framed on a Saturday

"One day we'll get out of here, Wanda"

Today isn't a day in which your Baroque correspondent looked at a newspaper, or kept abreast in any other way with current affairs. She did go to a dinner party, and admittedly in the home of someone pretty high-powered in domestic affairs, but aside from her sparkling anecdotes about Ted Hughes' letters, and Charles Lamb and his mad sister, the thing did not stray far into the Public Good. I guess there was some talk of Michael Portillo.

The main thing Ms B did today, beside getting her roots done (and not before time) was to take eleven - count 'em - pictures to the framers'. Got it? That's an Ikea sofa. A week somewhere hot. A week, in fact, of pay. Eight lots of getting your roots done. But the pictures are largely sentimental in some form or another. And they're also great, in the sense of being good, and are going to look lovely, and it means that the Mansions of Baroque will once again settle down into a state of balance, of being as they should be. It is very hard to settle in a place without things on the walls, and that is all there is to it. Some of these pictures have been waiting years. Some of course, have just come from le palais du Duc, and were getting brown and foxed in bad mounts. Some are amusing French nursery pieces from c1900, and some are original abstract ink drawings etc. which were getting increasingly - no matter what care take in the domestic environment - wrecked. Some are kitsch, and some ineffable. One is an engraving of a monk looking lasciviously down the bodice of a lady, and it will shortly have a dark red lacquered frame which I think highly suitable. The frames I chose are a mixture. Most of the pictures I got either for free or for a pittance (eg the monk, 50p at the William Patten school fair). They will all be ready next Friday. Whereupon I will expire.

But did I replace the wrong printer ink with the right printer ink? So can I print out all this work I'm doing? No. Because I barely had time to rush back to get my roots done. Well, never mind. And thank God for the dinner party, because back here we're on porridge.

Let's see. Other than that, a Ruth Fainlight poem which I hope to have time to write about on the morrow, evoking a trail of feminine literary history akin to the Kiss that goes back generations. Nearly finished work on our interview, which I only conducted a year ago yesterday - which is clearly nothing in some scales of time. I mean, a species of dinosaur would hardly have had time to reach land! I wonder if 'Selena Dreamy' really thinks I have no scope?

By the way. Some weeks ago, out of sensitivity to the issue, I unpublished my post about Stoke Newington School maybe giving some of their Christmas show proceeds to the fund which had been set up for the parents of Etem Celebi, the boy who had been through school with my kids, who was killed. Well, I heard tonight at dinner that the teacher I wrote to has been mocking, or is it complaining about, this email she has received. AND in hearing of the kids! Because that's where I heard it! - although in two months she has not, unfortunately, found the leisure actually to respond. And she was a teacher I liked, though I was well aware that she had also said things to the kids that I thought were inappropriate. Well, I guess I'll take it a bit bigger.

one woman's reading: books of the Baroque year both future and past

What a difference a year and a day makes!

I've just discovered this among my files, as it were, and it bears so little resemblance to anything I could possibly write this weekend that I'm publishing it as a curio.

I (or someone kind of like me) wrote:

Four days into 2007, and long after all those newspapers did their "books of the year" sections, we're looking into the abyss of a new Reading Year. Baroque Mansions is piled high with things to read in 2007 (& I need my eyes to hold out this time; one of them is aching even now, but I think it's just an ache).

I have plans, I have commissions, and I even have a few little old hankerings. Sometimes I miss the simple pleasure of reading a novel, for no other reason than that it looked fun; of course there is still impulse-reading, and I do waste ("wa-aste?!?!?") an inordinate amount of time reading internet-things, but it isn't the same as when I used to read for... the story... and the plucky little characters...

Then there's the day job. Lots of items of professional interest are piled up in two different places around Baroque Mansions, alongside the poetry piles, the essay and criticism piles (Hazlitt, Sydney Smith, anyone?), and the odd little forlorn novel pile. Oh and I bought a proof copy of Larkin's letters the other day. I've put it on top of Lowell's letters. They're both in pink dustwrappers.

