Jean Giono

The novel opens with two old friends walking through the forest. A worry hangs over them but does not intrude on this passage. It is night, dark in the woods, and Antonio follows the forester Matelot, without sight only scent and sound guide the senses, touch adds to sensation.

It is a long time since I first read Giono – Colline, Regain, Un de Baumunges – more than forty five years ago; and it is a long time since I read, even occasionally, in French – the newspapers, the regular short novels of Amelie Nothomb, the occasional Fred Vargas; and it is a long time since I spoke French except on the rarest occasion.

I have had to look up words that I once knew – pie, for example; as well as the obsolete Occitan Giono employs – besson (twin), a word I knew only as a name, only then as ‘Colettte Besson’ and the soundtrack of the end of a 400m relay – “and Besson is fading, and Board is gaining ..”

As they walk through the forest Matelot is guided by scent, the scent of the three pines on their route; the senses of Antonio are open to sensation to caught wisps of scent, of sap, of green leaves, of flowers, green wood:

“Près de son oreille il entendit un petit sifflement. Il toucha avec son doigt. C’était la sève qui gouttait d’une fente de l’écorce .. Il sentait sous son doigt la lèvre du bois vert..”

I have included this as a prose poem. I have not sought to break it up as Yeats did with the description of the Mona Lisa by Walter Pater. And Pater writes in prose-poetry, without the irritating archaisms of his contemporaries. Each of the sentences beginning with that ‘That’ could be separated as a verse:

“Ça partait, ça fusait d’un côté, puis ça glissait dans les escaliers des branches et on entendait rebondir un petit bruit claquant et doux comme une goutte d’eau a travers un arbre”

Sounds sliding through the branches, the staircase of branches; small sounds echoing; is the drop of water falling though the branches or rising inside the trunk?

At the very least I have gained by forcing myself to look up how to add accents and reproduce the French properly.

Jean Giono from ‘Le chant du monde’ (1934)

Antonio entendit le bruit de la forêt. Ils avaient dépassé le quartier du silence et d’ici on entendait la nuit vivante de la forêt. Ça venait et ça touchait l’oreille comme un doigt froid. C’était un long souffle sourd, un bruit de gorge, un bruit profonde, un long chant monotone dans une bouche ouverte. Ça tenait la largeur de toutes les collines couvertes d’arbres. C’était dans le ciel et sur la terre comme la pluie, ça venait de tous les côtés a la fois et lentement ça se balançait comme une lourde vague en ronflant dans le corridor des vallons. Au fond du bruit, des petits crépitements de feuilles couraient avec des pieds de rats. Ça partait, ça fusait d’un côté, puis ça glissait dans les escaliers des branches et on entendait rebondir un petit bruit claquant et doux comme une goutte d’eau a travers un arbre. Des gémissements partaient de terre et montaient lourdement dans la sève des troncs jusqu’à l’écartement des grosses branches.

Jean Giono ‘Le Chant du Monde’ Gallimard Folio 1996 p.13

Imperial Britain and Brexit

Reading the chapter on Seeley in Murray (1929)[1] I paused at the contrast made[2] between the views of Empire of the Manchester Liberals as expressed by Morley, but channeling Bright and Cobden, and those of the Imperialists as expressed by Seeley:

“The truth is that Morley conceived, in the spirit of Manchester, that our empire was united, if it were united, by a community of interest, whereas Seeley conceived it as bound together by community of race and religion”.

This contrast it seems to me underlay part of the division in the vote over leaving the European Union.

It would be fair to say that those of us arguing for staying in the EU referred to the positive features of remaining in the European Community as a community of interest. This an interest that extended beyond the economic, but into shared interest in the environment, biodiversity, scientific research, education, culture, cuisine and other areas of shared European life.

At the same time it seems, noting always that I have shown where I stand on the issue, that those arguing for leaving linked their arguments to the imperialist view. The argument was about sovereignty, about building new deals with the USA, and with the countries of the Commonwealth (what was the Empire), about a ‘European project’ that would submerge the English (and it was English rather than British) identity.

