a gallimaufry

Winifred Radford

(Meredith Frampton, Winifred Radford, 1921, oil on canvas; National Portrait Gallery)

I was looking for some portraits to use in one of my English classes, and came across this one in the National Portrait Gallery. And I like it very much, so I thought I would share it with you. It seems that Winifred Radford (1901–93) was a very well-known singer before the Second World War and sang at the first ever Glyndbourne Festival. Subsequently, she became a specialist in French mélodie, performing the British premieres of some of Poulenc’s songs. She also taught singing at the Guildhall for sixteen years. You can read more about her life in this obituary from the Independent.

The artist Meredith Frampton (1894–1984) was the son of a sculptor. (And Radford was the daughter of a singer, Robert Radford.) He was a realist painter, who numbered George VI among his subjects. Apparently his reputation was resuscitated by a retrospective of his work at the Tate Gallery in 1982, but I don’t think that he any more than Radford is well known to most people now.

The picture was commissioned by Radford’s husband, Captain Douglas Illingworth, who was a friend of Frampton’s. Apparently he was very supportive of Radford’s career, but died in 1949. Here is a photograph of Illingworth and Radford on their wedding day in 1920, also from the National Portrait Gallery:

The portrait of Radford was painted after about a year of marriage and you can see that she still looks very young, girlish and fragile. The bird in the cage is an obvious and sad metaphor since the door appears to be closed, and the landscape behind her, a lake and mountains, is bleak and emphasises her delicateness. But Radford doesn’t look sad at all: to me she seems resolute and with a certain clarity about her. It’s a portrait which strikes me as full of hope.

And here is a final picture of Winifred Radford, a photograph from 1982 by Brian Harris for The Times, now held by the NPG. You can see her in the foreground, with her portrait in the background, and leaning on his cane is Meredith Frampton. They are at the retrospective at the Tate Gallery. It’s a nice circle.

no no no British Government, prisoners should be encouraged to read!

I have just been reading Frances Crook’s article on the British Government’s new plan to restrict prisoners’ access to books and I am deeply shocked and horrified.

No I’m not, I’m absolutely, steamingly, hoppingly furious.

I’m equally disgusted to discover that children are no longer allowed to send Christmas presents to parents in gaol. That is just jaw-droppingly inhumane. Here is an article about it in the Guardian – and here is Chris Grayling’s (feeble) response. Is Chris Grayling highly educated and in fact himself an author? Why yes he is. You might think he would understand the value of reading. Perhaps he does.

I read a lot (!!!) and I believe in the importance of reading, to inform, to stimulate, to challenge and to give pleasure. Shouldn’t prisoners be encouraged to read as much as possible, in order to deepen their understanding of other people, to acquire new skills and learning? I mean how are these things inimical to rehabilitation, which is surely a fundamental aim of prison? Aren’t many prisoners in gaol due to a failure in education or empathy in the first place?

If you too are outraged by this, there is a petition you can sign here. It doesn’t matter whether or not you live in Britain.

(This photograph was doing the rounds on Twitter with the caption ‘Nick Clegg and Chris Grayling prevent prisoners from getting to the books’ but I can’t find that original; this is from the London Evening Post)

authors I have not read

(Woman not reading but doing something else instead: unknown artist, ‘Autoportrait sur bois’, from Giovanni Boccaccio, Le livre de femmes nobles et renomees (anonymous French translation of De claris mulieribus), France c. 1440; British Library, found here)

I first saw this game played by Tom at Wuthering Expectations. He wrote a list of ten authors whose work he had not yet read, but felt he should have done. He supplemented this with a list of authors he had read instead. It’s fascinating to read, but I have decided to play the Jam and Idleness variation, as has Desperate Reader, and modify it to authors I have not read but whose work I already own. This is because there are so many authors I haven’t read but ‘ought’ to have done that I can’t decide on just ten, or twenty, or more... Also there is no one book or author I read in place of the neglected authors. For me, every time I don’t read Nightwood I’m reading something else instead, whether I actually think of Nightwood or whether, ahem, I forget that it exists for years at a time.

A further caveat: were this books I have not read, it would be rather more embarrassing, but while I confess I haven’t yet read Ulysses I have read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and some short stories. Perhaps Joyce should be on this list in spirit, but the rules bar him. Ha ha. The same is also true for most poets; that includes you, Dryden.

