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Wednesday
As Shakespeare would say, rough winds are currently shaking our darling buds, with gusts of up to 45 miles an hour bringing in unseasonably cold temperatures. At the same time, the green wave is well underway, having finally—for the most part—worked its way to the top of the Sewanee mountain. This gives me an excuse to share this lovely Patrick Kavanagh poem, about one tree that is taking its time about getting with the program:
To a Late Poplar
Not yet half-drest O tardy bride! And the priest And the bridegroom and the guests Have been waiting a full hour.
The meadow choir Is playing the wedding march Two fields away, And squirrels are already leaping in ecstasy Among leaf-full branches.
Ah yes, we’ve had more than our fill of ecstatic squirrels. For most of the trees, the wedding march is well underway.
Vikander and Gleeson as Kitty and Levin in Anna Karenina
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Tuesday
Twice over the past two days have I heard people advising sympathetic listening as response to our polarized times, is to listen. While actual agreement may seem like a distant dream, such listening at least gives us a fighting chance.
Kitty gives Levin advice along these lines in Anna Karenina, which I’m currently rereading, and it makes a difference.
In our church’s recent Sunday Forum, two members of the Beloved Community Commission, Nancy Cason and Kate Kesse, discussed how churches can play a role in advancing racial and economic equity for marginalized populations. The organization derives its name from Martin Luther King’s vision that the “aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community,” and we were advised that entering into someone else’s vision of the world is often more powerful than attempting to fix things or play Lady Bountiful. Only after such a relationship is established is further progress possible.
I heard something similar in a Carleton College zoom session yesterday on “Truth, Education, and Democracy.” Carleton Professors Sindy L. Fleming and Chico Zimmerman, along with two of their students, talked about a course they teach on “Civil Discourse in a Troubled Age.” Their aim is to move past discussion and debate to genuine dialogue, and to my question, “How do you engage people in dialogue who don’t want dialogue,” Zimmerman talked about the power of sympathetic listening. Reaffirming this approach, one of the students, who has engaged in voter registration, mentioned the power of such listening when he knocked on doors. Even when encountering strong anti-abortion positions, he said, he felt he made headway by asking questions and hearing what people had to say.
The judgmental Levin hears something similar from Kitty in the blissful moment after he learns that she loves him. Talking of one of the guests at a gathering they are attending, there’s this interchange, starting with Kitty:
“And I see you think he’s a horrid man?”
“Not horrid, but nothing in him.”
“Oh, you’re wrong! And you must give up thinking so directly!” said Kitty. “I used to have a very poor opinion of him too, but he, he’s an awfully nice and wonderfully good-hearted man. He has a heart of gold.”
“How could you find out what sort of heart he has?”
“We are great friends. I know him very well. Last winter, soon after … you came to see us,” she said, with a guilty and at the same time confiding smile, “all Dolly’s children had scarlet fever, and he happened to come and see her. And only fancy,” she said in a whisper, “he felt so sorry for her that he stayed and began to help her look after the children. Yes, and for three weeks he stopped with them, and looked after the children like a nurse.”
To which there’s this Levin response:
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, and I’ll never think ill of people again!” he said gaily, genuinely expressing what he felt at the moment.
And, in fact, he puts his new resolution into action immediately:
He did at once, and without the smallest effort, keep the promise he had made her—always to think well of all men, and to like everyone always. The conversation fell on the village commune, in which Pestsov saw a sort of special principle, called by him the “choral” principle. Levin did not agree with Pestsov, nor with his brother, who had a special attitude of his own, both admitting and not admitting the significance of the Russian commune. But he talked to them, simply trying to reconcile and soften their differences. He was not in the least interested in what he said himself, and even less so in what they said; all he wanted was that they and everyone should be happy and contented.
A short time later Kitty asks, “What do they want to argue for? No one ever convinces anyone, you know,” to which Levin replies, “Yes; that’s true; it generally happens that one argues warmly simply because one can’t make out what one’s opponent wants to prove.”
And then there’s this insight:
Levin had often noticed in discussions between the most intelligent people that after enormous efforts, and an enormous expenditure of logical subtleties and words, the disputants finally arrived at being aware that what they had so long been struggling to prove to one another had long ago, from the beginning of the argument, been known to both, but that they liked different things, and would not define what they liked for fear of its being attacked.
