Modernity in a medieval city

Posted on January 17, 2014 by Derek Turner

Modernity in a medieval city

Modern Masters in Print, Usher Gallery, Lincoln, until 30 March, admission free

Just down the hill from the superb Lincoln Cathedral is the Usher Gallery, the rather unlikely setting for this peripatetic V&A exhibition, which quit London last year in a flurry of hyperbole, and gave rise to a BBC TV series.

Endowed in 1921 by Lincoln jeweller James Ward Usher to house his private collection of ceramics, clocks, coins, silver, enamels and miniatures – and his own range of Lincoln Imp-bearing bijouterie – the Gallery opened in 1927, in a rather dour neo-classical building by the busy Blomfield. It has an echoey, institutional feel despite a major revamp several years ago, and a highly respectable collection, including works by Turner, Lowry and Stubbs, good 18th century porcelain, and sculpture by Nollekens and Epstein. There are also borrowings – a vase by Grayson Perry inspired by motorways and Walthamstow (more appealing than it probably sounds), and Kimathi Donkor’s ethnically outré Toussaint L’Ouverture at Bedourete, showing the Haitian hero spurring his horse and country into splendour (and squalor). There is a predictable, PC flavour to this and some of the other new pieces, as if the curators feel they need to nod to tiresome north London mores. Yet the abiding impression is still pleasantly provincial – limestone staircases, oils of Lincolnshire worthies (most famously Benjamin West’s imposing portrait of Sir Joseph Banks), cabinets where epergnes nuzzle orreries, and an odd, short corridor lined with stopped longcase clocks from Lincoln, Grimsby, Louth and Market Rasen.

This bastion of justifiable civic pride is now playing host to some fifty prints by Matisse, Picasso, Dalí and Warhol from the V&A’s collection, including some of the most familiar images of our time. The aim of the exhibition is never quite spelled out, but one supposes it is to cast light on the modern Western mind as a whole. While it is a worthwhile enterprise in itself to bring works by such titans to provincial audiences, focusing on prints simply because they are prints seems a little pointless. Visitors skimming the very brief introduction in the V&A booklet will probably not need to be told “Each artist used the print in his own way”. The four artists’ legacies were apparently examined in the TV series, but at Lincoln the only publicity material was a catalogue raisonné.

I confess to not relishing Warhol, although I acknowledge the interesting questions his work raises about how art is defined and created. So I drifted almost indifferently past his three Marilyn Monroes, images as over-exposed as their unhappy subject was during her life – although they were easily the three most colourful works in the exhibition’s subfusc space, dazzling out from the black walls and the adjacent examples of palette restraint.

Matisse is arguably not well-served by the exhibition’s focus on his monochromatic prints, because he was, after all, chiefly notable for his use of colour. His 1950 print Marie José in a yellow dress, featured here, is an exception; it was his only original etching in colour, but even that seems drained of vitality by the surrounding sombreness. Sans couleur, his odalisques seem insipid and almost asexual, and the textiles whose patterns and textures so intrigued him look like they have been subjected to too hot a wash.

The Frugal Repast

As we move onto Picasso, whom the catalogue calls an “artistic chameleon” and who of those featured is probably the best known as printmaker, we are faced with more images we have all seen in books – The Frugal Repast, his Lescaux-inspired ecstasies, his bull-fights, The Dance of the Fauns, Skull of a Goat on a Table, and Minotaur, Drinker and Women. But howsoever casually familiar, seen up close for the first time one is brought up sharply with a new appreciation of the artist’s fluidity, wit and verve. And then there are his illustrations to Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle, sketched so freely, and yet with consummate control – conveying perfectly the vitality of his subjects. (I must, however, take issue with the catalogue’s description of The Flea as being “sensual”; it shows a woman removing said invertebrate from an intimate part of her anatomy, and unsurprisingly was not used by the publisher.)

I had not previously seen – or if I had seen it, it had not registered – The Rape, from the Vollard Suite, a powerfully disturbing image full of what the catalogue calls “strained intensity” – distorted limbs and brutish energy, part-nightmare and part-corybantic fantasy. Nor, strange though it may seem, had I really thought of Picasso as portraitist, and yet my ignorance was partly rectified by the purity and poignancy of Profile Against a Black Background. These items alone made me glad I had come. The Picassos give the exhibition much of its heart and heft.

Few will like everything Picasso produced during his “chameleon” career, and it is rather common to meet people (especially conservative-oriented people) who reject him in toto as being somehow in opposition to the Western tradition. Yet his work was a necessary antidote to the conventions of his period; and not all of it is artistically unprecedented. His subject matter is often classical, and there are hints of many other artists in his work; for example, his Buffon illustration of The Cock is strongly reminiscent of Doré’s illustrations for Gargantua and Pantagruel. As for him being in some way radical, what could be older or more ‘rooted’ than Bronze Age imagery? In any case, is not innovation part of what it means to be a Westerner?

An unexpected treat came in the shape of Dalí’s 1968 advertising posters for France’s S.N.C.F., which happily combine Surrealist imagery with Shell Guide-style iconography and colouring. There were apparently six of these, although only four seem to have made it into this exhibition – Paris, Normandie, Alsace and Roussillon. These wänderlust-eliciting items feature obviously evocative images – the Eiffel Tower, Mont St. Michel, and so forth – but also in-jokes and self-advertising, as you might also expect, with Dalí interposing segments of his own earlier paintings into the compositions.

The mustachioed japester also played around with printmaking, once apparently detonating a bomb filled with nails and keys beside an engraving plate, to see the scratchy results. On another occasion, he dipped snails (rather cruelly) in ink, and placed them on a lithographic stone to see what would happen.

Wide-eyed vivacity bubbles up from works like The Blue Owl, and (my favourite) Don Quixote, a dynamic Futuristic swirl in which the comic hidalgo’s ruff is seen to be made up of tiny armed soldiers. Phobias are discernible in Grasshopper Child – it seems he was terrified of locusts – and perhaps some of the disjointed illustrations he provided for what De Jonge called the “sustained sick joke” of the Comte de Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror.

How satisfying it is to find such strangeness among the snuffboxes – and yet is it all that strange, when one considers the surrealism of the medieval minds that threw up the Cathedral and populated its highest places with angels and Imps?

 

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RADICALS & REACTIONARIES – Alan Ian Percy

Posted on January 14, 2014 by Derek Turner

RADICALS & REACTIONARIES

The 8th Duke of Northumberland, Alan Ian Percy

National noblesse oblige – the anti-communist career of Alan Ian Percy

ROGER DE COVERLEY

In this crisis, salvation can only be achieved by a return to convictions and principles which may be dubbed ‘reactionary’. But which will nevertheless earn respect and support, because they have logic and truth upon their side, and will be seen to be the only bulwark of authority amid the crumbling of altars and thrones.

