Today

19 May 2022
The nightmare of making films about poets

Television and film are popular mediums. Poetry has never been popular. This is Sam Weller’s father in Pickwick Papers, when he discovers his son writing a valentine, alarmed it might be poetry: Poetry’s unnat’tral; no man ever talked poetry ’cept a beadle on boxin’ day, or Warren’s blackin’, or Rowland’s oil, or some o’ them low fellows; never let yourself down to talk poetry, my boy. In 1994, I made a short film about Kipling. The director, Tony Cash, a man with a first-class Oxford degree in Russian, objected to a two-second reference to Aristotle’s ‘pity and terror’ in my script. ‘If you mention Aristotle, they [the TV audience] will think you’re an arsehole or an idiot.’ Until then, I didn’t realise Channel 4 viewers had such a strong antipathy to Aristotle.

The nightmare of making films about poets

Thursday

31 Mar 2022
Pablo Picasso in love and war

The decade 1933-43 was one of busy erotic multi-tasking by the deft and diminutive Pablo Picasso. It took him the best part of ten years to effect a separation from the reluctant Olga Khokhlova, his ex-ballerina wife, retired injured from the Diaghilev Ballets Russes. Legal proceedings were triggered by her discovery of Picasso’s affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter (aged 17 when Picasso picked her up in 1927 outside the Galeries Lafayette). On 5 October 1935, Marie-Thérèse gave birth to Picasso’s daughter, Maria de la Concepción, later known as Maya. By then Picasso was fornicating on many fronts: with Alice Paalen, the wife of an Austrian painter, and the 49-year-old Valentine Hugo, an ex of André Breton. Picasso disencumbered himself of both relationships when he took up with Dora Maar (Henriette Théodora Markovitch), the half-Croatian, half-French surrealist photographer.

Pablo Picasso in love and war

Thursday

24 Feb 2022
How good is he? Pissarro: Father of Impressionism, at the Ashmolean Museum, reviewed

Two markers: ‘Cottages at Auvers-sur-Oise’ (c.1873) is a sweet especial rural scene of faintly slovenly thatched cottages with, at its centre, an outside privy, its door modestly shut. A discreet little detail. Second, early in the exhibition, Corot’s ‘Duck-Pond’ (1855–60), an indicator of the tradition to which Pissarro belongs — a world of unconsidered trifles, granted a quiet importance. Linda Whiteley’s excellent, informative catalogue essay quotes Pissarro on Corot: ‘Happy are those who see beauty in modest places where others see nothing. Everything is beautiful, the whole secret lies in knowing how to interpret.’ He is writing this credo to his son Lucien in 1893. Later, Cézanne described Pissarro as ‘humble and colossal’.

How good is he? Pissarro: Father of Impressionism, at the Ashmolean Museum, reviewed

Thursday

23 Sep 2021
T.S. Eliot’s preoccupations in wartime Britain

In her essay ‘A House of One’s Own’, about Vanessa Bell, Janet Malcolm says memorably that Bloomsbury is a fiction, and that compared with letters and first-hand material, biography is like canned vegetables compared with fresh fruit. We read the letters of writers because they are informal, unguarded, unbuttoned, intimate and candid, revealing not only the secrets of composition but, we hope, glimpses of the writer in the flesh, with his trousers down. This is T.S. Eliot, on 26 December 1941, thanking the editor and critic John Hayward for a gift of toilet paper: BROMO is, as you know, and as the manufacturers state, so well known that lengthy description is not necessary... I shall try to be frugal, if not parcimonious [sic], in using what you have so generously provided: and on each occasion, will bless your name.

T.S. Eliot’s preoccupations in wartime Britain

Thursday

27 May 2021
Poems are the Duracell batteries of language, says Simon Armitage

Ezra Pound in ABC of Reading: ‘Dichten = condensare.’ Meaning poetry is intensification, ‘the most concentrated form of verbal expression’. Simon Armitage saying the same thing, memorably, genially, metaphorically, democratically: ‘How much power and force could be stored in — and retransmitted by — such compact shapes. Poems as the Duracell batteries of language.’ Both poets go straight to the point. But a shift has taken place — in tone, in attack — which can be illustrated also by the photographs Armitage found as a ‘sleep-walking’ teenager leafing through Worlds, a sampler of seven contemporary poets, edited by Geoffrey Summerfield: ‘Norman MacCaig watched television and smoked fags.’ We are in the recognisable world.

