'Quartet in Autumn' by Barbara Pym

        A week or so ago, I finished Barbara Pym's late novel 'Quartet in Autumn' - a book I have been meaning to read for some time now; a fragment of a wider and perhaps now lost  Anglo-Catholic culture.  (After  dipping into Mervyn Peake's behemoth 'Titus Groan' I am now currently reading the patrician 'The Soldier Philosophers' by Anthony Powell.)
As you may remember I have written about 'Quartet in Autumn' before when I was reviewing Paul Scott's panoramic and intricate 'Jewel in the Crown', set in the final years of the British Raj. 

     Both writers had been shortlisted for the 1977 Booker Prize - Scott for 'Staying On' set in Post-Independence India, and Pym for 'Quartet in Autumn'.  Both writers were deserving of public recognition, but the prize went to Scott who was by then not only an alcoholic but dying of cancer. He was to ill to be present at the award ceremony and died four months later in March 1978. Pym at the time was in remission from breast cancer, but it returned and she died in early 1980.  
      'Quartet in Autumn' was conceived in the wake of her diagnosis and treatment in 1971,  when she was working in the office of the International African Institute in London, and it was the first of novel of hers to be published since 'No Fond Return of Love' in 1961.  Early on in the book, in language that reflects the opinion of various publishers, there is a description of the sort of novel that one of the main characters is looking for: 'She had been an unashamed reader of novels, but if she hoped to find one which reflected her own sort of life she had come to realize that the position of an unmarried, unattached, ageing woman is of no interest whatever to the writer of modern fiction.' 

    All of that changed, however, in the mid '70s when, following an article in 'The Times Literary Supplement', there was a shift critical opinion, with 'Quartet in Autumn' being published in 1977, followed by 'The Sweet Dove Died' in 1978.  Four novels were published posthumously.

      'Quartet in Autumn' is the story of four co-workers who share a single office.  They are all roughly the same age and are all facing retirement. The office is in some un-named and un-described organization in central London, in the early '70s.  Faceless perhaps, I suppose.  I suspect, though, it is some form of institute of higher education, possibly in Bloomsbury. There are two men, Edwin and Norman, and two women, Letty and Marcia, one of whom, Marcia, has, like Barbara Pym herself, undergone a mastectomy. What any of these four does exactly is a mystery, or rather an irrelevance, as this novel is, apart from the impending fear of old age - loneliness, illness, and death, essentially about those bonds that develop between people who have been thrown together in the workplace - people no doubt that wouldn't have naturally formed friendships - and what happens to those relationships where circumstances change, and how much we owe to them.

     Pym is the chronicler of the mundane, of lives that have not been successful according to the world.  The depicter of the precarious life, the life lived in the bedsitter or the rented room, of the small pleasure.  A sense of the inadequate and the failure pervades her work,  of roads un-adopted where 'removed lives, loneliness clarifies'.

August

 August by John Clare (1793-1864)

Harvest approaches with its busy day;
The wheat tans brown, and barley bleaches grey;
In yellow garb the oatland intervenes,
And tawny glooms the valley throng'd with beans.
Silent the village grows, — wood-wandering dreams
Seem not so lonely as its quiet seems;
Doors are shut up as on a winter's day,
And not a child about them lies at play;
The dust that winnows 'neath the breeze's feet
Is all that stirs about the silent street:
Fancy might think that desert-spreading Fear
Had whisper'd terrors into Quiet's ear,
Or plundering armies past the place had come
And drove the lost inhabitants from home.
The fields now claim them, where a motley crew
Of old and young their daily tasks pursue.
The reapers leave their rest before the sun,
And gleaners follow in the toils begun
To pick the litter'd ear the reaper leaves,
And glean in open fields among the sheaves.

July

 

July by John Clare (1793-1864)

July the month of summers prime
Again resumes her busy time
Scythes tinkle in each grassy dell
Where solitude was wont to dwell
And meadows they are mad with noise
Of laughing maids and shouting boys
Making up the withering hay
With merry hearts as light as play
The very insects on the ground
So nimbly bustle all around
Among the grass or dusty soil
They seem partakers in the toil
The very landscape reels with life
While mid the busy stir and strife
Of industry the shepherd still
Enjoys his summer dreams at will
Bent oer his hook or listless laid
Beneath the pastures willow shade
Whose foliage shines so cool and grey
Amid the sultry hues of day

Adelstrop

Adelstrop by Edward Thomas 1878 - 1917

Yes, I remember Adelstrop -
The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express train drew up there

Unwontedly.  It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform, What I saw

Was Adelstrop - only the name.