When Levin, somewhat imperfectly, attempts to communicate this idea to Kitty, she
knitted her brow, trying to understand. But directly he began to illustrate his meaning, she understood at once.
“I know: one must find out what he is arguing for, what is precious to him, then one can….”
The ellipsis, I assume, indicates something along the lines of “come to a common understanding.”
While the Levin-Kitty marriage is a happy one, they of course have quarrels, including one involving a guest who flirts with her. What ensues is a mistaken assumption such as we see often in our own politics: sometimes when we see people demonizing others, it is because they are imagining things that those others are thinking and lash out in anger. Think about this dynamic as you read the following scene, where Kitty blushes in shame and embarrassment because Veslovsky is making love to her while Levin interprets the blush to mean that she is actually in love with him:
His jealousy had in these few moments, especially at the flush that had overspread her cheeks while she was talking to Veslovsky, gone far indeed. Now as he heard her words, he construed them in his own fashion. Strange as it was to him afterwards to recall it, it seemed to him at the moment clear that in asking whether he was going shooting, all she cared to know was whether he would give that pleasure to Vassenka Veslovsky, with whom, as he fancied, she was in love.
Levin turns cold, Kitty is hurt, and there are some agonizing moments. Fortunately, they are able to communicate and come to an understanding.
Communication is key for us as well. Unfortunately social media, Carleton professor Zimmerman noted, does not encourage common understanding. Indeed, flash emotional responses can foster just the opposite. Both he in his course and the Better Community project are attempting to establish something better. The very survival of our democracy hinges on such projects.
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Monday – May Day
As today is May Day, I share some literary instances of mayday dancing. Such dancing, when connected with a maypole (so my internet research informs me), “is believed to have started in Roman Britain around 2,000 years ago, when soldiers celebrated the arrival of spring by dancing around decorated trees thanking their goddess Flora.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne features maypole dancing in “The Maypole of Merry Mount,” although in his case the tradition has lost its seasonal significance as the decadent revelers dance around the maypole throughout the year. It has degenerated into no more than an excuse to party.
This is not the case with Thomas Hardy, who uses the holiday to connect his rural characters with ancient Cerelean festivals—which is to say, rituals connected with fertility deities. In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the dancers are all women:
The banded ones were all dressed in white gowns a gay survival from Old-Style days, when cheerfulness and Maytime were synonyms days before the habit of taking long views had reduced emotions to a monotonous average. Their first exhibition of themselves was in a processional march of two and two round the parish.
In addition to the white frocks, Hardy tells us the dancers carry willow wands, images of fertility:
[E]very woman and girl carried in her right hand a peeled willow-wand, and in her left a bunch of white flowers. The peeling of the former, and the selection of the latter, had been an operation of personal care.
In Return of the Native, men join the festivities:
A whole village-full of sensuous emotion, scattered abroad all the year long, surged here in a focus for an hour. The forty hearts of those waving couples were beating as they had not done since, twelve months before, they had come together in similar jollity. For the time paganism was revived in their hearts, the pride of life was all in all, and they adored none other than themselves.
Hardy describes the phallic maypole in detail:
The pole lay with one end supported on a trestle, and women were engaged in wreathing it from the top downwards with wild flowers. The instincts of merry England lingered on here with exceptional vitality, and the symbolic customs which tradition has attached to each season of the year were yet a reality on Egdon. Indeed, the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still—in these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, seem in some way or other to have survived mediæval doctrine.
The townsfolk witness the result of the May Day festivities the following morning:
[T]here stood the Maypole in the middle of the green, its top cutting into the sky. It had sprung up in the night, or rather early morning, like Jack’s beanstalk. She opened the casement to get a better view of the garlands and posies that adorned it. The sweet perfume of the flowers had already spread into the surrounding air, which, being free from every taint, conducted to her lips a full measure of the fragrance received from the spire of blossom in its midst. At the top of the pole were crossed hoops decked with small flowers; beneath these came a milk-white zone of Maybloom; then a zone of bluebells, then of cowslips, then of lilacs, then of ragged-robins, daffodils, and so on, till the lowest stage was reached. Thomasin noticed all these, and was delighted that the May revel was to be so near.
The purpose of the holiday is to connect with your natural roots. As you can’t do so if you fail to give yourself over fully to the earth’s natural forces, step outside and give it a whirl.
