The New Pope

The New Argentinian Pope has apparently made his views clear about what he calls "Las Malvinas," that is The Falkland Islands.  He has made statements regretting the loss of the lives of the Argentinian soldiers, sailors and airmen many of them conscripts, who perished during General Galtieri's misguided attempt forcibly to annex the islands to Argentina.

For a catholic, newly-elected Pope it might be a bit better if he were to apologise for Galtieri's appalling dictatorship and to the families of the "disappeared" ones - those thousands brutally executed or simply dropped from helicopters.  And also for Galtieri's cynical exploitation of the issue to distract attention at home - just as that idiot woman Kirchner is attempting at present.

Meanwhile I suggest that he keeps his Jesuitical nose firmly to the church grindstone (it is in need of urgent attention) and out of the affairs of Great Britain and the Falkland Islands.

Until the next time.

Characters in Books (Again)

The classics: something everyone wants to have read, but nobody wants to read.

Mark Twain

As will become obvious, Mr Twain was referring to more ancient works than the ones to which I shall refer in this piece.  However, attempting to ignore the warning implicit in his dictum, I recently acquired a copy of Henry James's Portrait of a Lady; it cost only a pound, and after reading the first page or two I decided to give it a chance.

I have managed about 40% of the novel and am starting to weary of it.  Mr James created a splendidly simpatico character in old Mr Touchett, but then - naturally for good plot reasons - decided to kill him off; I was disappointed to read of his decease.  Then there is Miss Isabel Archer, the 22-year old upper-middle-class American female to whom he refers from time to time as "our heroine."  I'm afraid that in my view this epithet is quite undeserved.

It is true that Miss Archer started well, but by page 200 or thereabouts I started to get fed up with her; in fact, so annoyed did I become that I decided that perhaps the book should have been named Portrait of a Silly Bitch whose Formidable Intelligence was only Exceeded by her Selfishness and Naïveté.  In other words, she started to get on my tits.  And there's another one - Miss Archer's friend, Henrietta Stacpole, meddling "democratic" American journalist who certainly by page 180 has earned if not a smack in the mouth, certainly a one-way ticket back to the U.S.A.  And there's another meddler, the elegant Madame Merle; curiously I took no exception to the rather cold and stiff Mrs Touchett, though I had the suspicion that I was supposed to.  Really it is all too much.

Reflecting on this dismal situation this evening whilst eating a hamburger, brought to mind some other silly women I have come  across in "the classics."  Consider Anthony Trollope's infuriating Lady Eustace (The Eustace Diamonds) or Thomas Hardy's Bathsheba Everdene.  The latter of course appeared in Far from the Madding Crowd, annoying silly woman - she did NOT deserve Gabriel Oak I'm afraid - and that was in Hardy's first novel.  In his last, Jude the Obscure he created a 24-carat, ocean-going cow in the form of Jude's wife, Susan - and this opinion is based on my reading the book over thirty years ago.  Perhaps I am wrong, but I won't go back there.

By contrast, Rosamond Lehmann's heroines, Olivia and Kate Curtis in Invitation to the Waltz are really quite delightful (Olivia rather lets her standards drop I think in the sequel The Weather in the Streets); Miss Lehmann's heroines in her other novels (with the exception of Dusty Answer) are more difficult in this regard, and several are pretty bloody, although I believe that we are supposed to sympathise with them.  Despite  Miss Lehmann's superb writing I usually, as one might expect, find this pretty hard - if not impossible - to do.

Rose Macaulay created a complex though not unsympathetic character in The World my Wilderness: Madame Michel; she is however finally redeemed - at least in my eyes.  Her daughter is difficult, but understandably so.  Her female characters in Told by an Idiot are largely attractive - especially Rome (yes, that was the name).  Sadly Miss Macaulay's books are not so easy to find.

For the time being, Henry James having brought  me to this summit of annoyance, I shall return to the relaxed and cultivated English of one of his (many) admirers: Sir Max Beerbohm, where I shall be soothed; equally I know that there will be no silly bitches in Sir Max's writings to wind me up - oops!!  I had momentarily forgotten his infuriating charcter, Zuleika Dobson; I'll give HER a miss.

Re-reading the foregoing, I have concluded that anyone who can be bothered to read my scribblings will assume that I expect perfection in an imperfect world; perhaps I do and am thus a disappointed man.

I rather think that I am.

Until the next time.

All-Purpose Poetry - Nearly

Today I found an excellent little book by one W.S.Scott, published in 1946.  It has the slightly curious title a Clowder of Cats.  A clowder is one of a number of names for a group of cats, another being a "glaring."

As a cat-lover of course I snapped it up.  So far I have had only limited opportunity to examine the book (being currently busy reading Max Beerbohm's Seven Men and Two Others for about the fifth time).

There are several pieces lamenting the passing of beloved feline pets; the following example, apart from a reference to a paw, could well apply to other circumstances and indeed to other relationships:

To a Siamese Cat

"I shall walk in the sun alone
Whose golden light you loved:
I shall sleep alone
And, stirring, touch an empty place:
I shall write uninterrupted
(Would that your gentle paw
Could stay my moving pen once again!)

I shall see beauty
But none to match your living grace:
I shall hear music:
But not so sweet as the droning song
With which you loved me.

I shall fill my days
But I shall not, cannot forget:
Sleep soft dear friend
For while I live, you shall not die."
                           
 Michael Joseph

I am no poetry critic, but must say that I find the final line if not entirely original, incredibly moving.

Until the next time

De Mortuis nil nisi Bonum? Probably Not

So President Chavez is dead; no more "raspberry beret" then.

