Men and Women of Letters

 What is, or was, a man or woman of letters? Does the phrase still have any meaning or value? These questions have been on my mind recently because I have been re-reading two biographies by my friend of more than fifty years, John Smart: Tarantula’s Web, John Hayward, T.S. Eliot and their Circle (Michael Russell, 2012) and Shores of Paradise, The Life of Sir John Squire: The Last man of Letters (Matador, 2021) Each book is about someone who in his day was certainly thought of as ‘a man of letters’; one of them has those words on his gravestone. But what does the phrase really signify? Who qualifies? Who doesn’t?

Originally, to be ‘a man of letters’ just meant you were literate. However, by the mid-eighteenth century it could be applied to – and adopted by – people such as Dr. Samuel Johnson, whose public persona was as a writer whose range included fiction, poetry, literary criticism (Preface to Shakespeare, 1765, in particular), travel writing, and of course lexicography. In an age in which the essay as a literary form was taken seriously, he was widely admired for the essays he published in his twice-weekly newsletter, The Rambler. He gave his readers to understand that literature could not only give pleasure but could also enhance one’s moral, intellectual and imaginative understanding of life. He was a writer who used his standing as an author and critic to advocate for, and comment on, literature as something essential for society and the individual.   

By the nineteenth century, ‘man of letters’ had become a widely recognised term, but with two not quite overlapping meanings. First, it was used to identify people who had established reputations particularly through literary journalism and publications aimed at a wider, educated but not academic audience. Second, and largely through a series of literary biographies launched in 1878 called simply English Men of Letters, it came to refer to any prominent writer within a range of fields – history, philosophy, poetry and fiction – ranging from Chaucer to Thackeray but including (at first) only one woman, George Eliot. 

The author of the George Eliot biography was Sir Leslie Stephen, who had contributed the opening book in the series, appropriately on Samuel Johnson. Stephen was a quintessentially Victorian man of letters and the founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, to which he personally contributed over 370 biographical essays. To most people today, however, he is best remembered as the father of the artist Vanessa Bell and her sister, the writer Virginia Woolf. During the twentieth century, in addition to her formidable achievements as a novelist, Woolf championed the literary essay as collected, for instance, in her books The Common Reader (first and second series: 1925,1932).  A woman of letters? Without a doubt.

Virginia Woolf’s phrase, ‘common reader’, is significant. She addressed all those who had in common an interest in literature. Herself denied a university education by her father,  Woolf wrote for an audience outside the walls of the universities: an audience of people who enjoyed reading for pleasure but who took seriously books and what writers of the past and present had to say; these were people who recognised that literature mattered to them and who believed that literature matters, full stop. You did not have to have a degree in English Literature to qualify; in fact it might disqualify you.

You don’t hear the phrase ‘man of letters’ much these days and this is not just because of its gendered connotation. (Virginia Woolf dealt with that, forensically and passionately, in A Room of One’s Own.) As the twentieth century progressed, the term ‘man of letters’ suffered  because, by contrast with the more serious-sounding ‘literature’, the very word ‘letters’ seemed to imply some frivolous, mannered, dilettante; hence, ‘man of letters’ came to identify writers (essayists especially) tainted by association with the outdated tradition of ‘belles-lettres’.  How easily then do the subjects of the two biographies I have been re-reading wear the mantle of man of letters? JC Squire (1884-1958, familiarly known as Jack Squire) and John Hayward (1905-1965) were both clubbable figures easily identified in the London literary world. Both considered themselves to be men of letters (it was Hayward whose gravestone describes him thus) but they were not friends with each other and their spheres of influence were polar opposites. The one word on Squire’s gravestone was ‘Poet’. 

Squire had risen to prominence both as a poet and as a reviewer and journalist for The New Age and the New Statesman before and during the First World War. As a poet, he was always identified as a contributor to the Georgian Poetry anthologies; his greatest achievement as a man of letters was to found and edit the London Mercury, which became in the entre deux guerres period of the twenties and thirties a very successful and influential journal. He was knighted for his services to literature. The latter years of Squire’s life, frankly but sympathetically described in John Smart’s biography of him, make sad reading, but he was admired by many loyal friends. John Betjeman was one such; indeed, in several respects (as Smart suggests) he can be seen as Squire’s successor. Both men were clearly antagonistic towards, and despised by, the literary avantgarde; each of them had a strong and abiding affection for England and traditional English life and culture. Both were prominent conservationists (Squire had led a successful and very public campaign to ensure the landscape around that Stonehenge would be properly preserved and protected) and each of them embraced the new media of their day. Squire was an early and popular voice on the radio – he was the first person to provide live commentary on the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race – while Betjeman became famous for his idiosyncratic television documentaries. Embracing the opportunities offered by the new mass media greatly increased the public appeal of both Sir Jack and Sir John as writers.