Plus, I have decided it is time to learn more about typography, properly. My happiness may depend on it. That's another pile.

It's becoming clearer all the time that I will never read Easy Riders, Raging Bulls - a book I just, one day in the second-hand shop, thought looked very interesting. And a friend had liked it. But that ain't enough to cut it any more.

Several of the "book blogs" seem to list books people have "read," as if they pick up a book, read it till it's finished, and then read another book in the same fashion, for no other reason than that they "like" them. They read, or hear, about it, and if they decide they might like it, they read it. Then they read another one; and they talk about them in terms of whether they thought they were "good" or not.

I mention all this only because it sounds so completely different from how, what, and why I read that it might as well be ice skating or hill walking. Don't they dip into a hundred books, on the grounds that they feel they "should know what's about"? Don't they read books they dislike? Do they really finish everything? When can you be said to be "reading" something - is it when you take the same book every morning on the tube? Is it like going steady? (Uh oh. I take a different book every day on the tube, depending on my mood and what I was dreaming about. Plus there are usually a couple in my bag, forgotten, from previous days.) Don't they get sidetracked by trains of thought? Do they not read any criticism or non-fiction? Is it always just for entertainment - novel after novel - and never for elucidation, research, education or critical analysis? (Having said which, I do wish I read more fiction.)

(I say they; it should probably be you. I know I'm the one who's out of kilter, not you. And this is why I can never go into a bookshop on a date, or whatever, because they think it's fun to browse, and my cover would be instantly blown. I say would be - but it has happened. They don't like it.)

Ah, well. Here's the list, what I can remember. Of course there was lots more that I read standing up in Border's or Waterstone's. But, like eating with the fridge door open, that probably doesn't count.

Ashes for Breakfast, by the German poet Durs Grünbein
Atomised, Michel Houellebecq
two novels by Mary Wesley
all of Wendy Cope's collections
Auden: essays, poems, "Letter to Lord Byron"
Table Talk of WH Auden, by Alan Ansen (who died a couple of months ago)
Swithering, by Robin Robertson
District and Circle, bits of, Seamus Heaney
Rapture, Carol Ann Duffy
The Optimist, Joshua Mehigan
Samuel Johnson, by Walter Jackson Bate - bits of
"Rambler" essays, a couple of, Johnson
Belle de Jour, blog book (far less sensational than promised; am I so unshockable?)
Charles Lamb and Elia, ed. JP Morpugo, ancient Penguin
Boudicca & Co, Jane Holland (Salt Publishing)
Faber Book of Sonnets and Penguin Book of Sonnets, in tandem, over the summer
Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag (Queen of Supposition and Sweeping Extrapolation) (I know, she died this year too)
Selected Poems, Geoffrey Hill, in beauteous new Penguin
Selected Poems, Greg Delanty, for an interview that never happened
title essay plus a couple, The Geography of the Imagination, Guy Davenport
Object Lessons, Eavan Boland
Harbour Lights, Derek Mahon
Almanacs, by Jen Hadfield
Gethsemene Day, Dorothy Molloy
Life Studies, Lowell
The Wounded Surgeon (Confession & Transformation in Six American poets), Adam Kirsch
Western Wind: an Intro to Poetry, David Mason and John Frederick Nims
Ulysses, James Joyce (bits of; much better than the audiobook, sweet as that was)
"The Dead", James Joyce
great chunks of Less Than One by Joseph Brodsky (I just don't really do that "I read this book from start to finish" thing)
various essays by Ian Hamilton
Immigrant Blues, Goran Simic
The Ode Less Travelled, Stephen Fry (more arch than a gothic cathedral, but technically sound enough)
I spent a most of a week reading Martin Amis' "Horrorism" article from the Guardian (horrorism is bloody right)
Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk (bits of)
The Forsyte Saga (started, twice, for reasons stated above)
Bleak House (ditto)
short stories of Elizabeth Bowen
Autumn Journal, MacNeice; about four times
Louis MacNeice: a Study, by Edna Longley
Moon Wheels, Ruth Fainlight
Selected Poems, Ruth Fainlight

Well, that's what I can remember as standing out. To a certain extent it's arbitrary: there was some Wallace Stevens, some Coleridge, some Keats, I think there was some Anne Sexton in the summer. Plus there have been reams of articles, interviews, poems etc, downloaded from the web. Plus endless magazines...

