Philip Larkin: The Complete Poems - review by Terry Kelly

The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here
Terry Kelly
The Complete Poems, Philip Larkin, edited by Archie Burnett, Faber
and Faber, 768pp, £40 (hardback)

When Philip Larkin sent fellow poet Robert Lowell a copy of High Windows in 1974, his inscription read: ‘From a Drought to a Deluge’. The phrase can be read as either literary self-deprecation or – given Larkin’s naturally spiky nature and dislike of Lowell’s poetry – a thinly veiled Larkinesque rebuke for what was widely seen as the American poet’s prodigious, almost profligate output. (Lowell had published three collections in 1973 alone.) When Lowell’s bulky Collected Poems eventually appeared in 2003 it ran to almost twelve hundred pages. How ironic, then, to watch Larkin’s posthumous oeuvre similarly swell to almost Lowellian proportions in the quarter-century since his death. A substantial Collected Poems, edited by Larkin’s literary executor Anthony Thwaite in 1988 (reprinted with revisions in 1990), was followed by the highly controversial Selected Letters (1992); Further Requirements (2001), a collection of miscellaneous prose; Trouble at Willow Gables (2002), a book of early fiction; then a reordered and slimmed-down Collected Poems (2003); Early Poems and Juvenilia (2005); Letters to Monica (2010); and last year’s Poems, a long-overdue selection edited by Martin Amis.

Now, leading the heavyweight Larkin division is noted Housman scholar Archie Burnett’s fabulously annotated and much-anticipated edition of The Complete Poems. Once a neatly populated English village, Larkinland has been swollen by the literary equivalent of rapid urban growth since the poet’s death in 1985. Larkin famously said, ‘Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth’ but his post-mortem output has looked anything but deprived.

Despite the wealth of Larkin material which has appeared over the last twenty years or so, it is arguable that his literary reputation still rises or falls on precisely three mature poetry collections, none of which reach fifty pages. Once described by Clive James as ‘thin as blades’, those precisiontooled volumes – The Less Deceived (1955),The Whitsun Weddings (1964)and High Windows (1974) – were meticulously ordered and orchestrated by the famous librarian-poet from the University of Hull. He commented on his poetic architecture in the following knockabout terms: ‘I treat them like a music-hall bill: you know, contrast, difference in length, the comic, the Irish tenor, bring on the girls.’ As far back as 1988, however, the poet and critic, Ian Hamilton, expressed concerns about the incremental growth in posthumous Larkin. In his perceptive review of the original Collected Poems he wrote:

The beauty of Larkin’s three grown-up books, or one of their beauties, is that you can open them at any page and find something that only Larkin could have written. And even his most light-weight pieces are consummately ‘finished’ – there is nothing slovenly or make-weight or derivative. With this Collected Poems, there is an almost fifty-fifty chance that ‘any page’ will reveal lines which you’d swear could not possibly have sprung from Larkin’s pen.

As the poet himself said about a teenage university friend in ‘Dockery and Son’: ‘Why did he think adding meant increase?’ Early Larkin affords tantalising glimpses of the later, unforgettable mature work. But it is more usually a poetic pot-pourri, a literary mixing of the likes of Eliot, Auden, Yeats and even Dylan Thomas before the poet’s life-altering encounter with Hardy’s gloomy lyrics. For the most part, Larkin’s apprentice work employs the rather hackneyed furniture of Romantic verse, with lots of solitary musing on the moon, clouds, the sea, rain, wind and so on. But he was undoubtedly a skilful imitator, immersing himself in the bleak, prophetic, Audenesque landscape throughout much of the 1930s and early 1940s. This poetic austerity was eventually supplanted by the Yeatsian fever, which imbued his work with a more bardic tone. Larkin explained how he became hooked ‘out of infatuation with his music’. Ploughing through the tyro work, however, one is apt to agree with the critic Peter Conrad, who noted how the reader ‘[wants] Larkin to grow old as quickly as possible, so that he can write the poems that really matter’.

Archie Burnett’s landmark edition, several years in the making, provides the most comprehensive picture to date of Larkin’s poetic development and overall literary achievement. Setting out his critical modus operandi in his introduction, Burnett explains that he has included those poems which Larkin ‘completed’ or which are ‘self-contained’. This means that short, satirical or even scurrilous verses from his letters make the cut but not incomplete poems of arguably greater inherent literary value. This also means the exclusion of fragments, drafts or verses with uncancelled alternative endings. (Such an editorial move can prove contentious – as Burnett admits – in the case of the late and quite haunting poem, ‘The Winter Palace’, of which more later.)