Justin carrying the cross at the National Cathedral in Washington
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Spiritual Sunday
Last Sunday Julia and I attended church service in the new Coventry Cathedral, which stands next to the one that was bombed by the Germans in 1940 and that now stands open to the sky. I think of that as I write today’s essay about Justin, my eldest son who drowned on this day, April 30, 23 years ago. We lost him on the first Sunday after Easter.
Like Coventry Cathedral, we still bear the marks of the blast we received that day. And like the people of Coventry, we rebuilt our lives, which stand adjacent to the ruins. Extending this analogy, in the new cathedral one can look through a glass wall, known as “the screen of saints and angels,” and see the old cathedral. Angels have been etched into that glass by artist John Hutton (it was a ten-year project) so that, as one looks out at the old church, one is aware of ghostly presences. While we no longer think of Justin daily, at unexpected moments he enters our thoughts, just as Hutton’s transparent angels insinuate themselves into one’s field of vision.
Justin would have loved the George Herbert poem/hymn we sang as the recessional. Justin, who was 21, had embarked on an intense spiritual search at the time of his death and visited four churches in the 24 hours before he died, including the Episcopal/Anglican church he grew up in. Although sometimes tormented by religious struggles, he was also joyful and didn’t hold back from expressing his joy at being filled with the holy spirit. Here’s Herbert doing the same in his call-and-response poem that places special emphasis on the heart:
Antiphon 1
Chorus Let all the world in ev’ry corner sing, My God and King.
Verse The heav’ns are not too high, His praise may thither fly: The earth is not too low, His praises there may grow.
Chorus Let all the world in ev’ry corner sing, My God and King.
Verse The church with psalms must shout, No door can keep them out: But above all, the heart Must bear the longest part.
Chorus Let all the world in ev’ry corner sing, My God and King.
In the moments before his death, Justin rushed up to the large wooden cross on Church Point (at St. Mary’s City, Maryland), kissed it, and joyously flung himself into the St. Mary’s River, a kind of baptismal immersion to match his overflowing joy. He was singing from every corner of his being.
And lest you think he was being reckless, we had taken our kids to swim in this spot when they were small, and at any other time the river would have posed no danger. In fact, Justin had jumped into that water fully clothed before. What he didn’t know was that the rainiest spring in decades had created dangerous currents, one of which caught him and dragged him out.
A student who saw him go under reported that he cried out, “Jesus God!” before disappearing forever. I’m sure there was fear and desperation in those words but maybe also a sense that he was not alone. There’s no way I can know.
What I do know is that Herbert’s hymn would not have done much for me at the time. I didn’t much feel like lifting up my voice to sing, and God indeed seemed “too high,” an impersonal force that didn’t bother itself with our tiny lives.
Now, however, my heart opens to hear the psalms, including today’s psalm, which is the 23rd. In church together we will read, “Yea though I walk through the valley of death, I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me” and “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. And I shall live in the house of the Lord forever.”
Justin, as he leapt into the water, was singing from the heart. Our children have much to teach us.
Old Coventry Cathedral seen through the western window of the new cathedral
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Friday
On our plane ride back from the United Kingdom, I watched Sam Mendes’s Oscar-nominated Empire of Light, which looks back to a time when cinema screens seemed to stretch forever and when films like Chariots of Fire were public events. I write about the film here because it is filled with poetry, which infuses the film with a special magic.
An article in Awards Daily by one Sasha Stone picks up some of the poetic references I missed. For instance, the film is set in the beach resort sound of Margate Sands, where T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land, and a crossword puzzle that one of the characters is filling out asks, “What is the cruelest month.” (I know I don’t have to answer that one for you.) After that, we encounter poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson, W. H. Auden, and Philip Larkin.
The story reminds me somewhat of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 film Ali:Fears Eats the Soul in the way a middle-aged woman, beaten down by life, is rejuvenated by her relationship with a young immigrant of color. In this case, he is from the West Indies and he works alongside her in a movie theatre. The year is 1981, which is when Thatcherism and skinhead riots were creating havoc in the U.K., and at one point rioters smash through the cinema’s windows and beat up young Stephen. Hilary, meanwhile, doesn’t have the self-belief to stand up to her boss, who uses her sexually. They are indeed living in a desolate wasteland.
