Your correspondent is a simple soul. Here, on the day of a memorial service for le Duc de Baroque, she has very little to say. Instead, we give you.... Mozart.
It's a miracle this film is even available, you know.
And, harking back to that year I was 14 and my mother took me to see Bergman's Magic Flute... it was a joint effort there: she took me to the movie, he gave me the (Klemperer) recording.
And I'm happy to report that it's snowing here today.
We always knew it existed.
Kwame Kwei-Amah's description of a production of The Magic Flute in the townships, in today's Guardian, has reminded me of something. The urgency of art, for lack of a better phrase.
This is what we were discussing the other week, when I lost my rag at someone called "anonymous" who accused me in indirect terms of being a pretentious middle-class twat... now, I'm not going to go all populist on you - that is clearly not the Baroque way. But I am going to remind you that art, all art, not just "academy" or "safe" art, but even Dada - the impulse of art - is, as far as I can make out, wherther the artist even realises it or not, redemptive.
No one knew this like Mozart.
And there's an element of art belonging to everyone. Die Zauberflöte was written for a music hall, afgter all. And as Kwei-Amah writes:
"...the entire cast... sang the score in a fashion that was unique. It met all classical requirements, but added something extra: something distinctly black South African, something soulful. These were not young people imitating the genre; they were singing opera on their own terms. This terrific authenticity was aided by an orchestra made up exclusively of marimbas. (nb: this is something I would have to hear. Well, it's at the Young Vic.)*
...Dornford-May... explained why Pauline could sing both Carmen and the Queen of the Night, and why he could have open auditions in Khayelitsha and discover all these wonderful young singers: it was because of the strong choral traditions of the black South African churches. Many of these performers had been to classical colleges, but only after years of rigorous church choir training.
Any notion I had that this would be another blacking-up of a European narrative to serve notions of superiority was disabused. In this Magic Flute, the story has been transposed to the ritual that young Xhosa boys go through when they come of age."
Anyway, it all sounds fascinating, even though it is precisely the kind of thing that would normally drive me nuts. And here's his description of a previous production of Carmen (whose star, as he explains in the article, was also able to sing the Queen of the Night):
"Mark Dornford-May's 2005 film adaptation of Bizet's opera Carmen, called U-Carmen eKhayelitsha, was set in South Africa's largest township, with a cast made up of local talent. I was immediately struck by the authenticity of his treatment. The bleakness of the environment, juxtaposed against the joyous brilliance of his cast, made me stamp with joy throughout many an aria."
Sorry to be thin on original content, but argh.* And Mozart.* I have tried to post the picture in the Guardian up here - it simply isn't letting me, on two computers. Suffice to say it looks very simple and beautiful, no matter my fears for the orchestration. It looks a sight better than Kenneth Branagh's portentous WWI film version, which I note here en passant seems to have gone up in a cloud of mustard smoke.
**Why is London grinding to a halt this week?!? Does anybody have an insight? It took me two hours to get to work today, and on the way home I had to walk halfway from Seven Sisters - with my glaucoma-addled night-vision - there was one point while we were sat in Finsbury Park station (see how far I got) where they annouced that there wasn't a single train running southbound on the entire Victoria line, all the way down to Brixton. Ten minutes later it was still the same. Hardly Victorious, if you ask me. Finally emerging from Green Park tube, hours later, I was met by the sight of a bus bearing, on its front, the legend not in service.
"Mozart was a keen observer of mankind, and boundlessly empathetic, but what he expressed in his music was us, not himself. Put another way, Mozart was the consummate artist, able to manipulate and cajole his listeners, to draw them in and draw them out, to create art, to construct art not for the sake of self-expression but to allow us to express ourselves."
This is Cliff Eisen, writing in his introduction to WA Mozart, by Hermann Abert (reviewed by Charles Rosen in the NY Review of Books) - a definitive work published 100 years ago, and now available in English in a masterful translation and edition. It's $55 in America - really, with the exchange rate as it currently is, hardly more expeisive than a new Ian McEwen novel.
