Blessay 65: Scalarama

Last night I attended a screening of the documentary SCALA!!! which tells the story of London’s Scala cinema from the 1960s to its closure in 1993. Its most fondly remembered home was in a seedy Kings Cross long before its eventual gentrification. I went twice in the late eighties. Taxi Driver being part of a double bill that I fell asleep through. And later a rare screening of The Terence Davies Trilogy. No usher with their torch assisted me. I stumbled through the thick darkness and groped to find a seat. It was the darkest cinema I’ve ever experienced. You felt you were falling into a black pit or climbing up a misty mountain. My seat was excruciatingly hard, rickety and smelt of cat pee. It was damp and freezing cold. I kept my overcoat on. The projection was erratic and marihuana was in the air. Those pungent memories were reconfirmed by those audience members interviewed in the film. Discomfort was an integral part of the Scala cinema experience!

SCALA!!! is an eclectic, highly nostalgic reminiscence of a cinema as a sociological phenomenon. As one customer says, “A place for weirdos and misfits.” A safe space for the gay community. A venue for music gigs (Lou Reed did one, apparently it was awful). A meeting spot for groups like the Laurel and Hardy appreciation society or martial art movie fanatics. A home for the lonely to escape to. A sanctuary for the dispossessed. A niche for desperate cinephiles to discover cinematic rarities’. And even a place for uninhibited expression – a frustrated man, before a screening of John Carpenter’s The Thing, shouts out to the audience it’s a crap film and then reveals the ending.

Watching SCALA!!! was a rough and smooth trip down memory lanes of the 1980s. The Scala cinema was one of 5 London repertory cinemas; the NFT, The Electric Cinema on Portobello Road, Riverside Studios and The Everyman in Hampstead all more visited by me than Kings Cross’s epic flea-pit. I probably went to them more than the Scala because they were warmer in mid February, the seats weren’t built of concrete and their auteur programming was more appealing (SCALA!!!,s punk-energetic focus on its alternative audience meant no appreciable screen time was given to the film buffs who, as someone interviewed said, may have wished to see an Agnes Varda quadruple. Yes, have that and early Antonioni and late Ozu squeezed in, a lot more, or for the first time, between the John Waters and Kenneth Anger nights).

To say their programming was weird would be an understatement. Pasolini’s 120 Days of Sodom would be rolled over by Thunder Crack’s 1975 horror porn comedy then Laurel and Hardy came next with more sexploitation or schlock horror to follow. Its rock ‘n’ roll and drugs audience came for the rocking movies and special sex in hidden quarters of the cinema.

Overall SCALA!!! is a very entertaining, cleverly edited (Thatcherite disturbances abound) doc that just goes on a bit too long. It’s as if the filmmakers were too high on their celebration that they didn’t want their film to ever end. Ten minutes could have been dropped. It should have finished with the cinema’s final film the thirties King Kong which was also the first film to have been screened at Kings Cross.

I wasn’t a big fan of the Scala cinema. But I miss it. Or should I say I miss a cinema environment that was wild, even transgressive. And it stood next to The Bell, a welcoming all dance venue. Patrons could rush from its dance floor into a house of movies from midnight to dawn. With a few notable exceptions repertory cinemas, and there are far less of them now than in the 1980s, have become expensive, plush and bourgeois with sofas, dining tables, three course meals and mainstream movie fodder flipped between the most chic art-house stuff.

A film well worth seeing if you knew the Scala and are now probably in your mid fifties, sixties or seventies. Will a much younger crowd appreciate SCALA!!! or is it just for the unreconstructed, the nostalgics or converted Scala lifers?

Blessay 64: My Old Time Religion

Religion has never played a central part in my life. I didn’t grow up with a parental drilled obligation to believe in God but my 1950’s England was not the godless Christian space that the majority now inhabit in 2023. To be confidently secular then, in working class northern England, wasn’t possible. You might have indulged in a drunken atheistic rant but risked being shouted down and shamed. Queen, country, the government and a big G were running the show. A deference to authority was as natural as breathing. Risk offending that and a nasty shortage of breath could occur. It was a delusional consensus both cohesive and depressing. A post war pact of beliefs on which new housing and the creation of the NHS flourished. We were bribed by those lovely sweets. Soon a Labour Jerusalem and Conservative Eden were promised by our leaders. But I’m still waiting for them. Perhaps God, believed by some folk, to be pulling the ethereal strings, behind Clement Atlee and Harold McMillan, was only any good at deferred gratification. You’ll get it all in the after-life without being taxed. But we’ll probably resurrect the nation’s means of control.

In my early thirties I read a lot of Freud, Jung, books on Buddhism and mystical poetry. I think this was tied up with the Jungian idea of individuation and attempting to get closer to, what Jung temptingly named one of his books, The Undiscovered Self. My paperback copy had a very shiny silver cover that reflected your puzzled face: a simple but highly effective marketing on behalf of a shrewd publisher.

This was followed by Marx and other Marxist thinkers. I began to formulate ideas about the inner and outer self – a discoverable individuality lying beneath the layers of your persona, plus a personal collective responsibility conditioned by the socio-economics of capitalism. In between the material and spiritual realm, a religious quest, fascinated me. Freud was too harsh and dismissive of religion as an infantile and sexually repressive concept. Jung’s idea of the archetype was compelling with the self’s need to view itself in the image of God. Whilst I found Marx’s economic analysis and revolutionary fervour captivating. All this (deluded or not) was my sincere attempt to become a good person: achieve a more satisfying authenticity. And shadowing these thinkers was my teenage immersion in existentialism

I’d read Sartre and wanted freedom to be a human agency that dispensed with the need for God and take moral responsibility for my own actions: though I believe you have a spiritual life, irrespective of a belief in God or a religious creed. These thoughts haunted me. After university I could have gone down the intellectual route of post-grad academe. Instead I threw myself into “hands on” social work – a volunteer at a hostel for single homeless men; carer in a residential home; children’s nursery worker and adult literacy tutor. And during those years the writings of Simone Weil (1909-1943) a philosopher, sociologist, teacher, mystic and political activist were inspirational. In the introduction to Weil’s The Need for Roots T.S.Eliot said she was “a great soul and brilliant mind…a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of the saints.” She was the intellectual who, with empathy and compassion, endured the exhausting labour of French factory life in the 1930s. Weill’s experience of worker exploitation was not a tokenistic gesture but authentic truth seeking.

 “It is not on account of what is personal in him (her)—that he (she) has a personality with such and such qualities—that it is wrong to inflict harm on him (her). It is, rather, the impersonal in a person that makes it wrong. It is the impersonal in a human being that is sacred”                                                                

I still think that’s wonderful. To have a universal objectivity that recognizes the essence of what it is to be human. We all have very different personalities but our shared essence, the right to be and exist, as a respected human being, is within all of us. Weil delivers that belief with a punchy clarity hovering on being religious. I say hovering because Simone Weil, a committed socialist, who turned to God and Catholicism, couldn’t join the church. For her it was an institution unable to accommodate her austere faith, so terrifying pure that it journeyed to martyrdom (I wouldn’t recommend going along that extreme path). Yet she’d a burning outsider commitment to root out injustice and hypocrisy. I don’t have an ounce of Weil’s intense courage or mysticism but her self-denial, in pursuit of getting at the truth of things, planted a seed in me. Simone Weil’s writing is troubling and insightful and alongside of Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Eliot’s Four Quartets a formidable spiritual testament.

At the age of nine I went to Sunday School. I found the music and prayers boring. What I liked best was art. In my drawing book I was encouraged to crayon pictures of Jesus and his disciples. “And how did Jesus manage to walk on water?’ asked the teacher. To this question the class, as a puzzled chorus, said “I don’t know Miss,” Miss didn’t go on to give us an explanation beyond the fact that Christ was a miracle worker. I was already doubtful of the supernatural, even though it appeared to originate from a strange ancient world. I wanted to suggest the disciples had found a clever plumbing solution involving unseen pipes and a platform. But the faith of my teacher’s expression upset me so I shut up. I drew my bearded Jesus in a purple T-shirt with green feet as big as surfboards on jagged waves. Miss was shocked by the colours and exaggerated feet. She asked me if I might be more respectful.

Back home I told Mother that I didn’t want to go to Sunday School because I thought it silly. She accepted my reason and I was released. I’ve always been grateful to her. Her vague C of E religiosity, more learnt from BBC Songs of Praise on television than any churchgoing, saved me from the traps of the Christian fairy tale. I’ve nothing against fairy tales. They can be profound, enchanting and instructive. But religion brings along its special baggage of fixed rules and regulations. As I grew up religion only mattered for me as a flexible spiritual metaphor with literary powers (The Bible, especially The New Testament, in the great King James version is wonderfully poetic and The Dhammapada, The Upanishads and The Bhagavad Gita are also sublime reads). 

