,” he wrote to Monica Jones. He also had the pleasure of reading for the first time, and sharing with Monica, the HOW OLD CARY GRANT? telegram joke – it’s hard to believe there was ever a time when it wasn’t hoary.

Staying with his mother in Loughborough did not do anything for his mood:

I can’t say I feel on top of the world here – Mother’s friends all seem to have just died, or had a stroke, or a fall, or been widowed, or be having “deep ray” treatment, or in the mental hospital – no reason why they shouldn’t, in the driving rain of time that will bring us all down in the end. A few more years shall roll. Still – it is a sad atmosphere – don’t know what I should do if it weren’t for The Archers …

A few days later, and now past his fortieth birthday, he is writing to Monica again:

… I seem to have very little time here. It’s all eating or washing up ‑ I must say that after a week of it I begin to feel for my father in his retirement [Sydney Larkin, Coventry’s city treasurer, was an enthusiastic Nazi who visited the Nuremberg rallies twice and only took down the swastika in his office in 1939] – it is a dreadful life. I remember him holding up some implement or other at the sink and saying “That’s the third time today I’ve washed this!” And it was, and I expect I’ve washed it three times a day myself, 15 years later. I wondered what he would have thought, to see me washing the same old colander, the same old saucepans, the same old cooking knives and forks – laughed, I should think. You may say there’s nothing very awful about all this – but all the same I think there is – I feel it as awful, anyway.
Home is a sad, place anyway … I feel I’ve done nothing with that fat fillet-steak part of life, 20 to 40, and now it’s gone. And I haven’t done anything with it because I’m too spiritless and cowardly and talentless. People have a lifetime a year compared with me.

Decades of course are no more clear dividers of the stages of our lives than centuries are of history. Just as many historians like to think of a nineteenth century which did not end until 1914 so also our lives may not best be measured by the twenties, the thirties, the forties etc. For many people that “fat fillet-steak part of life” may not begin as early as twenty but at the point, usually a few years later, when we are first able to fly the nets of home and earn an income for ourselves which allows for a little independence (or indeed folly). And for many it will end, or at least be suspended, with the arrival of children. I have never had any time for people who make a fuss about being thirty (“omygod”). Forty now, I can see that. With fifty you’ll probably have too many other things on your mind to much notice and by the time sixty arrives you’ll have been to the funerals of some of your friends. Soon, thoughts may turn not to decades, but to weeks, and days. Letters to Monica is published by Faber and Faber at £12.99. Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems is published by Faber and Faber at £13.99.

Days

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us.
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

9/08/2014

The sentences in my head

The Hungarian novelist and screenwriter László Krasnahorkai, best known for his novels The Melancholy of Resistance and Satantango, is interviewed by George Szirtes for The White Review. Delving into a mine so often richly explored by The Paris Review, Szirtes asks Krasnahorkai how he writes. The answer, which has less to do with sharpened pencils vs laptops, clear vs cluttered table, strong coffee vs Jack Daniel’s or just plain, iron determination to sit there hour by hour until something happens, is interesting:

I don’t sit at a work-station, meaning a writing desk, and I don’t stare at the laptop hoping to get an idea, but work in my head starting from the assumption that literature is my work. Putting aside personal reasons, the fact is that when I began to write I was living in very difficult circumstances: I had no writing desk and was never alone. So I got used to beginning sentences in my head, and if they were promising I kept adding to them until the sentence came to a natural end. It was at that point I wrote it down. That’s the way I do things even now, in the most unlikely places, at the most unlikely times – in other words I am continually at work. I write everything down at the end. I don’t correct in the normal way because I’ve done all that in my head.

But don’t you forget it all the next minute? Oh, never mind. Sorry. And what does he read?

When I am not reading Kafka I am thinking about Kafka. When I am not thinking about Kafka I miss thinking about him. Having missed thinking about him for a while, I take him out and read him again. That’s how it works.

Homer, Dante, Dostoevski, Proust, Beckett and Thomas Bernhard are others who serve under this regime.

And what is the explanation for your success?