Alan Ian Percy, Eighth Duke of Northumberland (1924)

When enacted in 1999, the House of Lords Act drastically changed the Upper House’s membership and culture by removing all but ninety-two hereditary peers. It constituted a vehement campaign by New Labour against anyone listed in Debrett’s. Sneeringly describing hereditary peers with mechanistic terms such as ‘obsolete’ and ‘outdated’, Blair sought to modernise an ancient constitution through aggressive class warfare. While some aristocrats were genuinely taken aback by this act, others perceived its origins decades before its final fulfillment. In particular, the writings of Alan Ian Percy, Eighth Duke of Northumberland (1880-1930) proved quite prescient.

A High Tory and deeply religious, the Duke actively engaged in right-wing politics for much of his adult life. His Grace sought to keep his beloved nation free from radicalism and maintain its unity in a shaken world following the Great War. He channeled all of his energies into actively opposing communism’s infiltration into British society.  Acquiring the Morning Post in 1924, he popularized rightist thought in country house society through powerful editorials and published speeches. The Duke’s vigorous efforts to preserve hereditary privilege and defend the Empire proved quite effective in shaping Conservative opinion. Continue reading →

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Fascist Italy speaks

Posted on January 11, 2014 by leslie

Benito Mussolini

Fascist Italy Speaks

Fascist Voices: an Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy, Christopher Duggan, Vintage, London, 2013, 501pp, pb, £10.99

Leslie Jones listens to some “ordinary” Italians

It is possible to identify two distinct but not necessarily incompatible perspectives on Italian fascism. Some historians have drawn attention to Mussolini’s genuine popularity (as opposed to that of the movement that he led) and to the quasi religious elements of fascist ideology and liturgy. These are the salient themes of Christopher Duggan’s admirable new book Fascist Voices: an Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy. But other, more orthodox commentators have emphasised the coercive and repressive aspects of Italian fascism, depicting the latter as a brutal dictatorship imposed on the masses[i]. Thus, Richard Evans, in an otherwise favourable review, claims that Duggan undermines his own argument because he documents the extraordinary degree of surveillance of dissenters in fascist Italy[ii]. The idea that fascism enjoyed mass support is evidently anathema to the left. The upshot is that studies of fascism, whether of the Italian or German variety, are “ideologically inflected” i.e. skewed, in Duggan’s judgement (page 426). Professor Evan’s The Third Reich in Power, volume two of a trilogy, arguably provides a telling example.

By the early 1930’s, the cult of Mussolini, the allegedly omniscient and beneficent Duce, had become “a central pillar of the regime” (page 217). Paradoxically, the ideological opacity of fascism[iii] and the manifest corruption of many party officials encouraged veneration of the leader. “If only Mussolini knew” was a prevalent refrain. At the Segreteria Particolare del Duce, fifty civil servants dealt with the approximately 1500 letters addressed to Mussolini that arrived each day. Following the failed attempt on his life by an anarchist in June 1932, the number of letters and telegrams arriving at the Segreteria Particolare reached a crescendo. By 1943, an archive lodged in the Segreteria and consisting of 565,000 files and millions of filing cards testified to the dictator’s popular appeal.

And today, the Mussolini memorial in the crypt of the family’s mausoleum at Predappio, where the Duce’s body was deposited, attracts numerous sympathisers. As the eulogistic comments left in the registers in front of the tomb by the “pilgrims” indicate, many ordinary Italians view Mussolini as an incorruptible and patriotic figure, the heaven-sent man who restored order and discipline to a country threatened by anarchy and communism[iv].

Mussolini memorial in the crypt of the family’s mausoleum at Predappio,

Professor Duggan’s use of contemporaneous letters and diaries, the fascist voices of his title, is particularly noteworthy and effective. Many of these sources indicate that fascism and Catholicism were widely viewed as complementary. Faith for both sets of believers was the supreme virtue. Giuseppe Armellino, an officer who served on the Eastern front in 1942 and 1943, wrote in his diary of his “love of the fatherland, and faith in God and in the Most Holy Madonna of Pompeii”. Other soldiers, in similar vein, viewed the war in the East as a crusade against atheism and materialism. Whereas in 1939 the Catholic Church had condemned the war in Europe, it supported the campaign in Russia.

Alberto Caracciolo, a student at the University of Padua, later recalled that many of his fellow students had regarded fascism as “a true religion”. As such, it was relatively impervious to reason, possessing what Duggan calls “a compelling quality that made it extremely difficult…to find a moral key that would permit an exit” (page 201). In October 1923, war veteran Carlo Ciseri had commented in his diary that Mussolini was “a superior being sent by God to restore peace to us, and perhaps also the honours and glories of ancient Rome”. Like millions of other Italians, he revelled in the conquest of Ethiopia by “fascist and proletarian Italy” and the proclamation of the Empire in 1936. And despite Italy’s subsequent humiliating defeat and the fall of the regime in 1943, Ciseri, for one, never harboured second thoughts about fascism. Other diehard acolytes considered the deposed dictator a selfless, Christ-like figure, cruelly betrayed by his fellow countrymen.

Matthew Stibbe notes that historians have been “reluctant to recognise the sheer popularity of the Nazi dictatorship”[v]. Ditto that of Mussolini.

©

Leslie Jones, January 2014

Leslie Jones is the Deputy Editor of Quarterly Review

 

[i] In fact, Duggan sees the rise of Italian fascism from 1919 to 1922 as in part a reaction to industrial unrest and peasant land seizures. He acknowledges that the fascist movement was strongly supported by industrialists, landowners and other conservative elements, notably the Catholic hierarchy

[ii] Richard J Evans, ‘Kisses for the Duce’, London Review of Books, vol 35, no 3, 7 February 2013, pp 6-8

[iii] For example, in 1938 Mussolini introduced anti-Jewish laws, prompting the departure from Italy of his former mistress Margherita Sarfatti, who was Jewish. Yet he had hitherto debunked the notion of pure races.

[iv] Duggan, for one, plays down the alleged threat of communism in Italy in the aftermath of the Great War

[v] Matthew Stibbe, ‘The Fatal Attraction of National Socialism’, GHI Bulletin, Nov 2013, Volume XXV, No 2, pp 132-137 at p 132

 

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Thomas Sipos – a libertarian in Hollywood

Posted on January 10, 2014 by Derek Turner

Thomas Sipos – a libertarian

in Hollywood

MARK WEGIERSKI profiles one of America’s most distinctive horror writers

Thomas M. Sipos must be one of America’s most unusual libertarian-conservative ‘culture warriors’ – notable for his ‘paleolibertarian’ views, his chosen career, his lifelong interest in pop-culture, and his baroque literary tastes.