My first image of Christianity was a picture of Jacob, ascending his ladder to heaven: behind the top rung hovered four angels. It hung in my parent’s bedroom opposite a Technicolor image of Christ whose piety was definitely miffed. The net curtained windows objected to daylight causing Jesus to suffer in his dark corner. On Jacob’s side of the room he could see much better: feel confident to climb. Jesus, despite his controlling smile, had dispirited eyes: as if God had cunningly removed the ladder. You’ll get to heaven the hard way, via crucifixion. We had two Victorian images of the son of the Almighty and a heavenly transport option to God. I didn’t take up either offer, no matter how much school tried to indoctrinate me and all those other post-war kids.

Today my earlier atheistic self has been tested (or compromised?) for I’m inclined to be more of an agnostic. But my mother’s Jesus and that climbing up to the angels’ picture would always be taken down and binned. I can love, more intensely, my Mother and my Father without the religious sentiment that once looked, so calculatingly, down on us, from the wallpaper of our old damp house.

Blessay 63: On Light and Noise

I am under duress: though this is an irritation not a major crisis. Scaffolding has been placed outside every window of my tower block flat. Men go up and down in a cage to drill, hammer and inspect. On Monday morning more men enthusiastically pick up their building toys. After the weekend they’re eager to dig deeper into concrete and demonstrate they’re still able to put on a serious work show. At least for the first hour: then there’s a brief silence and play recommences in hiccupping spasms. Now aluminium clips are being slowly fitted to support the future installation of the cladding. Old dense concrete can take it. The more vulnerable residents can’t. My 1960s ‘council utopia’ of twenty two floors, in Swiss Cottage, London being refreshed: erasing the shadow of the nightmare of Grenfell.

Last week I met a carer, in the lift, who’d been visiting a very old man living alone on the top floor. She told me that he won’t use ear plugs or wear noise cancelling headphones. He sits, moans and eats ready made meals. The man hasn’t allowed the builders to enter his flat and replace the windows. Mine have been replaced and recently cleaned from outside. They are good windows but gauze netting and scaffolding obscures my 20^th floor panoramic view, further blighted by endless bad July summer days.

No cladding can be put on until each resident’s flat, on each floor, has been done. There is a works schedule. The cladding must begin, at the latest, by September. The resistant old man needs to let them in. He will soon begin to annoy his carer and make enemies, not just of the contractor, but his neighbours. They will make him relinquish his hold on his home. We want the cladding done and the East European cladders to depart. Yet my sympathy is divided between the man and the workers. The work progresses too slowly with two few men. Brexit may account for a labour shortage; rumours abound of hired people having been dismissed because of incompetence and poor training, and that the sort of major refurbishment being undertaken is seriously complex, hence they are running into difficulties.

The sound of their cage and my concrete being beaten begin to take on the shape and force of people digging for coal in a mine. A mine in the sky? That’s absurd. Mines are under the earth not reaching up to clouds. Perhaps it’s because I’ve internalised these sounds so they burrow like a mole into me. I can’t stand this racket. I need to ground myself, some streets away, in the local library. I may not get the kind of quiet that libraries once provided you with before the internet and mobile phone. Yet yellow foam earplugs will defend me. I will come through. There’s a huge difference between an invasive contractor attack and a background library hum.

To stay too long in my kitchen drinking tea, under a florescent bulb doesn’t calm me down. The taste of Earl Grey tea loses its caffeine power. I slump over the table feeling drained of energy as I sip what now tastes like boiled misty water unable to seep into the tea bag, realising its leaves lack flavour because the whole atmosphere of this zero summer is profoundly wrong. At least in the library their fluorescence is further away than the glare from my ceiling light-tube and there are many more windows without prison bar scaffolding.

The work lasts from Monday to Friday (9-4). So why am I moaning? Because it’s gone on for six months and become a way of life that I’m forced to react to. My writing routine has been disrupted. Have I suddenly become inflexible? I used to think I could almost write anywhere, under any adverse or unusual conditions: that I was naturally adaptable. I’d scribble on long train journeys in Europe, retreat to the park on a boiling hot day to make notes or even daydream enough to compose a paragraph or two as I swam at the leisure centre or walked down the Finchley Road. Now the building work has jolted me from my home habitat and routine – propped up, by a cushion, on the bed, writing for an hour or leaning over my desk researching Google things on the PC. Sorry, I feel listless, even mentally lame, having had to limp back to the library with a sense of not having got much done.

Yet I am writing this page. The writer spark refuses to be beaten. I hope I’m not writing rubbish. Or rubbish is writing me. It says 3.59 on my Library PC. They are about to stop the cage for the day and put down their tools. I could write undisturbed back home till bedtime but I won’t. It’s an early evening meal and a Proms concert. I will stand in the Albert Hall and listen to music. Maybe in the interval I will try very hard to recall what John Cage said about noise and then dismiss it.

“Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments.”

Try saying that to a daily electric drill and sledgehammer. Remember the context of noise John. The context!

Blessay 62: Tremble and Transcend (2)

Three years ago I wrote my first essay on six epiphanies I’d experienced from listening to classical music. Here are three more. If you want to remind yourself of my definition of epiphanies / frissons then please read Tremble and Transcend (1).

Music epiphanies are deposited in a bank of feeling. A money analogy isn’t a flippant one but a statement of a different definition of wealth. In this rich zone of musical taste a high interest (of pleasure) accrues significantly more than any interest on the money in my savings account or ISA. Each time I return to playback this music it still turns me on – a very 60s phrase and applicable to the time when I first discovered all 3 works on vinyl and cd.

(1) Scheherazade – Ravel

The young Ravel’s beautiful song cycle setting of three poems by Tristan Klingsor operates on a dual level. First as a 1904 version of orientalism (Long before Edward Saide’s important critique) with its depiction of the other and the allure of the East as being mythically dangerous, exciting, fearful, enchanting and mysterious: words that fancifully adorn a complex reality. The 1001 Arabian Nights still inhabits the cultural background of our perception of the East despite the problematic geo-politics of many parts of Asia. Yet at the beginning of the century Ravel and Klingsor centred very sensually on the Eastern romance of their composition: not only the fairy tale element but secondly an early modern view of individuality repressed by societal constraints.

Asie, The Enchanted Flute and The Other (Or better still in French L’Indifferent) are intoxicating songs. If I had to only choose only one then it would be Asie (Asia) and to be precise the very opening when the word Asie is sung three times by the great female soprano Victoria de los Angeles. Her voice has a beguilingly warm sweetness, technical ease and unsentimental lyric power. When I was nineteen I first heard her recording of Scheherazade and loved it. I hadn’t yet travelled abroad. Western Europe was out there and enticing – though Asia was the greater challenge. Victoria cried out Asie to accompany Ravel’s wonderful orchestration. I was seduced and literally wanted to fly to the East. Not on a plane but by flapping my wings. This is an Asia “where fantasy sleeps like an empress in her forest filled with mysteries” and a schooner will “spread its violet sails like a huge bird of night in the golden sky.”

The promise of Scheherazade is also generalised into a deep need to escape your circumstances, overcome the often crushing routines of life and achieve a greater imaginative freedom. In Tristan Klingsor’s case it might have been because he was a gay man. Ravel might also have been gay but there is no real evidence of his sexual preferences.

In my case I was a comfortably heterosexual teenager who vaguely wanted to escape from Liverpool. In 1969/70 I had a good friendship with a woman 10 years older than me. Pauline kept telling me that she thought Liverpool was a dump and that young people like me ought to leave. Ravel and Klingsor were members of an artistic group called Les Apaches (The Hooligans) and their creative ‘mischief’ was to create a fourteen  minute musical disruption. Scheherazade had me itching for new possibilities. Asie, Asie, Asie, magically sung as a stretched out Aaa-sie finally had me singing Get-out, Get-out, Get-out over De Los Angeles’s compelling voice.

 (2)  Symphony no 1 in D Major – Mahler

My first encounter with the symphonies of Mahler was through Charles Groves, now sadly forgotten. Once he was the conductor of the Liverpool Philharmonic and championed Mahler at the many concerts he gave. Yet I don’t recall going to hear his performance of Mahler’s 1st. I came to that through the CBS recording that Bruno Walter made with the CBC orchestra in 1962.

Nature inhabits Mahler’s first symphony – even the sound of a cuckoo is depicted in the opening movement as we hear the return of Spring. The symphony’s nickname is Titan: presumably meaning the titanic power of nature. We’ve had previous musical descriptions of nature – eg. Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony and Schumann’s Spring symphony yet not so violent. But the last time I listened to Walter’s recording was the day after I’d put on my CD of Songs for Swinging Lovers by Frank Sinatra. The song I was most drawn to was You Make Me Feel so Young with its great line “You make me feel that Spring has sprung.” Just what I felt Mahler had achieved, although Spring being sprung in his first symphony produced an orchestral scream moment that rudely shocked the audience at its premiere in 1889.

