life's a beach

Dear readers. I hope you have enjoyed the last few posts here. I hope you liked them so much that you would like to keep reading them for the next four days, because I am doing something I said I would never do: I am going back to Southwold, the Town With No Public WiFi. Yes. Unless things there have changed very considerably since the August bank holiday weekend of 2006, it may be very difficult in the next few days for me to keep you all suitably up-to-date with the play of intellectual light and emotional shadow as they flit across the gently undulating synapses of my brain.

It goes without saying that I will see what I can do. I have been known to shlep my laptop everywhere, at great cost to my right shoulder, my lower back and my arm, just so I can surreptitiously open it in random cafes to test for "accidental" wifi networks. But I will be in Southwold with a companion, and that pastime may not get the Seal of Approval, thinking about it - for reasons which will be immediately obvious to everyone except you, dear readers, and of course me. (Nb: and the cafe-owners.)

The companion in question is not my friend Ms Rational Self-Determinism, the high-powered behavioural therapist, who used to rent a flat there in the summers - oh, the japes we had! No, she has now amazingly bought a "second home" in Norfolk, which is where we were going to stay, but when she went up to make it all nice and cosy for us last weekend (thank you, honey) she found that the boiler had completely packed up. Can you imagine.

Well, yes. So Southwold it was, and is, and will be. And as I recall, Ms RS-D simply laughed in the face of my offline discomfiture that other time. In an unimpressed, kind of lovingly indulgent, way.

I'm taking my books. I want my Big Idea to begin to take a shape this weekend, perhaps even to be nailed like a poor little butterfly by next. I'm taking up a bit of James Merrill, too. And I won't be back in London till late Monday - but do check in, just in case I've miraculously managed to convey some earth-shattering Hechtian insight across the ether. (All this fuss about 2,000 poxy words! What am I like. Always the same, that's what.) You never know... and then there's the sea.

(Next time: maybe a beach hut.)

a Hecht hint and a Merrill moment

Anthony Hecht was a great midcentury American poet of the type now known as "formalist" - meaning he wrote elegant verses in rhyme and metre, though back then I'm not sure people really obsessed the way we do about labelling it as such. (New formalism: "The old formalism never went away!") Hecht is one of a handful of masters of the art of formal poetry in midcentury America (leaving Wallace Stevens, the Master of masters, out of the equation, because frankly he had other fish to fry) along with Richard Wilbur and James Merrill.

Now, I should say that I admire Hecht very much. He wrote some poems I love and am inspired (and sometimes a bit cowed) by, including the wonderfully-named "Proust on Skates." But my love for Merrill is deeper, and in fact in type it is not unlike my love for Mozart.

Therefore it seems appropriate that Harold Bloom has apparently called Merrill the Mozart of 20th century poetry; and significant that my friend and editor Ernest Hilbert has then gone on to say that if this is the case then Hecht - who wrote much about the Holocaust and his experiences in the war, and who had a hotline to some inner demons that would have many of us hiding under the bed - must be its Mahler.

And there, in a nutshell, we have it. What do you think? (Well - that is the nutshell. All I have to do now is crack it.)

Here are three stanzas from Hecht's poem, "For James Merrill: An Adieu":

But you, dear friend, managed to slip away,
Actually disappear int he dead of winter
More perfectly than Yeats. As at a show,
While we were savoring your skills, the play
Of your words, your elegant, serious banter,
You cloaked yourself, vanished like Porspero

Or Houdini, escapoing from the padlocked fact,
Monacles, blindfolds, all our earthly ties,
Leaving us stunned in the middle of his act,
The stage vacant, expecting some surprise
Reentry from the wings to a rousing Lizst

Fanfare, tumultuous applause, a bow
And a gentle, pleased, self-deprecating smile.
There comes no manager hither to explain.
Words fail us, from the weak and fatuous "ciao,
Bello," to the bellowing grand style,
As we shuffle out to the shabby street and the rain.

Let's just hope I can do something good with it. (And, do you know, I too have a poem in which Houdini figures prominently...)