Oh, and this list could have been much longer!

1. John Aubrey

Not having read Brief Lives yet doesn’t, I admit, give me sleepless nights. However, it’s been hanging around for a long time and I suppose that my idea of myself is of a person who has read John Aubrey, otherwise I’d have given the book away by now. (And perhaps it’s standing in for Pepys, whom I have read, but rather patchily, and I do keep meaning to remedy that, although I have no idea where the hell my copies of the diaries are.)

2. Djuna Barnes

This is a particular embarrassment since I bought Nightwood when I was writing a dissertation on Virginia Woolf in 1993, and in fact I have picked it up a couple of times over the years and read the first few pages. Yet I still want to and mean to read it. Time to revive my flagging Modernist reading challenge, perhaps?

3. Miguel de Cervantes

How long has Exemplary Stories sat on the shelf? Who knows? Not me.

4. Francesco Colonna

Colonna isn’t terribly well known – nor even certain to be the author of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, which is the book at which I’m now looking. I bought it after seeing an exhibition on Sienese art in the National Gallery, and I bought it with great enthusiasm partly because at that time I was planning on starting a PhD and this was background reading, well it wasn’t really but I wanted to read it anyway. It seems a great pity that that enthusiasm has never translated into sitting down and reading it. And it has pictures! So, despite its obscurity, no excuses.

5. William Golding

I have amassed a small collection of Golding’s work without ever once yielding to the temptation to read any of it. And yes, I am perhaps the only British person of my age who didn’t study Lord of the Flies at school. Although that is an exaggeration, the rest of Upper IVS didn’t study it either. We read Of Mice and Men instead, which gave me my deep and abiding hatred of Steinbeck.

6. George Mackay Brown

When I first moved to London in the middle 1990s and had a proper job in publishing which paid me a salary – and how I laughed for the first few days to think that someone was actually paying me money to do this stuff – and how quickly that laughter wore off – I went a bit mad regarding books. I had more money than I’d ever earned in my entire life, there was lots of space in my manky bedsit because I had left all my books at home with my parents and I was in a city full of bookshops. Whoopee! When George Mackay Brown died in 1996 I felt it was an appalling omission in my reading life that I’d never heard of him, so rushed out and bought a copy of Beside the Ocean of Time. It was only when I was looking for Authors I Have Not Read that I rediscovered it. Sorry, George.

7. Robert Musil

Another great embarrassment: the work of Musil’s I own isn’t even the honking great Man Without Qualities cycle whose sheer size might be understandably offputting, but a slender volume of his short stories: Tonka and Other Stories. I bought this from the wonderful Oxfam bookshop in Canterbury. If you’re ever within 20,000 miles of Kent, go to this shop, you will not regret it.

8. Georges Rodenbach

I bought Bruges-la-Morte (in translation!) when I knew I was moving to Belgium. Did I hope it would reveal some of the Flemish national character to me?

9. Jose Saramago

A dear friend gave me A Year in the Life of Ricardo Reis two years ago after I expressed an interest in Saramago. Yes, I am blushing.

10. Bruno Schulz

Technically, Bruno Schulz shouldn’t be on here since I have read the first few stories in The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories. But I didn’t finish the book, I forget why, and I feel very bad about him. Having seen the Théâtre de Complicité’s wonderful production of it in the 1990s, I feel even worse. Momentarily, anyway.

What is the point of this list? It made me spend some time with my books and really, need one justify that? It’s also a good way to remember what I have, because I don’t keep my unread books apart in a TBR pile. I know. But that TBR pile would be so big I would just cry every time I saw it, and reading shouldn’t involve weeping, should it? Well, unless it’s The Old Curiosity Shop. Until very recently, I used to buy books which looked interesting and trust to the future to bring the moment to read them. It’s a policy which isn’t terribly efficient and leads to forgetting of what has and has not been read and wailing from K about messy heaps of books everywhere, but I like it. Perhaps I should look again at this list in a year’s time, and see who still qualifies to be on it... Or I could just turn all my unread books into artworks, like Mike Stilkey.

Which authors haven’t you read (yet)?

