The Filter^

Magic, Finland and the Hare.

The miller had a great gift for imitating the animals of the forest. He would make a game of it, and the youngsters would compete to see who could be the first to guess which animal he was mimicking. One minute he would become a hare, and then the next a lemming or a bear. Sometimes he would flap his long arms like a night owl, or start howling like a wolf, pointing his nose at the sky and letting out such a heart-rending wail that the terrified youngsters would huddle together for comfort.

Arto Paasilinna, The Howling Miller

I think too often we are a little bit squeamish about the magical. We feel too old for it as if our adult minds have moved onto more serious matters; we are quick to dismiss it as childish and not deserving of our attention. Henry Perowne’s objections to magical realism in Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday: “the recourse of an insufficient imagination, a dereliction of duty, a childish evasion of the difficulties and wonders of the real, of the demanding re-enactment of the plausible” are, I think, what a lot of us might actually feel. There is an awkwardness there – another adult has produced these works, well are they quite… Those words Perowne uses: “insufficient”, “dereliction”, “evasion” are all about deficiency. To accept magic in the way that a child might, is to be somehow mentally deficient. Like another of McEwan’s characters, Charles Darke in the novel The Child in Time, we have an image of an adult escaping from the real world to live as a child. It’s just not proper. It’s unseemly.

And the above passage from Finnish novelist Arto Paasilinna’s novel The Howling Miller explores just that. We (and the villagers in the book) are reasonably comfortable with this man’s impressions of animals for children, but when he begins wildly howling in the night, things become another matter. Notice how it is phrased: ‘one minute he would become a hare’. It is the kind of phrasing we use all the time about impressionists, but if we think about it for a moment it is more than metaphor. The miller becomes a hare because he is hare-like, but then, he is acting like a hare.

Consider that most famous of hares, Albrecht Dürer’s watercolour A Young Hare (1502):

When we look at the image above, we say ‘that is a hare’. We might go on to say ‘that is a watercolour of a hare’, or even ‘that is an extraordinary likeness to a hare’, but our primary response is that it is a hare. Of course it isn’t, it is simply a mass of assembled pigments upon paper, but our mind allows it to become a hare for us. We would not even say that the picture is hare-like, for that would do discredit to the magic that Dürer has woven with his brush. In the same way, the miller is not hare-like, his impression is such that he is for a moment a hare.

Consider then, E. M. Cioran:

Let me live the life of every species, wildly and un-self-consciously, let me try out the entire spectrum of nature; let me change gracefully, discreetly, as if it were the most natural procedure. How I would search the nests and caves, wander the deserted mountains and the sea, the hills and the plains. Only a cosmic adventure of this kind, a series of metamorphoses in the plant and animal realms, would reawaken in me the desire to become Man again. If the difference between Man and animal lies in the fact that the animal can only be an animal whereas man can also be not-man – that is, something other than himself – then I am not-man.

E.M. Cioran, from ‘Not to be a Man Anymore’, Pe culmile disperării

I hear uncomfortable shuffling at the back. Wants to live the life of every species? What’s his game? Wants to be not-man? Calls himself a philosopher? We’ve met his type before. Mostly on public transport. It’s not normal, is it?

Well that’s just the point: it is. Or rather, what Cioran is suggesting there is that to understand the state of normal human existence we must first attempt to understand what it is to be states other than that. We must accept the magical in order to really see what our present state is. To truly understand life as a man, we must first understand what it is to live as a hare.

Which rather neatly brings us to Finland, or rather to a very lovely book about Finland, again written by Arto Paasilinna. Interesting, in Cioran’s essay ‘Not to be a Man Anymore’, is the sense of dropping out of everyday life to pursue these existential ends. It’s a wild fantasy we might have, to one day disappear from the modern world and adopt an altogether more primitive means of existence. We probably doubt we will ever do it, but this is exactly the plot of Paasilinna’s novel The Year of the Hare.

One night, Vatanen, a hugely successful journalist and his photographer are driving along a country road back towards Helsinki. The car hits a hare. Vatanen goes after the animal into the woods, and the novel begins.

For all this talk of magic that I have made so far in this post, what is striking about this story (apart from the very last four paragraphs of the book) is that actually none of this is magical at all. It is purely the story (however improbable) of a man who abandons the journey back to his former life – his wife, his job, his boat, his means of living – to look after an injured hare in the woods. It merely seems magical because it is so distant from our everyday points of reference.

Which is rather the point. Vatanen feels lost within the modern world so he drops out of it into the wilderness. Throughout the book there is a struggle, at times an ecological one, but more generally a personal one between the modern urban Finland and the wild, untamed expanses of it:

There was an old meadow, full of wild flowers, and a brook murmuring beyond it. Vatanten put the hare down by the brook, stripped off and took a cold dip. A tight shoal of tiny fish, swimming upstream, took fright at the slightest movement, invariably forgetting their fear the next moment.
Vatanen’s thoughts turned to his wife in Helsinki. He began to feel depressed.

In order to escape his past life, Vatanen must learn to live as a hare; as indeed the hare begins to live as a man. For sections of the book they are both on the run, seeking out food and survival. Things that would seem commonplace to modern, urban man, such as the presence of a raven, suddenly become predators to him – the raven almost starving him by daily ransacking his food store. It is an unsentimental book in some ways, and by no means sets out to suggest that this rustic existence is less stressful than Vatanen’s former life, but it is a gently very funny book too – it’s quite wonderful just how innately amusing the circumstances of walking into a bank, or a hotel, or a restaurant, or a taxi rank and happening to have with you a hare, can be.

It is by its nature magical. It’s unexpected. It’s that sense of phantasmagoria that so obsessed Walter Benjamin; the unexpected collision of two disparate worlds in one moment forming a new kind of poetic truth.

Which is more or less how I came by this book. You see, I’ve been thinking about hares for ages, and yet had it not been being asked to write something on Finnish literature, I am certain that I would never have come by Paasilinna. Suddenly upon finding this book, I realised that a lot of things made sense.

The poet William Cowper kept hares. One of the loveliest essays of the eighteenth century is a piece by him titled ‘Epitaph on a Hare’ published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in June, 1784. It details how he came to care for three such animals: Puss, Tiney, and Bess “notwithstanding the two female appellatives, I must inform you that they were all males”. It is a strange piece of writing. One that I am instantly drawn to, but save for taking it as instructions for the care of domesticated wild animals, not one I can see a way of doing much with. As with Vatanen’s hare, between Cowper and Puss we see a strong bond of understanding develop between the animal and its rescuer:

Puss grew presently familiar, would leap into my lap, raise himself upon his hinder feet, and bite the hair from my temples.  He would suffer me to take him up and to carry him about in my arms, and has more than once fallen asleep upon my knee.  He was ill three days, during which time I nursed him, kept him apart from his fellows that they might not molest him (for, like many, other wild animals, they persecute one of their own species that is sick), and by constant care and trying him with a variety of herbs, restored him to perfect health.  No creature could be more grateful than my patient after his recovery; a sentiment which he most significantly expressed, by licking my hand, first the back of it, then the palm, then every finger separately, then between all the fingers, as if anxious to leave no part of it unsaluted; a ceremony which he never performed but once again upon a similar occasion. Finding him extremely tractable, I made it my custom to carry him always after breakfast into the garden, where he hid himself generally under the leaves of a cucumber vine, sleeping or chewing the cud til evening; in the leaves also of that vine he found a favourite repast.  I had not long habituated him to the taste of liberty, before he began to be impatient for the return of the time when he might enjoy it.  He would invite me to the garden by drumming upon my knee, and by a look of expression, as it was not possible to misinterpret.  If this rhetoric did not immediately succeed, he would take the skirt of my coat between his teeth, and pull at it with all his force.

Cowper had to formulate for himself the diet of the hare suggesting: “Sow-thistle, dent-de-lion, and lettuce”, “white sand […] I suppose as a digestive”, “green corn […] both blade and stalk”, straw, oats and occasionally aromatic herbs. For Cowper, the separation of time makes it quite unsurprising to us that he should know what to feed his hares, but in The Year of the Hare, this act demonstrates the stark separation between modern man and the natural world.

Vatanen takes the animal to the warden of the South Savo Game Preservation Office, in order to find out what hares actually eat. He is told:

‘Feed it early clover. You’ll find a lot of that almost anywhere now. And for drinking, give it pure water; no point in forcing milk on it. Besides clover, fresh grass may do, and barley aftermath… bonnet grass it likes, and meadow vetchling. In fact, it likes all the vetches, and alsike is something it likes too. In the winter you’d best give it cambium of deciduous trees, and deep-frozen bilberry twigs as well, if you’re keeping it in town.’
‘What sort of a plant is meadow vetchling? I don’t know it.’

