Durrell?
Martha Bridegam
question in July about whether, or how well, GO would have known
Lawrence Durrell. (See www.k-1.com/orwell/ and pick "discussion.")
Tom Deveson and ROBBIE talked here in August about Durrell criticizing
Orwell, and as the Kollar-page poster notes, Durrell wrote to Orwell
praising __1984__. But anyone know more? Or more about Durrell in
general?
/MAB
--
jo...@sirius.com
Tom Deveson
> Durrell wrote to Orwell
>praising __1984__. But anyone know more? Or more about Durrell in
>general?
Don't know about the LD/GO personal connection but there are both
tenuous parallels and (more strongly) contrasts of various kinds.
Sort-of parallels or overlaps or points of contact -- Durrell wrote both
fiction and personal accounts of travel. He was born in India in 1912,
and educated at an English public school (St Edmund's Canterbury) and
began publishing in the 1930s. For some time after leaving school he led
a bohemian London life, playing the piano in a night-club and working in
a photography studio. *The Black Book* was published in France in 1938
and was experimental in the Henry Miller mode and not publishable in
England at the time. Two later-ish novels *Tunc* [meant as both Latin
for "then" and as a rude anagram] and *Nunquam* are concerned with the
way a vast supra-national dehumanised enterprise can destroy love and
creative energy.
Disparities -- Durrell wrote and published lots of poetry and several
plays. He spent much of his life in the eastern Mediterranean, and it's
the background to much of his work. He wrote about Greece and Cyprus and
Rhodes and Alexandria (where his best-known quartet of novels are set)
and worked for the British Council in Greece and Argentina. He also
lived in Provence. He had various foreign press jobs in Athens and Cairo
and Belgrade. He worked in the 1950s as Director of Public Relations for
the Cyprus government. His fiction depends on an exotic appeal and
experimental technique, showing the same events through the perceptions
and interpretations of different characters. The Alexandria Quartet is
about people like novelists and painters, and how sexual, political,
religious and artistic motives melt into one another. Durrell takes his
epigraphs from de Sade and uses Sade-like themes of masks and disguises
and revelations. He was interested in the indeterminate nature of
experience rather than social/political realism. His Greece is more a
world of palaces and brothels and erotic fantasy and dream-like events
and thick creamy prose than the Greece of measure and proportion and
clarity that others have found or been inspired by.
His poetry is sensuous, raffish, sometimes witty as well, technically
rather loose, partly influenced by surrealism and by Cavafy. He's the
kind of poet that the 'Movement' UK poets of the 50s reacted strongly
against (and in favour of Orwell among others) in their concern for
clarity, argumentative coherence and lack of affinity for 'abroad'.
Tiny fragment from *Deus Loci* [the last section] gives a flavour:
"...So today, after many years, we meet
at this high window overlooking
the best of Italy, smiling under rain,
that rattles down the leaves like sparrow-shot,
scatters the reapers, the sunburnt girls,
rises in the sour dust of this table,
these books, unfinished letters -- all
refreshed again in you O spirit of place,
Presence long since divined, delayed, and waited for,
And here met face to face."
There's a cheerful bawdy *Ballad of the Good Lord Nelson* which is too
long to transcribe. Short extract:
"...'England Expects' was the motto he gave
When he thought of little Emma out on Biscay's wave,
And remembered working on her like a galley-slave
Aboard the Victory, Victory O.
The first Great Lord in our English land
To honour the Freudian command,
For a cast in the bush is worth two in the hand
Aboard the Victory, Victory O..."
Perhaps more typical (certainly un-Orwellian) is a poem like *This
Unimportant Morning* (1945) which begins:
"This unimportant morning
Something goes singing where
The capes turn over on their sides
And the warm Adriatic rides
Her blue and sun washing
At the edge of the world and its brilliant cliffs.
Day rings in the higher airs
Pure with cicadas and slowing
Like a pulse to smoke from farms,
Extinguished in the exhausted earth,
Unclenching like a fist and going..."
For a contrast with GO's way of writing about troubled politics, here's
a complete poem about Cyprus at the time of the period of agitation for
Enosis (union with Greece):
Bitter Lemons
In an island of bitter lemons
Where the moon's cool fevers burn
From the dark globes of the fruit,
And the dry grass underfoot
Tortures memory and revises
Habits half a lifetime dead
Better leave the rest unsaid,
Beauty, darkness, vehemence
Let the old sea-nurses keep
Their memorials of sleep
And the Greek sea's curly head
Keep its calms like tears unshed
Keep its calms like tears unshed.