Rosen writes:
"For his contemporaries, Mozart was a difficult composer, not only hard to play but hard to listen to. Most of the more ambitious works, they felt, could only be performed by the finest professionals, or else they would make a poor impression. Not only were there too many notes, there were above all too many new ideas and new themes, all coming one after the other in a profusion that was painful to follow. (In most operas by other composers, the second violins played the same notes as the first violins most of the time, but in Mozart they are more often given an independent line, and the violas, as well, are allotted interesting phrases.) And the harmony was often outrageous and impossible to understand (to this complaint E.T.A. Hoffmann replied that connoisseurs understood Mozart's harmony without difficulty, the uneducated public was emotionally stirred by it, and only the half-educated music amateur was bewildered)."
It seems to your correspondent here that, even without any danger of falling prey to a decadent neo-Dadaist fetishisation of newness or shockingness for its own sake, this insight could be applied to the way we experience art - say, poetry - now. I feel Mozart would never have been a New Formalist, just as he would never have been a "language" poet (though I could be wrong; it could be that a Mozart is all these movements are waiting for). Nor would he have been impressed by poetry workshops encouraging young people to express and "empower" themselves, etc.
(The marvellous picture: Mozart is sitting at the Klavier with his sister Nannerl - looking, one can't help but feel, a little like a very young Patrick Malahide - and his father, who is leaning on the piano holding a violin. A portrait of his mother hangs on the wall. This lithograph, by F. Leybold after a painting by De la Croce about 1781, was published for Mozart's centenary in 1856. Click to see it big. )
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...)
Ingmar Bergman - "the poet of the cinema" - has died, at 89. It's a great age, of course, but the event is important because it is the departure from our world of someone who gave us a great deal, to whom we are indebted probably in ways we don't quite know yet. The very fact that Bergman is so easy to lampoon shows that he did something new, that he gave us a way of seeing, a distinctive aesthetic framework for our own emotional experience.
I don't think this is overstating the case. Many of the most powerful and influential cultural moments of my life have been about Ingmar Bergman - and that's just the directly attributable ones.
I can't remember which was the first of his films I saw, but I know it changed the way I saw everything. Oh, wait. I remember going to see Autumn Sonata: amazing. Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullman and an absolutely engrossing emotional world.
Fanny and Alexander came out pretty early in my serious filmgoing life. It struck a huge chord with me - just at the brink of the adult world and still able to feel things as a child. I think this really is a time of susceptibility to ghosts, whether actual or psychological ones, things that mill around half-seen and felt, and this is something Bergman knew. For many years I cited it as my very favourite film.
By the time I saw The Seventh Seal it was too late, of course: the experience was necessarily corrupted by all those Woody Allen films. But isn't it stupendous? They've just re-released it on the big screen, by the way. It's on at the Curzon Soho, this week only. Seriously. I'll be going.
In 1987, after Bergman had retired from filmmaking and was the director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, his production of Miss Julie came to the NFT. I was so excited: I borrowed the play from the bookshop where I worked, walked over Waterloo Bridge, and sat in the foyer brushing up my Ibsen while waiting for the cheap on-the-day tickets to come on sale. (The guy at the desk insisted on giving me a discounted student ticket in the end - the earthly reward for all my swotting up!) It was wonderful. Watching the play in a foreign language - even with Strindberg's words floating fresh in my head - meant I was double-alert to all the other indicators. It was extra-intense and even maybe extra-dramatic.
Bergman's use of visual cues, of colour to build atmosphere, the amazing simplicity of everything he does - even if it seems ornate it is always incredibly simple - his directness coupled with his subtlety of perception - the completeness of everything he made. These are wonderful things. If I shut my eyes and think of each of these films, I can see a colour impression. In the case of The Seventh Seal, it's light and shadow.*
In 1987 I read Bergman's autobiography, The Magic Lantern. A brilliant, or at least it struck me so at the time, portrayal of how his creative life grew from childhood onwards. Bergman understood innately that everybody, no matter how insignificant they may seem to other people, has an inner life. During this part of my life I was hungry for knowledge - news, as it were - of how other people had navigated theirs, how they had translated thier experience into creation, and Bergman's was one of the most inspiring books I read. I still have my proof copy.
But actually, I've just remembered the biggest thing Bergman ever gave me. It was his Magic Flute that introduced me to Mozart when I was only 14 - changing the way I thought about movies at the same time, incidentally. My love for Mozart's operas is one of the main things in my pantheon of loves, so this was a big moment for the young Ms B!