The symphony is superbly realised by Bruno Walter (Who as a young man met Mahler) and by 1962 was an elderly disciple making his second recording of a work that had so convinced him of Mahler’s greatness. Walter’s performance is timed at 52.03 minutes. About 3 minutes before the end of the symphony I experience a real heart beating epiphany with the last movement called the “victory chorale.” At this point the Mahlerian hero has escaped the blows of fate, the orchestral screaming, and comes triumphantly through. There are times when I’ve just played, as if injecting a needle into my arm, those last 3 minutes of Mahler 1. That ending echoing ideas of the opening, comes organically round full circle to its wonderfully resolved D major climax.

I now know Mahler’s “victory chorale” so well that I don’t even need to listen to the CD. It’s internalised: locked in my memory and, of all places pops into my head. The pulse of its musical triumph calms me when I’m in a supermarket and irritated that a certain item isn’t in stock, but an epiphany definitely is.

 (3) Piano Sonata opus2, no 3 in e flat minor – Beethoven

A protean restlessness is my first reaction to this early Beethoven sonata. In their liner notes for records and CDs music critics tend to employ too much technical language. With a few exceptions (Bryce Morrison, always astute and literary) they often go for musical terms over metaphors.

“Employing elaborate figuration, original pedal effects and a brilliant use of trills.”

That’s one least bad example: a description of this Beethoven sonata by William Kinderman and true enough. But the work is also mercurial, inventive, irrepressible and humorous. Here is Beethoven already imposing a Beethoven identity on the piano sonata form assisted by what he’d learnt from Haydn. He would compose 32 piano sonatas. Masterpieces like the Waldstein, Pathetique and The Hammmerklavier were to come. And 30, 31 and 32 would enter a new pianistic sound world.  

Of all the epiphanies I’ve written about in these two essays only the Beethoven Piano Sonata opus 2, no 3 in e flat major comes closest to depicting so much of my basic personality and individuality: especially so in its first movement. I simply see myself; hear the rhythm of me, my identity, moving through life: trying to escape, outwit death, and lesser disappointments, in a defiantly childlike manner. All the while testing social parameters and exerting my freedom to question authority.

Allowing for many different interpretations, and I do, of this sonata then the recording made in mono in 1951 by Wilhelm Kempf is the one that contains so much of me. Praised for the spirituality and poetry of his playing Kempf was from a golden age of pianists. He was born in Germany in 1895 (When the world still had the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and died in 1991. There’s a lovely story of him meeting Sibelius in 1957 and playing the Hammerklavier sonata. According to Kempf when he’d finished playing Sibelius said “You did not play like a pianist, you played like a human being.” I can’t verify how true that remark is but it feels right. Wilhelm Kempf sensitively playing in a human and direct way: naturally conveying the very human qualities of late and early Beethoven (that pesky yet genial sonata no 3) to my ears and subsequently my sense of what it is to be identified as being human.

Recordings

Ravel: Scheherazade – Victoria de los Angeles Orchestra de la Societe des Concerts de Conservatoire conducted by Georges Pretre.  Great Recordings of the Century EMI 1962

Mahler; Symphony no 1 CBC Orchestra conducted by Bruno Walter, 1962 Sony Classical

Beethoven; Piano Sonata opus2, no 3 in e flat minor – 1951, Wilhelm Kempf in the box set of Beethoven Piano Sonatas, Deutsche Grammophon

Blessay 61: Nostalgia for a Lost City

A man calling himself Billy of Liverpool’s Yesteryear has been posting up old photographs of Liverpool, the city of my birth, on Facebook. The main nostalgia axis for Billy is the 50s, 60s and 70s – the post-war years of economic development. Edwardian, Victorian and even earlier architecture were threatened by the feverish expansion of the motor car industry. Buildings casually demolished for car parks, motorways, road extensions, flyovers and roundabouts. Trailing just behind the car was the ubiquitous office block. So pubs, often as large as grand hotels, streets of two up and two down houses, thirties estates, traditional shopping squares, the tough remains of cobbled streets and much more besides were unceremoniously uprooted and destroyed.

Setting to one side the necessary demolition of some dreadful slums this was naked, cultural vandalism of a high order: more a blind, insensitive progression than social progress. Then side stepping real social betterment came a piling on of new tacky architecture un-complimenting a wrecked central Liverpool, now with vastly increased space for its polluting cars, that justified the inflexible Local Council axiom – we are bringing you progress, you can’t stop it and don’t even try to.  

“That most logical of 19^th century aesthetes, Mallarme, said that everything in the world exists to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”

                                                                              On Photography by Susan Sontag

I left Liverpool in 1971 to go to Sussex University. Yet roughly once a year I went back home to see my family. In 2009 my older brother died, whilst Mum and Dad had passed away some time back. Since then I’ve only visited Liverpool for one day trip and a weekend stay with my niece. Nostalgia for my roots has been kept in abeyance, deflected and even ignored. I haven’t pinned for Liverpool. I’m still a northerner at heart but now happily southernised from living in London for 43 years. Flashes of memory make me a little wistful but I don’t sentimentally dwell, hard and fast, on the past. Yet show me a photograph of Liverpool during the time I was young, or before I was born, and it exerts an irresistible pull. So the Billy photographs had me yearning. Not a longing to be back then but leisurely pass through, sit down and eat at that table of memory once more.

Clayton Square, Edge Hill, Lark Lane, Smithdown Road, Ullet Road, Granby Street or Wavertree Road. Place names when linked, as they once looked like, to black and white photographs, are irrevocably part of me. Although I only lived in Toxteth (Liverpool 8) Wavertree (Liverpool 9) seemed, from my young child’s point of view, a great distance away. Scotland Road was tarred as the roughest of areas and was, according to my mother, a “dirty road where only common people lived.” Lark Lane, both bohemian, posh middle class and on the fringes of Sefton Park seduced me. The great Victorian landing stages and tunnels of the Pier Head were awe inspiring. I could go on.

Opening again my copy of Liverpool Our City.Our Heritage by Freddy O’Connor I found even more streets and buildings, in parts of Liverpool, I’d rarely visited. Not all have gone. The most prized listed buildings, for the cause of tourism, survived. I mean contractors may still plant an incongruous hotel in front of the Liver Building but if you strain your neck and look up you will still be able to see the iconic Liver Bird. Yet travel a few miles out of the city centre and the scene becomes increasingly mournful. Why demolish that? Why build that? Why put a road there? What happened to the grass?

I’m not a student of architecture or sufficiently au fait about its styles, movements and fashions. I’ve a superficial knowledge about buildings and cityscapes but like most people possess an innate sensitivity to architecture that delights and inspires. I’m not an anti-modernist. I think the good new must co-exist harmoniously with the good old. Why couldn’t the English town planners of the past 50 years have learnt from Paris how to achieve this? Cultural Heritage is a big noble world. Did Liverpool live up to it? No, it lived down to it because of city planner Graeme Shankland.

‘Shankland was an important representative of what Peter Mandler has described as a new ‘more dirigiste version of urban planning’, an approach that had ‘little sentiment about historic townscapes’. As Mandler put it, ‘city centres were to be made “liveable” not by preserving the familiar (which was deemed grey and boring) but by projecting a vision of modern vitality.’ Shankland’s plan for Liverpool is notorious. Gavin Stamp described it as a ‘nightmare’ which was mercifully only ever partly completed. Raphael Samuel labelled him ‘the butcher of Liverpool’.’

                                        Architectural History Vol 65, 2022 (Editor Mark Swenarton)                            

If the money hadn’t run out in the 70s then Shankland would have fully realised his brutal, philistine ‘vision’ for the city. Of course the vandalism continued into our new century. The UN agency declared that Liverpool Waters, a 5.5bn project by Peel Group, to build on derelict land resulted in “serious deterioration and irreversible loss” and “significant loss of to its (city centre) authenticity and integrity.” In 2004 Liverpool was given a Unesco World Heritage status. In 2021 that status was removed mainly because of the crap architecture, bordering the magnificent Royal Albert Dock restoration, and the building of Everton’s 500 million football stadium involving the demolition of the Bramley Moore Dock closed in 1988.

This all brings me back to photographs and existence. That so many of the old Liverpool buildings and streets now end up dead in a photograph and only alive for the people, still living, who once inhabited some of them. Of the places that have survived, like the two up and two down of my home 79 Cedar Grove, there will be a fondness, tense love and critical affection. Yet I’d prefer not to have nostalgia for, lost only in time or lost through demolition, Liverpool architecture: only a kindly remembrance of my heady growing up: my freedom and existence in those once intense 50/60s haunts, both private and public, of a great city.

