The TLS blog

Hi-pri spy-guy here

Three hitherto unnoticed (by me) benefits of blogging.

1) You get to know when your piece on Brigid Brophy's novel, The Finishing Touch, is published in a faraway newspaper.

2) Also that "TLS Editor Sir Peter Stothard lays it on the hi-pri spy-guy dreadline in this deft, distinguished, and distinctive re-examination of Brophy's lesbian-fantasist novel". I could not have put it so generously  myself. I truly could not.

3) And you get a 'Happy Birthday' wish from faraway too.

So thanks to Canadian poet, Judith Fitzgerald at Books, Inq., for all that.

And, for anyone who wants to know (see previous posts) why Brophy's slim volume was my choice for exhumation as a 'Buried Treasure' in the series currently being published by the Toronto Globe and Mail, the answer lies below.

WHAT ANTHONY BLUNT HAD TO DO WITH HER

In a history of fictions inspired by the lives of famous spies, no novel would lie more deeply in the footnotes than Brigid Brophy's The Finishing Touch. This "buried treasure" is no sort of spy thriller. The author liked to call it "a lesbian fantasy." Its setting is a French finishing school for the daughters of the very rich, a hothouse of such exquisite heiresses as Regina Outre-Mer, whose mauve blotting paper reveals her most passionate devotions; Fraise du Bois, whose addictions leave her droguée in the asparagus bed from dawn to dusk; and a hereditary abbess, her Poggibonsian bottom "buttoned down the back; so suggestive of the girl."

The novel's plot, containing nothing of cold wars, or any wars, concerns only the arrival at the school (and hasty departure) of an English princess, her royal breast stung by a nasty local wasp, her headmistress's oral remedy caught by a contraband camera.

Brigid Brophy's work attracted much thoughtful criticism in its day, but in 1963, no one saw the slightest connection between The Finishing Touch and the Blunt affair, Britain's greatest postwar spy scandal. Eventually came the revelation that Miss Antonia Mount, the fictional educationaliste with the lifelong difficulty in deciding between yellow and green Chartreuse, had been inspired by Sir Anthony Blunt, curator of paintings for the Queen and the Fourth Man of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union.

On the surface of the novel lay a few clues: a feminized Christian name and a fondness for sex with British sailors shared by both the real and imagined figures. Beneath Brophy's sparkling and perfumed prose lay deeper rococo corruption. But even so newsworthy a critical identification could not bring this masterpiece of comic style a permanent popular appeal. Brigid Brophy, when remembered at all today, is remembered for other works than this, which is her finest.

To read The Finishing Touch in 2009 is to enter an almost forgotten sensibility. Every sentence is there to be weighed, stroked and smelled. The mixture of languages, the mocking allusions, the merciless way with snobbism: All produce a sense of extended pause and perilous calm. Instead of hastening from paragraph to paragraph in the modern manner, the reader is drawn back after every few lines to sniff the night airs again, to hear the grenouilles ("as though at a mad dinner party every guest had simultaneously seized on his pepper mill") and to seek the "dusky dusting powder" in the ménage of the African president's daughter ("but was it, Antonia prickled with the question, black or blue?").

Every schoolgirl's parent hopes, of course, for a future friendship with the royal newcomer, a rounders-playing ingénue with an "innocence of French literature" that Buckingham Place is keen should not be spoiled by French schooling. Letters from homes around the world urge the same message "like multifarious petals awaiting pounding into a potpourri." Sadly for their writers' social ambitions, and for the future dreams of "Dame Antonia," a wasp, a bosom, a medically attentive mouth and the paparazzi skills of the Plash girls ensure that the captain of a British destroyer has to come and provide the finishing touch to the plot.

Digging up this lost treasure is no act of social nostalgia. Brophy was an inventive original throughout her life, self-consciously at the forefront of extending rights as well as imaginations, for fellow authors and fellow animals most of all: "Whenever people say, 'We mustn't be sentimental,' you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add, 'We must be realistic,' they mean they are going to make money out of it."

All British writers who cash a Public Lending Rights cheque, an annual sum calculated on the number of their books borrowed from libraries, owe a toast to her memory. Her reputation probably suffered from the very breadth of her activities, and from a long final illness that ended her literary productivity without providing the promotional possibilities of death.