The pursuit of editorial accuracy is one of the main reasons given for this weighty volume by Burnett, co-director, along with literary critic, Christopher Ricks, of the Editorial Institute, and Professor of English at Boston University, USA. He is also the acclaimed editor of the definitive volumes, The Poems of A. E. Housman (1997) and The Letters of A. E. Housman (2007). While noting ‘a scattering of errors’ in the original Collected Poems in 1988, Burnett does not spare the rod with fellow Larkin scholar, A. T. Tolley, for the editorial standards the latter applied to his Philip Larkin: Early Poems and Juvenilia (2005). He highlights ‘72 errors of wording, 47 of punctuation, 8 of letter-case, 5 of word-division, 4 of font and 3 of format’. Tolley is also chided as ‘an uncritical follower’ of the original Collected Poems and repeatedly scolded for editorial carelessness. To some, this will smack of academic pointscoring but scholarly accuracy is one of the touchstones of this meticulous volume. Burnett maintains an editorial laser beam on his prime sources – chiefly, Larkin’s workbooks and typescripts, mostly stored in the archives at Hull, London and Oxford. The dating of Larkin’s poems is corrected so as to indicate the complete process of poetic composition rather than simply the point at which a particular poem is brought to some state of completion. The volume also represents a first in printing variant wordings for Larkin’s typescripts and manuscripts, late in the composition process, plus some previously unseen work.

Apart from representing an unprecedented Larkin poetic storehouse, the other glory of The Complete Poems is Burnett’s dazzlingly detailed commentary, running to more than three hundred and thirty pages. Easily capable of being a stand-alone critical volume for Larkin scholars, the commentary incorporates everything from the poet’s comments on individual poems to relevant historical details, people and places, echoes and allusions and linguistic usage. Burnett will often employ relevant details to contextualise a poem, without, as he stresses, attempting to say what the poem actually means. But some Larkin poems are unarguably drawn from the facts of his life. For example, ‘An April Sunday brings the snow’, is inspired by the death of the poet’s father, Sydney Larkin, of liver cancer, on 26 March 1948: ‘Behind the glass, under the cellophane,/Remains your final summer – sweet/And meaningless, and not to come again.’ Burnett records the fact that plum trees grew in the back garden of the Larkin home at 73 Coten End, Warwick; he quotes a contemporary letter by the poet on his father’s death; he refers to both Vernon Watkins and Housman on plum blossom; and he highlights a possible allusion to George Herbert’s ‘Love III’, spotted by the critic John Carey.

Ever the disinterested editor, Burnett is careful not to get drawn into the crossfire between traditional critics and theorists. Rather, he believes that ‘the editor’s duty ends with providing the reader with information that has some bearing on the poems, and it is for the reader to assess the pressure of that bearing’. He also concedes some ‘overlap’ between what went into the making and meaning of certain Larkin poems.

While Larkin enjoyed parading an anti-literary persona and a boorish dislike for what he sneeringly called the referential ‘myth-kitty’ school of poetry, his work is in fact often a ventriloquial literary echo chamber. A skilful pasticheur, Larkin’s early work evinces the influence of Eliot (‘Stanley en Musique’, 1939), Auden (‘Watch, my dear, the darkness now’, 1939), Dylan Thomas (‘The Returning’, 1942) and Yeats (much of his first book, The North Ship, published in 1945).

One of the inevitable outcomes of The Complete Poems will be to reveal the post-war, Parnassian Ron Glum of twentieth-century English verse as, in fact, something of a literary aesthete. The early Larkin was an accomplished poetic mimic and, while only noting specific literary allusions and references – Housman included, Burnett concedes ‘that many more traces of allusiveness remain to be uncovered in Larkin’s poetry’. Before the late 1940s, however, readers will mostly search in vain for the distinctive Larkinesque ‘voice’ in the book’s wealth of early work. 1946 was the year Larkin experienced a liberating literary ‘conversion’ from Yeats to Hardy after reading the latter’s ‘Thoughts of Phena’ (‘Not a line of her writing have I,/Not a thread of her hair’). Until that point the apprentice poet was still capable of writing, without much visible irony, about ‘the unmeasured sword/Rising from sleep’. While there are poetic dry-runs for what Martin Amis in 2011 defined as the ‘frictionless memorability’ of the mature work, the real Larkin was still mostly elusive.

Between 1945 and 1946, however, Larkin’s distinctive poetic identity begins to emerge, initially in lyrical fits and starts but eventually across whole poems. Several Larkin scholars have identified ‘Going’ as one of the turning points towards canonical Larkin. A gnomic, puzzling poem originally entitled ‘Dying Day’, noted Larkin critic, James Booth, calls it ‘a belated Imagist poem’. Burnett’s commentary tells us it was drafted between 15 December 1945 and 23 February 1946. ‘There is an evening coming in/Across the fields, one never seen before,/That lights no lamps.’ Larkin’s literary quiddity is no easy thing to define but it partly involves the merging of plain diction with great poetic resonance. The authorial voice is by turns direct and rhetorical, afflatus often rising from the quotidian, as in the famous conclusion to ‘High Windows’ – ‘the deep blue air, that shows/Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless’ – or the earlier ‘Going’: ‘What is under my hands/That I cannot feel?//What loads my hands down?’

