From Bath

No rest for whacked. From Bath to London to Hitchin to Wymondham to Norwich to Wymondham and tomorrow to London and back again, before London again Monday and Coventry Tuesday.

In Bath reading with Zoe Brigley, young Welsh Bloodaxe poet, followed by Indian meal to midnight then hanging round the deserted bar of the hotel with Zoe, Tim L and Carrie E until about 1am when one of us (not me, constable) inadvertently sets off the bar alarm in trying to get a drink of water. We continue sitting around for another fifteen minutes waiting to see what will happen. Nothing does. Eventually the night attendant, a sheepish boy from somewhere in Europe, appears and smiles sheepishly but doesn't know how to turn off the alarm. Then, at last, someone else does turn it off. I was faintly expecting the cops to burst through the door.

The train home is delayed half an hour. Spend time listening on iPod toy to Beethoven's String Quartet op. 132, one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, and Schubert's Quintet in C, another of the greatest pieces of music ever written.

The university has been asking to see my naturalisation papers. After fifty-two years in England they had better check I am not illegal or a terrorist in a sleeper cell. No one ever bothered before. In any case I find it and see, surprisingly, that what I had remembered about becoming one of her Majesty's subjects was wrong. The wording, according to the 1948 British Nationality Act is THE ABOVE NAMED HAS BEEN REGISTERED AS A CITIZEN OF THE UNITED KINGDOM AND COLONIES.

So British, United Kingdom and colonies. A pretty kettle of halibut. Now they want to see my P60 to check that the NI number they have had for a number of years is the NI number they have had for a number of years. It is, I assure them, the NI number they have had for a number of years.

The meeting I dashed into Norwich for was. appropriately enough, about refugees and asylum -seekers, as part of the City of Refuge programme.

*

Directed to a lovely review of the New and Collected Poems in The Morning Star today. Which reminds me. The hotel had a decorative book-case in the restaurant. Clearly no-one was expected to actually take a book from it. I did this morning. There was a well preserved copy of a New Statesman anthology, including H.G.Wells's interview with Stalin. It is faintly comical, Wells imagining he is putting Stalin on a spot with the odd Fabian half-nelson. Bernard Shaw also finds it amusing, but then Shaw is a repulsive bag of self-conceit. Neither of them pick Stalin for the monster he is. At that precise moment in fact. The purges were happily proceeding while the interview was going on.

Incidentally, pleased the Menezes case has exposed the police cover-up. The thing stank to high heaven from day one. And now the knife-crimes figures. It is getting very hard voting for this lot.

To Bath

I am off to Bath for a reading. C set off to Hitchin earlier to look after her mother. Except the car has broken down on the way, with a flat tyre. The car was fitted with new tyres only last week, whether this particular tyre I don't know. She's at the side of the triple carriageway, ringing me. This is a couple of hours or so before I am due to get the train. So I ring the AA and tell them to hurry then call a taxi for myself to get down there. Who cars about cost? It'll be about half an hour's drive to where she is. The AA say they'll be there soon. The taxi arrives just as C is ringing. 'Don't come,' she urges me. They are almost there. So I send the taxi away with £10 for his trouble. He scowls. He has only come round the corner so there's not much call for scowling.

Meanwhile the rain raineth but the sky cleareth. Maybe it cleareth.

It will be a series of phone calls now to make sure she's OK.

*

The issue of assisted suicide. I understand there need to be safeguards. Old people, sick people, shouldn't be pressurised into it. There should be no guilt attached to choosing to stay alive by whatever means. But the fact is I myself would feel guilt if it were me. And I value my dignity too. The man in the news finished off the job himself. No-one murdered him.

I cannot begin to express how deeply I loathe those who mouth on about sympathy at a safe distance but still want the final say on what others do with their lives. I see them as a crew of moral Health & Safety officials who would prevent you crossing the road without their say-so. Totalitarians of the spirit.

Enough fuming. Other things to do. Check C. Shave.

Hah.

