At the Biographers’ Club Prize Dinner

To Brooke Street, Mayfair, on a damp November evening. No. 69 is the home of the Savile Club, founded in 1868 and haunt ever since of writers, artists and bookmen; an apt venue, therefore, for the annual Biographers’ Club Prize Dinner. This takes place in the Ballroom, a first-floor saloon of stunning opulence – mirrors, murals and windows in the French manner – reached by a very grand double staircase.

In the room, the people come and go: a Regius Professor of History, biographers of royalty, of celebrities, even (these days) of cities, mountains and the London fog; life-writers short and tall, publishers and agents, politicians and biographers of politicians. There are kind souls who make a point of introducing themselves and greeting strangers – as we are – while others accost old friends cheerily, as if always bumping into them on occasions such as this. I am thus astonished to hear my own name called by a former colleague who has spotted me in the crowd. It’s good to meet him again. His companion is one of the short-listed writers in the ‘Best proposal by an uncommissioned, first-time biographer’ category. I wish her luck and head back to my own party, for we are guests of our good friend John Smart, whose biography Tarantula’s Web is short-listed for the ‘HW Fisher Best First Biography’ award. I wrote about this book when it came out a year ago, and I admire more than ever its unravelling of the complex network of relationships connecting and later dividing John Hayward, TS Eliot and their circle. (John Hayward was a bookman par excellence. I’m sure he’d have known the Savile Club: the word ‘clubbable’ fitted him perfectly.)

*          *         *

Biography is much on my mind at the moment: I’ve recently completed a commissioned entry for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. A life in miniature: personal details – birth, upbringing, education, marriage and family – followed by career, details and significance of; publications ditto, and a thumbnail sketch of personality, reputation and legacy, all in a thousand words. By contrast, my self-imposed task of writing a book on the life and stained glass of Charles Eamer Kempe, presses insistently on me. And I feel that the better I know him, the more elusive he becomes. Here, for instance is an extract from an enthusiastic letter twenty-three-year-old Kempe wrote in 1860 to his mother from Rouen, which he was visiting for the first time:

I have wandered about its intricate streets (thanks to a good topographical skull) with round eyes, & open mouth, like little Johnny head-in-air….The cathedral and St Ouen have given me several hours’ delight: the western front of the former grows on me hourly – at the end of each day I wander back to it again & again, to peep at it & “find a spell unseen before”…. Altogether my visit to Rouen has been most successful. Its gay streets (I do not know what you wd say of its back streets in the evening where every alley might contain a murderer for aught I know to the contrary), its crowds, among whom I pass quietly on my way, in happy unconsciousness of them, and its grand old buildings render it delightful.

This letter seems straightforward enough, but it’s both frustrating and tantalizing: frustrating because it says nothing specific about the buildings Kempe has been enjoying – no reference at all to stained glass, for instance. (Elsewhere he talks about making notes and sketches in his diary, which alas has disappeared, believed destroyed.) It is tantalizing because one wants to know why Kempe was spending his evenings wandering through the back streets and dark alleys. He enjoys shocking his mother – ‘I do not know what you would say’ etc. – a widow living in sedate Cheltenham, but Mrs Kempe would have been much more shocked if she had read the account of this same area in Madame Bovary, Flaubert’s scandalous novel published only three years earlier:

This is the area of theatres, bars and whores. Often, a cart passed close beside Emma, laden with a wobbling piece of theatrical décor. Youths in aprons were spreading sand on the paving stones, between the tubs of green shrubbery. There was a smell of absinthe, cigars, and oysters.

In a letter to his friend Louis Bouilhet (23 May 1855) Flaubert had written of these streets: ‘The word is out: Babylon is here.’

So what was Kempe doing in this seedy part of Rouen? He certainly had a taste for theatricals and he’d inherited a love of historical costume and fancy-dress from his mother and his aunt, Mrs Claxon, wife of a Canon  of Gloucester Cathedral. Sometimes his early stained glass designs look like carefully dressed stage sets (as in the window above, showing Dives at dinner with his friends). He was a sociable man, given to celebrating friendship, but he never married. Who knows why not? For much of his life his closest confidante was his sister Augusta, but their letters give nothing away about his private life – if he had one. Until shortly before this visit to Rouen, Kempe had been planning to become an Anglican priest, only a bad stammer apparently preventing him. I have been writing and lecturing about Kempe for twenty-five years but I’m baffled by what he still keeps hidden from me. I’d like to discover if he read Madame Bovary. And, if so, what he’d thought of it. I might learn a lot, if I knew.

