'Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds' - Dune Messiah

     I don't usually issue a 'spoiler alert', as I make an effort when writing a review not to disclose too much plot information, but just enough to intrigue. However this book cannot really be discussed without revealing more than usual. You have been warned.

     Apologies for this post having taken so long: firstly lockdown has really taken it out of me and although I am functioning and not just slumped in a heap in a corner with depression motivation is something I have lost. Secondly this post, like the 'Dune' post, has been subject to endless editing as I have been trying to get to grips with what is an extraordinary piece of literary imagination. 

     'We saw our parents' nakedness; Rivers of blood will be required to cover them. Rivers of blood.'

     I've been re-reading 'Dune Messiah' by Frank Herbert, the second novel in his 'Dune' sequence - a slim intermezzo of a book between the behemoths of 'Dune' and 'Children of Dune'. Not that I would want to suggest that 'Dune Messiah' is in anyway 'light' or frivolous. It is certainly neither. This re-reading, I have to admit, has been prompted partly by the growing excitement on social media over Denis Villeneuve's new film adaptation of 'Dune' but also by a loss of direction in my reading. It was there at my bedside and I just picked it up for want of something better. I suspect 'Dune Messiah' gets called a sequel for convenience sake - I certainly did in my post about 'Dune'. However we would be wrong to do so: Herbert originally conceived the first three novels (of what would eventually be six novel cycle) as one. It was his agent who got Herbert spilt them into three worried that they would make too hefty a tome for easy reading. (Herbert speaking at UCLA 17.04.85) Certainly there are parts of 'Dune Messiah' that were written at the same time 'Dune'.

     And I must say I'm glad I did, for although at times, as I mentioned in my previous 'Dune' post, the 'Duniverse' is a very strange place at times - the climax of 'Dune Messiah' is one of the weirdest and saddest things I have yet read - this has been an intense, immersive experience. In fact it has had quite a profound effect on me, causing me not only to re-asses my attitude to the Sci-fi but causing me to loose sleep as its strange and hermetic themes swirled about my head. So much so that I changed by bedtime reading to the much duller world of Margaret Drabble and 'The Ice Age', a state-of-the-nation novel of the mid 70s. What I was really looking for was 'Great Fortune', the first of Olivia Manning's fabulous Balkan Trilogy. (I have already the third novel in the sequence: 'Friends and Heroes'.) Anyway 'The Ice Age' has turned out to be oddly successful for a novel that is virtual all 'tell' and no 'show', and I would recommend it.

     'He remembered his earliest visions of the jihad-to-be, the terror and revulsion he'd experienced. Now of course he knew visions of greater terror. He had lived with the real violence. He had seen his Fremen charged with mystical strength sweep all before him in the religious war. The jihad gained a new perspective. It was finite, of course, a brief spasm when measured against eternity, but beyond that lay horrors to overshadow anything in the past.'

     'Dune Messiah' is, I suspect, not so much read as 'Dune' and this has allowed the latter to be misinterpreted. David Lynch's film of 1984 certainly did (Why on earth did it rain at the end of the film killing off all the sandworms destroying thereby all spice production and consequently ending space travel?) and I fear that the latest cinematic adaptation directed by Denis Villeneuve may well be found guilty of the same. I really cannot emphasise enough that Paul Muad'dib is not a hero. He is not as Timothee Chalamet said in a 'Vanity Fair' interview 'Think Greta Thunberg, only she's a Jedi with a diploma from Hogwarts'. (Unless, of course, he knows something about la Thunbeg that we don't.) It doesn't bode well. And he is certainly not the 'Mightey-Whitey' of Noah Berlatsky's article in escapist.com.* I think it might have helped his case if Mr Berlatsky had actually done some reading in preparation. Otherwise how do you explain such a wilful misreading of the texts? Paul is not the leader of some armed liberation movement, but a mass murderer guilty of genocide on an incomprehensible scale, or else, to exonerate him a little, merely the facilitator of such a gargantuan crime:

     '[]....at a conservative estimate, I've killed sixty-one billion people, sterilised ninety planets, completely demoralised four hundred others. I've wiped out the followers of forty religions [] We'll be a hundred generations recovering from Muad'dib's Jihad.'

     The Fremen jihad was a war for the political and religious domination of the Known Universe - not a war to set themselves free from oppression, but a revenge on the rest of humanity for thousands of years of perceived subjugation. Just a niggle but it is never explained how the Jihad commences, or how the Fremen achieve such cataclysmic results. Yes, we are told that they are fanatics, but still.... Historically, the success of the Islamic/Arab conquests were in part due to the exhaustion of the two great powers of the day, the Eastern Roman Empire and Sassanid Iran, after an apocalyptic war. There is no evidence of any such civilizational fatigue in the Dune Universe, unless one counts the lack of religious belief among the elites of the Empire. My guess is that after the defeat of Shaddam IV and his Sardukar troops on Arrakis the Empire momentarily collapsed into anarchy and the Jihad grew out of Muad'dib's re-assertion of Imperial authority, but it is only speculation.