His mother was an Hungarian Catholic and his father a Lutheran, who fled the country to escape communism. Their son, who was brought up as a Catholic, earned a bachelor of fine arts in film and television at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He became heavily involved in the peace movement during the George W. Bush era, grounding his opposition (especially to the Iraq War), on paleoconservative and paleolibertarian critiques that sadly were generally little-noticed in America at large. He has also been active in the U.S. Libertarian Party, a pragmatist who advocated a Republican Romney/Paul ticket in 2012. Sipos was appointed editor of the California Libertarian Party newspaper in 2007, and gave it an anti-war focus. He was Los Angeles County Libertarian Vice Chair in 2006-2007. He also served as a delegate to various local, state, and national conventions, from 2004-2009. However, it is chiefly his views on culture that make him interesting, and important.

He has long argued that libertarians and conservatives need to be making some of the mass-market cultural productions that make up pop-culture. To this end, he has worked as both an actor and a screenwriter in Hollywood, focusing especially on the horror genre. Although his ‘big break’ has not yet come, his sitcom and horror scripts have won awards. He has also professionally published a number of short stories – which allowed him to become a full member of both the Horror Writers Association, and the Science-fiction and Fantasy Writers of America – and has extensive non-fiction publication credits in both professional magazines and a huge variety of ‘semi-pro’ zines.

In 1999, he published his first novel, Vampire Nation (the short story version had appeared in 1998) through the XLibris on-demand publishing house. The premise of the novel is that the members of Romania’s Communist elite under dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu were actually vampires. Sipos’s book was partially inspired by his visits to relatives in Romania in the 1970s. The work hammers home the real evil of Communism, which was in some ways not that far removed from Sipos’s gory renderings. In 2000, Sipos launched his website – www.communistvampires.com – which he continues to maintain.

In a 2012 interview, I asked Sipos to expand on his reasons for writing Vampire Nation.

Vampire Nation is the only novel I ever intended, from the beginning, to have a message, which is anti-communism. It is not pro-conservative, or pro-libertarian, or pro-anything. Unlike Ayn Rand, I specifically avoided advocating a belief system. It’s intended to be an exposé of Communism. An entertaining lesson about Communism, much like Maus is for Nazism. Part of the strength of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm is that they advocate nothing. His satires expose and attack, but offer nothing in their place. That’s a good thing. His books aren’t weighed down with ideological baggage. It’s why conservatives and socialists still argue over who can claim Orwell.

Vampire Nation began as a short story for a Barnes & Noble anthology, Horrors: 365 Scary Stories. The story was about a vampire who wakes up in communist Romania. He’s thrilled at awakening in a nation of atheists, because the vampire’s strength is that nobody believes in him. He thinks he’s among easy prey. Instead, Communism sucks him of his drive, so that he becomes an inept, shiftless vampire, unwilling to expend much effort at hunting prey. I thought the idea was strong enough for a novel.

I’d visited Communist Hungary and Romania as a child. I now spent 1997 researching Ceausescu and Romanian communism. I created a skeleton outline, listing the events to showcase: the painted trees, Securitate tunnels, devastated Bucharest, the orphans, etc. One event per chapter. As I fleshed out the novel, I didn’t know what would happen in the next chapter until I wrote it, only its event.

One critic suggested that my heroine, Countess Anya Amasovich, is named after Ayn Rand. Because, I suppose, they’re both Russian, both anti-Communist, and have similar names. These similarities never occurred to me. Not even subconsciously. I know this, because I know where my Anya came from. She is inspired by KGB Major Anya Amasova, from the James Bond film, The Spy Who Loved Me. I read the entire Fleming series at age 13. Barbara Bach’s Anya Amasova was my favorite Bond girl. But I couldn’t accept her as a Communist — too evil. So I re-imagined the film’s Anya as her mirror opposite. Instead of a Red Russian, I imagined her as a White Russian. A Tsarist aristocrat. Every writer’s head is full of characters and ideas he might use someday. When I decided to expand Vampire Nation into a novel, I knew it was time to cast Anya. My Anya resembles a cartoonish Bond movie spy. Like Bond, she is all perfect. Impeccably dressed, even in grimy tunnels. Knowledgeable in all things. Skilled in all weapons. Sophisticated. One of her day jobs is that of fashion supermodel (an homage to Barbara Bach, who was a model before she was an actress). Anya also wields a cross, something Rand would never do.

Vampire Nation has a linear plot, and is focused on only one character, Henry. We meet Henry already on his journey to an exotic foreign land, with a flashback as to how he got his assignment. Then some early brushes with danger, a meeting with locals, meeting The Girl, several extended car chases and battles, culminating at the super-villain’s lair. I didn’t know how to end the novel until shortly before the final chapter. My outline only said that Henry and Anya meet Ceausescu, and Something Big happens. I considered killing Ceausescu, or Anya dying heroically, or everything destroyed by fire, or who knew what.Instead, the ending grew organically from my research. I’d learned that Ceausescu had a summer place near Dracula’s grave. Also that Ceausescu had a curious habit of twitches, of glancing about a room, looking at apparently nothing. My outline only said that Henry and Anya go to Dracula’s grave (the event) where Something Happens and then they go to Ceausescu’s home, where Something Even Bigger Happens. Only as I wrote of them going to Dracula’s grave, did I conceive of what they did there, and how it was to affect Ceausescu. Most readers like the ending, but a few complained that it stuck too close to history. Yet that was my intent. Vampire Nation is not alternate history. I call it parallel history, in that I maintain all the key historical facts — dates, places, quotes, events — and only add on a fantastical layer that provides a supernatural ‘explanation’ for historical events.

Anya’s aristocratic nature is her fatal flaw. She imagines that aristocracy matters, and that therefore, Prince Dracula’s ghost will aid her. Instead, Dracula assists Ceausescu. If anything, Vampire Nation takes a swipe at the silliness of aristocratic heritage. What Kurt Vonnegut calls foma. That said, Anya is the only (close to) perfect character I’ve ever written. Most of my characters are antiheroes or villains. My novels are full of self-deluded, status-hungry people pursuing false gods: careerism, consumerism, fame, communism. The vampires are delusional. They believe their motives are sincere, and that they’ve achieved paradise on earth.