When Brophy first met Sir Anthony, at dinner among the sailors and art students ("probably both," she suggested) of his Courtauld Institute apartment, not even the British security service knew that the aesthete was their betrayer. A few years later, he secretly exchanged immunity for a full confession and remained a respected art connoisseur, at the heart of London society, until he was finally exposed in 1979 and deprived of the title that Antonia never gained. Anthony Blunt suffered a few other signs, too, of belated public disgrace. John Banville and Alan Bennett turned him more directly into fiction. But a life eked out in a finishing school for girls? That, Brophy wrote in 1987, was perhaps "the hell he had imagined for himself."

New stone women of New York

It is 'Korean season' in the retail outlet of MOMA in Manhattan.

So to brighten a dark wet day I could have bought a designer-nail-clipper for the pet dog I don't have.

Presumably,  when Koreans eat dogs, they like the claws to be as short as possible.. 

Or perhaps, since the device allows the clippings to be kept in a white plastic compartment,  the Seoul-inspired pet-lovers of New York have separate culinary plans for the canine calcium parts.

Korean designers also offer buttons-as-art, each blue-and-white striped badge made of cloth from discarded shirts.

There is a red credit card that can be used  to crush garlic.

And a wine glass imprisoned in a wine bottle - which may make sense somewhere that isn't here.  

On this brief trip, I've discovered too that there is a newly published  translation of Dante's Rime (see previous posts).

Apparently, the poems have been out of print in English for years.

That seems unlikely - but a crowded internet cafe on 10th Avenue and 52nd Street is not the best place to hang around and check it out. 

Any such neglect will surely never happen to dog-nail-clippers from Korea.

With a new English/Italian parallel text in hand, anyone with a bit of language and some patience can work their way through the poems for cold times and cold hearts that concerned this blogger last week after  Valentine's Day.

The translations are by J.G.Nichols and Anthony Mortimer.

Mortimer is the one who gets his chance with ‘Al poco giorno’, the poem I idly thought might suit the sad man in the card queue in Reading last Saturday.

Of course, if my searcher after seriousness had been looking instead in the designer shop at the Museum of Modern Art, his day would have been wholly different.

He could surely have found some much more suitable love-tokens.  

Consummation in the woods

A happier sestina poem for a Valentine’s Day card (still time for next year) comes from W.H. Auden.

Or, so I’ve been reminded, following my story of the sad man seeking some serious love lines last Saturday in the newsagent’s queue (See previous post).

The ‘sestina’ (for those who don’t want to click back) is a poem of six line stanzas in which the same six words – in an order decreed in mediaeval Europe – must mark each line’s end.

The one that I first wanted to suggest to the lovelorn youth of Reading, Berkshire,  was by Dante: its six end words were stone, woman, shade, green, hills, grass.

But it is a chilly, gloomy piece – too much so perhaps even for the man moaning at the seller of cardboard greetings.

Auden’s sestina, from ‘The Orators’ (1934) is called, more encouragingly, ‘Have a Good Time’.

Its six words are country, vats, wood, bay, clock and, most important for this purpose, love.

‘Wood’ and ‘clock’ are not so hard for the poet to manipulate.

‘Vats’ is a more challenging choice  – and it is not wholly clear whether Auden is talking of whisky distilleries or the cauldrons of cloth-dyers.

The hero of ‘Have a Good Time’ is an airman of the 1930s, a handsome Greek hero type with appropriate sexual anxiety.

His controllers introduce him with:

‘We have brought you’, they said, ‘a map of the country;
Here is the line that runs to the vats,
This patch of green on the left is the wood,
We’ve pencilled an arrow to point out the bay.
No thank you, no tea; why look at the clock.
Keep it? Of course. It goes with our love.

By the end of the sestina, Auden’s airman of espionage has been much more sexually successful than Dante’s hero.

He gets his ‘consummation in the wood’.

The final three line stanza, which, by the strict rules of old, must also contain all the six words, runs:

Sees water in the wood and trees by the bay,
Hears a clock striking near the vats;
‘This is your country and the home of love’.

There is time enough before February 14 comes round again for other suggestions too.

To an icy Valentine

 

There was a dissatisfied customer in the queue at the newsagents this morning.

Why, he wanted to know, did all theValentine’s Day cards have the same vapid poems?

This young man had a real problem, not just the ‘God, I’ve forgotten and will she notice it wasn’t posted in time?’ problems of the rest of the sheepish line.

