What is (or was) Cambridge English?

On a late autumn afternoon in Cambridge I am with a group of cheerful Chinese visitors who are enjoying the sun and the views along the Backs. They pose for photographs next to the smiling statue of Confucius in Clare gardens. From their shoulders hang tote bags emblazoned with the words ‘Cambridge English’ and, underneath, the strapline The most valuable English qualifications in the world.

Google ‘Cambridge English’ and you’ll reach the website of Cambridge ESOL which is a division of Cambridge Assessment, the ‘trading name’ of the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate, which is in its turn a non-teaching department of the University. Cambridge ESOL uses the label ‘Cambridge English’ as an umbrella for all the qualifications it offers in English for Speakers of Other Languages.  It defines ‘Cambridge English’ like this:

•             an international language including the world’s major varieties of English        
•       English that is understood and used globally for business, study and everyday living
•             the English spoken in the real world – not just in the classroom.

So, 'Cambridge English' is at once a brand (‘Cambridge’ itself is a powerful international brand), a set of language qualifications and an all-embracing variety of English. Behind those inclusive words ‘international’, ‘globally’ and ‘real world’ lurks mischievously another definition of ‘Cambridge English’ – that it is everything ‘Oxford English’ isn’t.  ‘Oxford English’ is the English of Brideshead Revisited or – for current viewers – the English spoken upstairs at Downton Abbey. It belongs, so the stereotypes suggest, to a narrow and out-dated world, time-bound, class-bound, exclusive,

And oh, so seductively superior, so seductively

                   self-effacingly

                   deprecatingly

                   superior. —

We wouldn't insist on it for a moment

                   but we are

                      we are

                   you admit we are

                      superior. —

Thus D H Lawrence scathingly in his poem ‘The Oxford Voice’. By contrast 'Cambridge English', at least as offered by Cambridge ESOL, presents itself as class-neutral, country and culture-neutral.

Cambridge English (this time without inverted commas) means something else, too. For much of the past century it has signified a philosophical approach to English as a discipline centred on the study of literature rather than language, and on the principles of close reading and practical criticism rather than historical, cultural or critical theory. When Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (by training an Oxford classicist) delivered his inaugural lecture as King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge (29th January 1913) he reminded his audience that the University Ordinance establishing this Chair had included the following statement:

It shall be the duty of the Professor to deliver courses of lectures on English Literature from the age of Chaucer onwards, and otherwise to promote, so far as may be in his power, the study in the University of the subject of English Literature. The Professor shall treat this subject on literary and critical rather than on philological and linguistic lines.

This definition at once distinguished Cambridge from Oxford English: at Oxford the study of English was decidedly linguistic and philological, beginning with Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon poetry, some five hundred years before the age of Chaucer. At Cambridge to this day, Old English is taught not by members of the English Faculty but within the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic.

These differences between Oxford and Cambridge approaches to English are, in the twenty-first century, in most respects more apparent than real. But if you look at the Cambridge English Faculty’s website, you will see prime acknowledgement given to I A Richards for his defining contribution to English Studies – practical criticism; by comparison, F R Leavis gets only a passing mention. Yet for many people, even today, it is Leavis rather than Richards who embodies Cambridge English at its most influential and controversial.  Leavis himself believed this: “We were and knew we were Cambridge – the essential Cambridge, in spite of Cambridge,” he was fond of saying about himself, his wife and their Scrutiny circle.

Leavis himself was acutely conscious that Cambridge English and its Oxford counterpart were worlds apart. Late in his career at Cambridge he wrote to his old friend Tom Henn, who taught English at St. Catharine’s, about the new generation of people being appointed to teach English at Cambridge:

All I can see any point in saying further about Appointments is that we must stop the movement in of Oxford (all the Oxford men hate the Tripos) and the recruitment of alleged specialists in this or that period or subject: we desperately need men genuinely interested in literature, & intelligent about it in such ways as make them good teachers of intelligent undergraduates, and good examiners.

I came across this revealing letter, written in Leavis’s characteristic anguished hand, just the other day in the University Library Manuscript Room (UL/ENGL 2/13). I don't believe it has been published before. I found it unexpectedly while doing some research of my own into  teaching as the heart of Cambridge English from Quiller-Couch to David Holbrook. I mentioned Holbrook recently in The Singer and the Song, and I shall write more fully about him again before long because his key book, English for Maturity, is fifty years old this year – an anniversary no one seems to have noticed. As for Leavis’s letter, it too has an anniversary: it was written on 7th November 1961, fifty years ago today.