And willows, willow-herb and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,

No whit less still, and lonely fair,

Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang,

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

June

June by John Clare (1793-1864)

Now summer is in flower, and Nature's hum
Is never silent round her bounteous bloom;
Insects, as small as dust, have never done
With glitt'ring dance, and reeling in the sun;
And green wood-fly, and blossom-haunting bee,
Are never weary of their melody.
Round field and hedge, flowers in full glory twine,
Large bind-weed bells, wild hop, and streak'd woodbine,
That lift athirst their slender-throated flowers,
Agape for dew-falls, and for honey showers;
These o'er each bush in sweet disorder run,
And spread their wild hues to the sultry sun.
The mottled spider, at eve's leisure, weaves
His webs of silken lace on twigs and leaves,
Which ev'ry morning meet the poet's eye,
Like fairies' dew-wet dresses hung to dry.
The wheat swells into ear, and hides below
The May-month wild flowers and their gaudy show.

'No Country for Old Men' by Cormac McCarthy

      'That is no country for old men'.... so begins one of W B Yeats most famous poems, 'Sailing to Byzantium'.  The country in question here, in this potent novel, is southern Texas on the Mexico border; part of what is often referred to as 'flyover country' that great hinterland of the United States between the east and west coasts, 'that vast obscurity beyond the city where the dark fields of the Republic rolled on under the night', and a place that Cormac McCarthy has visited before in his novels.  It is also his own country for, although born on the East Coast, the majority of his childhood and adolescence was lived in Tennessee.  He is a writer who has only really entered my field of few in the last few years, and this is the first novel of his that I have read.

     'No country for Old Men' is a three way tussle between the Ed Tom Bell the sheriff, Llewelyn Moss the petty criminal, and the psychotic Anton Chirgurh, the hired killer.  The novel opens with the discovery of a sprawl of corpses and abandoned vehicles in the desert.  Moss has stumbled upon some sort altercation between drugs gangs, or some such.  And among the dead and the dying he makes a further discovery, one that drives the narrative.  That fight in the desert is never fully explained, for this is a lean, tense novel, sparse in the way that Jean Pierre Melville's cinematic masterpiece 'Le Cercle Rouge' is sparse. (sparse of punctuation too) Information is withheld from the reader.  In one sense it doesn't matter, the novel is not about Mexican drug cartels as such but a personal conflict between three men. A concentrated affair, that is part thriller, part Western and part meditation.  The result of this economy of information, however, is that the reader is left wandering through, what I can only describe as, a nocturnal battlefield.  A novel of darkness and fire.  And one I would recommend.

Love, whose month is ever May: Poetry and Prose for May Day

May by John Clare (1793-1864)

Come queen of months in company

Wi all thy merry minstrelsy
The restless cuckoo absent long
And twittering swallows chimney song
And hedge row crickets notes that run
From every bank that fronts the sun

And swarthy bees about the grass

That stops wi every bloom they pass

Fantasticks by Nicholas Breton (1545/52 -1623/5)

     It is now May, and the sweetness of the air refresheth every spirit: the sunny beams give forth fair blossoms, and the dripping clouds water Flora's great garden....

     It is the month wherein Nature hath her fill of mirth, and the sense are filled with delights.  I conclude it is from the Heavens a grace, and to the earth a gladness.

Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:

   So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

   So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

A Survey of London by John Stow

     In the Month of May, namely on May-day in the morning, every man, except impediment, would walk into the sweet meadows and green woods, there to rejoice their spirits with the beauty and savour of sweet flowers, and with the harmony of birds.....I find also in the month of May, the citizens of London of all estates, lightly in every parish, or sometimes two or three parishes joining together had their several mayings, and did fetch in May-poles, with divers warlike shows, with good archers, morris dancers, and other devices, for pastime all the day long; and toward the evening they had stage plays, and bonfires in the streets.

The Driving Boy by John Clare (1793-1864)

 The driving boy beside his team

Will oer the may month beauty dream

And cock his hat and turn his eye

On flower and tree and deepning skye

And oft bursts loud in fits of song

And whistles as he reels along

Crack[ing] his whip in starts of joy

A happy dirty driving boy

When will my May come? by Richard Barnfield (1574-1627)

When will my May come, that I may embrace thee?

When will the hower be of my soules joying?

If thou wilt come and dwell with me at home,

My sheepcote shall be strowed with new greene rushes

Weele haunt the trembling prickets as they rome

About the fields, along the hauthorne bushes;

I have a pie-bald curre to hunt the hare,

So we will live with daintie forrest fare.

