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.

A Toast to Tom

To Oxford, for the funeral of one of our oldest friends. The Crematorium Chapel is full to overflowing, for it is a sad fact that the younger you die the larger the number of people who can come to your funeral. Live to be ninety and you’ll have outlived most of your friends. Tom was just six months short of seventy, a milestone we passed some time ago.

He had a talent for friendship. Though he never married, and always lived on his own, his circle of friends was wide and he worked hard at keeping in touch. He had retired early (very early) but was the lynchpin of a group of friends and former colleagues – the ‘Old Farts’ – who met not often but regularly. Not that they got together to reminisce about the good old days: Tom had little respect for some of his former bosses, especially those he felt had dealt badly with younger members of the organisation. His wrath against his last boss was unfading: if we so much as mentioned their name, he imposed an instant fine of 50p for each offence. He never collected the fines – his good humour simply a way of deflecting his outrage.

 

Year by year Tom’s diary filled up with a kind of carefully-plotted royal progress, making his way around Britain or abroad to visit family and friends. He never expected any ceremony: he would arrive on the doorstep at teatime encumbered by rucksack, sleeping bag and pillow. These having been dumped wherever he was going to sleep, he was keen for us to go in search of the first pint of the evening.

Good beer always influenced his choice of the pubs to which we would be summoned to celebrate what he laughingly referred to as his ‘official birthday’. Indeed, the standards he applied to beer were exacting: Greene King was denounced for having abandoned hand-pulled ale in favour of what he likened to the Watney’s Red Barrel of dreadful memory. By contrast, he praised Hook Norton beer for remaining true to its origins; to prove the point he insisted we should visit the Hook Norton brewery with him. I thought I knew quite a lot about Victorian architecture; thanks to Tom, however, that day’s visit to the wondrously idiosyncratic but entirely practical five-storey Tower Brewery showed me how much I had still to learn – about beer and buildings.

He was a very good travelling companion.  Before the coming of Covid, continental itineraries usually included battlefields, golf courses and cricket grounds (he was a loyal camp-follower of the Barmy Army). We went on holiday with him at least fifteen times, initially to France, where our first night would be spent in Boulogne, staying at a quirky hotel with two things recommending it to Tom: first, its resident talkative macaw who greeted guests as they came downstairs to breakfast and, second, its proximity to the town’s Welsh Pub. This, though neither Welsh nor a pub, was a restaurant whose seafood, wine and atmosphere Tom relished. He had some special eating places, their locations usually determined by links with both world wars. 

The Old Tom Hotel in Ypres was a favourite, and its signature dish, Eels in Green Sauce, always his first choice; he would cheerfully disregard the dismay of his companions on catching sight of such a plateful. At Arromanches, the Marine Hotel on the edge of the beach (Gold Beach during the Normandy Landings of June 1944) offered another restaurant Tom was always glad to revisit. To see him on a sunny afternoon sitting by the window, ploughing through a pyramid of shellfish and gazing out to sea at the remaining concrete caissons of the Mulberry Harbour was to see a man at peace with himself and with the world.

Tom’s passion was military history, particularly the histories of the two World Wars, though 1914-18 perhaps more than 1939-45. On our first visit, he had offered to find for me the graves of two English poets, Isaac Rosenberg and Edward Thomas, both in Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) cemeteries near Arras. We duly visited both – though not before my inadequate map-reading meant we got stuck in the centre of Arras, going round and round trying to find a way out; poor Tom’s rage (he was driving) on this occasion was mercifully short-lived and later became a standing joke between us.

 It was with Tom’s help that I first began to understand CWGC and German war cemeteries and memorials as a way of ‘reading’ the cultural history of the aftermath of war.  On that very first visit, he also took us to the Thiepval memorial and the Menin Gate, inscribed with what Siegfried Sassoon described as ‘those intolerably nameless names’; to cemeteries at Neuville St Vaast, at Newfoundland Park (site of the first day of the Battle of the Somme), to Vimy Ridge and to the German Cemetery at Langemark.  Langemark, largest of all the Great War German cemeteries, is surrounded by trees: ‘I’ve never heard birds singing here,’ Tom told us. Later he took us to Rancourt, where the British, French and German cemeteries are within sight of each other, each displaying starkly contrasting ways of expressing the imperative to memorialise. ‘The graves of the soldiers admonish to peace’: these words of Albert Schweitzer are displayed in all the German cemeteries. 