… it seems that at the time of publication, Satantango was the kind of book many people actually wanted. People who wanted to escape the middle ground of high-formal pyrotechnics and the exhaustingly new; those who were waiting for a book that says something about the world; those who want something other than entertainment, who don’t want to escape from life but to live it over again, to know that they have a life, that they have a part in it, and have a preference for the painfully beautiful. My explanation is that we have no great literature. But readers need it, not as medicine, not as delusion, but because they need someone to tell them there is no medicine.

 

Read Aengus Woods’s drb review of Satantango here::

Why they went to war

The Hay Festival Kells gets under way next week and features, with the year that’s in it, a number of First World War-themed lectures. On Thursday (July 3rd) Myles Dungan talks on “Lions, Donkeys and Paddies: The Irish Experience of the Great War” while John O’Keeffe’s lecture on the same day is entitled “Moral Insanity and the Great War: Bad Men in Good Jobs”. O’Keeffe, a psychologist and criminologist, asks if Douglas Haig, David Lloyd George and the Kaiser were psychopaths. Ciaran Wallace deals with the home front, Turtle Bunbury focuses on a number of Irish personalities who featured in the war and Danny Cusack talks about Francis Ledwidge, Meath and the Great War. Ledwidge was killed at Passchendaele while serving in the British army in July 1917. On Thursday evening, Myles Dungan introduces a performance of songs from the war.

Friday afternoon sees a talk from Jeremy Paxman at the Headfort Arms Hotel in Kells. “Traditional images reinforce the view that the Great War was a pointless waste of life. So why did the nation fight so willingly and endure suffering for so long?” Paxman asks. A worthwhile question, but perhaps, by reference to a striking piece of oral history collected almost fifty years ago when many survivors of the war were still alive, we may unrhetoricise it.

Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, by Ronald Blythe, was written in 1966-7 and published in 1969. It is a lightly fictionalised account of the life of a Suffolk village in the present and in the past (within living memory for the most part), a life that in the 1960s was disappearing and now has disappeared, with old fields, hedgerows and farm buildings buried under vast fields of waving corn. Akenfield (field of oaks) cannot be found on the map; the book’s topographical description is largely based on the village of Charsfield, northeast of Ipswich, a place with which the author was familiar. Blythe, by the way, did not claim to be an oral historian, “a profession I had never heard of when I wrote it”. He thought his book was more the work of a poet: “My only real credentials for having written it was that I was native to its situation in every way and had only to listen to hear my own world talking. Thus a thread of autobiography runs strongly through it.” Oral history it may or may not be – I’ll go for may – but from a literary point of view Akenfield is a masterpiece.

The words that follow are those of Leonard Thompson, a farmworker, aged seventy-one.

There were ten of us in the family and as my father was a farm labourer earning 13s. a week you can just imagine how we lived. I will tell you the first thing that I remember. It was when I was three – about 1899. We were all sitting round the fire waiting for my soldier brother to come home – he was the eldest boy in the family … This young man came in, and it was the first time I had seen him. He wore a red coat and looked very lively. Mother got up and kissed him but Father just sat and said, ‘How are you?’ Then we had tea, all of us staring at my brother. It was dark, it was the winter-time. A few days later he walked away and my mother stood right out in the middle of the road, watching. He was going to fight in South Africa. He walked smartly down the lane until his red coat was no bigger than a poppy. Then the tree hid him. We never saw him again. He went all through the war but caught enteric fever afterwards and died. He was twenty-one …

Our food was apples, potatoes, swedes and bread, and we drank our tea without milk or sugar. Skim milk could be bought from the farm but it was thought a luxury. Nobody could get enough to eat no matter how they tried. Two of my brothers went out to work. One was eight years old and he got 3s. a week, the other got about 7s. …

Our parents and all the cottage people were very religious and very patriotic. The patriotic songs and the church hymns seemed equally holy. They took our breath away. The boys marched through the village singing … and their faces would look sincere and important. It was all ‘my country’ – country, country, country. You heard nothing else. There was no music in the village then except at the chapel or the church and our family liked it so much that we hurried from one to the other to hear all we could. People like us, who went where we fancied on a Sunday, were called ‘Devil-dodgers’ … People believed in religion then, which I think was a good thing because if they hadn’t got religion there would have been a revolution. Nobody would have stuck it. Religion disciplined us and gave us the strength to put up with things. The parson was very respected. He could do what he liked with us when he felt like it. One day he came to our house and told my eldest sister, who was eleven, to leave school. ‘I think you needn’t finish,’ he said. ‘You can go and be maid to old Mrs Barney Wickes, now she has lost her husband.’ Mrs Barney Wickes was blind and my sister was paid a penny a day out of Parish Relief to look after her …

