The Poetry of Silence, or...

Caught Vilhelm Hammershoi's exhibition at the RA just before it closes at the end of the week. The show is titled The Poetry of Silence. Hammershoi is Danish, 1865-1916. The paintings come complete with recommendations from Rainer Maria Rilke among others.

The place was packed out with the aged and the refined. The RA is like that. It is intelligent, knowledgeable, well-dressed and, generally, rich.

It is a complex act taking in a painting. Most people, most of the time, drift past a series of them, and form an impression of some sort, or hover for a minute in front of one or the other before moving on. In an ideal world you would be given a good half an hour in front of anything even vaguely interesting and let your eye inhabit the work a little. That's hard in life, generally because of time and other people, which is why I have always gone away from a good exhibition wishing I could steal one of the works, usually just a small one, if only for a month or so, to live it a little the way the artist lived it.

Because pictures don't just appear. They come about, often rather slowly and painstakingly, and were coming about well before the brush first touched the surface. So looking at a painting is a kind of undressing of the work, then re-dressing it. I sat in front of the only full sized figure in the exhibition, the painting of a cellist, playing near the bridge of the instrument, on the top strings, and made notes. Cello seemed appropriate to Hammershoi, especially one that was straining to be a viola.

What you generally get with him are plain walls, plain doors, plain windows and not very much light, except, here and there, a kind of fluttering. The city views are determinedly grey-toned as though a giant spider had done a Christo on them and wrapped them entirely in fine cobwebs. You do sometimes get Mrs Hammershoi, but usually she has her back to you. If I said think of an unlikely blend of Gabriel Metsu, L S Lowry, Rene Magritte, Gwen John, Georges Seurat, Pierre Renoir (on a particularly rainy day) and Pieter Saenredam, you wouldn't thank me. I thought of all these, settling chiefly on Metsu and Gwen John but never quite being able to forget Magritte. If he had painted a bowler hat on his wife the association would have been complete. But then the back of Mrs Hammershoi is often the nape of her neck or the small of her back, so there is an air of voyeurism there too, as if he had crept up on her, the way Hitchcock's camera creeps up on his female victims.



Interior St. Bavo-Haarlem Pieter Saenredam



Mère Poussepin Gwen John


But walls are not entirely straight, windows not entirely set in their frames, chairs not absolutely fixed to the floor, nor ceiling free of a certain occasional tendency to sag. Nothing is quite as certain as that simple view of a simple room would indicate.

And the simplicity is that peculiar Scandinavian Calvinist simplicity that is permanently pitched between sin and mourning. The rooms are obsessively tidy, the light fixedly non-sensual. If it caught so much as a sniff of voluptuousness it would flap its black skirts and scream.

These are spaces to hover in, and maybe that's why they called the exhibition The Poetry of Silence. Put it another way. Think of Ingmar Bergman remaking Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire. Or put it still another way...

God on Trial

I suspect this may be the first of a couple of posts on the subject since it is late and I have to go to London tomorrow, but I couldn't help sitting down to watch God on Trial and want to think about it. I had already heard the writer, Frank Cottrell Boyce, a Catholic, talk about it on the radio, twice, and was impressed by him.

The information is there in the link, but, briefly, the play is set in Auschwitz, and the trial probably an apocryphal event, a mere story. What happens is simply that the prisoners in one of the huts decide to put God on trial.

This could have been a very bad play indeed, fraught with the danger, on the one hand, of cheap rhetorical sentimentality, on the other of intellectual aridity and after-the-event smugness. As it was, I found it spell-binding for various reasons, and by that I mean all the obvious reasons: excellent writing, excellent acting and disciplined directing, complete with the rejection of mood-music (or very little). As Raymond Carver used to say: No tricks.

I had actually given up hope that the BBC could produce something as concentrated, as plain and powerful as this. I have sometimes thought back to the great Michael Hordern Lear as an example of what could be done with a box in the corner of the room and a head as big as your own facing you then turning away into itself. That, I thought, was the great secret of television, the secret no one ever understands: the power of confrontation and interiority. But let that pass for another time.

The court-room drama has a very long precedent. From Twelve Angry Men to Judge Judy, from long before to long after, it has been clear we are engaged in any argument on which much depends.

This was a much more fluid affair than standard court-room drama, the witnesses appearing in no box but in their bunks, the judge, the prosecution and the defence all without authority, all themselves condemned.

Cottrell Boyce took no easy route, offered no way out. He rehearsed all the most likely arguments and put them into the mouths of those who lived and died by them, in the very worst circumstances, at the point of death. He did well to focus on the central issue - the only possible legal issue - which was not the existence or non-existence of God, but the notion of a broken contract or covenant. None of the arguments was presented as unworthy or inhuman. Anthony Sher's speech at the end, in which he upbraids the God of the Jews, pointing out that God (to parallel Hitchens's argument) is Not Good, that he has been as savage as any other deity, with his one supposedly saving virtue that he was, at least, our bastard, not somebody else's, was a tour de force, complete with Biblical instances. So the bastard has broken the contract and made one with somebody else, was the line. So what! You could hardly call it a humane record!

Nevertheless, the prisoner who had been made to choose between his sons maintained his faith, and the end of Sher's speech was a prayer. The question as to whom that prayer was addressed to, and what it was for, is something I must take up tomorrow. What remains very clearly is the sense of evil, its presence, its fermentation, its oppressiveness, its logic, its sheer bloody-mindedness, and the desire of some human beings, in some conditions, to deprive others of their humanity.