Also in 2000, he published Manhattan Sharks – not a horror work, but a satire of corporate life and personal greed set in 1980s New York City. Serving as coda to the novel are two acerbic short stories, “Career Witch” and “Spirit of ‘68”. The latter – a mournful lament on the loss of the true Sixties’ idealism – won a well-deserved Honorable Mention in the 1996 Writer’s Digest fiction contest. In 2001 came Halloween Candy, an anthology of horror fact and fiction – including a never produced screenplay of the same title. In 2010, Pentagon Possessed: A Neocon Horror Story appeared – a screenplay portraying the run-up to the war in Iraq as a parody of an X-Files type conspiracy tale. Also that year, Sipos achieved his first professional book publication (with McFarland) – Horror Film Aesthetics: Creating the Visual Language of Fear. He followed quickly in 2011 (again with McFarland) with his book, Horror Film Festivals and Awards – one of the most thorough guides to these events ever written.

In 2010, Hollywood Witches was published – a satirical urban fantasy (with elements of horror). The book is very ‘adult’ in content, sometimes decidedly grotesque. The main message of the book, however, is a send-up of various New Age-type ideas – as well as of ‘political correctness’ in general. The heroine, Vanessa Cortez, uses her Catholic faith to fight against New Age occultists. She is helped by Hank Willow, her ex-boyfriend (also a Catholic) and co-worker at a tabloid newspaper. Sipos tellingly catches some of the irony of our modern times when he mentions that Hank ditches his extensive porn collection in order to consider himself as worthy of Vanessa. Multifarious aspects of Hollywood are also satirized – such as the mistreatment of ‘extras’ on the sets of movie productions, and there are quite a few passages that are very funny. The book is also fascinating for its descriptions of various sub-cultures, such as that of tabloid newspapers. The rock concert which occurs towards the end of the book is exceptionally well-rendered.

Sipos again, from the same interview:

Hollywood Witches is largely about the quest for social status. Diana Däagen is obsessed with projecting the correct image, to show that she ‘belongs’ to the industry, and has a high status within it. Many of the characters are similarly obsessed. I didn’t plan it that way. The themes just emerged.

In 1997 I was commissioned to write a sitcom for National Empowerment Television (NET), a conservative satellite network no longer on the air. I called it Washington Tricks, inspired by Yes, Minister. The main character was Cameron Cortez, a Congressional intern. (Monica Lewinsky was in the news.) I put Cameron on the cusp of identity politics. A Latina, yet Cuban-American (hence, more politically conservative). A woman, yet devoutly Catholic. Named Cortez because it was Latin, yet the name of a European conquistador. I figured her character would make for a good ideological tug-of-war in future episodes. The president of NET (Paul Weyrich) liked my pilot script, but was fired before my deal was finalized. Washington Tricks won its category in the Writers’ Foundation/America’s Best contest, and was thus supposedly read by a development executive at NBC, but nothing came of it. I later adapted it into an animation pilot, but nothing came of that, either. I put Cameron Cortez into Hollywood Witches instead, renaming her Vanessa, and changing her to Mexican-American, socially conservative, but pro-union Democratic. I considered making Vanessa a Wiccan, but kept her Catholic, not so much for ideology, but simply because I’m neither a woman, nor of color, nor a Wiccan. Making Vanessa a Catholic gave me something to identify with. When I transported Vanessa into Hollywood Witches, I also transported the issue of diversity, and in this new context, Hollywood’s hypocrisy on that issue. I also gave that issue to Diana, primarily to give her an ideology to motivate her.

Strong villains need some justification for their evil deeds. And ideally, their justifications should make some sense, at least on the surface, but are then warped through their actions. Good ends, bad means. In The Spy Who Loved Me (the Bond film), Stromberg wants to end human greed, hypocrisy, hatred, and war. He wants to do this by cleansing the earth through nuclear war, wiping the slate clean, and starting afresh. Hugo Drax in Moonraker (another Bond film) has a similar goal. Diana wants to bring fairness and diversity to Hollywood. Good goals. She wants to do this by killing thousands and enslaving millions. Bad means. Like Ceausescu in Vampire Nation, Diana is a utopian. I’d also had trouble with Hank in the earlier versions. Today, tabloid editors come from the Ivy League. Movies still often depict the stereotypical tabloid reporter, but I tried to show them as they are. I also changed Hank from an ace celebrity reporter to someone near the bottom of the tabloid food chain. These changes gave my characters moivation. Diana now had an ideology – diversity. Vanessa had a moral core – Catholicism – and Hank a goal – tabloid success (and its social status).

In 2013, Sipos wrote an introduction for Contentious Minds: The Mary McCarthy, Lillian Hellman Affair, by Ben Pleasants, a noted playwright. It draws attention to Hollywood celebrities covering up Stalin’s crimes. With this leitmotif of anti-communism, it seemed natural to ask Sipos about his attitude to Ayn Rand, with whom he has sometimes been compared.

I’ve never read The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. I’ve had sections read to me by boorish Objectivists, so I’ve some idea of their contents. I received a FREE hardcover Atlas Shrugged that I kept on a shelf for ten years. I flipped through it on occasion, but never read it. I eventually sold it for $20 on Amazon. So I guess I’ve mooched off of Ayn Rand’s estate. The only Rand books I’ve read – back in high school – are Anthem, The Night of January 16th, and The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. I saw The Fountainhead movie a couple of times. An unintentionally funny film. I saw the Atlas Shrugged Part 1 DVD (rented for FREE from the public library – more mooching by me), and thought it was a bore.

Like Nietzsche and Camille Paglia, Rand excels as a polemicist. Her powerful prose sarcastically and cleverly sledge-hammers away at her opponents. If you hate Rand’s targets, you’ll enjoy her vitriolic bon mots. But remove the polemics, as in the Atlas Shrugged film, and you’re left with cardboard characters and a dull story. Manhattan Sharks’ Golda Grandman caricatures the Rand cultist. Just like Nathaniel Branden changed his name from Nathan Blumenthal to incorporate “Rand” — “B-rand-en” — so Golda changes her name to “G-rand-man.” Also “Grand Man.” And “Golda” incorporates Gold. Golda is a typical Rand cultist. A self-delusional, non-entity who imagines herself “a man of great creative genius,” despite any achievements. Most likely, she thinks she’s “on strike.” Rand creates unintentionally funny, cardboard heroes, whereas I strive to create funny, self-deprecating anti-heroes.

I prefer Vonnegut to Rand. Although he’s a man of the left, and an atheist, a strong paleo-nostalgia runs through much of his earlier work. He recognizes America’s faults (slavery being among the worst), yet also regrets that something precious about America has been irrevocably lost in modern times. Like Bradbury, Vonnegut hankers after slower, simpler, more honest days (though when in one of his cynical moods, he might have denied that such days ever really existed). I wrote this about Vonnegut, which explains. I end that article by saying: “Like many satirists, Vonnegut is better at identifying and ridiculing a problem than in offering a solution”. That’s also true of Vampire Nation. It might have been true of Rand, had she a sense of humour and an ability to laugh at herself.