My book of the year would probably be Charles Lamb.

winging it in the Charles Lamb

I'm in Elia St on the Charles Lamb's free wifi. I've always said if the dear man were alive today he'd have a blog, he was just the type. Strangely, tonight the pub is strewn about with "Happy Thanksgiving" banners, the mantelpiece mirror is covered with huge saccharine cut-outs of pilgrim and Indian children, and the menu is full of corn chowder and pumpkin pie.

I guess nobody in my family is probably giving much thanks today - though, as was said to me the other day, my father "is at peace." Which is more than I can say for me. But these things happen and holidays come and go, do they not, as regular as the seasons. And the whole point is that they happen regardless of everything else. And Ms Baroque pretty much gave up on Thanksgiving, as it happens, as soon as reaching the Shores of Albion: hurrah! No more most boring day of the year! No more White-Witch-like Christmas Without Presents. The day on which, whilst not being allowed to eat anything till 4pm and while the grownups were all watching some football game, the most amusing thing you could do was walk to the main road and stand in the middle of it, just to prove that there was really no traffic.

Of course it was le Duc himself who deprived me of my lunch all those Thanksgivings. I can see him now, bringing an enormous platter of turkey into the dining room (and again on Christmas). Anyway, families, eh. I'll be flying over in less than a week to greet the deadness of my dad. It's not good.

Our Charles Lamb was someone who understood the strangeness of family dynamics. His sister Mary went crazy one day and, after some horrible chasing-round-the-table-&-screaming scene, stabbed their mother. Fatally. She also put a carving fork into their father's forehead, but the father survived, thanks to young Charles' efficacy in finding the right medical help (as well as an asylum for Mary and a funeral for their mother). The penalties for murder back then didn't really bear thinking about, and nor did the "asylums" - Mary was sent to a private asylum for a time but Charles managed to get her out, and off any trace of a murder charge, and she lived with him until he died. Which wasn't very old, poor thing - 59 - possibly hastened by the stress of his life. He worked in the accounting offices at the East India Company (see, the "famous authors" - even the "dead white males" - weren't all grand), and wrote a wonderful essay about the excessive jubilation he felt when they called him in one day and gave him a pension. (I mean, one he could live on! That's not going to happen to me before the age of 59. Apparently raising the next generation, unlike working in - say - Macdonald's, isn't pensionable.)

Anyway, he and Mary got on happily enough, but she had periodic fits and had to be sent to the asylum - there were a succession of them - but in between they had weekly soirées where she played whist and he had his friends round - including Coleridge, etc. He wrote his wonderful essays, and poems and letters, and she wrote most of the famous Lambs' Tales From Shakespeare. Charles said of his sister, "We are like tooth ache and his friend gum boil, an uneasy kind of ease, a comfort of rather an uncomfortable sort."

And imagine knowing what the consequences of one of Mary's attacks might be! I sometimes think of that: what it took to take her in. And he never married, never had children.

His essays are funny and lovely, but I love his letters even better. Many of the letters act as first drafts for ideas later kitted out in the essays - the best among these I think are the one where he left work and the one about Coleridge's shocking book-borrowing habits. (That one is actually rather affecting, such was his love for his troublesome friend.)

And there we are. The pub has only been called the Charles Lamb for about two years, clearly named in honour of being in Elia Street - which is clearly named, as Elia was Lamb's nom de plume, in honour of Lamb having lived around the corner for a time. I love it round here. But it's too dark, and I'm not going to eat the Thanksgiving food.

And now the bar guy has taken away my glass - why do they do that?? thus removing all trace of an excuse for sitting here. Home one goes.

modern - "not Ms" - baroque

It's Edward Burra, apparently. Hat tip to Todd Swift at Eyewear, where he carefully distinguishes the painter from me.