The school was useless. The farmers came and took boys away from it when they felt like it, the parson raided it for servants. The teacher was a respectable woman who did her best. Sometimes she would bring the Daily Graphic down and show us the news. I looked forward to leaving school so that I could get educated. I knew that education was in books, not in school: there were no books there. I was a child when I left but I already knew that our ‘learning’ was rubbish, that our food was rubbish and that I should end as rubbish if I didn’t look out …

The farmer was a dealer. I stayed with him a year and four months and was paid 4s.6d. a week. And then I got into a hell of a row. I’d driven a flock of sheep from Ipswich and the next morning they found that one had died. The farmer was in a terrible stew. He ran down the field and met my mother on her way to chapel and told her all about it. I had driven the sheep too hard, he said. ‘And you drive boys too hard!’ said my mother – she had no fear at all. Well, the truth of the matter is that she said a lot of things she’d only thought until then, and so I left the farm. It must seem that there was war between farmers and their men in those days. I think there was, particularly in Suffolk. These employers were famous for their meanness. They took all they could from the men and boys who worked their land. They bought their lives’ strength for as little as they could. They wore us out without a thought because, with the big families, there was a continuous supply of labour. Fourteen young men left the village in 1909 – 11 to join the army. There wasn’t a recruiting drive, they just escaped …

I returned to my old farm at Akenfield for 11s. a week, but I was unsettled. When the farmer stopped my pay because it was raining and we couldn’t thrash, I said to my seventeen-year-old mate, ‘Bugger him. We’ll go off and join the army.’ … We walked to Ipswich and got the train to Colchester. We were soaked to the skin but very happy. At the barracks we kissed the Bible and were given a shilling …

In my four months’ training with the regiment I put on nearly a stone in weight and got a bit taller. They said it was the food but it was really because for the first time in my life there had been no strenuous work. I want to say this simply as a fact, that village people in Suffolk in my day were worked to death. It literally happened. It is not a figure of speech …

We were all delighted when war broke out on August 4th. I was now a machine-gunner in the Third Essex Regiment. A lot of boys from the village were with me and although we were all sleeping in ditches at Harwich, wrapped in our greatcoats, we were bursting with happiness. We were all damned glad to have got off the farms …

We arrived at the Dardanelles and saw the guns flashing and heard the rifle-fire. They heaved our ship, the River Clyde, right up to the shore. They had cut a hole in it and made a little pier, so we were able to walk straight off and on to the beach. We all sat there – on the Hellespont! – waiting for it to get light. The first things we saw were big wrecked Turkish guns, the second a big marquee. It didn’t make me think of the military but of the village fêtes. Other people must have thought like this because I remember how we all rushed up to it, like boys getting into a circus, and then found it all laced up. We unlaced it and rushed in. It was full of corpses. Dead Englishmen, lines and lines of them, and with their eyes wide open. We all stopped talking. I’d never seen a dead man before and here I was looking at two or three hundred of them. It was our first fear. Nobody had mentioned this. I was very shocked. I thought of Suffolk and it seemed a happy place for the first time.

Akenfield is published in the Penguin Modern Classics series at £9.99.

28/06/2014

Forty days of sunshine

Ireland’s oldest known surviving manuscript, the Codex Usserianius Primus, or First Book of Ussher, is among a group of works that will shortly join the Book of Kells on display at Trinity College, Frank McNally in The Irish Times (June 21st) tells us. The “book” (actually a series of fragments) may date from as early as the fifth century and is named after Archbishop James Ussher, a man best known for having determined the precise date of the creation of the universe (Saturday night, October 22nd, 4004 BC – are you paying attention down there at the back, Dawkins?)

Ussher was C of I, but of a rather Calvinist hue and, like many a strict scriptural man, he could seldom resist accusing others of living in darkness: “The religion of the papists,” he wrote, “is superstitious and idolatrous; their faith and doctrine erroneous and heretical; their church in respect of both, apostatical; to give them therefore a toleration, or to consent that they may freely exercise their religion [as the monarch at the time, Charles I, wished], and profess their faith and doctrine, is a grievous sin.” Come to think of it, Professor Dawkins, a man reluctant to allow error any room for manoeuvre, might well agree with the archbishop on this point, if on little else.