That he doesn't know what any of these plants are marks a huge chasm in our world; the false means by which man is able to live on a planet sustained by organisms he is generally ignorant about, is, when we really consider it, a rather disturbing truth. We might be unlikely to be placed in a situation in which we need to look after an injured hare, but our ignorance of these matters is on a level startling. It would be easy to dismiss A Year of the Hare as silly nonsense, a child’s story of a man going off to live with an animal. Within the book itself the account of his journey is met by scepticism by a scientist, and the way that the book is written; a series of very short ‘adventures’ tricks us into this false conclusion that this is merely kid’s stuff. Not the kind of thing we should attend to with our serious, sophisticated brains. The ending – an ending that takes flight from the rest of the book and is purely fantastical – is surely proof of that itself. We could easily dismiss this book as “a childish evasion of the difficulties and wonders of the real, of the demanding re-enactment of the plausible”, but really it is our own base ignorance – our lack of understanding of what it is to live as a hare, our caution at not wanting to appear silly or feeble-minded – it is that that keeps us only as children.

Poor Soul, poor Girl!

Poor Soul, poor Girl!

(A Debutante)

I cannot imagine anything nicer
Than to be struck by lightning and killed suddenly crossing a field
As if somebody cared.
Nobody cares whether I am alive or dead.

The above poem, ‘Poor Soul, poor Girl!’ by the English poet Stevie Smith, imagines the voice of a young woman confronting mortality and her place in the world. It is a short poem. It is somewhat absurd (such nihilistic thoughts placed in the mind of a young girl – more than that, a debutante; a girl on the brink of all that the world has to offer, a figure that represents youthfulness and life itself, wishing to be struck down dead in an instant, imagining that such an act would prove compassion, or interest, or something – well if nothing else, it’s somewhat unexpected). It is nonetheless poignant. It is sad. It is also an awkward poem, strangely informal; the metre of the long second line, followed by the short third, and the colloquial term ‘nicer’, all contribute in producing a sense of the girl’s innocence of speech. Her thoughts are there: ‘Nobody cares’ – these are the somewhat trite sentiments of a girl not yet fully developed in the psychology of adulthood, and yet contemplating the matter of her ‘soul’ as each of us surely must at one time or another.

It is a poem that comes to mind as I read the work of Edith Södergran – a figure who in turn wrestled with mortality at a surprisingly young age – and mentioning Smith here at all, is merely a means of getting around to some poetry from Finland, by way of Hull.

Södergran was born in St Petersburg in 1892. Her early years were spent between schooling in Russia and holidaying in Raivola, Finland, where the family relocated permanently after the death of her father from tuberculosis. The shadow of this disease, which Edith herself was diagnosed with as a teenager, hung heavily upon her working life. All of the five volumes of poetry published in her lifetime, were written in just the four years before her death, as she fought against her declining health. Her work, often ambiguous, always wrestling with the difficult questions is surprising stuff; and for the apparent similarities between her and the figure in Smith’s poem, there is so much more in Södergran. Her poems are short, and often somewhat frightening constructions. A good translation comes from Gounil Brown’s collection of her poems (Zena, 1990). Here, the poem ‘I saw a Tree’ gives an interesting insight into the young woman confronting the apparent injustice of the world:

I saw a tree that was taller than any
        others
and full of unattainable cones;
I saw a great church with open doors
and all who came out were pale and strong
and ready to die;
I saw a woman who smiling held the dice
and threw it once for happiness,
and saw that she lost –

Around these things was drawn a circle
that no creature shall cross.

As with Smith’s poem, it is the economy of expression here that is most moving; the final line, ‘that no creature shall cross’ is so binding. We are told that this is the way of the world; health, happiness – these things are not guaranteed and may be lost with the roll of dice – and yet despite its pathos, the poem does not rail against the injustice as Smith’s debutante might, it is coldly accepting. The figures leaving the church are ‘pale and strong / and ready to die’; it is a haunting image, the juxtaposition of the words ‘pale and strong’ place the figures already in the midst of death and yet held up by what we presume to be faith.

What Södergran’s poetry confronts is the uneasy inevitability of death, written by a woman painfully aware from her teenage years of her shortening days; and as a result there is only ever acceptance, as here in the poem ‘The Moon’:

How strangely wonderful are all things dead
and calmly silent:
a dead leaf and a dead person
and the moon’s disc –
[…]
that the moon’s course around the earth is
        the path of death –
and the moon weaves her magical web that
        flowers cherish
and the moon spins her fairy net around
        all that lives –  […]

With time comes death, and Södergran’s poetry serves to remind us that living is the course of dying. On midsummer’s day in 1923, in the Finnish town of Raivola, Södergran succumbed to her illness and died aged 31. She has fared well since then, her writing translated into all of the world’s major languages and is she is often held up as the premier female Scandinavian modernist poet.

Books are too important to actually be read

The Economist's review of How to talk about books you haven't read.

The librarian in Robert Musil's “The Man Without Qualities” explains that reading any particular book distracts from what is truly important: the relationship between all books.

Beautiful Libraries

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the most aesthetically pleasing libraries in the UK aren't in London, and there aren't any libraries that are suitable for thrilling research in my fields. The LSE and the SSEES (at UCL) have great collections, but are hard to work in. The BL is useful, but does have a poor range and awful usability, and is faux-business. Anyway, Tyler Cowen links to a Compendium of Beautiful Libraries. It's just a shame that functionality and grandeur never seem to come and in hand. Except for here:

Happy Birthday, Mr Tessimond

105 years ago today the poet A.S.J. Tessimond was born, and today marks the end of our celebration here of his work. It has been a curious process for me putting this together, a slow journey discovering how completely a life might disappear in less than fifty years. There is still very little known on the man himself; Hubert Nicholson’s introduction to the Collected Poems, and a tiny six page pamphlet by the artist Frances Richards (which coincidentally had a print run of 105) remain our only main sources on the poet’s life. In total there are less than twenty items of Tessimond’s correspondence held in library archives, and the Hubert Nicholson Archive in Hull (though at time of writing, inaccessible due to flooding) appears not to hold any materials either. What has become of the Tessimond’s personal papers is at present unknown, but I would be grateful to anyone who has any information on the poet getting in touch.

It is surprising that a poet who throughout the 1930s and 40s was such a regular name in the poetry presses, should slide from our consciousness so quickly. There is a short, touching poem that appears in the posthumous collection Morning Meeting about half forgotten women in hotel lounges:

The lonely women in hotel lounges

Pity us,
Us the unloved, unlovely and unloving,
Half-loving a cat, our morning tea, jewels in a trunk,
Warmth and a little ease.
Pity our too much peace;
Our absence of release;
Our long days falling without cease;
Us who have missed and still at moments know we miss
Life’s bonfire and his kiss.

It is a poem as good as any for expressing a sense of what Tessimond is about. A sad, poignant portrait of a way of life; observed with the precision of good satire, but ultimately not mocking. There is humour here; ‘Half-loving a cat, our morning tea’ seem trivial things for a person to love – love in the sense suggested in the line before, perhaps – but the feeling of having missed out in life is moving. It is the same thing felt in ‘The Man in the Bowler Hat’; the desire and fear of rising up and making something of a life. I love the phrase ‘our too much peace’, it is that simple yet weighty kind of expression that stirs you when you read his poetry, and perhaps ‘too much peace’ is what has befallen Tessimond himself these days.

But he remains loved, lovely and loving. His view on life is beautifully human, he has warmth for transgression and failiure:

Heaven

In the heaven of the god I hope for (call him X)
There is marriage and giving in marriage and transient sex
For those who will cast the body’s vest aside
Soon, but are not yet wholly rarefied
And still embrace. For X is never annoyed
Or shocked; has read his Jung and knows his Freud,
He gives you time in heaven to do as you please,
To climb love’s gradual ladder by slow degrees,
Gently to rise from sense to soul, to ascend
To a world of timeless joy, world without end.

Here on the gates of pearl there hangs no sign
Limiting cakes and ale, forbidding wine.
No weakness here is hidden, no vice unknown.
Sin is a sickness to be cured, outgrown.
With the help of a god who can laugh, an unsolemn god
Who smiles at old wives’ tales of iron rod
And fiery hell, a god who’s more at ease
With bawds and Falstaffs than with Pharisees.

Here the lame learn to leap, the blind to see.
Tyrants are taught to be humble, slaves to be free.
Fools become wise, and wise men cease to be bores,
Here bishops learn from lips of back-street whores,
And white men follow black-faced angel’s feet
Through fields of orient and immortal wheat.