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[1] R H Murray (1929) Studies in the English Social and Political Thinkers of the Nineteenth Century: Volume II Herbert Spencer to Ramsay MacDonald. W. Heffer & Sons 474pp

[2] Op cit p.210

Sydney Tremayne ‘Refugees’ 1948

I posted this in 2017 with its critical note. The context was different then, and the note was concerned with other things. It is the outstanding poem in the collection – and in the current context of refugees from Ukraine, and the slow response to them by the government of the UK gains added relevance.

Refugees

Sydney Tremayne

There is one thing that matters,

only one thing that matters,

but I can’t remember what

for my wits are refugees

overloaded with bundles

dragging a dead time’s keepsakes,

bank book, birth certificates,

insurance policy, deeds,

proofs of dead identity,

contract with security,

receipts for outdated hates.

My wits are overburdened

with keys to demolished codes

no longer abodes but stones

with which little noted lanes

will be hardened and widened

into arterial roads.

Meanwhile they wander dully

in unfamiliar country

unkempt, dispersed, defeated,

cheated of will’s coherence,

now bit by bit discarding

treasures of no importance.

But there is one thing that matters.

There was one thing that mattered

though the world shatter wholly.

How can the whole be shattered?

How can the shattered be whole?

I talk like a fool. One talks

to be companionable.

It is laughable, really,

but I am weary, forget,

and strife has picked reason’s locks

and burgled the store. No more

shall we arrange the trim lore,

pour out the warming wisdom

and hand it around. Sugar?

No, that doesn’t matter. But

there was something that mattered,

something I must remember

more important than saws. Look,

there is sunlight again. See

how the whole world glows. Trees’ bare

bark sparkles and shows life, like

the plumage of birds. More words!

Whole world! World whole!

Whole world well,

Hey ding-a-ding-ding,

As seen from a shell hole in the spring

And broken trees bring images

Of birds with shimmering plumages

Not stuffed but on the wing.

What was I rummaging for?

Something must not be damaged,

something of great importance

and I wonder what it was.

From Sydney Tremayne ‘Time and the Wind’ Collins (1948) p.53

More Wellington than Churchill

Boris Johnson implies comparisons between himself and Churchill though one was Eton, and the other Harrow. There is a clear comparison with another Etonian predecessor in their Cabinet selection. As Morley puts it in his Life of Gladstone (1904 v1. p68 – 69): “the Wellington government.. and the parcel of mediocrities and drones with whom .. he had filled his cabinet”.

Morley makes an exception for Peel, and there is some enthusiasm for Sunak in the cabinet of Johnson, but that is something that time will have to comment on.

The Bishop of London on Brexit voters 1900

The Bishop of London writing to Harcourt the ‘international man and good European’[i] (not a point relevant to this correspondence) in 1900 describes how I perceive those who without knowing a great deal about the arguments voted to leave the EU and appear most aggressive in their adherence:

“If speculation has taken a wrong turn it cannot be diverted all at once by heroic measures. Men who have made a mistake, who have gone further than they intended, can easily be stratified into obstinacy, but can only gradually be persuaded to withdraw from a position which has proved to be untenable”[ii]

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[i] A G Gardiner Life… v2 p377

[ii] Quted intrhe same volume p.486

Dr Livingstone I presume?

Dr Livingstone I presume?

William Vernon Harcourt was a principled, learned politician with a humanitarian turn of mind. He had faults such as an opposition to women’s suffrage, but his strengths were in his humanity and the strength of principles held consistently. I have just finished the two volumes of his life published by A G Gardiner in 1923.

Opposed to capital punishment, as Home Secretary he chose not to execute when he could. It was a point of difference with Queen Victoria who was particularly anxious that men who killed their wives should be executed, rather than in her view being treated partially. Official avoidance of the issues around domestic violence are still with us, and perhaps the queen was aware of this.

The attitude extended to Empire. An anti-Imperialist he was angered by the exploitation and cruelty, the bad faith and dishonesty of some colonial administrators and of those extracting the wealth from the land. This thread in his life was highlighted for me by a small shock on page 94 of volume 2.