Also to be displayed by Trinity is the Book of Dimma, a “pocket gospel” of the eighth century, associated with the Abbey of Cronan in Roscrea, Co Tipperary. Each of its gospels is signed by the scribe, Dimma MacNathi. According to legend, McNally writes, “MacNathi was commanded by Cronan to produce the book in a single day. He worked unceasingly and without food until it was finished, by which time the sun had still not set. But, as the legend adds, 40 days had passed in the book’s making. The continuous sunshine was a miracle.” (This cannot possibly have occurred – RD.)

In some respects perhaps the closest equivalent we have today to the Book of Dimma is what we might call the Book of Frank, otherwise The Irish Times, which is produced from start to finish in a single day (and most intensively in the evening) six days a week by the person-hours of a couple of hundred Dimmas, comprises up to 150,000 words per issue and contains far fewer scribal errors than it might ‑ though readers of a certain stripe can get very high-horsey about those that do slip through.

The new material to be displayed at Trinity is rounded out by the Book of Mulling, an eighth century gospel that includes portraits of the evangelists, and the Garland of Howth (the name “garland”, Frank says, is a corruption of the Irish ceithre leabhair; I am not so sure about this etymology – the OED records the meaning of an anthology or miscellany in book form for “garland” from 1612). Be that as it may, the Garland, he adds, “is considered the work of multiple scribes, none of them first class”, which only a bounder would say about The Irish Times.

Read Frank McNally: http://bit.ly/1qA2CTY

A bookselling institution

A great London literary institution, Foyle’s, is reinventing itself in a new premises. The famous Charing Cross Road branch (Charing Cross Road was London’s street of books) was once trumpeted as “the largest bookshop in the world”. Whatever about that it was certainly the most byzantine and featured a Soviet-style buying system (queue to be given a chit for your book, queue to pay your bill at the cashier’s, queue again with your receipt to collect your purchase). This elaborate arrangement was introduced by Christina Foyle, who managed the shop after her father’s death in 1963, to combat “widespread internal dishonesty”. The building’s many miles of shelving and many nooks and crannies however did little to combat widespread external dishonesty. It was a book thief’s paradise.

Foyle’s, now owned by nephew Christopher Foyle, is to open in a huge, and hugely impressive, new building just a stone’s throw away from the historic premises in the former Central Saint Martins art school, an art deco building dating from 1939 which has been home to Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney and John Galliano. Edwin Heathcote writes in the Financial Times (June 7th):

There is no luxury shopfitting here, no confusion with the smooth artifice of a fashion store or a mall. Instead there are 4.6 miles of bookshelves, exposed ducting and lights in the ceilings and an emphasis on books as beautiful, tangible objects. It is a building of exceptional clarity …

The future of bookselling is of course uncertain, but Foyle’s is making a large investment. Some people think that the future for bookselling will involve the reinvention of premises as cultural, as well as retail, centres. There will be nothing new in this for Foyle’s, which has been running its celebrated literary luncheons since 1930: guests have included George Bernard Shaw, who drew two thousand paying guests, and, in the summer of 1940, a little known refugee called Charles de Gaulle. Not that literary events are always enthralling or the speakers necessarily magnetic of personality. Christina Foyle recalled (the story is retold in her Daily Telegraph obituary of 1999) the occasion on which the guests were addressed by Walter Gilbey, the head of the gin-making firm. “He spoke for one and a half hours,” she remembered. “A man in front of my father fell asleep, so he hit the chap with the toastmaster’s gavel. The man said: `Hit me again, I can still hear him’ ”
16/06/2014

If you gotta go …

Eighty-three-year-old Michel Rocard, one of the grandest old men of French social democracy, prime minister from 1988 to 1991 and subsequently general secretary of the Parti Socialiste, senator and MEP, has launched a broadside in Le Monde (dated June 5th) against France’s old rival and enemy, la perfide Albion.