[photo: King's College Chapel from the Backs, 3.30pm Tuesday 1st November 2011

Twelfth Night: counting on Olivia

I have been asked how to scan the following line from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night:

Yet I suppose him virtuous, know him noble. (1.v.244)

I thought it would be easy, but it isn’t.

It always helps to look at a line in the context of the speech and of the scene in which it appears. Viola, disguised as Cesario, has come to woo the Countess Olivia on the Duke Orsino’s behalf. It’s an awkward encounter: Viola has already fallen for Orsino, though can’t admit it since he thinks she is a man, and now has to try to persuade Olivia that she should accept Orsino as her husband – a man in whom Olivia has no interest. This awkwardness shows itself plainly in the staccato forms and fractured rhythms of their conversation. After the preliminaries have been conducted in prose (V: ‘Are you the lady of the house?’ O: ‘If I do not usurp myself, I am.’ V: ‘Most certain if you are she you do usurp yourself’ etc.) Viola switches to blank verse:

Lady, you are the cruell’st she alive

If you will lead these graces to the grave

And leave the world no copy.

But Olivia will not join in, and answers still in prose: ‘O sir, I will not be so hard-hearted.’ She mocks Viola and Orsino by giving an account of her own beauty which, like Shakespeare’s sonnet 130 (‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’) is a spoof on conventional poetic praise of women’s beauty:

I will give out divers schedules of my beauty. It shall be inventoried and every particle and utensil labelled to my will, as, item, two lips, indifferent red; item, two grey eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin and so forth.

Viola is not in the mood to be mocked and replies, rather more forthrightly than she ought:

I see you what you are, you are too proud,

But if you were the devil, you are fair.

Recovering herself, however, she gets back to the job she is meant to be doing:

My lord and master loves you. O, such love

Could be but recompensed though you were crowned

The nonpareil of beauty …

and it is only at this moment that Olivia too switches to blank verse. She completes Viola’s half line by asking (impatiently? quizzically? sarcastically?)

                                                            How does he love me?

But now there are twelve syllables in the line, not the conventional ten, and the underlying iambic rhythm is disrupted by the dominant stress on ‘How’ for Olivia’s question follows the rhythmic formula DUM-diddy dum-di. (cf Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet 43: ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways’). Viola tries one last time to keep to Orsino's instructions  (‘O then unfold the passion of my love, / Surprise her with discourse of my dear faith.’ 1.iv.24-5) by telling Olivia he loves her

With adorations, fertile tears,

With groans that thunder love, with sighs of fire.

But this is finally too much for Olivia, who snaps:

Your lord does know my mind, I cannot love him.

On its own this eleven-syllable line shows little sign of being blank verse. Politeness, however, demands she should not be quite so abrupt, so she begins another inventory, this time itemising Orsino’s good qualities and looks, and this time in verse:

Yet I suppose him virtuous, know him noble,

Of great estate, of fresh and stainless youth,

In voices well divulged, free, learn’d, and valiant,

And in dimension and the shape of nature

A gracious person; but yet I cannot love him.

He might have took his answer long ago.            

But of this speech only two lines are conventional iambic pentameters. Every other line is stretched or distorted in some way as Olivia struggles to contain her annoyance and frustration behind a mask of good manners. Indeed, it’s best not to try to squeeze the lines into a shape they so clearly resist, but to be guided by pause and emphasis. I offer the following suggested scansion:

	ˇ       ⁄	ˇ       ⁄	ˇ       ⁄	⁄    ˇ	⁄      ˇ	Sylls.
1	Your lord	does know	my mind,	(I) cannot	love him.	11
	⁄  ˇ    ˇ	⁄      ˇ	⁄    ˇ    ˇ	⁄        ˇ	⁄    ˇ
2	Yet I sup-	pose him	virtuous,	know him	noble,	12
	ˇ       ⁄	ˇ       ⁄	ˇ       ⁄	ˇ           ⁄	ˇ         ⁄
3	Of great	estate,	of fresh	and stain-	less youth,	10
	ˇ     ⁄	ˇ        ⁄	ˇ       ⁄	ˇ           ⁄	⁄     ˇ ˇ
4	In voi-	ces well	divulged,	free, learn’d	(&) valiant,	12
	⁄    ˇ    ˇ	⁄     ˇ	⁄     ˇ	⁄        ˇ	⁄   ˇ
5	And in di-	mension	and the	shape of	nature	12
	⁄   ˇ  ˇ	⁄      ˇ	ˇ     ˇ     ⁄	⁄    ˇ	⁄       ˇ
6	(A) gracious	person;	but yet I	cannot	love him.	13
	⁄       ˇ           ˇ	⁄   ˇ	⁄     ˇ	⁄    ˇ  ˇ
7	He might have	took his	answer	long ago.		10

I’ve set myself two rules here. First, to try to find five stresses for each line, which, even introducing trisyllabic feet (e.g. in line 6) is not too difficult since so many of the lines have more than ten syllables.  Second, to follow the classical principle that you cannot have a pause – a caesura – in the middle of a metrical foot: if I had scanned line 2 in standard iambics, the pause would have come in the middle of the fourth foot (‘-uous, II know’) which wouldn’t do.