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
Martha Bridegam
>
> ....His poetry is sensuous, raffish, sometimes witty as well, technically
> rather loose, partly influenced by surrealism and by Cavafy. He's the
> kind of poet that the 'Movement' UK poets of the 50s reacted strongly
> against (and in favour of Orwell among others) in their concern for
Thx for explanation. Appreciate continued seminar.
But "Movement" UK poets of the 50s wld be whom?
Speaking of Alan's Cavafy poem about the Barbarians, saw the funniest
thing in the SF Chron today: a Man Bites Dog article about an amazing
little town in China where they actually (sort of) practice Maoism. Not
sure who they meant by Barbarians in 1905 but it does seem that nowadays
we're running out of Red Menaces & we have to demonize our own neighbors
instead. (Or run around buying up dried rations for the Y2K disaster...)
/MAB
Tom Deveson
>But "Movement" UK poets of the 50s wld be whom?
Well, "The Movement" started as a piece of loosely-fitting journalistic
generalisation -- but basically pointed towards Philip Larkin, Kingsley
Amis, Donald Davie, DJ Enright, Thom Gunn, John Wain, Elizabeth
Jennings, as they were in the 1950s and before they went their very
disparate ways.
It would take a book (and there's a good one, by Blake Morrison) to tell
all the story and make the links. Here's a very few pointers.
The *Spectator* article in October 1954 called *In the Movement* which
started the term going mentioned "genuflections towards Dr Leavis and
Professor Empson, admiration for people whom the Thirties by-passed,
Orwell above all" as a recognition sign. It went on to say, "The
Movement, as well as being anti-phoney, is anti-wet; sceptical, robust,
ironic, prepared to be as comfortable as possible." It also mentioned
Iris Murdoch in the same connection, as well as Davie, Amis, Wain and
Gunn.
Some of the poets had appeared on the BBC Third Programme in a series
edited by John Lehmann called *New Soundings* which partly carried on
Orwell's work of using the radio to popularise poetry.
Walter Allen, in his 1954 review of Amis's *Lucky Jim* referred to
Orwell, Leavis and the Logical Positivists as contributing to the making
of the "new hero" of Amis and of John Wain's *Hurry On Down* -- "He has
one skin too few , but his is not the sensitiveness of the young man in
earlier twentieth-century fiction: it is the phoney to which his nerve-
ends are tremblingly exposed, and at the least suspicion of the phoney
he goes tough.."
There are parallels betweeen Gordon Comstock and Wain's Charles Lumley
and Amis's Jim Dixon -- hating their jobs but desperate to have the
money it brings (and therefore needing a job), tyrannised by
landladies, hating snooty culture-snobs, rebelling while conceding the
need to adjust and conform, etc, etc. The quietism of *Inside the Whale*
and of Bowling is also mirrored in some of Amis's writing of the time
(Porteous BTW is a sort of anticipation of Amis's Professor Welch) and
what Anthony Hartley, writing in 1963, called "a flight from idealism
towards an empiricism which was the more welcome in that ideology had
visibly proved itself to be the curse of the twentieth century." [Of
course, this can also be read as a rather complacent justification of an
already established impulse towards conservatism.]
Attitudes to childhood make an interesting example. The 40s poets such
as Dylan Thomas tended to write about childhood with an afflatus ("Now
as I was young and easy under the apple boughs/About the lilting house
and happy as the grass was green..."), but the Movement poets were more
attuned to Bowling's view about "that poetry of childhood stuff. I know
that's all baloney....The truth is that kids aren't in any way poetic,
they're merely savage little animals.." Donald Davie wrote, "I was as
happy as a glass was dark" and Larkin wrote about Coventry "where my
childhood was unspent" and about childhood as "a forgotten boredom."
Enright's *The Noodle-Vendor's Flute* from a 1960 collection:
"In a real city, from a real house,
At midnight by the ticking clocks,
In winter by the crackling roads:
Hearing the noodle-vendor's flute,
Two single fragile falling notes...
But what can this small sing-song say,
Under the noise of war?
The flute itself is a counterfeit
(Siberian wind can freeze the lips),
Merely a rubber bulb and metal horn
(Hard to ride a cycle, watch for manholes
And late drunks, and play a flute together).
