THIS WRITING LIFE

Listening to the British Library's British Poets CD, which Robert Mitchell kindly gave me the other day because, disappointingly, it was a dud: his expectations of disc 3's WS Graham, Amis, Edwin Morgan, G. Mackay Brown et al, dashed upon the rock'n'roll of Ferlinghetti, Bukowski, Ginsberg, --the American disc slipped incorrectly into the British box-set. And it is a shock on the ear let alone sensibility; the speak easy vs the elocution lesson… The contrast's the greater because one's probably missing Whitman's introduction, from whence the long century of a determined modern cultivation, mostly all free one imagines, even as Ashbery's sestina or Sexton's parables, the colloquial messing up the old poetical.

On the 2nd English disc, Dylan Thomas follows George Barker, and it's his dramatic  diddledy-di which upsets the decorous continuum, as far as annunciation's concerned, from C Day-Lewis through John Betjeman (full of fun, a poetry that sticks in the ear, history recorded via nostalgia and as true as comedy allows), Spender, Auden. Sorley MacLean is different & not only due to the Gaelic (that is, the Gaelic's thoroughly not-Englishness); and R S Thomas in another way. But Dylan Thomas is something else, the strong & continuous flowing, the rhymes & rhythms, the repetitious or better said, the apparent circularity of image & rhyme; in the spirit of Hopkins & Yeats, accessible to their great spirits.

The British disc is an entire lesson, whether or not in the largely bypassed diction --a lesson in the old craft by its late practitioners, the mid 20th Century's sages & stars who were the main men on the shelf when I was beginning, hardly beginning, early '60s ℅ Southampton's public libraries. I got into my own stride by rejecting the lot of them. I was looking for W C Williams not Charles on the poetry shelf!

Listening to the American disc, I can imagine the converse surprise of the American poetry buff, the  horror listening to Larkin or Hughes instead of John Ashbery or Le Roi Jones… And I can hear how Adrienne Rich connects with Anne Sexton & I'm sure Sylvia Plath too. Incantation by which didactic is kept sweet to the lyric. Question : How remain individual (retain eccentric personality) in the vortex of the topical (perhaps the involuntary generality)? How save individual in the maelstrom of the everyday (one's 'particular narrowness' as per Celan)? How prevent the signature American poetry (the declasse vernacular to which all accents adhere, Walt's 'democratic idiom') convoluting to artless prose? My questions, only mine, never finally put away…

(December, 8th, '16)

BOOKS THAT DARE NOT SPEAK THEIR NAME, #2

(continued from BTDNSTN, #1)
[RUSKIN SPEAR, Mervyn Levy; Academy Chicago Publishers, 1986]