     'No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a hero.'

     'Dune Messiah' opens twelve years after the events of 'Dune'; Muad'dib's Jihad - that 'blood-dimmed tide' - has, as we have seen, spread to nearly all the inhabited worlds; the small Arrakid city of Arakeen is now the Imperial capital and the centre of all religious life in the Empire - thousands make the Hajj, the pilgrimage, to its temples and shrines; Muad'dib's promise to 'green' the planet advances. Never has there been an Emperor as powerful as Paul Muad'dib. And yet....and yet....Arakeen still feels empty and provincial - though crammed with vulgar, bombastic monuments and surrounded by ugly monotonous suburbia that is prey to constant intrusion by the desert. And the Fremen are disillusioned (as happens so often after a revolution). There is a sense that things have taken a wrong turn. They have had their revenge on humanity, but now their lives are largely empty, devoid of meaning and direction. The Jihad failed to become the moment of re-integration with the world, as the former jihadi Farok, speaking early in the book, believed Muad'dib offered his followers. And not only Muad'dib, but, as explained in 'Dune', the Bene Gesserit have been there before him inadvertently tilling the ground in preparation for all this violence and failure when all they wanted to do was protect and promote their own. Instead of bringing liberation the jihad only furthered the alienation of the Fremen as it effectively destroyed their past in the process, leaving them suspended between that lost past and a non-existent future. In effect they merely exported Arrakid chaos to the rest of the universe. There is now a desire among the Fremen to return to ways of the desert, and towards the end of the novel we learn that the newly constructed qanats (irrigation canals) and other symbols of the new Arrakis have been sabotaged, the Golden Flower rejected. Ennui envelops and corrupts many. They are ripe for exploitation at the hands of plotters.

     And it is with the plotters, a motley crew if ever there was one, that the real weirdness steps in. In particular we are presented with two products of the Bene Teilaxu: the Guild Steersman Edric, and the face dancer Scytale (both genetically engineered mutations). Connected with the plot are two more products of the Tleilaxu; the human distrans Bijaz, (another piece of genetic manipulation) and most importantly the ghola Hayt. The other conspirators are Helen Gaius Mohaim and the Princes Irulan (both Bene Gesserit). In addition there is Korba, who like Farok we have encountered in 'Dune', a fighter from Seitch Tabr and later a Fedaykin leader and now one of the Qizara Tawfid, the priests of the new religion of Muad'dib. A long term intimate of Muad'dib then, but he and his own separate coterie of plotters are not happy either. 

     And then there is Paul Muad'dib himself that strangely disengaged prophet, complex and contradictory, conflicted and more isolated than ever: his mother, the Lady Jessica, and Gurney Halleck (one of the few survivors of the Atreides household, of any rank, to have escaped the Harkonen purge)  have returned to Caladan. The estrangement between Paul and his wife Irulan has deepened, his relationship with his concubine Chani under increasing strain. He rules by personal fiat - he is a benign autocrat surrounded by a small coterie of counsellors. He refuses both a constitution and to rule as a god. And what is more Paul's prescience has become a curse rather than a gift. He has become its prisoner, unable at times to assert his own autonomy and agency. (It is not as though his prescience is 'all seeing', indeed it is partial, selective; obviously something else is at play here, most likely the unconscious. It is certainly not an objective 'sense'. Similarly I don't view the collective unconscious, as exemplified as the collective memory of the Fremen, as in anyway objective. Perhaps like memory prescience is a creative process. In the case of the Fremen we cannot rule out the influence of the hand of the Missionaria Protectiva either.) Estranged from wider society by his semi-divine powers he draws closer to his younger sister Alia. It is impossible to not feel a deep sympathy when encountering Alia, St Alia-of-the-Knife, Abomination, object of veneration. Merely a teenage girl. Prescient and fully conscious at birth. 

     With all of that established, and bubbling away nicely, we witness the arrival of an embassy from the Spacing Guild headed by steersman Edric. Among the entourage is a gift, Hayt. The ghola. Paul recognises immediately that Hayt is in fact Duncan Idaho - his friend and weapons trainer. Dead Idaho. The Idaho murdered by the Harkonens 15 yrs previously. Restored to life. Re-animated as it were. Re-heated and served. The Bene Tleilax are good at that sort of thing, manufacturing not only humans to order but other even more morally reprehensible things: war, famine, & poverty. Soon we learn that Hayt has been trained as a mentat and in Zensunni philosophy, but importantly, for the plot at least, he has no recollection of his earlier life. The gift is accepted, and a strange relationship develops between Hayt and the Atreides that only serves to further isolate them from the Fremen, who are rightly suspicious of the Tleilaxu and their 'products'. They have a particular aversion to the ghola's eyes which in common with all of his type are metal.