“Architecture for Thinkers. An insight is needed (and that probably very soon) as to what is specially lacking in our great cities – namely, quiet, spacious, and widely extended places for reflection, places with long, lofty colonnades for bad weather, or for too sunny days, where no noise of wagons or of shouters would penetrate…for us godless ones to be able to think our thoughts in them. We want to have ourselves translated into stone and plant, we want to go for a walk in ourselves when we wander in these halls and gardens.”

                                                                       Nietzsche – The Gay Science

When will such city plans be drawn up? Only in my dreams.

Blessay 60: Akira and Tom: Some Thoughts on T.S.Eliot and Cinema.

T.S.Eliot was known to occasionally visit the cinema with either his close friend Mary Trevelyan or Valerie Eliot. Mary records them going to see the Marx Brother’s A Night at the Opera (An irrepressible Groucho Marx was now corresponding by letter with the dour Tom); a Luigi Zampa film called Angelina, starring Anna Magnani, through which Eliot fell asleep and later told Mary “I thought Zampa was the name of an obscure opera.”  Also in 1949 Mary arranged for them to attend the premiere of Carol Reed’s The Third Man but Eliot missed it for he had to leave London for a lecture tour. That was a pity.

Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 Throne of Blood, adapted from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, has for sixty seven years been cited as T.S.Eliot’s favourite film. Again and again Eliot is reputed, presumed, reported or supposed to have said this in an interview. But where and when? I can’t find a source for his claim. Eliot lived in London not far from the Southbank NFT and The Academy Cinema in Oxford Street: both indubitably screening the films of Kurosawa.

If Eliot really saw Throne of Blood then I’m sure he would have been excited. Although much of Shakespeare’s dialogue is omitted, intense visual metaphors of fear, power, revenge and guilt explode on screen. And particularly so in the scene where a distraught Lady Macbeth attempts to wash off the blood she still imagines to be on her hands. Lady Macbeth (Lady Asaji in the film) is played by Isuzu Yamada whose Noh mask-like face proves to be so haunting. Her terror at smelling the spilt blood feeds into Eliot’s criticism where sensations and atmosphere inevitably accompany and motivate characters in a poem, play or novel (Eliot wrote about Shakespeare’s Hamlet and also spoke of Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene as an example of his theory of the objective correlative in art.)

The young Eliot wrote enthusiastically about the music hall which he preferred to the serious new theatre on offer. When older he occasionally mentioned the theatre (most disparagingly concerning the film version of his play Murder in the Cathedral of which he said “the film is not a good medium for poetry.”) If he meant that cinema has a hard time with poetic verse drama then I would probably agree. Interestingly verse dramas performed in London’s West End of the fifties saw full houses. Not just for Eliot’s plays but Christopher Fry’s. And Fry went on to script films that although they aren’t verse dramas, have a quasi poetry. Forgetting the TV movies of his plays, now rightly or wrongly forgotten, Fry scripted two Hollywood biblical epics, Barabbas (Blank verse very well) and The Bible…in the Beginning (Well not so well). As for Eliot’s plays there was a BBC TV version of The Family Reunion but the recording was then wiped. After this, Eliot’s final play, it’s hard to imagine him taking up scriptwriting

The Waste Land was published in 1922. In 1925 The London Film Society was founded. Under a special club licence they were able to screen Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925). Many writers, artists and intellectuals attended the screenings. Yet there’s no record of Eliot being there. The critic Michael Wood has said that The Waste Land is “modern montage par excellence.” It that’s correct then the fragmented disunity / unity of this modernist poem has much in common with the editing of the Odessa steps sequence of Potemkin and the savage climax of Eisenstein’s earlier film Strike ( 1925). I think Eliot must have been aware of 20’s Russian cinema but never let on. It was maybe that cinema, as modernism was a force concurrent with modernist poetry but only infrequently to be taken seriously and, as a tasteful commercial entertainment, snobbishly looked down upon.

Automatism is a word that Eliot and D.H.Lawrence recoiled from. Mechanical reproduction of art was not for them. Eliot could view an artist like Chaplin as a genius performing in films (viewed with his suspicion or antipathy) to possess a performance rhythm set apart from the rhythm of film editing and I assume, for Eliot, superior to the medium. His real figures of mythic stature were musical hall artists like Marie Lloyd. For Eliot Lloyd’s spontaneity and ability to ad lib for a working class audience was a more visceral experience than a film comedy that’s sealed in the can. Of Laurel and Hardy Eliot he did not find them to be “comedians for national life.” The brilliance of their routines had been pre-recorded. And therefore lacked the immediacy and authenticity of comedy in the here and now. To that I would say no. The greatest physical screen comedians (Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy or Jacques Tati) rarely improvise on screen but construct a comic universe. Though all that rigour and artistic control also creates the illusion of occurring easefully in the moment.

I wonder what Eliot would have thought of Laurel and Hardy if he’d attended one of their theatre shows when they toured the UK in the early fifties? Would that have made them proper comedians for national life or would hyper-fussy Eliot have regarded that as only a stage record of the duo’s tried and tested movie routines? My own brother told me he saw and loved their stage act in Liverpool. It slipped my mind to ask him how much they improvised for their adoring audience.

Given Eliot’s prominence as the leading modernist poet then you might have assumed he’d be attracted to early experimental cinema (Hans Arp, Rene Clair’s Entr’acte, Jean Epstein or Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou) and that he’d adopt similar cinematic devices. Certainly the fragmentation of the epic The Waste Land collage was innovatory and yet was it, before its time, more a prescient radio play than a cinematic experiment akin to the film avant-gardists? Last year (2022) Radio 3 produced The Waste Land in the manner of a radio play with actors, sound effects and music. It fitted very comfortably inside this other medium: resonating as powerfully as Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall (though that was written as a specific play for radio and is still regarded as a landmark drama).

Eliot saw some early silent westerns and enjoyed them. Probably The Great Train Robbery (1903). Afterwards he was playing round with a scenario called Effie the Waif in which he included technical film terms. Eliot was attracted to playful, mainstream popular cinema. No avant gardism here. But before writing The Waste Land Eliot read a book by the surrealist French director Jean Epstein. He found it very interesting. Did it influence his writing? There are contradictions round Eliot’s seemingly indifferent and very passing engagement with film.

“He do the police in many voices” was once the first title over “The Burial of the Dead” opening for Eliot’s great modernist poem. That suggests ventriloquism for The Waste Land more than imagism. Yet cinematic impressions, with an edgy soundtrack, of Eliot’s own invention or borrowed from other classic texts, working class pub chatter and classical music are in the poem. In 2021 Four Quartets was done on stage as a one man show by Ralph Fiennes. He attempted to dramatize the verse and it was mainly successful. But can you really make a version, re-imagined as an authentic film, of The Waste Land or should you resist the idea of an immersive cinematic event? Maybe going for Eliot’s possible preference – commercial cinema over art house: old Possum’s ruins shorn across a huge IMAX screen in 3D with a Hans Zimmer soundscape battering on? Not for me.  I’m happier to remain at home with my copy of Eliot’s collected poems and mentally zoom into his haunting language, producing and directing it all in my head.

Blessay 59: Tremble and Transcend (1)

This will be an essay about classical music and how this great European tradition has affected me. It won’t be a condensed history of music or a description of how music accompanied me as some soundtrack to my life. A few years ago, writing in The Gramophone, Simon Callow berated the latter idea. For me, and I think Callow, music exists as a mysterious means to satisfy a cultural hunger and thirst that doesn’t need to be pinned down as a marker for a significant chapter in your life.

The moment you met someone who could be your partner; experiencing the death of a loved one; the birth of a child or simply having a fantastic holiday: all can be celebrated but why should these moments need triggering by music, apprehended at the time of the event? Why should music’s core function be the heightening of significant chapters in your life?

It’s not a question of your location, and what you were doing, when you first heard Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. More to what space did the Brandenburgs transport you to? Such a space may have had little to do with an intense real memory: far greater than the pull of nostalgia can be a re-living or re-experiencing of this state. And though my thoughts and feeling might be different on each listening to Bach what also delights me is a musical epiphany or frisson. In other words music can frequently posses you irrespective of the special life circumstances you find yourself in.  

I need to provide some dictionary definitions of epiphany and frisson.

EPIPHANY:  (1) The magnification of a supernatural or divine energy.

                       (2) Any moment of great and sudden revelation.

FRISSON:     Shiver. Thrill (An aesthetic one)

James Joyce gave the word epiphany to some of his early fiction and poetry.

“Go seek her out all courteously,

      And say I come,

Wind of spices, whose song is ever

Epithalamium.

That is verse X111 of Joyce’s Chamber Music. And Epithalamium means a poem or song written to celebrate a marriage. Perhaps there’s a marriage occurring between the experience of an epiphany and a frisson when listening to classical music: what’s heightened (the self) and the heightened effects (the self’s perception).

What follows is a list of moments from 6 classical pieces that for me always create a powerful high as they have the disarming ability to make me tremble at the beauty of their form and content.