Not everyone will be happy with my stressing the two ‘ands’ in line 5, nor with the way I have scanned the second half of line 6. But the fact that Olivia uses the statement ‘I cannot love him’ twice in seven lines invites variation; and dramatically I think an actresss and an audience might get more out of this speech by emphasizing the contrast between her feelings and Orsino’s in the last two lines.

I'm grateful to the student who asked my advice about this speech. I've known Twelfth Night almost all my life, and it was the first Shakespeare play in which I ever acted, but I have never had to think so hard before about how a line should actually be spoken. Better late than never, I suppose!

The Singer and the Song

The other day I was in Sèvres, at CIEP - the Centre internationale d’études pédagogique - giving a lecture entitled ‘The Singer and the Song’. This was the final session of a two-day training programme with colleagues from all over France and Belgium who teach English Language and Literature to students taking the OIB, the British option within the French Bac.

My starting point was to ask why students of all ages so often find poetry less appealing or accessible than fiction or drama, and I wanted to focus on what poets themselves have to say about what they think poetry is, what it does and why they write it. Too often, it seems to me, we take these questions for granted or we simply avoid asking them because the answers are too difficult. My title therefore celebrated the poet as well as the poetry: to help students see the point of poetry, we should listen to what poets have to say about themselves as poets and about poetry as a way of using the imagination with precision.

For a start, of course, poets sing. ‘Arma virumque cano’ sang Virgil as he launched himself into the Aeneid. W.H. Auden told his fellow poets it was their job to sing:

          Follow, poet, follow right

          To the bottom of the night,

          With your unconstraining voice

          Still persuade us to rejoice;

          With the farming of a verse

          Make a vineyard of the curse,

          Sing of human unsuccess

          In a rapture of distress ….

Robert Herrick famously listed all the subjects he wanted to sing about:

I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers,

Of April, May, of June, and July flowers.

I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes,

Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal-cakes.

I write of youth, of love, and have access

By these to sing of cleanly wantonness.

I sing of dews, of rains, and piece by piece

Of balm, of oil, of spice, and ambergris.

I sing of Time's trans-shifting; and I write

How roses first came red, and lilies white.

I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing

The court of Mab, and of the fairy king.

I write of Hell; I sing (and ever shall)

Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all. (‘The Argument of his Booke’)

For Herrick, as for Auden, to write and to sing are synonymous in poetry. His subjects embrace the whole of human experience from the every day to the ever after. It’s important for students to learn that no subject is off limits for a poet: Yeats wrote in ‘The Spur’:

You think it horrible that lust and rage

Should dance attendance on my old age.

They were not such a curse when I was young;

What else have I to spur me into song?

So what do poets say about why they write poetry and what poetry can do? Anthony Hecht first:

One of the things I think I learned from Elizabeth Bishop, from Thomas Hardy, from Robert Frost, concerned particularity and clarity of seeing. Seen with enough precision, things become wonderful, and one can see a world in a grain of sand.

Two things appeal to me about this statement. First, I like the way Hecht is eager to acknowledge what he has learned from other poets:  for poetry always involves a dialogue between writers past and present. I noted, for instance, in my talk how Seamus Heaney in a recent poem* echoes John Keats who in turn echoes Christopher Marlowe. This is the debt that poets of the present acknowledge to the poets of the past, and helping students to recognize or discover such links for themselves is one of the joys of teaching: it is what makes them and us part of the ‘community of literature’ – a community that involves readers as well as writers.

Second, those words ‘particularity’, ‘clarity’ and ‘precision’ lie at the heart of poetry and perhaps at the heart of all art that attempts to represent the world to us. John Ruskin had this to say (in Modern Painters, though he kept repeating the point throughout his life):

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this word is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion all in one.

This reminds me immediately of Matthew Arnold’s stress on aiming to ‘see life clearly and to see it whole’, an aim which in a later generation E. M. Forster was also to stress. Because Forster lived such a long life (he lived until he was ninety and died in 1970) it is easy to forget that he was the contemporary of the poets who lived and died in the Great War, that Rupert Brooke admired him and that he admired Edward Thomas, who wrote thus about poetry:

Concentration, intensity of mood, is the one necessary condition in the poet and in the poem. By this concentration something is detached from the confused immensity of life and receives individuality.