The trajectory of John Hayward’s life as a man of letters was rather different. He knew from an early date exactly what he wanted to be: writing at the start of the Second World War, he explained, ‘When I was a little boy I used to play at being a man of letters. This engrossing game of make-believe kept me quiet for years on end.’ From childhood onwards he was severely handicapped by muscular dystrophy, but he never let this embitter him, unless his reputation for having a biting satirical wit betrayed his frustration at a life lived mainly in a wheelchair. By the time he left school (Gresham’s, where as editor of the school magazine, he was the first person to publish the poems of his younger contemporary, WH Auden) he was already being taken seriously as a scholarly editor of seventeenth and eighteenth century poets. He was commissioned by Nonesuch Press to edit the poems of Lord Rochester even before he had gone up to King’s College, Cambridge. While still an undergraduate he was being described as ‘charming, and brilliant and the most erudite bibliomane in King’s bar none.’ His Nonesuch edition of the poetry and selected prose of John Donne sealed his reputation as an editor; by the end of the Thirties,  when he was still only 35, his wide circle of Bloomsbury and Cambridge contacts and friends (of whom TS Eliot was to become the most significant) ensured he was well known both in Britain and abroad as an important reviewer and commentator on the London literary scene . 

Poetry editions and anthologies added further to Hayward’s visibility and reputation. From 1934-1938 he was chief London editor of the New York Sun, for which he wrote a regular column called ‘London Letter’. Full of literary news and gossip, as well as reviews of books, plays and exhibitions, this column had the breadth and informality that today one might associate with a blog or a podcast. After the war much of his literary attention was focused on editing a new journal, The Book Collector. For this, too, he wrote a regular column that became essential reading for anyone interested in the world of books, book collecting and literary life. He himself by this time was recognised as one of the most important authorities both on the history of the printed book and on the great private collections of books held in Britain but increasingly dispersed and sold (often to American universities) in the postwar period. Hayward and Squire were very different characters and John Smart places them firmly in the centre of their different London circles: Hayward’s (his spider’s web – ‘Tarantula’ was his nickname) the world of The Criterion, Faber & Faber and the salon of Lady Ottoline Morrell; Squire’s (the Squirarchy) the world of Edward Marsh, Harold Monro and the Georgian Poetry anthologies, of cricket and of his own magazine, The London Mercury. 

Coming back to both these biographies, as I have been doing ever since I learned with distress last summer that John Smart had died, has made me realise – more clearly than before – how valuable these two books are. Taken together, they map the landscapes of literary London in the first half of the twentieth century in a way that has not been done by anyone else. They reveal too, at once critically and sympathetically, just how deeply both Squire and Hayward cared about literature past and present, about reading and about the contribution of literature to the health of society. These, I am sure, are essential characteristics of men and women of letters writing at any time and in any country. Men and women of letters still exist (of course they do) and their participation in debates about literature and their encouragement of reading is as important as ever; these days, however, they simply travel under a different passport.

Lives of writers, and of their biographers, matter too. Re-reading both Tarantula’s Web and Shores of Paradise I have heard John’s voice alongside the voices of Hayward and Squire, whom he brought to life in a way many historians and biographers never quite manage with their subjects. John’s research was formidable, his knowledge of English poetry ditto, but his writing was always accessible and never pedantic. Sometimes (especially in his writing about Squire) I have heard John chuckling, too; his quiet amusement – his wry response to the vicissitudes of life and to the foibles of students, colleagues or friends –always at hand. He loved his family and his home, his books and his wine; he enjoyed company and was an excellent host but he loved, too, simply to be out walking with his dogs or watching birdlife on the Norfolk marshes. He was one of the least self-important people I have ever known, and I would say of John Smart that he was the kind of teacher whom alumni remember with affection and gratitude. As indeed do I. More than ever now, I admire him as the teacher and writer I knew for over fifty years – we met in Durham on the same PGCEd course in 1971 – and I shall always remember our friendship as one of the most important of my life.

In Tarantula’s Web, I came across this in the Acknowledgements: ‘Adrian Barlow is the godfather of this book. He first gave me the idea of writing about John Hayward and using the papers at King’s that had been embargoed until 2000.’  And after that book was published, John rang me about a possible subject for his next biography. ‘I’m thinking of JC Squire – what do you think? he asked, slightly nervous when he heard me burst out laughing. 'I think it’s an excellent idea,’ I replied, ‘especially as at this very moment my feet are resting on an almost complete set of The London Mercury someone has just bequeathed to me. Would you like them?’ John generously mentioned this too in the Acknowledgements of Shores of Paradise. I cannot adequately express how glad I am that our friendship led to the writing of two such books.

© Adrian Barlow, 2025

Illustrations: (i) the two books by John Smart under discussion; (ii) the title page of Virginia Woolf’s book, The Common Reader (second series). The Epigraph reads: “... I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be generally decided all claim to poetical honours.” Dr. Johnson, Life of Gray; (iii) Sir John Squire; The Book Collector - the yellow-covered copy is Volume 1, No. 1; (iv) John Smart’s biography of John Hayward, Tarantula’s Web.