(1)   Orfeo by Monteverdi.

The toccata opening of Monteverdi’s opera is a confident announcement, a grand proclamation played on drums, trumpets and strings. The toccata is repeated thrice within a time-span of less than two minutes. Monteverdi’s Orfeo was one of the first operas to be written. In a lovely self-conscious manner this new art form is being announced and the toccata fulfils its function to make me stay and listen to the opera that will follow. But it also does more. Its rhythms propel me into the narrative. The curtain opens (there were no stage curtains in Italy in 1610) for the overture has finished (This toccata is not an overture, the first one written was by Lully and probably for his opera Thesee.) My epiphany is the sense of a great moment in musical history and Orfeo’s toccata frisson is from me imagining I’m witnessing a landmark event.

(2)  St. Matthew Passion by Bach.

The beginning of the passion sets the scene for a drama that for believers and the irreligious has had such a profound effect on Western art and music. The booklet

supplied with my old recording says this is the greatest story ever told. These days

that sounds hyperbolic but the Christ saga is still emotionally gripping.

  “Come ye daughters, share my mourning;

    See Him – Whom? – The Bridegroom Christ

    See Him – How – A spotless Lamb.”

The chorus immediately proclaim the protagonist Jesus. This is followed by the chorale (A boys choir) singing “O lamb of God unspotted / There slaughtered on the cross.” and end with “Have pity on us, Jesus.”

This counterpoint of a double chorus is astounding. The adult one speaks of purity and holy innocence whilst the other boy chorus cries out at the victimisation of Jesus. I find this alternatively shocking, serene and dramatically intense. The passion will have to make both human and musical sense of this son of God’s suffering. Bach does just that. His music convinces us of the rightness and inevitability of a senseless crime, supplying majestic meaning alongside of a harsh drama of betrayal. This music of stark accusation, despair, joy and tender concern are wonderfully presented in these opening choral forces: musical frissons clustering round such beautifully seductive voices almost chilling in their earthly ‘damaged’ joy.

(3)  Symphony no 7 by Beethoven

The conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler detested Arturo Toscanini’s conducting and is known to have called him a “bloody timekeeper”. Too often I do find Toscanini’s conducting to be hard driven, even relentless. Yet I can forgive him all that when I listen to his 1936 recording of Beethoven’s 7^th symphony. And especially in the last movement, marked Allegro con brio. Both composition and writing are phenomenal. Toscanini’s interpretation is a precise (though not dogmatic) attack producing an energy that spirals through my body. I can only describe it as having the power of an electrical storm madly dancing inside of me. And Beethoven’s writing delivers a trembling transcendence to leave me both exhilarated and exhausted.

(4)  Symphony no 5 by Bruckner.

The epiphany is to be found in the first movement, marked Adagio – Allegro with its pizzicato effects. Not just Bruckner’s writing for the strings but the sound produced by a clarinet that, for me, conveys the beating of the heart. There are times when I’ve set my CD player into repeat mode to hear this again and again. There is always a pulse in music and great conductors quickly get to this. Yet here a ‘heartbeat’ becomes an extra musical idea – almost as if the strings were pumping blood into the wind section of the orchestra. This is barely audible on most recordings but in the RAH 1971 live performance, BBC symphony orchestra, conducted by Jascha Horenstein; it’s clear, pronounced and highly effective. Of course I can’t just linger on the frisson it provides but follow the whole symphony to its logical conclusion with the great fugal working out of the last movement, frisson after frisson, where heart and head creates such an organic architecture that you sit back, beautifully stretched by the structure, praising Bruckner for his wonderful compositional skill.

(5) Bluebeard’s Castle by Bartok.

All those seven locked doors, of Bluebeard, that the curious Judith wants to be opened. Each one painted in a symbolic colour; the first a torture chamber and the last a room of wives. Bartok’s opera was once described by a critic as having “a blood drenched lyricism.” At the white door no 5 Judith reaches Bluebeard’s kingdom of far vistas and blue mountains and is dazzled by the light streaming in. Her cry or scream (depending on which recording you sample) is followed by the tremendous sound of the brass section, blaring out its ‘blood motif’ (in the minor second) with the organ played underneath, quickly followed by ominous strings. Bluebeard sings of his country having “Sun, moon and stars have dwelling. / They shall be thy deathless playmates.” And Judith’s response is, “Yonder cloud throws blood-red shadows / What are these grim clouds portending?” What they portend is Judith’s death, along with Bluebeard’s previous wives, once the last two doors have been opened.

Bartok’s music has often been used in horror films (most famously in Kubrick’s The Shining) yet though he is a master composer of the sinister and violent, I think we have to interpret Bartok’s famous “night music” as not so much pushing us towards the grand guignol but conveying a psychological darkness that has much to do with Bartok’s own private nature. Whether it’s expressing the opera’s source, Perrault’s fairy tale, or other influences I feel such a great visceral power every time the music and its two singers unlock that fifth door of Bluebeard’s Castle. A Bartokian frisson sends a shiver down my spine and projects gaunt thoughts of dread.

(6) Symphony no 5 by Vaughan Williams.

I feel a pride at being British, with Celtic antecedents, but not in a nationalistic way – more a soft-power patriotism. I’m no royalist or a follower of football. The BBC, the NHS and our countryside reinforces my attachment to England. And the English classical music that colours that patriotic identity is that of Ralph Vaughan-Williams. As much as I also love and enjoy Elgar, Britten and Purcell it’s RVW who has proven to be the most persuasive, often irresistibly so.

The visionary impulse, melody and attack of his music has been with me since the age of twenty. After being wooed by his The Lark Ascending and Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, Vaughan-Williams’s 5^th symphony is the serene masterpiece that I return to more than those works and his other, differently wonderful, symphonies.

The third movement of the fifth is called romanza. The definition of romanza is “a short instrumental piece of song-like character.” Song is probably a keyword here. Vaughan Williams is famous for his collecting of English folk song. Musical themes from his opera The Pilgrims Progress are to be found in the symphony and in the manuscript score there are words by John Bunyan “He hath given me rest by his sorrow and life by his death.” These words were sung by Pilgrim in the opera. Yet it is the gentle introduction of the cor anglais in this movement which replaces the human voice. This theme is then developed by the wind section. The introduction of the strings brings a Sibelius-like mood, yet as the music progresses its soft-hued, but resolute, climaxes evoke, for me, a very English and deeply visionary sense of the land. It’s as if my reserved spot on the landscape is speaking to me to come and stand or lie there and receive great peace and serenity as things spiritually connect.

The fifth came after the abrasive violence of Vaughan Williams’s fourth symphony. It was premiered in 1943. Astonishing that such a tranquil work was composed during the Second World War. Yet like the 3^rd symphony (Pastoral) its healing surface hides conflict. The composer Anthony Payne said of the fifth that the agonies of the fourth and sixth symphonies “lie beneath its spiritual radiance.” To ‘bathe’ in its almost Blakean mysticism and Bunyan rightness, of the pilgrim’s journey, touches me deeply. I don’t believe in God but such music gives me a spiritual identity that I can comfortably live with. 

Of course there are more than six great moments in classical music. Already another dozen or so need mentioning. And many more. Another time. Another essay.

I haven’t done the obvious and given readers a YouTube link to this music. You will of course find them there. But I recommend that you seek out the cd recordings. For me the sound is preferable to the now second-hand vinyl. But what recordings?  There are so many performances in the catalogue.

Here are my personal favourites.

Monteverdi: Orfeo – The Ensemble Vocal et Instrumental de Lausanne conducted by

                                  Michel Corboz.   (Erato – 2 cd set) 1968 re-mastered 1989

Bach: Saint Matthew Passion – Munchener Bach Orchestra conducted by Karl Richter

                                                 (DGG – 3cd set) 1959 re-mastered 1994

Beethoven: Symphony no 7 – The New York Philharmonic conducted by Arturo

                                                Toscanini (RCA – I cd) 1936 re-mastered 1991

Bruckner: Symphony no 5 – BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jascha

                                             Horenstein (BBC Legends CD) 1971 re-mastered 2000

Bartok: Bluebeard’s Castle – Hungarian State Opera Orchestra conducted by Janos

                                             Ferencsik. Bluebeard – Yevgeny Nesterenko (bass)

                                             Elena Obraztsova (mezzo-soprano) (Hungaroton – 1 cd)

                                             1981

Vaughan Williams: Symphony no 5 – London Symphony Orchestra conducted by

                                                           Andre Previn (RCA – 1 cd) 1972 re-mastered

                                                           2003

There are of course many other recordings. I have some of those as well. But these six are very special: some of my first purchased vinyl, and then cd, encounters with great music. I hope you discover them too.