However, solipsistic to the last, I do feel that Jane Stevenson's summing up (in the Guardian, of course; gallingly, isn't everything?) of "modern baroque" is still useful in the context of moi:

"inclusive, protean, humorous, unafraid of bad taste, entranced by games with perspective; a modernism that finds Harlem dudes in camel overcoats more interesting than all the log piles in the world."

Burr's appeal has never, to me, been obvious; but you can usually get me with discussion of technique, and after reading Stevenson's review I am more inclined to have a serious look. He also sounds like a delightful person (oddly, rather in the manner of the otherwise utterly un-baroque Charles Lamb). And here's an interesting thing:

"Because of his working method, with the paper flat on a table, he [Burra] could never really see how the picture turned out until it was framed, which makes his vertiginous, highly expressive use of pictorial space all the more impressive. Though he could draw accurately from a life-model, and did, the figures in his paintings were subject to an expressive distortion...."

Something to aim for, then?

the holy land

Good morning, Baroquistas. Ms B can report that she is ever so slightly* the worse for wear, having successfully - some might say too successfully - navigated a monster day. It started with work, but was dominated by a funeral, and then an emotional bonding session in a Wetherspoons pub in Wanstead (over champagne and chips) with a group of people she'd never met before (but now loves), and finished with the launch of Maurice Riordan's long-awaited third collection, The Holy Land (Faber), at the London Review of Books bookshop.*

The funeral service was beautiful, with a beautiful vicar who really conveyed a sense of what Julia was like, and lots of exactly the right sort of religion - much comfort - which was a relief. It felt surreal. Even the location felt surreal; I'd never been so far east before. There's a distinctive atmosphere out there, like stepping back in time, or out of time: village green, big houses, capacious pubs, and a general air of net curtains and pebbledash...

The funeral itself was also harrowing. Very hard. The hardest part of all was the awful witnessing of other people's grief. It really felt as if the whole packed chapel-full of people were almost physically supporting Julia's family, but even among the other mourners it was somehow shocking to see the men in their beautiful black ties crying. It all felt very raw and primal, outside life. Clearly the funeral chapel is a place where we step aside from the world for a minute. But it is life: that's why it's so awful, and awe-ful. Everyone afterwards was hyper-kind.

Then into the underground - a different kind of stepping-outside-life. Sitting there in the artificial light of the Central Line - having had a row at the barrier and had to pay extra to get in there because it is in Zone Four - everything felt strange, even the familiar stations of dear old London.

Holborn: out I got. Dizzy, feeling a bit ill, but grateful.

The launch party was overwhelming. Of course it was dark out by then, I was full of champagne, and the LRB shop looked exaggeratedly lit and full and buzzy. It was totally thronging with poets - so much so that the room was impossible to work, and the mood (phew!) was one of love overflowing. Reunions and embraces on all sides. It was easy to enter into that mood after the experience of the harrowing funeral ; good to have something to do with all the emotion, and actually very affirming and wonderful to be in a room packed out with people who are still alive, many of whom are rather dear to Ms Baroque, not least the author himself. Wonderful things were said and done. (And there was one other person there who had been at the funeral, and who spontaneous remarked how hard, unexpectedly hard even, it had been.) So I was held aloft on this sea of life, and floated through the evening...

Maurice, though, never reads for long enough! I suppose he was too busy signing books to have time for reading. Someone said to me, "and do you have one of the very rare, unsigned copies?"

The day finished, predictably, with one of those endless don't-want-to-be-alone-yet after-hours treks (the nighttime version of the London Trudge) across Soho (with a poet who's doing a PhD on Coleridge,*** and a barrister who looked like the younger Sam Neill) looking for yet another place to shout over the music and cigarette smoke. Ms B arrived home in a cab at 3am with no voice left, feeling very loved-up and wrung-out. It is now time to drag what's left of her to work (where there is a 68-page final layout to proof, including about a hundred footnotes). She is not sure if she can make it. First, Fresh & Wild, I think, for some of their hangover elixir (cure, not cause), and a coffee from Absolutely Scrumptious.