Once again, this film conveys an incredibly subtle mix of innocence and sophistication, the darkness never quite concealed by the light, the richness and simplicity of Mozart's music and the broad music hall comedy - the stage flats, the backstage scenes... Everything fell open for me, the experience and all of its constituent parts. I can remember trying - and failing - to describe the impact it made on me to my dad, in his kitchen later. That girl in the audience, the one the camera keeps coming back to? I know she was a cinematic device to channel our experience of the play-within-a-movie, and all that, but forget that: I was her.**
Mozart was a natural chopice for Bergman: they are both very much concerned with redemption, with what is possible for the spirit precisely in the context of earthly living, both alive to the humour that co-exists with pathos, waiting to trip us up - both quintessentially alive. Both had a reputation for the ladies, too. And both made great art.
And another thing about Ingmar Bergman: people talk about the Gloomy Swede, but his films are so exuberantly observed, they are so drenched in awareness, that they seem more exhilarating to me than otherwise. And indeed, time and again in televised interviews Bergman appears giving great howls of laughter. His actors report much laughter on set. Really: however gloomy a vision may be, to communicate it, and to receive it, can be a matter of joy.***
"The people in my films are exactly like myself - creatures of instinct, of rather poor intellectual capacity, who at best only think while they're talking," Bergman said. "Mostly they're body, with a little hollow for the soul."
This quote, from the Washington Post, feels apt, today.
* Of course, Sven Nyqvist is a genius too.
** Somewhere in my mind is a pesky Simon Callow as Schickaneder that won't go away: I think that must have been in Amadeus. Ah well! Simon Callow - love 'im.
*** I had this experience at the age of 17, reading Crime and Punishment. I found it actually overwhelming, and was so happy I felt I might burst. On later rereading, I found many of the passages that had had this effect on me stultifyingly sentimental and overblown - but this only goes to prove that everything in art is about capacity, taste, experience. No matter; I've never lost the experience, anyway.
I tried, I've tried I've tried. But my concentration is strangely shot. My sister arrives at the crack of dawn tomorrow and I'm under the - well, you know... the day after.
So today it was no use. I tried to do my MacNeice - still flushed with the editor telling me I was the only contributor to that issue who had even thought about what they were going to write - but it was just little ants marching across the page. I tried to read Jane Holland's review of Jacob Polley's new book, Little Gods; I even had Little Gods in my bag (sadly, unsigned; I did see Polley read from this and was so useless at remembering my book that I had to ask him to sign a Selected of Donald Hall. Hey: I like to live on the edge). But no; couldn't do it.
Instead, I found myself thinking that to buy some meringues at Ottolenghi would be the most useful thing I could do, so I got on the bus for the Angel. (My hair looks much better, btw; they are darlings at the salon. Lara who does my colour had a fantastic hairdo today, all hairspray and little quiffy bits, and when I commented on it she said she'd been watching Dita Von Teese on something-or-other last night and that inspired her to pull her socks up. I mean put her hair up. They're so great in there, we all kiss each other goodbye. It's like a party.)
So I kissed Lara goodbye in the street and went on the bus to Ottolenghi. Via Past Caring - no furniture in there I needed - and then Flashback, where I bought some Mozart piano sonatas for my recuperation (it's all second-hand) and two videos for ditto: Cyrano de Bergerac, starring the ineffably curative Depardieu; and that sweet eighties film, Letter to Brezhnev., which I think will be a feel-good film par excellence to get me better. Then I went up Cross St (past Get Stuffed, the taxidermist) to Ottolenghi, where I replenished my supply of overpriced, enormous designer meringues, at a cost equivalent to only about five large packets of chocolate Hobnobs. But I can't eat Hobnobs anyway, so it is all academic.
Then thought I might as well have a quick look in Jigsaw...
The silver strappy top will be fabulous for recuperating with abdominal scars, because it's one of this summer's smock shapes. It's so cute. Can you just see the whole thing? It's a bit small in the bust, but that's not a problem because I'm told the real weight loss has barely even begun, & anyway it looks fine. So I asked the girl for a little cardigan to put on over it, to see how it might look in real life. The cardigan was so lovely... I liked it almost better than the top!
But I had to go to the cashpoint, due to some vicissitudes of my cash flow, and on the way back from there - feeling, I have to say, by this time really stressed out and aware of the impending knife and tired of carrying my laptop and aware of spending money and needing still to go buy food - I happened to see this beautiful Chinese orange handbag in the window of Spice... and you know, it is small (but cunningly roomy), and I've been thinking for weeks: I'm going to have all these incisions on my right side, which is where I carry my bag, and all my handbags are huge... even after I'm okay to go out I won't be able to lift the damn bags...!
