Paul Murphy

Murphy's Lore presents Paul Murphy in conversation with myself. Paul is best known as a poet, but is paradoxically most widely read (there's just more of this) as a remarkable critical sensibility. He's extremely well-known for his film criticism, and cultural and historical commentaries; and almost as much for his shafts on Germany and poetry. He often travels with devastating results to travel-writing. In Blake's 250th year, someone who doesn't cease from mental fight deserves honour and wider dissemination than here.   His deconstruction of everything from Hollywood and German politics, to Turkish baths, frustration, the Velvet Underground, and Milton and the Civil War, make him compulsive, one might say compulsory reading on all the alienations we live under. The correspondence is presented in neccessarily reverse chronological order. Which means you often have to get through one of my letters first. But it can easily be skipped - SJ.

May 1st (or April 1st if it's Boris)

Hi Paul,

There’s a Hindemith comic opera from 1921 Das Nosch Noschi, literally the nut eater, that does the same thing to a set of courtiers that your rabbit does. The Rabid Stoat of Bow sounds something that should be elegized in a ballad. Good luck with Roxanne. There’s a Roxanne in Szymanowksi’s King Roger (1918-24), wife of the eponymous King Roger, who goes with the shepherd preaching Dionysian rites in 12h century Sicily. Roger actually existed. He chooses neither the strict Christians of his court nor yet entirely the seductive, bi-sexual shepherd, but to contemplate a middle way. A profound opera.

I admire the spunk, as it were, in the poem. It puts this woman you address in the invidious position of being complicit in the machining of men. It’d fit your collection and that’s where I’m sending it. Today I have to rush, so, till two weeks time – I’m taking my holiday next week…All the best, Simon

April 30th, late

Dear Simon, everyone is in the habit of denying everything so its unsurprising that Global Warming is also something on the list of deniers.  There are deniers of all sorts, even Hitler himself said 'who will remember the Armenian genocide'.  Of course that presumes that there is someone left to remember, but all sorts of people have forgotten his sordid end in the bunker.  Global Warming is a more serious, long-lasting threat than Nazism, but it originates from the same source: a tiny elite of fanatics who are bound together by ties of blood not merit and who believe in their total rightness to do the things they do, even in the face of all the facts.  The facts speak for themselves.  We are reaching the point of no return, where the earth will be so damaged that correcting these developments will become impossible.  In short our habitat, this beautiful Eden, a ball of blue and slime rotating somewhere nr our sun, will become a burnt out shell coated with those little creatures you sometimes view out of the side of your swimming glasses.  I've noticed them, basically they feed off furballs, faeces and bumfluff.  They're eager, active and they're here.  (one of them is the President of the US, a massive one - have you seen him?  If not try wearing your swimming glasses when he comes on TV.)

I'd like to write a book, some of these creatures escape and eat all the indefinite articles in every seminal work of English poetry.  They hide all these articles in a deep burrow, infested by a giant testicle eating rabbit called 'the doors'.  If you get down the burrow he confronts you, plays The End before brutally tearing off your knackers and swallowing them with an immense burp.  Then there's the rabid stoat of Bow, secretes juices into works of High Modernism...you guessed the rest.

I'm listening to Santayana and Lou Reed, presently chilling and thinking of playing some pink trombone... As a bizarre echo of Kipling, one of my students happens to be called Roxanne, an Iranian from Tehran, probably related to the original Roxanne who seduced Alexander all those summers ago.  Perhaps if I showed her my medallion, the one that's eerily like the secret symbol of the Masons, then... bw, Paul

April 30th: rain cleared

Hello Paul,

The Books by Jasper Fforde so far are: The Eyre Affair; Lost in a Good Book; The Well of Lost Plots; Something Rotten. He’s written others in another series. He had no success till 2001, when all his books came tumbling out after final acceptance. Yes, they’re post-modern with a vengeance. I thought their jouissance as they’re inevitably called, would appeal. They reminded me of some of your plots.

Modal verbs et al? My knowledge of grammar is still more intrinsic than extrinsic, as we were taught at Leeds (grammar course supposing that English students don’t have extrinsic knowledge). But I’m beginning to grasp and re-grasp more. An opening section of my PhD was about the subordinate clause of Drummond Allison. I had some fun with post-structuralists. Subordinate clauses equal an eternal postponement of peace, Allison and Henry Reed using them extensively. Sure, it’s arguable, I say. But so what? It was only a partial truth. Useful, but some people build up theses on it. If that’s how you spell it, as it were.

 I saw the Al Gore film but nodded (it was warm, a DVD showing by friends) at the fundamentalist part you mentioned. Yes, he forgot he doesn’t have to collect votes now, and even Christian fundamentalists can hardly argue against a natural order and climate change. Maybe some curiously suggest God’s habitat is the petro-chemical Order of the world. Even for the die-hards amongst them it must be like holding an election against death, which Mugabe is currently doing. Falsify all you want; you’ll lose. Speak soon, thanks, Simon

 Dear Simon, this morning up bright and early to go to school to teach synonyms and antonyms.  Last night I watched 'An Inconvenient Truth' wit hAl Gore and used some of this material in my class.  Actually an interesting film, Gore simultaneously has to educated all of those numbskulls out there like me who don't have a good science grounding in Global Warming, simultaneously placating the religious right by constantly explaining that his account of the world's history and historical ecology IS consistent with a Biblical interpretation of reality.  Al Gore shouldve been thrown out of a plane for making this, he is simply one of the most offensive, stupidest people ever born and it is unsurprising that he lost the election to the monkey G W Bush, surely a throwback of some kind. 