     Slowly the plots converge. Muad'dib looses his sight in a terrorist explosion (A small nuclear device known as a 'stoneburner' is detonated within the Imperial capital) and then his prescience. And at the climactic, melodramatic conclusion of the novel, Paul and Duncan end their exile, their occultation. Their identities restored, they become once again fully integrated human beings. And thus restored Paul walks out alone into the desert. Perhaps we are supposed to have in mind here the death of Alexander the Great at a similar age, and the occultation of T E Lawrence at the end of WWI. Unlike Indra, the slayer of Vritra, who I discussed in my 'Dune' post, Paul rejects his cosmological dharma. It is left to others to fulfil that terrible purpose. (This is for others to explore, but I do wonder if in the relationship between Paul and Duncan there is an echo (and a faint one at that) of that between Arjun and Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. Just a thought. Be that as it it may, Duncan can be seen as Paul's moral anchor.) 

     'Dune Messiah' has caused me reassess my attitude to Science Fiction and Fantasy writing. I still haven't changed my mind about the literary quality of both genres, but I've come to see that both fulfil important roles within the culture. It works something like this: the Enlightenment with its emphasis on reason degraded the position of myth in Western Culture, echoing both the earlier Protestant Reformation, and its jihad against 'superstition' **, and British Deism. These movements tended toward dis-association, an alienation in humanity. One that industrial, mass society has exacerbated. It helped feed the growing 'Meaning Crisis'. Romanticism 'rediscovered' myth, as a means to heal the breach. Think, for instance of the work of William Blake. It, Romanticism, had perhaps a better understanding of being human than the Enlightenment. However, dis-associative culture remained and continues today in certain sections of elite culture. In the twentieth century Carl Jung attempted to end the crisis in meaning by attempting to re-incorporate myth into what was essentially a new metaphysics. Later other thinkers have attempted the same: Joseph Campbell being a notable example whose cultural influence has been immense. It was Campbell, I believe, who pointed out that myth is the mirror of the self. In our own time both Jordan Peterson and John Vervaeke are attempting the same. I believe that both Sci-fi and fantasy are popular and 'spontaneous' attempts, largely outside elite culture and the academy, to heal that breach, to fill the vacuum created by Modernity. They are not therefore to be dismissed. Specifically I've come to see the 'Dune' sequence, in all it richness and complexity, to be very cultural important. It speaks to our time. I begin to wonder if the sequence is an extended metaphor for the Pax Americana.

*   Berlatsky is not alone in this. See Haifa Mahabir's essay 'Dune and Orientalism' on the 'Munitions of War' website. I'm not entirely sure whether she has read 'Dune' or not. I think not though.

** I've come to take the view that the Reformation in its attack on the sort of customs, such as ashing or the production of religious art, and which are common to other religions, as a form of de-naturing. Sadly attempts to re-nature ourselves, such as Anglo-Catholicism, have largely failed by being largely prescriptive and self-conscious, lacking in spontaneity (being overly concerned with the correct externals).

'Die Nibelungen'

      Apologies yet again for not having posted anything of late but the whole lockdown thing has been corrosive of my equilibrium. The depression and anxiety have returned. It has only served to further my mistrust of the msm; their coverage has been at times alarmist. I'm thinking of yesterday's front cover of 'The Daily Telegraph'. So much so I have given up watching and listening to the news, the better to protect my mental health. There really has to be a better way of managing this crisis.

     Over this last week the bf and I have been making our way through the immense, the epic 'Die Nibelungen' and what a gargantuan piece of cinema it is. All four hours and forty five minutes of it. (But no where near the length of Jacques Rivette's 'Out 1; Noli me Tangere' which weighs in at a staggering 13 hrs. I barely got past the grunting.) A brave undertaking, none the less, by one of the masters of German cinema, Fritz Lang (1890-1976), who with his wife, Thea von Barbou , wrote the script. Lang was a leading exponent of Expressionism, and here that heightened language is blended with an Secessionist aesthetic; Lang being directly inspired the illustrations, by Carl Otto Czeschka, in an abridged children's version of 'Die Nibelungen', even it appears borrowing the title. Both film and book, and Wagner's Ring Cycle, are based on the 12th century German epic, the 'Nibelungenleid', which itself has deep origins in the Germanic oral tradition, and in real events in Late Antiquity.