Just squeeze between gloved fingers,
And the note of mild hope sounds:
Release, the indrawn sigh of mild despair...
A poignant signal, like the cooee
Of some diffident soul locked out,
Less than appropriate to cooling macaroni.
Two wooden boxes slung across the wheel,
A rider in his middle age, trundling
This gross contraption on a dismal road,
Red eyes and nose and breathless rubber horn.
Yet still the pathos of that double tune
Defies its provenance, and can warm
The bitter night.
Sleepless, we turn and sleep.
Or sickness dwindles to some local limb.
Bought love for one long moment gives itself.
Or there a witch assures a frightened child
She bears no personal grudge.
And I, like other listeners,
See my stupid sadness as a common thing.
And being common,
Therefore something rare indeed.
The puffing vendor, surer than a trumpet,
Tells us we are not alone,
Each night that same frail midnight tune
Squeezed from a bogus flute,
Under the noise of war, after war's noise,
It mourns the fallen, every night,
It celebrates survival --
In real cities, real houses, real time."
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
Martha Bridegam
>
> Martha Bridegam writes
>
> >But "Movement" UK poets of the 50s wld be whom?
>
> Well, "The Movement" started as a piece of loosely-fitting journalistic
> generalisation -- but basically pointed towards Philip Larkin, Kingsley
> Amis, Donald Davie, DJ Enright, Thom Gunn, John Wain, Elizabeth
> Jennings, as they were in the 1950s and before they went their very
> disparate ways.
>
> It would take a book (and there's a good one, by Blake Morrison) to tell
> all the story and make the links. Here's a very few pointers.
>
> The *Spectator* article in October 1954 called *In the Movement* which
> started the term going mentioned "genuflections towards Dr Leavis and
> Professor Empson, admiration for people whom the Thirties by-passed,
> Orwell above all" as a recognition sign. It went on to say, "The
> Movement, as well as being anti-phoney, is anti-wet; sceptical, robust,
> ironic, prepared to be as comfortable as possible." It also mentioned
> Iris Murdoch in the same connection, as well as Davie, Amis, Wain and
> Gunn.
Thx.
But "comfortable as possible" means what?
Norton Anthology here has Gunn, Larkin and Enright anyhow.
And sheesh, Larkin's a cheerful one. They have his "Myxomatosis."
Footnote says it's about germ warfare on rabbits:
"Caught in the center of a soundless field
While hot inexplicable hours go by
*What trap is this?* *Where were its teeth concealed?*
You seem to ask.
I make a sharp reply,
Then clean my stick. I'm glad I can't explain
Just in what jaws you were to suppurate:
You may have thought things would come right again
If you could only keep quite still and wait."
So there's a tight Orwell smile back of that one.
But *Thom Gunn*? Earliest Gunn in this anthology here is 1957, by which
time he had already moved to CA and apparently developed a crush on
Marlon Brando that could've used a good bit more irony. The poems of his
here are either gee-whiz enthusiastic or kind of wistful, but wouldn't
call 'em skeptical or ironic. Care to defend that one? (Not to dis Gunn
too badly. He's one of the Haight-Ashbury's remaining redeeming
features.)
/MAB
--
jo...@sirius.com
Tom Deveson
>But "comfortable as possible" means what?
In this context (1954) it meant not being exercised by the Angst
(Kierkegaard, Kafka, etc) that writers had emphasised in the 1940s (eg
Auden's *Age of Anxiety*), but the article was to some degree part of a
writers' generational/territorial dispute. I wouldn't put too much
emphasis on it.
>And sheesh, Larkin's a cheerful one. They have his "Myxomatosis."
>Footnote says it's about germ warfare on rabbits:
Indeed. I remember the fly-blown rabbit corpses from walks in the
country around that time. Larkin's *Church Going* is a strong poem, and
also Orwellian in certain aspects. It came out in the *Spectator* in Nov
1955 and in L's collection (*The Less Deceived*) that year, and in the
*New Lines* anthology which partly defined the Movement the next year.
Morrison's book locates it in a whole tradition of sceptical church-
poems, and also compares to Dorothy's "Anglican Atheist" position.
The lines "...Back at the door/I sign the book, donate an Irish
sixpence,/Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.." are like the
bit in CUFA where Bowling goes back to the "dusty sweetish corpse-smell"
of his old parish church, is disturbed by the vicar's antiquarian
ramblings, and "As soon as I decently could I dropped sixpence in the
Church expenses box and bunked."