When I was at school we had books with line drawings, some in a rather Boys comic style showing Mungo Park battling hippos (or maybe crocodiles) amongst reeds growing along what was probably the Niger river. Others a little staider, and one has been perched in my memory from that childhood.

This showed two white men meeting, one with his solar topee on his head, the other holding his. One extends his hand towards the other, and there is the caption we all knew: “Dr Livingstone I presume?’. The rather self-effacing and laconic charm of the English hero abroad. Behind the figure extending his hand is a line of porters, natives dressed in loin cloths, presumably impressed by the reserve of the two gentlemen.

On January 7^th, 1891, Harcourt writes to Gladstone describing Stanley’s African expedition as one of those “filibustering expeditions in the mixed guise of commerce, religion, geography and Imperialism, under which names any and every atrocity is regarded as permissible.. An armed expedition like Stanley’s claims and exercises the power of life and death and outrage upon all with whom they meet, powers which are exercised without remorse. They enlist man whom they call carriers, but who are really slaves, driven in by contract by the established slave drivers of the country. They work these men to death, and if they are recalcitrant flog or shoot them… What is really wanted is to concentrate public opinion upon the real nature of these transactions which are the worst form of piratical Jingoism…”

But what survived was not knowledge of ‘the real nature of these transactions’, but the myth of the two civilised Englishmen meeting and shaking hands, with all due reserve, cool in the middle of a strange continent.

I am conscious that these concerns have been reported before, but it is not something that I have been aware of, hence my reaction.

It is this image of Empire that many seem to want to hold onto and to celebrate and has been seized on by our populists. As Mark Lilla warns in ‘The Shipwrecked Mind’ pxiv:

“Every major social transformation leaves behind a fresh Eden that can serve as the object of somebody’s nostalgia. And the reactionaries of our time have discovered that nostalgia can be a powerful political motivator, perhaps even more powerful than hope. Hopes can be disappointed. Nostalgia is irrefutable”

Leopold Sedar Senghor

Leopold Sedar Senghor

Poet and politician – I do not want to summarise a biography or mourn the passage from the idealism shared with Fanon to the head of a one party state

In the later 1970’s I was travelling around France on a Solex. A method of travel so slow that it allows a lot of detail to be taken in. One of my clear recollections was of gateways or memorials with plaques that honoured soldiers from Senegal who in that place were ‘mort pour la France’. The country of origin sometimes varied but many represented those soldiers from the colonies who had answered the ‘call. The UK was the same, soldiers from Kenya fighting in Burma; support from Basutoland along the spine of Italy, not to mention the legions of south asia. It was the first line of the poem that resurrected this memory for me:

‘They are lying there along the captured roads, ..  like lengthened shadows across the soil of France’

This poem is not about those martyrs to colonialism, but about those martyred/murdered  by the occupying forces in their fight against the colonialists

I stumbled over one word, hesitated really, over ‘virid’. To the English mind the word verdant comes to mind; for those of us acquainted with French it is vert., and the English meaning (OED) ‘verdant green’ confirms this. But the word also summons up vivid and virile. It is the ideal choice for the translators to have made.

 This fits with some thinking I had been doing about flags. The flag of Senegal has confident stripes of red, yellow and green. The same choice is seen in the flags of several other countries in West and Central Africa, not all former French colonies. The colours are those of the Pan-African movement, and they are also the colours of Ethiopia, the one African country (apart from Liberia) to maintain its independence while the ‘Great Powers’ were carving up the land, the wealth and the people.

Th symbolism is much the same from country to country – the red for the blood of its people, for its people; the yellow for the wealth of the country; the green for nature – the verdant green – as well as, in some cases, for Islam, or hope, or a ‘new democracy.

Two countries beyond have these colours for their flags. In Bolivia and in Lithuania the meaning is the same: the people, prosperity and nature.

It was the thinking about the flags that took me back to this poem. The green is referenced directly; the blood of the people is central; fecundity brings to mind the wealth.