April 30th: Rain

Dear Paul,

Yes, it is wet. You graphically convey the misery of German verbs dripping in the rain. I’m reading D’Annunzio alternating with Jasper Fforde, given to me by a writer friend Carol Sterenberg, and am in the third of the series. A fantastical parallel world of 1985 where the Crimean war has just been ended, the heroine Thursday Next of the Literature Tec Police investigates crimes against fiction and grammasites are animals that bore into books and eat verbs. One has taken all the punctuation out of the last part of Ulysses. People live in and out of fiction: Next is in the ‘real’ world but can enter fiction; her first intervention changes the end of Jane Eyre (which saw Eyre leave for India miserably with St John Rivers) into a happy ending. Bertha is killed by a villain (Archeron Hades) Next kills in her turn. She’s tried for intervention but Rochester witnesses in her defence.

Britain had been beaten by Germany as Churchill was killed as a boy (this might change) and the Americans with the Goliath Corporation and mean operative Jack Schitt have more or less ruled Britain ever since about 1950. The formidable Miss Havisham (the very same, in her wedding gown, but not always) is a Jurisfiction agent and has a penchant for fast cars; she races Mr. Toad out in the ‘real’ world and uses Police speed cameras to verify. Hers is the 1927 Perry dug out of the sands recently. Currently Next is living in a piece of fiction under threat of demolition, in a Sunderland flying boat, in hiding whilst she has a baby, Of course on one level it reinforces how the three-quarter educated can congratulate themselves on not having to read any more. But it’s far better than that.

Very interesting about Orwell’s TB inflecting that whole last third. I did wonder. But the whole exudes a horrific dys-sanatorium effect, if I might coin that. A torture hospital. O’Brien is a kindly sadistic psychiatrist. Reverting to what I said about Dictators eating their own children: it was literally true with Stalin and to some extent Hitler – he had fewer relatives to kill. They mostly died. If their regimes preached personal extinction it’s as though Stalin and Hitler fed off the blood of their family, and  nations, to stay alive for ever. They didn’t quite contemplate dying themselves, and certainly entrusted to no progeny, succession being the admission of death that even monarchs bow to. It’s the contradiction at the heart of the dictators' rule.

I discovered your comment about the anarchists and suggestions of holiday, which I’ve now posted. Thanks.  It was hiding incongruously  in the junk mail box, wholly separate from your other mails – and has been rescued.

All the best, Simon

 Dear Simon, thanks again for this interesting contribution.  Cyril Connolly surfaces in the Bowker book which is worthwhile looking out.  Since then I've also listened to 'On the Road' by Jack Kerouac read by David 'Kung  Fu' Carradine and 'Schindler's List by Thomas Kenneally, read by Ben Kinglsey.  Very wet day, splitting headache for I woke feeling exhausted, a very bad sign, then into teach a class just a bit smaller than yesterday.  A day spent expostulating modal verbs, an auxiliary verb connected to mood and synonomous of Germanic languages.   I'm going to go for a long walk before bedtime, top up on fluids, maybe eat a bit of chocolate. 

Yeat's membership of The Golden Dawn is the most UnOrwellian epoch its possible to think of, yet Yeats turned out to in many ways be a great pragmatist, running the Abbey Theatre, enjoying the money he gained from his Nobel Prize, dying contented.  Orwell must've gone running after the MONEY but, as I said,  never lived to enjoy it.  The last 3rd of 1984 is more to do with Orwell dying of TB than with the sufferings of Winston Smith. 

bw, Paul

April 29th: Nightfall with storm clouds

Hi Paul,

As ever a huge amount to respond to. Orwell was perhaps, like Owen, an 'injustice collector' which Cohen in Journey to the Trenches suggests Owen was afflicted with. He does this with great sympathy and tact; it doesn't detract from his incredibly moving poetry. But there is a sense in which Orwell too sought out this miserablist stance, partly Burmese administrator-aggravated class guilt, partly a protest against all he was brought to. No other writers of his generation - none at all since Kipling and Saki - had to face colonialism's ruling protocols; and justify them to the colonised. He eschewed Oxford after Eton unlike his exact hedonistic contemporary Cyril Connolly, who also exactly dissected the period - but in a more confessional, wry manner.

Orwell has little humour either. But he was also a more fundamentally creative figure than Connolly and indeed Isherwood, perhaps. Possibly he also reacted to their self-regard, however ironised. I agree entirely about his having benfited Capitalism, and hias arguments falling with a deadening squareness into the Arms of CIA-funded Encounter. And his old friend Spender who kept himself blind to it. Orwell would of course have been horrified. he would also have argued agaisnt the closed systems of capitalism every bit as much as Popper congratulated himself on his Open Society and its Enemies. We lacked his critical balance.