I have also written about John Smart in two previous posts:

Tarantula: John Hayward, Man of Letters

At the Biographers’ Club Prize Dinner

Random Summer Reading: Little Boy lost

With time to spare the other day in Yorkshire, I dropped into my favourite independent bookshop, the one on the Grove in Ilkley. I came out with the last book I had expected to find or buy: Little Boy Lost, by Marghanita Laski, published in 1949, the year I was born, and now republished by Persephone books. I vaguely thought I’d read it before: I certainly remember it as one of the few modern novels my father ever owned.  I suspect he may have bought the book because he admired Marghanita Laski; he used to enjoy watching her and Jacob Bronowski on The Brains Trust every Sunday at teatime.

Having now read it, I’m sure this was for the first time. I do remember, though, having been puzzled by the name of the central character, Hilary (the English father searching for his lost child in postwar France) so I must have at least looked at it. Hilary I knew only as a surname – Sir Edmund Hilary my earliest hero – or as a girl’s name. The idea that a man could be called Hilary perhaps put me off.  The story itself, as I now know, is by turns moving and disturbing; it is beautifully told by an author who never wastes words and has so skilfully constructed the narrative that the resolution is only reached in the last paragraph of the final page.

It isn’t, however, just the search for the little boy lost that makes this book compelling. Much of the tension in the story derives from Laski’s evocation of small-town France, post Vichy, post war, where the aftermath of four years of conflicted loyalties – of collaboration and accommodation, of resistance and betrayal, clouds every conversation. Even the Mother Superior of the Orphanage which may or may not be housing Hilary’s son has to confess to the moral compromises she felt forced, during the Occupation and especially after the Liberation in 1944, to make.

For Hilary, compromise is ethically unthinkable; yet he too must wrestle with the dilemma presented by the little boy for whom he begins to feel an attachment, although nothing so far has persuaded him that he is the child of his wife, Lisa. He and she had separated the day after their son was born, just before the fall of Paris, he returning to England, she staying in France to join the Resistance, only to be captured and executed. The Mother Superior tries to persuade Hilary to take on responsibility for this waif, but Hilary cannot convince himself that this would be fair to Lisa (since their actual child would then for ever remain unfound) or to himself.

The later chapters, when he decides to sever ties with the child and plans to return to England, make disquieting reading, his self-justifications and attempts at putting the past behind him being set against the background of a frustrated visit to a local fairground. Self-justification turns to self-contempt, however, when he realises that a woman he has agreed to meet at the fair has spent the years of the Occupation enjoying the company of German soldiers stationed in the town. Ironically, though, it is a lucky win at one of the fairground stalls that same evening which leads to the final and wholly unexpected resolution of the novel – as I’ve said, on the very last page.

Little Boy Lost, a book I don’t suppose I had thought of for nearly sixty years and which I bought on impulse, is one I shall now never forget. It has also prompted me to plan on rereading a book I last read some twenty years ago, Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness, published within a year of Marghanita Laski’s novel. This, too, is a novel set in the aftermath of the war; it is also a story of the consequences of accommodation, collaboration and resistance, focusing especially on the guerilla activities of the Maquis. The central sections of the novel are set in London where two childhood friends, who met originally in France, are reunited and find new life, new friends and new dangers in the bombed-out churches, offices and houses of the City of London.

I first read The World My Wilderness not for its topographical or postwar setting but for a different kind of new life: Macaulay’s representation of the architectural wreckage of London being repossessed by the wildflowers that transform the rubble of war into a strangely beautiful brave new world. I included the book in a reading list I produced for a weekend course on ‘Ruins in Literature’ I taught about twenty years ago at Madingley Hall, the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education, where I used to work. I’m eager to re-read and compare it with Marghanita Laski’s novel.

But as it happens, I cannot yet re-read Rose Macaulay’s novel; it’s sitting on my shelves at home while I am in the USA for the next month. What I have read, however, is the historian Julian Jackson’s latest work: France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain (2023).

I am in awe of this book, the title of which perfectly explains its thesis. Not just focusing on, but wonderfully reconstructing, the trial of Pétain in the stifling and claustrophobic Palais de Justice next to Sainte Chapelle in Paris, Jackson demonstrates how the trial exposed a post-Liberation France bitterly divided against itself. Because Pétain had been technically head of state - though even that was a point at issue – France  itself was indeed in the dock, and Jackson shows that the whole trial was an indictment not just of one man but of the way a country that had a strong, almost mystical, sense of its grandeur, had failed to defend itself and its citizens or to support its allies.  I would not have bought France on Trial if I had not just read Little Boy Lost, but to have read two such books in succession has made my summer.