And even more we have the blackness of the people celebrated  by one of the originators of the idea of Negritude as a way of looking at the world:

‘You are the flower of the foremost beauty in the stark absence of flowers

Black flower and solemn smile’

The poem celebrates the qualities of strength, of resistance, of clarity of thinking seen in the two ante-penultimate lines, two lines of enormous power:

‘The immense song of your blood will conquer machines and mortars

The pulse of your speech, lies and sophistry’

And the tolerance in the penultimate line

‘No hate your heart without hate, no guile your guileless heart.’

Leading into that Mandela like call for peace and reconciliation in the final line:

‘Black martyrs O undying race, give me leave to say the words which will forgive.’

‘Martyres’ Leopold Senghor 1948/1964

Leopold Sedar Senghor

Martyrs

They are lying there along the captured roads, along the roads of disaster

Slender poplars, statues of the sombre gods wrapped in long golden cloaks

The prisoners from Senegal lie like lengthened shadows across the soil of France

In vain they have cut down your laughter, and the darker flower of your flesh

You are the flower of the foremost beauty in the stark absence of flowers

Black flower and solemn smile, diamond time out of mind.

You are the clay and the plasma of the world’s virid spring

Flesh you are of the first couple, the fertile belly, milt and sperm

You are the sacred fecundity of the bright paradise gardens

And the incredible forest, victor over fire and thunder.

The immense song of your blood will conquer machines and mortars

The pulse of your speech, lies and sophistry

No hate your heart without hate, no guile your guileless heart.

Black martyrs O undying race, give me leave to say the words which will forgive.

From Leopold Sendar Senghor ‘Selected Poems’ tr John Reed and Clive Wake, OUP 1964 p.41. First published in ‘Hosties Noires’ (1948)

comme l’ecrivain

My friend Martin has sent me this:

“I was reflecting on changes in spelling even among the literate. A couple of weeks ago a Guardian columnist referred to churned up, partially melted snow as ‘sludge’. I would use slush. Perhaps she/they as a younger person equates this with a  sugary coloured, fruit free confectionery. Then in Michelle Obama’s ‘Becoming’ the author has an image of herself as FLOTUs floating serenely swan like, while her legs below the water are ‘pedaling’ frantically (yes, I think she spelt it with one ‘l’, and I am not going back to check). Here, I would haver used paddling, although one must remember the swan headed pedalo’s on Lake Annecy (and are they pedalo’s or guided swans in the grotto at the nutty Bavarian King Ludwig’s castle at Neue Schwanstein?).

Anyway, this reflection led me to the mis-spelling of my family name that is now more common that the correct spelling. Hemingway with two ‘mm’s. I cannot bring myself to write it. It is a variant, although less common than the proper spelling, so my usual response to those making the error that it is ‘only miss-spelt in obituaries, when you can’t complain’ is a little inexact.

The problem is that the name of a not entirely pleasant American writer and Nobel prize winner has dropped from the popular conscience where it had sat in the fifties, sixties and seventies – an American Studies day at the University of Sussex in 1970 looked at ‘Fiesta (The Sun also rises), and that was the first Hemingway I had read, although a copy of ‘The Essential Hemingway’ stood life affirmingly on my bookshelf.

Working in France in the seventies, when I gave my name the person on the other side of the desk would say ‘comme l’ecrivain’ and the name would be correctly spelt.

Our Maggie, an actress I understand, and our Wayne, something in the rag trade, do not seem to have managed the same nominal imposition, and that is something to regret. I am barely famous in my own backyard.

It is I accept how language grows, although I still cannot accept the ugly ‘impacted’ replacing ‘affected’, or ‘impacts’ replacing ‘affects’ – an ugliness imposed by those who could not tell their ‘effect’ from their ‘affect’ I suspect. And don’t get me started on ‘less’ and ‘fewer’.

But life would not be the same without old people complaining that things are not the same as when they were young, so at least this complaint is life-affirming, as Granny Weatherwax would put it ‘I ain’t dead yet!’”

Thanks Martin