Reviewing the original Collected Poems (1988), poet and critic, William Scammell, defined Larkin’s mature voice as ‘every bit as assertive as Yeats’s, stuffed with X is Y formulations ... but the assertions are bedded in empirical low-life detail, hedged round with qualification, in both senses’. Although Scammell believed that ‘rapture wasn’t Larkin’s style’, a sense of Lawrentian ‘rapture’ certainly informed another poem signalling the emergence of the mature Larkin style. Drafted in September 1946,‘Wedding-Wind’ was rated by the famously self-critical Larkin. He told his long-term girlfriend, Monica Jones, in 1950 that it was ‘the best’ of a batch of six poems he had sent her. Burnett’s ever-helpful notes also suggest that it was ‘Wedding-Wind’ to which Larkin was referring in 1973, when he commented: ‘I wrote my first good poem when I was twenty-six.’ Burnett’s commentary also tells us that Larkin felt Lawrence’s The Rainbow may have influenced his only poem with a recognisably female speaker. The poem may also be unique in the Larkin canon for its unalloyed sense of joy: ‘Can even death dry up/These new delighted lakes, conclude/Our kneeling as cattle by all-generous waters?’ Both ‘Going’ and ‘Wedding- Wind’ would later be included in The Less Deceived, Larkin’s first mature collection.

For Larkin devotees, one of the chief pleasures of The Complete Poems is tracing the emergence of one of English poetry’s most distinctive poetic voices. But this can prove a frustrating business, as the book’s wealth of immature work reveals the early Larkin often possessed literary feet of clay. We witness a long poetic apprenticeship, with genuine foreshadowing of later literary quality being generally outweighed by frequent tonal wobbles and whole poems which miss the mark.

While the ideas and poetic ambience are often present and correct, what is missing, crucially, is the later pin-sharp poetic memorability,that distinctive Larkinesque quality which Martin Amis defined in his introduction to 2011’s selected volume as ‘instantly unforgettable’. For example, ‘Unfinished Poem’, written between 1951 and 1953, reads like a rather wordy and overly philosophical dry-run for the later and much-anthologised ‘Mr Bleaney’, completed just a couple of years later: ‘I squeezed up the last stair to the room in the roof/And lay on the bed there with my jacket off//... That was a way to live – newspaper for sheets,/A candle and spirit stove, and a trouble of shouts/From below somewhere, a town smudgy with traffic!/That was a place to go, that emaciate attic!’ (There is probably a thesis to be written about the links between Larkin’s poetic creativity and the rented accommodation where he lived until 1974, the year his final collection, High Windows, appeared.) Similarly, ‘Hospital Visits’, also dating from the early 1950s, explores subject matter familiar to Larkin readers, particularly in such later expansive meditations on mortality as ‘The Building’, but the earlier poem struggles to get into second gear. Apart from containing much early work, The Complete Poems reprints not /only The North Ship and Larkin’s three iconic mature collections but also restores to the canon poems published in the original Collected Poems, edited by Larkin’s literary executor Anthony Thwaite in 1988. These were later omitted from the rejigged Collected Poems of 2003 on the grounds they were not published during the poet’s lifetime. Readers can therefore welcome back such essential poems as the late and inconsolably desolate ‘Love Again’ (which Blake Morrison called ‘Larkin’s last great poem’); ‘An April Sunday Brings the Snow’; ‘The Dance’; ‘When First We Faced, and Touching Showed’; ‘Morning at Last: There in the Show’; ‘Mother, Summer, I’; ‘The Little Lives of Earth and Form’; ‘The View’; ‘Long Lion Days’; and the recently emerged, ‘Dear Jake’ (a kind of 1976 critique of Larkin’s earlier poem, ‘Posterity’). There is also ‘We Met at the End of the Party’, which is possibly addressed to Larkin’s secretary, Betty Mackereth, with whom he had an affair.

However, owing to Burnett’s editorial decision to exclude fragments or poems with variant or unresolved endings, some later and potentially /interesting and longish drafts, such as ‘The Duration’ and ‘Letters to my Mind’, are omitted. Out, too, goes ‘The Winter Palace’, a poem from 1978, known and cherished by many Larkin readers since its inclusion in the original Collected Poems. Even Burnett admits he excluded the poem ‘not without regret’ but concludes that ‘Larkin did not finish work on the poem’. Readers will nonetheless search in vain among the apprentice work for a poem with such a haunting final couplet: ‘Then there will be nothing I know./My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.’

While editorial consistency is to be applauded, the result is that interesting poems are jettisoned. At the same time, poems that make the grade on the grounds of their literary ‘finish’ include such notorious extremist doggerel as ‘How to Win the Next Election’ (‘Prison for strikers,/Bring back the cat,/Kick out the niggers,/How about that?’); barbed literary squibs; salacious stanzas; and unpleasant class caricatures (‘I want to see them starving,/ The so-called working-class’, or ‘Sod the lower classes,/Kick them up their arses’). This is one case where a degree of editorial flexibility would have reaped benefits for Larkin completists. (Oddly, Burnett decides to print ‘The Dance’ – a long, introspective poem, drafted between 1963 and 1964, which ends mid-sentence, conceding in his commentary that it ‘remains unfinished’.) Larkin devotees, of course, want everything the man wrote. It would be churlish to dwell on the occasional omissions. While it is principally aimed at those same devotees and literary scholars, Philip Larkin: The Complete Poems is a landmark volume, a wonder-book of verse by one of the art form’s best practitioners of the last hundred years.