On other visits we found (with difficulty; my map reading again) the Anglo-German cemetery of St. Symphorien at Mons, with the graves of 284 German soldiers and 229 Commonwealth soldiers and a remarkable German memorial acknowledging the heroism of the English soldiers in the first battle of Mons – chivalry indeed. With equal difficulty we located the German cemetery at Vladslo, enclosed by high hedges and guarded by great oaks.  Here we saw the iconic statues of the Die trauernden Eltern (the Grieving Parents) by Käthe Kollwitz. We also visited the daunting Ossuary at Verdun and the grave of Wilfred Owen in the little village cemetery of Ors. Back in England we made almost the most unexpected discovery of all: a huge German cemetery hidden in plain sight on Cannock Chase.

These expeditions opened my eyes to the largely unexplored territory of contrasting British and German approaches to commemorating the dead of two world wars. This subject has preoccupied me now for the past twenty years, thanks to Tom; without him, I would not have been able to write and lecture in Britain, Germany and France about the art, literature and architecture of Remembrance. I can’t speak for my readers and listeners, but for me it has been one of the most important and rewarding subjects I have ever explored.

We didn’t agree about everything to do with the First World War. Once, while we were standing by the equestrian statue of Field Marshal Haig in the main square of Montreuil-sur-Mer, Tom ticked me off me severely, accusing me of underestimating Haig’s achievements and of overstating his responsibility for the huge casualties suffered by British and Commonwealth forces from 1915 onwards. I was duly chastened, knowing that Tom had read far more than I ever would about Haig. (Tom’s library of First World War history was, to put it mildly, extensive; indeed, I understand his entire collection has been given to the Library of his old Oxford college, St. Catherine’s; he’d have been very pleased about that.) 

I’d love to know, though, whether Tom had managed to read a recent book about Haig by the highly respected historian, Robin Prior: Conquer We Must: A Military History of Britain 1914-1945, published just last November.  In the week of Tom’s funeral, this book was reviewed in the Literary Review, according to which Prior argues that, though Haig’s orders ‘betrayed flashes of insight into the sanguine [sic; sanguinary, surely?] realities of the conflict’, these were no more than flashes, ‘stifled by brutal, unwarranted overconfidence’ and what the reviewer called ’Haig’s lethal bullheadednesss’. I think Tom and I could have had a good argument over this book, perhaps after supper with a bottle of Calvados on the table.  Calvados was something else to which he introduced us: our trips to Normandy always involved finding a ferme selling its own Calvados from a barn behind the farmhouse. I shall miss him. Here’s to you, Tom.

Adrian Barlow

Illustrations: (i) Tom on the Isle of Skye, 2016 (ii) The Tower Brewery, Hook Norton (iii) The remaining units of the floating Mulberry Harbour, Arromanches, Normandy (iv) Equestrian statue of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, Montreuil-sur-Mer. All illustrations copyright Adrian Barlow

La Grande Guerre: Elegy in a French Country Churchyard

In Defence of the War Poets: the Battle of Max Hastings

The Great War: writers, historians and critics

'Our Speaker Tonight’: a lecture tour in Germany

 

September 2022 has been a momentous month, and already it seems more than two weeks since my recent lecture tour to Germany. This was my sixth such tour since 2001 –all of them undertaken for the Deutsch-Britische Gesellschaft (D-BG) – and it will be my last: after December, I shall be ‘retiring’ from giving public lectures and talks. Why? Well, to be honest, I am beginning to tire of the sound of my own voice addressing an audience, and I want to stop before other people tire of it too.