Villon, Lautrec and Baudelaire are here.
Here Swift forgets his anger, Poe his fear.
Napoleon rests. Columbus, journey done,
Has reached his new Atlantis, found his sun.
Verlaine and Dylan Thomas drink together.
Marx talks to Plato. Byron wonders whether
There’s some mistake. Wordsworth has found a hill
That’s home. Here Chopin plays the piano still.
Wren plans ethereal domes; and Renoir paints
young girls as ripe as fruit but not yet saints.

An X, of whom no coward is afraid,
Who’s friend consulted, not fierce king obeyed;
Who hears the unspoken thought, the prayer unprayed;
Who expects not even the learned to understand
His universe, extends a prodigal hand,
Full of forgiveness, over his promised land.

It is an intensely kind voice that runs throughout his work, frequently sad but also with playful wit and irreverence. It is a shame for us all he is not more read. It’s a Victorian idea, but I suspect Tessimond is an ‘improving poet’ (a notion he would probably have hated). The Collected Poems, though out of print, is still obtainable through second-hand bookshops and libraries. I’d like to thank Anthony for giving over a fortnight of The Filter^ to a long and obscure reflection, and to those who have read and commented on these posts. Finally: Happy birthday, Mr. Tessimond.

On the death of a great man

He goes. You, world, are poorer for his going;
And poorer yet again, world, for not knowing
Your loss … ‘Tis well, world. You deserved to lose
That which you neither sought, nor cared to use!

Pets

Pets

An indoor elephant
Seems irrelevant.
Keeping a seagull
Is not legal.

Armadillos
Nest in pillows.
Hungry llamas
Eat pyjamas.

Hippo and rhino
Damage the lino.
Crocodiles stay
In the bath all day.

Women are flustered
If a large bustard,
Eagle or lion
Watches them iron.

Such birds as grouse
Flap through the house
And polar bears
Block up the stairs.

Sheep are loafers
On chairs and sofas
And few sane men
Can love a hen.

Most people therefore
Prefer to care for
A dog or cat;
And that is that.

A frayed but silver rope

Gordon had a big job on hand at the moment. The Queen of Sheba Toilet Requisites Co. were sweeping the country with a monster campaign for their deodorant, April Dew. They had decided that BO and halitosis were worked out, or nearly, and had been racking their brains for a long time past to think of some new way of scaring the public. Then some bright spark had suggested, What about smelling feet? That field had never been exploited and had immense possibilities. The Queen of Sheba had turned the idea over to the New Albion. What they asked for was a really telling slogan; something in the class of ‘Night Starvation’ – something that would rankle the public consciousness like a poisoned arrow.
        George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, p.271

The similarities in the situations of Tessimond and the character of Gordon Comstock in George Orwell’s novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying are surprisingly close. Both worked in bookshops, and then as advertising copywriters, both struggled with becoming published poets. The joke of Orwell’s novel is that Comstock is a much better copywriter than he is a poet, but the similarities are still striking. Tessimond’s poem ‘Money’ could stand as a preface to the book: ‘I am your master and your master’s master, / I am the dragon’s teeth which you have shown’, and both Tessimond and Orwell take a similarly grim view of advertising:

Advertising

You, without gleam or glint or fire,
You cannot know your own desire.
But I will tell you. I will look through your eyes. Now listen!
Here are the toys that please, the almost-gems that glisten! …
I am your wish and I its answer.
I am the drum and you the dancer.
I am the trumpet-voice, the Stentor.
I am temptation, I the Mentor
Who tells you that ten million men have long
Called a stone bread – and can ten million men be wrong?
I am the voice that bids you spend to save and save to spend,
But always spend that wheels may never end
Their turning and by turning let you spend to save
And save to spend, world without end, cradle to grave.

The Ad-Man

This trumpeter of nothingness, employed
To keep our reason full and null and void.
This man of wind and froth and flux will sell
The wares of any who reward him well.
Praising whatever he is paid to praise,
He hunts for ever-newer, smarter ways
To make the gilt seem gold; the shoddy, silk;
To cheat us legally; to bluff and bilk
By methods which no jury can prevent
Because the law's not broken, only bent.

This mind for hire, this mental prostitute
Can tell the half-lie hardest to refute;
Knows how to hide an inconvenient fact
And when to leave a doubtful claim unbacked;
Manipulates the truth, but not too much,
And if his patter needs the Human Touch
Then aptly artless, artlessly naive,
He wears his fickle heart upon his sleeve.

He takes ideas and trains them to engage
In the long little wars big combines wage.
He keeps his logic loose, his feelings flimsy;
Turns eloquence to cant and wit to whimsy;
Trims language till it fits his client's pattern,
And style's a glossy tart or limping slattern.

He uses words that once were strong and fine.
Primal as sun and moon and bread and wine,
True, honourable, honoured, clear and clean,
And leaves them shabby, worn, diminished, mean.

Where our defence is weakest, he attacks.
Encircling reason's fort, he finds the cracks,
He knows the hopes and fears on which to play.
We who at first rebel, at last obey.
We who have tried to choose accept his choice.
Tired, we succumb to his untiring voice.
The drip-drip-drip makes even granite soften.
We trust the brand-name we have heard so often
And join the queue of sheep that flock to buy;
We fools who know our folly, you and I.

A slightly more sympathetic view is put across in this later poem, not published during the poet’s lifetime:

Defence of the ad-man

He brings us aims and dreams and drugs; he tells
Us fairy-tales that half come true or might.
The patent panaceas that he sells
May be placebos, but placebos can
Act like elixirs; syrups have their spells,
And coloured water sometimes can assuage
A thirst for draughts from unattainable wells.

He binds us with a frayed but silver rope.
He peddles jewels false perhaps but bright.
He kindles flares that beckon eyes that grope.
His ‘you, you, you’ consoles the lonely man
And humble woman. With permitted dope
He medicines the sickness of our age;
Offers the ugly, glamour; the hopeless, hope.

Before the inept lips open.

Meeting

Dogs take new friends abruptly and by smell.
Cats’ meetings are neat, tactual, caressive.
Monkeys exchange their fleas before they speak.
Snakes, no doubt, coil by coil reach mutual knowledge.

We then, at first encounter, should be silent;
Not court the cortex but the epidermis;
Not work from inside out but outside in;
Discover each other’s flesh, its scent and texture;
Familiarize the sinews and the nerve-ends,
The hands, the hair – before the inept lips open.

Instead of which we are resonant, explicit.
Our words like windows intercept our meaning.
Our four eyes fence and flinch and awkwardly
Wince into shadow, slide oblique to ambush.
Hands stir, retract. The pulse is insulated.
Blood is turned inwards, lonely, skin unhappy…
While always under all, but interrupted,
Antennæ stretch … waver … and almost … touch.

Polyphony in a Cathedral

Polyphony in a Cathedral

Music curls
In the stone shells
Of the arches, and rings
Their stone bells.

Music lips
Each cold groove
Of parabolas’ laced
Warp and woof,
And lingers round nodes
Of the ribbed roof.

Chords open
Their flowers among
The stone flowers; blossom;
Stalkless hang.

Another chanced-upon scrap of biography:

The local Organists and Choirmasters’ Association, whose president is Mr Lloyd Moore, announces a series of lectures by Mr. H. W. Griffiths (‘The Gramaphone’), Mr. G. A. Tessimond (‘The influence of poetry on the development of modern music’), Mr. Walter Bridson (‘Liszt’), and Mr. W. A. Roberts (‘Modern French Organ Music’).

                   The Musical Times, October 1st 1921

This mention of the poet’s father in a round-up of musical events from Liverpool offers an intriguing insight into the poet’s background. George Tessimond worked as honorary treasurer for the Liverpool Church Choir Association until its close in April 1930. Founded in 1900 by Ralph H. Baker, the Association held a series of fifteen festivals of Church music in the city’s St. George’s Hall and by 1924, once building work had progressed enough, continued them within the unfinished Liverpool Cathedral. The role that this organisation must have played within the city’s musical life at this time cannot be underestimated; it provided the choir when Edward VII laid the foundation stone for the new Cathedral in 1904, and again when George V opened the Gladstone Dock in 1913. The Association ceased work between 1914 and 1921 due to the war and its aftermath, but its highpoint seems to have been the transition of the festivals between the secular St. George’s Hall and the Cathedral:

The experiences of the first Choral Festival in the new Cathedral should hold an incentive to improve on the next occasion. The organ accompaniments, played by Mr. H. Goss Custard, were models of restraint. Of course he was not able to use the Great organ diapasons, which are not yet sounding; but at the next Festival we shall no doubt hear them, as well as the heavy-pressure tubas which are to excel in tone anything previously associated with the master-hand of Willis. To the conductor, Mr. Branscombe, and to the choirmasters concerned, due acknowledgement should be rendered, as also to the Cathedral authorities for the arrangements made for the carrying out of the most imposing and notable choral service yet held at Liverpool.