Thomas M. Sipos has certainly been carrying out a long-term guerrilla campaign of cultural endeavour in hostile territory. It remains to be seen if he can ever score some truly great successes that might make him a household name in America.

MARK WEGIERSKI is a Toronto-based writer and researcher with a special interest in horror, fantasy and science-fiction

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Land hunger, land anger

Posted on January 9, 2014 by Derek Turner

"Sloping Fields" by Liam Daly (Bicyclistic.com). Reproduced with permission

Land hunger, land anger

The Field (1990)

DEREK TURNER

The Field opens in dramatic style. The setting is the rural west of Ireland, in 1965. A father and son are seen silhouetted at the top of a cliff, having dragged there a strange and heavy load – a dead donkey stallion – which they then precipitate over the cliff into the bay below. The two men are Thady “The Bull” McCabe (Richard Harris) and his son Tadhg (Sean Bean). It transpires that the latter has killed the animal for having entered his father’s fiercely treasured field, a highly fertile holding of just under four acres created over years of unremitting toil by McCabes, carting kelp up and down hill to lay down as manure (1), until it has become an almost acrylically verdant oasis amidst the adjoining dun bogland.

As his nickname suggests, “The Bull” has an angry tunnel vision about this holding, fuelled by over-developed historical resentments about the Famine and even older and bitterer history – centuries of lands expropriated by foreigners, corrupt authorities and a Church uninterested in the plight of the poor. The field is his one bulwark against the hostile world, a kind of insurance policy for his family against poverty and the surrounding waste, and he has melded almost metaphysically with the handmade soil.  His extreme practicality has become a sort of poetry. This is from John Keane’s original text –

I know every rib of grass and every thistle and every whitethorn bush that bounds it. There’s shamrock in the south-west corner. Shamrock, imagine! The north part is bound by forty sloe bushes. Some fool planted them once but they’re a good hedge. This is a sweet little field, this is an independent little field that wants eatin’

His moral claim to these acres is fully accepted by the locals, among whom he occupies a respected-feared position, as a man of great physical prowess, who is, moreover, related to many of them.

The problem is that he is not the actual owner of the field, and Maggie Butler, the widow (Frances Tomelty) who owns it, decides to sell by public auction. She will not sell directly to Bull because she blames him for years of harassment at the hands of Tadhg and a local drunk and camp-follower, “The Bird” O’Donnell (John Hurt). In fact, Bull had been unaware of the harassment, and when he finds out about it he is wrathful. In the ensuing auction, although no local will contest with him, he finds himself pitted against the much greater financial resources of an American (Tom Berenger) with roots in the region, who wishes to pave over the precious field to allow access to a projected limestone quarry. In the original text –

A total stranger has come and he wants to bury my sweat and blood in concrete

The American is backed by the Gardaí and the local priest, and this feeds the Bull’s paranoia and feeling of powerlessness, giving rise to memorable orations – in which the aggrieved pride of the working man combines with a kind of ultra-nationalism and fear of the future. Disastrous events follow almost inevitably – a violent confrontation with the American which leads to his accidental death, the gradual disintegration of what remains of Bull’s patrimony and ideals, ending in the death of Tagdhg on the cliffs on which we met him, and the Bull’s descent into full-blown insanity, lashing the sea with his ashplant.

Although The Field is now regarded as a minor cinematic classic, it was not a commercial success. According to IMDB it earned just over US$1.4m in what should have been the highly lucrative US market (it had cost approximately IR£5m to make). This was notwithstanding that it was adapted from a 1965 play by the best-selling  John Brendan Keane (2) and that it was directed by Jim Sheridan, who had already directed My Left Foot, and would go on to direct In the Name of the Father and In America. Reviewers generally disliked the film, although they agreed that Harris was outstanding (his part earned him his second Academy Award nomination). Harris’s passionate commitment to the part must have been fuelled by his Irish nationalist sympathies (3). The film is admittedly melodramatic – but it is also possible that many reviewers simply could not relate to McCabe’s bullying persona, his distrust of ‘progress’, his contempt for the rule of law, and his premodern obsession with family and land.

McCabe’s exaggerated emotions are however driven partly by insecurity – knowledge of his own powerlessness in this new rationalist scheme of things where money means more than moral right, and the knowledge that Tadhg simply does not share his monocular commitment. In the film there is an enticing Traveller girl who has set her cap at Tadhg – for Bull, she symbolizes irresponsibility and impermanence.

Much deeper even than these motivations is guilt about his first son, Seamie, who killed himself (a mortal sin for Catholics) after the Bull had told him the field could only ever support one of the sons. (Since the suicide, some eighteen years before the story begins, the Bull and his wife – played by Brenda Fricker – had not spoken to each other.) So if he is an unsympathetic figure, he at least has some cause – and as he lurches inevitably from one cataclysmic error to another he accrues pathos, as if the viewer is watching some figure from legend, a Polyphemus blinded by passion and limited by his lack of imagination. Many seeing the film will also have a sneaking feeling that the Bull was right to try to thwart ‘progress’, at least when that progress involves the erasure of the earth in favour of concrete and quarries.

The film diverges from the play in many particulars, although many of the changes are understandable from a film-maker’s perspective. The most important change is that in the play the story ends unresolved, with the community united in a conspiracy of silence. In the play, there are no Travellers. There was no harassment of the widow. The story about Seamie was also wholly made up by screenwriters; the real cause of the eighteen year silence between the Bull and his wife was that he had shot a tinker’s pony. The notion that the Bull’s mother died while making hay in the field likewise has no textual basis. The would-be purchaser has come from England rather than America. The auctioneer Mick Flanagan, his wife Maimie and their son Leamy are all much more important in the original, with the auctioneer comical as well as corrupt, and a broad hint at the end that Leamy will tell the authorities what everybody knows. The Bull and Tadhg are even less admirable than in the film, the Bull readily threatening death to potential informants, even obliquely to the widow, Tadhg quite as fanatical as his father. (In an alienating aside, we learn that it took the two of them an hour to beat the donkey to death.) And it is the Bishop rather than the parish priest who lectures the complicit community and threatens them with interdiction –

This is a parish in which you understand hunger. But there are many hungers…There is a hunger for food – a natural hunger. There is the hunger of the flesh – a natural understandable hunger. There is a hunger for home, for love, for children.. These things are good…but there is also the hunger for land…how far are you prepared to go to satisfy this hunger?

Although the screenwriters managed to transmit some sense of Keane’s lyricism, little of his whimsy was translated to the screen, such as the surreal conversation between the Bull and his son while they are lying in wait for the stranger, in which they wonder whether crows think like men, and Tadhg avers with a superstitious shiver that “if the seed of man fails, the rats will take over the world”.