And when it pleaseth thee to walke abroad

Abroad into the fields to take fresh ayre,

The meades with Floras treasure should be strowde,

The mantled meaddowes, and the fields so fayre.

And by a silver well with golden sands

Ile sit me downe, and wash thine ivory hands.

But it thou wilt not pittie my complaint,

My teares, nor vowes, nor oathes, made to thy beautie:

What shall I do but languish, die, or faint,

Since thou dost scorne my teares, and my soules duetie:

And teares contemned, vowes and oaths must faile,

And where teares cannot, nothing can prevaile.

When will my May come, that I may embrace thee?

    

The Great Gatsby I

It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire.

     Today - the 10th of April 2025 - marks the hundredth anniversary of the publication of one of the finest American novels of the 2oth century - perhaps even the finest - 'The Great Gatsby'.  It was F Scott Fitzgerald's 3rd published novel and it seems to me to be the distillation of the art.  The very essence.   The American critic Charles R Jackson called it 'the only flawless novel in the history of American literature.'

    Comparatively short, succinct but not parsimonious in style - to quote T S Eliot:

 where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together

       - there is something deeply satisfying about this novel.  It is one my favourite books.  It is a book I have returned to time and again.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.

      I suppose the plot is simple enough - it is a small enough tragedy, though scandalous. Yet 'costing not less than everything' - to quote T S Eliot again.  It is the attempt of the narrator to put something right.  The story of Jay Gatsby and his loves, and how he is mastered by them.  The setting is the plutocratic world of Long Island, and New York, but also, fleetingly and movingly, 'the forgotten Swede towns' of the Mid-west. (Both Gatsby and the narrator it turns our are, like Fitzgerald himself, Mid-westerners.) It is the early 1920s and it is the 'Jazz Age'. Gatsby, I think, is rather like Miss Jean Brodie, in that both eminently charismatic but ultimately flawed characters who are unseated by their desire for the absolute.  Both are cultural Romantics of a very 19th century cast and are brought down by an adversary who is more ruthless than they.  And both are characters that enthrall the reader, offering the prospect of a live lived 'purified' of the dross, yet are really morally compromised, and, in the case of Jean Brodie a comic grotesque.  Gatsby is certainly not that. 

     

'Oh, to be in England'

 Oh, to be in England, by Robert Browning 1812-1889

Oh, to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England - now!

And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops - at the bent
spray's edge -
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song
twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children's dower
- Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

I'm ready for my close-up now Mr DeMille.

    

     The last time I visited Brighton I stayed the weekend with my friend Richard.  He lived in Brunswick Place in a top floor flat. Unhappily, the weekend did not go well.  However on Sunday we walked into the centre of Brighton the back way, along Landsdown Rd etc., avoiding the vile Western Avenue.  At the far end we paused for me to take some pictures of the somewhat eccentric Gothick Wykeham Terrace - all grey and white stucco and pinnacles - when a first floor window opened and voiced called out 'I'm ready for close-up now, Mr DeMille.'  He, Michael, then invited us in, at one point leaving us - two strangers - alone in his sitting room while he went downstairs to the kitchen.  The sitting-room was 'pure' Late Sixties/Early Seventies - white painted Gothic book shelves and a lime green carpet.  It was all rather stylish.  He returned some minutes later with some headed note paper and an invitation to tea sometime.  I remember him announcing that at one time he 'had Roy Strong on one side of me and Flora Robson and her sisters on the other.'  Or words to that effect.

     Sadly I never returned for tea, and never saw Michael or Richard again.  I wish I had, particularly Michael as he was a hoot and I was keen to record his house, but that weekend spelt the end of my friendship with Richard.  We last spoke at the beginning of lockdown, but alas, I think Richard must of died during those grim months.  

     This has turned out to be a less than cheerful introduction to a post about a couple of books by Sir Roy Strong, or as they used to call him in Private Eye, Dr Strange, than intended. However it is just about the only anecdote I have about the man, so it will have to do.