Adrian Barlow

The St. Francis window in Christ Church Cathedral

To Oxford, on St Frideswide’s Day, for Christ Church Cathedral’s annual Patronal Eucharist with its traditional procession to the shrine of St. Frideswide in the Latin Chapel. This year, though, the service included a second procession: to the west corner of the north transept for the dedication of a new stained glass window, presented to the Cathedral in memory of a much loved and admired Law Don in the College, Edward Hector Burn. It was for this, the dedication and my first chance to see the new window, that I had come to Oxford.

The light was already fading fast when the service began at six o’clock. I had arrived early, hoping to have time to visit WH Auden’s discreet memorial in the chapel at the east end of the south aisle: a small stone square, placed on the floor near where he used to sit when attending early morning communion every Sunday. Auden only came if the liturgy was from the BCP:

The Book of Common Prayer we knew

Was that of 1662:

Though with-it sermons may be well,

Liturgical reforms are hell.

 

The injunction on Auden’s memorial, ‘Bless what there is for being’, is a quotation from a poem of his, ‘Precious Five’, about the five senses; surprisingly, this would also be an apt epigraph for the Cathedral’s new window, which celebrates St. Francis and his love for the natural world. Like all good stained glass, it challenges you to keep looking and to keep coming back to look again. At first sight, seen at a distance from the nave, the design looks almost abstract though with a strong sense of movement. The lower third of the window is predominantly patterned grey (almost a kind of grisaille), though with strong upward flashes of light and dark green and occasionally blue. Come closer, and you can see that the patterns are ferns, grasses, leaves, stems and twigs, even (in the lower, right-hand section) the gnarled and twisted branches some may recognise as belonging to the famous Jabberwocky tree in the Christ Church garden. 

 

Come closer still:  in the centre light a small grey figure seems to be emerging from the surrounding

foliage and flowers - and this is Francis. Not Francis as he is usually seen in stained glass, however: I don’t know that I have ever before seen a St Francis without a halo, nor one whose head is covered by a cowl. His young face looks straight out at us, his long right hand is stretched across his body. There is something touchingly diffident, almost defensive, about this Francis: he seems perhaps overwhelmed by the natural world all around him. And suddenly the colours are stronger, richer – for the first time gold and red appear – and now, as one follows the colours upwards, flowers and birds both exotic and domestic fill the tops of the three lights and, above them, the tracery. Patient searching will reveal other animals too: creatures of the field, bees, even the pet dog that belonged to Edward Burn – the latter identified only by his initials, EHB, framed at the bottom of the centre light.

 

The service begins with a processional hymn. From the ante-Chapel at the west end of the Cathedral emerge the choristers, then representatives of the college and University, then a cluster of mainly elderly and mainly well-dressed men and women, members of the Order of St. Frideswide, scuttling down the aisle to keep up with the rapid pace set by the girls and boys of the choir. A solemn procession this is not, at least not until the Verger, wearing a black gown trimmed with scarlet panels and tassels, leads in the Cathedral clergy, the Dean and the Bishop’s party wearing golden vestments – copes, chasubles, dalmatics. It is an undeniably impressive spectacle, and the hymn is hardly long enough to allow the Bishop to reach the High Altar, commit his crozier to the deacon’s care and his mitre to his chaplain’s, and begin the liturgy.

 

After the introduction, the canticles and the Gospel reading, the Dean preaches a fine sermon. She describes the cathedral as a palimpsest, a stone document which successive centuries have altered by erasing or overwriting the old architectural features with new ones. Our cathedral isn’t a museum, she says; it’s dynamic, it evolves. In the medieval period it was full of stained glass, only a little of which still survives. In its place came some fine glass of the 17^th and, later, the 19^th century – most impressive of all, perhaps, the St. Frideswide window in the Latin Chapel, designed by Edward Burne-Jones and installed in 1859, when the artist was only 26. And now a new window has been added, the first addition to the Cathedral’s stained glass for over 120 years. Its subject, St. Francis surrounded by the natural world, could not be more timely or more necessary. The Dean hopes that this window, designed by John Reyntiens and created in his London Studio, will speak to all who care to look, to enjoy and to reflect on it.

 

Now comes the St. Frideswide procession, in which we are all encouraged to join. Led by an acolyte swinging a thurible of incense, we follow choir and clergy into the Latin Chapel and assemble around the shrine of the saint. It is very pleasing to hear an extract from the ‘Life of St. Frideswide’ read in the original 14^th century English. Clouds of incense (the acolyte now in full swing) accompany the description of how Frideswide’s father, pleased that his daughter wanted to become a nun (and in the very church where today she lies buried), sent for the Bishop of Lincoln to perform the ritual of admission:

 

The byscop for the kynges heste thuder he cam hymsulf

And share hure in the nonnerie with hire felawes twelve.

At the king’s behest the bishop came in person and cut off her hair 

alongside her twelve companions’ in the convent. [share : sheared]

 

At this point, we too are cut off – by the fire alarm. 