Their relationship brings poetry into their lives, sometimes literally as Hilary shares various poems with Stephen. The first poem I recall is Tennyson’s “Ring Out, Wild Bells,” the first stanza of which Hilary recites for Stephen as they greet the new year. At the time, they are standing on the roof of the theatre awaiting the fireworks:
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light: The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Moved by the poem and the moment, Stephen kisses Hilary, at which point, frightened by her growing attraction for him, she runs away. Eliot’s Waste Land explains why. April is the cruelest month when we have shut down our feelings (“Winter kept us warm, covering/ Earth in forgetful snow”), which Hilary has, and now here are, like
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain…
As the relationship blooms, we learn that Hilary has been raped in the past and also been hospitalized for mental problems. As the two face pressure from both sides, Stephen wonders whether they should break off the relationship, which sends Hilary into a tailspin. Yet she gathers her strength and, during the announcements of a grand showing of Chariots of Fire that all the local luminaries are attending, crashes the podium. In her remarks she pleads for interracial harmony and then reads to the bewildered crowd the final stanza of Auden’s “Death’s Echo”:
Dance, dance, for the figure is easy, The tune is catching and will not stop; Dance till the stars come down from the rafters; Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
“Death’s Echo” is a dark poem, as indicated by such lines as
The greater the love, the more false to its object, Not to be born is the best for man; After the kiss comes the impulse to throttle, Break the embraces, dance while you can.
If we can dance—or if we can love—the Waste Land won’t have the last word. Hilary proclaims this vision to herself, to Stephen, and to the world.
Her relationship with Stephen cannot last, however. If he is is to step into his powers, he must leave his job at the theatre and go to college. He must also find someone his own age. Hilary realizes this and, in the end, though heartbroken, she uses a Larkin poem to let him know it’s okay to leave her. Opening the book of Larkin poems that she has presented him upon his boarding the bus, he find the following one marked:
The Trees
The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again And we grow old? No, they die too, Their yearly trick of looking new Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
“Dance, dance, dance,” Auden has written and now Larkin follows it up with his own thrice repeated command. “Trees” also reads as a response to Eliot’s vision of a world
where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water.
The Larkin poem applies more to Hilary than to Stephen and could be her way of reassuring him that all will be well with her. While separations and deaths inevitably occur in our lives, greenness returns. “Last year is dead,” Larkin writes, just as Tennyson writes, “The year is dying in the night.” And while Tennyson follows this up with, “Ring out, wild bells, and let him die,” Larkin writes, “Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.” At movie’s end, we see Hilary indeed beginning afresh as she returns to her friends in the theatre and to the world of the movies.
One last note: I believe the movie ends with Hilary seeing, for the first time, one of the films her theatre is showing. In watching Peter Sellers, as Chauncey Gardener, walk across a pond in the finale of Being There, we are seeing the power of cinema, that empire of light, to create transcendent moments. Hilary herself has achieved a new level of being—she has begun afresh—and the movie confirms what she has achieved.
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Thursday
We returned to the States to discover that Fox’s Tucker Carlson, who had remade himself into a racist nativist, has been fired by Rupert Murdoch. Of the many commentaries I’ve read about the bow-tied pundit, one surprised me by invoking a forgotten novel that I haven’t read since high school.
Mother Jones’s David Corn has alluded to Bud Schulburg’s What Makes Sammy Run in an attempt to figure out Carlson’s strange trajectory from seemingly reasonable rightwing intellectual to white supremacist. In Corn’s eyes, he is a “Sammy Glick of the Right”:
What happened to Carlson? Perhaps nothing. Maybe from the start he was nothing but an opportunistic guy on the make. A Sammy Glick of the right. As a young reporter, he seized the opportunity to brand himself as a conservative journalist different from other right-wing scribes in the combative Age of Clinton. Years later, as that glow wore off (and his television career started slipping), he reinvented himself as an angry populist cheerleader of the Trumpish right. That’s where the audience and the big bucks were—and the influence. It’s possible that along the way he even convinced himself of some of what he was saying. But the likely explanation is that truth never mattered: It was all about status and money.
Comparing Glick and Carlson is somewhat strange in that Glick is a working class kid fanatically driven to rise in the world—a kind of Jewish Gatsby—whereas Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson grew up in privileged surroundings, attending first a private boarding school and then one of the small ivies, Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. But like Sammy, Carlson appears to be willing to do and say anything to succeed. As Sammy says at one point in his rapid rise to Hollywood mogul, “Going through life with a conscience is like driving your car with the brakes on.”