*          *          *

At the Biographers’ Club Prize Dinner, the judges described Tarantula’s Web as ‘a wonderful book that needed to be written’ and praised John Smart’s research, but the £5000 prize went to Charles Moore for his biography of Margaret Thatcher. Moore, whose ungenerous attack on Seamus Heaney I blogged about recently, read out a confidently pre-rehearsed acceptance speech; but it was Antonia Fraser, receiving a Lifetime Services to Biography Award, whose speech I preferred. She neatly inverted Carlyle’s dictum that ‘A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one’ by declaring that ‘it is possible to have a well-spent life trying to write a well-written one.’ I hope she’s right but, if she is, I still have a long way to go with Kempe.

Adrian Barlow

Postscript (28.11.13): I’m delighted to see that Tarantula’s Web is listed as one of the Books of the Year, in today’s Times Literary Supplement. Biographies of former prime ministers are conspicuous by their absence.

[Illustration: ‘The rich man’s table’ – detail from a window depicting the story of Dives and Lazarus (St. Saviour’s, Oxton), by Wyndham Hope Hughes for the Kempe Studio, 1872. Photo © Philip Collins

History, Heaney and Hilary Mantel

Dublin’s United Arts Club is an hospitable and appropriate place to lecture on Irish literature. I was there last week, invited by the Irish Byron Society, to speak about Seamus Heaney.  Taking my title from the blog I wrote in early September, Seamus Heaney Full Face, I reminded my audience that the line ‘Full face, foursquare, eyelevel, carved in stone’ (from ‘The Pattern’ in Human Chain, 2010) describes the image of a bishop who had stared down at the youthful Heaney as he nervously approached his first confessional. Would he be telling the truth, the beady-eyed bishop challenged him, or would his confession amount to no more than what Yeats had called ‘polite meaningless words’?

I felt similarly challenged, and by Heaney himself.  If my lecture was to be more than simply carrying coals to Newcastle – talking respectfully to the Irish about the Irishness of a great Irish poet – I wanted to confront head-on a difficult topic: the charge recently levelled in England against Heaney that he had been cowardly, disingenuous and deceitful (‘sly’) in not condemning ‘without equivocation, from within the same tribe, the thuggery, murder and bigotry of the Provisional IRA’.

This charge (in The Spectator) had been brought by Charles Moore, the prominent Catholic editor, commentator and biographer of Margaret Thatcher. It had struck a sour, dissenting note at a moment when obituaries were praising Heaney as a humane and generous man, the greatest Irish poet since Yeats.  Henceforward, one even suggested, we ought instead to speak of Yeats as the greatest Irish poet before Heaney.

Moore began his attack thus: ‘Many articles say what a nice man Seamus Heaney was. I believe it, and it is nice to be nice. But niceness is not necessarily the same as goodness, let alone courage.’  He went on to give two examples of Catholic priests (‘from within the same tribe’) who, he said, had condemned the IRA outright, but 

nice Seamus Heaney never quite did: his work left enough word-room for the bad people to thrive. ‘I loved his whole manner,/ Sure-footed but too sly’, he wrote of a drinker in a Derry pub. That was Heaney too.

‘Word-room’ is a term Heaney himself might have used. But if Moore was right, how could I square ‘sly’ with my conviction that  - as Heaney had once said of Robert Lowell – what we see as we read his poetry is the man himself? 

Full face, close, kindly, anxious, testing – a husband’s face, a father’s, a child’s, a patient’s, above all a poet’s.

My defence of Heaney began with ‘Casualty’ (from Field Work, 1977), the poem Moore had quoted. The poet recalls a stubborn Catholic fisherman who’d ignored an IRA-imposed curfew, in the wake of Bloody Sunday, and visited a loyalist pub because no one was going to tell him whether or where he could or couldn’t go for a drink. The pub had been bombed and Heaney’s friend killed. Now the dead man forces him to question both his own loyalties and responsibilities as a poet:

My tentative art

His turned back watches too ….

I contrasted ‘my tentative art’ with a description Heaney once gave of Yeats: ‘bold, reckless and outspoken’. These are words Heaney would never, I suspect, have applied to himself: indeed, he only once really railed against his own caution (in ‘Weighing In’, from The Spirit Level, 1996), but – and here’s the nub of my argument – he had the courage to admit the ambiguity of his feelings and to keep interrogating his need to see ‘Two sides to every problem, yes, yes, yes’. He speaks pointedly in ‘Casualty’ of ‘our tribe’s complicity’ and at the poem’s end, like Hamlet appealing to his dead father’s ghost, urges the dead fisherman:

Dawn-sniffing revenant,

Plodder through midnight rain

Question me again.