Well, so after buying the handbag, only in grey not orange because it's more versatile and anyway the hardware was gold on the orange one which is not me - and the top and the cardigan in Jigsaw (my lovely recuperation outfit which will cheer me up no end after all the months I've spent watching my same two grey Gap T shirts get baggier and baggier, one with the stray thread that hangs down just at the V of the scooped-out neckline) I had to go have a coffee and sit down. So tired. So many bags. Plus the laptop on which I had been unable to do any of my work. And, like, all these days of getting caught in these downpours, today I bring my umbrella out and of course it stays dry!
I've bought the food. Cooked the chicken. Changed the beds. Done laundry. And the dishes. And watched EastEnders (don't even ask), and taken the rubbish out (but not replaced the bin liner). And had a big fight on the phone with my lovely pain-in-the-ass eldest child the Urban Warrior, and then put my head in my hands and cried, wanting to ring someone and wail at them, "it's so awful and no one will help me, and no one cares and I'm going to be put under and cut, and you have no idea, I spent so much money - !" But there wasn't anyone.
So then I went and cleaned the kitchen.
Oh, and a family friend says to me, "don't worry, it'll feel like a whole new world. You'll see, it'll be great." She goes,"you'll have to be careful what you eat for a month or so, you can't eat anything greasy. But that's okay because you won't feel like eating anything." She says, "well you'll lose tons of weight!"
So, maybe no chocolates after all. Will it never end?
On the other hand, it looks like I might be reading at the Poetry Cafe on July 7th (Ringo Starr's birthday, I can tell you now for nothing). To be confirmed.
Last night, with Mlle B out at yet another sleepover, I watched a movie that's been sitting here costing me money for a couple of weeks. It's a movie I'd never seen before: Almodovar's Talk to Her.
Shocking I know, but it has taken me years to get Almodovar. I saw Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown and thought it was kind of cute, but too brittle to really resonate. Last year I saw Volver in the cinema, and began to realise how shallow my assessment of Women on the Edge had been.
So last night I watched Talk to Her. This movie seems to me far more daring than either of the others. It's so subtle in its exploration of how we associate things, how we process feeling to action, that I feel I need to see it again. It obviously deals with many of the same things - aspects of the same issues, or issue - as the others, because Almodovar is clearly a man with something on his mind - but it seems to me to go deeper then they do, further inside.
And indeed its issues are all about what's inside us, and how it gets to the outside, and what form it takes when it gets there. And look at those pinks and oranges! Look how wonderfully not-quite-symmetrical that shot is.
The central character, Marco, is the emotional heart of the piece. I loved the way everything is really understated, but that his emotional reactions to things are showcased. His face is so impassive, but then a tear will roll down it. In that way it reminded me forcibly of Bergman's Magic Flute - which, I have to say, was tremendously influential on the young Baroquina, back in the day. This is a film that also dwells almost as much on the reaction of a spectator as on the action itself, for its subject.
The film even opens with a rather long contemporary ballet sequence, and then a shot of the audience. It's impossible, with the information we have so far been given, to read these things. We have no idea, as the tears form themselves in Marco's eyes, who he is.
The person sitting next to Marco in the theatre looks over at him, sees the tears, and is visibly taken aback by them. Or, no - interested. Curious. I laughed at this point, it was so delightful, but the point is we reinterpret that look several times throughout the film. As in life, the meaning accrues with knowledge and experience, and can be retrospectively adjusted.
Cinematically daring and beautiful, saturated colours, undulating countryside that looks like a woman's body, women's bodies looking like the countryside... The film leaves room for faces. Faces, faces, as in Bergman. How we communicate our feelings. Our expressions. The women who are in the comas, one is a dancer, the other is a bull-fighter: their expression was in how they moved their bodies, and even now the camera lingers on their faces, their expressions of perfect serenity.
The other main character, the wonderfully named Benigno, is presented to us by observation only, without all the tedious labellings many films would feel it necessary to make. In one scene someone calls him a "retard" and that is as close as we ever get to an official line on him.
It brings to mind the words of the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, when she said, "I will a tale unfold...", comparing it to taking a new frock out of its box.