TERRY KELLY


This review originally appeared in The London Magazine:
http://thelondonmagazine.org/

Whitney Houston RIP

Whitney Houston: the trailblazer
Whitney Houston, who died on Saturday, was the inverse of today's young female singers

Bim Adewunmi
guardian.co.uk
Sunday 12 February 2012

For little girls in the 1980s and 1990s, Whitney Elizabeth Houston was everything. Her big hair, the seemingly heartfelt lyrics, her skinny little knees in a denim miniskirt, her powerhouse of a voice – she was the supreme living doll. I have not met a single woman of my generation – white, black, brown or whatever – who did not want to be her at some point. She was perfect.

And now, with her passing, a certain kind of pop star is gone forever. Her mix of gospel vocals with unthreatening girly looks and attitude made parents comfortable – more than can be said for the likes of Rihanna. The gospel in her voice was the legacy of an early life spent singing in church, and the illustrious line of female gospel vocalists she came from: her mother is the great Cissy Houston, her cousin Dionne Warwick, her godmother Aretha Franklin. It meant that Whitney was probably singing in church as she was learning to speak, perfecting the vocal acrobatics heard among black congregations everywhere. By the time she was making her first forays into pop, she was already a seasoned performer with a weekly audience. The gospel training also allowed her to straddle genres to powerful effect, as anyone who remembers her cover of Dolly Parton's I Will Always Love You – who doesn't? – will attest.

That ineffable girl-next-door vibe Whitney had is something that's more or less disappeared from the pop scene in the last 15 years. Child and teenage stars endure, sure, but not like her. She was pretty – enough to be a successful model – but she was also sweet. Her persona didn't seem like an act to shift more units, though it undoubtedly helped. It reflected her upbringing, her rootedness in a certain kind of black culture. I remember my mum referring to her as a "good girl" – a ringing endorsement if ever there was one. But her safeness as a pop star didn't mean she was boring, because that voice made one thing very clear: "I may look like a milquetoast, but have you heard me sing?"

You very quickly run out of words to describe Whitney's voice. In her heyday – basically a large chunk of the 80s and 90s – it could stop you in your tracks. Today's pop stars bandy vocal pyrotechnics about regardless of their capacity to really pull it off. They are all-knowing sexuality and casually orchestrated middle finger salutes. Whitney existed in a world before all of that. She was marketed as America's sweetheart, previously the domain of blond white girls: a huge cultural shift. When she co-starred in The Bodyguard opposite Kevin Costner, one of the most famous Hollywood actors of the time, it was virtually unprecedented. Here was a black woman, a singer no less, making a worldwide smash hit movie like it was a normal thing to do.

It was Whitney's famously clean living that made her subsequent troubles – a relationship with R&B bad boy Bobby Brown (immortalised in their duet Something in Common), drug use, a reality TV programme, finally divorce – seem all the sadder. In many ways, her life was the inverse of today's female singers. While they play wild and dangerous on stage, they seem to lead focused, driven, business-led lives off it. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of Beyoncé. She's Sasha Fierce while performing, but Beyoncé the CEO at all other times.

Like Michael Jackson before her, Whitney Houston defined the pop landscape of her time and influenced it for years afterwards. Every time you hear Beyoncé drag out a single syllable over three or four beats, that's Whitney. And when Mariah Carey does her little hand movements to accompany a ridiculously high note, that's Whitney too. This was a talent whom others can only imitate. And for all her troubles in later life, her legacy is secure: come the X Factor this autumn, you'll hear it by the truckload.

Albrecht Durer

J. D. Salinger: Kenneth Slawenski interviewed...

PRINCETON: Biographer talks about J.D. Salinger, ‘Catcher’
hursday, January 12, 2012
By Charley Falkenburg, Staff Writer

The Princeton High School Performance Center was the place to be on Jan. 10 for J.D. Salinger buffs when acclaimed author of “J.D. Salinger: A Life” Kenneth Slawenski made a visit to unlock some mysteries of the man who wrote the classic “Catcher in the Rye.”

Students had the opportunity to hear the exclusive details of Mr. Slawenski’s biography prior to his evening book signing and paperback launch at the Princeton Library. Students listened intently as teen services librarian Susan Conlon interviewed Mr. Slawenski and followed up with their own questions.

Slouched comfortably with one hand in his pocket, he described the lengthy process of researching and writing the biography, which took him nearly eight years. Throughout those years, Mr. Salinger continued to surprise him.

”As I wrote the book I was finding things out,” Mr. Slawenski said. “It dawned on me that I was mostly writing a biography of ‘Catcher in the Rye.’”

For example, he was shocked to learn the extent of Mr. Salinger’s military service, where Mr. Salinger spent four years fighting in World War II and chose to spend an extra year in Germany cleaning up after the Nazis. As a result, he suffered a mental breakdown, known today as post-traumatic stress disorder.

”The war was a pivotal event in his life. It was more important to him as a man and his works,” Mr. Slawenski said. “Before he left to fight the war he didn’t question anything and just wanted to be rich and famous. But after the war he questioned the nature of living, of good and evil.”

Finding these hidden facts were not easy and Mr. Slawenski had many difficulties acquiring information on Mr. Salinger’s participation in the war. It took him an entire year to write the chapter on Mr. Salinger’s World War II service.

