Advent 18 Canon

This is a slight cheat on my statement that in the canonical sliver of this enterprise, I am reading books that I ought to have read but have been too lazy to take on. T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Other Poems did cross my way when I was at school. I wasn't ready for it, come to think of it probably still am not. No matter, this is dynamite stuff. Elusive, allusive, beguiling. Two extracts stand out for me. First from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, comes one of those passages I wish I could pass-off as my own:

In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.

More striking still is this that served as the inspiration for the title of Waugh's brilliant novel, A Handful of Dust:

And I will show you something different from either / Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; / I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

  

Making Yourself Read

Marchant's Second Law - 'writers read'. Thus while I have been recovering from my recent back injury (still sore but I'm being a very brave soldier) I have supplemented my diet of telvision documentaries with quite a glut of reading. I surf the web thingy a fair bit - the BBC website is my starting point for news but I am also drawn to American sources because of my morbid taste for American politics. Trump/Biden has all of the dreadful allure of a grisly car crash. All you can do is look on and ask yourself yet again how it comes to this. What has happened to that welcoming and optimistic country that took me into its arms back in 1981? 

Real reading does not though (in the humble opinion of your correspondent) involve a screen - it is a matter of printed paper. And I am currently enjoying three very good books. One has to forgive Jonathan Coe the fact of his schooling at KES. He has a conversational dleivery and is funny about serious things, always the best way to aproach the difficult. I am a good way through The Closed Circle and I look forward to the time of day when I read it. I will review it thoroughly when I have finished.

I have become more like my late father and I have at least three books on the go at any one time. I try to ensure that at least one of these is non-fiction. At the moment that means Tommy, Richard Holmes' heavy tome on the lot of the soldiers of the Great War. It is authoritative and moving. Come to think of it, I think it was Mum and Dad who gave me the book for Christmas back in the good old days when he was alive and his mind still accessible to us.

The third book in my rotation is Evelyn Waugh's Unconditional Surrender, the final part of the Sword of Honour trilogy. On the last day that I saw Dad alive I read aloud to him from these novels. Decades earlier he had gently pointed me in the direction of Waugh, as he did with much literature without ever being prescriptive. Such statements are inherently ludicrous but I nonetheless offer up Waugh as the greatest English writer of the twentieth century. As for Dad, well, it's far easier - he was the greatest influence on my life.      

The Coup

John Updike's prose is poetic. I'm afraid I have no clue at to whether his poetry is prosiac, since I must confess I have never read any. So what of The Coup his 1978 attempt at an African comedy? It is, I suppose, a wry post-modern companion piece to Waugh's Black Mischief. But not nearly as good - not for this reader anyway. Don't get me wrong it is dauntingly beautiful in its composition but so dense that the comedy struggles to get out from under the taut wrapping of the prose. It plays artfully with point of view but, and here I suspect we have the key, it is at its most engaging when we flashback to the narrator/dictator's American college years. Updike's educated ennui with his own country shines through. A wholly admirable novel but not a page-turner. I doubt that Updike would be even remotely bothered by this middle-brow estimation. My instict upon finishing the book was to reach for Waugh's Unconditional Surrender, one of my late Father's favourite's, my well-thumbed copy of which I keep near at hand. Now that is mastery.  

Quotable Stuff

In my eclectic reading over the past week there has been a surfeit of stuff that had me thinking, yes he's got a point there, possibly wrong but there's an arguable point to it.

First up is my favourite member of the commentariat, Rod Liddle, Milwall fan and provocateur. In this week's Spectator on the topic of the lockdown (of which he is broadly a supporter):

The notion that we might end up kindlier, greener, gentler as a consequence of our brush with this ineffectual Armageddon was always horribly misplaced. The only lasting impact will be that reform of the cumbersome and often fantastically inept National Health Service will be off the cards in perpetuity and instead we will probably still be forced to kneel down before it every Thursday evening to give praise, clutching a used face mask in lieu of a rosary.

Next, my favourite denigrator of all things Bagehot whose lucid vitriol when it comes to my old mate Walter has even me thinking again. This, from his one hundred and forty page rant against Bagehot The Case of Walter Bagehot, is C.H. Sisson:

The central object of Bagehot's writing - and it is a destructive one - was to give exclusive respectability to the pursuit of lucre, and to remove whatever social and intellectual impediments stood in the way of it. Intellectual pursuits, and whatever strives in the direction of permanence and stillness, have to give way to the provisional and divisive incitements of gain. In the end one is left contemplating numbers over a great void. 

Finally from Waugh's Officers and Gentlemen, the arrestingly crafted summary of Guy Crouchback's private desolation occasioned by the entry of Russia into the war:

It was just such a sunny, breezy Mediterranean day two years before when he read of the Russo-German alliance, when a decade of shame seemed to be ending in light and reason, when the Enemy was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off; the modern age in arms. Now that hallucination was dissolved.