He wanted a poem for an icy Valentine’s morning and an ice-hearted object of his desires.

Pink hearts and sunshine optimism were no good.

The sales assistant was not much help.

Nor was anyone else.

The editor of the TLS - if he had been in some recognizable uniform -  might have been called upon for suggestions.

But fortunately we have never invested in literary critics’ costumes.

So I could slink out and walk home wondering what, if suddenly and absolutely necessary, I’d have suggested for his blank ‘add your own personal message’ card.

Once upon a time I knew by heart a poem by Dante that begins:

‘Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra

Son giunto. . .’

‘To the short day and the great circle of shade

I have come. .’

The ensuing lines are certainly and suitably about a man whose beloved is as cold as stone.

The poem  is not obscure – in as much as any poem of Dante now merits that description – and might easily fit on a Valentine card in one of its English forms.

It is also a peculiarly potent poem – in a memory-aiding form known as a Sestina.

Learning it as a schoolboy was not as much of an effort as it might now seem. For each of the six lines in each stanza ends with one of the same six words.

Donna, petra, ombra, erba, verde, colli.

Woman, stone, shade, grass, green, hills.

The last stanza has only three lines – and the poet must include all six words within them.

‘Quandunque i colli fanno piu nera ombra,
Sotto un bel verde la giovane donna
La fa sparer, com’umom petra sott’erba.’

‘Whenever the hills make a blacker shade,
under her greenery the young woman
makes it disappear like a stone under the grass.’

Not every elaborate rhyme scheme in the history of poetry adds to the message that the poet is trying to convey.

But the Sestina is a perfect form for frustration, imprisonment, obsessive complaint.

I couldn’t have helped the young man in the newsagent’s queue because – forty years on – I’ve just had to look the poem up in a book.

I was quite impressed with myself that I could even remember the first line and a half.

But in the very unlikely event that he is a reader of this blog, Dante’s Rime, number 44, is my suggestion for his Valentine.

A throat slashed on ice

This morning there was blood on the waters of my tiny part of the Berkshire Thames.

A Greylag goose, grabbed by a fox, had made a bright stain on the snow.

On the icy river this became a darker blotch, spreading and fading until the bloody mess, pursued by logs and leaves, finally drifted out of sight.

This is not so uncommon. See previous posts. It would be hardly worth noting at all except for the extreme of the contrast between the warm blood (a constant) and the freezing water (unusually hostile today).

Somehow, perhaps because of that sharpness, the sight was suddenly in that patch of reality which Horace made one of the most famous in all Latin literature, the cold of the Bandusian spring in his thirteenth Book Three Ode, and the heat of the young kid that was to be sacrificed over its surface 'more shining than glass'.

'O fons Bandusiae, splendidior vitro. . '

It was once the party piece of even those who knew no other Latin at all.

Wordsworth was one of many who made an English version.

It is a surprisingly macabre work to have won such widespread love.

Sacred streams in Roman times normally received flowers and wine on their Fontinalia feast day.

Horace looks at the water in his own garden - and describes how he will cut a young animal's throat over it instead.

The litle victim might have gone on to all sorts of success in love and fighting - but now will not.

As for the cold stream itself, it will be famous for ever, but only because Horace has written about it.

These were thoughts that began with Theocritus, with the Palatine Anthology, with Greeks that we no longer even know of - and endured into the English Romantics and beyond.

The TLS published a splendid new version by Peter Porter two years ago.

'A death to crown both love and war

But all in vain: the blood will tip

Into the icy stream a store

Of wanton crimson, staining all

That lives and grows, the flocks that sip,

The generations of the grass.'

'Horace takes the waters', also included in Porter's latest collection 'Better Than God',  is just the latest reason why blood in a cold river will forever be a thing beyond itself.

Arthur Miller's man on the bridge

After a gut-gripping first night revival of Arthur Miller's A View From The Bridge, where is a blogger left to turn?

Nowhere. With nothing, only a natural and seemingly very reasonable reluctance to say anything at all.
 
Newspaper critics have already delivered their 'five stars', fully deserved plaudits for some of the finest acting to be seen in a year, praise for Ken Stott's Eddie Carbone that should bring a season of house-fulls to the Duke of Yorks.