”It wasn’t easy,” Mr. Slawenski emphasized. “I double, triple and quadruple checked every fact in that chapter.”He also came across frustrating information gaps during the research process, leaving several parts of Mr. Salinger’s life blank. He gave the example of being unable to find details of Mr. Salinger’s work for Intelligence in the Army when he went to Nuremburg, Germany.

”The only thing you can do is acknowledge the gap and move on,” Mr. Slawenski told students.

He went on to describe similarities between Mr. Salinger and his infamous Holden Caulfield character, Mr. Salinger’s lifelong interest in Zen Buddhism and Mr. Salinger’s obsession with his Glass family characters, which he wrote about for 15 years.

”Salinger fell in love with these children, he adored them as if they were real people,” Mr. Slawenski said. “He had a winning formula with Holden and the Caulfield family and he abandoned it for the Glass family.”

He added that the Glass children are similar to Holden in that they have anxiety, but that it was more of a spiritual anxiety that caused them to look for God and the meaning of life, a theme that dominated most of Mr. Salinger’s later works.

Mr. Slawenski talked about the New Yorker’s rejection of “Catcher in the Rye” despite their tight knit relationship with Mr. Salinger and his overnight booming popularity with “Catcher in the Rye” that became synonymous with the 1960s generation.

”The anxiety of Holden represented anxiety of the generation,” Mr. Slawenski said. “‘Catcher in the Rye’ fed off a general apprehension of society because of the atomic bomb.”

However, people had misguided views of Mr. Salinger.

Mr. Slawenski said many believed he was a genius and a “one trick pony” with “Catcher in the Rye,” but this was not the case — Mr. Salinger wrote three other books and several short stories and “Catcher in the Rye” took him a difficult 10 years to write.

But instead of enjoying the limelight he sought for so long, Mr. Salinger recoiled and increasingly withdrew from society. It prompted him to move to a cottage in the woods in New Hampshire and spend 12 to 16 hours a day writing in a private bunker on the property – isolated from his second wife and two children, ultimately resulting in divorce.

”He found out he wasn’t meant for the spotlight,” Mr. Slawenski said. “Salinger didn’t think he owed us anything – he believed he owed everything to God because God gave him the ability to write.”

Mr. Salinger stopped publishing his works for 45 years, but Mr. Slawenski stressed that he did without a doubt continue to write.

”He wrote at least a dozen books. We have yet to read them because they haven’t been published,” he said. “The literary well is holding their breath.”

He added that there is a rumor that Mr. Salinger asked his son and wife to wait a number of years before publishing his writings. The reason is that he knew his fans would be happy when he died solely for the hope that they would then be able to read his hidden gems.

”I bet he’s laughing up there now,” Mr. Slawenski said. Students were surprised to learn that Princeton University has five of Mr. Salinger’s unpublished stories.

With two memoirs and two biographies already on Mr. Salinger, Mr. Slawenski felt the need to write his own to set the record straight and give a true, unbiased account. He described the other accounts as “unflattering.” Mr. Salinger had even sued Ian Hamilton’s publisher for the vindictive tone Mr. Hamilton’s unauthorized biography contained.

Ironically, Mr. Hamilton’s publisher is the same as Mr. Slawenski’s: Random House.

Mr. Slawenski’s interest in Mr. Salinger sparked in junior high school when he read “Catcher in the Rye” and was rekindled when he picked the book back up again years later.

”I enjoyed the book more in my 40s than when I was 14,” Mr. Slawenski said. “I then set out to read everything Salinger ever wrote.”

This sparked his Dead Caulfields website in 2004 where he started chronicling little known Mr. Salinger stories about Holden and his family. It wasn’t until an editor asked him if he ever thought about making the website into a book that he decided to take on the project.

”I didn’t intend for it to be a biography,” Mr. Slawenski said. “I was almost afraid that if I knew too much about him it would spoil it for me, but the more you know about the author the more you enjoy the works.”

Now “J.D. Salinger: A Life” is published in 17 countries in 14 languages.

Mr. Slawenski isn’t stopping there. He is in the process of researching and writing a historical book on World War II that focuses on the battle of Hurtgen Forest, a battle in which both Mr. Salinger and Ernest Hemingway fought. He plans on using Mr. Salinger and Mr. Hemingway as conduits – following them as they talk about the battle itself.

When asked what he would ask Mr. Salinger if he ever received the chance, Mr. Slawenski did not even hesitate.

”Like everyone else, I want to know what he has been writing for the past 45 years,” he said with a smile. “And is it any good?”

http://www.centraljersey.com/articles/2012/01/12/the_princeton_packet/news/doc4f0f51b6d2303546728935.txt

Last night's set list

At The Habit, York: -

The Sound Of Silence
Cecilia
The Boxer
Bye Bye Love

A change from Phil & Don to Paul & Art. A cold, cold night in York, but there was respite in The Habit.

Hockney at the Royal Academy

David Hockney is still an artist who genuinely matters
Hockney's show poses hard questions, on how and why we decide how much things matter

Martin Kettle
guardian.co.uk
Wednesday 18 January 2012

David Hockney's trumpeted and garlanded landscape show at the Royal Academy is more than just the must-see art exhibition of the new year, though it is certainly that too. It is also a bold assertion about the place of skill, craftsmanship and beauty in the making of art, which sets Hockney gloriously at odds with much of art's recent past.