* This is a euphemism. (edited in: it also turns out to have been the beginnings of the gallstone attack that landed me in hospital for a week with a blood infection! I was wondering why the hangover stuff didn't work...)

**It looks extremely beautiful. I love these colourful typographical Faber jackets. Really lush and sumptuous.

***I talked to him about Charles Lamb - apropos Coleridge, of course. He says, "all the people who are studying Lamb are really lovely people." Of course they are! He also says he wishes Coleridge hadn't written so much.

those pesky amazon reviewers: another angle

lowering critical standards 200 years into the future: a
deplorable lack of responsibility for publicly promulgated opinions

The story that wouldn't die. Well, it might be dead, but I have got a new angle on it, which amuses me so I shall share it. James Marcus, a New York-based writer who for five years was senior editor at amazon.com, has sent me an article (now sadly offline) that he wrote two years ago for the Washington Post after a puff of wind blew up the skirts of amazon.ca, revealing the identities of its 'anonymous' reviewers.

Like all fresh air, this gust blows away some hoary old cobwebs. One of the main accusations I've seen hurled at internet-based reviewers, bloggers etc, is that they often hide behind "the anonymity afforded by the web,". But let's look at it for a moment. Even the most cursory glance round the top of my head reveals, for instance, its recent lodger Charles Lamb, who published his Essays of Elia under the name of - well - Elia. Samuel Johnson - another frequenter of the top of my head - cloaked himself in the veil of anonymity to write his great moral essays for The Rambler. And all his political pamphlets were anonymous.

Maybe this shocking moral laxness on Dr Johnson's part - two hundred years before the internet - accounts for the looseness of some of the definitions in his Dictionary? ("lexicographer - an irresponsible, cowardly, self-regulating drudge." Hmmm.)

But back to James Marcus, and the specific issue of reviewing - or "moving books".

"Due to a widely reported technical blooper," he writes,

the Canadian division of Amazon.com revealed the identities of several thousand of its anonymous reviewers. For just a few days in February [2004], until the company restored their electronic fig leaves, these stealth critics were effectively unmasked. For the most part, of course, this was no big deal. What difference did it make if "a reader from Saskatchewan" turned out to be named Keith -- and actually lived in Hoboken? Surely such minor mendacities could be forgiven. Maybe Keith was just shy, and longed for the Great White North.

Yet there were also some alarming discoveries to be made. A fairly large number of authors had gotten glowing testimonials from friends, husbands, wives, colleagues and paid flacks. A few had "reviewed" their own books. The novelist John Rechy, among those caught in flagrante, pleaded the equivalent of self-defense: He was simply fighting fire with anonymous fire. Other miscreants cited the ancient tradition of self-puffery, practiced by both Walt Whitman (who wrote not one but three unsigned reviews of Leaves of Grass, and quoted them all in the second edition)...

bloggers of the Canon

Okay, it's Sunday and we want to take it easy. My parlour game for today is this: of the old writers we love, who would have had a blog, if there had been blogs back then?

I'll start:

Charles Lamb YES
Byron YES
Defoe YES
Pound YES YES YES!
Eliot NO
Mary Wollstonecraft YES
Mary Shelley YES but it would have all been about Shelley
Joyce YES
Proust NO
Fanny Burney YES but under a false name
Johnson NO, & then someone would have persuaded him, but it would have been SHORTLIVED
Li Po YES (I've taken the word "Western" out of the title as I realised that)

Any other ideas?

the blind critic

Of course I’ve been thinking about this lately. I’ve thought about it since the age of six, when I realised how important reading was. I know from poetry readings, and indeed conversations, that I don’t take things in nearly as well through my ears. Seeing is believing! I’ve often liked spoken poetry, only to find when I saw it on the page that the poet hadn’t reflected his own written form.

It's a delicate balance between a line ending and a caesura. When I read, this is the hardest element to enunciate, and when I go to readings it is the way in which poets most often ruin their poems: bad poems can, dangerously, be made to sound better than they are, and beautiful ones can be made to sound choppy. And the fashion for reading straight over a line break as if it didn’t exist means that the shape of the poem is (in the absence of visual cues) destroyed.