                   The Musical Times, November 1st 1924

It must have seemed an exciting time for the Association. Within the city grew a huge building which was to be their home, with an impressive organ at their disposal. As it turned out, Harry Goss Custard was to play at only three more such festivals. It seems somewhat sad that as the Cathedral grew, interest in the Church Choir Association seems to have waned. The 1928 festival was to be their last; cancelled at a late stage after the music books had been printed and learned by the choirs involved. It appears that the Association never really recovered from the toll that the war had taken on it, and the increased burden involved in building the new cathedral meant that the Church could not offer them as much financial support.

That Tessimond's father was actively involved in this world is an interesting fact. That his lecture in 1921 should be titled: ‘The influence of poetry on the development of modern music’, is even more so.

We can see that Tessimond’s poetry is influenced by music in the titles alone: ‘Polyphony in a Cathedral’, ‘Music’, ‘Quickstep’, ‘Song in a Saloon Bar’, ‘Dance Band’, ‘Black Monday Lovesong’, ‘Invitation to the Dance’, ‘Skaters Waltz’, ‘Two Men in a Dance Hall’, ‘Symphony in Red’, ‘The Conductor (Concert Study)’, and so on. The range of this influence is vast, stretching from the popular (poems about the Charleston and Edith Piaf), to sacred and classical works. He is said to have introduced the painter Ceri Richards to Debussy, Ravel and other modern French composers*; and music appears to have been as much a part of the son’s life as it was for his father:

On listening to a piece of music by Purcell

I cast no slur upon the worth
Of modern men and modern ways,
And our no whit declining days –
On modern heaven and modern earth;
Yet in your muse I seem to find
Something our later muse has lost –
A note more sure, less trouble-tossed,
A carelessness and ease of mind –

Relic of times when History’s ink
Had scrawled less wantonly the page,
When man had had less time to think,
Less circumspectly flowed his blood:
Trace of a prelapsarian age,
Echo of days before the flood.

‘Less circumspectly flowed his blood’ is a great line; it echoes what seems to be Tessimond’s belief that once there was a time when life was easier for Mankind, but here temporary hope is offered through music’s ability to transport the listener back to that point. In his poetry, music is something that transcends time and that it brings about dance – ‘rituals as old as springtime’ (from the poem ‘Dancing’) – is proof of this. As we will see more closely tomorrow, it is perhaps language that prevents human communication, but music ‘This shape without space, / This pattern without stuff,’ (‘Music’) allows it to happen.

*Ceri Richards Exhibition Catalogue, (London, Tate: 1981) p.23

Spittle, slaughterhouses, double pneumonia

I suspect there to be few places on earth quite as depressing than a wet park seat above Luton’s Gasworks. I promised Andrew flippancy at one point last week, and have not yet delivered, so here we are:

Letter from Luton

Dear Hubert,
                    Bored, malevolent and mute on
A wet park seat, I look at life and Luton
And think of spittle, slaughterhouses, double
Pneumonia, schizophrenia, kidney trouble,
Piles, paranoia, gallstones in the bladder,
Manic depressive madness growing madder,
Cretins with hideous tropical diseases
And red-eyed necrophiles – while on the breezes
From Luton Gasworks comes a stench that closes
Like a damp frigid hand on my neuroses;
And Time (arthritic deaf-mute) stumbles on
And on and on and on.
                                 Yours glumly,
                                                     John

It’s a poem which I think shares a tone with Betjeman’s poem ‘Slough’, though the majority of the complaints here are directed at the narrator himself (or what he perceives to be directed at himself), the setting of the ‘wet park seat’ in Luton confirms the utter awfulness of the world.

Epistolary poems are a long-standing poetic tradition but this poem, which was not published during Tessimond’s lifetime, perhaps originated as an actual correspondence between the poet (John, as he was known in adult life) and his friend Hubert Nicholson. It is in part the doggerel nature of the rhymes that bring the humour here; ‘mute on / Luton’, ‘closes / neuroses’ and the repeated internal rhyme of ‘on and on and on and on […] John’. The rhymes themselves are pathetic, but comically so, as are the poet’s concerns upon the park bench.

It’s a black humour. Tessimond was suffering from manic depression in his own life, and even the most ridiculous of his concerns, the ‘red-eyed necrophiles’, carries some sort of resonance as an image of the most hopeless kind of unreciprocated love.

But it’s ultimately a fun poem, the spirit of Eeyore rather than a truly sad voice; and it’s the fact that it’s set in Luton that makes it depressing, not the other problems of the world.

To Man alone

Last week I wrote about Tessimond’s mistrust of man seeking permanence through building. Today’s poem informs that view, but suggests something more complex:

In Canterbury Cathedral

Trees, but straighter than birches, rise to the sky
Of stone. Their branches meet in the sky of stone.
Stone fountains leap and meet: their traceries are
As light as lace. These prayers of stone were prayed
To a God I can’t believe in, but were made
By Man, men almost gods, in whom I can
Believe: were made as strong, to last as long
As time. I stare and pray to Man alone.

It is a small poem, but the weight of that final sentence: ‘I stare and pray to Man alone’, is nonetheless very forceful. Here, we are concerned with the separation of the sacred and profane in church architecture, and beyond that, the sense of atheistic belief in man.

The composition of the poem is fundamental to the expression of this view. ‘Trees’, the poem states, ‘rise to the sky / Of stone’. Not ‘Tree-like pillars’, but ‘Trees’. Whereas the idea of gothic architecture mimicking plant forms is not new (it builds upon the thoughts of Ruskin in The Stones of Venice), here the metaphor is absolute. The pillars do not resemble trees, but are trees; a transfiguration has taken place – stone has become tree, stone has become sky.

This repetition of the word ‘stone’ is sombre in the poem. In such a short piece it is carried out to a huge degree, to the point of repeating the phrase ‘sky of stone’ twice over within two sentences, and placing the word next to itself between lines 2 and 3. The effect is to ground the poem. The description of the architecture’s transfiguration is fanciful, it is ‘fountains leap’[ing] and ‘light as lace’; but the repetition of ‘stone’, reminds us of the true quality of this material. It is earthly, heavy. It suggests the near miracle that this structure should hold up at all.

This is very much the nature of the poem’s argument about the cathedral’s architecture. Though it might appear that these pillars are trees, the fact is that they remain as stone. Just as there might be an appearance of a God, the poem suggests that ultimately man is all there is. This is picked up in the rhyme of the final word of the poem. Resonance is given to the word ‘alone’ because we have read the word ‘stone’ so many times over before it. The poem’s prayer does not simply go out to Man’s achievements with the exclusion of a God, but to ‘Man alone’ as in ‘Man on his own’ – without a God above him.

Yet there is a respect for belief in this poem. The poem stands in awe of the cathedral, and acknowledges that it came about through ‘prayers of stone [...] prayed / To a God’, and to a large extent it seems to trust this building more than man’s personal desire for statuary, because it isn’t created to edify man himself. It is ‘a God I can’t believe in’; again an almost personal assumption of deficiency on the narrator’s part. It is the narrator who cannot believe, not necessarily the God that doesn’t exist. The indefinite nature of ‘a God’ implies a sense of this, and the notion of men being ‘almost gods’ evokes a terrific faith in mankind, a distinct sense of humanism in the poem. Man has created this amazing building, and if there is a God, then Man has achieved just as much as him: Man’s trees are ‘straighter than birches’ and they will ‘last as long / As time’.

32, Devonshire Road

32, Devonshire Road, Claughton, Birkenhead: the childhood home of A.S.J. Tessimond.

Tessimond's parents, George and Amy, married in West Derby, Liverpool in 1885. Though the unfamiliar family name perhaps suggests some foreign origin, it seems most likely that it is a derivation of the English surname Tesseyman.They were a local couple; George was the son of an iron foundry owner who in 1871 was employing a staff of 20 men and 10 boys. George then worked as a bank branch inspector, and by 1901 the couple had moved to the solid, elegant, semi-detatched villa in Devonshire Road, Birkenhead. Though Hubert Nicholson states that he was an only child, the 1901 census records that the couple had a daughter before him: Lillian C. Tessimond, who would have been 15 when the poet was born. The relative grandeur of the house indicates that the family at this time were materially comfortable, indeed in 1938 his mother must have had sufficient wealth to have made a generous donation of £5 to the 'Lord Baldwin Appeal on behalf of the victims of religious, racial and political persecution'.* They lived in the house with George’s sister Elizabeth employing two members of staff. Nicholson mentions that as a child the poet ‘relied for human warmth on a kindly old aunt. (She lived to ninety, and left him some money.)’ and it is possible that this was Elizabeth.