The lectures I’ve given during these tours have reflected the three subjects – literature, architecture and stained glass – on which my post-career career (if such it has been) as an itinerant lecturer has been based.  On my first visit, I spoke on ‘The idea of Englishness in the Modern English Novel’; in 2014 I offered two topics: ‘If Armageddon’s On: British Poets and the Outbreak of the First World War’ and ‘The Architecture of Remembrance: Memorialising the First World War’. This last, contrasting as it did the different approaches to war cemeteries and memorials adopted by Britain and Germany during 1914-1918 and for the century since, was a sensitive subject and I was nervous about how it would go down. I was struck, though, by the number of people who thanked me for opening up a subject barely mentioned in Germany: ‘No one has had the courage to talk to us about this before,’ I was told at the Humboldt University in Berlin. 

I have particularly enjoyed visiting cities in the former East Germany. I shan’t readily forget giving a seminar to a group of students from the Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena and afterwards joining them for a tour of the city’s bars.  But how I got back to my hotel and how I caught my train the next morning I can neither remember nor imagine. Another time I spent a weekend in Schwerin, that beautiful city not far inland from the Baltic Sea. Our genial host served curried banana soup and explained how he still missed the pre-Reunification era. ‘We’ve lost the old sense of looking out for each other,’ he said.

There are 20 D-BG centres spread across Germany and in the course of my six tours I have visited 17 of them, several more than once. I have happy memories of every centre. The Goethe Museum at Dűsseldorf, housed in the 18^th century Schloss Jägerhof, is perhaps the most exotic building in which I have lectured, speaking in a room lined with vitrines full of fine Dresden porcelain. More often, however, my talks have been given in university seminar rooms, none more august than those at the Humboldt; but the building I have most admired is the Essen Volkshochschule. This strikingly glass-fronted building stands in Burgplatz, the very centre of the city, facing the ancient cathedral. The idea of a community college of adult education in Britain being given such prominence and held in such esteem by the city it serves is hard to imagine. I was very touched to be given this time, as a memento of my five visits, a medallion depicting the famous Golden Madonna who sits in Essen’s Cathedral and about whom I have written before.

I shan’t forget the Deutsch-Britische Gesellschaft, nor the friends I have made. For this ‘farewell tour’, travelling with my wife, I chose to talk about stained glass in British Cathedrals. I began with the earliest windows in Canterbury, the magnificent ‘Ancestors of Christ’, and I quoted the Cathedral’s Director of Stained Glass, Leonie Seliger, who has argued that these windows ‘would have witnessed the murder of Thomas Becket, they would have witnessed Henry II come on his knees begging for forgiveness, they would have witnessed the conflagration of the fire that devoured the cathedral in 1174. And then they would have witnessed all of British history.’

Nor shall I forget the last evening I gave this lecture, on Thursday 8^th September. I was in Műnster, a small city heavily bombed between 1943 and 1945 but today rebuilt and at ease with itself and its past. After enjoying a meal of blutwurst mit sauerkraut with our hosts before the lecture, I was anxious that time was pressing and eager to get to the University to check the A-V equipment. Just as we were leaving, the restaurant manager rushed out to tell us the Queen had died. 

Witnesses to history: only two days earlier, in Dűsseldorf, we had seen a large crowd waiting outside the Rathaus to cheer the Sussexes, Prince Harry and Meghan. That same day we had watched on TV Her Majesty standing before a roaring fire at Balmoral, beaming as she saw Boris Johnson out and Liz Truss in. Now, in an instant, the old order had changed: Charles III was King. As one commentator would soon put it, with the Queen’s death, the post-war era really was at an end. Suddenly, my lecture on stained glass seemed rather irrelevant, and indeed the small audience who turned up suggested others might have felt the same. But the A-V worked, I was introduced and began talking. 

I like to keep an eye on my audience when I’m speaking and, after ten minutes, I noticed an elderly and diminutive lady sitting at the back who had fallen asleep. Not even the repeated attempts of someone trying to phone another member of the audience disturbed her. I carried on but soon there was a clatter and a crash as she slid off her chair and hit the stone floor. The ensuing commotion forced me to stop as almost everyone else in the audience crowded round her to help, if help were needed. The owner of the ringing phone rushed outside – to call, I assumed, an ambulance.