Unlike Carlson, Sammy is a product of New York’s “dog eat dog” Lower East Side. The narrator meets him when, at 16, he is a copyboy for a newspaper. By the end, through stealing scripts, shamelessly using and discarding acquaintances, stabbing his principled boss in the back, and leaving his girlfriend to strategically marry the daughter of the Wall Street banker representing the film company’s financiers, Sammy rises to the top, becoming a producer.
Then, having reached the pinnacle, he experiences the emptiness of a life where everything has been transactional. When he catches his wife Laurette Harrington making love to an actor he has just hired, she informs him that their marriage is no more than a business affair. His response is to order Shiek, his personal servant, to find him a prostitute.
Before this occurs, however, he tells the narrator that he has achieved everything he ever wanted. I wonder whether Tucker Carlson, when he ruled the world of cable television, ever thought similarly. The scene occurs when Glick is looking out his window at Hollywood in action:
“Now it’s mine,” Sammy said. “Everything’s mine. I’ve got everything. Everybody’s always saying you can’t get everything and I’m the guy who swung it. I’ve got the studio and I’ve got the Harrington connections and I’ve got the perfect woman to run my home and have my children.”
I sat there as if I were watching The Phantom of the Opera or any other horror picture. I sat there silently in the shadows, for it was growing dark and the lights hadn’t been switched on yet and I think he had forgotten he was talking to me. It was just his voice reassuring him in the dark.
“Sammy,” I said quietly, “how does it feel? How does it feel to have everything?”
He began to smile. It became a smirk, a leer.
“It makes me feel kinda..” And then it came blurting out of nowhere—“patriotic.”
If you see the American Dream as achieving personal success, then I suppose you could interpret your ascension to the heights as patriotic. But success paid for with one’s soul is ultimately empty, as the narrator reflects after having seen Glick turn to paid sex after discovering his wife’s affair:
I drove back slowly, heavy with the exhaustion I always felt after being with Sammy too long. I thought of him wandering alone through all his brightly lit rooms. Not only tonight, but all the nights of his life. No matter where he would ever be at banquets, at gala house parties, in crowded night clubs, in big poker games, at intimate dinners, he would still be wandering alone through all his brightly lit rooms. He would still have to send out frantic S.O.S.’s to Sheik, the virile eunuch. Help! Help! I’m lonely. I’m nervous. I’m friendless. I’m desperate. Bring girls, bring Scotch, bring laughs. Bring a pause in the day’s occupation, the quick sponge for the sweaty marathoner, the recreational pause that is brief and vulgar and titillating and quickly forgotten, like a dirty joke.
Tucker Carlson is far from the only Sammy Glick in the rightwing media. Tom Nichols, Atlantic writer and former Republican, identifies the type. In the 1990s, he says, the new generation of young conservatives
realized that the way to dump their day jobs for better gigs in radio and television was to become more and more extreme—and to sell their act to an audience that was nothing like them or the people at D.C. dinner parties. They would have their due, even if they had to poison the brains of ordinary Americans to get it.
Carlson, as Nichols sees it, is
emblematic of the entire conservative movement now, and especially the media millionaires who serve as its chief propagandists. The conservative world has become a kind of needle skyscraper with a tiny number of wealthy, superbly educated right-wing media and political elites in the penthouses, looking down at an expanse of angry Americans whose rage they themselves helped create.
If your only criteria for success is how much wealth and/or power you can amass—I’m thinking of such unprincipled politicians as Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Lindsey Graham here as well as Carlson—then you are doomed to a perpetual restlessness. Or as Schulberg’s narrator puts it, “always thinking satisfaction is just around the bend.” You run incessantly without ever finding peace.
And sooner or later, as Schulberg narrator notes, there will be other Sammy Glicks overtaking you—or in Carlson’s case, other Fox commentators—at which point you may come face to face with the emptiness inside you.
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Wednesday
Visiting my cousin John Beech in Coventry, England after two weeks of ancestor-searching with Julia, I learned about a Phil Larkin plaque in a local railway station. On it is the opening stanza of “I Remember, I Remember”:
Coming up England by a different line For once, early in the cold new year, We stopped, and, watching men with number plates Sprint down the platform to familiar gates, “Why, Coventry!” I exclaimed. “I was born here.”