>But *Thom Gunn*? Earliest Gunn in this anthology here is 1957, by which
>time he had already moved to CA and apparently developed a crush on
>Marlon Brando that could've used a good bit more irony. The poems of his
>here are either gee-whiz enthusiastic or kind of wistful, but wouldn't
>call 'em skeptical or ironic. Care to defend that one? (Not to dis Gunn
>too badly. He's one of the Haight-Ashbury's remaining redeeming
>features.)
Well, Gunn himself said in 1958 (the *Spectator* again) that "I found I
was in it [the Movement] before I knew it existed...and I have a certain
suspicion that it does *not* exist..."
But there are Movement-ish passages you might call ironic in his early
poems:
"I think of all the toughs through history
And thank heaven they lived continually.
I praise the overdogs from Alexander
To those who would not play with Stephen Spender..."
Gunn is also more directly concerned with existential notions like
"will" and "action" than other Movement poets, though here again tinged
with an ironic attitude:
"...You keep both Rule and Energy in view,
Much power in each, most in the balanced two:
Ferocity existing in the fence
Built by an exercised intelligence."
from *To Yvor Winters 1955*
*Carnal Knowledge* (too long to transcribe right now) has a
characteristic stanza:
"...I hardly hoped for happy thoughts, although
In a most happy sleeping time I dreamt
We did not hold each other in contempt.
Then lifting from my lids night's penny weights
I saw that lack of love contaminates.
You know I know you know I know you know..."
When Gunn was over here (he's been in SF since 1954 I think) in about
1992 reading from *The Man With Night Sweats*, I went to hear him and
thought he was still good. The AIDS poems bear out (for once) the blurb
on the book -- "unflinching directness, compassion and grace".
Tom (got to hurry)
--
Tom Deveson
Alan Allport
news:PhrKNPAz...@devesons.demon.co.uk...
> Larkin's *Church Going* is a strong poem, and
> also Orwellian in certain aspects.
When the Russian tanks roll westward, what defence for you and me?
Colonel Sloman's Essex Rifles? The Light Horse of L.S.E.? (1969)
Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home,
Strangeness made sense. The salt rebuff of speech,
Insisting so on difference, made me welcome:
Once it was recognised, we were in touch.
Their draughty streets, end-on to hills, the faint
Archaic smell of dockland, like a stable,
The herring-hawker's cry, dwindling, went
To prove me separate, not unworkable.
Living in England has no such excuse:
These are my customs and establishments
It would be much more serious to refuse.
Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence. (1955)
Walking around the park
Should feel better than work:
The lake, the sunshine,
The grass to lie on,
Blurred playground noises
Beyond black-stockinged nurses -
Not a bad place to be.
Yet it doesn't suit me,
Being one of the men
You meet on an afternoon:
Palsied old step-takers,
Hare-eyed clerks with the jitters,
Waxed-fleshed out-patients
Still vague from accidents,
And characters in long coats
Deep in the litter-baskets -
All dodging the toad work
By being stupid or weak.
Think of being them!
Hearing the hours chime,
Watching the bread delivered,
The sun by clouds covered,
The children going home;
Think of being them,
Turning over their failures
By some bed of lobelias,
Nowhere to go but indoors,
No friends but empty chairs -
No, give me my in-tray,
My loaf-haired secretary,
My shall-I-keep-the-call-in-Sir:
What else can I answer,
When the lights come on at four
At the end of another year?
Give me your arm, old toad;
Lead me down Cemetery Road. (1962)
c/o Alan.
Martha Bridegam
>
> Tom Deveson <a...@devesons.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
> news:PhrKNPAz...@devesons.demon.co.uk...
>
> > Larkin's *Church Going* is a strong poem, and
> > also Orwellian in certain aspects.
>
> When the Russian tanks roll westward, what defence for you and me?
> Colonel Sloman's Essex Rifles? The Light Horse of L.S.E.? (1969)
<etc.>
Thx. Nice escape from air compressor next door and need to make several
unpleasant phone calls.
But who's Colonel Sloman?
> And characters in long coats
> Deep in the litter-baskets -
Naturally I notice this bit. Goes to show that in 1962 people scavenging
things from litter-baskets were puttering eccentrics. Here in San
Francisco now, it's a job for an able-bodied worker. Cans are 2-1/2
cents apiece. You see a man pulling soda cans out of a municipal
trashcan and he's as efficient as a factory worker -- reach in, shake
out remaining liquid from can, set upright on sidewalk, stomp flat with
one motion. (I don't know how the hell they do that stomping trick, it
always takes me two or three tries.)