Houses

People who are afraid of themselves
Multiply themselves into families
And so divide themselves
And so become less afraid.

People who might have to go out
Into clanging strangers’ laughter,
Crowd under roofs, make compacts
To no more than smile at each other.

People who might meet their own faces
Or surprise their own voices in doorways
Build themselves rooms without mirrors
And live between walls without echoes.

People who might meet other faces
And unknown voices round corners
Build themselves rooms all mirrors
And live between walls all echoes.

People who are afraid to go naked
Clothe themselves in families, houses,
But are still afraid of death
Because death one day will undress them.

*Times, Thursday, Dec 15, 1938.

 

That I admit undeftness

In Genesis chapter 11, God sees the people of the earth unified, and building a tower in order to reach heaven. He responds by scattering them across the face of the earth, confounding their language so they may not speak to one another. The tower of Babel looms large in the poetry of A.S.J. Tessimond. As we saw yesterday, there is that instinctive mistrust of statuary – why should man think himself important enough to build a tower up to heaven? – but also there is a scar running through his thought; the painful experience of that separation that followed. In his poetry, as well as in his life, there is a searching; a desire to reconnect across the divide, to finally, hopefully understand the speech and meaning of another human being. This is perhaps felt most strongly in his poem ‘Any Man Speaks’:

Any Man Speaks

I, after difficult entry through my mother’s blood
And stumbling childhood (hitting my head against the world);
I, intricate, easily unshipped, untracked, unaligned;
Cut off in my communications; stammering; speaking
A dialect shared by you, but not you and you;
I, strangely undeft, bereft; I searching always
For my lost rib (clothed in laughter yet understanding)
To come round the corner of Wardour Street into the Square
Or to signal across the Park and share my bed;
I, focus in night for star-sent beams of light,
I, fulcrum of levers whose ends I cannot see …
Have this one deftness – that I admit undeftness:
Know that the stars are far, the levers long:
Can understand my unstrength.

The poem is filled with separations. We have the separation of the child from its mother at birth, a line that perhaps hints at Tessimond’s feelings of isolation as a child, that birth may have been the last time he felt connected to his mother. The severance of speech: ‘Cut off in my communications; stammering; speaking / A dialect shared by you, but not you and you’; an image drawn directly from God’s scattering of language at Babel. Also we have Adam’s separation from Eve; ‘I searching always / For my lost rib’ and again it feels a very personal image, especially as it descends into the specifics of the modern world: ‘To come round the corner of Wardour Street into the Square / Or to signal across the Park and share my bed’. There is a sense of this separation and subsequent searching in Tessimond’s own life; whilst at university he became engaged to be married but this was broken off in his mid-twenties. There followed a series of seemingly unhappy relationships with women; perhaps a searching for his own ‘lost rib’.

This sense of division, the possibility that we might not understand the words of those even closest to us, is profound in the poem. A free-verse sonnet, it is itself a form that feels somehow broken or ‘unaligned’. The opening verb phrase ‘I have’ is torn apart by so many other clauses that we only discover what the opening word relates to in the twelfth line. The separation is taken personally, as his own inability to connect; a clumsiness in his ‘stumbling childhood’, an awkwardness in his ‘undeft’ adult life.

The places mentioned, Wardour Street and [Soho] Square, marked the heart of London’s area of prostitution, and the ‘signal across the Park’ is a undoubtedly streetwalker’s furtive invitation to him for trade. It is a painfully lonely poem, and a recurrent theme elsewhere in his verse, as here in the poem ‘Speech’:

I am dumb, you deaf. I try in vain to fashion
A convention of common speech,
A password. Babel reigns still: each is unable
To understand each…

But there is also strength in ‘Any Man Speaks’. Do not simply pity the narrator in his misdirected search for his rib with prostitutes (even when in the poem ‘The Prostitute’, the acknowledgement is made that it is the punter who is ultimately tricked), for here is perhaps the greatest strength that any character can have:

I, focus in night for star-sent beams of light,
I, fulcrum of levers whose ends I cannot see …
Have this one deftness – that I admit undeftness:
Know that the stars are far, the levers long:
Can understand my unstrength.

He may be stammering, speechless, bereft; but the figure here has an astounding humility in knowing himself. Though he might understand nobody else, he ‘Can understand my unstrength’.

The not-quite-fool

The Man in the Bowler Hat

I am the unnoticed, the unnoticeable man:
The man who sat on your right in the morning train:
The man you looked through like a windowpane:
The man who was the colour of the carriage, the colour of the mounting
Morning pipe smoke.

I am the man too busy with a living to live,
Too hurried and worried to see and smell and touch:
The man who is patient too long and obeys too much
And wishes too often and seldom.

I am the man they call the nation’s backbone,
Who am boneless – playable catgut, pliable clay:
The Man they label Little lest one day
I dare to grow.

I am the rails on which the moment passes,
The megaphone for many words and voices:
I am graph, diagram,
Composite face.

I am the led, the easily-fed,
The tool, the not-quite-fool,
The would-be-safe-and-sound,
The uncomplaining bound,
The dust fine-ground,
Stone-for-a-statue waveworn pebble-round.

We start our celebration with one of Tessimond’s most famous poems. Ironic perhaps that he should be noticed for a poem about not being noticed. It is a skilful piece that plays with everyday mundane expression against vaguer, loftier ideas. Notice the repetition: ‘The man’ ‘The man’ ‘The man’; in part it delivers to us the rhythm of the morning train, but also it is the wallpaper repetition of this figure, the hundreds of him filling every carriage, every morning. The past tense of this opening is playful; ‘The man who was the colour of the carriage’, we are informed. We are invited to remember him, to remember the colour of the carriage, but we are not given to recalling minor details.

It is an Everyman poem. This is Magritte’s faceless, bowler-hatted figure who represents all of us, here in our uniform failings:

I am the man too busy with a living to live,
Too hurried and worried to see and smell and touch:
The man who is patient too long and obeys too much
And wishes too often and seldom.

It is the irony of his situation that is moving; there is no escape for the man in the bowler hat from living this way because it is his life. In a sense it is a commonplace idea; ‘too busy with living to live’ is a phrase that we’re perfectly likely to overhear someone say upon the train, but the final line of that stanza: ‘And wishes too often and seldom’ is more enigmatic. The pathos of David Brent’s character in The Office often came from the fact that he did have dreams, but they were the wrong sort of dreams. There is perhaps an element of that same thing in this; Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes is here; what we really need, and should hope for, is not the things that we actually desire in life.

We pity this man, don’t we? ‘Too hurried and worried to see and smell and touch’, that is something we feel pity for. Though I am not sure if this man feels pity for it himself. The tone throughout is somewhat matter-of-fact, accepting of his lot, and the only times that a note of bitterness encroaches in the poem is when he resents the fact that he is not more successful in his working life:

[…] playable catgut, pliable clay:
The Man they label Little lest one day
I dare to grow.

Here ‘man’ takes a capital M for the first and only time in the poem. That might indicate the Everyman nature of the term, this is Man against the much larger Gods of business who shape him out of clay perhaps; but that it happens here and not elsewhere in the poem is significant. The capitalisation adds a new stress to the word indicating the narrator’s resentment of his position; we spit the word out because of it. ‘Little’ is also capitalised, and we are invited to draw the two words together, form the insult for ourselves: call him a Little Man.

In this stanza, the ‘nation’s backbone’ stops being a term of praise and becomes a somewhat loaded insult – ‘Who am boneless’ – it is a really terrifically crafted phrase. That Tessimond selects the ‘am’ form of ‘be’ here (and not ‘is’), creates the astonishing impression of this man’s entire Being is formed of ‘bonelessness’. When we read it, it sounds unsophisticated, primitive; almost as if early man was wearing bowler hats inside his caves, but despite its grammatical clumsiness it does its job, which of course is what the man in the bowler hat is there to do.

I don’t wish to say too much about the rest; in a sense it is the immediacy of his poetry that is profound. We all understand what this is saying, we all perhaps feel, or fear, the sentiments of The Man. Let us just pause over the last line before we close however; the image of the ‘Stone-for-a-statue waveworn pebble-round.’

The lack of punctuation here, the hyphenation of the first four words, all contribute in producing the smoothness of this stone in the physical form of the poem. The edges are brushed off by it. In another of Tessimond’s poems, ‘Invitation to the Dance’, he writes:

Enough, my brain, of these circles, circles.
    Cease caged enemy, cease.
Others have thought these thoughts before you.
    Peace, brain; peace.