 

First the bell, and then a stentorian recorded voice barking at us to leave the cathedral; the verger, having abandoned his tasselled gown, reappears in a high-viz jacket exhorting members of the congregation not to go back for their coats (it is raining outside). Eventually we are all out, and for fifteen minutes we huddle in the nearest corner of Tom Quad, wondering whether we shall be allowed back in or whether the whole service will have to be abandoned and the new window remain undedicated. ‘If they really wanted so much incense,’ I heard someone mutter within hearing of the Dean, ‘they should have remembered to turn off the bloody fire alarm.’ 

 

But all is well: we are allowed back in, the liturgy is resumed and soon we are processing again – and rather less formally this time – to gather around the St. Francis window. It is remarkable how rapidly the atmosphere of the service is re-established: Prayers are said and thanks expressed:  for the life of Edward Burn; for the generosity of the donor; for the vision of the window’s designer and for the artistry and craftsmanship of those who made that vision a reality (stained glass is always a collaborative art).  At the climax of  the act of dedication the Bishop asperges the window and says:

 

I dedicate this window in honour of St. Francis

And hallow, bless and consecrate it

For the adornment of this holy place.

 

 As we return to our pews, I am struck by what I have just witnessed, by the sense that hallowing a window and sprinkling it with holy water is as much an act of faith in the future as an acknowledgement of our need to remember the past. Can I have been the only person to have had this thought?  

 

I think not, for this is one service I shall always remember. A fire alarm set off in a cathedral by a cloud of incense is a story too good to be wasted. No doubt it will become a tale ‘that has often been told and often been changed in the telling’. But I hope there’s every chance that this beautiful, challenging window will survive for centuries, long after the fire alarm has been forgotten.

 

Adrian Barlow

Notes:

Illustrations: photographs © Jane Moyle, by kind permission.

Links:

I have written several times in my blog about stained glass, e.g:

Reading Stained Glass: Corpus Christi and the Pelican

George Herbert’s ‘brittle crazy glasse'

References: 

Auden’s verse about the Book of Common Prayer comes from the poem ‘Doggerel by a Senior Citizen’ in his posthumous collection Thank You, Fog (Faber, 1973)

 

‘The Life of St. Frideswide’ (whose original name was Frithuswith) comes from The Shorter South English Legendary, a compilation of the lives of the early English Saints, mostly dating from the 13^th to the 15^th centuries.

 

 ‘a tale that has often been told…’: I have slightly adapted the words of Thomas Becket in TS Eliot’s play, Murder in the Cathedral (Faber, 1935), when he speaks of how, in time,

…age and forgetfulness sweeten memory

Only like a dream that has often been told

And often been changed in the telling. (Act 2, p.69)

 

Paris, ‘patrimonie’ and roofs

We have just returned from a week’s holiday in Paris and Versailles. Before setting off I read the second most exhilarating book I have encountered since last Christmas: Rooftoppers,¹ a novel about Sophie, a twelve-year-old girl in Paris searching for her mother. Almost everyone else in the story believes her mother to have drowned in a tragedy in the English Channel; Sophie herself had only been rescued by chance after being found floating in a cello case. It’s a book by the award-winning children’s author, Katherine Rundell. (I should explain here that the most exhilarating book of all I’ve read this year is a new biography of the metaphysical poet John Donne.² The author is an Oxford don, a fellow of All Souls, the same Katherine Rundell.)

We stayed at a hotel in rue de Richelieu in the 2^eme Arrondisement, close (as it happened) to the magnificently long building that formerly housed the Bibliothèque Nationale until President Mitterand modestly decreed that a new national library, the  Bibliothèque Francois-Mitterand, be built next to the Seine. Across the road was the École Nationale des Chartes: ‘Grand établissement d’enseignement supérieur au service de l’histoire, de l’histoire de l’art, de la philologie, de l’archéologie et des métiers de la conservation du patrimonie et des bibliothèques’. This lofty description, spelt out on the wall of an actually rather modest building, was also translated into English and – though possibly not for the benefit of any passer-by who could read neither French nor English – into Latin. I’m struggling to think of anywhere comparable in England, somewhere that at least embodies heritage, even if it does not teach patrimonie; All Souls,Oxford, perhaps– or not? 