There are poems that appear to be free verse, and roughly are, which actually contain metrical and even rhyming lines embedded within their structure. I think a lot of poets do this unintentionally. They just don’t have the ear, and when they read aloud they read in metre without even knowing it.

On the other hand, for example, Dorothy Molloy is a poet who does it on purpose as a sort of contrapuntal technique; it’s part of her style signature. Look:

My heart lives in my
chest. I know it’s there.
But now the rogue will often
disappear, and leave me
stranded in my scarecrow
mind. It’s so unkind.

These lines, read naturally, aloud, would sound like three perfect iambic pentameters on an aabb rhyme scheme, with a short final line:

My heart lives in my chest. I know it’s there.
But now the rogue will often disappear,
and leave me stranded in my scarecrow mind.
(Da DA da DA da DA,) It’s so unkind.

How on earth would you pick that up with out seeing it on the page? (And how would the blind critic even get hold of this kind of work in the first place? But that’s another question.)

I just finished putting next-to-final edits on a close reading, for the Contemporary Poetry Review, of a Joseph Brodsky poem. More-than-usually conscious of how I work, I realised something explicitly which I think I've always noticed under the surface: that I read a poem (aside from hearing the sounds, which so many poets seemingly fail to do) simply by looking at it - its patterns and shapes settle themselves onto my eye, informing the linear reading.

This isn’t how Homer’s audiences did it. But they probably also weren’t writing essays about his use of assonance and dissonance, end rhyme, internal rhyme, slant rhyme, caesurae. Or were they? (Of course, Ms B will probably now have to adopt the great poet as a mascot, if not as an actual role model; but he lived in the Great Age of Memorisation.) In our world, how do you formulate a critical opinion if you can’t see all the beautiful double l’s standing up in lovely rows?

I’d need to train someone to read to me, according to some system I would develop, and I’d have to memorise the line endings. Otherwise, in practical terms, one’s judgement would be in fact shot.

Now, I am clearly writing this with my eyes — in fact, I'm sitting in the lovely Charles Lamb pub, waiting for my friend the Darling Ranter — and even the worst thing I have been given to fear in the immediate future is not the total annihilation of the Baroque Vision; as I say, I entertained these musings from the moment I realised about reading. It is a formal deliberation.

But the routine disregard of linguistic patterns someone went to the trouble of making is something I do think about even at the best of times, so why not flag it up now?

Happy belated National Poetry Day!

I'm always saying I'm going to read Miss Baroque's books when she finishes with them, but of course I never do. And I don't care, because now I've found something first.

I've just read this quirky and utterly charming thing. The Scottish Poetry Library commissioned the poet Gerry Cambridge to write a blog last week, around National Poetry Day, which was last Thursday. The blog was aimed at schoolkids, who could and did post questions for the poet to answer. Ms Baroque was otherwise engaged on the day (though she did go and buy Robin Robertson's Swithering, and also had a visitation from Charles Lamb - maybe not such bad going after all), so only caught up with it today (and was late for work as a result; thank you, Scottish Poetry Library!).

It's vivid stuff. The descriptions are gripping, for example of Cambridge's twenty years living in a remote caravan with no car (he loves umbrellas; and, I should think, eiderdowns) and a stunned vole that let him pick it up off the path and take it in by the gas fire.

There's a lot about poetry here, as there certainly should be - and, as with poetry itself, there is also a lot about life. This is what kids deserve. I can imagine loving this when I was a child (though admittedly I'd have preferred it if there were a girl in the story, possibly cooking dinner in the croft in a long dress while the old man was out trying to find her a mother in his tragic, misguided way), and my inner eight-year-old thinks you might like to read the rest of it.

Here's a partial transcript of a radio interview quoted in the blog:

"Do you have a funny or a quirky poem you could read to us?"

"It's a choice between a Shore Crab talking like a Glasgow hardman, or an old crofter whose main regret in life was that he hadn't got married, and who used to get drunk and go out on his tractor looking for women."

