The TLS blog

Freud, Leonardo and the fork-tailed M40 birds

A note for the end of this 'red kite week'.

The birds of the Chiltern hills have, I discover, their own websites, a multiplicity of sites.

And a fascinating new book has arrrived at the TLS from Princeton.

Birdscapes, by the former Cambridge University Press boss, Jeremy Mynott, seems to have a good deal to say about kites.

I have only an index-less proof copy but, without too much trouble, I've found accounts of Leonardo da Vinci's obsession with fork-tailed birds, swallows as well as kites.

Leonardo, it is claimed, had homosexual fantasies about a bird from his childhood that was a kite - although Freud saw it as a vulture.

Mynott wonders whether in future, now that kites can be seen from the M40, he will care less about them, despite their colour, their aerial magic, their past associations and persecution.

He considers the idea of 'charisma' in birds, why some are celebrities and some are not, and how that status changes.

I did not know that our common magpie is a rarity on the Scilly Islands - and is much sought by 'birders' there. Mynott comments on the 'birders' word too and why 'twitchers' and 'birdwatchers' are different.

I'll try to finish Birdscapes in Berkshire over the weekend - if lorry crashes and kite-watching don't detain me on the motorway too much.

After a poet's funeral

Why was I kite-watching on the M40 motorway last Wednesday afternoon?

Why wasn't I at my desk planning today's edition of the TLS?

Well, since one of our Italian TLS readers asks, I was on my way back from Mick Imlah's funeral. See previous post.

There had been pews full of his fellow poets and other friends in Magdalen chapel.

We had heard James Fenton  intone from Tennyson's The Princess.

'Blow bugle; answer, echoes,dying, dying, dying, dying.

O love, they  die in yon rich sky'

Bernard O'Donoghue had read from Burns.

'My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here;

My heart's in the Highlands a chasing the deer;'

Hugo Richardson had sung one of Mick's own Scottish party pieces, 'The Bonnie Earl of Murray'. The language of this song is never easy to decipher, whoever the singer is, and its fantasy character, Lady Mondegreen, was, as usual, easily audible in place of 'layd him on the green'.

Craig Raine, Alan Jenkins, the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, and many other poets had stood in attendance.

Martin Amis and Isabel Fonseca too - with  Alan Hollinghurst, who gave the address - and almost all of us from the TLS where Mick had been poetry editor and where we had watched him last year through the horror of the disease known as Motor Neurone.

It had been a service both luxuriant and austere, befitting a man to whom those adjectives both belonged.

Then came the kites, soaring over the stationary Berkshire traffic lines, no more numerous  than on a normal day but seeming more to everyone waiting patiently behind the lorry crash.

For once we could look for hours up into the motorway sky.

These were birds who in the time of Burns and Tennyson and the Earl of Murray used to keep the streets clean.

They scavenged in their thousands over the highlands and lowlands of Britain.

They were not hunters of living things.

They were themselves prey to the best-trained falcons of human hunters.

Kings vied to see how many kites their hawks could catch.

Watching kites for the afternoon hours was one way to calm the spirits of the morning.

Kite food

There is little to be said in favour of a lorry crash on the M40 motorway except as an opportunity to watch the red kites.

Two hours in stationary traffic under a sky full of soaring scavengers can be almost a pleasure - as long as the need to be out of Oxford and into London is not acute.

Or, even if it is acute.

A full set of blocked carriageways is not a fact to be changed before its time.

Nothing was moving in the early hours of a Wednesday afternoon but birds with forked tails and fringed wings - beautiful chestnut rarities a decade or so ago, now the most visible pride of the Chilterns.

The 'hungry kite' had once a fearsome reputation - as a careless and devious killer.

Cart-crash victims in the Elizabethan age could fear for the fate not only of their bodies:

"Ravens, crows and kites
Fly o'er our heads and downward look on us,
As we were sickly prey "

But also their livestock:

"Who finds the partridge in the puttock's nest
But may imagine how the bird was dead,
Although the kite soar with unbloodied beak ?
Even so suspicious is this tragedy."

And even for their sheets and blankets:

"My traffic
is sheets; when the kite builds, look to
lesser linen."

Thanks to Shakespeare's Cassius, Warwick and Autolycus - and other legends of the English countryside - the red kite was hunted close to extinction.

In truth, the bird was always more wing  than body.

It has no power on the ground.

It needs 'crows and ravens' to cut up its food.

The first beak to find a dead lorry driver on the M40 is never going to be a kite's.

There is no danger  to anyone stuck on the Stokenchurch stretch - except game birds, foxes and hedgehogs that are already dead.

But you need a good two hours in traffic to appreciate what we were missing all those years.

A lesbian, a bi-sexual, a wrist-slasher or a good laugh?

My friends at the Toronto Globe and Mail have begun a new series called Buried Treasures, a search for 'wonderful books that have either been neglected, forgotten or ignored'.

Where's my list?

Any genre is allowed, they say.