Under the headline “Amis Anglais, sortez de l’Union européene mais ne la faites pas mourir!” (Leave the European Union, my English friends, don’t kill it), Rocard first praises the English for their contributions to democracy and human rights and for their success over many centuries in dominating the world, first through sea power, then through finance, for their courage in 1940 and in the following years. He goes on to quote Churchill’s celebrated “Zurich speech” of 1946 but points out that his warm words of support there for a European union – indeed a “United States of Europe” – concerned an entity from which it was clear Britain would stand aside (having its own union, the Commonwealth).

What part of this did you not understand, Rocard asks, before going on to answer his own question:

But you wanted to do business, and that is all you thought of. Once the president of the republic (de Gaulle) was gone, in you came. Never again afterwards – not once – did you allow the slightest step forward towards a little more integration, a little more space where decisions could really be taken communally. The Community is engaged in trading, which suits you, because it calls itself economic, but as regards the heart of the economy, taxation, company law, the representation of social forces, you demand, indeed insist, that decisions can only be taken on a basis of unanimity. What you wanted was paralysis.
Lots of neighbours remark on our initial successes and are envious. They’d like to come in. You support every enlargement – us too it must be said; we hadn’t figured out yet what you were up to: all of this diluted the Community. You would never allow the least deepening. Europe remains hampered and poorly directed, an economic giant and a political dwarf.

Rocard sees the hand of the British working in the various treaties (Maastricht, Amsterdam, Nice etc), working, that is, to make them less ambitious, less effective. And he sees it again in British opposition to the candidacies for the presidency of the Commission of the late Jean-Luc Dehaene and now of Jean-Claude Juncker. Rocard himself voted for the Spitzenkandidat Martin Schulz (that is to say he voted for the French socialist list, PS-PRG), but the voters chose instead Juncker, “a courageous and tenacious federalist” (that is to say the Christian Democratic bloc has emerged as the largest in the new European Parliament). Yet the British are determined to block Juncker and to block the operation of a democratic will (however incomplete), without which “Europe is not worthy of itself and will wither and die”. The British, it seems, want to both hobble Europe and to leave it. One or the other please:

And then it seems you want to go: the majority of your people don’t seem to have any doubt about this. But you still have some banking interest in profiting from the disorder you are creating …
Why not leave before you’ve broken everything? There was a time when the word British was associated with a certain elegance. Let us build Europe: you go and rediscover your elegance and you will regain our respect.

There is no doubt that all this is tremendously emotionally satisfying, and not just to the French. There are certainly many people in Ireland too who are heartily sick at having had to watch the Tories (and now the überTories of Ukip) doing their European tease over so many decades (“We’re going to go … I’m warning you, we’ll go unless you give us what we want!” “Byee! Close the door gently.”)

But a few questions remain perhaps: surely Mr Rocard and many others like him are going a little bit ahead of the evidence in claiming that the European people have endorsed Mr Juncker as president of the Commission. Did the 180,000 voters who enthusiastically voted for Brian Crowley in Ireland’s South constituency do so because of their admiration for Liberal Spitzenkandidat Guy Verhofstadt whose colours the Corkman was supposed to be carrying? Chances are that few of them could have told you who he was. What of Slovakia, where only 13 per cent of voters bothered to come out (electing 13 MEPs)? What do we see if we look into their hearts? It is easy (for some of us at least) to sympathise with the wish that Europe should have more legitimacy and that decisions should be arrived at in a way other than the “behind closed doors” one we now seem to be heading towards – particularly if Merkel allows herself to be bullied by Cameron into withdrawing her (ambiguous and apparently reluctant) backing for Jean-Claude Juncker. But it is questionable whether pretending that Europe has legitimacy, pretending that there is a European demos, when the evidence suggests that it hasn’t and there isn’t, is going to get us anywhere. The legitimacy (as opposed to the consent to be governed, itself a bit shakier than it was) has to be built, often in the face of an indifferent or hostile media: remember that the PES candidate in Dublin was actually mocked in our newspaper of record for her apparent naivety, or culpable earnestness, in campaigning on European issues – and lost her seat.

Finally, it is worth pointing out that a British exit from the EU, for all the emotional satisfaction (and relief) it might well produce, might not be in Ireland’s economic interests. But I suppose the interests of an offshore island off an offshore Ireland are scarcely paramount in Mr Rocard’s calculations.
10/06/14

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