And of course three of my grandparents were notionally present there, and uncles and aunts. And my mother. The world forgets how near these things still are. To some of us they are still tangible, so tangible one could actually physically touch them. And did touch them.

English Rain

There is something I actually like about rainy, autumnal England. There ought to be a vast encyclopaedia listing the occasions, locations, densities, wind-directions, temperatures and colours of English rain. Or a book of essays, poems, excerpts from fiction, weather forecasts and meteorological observations. Let's call it The Book of Rain.

Irish rain is slower, heavier, the drops generally twice the size of the rain we get. When Irish rain lands it explodes softly, leaving a small drenched spot. English rain rarely drenches you; it beats against you like something flapping in the wind.

Tonight I drove into the city to see the MA show at the art college, now a university. It was a little clammy inside. There was a thickening in the air. From there I went to the school where C does a couple of days a week and where the head was having a pre-term hour or so of drinks. It was on coming out of there into the cathedral close that I noticed the sky.

Often, before rain, there is a faint yellow glow in the sky, only just yellow, more grey than yellow, but still feasibly yellow. Above it, like a growing ball of wire-wool, the rain clouds, dark grey and blackening, sodden at their core. I have always felt that approaching rain in this form is the equivalent of a concentrated frown. The roofs look surprisingly light against such sheer intensity of premature dark. It is as if the city were briefly a photograph in negative.

But we were in the bar by the time it came down, the noise of conversation drowning out the sound of rain. And there's nothing like having just got in before the rain really comes down. You know it is hissing and bouncing outside, but here you have a drink in your hand and can watch it, your entire body warm and slightly damp.

While sitting at the table I noticed the sole was coming away from one of my relatively new shoes. There were puddles outside when we left and the smell of freshly passed rain and traffic.

On top of this post sits a wonderful, quite famous, Constable sketch of breaking rain. Aldous Huxley called George Herbert the poet of inner weather. That, I think, is part of the Englishness of English poetry. All the varieties of rain.

New Links

New set of links in the side bar to interviews and articles I have done here and there, that are available on the web. There's the John Tusa piece, among others. It may be handy for some.

Democratiya 14

The new Democratiya is in. There's a 'Letter from Hungary' in it. (Not from me, but containing a story told directly to me by a friend.)

A Little Márai 2

The excerpt.

The ribbon hadn’t faded, simply looked a little worn, in that peculiar way dead people’s possessions can do. Have you noticed how the hats and handkerchiefs of the dead tend to age, practically the moment the wearer dies? They lose color somehow, like leaves torn off the branch, and the green begins immediately to fade as green watercolour does… It seems there is a certain electric power in people whose current runs through all their belongings, the way sunlight runs through the world.

The lilac ribbon was barely alive. It was as if it had been worn a very long time ago. The person who wore might already be dead… or at least dead to my husband. That’s what I was hoping. I gazed at it, sniffed it, rubbed it between my fingers, questioned it… but the ribbon did not give up its secret. It remained obstinately silent, with all the defiance of an inanimate object.

And yet at the same time it gave something away. It was somehow superior, dense with schadenfreude. It was as if a mischievous goblin had stuck out its apoplectic lilac tongue to mock and ridicule me. This is what it said in goblin language: ‘See, I have been hiding behind the lovely, well-arranged façade of things. I had existence then and exist now. I am the buried, the secret, the truth.’ Did I understand what it was saying?... I felt so agitated, so cheated, so shaken - such fury and curiosity burned in me - that I would not have baulked at rushing into the street to find the woman who had once worn it in her hair or her corset… I was red with fury at being so insulted. See, even now my face is quite hot, flushed and red, just thinking of the lilac ribbon. Wait, lend me a little powder, let me make myself presentable.

There. Thank you, I feel better now. Well, the clerk soon appeared and I tidily put back everything in the purse; the calling cards, the proofs of identity, the money and the lilac ribbon that was so important to my husband that he rang home excitedly from the factory in the morning and had to send a clerk for it… And then I stood there, the great decision made in my heart, blazing with indignation, understanding nothing of life.

This is, of course, only a draft at this stage. I have also started writing the Englishness of English Poetry lecture. So far so good.

A Little Márai 1

Uncertain yet whether the title of the novella is better as The Real Thing, or The Genuine Article... (neither will quite do.) The woman who is narrating it is becoming estranged from her husband, proclaiming that she loves him, but really wishing to possess him, body and soul.

But he won't be possessed. There is some part of him hidden from her that she is determined to worm out of him. He is a good man, she says, an eminently good, proud, if somewhat undemonstrative man. She thinks his secrecy and reserve, his inability to completely give himself over to her, might be the result of a bad relationship between he and his mother in childhood, but she doesn't know.

They have a baby, but the baby dies in infancy, of an infection. She thinks he blames her for it. He never says so. She feels so desperate she goes to confession, and the old priest tells her she is being vain and greedy, that souls and secrets are not to be possessed.

Then one day he phones home from work - he is a wealthy industrialist - to say he has left his wallet at home and is sending a clerk to fetch it. She detects a certain excitement in his voice and, for the first time in her life, goes through his wallet. He is a very tidy man, the wallet is in perfect order. But in the innermost pocket of it she finds a lilac ribbon that does not belong to her. It has no scent, it smells only of his wallet.

An excerpt in the next post.