I tried to demonstrate this by picking up the reference to ‘the court of Mab’ in Herrick’s poem and recalling how Shakespeare first introduced Queen Mab in Romeo and Juliet:

She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes

In shape no bigger than an agate stone

On the forefinger of an alderman,

Drawn with a team of little atomies

Over men's noses as they lie asleep;

Her wagon spokes made of long spinners' legs,

The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers;

Her traces, of the smallest spider web;

Her collars, of the moonshine's wat'ry beams;

Her whip, of cricket's bone; the lash, of film;

Her wagoner, a small grey-coated gnat,

Not half so big as a round little worm

Pricked from the lazy finger of a maid …. (Act 1 Scene 4)

If ever there was a prime example of a poet ‘using imagination with precision’ (a phrase I heard used earlier this year by Professor Priya Gopal), this is surely it. And not just concentration: look how the fingers - the ‘finger of an alderman’ at the start of the passage and the ‘lazy’ finger of a maid at the end - both point us in directions that take us far beyond the simple idea that Queen Mab’s carriage is miniscule. These are not similes, and if they are examples of metaphorical language they remind us that poetry and metaphor are inextricable:

Poetry is not ‘writing about’, but exploring experience metaphorically. For poetry is a development of metaphor. Metaphor is not, as we were taught at school, a figure of speech. In language it is the means by which we extend our awareness of experience into new realms. Poetry is part of this process of giving apparent order to the flux of experience.

This comes from David Holbrook, author of that once-seminal book on teaching English, English for Maturity (1961). I ended my talk on ‘The Singer and the Song’ by suggesting we should encourage students to think of poetry as experimental; that the whole point of ‘exploring language metaphorically’ is to enable us to understand how words used with concentration, precision and clarity work for poets as writers and for us as readers; how they unlock the imagination and help to explain ‘the flux of experience’ - which I take to be the same as Edward Thomas’s ‘confused immensity of life’.  Seen in these terms, poetry comes quickly to have a purpose students grasp and value. And having done so, they approach the singer with a sharper ear and the song with a clearer eye.

                        

*The poem is ‘Chanson d’Aventure’ (again, a song) in Heaney’s 2010 collection Human Chain. The poem by Keats that he directly echoes is ‘This Living Hand’ which in turn echoes a key line from the final soliloquy of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.

[photo: Sèvres seen from the terrace of C.I.E.P.  early morning, 14 October 2011

'Bottom, thou art translated' (into Korean)

In Venice last week, I read of the plans to run a festival in 2012 at the Globe Theatre in London of Shakespeare’s complete works performed in thirty seven different languages. It’s a marvellous idea for a festival, but I confess my initial reaction was thoroughly parochial – won’t it just show what you lose when you don’t have Shakespeare’s own language? Won’t it be, I thought, a linguistic example of Hamlet without the Prince?

I used to admire Robert Frost’s definition of poetry as ‘what gets lost in translation’. I’ve learned better. It would be truer to say that literature is what survives in translation. As I stood in the Campo San Giacometto, near the statue of Old Gobbo the crouching hunchback, and thought of The Merchant of Venice and of Othello, I realized how inadequate Frost’s definition is. I remembered once finding myself in Berlin, watching a production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters performed in German, a language in which I can just about order a currywurst without making an idiot of myself. Luckily it was a play I knew well, and the production was breathtakingly good, so I could concentrate on the acting and on the direction – in fact, on the play itself.

But how come I was able to know the play at all? Through translation, obviously, since I can speak and read barely a word of Russian. I’d first read the play, as I read all Chekhov, in the sixth form. Even before that I’d seen The Seagull at the Queen’s Theatre in London, with Vanessa Redgrave, Peggy Ashcroft and Peter McEnery, when I was fourteen – my first experience of a West End play. Three years later I’d seen Olivier’s production of Three Sisters at the National Theatre. These were defining theatrical experiences for me, but without translation I would not have had them.

Shakespeare himself, of course, depended utterly on translation. Translation allowed him access to the Venetian stories that gave him Desdemona and Iago, Shylock and Launcelot Gobbo – to the plots of most of his plays, in fact. Writers are always crossing boundaries, borrowing from each other, translating each other’s ideas. It’s what they do. And actually it’s what we do as readers, too. You could push the idea even further and suggest that all communication involves an act of translating: decoding what someone else has said or written and trying to understand it in our own terms.

I like the brisk approach the Director of the Globe Theatre, Dominic Dromgoole, is taking to his new festival. As The Times reported,

Each company will get at least two performances of a maximum length of 2 hours and 15 minutes. There will be no surtitles because Dromgoole believes that they undermine the chance to “slip free” of the text and consider the play in a fresh light.