As for his superstition, and his self-harm (alluded to above) it seems as if something deep drove him into a position of always suspecting he was about to be found out. Thinking that over, one can apply it to so much of his work and life - culminating in the devastating last third of 1984. Perhaps this isn't simply something in the bedsheets your parents discover; it's about religion, superstition, a sublimation of the Last Judgment. Perhaps the removal of this on a conscious elvel decided Orwell in responding to a complex call to sound a Last Judgment himself; and afraid of there being a supernatural one on a sub-conscious level. I'm trying here to explore his sense of dread balancing his sense of injustice. It's claustrophobic and extraordinarily strong.

Freemasonary provided an enormous liberation from straight Christianity, and in the 18th and even 19th century was not only a means of networking, but often a positive force, full of ideals. Naturally by Kipling's time it had become more debased and the occult had taken a more conventional hold. Yeats as you say liked to codify the supernatural, and was far mroe interested in hierarchies of angels. He would have told Rilke just how many Orders of Angels there were, and what they wore. Had he been a conscious believer, Orwell would have swept this aside. There was just one kind of dread, fear and trembling.

I'd add Ligeti's Lux Aertana to that list of 2001 music beneficiaries. Though I think the Blue Danube shifted pretty well for itself. As for Monahan, thanks for the tip. I lived in Dublin and Wicklow in my early years. Nothing but trams, personable high street shops, suburbs with circumcised stone lions, pubs, and in Wicklow, more sand than I've ever seen again. But then I was smaller...

I'd best be off, people will want to read you, not me; All the best,Simon

April 28th, 2008

Dear Simon, an interesting weekend.  On Saturday a trip to the Riverside Studios to review 'There Will be Blood', then met a crowd of friends in Islington in the evening.  I felt tired so left early and walked back to Holloway Road.  Perhaps my perambulations cast a shadow on events, so that in the morning a vast police cordon had been established sealing off Holloway Road, for a man had been fatally stabbed outside the club Majanko, a club used heavily by Afro-Caribbean types.  So Sunday was a wasted day for me, spent it mainly in bed then writing up my report on the movie and watching 'Kinsey' a biopic with Liam Neeson and Laura Linney.  Today I arrived, my classroom bulging with students, they all very keen to begin the business of learning and I oddly contented.  I read some more Orwell on the tube this morning.  According to Orwell, the English middle-classes don't have much time for anti-semitism, the English working-classes do, especially Irish labourers (me!). 

Do I ever tell you about the phlid? Paul

April 26th, 2008

Hi, some woman appeared at the National Film Theatre telling me that I couldn't be Irish, that it had been done before.  Just appeared out of the blue.  She seemed to be desperate to tell me something about her husband, a Professor of film studies, but I really wasnt interested and vowed never to sit in the foyer of the NFT again.  There's nothing wrong with having verbal wit or felicity or whatever, yes its been done before, no I am not standing on a Yeti.  Ireland is a small island.  At the top are a crowd of rock-throwing Neanderthals, the Loyalists.  At the bottom are a band of rock-throwing Neanderthals, the Fenians.  Inbetween are some interesting bogs and a place called Monaghan.  Don't go there.  That's Kavanagh country, the real dead centre of island and as bleak as get out.  Nearby is the Tyrone Guthrie Centre.  I spent time there, going through Guthrie's record collection, hiding in the attic while the Manager and his wife implored me to leave even though they initially implied that I could stay there for the Summer, thus relieving a further burden from my poor ma and da (RIP).  An ex-actor told me that about his Shakespearian habits, necrophilia and a fine King Lear hidden under the bed for latex pleasures.  Wagner he iterated, had his left and right convictions.  Aye, I thought, as I managed to avoid the foam of vaseline that came at me through the inky hall-light.   But that's about all and all the comment about the horrid little place I'm from.

All the authors we mentioned presided over a world in which Christian morality had begun to be replaced by new values, indeed Orwell's was preoccupied with the link between science and morality and between politics and morality.  In Kipling's 'The Man who would be King' Freemasonry seems to replace Christianity (or at least to be a kind of Christian heresy), those who possess the secrets of the craft becoming powerful.  Indeed Freemasonry becomes a trope for the creative process itself, at once mysterious, elusive, impenetrable but also akin to flummery or hollow, insubstantial mysticism.  If you read 'Da Vinci Code' you'll learn that many of the greatest artists in the Western tradition were Freemasons, but this seems to me to be more to do with the possible contacts they might make and the artists fascination with alternate belief systems and secret societies than any palpable connection. 