All this having been noted, The Field is nevertheless an engrossing and at times entrancing film, which casts a rare and unsentimental light on the pinched and precarious lives of tenant farmers, and one of mankind’s oldest and strongest emotions.

NOTES

  1. Seaweed contains salt, but in small and easily soluble quantities, and it also contains such essential improvers as nitrogen, potassium, phosphate and magnesium. In the play, the field has been manured more conventionally, by the McCabes’ heifers
  2. Born in Listowel, County Kerry, in 1928, Keane lived in England from 1951 to 1953 and then returned to Listowel, where he ran a pub. In his spare time, he was a prolific playwright, short story writer and poet, although he may be best remembered for his humorous series Letters of…, supposed letters from a T.D., a priest, a Garda officer, etc. His work was popular but was long disregarded by critics, perhaps because of its perceived provincialism. In A Biographical Dictionary of Irish Writers (1985), Anne M. Brady and Brian Cleeve surmise, “A possible cause of critical unenthusiasm has been the excitement and poetry of his writing, presently unfashionable”. Keane died in 2002. His nephew is the well-known author and journalist Fergal Keane
  3. The Limerick-born actor was a notorious supporter of the IRA, although he recanted somewhat following the Harrods bombing of December 1983. Naturally, these views did not deter him from living in the enemy environs of Holland Park, or accepting starring roles in many British-made films – including, most ironically, Cromwell (1970)

 

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ENDNOTES Tasmin Little – ebullient torch-carrier for excellence

Posted on January 7, 2014 by Derek Turner

ENDNOTES

Photo by MELANIE WINNING

Tasmin Little – ebullient torch-carrier for excellence

Classical Music Editor Stuart Millson meets TASMIN LITTLE, O.B.E.

Just before Christmas, the Quarterly Review was very fortunate to meet one of our country’s foremost musical talents, the brilliant violinist, Tasmin Little. Known for her many recordings, recitals and concerts, this performer seems able to move between genres with great ease – the monumental Elgar Violin Concerto one day; caprices, concerti and reveries by Berlioz, Locatelli, Szymanowski or Ravel, the next. In fact, the QR was very lucky to have slotted into her busy schedule: just after our interview, the soloist was flying out to Dublin, for a concert at the country’s National Concert Hall.

I travelled over to suburban West London on a cold, but sunny morning for the interview, and was greeted at home by this ebullient musician as if I were an old friend – something which put me immediately at my ease; as being a non-musician myself, I was naturally anxious to avoid making too many technical mistakes. Coffee, and excellent coffee at that, was served, and I was able to strike a spark soon into the proceedings, as many years ago, when I lived in Gloucestershire, my neighbour next door-but-one – a retired lady who loved classical music – was actually one of my interviewee’s teachers. Soon, my questions, which I had written into a rigid 1-10 sort of structure, flowed into a general, and most illuminating discussion – a discussion which took us from the earliest influences in Tasmin’s musical career, to the whole matter of how a recording is actually undertaken.

Tasmin Little was born in 1965,

…into a household where classical music, and other types of music, too, were played. I can remember records of Locatelli – sparkling violin playing which switched me on to the violin and the virtuosic idea. Paganini’s violin works, and their quite different and muscular style showed me how the violin was capable of creating effects and astonishing sounds – the violin portraying different characters of itself. My father had a love of Delius, which in turn developed in me an attachment to the composer and other late-romantic English music.

So how and when did the musical career begin?

I started at a normal primary school, and before long my teacher strongly recommended that it was essential that I should attend a specialist music school. At the age of eight, I began at the Yehudi Menuhin School in Surrey. I developed a love of chamber music, and found that this gave me the essential ingredient for all music-making – listening. Music became for me a dialogue, a conversation, and this has informed my music philosophy: listening and collaboration.

It is, of course, a very difficult thing to try to describe the creative process, the strange element which gives noises made by musical instruments their spiritual and emotional value, but the violinist believes that “the intimacy of making music with someone” is part of that miraculous formula: a sense that musicians almost have an extra sense – a wavelength all of their own. I asked if, during these years, my interviewee attended concerts and gained a feel for the profession through such outings, but it was the Menuhin School – in itself – provided the spur, the foundation and the inspiration. “Life and work there was truly intensive,” Tasmin explained,

…but this period equipped me with the ability, later, to take flight as a soloist, which I did, as a direct result of participating in the Menuhin Competition, in which I won third prize. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra then offered me an engagement, as the First Prize-winner was unavailable! I was 18 years old – quite young to be given such an opportunity – and I appeared at St. David’s Hall, Cardiff, with Yehudi Menuhin conducting. I remember him as being extremely warm and friendly.

Tasmin’s next great step was a meeting with maestro, Kurt Masur (a conductor known for his work, especially in the romantic repertoire, with orchestras from Germany to New York). “I met Kurt Masur, and he gave me another early opportunity, this time to play with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in the Delius concerto.”

I asked if the career of a soloist could be a lonely experience, in the sense that a player (or indeed, conductor) might rush from one ensemble to another. “There are many friendly faces that you see and get to know,” replied Tasmin. “The life of an orchestra has to carry on, but it is not as lonely as you might think!”

One particular matter which has long preoccupied me is the question of how a recording actually made? I asked Tasmin: “Our readers would probably be quite keen to know how you, a conductor and an orchestra go about making a record. Do you, for example, sit down with – say – Sir Andrew Davis, and discuss a work over coffee? How much preparation is there?”

Tasmin’s answer (and she referred to her tremendous Elgar Violin Concerto recording on the Chandos label) surprised me.

Andrew Davis and I know each other, and we know – instinctively, professionally – what we are doing. We have each performed this work, possibly some 50 times, before recording it. I did the recording with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, which was a huge adventure for them, as they hadn’t actually played it for years. It felt like a new piece for many of the players. We didn’t know precisely the detail of what we wanted to do – Andrew might turn a corner, and we kept in step, the performance evolving rapidly, with a spontaneity, a bond. But we both know the work so well, and take details on board, and respond to the impetuousness of the writing. It is that detail which makes or breaks an Elgar performance. It is that sort of artistic collaboration that gives the very best possible outcome.

So do you, in a sense, walk into the studio or concert hall, and launch into a complete play-through?

We like to record in great chunks – a complete take. We then have a complete break and listen to what we have recorded, to see if we have attained the right sweep. The producer might well comment, and we might compare notes, and even do a different take if one small part needs correction. That is the beauty of modern recording. We did the Elgar [nearly an hour in length] in two sessions, two sessions of six hours. And we did a flying leap at it, the two sessions being like two magnets slotting together.