To keep a Shakespeare play to 2 hours, you have to cut the text. It cannot be treated too reverentially. It can of course be cut even further, right to the bone: Tom Stoppard did this memorably with Dogg’s Hamlet, where the play is reduced to 10 minutes and given a hilarious reprise in an encore lasting 90 seconds. Shakespeare himself refers to the ‘two hours’ traffic of our stage’ in the Prologue to Romeo and Juliet (to be performed at the Globe in Brazilian Portuguese) but it would take you more than two hours just to read every word of that play.

Only one play of the whole Shakespeare canon is to be performed in English: Henry V. At first I thought this a too-obvious choice: could it really have been chosen because it is all about England and Britishness, a patriotic pageant to be used whenever national crisis requires a dramatic commentary on current events –  Olivier’s 1944 film, for instance, or Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 version? I’m sure the answer is more interesting that this.

Almost uniquely, Henry V is a play in which Shakespeare explores and dramatizes issues of translation. These issues are political: at the start of the play, the Archbishop of Canterbury explains to Henry that he has a just claim to the throne of France because the French ‘unjustly glose’ [i.e. gloss] the Latin statement In terram Salicam mulieres ne succedant to mean that no woman can inherit the throne of France. At the end of the play Henry forces the King of France to write in Latin and in French a statement declaring that Henry is his ‘dear son-in-law and heir to the throne of France’: Notre très-cher fils Henri Roi d’Angleterre Héritier de France.

This power politics is offset, of course, by two  comic scenes. In the first, Katherine, daughter of the King of France, is being instructed by her lady-in-waiting, Alice, in some basic English vocabulary:

Katherine: Comment appellez-vous le pied et la robe?

Alice: Le foot, Madame; et le coun.

Katherine: Le foot et le coun; O Seigneur Dieu! Ils sont mots de son mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique, et non pour les dames d’honneur d’user.

It sounds almost like a snatch of dialogue from Blackadder. Then, secondly, after the Battle of Agincourt, when Katherine knows that she is the spoils of war and Henry has come to claim her, it is the language barrier that has to be overcome if political expedience is to be married to emotional reticence. I have seen this scene played entirely for laughs, and I have seen it played with a good deal of seriousness; but I know of no other play in which Shakespeare uses questions of translation as a powerful but ambiguous dramatic and thematic device. The play begins and ends with the unanswered question, ‘Do kings mean what they say?’ and Henry himself admits he and Kate speak each other’s language ‘most truly falsely’.

I should love to see some of the plays in the Globe Festival, and with luck Henry V will be one of them. And I think that in selecting this play, of all plays by Shakespeare, to be performed in English the Festival organizers have after all made a shrewd choice.

[illustration: The Campo San Giacometto near the Rialto, Venice, as painted by Canaletto. The statue of the crouching hunchback, Gobbo, is in the middle of the arcade on the far side of the square. At present it is under wraps and under restoration.

Venice at the edges

Venice in late September: a good time to be here again. The figs and peaches are at their best, the light is clear as ever and there are fewer people around now the high summer has passed and the frenzy of the Film Festival has died down.

What we enjoy best is revisiting the quiet places. Yesterday we retraced a route we first took by night five years ago when we were met at the lone tree in the corner of Piazzale Roma and escorted to the apartment we were renting in the Corte Mazor. We followed the Fondamenta Burchielle, and crossed the Rio Terra dei Pensieri. This is very definitely not tourist Venice: the city’s main prison is here and the cell blocks with their upwardly louvred windows look intimidating. But I once saw and heard a remarkable scene here early one morning: a woman standing under the prison wall singing loudly and gazing up at one of the windows where a broom head, poking out between the louvres, was being waved up and down in time to her singing. The more it waved, the louder she sang. Her face streamed with tears, but she was smiling.

When we reached the little square where our apartment had been, we had a spritz at Cambusan, a café entirely patronised by locals, and then made our way round the corner to the westernmost church of Dorsoduro, San Nicolò dei Mendicoli. It is dark inside – there are very few windows – but the decoration of its Byzantine columns is picked out in gold, as are the giant wooden brackets supporting the organ loft at the back of the church. Just inside the door is a plaque announcing in Italian and English that this church was rescued from the floods and restored with the help of the Venice in Peril fund between 1972 and 1977. Indeed it was, and while in restauro San Nicolò was used as the location for one of the most frightening scenes in the film Don’t Look Now (1973). Donald Sutherland plays an architectural historian in charge of the restoration of the church, who is almost killed when the high scaffolding on which he is standing collapses and he only saves himself by clutching at a swinging rope as he falls.