Blessay 59: Tremble and Transcend

Blessay 58: Dogs, Babies and Flowers

What are hard things to describe in a story or poem? The political state of the nation; climate change; the atrocities of war; sex without bathos; metaphysical conjecture or the sub-atomic building blocks of existence? All ambitious themes. All worthy of the attempt. Yet it’s toward ‘smaller concerns’ that I’d gravitate: very human and, by comparison, almost minutiae, set against those grand, and potentially grandiose, narratives.

Dogs, babies and flowers would be on my list. These are subjects that require a rare empathy, charge of imagination and an intuitive leap of faith. Too few writers have attempted and succeeded in convincing me that they can pull it off. After many years of reading for me only three writers have come through, Thomas Mann, D.H.Lawrence and Edith Scovell.

Firstly dogs. I have to admit to having read very few full-length books about canine adventures. Putting my childhood memories of the written and celluloid heroism of Lassie (the wonder dog!) to one side there is J.R.Ackerley’s memoir My Dog Tulip (described by Christopher Isherwood as “the greatest masterpiece of canine literature”). It’s a very good book but deserves an essay all to itself. No, instead I’ve chosen Thomas Mann’s 1918 short story, A Man and his Dog, which you’ll find in the Penguin edition of Mario the Magician and Other Stories.

A Man and his Dog concerns Mann’s relationship with a dog call Bashan – a German short-haired pointer. Some critics have said this work is as much about the mind of its author as well as a dog’s psychology. Certainly it’s an affectionate account of Mann’s love and respect for the canine. Bashan is a “manly” looking, hunting dog whose owner calls by whistling “in two notes, tonic and lower fourth, like the beginning of the second phrase of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony.” (Thomas Mann, always so magnificently passionate, in his novels, about preserving high Western culture, can’t resist such a reference even in his ‘doggy tale’).

There’s a lovely moment in A Man and his Dog when Mann finds it difficult to write for Bashan is very much an attention seeker.

“(Bashan) would smudge my freshly written page with his broad, hairy hunter’s paws. I would sharply call him to order and he would lie down on the floor and go to sleep. But when he slept he dreamed, making running motions with all four paws and barking in a subterranean but perfectly audible sort of way…For this dream life was obviously an artificial substitute for real running, hunting, and open-air activity; it was supplied to him by his own nature because his life with me did not give him as much of it as his blood and senses required.”

The owner both adores and reprimands his dog, especially about his hunting prowess and stamina. Mann is very funny when he’s arguing with himself over whether Bashan would be handled better by another owner. The dog whines at Mann as if to say he’s a “rotten master.” At other times Mann calls Bashan a “murderer” for eating a mouse and then lavishes praise on his hunter pose. “like a clumsy peasant lad, who will look perfect and statuesque as a huntsman among his native rocks.” A Man and his Dog conveys power and authority, submission and control, master and slave relations and peasant and aristocrat associations in the hunting grounds (beautifully described) of post-WW1 German gentry. I have never read such a powerful and fluid account of a slipping in and out of consciousness between a man and his dog. In this profound love/hate bond Mann astutely understands their differences and similarities playing off each other

“Animals are more primitive and less inhibited in giving expression to their mental state – there is a sense in which one might say they are more human: descriptive phrases which to us have become mere metaphor still fit them literally, we get a fresh and diverting sense of their meaning when we see it embodied before our eyes.”

I’m personally more of a cat lover than a dog lover but Thomas Mann convinced me, admittedly in the guise of the over-masculine hunter / gather role, of our long deep connections with the canine. Yet one day I will have to seek out a literary description of the hunter character of the cat. As far as I can discover Mann didn’t investigate the feline consciousness. Maybe that was too independent and aloof for his sense of patriarchal control?

And so onto babies. I’ve greatly admired writers who can convey the sensibility of a new born baby (It’s much ‘easier’ to write about older children or teenagers). For me only D.H.Lawrence and Edith Scovell have realised this well.

Lawrence will always be a controversial novelist for some readers. Yet even his detractors admit he had extraordinary powers to detect the poetic thingness of things, both animate and inanimate: making so much live and project their existence on the page. Lawrence had a great sympathy for all forms of life. Exploring his Collected Poems you can find accounts of rabbits, gazelles, snakes, cats, fish and babies.

“And I wish that the baby would tack across here to me

  Like a wind-shadow running on a pond, so she could stand

  With two little bare white feet upon my knee

  And I could feel her feet in either hand

  Cool as syringa buds in morning hours,

  Or firm and silken as young peony flowers.

That’s the conclusion of the poem, Baby Running Barefoot. We have the movement of the baby delicately expressed (“Like a wind-shadow running”) and her feet, on the adult’s knee, that when touched feel like lilacs or “firm and silken” peonies – representing romance and prosperity. It’s as if the baby is bestowed with a firm foundation on which to flourish and develop.

And then there’s A Baby Asleep after Pain.

“My sleeping baby hangs upon my life

      Like a burden she hangs on me;

  She who has always seemed so light,

          Now wet with tears and pain hangs heavily,

          Even her floating hair sinks heavily

                   Reaching downwards;

  As the wings of a drenched, drowned bee

           Are a heaviness, and a weariness.”

Lawrence beautifully conveys the weight of a baby held by its mother or father. And this is a baby asleep after some upset. Unlike the dead bee, of wet wings, the baby will awake soon, renewed by sleep to forget what hurt it so. In both poems a metaphorical connection is made with flowers and insects so that the baby is innocently placed in a protective world of nature. Lawrence, often a pantheistic and visionary writer, able to inspire or hector, doesn’t need to shout out loud about what he sees here only tenderly and quietly observe.

Edith Scovell (1907-1999) was one of the great, unsung female poets of British poetry. Her sensibility is not so much feminist but feminine guided by a careful, compassionate precision. Her unerring eye for detail ranges over poetry about the sea, flowers, childhood and old age. In her Selected Poems we find Poems on infancy where for me are two of the greatest poems ever written about a baby. The First Year and A Baby’s Head have a perception and insight that equals and often surpasses D.H.Lawrence. I love the sense of wonder at birth expressed in these two questions that make for verse three of The First Year.

“What should you do, new born, but fall

  Asleep, in sleep disclosing all?

  What can you do but sleep, an hour from birth,

  Lacking an answer yet to give to earth?

These metaphysical questions set up the mystery of the first year of birth, presenting them like a philosophical proposition. Yet this is no cold enquiry but a journey of warmth and discovery. Mother places her finger in the baby’s palm – “closed again (as they must) on mine, to a bud” sensing the baby’s helplessness and immaturity. She arrives at a state where “I am absorbed and clouded by a sensual love / of one whose soul is sense and flesh the substance of Her spirit; and her thoughts, like grass shadowed by the wind’s flight.”

   Scovell evokes Walt Whitman with his praise of lush grass in A Song of Myself without ever being Whitmanesque in style, instead alluding to The Bible (“For all flesh is grass and the glory of man like flowers”). The core of this poem is to be found in Stanza six. The poem’s title The First Year – is a time when a baby isn’t yet fixed in its comprehension of the world: no babyish word or action is attempting to make sense of things. The questions pile on.

“Whom do I know? Who learns from me to kiss, to play?

  Who answers sound with sound and looks with eyes of friend?

  Strange that this long first year of life, this standing day

  In which you are set like stone in ring, in which we meet, will

       more than end;

“Will drop far out of sight, and you become another,

   Sister and stranger to this self, changed without motion,

   Caught in acquirements, calling things names, calling me mother,

   But lost this lucid year, dropped out of sight, this key dropped

          in the ocean.

Those last lines “this key dropped in the ocean” is an exquisite finishing off to the baby’s first year, now redundant, in order to prepare for the coming of less pure years: its growing up, the assuming of a social identity, first with mother, and then with the larger world beyond. Scovell conveys regret at the passing of this unique time.

In A Baby’s Head she describes with a lyricism, devoid of sentimentality, the baby’s face in order to speculate on her future looks. “In fifty years if you have beauty it will be / Words written on your face, abstract as history.” Yet in the poem’s final verse Scovell pulls back to admire once more her child’s head in the present.

“Only for a moment your cavernous human brow

  Will dwell in the word of sense as naturally as now,

  Beautiful with no meaning, but that it commands

  Those to love, who hold you in their hands.”

Alongside of Lawrence Edith Scovell shares a mystical perception of the world. You sense that behind appearances is a spirit animating our behaviour. Both treat what is really beyond words with deeply tender words. Unlike Coleridge’s Frost at Midnight its baby subject is not one that stirs an excited, though anxious, concern of a father for the future welfare of his child. Coleridge’s baby Sarah will grow up. As will Lawrence’s baby (the imaginary one?) and Scovell’s (the real one). And all three poets are impelled to celebrate and reflect the glow of a new presence in the world.