Anyway, the film opens with a dance scene. The central scene is a long clip from a rather extraordinary silent movie Benigno has seen, which mirrors his own emotional state and drives him to the physical expression of his love for the comatose Alicia - a physical expression which is only, by the way, natural. And it ends with another dance, this one staged by Alicia's dance teacher, which also mirrors the concerns of the movie. Only where the movie started with Marco's tears, it ends with him smiling at Alicia as she sits two rows behind him. And by then, when you get it, the image of the rows of couples dancing slowly across the stage is spellbindingly poignant and beautiful. By then, Marco didn't need to be crying while he watched, because I was crying for him.
In the language of this film it's only Benigno's choice of a girl in a coma as the object of his affections, only his inability to realise how one-sided that is, that renders it not 'natural'. And Marco's acceptance of Benigno's feelings is implicit, even after the scene where they argue about it - obviously, because they are two sides of the same man, which is Almodovar. Ultimately the film almost asks the question of whether it even matters that a love has been reciprocated. Note: love, not just desire. Benigno has loved and cared for Alicia tenderly and devotedly for four years by the point where we meet him. By his own lights, they get along together like an old married couple. After Alicia wakes up she remembers nothing about him, and is herself unaware of having been touched in any way by him, either physically or emotionally. But she is happy and light as only a loved person can be.
This aspect of the film is so stylised that it reminded me of another movie, one I saw untold aeons ago - Bertrand Blier's equally unlikely, strange, funny, dangerous, and touching Préparer Vos Mouchoirs,* or Get Out Your Handerchiefs - but that is another story.
Sorry; this all feels very approximate to me. We have had the ultimate rainy Sunday here in Baroque Mansions.
* Gerard Depardieu's second film. I simply didn't know what had hit me.
This lack of self-importance also determined his career as a children's author. I don't have a source for it, but I read years ago - before I visited him, I think - that Alexander said, "Children's books are written to be read. Adult novels are written to be talked about at cocktail parties." (Strangely, even as a kid - and one with passionate loyalty to the books and authors I loved, and one who knew full well the depth of the importance of children's fiction - while I could see what he meant by this, I couldn't quite see what was so bad about the other. I thought, well, if they're talking about them, they must think they're important - right? It's as if, through my haze of sun-bonnets and magic pigs, I saw my own grown-up self.)
Among the infant Baroquelina's favourite all-time books were the Chronicles of Prydain - a series of children's fantasy novels based on the ancient Welsh repository of myth, the Mabinogion, by Lloyd Alexander. The Book of Three, The Black Cauldron - The High King, with its vague Narnian overtones - I loved them all.
When I was eighteen, en route to North Carolina with a group of friends, I happened to be passing through Philadelphia. I knew Alexander lived in a suburb of Philadelphia called Drexel Hill (its name is still engraved on my memory, since I had to figure out how to get there). I think he must have been in the phone book - I think I must have got my courage together and called him - because I made the pilgrimage and sat, or rather perched, in Lloyd Alexander's living room (without my friends). He talked to me about being a writer, and my writing, and his lifelong friendship with another childhood hero of mine (I might have known), Maurice Sendak. (There was a framed drawing of Mozart, by Sendak, on the wall, which I looked at longingly throughout our conversation.) He must have told me about his years in the Army, stationed in Wales and then Europe, and how he read the ancient myths... and we both had a passion for the Arthur legends. It was a wonderful afternoon and probably more important to me than I even knew.
Lloyd Alexander died last Thursday, May 17th, in the same house I sat in those years ago. That fact feels surprising to me now. His wife of 61 years - whom I also met that day - had died two weeks earlier.
A childrens' books website called kidsreads.com quotes Alexander, talking characteristically modestly, about how he came to write:
"My parents were horrified when I told them I wanted to be an author " Alexander recalls. "I was fifteen in my last year of high school. My family pleaded with me to forget literature and do something sensible such as find some sort of useful work. "I had no idea how to find work useful or otherwise. In fact I had no idea how to become an author. If reading offered any preparation for writing there were grounds for hope. I had been reading as long as I could remember. Shakespeare Dickens Mark Twain and so many others were my dearest friends and greatest teachers. I loved all the world s mythologies; King Arthur was one of my heroes; I played with a trash can lid for a knightly shield and my uncle's cane for the sword Excalibur. But I was afraid that not even Merlin the enchanter could transform me into a writer."