Orwell was also one of the first people to address popular culture and take it seriously, hence his analysis of boys own magazines like The Magnet, saucy postcards.  I'm sure if he were alive today he would have interesting, if not prophetic, things to say about the internet and email.  I'm sure he would embrace this new technology and be a fervent blogger.  Today popular culture or mass culture is surely not so innocent as in Orwell's day, its had to adapt constantly to high culture, sometimes being absorbed (as in the example I provided of The Beatles where they adapted new musical techniques of Stockhausen into their album Seargent Pepper.  In fact, in this case, popular culture is beginning to call the shots over high culture, The Beatles album made Stockhausen famous, Stalin Kubrick's film '2001' popularised the music of Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss and Aram Khatchaturian.).  For instance I've just been looking at the sophistication of spam and how its beginning to evolve an aesthetic and pseudo-scientific flavouring.  On some of these spams, specifically advertising penis enlargement kits, there are detailed medical/scientific diagrams, cross sections of the penis detailing the scientific benefits of their kits and pills.  They're incredibly detailed, reminding me of the graphs and mathemes of Jacques Lacan (which are also seen to be spurious, fraudulent), the work of Kinsey, Benjamin Spock or even popular or tongue in cheek science fiction.  Other spams provide me with information and details of beautiful Russian girls or viagra, a University degree, a job in movies.  All of the spams have something in common: they identify the receiver as a 'little man' (and usually male, although I take it that females receive different spams?  How do the spammers find out your gender?) perhaps someone susceptible, gullible, lacking in self-esteem, needing a rock hard penis, a Russian girl, viagra, or a University degree, things that will somehow make up for the gapingness or absence that spam can deal with.

bw, Paul

April 25th, 2008

Hi, I finished the Bowker book today.  According to Bowker Orwell had 2 main opponents in poetry, the 'nancy poets' Auden, Spender and Isherwood (Orwell often comes down on what he sees as 'nancy boys'.  When he meets women he often simply asks them directly for sex or just assaults them.  But Orwell also maintained friendships with Gay men and when he met Spender found that he liked him apologised to him for depicting him as a 'nancy boy'.)  and also Yeats because of his Occult interests and politics (its perfectly obvious that Orwell would reject Yeats and his poetry, but Orwell was also very superstitious, probably far more so than Yeats was.  The Bowker book depicts how superstitious Orwell actually was.)  So Orwell was a stereotypical 'man of the Left' despising soft, effete homos on the one hand and immaterial Occultists on the other in favour of hard materialism, facts and machine guns.   In fact his novel '1984' is about the exceptional person who doesn't fit into the Totalitarian regime, a person perhaps who, like Yeats, felt there was more than just bricks and mortar to hard reality.  (or even much more than a simple hard  on.)  Orwell's sadistic sexual streak is depicted in '1984' in the character of Winston Smith, also the last ravages of the TB that eventually killed along with the chain smoking.

Finally I think him to be a totally likeable character with many of the faults and prejudices of an Etonian, but redeemed by his willingness to get out there and learn.  Ironically he never enjoyed the money from his writing of 'Animal Farm' and '1984' and his new wife Sonja mis-managed the royalties after his death.  On one level he seems to have rejected poetry as immaterial, unprofitable ( something to do with 'nancy boys' and even psychosis, as in the example of Yeats.  He doesnt seem to understand the Irish background to Yeats, the naive culture of the supernatural and how it was an actual outlet or depiction of some anti-Imperialist process.) but in the end didn't live to enjoy the vast profits that his last novels made for him.  In retrospective his last 2 novels didn't serve the interests of democratic socialism but capitalism.  Capitalism is something he doesn't even often talk about, living at a time of total polarisation of left and right when Capitalism was entirely disfunctional or non-existent. Perhaps if he'd read the likes of Auden, Isherwood, Spender and Yeats with more sympathy and understanding he might have avoided the life events that led to his disastrously early death at 46.  Orwell was the author of his own demise, as he journeyed to participate in a war he palpably didnt understand, unfit and without real military experience, as he got himself lost on an island off the north coast of Scotland, having to be rescued, as he invited famous authors to dine with him after having insulted or criticised them in the press.  In most ways his behaviour is a real insult to the intelligence as he denegrates some really worthwhile people, evinces crass prejudices and a real lack of understanding and sympathy for really anyone else.  But reading him, your always convinced that he's a good bloke, that his heart was finally in the right place.

Today one of my Spanish students had a copy of 'Homage to Catalonia'.  We talked for a while about the SCW and then about Spain today.  I suppose this is my final postscript on Orwell, because his work is still being read, talked about and is as relevant today as it was in 1936.  Spain now has a consitutional Monarchy like the UK, but there is less freedom there than in the UK and the society can hardly be said to be multicultural.  (remember the recent racist nonsense at the Catalonia Grand Prix when some Catalan blacked up as the 'Lewis Hamilton family') Spain still resembles a hardened Mediterranean dictatorship moulded through the Roman Empire and still retaining certain traits of that Empire, modulated through its Catholicism.  Its not a country I'd like to live in.

Dear Simon, Bowker's account of the Barcelona fighting is absolutely harrowing.  The Anarchists had a 'tactic' of charging machine guns.  Orwell describes how 500 Anarchists died in one such assault.  Obviously they knew nothing about the realities of war.  They weren't weapon trained and many of their weapons were antiques and didn't work.  Their fanatical bravery was incredible, but foolish, stupid and wasteful.  Better to surrender to the fascists and build an alternative slowly.  I know Barcelona well.  Its the most cosmopolitan of Spanish cities.  I'm not surprised that Orwell went there and found a certain political sophistication when he arrived.  The rest of Spain must've been a terrible mess and the fighting very frightening and very messy.  My amiga Rosa lives in Villafranca del Penedes, a French seeming town nr Barcelona, famous for its Cava and cars.  There's no doubt the Catalan are within the European mainstream, but other parts of Spain are decidedly infra dig.