Less than five minutes away we come to the church of Angelo Raffaele, a complete contrast: much bigger, much lighter and all baroque. The organ is playing, and this lures us in. I first visited the church after reading Salley Vickers’ novel, Miss Garnet’s Angel. In the story, Miss Garnet’s little apartment is located in the square beyond the church. The church itself, and the story of the angel Raphael and Tobias, the young boy with the fish, play a large part in the novel. There is hardly anyone around, even though we are only a couple of hundred yards from Zattere, the popular promenade which runs along the Giudecca Canal up to the Punto delle Dogana, at the entrance to the Grand Canal. We don’t walk that far, turning left instead towards San Trovaso. We pass the gondola repair yard and walk under the windows of the little apartment Ezra Pound rented when he first came to Venice. Before we leave Venice we shall go, as we always do, to pay our respects to Pound and Olga Rudge in the little protestant cemetery at the far end of San Michele, the cemetery island. Nearly always, we have the place to ourselves.

And today, getting as far away from the centre of Venice as it is possible to get and still stay within the confines of the city, we have been to Pellestrina, in the remote south west corner of the lagoon. It takes some getting to: first, we have to cross to the Lido, which is easy enough, and the new landing stage at Santa Maria Elisabetta is the smartest in all Venice. Then we catch a Number 11 bus, which sets off down the Gran Viale, the main street of the Lido, and turns west along the Lungomare Marconi. Now the Adriatic is sparkling on our left beyond the beach huts that used to belong to the Hotel des Bains, where Thomas Mann set Death in Venice and where the 1971 Visconti film starring Dirk Bogarde  was shot. The Hotel itself, a monster of a place, closed some years ago and its conversion into luxury flats seems to have ground to a halt. The bus carries on to the further point of the Lido, Alberoni, and then travels by ferry to the next island, which is really no more than a long sandbank with a defensive sea wall, and this is Pellestrina. Even so, the bus has to drive to the furthest end to reach the village itself, and by then we are much closer to the city of Chioggia, across the last stretch of the lagoon, than we are to Venice.

Pellestrina is all about boats and fishing. There are boat builders on the island (many of Venice’s vaporetti come from the Pellestrina boatyards) but most of the vessels one sees are snub-nosed fishing boats that dredge the sea bed for clams. Like most non-Venetians my introduction to the place was Donna Leon’s excellent Inspector Brunetti novel, A Sea of Troubles, in which the elusive Signora Elettra falls in love with a fisherman and Brunetti’s faithful boatman, Bonsuan, is himself murdered.  She made it sound a fearsome place.

Today, though, there is something wonderfully quiet about Pellestrina. The houses are small cottages, not imposing in any way, their shutters closed against the sun; there seem to be more seagulls and pigeons than people. Occasionally a boat sets off or returns, but the sea is otherwise absolutely calm. 

A little way out from the shore there are a few strange random huts on stilts, fishermen’s stores presumably, but looking like odd surviving structures from an ancient lake village or a Borneo kampong. It’s hard to imagine anything or anywhere looking less Venetian than these silent shanties.

When Donna Leon came to Cambridge a few years back and signed copies of her book in Heffers, she wrote in ours, ‘Do not eat the clams’.  She warned us the lagoon was so polluted that the clams were by now almost certainly radioactive. I’m glad to say we ignored her advice today. At the Ristorante ai Pescatori, the tables of which were simply set out in the gap between two cottages, we had probably the best spaghetti alla vongole we have ever eaten.

[Photos: Pellestrina, 28 September 2011

Edward Thomas at Buchy

Edward Thomas, according to a recent review in The Guardian, is ‘arguably the most influential English poet of the 20^th century’. A judgment like this would have seemed extraordinary forty years ago; but such is Thomas’s standing today that the recent biography by Matthew Hollis, Now All Roads Lead to France (Faber, 2011) got headline reviews everywhere.

I have admired Edward Thomas’s poetry for as long as I have been teaching: ‘March’, ‘Old Man’ and ‘Tall Nettles’ are the poems I first encountered and can never forget.  I admire many things about Hollis’s biography, too. For a start, his account of the friendships, tensions and rivalries between the Dymock Poets in the summer of 1914 is very good; then, in the final pages of the book, his description of Thomas’s life as a soldier, both in England and finally in France, is very movingly told. What’s more, Hollis has reminded me of several things about the poet that I had forgotten I knew.

