Counting to a Hundred: ‘Let it Go!'

This is my hundredth post since 16^th August  2011. For two years before that, while still working in Cambridge, I wrote a blog called World and Time, which began life as a way of bringing Madingley Hall’s programme of courses to the notice of a wider audience. I’m not sure it was particularly successful in this, but keeping a blog became for me a way of reflecting on how my interests in literature and teaching, Cambridge and Venice, architecture and stained glass have helped to shape the life I lead now. In my introductory post I wrote the following:

'Who am I writing this blog for? For my students past and present; all those who have taught me more than I have taught them, and with whom I have had great pleasure talking about why writing matters and reading matters just as much; for students I have yet to meet; for friends and colleagues; for fellow teachers of English; for anyone interested in what I have to say, even if (particularly if) they don’t agree with me; for myself – on the ‘how do I know what I think till I hear what I’ve said?’ principle.'

When I retired from Cambridge, I wanted to stay in touch with these same students, colleagues and friends – some of whom had been rash enough to ask me to keep writing. So I called my new blog  (the first post of which was published on the same day as my last post for World and Time) simply Adrian Barlow’s Blog, in the hope that people would find it easy to track down if they wanted to. So it has proved, and the joy of blogging for the past four years has been hugely enhanced by the number of new friends I have made, and old friends with whom I have reconnected. I have been amazed by the popularity of my blog: it’s currently receiving well over 100 visitors a day: not exactly ‘going viral’, I admit, but readers come not just from the UK but from the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and more recently from Russia too. This has led to the only conscious change in the way I have written: at the outset I assumed all my readers would, broadly speaking, have the same frames of reference that I have; more recently I have tried (unobtrusively, I hope) to give a bit more context when introducing people, places, books etc., that may not be familiar to all.

I had written about blogs before I started to write my own. In my book World and Time: Teaching Literature in Context (C.U.P. 2009), I included a chapter entitled ‘Essays and blogs: Woolf, Carter and Beard’, in which I tried to find links between the way three writers I admire - Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter and Mary Beard - address their readers. ‘The blog,’ I wrote,

… is a phenomenon already shifting our perception of how ideas, opinions and prejudices can be shared and expressed in print – even if in cyberprint. Curiously, it has led to a revival in the art of the conversational essay: everyone who writes a blog tries, consciously or otherwise, to shape their prose in such a way as to get across effectively what they want to say and, in doing so, to give an impression of themselves as someone participating in a conversation.

My childhood introduction to the art of the conversational essay was Charles Lamb’s ‘Dissertation upon Roast Pork’, and I have been a fan of Lamb’s work ever since. It pleases me very much that a piece written for World and Time in 2010, ‘Charles Lamb and Cambridge’, led to an invitation to give a lecture (‘Lamb and Cambridge: Cambridge and Lamb’) to the Charles Lamb Society in London earlier this year. I’m pleased, too, that going to London to deliver this lecture prompted me to compose one of the posts  I am most pleased to have written: an impromptu meditation on London, Lamb, and the poetry and people to be found in Queen Square. But before I paused in that secluded square on my way to give the lecture, I had no idea that before nightfall I’d have written ‘In London, with Charles Lamb’.

Later in my chapter on essays and blogs, I reflected on the significance of the term ‘post’:

You post a blog. And this suggests two things: not only sending it by mail as if it were a letter that someone would open and read at the other end, but also pasting it on a wall like a poster so that any casual passer-by can read it [….] Posters are general, aimed at a wide audience who may or may not take any notice.

It is one of the pleasures of blogging to discover that people have taken notice, and have sometimes been interested, moved or irritated sufficiently by something I have written to post a reply, email or write directly. You get far more feedback to a blog than to a book, in my experience. I treasure a message of thanks sent by someone working in the Janitor’s Department of Alcatraz. But my thanks to all who have ever got in touch after reading my blog.

This, however, will be my last post. 100 not out seems a good score with which to retire, if you’ll forgive the cricketing metaphor. Over the past four years, a few pieces have written themselves at a single sitting, but I find I’m spending longer planning, writing and editing them now, for each one has to be just 1000 words. I still enjoy this, greatly, but I don’t want my posts seeming laboured to those who kindly read them. Besides, the book I’m now writing - Kempe: Life and Legacy - presses insistently. Some friends have suggested I publish a collection from my blog. I’ve been tempted; I even chose a title, Short Measures. But blogs, I have concluded, are best left in their native element, which is cyberspace.

Adrian Barlow

[illustration: an urn inscribed with the words of William Blake’s poem ‘He who binds to himself a joy’. My post about this poem, Short Measures (i): William Blake and Eternity’s Sunrise, has been by far the most visited page of my blog.

www.adrianbarlowsblog.blogspot.co.uk  will continue to be found at its present address, and I am compiling an inventory of all my past posts, if anyone cares to revisit them.  I hope to publish this online very soon.