     The film, unlike the Ring Cycle, stays pretty faithful to the original. It is essentially a story of love and revenge. The film is divided into parts 'Siegfried' and 'Kemhilds Rache'.  'Siegfried' is the story of the the eponymous hero, his love for Kremhild the sister of the Burgundian King Hagen, and his betrayal and murder. The second part is the story of Kremhid's revenge upon his murders. And a thorough job she makes of it. I should add here that each part is sub-divided into Cantos - reflecting, I suppose, the structure of the original text. (It does make it easier watching at home. You can watch it in instalments as we did.)  I suppose those divisions to make for a 'literary' film, but don't be put off; they have little, if any, effect on the narrative drive which reaches a suitable dramatic and compelling climax as the bodies pile up. This is a visually stunning film, beautifully shot. Sometimes rich and complex, sometimes austere. There is a strong hieratic quality to scene after scene - very often the camera is static and the actors compose themselves like those in Czescka's illustrations. Though, I suspect, that isn't the only artistic influence; Kremhild, played by Margarete Schon, looks as though she has stepped out of a painting by the Belgian Symbolist Ferdinand Knopf. Scenes are often framed with architecture or members of the cast. Costumes are eclectic - part Byzantine, part Gothic, reflecting the cultural interplay of a 12th century text and a narrative set in the collapsing Roman Empire. Eclecticism, too, in a setting that has dragons, magic, Germanic paganism and Christianity. At times a fairy-tale world of wonders - and horrors.

Die Neblungen                                                                                                       

1924

Producer:                Erich Pommer
Director:                  Fritz Lang
Cinematographer:  Carl Hoffman, Gunther Rittau, Walter Ruttmann

'The River'

     More than likely in common with many other households in Britain we have a little ritual every evening after dinner that consists of sitting ourselves down in front of the television picking up the remote control and/or the Radio Times then complaining about the lack of something intellectually, emotionally engaging to watch. The word 'crap' is used. Repeatedly. Night after night, faced as we are by a never ending stream of mediocrity. Invariably we watch a repeat rather than 'live' TV. For months now we have been working the Doctor Who back catalogue. It is a cause of small wonder to me that a series that at times is so dreadful inspires such devotion.

     I really have little sympathy for the 'Defund the BBC' campaign, what after all would replace it? I was lucky enough to grow up during the Golden Age of broadcasting and it has left an indelible and welcome mark on my cultural and intellectual life. I'm looking to revive not remove. However I do wonder if its demise in now inevitable, along with say the mainline Protestant churches and the Universities - particularly the humanities departments. They really are, frankly, fucked. Some museums, newspapers and, here in the UK, the National Trust seem to be heading the same way. All of these organisations have positioned themselves as 'Blue Church'*. The recent BLM debacle post-Covid is not the real agent of this change, but the symptom of a greater cultural decline, which is a failure of purpose rooted in the collapse of narrative and in particular the collapse of religion. We are in the midst of a meaning crisis and Identity Politics, as Douglas Murray as so convincingly argued, is an attempt to establish a new metaphysics, a new meta-narrative. Yet another one, and one (I would argue) that has only intensified the crisis.

     Anyway enough with the pontificating, last week the bf came to the rescue and helped slough off the ennui with this wonderful film directed by Jean Renoir and based on the eponymous novel by Rumer Godden (1907-1998). It is a delight. Engrossing and visually rich. It seemed to me rather like the contemporary work of Powell and Pressburger, a feeling enhanced by the presence of actor Desmond Knight who appeared in a number of the latter's films.

     The setting is India during the British Raj, the time the early 1920s - the aftermath of WWI. Important that. The film is, essentially, the evocative  re-telling of Godden's own admittedly idyllic childhood. Not that it doesn't contain an iron fist in that velvet glove, but to explain that would be to reveal too much of the plot. It does however contain a familiar theme in Godden' work: the emergence from childhood of a young woman, with all its blind rages, joys and losses. A process here initiated by the arrival of a wounded American soldier, who inadvertently brings conflict in his wake as three characters vie for his attentions. The political situation in India as the independence movement gathered pace is handled tangentially. (It does not occur at all in the book.) 

     This will, no doubt, annoy some - but ignore the ire of the woke with all their simplistic puritanical censoriousness. (Intellectually its all pretty fraudulent in any case). Sit back and enjoy this quiet masterpiece. Of the two cinematic adaptations of her work - the other being 'Black Narcissus' - this apparently was Godden's favourite.

* for a definition of the 'Blue Church' and its opposite the 'Red Religion' see the work of Jordan Hall and Rebel Wisdom

The River                                                                                                               

1951

Producer:                 Kenneth McEldowney, Jean Renoir
Director:                  Jean Renoir
Cinematographer:  Claude Renoir

St Cadog, Llanspyddid

     On our journey back to the Infernal City we stopped briefly at Llanspyddid, between Brecon and Sennybridge (that whole valley of the Usk being some of the most beautiful countryside in Britain) so that I could photograph the church having noted, every time we pass by in the car, how beautifully it sits in its surroundings. An ancient place, dedicated to an early abbot of the monastery at Llancarfan in the Vale of Glamorgan. That picturesque quality is aided, I think, by the yew trees in the graveyard - the Ancient Yew Group has a system for classifying old yews: Ancient, Venerable and Notable and according to the The New Naturalist Library 'Brecon Beacons' edition (2014) Llanspyddid has one example of each. I didn't count how many yews are currently growing there (7/8 apparently), but there were once more: Edwin Poole in 'The Illustrated History and Biography of Brecknockshire',1886, mentions fourteen.