It was sometimes unbearably hot in Paris – and when I saw water being sluiced along the gutters, I recalled my first visit to the city, in August 1969; then, I had deliberately walked in the gutters to keep my feet cool. It did rain once last week, however: a biblical downpour while we were having supper in the Brasserie Vaudeville, opposite the Bourse. This restaurant originally opened in 1918, just as the Great War was grinding uncertainly towards its end – surely a bold time to start a business? – and it’s somewhere I shall always cherish, for three reasons. First, the food is terrific. Second, it retains all its original and very stylish decoration: Art Deco avant la lettre (the term – but not the style – originating with the 1925 Paris World Fair, the  Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes). Third, since 2004 the restaurant has sponsored a distinguished literary prize, the Prix littéraire le Vaudeville, and photographs of previous winners hang on its walls. Food, style and literature united: ‘They order,’ as Laurence Sterne so rightly said, ‘this matter better in France.’³

In Rooftoppers Sophie criss-crosses Paris, looking for her mother, at rooftop rather than at street level. Taught by Matteo, a boy who lives among the skylights and chimney pots of the city, she learns how to climb, run and jump safely, how to navigate her way from one street – even from one arrondisement – to another; he even teaches her tightrope walking. These are skills that Katherine Rundell herself has acquired. In the Introduction to the novel, she says, ‘I’ve always loved being up high; I love aeroplanes, and mountains, and flying on the flying trapeze. I’ve always been shy, and I love the idea of seeing the world when it can’t see you. When I was younger, I taught myself to walk on a tightrope – I find the feeling of focus and balance and height it brings a miraculous thing.’

The rooftops of Paris are astonishing in their variety, especially in the ingenuity with which extra space is found for rooms in the roof space. Part of the secret, of course, lies in the ubiquitous mansard attic roof, a style well illustrated in Versailles – on a grand scale at the 17^th century Chateau and, later, on a domestic scale seen on a series of small shops in the rue Royale. Though the lower section of such a roof has a very steep pitch, the pitch of the higher section is gentler: easier to walk or run across. When Sophie is just beginning to learn, she asks Matteo what is the worst type of roof surface – copper, because it is slippery? ‘Non,’ he replies, ‘Stone tiles, the old ones, from the old days.’ He explains that they are too easy to dislodge, and the noise they would make crashing down might give away the presence of someone on the roof. He prefers slate or copper, and tells her flat roofs are best.

I’m surprised Matteo makes no reference to zinc. Rooftoppers is mostly set in pre-First World War Paris, when zinc was already a regular choice of roofing material:  it had been introduced by Baron Haussmann in the 1840s and apparently now covers 80% of all roofs in the capital. In 2014 an application was made for the zinc rooftops of Paris to be recognised as a world-heritage site, but more recently it is the professional skill of the zinguers, the welders of zinc roofs who have the knowledge and expertise to create these practical as well as aesthetic features of the Parisian roofscape, which has been listed in the inventory of France’s ‘invisible’ cultural patrimonie. I will admit, though, that welded zinc isn’t necessary to the plot of this astonishing novel. In the end, Sophie almost flies across the rooftops to be reunited with the mother no-one but she believed she’d ever meet again. We see them, finally, spinning ‘round and round until they looked less like two strangers and more like one single laughing body’.  

On our last full day in Paris we took a nostalgic train journey to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, passing the University of Nanterre, which proclaims itself L’Université des Possibles. I wonder whether Katherine Rundell has seen this slogan; if she has, I think she’d approve: ‘Never ignore a possible!’ runs like a mantra through Rooftoppers.

 

© Adrian Barlow

Notes:

1.     Katherine Rundell, Rooftoppers (London: Faber & Faber, 2013)

2.     Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite: the transformations of John Donne (London: Faber & Faber 2022)

3.     The opening sentence of Laurence Sterne’s 1768 novel without a plot, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy.

Illustrations:

Fig. 1 A rooftop view of Paris looking towards the Eiffel Tower and the dome of Les Invalides. This photograph first accompanied my 2013 post, Paris, as I see it

Fig.2 Rooftops seen from ground level (rue de Richelieu)

Both photographs (c) the author

At Cheltenham Jazz festival: ‘the natural noise of good'

 

'I rather like being on the edge of things’, says Philip Larkin at the start of a BBC Monitor programme, Down Cemetery Road, made in 1964. You certainly couldn’t imagine his ever saying, “I rather like being in the swing of things”. On the other hand, of swing, in terms of jazz , he was a passionate advocate. He loved ‘The wonderful music that swept the world during the first half of this century [he was writing in 1970], so wonderful that it sang songs about itself (‘Everybody’s Doing It’, ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing If it Ain’t Got That Swing’)’.

I thought of Larkin when on Saturday, the only sunny day of last weekend, I walked down the road to see what was going on at my local Jazz Festival. Montpellier Gardens, usually quiet and quintessentially Cheltenham, was transformed. A huge blue-and-white big top dominated the scene, but the crowds were all outside the tent, encamped for now in front of the Free Stage: families with very small children claiming what space they could with picnic rugs and baskets; the old – and there were plenty of us there as well – commandeering the few seats scattered around. Everyone else stood, talking, listening to the music, enjoying themselves just by being there.