"The old crofter, please."

I read my poem 'The Drunken Lyricist', a sonnet. It is about an old crofter called Tom Mackay whom I've written about elsewhere, especially in my first book of poems, The Shell House. I got quite close to him when I spent a couple of summers on Papa Westray, where he lived. He stayed in a hovel down on the shore. It was a caravan with breeze blocks built all round it.

"Oh, that's a sad poem," Susan Morrison said. She's right, though most folk who hear it seem mainly to see the funny side of it. "I hope he found his woman in the end?"

"He didn't, I'm afraid," I said. "He died in his bed in 1997, and a friend sent me a clipping written by the former Herald journalist Jim Hewitson about how he'd been found by another islander, and how his best friend and drinking partner had been lost at sea within hours of Tom dying – so neither knew of the death of the other.

there's a Lamb

I do think these things come along as and when they have to. I know most people don't care a toss for Charles Lamb, but nonetheless I've been reading him lately, in a quirky 1948 Penguin called Charles Lamb and Elia, edited by JE Morpugo. It's a compilation of essays, poems and letters.

Now, Charles Lamb wrote wonderful letters. He wrote long, rambling (all the rambling he was doing) missives to Wordsworth, of all people, all about how boring he thought mountains and the countryside were. He says, for example: "I ought before this to have reply'd to your very kind invitation into Cumberland. With you and your sister I could gang anywhere. But I am afraid whether I shall ever be able to afford so desperate a journey. Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life." That's funny, and it's a great letter. And the essays Lamb wrote as 'Elia' for the London Magazine can be weepingly funny, as I found to my cost back in 10th grade, trying to read A Dissertation Upon a Roast Pig in class. But Lamb's other qualities, revealed to me in this little book, are tenderness, affection, humility, a complete lack of pretence, a keenly incisive literary mind, and an understanding of how hard life is.

He was in no way pampered. Unlike most writers one hears of from that period, Lamb worked in an office for thirty years, as a clerk for the East India Company. His letters and essays on the subject of his retirement with pension are infectiously ecstatic - a tone one also does not often encounter. In short, once you read Lamb, you have to love him.

Anyway, yesterday morning I had am email from a very kind friend with a pub in it, yes! The Charls Lamb, in Elia Street, N1. Imagine! It looks charming. I wrote back saying we must go there, and then went off to the hospital.

After the hospital experience I trudged from Old Street to the Angel in the rain, feeling pretty miserable, it has to be said, but liking the walk. I was going to Waterstone's to get (blind or not) Swithering, by Robin Robertson, which has just won this year's Forward Prize for best poetry collection. I feel I might write something about it. So, at the top of City Road I turned off to avoid crush of Angel station, and went down Colebrook Row instead. It's such a lovely little road, all cottages and trees, and brick pavements with many levels. I've often been down that road before, but never from this end.

Well! What do you think runs off Colebrook Row but Elia Street. It was drizzling, I was upset, my feet hurt, my eyes hurt, and there was the Charles Lamb. If I'd felt better I'd have gone in for a nice glass of wine, but as it was I did feel better. A bit further down the road I found something I'd also never noticed before: I was standing outside a pretty white house with a blue plaque on it, saying Charles Lamb had lived there. And indeed, Charles and Mary Lamb did live in Colebrook Row from 1823 till 1829.














It really was as if he was saying hello to me. I've been up and down this road fifty times before and never seen this house. And I'd never have been given this moment at all if I hadn't chanced on this foxed, musty old book in a disgustingly ill-tended secondhand bookshop in Southwold.

Here's a quote from a memoir of Lamb written by one Bryan Waller Procter. I'd be happy to think someone might one day write something like this about me:

"it must be confessed that in literature Lamb's taste, like that of all others, was at first imperfect. For taste is a portion of our judgment, and must depend a good deal on our experience, and on our opportunities of comparing the claims of different pretenders. Lamb's affections swayed him at all times. He sympathized deeply with Cowper and his melancholy history, and at first estimated his verse, perhaps, beyond its strict value. He was intimate with Southey, and anticipated that he would rival Milton. Then his taste was at all times peculiar. He seldom worshipped the Idol which the multitude had set up. I was never able to prevail on him to admit that "Paradise Lost" was greater than "Paradise Regained;" I believe, indeed, he liked the last the best. He would not discuss the Poetry of Lord Byron or Shelley, with a view of being convinced of their beauties. Apart from a few points like these, his opinions must be allowed to be sound; almost always; if not as to the style of the author, then as to the quality of his book or passage which he chose to select."