The choice does not have to be too obscure :  in the first of the series Jane Urquhart chooses Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower, certainly  a 'wonderful book' but one which I do hear talked about from time to time.

So, in the same spirit, I am going to offer one of the following to the T G and M, the product of a pleasant Saturday morning  at home in some not recently visited shelves of fiction.

In order of publication date:

David Storey's Flight into Camden, 1960: a northern father accuses his son of  'educated emptiness', a terrifying attack scene which haunted me for years. Magnificent,  but I'm just not sure I want to experience it again.

Brigid Brophy's The Finishing Touch, 1963: rather more agreeable pages of a princess's arrival in a lesbian finishing school in France. Short and redolent of green and yellow chartreuse.

Susan Hill's In the Springtime of the Year, 1973, a masterpice of autobiographical misery, possibly not quite 'neglected, forgotten or ignored' enough. Which is probably a blessing for any Canadian who is depressed enough already without this recommendation.

William Donaldson's Both the Ladies and the Gentlemen, 1975, the memoir of an amateur brothel-keeper starring police officers, lawyers and editors alongside Disgusting Deirdre and Carwash Carol: the funniest book I had ever read, or so I thought at the time. A chance to go back to it now?

Julian Barnes's Fiddle City, 1981, published under the pseudonym, Dan Kavanagh: a bisexual detective takes on the the thiefs of Heathrow: there are also Donaldsonesque scenes in Dude's club in Soho but, thinking more about this problem now, I might change course and  go for a different Brigid Brophy, the absolute airport classic, In Transit. This is getting all more complex than I thought.

Martin Amis's Night Train, 1997: 'I am a police' begins the central character, a female officer called Mike. Genre novels by literary writers are good candidates for 'neglect'. This one is more serious than Barnes's - fewer clubs and more cosmic explanations for suicide - but less obsessively gloomy than the Storey or the Hill. So perhaps this should get the nod for the G and M.

All the copies in front of me now date from my thankfully abandoned book-collecting phase of life. So it's tempting to include a bit of market-sensitivity to the decision.

 My guess is that the Barnes would be the most valuable, though some collectors may still  like, as I did once, the pale blue Cape proof copies of an Amis, promising booksellers a '24-copy dumpbin', and an  'author poster' with their orders. The Hill is a rare book in having no words on its front or back cover, only a William Morris wallpaper pattern. David Storey is out of favour. The Brophy and the Donaldson both show nipples with variant degrees of discretion.

Next week, I'll talk to Toronto and see if any of these fit the bill.

A note from Mick Imlah

There have been many fine tributes to our poetry editor, Mick Imlah, who died last week.

I thought I might say something more here. But saying something about so perfectionist a poet and editor has made me freeze - as though I were trespassing on one of his areas of special interest, Tennyson, cricket or Walter Scott, and he were still looking over my shoulder with a hard pencil in his hand.

So this will be no new obsequy.

The only thing I have for a blog is a note already written, sometime in the early 1980s, and  inserted in one of my three copies (yes, Imlah in unexplained triplicate) of his first book, The Zoologist's Bath and other adventures.

I was a features editor on The Times in those days and the note consists of a set of points which I must have thought I'd ask him about, perhaps for an interview, perhaps because I wanted him to judge some competition, maybe  for some other reason long ago lost.

It reads:

1) no poems which look like rubble

2) eat cheese to stir up dreams

3) the glamour of not travelling

4) in alleys and toilets in places like Norwood

I never did get to ask him about rubble, cheese and the facilities of south east London. I'm not sure we ever did meet until I joined him at the TLS.

Twenty five years ago he did leave a message at the side of my desk, in large clear letters written on the side of a corrugated cardboard box.

All it said was that he'd passed by and I'd missed him.

He had, I did and I do.

Father Brown stories for hard times

It is tempting to wonder what G.K Chesterton's Father Brown would have made of an American pancake house where at one of the late-night tables  there was a man dressed as his creator.

The little priest was famed for solving crimes from a distance, from the other side of a crowded room, when everyone was ignoring him.

A recent bulletin from the American Chesterton Society - which I discovered by accident while seeking  the estate agent's site founded by the author's father - explains that the pancake scene occurrs after a meeting to discuss a new radio recording of that great Father Brown story, The Honour of Israel Gow.

Whether the detective priest would have believed this I rather doubt. There would have to have been a better explanation of an Edwardian gentleman with a beard in a whipped-cream-and-waffle house.

He would surely have had an answer to a G.K Chesterton mystery as strange as this one.

A pencil box of bees

In the current edition of The American Scholar my friend, Steven Isenberg, recalls lunches in his enthusiastic youth with Auden, Larkin, Forster and Empson.

It is a rose-tinted piece of recollected pleasure - one which raises more issues than first appear, not least about whether how young admirers could or would have such meetings today.

These were not interviews, promotional opportunities, book-tour signings - just lunches.

Some readers may already know which of the four great men told Isenberg a joke about keeping bees in a pencil box.

Those that don't - and those that do too - can read the memoir for themselves right here.