I retreated to the Bandstand, which was quieter and cooler. (It was from there that I took the photo above: a panoramic image which, somewhat unnervingly, uncoils the wrought-iron circular balustrading of what claims to be one of the earliest bandstands in Britain.) A couple who had also sought the shade asked me what music I had come to hear. Ah, I explained, I hadn’t actually come for the music –  realising as I said it how absurd that sounded. ‘I just like to see people enjoying themselves.’ It was true: there’s something slightly intoxicating about a scene – especially an outdoor scene – where everyone is simply being happy. The couple smiled. ‘Enjoy’, they said.

‘En joie’. Jazz, his kind of jazz, gave Larkin joy. Twenty years ago, Tom Courtenay did a one-man show about Larkin called Pretending to be myself. The stage was cluttered with packing cases and odd pieces of furniture: Courtenay (who had devised the show himself) set the play on the day in 1974 when Larkin had regretfully moved out of the flat he’d lived in almost since he had become Librarian at the University of Hull. Centre stage was an aged radiogram with, around it, some of Larkin’s record collection.  Courtenay, who looked nothing like Philip Larkin but moved and stood and blinked exactly as Larkin used to do, chose a record and put it on. Sidney Bechet. As the music played, Larkin started to sway, very slightly and never moving his feet. When  the music stopped, he stopped too, and a great smile broke across his face. He just stood and stood there, beaming and absorbed in his own happiness:

On me your voice falls as they say love should,

Like an enormous yes. My Crescent City

Is where your speech alone is understood,

 

And greeted as the natural noise of good …. (For Sidney Bechet)

 

I have always admired Tom Courtenay as an actor, and never more than in that moment.

Before I became a teacher, I doubt if I had read much of Larkin’s verse except for ‘Church Going’.  But in my first year High Windows was published and in my second I taught The Whitsun Weddings as a set text. Larkin’s poetry has lived with me ever since. Towards the other end of my career, I was invited by the Larkin Society to give a lecture in Hull at a conference for teachers teaching Larkin. I chose to talk about what jazz had meant to him and how this was reflected in his own writing of, and about, poetry. I started by trying to dispel the image of Larkin as an irredeemably miserable man:

Few things have given me more pleasure in life than listening to jazz. I don’t claim to be original in this: for the generations that came to adolescence between the wars jazz was that unique private excitement that youth seems to demand. (‘Introduction to All What Jazz’)

That first sentence (‘Few things ….’) is echoed over and over in his writing and talking about jazz. I explained to my audience at Hull, that when he had been a guest on Desert Island Discs, Larkin had chosen two records by singers from the Thirties, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. He’d chosen Bessie’s song ‘Down in the Dumps’ because (as he explained to Roy Plomley ) in spite of its title ‘She sounds so full of life and, as she says, vitality’; he chose ‘These Foolish Things’ because, although ‘I always thought that the words were a little pseudo-poetic, Billie here sings them with such a passionate conviction that I think they really become poetry.’ When asked at the end of the programme which of his eight records he would choose if he were only able to take one, he replied, ‘It would have to be one of the jazz records. I can’t live without jazz.’ 

It is interesting, and perhaps revealing, that Larkin wrote so rarely about ‘that unique private excitement’, jazz, in his poetry. This might suggest that he wanted, consciously or otherwise, to keep these two key areas of his life separate. But on the rare occasions when the two come together, the effect can be almost overwhelming. So I went on to compare and contrast Larkin’s bleak but evocative poem ‘Reference Back’ (‘The flock of notes those antique negroes blew / Out of Chicago air’) with his private ode to joy, ‘For Sidney Bechet’. Both are fine poems, each repaying the reader’s careful attention, and proving Larkin’s point that ‘at bottom poetry, like all art, is inextricably bound up with giving pleasure’. And when he said ‘like all art’, he was talking about jazz – jazz as he expresses it in poetry: ‘the natural noise of good’.

© Adrian Barlow

All quotations above about jazz come from Philip Larkin’s two collections of essays, interviews and reviews, Required Writing (1983) and Further Requirements (2001), both published by Faber.

Illustration: the Cheltenham Jazz Festival 2023, as seen from the Bandstand in Montpellier Gardens.

I have written about Larkin before:

Re-reading Julian Barnes: on poetry and ‘the poet’

Yet Sit and See: on the Choruses in Shakespeare’s 'Henry V'

Whenever I think about Henry V, I think about Monmouth /Trefynwy, the Welsh border town where Henry was born and where (long ago) I used to teach. It’s a play I encountered first at the age of eleven, in the worst of all possible ways: reading it clumsily round the class. Four years later I ‘did’ it for O level, and watched the Laurence Olivier film; twenty years on, I took a coachload of my own pupils to see to see Kenneth Branagh playing Henry at Stratford in 1984. That was from Monmouth; there, too, I directed Henry V as a junior school play. I wanted to see if children aged 11-13 couldn’t get much more from the play by acting, rather than from just reading it round the class. Of course they could, and did: two of the boys, for whom this was their first real experience of acting, went on to become professional actors.