     Alas, on closer inspection it was all a bit of a disappointment - the church an orchestral player not a soloist. Its interest scenic rather than architectural. The graveyard is a mess - a visitor would be hard placed to find the pillar stone of the 7th-9th century AD that is traditionally said to commemorate Aulach, father of Brychan the founder of the ancient kingdom of Brycheiniog. And, to be honest, the church is somewhat lacking in interest. Not only was it closed but had the air of being abandoned. That said the porch, which by the looks of it was originally all of timber, and the little Victorian bell turret make a nice composition, but on the whole the church is somewhat dull. A simple unicameral structure like a Medieval church in rural Scotland. I suppose you could make the argument that St Cadog is a good example of how an ancient building, grown up in harmony with its surroundings, can fall foul of Modernity, and be left reeling. It suffered a restoration in 1886 at the hands of Charles Buckeridge of Oxford, though Edwin Poole praised it highly enough. Buckeridge who restored quite a number of churches in Breconshire, about twelve in all, was a pupil of George Gilbert Scott and heavily influenced by George Edmund Street, so you would think he might know better, though judging by Street's assault on North Luffenham church, perhaps not. The odd bit of research on the internet suggests that it did retain its Tilestone roof until the second half of the 20th century when it was replaced with artificial plain tiles. Artificial!! Buckeridge deserves some credit therefore for its retention at the time, when he could have easily swept it away and replaced it with slate. I suppose in its previous state the church must have resembled, somewhat, St James in Kinnersley. Buckeridge's bellcote is fine, but as for his east window the least said the better. And now, with the continuing decline in religious observance, indifference is completing the work. 

     I'm not a fan of comprehensive restorations - they tend to sweep too much away in the process, and after all an ancient structure such as this is an accretion of things, a layering of history, in which for good or ill each part has as a role to play. However here I would be willing to make an exception seeing Llanspyddid as a place that needs an 'unrestoration', a careful unpicking of Modernity.

     Richard Hall, (1817-1866), the local poet is buried in the churchyard.

St Michael, Tenbury Wells I

     We had a further three stops on the way to Bewdley; Monkland Cheese Dairy (we really do recommend a visit), Leominster, and our third, which concerns us here, St Michael Tenbury Wells. From the burgeoning Late Gothic Revival at Kinnersley back to High Victorian Gothic.

     This, it has to be said, is a quite extraordinary building, best Camden Society approved middle-pointed, built both as parish church and school chapel, for it is part of a complex of buildings, such as All Saints, Margaret St or All saints, Boyne Hill, Maidenhead. Fruits all of the Tractarian movement intended to develop and nurture the spiritual and intellectual lives of the surrounding people and that have their origins in the work of Pugin, particularly in his polemical book 'Contrasts'. Here church and school are parallel to one another linked, umbilically as it were, by a cloister so as to form a quadrangle open to the west. From a distance the church looks like a gigantic scale model of a French High Gothic cathedral that had been dropped into the unsuspecting Worcestershire countryside, and to some extent it is a building out of time and place, for although it partakes to a degree of local materials and local styles it isn't vernacular like St James back in Kinnersley. Something is different, and that is, I suppose, that it is a product of an industrialising society, of Modernity. It is to a certain point self-conscious design, while Kinnersley organic. A building that at one time in the mid 20th century would provoke hatred among many architects and critics, but love in others such as Sir John Betjeman. Perhaps a building constructed out of antinomies. Changeable. Mannered - it is no mere copy of a medieval building, but an imaginative, thoughtful, if not wilful, set of variations on a theme. The details are ever inventive, and seem occasionally to move into unknown territory. Restless even, certainly it has that relentlessness and intensity common to that stage of the Gothic Revival. Earnestness, and muscularity are terms often used in this context. That context being a forceful reaction to the good manners of most 18th and early 19th century architecture. The architect was Henry Woodyer (1816-1896) one time pupil of William Butterfield. It was built for that remarkable man Sir Frederick Ouseley - professor of music, priest, composer and Baronet - with the intention of not only satisfying the spiritual requirements of the local population but playing a national role in the revival of English church music, a role it played until the closure of the school in 1985. Since then the church has continued parochial, and until June this year the school occupied by another educational establishment. The building is now empty and apparently up for sale. I wish I had known this at the time as I would have taken some photos.

     Alas, due to the current events we couldn't gain entrance, so here are the photos I managed to take of the exterior of the chapel.  

St James, Kinnersley

     Back to Worcestershire at the weekend for a family birthday with three stops en route. The first was the church of St James at Kinnersley in the far west of Herefordshire. Ever since we've been making this particular journey I've been intrigued by this church - it looks so beautiful from the road. A visit was a must particularly on learning that the church contained work by that great Late Victorian architect G F Bodley, and that the graveyard contained his mortal remains. Thankfully our visit did not end in disappointment. The church is a delight. Small, aisled, nestling under a vast roof of riven Herefordshire Tilestones of local sandstone. The square headed aisle windows are a delight - very elegant. Medieval or Bodley? There is a timbered porch and there's that wonderful, masculine tower. Architecture that seems in harmony with the landscape it inhabits.