Would you like to go to Calafell next summer?  There's an amazing beach there and I can introduce you to painters and show you some of the history.  Also I know how to do a holiday there amazingly cheaply.

bw 

April 24th, 2008: Night

Hi Paul,

More interesting sidelights on me and H. G. Wells ('brains but no tact' - his uncle of him at 14). Wells saw through Stalin, though. And yes Orwell saw through everyone's weakness, not always their strengths. He said at the seat of each person there is a secret sense of where we crucially failed. Orwell would have liked Beerbohm's deadly parody of Wells in Perkins and Mankind, where on 'General Cessation Day' the old go cheerfully to lethal chambers to make way for the young... 'Perkins will not be thinking of himself... but the young in their antiseptic garments, disporting themselves so gaily on this Day of Days...' Kipling's poems are as you say, misunderstood, especially his military ones and their subtelties -

Must be off, Best, Simon

April 24th, 8pm

Hi Simon,

I also learnt that Orwell knew and had met H G Wells.  Obviously the 2 writers have distinct similarities, but Orwell was coming out against Wells, inviting him simultaneously to dine with him in his flat nr St Johns Wood, which is supposed to be the model for Victory Mansions.  (I also thought of Victory Mansions when I visited you and Sonja in Hove...)   Wells is a complex figure and it would take more space, more time to do him justice, but the farcical encounter is just another of the near disasters that demonstated that Orwell had little or no emotional intelligence (a twit) but had the knack of pulling his twittish errors off.  On another occasion he went on a fishing trip with his son and friends off Jura and got stuck on a little island, having to be rescued.  Spain is an obvious demonstration of his total idiocy.  However, I wonder how the 20th century would've shaped up without Orwell and their like?  For all his twittery there's an integrity that shines out like a beacon in the darkest night, through the blitz and the bombs and even into our own era.

O, you must read 'Homage to Catalonia'.  The most important political book ever written.  The strongest thing Orwell  committed to print, a novel he'll be remember for a long time after 'Animal Farm' and '1984' are forgotten.

As for Mozart.  I think his symphonies are incredibly charming, but they don't move me very much.  So too Haydn.

Re Kipling: Even a poem like 'Gunga Din', seemingly epitomising everything that was wrong with the Empire, now seems like a glorious eulogy to the courage of native Sepoys and auxiliaries (Gunga Din is a water bearer, a very important auxiliary to have with you in a tropical climate and very important that these people stay loyal.).  Its only with the benefit of hindsight that it seems offensive.  Kipling also eulogises the 'Fuzzy Wuzzies' or Hadendoa for 'breaking the square'.  Of course its very unlikely that anything except well-formed lancer (Uhlan) cavalry well-supported or artillery could break a square, but Kipling rightly realises that native irregulars breaking a square (twice) was miraculous, speaking volumes for their courage and desperation. 

I just re-read 'Gunga Din', interesting Kipling's British solider makes a correlation between Gunga Din's dark skin, but he was white through and through, Kipling writes.  So darkee also meant dark morality or dark spirit to this representative soldier, but perhaps not to Kipling.  so just think of that outlandish theory, but one that is often re-iterated by racists.  I also re-read 'the Man who would be King'.  Billy Fish is another sub-continent type like Gunga Din, a 'native' who prefers to fight with the British than his own race. 

That's an important part of the mentality of Imperialism, how many of the 'natives' fell under the spell of the Imperialists because of their sophistication, ardent militarism, orderliness, discipline.  I remember Schama saying that one of the Indian Kings spent his time composing exotic Persian court poetry, definitely not the  work expected of a European Monarch, who might, though be expected to compose a competent verse or three, as the Queen is often still expected to do.  (I think this is ridiculous like Prince Charles painting, but there you go.  If some people want to pretend that Prince Charles is a real artist, then let them.  I was thinking that perhaps Prince Charles painting is a kind of benchmark, I mean, this is the basic standard that everyone must attain in order to be called an artist.  But its hard to take all this seriously, at least at this point in post-colonial history.)  What this 'native king' lacked was any kind of 'emotional intelligence' perhaps, the quality that Orwell also lacked, but somehow combined twittery with a miraculous savvy, that saved his bacon time and time again.

bw Paul

April 24th,

Dear Paul,

It's really interesting how Ireland faded, came to the fore when troublesome, and then was appropriated by foreign powers. British mainland people forget that the 1798 rebellion with Wolf Tone and Emmett was a Protestant rebellion, for instance. I agree about complacent British imperialism and its use of the left when absolutely necessary. I was fascinated you felt that Orwell - who as you say was a thorn to everybody official and ill, mostly - was being protected by Barcelona officials. Not the anarchists? I've stilll not read Homage to Catalonia. Laurie Lee and John Cornford, as well as Christopher Caudwell, weren't so lucky; too young.