Even stronger self-scrutiny appears in the poem ‘Punishment’ where Heaney contemplates the bog-preserved body of a young shaven-headed girl, who had, in another age and in another country, been blindfolded and hanged – perhaps for adultery:

My poor scapegoat

I almost love you

but would have cast, I know,

the stones of silence.

I noted how silence, as here, can signify complicity in the rough justice of the tribe, a silence over which Heaney agonizes when comparing the punishment once afforded the hanged girl with that exacted by the IRA:

I who have stood dumb

when your betraying sisters,

cauled in  tar,

wept by the railings,

who would connive

in civilized outrage

yet understand the exact

and tribal, intimate revenge.

There is, I argued, an honesty here that has escaped Charles Moore.

Equally, though, Heaney recognized the power of silence as a weapon. In  ‘Weighing In’ he wrote of ‘the power / Of power not exercised, of hope / Inferred by the powerless forever’; and in ‘To George Seferis in the Underworld’, a key poem from District and Circle (2005), he paid tribute to the power of the Greek poet’s ‘elected silence’ to express outrage against the unelected junta of the Greek Colonels. By contrast with this devastating refusal to dignify their brutal regime with a denunciation, today’s language of protest, Heaney notes ruefully, is merely ‘marshmallow, rubber dagger stuff’.*

Earlier this week I heard Hilary Mantel say in a lecture at Exeter University that ‘in Ireland especially, history is still lived and suffered through. Though it leaves its mark on the landscape its real marks are internal.’ She added that in England we have heritage, not history – ‘castles, cathedrals: you pay for admission and they let you through the door. In Ireland, for better or worse, you can get in for free.’ Precisely. It’s always dangerous to rush to judgment – especially about people living in and through historical conflicts of which we are merely spectators. Charles Moore might have thought twice before accusing Heaney of cowardice, had he really read his poetry and pondered the honesty and, yes, the courage with which Heaney articulated his moral uncertainties. I hope I said so clearly enough in Dublin.

Adrian Barlow

*I have written in more detail about 'To George Seferis in the Underworld' in World and Time: Teaching Literature in Context (C.U.P. 2009, pp.58-59). The phrase 'elected silence' appeared in the poem's first version, published in the TLS in 2004; by the time it was revised for District and Circle, a year later, this phrase had been replaced by 'your much contested silence'. Was this a more pointed echo of Heaney's own disinclination to speak out unequivocally about the Troubles?

I have also blogged about Heaney before:

World and Time: Heaney’s penwork

World and time: Heaney's Human Chain

Heaney and the conversation of poetry

Seamus Heaney full face

Reading Stained Glass (ii): Wittersham in the Isle of Oxney

In Reading Stained Glass (i): Rouen, earlier this year, I discussed a small medallion from a huge early 13^th century window in Rouen Cathedral. This intensely coloured medallion, depicting Christ washing his disciples’ feet before the Last Supper, was so high up it was difficult to see with the naked eye. By contrast, I want to write now about a 20^th century eye-level window in a remote village church in Kent, which appears to have barely any religious connotation,  and mainly consists of palely coloured glass so clear that the churchyard trees outside almost become part of the picture.

This window, in Wittersham Church in the Isle of Oxney, is a memorial to John Body. It’s a simple two-light window, each light full of small lozenge-shaped pieces of plain hand-blown glass. Most of these quarries (to give them their technical name – which comes from the French carré: square) are clear, though some are tinted very pale blue, lemon, pink or green. Each light is also surrounded by a border made up of three elements: a narrow outer ribbon of clear glass and a central ribbon of vivid, varied blues, interspersed irregularly with small patterned gold squares or oblongs. These sometimes intrude into the narrow inner band of clear glass, though never into the outer. Every one is different, and all are painted black on gold with a cheerful naivety.

In the bottom right-hand corner of the window, the border frames a curious little figure: a cowled monk,

no more than a couple of inches high, and easily overlooked. But he has an important job to do. The monk is the emblem of the Whitefriars Studios, home of the illustrious stained glass firm of James Powell and Sons, and the initials either side of the monk, J H, indicate that this window was the work of James Humphries Hogan, Chief Designer of the company before and after the Second World War. Beneath the monk, the date 1947 indicates when the window was made and installed.  Hogan died the following year, so this was one of his very last windows.