Finally arriving at flowers I’ll digress to my childhood and my mother. My family didn’t grow up with a garden but a very floral-naked backyard. Whenever a relative called round, usually on a Sunday afternoon, with a bunch of flowers, to chat, Mother was pleased. I felt strongly indifferent to cut flowers in a glass vase, banged down, by father, on the kitchen table. Mother wished for a garden and I would transplant, in my head, Wavertree Botanical Gardens (Or at the very least a patch of roses) to the yard.

I had close access to excellent parks in Liverpool. However the cultivation of a garden first struck me most when as a teenager I read the remarkable poems of Andrew Marvell. In his case flower imagery could be seen as a highly refined order, a lost Eden or even function as military metaphor – A Garden: written after the Civil War. Yet many years later it was Scovell and Lawrence’s flower poems that I found much more human and inviting.

Four Scovell poems have made an indelible mark. Summer Night, Night Flowering Jasmine, The Evening Garden and Shadows of Chrysanthemums. Instead of attempting a careful exegesis of them (I haven’t the space in this essay) I will only take the last four lines of The Evening Garden to sum up Scofield’s achievement.

“The lighted room is small.

  Now we exist; and now we fashion

  A garden and a girdling wall,

  Our salient into wild creation.”

With the dual meaning of salient as angle or projection Scofield states her perspective on nature and the flower kingdom of her garden to be a “wild creation” of flowers that continues to fascinate similar to the roses in Eliot’s Burnt Norton that “had the look of flowers that are looked at.” We may create a barrier between ourselves and the garden. Yet Scovell’s wall is a girdling one suggesting girdle, a woman’s corset, and the mark, left on a tree trunk, after the removal of a ring of bark. This is an encircling of the feminine with nature, a need to hold back a higher world of flower-beds. The wild is tamed and cultivated: now its night and the gardeners have left to continue their existence in a small lighted room. We’ve fashioned what of nature we can and the flowers, that cannot speak, may look back at us.

I have to admit that one of the supreme flower poems Lawrence’s Bavarian Gentians does cheat: for though it realistically describes the gentian it is its symbolic power to illustrate death which is highlighted. In this poem the reader is drawn down into the unconscious power of a tiny flower with its torch-like petals.

Lawrence’s great poem is so resonate with meanings that I have to include it intact.

“Not every man has gentians in his house

  in soft September, at slow, sad Michaelmas.

  Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark

  darkening the day-time, torch-like with the smoking blueness of

         Pluto’s gloom,

  ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness spread blue

  down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day

  torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto’s dark-blue daze,

  black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,

  giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter’s pale lamps give off

           light,

  led me then, lead the way.

  Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!

  let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower

  down the darker and darker stairs, where darkness is awake upon the dark

  and Persephone herself is but a voice

  or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark

  of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,

  among the splendour of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on

           the lost bride and her gloom.

This is late Lawrence and is often viewed as a poem about the approach of death – D.H.L. was dying of tuberculosis. Yes, I suppose so, but it’s also a highly generalised poem about death symbolising the end of summer and an edging towards winter. It’s Michaelmas (the 29^th September) and on the cusp of autumn.

Bavarian Gentians descends into “the passion of dense gloom” revealed by the small torches (gentians) of darkness whose blue darkness (never hopefully turning to black?) reveals in the unconscious “the lost bride and her groom.” Why lost? Will death finally marry the feminine and masculine inside us? Yet it’s her groom. Which could mean partner or complement, a last configuration of both sexes, as Persephone, the goddess of spring and the queen of the underworld, becomes “a darkness invisible.”

And in this subterranean darkness the gentian assumes a mythopoeic force, a torch to guide you to “the passion of dense gloom.”  Here I love the duality of the word passion. This could be the sufferings of Christ from his last supper to his death on the cross but also passion as anger or an ardent love or affection. I’d go with the latter two definitions over the former, for if there is one word that describes D.H.Lawrence’s writings it’s passionate. And here he is, with a sombre passion, transforming Bavarian gentians (epitomising sweetness, passion charm and ‘flowers of victory’) into dark aides leading him to his and the poem’s ending.  

A dog, a baby and a flower. Three daunting subjects to be creative about or simply watched, enjoyed, perhaps only tolerated, as they forcefully confront most of us, if we are fully awake, on a daily basis. I shall watch out for cats too.

Blessay 57: My Power Failure and Daphne

The trouble with constantly writing is that I’m never left with enough energy and time to pause, stop and seriously read the completed creative efforts of other fiction writers. Pinning down a poem that resists every alteration of a line or replacing stilted dialogue in a story doesn’t make me want to reach out to examine, and enjoy, how others have succeeded in what, D.H. Lawrence termed, are “the big books of life.” I grab at newspapers, magazines, music or films. Some are deep cultural containers some are shallow distractions: yet they don’t judge me for what I’m at – struggling with slippery words on the page.

Three weeks ago a power failure at home coincided with me feeling creatively tired. My inner creative box and electricity fuse box gave up on me. I still had my mental powers but seven of my flat’s power-points had failed. As Camden Council and the local electricity authority wouldn’t define my problem as an emergency I was given a routine repairs appointment. This blow-out happened on a Friday. No one could call till Monday. I had a hospital scan booked for then so the repair changed to Tuesday. Apart from a portable radio this meant no computer, TV or hi-fi distraction.

I scanned my bookshelves and came across Daphne Du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel and The Birds and Other Stories. As I knew and loved Rebecca (both book and film) I threw myself into reading My Cousin Rachel which was published in 1951. My Virago paperback has a quote from The Guardian, “A masterpiece of suspense.” and compares it to Rebecca. “Unputdownable” states Sally Beaumont in her introduction and she was right. For two days (only broken by eating, sleeping and exercise) Du Maurier’s novel clung to me like a greedy lover. I couldn’t stop reading (Not so fast now Alan, you need to savour the elegant prose) about the virginal and orphaned Philip Ashley, brought up by his cousin Ambrose, and experiencing emotional turmoil, after Ambrose’s early death: even more so after meeting his widow, the enigmatic Rachel. “Despite himself Philip is drawn to the beautiful, mysterious woman. But could she be Ambrose’s killer?” This cover blurb made it all sound too pat – only a gripping crime novel. 

However things get more complicated in a cat and mouse game of attraction and repulsion between Philip and Rachel. My Cousin Rachel is no murder mystery but a suspenseful account of the psychological collision of male and female control. Right up to the novel’s tragic ending we just don’t really know who was right or whose authority won through. And it’s not so much a clash of innocence and experience but whether the protagonists are consciously in control of their actions. Rachel is a strong, clever woman who needs money but is she a murderess? Whilst Philip’s sexual identity is complicated. A virgin young man of twenty six highly influenced by the misogynist Ambrose: vexed at Rachel inheriting Ambrose’s property and money, yet drawn, like a magnet, to the oedipal lock of desire which Rachel opens. Rachel as mother figure, imagined lover and femme fatale disturb his emotional life. And although Rachel sexually rejects Philip her feminity is of a passionate nature, heightened by her Italian identity, money, profligacy, property and self esteem.

The power of Du Maurier’s writing lies in its moral ambiguity. Du Maurier is often misunderstood as simply an author of popular gothic romances. Yet she is a marvellous psychological novelist of great skill and insight who averts and subverts melodrama as she questions the motivations of men and woman pushed to extremes other than those of romantic love. Hearts and minds are disturbingly tested: beyond the reasoning of Du Maurier’s plotting lies the wider mystery of human intent.

“Those things can never be explained, they happen. Why this man should love that woman, what queer chemical mix up in our blood draws us to another, who can tell me? To me, lonely, anxious, and a survivor of too many emotional shipwrecks, he (Ambrose) came almost as a saviour, as an answer to prayer.”

But did Rachel slowly poison Ambrose? Credible evidence is provided yet, in this fascinating anti-thriller, we are left unsure. And My Cousin Rachel certainly cried out for Hitchcock to have filmed it. He produced screen versions of Rebecca, Jamaica Inn and The Birds but Rachel (with its sense of vertiginous obsession) was strangely ignored.

By day three of my power failure it was very satisfying to be absorbed by the printed page and not the over-bright screens of electronic devices. I lingered with the craft of Du Maurier. The Birds and Other Stories is an excellent collection of six stories. Again I sensed Du Maurier’s natural affinity with Hitchcock. Not just the The Birds but the story The Little Photographer. A beautiful and bored Madame le Marquese is on holiday, with her children, by the French Mediterranean coast. She meets a humble photographer, has a secret sexual liaison with him and when he wants to keep seeing her, after her vacation, she recoils, says no and pushes him right over a cliff. It’s a beautifully observed story packed with astute reflections on money, sex, power, class, guilt and privilege. The sting in the tale is that the already suspicious sister, of the photographer, turns up to blackmail Madame. I’ve read that the story was turned into a play. Yet I think it would have made a perfect TV film for the Alfred Hitchcock Presents Series.