And what of acoustics? How much would the acoustic of a place influence your performance?

An acoustic with an other-worldiness, a dreamy, swimming sort of acoustic, now that is right for a large-scale work. Not so for a completely solo chamber work. Where we choose to record is driven by the repertoire.

Finally, I asked Tasmin what her views were on the place of music within our society.Are we doing enough as a country to promote classical music and the arts? I mentioned the situation in many state schools, where children have no exposure to great music – where children no longer sing together in school assemblies. And what of the ideas associated with “outreach”? Is classical music in danger of diluting itself, losing its mystery and ritual, in an attempt to become more accessible? Tasmin clearly believes in the absolute importance of music:

I have spoken to politicians, to a committee within Parliament, to the press, to everyone who will listen, to explain why the arts are vital. We have always celebrated individualism in this country, and this ability to be creative is brought out by education, music and arts. Our education system has often been the envy of the world, but I am very worried when we begin to take away options. If you don’t reach children at an early age – to find out what they are capable of, they will lose that learning potential. Music should be part of everybody’s life. Music is still all around us, but how can we keep up that level of musicality without injecting time and money into it? Scientific studies, and our own experience, show that music helps with the functioning of the brain. Music is good for our bodies and our emotions.

And the ideals associated with “outreach” need not be a dilution, says Tasmin, if prepared thoroughly, and without making concessions.

On my website, I have created my own outreach – three pieces of violin music, presented as “The Naked Violin”. I have made available pieces by Bach, Ysaye, and the modern British composer, Paul Patterson. Since I launched this facility, I have received about a quarter of a million contacts – people from all over the world, from China to Papua New Guinea, who had never considered listening to our buying a classical CD, but who have now been given an introduction to classical music. This exercise simply presented the music. I believe that this is the right way to achieve contact with a new audience. It doesn’t have to be diluted.

From a violinist who has some 70 or 80 works in her repertoire (a truly astonishing feat of memory and artistry) this education and listening project is indeed a gift – as are her many performances and commercial CDs. Meeting Tasmin Little made me realise that we should not be pessimistic about the future of the arts. Thanks to her energy, eloquence, elevating performances – and her deep commitment to education – the future of our musical life is surely safer than thought.

 

 

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ENDNOTES – Do the Math

Posted on December 17, 2013 by leslie

Do the Math

Leslie Jones attends ‘Zemlinsky & his Quartets’, a talk given by Antony Beaumont, 20th November, Austrian Cultural Forum, as part of the Hampstead Arts Festival, 2013, and reviews Zemlinsky, String Quartet no 4, Op 25 (1936) and other music connected with Vienna, the Brodsky Quartet, Hampstead Parish Church, 3rd December 2013, also part of the Hampstead Arts Festival, 2013

Alexander von Zemlinsky

Composing music is presumably difficult enough but the difficulties are compounded if the composer is in thrall to insidious, non-musical influences. Alexander von Zemlinsky, as musicologist and conductor Antony Beaumont pointed out in an informative and entertaining lecture, replete with illustrations on the piano, was obsessed with the putative mystical significance of numbers. This numerological fixation apparently determined key aspects of his compositions, such as the recurrence of particular notes. Certain numbers transposed into notes represented key personalities or elements in the Zemlinsky sphere, such as the antithesis between the ego and the other. Beaumont detects here the influence of Jewish mystical teaching (Kabbalistic thought). According to the latter, every letter, word and number in the Hebrew Bible has an underlying esoteric meaning.

Douglas Jarman notes in ‘Alban Berg, Wilhelm Fliess and the Secret programme of the Violin Concert’, that Berg also regarded particular numbers as fateful and symbolic. Number 10 apparently represented Berg’s mistress Hanna Fuchs-Robettin. A devotee of Wilhelm Fliess’s theory of vital periodicity, Berg regarded number 23 as especially significant for men because, like women, they (allegedly) go through mathematically fixed sexual cycles.

Antony Beaumont believes that qua composer, Zemlinsky always needed a painful external stimulus, such as the break up of a relationship, to banish inanition. In the case of the String Quartet no 4, it was the death in 1935 of Alban Berg. This piece, accordingly, is dark and downbeat throughout, although not devoid of lyrical passages. How fitting, then, to hear this sombre and austere work, arguably indebted to a distinctly Jewish musical tradition, in the atmospheric setting of Hampstead Parish Church, with its fine acoustic. The concert concluded with another melancholy composition, Beethoven’s String Quartet No 115 in A minor, Op 132 (1825). The tragic third movement, in which the composer contemplates his own mortality, is indicatively entitled ‘A convalescent’s sacred song of thanks to the Godhead’ (‘Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit’). Éblouissant.

Beethoven

 

Leslie Jones December 2013

©

Leslie Jones is the Deputy Editor of Quarterly Review

 

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ENDNOTES – Diva Assoluta

Posted on December 10, 2013 by leslie

Diva Assoluta

LESLIE JONES reviews a recital in celebration of the National Day of Romania, December 1st: the Romanian Cultural Institute, 5th December 2013, Anita Hartig, soprano, Mats Knutsson, piano

Anita Hartig

Musically, Romania has consistently punched above its weight, as evidenced by the disproportionate number of top sopranos that it has produced over the years. Names like Cotrubaş, Gheorghiu, Văduva and Zeani, spring to mind. Anita Hartig, a member of the Vienna State Opera, once again confirms this rule. Her voice, warm but powerful belies her somewhat slender figure and is reminiscent of the late Elizabeth Schwarzkopf (an earlier stalwart of the Vienna State Opera). She evidently has all the attributes to make a brilliant career: stage presence in abundance, the ability to sing opera in several different languages and (dare we say it) ravishing beauty.

Judging from this performance she is quite at ease across the repertoire – in Mozart (Le nozze di Figaro, Dove sono, Aria Contessa act. 3), in Richard Strauss (Lieder, Heimliche Aufforderung, Breit über mein Haupt dein schwarzes Haar) but also in the warhorses of the Italian and French operatic repertoire such as Puccini’s La Bohème (Donde lieta, aria Mimi act. 3) and Gounod’s Faust (Air des bijoux, aria Marguerite act. 3).

How did the Romanian Cultural Institute manage to land such a sought after performer? The answer is perhaps provided by the material with which she concluded her recital, to wit, some evocative and affecting songs from her native country. In other words, she has an unbreakable emotional tie to her homeland and her community.