Anyway, Alexander decided to write for the people who cold most benefit from the particular thing he had to give, and a wonderful gift it was. Over a long career he wrote over forty books, mostly for children, and those children have grown up into adults who still love his books. He was very generous as a writer, and certainly very kind to me.
The phrase above - "making things" - amounts almost to the Baroque manifesto. There is something sacramental in the activity, regardless of which particular activity it might be.*
When I was about 12 it was pancakes: once I realised it was possible to have pancakes any time I wanted, I was free. (I became obsessive about technique: they had to be the best pancakes. Mix the batter just enough to moisten it all. Don't worry about lumps, they cook out. Yogurt makes the pancakes fluffier, but you need more milk.) Then it was muffins, cakes, the world.
Before that, paper dolls and dresses: hours and days I sat at the dining room table, looking up period costumes in the encyclopedia and drawing exaggerated leg-o'mutton sleeves (with tabs) and farthingales. I've lost the shoebox full of paper dolls - I don't know for sure when or how. It's still a regret. All that remains from that period is a statue of Elizabeth I I made out of a bleach bottle, and dressed (quite authentically!) in silk, with a lace-doily ruff and a huge pearl pendant. (I have spent half my morning looking for a picture I know exists of this figure. If I find it, I will post it.)
I drew, and drew, and drew. I looked, and drew. (I was also obsessed with types of pencils.) When did I stop drawing? Sometime. Why? I have no idea. It was only my own efforts.
Then I used to make my own clothes. In my hippy teens (the hippies themselves found me utterly unconvincing, by the way, with my Mozart records, Ezra Pound poems and fascination with history; all they cared for was raw food and nuclear disarmament). I made clothes from folkloric patterns using fabric from our overstuffed attic, and wore them with long earrings and jackets from the forties.
Of course I wrote, too. I filled endless notebooks! Journals, poems, stories with no plots. I searched for tone and structure, without knowing what it was I was looking for. But it was harder to manipulate the material, to structure ideas than to structure a seam. And there were people around me who could help with the sewing. No one can help with writing. Well - they did what they could... looking back I can see I had a lot of encouragement, but no advice about how to develop a plot. (Someone should have given me Aspects of the Novel; in it, Forster even laments the prosaic need for a story, and then delineates the layers with which a plot grows. Anyway, there can be something crude about a story, like leaving thread hanging down off a hem.)
When I was a little girl I hated full fashioning. All those labels: "fully fashioned" - as if there were an alternative in any case! Little Miss B was the kind of child that things got on the nerves of. All those annoying stitches, going up along the join of ladies' sweaters, so naked in their purely utilitarian intent! It seemed, at best, making a virtue of necessity. Like darts. I also hated darts on ladies' blouses: they just seemed a bit coarse to me, a bit "must we really discuss this"?
I can also remember railing on against Ethan Frome in 8th grade, because Edith Wharton had set her story in a town called Starkville. Starkville! It offended me. I can remember shouting at my friends, "What, they don't think we'll get it otherwise???" I think were were sledding in the park at the time. My friends didn't care, though we did talk (the boys among us with some relish, I recall) about what it would be like to hit a tree. (That also annoyed me. A tree. Honestly. Like we wouldn't get it otherwise?)
But of course, the lesson is this, and the fascination too: we cannot escape from the physical. We are prisoners of the three dimensions, and everything we make on this earth must obey their laws.
Of course fabrics are much stretchier now than they were then. But that is just a cop-out, and it is in the cop-out that the revelation resides. Once you get used to crappily-made garments which use stretchy fabric as a rationale for not being properly shaped, you come to realise the utter gorgeousness of full fashioning. It's like cloth-covered buttons. I was so happy in the eighties when they came back in. I had felt cheated.
In my twenties I made clothes without buying patterns. I even made clothes I didn't like, just for the technical challenges they presented. I learned how to knit and for many years was obsessed with colour, texture, and the incredible way you can turn a piece of string into a three-dimensional object. I learned sophisticated stitch techniques for shaping collars, necklines, shoulders: if you knit well enough you should never have to sew a seam.
I still think Wharton possibly overstated her case a bit: that is why (to be crude) she is not Henry James. (The ex-ex-Mr B bitterly resented my love of Henry James, and thought that for a person to read novels for "structure" was the sickest thing he'd ever heard of. I think he was just jealous.) But I can now see that what I used to consider merely blindingly obvious in fact has a beauty in it: sometimes, reduced to mere suggestion, a thing turns to wisps and drifts away. Sometimes we need outright reference, not just allusion. We need the name, the word, the handle, and of course this will be beautiful in itself, because it is an artefact. What is the source of this beauty? What is its nature? I'm still not sure.