Well; almost.

lightening up

...and I don't mean my roots! Or maybe it is my roots. Yesterday's haul is anything but light, and weighs in at:

1. The long-coveted Letters of Robert Lowell. I love being a regular, I walk into the Church Street Bookshop and Tim says, "Oh, I think I have something you want!" Lovely pink Faber spine with a beautiful b&w picture of mad Lowell, in a wonderful sixties jacket, writing a letter. I had to leave behind two hb Farrar Strauss Giroux collections (not firsts, no dw) to make way for this, and I'm a bit under-resourced in the Lowell department. But anyway I'm way into Charles Lamb at the moment, and he is the sort of antithesis of Lowell, bless them both.

2. Further Requirements by Philip Larkin, whose reviews combine breezy readability with acerbic remarks. Not a man to try and put one over on. It'll be great bedside reading.

3. Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled: I got into an argument about this, having never cracked a copy, based purely on the reviews I'd read plus my own prejudices. (Baroque I may well be - and it wasn't my decision {it seems the little gold angels are a bit of a giveaway, which is odd as I don't even have any} - but fogeyism is just tiresome, don't we think? There's no excuse for it.) Fry's famous "arse-dribble" remark went down spectacularly badly in Baroque Private Conveniences. Why, some of my best friends are contemporary poets. For under a fiver, though, I thought I'd inform myself - if only to hone the argument. Also, people I love and admire have raved about the book's examples of metre and form, etc. I still expect to come out on the Fenton side of the fence. (Yes, I'm building the fence as we speak.)

4. Auden's Table Talk: someone called Alan Ansen apparently used to go home from Auden's lectures/dinner parties/readings and scribble down in a notebook everything he could remember that Auden had said! It's hard to imagine doing that (I mean the talk of people other than Auden; clearly I never went to dinner with Auden, I was maybe 10 when he died), but there are occasions when I wish I had. So here's the great man holding forth effervescently and camply on his opinions, never imagining OUR ghostly presence... and I was going to leave that in the shop? I don't think so! Here's a review from Peter Forbes; the book came out in 1991. I love this: "The great paradox about Auden is this: how can the writer of the sanest, most liberal and chaste poetry in English of the twentieth century also be the crotchety opinionated old fossicker of the Table Talk?" He goes on to say that Auden's pronouncements "flatly contradict" his poetry, which is what I've, frankly, always found in Auden's essays anyway. Maybe I'm wrong.

But who doesn't love opinionated, crotchety old fossickers? One day they'll be saying that about me, and when they do, I'll say: "Be quiet! Fetch me that lap shawl!"

5. Eliot, Collected Prose, replaces my motheaten illegible old marginless Pelican.

6. The KGB's Literary Archives. This is such a momentously interesting volume that I'm almost scared to read it. Contains the files in Bulgakov, Gorky, Pasternak, Mandelstam and others. Many pictures. God, Bulgakov was handsome. But I already knew that.

serious things

I do know they still exist! News items flash by like lampposts out of a speeding - well - bus, but faster. I wanted to write about the Pope's impossible speech/es, the saga of Tyrrells crisps and evil supermarket barons Tesco ("a victory of David over Goliath"), that letter last week about the state of childhood today, and oh I forget what. I'm reading the essays and letters of Charles Lamb, and there was a longish passage I wanted to quote, about Work. I just finished writing a review of the poet Dorothy Molloy's second, posthumous collection (Gesthemene Day, Faber), and I am pleased because I think I managed to say what I think about the book. But now I must to bed. I promise, when awake, not to write about clothes for a little.