The pictures are a right & proper distraction from the text... Hard to resist the temptations of the drawing of his old man; the oil of Muriel Belcher (--I assume is the subject of A Night Out for Muriel, tho maybe not at all); the somehow obscene & fantastic Strawberry Mousse; the Barnett Newman satire ("Vermillion is a very expensive colour --the painting is seven feet high and four feet wide --and if it had not been for a friend who provided me with some large cans of Painters & Decorators red, the picture would have cost me a fortune! Curiously, poor old Newman died soon after I completed the painting, and I was warmly complimented by one or two protagonists of the great man [whose work Spear considered ludicrous] for my alacrity in producing such a speedy tribute!"); the curiously two-dimensioned & imposing Carel Weight (classically precise head & shoulders against the cartoony fluidity of a peopled park, which may of course be one of his sitter's own paintings); and so many more.
Levy's opening remark that "English painters have a distinct flair for descriptive art (...) ranging from the satire and humour of Hogarth and Gillray to the frankly eccentric vision of LS Lowry", situates Spear appropriately. The Seventeenth-Century Dutch as well as Sickert & the Camden Town Group, expands the reference.
Levy/Spear resumes a discussion which has always interested me, about the verity of a work whether realism or satire, portrait or cartoon. One's talking about a represented object, that is an object vis a vis both subject & manner of representation. Mulling this over here, images of Anthony Green's family chronicle occur to me. My main reference, in the absence of having seen much of his work in galleries, is (good & obvious pun) a green part of the world (Thames & Hudson, 1984), an illustrated memoir by this, supposedly, very private person. In my mind is not one of the mister & missus cameos, in flagrante, love-making around their well appointed house, with supporting cast of family members occasionally in the wings, but Pictures of Our Garden (1979), Lucy's Artichoke Patch (1978), & The Enchanted Garden : Twentieth Wedding Anniversary (1981)... In my mind, over the years, they've collapsed into a kaleidoscope, and so prosperous is it that I think it supports every aspect of the nostalgia securing for me an English village- or suburban-childhood, all of it devolved upon the bonfire & its plume & drift of smoke, the borders of lavender, rows of lettuces, cabbages, small sheds, beens on their poles, the swing, the lawn, paving, shrubs, flowers.. It is literally! symbolically! the truth! It's a quality of truth I invest in the painting(s), and correspondence with the painting dynamises that truth!
To return to Ruskin Spear, for example his picture of Betjeman. If it's satire then it's of an entirely different order to his Barnett Newman where that painting is nothing more than cheeky conjunction of artist & signature style. The Betjeman, though, tells a story which may or may not have occurred (the poet rowing a boat on the river) but casts a cultural clothing about the historical person that's composed of the very Englishness the man would have identified & celebrated, that has become synonymous over the decades with his name. It's also a pun : Betjeman, as ever, rowing his own boat...
Levy describes Ruskin Spear as "one of England's most influential teachers. At the RCA, between 1947 & '75, his colleagues included Carel Weight, Rodrigo Moynihan, Robert Buhler, Johnny Minton, Leonard Rosoman. regarding his association there with Weight, Levy writes, "These two remarkable men --both highly distinctive artists -- fostered the generation of Peter Blake, Frank Auerbach, David Hockney, Ron Kitaj and Allen Jones (...) It is unlikely that the system of art teaching which operated in Britain before the 1960s could have actively participated in the fostering of such rare talents." And regarding the freeing up of the system, under the RCA's principal, Robert Darwin, Levy notes, "Ruskin Spear was perfectly in accord with the mood of the early Sixties : partly iconoclastic, partly seeking the security of new directions." Of course, the emancipating tutors had come up through the old school now criticised as mechanistic, and perhaps that's the paradoxical lesson; no liberation without tradition. Except that Spear appears dramatically arse-about as quoted by Levy (p106), "Since [the students] usually arrived at the College well satisfied with their ability to produce proficient drawings of the figure,I argued that painting should come first and that one should learn to draw by exploring and resolving some of the problems of painting. After all, painting is drawing, if not in the linear sense..."
To me, Ruskin Spear's strength & charm lies in his adoption of the local, whether following Sickert's Camden with his own Hammersmith or making art of the nominally accessible &/or popular subject. Mervyn Levy could have sub-titled his monograph, From Sickert to Pop-Art. The Sixties' egalitarianism didnt cancel the erstwhile elite patronage (Sutherland's upper-crust commissions for example) but the celebrities of several social domains were now simultaneously acceptable. Almost beside the point from the Australian viewpoint but significant in Britain still. Spear's portraits --for example, Harold Wilson the pipe-smoking PM, George Brown & Barbara Castle from his cabinet, Sid James on the telly (on top of everyone's cabinet), Fred Trueman, sartorially challenged, on the cricket field --and his r&r snaps make him the perfect generational bridge & chronicler of the time.
Needless to say, a valuable addition to this sentimental reader's modern British art shelf.