     Inside there are two arcades, one sturdy, the other one light and lithe Perp Gothic. It has those small inconsequential capitals we saw in the choir of Malvern Priory.  There are a number of monuments too, the most spectacular being the Smalman monument in the chancel. Carolean and in need of much help. And then there is the work by Bodley. Most conspicuous and beautiful are the large areas of diaper pattern above the aisle arcades. They are fading a bit. The church is currently undergoing a restoration/repurposing; I just hope they do as little as possible to the wall paintings here.  They are in just the right state of 'pleasing decay'. However I think that Bodley's work in the chancel would probably benefit from a more proactive approach. I should add here that the work is not by the usual suspects but the then incumbent the Rev Frederick Andrews under Bodley's supervision. Andrews incumbency started in 1873 and ended in 1920. In addition to all the painted work there are Bodley tiles in the chancel (made by Godwin of Lugwardine, also in Herefordshire), organ case and beautiful wrought iron chandeliers like those at St Helen's Brant Broughton in Lincolnshire (Bodley restored the church in the early 1870s) and were made by Coldron's in the village. I suspect they supplied the chandeliers here too. I suspect too that the roofs were replaced by Bodley or in an earlier restoration by Thomas Nicholson in 1867-9. I would suggest also that the chancel was decorated first, the nave second.

     As I said the parish are currently busy at work on the church - there is much do. I only hope the work will not rob the church of its special atmosphere. As it is there is too much clutter.

RIBA Traditional Architecture Group Exhibition

     Put out the flags! Sound the Trumpet! Let each true subject be content to hear me what I say!

     The Traditional Architecture Group, of which I am an associate member,  is currently holding an online exhibition - the times being what they are. And I am pleased and honoured to have two works on display for your perusal and delight. Here lies the link.

Own work: Lettering

     The final one of an occasional series of the letters I've done to mark family birthdays.

Own work: Pencil-crayon study

         Pencil-crayon study. Nothing else to add.

Own work: Lettering

     And another little lettering gift to a family member.

Own work: Lettering

     Another one in my series of lettering for family members to celebrate their birthdays. Collage and pencil crayon on 120 gsm cartridge paper.

'Straight on Till Morning'

      Another film like 'The Ballad of Tam Lin' or 'Get Carter' in the sub-genre of what has been called on Twitter the 'Sixties Disillusionment Film'. (But then, one may ask, has there ever been a film about Swinging London that has ever been other than critical, or at least ambiguous about the whole parade?) Anyway this one is a product of Hammer Studios, purveyors of cheap, yet now cultish, horror. Though this offering may be more accurately and neatly categorised as violent psychological thriller. The director is Peter Collinson, of 'The Italian Job' fame - a film which unaccountably has never appeared on this blog and yet which I love. 'Straight on Till Morning' is however of a very different cut. I doubt it is something I could watch over again. That's not to say it's that bad only that it does make for uncomfortable viewing. There is something deeply unsettling, disturbing, about this film. Remorseless even. It leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.    

     Brenda a painfully naïve girl, played by Rita Tushingham, moves to London from an anonymous drab northern town looking for a husband for her baby. Brenda you might remember is the name of Tushingham's character in 'Smashing Time'. Poor Brenda, she seems doomed from the very beginning. In London she is a fish out of water. For a brief while things begin to right themselves when she gets a job in a fashion boutique and a room in a flat share. But then a chance with meeting with the cool, aloof Peter, played by Shane Briant, puts pay to all that. Things indeed get very dark.

Straight on Till Morning

1972

Director:                 Peter Collinson

Producer:               Michael Carreras

Cinematographer: Bryan Probyn

Dinefwr

     Over to Llandeilo last Monday to meet up with family who were staying there for a couple of days.

     After a tour of the town we walked over to the landscape park at Dinefwr. Quite interesting for the hand of Capability Brown, who was employed here as an adviser, and who could be terribly dull, but here had good bones to work with.

   It was our second visit and it is only in researching post have I come to realise how rich, complex and ancient is the history of this site. There is an Iron Age hill fort where the castle stands and a large Roman fort under the park. With the collapse of the Empire in the West the ancient Kingdom of the Demetae (its civitas was at Carmarthen) re-emerged as Dyfed. The subsequent history is one of repeated dissolution and consolidation, until the emergence of Deheubarth, which was centred on Llandeilo and Dinefwr where eventually the Lords Rhys erected a castle high on the bluff above the river Towy. A small town grew up to the north of the castle augmented by a second community, Newton (Drenewydd) further north still. Both have disappeared, and the Park has swallowed their remains. The castle survives though succeeded by Newton House, aka Plas Dinefwr, built on the site of that second community. And Newton House was our first destination, though because of Covid closed to the public. I'm not that sure we missed much. I wrote about this in my first Dinefwr post, but I will say it again. The National Trust should have employed a leading interior designer to work on the interior. This was their policy in the 1960s & 70s: David Milnaric at Benningbrough; John Fowler at Clandon Park and Sudbury Hall; and David Hicks at Blickling Hall. These designers combined historical knowledge and refined aesthetics. It was a self-confident approach, but like many institutions today confidence is something the Trust lacks. Enough with the rant. Newton House dates from the 1660s and was given a thorough-going High Victorian Gothic face-lift in the 1850s by J R Penson. The result is, perhaps, not entirely satisfactory.