It has all been written in books, and better.
    Come let the tidal sweep
Of the music run through our veins’ slow delta.
    (Sleep, brain; sleep.)

That idea of it all having ‘been written in books, and better.’ Of thoughts running in circles that are repeated through the ages, is prevalent in his work. It is that sense of permanence mentioned yesterday; some thoughts remain, others are cast aside. Here perhaps we are hearing the thoughts of Thomas Gray’s Elegy recycled again, that beneath any of the gravestones in the country churchyard, a potential Milton or a Cromwell might lay buried. For Tessimond, any stone might achieve the form of a statue if it is not worn ‘pebble-round’ by the world.

Permanence also comes in the form of the statue. Man strives to be permanent in the world, and that is perhaps his failing. In his poem ‘The Pathetic Fallacy’ Tessimond condemns man’s desire to ‘perpetrate / Magnification of himself / In iron and steel’. It is not the act of building that is at fault but the desire of man to magnify himself. It is the man in the bowler hat’s (cautious) desire also, to one day ‘dare to grow’.

Pebbles are perhaps less noticeable that statues, but they are often more pleasing.

Under a marked stone waiting

We speak to a few of you now, but to many later,
And more still after both you and we have gone,
And we, through you, have left our devious traces:
Ciphers in caves or under a marked stone waiting
For a finder one day to decode, and show his friends.

In poetry I suppose I have an instinctive fondness for the overlooked, the underdog, the forgotten. I’m not sure where it comes from, but an early attraction to that scene in Fahrenheit 451 where the people led by Granger wander around reciting the books that they have memorised, remains a vivid memory from my teenage years. I have a subconscious fear that things will be lost.

Though Tessimond is engaged with ‘the unnoticed, the unnoticeable’ – the forgettable in a sense – I suspect that he felt somewhat differently to me about such things. Quality will always out itself in his poetry, and if it does not, it is of no matter. He champions the resilience of the good, the hard working, the stoic.

The above passage comes from a poem called ‘The Lesser Artists’. It is a title that strikes a chord, as Tessimond is pretty much overlooked today. He is sometimes anthologised, sometimes even graffitied (I once came across a misquoted fragment of ‘The Man in the Bowler Hat’ scratched into the door of a public toilet in Durham), but the vast body of his work does not receive the critical attention it deserves. He is a minor poet, a lesser artist; but that is not to say that his work is small, or unimportant.

His literary executor Hubert Nicholson notes, in the introduction to the 1985 Collected Poems, Tessimond’s characteristic use of the personal pronoun ‘I’ in the poems. This is particularly key in the collection Voices in a Giant City, in which ‘The Lesser Artists’ appears, but as Nicholson notes:

[the poems] are not in the least egotistical. They are imaginative projections of himself into types, places, generalised Man, even God or Fate.

Yet here in ‘The Lesser Artists’ (as in the poems ‘The British’ and ‘The Neurotics’) it is ‘we’. It might imply Tessimond belonging to this group. The narrator acknowledges himself not as one of the big writers of his age, but as a small man, a faulted man. In an obituary written for him in The Times, his friend the critic George Rostrevor Hamilton said of him:

He was modest about his poetry, and sometimes thought it too small to be worth while. But over and above a dry wit and fancy, he had an exquisite feeling for words, meticulous but, like himself, without affectation. In his own way he was unrivalled.

It is Eliot’s Prufrock declaring himself as no Prince Hamlet, and the thing is: it doesn’t matter.

It does not matter if he speaks only ‘to a few of you now’, for his work will remain ‘under a marked stone waiting / For a finder one day to decode, and show his friends.’ That is the purpose of this celebration of Tessimond, a finder saying to his friends: “Look, this is some of the best poetry of the twentieth century.”

Arthur Seymour John Tessimond was born at 32 Devonshire Road, Birkenhead on 19th July 1902. He studied at Charterhouse, and later at the University of Liverpool where he won the Felicia Hemans Prize for Poetry. At the beginning of the Second World War he went on the run to avoid conscription, fearing that armed service would make him ‘intensely miserable’ and that he would prove to be dangerous to his fellow soldiers. Abandoning his home and job to avoid detection, when finally he tired of running and  submitted to a medical, he was declared unfit for service.

At the end of the war he inherited £4000 from the death of his father, half of which he spent on psychiatrists who declared that his parents’ lack of affection for him as a child was responsible for his sexual difficulties, the other half he spent on nightclub hostesses, striptease girls and models. Tessimond was subject to manic depression through this latter part of his life, for which he received frequent courses of electroshock therapy. His memory declined in his final years due to this and on 15th May 1962 he was found dead in his flat in Joubert Mansions, Chelsea having suffered a cerebral haemorrhage. He had been dead for two days.

He was cremated on 22nd May at Golders Green. In 1978 Bernard Levin wrote of him:

It was a quiet voice, which makes it easy to miss the resonances, but they are there, and although I doubt if he will achieve a widespread fame, I am sure that any future anthology of twentieth century English verse that does not include a sample of his work will be less complete, less representative and less valuable than it might have been.

It is the difference between fame and importance. It does not matter if Tessimond is not well known for he will remain for us, under a marked stone, waiting.

A.S.J. Tessimond: A Celebration

The 19th July this year marks the 105th anniversary of the poet A.S.J. Tessimond’s birth. Numerically it’s a pretty unremarkable anniversary, but Tessimond is a poet concerned with the unremarkable, so in the 15 days* running up to this, The Filter^ will be bringing you a celebration of the very best of this overlooked, Birkenhead-born poet.

*15 being a rather unremarkable number.

Gill on the English

'Indians, West Indians, Jews, Gypsies, Scots, Irish, French, Germans, Essex girls, blondes, Catholics, Hindus, Muslims, Gays, Northerners, Southerners, Brummies, yokels, cripples, spastics, epileptics, midgets, lunatics, prostitutes, vicars, the Queen, the unions, Tories, chickens, dogs, donkeys, publicans, the devil and God' says A A Gill, '...there is hardly anyone who hasn't at some point been slapped with the famous English sense of humour'.

Has a simple assembly of peoples ever sounded so funny and similarly made one feel so ashamed to be English? Gill's book The Angry Island, Hunting the English is a great read. Some passages are put together with such extraordinary prosaic skill and thought that you can almost lose the sentiments of Gill's text in its beauty. Those sentiments are englightening and thought-provoking, if a little general in some respects. He hits the nail on the head, though, when citing a few areas in which the English excel in short-sightedness, notably 'History' and 'Memorials' and our so often misconstrued take on culture and aesthetic beauty. Here are another couple of excerpts (I hope I'm OK for copyright doing this? But do go any buy a copy anyway, it's a book of rare thought and revelation):

Gill On Football: 'Investing that much emotion in a game that you have no control over, that you don't play in, that is run for sponsorship access to television and derivative clothing lines, that offers so much unproductive disappointment and triumph, is cultural suicide'.

Gill on English: 'Iambic pentameter is the beat of Shakespeare. It's emphatic and memorable. It's the beat of oratory and statement rather than enquiry and conversation, and it's perfect for the passing of instruction or orders. Received pronunciation hits the black notes. It's in a major key, which is the sound of assurance and confidence. A Birmingham accent is in a minor key, and a minor key sounds querulous and questioning. Iambic pentameter stresses information, and in RP the beat lands on the consonants. Stressing consonants imparts fact, but hides emotion. In American English, the emphasis is on the vowel. Vowels are where the emotion of language lives. Opera, for example, is all vowels, all emotion.' 

Of human life and death

But he that heareth, and doeth not, is like a man that without a foundation built an house upon the earth; against which the stream did beat vehemently, and immediately it fell; and the ruin of that house was great.

Luke vi. 49.

The first time I visited Liverpool, seven years ago now, I got lost. And it was getting lost that made me stay. Somehow following the map I had been given by the university, and directing myself by the tower of the Anglican Cathedral until it disappeared behind other buildings, I managed to overshoot my intended destination and found myself on Upper Parliament Street. I was glad. I didn’t know much about the place before arriving, but here I was amid brilliant Georgian terraces the like of which I had only ever seen in London. It was not these terraces that informed my decision to come here however. It was the experience of rounding a corner off this street and finding a block of three-story, Georgian town houses gutted and blackened from attic to basement, their brickwork sprouting weeds, and buddleia where a roof should have been; the block was an apparent remnant of the Second World War.