Two examples: first, I thought it was news to me that Thomas may very possibly have met Wilfred Owen – indeed, that he may well have instructed him in map reading while in training at Hare Hall Camp in Essex. But I realize now I had come across this before: Andrew Motion’s essay Edward Thomas: an Imaginary Life (2004) takes as its premise the idea that instead of being killed by the blast of a shell at the Battle of Arras on 9^th April 1917, Thomas had been knocked unconscious by a piece of shrapnel. When he woke up in hospital Thomas found his left arm had been amputated. (‘I could spare an arm. I shouldn’t want to lose / A leg’ he had written in ‘As the Team’s Head Brass’.) Motion invents a passage from an imagined Autobiography (1929) in which Thomas recalls his one and only conversation with Owen at Hare Hall and his post-war admiration for Owen’s poetry.  The conversation may be imagined; the fact that they overlapped in this training camp is not.

The second example is a single place name: Buchy. Hollis notes that when Thomas eventually crossed to France, he went by train to the Front from Le Havre via Buchy, Alaincourt and Amiens. I should have remembered this. In his diary for 5^th February 1917 Thomas records the following:

At 7 a.m. after many stops and starts we were close under partly wooded chalk hills, among railway trucks, and near a village with here and there an upper storey quite open like a loft. Snow. Gradually flatter and poplars regular as telegraph poles, orchards, level crossings, children.  Buchy at 10 a.m. – Y.M.C.A. –  Leave train. Nearly lost train. Fine snowfall.

I have been to Buchy. It’s a small town 25 km north east of Rouen.  Flaubert used it as a location in Madame Bovary. When Edward Thomas stopped at the station, the population of Buchy was barely 1000 people. Actually the station is some way out of the town at a hamlet called Montérolier, a place with a station café, a railway bridge and a couple of farms − nothing more. But during the Great War, Buchy was a name known to hundreds of thousands of British troops: the trains from the Channel to the Front stopped there (there were no buffet cars on the troop trains – the men travelled in cattle trucks: 36 men to each truck. Only the officers had compartments to share) so comfort stops were a necessity. There was indeed a Y.M.C.A. canteen at the station, where ‘other ranks’ could get a free cup of tea and send a postcard home. This canteen was staffed by volunteers from England, middle-aged clergymen and young women who wanted to work near the Front but were not trained nurses or ambulance drivers. These would be the last English women many of the men would ever see.

Such railway stops were of unpredictable length, which is no doubt why Edward Thomas almost missed his train. I expect he walked up the hill from the station to get away from the queue at the Y.M.C.A. canteen, to stretch his legs and to see what he could see. Across the snow-covered fields he would not have missed the tents and huts of no. 11 Convalescent Depot, a huge British army encampment where troops came for a few days’ rest and recuperation from the trenches or to recover from minor injuries before rejoining their units ‘somewhere in France’. At the top of the hill was alternative refreshment: the station café, where perhaps he went for a coffee and met the formidable proprietress, Mme Bigot, famous beyond her wildest dreams:

Half of the British Army knows Madame Bigot. The other half has heard of her…. It is time that the women at home learnt of the subtle power wielded by one woman.

This is the opening of a newspaper article by Hilda M. Love, a war correspondent whose reports from France, addressed to ‘the women at home’, were syndicated around the world. Look her up on Google: you’ll see she features in newspapers in London and New York and across the British Empire, from the Straits Times (Singapore), to the Western Gazette (Kalgoorlie, W. Australia), and the Wanganui Chronicle (New Zealand). Her special brand of belligerent sentimentality outraged Ezra Pound, who denounced her in The New Age (November 8^th, 1918), and she was certainly not the Kate Adie of the Western Front; but at least she wrote about Buchy at the time Edward Thomas stopped there unwontedly, got off the train and was nearly left behind:

Madame Bigot, who might have lived and died unknown in a tiny village of France, has spread the fame of that village throughout the world, has worked her way into the hearts of the British Army with such homely weapons as a casserole and a frying pan.

Her little inn stands on a hillside and the door commands a view of one of the finest provinces of France. In spring-time a sea of apple-blossom stretches away in all directions. To-day a sea of grey tents stretches away to the left of madame’s windows, while to the right khaki figures gather at their favourite rendezvous, the railway bridge.

It is the presence of the railway that has brought madame such wide fame.  On the boards of that village station are painted names that will wring the heart of France for ever, and the trains that daily pass through that countryside daily carry khaki thousands who have sworn to avenge those significant names.

And, unlike the supercilious expresses that thundered over the rails in peace time, these trains of war stop for an hour or more at this wayside village. Men who have been sitting cramped for long, weary hours, tired, cold, and hungry, rise and stretch themselves, tumble out of the train, and douche their heads in the big wooden tubs of water along the line, while from madame’s inn travel ravishing odours that lure. Etc. etc.