All these bits of information help us the better to understand the window; for with windows, as with books, reading means looking, contextualizing, reflecting and then looking again, this time seeing the window in a clearer light. However, there is much more of this window to take in. First the dominant images: in the left-hand light a green dragon stands on a clump of grass with, beneath it, a Latin motto enscrolled thus: VETERI FRONDESCIT HONORE. Then in the right-hand light, three wheatsheaves, emblems of harvest, and beneath them a biblical text BEHOLD A SOWER WENT FORTH TO SOW. This is almost too long to fit across the glass, so the words ‘went forth’ are reduced to half-size lettering. Odd, don’t you think, to have a text about sowing seed accompanying an image of already harvested corn? Presumably the idea is to suggest that, in the context of this window at least, the seed fell upon fertile ground.

Beneath the two main images in the Wittersham window, running across the two lights and ignoring the stone mullion that separates them, is a dedication. The lettering is an excellent example of mid-20^th century calligraphy: it’s beautifully clear but just a little self-conscious with its interlinking loops and a hint of the formal script of an earlier age. It is the exact opposite of the Gothic script that was the lettering of choice for Victorian stained glass inscriptions. The inscription reads:

In loving remembrance of  JOHN BODY of

Wittersham Court who died 5^th December 1945

A Man of Kent

This gives little away, though the picture at the bottom of the window offers a clue: it shows a gentleman farmer in a Norfolk jacket leaning on a stick with his faithful sheep dog beside him: it’s after the war; the world is at peace again, so his flock may safely graze against a bucolic background of meadow, spinney, church, farmhouse and newly thatched haystacks – the ladder still propped against one of them. ‘All is safely gathered in’, in fact. The whole image, running across both lights of the window, suggests a man at peace with the world in a world at peace: he has lived, after all, just long enough to see the end of the Second World War.  It’s a picture of what Candida Lycett Green in The Oldie – my current magazine of choice – calls ‘unwrecked England’.

There is another important clue, however. The Latin motto belongs (as does the emblematic dragon) to the Royal East Kent Regiment, ‘the Buffs’. It means that the regiment ‘flourishes’ (frondescit) with ancient honour’ – though some translators render it thus: ‘Its ancient honour is evergreen’. A quick internet search will tell you that Lt. Colonel John Body was a career soldier whose regiment was The Buffs and who commanded the first British troops to enter Baghdad in 1917. He was awarded the DSO and Bar and many other decorations, which, sic transit Gloria mundi, ended up on e-Bay. Astonishingly – to me at least – after the war he became Master of the Tigris Vale Foxhounds in Mesopotamia. Eventually he retired from the Army, came back home to Kent, happily exchanging the Garden of Eden – Milton speaks in Paradise Lost of  ‘Tigris at the foot of Paradise’ – for the Garden of England. There he was a Justice of the Peace and Deputy Lord Lieutenant of the County.  He lived quietly at Wittersham Court, respected by all as a countryman passionate about preserving the countryside.

Such a man was John Body, and I like to think that it’s as he would have wished, that none of his wartime or civic distinctions should appear on the inscription on his memorial window.  So what might look at first like a rather bland example of mid-20^th century glass offers on closer reading a subtle and moving example of post-war English stained glass  by a designer, James Hogan, who deserves to be better remembered: an understated celebration both of an immemorial England that has just survived five years of war, and of a Man of Kent, soldier (the dragon) and farmer (the wheatsheaves) – literally then,  ‘ A Body of England’s, breathing English air’.

Adrian Barlow

[illustrations: the John Body memorial window, in the church of St John the Baptist, Wittersham. I am grateful to my friend Peter Hart for supplying the photograph for this window, which I have yet to see for myself.

I have written about this part of the Kent-Sussex border once before:

World and time: what I did on my holidays

Machiavelli at the Cheltenham Literature Festival

Philip Bobbitt , American presidential adviser, academic and author, describes himself soberly as a constitutional lawyer and historian of diplomacy and strategy. Others show less restraint. The Spectator has recently likened him to Indiana Jones, and the New York Observer has labelled him ‘the James Bond of the Columbia Law School’. More alarming still, a reviewer of Bobbitt’s influential but controversial book on modern states and modern war, The Shield of Achilles (2002), called him ‘Satan’s Theologian’.

He has just given one of the opening lectures at this year’s Cheltenham Literature Festival, and I was asked to introduce him. I thought this might be daunting – after all, Bobbitt was President Clinton’s senior director for Strategic Planning, and he’s a man who numbers both Henry Kissinger and the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, among his admirers. (Of whom else in the world today could that be said?)  I am happy to report, however, that we got on very well, and even found two things at least in common. First, we discovered we’d once lectured at Madingley Hall, Cambridge, during the same weekend (he on International Relations and I on David Lodge’s fiction).  Second, we were the only two people at the Festival that afternoon wearing ties.