A lot has happened to the city in those seven years. The ruined terrace was demolished in my third year of university to make way for a square slab of roughly-sown grass, bordered by drab two-storey social housing; and currently the city is undergoing the largest development it has experienced in over a hundred years. The following links will give the casual browser some idea of the scale of this work:

http://www.liverpoolvision.com/
http://www.bigdig.liverpool.gov.uk/
http://www.kingswaterfrontliverpool.co.uk/
http://www.liverpoolpsda.co.uk/
http://www.liverpool-one.com/Home

It is to be encouraged. Some of the work that is already finished is genuinely exciting. The city already feels a different place, as if it is ready to come awake again and catch up with the rest of the country. And yet, and yet…

What of the ruins? I mean this quite seriously. I am concerned that Liverpool is removing a huge part of its character and heritage by redeveloping these areas of dank, crumbling structures.
In 1825, when many of Liverpool’s finest buildings were being erected, the chaplain of George IV wrote the following on the recent work done to Windsor Castle:

Windsor Castle loses a great deal of its architectural impression (if I may use that word) by the smooth neatness with which its old towers are now chiselled and mortared. It looks as if it was washed every morning with soap and water, instead of exhibiting here and there a straggling flower, or creeping weather-stains.

The renovations to the castle caused great national debate at the time. Castles are of course central emblems of romantic thought, and yet the improvements made by Sir Jeffry Wyatville under the King’s instruction, robbed the building of much of what made it a castle. It became a tidied-up Gothic fake, whereas before it had largely been a genuine Norman pile. Liverpool is undergoing the same process in the present.

Before we go any further, we need to understand the Romantic ideal of the ruin, why creeping weather-stains might be valued more so than smooth neatness. It is not merely an arbitrary distinction, nor is it a purely sentimental notion. To do so, let us look at a little of the work of a poet, Felicia Dorothea Browne Hemans (1793-1835). Here, a section from a poem entitled The Ruin and its Flowers:

Proud Castle! though the days are flown,
When once thy towers in glory shone;
When music through thy turrets rung,
When banners o'er thy ramparts hung,
Though 'midst thine arches, frowning lone,
Stern Desolation rear his throne;
And Silence, deep and awful, reign,
Where echo'd once the choral strain;
Yet oft, dark ruin! lingering here,
The Muse will hail thee with a tear;
Here when the moonlight, quiv'ring, beams,
And through the fringing ivy streams,
And softens every shade sublime,
And mellows every tint of Time—
Oh! here shall Contemplation love,
Unseen and undisturb'd, to rove;
And bending o'er some mossy tomb,
Where Valour sleeps, or Beauties bloom,
Shall weep for Glory's transient day,
And Grandeur's evanescent ray
And list'ning to the swelling blast,
Shall wake the Spirit of the Past,
Call up the forms of ages fled,
Of warriors and of minstrels dead;
Who sought the field, who struck the lyre,
With all Ambition's kindling fire!

It is a quite typical romantic view of the ruin. It is perhaps an obvious point to make, but notice that repeated ‘When’ at the start of the lines in this passage. It is a primary feature of the ruin that it connects the ‘now’ with the ‘when’, in a way that any other old building does not. I currently live in a very beautiful Georgian house, but the house remains in the now, it still fulfills its purpose. The ruin does not, it is merely a monument to the past. Or not merely, for the subject of Hemans’ poem is concerned with the way that nature has reclaimed this plot; the ‘the fringing ivy streams’ upon it, moss covers its tombs, ‘beauties bloom’ out of it. The ruin is in effect full of life; it is simply not human life.

An example in Liverpool of this is a cotton warehouse on Parliament Street. The building has for a long time been disused, and has sprouted a wall of bright purple buddleia, filled with butterflies each summer. It has subsequently become known in the city effectionately as the Buddleia Building, a name that will remain even once the buddleia has been removed.

But this is evidence of the ruin’s ideological strength. It is a meaningful name, not one picked by committee, but one given because the building’s desolation caught the imagination of people in the city. Imagination is of course what the ruin is about. In Hemans’ poem: ‘here shall Contemplation love, / Unseen and undisturb'd, to rove;’ the whole poem is about contemplation; imagining the past. When Hemans writes that ‘thy towers in glory shone’, of course she does not know that to be a fact, it is an impression created from the building as it currently stands. Equally the music, and the banners are also imagined. The ruin allows the onlooker to envisage the potential building, and in that the potential of the past.

Here in another of Hemans’ poems, The Lonely Bird, a bird’s song is made sweeter by the ruin in which it sings:

How can that flood of gladness
   Rush through thy fiery lay,
From the haunted place of sadness,
   From the bosom of decay?
While dirge-notes in the breeze's moan,
   Through the ivy garlands heard,
Come blent with thy rejoicing tone,
   Oh! lonely, lonely bird!

On its own, the bird’s song is of course lovely, but it is the surprise of it rushing from the ‘bosom of decay’, that makes it beautiful. It is that funny, archaic word (a ruin itself) ‘blent’ that informs the song, it is the combined effect of the ruin’s ‘sadness’ and the bird’s ‘gladness’ that creates beauty; it cannot be without the loneliness of the setting.

And nor can Liverpool be beautiful without its ruins, and yet the current desire is to tidy them up. The Casartelli Building on Hanover Street is a perfect example of this. It was an undeniably fine Georgian warehouse; the premises of manufacturers of nautical instruments. For years the building was a beautiful ruin. To the left here is a rather poor photograph of it from that time.

With its weather-stained stucco, and sad sagging façade, it looked like a building transplanted from Venice. And then it fell down. It was not being used; it reached the end of its natural life. All things die, even buildings.

Only the Casartelli Building did not die. It was rebuilt, or rather a building that looks virtually like it, was built in its place.

To the right, is a photograph of it today. Spot the difference. The current building uses none of the same materials or building methods that the original did, it just looks (excepting a few minor points) exactly like it. Except it has been washed clean. The yellow stucco gleams in the sun, and the left hand wall that runs down Hanover Street offers a fantasy of what its neighboring warehouses might (but didn’t) once have looked like.

It is a fantasy. It is historical pornography. It is aiming to do what the ruin does do; offer a window into the past, show what things once were like. Just as Hemans looks at the ruin and imagines by gone glories, we are meant to look at this building and do the same. Only it is a different building.

Increasingly this happens.

Below, is another development at Cleveland Square, three sides of which were demolished in the 1980s during the city’s apparent war against nice things. As part of the current redevelopment, these six shop fronts have been ‘saved’.

They’re perfectly lovely in their own way, but they’re pure invention. The brickwork, the windows, the paneling of the shop fronts, the metal balconies, are all new. This isn’t what the square was ever like; it is a Disney theme park attraction only the inhabitant mice have all been exterminated. Why are they kept at all, but to stir us into some false nostalgia for the past? They are kitsch, they are freakish, they are wrong.

The city does not need to invent signifiers of the past, it has hundreds of examples already, and in wiping out its ruins, in sanitizing its history with false images of historic chintziness, it is eradicating proof of an important fact of its history; the fact that in Liverpool for most of the twentieth century, there was very little investment and a lot of economic hardship. It is the same soap and water technique employed by George IV on Windsor Castle in the 1820s, though whereas he was at pains to hide the fact that his ancestors had been an uncivilized warring lot, Liverpool is busy painting over the cracks to hide the fact that it was ever poor.

Let us return finally to Hemans. In her poem The Ruin, the poet describes a different kind of ruin to the others I have shown in her poems here. Whereas these others portray castles that have fallen desolate, The Ruin considers a family home where ‘banners of knighthood have not flung’ but important, everyday events have walked their course:

Thou bindest me with mighty spells!
   A solemnizing breath,
A presence all around thee dwells,
   Of human life and death.
I need but pluck yon garden flower
   From where the wild weeds rise,
To wake, with strange and sudden power,
   A thousand sympathies.

Thou hast heard many sounds, thou hearth!
   Deserted now by all!
Voices at eve here met in mirth
   Which eve may ne'er recall.
Youth's buoyant step, and woman's tone,
   And childhood's laughing glee,
And song and prayer, have all been known,
   Hearth of the dead! to thee.

A similar fate has befallen Hemans’ own family home in Liverpool. The house which she spent her adult life in here, now languishes as dust beneath the forecourt of a used car showroom in Wavertree, but the place of her birth, the house from which her father ran his business and where she lived until that business failed, still stands as a noble decaying structure on the city’s Duke Street. It is a rather fitting monument. The back of the house is currently visible, and offers a rare glimpse of one of few remaining examples of court housing in the city, a large bow window hanging dissolutely over a long abandoned street.