I am not, of course, at all sure where I am going with all of this but I take mild comfort in the fact I am in my inefficient way still trying to get somewhere.  

Writers Write/ Writers Read/ Kill Your Parents

Any of you who have been with me since the start will recognise these three injunctions as the Imperatives of Marchant delivered as with lapidary permanence by my first creative writing tutor.

I have found the first of these difficult to observe of late, rather feeling that what little I have got to say has already been said. As for the second, well I drift in and out of reading - I'm in one of my good phases at present. I alluded to this in my last entry. Since that entry I have completed Waugh's Men at Arms and have saved the next instalment of Sword of Honour for later, treating myself now to an interval of Simon Raven. I have read and re-read his Alms for Oblivion sequence countless times already - first encountering him from the fiction shelves of Erdington library as a teenager, pointed in the direction of this magnificently louche author by my father. To repeat the most oft-used critical estimation: the mind of a cad and the pen of an angel.

So it is that I am a hundred pages into Friends in Low Places, the second novel of the sequence. In my mind I had thought that this was one of the weaker books of the ten. Either I have hitherto been wrong or the whole shebang is even better than I had thought. Entrancing - no that's not quite the bon mot - let's try raucous and compelling, which is two bons mots. Just writing this piece is making me want to get back to read some more.

There is a temptation to read into the fictional mind of Raven's proto-novelist Fielding Gray something of Raven himself:

But what then? Suppose his work found favour with Somerset and his novels were published by Gregory Stern, suppose, even, that they achieved some measure of public esteem, what was to follow? Would there be anything more to say? Could he face the prospect of carrying on indefinitely with such a career? For did not even the two existing manuscripts pose the question, "While this is quite well done, was there ever, in truth, any real reason for doing it?"

I think we can take it as read that Raven himself would not have set much store by the opinion of a jobbing commercial lawyer but for what it's worth Simon old boy, these novels have been important to me. And here is another sample of why - this is the Marquis Canteloupe's reflection on his first meeting with the gruesome Somerset Lloyd-James:

In short, Somerset Lloyd-James would do. That he was manifestly not only a gentleman but also a howling shit did not deter Canteloupe one iota: for one thing, as he reflected, he was a shit himself, and for another he preferred working with them. For the great thing about shits was that they got on with it (provided the price was right) and didn't ask damn silly questions.

Delicious and so so right, as any honest jobbing commercial lawyer will tell you. Mind you, good luck in finding such a tradesman who is both jobbing and honest.

Away from books and outside on the mean streets of Britain, coronavirus continues to hold us in its invisible grasp. The Prime Minister has gone down with it now, not to mention the heir to the throne. The Roberts household is fine thus far and indeed Big Fat Pig is rather relishing the feeling of virtuousness that comes with regular exercise - two runs this week and an outing on the Precious Bike. All of this the Pig reports to you exactly one calendar month away from his sixtieth anniversary.

The mood of the domestic incarceration we are all enduring is no doubt made lighter by the gorgeous Spring weather we are enjoying. When, as it must, rain keeps us from even the sole exercise excursion we are permitted each day, the national mood may darken. As for how people will feel when we finally emerge blinking into the sunlit uplands of normality is a more troubling question - because then we will survey the full wreckage of our economy. But that is for another day.    

   

What Was It Like Before Coronavirus?

Can anyone remember? The whole bloody world has ground to a halt, interrupted by explosions of activity as people indulge in panic-buying bog roll. Not a good look. As of a few minutes ago all the schools have been closed save for the offspring of 'key workers' - whatever that means and assuming such workers have not already self-isolated themselves and their children. Has it occurred to the powers that be to suspend the stock markets as well? After all the markets are run by and for children who sometimes need protection from themselves.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not angry about all this - if the medics say we're all going to die then I'll go along with it. For now.

What else can I report. Oh yes, last week at Cheltenham was fun albeit tempered by an end of holidays feeling that soon such frivolity would be banned. Sure enough it has been. When last we corresponded I was optimisticallly clutching my Lucky 31 voucher which was going to land me some £13500. As it turned out it paid a return of £6.71. About as good as my punting got all week.

Don Juan's Reckless Daughter - listening to it now. Now there's a reason to be cheerful. Good old Joni.

I've been out running the last couple of days after an indecent period of sloth. Yesterday was dreadful - two miles and nothing more rewarding than the sensation that I might be sick. Today was better - three miles and now I can barely walk. I must rediscover those balmy and energised days of 1996 when I ran the London Marathon and lost only narrowly in a sprint finish with a bloke in a rhino costume and another with one leg. Once were warriors indeed.