(Another woman not reading: unknown artist, ‘Artiste préparant une fresque’, from Giovanni Boccaccio, Le livre de femmes nobles et renomees (anonymous French translation of De claris mulieribus), France c. 1440; British Library, found here; I have just included these pictures of mediaevel woman artists because I like them. Photographs of Djuna Barnes, 1905, from here and Georges Rodenbach, 1898, from here)

The Tale of the Fisherman and his Wife

(Illustration by Walter Crane from Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, Household Stories from the Collection of the Brothers Grimm, translated by Lucy Crane. London: Macmillan & Co., 1882; from here)

This is another of the better-known of the Grimms’ tales, and I do remember it quite well from my childhood. You can read it here, although it refers coyly to the fisherfolk’s home as a ‘filthy shack’ whereas Joyce Crick in the Oxford University Press edition translates it more robustly as a ‘piss-pot’. Mmm. No wonder the fisherman’s wife is a pushy opportunist. Who wouldn’t want to escape that?

In her endnotes Crick explains that a painter, Philipp Otto Runge, was the Grimms’ source for this story. His first version was in Pomeranian dialect but this was later replaced by another he had written in Hamburg dialect. He didn’t invent the story, there were quite a few variants in circulation including at least one in which it was the fisherman who was the demanding character rather than his wife. So it’s an interesting hybrid even before the Grimms receive it, a story which has been deliberately shaped by an educated man to retain the flavour of the ‘volk’ and its oral nature, even as it’s been changed into a written piece of literature for the more educated members of society.

(Luise Neupert, silhouette illustration in Märchenhafte Papierschnitte, Kassel : Brüder Grimm-Gesellschaft, 2002; found here)

This version is pleasing, despite the misogyny lurking behind the characterisation of the wife, because it is funny and elegant. The increasingly outrageous and improbable demands of the wife – to be king! emperor! pope! God! – are reflected by the state of the sea, which grows murkier, stormier, each time the fisherman returns with a fresh request. The obvious moral of the story is to beware of over-reaching, of being too greedy and discontented. Discontent feeds upon itself; the wife becomes more and more frenzied in her demands until at the end, when she’s declaring she wants to become God, she completely loses self-control:

Then she flew into a rage; her hair flew wildly round her head, she tore her stays and gave him a kick with her foot and screamed: ‘I won’t stand it and I won’t stand it any longer! Will you be off!’

But I think that responsibility for this lies with the fisherman as well as his wife. In the Grimms’ telling, it is clear that unlike his wife he has a moral sense and he understands that acceding to her demands is wrong. However, he is too weak to seriously oppose her and obeys her against his better judgement. Thus she grows into a monster. Did this have extra resonance when the Grimms were first assembling their collection, in a German kingdom occupied by the French under the emperor Napoleon? Certainly it lends itself to political interpretation: Crick writes that a version was printed in 1814 which turned it into an allegory of the fall of Napoleon.

An amusing element of this story is that the characters seem conscious that they are in a fairy tale. The fisherman’s response to the flounder is exactly the response one would expect of a reader of fairy tales:

Then the flounder spoke to him. ‘Listen to me, fisherman. Spare my life, I beg you. I’m not a real flounder. I am a prince under a spell. What good will it do you if you kill me? You wouldn’t enjoy eating me. Put me back in the water and let me go.’ ‘Well,’ said the man, ‘you don’t need to make such a fuss about it. I’d have let a talking flounder go anyway.’

And his wife knows the rules that we readers know: you help a magical character, you are rewarded:

‘Didn’t you make a wish for anything?’ said his wife. […] ‘Go back and call him. Tell him we want to have a little cottage. He’ll do that for sure. […] For heaven’s sake, […] you did catch him after all, and you did let him go. He’s sure to do it. Go down right now.’

Perhaps this shared consciousness of being characters in a story brings them a little closer to us, who are on the outside looking in.

And what about the enchanted flounder? We never know his story. I hope he either enjoys being a fish, or is freed from the spell…

(Illustration by Kay Nielsen in Hansel and Gretel and Other Stories by the Brothers Grimm, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1925; found here)

The Romance of Tristan, by Béroul, translated by Alan S. Fedrick

(Image used on the current Penguin Classics edition of The Romance of Tristan; found here)

In the introduction to his translation of Béroul’s Romance of Tristan, Alan S. Fedrick warns us:

[…]Beroul’s poem contains much that will startle and baffle a present-day reader who judges it by the modern aesthetic criteria of fictional narratives. There is no doubt that Beroul’s poem is sadly defective by modern standards; for it is far from easy to imagine that a piece of narrative fiction can exist as a serious work of art while dispensing with elements as fundamental as a coherent plot, an ordered flow of events with a clearly discernible causal nexus, and convincing characterisation.