Assisted suicide

My opinion on suicide has turned a 180 degrees since I was in my teens. My mother kept talking about euthanasia. I hated it. Her desire for death, after many years of suffering, seemed to be an infringement of my rights to feel rosy about life. It was adolescent self-centredness. That's how it seems now anyway. Everything at that age is an attempt to construct the world as one would wish it to be. An adolescent has so little control over anything and has such an insecure sense of self that other people's actions often constitute a threat. As Harry Enfield's teenager Kevin on the TV show used to repeat time and again: It's so-o-o unfair!

No, it isn't. I can see why she yearned for it. I can see I was a prig to feel as I did.

Now I am for it. Especially since the Scottish clergyman insisted that it is God's right to make us suffer and that we have no right not to suffer or to save other's suffering by ending our own. Not my kind of God then, vicar. That one can get lost.

In the current brouhaha about the televising of the death of one man who wished to be shown dying, whose surviving wife also wished it to be shown, I am wholly with the couple. I don't think it is sensationalist TV. It is reality, and it is about time death was shown as something real rather than acting and shoot-em-up. Someone pro-life on radio was saying there was no counter-argument to be heard on the programme. It's not argument. It is an event. No one has to watch it. People know it's there. It has been fully signposted. It is not glamorous. It is not youthful death wish. The man would have wanted to go on living if living had been possible. He would soon not have been able even to swallow. Would God have been satisfied then? As it was, from what I read, it was a loving leave taking.

I don't intend watching it myself. Can't, as we're out anyway. But I know it's there and am not sorry it is. The Roman route in such things seems far superior to the later model.

*

A footnote

See comments but this one is mine and I want it here, where it belongs. As below:

What annoys me are those people who keep repeating:

Your life doesn't belong to you. Not even to those who love you. It belongs to us. To God, to the community, to anybody but yourself.

And then they have the gall to say:

We fully sympathise and it isn't aimed at you, but those who choose this method are cowards and bad citizens and will fry in hell (not meaning you, of course, because we have full sympathy for you.)

I've heard several like that these last two days. Go fuck your sympathy, is what I think. You don't have to do anything about it, you patronising bastard.

Two local events

Events are almost more frequent than non-events at the moment but I am retrospectively registering these two, both in Norwich, both quite different.

1.



Last Friday we had booked the King of Hearts - a very old building that serves as cafe, art gallery and music room/performance space upstairs - for the local launch of the New and Collected. The idea in this case was not to have a reading by me, but to invite writer friends, ex-colleagues and ex-students, including a couple of present ones (some of these categories overlapping) to come and read a poem. In the event there were some nineteen readers, which is a lot, plus me topping and tailing the two halves with drinks at half-time. I realised in the course of the event there could have been more, but it was a grand audience, mostly on the younger side of thirty-five, and it was as joyful as I can remember. I took sixteen copies of the book, all of which went. Then it was over to the bar for another couple of hours. What I love about teaching is that doing it it becomes blazingly obvious that poetry is not the preoccupation of the middle-aged and middle-class, but is live and shared and pleasure across all boundaries.



2.



Then, on Monday night, Dragon Hall, another ancient Norwich building, or a dual event: the launch of Shuck, Hick, Tiffey including some of the music sung and performed, and the farewell do for the angelic Tom Corbett, who despite being angelic is nobody's fool. Tom has had an extraordinariy life as run-away, sailor, briefly priest, then publisher, headmaster and much else, lord of the universe for all I know. I think of him as an improbable cross between the angel Clarence in 'It's a Wonderful Life' and Jack Sparrow in 'Pirates of the Caribbean'. Clarence Sparrow set up poetry groups, set up publishers and was so bursting with ideas they had to tie him down with sellotape. He is also, according to one calculation, about two-hundred and forty-three years old.