I disagree about Mozart in part: his 25th (little g minor), 29th (the A major), 35th, perhaps 36, 38,39,40 and 41st symphonies are masterpieces. And 20 or so of Haydn's 106 (only 104 were numbered). It's a different musical language and you're a post-Beetovenian, perhaps. Most of us are. Vanhal and Pleyel, as well as a few others, wrote a batch of great symphonies in the late 18th century. I won't go on into the 19th and 20th. Too many. Schumann's 4 and 2 of Mendelssohn, and so forth. Schubert's 7th and 10th (anticipating Mahler in its slow movement and a scherzo-rondo-finale) have seen the light. One other, partially completed, D708a and between the 6th and 7th, is stunning in its slow movement too. Schubert needs gifted scholarly completions, as he abandoned many at the recapitulation point.

There's a battery problem with the server and I must go before everything is wiped!

Cheers, Simon

April 24th, 2008

Dear Simon, yes Britain turned to the Left both during and after WW2, but very few people were anti-Imperialist at the height of the Empire and, as I said, Britain has never done anything about the often bitter fruits of its Imperialism, even though other European countries have been forced through many cycles of enforced reparations.  You know this, so please stop apologising for what is unapologable.

I'd say that Schubert's Symphony No.8 should join the list, 4 or 5 of mahler's symphonies, 3 or 4 of Sibelius', perhaps 1 or 2 of Anton Bruckner's.  I'd be reluctant to include any of Mozart's, except in terms of their historical worth.  I mean interesting but essentially undeveloped.

Hello Paul,

There just aren't hours here in the office to respond to the wondrous strands this week. last night's will have to do. Briefly, it was Orwell who produced that phrase about Kipling, a 'good-bad' poet, which Graves and his and my friend Martin Seymour-Smith gently countered by saying that there's no such thing as a bad poet. You're a poet or not. But Kipling is an odd case. Martin directed many to poems like 'Danny Deever' which is thrilling and devastating. There's a sexual content there too. Several other poems of Kipling of course exhibit the same genius. so do a dozen of his short stories, including his last, 'Proofs of Holy Writ' written in 1934 and relating a scholarly revision of the emerging St James Bible by Shakespeare and Jonson. Shakespeare's son in law Dr John Hall was in contact with the Oxbridge scholars involved in the translation and it's likely the two great dramatists who were also friends would ahve been roped in to bring their linguistic skills to the final version. It's superb.

I agree with Martin who wrote a biography of Kipling somewhat uneasily, in 1989, that Kipling's greatest is some of the greatest in the language. He was complex, private, stifled and erotically (not just sexually) frustrated; also splentically angry at some things. It conditioned his response to the world. His bowels, as he predicted in any unresolved man, 'brewed him perpetual strife'.

Orwell himself was the greatest journalist of the 20th century, and sometimes a transcendently great novelist. Both those facts are important in dealing with his predecessors. He did react to the modernists of the previous generation, as did his contemporaries like Greene, Henry Green, Waugh, Powell and others. Lawrence was, like Joyce, an exuberant modernist. But just as Auden reacted to Eliot with traditional metres and modifed modernism (modified through the guts of its successors), certain British reactions to modernism rendered them unwilling to respond as openly as they might have.

Hitler? Not evil...? It depends what you mean by evil. You're here espousing what many Marxist theorists suggested, iin their quest to prove that bourgeois individualism didn't really exist; that it had no bearing on the world. I'm afraid I feel that Hitler, like Thatcher on a smaller scale and as you've said, was the final revenge of the Bourgeois Individual on history. I think they won, if history thought itself a determinist. The fact that they were overthrown merely proves they lived in time.

Enough, enough... Take care, Simon

April 24th, 2008

April 24th, 2008

April 23rd, 2008

Hi, spent my day listening to a tape of 'Finnegan's Wake'.  The Museyroom, for instance, sounds to me like the racy patter of a horse-racing commentator, words for humorous effect but nonsense.  Obviously Joyce had dissolved the constraints he found in the 19th century novel: an external, all-knowing narrator, an essential moral fixed point of reference for the reader, who needed to be told what to think or feel.  This is something Orwell said he had difficulties with  when reading 'Women in Love', the absence of narratorial judgment.  The characters just seemed to exist autonomously, their actions were never judged.  But there is lots of judgement and judgementalism in Orwell, whose Socialist paternalism was not something he shared with Joyce who was a libertarian/anarchist.  Other features of the 19th century novel: linear narrative, but that's not quite true since the absence of linearity is noticeable in 'Wuthering Heights' another profoundly innovative novel that jumbles up the temporal connections in a way Joyce might have admired.  But he wouldn't have admired the lack of irony in WH.  Essentially Emily Bronte felt her story and characters were very serious, something she felt very seriously about.  She wasnt a creature who ate liver and shat in the outside toilet or felt pleasure at such things or wanted so much to talk about her new orgasm in the pages of her books, but a silent, impenetrable witness to the happenings on the Moors.  In fact she's invisible, but Joyce always maintained a certain visibility, if only to say some very annoying things about his writings, the role of readers.