Hockney's show offers his own way of seeing the East Yorkshire landscape in which he now lives. There's not a swimming pool in sight. It's a show about the Yorkshire countryside, about changing skies and seasons, about trees and blossom, hedgerows and puddles. But you can tell from the very first room, in which Hockney has painted big pictures of the same three trees at four different times of the year, with the same low hills and the same bend in the road, that there are wider ruminations here too.

For this is also a show about a man, his craft and the land. It is a statement about the primacy of skilled drawing and painting in the visual arts and about the challenge of doing them with originality in the 21st century. A conversation with art history runs through the exhibition too, a dialogue with Caravaggio, Claude, Constable, Monet and Picasso among others. And though one of the show's most distinctive themes is Hockney's famous fascination with his iPad and new technologies, another is its potent respect for and celebration of tradition.

This makes the exhibition, to use a phrase Hockney is fond of, a vindication of his own eye, own hand and own heart. (And what an eye, hand and heart they are. Such energy too, thrilling in someone of 74, almost Verdian in its old man's creative fervour.) But that makes it also a set of propositions about art and ourselves, about the meaning and content of art in the Britain of 2012, and about that hardest of all questions in both art and life – how and why we decide that one thing matters more than another.

That's why the opening of the Hockney show has been taking place to a not particularly subtle descant of propaganda and provocation from the great man himself. It's as if all those interviews he's been giving, including the needling of Damien Hirst and the conceptual artists (since retracted, but we know better, I think), are intended to make us do more than look at his pictures. Hockney seems to want us to think about what the different approaches mean, as well as what they show. To use the title of the wonderful recent book of Hockney conversations with Martin Gayford, he has a bigger message.

That message is principally about the craftsmanship that, in his very different way, Grayson Perry's terrific British Museum show (catch it too, it runs for another month) also glorifies. Hockney celebrates drawing because, as he says to Gayford, drawing is an instinctive human act from an early age, and because teaching someone to draw better is to teach them to see better. He does not add that to see better is to understand better, and thus to communicate better, but it is implicit and central to everything else.

It has always been hard to tell if Hockney is interested in politics – but he is a child of his time and a product of the hard-working northern culture in which he grew up, and of the British postwar settlement. He is manifestly, as Benjamin Britten once put it, an artist who thinks it is important to be useful. Britten comes to mind a lot when thinking about Hockney, not least because they are two of those rare artists of my lifetime whose new works genuinely mattered to a large audience outside the academy.

At the risk of pushing this argument too crudely and too far, and conscious also of my own Yorkshire pride, it seems to me that Hockney and his art express and address the kind of people and country that he and we wish we were. There is something religious in his work. And when Hockney takes a pop at Hirst, I, for one, will cheer, because he is taking a pop at the kind of country we have become, in which attitude is more important than morality, price trumps value, and in which to shock and make a name is privileged over doing something lovely or true.

The new Hockney show is not wall-to-wall pleasure. The room devoted to hawthorn blossom is strident. Hockney's colours don't always convince. Time and again, though, something draws you in and won't let go. The light, the draftsmanship and the composition are all there, but so too is the sensibility and the feeling, even the moral feeling, which is missing from so much that is merely fashionable.

For a few days more, on the floor above the Hockney show at the Royal Academy, you can still see a much smaller exhibition about the modernist values of Soviet art and architecture. It's a poignant show, about the failure of the revolutionary idea. The modernists, like the conceptualists today, believed that the past had nothing to teach them and that the rules all had to change. They were utterly wrong. They offered 20th‑century answers to 19th‑century questions. Hockney seems to know it is time to move on. This show offers one artist's own 21st‑century answer to a quest for something beyond ourselves that is truly timeless.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/18/david-hockney-artist-matters?intcmp=239

http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/hockney/

Happy Birthday, Charles!

The first 200 years are always the hardest...

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #143

Shooting Highway 61 Revisited

The Player:
Daniel Kramer is a renowned photographer who worked with Bob Dylan throughout the mid-1960s, shooting the covers of Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. His work on Dylan is featured in Bob Dylan: A Portrait of the Artist's Early Years.

Daniel Kramer:
The Highway 61 cover made in New York, is a very short story how that came about. We had worked for hours, all afternoon, photographing at a location in front of O. Henry's Restaurant. I had done all kinds of pictures of Bob at the outdoor café.

At one point I wasn't happy with what he was wearing, so we went around the corner and we bought new clothes in a men's store. Then we put the newly-draped Bob back in the picture and we shot for another couple of hours. We even had the tags still on the shirt cuffs and sleeve, because we didn't take them off, we didn't know if we would return them afterward [laughing] so we still have all the tags on

When we finished these rolls and rolls and rolls of pictures, we all dragged ourselves back to the apartment where Bob was living; he was sharing an apartment with Albert Grossman in New York. And when we got there Bob said, "You know, I have a new T-shirt. A motorcycle T-shirt. I'd like to just have a picture of it. Of me in this motorcycle T-shirt." I think it was for himself that he wanted to have this picture. So he went in, put on the T-shirt, came out, and he said, "How's about this? Maybe we could use this for something." I said, "Well, maybe we could use it. Let's do something. What can we do?" I said, "Nothing." Because we were finished and we were all tired and we were there on the stoop of the building.