Turnul Chindiei

Leslie Jones, December 2013

©

Leslie Jones is the Deputy Editor of Quarterly Review

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Reconnecting with Cavafy

Posted on December 10, 2013 by Derek Turner

Reconnecting with Cavafy

DEREK TURNER reviews the latest tribute to Greece’s greatest modern poet

Shades of Love – Photographs Inspired by the Poems of C. P. Cavafy

Dimitris Yeros, poems translated by David Connolly, Insight Editions, San Francisco, 2010, 165 pps, $75

Your nightingales, your songs, are living still

And them the death that clutches all things cannot kill (Callimachus)

This volume landed in my postbox burdened by the weight of its handsome format and approval from such luminaries as Gore Vidal, Edward Albee, Jeff Koons, Olympia Dukakis and even the American Library Association. That is not to mention the awesome responsibility of repackaging for new readers the classic works of Constantine P. Cavafy, generally agreed to have been the greatest Greek poet of the 20th century – and who is furthermore notoriously difficult to translate. But Dimitris Yeros is deservedly highly-regarded as an artist-photographer, and David Connolly has stepped assuredly up to the mark made in 1975 by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Shades of Love is derived from a short poem, “To Call Up The Shades”, oddly not included in this 67 poem strong collection.

Cavafy is venerated by educated Greeks because of his wistful evocations of the great Hellenic past, which seems all the more resplendent in contrast with today’s diminished (and still diminishing) country. His works have also accrued international admirers, like Forster – who quoted Cavafy in his Alexandria, and described him memorably as “a man in a straw hat, standing at a slight angle to the universe” – T. E. Lawrence, Eliot, Toynbee, and Durrell. Here is a more recent example of the poet’s lasting appeal – Sean Connery reciting “Ithaca” to the music of Vangelis. But then who could not be moved by such expansive sentiments, such an imaginative itinerary across the Inland Sea? Yeros has illustrated this poem with a study of Gabriel García Márquez, because of that writer’s “life rich in adventures and experiences”; this is one of the more oblique and therefore most successful picture/poem pairings.

Cavafy’s “Thermopylae” likewise throbs with transcendent chivalry (and a rare respect for conservative impulses). Here is Connolly’s rendition of that noble work (American orthography retained):

Honor to those who in their lives

resolved to defend some Thermopylae.

Never wavering from duty;

just and forthright in all their deeds,

but with pity and compassion too;

generous whenever rich and when

poor, still generous in smaller ways,

still helping all they can;

always speaking the truth,

yet without hatred for those who lie.

 

And still honor is their due

when they foresee (and many do foresee)

that Ephialtes will eventually appear,

and the Medes will, in the end, get through.

All Westerners should value this hierophant of Hellenism, but Cavafy speaks first as a Greek to Greeks, a man whose modest mode of living – civil servant (1), private dreamer, washed-up exile-of-a-kind in once-important Alexandria – might epitomize his country’s disastrous most recent century.

Yeros clearly revels in Cavafy’s Greekness, but he has opted to emphasize Cavafy’s non-nationally-specific other side – his homosexuality. Homoerotic sentiments are proudly overt and liberally distributed throughout the canon, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his proclivities. Yeros is not the first artist to have zeroed in on this; as long ago as 1966, David Hockney illustrated twelve of the poems in similarly lithe (if less lavish) vein. But some of the images unfortunately supplant rather than complement the verse. This is always a risk when illustrating poetry, perhaps especially when the verse is subtle, and concerns a subject which is still surrounded by moralism and mystification. Yeros also used some unpublished and “not very good poems” because they gave him an idea for an image. Would a poet of Cavafy’s notorious perfectionism have wanted these efforts to be included in such a prestigious collection – and would a man of his period and cultivation really have wanted his sexual orientation to be the first thing the American Library Association remembers? The poet enjoyed Alexandria’s blowsy underbelly – but he was also a private person of surpassing seriousness, a man who lived alone for much of his life, an Orthodox observer interested in “the feelings of my own people” (2) and “the great glories of our race, / To the splendour of our Byzantine heritage” (3). In the end Yeros is constrained to admit “I do not know whether Cavafy himself would have approved of these photographs”. In any case – if at the risk of sounding like a serious version of Ed Zern (4) – to the general reader all this eroticism is likely to be less interesting than Cavafy’s numinous exactitude, gossipy historical immediacy and wry humanity.

Cavafy is big enough to accommodate all kinds of interpretations, and as the subtitle “Photographs inspired by…” makes plain, this was always intended to be a visual rather than a literary treatment. In any case, it is by any reasonable standards a thoughtful and generous tribute, a labour of love that does credit to its producers. Thanks to its technical excellence, and clever co-option of some unexpected public figures as Cavafyites, it will also help keep the poetry alive into an increasingly less Western world. Yet it seems a shame that it omits gems like “The City”, “Waiting for the Barbarians” and “The God Abandons Antony”. Maybe Yeros thought them too obvious; yet they are obvious for a reason. It would have been fascinating to know how Connolly would have Englished those, and see what subtle  beauty they would certainly have elicited from Yeros’ highly-attuned apparatus.

Greek Alexandria has gone the way of the Great Library and the Pharos, drowned like Rhakotis or exported like Cleopatra’s Needle – and now even the Greek homeland teeters on the brink of dissolution, its social model sullied seemingly beyond catharsis and foundering under uncontrolled immigration, its economy mortgaged to the World Bank, its politics beholden to Brussels, its streets at times a battle-zone between murderous extremists. Yet through Cavafy as filtered by Forster, Durrell, Eliot, and now Yeros we can still connect with this endangered inheritance. Like Antony, legendarily listening to the music of Hercules’ departing retinue, we can

…go firmly to the window

and listen with deep emotion,

but not with the whining, the pleas of a coward;

listen – your final pleasure – to the voices,

to the exquisite music of that strange procession,

and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

NOTES

  1. Cavafy’s Pooterish-sounding profession was Special Clerk in the Irrigation Service (Third Circle) of the Ministry of Public Works
  2. “Since Nine O’Clock”
  3. “In Church”
  4. In 1959, Ed Zern wrote a spoof review of Lady Chatterley for Field and Stream – “This fictional account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of considerable interest to outdoor-minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour these sidelights on the management of a Midlands shooting estate, and in this reviewer’s opinion this book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller’s Practical Gamekeeping”

 

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The tide-watchers

Posted on December 6, 2013 by Derek Turner

The tide-watchers

 

At the end of a sand-heaped lane

A scene from Rembrandt –

Worried lights clustered against hugeness;

Lowlit men appraise an upraised ocean

Boiling where a beach should be.

Quiet speaking on a universal plain

As wind blows the buckthorn flat and

The blackest of black cattle stand against stars

Behind the dunes behind the sea-wall now attacked;

They move and moan like their owners.

“In twenty minutes we’ll know” –

“Twenty minutes”; eyes down and overlapping out,

Await the flow – there is nowhere else to go.

 

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