Have you finished watching 'The Aviator' yet?  I arrived this afternoon in the National Gallery only to notice the painting of Mars & Venus I'd seen in the Uffizi, Firenze and wondered if there were two such in existence.  Of course I've been around all the major eUROPEAN artgalleries and museums with the exception of the Hermitage, hence the Museyroom.  I mus tsay the Alte Pinakothek is a good place to lose oneself, then I read that Beckett also paced around in there for quite some time and also experienced headaches inflicted by the Fon (wind that sweeps through Munich from the aLPS.)  Not that I care about possible antecedents, because one of my antecdents is Grandfather Billy Somerset who never wrote a Modernist novel but collected money for those who left for Spain in 1936, or so he said.  Maybe he just collected money and bought further fish & chips.  He thought the Modernists were renegade bunch who betrayed the workers' movement, making degenerate works like FW while they should have been imploring everyone with depictions of proud, upstanding Stakhanovites.  But then lots of people were fooled by that old guff, 'cause old guff circulates and circulates.  Look at 'Da Vinci Code', all that stuff about the Knights Templars has been going round and round until it is almost as old and knackered as Thames Water.   ta ra, Paul

P. S. my criticisms of 'da vinci code', well its crap.  prose stuck together like strips of cellophane.  predictable narrative, little or no character development, no handling of real or adult issues.  the word banal comes to mind.  I almost felt I could have written the rest after listening to 4 chapters. 

April 22nd 2008

Hi, yes that's interesting that the Nazis behaved like religious zealots but Nazism itself was a secular politics.  I think the answer is that religion and the leadership principle became subsumed in the personality of Adolph Hitler, so that Hitler became much more than a politician of the stature of Napoleon. No he was also something of a God.  This also explains the devotion with which the Holocaust was carried out by the Nazi heirarchy and lower down: these were not orders, they were in part politics, in part religious undertakings.  The reason for this is that everything became subsumed in the person of the Fuehrer, whereas in other countries these functions were devolved into the hands of different groupings.  Everything became united in the personality of the Fuehrer.  Hitler was undoubtedly a very remarkable person.  I dont believe he was evil, he is the endstop of a certain historical development, that had been perfectly functional, perfectly creative.  Why this is is a totally open question, but it implies to me that Hitler's downfall can only be explained through the existence of an external deity, who is completely objective, entirely eternal, infinite and has an often benign interest in humanwell-being.  It is not even embodied, somekind of universal principle even.  For otherwise how could such a person as ruthless and possessing such magnetism as Hitler have been stopped?  Also the West agreed in principle with his anti-Communism and were keen to see Bolshevism crushed as we've seen, and Hitler's eastward expansion was a continuity with previous history, since the Germans had historically moved eastwards. In fact they viewed their historical mission as civilising, not exterminating, the Slavs.  So, why did Britain fight Hitler when it had so much common cause with him, answer me that?

Schama calls Churchill the hammer, Lloyd George the stiletto.  Churchill might have been called the blunderbuss, perhaps more apt.

 what are your thoughts about the 2 events I've mentioned?

Hello Paul,

I'd swap Beethoven 7 for 6, but otherwise the order's about right. I like the even-numbered ones better sometimes as the're fresh and more relaxed; but less innovative on the whole. I've read Benjamin, not On Hashish, not Gramsci, but have read Pasolin's Gramsci's Ashes. Alas it's 9pm and my response would be inadequate. Reich is interesting early on. Up to 1940. And the CIA were tailing him. The problem Luxemburg faced with Lenin is essentially the critique Trotsky brought to bear later on, about a worker's state degenerating into a degenerate workers state and then State Capitalism. A very final and pure anaylsis of communism's challenges; and has not been bettered within the orbit of those sympathetic to Marxism. But you can't run hospitals by votes. Hence opposing the NHS, as the RCP (the British Trotskyan break-away from the CP, 1951) did. They were opposed by the more mainstream SWP, basically a modernized CP without the baggage.

The British did embrace the Commonwealth Party in 1944-45, and their winning by-elections rallied the Labour Party and convinced them into a course of action far more daring and radical than they had envisaged. And Marxists sided with Jewish ex-servicemen after the war to carry on the work both had done before it at Cable Street: to crush Fascists. Group 43 destroyed the fascists post-war. It was absolutely necessary and only now is it all being told. Marius promoted the book in the mid-1990s and by coincidence I bought it then. So Communism at least has had an impact here. Marxism is more complex. 1968 had a huge lateral legacy, huger perhaps here than anywhere else, even Paris and Czechoslovakia. Marxism had less to do with it but the Civil Rights and other elements did percolate to the one place people forget was touched by 1968: Belfast.

Best, Simon

April 19th, 2008

Dear Simon, just woke up, cup of tea and put on Beethoven Pastoral Symphony (I think its the greatest symphony, the greatest piece of music ever written.  in fact Beethoven would have 5 symphonies in my symphony top 10, 6, 5, 7, 9, 3 in order of preference). 

The problem with Marxism is that it presumes too high a level of altruism, but altruism is obviously a good thing and a point of humanity we could all endorse.  Capitalism functions as a non-theory, but just a way of filling bellies or doing things that makes sense in the framework of economic activities that make sense on the micro-scale we all live on.  Not only Marxism, but many other grand schemes from the 19th century, such as Darwinism, began to flounder when applied because they presumed certain fixed, constant things about man.  Man is good, man is bad: but not really.  In truth man is capable of grandiose gestures, abysmal tomfoolery, crassness, bestialness, poetry all in one breath, all in one person.  Even my own behaviour sometimes confounds me. 