So Bob sat down on the steps and I looked through the camera, and it looked a little naked behind him. His road manager then was Bob Neuwirth. So Bobby Neuwirth stood behind him in kind of a striped shirt, and I still needed something else. So I dug into my camera bag and came up with a Nikon SP that I had done a lot of the shooting of all of these pictures that I'd done of Dylan was with this particular camera, because it's not a single lens reflex, it's a range-finder camera like a Leica, which gives a very little sound when you're shooting, and so it's more discreet. I gave Bobby that camera to hold and he held it at a level I kept ranging, so that it would just kind of fill some of the void in the background. And I shot two frames. That's the end of the story.

http://www.empmuseum.org/exhibitions/index.asp?articleID=570

Simon Callow at the Customs House - review by Terry Kelly

Simon Callow
Customs House, South Shields

WRITER Charles Dickens was once drenched by the waves on the beach at Tynemouth during one of his many and highly popular reading tours of the country.

But being the human and literary powerhouse he was, Britain's most revered novelist simply shook off the salt water and dried his clothes by walking another few miles.

This was just one of the many stories related by actor Simon Callow in a two-hour performance, tracing the life of the author of such classics as Great Expectations, David Copperfield and Bleak House.

With the UK and the literary world celebrating the bicentenary of the writer's birth in 1812, Callow, on the opening night of a month-long tour, read to a packed Customs House from his new and especially commissioned book about a personality who was probably the most famous man in the world in his Victorian heyday, a kind of literary Elvis.

A great actor and showman, Dickens eventually ruined his health with constant reading tours, while also wrecking his marriage through an affair with a young actress called Ellen Ternan.

Callow, without the aid of notes, skilfully traced the life and times of a writer whose literary genius was complemented by a campaigning zeal on behalf of the poor and bedraggled of society.

Central episodes in Dickens' extraordinary life, including his horrendous time in a London boot polish factory as a young boy - inexplicably, with his parents' blessing - were brilliantly recreated.

But there were times during a very engaging performance when I wanted less narrative and more Dickens, and additional extracts from the novels would have added light and shade to the evening.

However, Callow's one-man show was a sparkling evocation of a literary legend he rightly called "a blazing fire of a man."

Terry Kelly

Ben Gazzara RIP

Ben Gazzara, Risk-Taking Actor, Is Dead at 81

By NEIL GENZLINGER
February 3, 2012

Ben Gazzara, an intense actor whose long career included playing Brick in the original “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” on Broadway, roles in influential films by John Cassavetes and work with several generations of top Hollywood directors, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 81.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, his lawyer, Jay Julien, said. Mr. Gazzara lived in Manhattan.

Mr. Gazzara studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio in Manhattan, where the careers of stars like Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger were shaped, and like them he had a visceral presence. It earned him regular work across half a century, not only onstage — his last Broadway appearance was in the revival of “Awake and Sing!” in 2006 — but in dozens of movies and all sorts of television shows, including the starring role in the 1960s series “Run for Your Life.”

If Mr. Gazzara never achieved Brando’s stature, that was partly because of a certain laissez-faire approach to his career: an early suspicion of film, a reluctance to go after desirable roles.

“When I became hot, so to speak, in the theater, I got a lot of offers,” he said in a 1998 interview on “Charlie Rose.” “I won’t tell you the pictures I turned down because you would say, ‘You are a fool.’ And I was a fool.”

And yet Mr. Gazzara’s enduring reputation may well rest on his film work, specifically the movies he made with Mr. Cassavetes, the actor and director revered by cinephiles for his risk-taking independent projects and a directorial style that encouraged spontaneity.

The two had had bit parts in the 1969 comedy “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium,” but it was in “Husbands” (1970), directed by Mr. Cassavetes, that they, along with Peter Falk, really made an impression as unhappily married men out for a drunken night on the town together. As Mr. Gazzara wrote in his autobiography, “In the Moment” (2004), the on-camera camaraderie was so convincing that people assumed the three men had been lifelong friends; in fact they had barely known one another when the filming began, though they became friends during it.

Mr. Gazzara’s most important role for Mr. Cassavetes was in “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie” (1976), in which he played a strip club owner in debt to the mob. “It’s a thoughtful, intelligent interpretation of a role that just may not have as much depth to it as he’s ready to give it,” Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote of Mr. Gazzara’s performance.

In 1977 Mr. Gazzara had a supporting role behind Mr. Cassavetes and his wife, Gena Rowlands, in the backstage story “Opening Night,” with Mr. Cassavetes again directing. Speaking of Mr. Cassavetes recently, Mr. Gazzara said, “He set the climate for an actor to feel free to give whatever, and if it didn’t work, it didn’t work.” Mr. Cassavetes died in 1989.