I shall, in a way, miss his absurd - indeed sometimes almost surreal - rants; I suppose every stage needs a comedian sometimes.

For the Cubans' sake I hope that whichever of his socialist henchmen takes his place will be as generous as the late-lamented one; and for the Venezuelans' sake that the replacement might have at least a minimum understanding of economics or even a basic education.

There's an old joke:
"What would happen if the Sahara desert was taken over by communists?"
Nothing for a few years and then there'd be a shortage of sand."

With arguably the world's largest oil reserves, these socialist goons have a country with crumbling infrastructure and have had even to devalue their currency.  Typical left-wing balls-up - and remember that they have nationalised everything - normally the kiss of death it is true.  If a real lefty takes over I suppose they'll start making an atom bomb like that clown in North Korea.

Sic transit gloria - or perhaps not.

Until the next time

Culture & The Detective Novel

They do best who if they cannot but admit love, yet make it keep quarter, and sever it  from their serious affairs and actions of life; for if it check once with business it troubleth men's fortunes, and maketh men that they can no ways be true to their own words.*

*********************************************************************************

Literary commentators are apt from time to time to refer to "The Golden Age" of detective fiction.  This spans a period from the late 1920s and runs through to the 1950s.  English authors mentioned in connexion with this genre include Margery Allingham, Edmund Crispin, Ngaio Marsh, Michael Innes, John Dickson Carr, Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers.

I have read all of these writers - not all their works of course, except those of Miss Sayers, who was by far and away the finest of them, at least in regard to depth of characterisation and literary quality.  Consequent to this was her exceptional writing on emotions within a relationship, this of course being the famous  relationship between Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane that was developed over four novels.  The fact that her plots were implausible (except perhaps for the Nine Tailors) or shall we say more kindly, a little fabulous, and sometimes including a fundamental flaw (e.g. in Murder must Advertise) for me in no way detracts from her wonderful writing.  

Revisionist lefty critics like to point to Sayers' snobbery and even racism, but of course this is bollocks, since every revisionist is axiomatically anachronistic; these books were written in the 1930s.

Here's an example of the quality of Miss Sayers' writing from Gaudy Night:  Harriet Vane, an alumna of Oxford University is at her old college having been asked by the dons to investigate some strange goings-on there.  She has not been there for ten years and finds herself deeply attracted to academe and the calm of the "City of Dreaming Spires."  Thus inspired she sits down and composes a sonnet:

Here, then, at home, by no more storms distrest,

Folding laborious hands we sit, wings furled;

Here in close perfume lies the rose-leaf curled,

Here the sun stands and knows not east or west,

Here no tide runs; we have come, last and best,

From the wide zone through dizzying circles hurled,

To that still centre where the spinning world

Sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest.

This is followed by a short critique...  I challenge any of you to find any other detective writer who could compose such a poem or indeed has done.  There are I daresay, those who will ask "what has a sonnet to do with a detective story?" but that would perhaps be to misunderstand the "golden age" wouldn't it?

(Ironically that poem has strange relevance to me since the feeling it describes was known to me for just a few short months at the end of 2011 after nearly two years of misery; I shall never know such peace again I fear.)

But Miss Sayers has not finished!

Later in the book, her hero Lord Peter (every bit as erudite as his true love) completes the sonnet in a rather clever and off-beat way thus:

Lay on thy whips, O Love, that me upright,

Poised on the perilous point, in no lax bed

May sleep, as tension at the verberant core

Of music sleeps; for, if thou spare to smite,

Staggering, we stoop, stooping, fall dumb and dead,

And dying so, sleep our sweet sleep no more.

Again Miss Sayers follows this with a nice critique (in Harriet's thoughts of course).  This is I insist, elegant stuff and heartily recommended to lovers of good English everywhere.

And the elegant quotation from Francis Bacon, at the top of this article appears at the beginning of chapter 3 of Gaudy Night.   

Dorothy L. Sayers eventually had had enough of writing detective fiction, and moved off in other directions including a religious play and a translation of Dante, uncompleted at her death in 1957.  Jill Paton Walsh has completed an unfinished (by Sayers) Lord Peter Wimsey (and Harriet!) story, Thrones Dominations, and has also written another from scratch, The Attenbury Emeralds.

I should like to add in closing this piece that there are just two other detective writers from whom I am able to derive an equal degree of pleasure: Raymond Chandler and Georges Simenon, both very able observers of the human condition but neither of course English!

Until the next time.

*Throughout my life I have failed in this regard

The Elgin Marbles

It is not really a very good time for prime minister Mr David Cameron, with the embarrassment at Eastleigh on Thursday with the burgeoning UK Independence Party beating the Conservatives into third place.

How anyone in Eastleigh could have voted for the useless, corrupt and pathetic Liberal Democrats is beyond my imagination, but that as they say is democracy - i.e. what we have to put up with from our brilliant fellow-subjects.

Anyway Cameron has redeemed himself a little in my eyes upon my discovering that he does not intend that the Elgin Marbles (now known by the politically-correct as "The Parthenon Marbles") be returned.  Good.

Does it annoy any of you that names and pronunciations are constantly changed?

So to make myself clear:

"Mumbai" is Bombay

"Myanmar" is Burma

"Innuits" are Eskimos - or more properly Esquimaux

"Romania" is Roumania - that's how my Roumanian ex-girlfriend spelled it.

And Kenya is pronounced "Keenya" as I was taught

I can just about stand "Tanzania" and Zimbabwe, but they are horrible names.

Until the next time