We acted in the round. My Chorus of a dozen young children were on-stage all the time, sitting around the edge of the circle and sometimes jumping up to be cheering crowds waving the troops off from Southampton or soldiers on the watch – ‘watch’ a key word in the play – the night before battle. Sometimes they spoke in unison, sometimes alone; at others, a small cluster of voices highlighted one phrase then passed it on to be added to by another cluster. Sometimes they moved as they spoke and perhaps they mimed, suiting the action to the word; at others they were still, letting words alone do the travelling and the audience do the thinking:

For ‘tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,

Carry them here and there, jumping ‘o’er time,

Turning th’accomplishment of many years

Into an hour-glass.

 

An hour-glass doesn’t just measure time; it turns it upside down, making past present, the old time new again. Through all the Choruses – and none of Shakespeare’s plays has more Choruses than this – run the words ‘imagination’, ‘imagine’, ‘imagined’: if our mind’s eye can’t see what the words and actions the players are trying to convey, we might as well leave the theatre right now. Life is too short: momentum is everything. Act 3’s Chorus begins:

 

Thus with imagined wing our swift scene flies

In motion of no less celerity

Than that of thought. Suppose that you have seen ….

 

‘Suppose … Behold …Follow, follow! … Behold …Suppose’:  these repeated words, stretched out across twenty-five lines, turn the whole of Act 3’s Chorus into an extended chiasmus, an hour-glass of words that turn back on themselves while the sands of time keep running.

 

But the Chorus of Act 4 (my Chorus – I learned it at prep school and still have it by heart) is different. It is the longest of them all and, by contrast with the excited pace of the earlier choruses, here time has slowed almost to a standstill:

 

Now entertain conjecture of a time

When creeping murmur and the poring dark

Fills the wide vessel of the universe.

 

‘Entertain conjecture’ – it’s impossible to say these two trisyllabic words quickly: their wide-open vowel sounds demand each syllable be given its full weight. Nowhere else in any of the Choruses do two such long-drawn-out words sit side by side, almost defying scansion. Together the invite us to conjecture/conjure in our mind’s eye this moment in the middle of a long night when sound and sight are almost indiscernible. On the one hand these two senses are personified as creatures creeping and peering over the terrain of the next day’s battle  – a landscape of carnage being engendered in the ‘foul womb of night’; on the other, they are fused into a single thick miasma that has seeped everywhere over the earth and ‘fills’ the great upturned porridge pot that both encloses and embodies the universe. 

 

In the next eleven lines, the ‘hum of either army’ and the ‘secret whispers of each other’s watch’ at first suggest a sense of balance: fire answers fire and steed threatens steed; likewise the armourers’ ‘busy hammers’ strike a ‘dreadful note of preparation’ from both camps. But now the cocks crow, the church bell tolls, and the Chorus pans from army to army. The French are ‘[over]confident and overlusty’: they impatiently ‘chide the cripple tardy-gaited night’ for limping ‘so tediously away’. The ‘poor condemned English’, by contrast, have nothing to do but wait ‘patiently’, like sacrificial animals ruminating on the fate in store for them. No one could call this ragtag of an army overconfident and over-lusty: half-starved and ill-equipped, they already appear to the moon looking down at them as just ‘so many horrid ghosts’.

 

Then Harry appears:

O now, who will behold

The royal captain of this ruined band

Walking from watch to watch, from tent to tent?

 

The alliteration of (first) ‘royal’ and ‘ruined’ neatly contrasts the apparently hopeless state of the soldiers with the optimism of their king, a man with no time for the darkness of (second) the ‘weary and all-watchèd night’. Once again the hour-glass is turned on its head and the deadly darkness that had filled ‘the wide vessel of the universe’ is briskly replaced by ‘A largess universal like the sun’.  Harry’s gift for ‘thawing cold fear’ among the soldiers makes him seem godlike. Those wretches who were ‘pining and pale before’, now feel the warm glow of confidence that contact with the king creates. It used to be believed some illnesses might be cured if only the sufferer could be touched by a king, the Royal Touch relieving the King’s Evil (scrofula), for instance. Shakespeare’s ‘little touch of Harry in the night’ taps into this superstition. It’s also the Chorus’s final glimpse of the battlefield on the night before battle. After this, all he can do is apologise to the audience for what’s coming next: as acted, the battle will be no better than a ‘brawl ridiculous’:

 

Yet sit and see,

Minding true things by what their mockeries be.

 

Listen -watch -imagine.

 

Adrian Barlow

 

Illustrations: (i) A poster advertising the new museum at Agincourt (Azincourt, en France)’’

(ii) the discreet French memorial on a corner of the battlefield. The rough-hewn granite stele contains a simple cross, the one word ‘Azincourt’ and the date 1415. The small stone at its side speaks of ‘courage and faithfulness’ a lesson ‘to be remembered always.’ Photographs © the author.

 

 

I have written about Henry V once before, in Bottom, Thou art Translated – into Korean.