Two years after making “Opening Night,” Mr. Gazzara joined forces with another important director, Peter Bogdanovich, who gave him a rare leading role in “Saint Jack,” an adaptation of Paul Theroux’s novel about an American who operates a brothel in Singapore. He worked again for Mr. Bogdanovich in “They All Laughed” (1981), as a private detective who falls in love with the woman he is assigned to follow. The woman was played by Audrey Hepburn, with whom Mr. Gazzara had a brief romance after they met on the set of the 1979 film “Bloodline.”

Mr. Gazzara worked with numerous other notable directors, among them Otto Preminger, whose courtroom drama “Anatomy of a Murder” (1959) featured Mr. Gazzara as a military man who is tried for killing his wife’s rapist and defended by James Stewart’s small-town lawyer. In David Mamet’s 1997 film, “The Spanish Prisoner,” he played the possibly duplicitous boss of an inventor who has come up with a valuable idea. Wearing a slick white suit, he was a producer of pornographic movies in the Coen brothers’ “Big Lebowski” in 1998. In Spike Lee’s “Summer of Sam” in 1999, he was a mobster.

Beginning in the early 1980s Mr. Gazzara spent substantial stretches of time acting in movies in Italy, where he had a villa in Umbria. He appeared in Marco Ferreri’s 1981 adaptation of Charles Bukowski’s “Tales of Ordinary Madness”; “Il Camorrista” (1986), directed by Giuseppe Tornatore; and Stefano Mignucci’s “Bandits” (1995).

“You go where they love you,” he said in a 1994 interview with Cigar Aficionado, explaining his work in Italy.

Mr. Gazzara had parallel careers on the stage and in television. His first significant stage role was as a two-faced bully named Jocko in “End as a Man,” about life in a Southern military academy. Developed at the Actors Studio, it opened on Broadway in 1953. “Jocko is attractive, clever and alert on the surface, but evil at the core,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in The Times, “and Mr. Gazzara’s acting perfectly expresses this ambivalence.”

Then, in March 1955, came “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” in which he played the alcoholic son Brick to Burl Ives’s Big Daddy in the Tennessee Williams classic, with Barbara Bel Geddes as Maggie. Elia Kazan directed. The play ran till November 1956, but Mr. Gazzara left the cast early to take another Broadway role, in “A Hatful of Rain,” which opened in the fall of 1955. He played a dope addict named Johnny Pope, and the performance earned him a Tony Award nomination.

But his next Broadway venture, “The Night Circus,” closed in less than a week in 1958, and he did not return to Broadway until a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “Strange Interlude” in 1963. His other Broadway work included a 1976 production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” opposite Colleen Dewhurst, which earned him another Tony nomination, as did his dual roles in a 1975 double bill of O’Neill’s “Hughie” and David Scott Milton’s “Duet.”

Mr. Gazzara also acted in Off Broadway and regional productions, among them “Nobody Don’t Like Yogi,” a one-man show about Yogi Berra, which Mr. Gazzara began performing in 2003 and took all over the country for two years.

He was a familiar presence on television. “Run for Your Life,” in which he played a terminally ill man, was seen on NBC from 1965 to 1968, earning him two Emmy nominations. He was nominated again for his role as the father of a young man with AIDS in the 1985 television movie “An Early Frost”; his old friend Ms. Rowlands played his wife. He won a supporting-actor Emmy for his work in the 2002 HBO film “Hysterical Blindness,” playing the romantic interest of a character again played by Ms. Rowlands.

Mr. Gazzara was born Biagio Anthony Gazzara on the East Side of Manhattan on Aug. 28, 1930, the son of Antonio Gazzara, a laborer who did carpentry and laid bricks, and the former Angela Cusumano. Both his parents had immigrated from Italy, and they often spoke Italian at home, giving Mr. Gazzara a language skill that served him well when he began making films there. He grew up in a building at 29th Street and First Avenue, where, he wrote in his autobiography, he slept on the fire escape in summer and occasionally heard screams from the patients at Bellevue psychiatric hospital.

When he was about 11, he saw a friend act in a play at the Madison Square Boys Club and was bitten by the acting bug himself. He performed in shows there and, when he was older, found his way to the Dramatic Workshop in Midtown. A radio actress he met there, Louise Erickson, who would become his first wife, told him about the Actors Studio, and in 1951 he successfully auditioned for it.

That marriage ended in 1957. In 1961 he married the actress Janice Rule, whom he had met in 1958 when they appeared in a short-lived production of “The Night Circus.” They had a daughter, Elizabeth. That marriage, too, ended in divorce, not long after Mr. Gazzara met a German model, the former Elke Stuckmann, while filming the war movie “Inchon” in Seoul in 1979.

They were married in 1982; she and his daughter survive him, as does another daughter, Danja, his wife’s child from a previous relationship, whom Mr. Gazzara adopted. A brother, Anthony, also survives.

Mr. Gazzara was treated for oral cancer in 1999, but he said his bigger health battle was against depression, lasting on and off for decades. In a 2005 appearance before a group of mental health professionals, he recalled dealing with the condition 25 years earlier while shooting “They All Laughed.”

“I was in a depression during the whole shooting, and I was terrific in that film,” he said. “And I don’t remember doing it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/movies/ben-gazzara-actor-of-stage-and-screen-dies-at-81.html

Burne Hogarth