If that is a little offputting, postmodernism has interposed itself between the contemporary reader and Fedrick, whose words were published in 1970. I don’t think that we now apply those aesthetic criteria to all fiction, and in fact this passage seems more dated than Béroul’s poem, written down in c. 1170–90. It is true that the poem is studded with contradictions – for instance, several enemies are killed off more than once, gleefully – so that it can occasionally feel as if you’re reading several palimpsests laid one over the other rather than a single poem. These may be accounted for by the oral origins of the poem, the inattention of the scribe who copied it down into the only surviving manuscript of it or its author being not one but at least two poets; they may also be deliberate aesthetic choices. In any case, the poem is held together by its central concern, the love affair of Tristan and Yseut.

‘Sir, I love Yseut so much. Because of her I cannot sleep nor even doze. My decision is soon taken: I would rather be a beggar with her and live on herbs and acorns than possess the kingdom of the rich King Otran. I beg you not to ask me to leave her, for I cannot do so.’

Still, while this version of Tristan and Yseut may be the earliest written one still in existence, any reader expecting a wonderful romance of noble, star-crossed lovers will be surprised. The narrator of the poem is cheerily partisan, vituperating the lovers’ enemies (‘Whoever would think of such a low trick?’; ‘May God curse them!’) and exclaiming excitedly at moments of high tension (‘God, what folly! He was too rash’). What is odd is that Tristan and Yseut do not seem to justify such support. They suffer no qualms of conscience over their illicit relationship and deceive with both outright lies and, more usually, with ambiguous oaths. Tristan, who even before meeting Yseut has amassed a lot of experience in disguise and deception, repeatedly avows that he will prove his innocence in trial by combat, well aware that he is such a great warrior that nobody will dare challenge him. This is not the spirit of trial by combat, during which God is supposed to support the virtuous, not the strong. Tristan’s reasoning seems to be he is strong so therefore must be virtuous and supported by God, and he’s certainly right that nobody will risk fighting him. He is really little more than a bully, and not averse to murdering unarmed opponents either. And Yseut? Having persuaded her maid, Brangain, to take her place on her wedding night, Yseut tries to have Brangain murdered to safeguard her secret. She also swears on the holiest relics in Cornwall that ‘no man ever came between my thighs except the leper who carried me on his back across the ford and my husband, King Mark’.  The leper is Tristan in disguise, so while Yseut’s vow has one meaning for us, the readers, it intentionally deceives the other characters. In fact, there is no moral heart to the story: the only religious character, Friar Ogrin, advises the lovers to lie to the king in order to be pardoned. King Mark himself is not at all sympathetic, quick to violence and easily persuaded by whichever of his barons has his ear at any one moment. We may not be able to approve of Tristan and Yseut’s behaviour, but we can’t feel in the least sorry for the cuckolded husband. Powerful as Mark is, especially compared to a foreign knight and a woman, he is easily outwitted by their resourcefulness and courage.

(Illustration used for the cover of Joseph Bédier, The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, translated by Hilaire Belloc and completed by Paul Rosenfeld, New York: Random House; found here)

So what is going on here? Well, it seems to me that Béroul has chosen this legend, which would already have been in circulation orally for many years, to undermine mediaeval ideas about courtly love. Although their love for each other is strong and they willingly suffer for one another, and although their ingenuity is admirable, Tristan and Yseut are portrayed by Béroul as selfish and deceitful adulterers. They play with words and distort the truth (even in the quote above, in which Tristan claims he cannot sleep for love of Yseut, he is fibbing for effect). Courtly love is, like the lovers’ language, just a disguise for a rather less glamorous truth, a pretty dress to cover selfishness. Is Béroul also criticising an equivocal Church and a violent feudal society? That I don’t feel qualified to answer. However, I do urge you to settle down with this ambiguous, lively and often funny little book one evening and draw your own conclusions.