     Our next stop was the castle. The views from the battlements were wonderful. The 12th century round keep, continued in use into the 17th century, a belvedere being added to the top to take advantage of those views.

     Our final stop was Llandyfeisant church - a tiny structure embowered beautifully in trees below the park, dedicated to St.Tyfi. One of the followers of St Teilo, there are a number of confusing traditions around the saint one of which places his martyrdom here. Heavily restored in c. 1879, but rather beautifully and sensitively done. According to 'The Buildings of Wales' the architect was Rev William Wiggin of Hampnett, Glouscetershire, Lord Dynevor's brother-in-law; according to 'Coflein', J Kyrke Pearson (I think they mean Penson) of Oswestry, the guy who worked on Newton House. Roman remains were found here in the late 18th century and it was then asserted that the church stands on the site of a Roman temple. Contemporary historians have suggested it stands on the site of a Roman bath house attached to the fort. Just to the north of the church we found what we wondered was a holy well. Research on the internet didn't get me very far. There was mention of the Dinefwr Well and the Nant-y-Rheibis, but nothing to firmly locate it by the church. Long the estate church of Dinefwr, the late 20th century has not been kind and for a number of years the church was derelict.  It is now being restored.

'Spirits of the Dead'

     A few months ago now I found a very good fan edit video of Roxy Music's 'Love is the Drug' on YouTube. With a bit of research, getting lost on the way, we found it was constructed from fragments of the Fellini film 'Toby Dammit', starring Terence Stamp. I mean I really did get lost in the process, inaccurately attributing the clips to Passolini's 'Theorema' also starring Terence Stamp, which we duly watched. I must review that sometime. It was very interesting.

     Anyway back to the film in question. 'Toby Dammit' forms the third and final segment of a portmanteau film of adaptations of short stories by the American Gothic writer Edgar Alan Poe under the title 'Spirits of the Dead'. The French title, 'Histoires Extrordinaires' is perhaps more fitting. The other two films are 'Metzengerstein' directed by the notorious Roger Vadim and 'William Wilson' directed by Louis Malle. All are very good, though we both felt that Fellini's offering was perhaps not the best, lacking as it did a little focus. It was nevertheless full of striking visual imagery (perhaps the reason it worked so well, edited down, as a pop-video) and the awards ceremony scene was satiric enough - self-congratulatory, shallow and dull. It was also the only one of the three that gave a contemporary setting to Poe's work. The title too was changed. The original short-story becoming, in effect, a stepping stone to an exploration of contemporary Italy popular culture, in particular the nascent cult of celebrity.

     Visually 'William Wilson', starring Alain Dellon and Brigitte Bardot, was for me the most successful. A rather, sombre, restrained palette, in which the eponymous William Wilson, a young man without moral compass, is haunted by his own embodied conscience as though at some unspecified date the two were cleaved apart to live separate but occasionally intertwining lives. 

     This visual sobriety is in strong contrast to the element of decadence in the other two films - bear in mind that 'Histoires Extraordinaires' was the title Baudelaire gave for his collection of translations of Poe - a decadence heightened in 'Metzengerstein' by casting Peter Fonda opposite his sister Jane (then wife of director Roger Vadim) as the object of her frustrated desire. Tellingly filmed in Brittany among ruins and decay.  All very Late Sixties.  So perhaps decadence is what to varying degrees these films have in common, but to take an apophatic approach; all films are about an absence that has its locus in the main character; absence of moral compass and  ultimately an absence of meta-narrative. And that is essentially about us and our society.

Spirits of the Dead

1968

Producer:                  Alberto Grimaldi, Raymon Eger

Director:                    Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, Frederico Fellini

Cinematograpgher:  Claude Renoir, Tonio delli Colli, Giuseppe Rotunno

Arthur's Stone

     Our first proper outing since the start of Lockdown was to the crown of the great sandstone ridge of Cefn Bryn on peninsular Gower, taking the Red Road over the common from Llanrhidian. It was our first visit and we were properly rewarded with panoramic views in all directions. It certainly feels like the very centre of the peninsular - whether that's entirely accurate is a different matter.