But I was wrong. Happily the old lady was not hurt, just surprised and apologetic for disrupting my lecture. Another member of my diminishing audience assisted her home, and the owner of the phone came back and whispered to me that WDR (West-Deutscher Rundfunk) wanted to do TV interviews with me and members of the D-BG about the Queen’s death as soon as possible. Could they wait until I’d finished the lecture?  Yes, but please would I end promptly, because the janitor needed to lock the building by 9 o’clock, and the TV crew would be waiting for us at a café in Prinzipalmarkt.

And indeed they were. It was an unexpectedly memorable way to end my long and happy association with the Deutsch-Britische Gesellschaft: sitting, beer in hand, with friends old and new, staring into a camera and trying to answer the awful inevitable question, ‘How did you feel when you heard the Queen was dead?’

 

© Adrian Barlow 

 

Illustrations: (i) The Essen Golden Madonna medallion; (ii) Friedrich-Schiller University, Jena.

Note:  I have written before about two previous tours undertaken for the Deutsch-Britische Gesellschaft:

Anglo-German

Germany, Asparagus and the First World War

 

Poetry, Cultural Vandalism and the Brokers of our Heritage

It’s a long time since I had any connection at all with GCSE English.* But I have been shocked by recent headlines in (for instance) the Times (23.vi.22): ‘GCSE removes Wilfred Owen and Larkin in diversity push’ and the response from the Education Secretary, Nadhim Zahawi, as reported in (again, for instance) the Sun (same day): ‘Slamming the clearout of white writers, Mr Zahawi fumed: “Larkin and Owen are two of our finest poets. Removing their work from the curriculum is cultural vandalism. Their work must be passed on to future generations.”’ Speaking for myself, I am not shocked by the idea that students for the next few years may not encounter ‘An Arundel Tomb’ or ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’: GCSE and A level Literature syllabuses used regularly to rotate texts and authors – and should still do so. What shocks me is the assumption that, unless a poem is prescribed by a syllabus, pupils will never encounter it.

No syllabus can include everything, nor is it the job of an exam board to focus only on ‘our finest poets’. It has always been part of English teaching to go beyond the syllabus, to teach students of any age how to explore, enjoy and value literature in English for its own sake – especially, I would add, recent literature. Teaching literature is anyway not about teaching what to read, but how to read. And this is a lifetime’s study. 

What the Times described as a ‘diversity push’, Michael Deacon in the Telegraph (25.vi.22) has not scrupled to call ‘a woke outrage’, as if the crime of culling Larkin and Owen has been compounded by replacing them with internationally recognised writers such as the Ukrainian-American poet, Ilya Kaminsky and the Somali-British poet Warsan Shire. Pace Deacon, these are not ‘extremely minor’ writers who have been ‘chosen purely for the sake of “inclusivity”’.  

There is nothing new, and should be nothing shocking, about mixing familiar and less familiar poets in poetry anthologies. Philip Larkin’s own Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (1973) included many poets whose names have not entered the canon, and as Peter Porter wisely said, reviewing Larkin’s anthology for TLS: ‘Just about every name omitted, and even more each name included, will seem to the brokers of our heritage a shameful selling-short or a ridiculous marking-up’.¹ More than this, however, one of the jobs of an anthology is to help readers (including journalists) understand that literature is an ongoing conversation between writers and readers across cultures, ages and languages. 

Thirty years ago, Cambridge University Press published an anthology aimed at encouraging GCSE and A level students in the UK to read ‘canonical’ British poetry from Shakespeare to Sylvia Plath plus poetry by younger and less established writers. These poems were designed to be read alongside poetry written in English by poets from America to New Zealand and from Africa, India and South-east Asia. Actually, the anthology was primarily aimed at students world-wide who, studying English Literature for exams such as IGCSE, could compare the work of their own poets writing in English with that of specifically British poets. 

At a time when poetry books for schools tended to have rousing titles such as Touched With Fire, this anthology was entitled The Calling of Kindred.² There were 95 poets represented, of whom more than one third were not British-born writers. Larkin was included, but not Wilfred Owen. Isaac Rosenberg, however, was; so were two Second World War poets: Keith Douglas and John Pudney. There was even one poem from a recent conflict: Anthony Conran’s magnificent ‘Elegy for the Welsh Dead, in the Falkland Islands, 1982’.  