Text and illustration © the author

In London, with Charles Lamb

I have found myself in London for the past two Saturdays, a rare occurrence. Charles Lamb called London ‘a pantomime and a masquerade’, and he wasn’t wrong. In Covent Garden last Saturday, street performers were everywhere: fire-eaters, conjurors, mime artists who present the disconcerting illusion of actually sitting or walking on thin air. Fewer musicians than I remember: the finest buskers I ever heard were in Covent Garden: two men dressed in tail coats and playing con brio Handel’s Water Music, arranged for Souzaphone and penny whistle. But all human life was there, just as Lamb once described it in a letter to Wordsworth:

'I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead Nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, wagons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden […] the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old bookstalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes – London itself a pantomime and a masquerade.' (30 January 1801)

And today, a week later, I am in Bloomsbury, here to give a lecture on Charles Lamb. Elia himself

might have thought Queen Square, where I have been walking for a while this morning, a bit too quiet; indeed, I have it almost to myself, which suits me very well. Queen Square lies between Southampton Row and Great Ormond Street, one side of it lined with hospital buildings - neurological, neurosurgical and homeopathic. The Children’s Hospital is just beyond.  At the east end of the square is a building I once knew well. Looking more like an embassy than a hospital (there is an imposing, if somewhat Ruritanian, achievement of arms above the front door) is the Italian Hospital. The nurses are (or were) Italian nuns: my mother was once a patient there for a month. She said the sisters were the kindest nurses she’d ever encountered.

Outside the hospital is a paved area, and here someone has been busy: the flagstones are covered with poetry, chalked by a visitor who must have spent much of the night composing a poem in what W.H. Auden once called ‘a rapture of distress’. He raps of hunger and of meditation, of the kindness of strangers and the coldness of the stones; but he ends with this question: 

Who be the beggar and what the beggar be?

I walk within my own authority

There is no body that stands over me

So who be the beggar and what the beggar be?

Charles Lamb would have delighted to read this. In ‘A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis’ he lamented attempts by the City authorities to ‘extirpate the last fluttering tatters of the bugbear Mendicity from the metropolis’. Of the old beggars he says, ‘There was a dignity springing from the very depth of their desolation; as to be naked is to be so much nearer to the being a man, than to go in livery’.

Poetry becomes Queen Square: Faber & Faber used to have their headquarters here, and in the gardens – fenced off but open from dawn to dusk – I find a circular basin commemorating the Queen’s Silver Jubilee of 1977. Engraved on the paving stones beneath it, but dust-filled and fading already, I make out this verse:

IN TIMES WHEN NOTHING STOOD

BUT WORSENED OR GREW STRANGE

THERE WAS ONE CONSTANT GOOD

SHE DID NOT CHANGE                         LARKIN

I like the confident use of the poet’s surname – an echo perhaps from a time when to add ‘Philip’ would have been unnecessary. And walking round the basin I find another verse:

A NATION’S A SOUL

A SOUL IS A WHEEL

     WITH A CROWN FOR A HUB

TO KEEP IT WHOLE                  HUGHES

Larkin and Ted Hughes, Faber poets both. And there is more poetry to be found all around the garden: the paths are lined with seats, each one given in memory of someone who had either been a doctor working in one of the hospitals overlooking the Square, or a patient or a resident. Two commemorate victims of the Trident air crash of 1972, another a more recent victim of the London bombings. Several contain quotations: ‘Memory holds a seat’ says one, echoing Hamlet. Another quotes Samuel Beckett:

Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Close by, a bench given in memory of one who died young offers a plaintive comment: “The question ‘Why?’ will always remain unanswered.” Then, further on, a three-month old child who died perhaps in Great Ormond Street: the boy’s name was Elias. I think of Lamb again. Elia was his alias.

I was quite wrong to think Queen Square might not have appealed to him. Lamb loved children, and wrote about them with an affection all the more touching because he had none of his own.  Coram’s Fields and the Foundling Hospital, where mothers queued to hand in for safe keeping the children they could not keep themselves, are only a block away. Charles Lamb and his sister Mary once adopted an orphan girl. He knew about separation and loss – ‘All, all are gone, the old familiar faces’ he wrote in his one still-famous poem   – and in the middle of Queen Square today stands a sculpture of a mother and baby, clinging to each other, the child twisting a tiny finger under the strap of its mother’s dress, resisting all possibility of separation.  In Dream Children: A Reverie Lamb dreams he is indeed a father, surrounded by a loving family. The waking from this dream is as hard for the reader as for Elia himself. The children fade and, fading, seem to whisper to him:

We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been.

It’s time to go and give my lecture.

Adrian Barlow

I have written about Lamb once before, in Charles Lamb and Cambridge, and this was the subject of the lecture I gave.

[illustrations: (i) A mime artist in Covent Garden; (ii) Street sign in Queen Square (iii) Sculpture by Patricia Finch (2008) in the Garden of Queen Square

Text and illustrations © the author