For all that it celebrates Larkin, however, the plaque gives a false impression of the poet’s actual feelings about Coventry. Rather than experiencing nostalgia, the poet is cranky and sarcastic and essentially goes on to say, “I was born here? Big frickin’ deal!”
Indeed, at one point in the poem, Larkin’s interlocutor says, “You look as though you wished the place in Hell, judging from your face.”
His friend is prepared to hear a sentimental account of a childhood spent in Coventry, only to get the exact opposite. In other words, the excerpted stanza implies sentiments that the poet attacks. Not all people are sentimental about their family roots, we learn—which, for all we know, was also true of Julia’s ancestors, those Joneses and Pickens who emigrated to the United States.
Larkin’s starting point is a poem by the Victorian poet Thomas Hood entitled “I Remember, I Remember,” which Larkin appropriates but only so that he can attack the poem’s vision. When he recalls his childhood in Coventry, he arrives at a list of things that did not happen. For instance,
–he was not a child prodigy that invented “blinding theologies of flowers and fruits”; –there was not some “splendid family” that he ran to when he got depressed, a family that had muscular boys, full chested girls, a car he could drive, and a farm where he could grow into himself; –he never had a romantic encounter with a girl in the bracken; –his poetry was not printed in the local newspaper, nor did he receive early recognition.
In short, nothing memorable happened in his Coventry childhood, leading him to say, “Oh well, I suppose it’s not the place’s fault.”
And then:
Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.
So Coventry might just as well be anywhere else. Here’s the poem:
I Remember, I Remember By Philip Larkin
Coming up England by a different line For once, early in the cold new year, We stopped, and, watching men with number plates Sprint down the platform to familiar gates, “Why, Coventry!” I exclaimed. “I was born here.”
I leant far out, and squinnied for a sign That this was still the town that had been ‘mine’ So long, but found I wasn’t even clear Which side was which. From where those cycle-crates Were standing, had we annually departed
For all those family hols? . . . A whistle went: Things moved. I sat back, staring at my boots. ‘Was that,’ my friend smiled, ‘where you “have your roots”?’ No, only where my childhood was unspent, I wanted to retort, just where I started:
By now I’ve got the whole place clearly charted. Our garden, first: where I did not invent Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits, And wasn’t spoken to by an old hat. And here we have that splendid family
I never ran to when I got depressed, The boys all biceps and the girls all chest, Their comic Ford, their farm where I could be ‘Really myself’. I’ll show you, come to that, The bracken where I never trembling sat,
Determined to go through with it; where she Lay back, and ‘all became a burning mist’. And, in those offices, my doggerel Was not set up in blunt ten-point, nor read By a distinguished cousin of the mayor,
Who didn’t call and tell my father There Before us, had we the gift to see ahead – ‘You look as though you wished the place in Hell,’ My friend said, ‘judging from your face.’ ‘Oh well, I suppose it’s not the place’s fault,’ I said.
‘Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.’
If we go by what his friend sees in his face, the speaker’s “oh well” masks a deep resentment. He’s mad at Coventry because it did not give him the cliched childhood of someone who would become famous. In fact, the more he thinks about it, the madder he becomes for not having had such a childhood. It’s not Coventry he’s mad at but “anywhere.” Had he been born somewhere else, he would be just as angry.
So I guess that lets Coventry off the hook. And perhaps Larkin would appreciate the city finally getting around to saying, “There before us, had we the gift to see ahead, was a genius, and we didn’t even know it.” Would the plaque and other publicity material assuage his hurt feelings?
Even if they did, with Larkin being Larkin I can’t imagine him admitting it.
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Tuesday
Today Julia and I fly back to the States after having ancestor hunted in Wales, Ireland, Northern Ireland, and England. Although we have been here to track Julia’s ancestors, I’ve actually filled in some gaps of my own, thanks to my third-cousin John Beech, who lives in Coventry with his wife Sue. It involves a Lord Bunbury, although the actual one, not Algernon’s fictional friend in The Importance of Being Earnest.
I promise you some more literary allusions in this post but indulge me for a moment as I share some speculation about this family history.