Many poets were represented by more than one poem each but only Shakespeare and Thomas Hardy had three. The poems were grouped in five sections, but not by country, theme or date. Students were encouraged to make their own connections between poems, though some suggestions were included in the notes on each poet at the end of the book. 

Putting together an anthology can be tricky. I learned the hard way: The Calling of Kindred was my first attempt, and the first – though happily not the last – of my books for C.U.P. It has sat quietly all these years on my shelves, still bringing in a diminishing (but gratefully received) annual royalty; I had not opened it for ages, until this row about GCSE poetry and diversity broke out. Comparing my book now with the controversial OCR anthology, I’m confident that on diversity and inclusivity mine scores the more highly. Woke was I, avant la lettre? Back in 1993, nobody batted an eyelid.

Poetry anthologies tend not to get reviewed, but mine was. The poet John Mole, writing in the Times Educational Supplement, kindly described the book as ‘Like all the best anthologies, a personal choice without fear or favour’. He was generous, too, when he added:

Although The Calling of Kindred is strong on the established canon, what makes it exceptional is the skill with which the editor mixes these with his own discoveries, many of which are by young writers who are not British-born. A real sense of the English-speaking community is established, and the anthology’s title (taken from a poem by the Welsh poet Ruth Bidgood) suggests both intimacy and long-distance communication.³

In the book’s Introduction I wrote that ‘Kindred spirits are those with whom we feel we have much in common. Poetry is written, spoken and read in English all round the world, and poets and readers are a diverse but also a closely-knit family.’⁴ After fifty years of teaching, talking, and writing about writers, I believe more strongly than ever in the idea of ‘the community of literature’ and of helping readers of any age to feel they can belong to this community.

© Adrian Barlow

Notes:

*To be clear: I taught O level, GCSE and A level English Literature from 1973-1997; I was closely involved in GCSE, A level and international curriculum and syllabus development from 1985- 2005. I was OCR Staff Chair of English and Classical Subjects 2000-2005.

1. Peter Porter: ‘A Quiet Revolution’ (Times Literary Supplement, 13.iv.1973)

2. Adrian Barlow: The Calling of Kindred: Poems from the English-speaking world (Cambridge 1993: Cambridge University Press)

3. John Mole: ‘Speaking for themselves’ – review of The Calling of Kindred (Times Educational Supplement, 14.x.1994)

4. The Calling of Kindred, Introduction, p.6

 

I have written before about Wilfred Owen, in ‘Jon Stallworthy and Wilfred Owen’s Ghost’ (2014) and about Philip Larkin in ‘Re-reading Julian Barnes (ii): on poetry and ‘the poet’ (2012).

Alan Bennett’s Journey Home

Alan Bennett’s books come in three sizes: large and fat, tall and slim, or squat and thin. His three volumes in the first category - Writing Home (1994), Untold Stories (2005) and Keeping On Keeping On (2016; hereafter KOKO) – between them number over 1,900 pages. His plays, as published individually, are tall and slim; of those on my shelf, only The History Boys (2004) exceeds 100 pages. We usually associate slim volumes with poetry, none slimmer than Philip Larkin’s. Bennett, it’s no secret, is a great fan of Larkin. In the Introduction to KOKO, he tells the reader that when trying to think of a title for his new book, he picked up The Whitsun Weddings (1964; 43 pages), but was at once discouraged:

‘at eighty-one I’m still trying to avoid the valedictory note which was a problem Larkin never had, the valedictory almost his exclusive territory.’ 

 

Understandably for someone who will be ninety in two years’ time, there is something valedictory about Bennett’s latest book, House Arrest (2022), which definitely comes into my third category, squat and thin: it has only forty-nine pages and slips easily into one’s pocket. (I have been carrying it around and re-reading it for the past two weeks; if it was the one book I could take to my desert island, there’s a fair chance I might learn it all by heart.) House Arrest is subtitled ‘Pandemic Diaries’ and a monochrome painting by Jon McNaughton of Alan Bennett’s desk and study window prefaces the diary entries. It shows a room in deep shadow, the window blind lowered, the desk lamp off and the desk chair displaced by a low table. Desk and table are covered by neat stacks of papers and books, as if someone has had to come and tidy up the sheets of work(s) in progress that will now never be completed. A half-typed page sits inconclusively in the typewriter. 