Milan Kundera, in his new book of essays The Curtain (widely excerpted in the press; pictured here with its unforgivably ugly UK cover), talks about the chronological nature of our understanding of even a single, discrete work of art. This is another thing that used to puzzle and concern me when I was a child, and I can remember following Mama Baroque around the house, saying, "But Mommy, why? Why, if I wrote a poem right now that was just as good as a poem by Shelley, if it sounded like Shelley, would it not be as good???" Kundera discusses this phenomenon, and compellingly; but, although he seems to think he has solved the riddle, he hasn't. He simply nods towards it and digs into his argument, which is a disappointment, as it means his essay is necessarily only one man's opinion. It strikes me as a lack of ambition.
I also love the anecdote with which he opens this passage: I could certainly have related to this when I was a child, learning about making things. He writes:
"They used to tell a story about my father, who was a musician. He is out with friends someplace when, from a radio or a phonograph, they hear the strains of a symphony.
The friends, all of them musicians or music buffs, immediately recognize Beethoven's Ninth. They ask my father, 'What's that playing?' After long thought he says, 'It sounds like Beethoven.' They all stifle a laugh: my father doesn't recognize the Ninth Symphony! 'Are you sure?' 'Yes,' says my father, 'Late Beethoven.' 'How do you know it's late?' He points out a certain harmonic shift that the younger Beethoven could never have used."
But to me, this anecdote is primarily about something other than mere chronology, though I can certainly see in it the chronology Kundera makes use of. Though maybe that is me objecting to the darts again.don't you love that phrase?
Henry Porter may have hit something with his piece in Comment is Free. I think it originated in the Observer. Lamenting the lack of a contemporary Orwell or Dickens - or an English Havel or Pamuk - he writes: "What has happened is partly due to the politicisation of thinking in the last 10 years, but there must also be something in the fact that about 90 per cent of writers and public intellectuals voted Labour in 1997. With Tony Blair's victory, they eased back. The new Prime Minister seemed to be so completely the product of their own values and at one with their view of society that there was no longer any need to concentrate."
I certainly hope this is not the case! I had thought that the utter, abject failure of New Labour to be even as honestly evil as Thatcher's mob had sent people scurrying to lick their wounds, quietly giving up the hope that saw them (us) through the Dark Years.
Is Porter saying the intellectual elite of this country thinks the current state of affairs is okay??
The baroque opinion is that the change has been so swift and terrible that our heads are still reeling: no one knows what to think. However, look about you: NHS hospitals that can't feed patients properly. Schools that can't educate kids properly. Teachers who have been educated to a fine level of ignorance in the same system (sorry, all you teachers out there! I dare you to parse a sentence of my choosing and we'll see who has the last laugh). Crumbling streets, people who can't heat their homes, trains that don't run, "getting single mothers back to work", the Olympics. What a sop THAT is to feed to the people of the East End! Loyalty cards!
We're so busy believing all the pap we hear about how great things are that the writers have yet to catch their breath and take an assessment of the situation. At least, that's what I hope. Even the Victorians weren't as deluded as we are.
The Tart of Fiction quoted my favourite sentence from this piece: "Nowadays, there seem to be an awful lot of middle-aged blokes dragging their tortured souls around the literary circuit, fretting about their display in Waterstone's." (This reads really well if you've only just finished reading about how all the Waterstones are going to be either shut, or scaled back! Fiction, apparently. Anything else, you can get it online if you want it so bad. And by the way, 2 out of 3 book sales in the UK are through a Waterstones. My career is finished, before it even started.)
We had better get our heads straight & soon. It also strikes me that what is missing is not the ability to analyse - though, as Porter points out, it is the lawyers who are doing it - it is the capacity for Art. Proper, transformative, celestial, redemptive Art, of the kind that takes something and makes something else of it, forcing us to see our own existence in a new way: Tolstoy, Mozart. We're all journalists now.
I will add to this, in a not-very-articulate fashion (as befits a sick person who less than two hours ago was having a nightmare involving a Bad Lady and a doll), the following concerns:
Porter mentions our celebrity-obsessed media. We must take responsibility for that. A friend brought me in hospital a copy of Heat magazine: it contains an article on what Jen thought of Brad and Angelina's baby pictures!!! Brilliant and sick as this is, it is not helping us.