The place was packed with about a hundred people, perhaps more. I did a read through of the Tiffey, or rather a spoken performance. The composer Ken Crandell then did about half of the work-in-progress with singer Anna Bentley - then Helen Ivory for fifteen minutes. A break, then a reading from me and from three other Gatehouse Press writers: Jo Kjaer, Gary Kissick and Jenny Morris. Then the well-deserved tributes to Master C. Sparrow-Corbett.

*

In view of my feelings about localities and communities, their potential exclusiveness and hostility, it is peculiarly good to have written three fully regional pieces. It's a kind of integration. We live here. By this river. Near that mill. In this town. In this city. On that street. It seems a proper integration to me, that is to say it is internationalism on the small, local scale. Whether it seems so to others, I don't know. I once wrote that all poetry was local, and in a sense it is. The Tiffey is our Pimlico.

Seasonal Post

The trailer fairly drips with sugar. Everything, but everything, is wonderful. Better still it is produced by Liberty films. Folk are good. Folk are folk. Folksy folk are particular good folk. Folk support folk. Folk may occasionally lynch folk but they do it for the best of folksy reasons. Volk may even exterminate non-folk. Folk and volk hang together.

And yet.

Following on from Passport to Pimlico, it's a natural transit to It's a Wonderful Life (1946), a film that, despite everything above, does bring out the sentimentalist in me to a degree you would not believe. It's Dickens really and 'God bless us all, every one' but there I am gently sniffling like a phlegm-bedizened dotard, deeply embarrassed at myself.

Dickens tunnels out of darkness and so does Capra. Here is a nice New York Times clip-essay by A. O. Scott, pointing out the dark bits. Recession? Run on the bank? Hello from Pottersville.

It is only the darkness that makes it bearable, the sense that Pottersville is altogether more terrible than Bedford Falls. That and the hope that kindness is possible. One clings to that because, it is after all, not impossible. It happens. It has happened. It is a part of the field of human possibility. It is not entirely impossible that if you treat folk right, folk will treat you right back. What else are we supposed to think, M La Rochefoucauld?

What we take for Generosity, is very often no other than Ambition well dissembled, that scorns mean Interests, only to pursue greater. (CCXLVII)

Often. Not always, squire. Pass the mulled wine.

New Poem on Front

The Translators. About translating. The verses in italics are paraphrases of an opinion argued by a fine translator and theorist of translation. It's as well to be humble but I won't quite own to being a faux monnayeur.

Another hectic week ahead. Teaching till 6.30, then reading tonight in Norwich, launch of Shuck, Hick, Tiffey. Tomorrow the MA group here. Wednesday is fine. Thursday Bath, Friday home. Saturday London. More later.

Linda Grant on the Bethnal Green Bambinos

Gorgeous article by Linda, originally in The Jewish Quarterly. I have permission to quote and am making hay while the sun shines. So, Linda saith...


... Watching this film that afternoon, utterly riveted, I understood two things, that it was a satire of the war years and that it could only have been made by Jews. The satire was obvious, but the Jews? Well, there was the presence of the Jewish actor Sydney Tafler, portraying the bookie Fred Cowan; and his wife, who runs the schmatte shop, who, at the prospect of the family coming into a share of booty, declares that she will send their son to Eton, a classic Jewish mother intent on her children’s education. Jews not knowing their place in the class system, I recognised immediately. The Cowan’s (or Cohen’s as you suspect they’ve changed their name from) are Jewish like the people I grew up amongst were Jewish. My parents, everybody’s parents’, were the children of immigrants, they spoke like, but not quite like, the Liverpool working class. They did slightly different jobs. They were tailors, furriers, cabinet-makers, tic-tac men. They had a healthy gloss of vulgarity on them, they glowed with a kind of American optimism. They had a force of ambition, contemptuous of the codified strata of social class. They were modernists, lacking any tradition, except that which had been brought from the hame and was practised only at home because it had no currency outside it. They took to the New with relish. When the residents of Pimlico realise they don’t need a music licence, and Charles Hawtree, the pot boy, sits down at the piano, it’s the Cowans who do the most-up-to-the minute dance, the jitterbug.