     Roy Strong is a bit of National Treasure.  Quite the Renaissance man: scholar, curator, writer (Author of some 43 (!) books, some in collaboration with his late wife, the designer Julia Trevelyan Oman), garden designer and maker, aesthete, dandy and habitue of the Beau Monde.  And I must say I'm a fan.  His first volume of published diaries 'The Roy Strong Diaries 1967-1987' is quite one of my favourite books and along with 'A Chequered Past' by Peter Schlesinger opens a window on the fascinating, now long vanished, interlocking worlds of Bohemia and the Beau Monde in Late Sixties/Early Seventies London.  A world essentially ended by the Oil Crisis of 1973.
    Therefore imagine my excitement when the bf announces he's found a cache of Strong's books for sale at Aberglasney.  After some toing and froing I ended up with these five books.  The books that interest me most are the autobiographical 'Roy Strong: Self portrait as a young man', 2013, and the 'The Renaissance Garden in England' 0f 1978 & 1998. (This is the paperback 1998 edition)

     'Roy Strong: Self Portrait as a Young Man' fleshes out part of that period covered in 'The Roy String Diaries'.  It is fascinating, partly because my own background shares some similarities with his - lower middle class and living in a 'semi', though I didn't actually live in suburbia, but (as I've said before) in a small market town in Lincolnshire.  I suspect that our tastes, and attitudes, are pretty much the same: 'a committed Royalist; an Oxford Movement Christian; a lover of Old England, its great houses, churches and landscape; in short, at this stage of my life, a prototype of the later Young Fogeys, conservative by instinct and not at all an Angry Young Man of the Colin Wilson/John Osbourne variety.'  (All that said, I suspect that Osbourne was probably more culturally conservative than assumed at the time.)
   At times this book reads like an Evelyn Waugh novel with our hero ascending the 'greasy pole' from Winchmore Hill in Enfield to Keeper of the National Portrait gallery at 32 and eventually Director of the V&A at 38.  If I remember rightly from the Diaries enjoying some very long lunches in the process and all the while encountering a whole flight personalities and eccentrics in the process, often immensely talented and but tragically flawed: the critic and exhibition maestro Dickie Buckle, and the artist Astrid Zydower spring to mind.  There is wonderful photograph - very 'Sixties' - of Buckle, Strong, and Buckle's assistant, Joe Predera.  They are standing amidst the chaos of the hang for the ground breaking Cecil Beaton exhibition of 1968.  Buckle looks like he's nicked his shirt from a production of Swan Lake, giving him the look a particularly robust but brassy barmaid. It seems to sum up a whole era.

    

     'The Renaissance Garden in England' is one of Strong's more academic works, a very 'Warburg Institute'* book, showing the influence of Strong's Phd tutor at the Warburg, Dame Frances Yates.  Yates (1899-1981) was another of those eccentric figures in Strong's life, a historian whose field of study was the Renaissance esoteric tradition; her published books such as 'Giordano Bruni and the Hermetic Tradition', and 'The Rosicrucian Enlightenment', reflect this.  Rather like the other books I have mentioned in this post it sheds light on a lost world, for very few of the gardens discussed in this book actually survive.  A world of great formal gardens full of symbolism and allegory, of grottos and mechanical wonders, places where the esoteric and the scientific were not yet estranged.
     Given that dearth of source materials ie gardens, Strong relies on written descriptions and contemporaneous paintings, drawings and prints.  Quite fascinating those prints in themselves.  Only one Hollar, but there are a small number taken from the wonderful 'Britannia Illustrata' of 1709.  In addition there is a liberal sprinkling of poetry of the period.  The result of all this is a rich, polymathic, satisfying bricolage of a book, the design of which appears to me, at least, to be heavily influenced by Mark Girouard's books such as 'Robert Smythson and the Elizabethan House' which were designed by Girouard's wife Dorothy.

*  The Warburg Institute is part of the University of London.  It was originally established in Hamburg in 1909.  In 1933, with the rise of the Nazi Party to power in Germany, the Institute was relocated to London. 

'Serotonin'

      Well, I've finally finished reading 'Serotonin' by the French novelist Michel Houellebecq - that's one I was reading concurrently with Joseph Conrad's 'Lord Jim'.  Not a thing I would recommend, reading two novels simultaneously, for like having two masters 'either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other'.  Indeed, 'Serotonin' seemed a bit vapid compared to Conrad. It just doesn't have the heft.  Vapid too, compared to Houellebecq's earlier work.  As I wrote in an earlier post on these two book 'Serotonin' doesn't really stand up to say 'Atomised' of 'Platform'.  An opinion that, as you can see, hasn't changed.  At only one point did the novel hold my attention and that was when its focus shifted from navel-gazing to a putative insurrection by a group of well armed farmers.  It was both engaging and, finally, rather moving.  Alas, in a manner that echoed the half-hearted 'evenements' in 'Submission', neither the insurrection or Houellebecq's interest lasted that long, and the novel limped off to its conclusion.

Curently reading....