I do not know in which newspaper this article appeared. All I have is a cutting pasted into an old pocket book that belonged to my grandfather, the Rev. Edward Barlow. And why? Because in 1917, the same year Edward Thomas passed this way, my grandfather was a volunteer in the Y.M.C.A. canteen serving tea and handing out postcards to soldiers who had stopped briefly, like the most influential poet of the twentieth century, at Buchy, en route for the Front.

[photo: the station at Buchy, early 20^th century

Reasons to write

Most weeks, I try to read both the Times Literary Supplement and the Saturday Guardian Review. The differences – and the similarities – between them are often striking. The TLS is published (according to the printed date) on a Friday, but is always on the news stands the previous morning; the Guardian Review is folded in with all the other Saturday Guardian supplements – Family, Money, Work and other cheerful weekend topics. The TLS is more obviously academic in focus. The Guardian Review puts more emphasis on using writers from outside the academy and on the craft of writing itself.

The TLS tends to cover a wider range of subject areas in greater depth, but both give a good deal of prominence to fiction. Here, too, the choice of reviewer is indicative: last week Michael Ondaatje’s new novel, The Cat’s Table, was discussed in both papers. The novelist Annie Proulx reviewed it for the Guardian Review; the TLS reviewer was Madeline Clements, who announced, in ‘This Week’s Contributors’, that she was ‘writing a doctoral thesis on Muslim self-representation in the post 9/11 novels of Anglophone South Asian writers.’ Both reviews made me want to go out and read the book, but while Clements approached her subject cautiously, Proulx jumped straight in declaring her admiration for Ondaatje and his importance as a writer.

The TLS letters page is the place to go if you enjoy academic bitchiness, but not if you don’t. Sometimes it’s rather like reading David Lodge’s Small World without the laughs. Last week (2 September 2011, p.6), an outraged American historian took his revenge on a reviewer who had accused him of having ‘some kind of soft spot for Stalin’: her review, he began, ‘grossly distorts the book, my purpose in writing it, and the historical evidence that I present.’ Five paragraphs later (which other newspaper or journal in the world allows an author five paragraphs to fulminate against a bad review?), he declared that a book on a subject such as his own ‘requires, in short, a sophisticated approach to the historical analysis of evidence’ and signed off by saying that neither the reviewer’s review nor her own book on his subject – there’s the rub - ‘show readiness to understand or engage in such work.’ Ouch.

Life is generally friendlier in the Guardian Review. The job of writing and the difference between writing and reading are always under discussion. In the ‘Guardian Book Club’ column last week (03.09.11), Neil Gaiman wrote about his novel American Gods:

I do not know how American Gods looks from the outside. I’ve never read it, not to find out what happened next, anyway. I wrote it to find out what happened next, and that’s a very different thing.

The poet Lavinia Greenlaw (in ‘Author, author’, another regular Guardian Review column, with a different author writing each week about how and why they write) described the impulse to write in not dissimilar terms:

The way I know something might become a poem has nothing to do with thinking about it. It’s a physical sensation rather like the first instant of a memory before you’ve made sense of it.

She quoted Robert Frost: “the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew.”

The biographer Fiona MacCarthy was the writer in last week’s feature interview (‘A life in writing’). Her subjects nearly always appeal to me – Eric Gill, Stanley Spencer, William Morris and Lord Byron – and I was struck by the comment made by her interviewer, Paul Laity:

She has remarked that she doesn’t choose her subjects so much as wait for them “to claim me … always creative people of one sort or another for whom I feel a deep affinity.”

All of this interests me very much as I begin work on a book I have been promising myself (and other people) to write as soon as I have retired. It’s about the life and influence of the Victorian stained glass designer, Charles Eamer Kempe (1837-1907). I have been writing and lecturing on his work for twenty-five years, and it’s time I did the job properly. I’ve not attempted a full-length biography before. Has Kempe claimed me, as Fiona MacCarthy has been claimed by her latest subject, Burne-Jones, Kempe’s contemporary and in some respects his arch rival?

Kempe is a fascinating, contradictory and still controversial figure for those with an interest in Victorian church art and its legacy: Pevsner once described his work as “disastrously retardataire” and he has strong supporters and equally strong detractors. Having read last weekend’s Guardian Review, I am keen to interrogate my own reasons for liking Kempe’s work so much that I want to spend the next couple of years writing about it and him. My provisional title, echoing George Herbert, is Espying Heaven: Charles Eamer Kempe and the art of stained glass, and if the book ever gets reviewed in the TLS  (‘In your dreams!”) I just hope I shan’t feel moved to write a five-paragraph letter of protest against what the reviewer thinks of it.

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From now on, I shall try to add a new post every fortnight or less. I welcome comments and feedback.