Poems are the Duracell batteries of language, says Simon Armitage

Thursday

24 Sep 2020
Ladies’ man: Tom Stoppard’s love life revealed

Gilbert in Oscar Wilde’s dialogue ‘The Critic as Artist’: ‘Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.’ Not here. Hermione Lee’s immensely long Tom Stoppard: A Life is expert, engrossing, entertaining and sympathetic to its subject. At its heart is a writer steely in his determination to entertain, an inexhaustible mine of mots, a non-stop genius of jokes, capable of winning the Nobel Prize for the interview as an art form. It comprehensively replaces Ira Nadel’s Double Act (2002), a biography which Stoppard hoped would be ‘as inaccurate as possible’. (Indian Ink and Arcadia are both explicitly hostile to biography and its hubris.) One example: as a young reporter on the Western Daily Press, Stoppard fell in love with a colleague, Isabel Dunjohn.

Ladies’ man: Tom Stoppard’s love life revealed

Thursday

3 Sep 2020
As Lucian Freud’s fame increases his indiscretions multiply

Staying with Peregrine Eliot (later 10th Earl of St Germans) at Port Eliot in Cornwall, Lucian Freud remembered that the Eliots ‘ate off solid silver plate, even shepherd’s pie’. In 1968, Freud was having an affair with Perry’s wife Jacquetta. According to her, it was an addiction: ‘Completely hooked, a dreadful drug...’ After two turbulent years, she decided to have a baby by Lucian, ideally to be born on his birthday. Her husband agreed to bring up the child as his own, provided the matter was not mentioned again. The laissez-aller attitude is partly accounted for (though not by William Feaver) by the 1960s, and the way the young aristocracy embraced the hippy-trippy counter-culture. Jacquetta mentions smoking an opium spliff in Paris with Freud.

As Lucian Freud’s fame increases his indiscretions multiply

Thursday

5 Sep 2019
What made Lucian Freud so irresistible to women?

Amedeo Modigliani thought Nina Hamnett, muse, painter, memoirist, had ‘the best tits in Europe’. She fell 40 feet from a window and was impaled on the basement railings. Not suicide. She was peeing out of the window, the shared lodging-house lavatory being too distant. On her deathbed, her breathing was like a harmonica. The collector Roland Penrose liked being tied up by a dominatrix, a woman wrestler, whom he and his photographer wife, Lee Miller, brought to England and shared. The busy philosopher A. J. Ayer was known as Juan Don. When Isabel Rawsthorne finally had sex with the persistent, overweight sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, she reported that it was ‘exhausting’. She had to do all the work. Auden predicted that his last words would be: ‘I’ve never done this before.

Thursday

4 Jul 2019
Keeping it real | 4 July 2019

Félix Vallotton (1865–1925) was a member of the Nabis (the Prophets), a problematically loose agglomeration of painters, inspired by Gauguin and Émile Bernard, the school of Pont-Aven. Broadly speaking, this entailed an alleged allegiance to spirituality and anti-naturalistic flat colour. The Nabis — a secret group moniker —were heterogeneous, a broad church that seldom sang from the same hymn sheet. As we can see from Vallotton’s inadvertently emblematic ‘The Five Painters’ (1902–3): Vallotton stands to the left and Ker-Xavier Roussel stands to the right. Below, seated, are Bonnard, Vuillard and Charles Cottet.  Like many group paintings, it is an identity parade of posed and wooden mugshots. It is formally incoherent.

Keeping it real | 4 July 2019

Thursday

20 Sep 2018
‘Search me, squire’

I think everyone was a little nervous of Harold. Including Harold, sometimes. He was affable, warm, generous, impulsive — and unpredictable. Like his plays, where the hyper-banal surfaces — the synthetic memories and false nostalgia of Old Times, the aural drivel of Rose in The Room, the bogus familial warmth of The Homecoming — are fragile and about to be displaced by something ugly and authentic, something obscure and violent. Plays where on countless occasions — think of Lenny in The Homecoming or the alcoholic Hirst in No Man’s Land — a speech will take off into dramatic Tourette’s, unstoppable and at the edge of sense. The plays are edgy, alert to something sinister at the periphery. Harold once described his plays as being about the weasel under the cocktail cabinet.