I'm thinking the division of speciality in thought is also not helping us: you know, where scientists only know about science, artists only know about pickled sheep (and some useful welding, actually), and novelists only know about their friends and how to play pool. There's no excitement. Everyone else only knows about targets, and by that I do not mean they're down the pub playing darts.
I, and many people far better than myself, have written elsewhere about the need to remember the importance of language to our civil liberties, and of poetry (I know, I would say that) to our ability to make connections and perceive non-linear truth. What really puzzles me is that so many of our - what Porter calls "public intellectuals" - don't seem to be doing much analysis on the current regime's abuses of language - which are as bad here, nearly, as in the States, for all we never had Freedom Toast. But we are thinking in jargon and that is the First Step.
On Christmas I spoke to my dad, le Comte de Baroque (pictured above, on a Christmas some years back). I think we can call him that. We hardly ever call him anything much, in fact, because we don't speak to him very much at all: maybe a couple of times a year. This is the pace at which he himself set our relationship back in the day when I myself was little Mlle B, and with a few rantings and ravings thrown in from time to time I have respected that pace.
Anyway, I asked him how he was, and he said: "Well - I'm wearing my trousers rolled."
The great thing about my dad, aside from the fact that he is the reason I knew what he meant, is that he knew I would know, and never felt the need to explain his allusion, which is a conversational tic that destroys conversations.
Also, it's true. Thanks to his emphysema, the payback from 50 years as a politically agressive smoker (like, he started a smoking club at work when they banned it in the staff room), the last time I saw him he was sitting in a chair, with his feet encased in black support socks and propped up on another chair. That was in summer; he wore shorts. If it were winter, you might need to roll your trousers. Still, it was better to see him looking like that than the way he'd looked before he started getting the treatment. Then, he used to fall asleep all the time and everyone was saying: "dad's getting old..." Scary. And not that old in the scheme of things.
So it's nice being able to talk to him again, and it's also nice - when on site, that is - not to have to breathe the fumes. He used to have these parties where he'd invite all his friends from work. Well, his friends from work were the smoking club. Three weeks later you'd meet some guy in the mall, and Daddy would say, "You remember Dan? You met him at the party." You'd be going, "Dad, I couldn't SEE him at the party."
Le Comte was also the one who set the impossibly high standards for Christmas (read: everything) which have practically destroyed my relationship with my kids (hold on: that's not right! Well, whatever). He's the one who made me Baroque. He was the one who reassured me when I was four (flying in the face of anything you ever heard in the Catskills) that, yes, pink and red could go together - if you were in Mexico... It was his amateur dramatics company that gave me my chance to be a little Siamese Princess (no lines) (or was it the Crown Prince, and I had one line? Yes, I think that's it: a line to make up for being a boy), and ruined my childhood (read: strengthened my character) with seemingly endless productions of "Kiss Me, Kate!" I know all the Cole Porter songs. He gave me Klemperer's 1964 recording of the Magic Flute (still the best, if you don't count the Beecham of 1937) for my fifteenth birthday (and I still have it), and he's the reason I care about which recording. Oh, and he taught me to make meat loaf. He said he had no idea how he made it, he just did it, and if I wanted to learn I had to watch him do it. So I did.
He also, some years ago now, gave me his facsimile manuscript edition of The Waste Land, showing Pound's edits - handed me the baton, as it were (I loved twirling a baton when I was six; I could make it go pretty damn fast). So, with my necklace rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin, with my pink pashmina and my red shawl-collared cardigan with its glittery brooch, I shall enter 2007 modestly with resolutions sticking out of every pocket.
In a minute there is time
for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
Breaking news, of which anyone who knows me will realise the importance in Baroque Mansions: the great soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, in fact pretty much the definitive Mozart soprano has died.
Here's the article from The Independent.
She was 90. I know she hadn't recorded since virtually before I was born. And that's the great thing about Art. ONE of its consolations.
And here is something that only goes to show how much the world has changed since Schwarzkopf made those recordings: the only mp3's I've been able to find, for a link, are actually downloadable as ring tones. Hurrah! But you can hear her online, sort of. So, happy listening - and happy shopping!
There may well be more to say, later. Meantime I have to confess it almost feels as if Mozart has just died - though I know that already happened...