--July/August, 14,'08

BOOKS THAT DARE NOT SPEAK THEIR NAME

BRITAIN'S ART COLONY BY THE SEA, by Denys Val Baker (pub. George Ronald, London, 1959). What a steal! Mine written all over it tho' it was Alan Pose first spotted it. Told me I'd certainly be interested unless I already owned it. Well, St Ives is a sacred site within one of my key areas of interest. Of course I recalled the title but have never seen the book. Should have been his, then, but he passed. (The article on collecting will be written anon!)
A beautifully made book (missing dustcover? --no matter, leaf-green hard-back), pristine after half a century. Denys Val Baker states that it's "not a book of art criticism" but an "introductory survey" of St Ives art & artists, hoping that "more exhaustive studies may follow". Quite obviously written by such an enthusiast as the ex-editor of the Cornish Review would have to be, no jargon, plenty of reproductions of paintings, sculpture, pottery, & fine photos of the artists in situ (John Wells, paint-spattered Peter Lanyon, Barbara Hepworth in her now famous, tho' scarred with personal tragedy, Trewyn studio, John Pecks, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham in dramatic silhouette painting above the bay, Bernard Leach, Sven Berlin sculpting with mallet & chisel outdoors). The black & white plates arent the compromise they'd be in a contemporary publication; black & white is the colour of the historical one could say, and besides, the b & w reproduction is positive as colour, not for a moment denoting its absence.
Although there is a St Ives history & the history that takes one there, just one visit is sufficient to appreciate the rare reflecting-mirror of art & place. It's one of those locations in the world where the iconic pictures recall the place and vice-versa. Therefore there's a continuum and an ever-current expressive potential within the equation of art & place. (Because of Georgia O'Keefe, prime amongst others, Taos & the New Mexico desert would enjoy similar status I guess...) It adds up to tradition by now... The book, by extension, is both historical & current.
The frontispiece photograph is the quintessential evocation of the scene (--altho' morning or afternoon tea isnt quite the St Ives legend; and in whose studio I'd love to know? --could work it out via identification of the paintings in the room, especially the harbour scene on the easel with its sketch behind), after all, whom better to represent St Ives in the Fifties than smart jacketed Peter Lanyon, raising mug of tea to mouth, long skirted Wilhelmina Barns-Graham standing over the low table of teapot & jug & crockery (playing mother perhaps, the Fifties after all, and therefore her studio?), and could be Winter rather than manners, the straps of the skirt over long sleeve jumper, the men dressed warmly (and is that a tall sock over Lanyon's trouser leg or a trick of the light?)... On the other side of the small table is Sven Berlin, in fisherman's beany, Augustus John-gypsyish, with pointed black beard, flamboyantly cut jacket, mug in hand and behind W B-G's elbow is John Wells, hands about his cup (it must be Winter!), the most reserved by expression. They're listening to Guido Morris, mostly hidden by Peter Lanyon... Typical clutter of studio, "Peinture Moderne" poster on wall...
One can never know everything and though a b & w reproduction of an egg tempera, Cornish Scene, cant say it all, I'm as struck by the luminous high terrace & steps overlooking ocean by Stuart Armfield ("traditionalist" Val Baker describes him in long list of same, John Park, Leonard Fuller, Bernard Ninnes et al), --and perhaps it's the wild flowers occupying the right foreground balanced by the large gulls & the scudding clouds--, as I am the familiar Tunnard, Hepworth, Wallis & Jewel... Another name to investigate! The painters, the sculptors, the potters (-- lovely photo, "Bernard Leach discusses the merits of a pot with his son David and apprentices at Leach Pottery"), a late Fifties' snapshot...
Denys Val Baker's book is like a travel guide for artists & art lovers, documenting even as it solicits custom! Personally, I cant wait to get back there --some years now since Bernard & I visited, staying with Kel Bowers & Dooz Storey, renewing acquaintance with Bob Deveraux at the Salt House gallery, etc etc, rolling around heaven all day... Until then, employ book as magic carpet!

In passing, I picked up Mervyn Levy's little monograph on Ruskin Spear (Academy Chicago Publishers, 1986; first published W & N, UK, '85) in Bendigo recently. I happened to mention it to George Hartley (the Marvell Press George Hartley, friend & publisher of Larkin) at Collected Works the other day, in the context of wonderful finds in second-hand bookshops. The less famous English artists, he said, that's my interest too. Touche! He said he'd never ever seen anything on Ruskin Spear and would have snapped it up himself! I hadnt realized it was hard to get. I mentioned the frontispiece painting of John Betjeman, Poet Laureate Afloat (c1974, oil) : Larkin had done a television programme with Betjeman, complained about the filming & all in his usual way, but he loved it really, George said. Never got to meet him myself though, he added.
To be continued...