Nice bit about the loaf-haired secretary, too.
/MAB
--
jo...@sirius.com
Alan Allport
news:37F4E26A...@sirius.com...
> > When the Russian tanks roll westward, what defence for you and me?
> > Colonel Sloman's Essex Rifles? The Light Horse of L.S.E.? (1969)
> But who's Colonel Sloman?
I'm working on the assumption that it's Dr. Albert Sloman, former Vice
Chancellor of Essex University.
Alan.
Martha Bridegam
>
> But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
> Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
> Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
> And shivered, without shaking off the dread
>
> That how we live measures our own nature,
> And at his age having no more to show
> Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
> He warranted no better, I don't know.
Does that make Robert Frost a Movement Poet too?
/MAB
Alan Allport
> I remember when I first saw this couplet in 1969, it not only made me
> smile, as now, but reminded me of a would-be regiment my mother told
me
> about, to be formed in 1940 from central European refugees in London
who
> wanted to get into the war but were still considered security risks by
> the British authorities, even though some of them had been fighting
the
> Nazis since the 1920s: to amalgamate the Hampstead Highlanders and the
> Golders Green Grenadiers into the King's Own Enemy Aliens.
They could at least have resurrected the King's German Legion, a bona
fide regiment with a considerable military record.
Alan.
Tom Deveson
>When the Russian tanks roll westward, what defence for you and me?
>Colonel Sloman's Essex Rifles? The Light Horse of L.S.E.? (1969)
I remember when I first saw this couplet in 1969, it not only made me
smile, as now, but reminded me of a would-be regiment my mother told me
about, to be formed in 1940 from central European refugees in London who
wanted to get into the war but were still considered security risks by
the British authorities, even though some of them had been fighting the
Nazis since the 1920s: to amalgamate the Hampstead Highlanders and the
Golders Green Grenadiers into the King's Own Enemy Aliens.
(BTW, the last line of Toads Revisited is "Help [not Lead] me down
Cemetery Road.")
Since this is Larkin-Quote-Day, here's *Mr Bleaney*, which gets better
each time you read it over thirty years:
'This was Mr Bleaney's room. He stayed
The whole time he was at the Bodies, till
They moved him.' Flowered curtains, thin and frayed,
Fall to within five inches of the sill,
Whose window shows a strip of building land,
Tussocky, littered. 'Mr Bleaney took
My bit of garden properly in hand.'
Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook
Behind the door, no room for books or bags --
'I'll take it.' So it happens that I lie
Where Mr Bleaney lay, and stub my fags
On the same saucer-souvenir, and try
Stuffing my ears with cotton-wool, to drown
The jabbering set he egged her on to buy.
I know his habits -- what time he came down,
His preference for sauce to gravy, why
He kept on plugging at the four aways --
Likewise their yearly frame: the Frinton folk
Who put him up for summer holidays,
And Christmas at his sister's house in Stoke.
But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
And shivered, without shaking off the dread
That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don't know.
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
MN1st
>Martha Bridegam <jo...@sirius.com> wrote in message
>news:37F4E26A...@sirius.com...
>> > When the Russian tanks roll westward, what defence for you and me?
>> > Colonel Sloman's Essex Rifles? The Light Horse of L.S.E.? (1969)
>
>> But who's Colonel Sloman?
>
>I'm working on the assumption that it's Dr. Albert Sloman, former Vice
>Chancellor of Essex University.
Ack. I used to know this. Andrew Motion explicates it in his bio of Larkin ("A
Writer's Life") but I can't remember it. I believe Colonel Sloman does refer to
Albert Sloman & the LSE was some sort of left-wing student union.
Martha Bridegam
Martha Bridegam
>
> Golders Green Grenadiers into the King's Own Enemy Aliens.
>
> fide regiment with a considerable military record.
Any of it in Pennsylvania?
/MAB
Alan Allport
> > Ack. I used to know this. Andrew Motion explicates it in his bio of
Larkin ("A
> > Writer's Life") but I can't remember it. I believe Colonel Sloman
does refer to
> > Albert Sloman & the LSE was some sort of left-wing student union.
>
> Not the London School of Economics?