For how much longer this will be visible I am not sure, it is certain to have been swallowed up in the rush to prove prosperity within the next five years. The house itself will almost certainly be changed. It might become apartments, or a bar, or be demolished entirely. I wonder whether its owners are aware of its heritage. But for the moment that does not matter, for the moment it is a fitting monument for a much-neglected poet, for the moment;

A presence all around thee dwells,
   Of human life and death.

Inconsequence

I have not read Douglas Coupland’s novel JPod, (nor do I expect I ever shall), but I know how it begins:

[…]four pages of large-font slogans and computer programming fragments; two pages of small-font, un-indented, free-associated sentences such as "Put the word 'implement' in your resume and you won't get phoned back"; two pages of several thousand tiny dollar signs; a page of the words "ramen noodles" repeated 364 times (52 weeks times 7 days, presumably); and a page containing only the words "click here".

So said Patrick Ness in the Guardian Review on Saturday. Mark Lawson had said a similar thing on Front Row the week before. I know this book, and yet don’t know it. Things pervade, which I imagine is the point of the book beginning in this way; it explores that pervasiveness of words, of information, of advertising to some extent; though not exclusively this. Coupland is widely credited for inventing the term ‘Generation X’ in his novel of that name. He didn’t, but people know this ‘fact’ for the same reasons of pervasiveness, the ubiquitous spread of ideas simply by wont of their being mentioned. We ingest information continually from a variety of sources, and the majority of this information is fragmentary, absurd, irrelevant. You are reading this for starters, and heaven knows why you are doing that.

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“My days[…]” wrote Virginia Woolf  “[contain] a large proportion of cotton wool, this non-being”, the time between the moments that are important, consequential, felt; and these moments are like those words we take in between each that spurs thought or feeling. This cotton wool of words (this cotton woolf), are the street signs, the metaphorical sauce bottles, the imagined backs of matchboxes, cereal packets and sugar sachets which transmit the history of America or the means of engineering sky rockets from household materials, and of course these fragments of information are not unimportant, it is merely that their transmission is unorthodox. The fact that I learned the date of the Wright Brothers’ first flight from the back of a sachet of brown sugar whilst sitting in Staff House at university does not negate the usefulness of this knowledge. (It was December 17th 1903).
And yet the sugar sachet itself is unquestionably ephemeral, it is cotton wool, the cup of coffee unimportant in the large scheme of the cosmos, the companions with which the beverage was drunk, now forgotten. (I surmise that they were three fellow Filter^ editors, but truthfully it is only the sugar sachet that I remember. Sorry guys.) In the same year I read countless novels, plays, collections of poetry. Some of which I now cannot remember the content of. It is the inconsequential item that is remembered.

Coupland's disruption of his novel with advertising with such ephemera is hardly new of course. Does it differ very much from any of the following examples:

Have a finger in the pie. Women too. Curiosity. Pillar of salt, Wouldn't have it of course because he didn't think of it himself first. Or the inkbottle I suggested with a false stain of black celluloid. His ideas for ads like Plumtree's potted under the obituaries, cold meat department. You can't lick 'em. What? Our envelopes. Hello, Jones, where are you going? Can't stop, Robinson, I am hastening to purchase the only reliable inkeraser Kansell, sold by Hely's Ltd, 85 Dame Street. Well out of that ruck I am. Devil of a job it was collecting accounts of those convents.

James Joyce, Ulysses (1921)

Suddenly Mrs. Coates looked up into the sky. The sound of an aeroplane bored ominously into the ears of the crowd. There it was coming over the trees, letting out white smoke from behind, which curled and twisted, actually writing something! making letters in the sky! Every one looked up.
Dropping dead down the aeroplane soared straight up, curved in a loop, raced, sank, rose, and whatever it did, wherever it went, out fluttered behind it a thick ruffled bar of white smoke which curled and wreathed upon the sky in letters. But what letters? A C was it? an E, then an L? Only for a moment did they lie still; then they moved and melted and were rubbed out up in the sky, and the aeroplane shot further away and again, in a fresh space of sky, began writing a K, an E, a Y perhaps?
“Glaxo,” said Mrs. Coates in a strained, awe-stricken voice, gazing straight up, and her baby, lying stiff and white in her arms, gazed straight up.
“Kreemo,” murmured Mrs. Bletchley, like a sleep-walker. With his hat held out perfectly still in his hand, Mr. Bowley gazed straight up. All down the Mall people were standing and looking up into the sky. As they looked the whole world became perfectly silent, and a flight of gulls crossed the sky, first one gull leading, then another, and in this extraordinary silence and peace, in this pallor, in this purity, bells struck eleven times, the sound fading up there among the gulls.
The aeroplane turned and raced and swooped exactly where it liked, swiftly, freely, like a skater—
“That’s an E,” said Mrs. Bletchley—or a dancer—
“It’s toffee,” murmured Mr. Bowley—

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)

His eyes refocused themselves upon the posters opposite. He had his private reasons for hating them. Mechanically he re-read their slogans. ‘Kangaroo Burgundy—the wine for Britons.’ ‘Asthma was choking her!’ ‘Q.T. Sauce Keeps Hubby Smiling.’ ‘Hike all day on a Slab of Vitamalt!’ ‘Curve Cut—the Smoke for Outdoor Men.’ ‘Kiddies clamour for their Breakfast Crisps.’ ‘Corner Table enjoys his meal with Bovex.’

George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

The first and last of these examples concern men working (or not) in advertising, but in the second the appearance of a plane bearing a banner for toffee, affects the lives of everyday people sitting in a park. In each, advertising acts as an interruption. Bloom's thoughts in the first are halted by each memory of the content of a past advertisement he has worked on, and the adverts themselves; Plumtree's Potted Cold Meat Department, interrupt the list of the dead in the obituaries in the newspaper. In Mrs Dalloway, the appearance of the plane is mistaken by the visionary Septimus to be a message from God, everyone in the park stops what they are doing to try and make out the ethereal words, and Gordon Comstock in Orwell's novel ceases the composition of his poem in order to stare with resentment at the advertisements opposite his shop.

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The advertisement and ephemeral billet upset the progress of the novel. And it became quite the obsession of many twentieth century novelists. These are merely three examples from a vast list, and I would argue the majority of these follow the same lines of argument that Orwell put forward: Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket. The ephemeral advertisement is the enemy of literature. Is that what we are to believe? In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Comstock must abandon his dreams of being a poet in order to pen copy for The Queen of Sheba Toilet Requisites Co.

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Perhaps the horror stems from the fact that advertising copy is a writing designed not to last. The nightmare of the novelist: to be forgotten. But consider the benevolent advertisement, the Godly stare of Dr. TJ Eckleberg's billboard in the otherwise morally bankrupt landscape of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Woud we wish that undone? The idea put forward by a student in Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections that modern advertising is not exploiting the ideal of the family, but rather helping to promote its moral values. Or here in John Dos Passos' novel Manhattan Transfer:

The plank walls of the slip closed in, cracked as the ferry lurched against them; there was a rattling of chains, and Bud was pushed forward among the crowd through the ferryhouse. He walked between two coal wagons and out over a dusty expanse of street towards yellow streetcars. A trembling took hold of his knees. He thrust his hands deep in his pockets.
EAT on a lunchwagon down the block. He slid stiffly onto a revolving stool and looked for a long while at the pricelist.
“Fried eggs and a cup o coffee.”

John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer

Here the interruption, the word EAT painted on the side of a mobile restaurant is a salvation, it comes on only the second page of John Dos Passos’ novel written in 1925. On the previous page Bud Korpenning has been on a ferry arriving into Manhattan, on the same page as this he comes ashore: ‘A trembling took hold of his knees. He thrust his hands deep in his pockets.’

With retrospect we can presume that the ‘trembling’ is on account of Bud’s hunger, we might even deduce that he ‘thrust his hands deep in his pockets’ to feel for money, though equally as we read it for the first time it could be to ward against the cold, to close himself inwards against the vast exposure of the city. The intervention of the signage is our first signifier that hunger is the cause. The novel contracts at this point, the description becoming suddenly limited, focused only on that one word EAT, until Bud has duly been fed.

Soap creators like Agnes Nixon and Bill Bell credit Charles Dickens with most successfully developing techniques of attracting – and holding – a mass market. Like soaps, his novels incorporated a large (40+) cast of characters; multiple subplots inter-cut within each part issued installment…

But it is not just advertising that I wish to consider here, I feel it is something more general. What concerns me, I suppose is that way of knowing without knowing. That way of gaining information through the pervasive means that advertising uses, rather than the ideology of advertising itself. The fact that I have learned the date of the first heavier-than-air flight, has not sold me anything. The fact that I have acquired knowledge about the opening of Douglas Coupland’s l