‘Search me, squire’

Thursday

13 Sep 2018

Thursday

21 Jun 2018
Searching high and low

In the Moderna Museet in Stockholm there is a sculpture by Katharina Fritsch, which references Chekhov’s famous story ‘Lady with a Dog’. It was part of a Jeff Koons mini-show. At the time (2014), I thought it was by Koons. The postcard disabused me. It shows a woman in unapologetic Barbara Cartland pink, with a parasol, accompanied by a white fighting Pekinese. Both are constructed entirely from shells — she mainly scallop shells, her ample bust the bulging hinge of a clam, her arms fashioned from auger shells like mini-whelks. We have seen this ‘art’ before in a thousand evening classes for housewives who couldn’t get into the over-subscribed flower-arranging or macramé. It is the dog that makes the sculpture remarkable: it is an exact, pitch-perfect arrangement of a very few clam shells to capture the proud carriage, the bonsai bearing, the absurd chutzpah, the top-dog self-confidence.

Searching high and low

Thursday

22 Feb 2018
Keeping up with the Joneses

To bleak, boarded-up Margate — and a salt-and-vinegar wind that leaves my face looking like Andy Warhol’s botched 1958 nose-peel — to see Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’ at Turner Contemporary. The exhibition has been organised by a group of local residents, who selected the exhibits, designed the layout, and wrote the exhibition texts. In ‘The Waste Land’, some of it written in the Nayland Rock seafront shelter, Eliot writes: ‘On Margate Sands./ I can connect/ Nothing with nothing.’ The local research group have connected Eliot’s text with everything — some duds, some successes. For example, in ‘The Fire Sermon’, a gossipy, gripping, ungrammatical female voice says: ‘It’s them pills I took, to bring it off’. So we have three Paula Rego pictures, ‘Abortion Sketches’ (1998).

Keeping up with the Joneses

Thursday

14 Sep 2017
Sappho in America

We are gripped by gossip. Curiosity is a tenacious emotion. In her essay on Push Comes to Shove, the autobiography of the choreographer Twyla Tharp, Joan Acocella acknowledges this in an untroubled way. If you want to know what Baryshnikov was like in bed, she advises, look at p. 208 in a bookshop: ‘Tharp gives him better marks than [Gelsey] Kirkland’ in her 1986 autobiography Dancing on my Grave. On the other hand, we have our settled idea about Elizabeth Bishop, a famously unconfessional poet, marked out from Lowell, Sexton and Berryman by her continence, her wry tone, her meticulous descriptive accuracy and her beautiful containment. Lowell might announce in verse that he was tired of his turmoil — indeed, that everyone was tired of his turmoil — but Bishop’s poetry is unlikely to embarrass any reader, yet isn’t remotely genteel.

Sappho in America

Thursday

29 Jun 2017
Worthy, but wordy

Milan Kundera’s novel Immortality wryly depicts Goethe preparing for immortality — neatly laying out his life in Dichtung und Warheit and arranging for Johann Eckermann to record his conversation. He is, says Kundera, designing a handsome smoking jacket, posing for posterity. He wants to look his best. Then along comes the young Bettina von Arnim, a platonic flirtation from his past, with an alternative, memorably ridiculous version, ostensibly admiring, in which Goethe’s wife Christiane is portrayed as ‘the crazy, fat sausage’. There is immortal egg on the facings of that smoking jacket. In the case of Czesław Miłosz, we have a variant on this paradigm. He wanted, as it were, to replace the smoking jacket with the white tie and tails he wore in Stockholm in December 1986 to receive the Nobel Prize.

Worthy, but wordy

Thursday

27 Apr 2017
Boxing clever

Thirty years ago, Russell Davies wrote a weekly sporting column in the New Statesman. It proved unsustainable and was soon discontinued, but not before Davies had described a boxer ‘genuflecting through the ropes’ — an image I have coveted ever since. Boxing is ‘a standing challenge to [a writer’s] powers of description’, according to Carlo Rotella and Michael Ezra in their preface to The Bittersweet Science. They are right. All physical action is a challenge to writers: YouTube can repair deficiencies, and is invoked several times in this anthology; but it is no substitute for writing, because writing adds focus to reality. I once saw the handsome, British-Hungarian, bottle-blond heavyweight Joe Bugner working out in a gym above a pub in the Pentonville Road.