Larkin's referring to the abovementioned school, notorious in the late
1960s as the center of student radicalism in Britain and where young
revolutionaries apocryphally chanted "L.S.E.! L.S.E.! Save us from the
bourgeouisie!"
Alan.
Alan Allport
> > They could at least have resurrected the King's German Legion, a
bona
> > fide regiment with a considerable military record.
>
> Any of it in Pennsylvania?
Pennsylvania was enemy territory (OK, surly neutral territory) by the
time of the K.G.L.'s formation in 1803. It was made up of Hanoverian
emigres who had fled to Britain after Napoleon's annexation of the
electorate. A particularly fitting antecedent for an anti-fascist corps
in 1940, sadly never exploited.
Alan.
Martha Bridegam
>
> Tom Deveson wrote (quoting Philip Larkin):
> >
> > Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
> > Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
> > And shivered, without shaking off the dread
> >
> > That how we live measures our own nature,
> > And at his age having no more to show
> > Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
> > He warranted no better, I don't know.
>
>
And p.s. any chance Larkin knew Russian? "Mr. Bleaney" would be "Mr.
Pancakes" in Russian, which is kind of blandly appropriate.
/MAB
Gene Zitver
Alan Allport wrote
>Pennsylvania was enemy territory (OK, surly neutral territory) by the
>time of the K.G.L.'s formation in 1803. It was made up of Hanoverian
>emigres who had fled to Britain after Napoleon's annexation of the
>electorate. A particularly fitting antecedent for an anti-fascist corps
>in 1940, sadly never exploited.
The Ernst Thaelmann batallion, consisting of German refugees and named after
the leader of the German Communist party, was part of the International
Brigade in the Spanish civil war.
Gene
Tom Deveson
> Does that make Robert Frost a Movement Poet too?
>And p.s. any chance Larkin knew Russian? "Mr. Bleaney" would be "Mr.
>Pancakes" in Russian, which is kind of blandly appropriate.
Think the latter is very unlikely. Larkin spoke of his "hatred of
abroad" and once said, "I wouldn't mind seeing China if I could come
back the same day."
He did learn some German at school, after an earlier holiday there was
ruined by his not knowing the language; but when he went to Hamburg to
receive a literary prize in 1975, he spent only two days there. Though
he got an E (the lowest grade) in School Certificate French at age 16,
he did later write at least two poems with direct French allusions,
*Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis* and *Femmes Damnées*, derived from
Villon and Baudelaire respectively -- and *Sympathy in White Major* must
refer in passing to Gautier's *Symphonie en Blanc Majeur*. He also
wrote about Montherlant. But I don't know anything about his having
studied Russian, unlike, say, slightly younger writers like Michael
Frayn who did intensive Russian study as part of their post-war/Cold War
national service training. He might have known blini from restaurants,
but my intuitive associations with the name have been more to do with
'bleak' and 'meanie'.
The Frost question is big. I guess the answer is obviously *no* in the
superficial sense -- like "Was Turner an Impressionist?" -- but *maybe*
in other more complicated ways. A man who said, "We shall be judged
finally by the delicacy of our feeling of when to stop short...A little
of anything goes a long way in art" or who wrote this extraordinary
sonnet:
As I went down the hill along the wall
There was a gate I had leaned at for the view
And had just turned from when I first saw you
As you came up the hill. We met. But all
We did that day was mingle great and small
Footprints in summer dust as if we drew
The figure of our being less than two
But more than one as yet. Your parasol
Pointed the decimal off with one deep thrust.
And all the time we talked you seemed to see
Something down there to smile at in the dust
(Oh, it was without prejudice to me!)
Afterward I went past what you had passed
Before we met and you what I had passed.
-- such a writer is doing something that links up with Hardy and Edward
Thomas and the pursuit of unfaked emotional directness, which is what
the movement poets were at least trying to do, even if they didn't
always do it.
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
MN1st
>> Albert Sloman & the LSE was some sort of left-wing student union.
>
>Not the London School of Economics?
By Jove! I think she's got it! Give the lady a cigar. I hate it when the old
mental block starts with the blocking.
Martha Bridegam
>
> By Jove! I think she's got it! Give the lady a cigar.
Joel was recently quoting a bit in vintage "Doonesbury" where Bernie the
odd roommate reappears from a visit to an alternate dimension &
complains that they never clean out the ashtrays there.
You suppose it was ABGO?
/MAB
--
jo...@sirius.com