Literature Festivals celebrate the written word through the spoken word. They are also of course a sophisticated form of market place: the speakers nearly always have a book to sell. Philip Bobbitt’s is his new study of one of the world’s great bogeymen: Old Nick personified, Niccoló Machiavelli.  

I read this book, The Garments of Court and Palace: Machiavelli and the World That He Made, last

week, and am very glad to have done so. It’s far from simply a revisionist re-reading of The Prince: it’s a clear-eyed, humane attempt to explain why Machiavelli and his book still matter. Reminding us that Machiavelli never wrote ‘the end justifies the means’, Bobbitt argues that

the nature of the state – its commitment to the common, public interest which embraces all classes and groups under law – is what makes the state a worthy recipient of the devotion that Machiavelli felt is its due. Ends matter, and not just any ends will justify any means.

Two things have greatly enriched my reading of The Garments of Court and Palace. First, Philip Bobbitt writes as an historian whose deep understanding of history is tempered by his wide reading of literature. The first hint of this comes in the book’s dedication –

For Guido Calabresi

Il miglior fabbro

– which of course echoes Eliot’s dedication of The Waste Land to Ezra Pound. Then the first chapter has as its epigraph a snatch of dialogue from Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons:

Thomas More: Master Rich is newly converted to the doctrines of Machiavelli.

Richard Rich: Oh no.

Duke of Norfolk: Oh, the Italian. Nasty book, from what I hear.

Margaret: Very practical, Your Grace.

Plays in fact appear often in the book. Bobbitt might be expected to cite The Jew of Malta’s Prologue:

To some perhaps my name is odious;

But such as love me, guard me from their tongues,

And let them know that I am Machiavel.

But other plays, too – Pinter’s Betrayal, Stoppard’s Arcadia and Frayn’s Copenhagen – are invoked to illustrate a critic’s point that ‘Machiavelli’s irony does not involve simply saying one thing and meaning its opposite; it more often describes an attitude that embraces two possibilities at the same time.’

This willingness to create a dialogue between Machiavelli’s writing and the writing of later ages is the second thing to appeal to me. Both in The Garments of Court and Palace and in his Festival lecture he has admitted that “my rendering of Machiavelli is an example of what Jorge Luis Borges called a writer’s creating his own precursors”. At Cheltenham he gave, as an example of this, the way TS Eliot ‘created’ a John Donne so particular and so persuasive (and so like Eliot?), that it has become almost impossible to imagine anyone before Old Possum ever imagining Donne differently.

Just as Eliot ‘created’ a new Donne in order to explain and justify his own theories of literature (the dissociation of sensibility, above all), so Philip Bobbitt has created a new Machiavelli to be his own precursor. He calls his book a ‘commentary’ on The Prince and the Discourses, but some critics have suggested that The Garments of Court and Palace equally invokes Machiavelli to act as commentator on Bobbitt’s theories about statecraft and today’s ‘market-state’.

Is this hubris on Bobbitt’s part? I don’t think so. True, he admires the man (whom he calls ‘our sublime predecessor’) but his message – and this book certainly carries a message – is an urgent one: we ignore Machiavelli at our peril. His contemporaries missed his point; we can’t afford to:

In our case it is not the hegemony of foreign states that threatens us – though we are so accustomed to thinking in these terms that we scan the horizon restlessly for potential competitors – but rather internal dissolution and disgust with our own institutions.

If this sounds more like Savonarola than Machiavelli, Bobbitt’s message is nevertheless clear: ‘We cannot be guided by Machiavelli, but we can be alerted by him.’  At the end of the book, in an unexpectedly personal Acknowledgement, he notes that the world into which his son was born last year “is in many ways a far better one than the world into which I was born, and a far less dangerous one than Renaissance Florence”; he concedes, though, that it is “not without formidable challenges”. Not many writers, I imagine, readily go into print to acknowledge a debt to Machiavelli, but Philip Bobbitt does. Describing how he and his young wife “first met in a seminar on The Prince and The Discourses," he concludes The Garments of Court and Palace on a note of touching incredulity:

It now seems that, for all my many debts to Machiavelli , this will prove to be the greatest.

Adrian Barlow

[illustration: a corner of the Cheltenham Literature Festival site, Imperial Square, Cheltenham, 6 October 2013

Philip Bobbitt’s book, The Garments of Court and Palace: Machiavelli and the World That He Made, is published by Atlantic Books: ISBN 9781843546849.