      I am actually reading two novels at once, quite an unusual thing for me to do.  In the past I have occasionally suspended reading one novel to read another, say at Christmas when I might lay the current novel aside to read something more seasonal.  In the past this has included the Christmas books by Dickens, or Dylan Thomas's 'A Child's Christmas in Wales', or as last year the Collected Ghost Stories of M R James.
    The novels in this simultaneous read are 'Lord Jim' by Joseph Conrad and 'Serotonin' by Michel Houellebecq.  And what a difference a hundred years or so makes - from richness and complexity to something much more spare and lean, a observation both general and particular.  But then Houellebecq is a much more polemical, if not downright feral novelist.  Conrad, in comparison, a gentleman.  Really, I can't think of such an ill-assorted pair.  Amid so many glaring differences, yesterday evening (after I had published this little post) I realised that one of the subtle differences between these two novelists is that Houellebecq is writing in an age of consumerism and Conrad not.  It is enough for a contemporary novelist in attempting to define a character merely throw in a few brands for the reader to have some idea as to the taste, social position and wealth of the person described. (I think it may have Ian Fleming who started this trend.)

     I only started reading Conrad late last year with 'The Secret Agent' and was quite bowled over. I was reminded of Dickens, Dostoevsky and Conrad's contemporary Ford Madox Brown.  He is a great and subtle stylist. 

     I have to confess to being a little disappointed (so far) with 'Serotonin' though.  It lacks the venom, the sheer spite, of say 'Atomised' or 'Platform', or even the elegiac quality of 'The Map and the Territory' and 'Submission'.  Perhaps things will improve.

Last year in reading....

    Happy New Year!   The return of something I last did way back in 2016. I cannot believe it was quite so long ago.  Anyway here is (as far as I can remember) my fiction reading from this last year.  Discoveries were: 'Dr Zhivago', 'The Jewel in the Crown', and 'The Secret Agent'.  'Heretics of Dune', by Frank Herbert was, like 'God Emperor of Dune', was a much more impressive piece of fiction than 'Dune'. Only one real disappointment: 'Heat Wave' by Penelope Lively.

Ring out wild bells to the wild sky: In Memoriam 106

St Sylvester, Tuesday 30th December, 2024

In Memoriam 106, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

   The flying cloud, the frosty light:

   The year is dying in the night;

Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

 

Ring out the old, ring in the new,

   Ring happy bells across the snow,

   The year is going, let him go;

Ring out the false, ring in the true.

 

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,

   For those that here we see no more;

   Ring out the feud between rich and poor,

Ring in redress to all mankind.

 

Ring out a slowly dying cause,

   And ancient forms of party strife;

   Ring in the nobler modes of life,

With sweeter manners, purer laws.

 

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,

   The faithless coldness of the times;

   Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes.

And let the fuller minstrel in.

 

Ring out false pride in place and blood,

   The civic slander and the pride;

   Ring in the love of truth and right,

Ring in the common love of good.

 

Ring out old shapes of foul disease,

   Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;

   Ring out the thousand wars of old,

Ring in the thousand years of peace.

 

Ring in the valiant and free,

   The larger heart, the kindlier hand;

   Ring out the darkness of the land,

Ring in the Christ who is yet to be.

Mistletoe

 Monday 30th December 2024

Mistletoe by Walter de la Mare (1873-1956)

Sitting under the mistletoe

(Pale-green, fairy mistletoe),

One last candle burning low,

All the sleepy dancers gone,

Just one candle burning on,

Shadows lurking everywhere:

Some one came, and kissed me there.

Tired I was; my head would go

Nodding under the mistletoe

(Pale-green, fairy mistletoe),

No footsteps came, no voice, but only,

Just as I sat there, sleepy, lonely,

Stooped in the still and shadowy air

Lips unseen—and kissed me there.

     I first heard this the other week on BBC Radio 3 - it was the 'Friday Poem' - when I was struck both by the melancholic atmosphere and the occult sensibility.

The Waits

 29th December, 2024

The Waits, by Margaret Deland (1857-1945)

At the break of Christmas Day,

   Through the frosty starlight ringing,

Faint and sweet and far away,

   Comes the sound of children, singing,

         Chanting, singing,

    “Cease to mourn,

   For Christ is born,

         Peace and joy to all men bringing!”

 

Careless that the chill winds blow,

   Growing stronger, sweeter, clearer,

Noiseless footfalls in the snow,

   Bring the happy voices nearer;

         Hear them singing,

    “Winter’s drear,

   But Christ is here,

         Mirth and gladness with Him bringing.”

 

“Merry Christmas!” hear them say,

   As the East is growing lighter;

“May the joy of Christmas Day

   Make your whole year gladder, brighter!”

         Join their singing,

    “To each home

   Our Christ has come,

         All Love’s treasures with Him bringing!”