John and I share a great-great grandfather, one Thomas Scott, who was Lord Bunbury’s “factor” (estate manager) in Great Barton and Mildenhall. Family lore, which even allowing for exaggeration sometimes has truth in it, is that we are descended from Charles Montagu-Scott, 4th Duke of Buccleuch, although from the wrong side of the bed. Buccleuch, John says, fought alongside Lord Bunbury in the Peninsular War against Napoleon, and John’s theory is that William Scott was Buccleuch’s illegitimate son and “batman” or personal servant—and that through the Buccleuch-Bunbury friendship, William Scott and then his son Thomas found employment with Bunbury. One of Thomas’s daughters was Eliza Scott, my great grandmother, who married Edwin Fulcher, who took her first to South Africa and then to Evanston, Illinois. Her daughter Eleanor married Alfred Bates, and their son Scott is my father.
[Side note: John’s story helps me make sense of another piece of family lore, which was that we are related to Charles II. The first Duke of Buccleuch was Monmouth, illegitimate son of Charles, who was immortalized by John Dryden in Absolom and Architophel. Monmouth was not the only illegitimate child Charles produced, Dryden reminds us (casting the monarch as the Bible’s King David in his allegory):
Then, Israel’s monarch, after Heaven’s own heart, His vigorous warmth did variously impart To wives and slaves: and, wide as his command, Scatter’d his Maker’s image through the land.
My grandmother stopped boasting of our connection with Monmouth once she discovered he was a bastard, and it would have taken two illegitimate births, Monmouth’s and William Scott’s, for us to be linked to the king. So I don’t think we will be invited to the coronation of King Charles III.]
Anyway, back to my Coventry cousin John Beech. Wherever we have gone in Ireland and the United Kingdom, I have looked for literary connections and Coventry has at least three. In terms of most impressive to least, there is (1) George Eliot, who spent her twenties there taking care of her father; (2) E.M. Forster, who lived his final days there in a menage-a-trois he didn’t want publicized as it involved a man and his wife; and (3) Philip Larkin, who announces in “I Remember, I Remember” that “I was born there.”
Learning about this poem, I of course had to read it and, upon my first encounter, was very confused. The cranky and even cynical Larkin abhors sentimentality while the poem I was reading was sentimental in the extreme. Was this an elaborate parody, I wondered.
Only it turns out that the poem I was reading, while it has the same title, was written by the Victorian poet Thomas Hood. You can read the full version here but the final stanza reads,
I remember, I remember, The fir trees dark and high; I used to think their slender tops Were close against the sky: It was a childish ignorance, But now ’tis little joy To know I’m farther off from heav’n Than when I was a boy.
I’m running out of computer power as I sit in Heathrow Airport so I’ll have to postpone discussion of Larkin’s “I Remember, I Remember,” which doesn’t employ the word “remember” once. Instead, it is a satire of those who idealize their pasts, which I suppose is a useful corrective for those who sentimentalize their ancestors. Anyway, more tomorrow.
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Monday
As yesterday was both Shakespeare’s birthday (we think) and his death day, my post today is about a perspective I have acquired on one of his greatest villains. Yesterday, my Coventry cousins took us to the Richard III Center in Leicester, and I saw the extent to which the Bard had unfairly slimed the last of the Plantagenet kings.
Richard’s bones were famously discovered under a Leicester parking lot ten years ago, and a small museum has now been erected at the spot. From the wall displays, I learned that Richard was a reformer who did not (contra Shakespeare) murder Henry VI, his own brother Clarence, or his own wife Anne and who may not even have murdered his nephews, the two princes in the tower (although the jury is still out on this one). Nor was he an ugly hunchback who would have voiced the sentiments that Shakespeare puts in his mouth, such as
And thus I clothe my naked villany With old odd ends stolen out of holy writ; And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.
Or:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover, To entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a villain And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Shakespeare drew for his information on works designed to support the Tudors—starting with Henry Tudor (Henry VII), who had defeated and killed Richard. These included Holinshed’s Chronicles and Thomas More’s History of Richard III, and Shakespeare further distorted the record through freely embellishing.
It took everything I had to keep an open mind about Richard as I went through the exhibit, given the Shakespearean version of him I have always carried around in my head. When propaganda is able enlist a great artist in its cause, truth can take a beating.
But even if Shakespeare has problems with accuracy, his understanding of evil is unmatched. If you ever want insight into how political leaders will sacrifice everything we hold sacred for the sake of power, Richard III is the play for you.