The insertion of these very obvious Jews in this most British of films was not the only clue about its origins. ‘Passport to Pimlico’ is a comic investigation of Englishness. Not Britishness, which is rarely mentioned. Britain is an institutional entity, it’s government, Home and Foreign Office; it runs the Empire. Englishness is what the characters feel themselves to be inside. The film’s most famous line encapsulates how people felt about their country in the immediate post-war years, after a struggle against both fascism abroad and the dreary restrictions of living entirely by the rule book. ‘We’re English,’ a woman says, leaning her head out of an upstairs window to shout to the Whitehall bureaucrats below, ‘we always were English and it’s just because we are English that we’re sticking up for our right to be Burgundian.’

The head of the Ealing studios and the producer of the film, Michael Balcon, was the son of Eastern European immigrants and said to be so grateful to the English for giving sanctuary to his family that, according to his daughter, Jill Balcon, the wife of Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, he grew willows in his garden for the manufacture of cricket bats. The Jewish English gentleman, whether he came from Vienna or Lodz, saw in ‘Englishness’ a set of values woefully missing in 1930s Germany or Tsarist Russia. Perhaps there is something in ethnic national stereotypes, or perhaps it was just a three-hundred-year-old tradition of parliamentary democracy that created a climate that was moderate politically and moderate intellectually, never tending to extremes. When the people throw their packed lunches over the barbed wire to the starving Burgundians, eerily prefiguring the Berlin airlift, there is a question mark hovering in the air. How did the Poles behave when the Jews were trapped behind the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto? The newsreel of the Burgundians’ plight creates in the minds of Londoners a sympathy with the oppressed, an alliance of interests against bureaucracy and the Little Hitlers (played by Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford, the stalwart bowler-hat wearers of many a British picture) at Whitehall.

The film’s director, Henry Cornelius was born in 1913 into a German Jewish family in Cape Town. When he was a child, the family moved back to Berlin, where, at the age of 18, he was accepted to study with Max Reinhardt and at the age of 20 was producing plays at the Schiller Theatre. After the election of the Nazis, he moved to Paris and got into the film industry, working as an assistant editor at the Studios de Montrouge. From there he went to London and got a job on Rene Clair’s ‘The Ghost Goes West,’ produced by another Jewish émigré, Alexander Korda. After working with Korda, Cornelius went on to produce what is regarded as the first true Ealing comedy, ‘Hue and Cry’ before being given ‘Passport to Pimlico.’ He later made another small English classic, ‘Genevieve’ and co-scripted ‘The Ladykillers.’ His career was cut short by his early death in 1958.

So over this quintessentially English film, about little England, is the hand of two strands of post-war British Jewry, the second generation shtetl immigrant, and the Yekke, the Central European Jewish émigré intellectual. ‘Passport to Pimlico’ is a portrait of an England idealised by immigrants. The real-life residents of their notional Pimlico were unlikely ever to have been abroad. The Continent to them is a place of streets baking in sunlight, free from rationing, an escape from the endless rain and the class system, but there was nothing foreign about the Burgundians, indignantly retaining their right not to be aliens...

...‘Passport to Pimlico’ is a portrait of England from the vantage point of the grateful refugee. There is no Jewish community in Pimlico, just a sole Jewish family, as English as everyone else, not just tolerated but accepted, part of the community, part of the texture of life. Cowan and his wife drink pints in the pub. No Jew in Liverpool was a pub-goer. No-one drank, except a sip of Kiddush wine and a glass of whiskey at a simcha. The women didn’t drink at all. Pubs where were the goyim went to do goyish things, like playing darts, and getting drunk and starting fights...

... I look at the English countryside, at its churches, its graveyards, and it so obviously isn’t mine. But the Ealing studios made us an England. It exists within the small boundaries of a film released fifty-five years ago, and in the DVD playing on my laptop. This Pimlico. This little realm. This little nationality.


Two dozen cheers for the Bethnal Green Bambinos.