     On the north flank of the hill, and with panoramic views over the Loughor estuary to the Brecon Beacons is Arthur's Stone. (I mention that because it could have significance as to the placing of this monument.) Its Welsh name is Maen Ceti. The stone is a glacial erratic, now split into two, that forms the capstone of a two chambered burial cairn - time and the hand of man removing its covering of stones. I'm not sure if anybody knows for certain whether the stone was moved to this location, or that the burial chamber was excavated from underneath the pre-existing stone. Either way it's a hell of a thing to achieve. As its English name suggests it has connections to the legend of King Arthur, but to St David also. Both men are credited with cleaving the stone in twain. Arthur used Excalibur and David his pastoral staff. A little further off to the west is a second cairn.

McMorran and Whitby

     The other Saturday my latest ebay purchase arrived in the post. A monograph on the post-war classical architects McMorran and Whitby. Obscure, perhaps. Except British readers will have seen their work, and in particular one work, on television many times. That work is the extension to the Old Bailey, and for some, particularly the late historian and critic Gavin Stamp, it is their greatest work. I like it but am not wholly convinced. Neither, for that matter, am I wholly convinced by his description of McMorran and Whitby as 'progressive classicists' or that it's full of reverences to Lutyens and Vanburgh. Indeed I have to say that I find their work uneven, sometimes bland, occasionally rebarbative, but at their best these buildings have a quiet satisfying lyricism. 

This monograph forms part of series on 20th century British Architects published by the RIBA in collaboration with the Twentieth Century Society and English Heritage. Inclusion of McMorran and Whitby in the series perhaps indicates a change of attitude, among some historians and critics at least, towards contemporary classical architecture for in the years between the War and the advent of Post-Modernism, and in the early 70s the collapse of Modernism, the profession, critics and architectural press in the UK were dogmatically Modernist to the point of totalitarianism. As a result the profession came to be seen as aloof and arrogant. Look upon it as one of those strange paroxysms that British architecture is occasionally subject too when the doctrinaire has the ascendancy. Very few, such as Sir John Betjeman, stood against this, though the weight of popular opinion sided with the likes of Sir John and not the professionals. And for that lonely stand alone, regardless of the quality of their work, the likes of McMorran & Whitby, and Raymond Erith, deserve, and need, to be remembered. It was not an easy furrow to plough, as I can testify as a classically inclined student at Kingston Polytechnic School of Architecture in the late 80s. Not an experience I would want to repeat. On occasion it was close to bullying. I dropped out.

     McMorran & Whitby's historical context established, I think I should also make clear at this point that we are really talking about the work of McMorran here. Whatever the role of Whitby in the practice McMorran was the source of designs discussed here and in the book. There is one building designed by George Whitby illustrated in the book and that is the formidable, if not outright domineering, Plashet Girls School, East Ham, 1952-54. Not the sort of design one would normally associate with children's education.

     Donald McMorran, (1905-1965), spent a number of years before the Second World War in the office of Vincent Harris. At his best Harris was the designer of some great buildings, such as the Manchester Library and the City Hall in Sheffield, but at his worst could be unspeakably dull. Like Harris McMorran came to specialise in public buildings both housing and offices, and like Harris he was heavily influenced by that early twentieth century master Sir Edwin Lutyens. The final thing that McMorran designed in Harris's office was his master's house (10 Fitzroy Place, Highgate). It is an almost uncompromising brick box, the hipped roof hidden behind a parapet, mouldings superfluous. The redeeming feature, its one element of domesticity, is the (drawing room?) bay window dropped into the composition in an almost post-modern manner. Overall it is a hard and cold design, displaying all those things I would hate if it was a Modernist building. And rightly too. It is a Modern, but not Modernist, design. And it leaves me cold. Perhaps that was what Gavin Stamp meant by 'Progessive Classicism'. Be that as it may, McMorran's work is in continuity with that of the previous generation, that is it is essentially Neo-Georgian. And I suppose like the majority of post-War Modernism it, on the whole, just isn't that exciting. British architecture of either stripe had sunk low since its Edwardian heyday.

     Enough of this negativity. There are perhaps six buildings that really are excellent: (in chronological order) The Police Station, Hammersmith, 1938-9; The Lammas Green Estate, Forest Hill, 1953-7, Devon County Hall 1954-63; Cripps Hall, The University of Nottingham, 1957-9; The City Police Station, Wood St, The City of London, 1959-66; The County Library, Bury St Edmunds, 1965. In them McMorran overcame the economic strictures of Post-War Britain, with its sluggish economy, to produce lucid, intelligently designed Classical buildings. Humane buildings, sensitive to context and their place in a complex hierarchy of history, place and purpose. All are worth investigating, studying, existing within their time and yet part of the long British Classical tradition. Perhaps even timeless.

McMorran & Whitby

RIBA Publishing

London, 2009

Own work: Orange and Napkin

     My latest pencil crayon drawing: Orange and Napkin. Not that happy with it, to be honest.

Own work: Apple

     Apple anyone? I drew this a couple of days ago and thought I'd share this with you all. Pencil crayon on 220 gsm smooth surface cartridge paper.