More good cheer: I have regained the reading bug (it deserts me on occasion) and am immersed in several good books. Gary Imlach's My Father and Other Working Class Football Heroes is that cherishable beast, the good sports book - a record of a game now long gone with the wind. Premier League millionaires might do well to read it. It tells of a time when the professional players were treated lamentably and we should not be nostalgic for those times but we might want to stop for a moment and see how far the immorality has has spun to the other side of the coin. For fiction I am re-reading Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy. A delight. Poignant as well because I read the first couple of chapters to Dad the last time I saw him alive. I'm also dipping in and out of a tatty old paperback edition of World at War, the book that accompanied the fabulous television series.

The Groupie and I are off to collect a wine order. I hope she's ordered enough to last the length of the curent crisis. Now that really would be bad news. See you on the other side.  

Advent 10

There have been times when I thought Brideshead Revisited my favourite novel. Now I'm not so sure but unequivocally Waugh is the modern writer I most admire.

The 1981 television Brideshead soon acquired an almost legendary status. Again, I'm not so sure. It has its faults - Simon Raven would have done a better job than John Mortimer with the script which too readily falls back on a voice over of Waugh's brilliant words. But those reservations aside, this is still easily a piece of landmark television and Anthony Andrews as Sebastian never did anything remotely as good again.

Cricket Lovely Cricket

As it turns out I don't have to leave the country to make our cricketers play well. I am still in the UK and they stand on the brink of a demolition of Australia, an improbable rejuvenation after last week's capitulation. Test cricket is where it's at - don't let anybody tell you otherwise.

There are worse ways to spend the evening

I took in most of the day's play on the radio (no sport is better suited to audio coverage) whilst driving to Anglesey for one of my inspection visits at the old country estate. All is well, indeed made better by the nine holes of golf I treated myself to under a blameless, cloudless sky. As I stood on the ninth green at Baron Hill I forgave myself the fluffed chip and took in the view of the Menai Straits. A chap could do a lot worse. I have suppered of chili con carne and Weetabix (not together you understand) and am washing it down with Waitrose Good Ordinary Claret. I have Evelyn Waugh with me to round off the night - Scoop.

My golf? Petty crap I'm afraid. But tomorrow is another day.

Reasons To Be Cheerful

The last forty-eight hours have conspired to be kind to me. An initial piece of ill luck set in train a sequence of pleasant events.

The ill luck first. Wet road, huge pothole, flat tyre. I was able to limp the car home and did what any sensible bloke in my situation would do - called the AA - why bark if you own a dog? They were as good as, nay better than, their advertising promises - with me in half an hour and the spare fitted with a minimum of fuss. Very reassuring.

As is the modern way the spare tyre is a weedy little thing which you are advised to get swapped off the vehicle pronto. So yesterday morning I went down to National Tyres at Mere Green whose praises some of you may recall I have sung before. Once again, good as gold, sound advice and swift fitting. Tidy.

All of which left me well disposed towards the tawdry business of earning a living, so much so that I worked until after eight to make up the time lost to fixing the car. I ate well but not too lavishly, took early to my bed and read Waugh's A Handful of Dust. Cracking.

I slept well and was up in good time to dress for my pre-exercise health check at the gym. I passed with surprisingly flying colours, in particular excelling in my lung capacity. Buoyed by this news I swam twenty-five lengths rather splashily and then took to the sauna. The only casualty of all this was my watch which has steamed up. Waterproof my arse.

Feeling on a bit of a roll and ignoring the snow now falling I headed to the Belfry where I thrashed not entirely unconvincingly at ninety golf balls. Perhaps this is the year when The Overgraduate finally masters golf. Is it bollocks.

So all in all I'm feeling rather chipper. Which is nice

This is that time of year when I usually inflict upon you my predictions for the Six Nations rugby but, you know what, I'm uncommonly light on opinions this time. It would be nice to think that England will excel but in the absence of the injured Corbisiero I harbour doubts about the front row. I still cling to the notion that France should be better and that Wales aren't as good as their more blinkered fans would have us believe. Yes I know they provided the nucleus of last summer's victorious Lions but one has to remember that the Australia they beat were, in technical terms, absolute pants. Ireland have a very sound new coach and would be my idea of a decent outside bet, but what do I know.

Back to the gym tomorrow morning to be given my personal workout programme. Viva Iron Dave.

Vile Bodies

For the benefit of our regular readers who wonder if Big Fat Pig ever actually does any work when his training regime and general dossing allow, we are delighted to announce that our sister blog The Staging of Vile Bodies now has its first post. Go to http://thestagingofvilebodies.blogspot.com/ and find out more. Or don't. Suit yourself.