Of course, we have the famous The Birds. Both Hitchcock’s film and Du Maurier’s story are brilliant in their different ways. The story, set in Cornwall, is very disturbing – its written accounts of the bird attacks are as powerful as the filmed ones.

Hitchcock’s isolated Bodega Bay has no sense of the authorities (in the form of the police or army) intervening to fight off the feathered apocalypse. Whereas the story depicts the English government failing its citizens (No six pm radio broadcast to communicate what they are doing). As Nat’s wife, on the farm, hopes that we will call upon the Americans to help us, her husband pauses.

“Nat listened to the tearing sound of splintering wood, and wondered how many million years of memory were stored in those little brains, behind the stabbing beaks, the piercing eyes, now giving them this instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines.”

I left re-reading The Birds to the last and soon it was the morning of day five of the power failure. A cheerful South American electrician arrived to discover that my electric kettle had caused the trouble. “You don’t need it. Just boil water in a pan on the gas stove. It’s cheaper that way. “Thanks.” I replied putting down Du Maurier’s fictions and reconnecting to my electrics, wanting “the deft precision” of my real machines to aid, comfort and never attack.

No disturbance then till bedtime when I opened Dark Water, my all time favourite anthology of fantasy stories, edited by Alberto Manguel. Once more I read Du Maurier’s superb story Split Second where a anxious woman experiences a fatal time-slip very close to Hampstead Heath. But I’ll leave off describing that fiction, with its Twilight Zone comparisons, for another day, now that home-power has been restored, my devices still threaten to fragment my book-reading and the urge to write a new poem is returning.

Blessay 56: On Queuing as a Phenomena

Firstly a definition.

Queue – A line or sequence of people or vehicles awaiting their turn to be attended.

(noun)

Concatenation – a linking or joining together into a chain.

(verb)      takes ones place in a queue

“In the war they had queued for food”

(Why is this always only attributed to the British? The Germans also had rationing and queued for food. Perhaps it’s part of the ‘myth’ of the blitz to propagate the image of fortitude / waiting that the British people have now morphed queuing into a tolerance bordering on a national virtue – but is this not also a conditioned response?)

I have more problems spelling the word queue than standing in one. Often I write qeue or queu. Is this a defiant gesture? Do I refuse to join the queue? Pull back, once in line, when some authoritarian voice shouts Next!? (As it does so cuttingly in the Scot Walker version of the Jacques Brel song as the harshly instructed soldiers queue up to lose their virginity in the army brothel truck – only it’s not sex I pull back from but obeying orders.)

It all depends on what I am standing in line for: whether it’s for pain or pleasure. And if I’ve freely chosen to join a queue and not been made to. This essay could be re-titled “Great queues I was in, wasn’t in (missed) but wanted to be in and those I left.”

My queue musings began two days ago when I experienced a void in the afternoon. I’d arrived at the back-steps leading up to the Albert Hall. I’d gone to collect a cloakroom ticket number for my Arena Day Ticket Place in the queue for that night’s concert. It was 3.30 and there was no queue in sight. A steward informed me that the new rule was that once you have a cloakroom ticket you then only return to begin to form a queue at 6pm, for moving in at 6.30sh – an hour before the concert begins.

I’ve learnt that since 2017 (post – terrorist incidents in Manchester and London)that a long straggling queue, outside of the RAH, is considered a security risk. This has proved to be deeply anti-social. Part of the charm of being a promenader has been to join a queue, for a longer and more leisurely time, with its aim to meet people who are also passionate about music.

“There are no great conductors anymore, only musicians who occasionally deliver a great performance.”

“The territorial attitude of some people in the Proms arena creates a defensive, Little-Englander clique.”

“Thirty years ago you could stand even closer to the conductor on their rostrum –  remember that pause between movements in Bruckner’s 5^th when Bernard Haitink, wiping the sweat from his face, glanced down at us, smiled and said “Almost there.”

Aside from the nerd-queue arguments and anecdotes once upon a time people shared food and drink and allowed their queue to operate as a slowly moving vehicle into the RAH – that also functioned as a high-class pick-up joint.

The Proms queue was a concatenation that broke the links of its affable chain. It regrouped and co-operated with stewards who were once more eccentric, or less stressed, characters. I miss that often meandering line broken up by picnics and card games on the pavement. We still have a rump queue – a 40 minute assembling. Yet somehow the Proms queue, as a piece of performance art, has been horribly foreshortened (BBC2 once filmed a documentary about the Proms queue – maybe including too many Prom ‘characters’ – yet, exaggeration apart, this very human queue was seriously considered as a newsworthy phenomena.)

It appears that a genuine, democratic ‘peoples queue’ that might spiral ‘out of control’(Such was the Proms queue of 1984 for the Leonard Bernstein Mahler concert that went all the way round several streets, near the hall, ‘taking over’ Kensington) has to be avoided in our age of terrorist threats. Therefore any long queue, spilling into the borough’s space has gone as someone, driving a truck, might now plough into you.

So what of the other queues which have shaped my life?  Here’s my 10 best list.

1. The Proms experience that ended in 2016 in its purest form (Even though by then Proms queues where a pale reflection of the Bernstein event, but reduced or not we had more control, steward assisted, on the shape and size of them.) I hope it returns one day.

2. Queuing in 1980, by a butcher’s shop in Warsaw, for their daily meat ration. I was waiting, with a Polish friend, and hoping to buy some scraps of stewing steak for his mother. It was shortly after Solidarity had been formed. When people realised I was English they thought me mad to join in with their ordeal.

3. In 1965 a new fish and chip shop opened in Liverpool 8. The owners held an introductory sale of fish, chips and mushy peas at 50% off. I stood for ten minutes until some spots of rain and my teenage restlessness made me abandon the idea of a bargain bag of chips.

4. My overnight queuing outside Harrods in London in the 90’s. I hoped to get a cheap, portable colour TV set. I didn’t. In fact I ended up buying nothing, convinced that every item was over-priced even after its reduction. My ‘reward’ was not a material one but a Guardian newspaper photograph of me rushing through the opened doors of Harrods. From the staircase shot I appear to be in full flight with the leaders of the queue. But I was soon knocked to the ground by a burly Chinese woman. Dazed, but not confused, I re-joined the mob pouring into every floor. Things now looked like a posh jumble sale where people physically fought on another for a scarf or coat. Twelve long and sleepless queuing hours for zilch!

5. Joining the queue for passport control at Luton airport. I opt for the faster queue dealing with electronic passports. It never works for me. Maybe I don’t position my body correctly for their camera or they’ve screwed up the micro-chip in the passport.

6. Realising that the word queue is not part of Indian vocabulary. I fell into the path of a hysterical mob that attacked a local Calcutta bus. My orderly line mentality was junked by a mass force intent on physically possessing the bus. It was the last one out-of-town that day. I joined in with the attack.

7. Queuing at school. I was a queue controlling prefect on the steps as the younger kids made their way up to their classrooms. I never sent back children who disorderly or noisy. The queue moved on and upwards. I stood there hating my job, trying to dream.

8. The dole office in Renshaw Street, Liverpool, in 1970. You stood in a long line to                  sign on. It was a vast building: like an aircraft hangar overtaken by hard benches and counters. I always thought of the Soviet Union – a Stalinist, Gulag Archipelago of a building where you were expected to wait for them.

9. My queuing for a Bob Dylan concert at the Brixton Academy. I was surrounded by too many Dylanogists, of all ages, who extolled Bob’s triumphs but never mentioned  his failures. When the queue moved my partner and I were benignly pushed forward, moving us further to the front. Inside we ended up inside standing only three rows back from the stage. That panicky surge and queue re-                  assembling propelled me past the English Dylanogists towards a small group who spoke their fervent Dylan gospel in Japanese.

10.The description of the queue in Kafka’s The Trial and visualisation in Orson Welles’s film version. Frightened clients wait for an appointment with their advocate. Of course this is the queue pushed to its aesthetic extreme. And I was never in it. Except of course in my imagination, where I’m forever a miserable and anxious client.

And speaking of Kafka, there is now a distributed streaming platform called Apache Kafka. It’s a sort of queue software for computers.

“Apache Kafka is used for building real-time data pipelines and streaming apps. It is horizontally scalable, fault tolerant, wicked fast, and runs in production in thousands of companies.”

Google definition

Elias Canetti once wrote a brilliant book called Crowds and Power about the sociology of the crowd in history and a lot more besides. However he didn’t have anything to say about queues. If he had done Canetti might have thought a queue to be a reformed or contained small mob itching to be an unruly crowd?

Canetti is now dead: but ought to return to us to write a new chapter on the queue and technology. In this members of a queue for a train, forced by a poor service, ignore any queuing and rush to get a seat or standing place, in order to get to their offices and work on PCs all queued up and ready for us – being now so “horizontally scalable, fault tolerant and of course “wicked fast”.

Hurrah for the new virtual queue as we un-merrily stream along!