But in practical terms, the failure of Marxism in Russia was a consequence of Lenin's suppression of the left-wing opposition, against the wishes of Rosa Luxemburg, who, as you know, wrote to Lenin to urge him to do the opposite.  One can understand that the Bolsheviks, once they captured power, wouldnt want to give it up and the circle that exercised that power became increasingly narrower in their attitudes towards the West and dissidents within Russia itself, essentially an encirclement mentality.  Russia wasnt ready for Communism in 1917, for it had little experience of parliamentary democracy and probably needed humanitarian aid more than anything.  Liberalism had no roots within Russia, for a Messianic ethos pervaded life there, first of all in the 19 th century with Pan-Slavism, then in the 20th with Communism.  Russia was ready to save the world, apparantly, but could not feed its own people.  Recently Vladimir Putin reiterated his concern that Russians should look after themselves in the world economy, rebutting once again Russian Messianic principles for self-help. 

The Russians I've met like Igor Stepanov have been ingrained with goodness, but also with stubborn and bizarrely selfish nature at odds and in tandem with the other.  Thus Igor gets himself into all kinds of scrapes, the roof in the uniblock falling in on him being one of those things, but manages it all with Slavic indifference and will to move forward, like Siberian donkey. 

I'm interested of course in Arendt, the Frankfurt School, Adorno, Bloch, Marcuse but also Wilhelm Reich, his cloudbusting apparatus (have you tried one?) and Brecht, for most of the great Marxist theorists were German as we know, though not exclusively, for there is also Antonio Gramsci, plethora of French early agrarian anarchist like Proudhon, but also Bakunin in Russia and Kropotkin.  The philosophy also had adherents in America after those thinkers fled to the States in the wake of 1945.  Marxism had little impact in Britain, except perhaps in London, or on the fringes of student activists. 

I won't say anything more, but have you read much Walter Benjamin?

Hi Paul,

I agree about Marxism as a useful critique followed by a big WHAT THEN? Trotsky was able to go much further and critique Marxist-Leninism (as degenerating to state capitalism) as well as capitalism superbly. But his perpetual revolution becomes unworkable when he demands state capitalist creations like the NHS be banned. One supposes the hospitals would be run by revolutionary committees; at every point of order another ten patients die.

Briefly: we need to invite neo-Marxists thinkers onto the centre ground with active Liberals. Both have almost vanished. We have Liberal advocates, however. But not, as you say, theorists. It’s why the Lib-Dems have nervelessly drifted towards the right iceberg of Nick Clegg. He is far the prettiest of leaders, and ought to score higher than 92^nd as Cameron once did as sexiest man. But then sexiness ratings aren’t about sex; it’s about power. People understandably distrust theories. Look what it’s done for them. Perhaps Fujikama should have talked of the End of Theory. Except his…

Klein is an eloquent advocate for anti-Globalization, as indeed is George Mombiot. But they distrust theory as such: I think the latter was bound up in left-wing politics in the 1980s but stepped outside it. I’m not sure. Marxists have become as invisible as Liberals. It all happened after 1991. And then – with all that idiocy about the end of history - we’d got out of the habit of thinking politically a decade later.

Blair’s Britain was preceded by Major’s, which was also defused politically. One recalls the most charged issue was Europe, not strictly speaking a purely political issue but one of political nationalism (hence its splitting both left and right). And after that the economy, and sleaze. No Marxists were about to say that nationalism was a capitalist construct any more, and in any case be disproved (as in former Yugoslavia). With the destruction of all the left and right bogies at more or less the same time (1990-91), their reappearance has seemed almost an accident of personality in GW Bush, or lack of it, in GW Bush. Cheers for the weekend, Simon

April 17th, 2008

Hi, yes but there is a relative dearth of Liberal thinkers compared to Marxists.  The reason for this is that the Marxist tradition offers better methodological and analytical processes but isnt plausible (not yet) as a form of government. 

I've just read 'Da Vinci Code' by Dan Brown, after having seen the film.  The genius of this book is in bringing across a whole weight of dry knowledge in such an accessible, engaging, charming, readable manner.  Its a masterpiece of pop fiction for our era. bw Paul

its quite obvious that the Marxist tradition is now much richer in terms of its thinkers than the Liberal or Conservative ones.  There's a good deal about Edmund Burke in the Schama book, much about Tom Paine too.  I recommend it.

What Yeats is saying is that the shit always rises to the top, of course it does.  I don't think it was rational science, science is eminently rational, but science without morality.  After the Enlightenment, with the break up of traditional religious beliefs and the rise of scientific optimism, rationalism, positivism and inparticular Darwinism, something like the Nazi movement became imaginable.  Most major British thinkers at the time either imagined it or approved of it.  Nazism marks a historical dislocation of new strands of 19th century thinking in its own brand of atavism, the tribes of the Germanic forests of the 1sr century AD, no longer brandishing spears and axes but rockets and panzers.  (actually its quite hard to brandish a panzer, but I'm sure you know what I mean)  In the 20th century democ