This is a show without gimmicks or aggressive reinterpretation. Its director, Lindsay Posner, has 'done the business', all the business that needed to be done.

The text of the play itself is so studied, examined upon, Yorks-Noted, Sparks-Cribbed and extracted in selotape under school-desk-tops that the blogger can add no more.

Or, at least, that is how this blogger feels.

What more can he do?

But perhaps the point of blogging onward for a few more lines is that very sense of  'what more can he do?'.

It is a spirit so close to that of the play itself that I must have caught it at the back of the Royal Circle.

'A View From The Bridge' is Arthur Miller's Greek tragedy - with a sense of inevitable doom that is clear from the very first speech.  See Yorks and Sparks and BBC crib-notes passim.

A New York-Italian longshoreman has an unacknowledged passion for his niece; when she falls in love with a handsome young illegal immigrant from Sicily, the uncle is instantly heading towards disaster, towards betraying his fellow countrymen to the American law, towards death by an Italian dagger. It is all foreknown and foretold by the chorus - as on any stage in ancient Athens.

The play opens with its chorus-leader, Alfieri, an Italian who has made it as a New York lawyer and is recalling the story of the Eddie Carbone case.

Allan Corduner (pictured, top) took the part last night, the title role in its way, that  of the man with a view from a bridge beween cultures.

With a wonderful weary patience, he presents directly to the audience the key to what is coming.

There is the inherent distrust of the Sicilians towards the law: 'the law has not been a friendly idea since the Greeks were beaten'.

Beaten by the Romans 2,200 years ago.

When Alfieri first came to Brooklyn it was in the days of Al Capone, 'the greatest Carthaginian of all'.

Ancient Carthaginians, the people that most successfully for a while opposed the laws of Rome.

Alfieri is respectable and dull but occasionally he too remembers where he began: 'the dust in this air is blown away and the thought comes that in some Caesar's year, in Calabria perhaps or on the cliff at Syracuse, another lawyer, quite differently dressed, heard the same complaint and sat there, as powerless as I, and watched it run its bloody course'.

From then on the course of the night is set.

When Miller first wrote it, the course was short, one act and in verse.

Later the subsidiary characters were given more flesh - the means by which Hayley Atwell (pictured) and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio gave wounding and wounded performances last night.

But this remains a play that is spare at its heart, driving towards the end the chorus has foretold.

You are missing a living chapter in a long theatre history - the lessons no one learns in school notes - if you don't get to see it.

Girls school fantasy triumph

After gentle lobbying from colleagues, callers and commenters, the TLS Editor's 'Buried Treasures Award' for an unjustly neglected work of literature can finally be announced.

An invitation last week from the excellent Martin Levin at the Toronto Globe and Mail called for a single choice for this prize, something not totally obscure but a work deserving a little more light

A quick look among my bookshelves at home produced a shortlist of six (see post) - ranging from a 'wrist-slashing' depression-bringer, to a bisexual detective yarn and the memoirs of an amateur brothel-keeper.

New suggestions here included John Kennedy Toole's The Neon Bible.

 'The first novel from the author of 'A Confederacy of Dunces', and a work of genius. The crumbling hopelessness of life in a small US town dominated by Protestant fundamentalism, seen through the eyes of a sensitive and gifted adolescent', wrote Michael Buhagiar.

'Susie' offered the genuinely obscure and  forgotten Within and Without: remembered from her adolescence as a compelling erotic gem, all the more so because it was written in a straightforward male first-person form.

 'I could visualise the slender orange Penguin Book with its sketch of a female art student on the cover, the colour of whose voluminous hair was likened variously to whisky and toffee (how I envied that silky mane). Last night I managed to locate the book among various tottering skyscrapers of old books, and find it is by John Harvey (born 1925, presumably not the crime writer creator of Resnick)and published in 1960'.

There were supporters for  London Belongs To Me, a 700-page yarn of lowish-life in 1938  by the founder of BBC Woman's Hour and pioneer TV boss, Norman Collins. But but it has been just republished as a Penguin Modern Classic so perhaps is no longer 'buried' enough'. Is it a treasure? I am so far half way through it and have an open mind.

The winner, with eloquent support at the TLS, was The Finishing Touch, the book that Brigid Brophy called her 'lesbian fantasy'.

Why?

Since the original question came from the Globe and Mail, the answer will have to appear there first.