 

Facing this frontispiece is an epigraph from ‘Staring out of the Window’ (2001), an essay in which Bennet suggests that the work for which writers really deserve recognition should be the endless time spent staring out of the window, searching for something to say or struggling for a better way to say it. Bennett sums up the argument of that essay, whose title perhaps nods towards Larkin’s High Windows (1974; 42 pages), thus:

 

The real mark of recognition for a writer or any artist, perhaps, comes when the public wants him or her to die, so that they can close the book on that particular talent, stop having to make the effort to follow the writer any further, put a cork in the bottle.

 

Now, in House Arrest, he condenses that idea dramatically:

 

4 September (2020): What your work does is ‘tell people you’ve been alive.’ Lucian Freud.

 

Bennett is still very much alive, though suffering these days from arthritis and no longer able to ride his bike. Happily, he finds the pandemic and the prospect of ‘static semi-isolation scarcely a hardship or even a disruption to my routine’. Indeed, he faces the indefinite sentence of house arrest with complete equanimity. Reflecting on the new threat of Covid, he recalls that when he was a child fear of catching TB was the major anxiety: his mother’s determination that he should always keep his neck warm is the reason why, to this day, he is never without a tie. Clothes feature frequently in his diary entries: his mother’s ‘swagger coat’; his father’s two suits (both navy blue, one for best and the other worn every day in the butcher’s shop); army civvies, ‘ill-fitting, itchy and unbecoming’. He is shocked to see the Queen now wearing protective gauntlets instead of her traditional white gloves and dreads the thought  she might next appear in full PPE. 

 

Hands and hand washing, appropriately, feature too. Recalling how his mother was ‘Always one to diddle her hands under the tap,’ he comments that she would ‘have found the precautions against the coronavirus only common sense.’ On Good Friday he notes that ‘this year Pontius Pilate is not the only one washing his hands’. He admits he’s never much liked his own hands; now, ‘much washed’, they appal him: ‘shiny, veinous and as transparent as an anatomical illustration.’ 

 

I did not know how much junk shops mattered to him – ‘Lures they were in the sixties, junk shops’ – and he has fond memories of Mrs. Hill’s kitchen shop in Kirby Stephen, which (as he has previously explained in KOKO) sold ‘what these days is dignified by the name of kitchenalia’. Bennett has had a lifelong affection for marginalia, real and metaphorical, and you can sense his contempt for this undignified neologistic noun. Later, he is dismayed to find that a second-hand bookshop in Settle (‘a lovely shop full of unexpected treasures and absurdly cheap’) has closed for good, not just for Covid. The sense of loss, of times and places irrecoverable, of people much missed, runs insistently through this little book.

 

No less insistent is the idea of home. Bennett describes himself, accurately, as a ‘denizen’  (an outsider who becomes a resident) of London for most of his writing life, and records with no small pleasure the discovery that a fellow diarist, the Rev Francis Kilvert, once visited 23 Gloucester Crescent, previously Bennett’s own house. But it’s Yorkshire, of course, that is really home, and House Arrest ends with lockdown lifted and Bennett heading north at last. His route from Leeds across Wharfedale and up almost across the Pennines is one I know well: Spen Lane, Otley Road, Ben Rhydding, Ilkley, Bolton Abbey, Skipton and on. And now, after reading his Pandemic Diaries, I shall always imagine Alan Bennett not as actor, man of letters or national treasure but, improbably, as a ‘soldier on Coronation leave in 1953’ clambering up Ingleborough, one of the Yorkshire Three Peaks. Looking down, he can see the village  below to which his parents retired in the 1960s and which, ever since, has been his true home too.

 

© Adrian Barlow

 

Illustrations: (i) Alan Bennett’s new book, House Arrest, published 2022, alongside a work by the ceramic artist Janine Roper; (ii) the epigraph and frontispiece of House Arrest. 

Phototographs © the author.

I have written before about Alan Bennett: 

‘So teach us to number our days': diaries and diarists

Alan Bennett  and Tennyson in Poets' Corner