Boxing clever

Thursday

16 Feb 2017
The nature of genius

On 21 December 1945, Ezra Pound was confined to St Elizabeths hospital in Washington DC. He had broadcast for Rome Radio from 29 January 1942 to July 1943. To avoid his almost certain conviction for treason (and the death penalty visited on William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw), the superintendent Winfred Overholser testified that Pound was insane and unfit to stand trial. Overholser connived with Julien Cornell, Pound’s lawyer. He elided the testimony of six psychiatrists, whose verdict was more equivocal. He concentrated instead on Pound’s brief, understandable breakdown after being kept in a cage at the Disciplinary Training Centre’s stockade in Pisa. A. David Moody in his exemplary three-volume life of Pound delivers this lucid conclusion: ‘The almost unanimous view of the psychiatrists present at the conference was that Pound was neither insane nor incompetent.

The nature of genius

Monday

28 Nov 2016

Thursday

10 Mar 2016
Rich and fruity

F.R. Leavis once denounced the Twickenham edition of Pope’s Dunciad for producing a meagre trickle of text through a desert of apparatus, the trickle sometimes disappearing altogether. In this volume of T. S. Eliot’s letters, from 1932–1933, the footnotes, the infantry and the grunts, are the stars — shooting stars, flares with flair, illuminating apparently unpromising basic materials. For example, this is a letter to Auden in April 1932 in all its Spartan amplitude: Dear Auden, The modifications of the few passages which I discussed with you the other day have been agreed upon. As for the preface I felt myself from the beginning that it was not really desirable and I find my own opinion confirmed by two other directors who feel as I do that there is no need to apologise for obscurity.

Rich and fruity

Thursday

1 Oct 2015
Poet as predator

In Testaments Betrayed, Milan Kundera says: ‘Biographers know nothing about the intimate sex lives of their own wives, but they think they know all about Stendhal’s or Faulkner’s.’ In The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Janet Malcolm says: ‘The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography’s status as a popular genre.’ She also shrewdly remarks on the ‘mantle of judiciousness’ that biographers are forced to deploy. Jonathan Bate informs us that over a period of five years he has read and taken notes on nearly 100,000 pages of Ted Hughes manuscripts. He piously tells us at the end of his ‘Prologue’ that ‘the cardinal rule is this: the work and how it came into being is what is worth writing about, what is to be respected.

Poet as predator

Thursday

30 Apr 2015
The raw material of fiction

Saul Bellow died in 2005. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. The first installment of Zachary Leader’s exemplary, scrupulous, dispassionate, detailed, well-read, enthralling biography runs to over 800 pages and takes us only as far as 1964. The length is important. It allows Leader to adjudicate calmly, weigh the evidence — sometimes remaining undecided — and quote Bellow freely, so that the biographical narrative is enlivened by Bellow’s prodigally gifted prose, little injections of bliss. In his introduction, Leader quotes the appearance of the turtle from Herzog — ‘it trailed a fuzz of parasitic green’ — and makes it clear that Bellow’s fluent, unstoppable descriptive kleptomania, as much as the lurid personal life, littered with lovers and disfigured by painful divorces, is why he undertook to write the life.

The raw material of fiction

Thursday

11 Dec 2014
Seamus Heaney: no shuffling or cutting — just turning over aces

The impersonator — Rory Bremner, Steve Coogan — speaks, in different voices, to a single primitive pleasure centre in his audience. Counterintuitively, we like the imposition of imposture. We connive at deceit, at replication, for the release of neurotransmitters, the flood of endorphins — the brandies of the brain. I once heard Peter Ustinov on a chat show replicate the sound of an electric bell being pressed. Pleasure on a different, even more vertiginous level. The audience was convulsed. Unless a poet can produce this ungainsayable instant delight in the reader, this drench of dopamine, the poetry is automatically of the second order. (We expect less of our novelists, though great prose writers, such as Joyce or Dickens or Kipling, can also do it at will: Major Bagstock has a ‘complexion like a Stilton cheese, and.

Seamus Heaney: no shuffling or cutting — just turning over aces

Wednesday

11 Nov 2009